Letter: Nothing has changed (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing has changed

Dears Editors

Twenty years ago, there was a high profile pop concert organised by the Live Aid group, to help the famine in Ethiopia. Now two decades later nothing has changed.

The Live 8 concerts addressed the effects of poverty not it causes. Unless the present social system has changed, for many more decades down the line there will be more Live Aids, more GB summits on this poor continent, and more Bonos and Bob Geldofs, yet all their cries for billions to be spent on aid are still unlikely to make more than the smallest dent in the deprivation.

Although there is criminal incompetence of Africa’s post-colonial black elites (the people who call themselves presidents, prime ministers, and in some instances kings and princes of the continent have waged war on their own people and plundered the continent’s wealth to ever bulging Bank account in Switzerland), the main problem of the continent is capitalism.

It is common knowledge that up to two-thirds of the world’s population are hungry, while millions actually die from starvation each year. Why in a world of potential plenty is so elementary a human need as food neglected for some many people?

Some would deny that we live in a world of plenty and claim that the cause of world hunger is natural scarcity. That in other words, some people starve simply because not enough food can be produced.

In the present state scientific knowledge and productive techniques, enough food could be produced adequately to feed the population of the world.

World malnutrition then is not a natural but a social problem. Its cause must be sought not in any lack of natural resources but in the way society is organised. World society everywhere rests on the basis of the resources of the world, natural and manufactured, by very rich minorities.

Rock stars or any other celebrities will not persuade the rich class to make world poverty history. It’s in fact the world market system that ruled the world. Acting like a natural force beyond human control, it has much power than any national government.

The market creates an artificial scarcity and organised waste that is responsible for poverty and hunger in the world today. The law that governs everywhere is “no profit, no production”.

Michael Ghebre, 

London NW1

Letter: to Bob (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter to Bob

Dear Editors

Below is a letter I sent to Bob Geldof.

Dear Bob,

I deeply respect your sincerity in campaigning for the end of poverty through the world. My understanding of poverty is the insufficiency of the necessities of life leading to an inability to enjoy the wealth potentially able to be created in abundance by humankind, including leisure pursuits, the arts and the basic necessities including shelter, warmth, food and water and the freedom from illness. This deprivation leads inevitably to hunger and disease. I believe that this insufficiency is largely caused by money.

As I am sure you will agree, it is important to understand that wide-scale hunger and even famine can occur when the available food supplies are not necessarily less than sufficient to feed the people they should be intended for. For example the well-known study of the 1943 Bengal Famine by Armatya Sen, which I am sure you are familiar with, showed this clearly. Other famines in recent times have occurred when there has been a sufficiency of food. Indeed food exporting from Ethiopia continued during the famine of the 1980’s.

It is also important to understand that not all the population of an area affected by hunger will go hungry. It is often what has been called ‘entitlement’ that denies access to the available food. Under the present way of ordering Society this entitlement can be determined by money or barter and not necessarily by a person’s need for food. Having money alone that would ordinarily secure enough of the basics does not always ensure sufficient access to those basics as, for example, when there is a shortage caused by ‘natural’ or human factors. Generally, as with anything else, when there is perceived to be a shortage, the ‘value’ of goods and services (including food) rises. Because of the way things are ordered it is the poorest who suffer most when the price of commodities rises. Therefore Poverty can be said to cause hunger and hunger to cause poverty, because hunger weakens resistance to disease, which in turn leads to an increasing tendency to an inability on the part of its victims to tend to their needs.

As things are presently ordered, therefore, there is an advantage to those who control the availability of essentials and who in some way or other profit from their sale to regulate the supply of goods and services anywhere in the world.

If the products of human labour and indeed the plentiful raw materials throughout the world – including Africa – were freely available to those who needed them and indeed to those who help make them available for human consumption without the intervention of money or any other limiting factor imposed by a minority of humans then there could not be need of any kind, much less catastrophes like famines. Where there were factors held to be beyond the immediate control of humankind, for example floods or droughts, then the technology presently widely available could be used to ameliorate their worst effects. Water can be transported, sea water can be desalinated, rivers can, to some extent, be contained in their capacity to cause widespread damage to the lives of people who happen to live in their flood plains.

