The Black Hole of Calcutta (1943)

From the December 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

What might be termed the sequel to the historical incident we know by the above term has been, and is being written in the blood of thousands of starving, pestilence-stricken Indian workers and peasants of Bengal. Daily references in the newspapers to the famine in India have provided grim evidence of the ghastly scenes enacted on the streets of Calcutta by actors unable to choose the part they wish to play. Stories have been related of children being sold for a handful of rice, and of skeletons of men and women feeding on jungle roots and leaves. Figures of the death rate show it to have increased to nearly four times the normal average. The whole tragedy is graphically epitomised by the Calcutta Statesman which said:-

  “Thousands of emaciated destitutes still roam the streets in the ceaseless quest for food, scouring dustbins and devouring rotten remains of castaway food and fruit. Rickety children clutching imploringly the tattered garments barely covering the bones of their mothers are seen in all quarters of the city.” (Quoted in Manchester Guardian Weekly, October 15, 1943.)

Famine has always been a factor to reckon with in the economy of India, and has usually meant suffering for large sections of the population. It is commonly understood that a famine means a shortage of food owing to the natural failure of crops, but what is not generally recognised is that the character of the famine, and the way in which it affects the people, varies with the type of society in which it occurs. To the middle of the nineteenth century famines in India were localized in the area in which there was a shortage of crop, and meant an appalling lack of food in that area and of employment. Even if one had money there was no food to be brought, and the general solution was to migrate to areas where food was available. From about 1850, however, capitalism, under the tutelage of the British, became superimposed on the old Indian feudal economy at an ever quickening rate, with an ever greater intensity. With the spreading of capitalism the growth of industrialisation, the development of the plantation and factory system, the production of goods for sale came more and more into evidence. Concurrently with this development the means of transport and communication were vastly increased and extended. Hence, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it became relatively easy to shift quantities of foodstuffs into famine-stricken areas, and a change in the general character of Indian famines took place. They now meant, not so much an appalling lack of food as high scarcity prices and lack of employment, and whilst the growth of the means of communication lessened the danger of local famines, it tended to widen the area where high prices would prevail.

Thus the famine, from being a calamity of the natural order, turned into a calamity of the social order, aggravating the sufferings inflicted on the poorer sections of the population, notably the peasants, the landless day-labourer, and the growing urban working class.

It is true that in the area most affected by the recent famine, Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, there has been some destruction of crops due to natural causes, but at the same time there have been good crops in other provinces. In the reports that have arrived in this country there is a general insistence that the catastrophe has not come about because of any basic natural shortage, but because such deficits in supply as did exist have been taken advantage of by hoarders and speculators. The loss of the Burma rice crop, excessive inflation, and general economic dislocation (all factors arising out of the war), and natural shortages in certain districts, all tended to encourage the farmers and merchants to hold on to their stocks in order to get still higher prices and greater profits when they did at last decide to sell.

This was the position as early as January 15, 1943, when in the Manchester Guardian Weekly it was reported that “price control has never been rigorously enforced, except against small retailers. The impression is widespread that there are considerable stocks which would be brought out if price control was removed and this would relieve the shortage until next harvest.” The same issue of the paper also stated that black markets flourished everywhere.

After seven months had elapsed the same paper wrote as follows (August 13, 1943):-

  “The Government of India’s Food Member did not deny last week the allegation that men in authority have obstructed the Government’s measures to bring relief to the masses. The Food Secretary on Sunday admitted that Sind had made enormous profits through the sale of surplus wheat and rice. Lack of foresight, the toleration of profiteers, and the fear of alienating certain favoured sections like the landlords, have created the food crisis.”

Whilst we learn on the one hand of the fear of alienating certain favoured sections of the property owning class, we learn that there was no such fear during the period of alienating those sections of the population with little or no property. Side by side with the blackest of black markets, dealing in the very life-blood of the poverty-stricken masses, there were “long queues of hungry workers waiting all night outside Government controlled grain shops in places like Bombay.” (Manchester Guardian Weekly, January 15, 1943)

Investigations conducted by Calcutta University have revealed that 50 per cent of the families of destitutes have been broken up, and that 47 per cent are landless labourers, 25 per cent small cultivators, 6 per cent town beggars, and the remainder unclassified.

