As is our usual policy, we stood token candidates in the recent elections, in Folkestone and in Cardiff, to challenge all the pro-capitalist parties and ensure that the voice of socialism is not entirely lost amidst the recriminations of the professional politicians about how to run capitalism. As we fully expected we did not receive a landslide victory.

Brian Johnson received 82 votes in  the Cardiff Central constituency for the Welsh Parliament,  0.3% share of the vote. About the same number of votes as in the 2019 General Election but on a much lower turnout.

Max Hess received 61 votes at Central ward for the Folkestone Town Council election. In the Folkestone East County Council election Cde. Hess got 89 votes (3%)

Andy Thomas got 55 votes in the Folkestone West County Council election (1% of the vote)

The Socialist Party contests elections as a part of our campaign to establish a new system of society: one based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

That is our sole object. By common ownership we don’t mean that everyone will not possess personal belongings, but that in a society built upon our mutual effort, we should all benefit and have a say in how the means of production is run and how its products are distributed.

We currently live in a system of society based on a tiny number of people owning the wealth of our world, organised and run by a handful of bosses for their benefit. Their profits come first, our needs come second.

It seems we’re so busy taking care of the businesses of the rich that we don’t have time to take care of ourselves.

Because of this we have endless problems of poverty, poor services and all the issues politicians love to spend time telling you they can solve, if only given the chance.

We don’t believe any politician can solve these problems, as long as the flawed basis of our society remains intact. In fact, we believe only you and your fellow workers can solve these problems.

We believe that it will take a revolution in how we organise our lives, a fundamental change. We want to see a society based on the fact that you know how to run your lives, know your needs and have the skills and capacity to organise with your fellows to satisfy them.

You know yourselves and your lives better than a handful of bosses ever can. With democratic control of production we can ensure that looking after our communities becomes a priority, rather than something we do in our spare time.

We all share fundamental needs, for food, clothing, housing and culture, and we have the capacity to ensure access to these for all, without exception.

If you agree with this aim, then we ask you to get in touch with us, get involved and join in our campaign to bring about this change in society.

Together, we have the capacity to run our world for ourselves. We need to build a movement to effect that change, by organising deliberately to take control of the political offices which rule our lives, and bring them into our collective democratic control.

Our candidates never make no promises, offers no pat solutions, only to be the means by which you can remake society for the common good.

The International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States issued its long-awaited report on the U.S.’s police-perpetrated racist violence. The commissioners found that contrary to the popular notion that unjustified killings of Black people by police are merely the actions of “a few bad apples,” the real problem is structural racism that is embedded in the U.S. legal and policing systems.

The commissioners concluded that the systematic police killings of Black people in the U.S. constitutes a prima facie case of crimes against humanity and they asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to initiate an investigation of responsible police officials. The 12 commissioners are eminent experts and jurists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean.

These crimes against humanity under the ICC’s Rome Statute include murder, severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution of people of African descent, and inhumane acts causing great suffering or serious injury to body or mental or physical health. All of the crimes occurred in the context of a widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population of Black people in the United States.

The commissioners made the following findings of fact:

Pretextual traffic stops are a common precursor to police killings and uses of excessive force against people of African descent. Tavis Crane was killed by police after his young daughter threw a piece of candy out the window. Race-based street stops, known as “stop-and-frisk,” often trigger the use of deadly force by police. Eric Garner was suspected of selling individual untaxed cigarettes. George Floyd was suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill.Fourth Amendment violations invariably lead to the use of excessive force and police killings of Black people. Breonna Taylor was killed following the execution of a “no-knock” warrant after a judge had replaced it with a knock warrant. Police routinely use excessive and lethal restraints against Black people. They include Tasers, chokeholds, compression asphyxia, “rough rides” and the use of vehicles as deadly weapons. George Floyd died from asphyxia. Freddie Gray was taken on a 45-minute “rough ride” resulting in his death.

5. Lethal police violence against Black people is exacerbated by officers’ failure to provide medical attention. For example, Andrew Kearse was kept in the back of a squad car for 17 minutes as he begged for help, repeating, “I can’t breathe.” He died of a heart attack in the car.

6. Lethal police violence against Black people experiencing a mental health crisis is systematic. After Daniel Prude’s family called police to provide mental health assistance, he was walking naked in the street. The officers put a spit hood over his head after he began spitting. They held him face down on the pavement for two minutes and 15 seconds, and he stopped breathing.