Presently some African countries are troubled by, among other things, wars, corrupt government as well as crop failure due to drought and other factors. To some extent many other parts of the world have also been affected in similar ways over the last few centuries. The ‘debt’ that is owed by many countries in Africa and elsewhere is often at least in part due to the efforts of other countries to trade with them. With things ordered as they presently are – in other words governed by money – there is no incentive for traders with Africa or anywhere else to be ‘fair’. These traders are bound by the same rules all traders in the present system are – i.e. to maximise their profit in trading with anyone. If they were ‘fair’ they would quickly go out of business because their profits would decline.

Therefore ‘wiping out’ present debts is no guarantee of a long term solution to the poverty that has been more or less imposed on many African countries. Rather the abandoning of the money system itself by the entire world and sharing the resources of the earth in common is the only real way. Perhaps those countries that have experience in combating the worst effects of droughts could be called upon to help. There are many examples of international co-operation at present under the money system, Space Exploration to name one large one. Another example near to my home is the construction of the Thames Barrier, which utilised the expertise of the Dutch in Flood Defences, the Americans in producing heavy duty waterproof bearings for the gates, the British with their expertise in large scale steel structures, and Austrians with other necessary skills. If this can all be done now, with money as a limiting factor – imagine what could be done when the entire world is united in the will to solve the problems any other area may suffer! We could all share the skills and resources we all have in plenty for the benefit of all humanity! Imagine what kind of world that could be!

Yours,

Tony Norwell, 

London SE2 

World View: Famine or farce in Ethiopia? (2000)

From the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sixteen years after television cameras first brought the plight of Ethiopia’s starving millions into our living rooms, sparking the Live Aid rescue mission of 1985, history appears to be repeating itself on the Horn of Africa.

Just as it needed live images of children starving to death to shake Western governments out of their complacency all those years ago, having had prior warning that a famine was on the cards, so too now has the full threat of a famine had to become a reality before the world could sit up and take notice.

This time round, the Ethiopian famine was well predicted. In April of last year, the UN’s early warning system (GIEWS) reported that two years of drought were threatening two million people in Ethiopia with starvation. Nobody listened. Five months later, with further rain failures, the World Food Programme warned that 5.3 million Ethiopians faced starvation. Still, the cries fell on deaf ears. In January of this year, a UN mission in Ethiopia reported that 8 million faced starvation and that 800,000 tonnes of food were urgently needed to avert catastrophe.

At the beginning of April this year, the Ethiopian story finally hit the news headlines, but now with 16 million facing starvation in Ethiopia, as well as Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda, and with a further two million expected be added to this figure if the May rains fail to save the June harvest.

Perhaps many Ethiopians will recall the comments made by one key Ethiopian minister back in 1998 and recounted recently in the editorial of one Ethiopian daily.

In Kissingerian* fashion, the minister in question announced that “hunger in Ethiopia is already a thing of the past . . . has already been eliminated” and that Ethiopia would be food self-sufficient within five years and producing a food surplus ( Tamret Bekele in the Addis Tribune, 6 April).

Of course, we cannot criticise this individual for failing to foresee the present tragedy. He after all has no more control over the weather than the Ethiopian economy. But his remarks do point to the misplaced confidence people have in the present system and the inability of capitalist society to avert catastrophe because of its insistence in prioritising profit before need and in failing to implement long-term provisions.

Most of the aid given to Ethiopia in the 1980s was spent on emergency provisions, with little set aside for forward planning and for heading off the problems that made rescue missions so difficult back in ’85. Roads and bridges came low on the list of priorities, as did systems for storing what water did fall on the drought-prone regions. Vulnerable areas, like the Ogaden region were known to offer precarious living conditions but no plans were made for population relocation.

Again, much is hampering the current relief effort. Firstly, as in 1985, there is another war with Eritrea, sparked by an Eritrean invasion over a border dispute and which provides western governments with an excuse to cut aid – the logic being that aid is side-tracked into the military machine. Though not exonerating the likes of Clare Short, Britain’s overseas development minister whose idea it was to penalise Ethiopia for its border dispute nor the Ethiopian government who claim they did not start the conflict in the first place, as socialists we are upset that in an area desperate for concerted human co-operation and a willingness to work together in face of an overwhelming crisis, half a million men are dug into trenches preparing to kill one another over a piece of land none of them will profit from.