Such evidence as this throws into bold relief the fact that it is the propertyless who suffer and die, whilst the propertied reap excess profits and get all they want in the black markets.

The Indian scene, in normal times, is a picture of a vast mass of humanity living in the grip of abysmal poverty. Utter destitution resulting in a prolonged death through starvation, or a quicker death through mal-nutritional diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid, is the lot of Indian workers and peasants. What then must be their lot when the price of the food they require for a bare existence soars far and away above their means? What can they do but wait for death to claim them, their bony hands held out imploringly for food, on the pavements of the second largest and one of the “most prosperous” cities in the British Empire! In other parts of the same empire the granaries of Australia and Canada are full to overflowing with the wheat that would bring succour to those in need. The problem, however, according to Mr. Amery (Secretary for India), speaking in the House of Commons, October 12, 1943, was “entirely one of shipping, and has to be judged in the light of all the other urgent needs of the Allied Nations.” Yet the Allied Nations are producing ships faster than they have ever been produced before in the history of mankind, and the USA is able to boast of a production of 15,000 naval ships of all dimensions in the past three years.

Well might the reader at this point exclaim, “This is madness!”

No, reader, this is not madness—simply another example of the ever present anarchy in CAPITALISM, the economic system of society that holds the world enslaved.

An economic system that is based on the ownership of the means of life by the few, and the exclusion of the means of life from the many. Only under capitalism is it possible for conditions to arise where hoarders, speculators, and black marketeers of every nationality can flourish on the one hand, and be the social complement of starvation, unemployment, squalor, disease and poverty on the other.

Only with the abolition of this private property basis of society and its replacement by the ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution by the whole of humanity, can humanity solve the evils with which it is confronted.

This is the job, the only worth-while job, of the working class. Not only the working class of this country, but of the working class of the world acting in unison. No longer must they acquiesce in the retention of a system which condemns great numbers of men and women to exist like a seething mass of gentils beneath a rotten, stinking piece of meat. Just as the meat is a condition of existence of the gentils, so is capitalism a condition of existence of the working class. It must be removed, and with it will go all class divisions.

This can only be done by a working class conscious of the cause of its troubles, desirous of solving them, and with knowledge of the solution. Even in the case of the Indian working class the solution to their problems is the same as ours. It does not lie in the substitution of one kind of capitalism for another. It does not lie in the substitution of a native Indian master class in place of the British Raj; their fellow countrymen are among their most ruthless exploiters. In common with the rest of the workers of the world, their solution lies in the establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life – the establishment of SOCIALISM. Along this road alone, however tiresome may be the journey and however many pitfalls may be on the way, lies the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.

N. S.

By The Way: Atrocities (1945)

The By The Way Column from the August 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

Atrocities

As atrocities seem to be of great interest, just now, the “Socialist Standard” has pleasure in giving evidence of other atrocities to which the attention of Parliament and the Press might he called, besides the Horror Camp in Germany.

First a report from the Manchester Guardian, of Famine Enquiry Commission headed by Sir John Woodhead, Acting Governor of Bengal, 1934-1939).

   “After considering all the circumstances (it is stated), we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine as it actually took place. The Government of India failed to recognise at a sufficiently early date the need for a system of planned movement of food grains, including rice as well as wheat, from surplus to deficit provinces and states.”—(Manchester Guardian, May 8th, 1945).

