The Common Market Special Survey: 4. Agriculture (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agriculture may not be the most important problem for Britain in its negotiations over the Common Market but it is certainly going to be one of the trickiest.

Nor should it be forgotten that agriculture has been causing a great deal of trouble within the Common Market itself. Only recently, France declared that she would veto any fresh moves on the industrial front until West Germany showed more enthusiasm for removing the barriers on the agricultural side. The motive, of course, was the usual one—France is keen to get a larger slice of the German market for her agricultural exports.

The fact that Denmark, another large exporter of foodstuffs, has also applied for membership of the Community will cause further complications. It will be interesting to see how all these conflicting interests are finally sorted out, if in fact they ever are.

Britain

But there can be no doubt that British agriculture has plenty to worry over. Home farmers are overwhelmingly opposed to Britain going into the Common Market and have done their utmost to prevent it. There is equally no doubt that it is fear for their agriculture that has caused many Commonwealth countries to make such an outcry about Britain’s application to join. But in this modern world of capitalism it is the interests of industry that call the tune and the Macmillan Government has gone on regardless of both farmers and Commonwealth.

British agriculture has good reasons to be wary of the Six. In the first place, in spite of all the efforts during and since the war to step up home production, the U.K. has still to import more than half its food. Most of these imports come from the Commonwealth—meat and dairy produce from New Zealand and Australia, wheat and coarse grains from Australia and Canada, and such things as fruit from all three. Much of this comes in at preferential tariff rates, though this benefit is not so important as it once was.

On the other hand, the Common Market is virtually self-sufficient in foodstuffs. Indeed, certain countries like France and the Netherlands are now actually piling up surpluses. France in particular, as a result of improved methods since the war, is rapidly coming to the point of crisis in the production of some items, for which she is becoming desperate to find markets. Nor is the position going to improve since she has vast capacity to expand. By far the largest country in area (second only to Russia in Europe), and larger still in actually usable agricultural land, it has been estimated that with fully improved methods she could supply the whole of the Six with some products, notably wheat and beef. It is the fear that France may insist on supplying Britain with wheat that is causing Canada particular concern.

Both France and the Netherlands, and Denmark if she also joins, see Britain’s entry into the Common Market as providing a welcome outlet for their agricultural exports. The British farmer takes a much less rosy view of the prospect.

His pessimism is made worse when he considers a further important difference between the way his products are sold compared with the Six. This is strange on the face of it because food prices are generally higher within the Six than they are in this country and this should apparently be to his advantage.

But the reality is not so re-assuring. The reason why food prices are generally lower in Britain is because it has long been the policy of British governments to keep them down artificially. Their method of doing this has been to allow food to come into the country almost free of restriction and let prices find their own level irrespective of the fact that these prices are below those at which the home farmer can produce economically.

This policy if left unchecked would, of course, soon bring most British farmers to bankruptcy. To avoid this, the Government has regularly made up the difference between the farmers general price and the imported price by means of subsidies. This difference is certainly not chicken-feed—it amounts to about £250 million a year, plus many more millions in the way of other payments to assist and improve their farming.

The Six

This procedure is in marked contrast to the system in most countries of the Six, whose governments have been more inclined towards policies of keeping out foreign imports by means of tariffs and quotas. They have been able to do this mainly because they are largely self-sufficient in food and the result has been that though prices are higher they are at the same lime more closely related to the farmers’ actual costs.

In practical terms, of course, the two systems boil down to essentially the same thing. All that happens is that the subsidies needed to help out the British farmer are found from extra taxation so that overall the amount actually received is near enough the same. But it has been an exceedingly useful method for the British capitalist class in keeping food prices stable and thus of helping to keep wages under better control. It was, of course, used to its greatest effect during wartime and in the critical period immediately afterwards.

The Six have already made it clear, however, that they will expect Britain to fall in with their system. It is also pretty obvious that the British Government will not in fact be unduly upset about this since whatever merits the subsidy system has had in the past it has been causing them a lot of headaches recently. They are particularly restive about the financial burden: assistance to be paid out to farmers is even higher than usual this year, enough to make them wonder whether the time hasn’t come to have done with it altogether.

Prices

If therefore Britain does join the Six a rise in food prices seems highly likely. Estimates about this vary from a shilling or two per head per week to something very much more, but the truth is that nobody really knows. One thing is certain, however, and that is that it would provide the Government with a wonderful opportunity to whittle down the effective buying power of wages at a time when the wind of competition within the Common Market was already making the British worker feel chilly.

Agriculture is notoriously a difficult subject to make forecasts about. Governments play about with it and it has always provided a voting lobby sufficiently powerful to make political parties commit themselves to all sorts of peculiar things to win farmers’ support at election times. In addition, until the atomic bomb came along to make the question academic, capitalist governments everywhere have always had some regard for its importance in times of war. The fear of blockade has always been a bogey for them. One can never be certain, then, of what will happen when governments start talking about agriculture and even less certain when a group of their spokesmen get round a conference table to bargain and horsetrade.

A few things can be said, however. It seems fairly certain, for example, that if Britain does go into the Common Market ii will do so at the considerable expense of Commonwealth countries. Present indications are that whilst the Six may how some special consideration for New Zealand, whose economy is almost completely independent upon Britain taking all her meat products and butter, they will have little time for the claims of Australia and Canada who will have to start looking elsewhere for markets for their products. Australia has in fact already begun to do this and is now selling to China and Japan.

Bigger Units

Agricultural interests in France and the Netherlands would gain from this, though Denmark will provide extra competition if she also joins. Italian horticulture will also be given a fillip since the hitherto heavily protected U.K. market seems almost certain to be made more accessible. It is hard to see anything other than a catastrophic effect upon British horticulture, in fact, unless the negotiators bring something remarkable out of the bag. Expensively-heated glasshouses are no match economically for free sunshine and fast transport and can only have their existence in (he mad world of capitalism.

But even more clearly than with industry, the future of European agriculture is going to reflect the inexorable drive of capitalism towards bigger units, mechanisation, and more economic production.

In Italy, 44 per cent. of the population are still dependant upon the land for their living. In France the proportion is 25 per cent. and even in Germany it is 15 per cent. The figure in Britain is 5 per cent.

All these countries are taking deliberate measures to get their peasants off the land and into the towns and factories, though economic forces themselves are probably doing the work more effectively on their behalf. Hundreds of thousands of small farmers are fated to leave their farms in the not far-off future and their land will be merged into larger holdings, revert to its natural state, or be transformed into state forests.

Even in this country the process is still going on. Many small farmers are only able to keep going because of their subsidies from the State. Each year still shows a drop in the number of people getting their living from the land.

The Common Market, therefore, only throws into prominence a process which has been part and parcel of capitalism since its existence. In fact, the Common Market is itself a reflection of this process on the international field. The same impetus which forces firms to amalgamate within a country’s boundaries now forces the countries themselves to look outside their boundaries.

Surplus

But whilst the implications for industry of this process are great, for agriculture they are enormous. That is why all the negotiators at Brussels, whether they belong to Britain, the Six, Denmark, Ireland, or any other country with agricultural interests to protect, are going to talk tough and bargain hard.

And, very much in their minds and hanging darkly over all, is the shadow of surplus. Surplus in a world where half the population live near to starvation and another quarter not very much better.

And that for us is the real dark shadow over all this business of agriculture and the Common Market.

Stan Hampson

You can have your veggies and eat them too ! (2006)

From Issue 20 of the World Socialist Review

The practice of vegetarianism — or non-practice of animarianism* — is not new to humanity. However, one could argue that it has never been more important. World hunger, inhumane and filthy methods of meat production, and the spread of livestock diseases both new and old are forcing many who would never consider abandoning sinking their teeth into a steaming hunk of flesh to give the idea a second thought. There are many kinds of vegetarians, ranging from impostors to the almost monastic avoiders of any food product of animal origin. This lifestyle is admittedly difficult; from meat-lover’s restaurant menus to relatives who have to cook me something extra (and have my eternal gratitude), to the usually absurdly high-priced products offered in the supermarkets.