As in 1985, food distribution is also proving a logistical nightmare, with poor roads and the threat of inter-clan warfare and banditry halting the relief effort. Moreover, since the conflict with Eritrea, land-locked Ethiopia has since lost the use of two key Eritrean ports And, at present, mid-April, only 50 percent of the food needed has actually been pledged, with only a small percentage of this actually getting through.

Again, the current crisis and the famine of 1984-5 were sparked off by rain failure. But there are major differences now. The Ethiopian population is now 60 million, twice its size in 1985, which means an increasing rural population has had to work, and overwork, smaller parcels of land, which could only ever produce weaker and weaker yields. Added to this has been the shrinking availability of fertilisers. Ethiopia’s use of fertiliser, at 7kg of nutrients per hectare is half the sub-Saharan average and about seven percent the world average (statistics from Addis Tribune, 6 April).

After the 1985 famine the Ethiopian government sought to hold 350,000 tonnes of food in reserve to help avert further crises, but with 50,000 tonnes remaining at the beginning of April, it is evident a massive overseas contribution is needed to help provide the basic 7.2 million tonnes needed to feed the Ethiopian population in the year ahead.

What percentage of pledged food actually gets through remains to be seen, but it’s a fair guess it will fall far short of the 1.2 million tonnes the Ethiopian government estimates is needed urgently. Again, it is too early to predict whether or not the May rains will come and provide a desperately needed source of water to a country in which only 27 percent of the population have access to clean water even in the wet seasons, as well as saving the June harvest.

Only a month ago this journal reported on the natural disaster Mozambique encountered when the skies dumped a year’s rain on the country in a few short weeks, flooding tens of thousands of square miles. It seems something of a sick irony that we now comment on a country a few thousand miles up the same east coast of Africa that has awaited rain for three years.

In the years ahead we can well predict to comment on further natural disasters as the effects of global warming kick in and, more, to continually point to the failure of capitalism to effectively mobilise its vast technological resources to the benefit of those in direst need. As in Ethiopia 15 years ago, so too now will history continue to repeat itself, as tragedy, then as farce.

*At a world food summit in 1973, Henry Kissinger announced that global hunger would be eradicated within 10 years. There were then 400 million chronically malnourished people on the planet (a 75 million increase over the previous ten years). That figure now stands at 800 million.

John Bissett

When good news is bad news (1986)

From the April 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year five of the eight countries in the Sahel region of Africa had record harvests. Regional production of cereals is estimated to have been 6.3 million tonnes, or 10 per cent more than in 1981, the year before the much-publicised drought and famine in the area began. Good news, you might think. Or is it?

In a world organised to serve human needs a bumper harvest would of course be good news, but we are not living in such a world. Instead, we are living in a world where food and all other goods and services are produced for sale with a view to profit. No profit, no production is the basic rule and it is its inexorable application that leads to people dying of starvation in one part of the world while in other parts governments stockpile "surplus" food and pay farmers to take their land out of cultivation. Those who starve do so because, not having the money to buy the food they need to stay alive, they do not constitute a market from supplying which a profit can be made. It is as simple as that.

But what about food aid? Quite apart from the fact that it is often used to further the foreign policy aims of the donor governments (were voices not raised against giving food aid to Ethiopia because its government aligns itself with state capitalist Russia? And was not the rejoinder that aid should be given precisely to wean the Ethiopian government away from Russia?), the amount of food distributed in this way can never be more than marginal since it goes against the whole logic of the capitalist system. If practised on a wide scale it would amount to the economic aberration of instituting production for use in one sector (producing food for free distribution to those who need it) in a world of production for profit. Production for free distribution is of course quite logical from the point of view of human interests, but if applied under capitalism it creates problems. This is why the bumper crop in the Sahel could turn out to be bad news, as explained in a specialist publication:

  When an abundant local harvest occurs it comes up against the food aid stocks of millet, maize and sorghum. This aid visible on the local markets brings about a collapse of prices. National silos, filled up with aid food, cannot accept the new harvest. The local producers then risk not finding a buyer, or if so at what price? The following year they will plant a smaller area, as already happened in Togo in 1985 following difficulties in disposing of the 1984 harvest. If in 1986 the reduction in cultivated areas were to be combined with a drought year, the situation of the Sahel would become disastrous (La Lettre de Solagral, December 1985).