The Guardian continues: —

“Enormous Profits”   But the public in Bengal, or at least certain sections of it, are also held to have their share of blame. Reference is made to the “atmosphere of fear and greed which, in the absence of control, was one of the causes of the rapid rise in the price-level,” and the report adds: “Enormous profits were made out of the calamity, and in the circumstances profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved., and there was much indifference in the face of suffering. Corruption was widespread throughout the provinces and in many classes of society.”
   “A million and a half of the poor of Bengal fell victims to circumstances for which, they themselves were not responsible. Society, together with its organs, failed to protect its weaker members; indeed, there was a moral and a social breakdown as well as an administrative breakdown.
  “By August, 1943, it was clear that the Provincial Administration in Bengal was failing to control the famine. Deaths and mass migration on a large scale were occurring. In such circumstances the Government of India, whatever the constitutional position, must share with the Provincial Government the responsibility of saving lives.”

Second the following report of the worst air raid of the war on Hamburg on July 23th-26th, when the city “ceased to exist.”

   Twenty thousand Germans died and 60,000 were taken to hospital after one R.A.F. raid on Hamburg on the night of July 25-26, 1943, when the greatest firebomb inferno raged throughout the centre of the dock area. It lay waste the equivalent of three London boroughs.
     Official sources state that German air raid precaution statistics confirm these figures.
   That night fire-bombs set light to the dock warehouses and installations in the dock areas covered by the three suburbs Hammerbrook, St. Georg, and Borgfeldt.
   The heat of the fires, which lasted several days, was so fierce that several fruit trees produced blossom again and the oxygen became so rarifled by the heat that people died from suffocation.
    This was probably the worst air raid of the war. The total of casualties caused by Allied forces in their raids on the port is said to be 250,000, and of these it is estimated that 50,000 were killed. - - (Sunday Despatch, May 13th, 1945).

#    #    #    #

The Old, Old Story

Lord Beaverbrook has delivered himself of his awe-inspiring thoughts for the future prosperity of the nation in a speech at Bradford. According to his own paper, the Sunday Express, May 27, it is the “Way to a better Britain.” “Full work and high wages.” "How are we to have full employment”? he asks and answers “by setting a high standard of life for the people.” It’s as simple as that! A little more detail? “By satisfying the demand of the home market the output is built up and as the output is built up the costs of production are reduced. When the costs of production are reduced sufficiently then it is simple and easy to find foreign markets.”

Just like that! “The first export market I wish to seek is the export of an idea—the export of the standard of living to other countries, too.”

Whether this is to include Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan, etc., the noble lord did not say. Or even India, where a million died of famine last year.

“The Government should take part in such policy on two principles. The first is that the Governments of the world should meet together.” (Shades of the ill-starred World Economic Conference of 1933). Well, they’ve been doing this for several hundred years, now—they might as well go on, “for the purpose of setting the standards of living high enough and strong enough to provide work for every man.” The second principle should be that when there is a decline in employment, not only in Britain but in every country that is a party to the agreement providing for higher standards of life, that decline should be met by a rising scale of wages. A rising scale of wages will check the evil of Unemployment by providing increased buying power.”—(Sunday Express, May 27).

Which means: Increase output to cheapen cost of production to find foreign markets—BUT the Governments are to agree to increase wages when unemployment spreads throughout the world to “increase buying power.”

Why it will be necessary to find foreign markets with cheaper products his lordship does not say.

If it were possible to enable the workers to buy back even a large part of their produce, why not do it here?

If the policy will work, HOW does Beaverbrook KNOW that there is going to be a “decline in employment” throughout the world?

And do we have to have a decline in employment first so that the Government can “raise wages”?

Actually, Governments can no more “raise” wages, than they could raise the dead.

In a falling market after the war, the Government which tried to raise wages would “fall” quicker than the wages.

The intelligent workers are becoming more tired than ever of the “raise the standard of living” rubbish, started by Lloyd George and the Liberals in 1910, repeated by the Labour Leaders, 1919, and in “Socialism and the Living Wage” of the I.L.P. (1926), and by the Social Credit chumps of 1932.

Apart from the absurdity of proposing to call Conferences of the Governments of the world, immediately after sacrificing thousands to destroy half of them for five years, “cheapening cost of production” to “capture foreign markets” is reduction of Relative Wages—and however many “friendly” conferences are held, leads inevitably to WAR.

Wages are the price of labour-power. Prices fall in a condition of ample supply and falling demand—“when Johnny comes marching home again.”