I will try to show how vegetarianism in socialism makes sense and pass along some of the general benefits of the lifestyle, without attempting to convert you. There are people and organizations out there that can help you if you have questions or want more details on the nutritional aspects of meat-free lifestyles.

One of the concerns about meatless diets is protein. Actually, a balanced Western diet includes four times the recommended amount of protein for an average healthy adult, so leaving out the meat isn’t going to kill you. In fact, I don’t track where my protein comes from, and I sort of don’t care, because I know that there are sufficient quantities in many plant-based foods, the chief being the soybean. This is exactly where the herbivores get it and they do just fine.

Incidentally, this introduces an area where I think vegetarianism and socialism cross — at the cessation of the waste of matter and energy involved in transforming plants into meat. A good rule of thumb to estimate this waste is the “ten percent pyramid,” with humans on the top and the little greenies on the bottom. Only ten percent of each pound of “eaten” is successfully converted into “eater.” The rest is waste in the form of uneatable or indigestible matter and heat energy lost during chemical conversion. Therefore, it takes about ten pounds of plants to produce one pound of animal, and ten pounds of animal to produce one pound of human or other carnivore.

A Happy and Livable Planet

A little math tells me that if I was a carnivore, it would take 250 x 10 x 10 = 25,000 pounds of vegetable matter to produce a meat-eating version of me, but only 2,500 pounds to produce me as an herbivore. Abandoning meat as a food source can optimally increase the nutritive capacity of agriculture ten times, thus reducing our dependence on it! When socialism rolls around, the elimination of waste and hunger will surely be both primary goals for the creation of a happy and livable planet.

A socialist future like the one I dream about will also have a lot less pain and suffering than the current offering. I’ve done my homework, and without getting into details, I can say that there is a lot of that going on in the meat industries. Plants, in contrast, don’t feel pain. They cannot for the obvious reason that they do not have brains, or any nervous systems at all. And no, the cows and pigs are not going to reproduce out of control if we stop using them for food.

There are environmental impacts as well, the most serious of which is the pollution caused by the wastes of animals grown for food. This has to go somewhere — and usually, untreated livestock waste is dumped into the nearest body of water, unlike human waste, which is in most cases required by law to be treated before release into the environment. The impacts of farm animal waste are significant — I’m not going to quote statistics, so you can research this if you want.

The impact of fertilizer is even greater; however, this problem does not completely go away if meaty diets eventually disappear. Fertilizer will still be necessary to grow crops, but mindful socialists will not be forced by the pressure of the market to produce the most, the biggest, and the best — only that which is needed. They can take care that the effects of the fertilizer they do use are reduced and monitored by careful farming practices, efforts made easier by a cooperative agricultural model and not a competitive one. Meat processing facilities have environmental impacts as well. Since it seems impossible for capitalism to maintain clean and efficient slaughterhouses, those places remain vectors for disease and contamination. Shockumentaries still pop on the tube every once in awhile, reminding us, however ineffectively, how filthy meat processing actually is.

In sum, the benefits of a vegetarian society can go hand in hand with the desires of a socialist society. A widespread vegetarian lifestyle can play a significant role in reducing energy demands, pain and suffering, and the negative effects of agriculture on the environment. The environmental and medical impacts of a meat-centered culture are well documented even if they are generally ignored; and even though the psychological impacts may be harder to measure, they still contribute, in my opinion, to making the world a little more violent than it needs to be.

Tony Pink

* This is not an actual scientific term, but then neither am I.

Without comment (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than a decade now. the gap between population growth and food production in Africa has been widening. On present trends, says the FAO. the continent will have 650m more people and an annual deficit in cereal supplies of 100m tonnes by the year 2010 — more than the current yearly volume of world trade in wheat. 

Such shortfalls in the developing world have come to seem particularly offensive at a time when industrialised countries are struggling with budget-busting food surpluses that they cannot sell. The contrast between the two is probably the most striking and frustrating paradox of our age. 

It leads many sympathetic people to suggest that the problem is not one of food production, but one of food distribution. Find a way of recycling the food surpluses of the North to the food deficit areas of the South, they argue, and the problem will be on its way to a solution. But that hardly seems an adequate long-term answer to the problems of hunger in countries which are without exception still agriculturally-based, and likely to remain so for many years. 

The conundrum can be put another way. There is a problem of distribution, to be sure, but it is more to do with money than with food. People are not hungry these days because food supplies are not available; they are hungry because they are poor. 

(Financial Times 4 September 1986)

Profits before food . . . (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In June a Danish MEP, Jens-Peter Bonde, put down a written question in the European Parliament to the Common Market Commissioner for Agriculture, asking him to state what proportion of fruit bought by the Common Market to maintain price levels “was distributed free of charge, processed to make alcohol, used as animal fodder or destroyed in 1983” and adding, “when does the Commission intend to stop destroying people’s food?”

In his reply the Commissioner, Poul Dalsager, tried to argue that no food had actually been destroyed; it was just that some of the food bought to maintain prices “became unfit for use” before it could be turned into alcohol or used in other ways. This is pure hypocrisy: the food was deliberately allowed to rot — destroyed — because as Dalsager went on to explain, “an increase in the number of possible uses cannot be achieved without the risk of interfering in the normal distribution channels or of distorting competition between the various commercial operators”. In other words, if too much is given away to hospitals and other institutions or used as animal fodder or turned into alcohol, the profits of food merchants, animal feed producers and other alcohol distillers would be threatened.

The figures quoted by Dalsager allow us to work out how much food was destroyed in the ten Common Market countries in the year 1982/83 (April to April). For comparison we also give the figures for the amount given away free as this very neatly illustrates capitalism's priorities.

Adam Buick

World Socialist Radio - Withdrawal Symptoms (2025)

Adapted from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Withdrawal Symptoms by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

Even in a socialist society the legacy of capitalism would pose deep challenges—particularly in areas tied to personal behaviour, health and consumption. The episode points to obesity, processed foods, addictions, pollution, synthetic drugs and industrial toxins as examples of harms created under capitalism, and raises the question of how a socialist world would responsibly manage them without exacerbating individual dependency or imposing authoritarian controls. While acknowledging that some “withdrawal symptoms” might result from removing harmful, profit-driven products, a democratic socialist society would not perpetuate illnesses for profit, and would need to find ethical, collective ways to address lifestyle and health issues.

Adapted from the October 2025 issue of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

RSS Feed for Withdrawal Symptons.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

Nature (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nature of Nature. The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change. By Vandana Shiva. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2024. 162pp.

This is a wonderfully eloquent treatise on the human relationship with food and how that relationship is being disrupted by the despoiling of the earth and biosphere that is taking place and by the earth being treated as ‘raw material for industrial production’. In essence, it echoes the famous line from Rousseau: ‘You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’ It imparts with the utmost urgency messages such as ‘biodiversity erosion has now become an extinction emergency’ and ‘the climate crisis has become a climate emergency’, not simply stating them as unevidenced opinion but backing them up with research and evidence gathered over decades from the most well-informed scientific sources.