In other words, in a system where food is produced for sale, giving away food free merely upsets the market and leads to a reduction in food supplies. This is quite in accordance with the logic of capitalism. In fact, so absorbed were some relief workers by a (no doubt sincere) desire to help starving areas beyond the very short term that, at the height of the Ethiopian famine, they could be found urging that limits be put on the amount of free food sent to Ethiopia. They would have preferred to see aid channelled into small-scale projects which, unlike the free distribution of food, would not have impeded the development of local production for the market.

This is a good illustration of how those who want to do “something now" (other than working for socialism, that is) are led to accept and apply the logic of capitalism. When people are starving in one part of the world while unused food stocks exist in another part, the natural, normal reaction is to ask why the food can't be transported for free distribution to those who desperately need it — and it was to help achieve this that ordinary people gave money after the Band Aid concert. But, under capitalism, while this can help relieve an immediate situation it quickly creates another problem, precisely by undermining local markets and so local food production (which, of course, is geared to selling, not satisfying needs). And this leads relief workers, who see no further than capitalism, to oppose free distribution of food on the grounds that this impedes the development of local capitalist production of food for sale on the market.

As far as we are concerned, the spontaneous reaction of ordinary people, not the tortured reasoning of the capitalist-minded relief workers, is basically the right one: free distribution of food to the starving is the solution to the problem of world hunger, but only in the framework of a society in which all wealth would be produced for use and no longer for sale on a market with a view to profit; which in turn is only possible on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources.

In such a world socialist society any starvation inherited from capitalism could be stopped immediately by distributing “surplus" and "strategic" stocks, without this in any way discouraging local food production. This is because the latter would then be geared to use and not sale and so its output would not be in competition with the food shipped in from outside. Indeed, since it is desirable that areas should be self-sufficient at least in the area's basic cereal (be it wheat, rice, maize or whatever), the longer term aim would be that local production should be expanded so as to be able to replace outside shipments as quickly as possible.

A crash programme of this type combining free distribution to relieve immediate hunger and the development of local food production, within the framework of a world community without frontiers or buying and selling, is the only way to solve the problem of world hunger once and for all.

Adam Buick

Editorial: A World to Win (1986)

Editorial from the Summer 1986 issue of the World Socialist

The world we inhabit is split up into many competing units called nations. The nation is a product of property society; it is an area in which one group of property-owners is dominant and has borders and tariff regulations and armies keep its rivals out. The capitalist class — the small minority of the world’s population who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution — is disunited and in a constant state of fierce competition and potential war as each section of the capitalists seeks to possess what belongs to its national rivals.

The rivalries and wars between capitalist nations have nothing to do with the working class — the majority of us do not possess the means of living, but survive by selling our labour power for a wage or salary. Workers have no country, even though the national capitalists wherever we happen to live will try to indoctrinate us into the belief that their national ambitions will benefit us. When Britain had its Empire the industrial workers in London and Manchester were living in squalid slums: they had no share in the profits plundered by their exploiters. The modern Russian Empire, which commits the criminal fraud of claiming to be socialist, is a nation which has spread its power into Eastern Europe and, more recently, into Afghanistan, but its victories in conquering new parts of the world do not serve to improve the lot of the impoverished lives of the Russian workers who dwell in overcrowded flats and can only gain access to a limited range of food. In the US the capitalists possess great national prestige and the President’s word is seen as a command by many smaller national governments, but that has done nothing to improve the conditions endured by the slum-dwellers of New York or the millions of American children who live beneath the government’s official poverty line. Workers are persuaded to wave flags and salute leaders and hate enemies whom they have never met and kill in wars, all because of the pernicious ideology of nationalism. The conscious worker understands that he or she has no country — that they are not Americans or Russians or Austrians or Australians or English or Irish, but workers who have more in common with other workers across the world than they will ever have with their national rulers.