The echoes of the last shots are still reverberating around the world. Millions are still in the modern mass concentration camp known as the “Forces.” And all this “great brain” of the Tory Party can offer is “the mixture as before”; bidding the exploited worker, like a blue bottle on the window-pane, after having fought his master’s battle—to restart his painful and arduous attempt to crawl into the sunlight—only to crash once again into the abyss of poverty he longs to escape.

Horatio.

What causes famine? (1989)

From the December 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

One popular explanation of the cause of famines sees them as being due simply to not enough food being available. People starve because there's no food for them. What could be more simple? And if there's no food available that's because of some natural disaster—some so-called Act of God which we can’t do anything about— like flooding in Bangladesh or a drought in Ethiopia.

This simplistic view has been challenged and effectively refuted by Professor Amartya Sen in his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation that appeared in 1982. Sen showed that in most recent famines the food was available: what wasn’t available were "access rights" to it, whether money or the ability to directly grow food, on the part of those who starved.

Professor Sen returned to this theme in a radio broadcast on BBC3 on 21 March. After referring to his early experience when a schoolboy of the Bengal famine of 1943, one of the worst famines that has taken place in recent times, which he showed to have been falsely attributed by the authorities to not enough food being available. Professor Sen stated his basic case:

In every society the amount of food a person can own and consume depends on a set of rules governing his legal entitlement given by ownership, and possibilities of production and exchange. If food were to be distributed equally, the aggregate food availability would indeed determine how much food each person could get. But obviously this does not happen in any actual society. To decide whether a person will m fact be able to acquire enough food, we have to see what he owns, what he can produce with what he owns, what he can get in exchange. and so on. Starvation will result if a person is not able to establish ownership over an adequate amount of food through these means. Starvation is a social outcome reflecting an entitlement failure. Availability of food is only one influence among many affecting that outcome.

Turning to the 1974 famine in Bangladesh, he explained that what happened was that a flood destroyed the jobs of many millions of rural labourers who would normally have earned money planting and transplanting rice. With no jobs they had no income and so no money to buy food, despite 1974 being a record year for food availability over the period 1971- 75. As Sen put it, "what killed the Bangladeshi rural labourers was not any physical lack of food, but the failure of the social system to give them adequate entitlement to the food that was there”.

A similar situation had occurred in Ethiopia in 1973 except that it affected peasant farmers working their own land rather than rural wage workers. Here there was indeed a drought that did adversely affect crop production, but it wasn't this that caused people to starve, at least not directly as in the popular “not enough food" explanation for famines.

Because they had less of their particular food crop to sell, the peasants in the Wollo province, which was the centre of the famine, suffered a reduction in their income and were therefore unable to buy food to replace that which they were unable to grow themselves. It was this collapse of their income, not the failure of their crop as such, that led to the famine. Professor Sen again: “Had there been only a fall in food output in Wollo, without a simultaneous decline in the local population's economic fortune, food would certainly have moved into Wollo under the pull of the market”.

Nor could the famine be attributed to a lack of transport facilities, another reason sometimes advanced as a cause of famines, since the main North-South road from Addis Abba to Asmara runs through the worst hit area of Wollo. There was a movement of food along this road—out of Wollo. This happened, as it did in the notorious Irish famines of the 1840's, because purchasing power in the area had fallen more than output, so that market forces led to the "surplus” (to market requirements) being exported to areas where people did have the money to pay for it.

So, famines are features of a society in which entitlement to food is not direct but by means of money. Professor Sen sees the solution as lying in establishing mechanisms which would ensure that every person has enough money to always be in a position to buy enough food to stop them starving. He thereby ignores the obvious solution: establish a society in which people would have free and direct access to food as of right, a moneyless, socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources. In such a society nobody would ever starve because food would be being produced for its natural purpose of feeding people.

Adam Buick

An Irish Holocaust (1995)

From the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like most historical events the so-called famine in Ireland in the last century is shrouded in myth. It is commonly believed that not only was there an actual shortage of food but that the British government was solely responsible for the shortage. Needless-to-say, the facts tell a different story.