The author is particularly scathing about ‘agribusiness’ (also referred to as ‘the chemical and industrial food corporation’ and ‘the Poison Cartel’) and the alarming rate at which it is not only destroying biodiversity and the environment with its methods of cultivation and extraction but is now also, in response to criticism of its activities and consumer concern, pretending to ‘decarbonise’ its industrial food chain by what it falsely calls ‘regenerative agriculture’. Even its investment in meat (and dairy and egg) substitute products as a supposed replacement for intensively produced food is, she argues, a way of bamboozling consumers into thinking switching to such products (referred to here as ‘fake food’) somehow helps to lessen degradation of the biosphere and pressure on natural resources. Most of it, she claims, even when plant-based, is in fact just as ultra-processed, chemically and resource intensive and harmful to health as food produced and marketed through the conventional industrial food systems and just as, if not more, wasteful of the earth’s natural resources. The result, she states, is that it ‘ignores our relationship with nature’ and ‘reduces the bio-diverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine’.

All of this of course means that the author is profoundly opposed to the so-called ‘deep green’ agenda of renewability, regarding it as no more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised production. She sees the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain ‘renewable’ activities and technologies as both continuing to rely on fossil fuels and involving at least as much savage exploitation of the earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as in ‘non-green’ methods of production. So she is intensely critical of apparent environmental champions such as George Monbiot, referring to him as one of ‘the messiahs of fake food’ for his claim that ‘lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’. Such a view she dismisses as ‘false at every level’, since ‘being energy, resource and capital intensive, the lab food and fake food economy is highly non-sustainable’. A ‘greenwashing operation’ pure and simple and a massive fraud is the way this book’s author sees all this – at best an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs. But, even worse, it is, she tells us ‘a fully fledged counterfeiting operation that aims to gain control over our diets by making food ever more dependent on the multinational companies that produce and patent it’.

All this constitutes a searing indictment of capitalist industrial production, even though the author does not once in this book use the word ‘capitalist’ or ‘capitalism’, preferring instead to use terms such as ‘maldevelopment’ or ‘the economy of greed’. This may be a deliberate choice on her part so as not to lay herself open to any accusation of political partisanship as opposed to following the evidence of facts and science. Nevertheless, it is still clear that she is describing what socialists call commodity production, i.e. the production of goods for sale on the market with a view to profit for the tiny minority class who own the means to produce them. And she does show that she knows of the existence of this class (she mentions ‘the 1%’ on several occasions), that they are ‘predatory’ and that their activity ‘places profits above nature and people’. Yet there is no evidence in her book to indicate that she is looking outside the framework of commodity production for a different way of doing things.

At the same time, she has ‘an alternative path’ to propose to the current system’s ‘chemically grown and highly processed’ methods of food production. This consists of methods of production that would be ‘ecological not industrial … conserving and regenerating the earth’s biodiversity’, and these would involve ‘following the ecological laws of the earth – the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health’, thus offering ‘solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected’. It must be said that this is nothing if not an admirable vision. The snag, however, is that the author seems to see it as achievable within the framework of the present system of buying and selling and production for profit – and this by means of social pressure and the goodwill and actions of governments. Unfortunately this ignores the reality that all governments of all kinds and stripes are servants of that system (i.e. the capitalist system) and their role is one of oversight and of attempting to make it run in the least worst way. They are not in the business of overthrowing it or regulating it for the common benefit – or indeed for anyone’s benefit other than that of the small minority who already monopolise the planet’s wealth.

The existing method of production and distribution, with its growth imperative and its commodification of everything, has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. How can we prevent this going any further and reversing it? Not via tweaks to the way the current system works but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to cooperatively organise a leaderless, stateless society without governments, without markets, without buying and selling and with free access to all goods and services – a society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole biosphere, the whole environment of which we are a part – the real ‘economy of care’ that Vandana Shiva so passionately advocates for but offers no realistic path to.

Howard Moss

Editorial: Capitalism and the food shortage (1946)

Editorial from the March 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE Governments of the world are worried about the food problem. Mr. Herbert Lehman, Director- General of U.N.R.R. A., declares that: “More men, women and children in Europe and the Far East are hungry this winter than at any time in modern history." He calls it “the greatest critical emergency which has faced the United Nations since the end of the war.” The defenders of capitalism do not admit that the existence of the problem and the inhuman and bungling way in which it is being handled are evidences of the inherent defects of that social system, but that is what they are. It is not true that the shortage exists only as a bye-product of war, for in pre-war years, when there were great surpluses of wheat and other products there were, alongside of them, millions of undernourished workers and peasants too poor to buy the food they needed. War is itself an inevitable outcome of capitalist trade rivalries and has, too, a result that is welcome from the capitalist standpoint, of removing for a time the huge unsaleable surpluses of raw materials and foodstuffs. One of the reasons why war propaganda like that of the Nazis was listened to by the workers was that it was linked up with promises that territorial expansion would provide more food. Presumably with this in mind, Mr. Clinton Anderson, Secretary of Agriculture in the United States, demanded, in a broadcast in October, 1945, that: “hunger must be eliminated as a primary cause of war,” and “ the United Nations must not permit the pangs of hunger to bring about the basic fears and greeds which result in war.” —The Times, 15 Oct., 1945.

He went on to say that “two-thirds of the world’s population was undernourished, yet science and technology had advanced to such a point that the earth’s agricultural resources could fill the need of all.”

In a Socialist world, if a general or local shortage of food existed all the resources of the world would at once be available to move foodstuffs to the area where they were needed, or to increase total production if that was necessary. If, as a temporary measure, consumption of food generally had to be reduced to help a locality where shortage existed, there would be no obstacles in the shape of private ownership and the profit motive.

In the world as it exists to-day not even the realisation that starvation or semi-starvation threatens millions of people can prevent capitalism from functioning in its normal way. People in Europe need dried eggs, while in America, according to the Daily Express (8 Feb., 1946), there is “a glut of eggs” and “poultry farmers are facing ruin as a result." In the same country farm output could have been increased, but because farmers consider the price offered for their grains is too low “ they prefer to feed them to their stock rather than to sell" (The Times, 9 Feb.), and they have deliberately kept output below what it could have been (Daily Telegraph, 9 Feb.). American farmers had not forgotten the ruin that faced them before the war because they had produced too much, not too much for the needs of the population, but more than they could sell at a profit. The Times (9 Feb.; says that with the ending of the war the “fears of agricultural surpluses which haunted the United States between the wars were revived. In spite of the golden prosperity brought by the war years, the farmers recollection of the deep agricultural depression of the twenties and thirties is as active a political force as the ghost of the hungry forties was for a long time in the political history of this country. But the fear of being under an avalanche of farm surpluses, attended by a catastrophic collapse of prices, has proved to have been a misreading of the portents, and the miscalculation has been aggravated by the determination of farmers to hoard grain as a protest against the price levels imposed by Washington.”

At the same time that millions are undernourished—in U.S.A., as well as in other countries—because they cannot afford to buy more, there is not a country in the world in which the rich cannot buy the best food; either openly or in the black market, in unrestricted amounts. In every country labour and resources that could be used to supply the needs of the ill-fed and ill-clothed masses of the population are being used, often with the deliberate encouragement of the Governments, on production of luxury articles for the wealthy or goods for the export drive, or armaments. Hundreds of millions of pounds being spent by the leading Powers on perfecting the bomb or building up peace-time armies, navies and air forces. In Britain, simultaneously with the declaration about the need for more food, we read of booming exports of British cars and other products. The Evening News (9 Feb.), under the heading “British Car Exports Booming,” reported that the Nuffield organisation alone will have sent abroad 20,000 cars by the end of June, when its production will have grown to 1,000 cars a week.

Britain is short of food and because we live under capitalism low-paid agricultural labourers are so anxious to escape to the relatively better paid work in industry that the Labour Government—while refusing to carry out the Labour Party’s own oft- repeated demand that land workers should have wages not less than those in industry—uses the war-time emergency powers to tie agricultural workers to their jobs.