7. Cis- and transgender Black women, girls and femmes are disproportionately killed by police in the U.S. A friend of Kayla Moore, a mentally ill transgender woman, called for mental health assistance for Moore. Officers found a warrant for someone with Moore’s birth name, but 20 years older. They arrested her, threw her face down onto a futon to handcuff her, and she died of asphyxiation. Then they made disparaging comments about the gender identity of the woman they had killed.

8. Systemic racist police violence kills and traumatizes Black children and youth. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot to death by police as he played in a park with a toy gun. The young children of Jacob Blake witnessed their father being shot and paralyzed by police.

9. Racist police violence traumatizes and devastates families and communities. Manuel Elijah Ellis was hit, punched, choked and tasered to death by police. “We’re broken, generations of us are emotionally tired. Our bodies are weathered, and it causes us physical illness. It causes us lifelong ailments and diseases. It causes us generational trauma that we are passing on,” Jamika Scott, a friend of the Ellis family, testified. “We are traumatized. We live in a constant state of PTSD, we are hyper vigilant, we are fearful, we are anxious, we are depressed,” she added. “It tears holes in families and communities. And it’s not just one family, it’s what happens to one family in this community, it happens to all of us. And it happens, it has lasting echoes throughout generations.”

10. Black immigrants are particularly vulnerable to systemic racist police violence and police killings. Botham Jean, born in St. Lucia, was eating ice cream in his apartment when an officer walked in, mistakenly thinking it was hers, and shot him dead. “What was she defending,” Allison Jean, Botham Jean’s mother, asked, “as the only weapon he held was the color of his skin?”

11. Legal actors are complicit in police violence and killings of Black people through qualified immunity and systemic impunity of officers. Police officers in the United States enjoy impunity for their racist violence. They are rarely held accountable for killing black people, and qualified immunity protects them against liability for violation of constitutional rights.

a) Alarming pattern of destruction and manipulation of evidence, cover-ups and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors have a conflict of interest and medical examiners often do the bidding of police. After Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown as Brown raised his hands and said, “Don’t shoot,” the officer bagged his own gun and washed Brown’s blood off his hands. After police killed Henry Glover, the officers burned the car with his body in it.b) Prosecutorial misconduct and grand jury abuse. The offending officers testified at the grand juries in the killings of both Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, and in neither case was the officer cross-examined. There were no indictments of officers in either case.c) Systemic impunity and lack of oversight by police. Internal affairs investigations invariably exonerate officers. Police can’t be trusted to police themselves. The “blue wall of silence” keeps officers from reporting misconduct by fellow officers. Police unions facilitate impunity of officers. The police union got the body camera footage a few days after the killing of Daniel Prude but it took the Prude family six months to get it, and only after they filed several lawsuits.d) Qualified immunity. A recent U.S. District Court judge wrote, “[J]udges have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called ‘qualified immunity.’ In real life it operates like absolute immunity.” In case after case heard by the commissioners, victims’ families faced extraordinary obstacles to holding officers accountable for the killing of their family members.

 The COVID-19 pandemic, protracted conflicts and climate change have created an untenable situation for the most vulnerable, with 155 million people across 55 territories suffering from severe food insecurity, sending acute hunger figures to a 5-year high.

That’s according to the Global Network Against Food Crises, an alliance of humanitarian partners working to prevent hunger and respond to food crises. 

 It reported that 20 million more people faced acute hunger in 2020 than the previous year.

 The zero hunger by 2030 goal seemed “increasingly out of reach”.

 The report categorised 133,000 people in Burkina Faso, South Sudan and Yemen as being in “catastrophe”, meaning that they need immediate action to prevent widespread death and collapse of livelihoods.

 It stated that children living in food-crisis countries are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. In the 55 food-crisis countries under review, almost 16 million children under 5 years were acutely malnourished, while 75.2 million children under five years experienced stunted growth.

“Tragically, this report is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re facing all around the world,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley.  “The global picture is even more bleak when we consider all countries significantly impacted by hunger. For example, chronic hunger, which was 690 million, is now up an additional 130 million people.”

“Humankind can now pilot a helicopter drone and even split molecules to generate oxygen on the far-off planet of Mars, yet here on Earth, 155 million of our human family are suffering acute hunger and their lives and livelihoods are at risk because they lack the most basic of foods. The contrast is shocking and not acceptable,” said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu.

