Famines of the capitalist economy

I just read an article in The Economist, a bastion of classical economics, which detailed that the Russian war on Ukraine has killed more people in the Global South than on the battlefields of the war itself. Clearly, the war is a proximate cause of those deaths. But the deeper, systemic cause is the capitalist economy that coerces people into a reliance on purchasing food.

Capitalism is the domination of exchange value over use value. The logic of profit and accumulation over the logic of utility and humanity. Something I’ve written about a while back is that there is a fundamental contradiction between food production and the profit motive. Quite simply, the profit motive is a poor way of coordinating food production as it rarely delivers enough profit for food producers themselves.

But it’s also a grotesquely unequal way to coordinate the distribution of food too. As it stands, around 1 in 12 people on this planet go to bed hungry each night. That’s despite the world producing a vast surplus of food. Around 32% cannot afford a healthy diet. If you can’t eat a healthy diet, you will live a shorter life with more disease. And yet it’s conventionally accepted that capitalism is an efficient and rational system of organisation. Even though it causes people to die from hunger and malnutrition in a world that produces more food than it requires. This is absurd.

So if capitalism rarely works for food producers, and it’s causing billions to go to bed hungry, why is it accepted as the best form of organising our society’s food and farming systems? Clearly a rational, humane and just system would ensure that food production is not reliant on the whims of the profit motive and that having access to the correct nutrition doesn’t rely on the cash in your pocket.

With all the talk of food security recently I have seen not a single article or post questioning the very insecurity that a capitalist system produces. It’s just accepted as the norm. Every time there is a crisis that affects food and farming systems we see the naked logics of capitalism laid bare. The Economist article referred to above relentlessly refuses to question the profit mechanism even as rising food prices, as a result of the US-Israeli war on Iran, threatens the lives of tens of millions of the poorest across the globe. And yet I, the Marxist, am supposedly the only one who is an 'ideologue’. I became a Marxist after experiencing the broken economics of capitalist agriculture.

I’ll end with some of my favourite lines written by Engels, on the concept of social murder, from his work detailing the appalling living conditions of the working classes of England in the 19th century:

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society ^[1] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder, I shall have proved, when I cite official documents, reports of Parliament and of the Government, in substantiation of my charge.