Capitalism is indeed a mad and sorry system, which has long outlived its usefulness

Cheaper food—less wages (1948)

From the December 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the firm of Harry Ferguson, Ltd., of Coventry, producers of the Ferguson Tractor, comes a booklet containing an alleged solution to the rising cost of living. By reducing the cost of food and thereby preventing demands for higher wages, the farmer, so he is assured, can prevent the “vicious, mounting spiral of inflation.” But let Harry Ferguson, Ltd., speak for themselves:

A paragraph headed : “Industry’s Prime Cost’’ proceeds:

“The prime cost of all industry is the cost of maintaining human beings. Human beings cannot he maintained unless they are paid enough to ensure that they get sufficient food to keep them fit to do their jobs; and they must also have, at the very least, a reasonable margin left over to enjoy other things.

“If, therefore, food prices can be stabilised, wages can be stabilised too.”

The writer delicately refrains from carrying his argument to the next logical step—that if food prices can be reduced, wages can be reduced too.

This booklet has not, as you may guess, been produced for the purpose of introducing the employees of Harry Ferguson, Ltd., to Marx’s theory of Value. It has as its object the sale of tractors and carries the popular two fold appeal to the potential customer—the assurance that “costs” will be cut, backed by the patriotic appeal to assist the “National effort.”

Nevertheless, although the composer of this stirring appeal may never have read a line of Marx, no Marxist could quarrel with his analysis of the prime cost of industry. (The additional margin to “enjoy other things” is a novel, if somewhat vague touch and should merit close attention if some economist can be persuaded to come forward with the formula by means of which this margin is calculated!)

How often have the workers refused to accent this analysis from the Socialist platform? Will they accept it now, from the pen of their masters’ hirelings?

Let the worker consider carefully the implications. The farmer is urged to buy agricultural implements to enable the worker to enjoy a more substantial or varied diet. but, in reality, to facilitate a general reduction in wages. Nor is this stupid and vicious economy confined to the land. Everywhere that so-called “labour-saving” machinery is installed, whether in mills, mines or factories, whether in warehouses, offices or hotels, the object is never to save labour hut always to save wages.

This is inevitable under capitalism. The capitalist class is forever striving to reduce wages, whether by direct action in the workshops where labour-saving machinery enables production to be maintained or increased with fewer workers, or indirectly where the cheaper production of the necessities of life enables a reduction to be made in the basic wage.

The solution? A social system wherein the use of machinery on the farm as in every other sphere of production, has as its two-fold object the genuine saving of labour (with its accompanying increase of leisure and energy to enjoy that leisure) and the production of articles solely, simply and sensibly for—need. In a word—Socialism.

H.J.G.

Blogger's Note:

There's a strong chance that 'H.J.G.' was Howard J. Grew. My reasoning is twofold: Howard was a member of the Birmingham Branch of the SPGB, and the article refers to a firm in the West Midlands; and, secondly, he joined the Party in 1947, so his membership and this article overlap.

Howard's obituary appeared in  the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Food as a weapon (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the ending of the Cold War. American military power is no longer sufficient to hold its real economic rivals— Europe and Japan—in check, and the three power blocs are squaring up for the battle for world economic domination in the 21st century.

The current battlefield is a scries of talks on world trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which have now been stalled for nearly two years, with the European and US governments hurling abuse at each other over the emotive issue of farm subsidies.

So what is GATT, and why does an apparently minor dispute over handouts to farmers threaten to bring the world trading system to the point of all-out economic war?

The GATT process is aimed at promoting “free trade" amongst the competing states of the world, tearing down barriers to imports and allowing consumers to choose the most efficient supplier of anything from banking services to hairdryers.

In reality, of course, there is never any such thing as free trade among equal players— no ‘‘level playing field". US-based multinational corporations. with the economic battering ram of vast scales of production behind them, and the military and political power of the US state in the not too distant background, are clearly going to make easy meat of the struggling young industries throughout the “Third World”, currently protected by their own governments’ trade barriers.

Trade wars

Now all this is fine with European governments as well. They too have multinationals based on their soil, only too eager to participate in the turkey shoot. In the coming months you will doubtless hear ministers extolling the virtues of Free Trade for the health of the world economy.

But when we come to agriculture. there is a slight fly in the milk churn. European farms tend to be small and “inefficient" (unprofitable), whereas their US competitors tend to be large and “efficient"—fully industrialised and reaping the advantages of economics of scale.

This, of course, would give them a significant advantage in a genuinely free market, almost certainly devastating the European farm industry, and scoring round one of the battle for 21st century economic domination to America.

And American farmers have never been more desperate for markets for grain, which regularly gluts the American market. (Of course, this does not mean that there are no hungry people in America, simply that they can’t afford to buy what lies rotting in warehouses).

In fact this is another bizarre consequence of the ending of the Cold War. since in those good old days the Soviet empire bought all Americas surplus grain and paid on the nose with hard currency.

Europe’s governments, then, urged on by the powerful farming lobby, are determined not to give up their agricultural subsidies, while the US is desperate to prise the European market open.

A few months ago. a high- level EC delegation led by Portuguese Prime Minister Cavaco Silva and Commission head Jacques Delors, visited President Hush in Washington for crisis talks, with Cavaco Silva making it quite clear how deep the rift had become. “Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the apparent political goodwill and the technical proposals put on the table by the US”, he told the European (9 April).

And that’s just about as close as a diplomat comes to calling the other side a dirty cheating liar.

Both sides only entrenched their positions at the G7 economic summit in Munich last month, with John Major suffering a major rebuff to his attempts to break the deadlock, and vowing to continue to “bully, badger and cajole" fellow leaders into living up to the undertakings to conclude a deal by the end of the year.

In fact, although the European side has offered a 30 percent reduction in protection and support for agriculture, this would be on the basis of levels operating in 1986—a real cut of little more than 15 percent (The Grocer, 23 November 1991).

In the EC’s last review of support prices in June 1991. ministers cut a modest 1.5 percent from levels of support for oilseed, and at the EC Lisbon summit price support for cereals was cut 29 per cent. "Still not enough" said Hush.

Agri-business

The Daily Telegraph issued a dire warning following the failure of the Munich summit that the world is edging closer to a menacing era of protectionism. “There is a real danger that the Uruguay round of GATT could breakdown altogether, taking us back to the unstable trade bloc structures of the 1930s” (9 July).

The point is that food production is governed by the laws of competitive production for profit. Manufactures of food only survive by selling at a reduced price against their competitors, and with a glut of unsaleable food on the world market, pressure to subsidise unprofitable, mainly small-scale European producers against their industrialised US rivals is immense.

So the EC’s subsidies pile up yet more unsellable food, and US farming corporations are forced to watch their own surplus production rot in warehouses because it can’t be sold anywhere. The GATT negotiations are therefore a trial of political and economic strength between US and European agri-business, with their respective governments fighting their corners round the negotiating table.

What insanity! Capitalism— the competitive production of goods for sale at a profit—yet again proves itself to be completely unable to cope with a world in which we could provide an abundance of food for each citizen of this planet. It is the only system that actually manages to find adequate food production a major crisis. Surely its time to establish a system where this is an opportunity. through free access to all food production, to abolish hunger once and for all.

Andy Thomas

Does veganism help? (2024)

From the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The term ‘greenwashing’ is often used to describe attempts, often by big companies, to convey the false impression that their goods are produced in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way – and this sometimes with a view to distracting attention from their involvement in other environmentally damaging practices. Some, in fact, see the whole of the current ‘green’ agenda as, under cover of support for the environment, actually extracting from it resources it cannot afford to lose and, no matter how good the intentions of the ‘deep’ or ‘bright’ greens, as no more than a sop to capitalism’s growth. This consists of regarding the Earth only as a target for producing goods for sale on the market and of being unable by its nature to do other than subordinate real care for flora, fauna and climate to the imperatives of growth and production for profit. In the words of one writer: ‘Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life’ .