Capitalist politics is national politics. The world is full of manifestoes proposing to bring prosperity to this or that nation. None of them is worth the paper it is written on, for there can be no solutions to social problems on a national basis. Trade is international, banking and the money market cross the world, war policies involve multi-national gangs of murderers, such as the Warsaw Pact and NATO, communication technology has turned the world into a global village, the entire process of wealth production and distribution depends upon a complicated, worldwide division of labour. Anyone who proposes to examine the problems of society by concentrating upon just one nation is like a Professor of Anatomy whose study of the human body does not extend beyond the little finger on the left hand. That is why all parties except for the Socialist Parties of the world are wasting time in the futile pursuit of policies for national solutions: only the World Socialist Movement has recognised that capitalism is a world system requiring a worldwide solution.

Although the politics of capitalism is stuck in the rut of national fragmentation, many workers in 1986 have a worldwide outlook which far surpasses that of previous generations. Only in recent times have workers started to travel from nation to nation, and as they do it may occur to them that beyond the superficial differences there is a remarkable similarity in the lives of workers wherever you go. Workers across the world increasingly watch the same films, listen to the same records — and now, with easily-made home-videos and audio-cassettes we can communicate with one another without having to travel long distances. As we share experiences we find it easier to identify with those who are supposedly aliens. For all of its limitations, the worldwide consciousness made evident by the Live Aid concert — which was televised across the globe and had as its best-selling theme song a record called We Are The World —was an indication of the pent-up feeling within many people that they are citizens of the world and, left to ourselves, we do have far more in common than drives us apart. Again, whenever international disasters are shown on our television screens the vast majority of workers feel sympathy towards their fellow human beings whose lives have been shattered by earthquakes or floods or violence caused by the system. Socialists seek to cultivate such world-consciousncss, for until workers realise their common position as inhabitants of the planet earth the capitalists will continue to divide and rule.

Socialism is not a policy for running a nation. There has never been, and nor could there ever be, socialism in one country. Socialism has yet to be established, and when workers do decide to bring it about we shall do so as a worldwide transformation of society. For that reason, although the various Socialist Parties operate within different national units, we him are part of one World Socialist Movement, all sharing the same clearly-defined Object, the same Principles and the same democratic political tactics. In short, the struggle for world socialism requires a movement with a worldwide perspective.

In a socialist society all the resources of the earth, including the factories, mines, offices, land and the means of communication and transportation, will belong to everyone, regardless of colour, sex, age, or where one happens to live. All people will have free access to the goods and services which the world is able to produce.

A socialist world will not be one in which there will he no problems left to solve. But, free from the fetters of production for profit, the sole basis of creating goods and services will be the satisfaction of human needs. Without several nations competing to make the same product, without rival research institutes in different nations each trying to make a discovery without others knowing what they know, the world will be able to unite its energies for the first time ever. The waste, duplication and tension of a society cut up into nations will give way to one world, one people and one common aim of mutual survival and comfort.

The abolition of nations will not mean that cultural variety will be destroyed. Indeed, it is nationalism which all to often suppresses minority cultures. In a socialist society the richness of cultural customs will make the world a better place, just as the absence of armies and bombs and passports — all features of a world divided — will make the world secure.

Fellow workers, we have a world to win. Not a new government or higher wages or longer holidays or a new reform to keep us quiet — nothing less than common possession of the world and all that is in it and on it is worthy of our political effort as a class. To that end, we urge you to take your place as class-conscious workers within the World Socialist Movement.

Between the Lines: Sinn Fein, Game Shows and Live Aid (1985)

The Between the Lines Column from the August 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sinn Feigners

Beatrix Campbell, in Diverse Reports (C4, 3 July), sought to portray Sinn Fein as a progressive, caring, reforming party—an image it seeks to put across to electors. It should not be surprising that a programme showed Sinn Fein's policies without constant reference to the party's support for nationalist murderers; after all, the Tory and Labour parties support national armies committed to obscene acts of violence, but this is not mentioned every time there is a programme about their policies.