This year, in Ireland and probably in places like Boston and New York, the 150th anniversary of events in Ireland in the years 1845/49 will bring organised ceremonies of remembrance of the Great Famine that was to lay the foundations of bitter memories and abiding hatred.

In scale it was probably as great as those terrible events of a hundred years later in Nazi Europe which accounted for the state murder of some six million people who were, by religion, or tradition, Jewish. The method of killing in Ireland was not death camps but the utter despair and terror of parents watching their children die, or, perhaps worse, predeceasing their children, which was common to both cataclysmic obscenities. Both arose out of the material conditions of a society where the nourishment of human life was obliterated by the needs of wealth and power.

If that latter contingency belonged to the past, if life today was lived as it could be with the guarantee of the material needs of a full and happy life for every human being, then we might weep for all the victims of class society and build their memorial, in the categorical assurance that such evils have been banished forever.

But they haven’t: famines, real and contrived, are an endemic feature of world capitalism. Dying parents in one part of our world watch stark-eyed children stare .  .  .  hear their futile cries of pain and puzzlement, as mercy ushers them into peaceful death while, in the same place, life-saving food for which the starving do not offer a market is shipped to places where it can be converted to profit.

In Ireland in 1841 census returns showed a population of some 8.1 million people and forecast that, by the end of another decade, that figure would have increased by a further million. Life for the serf-like Irish peasantry was frugal beyond our imagination. Their diet was potatoes, enhanced sometimes by other root vegetables and, for those affluent enough to possess a cow, a bit of butter. It is a compliment to those basic foodstuffs that visitors to Ireland not infrequently remarked on the good physical condition of the people. But life was grindingly hard and physical security non-existent.

Landlordism

Landlordism was at the centre of the Irish economy. Outside of the province of Ulster, the peasant was simply a tenant-at-will, that is to say their tenure and their rent were arbitrarily determined seasonally by landlords or, more often, by their rapacious agents. Holdings were generally tiny, sometimes as little as a quarter of an acre, and any attempt at improvement, either of husbandry or habitation, drew the threat of eviction or higher rent.

Potato blight was common and in the years of the great Hunger the whole of Europe was seriously affected. Today the blight is exorcised by the use of chemical fungicides but then, in most countries where farms were larger farmers grew a number of varieties of potatoes thus assuring that if one species was blighted the others would escape the blight. Given the size of peasant smallholdings in Ireland, this natural antidote to the problem of blight could not be applied and a single variety of potato represented the tenuous hold on life in rural Ireland.

The ravaging of the crop by blight was not uncommon. For the pathetic smallholder and his family it meant months of semi-starvation and an increased burden of debt until the new season’s crop would appear. In 1846 there was a rich crop and the promise of a bumper harvest brought joy to the burdened people. But the promise was not realised for, almost overnight, the blight returned and turned hope into despair as the landscape became infested with putrefying vegetation and the atmosphere filled with the evil smell of decay.

Hope was abandoned: witnesses have testified to the despair of men, women and children sitting on fences, in the dank, overcast day wailing almost ritually at the sight of their life’s support turning to a foul-smelling mucilage. There would be no rent for the agent, and the landlords, doubtless prompted by the 1846 abolition of the Com Laws, were anxious to evict their miserable tenants and turn their estates into cattle ranches.

In the following year, 1847, not only did the blight return but, because of the shortage of seed potatoes and mass evictions from the land, the acreage under cultivation was down and the prospect of saving some potatoes offered even less hope.

For those fit enough to travel, places like Liverpool and the northern cities of England offered hope but the place where: “they say there’s food and work for all and the sun shines always there ” was the eastern seaboard of America.

Coffin ships

Helped often by landlords anxious to get them off the land, they left in their thousands and their need to travel provided an attractive market for speculators who could provide any form of shipping space for these miserable poor. Such were the conditions in the hulks playing the long, pitiless Atlantic crossing as to test the fit. But the starvelings embarking in these “coffin ships” were not only ill-fitted to face the cold, insanitary journey of endless nights and days; they travelled with death as a companion in their midst in the form of typhus and relapsing disease resultant from the conditions they had already experienced.