Plant-based

As part of ‘greenwashing’ in production and consumption via various ‘green’ solutions (eg, solar panels, wind turbines, green energy storage, recycling, LED lights, electric cars, hydropower, biomass, geothermal energy, etc.), some now add a particular lifestyle often presented as a way to reduce climate change and human impact on the environment: plant-based eating or veganism. In a recent article in Monthly Review entitled ‘The Case for Socialist Veganism’ , Benjamin Selwyn and Charis Davies point to the fact that many of the companies and corporations that have embraced the plant-based market use this as ‘cover’ for the damaging environmental impact they cause with their other production (‘meat, dairy and other environmental ruinous activities’). This, they say, represents ‘attempts at corporate brand greenwashing’ and is aimed at continued expansion of their sales and markets. It includes fast-food chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King, whose products are still overwhelmingly meat-based but who have developed plant-based product lines in an attempt to cash in on growing concerns for the environment or animal welfare. A chart the authors have put together demonstrates that plant-based brands not readily associated with big corporations often turn out to be owned by large non-vegan parent companies (e.g. Vivera by JBS, the world’s largest meat company; the Vegetarian Butcher by Unilever; Alpro by Danone, one of the biggest dairy companies in the world). And all these companies continue to have a massively damaging environmental impact in such areas as support for deforestation, mass-scale meat and dairy production, high levels of plastic pollution and damage to natural water sources. So JBS, while promoting Vivera under the flag of promoting ‘the wellbeing of the planet’, slaughters 8.7 million birds, 92,600 hogs and 42,700 head of cattle every day of the year, thus making an appreciable contribution to climate breakdown via deforestation, greenhouse gases from cattle and cultivation of massive quantities of feed crops. Unilever, for its part, was, in 2022, named as one of ‘the top ten global polluters’, and Danone too is a leading plastic polluter and, despite its stated aim to encourage ‘healthy eating trends’, is largely focused on cow’s milk production, which produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based milk and, like for like, uses ten times more land.

The charge here is that, however much veganism may have the potential to reduce human impact on the environment, the relative monopoly held by the big food producers makes that impossible. Focused as they are on animal-based production, any positive effect of vegan production is likely to be small and may in fact be negated completely if it simply increases the profits and investment power of the big producers and so aids their continuing focus on producing meat and milk as cheaply as possible, and so paradoxically increasing animal suffering and exploitation.

An ethical marriage?

So what to do? The solution which the authors of this article propose is to move the food system towards what they call ‘socialist veganism’, also described as ‘an ethical marriage between veganism and socialism’. This, they tell us, would involve the hundreds of billions of dollars currently spent on so called ‘green transitioning’ being directed towards what they call ‘an ecosocially transformative political-economic agenda’. This, they maintain, will help to ‘shift the balance of class power away from capital to labor’ and can be achieved, as they see it, via movements ‘from below’, largely, that is, through collective action by unionised workers to ‘alter the balance of class power between capital and labor in favor of the latter’.

The kind of development they see as necessary is an extension of ‘welfare provision’, through which ‘services are provided across an expanding array of social life as part of the transformation and increasing equalization of society’, and what they call a ‘decommodification of food’. This would mean, they say, that ‘food production itself could be increasingly brought under democratic control by workers, their communities, and consumers’. And this would be part of a ‘broader process of managed degrowth’ and ‘a socialist green transition’, which would include, in the words they quote of John Bellamy Foster, ‘growth in such areas as regenerative agriculture, food production, decent housing, clean energy, accessible health care, universal education, community welfare, public transportation, digital connectivity, and other areas related to green production and social needs’.

They also have other indisputably admirable ambitions, such as various alternatives to chemical-intensive farming assisted in part by use of computerisation and robotisation, hydroponics with plants growing without soil in vertical farms, and precision fermentation producing a whole range of tasty foods that mimic meat and milk products but do not come from animals. Precision fermentation could, we are told, ‘produce the same amount of protein as soy production does in the United States on 1,700 times less land’, which in turn ‘could, through reducing cropland, enable large-scale rewilding (to expand the world’s carbon sinks and restore the diversity of plant and animal species), through restoration of grasslands, wetlands, forests, and savannas’. Part of this transformation would, as the authors see it, allow ‘animals to be raised in more compassionate and ecologically sound ways’, and ‘with reductions in the role of meat in the overall Western diet’. So, the authors, while having a soft spot for veganism, do not necessarily advocate its universal adoption. They say, rather, that ‘vegan food production can, through decommodification and democratization of social life, contribute to providing good quality and affordable food for the many, mitigating climate breakdown, and contributing to mending the metabolic rift’.

Powers of government

Overall, an extremely positive and optimistic case is made by these authors for what they term ‘socialist managed degrowth’, even if, with its only ‘partial’ veganism, it is not what many socialist vegans, especially if coming from an ethical standpoint and favouring universal veganism, would want to hear. But it’s also a proposition that needs to be looked at through the lens of the operating procedures of the society we live in and of what it will take to move to the different operating procedures of a socialist society. Two beliefs seem to underlie the picture painted by the authors. The first one is that the shift to a different kind of society can take place bit by bit via a series of struggles by workers who gradually impose on governments their demands for greater fairness and more equality. The second belief is that governments have the power to bend and flex at will the capitalist system they administer and regardless of the profit imperative that underlies it. For all the good intentions of the authors, these beliefs are untenable, since the role of governments is to be the executive committee of the small class of people who own the productive forces, against whom they cannot act in any substantive way. It’s true that governments sometimes can and do intervene in the running of the system in the wider interests of its survival, such as in the case of America’s ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s (referred to in some detail here by these writers) and in the recent Covid crisis. But they do that to keep the system working not to make it fairer or more equal, even if sometimes reforms they bring in may turn out to give some relief to those suffering most from its effects. But they simply cannot regulate to their heart’s content the system of production for profit and buying and selling.

Tweaks or consciousness?

So what needs to happen to establish the kind of society that no doubt the authors of this article would ultimately want to see – a leaderless, stateless, marketless society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole environment of which we are a part, including its geology and its flora and fauna? What needs to happen is not just some tweaks to the way we live and work today brought about by pressure on governments (which would usually be reversible anyway) but the growth of a democratic movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people which will win control of political power, probably via the ballot box, and then collectively organise that new society. This can only happen of course once the necessary spread of consciousness has been achieved and plans to democratically organise that society are in place. It will then be up to that conscious majority to make all sorts of choices about how they live, including whether humans should continue using animals for food and other purposes and, if so, how and to what extent.

Howard Moss

Not—so—bon appetit (1989)

From the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

One thing is clear in all the fuss and confusion about salmonella in eggs, listeria in cheese and BSE in beef: the statements of, and advice from, ministers have not been fit for human consumption. There is nothing new in that: at the time when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl passed over Britain, letting fall its lethal chemicals with the rain onto the sheep of North Wales and Cumberland, the then Minister of Agriculture was self-sacrificially emphatic about how harmless it was. He declared that he was going to spend that week-end “enthusiastically" eating British lamb. So far he has not grown two heads, but evidence has emerged that the meat in those parts was dangerous to eat then and will remain so years after the fall-out.

Although the most recent row became public with Edwina Currie's famous remark about how widespread salmonella is in egg production, that was by no means the beginning of the affair. Currie's reputation for valuing career-sustaining self publicity over facts made her vulnerable to the kind of assault which the farming interests launched on her. When we saw TV pictures of adorably fluffy chicks on their way to being gassed because of her ill-considered words, her fate was sealed.