And having seen the uncensored picture, what are we to conclude? Quite simply, that Sinn Fein is just another party of reformist politicians who want to run capitalism. As the party's leader Gerry Adams, said, "All we can do is  . . . achieve those very small gains by working along with the people within the system". So much for Assembly member, Danny Morrison's throwaway comment that Sinn Fein is "a revolutionary party". From Adams we heard the usual vague claims of a reformist leader: first the nationalist movement must be built up to oppose British rule, and then after the British have withdrawn and Ireland is independent there will be "the beginnings of a socialist society". What does this mean? Uncensored Adams neglected to tell us. Campbell, who is a feminist, asked Adams what the position of women would be once Ireland had achieved Home/Rome Rule; she stated that "for women this happens to be one of the most repressive cultures you can think of." But Gerry told her that her question was based on "cultural imperialism" and she, being English, should learn that Irish people are different.

At the end of the programme one was left with the clear impression of a political party based on the twin confusions of nationalist illusion and reformist promise. If there ever is a united Ireland, presided over by Sinn Fein, it will be another capitalist state and the workers living under it will detest Adams and his fellow would-be rulers as much as they do their present representatives.

Even without the terrorist violence, which socialist unequivocally condemn, there was plenty shown about Sinn Fein to justify the unreserved hostility of socialists towards them.

Money sickness

It was D. H. Lawrence who referred to "the collective money-madness of mankind",  and where better to  observe that madness than in the gambling establishments of Las Vegas. Showdown at Glitter Gulch was a documentary about the world poker championship (BBC1, 3 July)  - an event where the winner gets a million dollars. It was an obscene spectacle, all these idlers throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars on to a table while millions of workers go without a decent supper and millions more die for lack of money for food. It was not "human nature" which led these men to indulge in an insane monetary ritual — it was a social system which elevates money into the god of life and trains those with more of it than sense to invest their energies in acquiring more. A mad system drives men mad and this programme was a peep through the window of one of the top-class asylums.

The price is indignity

The same "collective money-madness", but at a cheaper rate for the proles, is The Price is Right (don't know or care when it's on). The programme succeeds in being the ultimate in tasteless money fetishism. Crowds of impoverished workers scream and throw dignity to the wind as the prospect of guessing the price of an electric carving knife turns them into human cash registers. The aim of the game is to guess how much commodities are worth and if the guess is near enough to the price you win. Game shows generally portray capitalism as its most grotesque, and the trouble with watching them is that we are supposed to applaud contestants for doing well.

Live aid

Live Aid for Africa (BBC, 13 July) demonstrated several things that it did not intend, The purpose of the concert was to raise money to stop people starving to death in Africa. Yet its effect will be minimal, negligible, crumbs thrown into an ocean of despair. What then did the event show? First of all, that workers, even when motivated by immense goodwill and collective concern, cannot solve capitalism's problems. During the course of the sixteen-hour concert British workers donated a mere £4 million in telephone pledges, less than the British Government spends on the military machine every three hours every day; less than the richest woman in Britain (the Queen( receives as interest on her personal investments in one week. Workers were 'phoning up and saying that they would sell their cars and donate their precious savings to the worthy cause — but asking the impoverished in Britain to feed the starving of Africa solves precisely nothing.

Secondly, the show demonstrated just how superficial is the moralising self-righteousness of those who do not understand the capitalist system. Periodically we would be urged — by millionaires who became rich by dressing up in fancy costumes and singing about love through sore throats — to "feed the world". But why is food dumped while people starve? Why do some people have banquets while others do not? In short, the whole event was an invitation to weep at the symptoms, and to hell with any concern about the disease. Indeed, Bob Geldof (who may be sincere, but it certainly naive to a dangerous degree) was seen repeatedly throwing his arms in the air, like a man who feels something but does not know what, and declaring that governments should "do something". In fact, governments are doing something: running capitalism and feeding the capitalists' hunger for profits.