20 Million More People Face Food Crises, As Acute Hunger Rates Rise to a 5-Year High | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 The capitalist class likes to boast and brag about their charity and compassion towards the undeveloped nations of the world but it is not philanthropy to return a little of what you have plundered and pillaged in the past.

Capitalist powers have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960. Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totaled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.”

 The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and the richer countries of Europe appropriate $2.2 trillion worth of resources and labor—embodied in raw materials as well as high-tech commodities like smartphones, laptops, and cars that are increasingly manufactured abroad—per year from developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. That amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, 15 times over.

Rich countries have a monopoly on decision-making in the World Bank and IMF, they hold most of the bargaining power in the World Trade Organization, they use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy in debtor nations, and they control 97% of the world’s patents. Northern states and corporations leverage this power to cheapen the prices of labor and resources in the Global South, which allows them to achieve a net appropriation through trade.

The looting  increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, as neoliberal structural adjustment programs were imposed across the Global South. During the 1980s and 1990s, IMF structural adjustment programs cut public sector wages and employment, while rolling back labor rights and other protective regulations, all of which cheapened labor and resources. Today, poor countries are structurally dependent on foreign investment and have no choice but to compete with one another to offer cheap labor and resources in order to please the barons of international finance. This ensures a steady flow of disposable gadgets and fast fashion to affluent Northern consumers, but at extraordinary cost to human lives and ecosystems in the South.

Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.

Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960 | Opinions | Al Jazeera

 Political Colours

The Red wall fell, whatever shall folk do?

And yet, although the seats were rearranged

The voters soon found out nothing had changed,

Even if the language was somewhat Blue.

Perhaps a Liberal wash of yellow might

Lighten prospects, or prove a washout.

Whatever the colour, there’s surely no doubt

Without a real change the future’s not bright.

The Greens promise a profound schism

With the old order, a radical stance,

But then succumb to a Scottish romance

Of populist, petty nationalism.

For workers to wrest the world from their bosses,

It’ll take more than swapping ballot box crosses.

D. A.

Most nations are facing a demographic crisis and increased immigration is the answer.

The German birth rate is considerably below what’s needed to replace the population. German seniors, meanwhile, are living longer and drawing more on state resources for their pensions and health care.

There are basically two ways out of this demographic crisis. First of all, Germany could boost its birth rate.

The German state provides generous family leave and child-care policies—not to mention the famous Kindergelt, the direct monthly payments of child benefits—and the fertility rate has indeed edged up over the years from 1.24 children per woman in 1994 to 1.57 today. But the trend in industrialized countries suggests that it will be difficult to push the rate much higher. The closest to the replacement rate of 2.1 children that any EU country gets is France at 1.88.

The second way out of Germany’s crisis would be through immigration. The country could throw open its doors to people from all over the world to take unwanted and unfilled jobs, pay taxes, and support the increasingly aging population.

That is exactly what Germany did. The government of Angela Merkel, in 2015 and 2016, accepted over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Germany now has the fifth largest population of refugees in the world.

Nearly all the media—German, European, international—referred to the millions of desperate people trying to get into Europe as an “immigration crisis.” They should have given it a different label: the “immigration solution.”

 Opinion | Around the World, Immigrants Are Coming to the Rescue (commondreams.org)

 The World is heading for an unparalleled climate catastrophe unless  nations agree drastic cuts in CO2 emissions at the COP conference in Glasgow. Even if all the current promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions are honoured, the world will still see global temperatures rise by an average 2.4 C.

The World Socialist Movement (WSM) says very clearly that a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature that is in balance and with the capacity of the biosphere to renew itself will only be possible when socialism is established . If human society is to be able to organise its production in an ecologically acceptable way, then it must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism of capital accumulation and gear production instead to the direct satisfaction of needs.

The underlying principle is that the productive system as a whole should be sustainable for the rest of nature. In other words, what humans take from nature, the amount and the rhythm at which they do so, as well as the way they use these materials and dispose of them after use, should all be done in such a way as to leave nature in a position to go on supplying and reabsorbing the required materials for use.

In the long run this implies stable or only slowly rising consumption and production levels. A society in which production, consumption and population levels are stable has been called a “steady-state economy” where production would be geared simply to meeting needs and to replacing and repairing the equipment of the means of production.