But anyone with the most cursory acquaintance with what passes for farming and methods of the food industry had known for a long time about the active threats to health which they represented. There has been no shortage of information, available to anyone who wanted it, about the effects on cattle and on the people who eat beef of pumping the poor beasts full of hormones, not to cure them of some disease but to make them more copious producers of milk and beef. Yet another hormone — bovine somatropin — is now under test, although an unusually sensitive National Farmers' Union seems to be opposed to its use, presumably because they are anxious to avoid more bad publicity for their members.

Battery hens — quite apart from the sickening conditions in which they spend their brief, wretched lives — have long been known to be a source of salmonella poisoning, made worse by the fact that they have commonly been fed on the already diseased remains of slaughtered hens. That is why there have been warnings, albeit muted, about the need to cook chickens thoroughly and to avoid re-heating them.

So why didn't the government simply publicise the whole issue, a long time ago? Why didn't they tell us not to touch any intensively reared meat, or eggs from battery hens, or soft cheese? Or, more effective, why didn't they rush through parliament some sort of legislation to outlaw the production methods which cause the illnesses?

We saw the answers to these questions in the Currie affair. Intensive food production was developed because it is more profitable than the old, slower, less certain methods. The big drugs companies have enormous investments tied up in the production of the chemicals which the farmers shove into their animals. If enough people become scared of buying the food, demand for it can collapse to the point at which it becomes unprofitable to produce it. That may save a few lives and prevent a lot of very distressing sickness but it would play havoc with the profits of the farmers and the drug companies and that is not what the government is there for. Governments exist, not to look after the wellbeing of what is called the consumer — workers who spend their wages on the things they need to re-produce their energies — but to protect the profits of the class who own the means of production, which in this case means the farming industry. the food production firms and the drug companies.

That is why the first official reaction to the slightest breath of truth about something like salmonella in eggs is to rush to conceal the facts. If public pressure becomes so fierce that some of the facts must be allowed out they will often be so mangled and restricted as to be unreconcilable with the truth. This stubborn rearguard action can go on for a very long time, while workers endure painful and possibly fatal illnesses because of their ignorance of the facts.

The great food scandal brings us once again up against the reality that capitalism puts profits before people. Currie's big mistake was that, while she so ardently supports this social system, she allowed herself to voice a passing doubt about the effects of this principle. The penalty she paid, was a lot less distressing than what was endured by those who experienced what it meant from the business end of a sick-bed.

Thought for food (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The food industry under capitalism is part of the problem of starvation and malnutrition, not its solution.

Of all the ways in which capitalism means extremes of poverty and privilege, deprivation and excess, none is greater than in the production, distribution and consumption of food. According to Oxfam, 800 million of the world’s 6.5 billion population are malnourished, while two billion have a diet which is lacking in essential vitamins and minerals. At the same time obesity in the industrialised countries is on the increase. Obesity is not usually the result of eating too much good food – it is a working-class condition stemming from cheap food that adds bulk but not nutrition.

Capitalism seeks the nourishment of profits, not persons. There is more than enough food in the world to feed all of its population. But food is bought and sold, only exceptionally given and taken. Unless people are the recipients of charity that only nibbles at the problem, those who have to live on a dollar a day or less struggle to survive and often die prematurely.

The capitalist food industry has a number of features that make it part of the problem of starvation and malnutrition, not its solution. The market for food means that only enough is offered for sale that will cover costs and yield an expected profit. Anything more will not be brought to market because it will either remain unsold or push prices down. Hence the butter mountains and wine lakes that were the subject of so much adverse publicity in the 1980s. Small reductions were made, but the excesses are still there. Something similar applies to “set aside” — the logic (only to capitalism) of paying farmers not to grow food that cannot be sold.

Agribusiness is concerned with getting the best price it can for crops and cattle with the least possible expense. Scientists are agreed that artificial hormones injected into animals to fatten them up can be harmful to humans. Laws have been passed to limit but not abolish what amounts to poisoning food for profit. A reasonably healthy workforce is in the interests of employers generally, so we have consumer protection laws. The consumer who is mainly being protected is the consumer of labour power – the employing class.

When ill people are taken to hospital they expect the food they get there will help them recover. Often not so. Hospitals are among the worst sources of food poisoning. Hygiene standards are lowered by cuts in staff costs. Children are also the victims of a business approach to school meals. According to the Economist (20 May) plans to improve school meals are causing havoc. Jamie Oliver’s well-intentioned campaign against junk food has made some contracts between schools and the catering industry unsustainable. The schedule of lowly-paid dinner ladies assumes they just open packets and heat up the contents. They don’t have time for the labour-intensive preparation of fresh food.

Stan Parker

50 Years Ago: An Offence to Destroy Food—But only in War-Time (1990)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reviving a practice adopted during the last war. the Government has issued an order under which it is an offence to waste food. Heavy penalties, up to two years' imprisonment and a £500 fine, may be imposed on persons who wilfully or negligently damage or throw away anything "used by man for food or drink other than water", water being already covered by bye-laws.

This seems all very reasonable. What could be more natural than that it should be illegal to destroy or waste food when there are human beings in need of it. But observe. The order to this effect introduced in the last war ceased when the war ended. No authorities stepped in to fine and imprison the individuals and companies responsible for destroying wheat and coffee, throwing fish back into the sea, feeding milk to pigs, and so on. Indeed, in some countries the destruction of foodstuffs to keep up prices was organised with the active support of State authorities themselves.

There is, indeed, something very unnatural about the social system that permitted such things.

[From an editorial in the Socialist Standard, September 1940.]

Can the Capitalist Class Protect its own Interests? (1905)

From the November 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a common assertion that the profit, rent, and interest forming the income of the ruling-class is a natural remuneration for its superior intellectual power and for its greater responsibilities. The idea put forth is that profit forms the “wage of management,” the “rent of ability” of the capitalist class.

The Problem stated

The working-class are warned against the agitator who talks against the capitalist class and the capitalist system of production. The worker is not to be led into opposition to the capitalist whose interests so runs the tale are in no way opposed to his own. There is a harmony existing between them. The worker must not in any way be led into disturbing that harmony. Capitalism must not be abolished, it must be “moralised.” The capitalist must not be treated as an enemy but as a friend. He must not be coerced but must be won over to a recognition of the true position of the workers and he will immediately seek to alleviate it.

A pretty story, forsooth ! One which, fortunately for themselves, the working-class are little likely to believe. They know full well that the position of the capitalist-class is opposed to theirs inasmuch as the wealth of the capitalist depends upon the poverty of the worker—the poverty of the worker exists only through the wealth of the capitalist. Profits and dividends are raised when wages are lowered, and any increase of wages under given, conditions must necessarily be at the expense of profits and dividends.

This is a very obvious conclusion. The worker creates a certain supply of wealth in a given time. The greater the quantity of that wealth the capitalist takes as profits or dividends the smaller is the quantity remaining for the wealth producers. The endeavour of each class to raise his share as against the other is a necessary result of this state of things and constitutes one of the features of the economic warfare which Socialists have named the class struggle.

The impotency of Capitalism to touch it

Even were it not the case that the ideas of the capitalist-class qua capitalist-class are the reflex of their economic position and that they are thereby precluded from understanding the ideas, the longings, the feelings, and the aspirations of the working-class there would be no reason for trusting them. If they knew the sufferings of the worker and wished to redress them is there anything to show for a belief that they would transform those wishes into realities ?

We fancy not. To judge from the general ineptitude and inefficiency which they display in dealing with the interests of their own class—the inadequacy of their methods of securing their own class benefits it is at all events conceivable that an even greater degree of ineptitude and inefficiency would arise in dealing with the welfare of an alien class.

In every sphere of life they have monopolised the advantages but have been unable to make the best of them. The fact that their class is based upon a system of virtual slavery seems to stultify their ideals, dwarf their efforts, and belittle their every aim. The canker-worm is at the core of their civilisation, and the greed of gain, the motive power of their civilisation, has forced from their brains and hearts all pure thoughts and lofty ideals. The art, the literature, the drama, the science, the religion, and the politics of the age are purely commercial—the natural products of a commercial age. “Getting and spending they lay waste their powers.”