Thirdly, the show proved just how musicians have become incapable of performing without record producers to twiddle knobs and make them sound any good. Some of the sets from Wembley and Philadelphia, presented without the benefit of studio treatment, ranged from not very good to pathetic. Demonstrated above all, however, was the power of communication technology: fourteen international satellites beamed the show to 50 million TV sets, reaching an estimated audience of 1.5 billion people. But just as this technology can unite millions of workers for a lofty, if ultimately futile, moral cause, so too can it bind them together for more sinister propaganda messages, such as those demanded for example in the build-up to war. Left in the hands of the capitalist minority the means of mass communication are a potent weapon. But used for socialist purposes, think of how the worldwide unity forged by Live Aid could be turned into an instrument for making democracy work within the global village.

Watching the show until the final performance by Bob Dylan (not an occasion worthy of the wait, as it turned out), I was struck by an overwhelming sense of depression — not just at the thought that fellow human beings are starving to death, although that is good enough reason for a sleepless night, but because all the goodwill, energy, determination and technological know-how put into "doing something about it" will not feed the world. Despite Geldof's moral crusade the obscenity of mass human misery will go on and on and on until Elvis Costello stops singing "all you need is love" and the workers realise that the world os ours for the taking. And finally the national anthem came on, and by the time it got to "Long To Reign Over Us" I was fast asleep.

Steve Coleman 

Politics of Live Aid (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

I confess to being one of the millions of people throughout the world who watched the Live Aid concert, and one of the smaller number of Bob Dylan devotees who sat up half the night and saw it through to the bitter (as it turned out, in view of Dylan's abject performance) end. And I admit to having enjoyed watching all those super-stars strut and stagger, prance and pose on my TV screen. But this was supposed to be more than just entertainment, and to remind us there was, during the sixteen hour concert, repeated showings of a particularly haunting and harrowing film of Ethiopian famine victims. Bob Geldof, the concert's moving force, also continually reminded us that the purpose of the programme was to raise money, and he succeeded. Forty million pounds is a lot of money for a charity to raise in one go.

But Geldof also asked the question: why do people starve on one side of the world while on the other people are paid not to produce food, or "surpluses" are allowed to rot? He said that no-one had yet answered that question for him satisfactorily. I hope reads this article.

On the surface the answer to "what causes famine?" may seem obvious. Shortage of food causes famine, and the present food shortage in Africa is the result of drought. But is this really true? Why, when the world can be turned into a "global village" for the purposes of transmitting pop music , can it not be turned into a "global village" for the purposes of distributing food?

In fact the immediate cause of famine is a combination of events, which includes such things as successive years of drought and crop failures leading to the creation of deserts. But there is no inevitable relationship between even a number of crop failures in successive years and famine. The latter is more likely to be due, not to be an absolute shortage of food, but rather to its unequal distribution both between countries and within a country. So for example:

it is rarely the urban poor who suffer famine (because of access to wage labour) which is usually confined to rural populations which in many under-developed countries have little direct relationship with centres of political power, and therefore little influence (Frances D'Souza and Jeremy Shoham, "The spread of famine in Africa", Third World Quarterly, July, 1985)

And besides the environmental causes of famine there are also political causes such as warfare.

The immediate effect of food scarcity is rapidly rising prices and the movement of men to urban areas in search of paid work that will enable them to buy food for their families. At the same time farmers begin to sell their live-stock like goats and sheep in order to raise money. This leads to a fall in meat prices and hence in the purchasing power of the farmers, who are then forced to sell more valuable assets like plough oxen. When all these options have been exhausted, whole households and villages are forced to move to towns or relief centres in search of food aid:

Mass migration, usually taken as the first sign of a famine, is in fact a terminal sign of distress, and at this stage it is almost impossible to prevent mass deaths, however great the relief effort (D'Souza and Shoham, op, cit).

 The situation in much of Africa is clearly now in this terminal phase. And yet as long ago as December 1982 the Food and Agricultural Organisation said that Ethiopia would need 400,000 tonnes of food aid in 1983; no action was taken and the country needed 1.5 million tonnes by 1985. So why did the world not respond earlier? One answer is politics:

If countries supplying food aid want to ignore famine warnings they will. One reason why the famine was so bad in Ethiopia was that America, which is now supplying half of all Africa's food aid, was sending only a trickle of aid until October 1984. Ethiopia's government has few friends in Washington (The Economist, 20 July, 1985).