The WSM explains once more that the only feasible alternative is to address the problem and that problem is Capitalism. The destructive nature of modern production has developed as an integral part of capitalism. Because we live in a competitive, profit-motivated system , enterprises come under an irresistible pressure to use the cheapest and most labour efficient methods. There is no choice about this. Companies simply have to go for low cost options and cannot afford to worry about the ecological consequences of this. To choose high cost options would be to commit economic suicide. Under capitalism the production and distribution of goods takes place – and can only take place – according to the economic laws which govern the profitable circulation of capital. These laws are of an absolutely compelling nature. What this means is that production methods cannot be chosen on their merits, as being environmentally friendly.

The World Socialist Movement holds that only socialism can set up the relationships of cooperation, the freedom and the rational control over our affairs which can get us out of the serious mess we’re in. For all their good intentions, and for all their apparent radicalism, the policies of the environmental experts such as the esteemed professor are impractical because they stand no chance of establishing the kind of world they want to see. The obvious, and only practical, way forward is to get rid of the whole insane capitalist structure.

In socialism we would not be bound to use the most labour efficient methods of production. We would be free to select our methods in accordance with a wide range of socially desirable criteria, in particular the vital need to protect the environment. It wouldn’t matter if ecologically benign methods of producing energy required more allocations of labour than destructive methods as we wouldn’t be producing commodities which have to compete in price for sales in the market. We’d be free of all that. A “steady-state”, eventual “zero-growth” society is something we should aim at. What it means is that we should construct permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social production could even be reduced. You achieve this “steady state” and you don’t go on expanding production. This would be the opposite of cheap, shoddy, “throw-away” goods and built-in obsolescence, which results in a massive loss and destruction of resources.

“The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labour, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need. Power, no less than material things, must be freed from the control of the elites; it must be redistributed in a form that renders its use participatory.” – Murray Bookchin

Global military spending continued to reach record levels in 2020, rising almost 4 percent in real terms to US$1.83 trillion, even despite the severe economic contractions caused by the pandemic. 

The United States spends two-fifths of the world’s total, more than the next ten countries combined, and still cannot afford to prevent 50 million of its own citizens suffering from food insecurity. 

The United Kingdom is massively boosting its arms budget—the largest rise in almost 70 years, including a vast increase to its nuclear weapons stockpile—while cutting aid to the world’s poorest by 30 percent.

 military spending was diverted to real human needs, instead of sustaining the corrupt and profitable industry of war:

1. Meeting Goals 1 and 2 of the Sustainable Development Goals— ‘End poverty in all its forms everywhere’ and ‘Zero hunger’—would barely exceed 3 percent of global annual military spending, according to the UN’s Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.2. With the U.S. military budget of $750 billion in 2020, it could feed the world’s hungry and still spend twice as much on its military than China, writes peace activist Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK.3. The annual nuclear weapon budget worldwide is 1,000 percent—or 10 times—the combined budget of both the UN and the World Health Organisation (WHO), according to the Global Campaign on Military Spending.  4. Just 0.04 percent of global military spending would have funded the WHO’s initial Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund, according to Tipping Point North South in its Transform Defence report.5. It would cost only 0.7 percent of global military spending (an estimated $141.2 billion) to vaccinate all the world’s 7.8 billion inhabitants against Covid-19, according to figures from Oxfam International.

James Connolly is better known for his nationalist martyrdom, being executed for participating in Dublin’s Easter Rising. However, he was previously the founder of the Socialist Labour Party in Scotland, emigrating to the United States to become a full-time organiser for the American SLP. He also became an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World. The following essay is a reminder of his socialist origins.

In every discussion on the aims and objects of a Socialist Party some one is sure to bring up the objection that even if the Socialist Party were to conquer their opponents, and make an effort to establish their ideal as a political and social edifice, the difficulties which would arise out of the inability of the common people to understand the complexity of the social system they were called upon to administer, would infallibly produce the downfall of the new order. This objection is, it seems to us, rather far fetched in view of the circumstance that the majority of those who at the present day are entrusted with the work of organizing and administering the capitalist system are completely ignorant of every development of the system outside of their own particular sphere of employment.