In nothing is this incapacity of our ruling class more manifest than in their foreign politics—a euphemism for the exploitation of the weaker races and for the prevention of such exploitation by races equally strong. Arising from the productive system and its ramifications in the credit system is the necessity of monopolising markets. From this springs the jealousies between nations, the necessity of protecting commercial spheres of influence. The resultant friction tends to end in the breaking off of diplomatic relations followed by war.

Inevitable products of it

Every civilised country prepares for this. The national politics have more interest in war than in peace and efforts are made to maintain a permanent fighting force for offensive and defensive purposes. To maintain a standing army and navy with a further auxiliary force huge sums are annually expended. Plans are everlastingly being devised for the improvement of our war organisation—plans which receive the authorisation and support of the Executive and are thereupon shelved. Time and again it has been declared to be absolutely imperative to fortify and protect London by a line of forts—and time and again the capitalist-class has done nothing. Another feature and one of some importance to the ruling class is the fact that that Britain does not grow her own food supplies. Every year a larger percentage of our wheat is derived from foreign countries, the actual stock of wheat varying from three to fourteen weeks’ supply.

In case of a war between the ruling class of this country and some important Continental power, or even between two Continental powers, this fact might have the effect of raising wheat prices to starvation point. Even during the Civil War in America the cost of insurance of goods from America was raised enormously and much more would this be the case in a war in which the British Government was itself engaged. Insurances and freights would be raised, trade and commerce would be hampered, the market would be restricted, prices would rise, and the misery of the worker would be accentuated while the luxury of the capitalist would be diminished.

Much more dangerous would the position be if the country with which this country was at war was one which controlled the source of any considerable section of our wheat supply—say Russia or the United States. The flow of wheat would be stopped at its source and the supply would prove inadequate. To the capitalist this would be of less concern than to the worker, for he who has the longest purse can secure the first draft of an inadequate food supply.

The Food Question considered

Now to anyone who has studied the food problem it is well known that this country could supply not only sufficient wheat, but also sufficient of every other kind of agricultural and dairy produce to comfortably feed a much larger population than the forty millions who at present inhabit Great Britain.

The annual wheat requirement of the people of this country is at present 6 bushels per head, making a total requirement of 240,000,000 bushels per annum. Of this 60,000,000 bushels are grown at home while the remainder is imported.

Taking this country we find that it possesses the finest wheat growing land in the world. Its productivity per acre—29 bushels—is higher than that of any country which cultivates the cereal upon an equally large scale. Allowing that the present methods of farming are continued and that the average of 29 bushels to the acre could be maintained over a sufficiently large area it would require 13,000 square miles in grow the whole quantity needed for consumption in this country. The area of the United Kingdom—121,000 square miles should surely allow of this placing of 13,000 square, miles under wheat culture. Kropotkin gives the cultivablc area as 50,000 square miles.

At present we have in the United Kingdom under cultivation :

Wheat  .  .  . 3,000 square miles.

Barley  .  .  . 3,400 „

Oats     .   .  . 6,500 „

making a total of 12,900 square miles devoted to the cultivation of mixed cereals.

Again, we are informed by scientific agriculturists that by intensive agriculture—that is by a system under which the soil is specially prepared, where deep ploughing is resorted to, where the seeds are selected by the progressive eliminating of the unfit, an immense increase of productivity is to be secured.

The attitude of the Socialist

To the Socialist who has neither country nor patriotism it matters little whether England feeds herself or not. With true international sympathy he wishes to obtain the means of satisfying the material requirements of himself and his fellows with as little expenditure of social effort as possible. But from the point of view of the patriot it is very singular that, possessing the power of producing sufficient for home requirements, we continue importing the greater portion of our food supplies.

Every year a large portion of the land is allowed to go out of cultivation and the problem becomes intensified. Men give place to deer in many parts of the country. Now it would be easy to show that there are limitations—individual and economic—preventing the British farmer from holding his own with his competitor in other countries. On another occasion I may be permitted to discuss them at length.

It seems strange that the ruling class of this country holding the power of entirely solving this problem of food production should do nothing to solve it. The solution, however, involves the resumption of ownership of the land by the people, and it has been written, on the scrolls of fate that in the transformation of individual private property into collectivist common property the land must come last.

The answer in the negative

We have then to consider that the ruling class cannot rule, cannot administer the country—they can only drift upon the current of progress. They are an effete and impotent class, ruling by the power of the status quo. With them the working-class has no interest in common and the worker must learn that it is only by consciously organising himself in a political party for the purpose of getting rid of this capitalist class that he can in any way help forward the emancipation of his class.

Robert Elrick

Cooking the Books: The world could produce more food (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

“OF COURSE WE CAN FEED THE WORLD – JUST LOOK AT ALL THE UNUSED SPACE” was the headline of a recent “opinion” article by Ross Clark in the Times (26 June).

Clark, a supporter of the market (who thinks that any opponent of the “free” market is a “Marxist”), argues that food production has fallen, so causing the present shortages, because in previous decades it had been overproduced. It is of course obscene to talk of “too much” food being produced when there are millions in the world who are starving, but he means “too much” in relation to paying demand. Even so, his explanation exposes the irrational way in which the capitalist system works.

According to him:

“The reason for the fall in cereal production over 15 years has not been soil degradation or climate change: while crops yields are not increasing as fast as they were doing in the 1960s, they have still risen by 1-2 per cent per annum over the past 15 years. Rather, the decrease in production has been a straightforward response to overproduction. Remember the grain mountains of the 1980s? They resulted in a collapse in prices that in turn persuaded grain producers to contract their operation. Now that prices are rising again the opposite has happened: the FAO estimates that this year’s wheat harvest will rise by 13 per cent as a result of extra planting, putting downward pressure on prices next year.”

He points out that today:

“the background to rising food prices is the shrinkage of global agriculture over the past decade and a half. Globally, less food is being produced on even less land than was the case in the early 1990s. Take the US, which according to the FAO was producing 1,210kg of cereals per person per year between 1990 and 1992 and 1,104 kg between 2001 and 2003. Or Canada, at one time the ‘world’s bread basket’, where cereal production fell from 1,905 kg per person per year in 1990-92 to 1,384 kg in 2001-03.”

Given the current strong paying demand for food, the 1990s levels may well be reached again but this would satisfy only paying demand. What about those who can’t pay?

Though it is far from his intention, Clark provides information which shows that enough food could be produced to satisfy their food needs too. Of course it won’t be, and never will be, under the capitalist market system which he supports. But it could be in a socialist world where production would no longer be limited to what can be sold.

Clark writes:

“the total landmass cultivated for arable crops in 2006, according Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), was 1.402 billion hectares – or 14 million sq km. In other words, all the world’s cereals and vegetables are grown on an area equivalent to the USA and half of Canada. A further 34 million sq km – equivalent to the rest of North America, South America and two thirds of Australia – is given over to grazing, much of it extensive, unimproved grassland. The rest of the world – equivalent to the whole of Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia plus a third of Australia – is not used for food production in any way. Some of this land, of course, is desert, mountain or rainforest, which either cannot be used for agriculture at all or would require irrigation, engineering or clearance. But a vast amount of it could quite easily be converted into agriculture, but has until now not been needed.”

What does he mean “has not been needed”? Of course it’s been needed! What Clark means again is that it has not been needed to meet paying demand. Socialists say that it is needed to end world hunger but will only be able to be used for this when once the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all humanity. That’s the only basis on which these currently unused resources can be used to meet the food needs of everyone, not just of those who can afford to pay.