 The famine-stricken countries themselves may also, for domestic political reasons, not wish to acknowledge the existence of the problem. In Sudan for example, as late as mid-1984 the government claimed that there was no famine in the country for fear of the political consequences of admitting that people were starving.

But even when the existence of the problem is admitted and a decision is taken to do something about it, politics intrudes. The aid "industry" has vested interests: people who rely on the aid agencies for their jobs may be unwilling to co-operate fully with representatives from other organisations, which leads to pointless duplication of effort. For example, in 1983 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) received over 300 fact-finding missions from aid donors. They got so fed up with escorting people round the country that they are now refusing all international aid.

Most aid comes from national aid programmes rather than international relief agencies, and much of it is "tied". This means that the recipient government gets money provided it spends it on goods produced in the donor country. Clearly if the motive is to increase exports the interests of the starving in Africa are likely to come a very poor second to those of the rich in the donor country.

Another form of aid is "programme aid" whereby food is given to governments to be sold on the market. About a third of all America's 3.1 million tonnes of food aid and 60 per cent of that given by the EEC takes this form. In theory it enables recipient governments to buy seed and agricultural implements from the proceeds of the food sales; in practice the proceeds are just as likely to be spent on maintaining the armed forces.

Within the recipient country politics frequently affects the distribution of food aid. In Ethiopia the government has tried to prevent food from being distributed in the provinces of Tigre and Eritrea in an attempt to literally starve the rebels in those areas into submission and to force them to leave the region for feeding centres in other areas.

So in entering the aid business Bob Geldof should tread warily: it is a minefield of national and corporate interests, political manipulation and profit-seeking which is likely to destroy the good intentions of the politically naive.

For the sad truth is that despite the razzamatazz that surrounded the Live Aid concert the amount raised, though enormous by the standards of most charitable appeals, was a pittance when compared with the scale of suffering. Workers who gave money to the Live Aid appeal cannot afford to give enough to make a significant impact of the famine, since most of us rely only on a wage, salary or state benefits to provide for ourselves and our children. We do not own the wealth of the world; it is not ours to give.

Aid is in any case a contentious issue: some have argued that it has damaging effects for the recipients since it has the long term effect of weakening the capacity of communities to survive independently. Certainly it has been used for political and economic ends by the international capitalist class to create spheres of influence in the "Third World" and to maintain client states.

But a more important limitation of aid is the effect it has on the donors. Whether it is individuals giving to charities like Live Aid or governments making pious statements about the amount of aid they have provided, a dangerous illusion is created. The illusion, firstly, that something is being done, that we really can "feed the world" through charity and the efforts of a few dynamic and well-intentioned individuals like Bob Geldof. Both have politically disastrous consequences.

Famine is not a temporary upset in an otherwise harmonious world order which can be put right by a quick injection of money and sacks of grain: it is an endemic feature of a world system of society which dictates that those who have money to buy food can eat, and those who have no money must starve; that unsold food produced in one part of the world will not, in general, be transported to where it is needed because no profit would be made. For in our society food is not produced because people need it, but because those who own the farms and the land can make a profit from it. And if it cannot be sold profitably then it is left to rot.

So while it may be comforting to believe that Live Aid has significantly helped those suffering in Africa from the insanity of capitalism, it is dangerous because it ignores the real causes of world hunger. To perpetuate the myth that charity can solve that problem obscures the urgent need for political action to get rid of capitalism. We can eradicate famine: we have the technology, knowledge and productive capacity to produce enough food for everyone and to transport it to wherever in the world it might be needed. There is no need for people to starve but they will continue to do so as long as we produce goods for profit. To remove capitalism requires a much bigger commitment on the part of the working class than it takes to give a fiver to the Live Aid appeal. But whereas giving money to charity might give you a feeling of having "done something" to help the hungry (which lasts until the next awful pictures of unnecessary suffering are flashed onto your TV screen), working for socialism will bring the reward of knowing that you are helping to create a truly humanitarian society in which no-one, wherever they live, will die of hunger. And then we can all listen to pop music without feeling guilty.

Janie Percy-Smith