It is not at all necessary that everyone, or even a very large number, of those engaged in labour should be able to give an intelligent account of the multifarious processes of production, nor yet that they should be qualified even to trace the passage of the commodities upon which they are employed through all their stages from the crudity of the raw material up to the perfection of the finished product as it eventually reaches the hands of the purchaser. It is only necessary that each worker should perform with due skill and scrupulosity his own allotted task; to the few required as organisers of industry may be left the work of adjusting and interlocking the parts. Even this latter function – formidable as it may look when thus baldly stated – may be reduced to a mere automatic function to be executed as a part of the routine work of a clerical staff.

Any person reflecting upon the mechanism of the capitalist system can readily perceive how little its most important arteries of commerce are dependent upon international organisation, and how much upon the reciprocal action of the economic interests involved at first hand. Where the international organization of Socialism will indeed come into play it will come to smooth over and simplify many of the difficulties which are constantly arising under capitalism as a result of the clashing of personal interests. Hence the Socialist organisation of industry will preserve the effectiveness due to the development of capitalism whilst entirely obviating the friction and disputes capitalist competition entails.

It is well also to remember the multitude of things which in civilised society we are all compelled to take upon trust at the word of others. It is safe to say that what is called ‘progress’, or civilisation, would be impossible were each individual in the community, or even a majority, to insist upon acquiring a complete theoretical and technical mastery of, say, each new application of Science to the needs of life before consenting to allow its use. There are few persons nowadays who would shrink from trusting themselves to railway trains, even although in all but complete ignorance of the mechanism of the steam engine, signal-boxes, points, and brakes; we have had gas in our houses, shops, and public buildings for several generations, but to this day the number of those who really understand the processes of gas production, storage, and distribution are extraordinarily few, yet that does not prevent us using it despite its well known poisonous and explosive nature. And so we might go on enumerating many things in daily use – the use of which involves risk to life – which are accepted and freely utilised by people at large without stopping to acquire a perfect knowledge of their active principle.

Much the same might be said of the pretended wonderful and mysterious results to be attained under Socialism – results too wonderful to be realised. In Socialism there is nothing so abnormal that its realisation could exceed in strangeness things we see around us every day, and composedly accept with the greatest equanimity. In the proposition that the community can so arrange the work of production and distribution that plenty can be provided for every human being, there is nothing, in view of present day machinery, half so extraordinary as the fact that if a gentleman sitting down to dinner in Dublin sends a telegram to a friend in Australia that friend will have received said telegram before his Dublin correspondent could have finished the final course of his repast. The fact that people in Ireland were reading accounts of battles in South Africa, 7,000 miles off, while those battles were still in progress, is far more intrinsically wonderful than a system of society in which labour enjoys the product of its toil, and neither hereditary tyrants nor capitalist exploiters are tolerated.

If these stranger developments have been accepted whilst Socialism is still rejected, it is because the personal economic interests of the classes controlling the educative and governing forces of the world are in line with such developments, while the same personal economic interests of those classes are as directly opposed to Socialism. But the workers are in the majority, and their interests are in line with Socialism, which may, therefore, be realised as soon as they desire, and are resolute enough to put their desires into practice.

Difficulties of Capitalism

We propose to treat of a few of the Difficulties of Capitalism. In this connection we would point out that the critics of Socialism invariably devote their energies to demonstrating how far a Socialist system would fall short of ideal perfection, and, having so demonstrated to their own satisfaction, they affect to conclude that the last word has been said, and argument is at an end. It may perhaps surprise such critics to learn that such a line of argument leaves untouched the real contention of the Socialist Party which nowhere proposes that Socialism will escape the taint of fallibility due to all institutions of human origin, but only that the establishment of our social arrangements on a Socialist basis will ensure material prosperity to all men and women, and by so ensuring leave the race full freedom to seek for such expression of its faculties as is best suited to their varying characters. It does not assume that with the advent of Socialism all the evil of our nature will immediately disappear, that love, hate, ambition, lust, envy and all the forces which in our complex natures make for the stirring up of strife and discord, will be instantly eradicated, and the earth take on the aspect of Paradise. But it does contend that Poverty and the crimes born of poverty may be banished, and that with the elimination of the economic struggle from our life the intellectual forces which to-day expend themselves in striving for mastery will find expression in avenues of greater helpfulness, and individuals seek renown as benefactors instead of exploiters of their species.