Invasion or Starvation? (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The man in the street is comforted. If ever he had any doubts concerning “his” country’s preparedness for and protection against any possible invasion of this tight little isle, these have been entirely dispelled by Mr. Balfour’s recent speech in the House of Commons. Not only have “we” sufficient battleships, not only are they up-to-date, but in the moment of danger they could be so quickly mobilized at any given spot that there exists no necessity for uneasiness. And so our friend of the short sight, who discerns nothing beyond the tip of his nose, is reassured, and proceeds to his daily avocation briskly, humming—

“We don’t want to fight,

But by Jingo if we do !

We’ve got the ships,

We’ve got the men,

We’ve got the money, too !”

It is true that some of our largest battleships have a nasty habit of ramming each other now and again, that our torpedo boat destroyers sometimes buckle, that in about twelve months three of our expensive submarines have come to grief with much loss of life to our own men, and that our guns sometimes burst, hurling our handy-men into the great unknown. These are mere incidents, or such accidents as will happen in the best regulated navies. Balfour says “all’s well.” Campbell Bannerman congratulates him upon his statement, and the pleased patriot perigrinates, at peace with all the world.

Someone has remarked that the Britisher cannot concentrate upon more than one thing at a time, a failing of which the “statesman,” of both the capitalist and “labour” order, has not been slow to take advantage. Hence it happens that the great “B.P.” rarely concerns itself with the substance, so intent is it in grasping the shadow. In the present connection, John Bull, entirely failing to note the economic development of recent years, still imagines that the enemy against whom it is necessary to guard is a foreign navy or a combination of foreign navies, ever on the watch to swoop down upon these shores. This may have been the position many years ago, when we produced our own foodstuffs, and “every rood maintained its man.” But with the development of manufactures, to the detriment of agriculture, a new foe has arisen. It is not the foreigner with his ships of war that we have to fear and to fight, but that product of capitalism, the financier, of no nation and of every nation, whose operations could at any time not only inflict severe hardships upon the people of this and every other country, but could bring Britain to its knees by withholding its food supplies.

Fifty years ago, during the financial year 1854-5, 20,546,000 quarters (of 480 lbs.) of wheat and wheat flour were consumed here, of which 17,563,000 quarters were home grown and only 2,983,000 were imported. At the time of writing, I am unable to obtain the exact year when we ceased to be self-supporting as far as foodstuffs are concerned, but it certainly must have been long after the commencement of the 19th century. An article which appeared in Blackwood’a Magazine for February, 1903, contained a Declaration signed by 26 of the leading corn merchants of the United Kingdom, in which it was stated that “as late as the Crimean War we were almost self-supporting but we now import four-fifths of our wheat.”

As this article showed, there are some among the capitalist-class who view with alarm our present dependent position, but the proposals they put forward are, as might be expected, totally inadequate. They do not desire the emancipation of the wage-earning class and therefore advocate nothing that would tend in that direction.

In 1898 a Committee was appointed “to inquire and report how far, and in what way, the proposed establishment of national stores of wheat would affect the interests of British Fanners.” It consisted of M.P’s and others, all supposed to possess a practical knowledge of agricultural matters, and the most important of their conclusions was, “It may be concluded, therefore, that for six months after the end of March in any year, the quantity of wheat and flour in the country seldom exceeds six weeks’ supply.” To-day we are more dependent than ever upon other countries, because our population has increased, whilst the home area under cultivation has considerably decreased.

With the recollection of the recent Leiter-Armour manipulation of the world’s wheat supply let us look the facts squarely in the face. Is it possible invasion or probable starvation that we free-born Britishers have to prepare for?

Some of those who gave evidence before the Agricultural Committee seemed to get very near to the truth, but just failed to grip, or to admit, the exact situation. Mr. James Birch thought that “in the event of war we should be practically in the hands of the plunging speculator,” but is war a necessary condition ? Mr. T. B. Home spoke of “the perilous position this country would be placed in for its food supply, should a combination of nations against Great Britain arise,” but substitute determined financiers or plunging speculators for “nations” and the peril is as great and probably the action would be more rapid, the effects more immediate and disastrous. Some of the witnesses admitted that “apart from a forcible interruption of supplies by enemies’ cruisers, there is a possibility that a nation—or a coalition of nations— intending to make war on this country might forestall the supply of wheat by the purchase of futures.” Mr. Proctor could quite imagine that “if Russia to-day were to be at war with us, our own supplies (from Russia) would be stopped, and, through German and other sources, she might buy, in America, practically all the American wheat.” And Mr. Seth Taylor, in reply to a question respecting the engine of offence which be used by those countries unable to compete with us on the seas, answered “they have nothing to do but sit on their stocks.”

Let us put it in another way. Apart from a forcible interruption of supplies by enemies’ cruisers, there is a possibility that a millionaire—or a coalition of millionaires—intending to bring this country to submission, might forestall the supply of wheat by the purchase of “futures.” Not in any way a remote or improbable contingency. According to the article in Blackwood’s, “the chief source of our supply is the United States, but the price of wheat on the American corn market can be raised artificially, and in the event of a European war, in which Great Britain was involved, it is quite possible, indeed probable, that it would be so raised.” And it could also be so raised, as has already been done, without a European war, as the working-class have good cause to remember.

When Mr. Joe Leiter, Lord Curzon’s brother-in-law, attempted the cornering of the world’s wheat supply, the capitalist Press said that he failed, but viewed as a failure, the effect upon the working-class was so disastrous that one can imagine what would have been the result had he succeeded. Not only did the price of wheat, flour and bread rise all over the world, but the inability of the workers in some parts of Southern Europe to obtain bread led to riots, and in Hungary the people, demanding bread, were given the usual capitalist answer—bullets. If, then, the operations of one man in Chicago, or, counting Armour, two men, could produce such world-wide results when those operations were supposed to have failed, it is easy to see that a combination of financiers could dictate their own terms, particularly to a country so dependent upon outside sources for its food supply as is Great Britain.

The proposals usually put forward are useless, because they all depend upon the continuance of the competitive system.

There is the tariff reformer, who, by a readjustment of fiscal conditions, would induce the growing of the Empire’s food supply within the Empire, but who can never show (I myself have challenged several) how that will prevent the financiers operating. Love laughs at locksmiths and Leiter, Armour, Rockefeller & Co. would laugh at tariff walls if they determined to get control of the food supply of this Empire or of any other part of the world.

The establishment of national granaries would not only not affect them but by creating an extra demand for the twelve month’s supply of wheat which it is proposed to store, would give the “plunging speculator” his opportunity.

Then there is the reformer, sometimes claiming to be a ”Socialist" who advocates small holdings or peasant proprietorship, either because he thinks, with the late Lord Salisbury, that “to increase the number of small holders of the soil is to secure the strongest bulwark against revolutionary change,” or because he honestly believes that to be the best proposal, But apart from the fact that the day of small things is past, that production on a small scale is wasteful, it is well known that the transformation from a tenant to a small proprietor, whilst freeing the cultivator from the domination of the farmer or landlord, drives him into the clutches of the ursurer. What has the tenant farmer of Ireland gained ? Is it better to be the victim of the gombeen man than of the landlord ? And none of the other proposals would be effective. What is wanted and what alone will suffice is a complete revolution. The class-proprietorship of the means of life must be abolished : they must be taken over and controlled by the people, all of whom shall be workers. With the substitution of common for private ownership of land, factories, railways, etc., the power of the capitalist, great and small, of gambling with the people’s food, of appropriating the product of the labourer, whether of the field, the mine or the workshop, will be destroyed and the people freed from their subjection to a class. The matter affects both town and country worker, of every land, of every creed. The men of capital are stronger than the men-of-war and their strength can only be taken from them by the organisation of the working-class into a separate and distinct revolutionary Socialist party, such as The Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Jack Kent