Until 1854, when the Passenger Acts were strengthened by Act of Parliament, most British ships carrying Irish emigrants provided only the most basic facilities for cooking at sea and sanitary provision was minimal or non-existent. It is estimated, from passenger lists, ships’ logs and medical records in the ports of arrival, that some 25 percent of Irish emigrant passengers on British ships were fatalities of the Atlantic crossing.

Those who did survive nourished a hatred of “England” (Irish folk patriotism always singularised England as Perfidious Albion) that would survive the generations and ensure that rebellion in Ireland was not only funded but most forcibly stimulated. From the Fenians to the plastic buckets of Noraid the folk memory of more than a million sad refugees matured to anger and bequeathed the memory of the other millions whose lives had been torturously forfeited to a semi-feudal landlordism and an equally brutal capitalism.

Food exported

In reality there was not a famine in Ireland during the terrible years of hunger and disease. What did happen was the staple food of the poor was blighted with disease and such was the system of landlordism that there was no fall-back root crops available to the peasantry. It was the rapacity of the feudal aristocracy that imposed this frugal living on the people. They were mainly English but the vile agents who carried out their sentences— for eviction in the prevailing conditions was almost certainly a death sentence— were often Irish.

We say there was not a famine because the well-documented record reveals that during the starvation years, when people ate dogs, cats and rats and when a few instances of cannibalism were reported, enough food to feed twice the number of people in Ireland was continuously exported. Cattle, sheep, pigs and the thousands of tonnes of cereal crops left Ireland during each of the famine years.

James Connolly is among the writers and historians who give us an insight into the grim mathematics of economic murder that capitalism wrought in Ireland in the years between 1845 and 1849:

“The first failure of the potato crop took place in 1845 and between September and December of that year 515 deaths from hunger were registered although 3,250,000 quarters of wheat and numberless cattle had been exported. From that time until 1850 the famine spread, and the exports of food continued. Thus in 1848 it was estimated that 300,000 persons died of hunger and1,826,132 quarters of wheat and barley were exported. ” (Labour in Irish History, p. 102.)

That Connolly’s figures may err on the low side is contested by some other writers and would seem to be borne out by the figures he quotes, earlier in the same work, for the yearly value of the Irish potato crop which was approximately £20 million while, in the year 1848, when the entire potato crop was a total loss, the value of Ireland’s agricultural produce was £44,958,120.

The historian, Curtis, points out that while half of Ireland’s 8.1 million population was entirely dependent on the potato at the time of the potato blight, “three quarters of the soil was under wheat and other crops”. (A History of Ireland, Edmund Curtis, p. 367.)

L. M. Cullen, an apologist for capitalism, unwittingly shows the cause not only of the Irish “Famine”, but of most subsequent famines elsewhere, when he draws attention to the fact that in much of the country a retailing system existed. “Here the problem was not one of the absence of a food market but of the lack of an income on the part of the poorer members of the community. ”

With the exception of the counties Antrim, Down and, to a lesser extent, Armagh, the lifestyle and culture of the comparatively new system of capitalism was foreign to Ireland. But the London parliament, consisting then of free marketeers like the contemporary brigands Portillo, Lilley and their compassionless ilk, preaching the brutal gospel of laissez-faire, did not see the economic murder of the poor as a valid reason for disturbing the free play of the market. In the light of public outcry in Britain and elsewhere, the government did reluctantly introduce some relief schemes but because they had to circumvent market interests they were often absurdly ineffectual and a starving people continued to watch the export of the food that could save their lives.

It is a pattern—market forces dictating that food should be exported from a famine-stricken area towards consumers who can pay, leaving those who can’t pay to die of starvation—that has been followed ever since under capitalism: in Bengal, in the Sudan, in Bangladesh and in Ethiopia.

Richard Montague