Our sapient critics likewise forget that the line of argument which consists solely in discovering possible flaws in a future state of society is permissible only to those who defend a state of society in itself flawless. Such capitalist society obviously is not. Its glaring contradictions are so many and so apparent that many of its most zealous defenders rely for their success in maintaining its integrity intact upon their skill in impressing the ignorant multitude with the belief that reform is hopeless, and, therefore, politics a mere waste of time. The space at our disposal would not permit of the mention of a tithe of the problems and difficulties, the contradictions and absurdities, which abound in the very nature of capitalism, but a brief enumeration of a few of these may be of use in serving to convince the less obtuse of our critics that they are playing with a two edged sword when they speak of the difficulties Socialism may have before it.

Why is it necessary that human beings should work at all? In order that the world may be supplied with goods, of course. Do we therefore rejoice when the world is so supplied? Oh, no, that is the greatest disaster we can imagine, for then we would be thrown idle, owing to over-production. We must labour in order to supply the world, and when the world is supplied we must starve because there is plenty for all and our labour is not needed.

Science and invention by increasing the productivity of our labour lessens the period necessary to stock the world’s markets, and thus, at one and the same time, lessens the period during which our labour is required and increases the duration of our compulsory idleness.

One difficulty – one insoluble difficulty – of capitalism is to devise a method whereby the march of science and inventive genius can assist industry without menacing the bread and butter of the working class.

Property of all kinds making for human comfort commands the respect of all men. Yet there are times when the unemployed building trades need not repine if a conflagration lays a street in ruins, or an earthquake wrecks some noble building; and we have known shipwrights to rejoice when some stately ship foundered in mid-ocean.

The world rejoices at the progress of medical science, yet the same healing art which withholds its victims from the grave robs the cemetery companies of their expected dividends, and the funeral undertakers of chances of earning a livelihood. Under capitalism matters of public calamity – war, pestilence, death – are often matters of private thanksgiving; the crepe on the widow’s bonnet finds its counterpoise in the breakfast on the grave-digger’s table.

When capitalism has made the private interest coincide with the common weal; when machinery becomes in reality ‘labour-saving’, and not as at present, wage-saving; when an overstocked market means for the worker a well stocked larder, and not idleness and hunger, then it will be time for our enemies to tell us of our future difficulties.

But under Capitalism that time will never come.

James Connolly,

Workers Republic, 1903

 Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System, and has an article in The Guardian which contains many pertinent points. 

“…Scratch the surface of a bar of chocolate, a tuna sandwich, or even a chicken nugget, and you find the horrors of international trade: violence, exploitation, poverty and profit. Capitalist logic is everywhere the same, but countries are capitalist in their own ways…”

“…The legacy of the United States’ founding racial territorial conquest and domination can be read off the Department of Labor’s occupational data. In 2020, the whitest and most racially segregated job in this settler state was the appraising of property (96.5% of appraisers are white), and the second whitest was managing a farm (96.3%). It is hardly a coincidence that the largest farmland owner in the United States is one of the country’s richest men: Bill Gates…”

“…In the United States, the legacy contradictions within the food system are particularly acute. Seven out of the 10 worst-paying jobs in America are in the food system, and women are overrepresented in them. Nearly a third of families headed by single mothers are likely to be food insecure, and food insecurity is systematically higher in communities of people of colour…”

“…Tipping was a European feudal relic imported to the United States by the well-travelled Victorian-era American upper class. Initially, it was widely reviled. Even as late as 1905, it was possible to find restaurants in St Louis with signs in the window announcing “No tipping! Tipping is not American.”

Tipping stuck in the United States because it helped keep employers’ wage bill low, and fit with racist sentiments like those of journalist John Speed who wrote, “Tips go with servility, and no man who is a voter in this country is in the least justified in being in service.” The Pullman car company hired Black men from the south to work because “he is more adapted to wait on people and serve with a smile”. The minimum wage for tipped employees hasn’t increased since 1991 – it’s still $2.13 an hour…Tipping was resisted not just by those in the US who considered it an insidious European import. Workers read it correctly as an opportunity for bosses to lower wages. In 1911, the International Hotel Workers Union “demanded higher wages and no necessity of depending on tips”. When the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was organized in 1925, in defiance of the Pullman Company, one of its first orders of business of this first Black trade union was to petition for a ban on tipping.“

 “…Through treaties at the World Trade Organization, and through Nafta, the US has done everything from generate an epidemic of diet-related disease in Mexico to decimate peasant food production in the global south. But the US is happy to blame the migrants fleeing the economic consequences of US agribusiness. And yet, the US continues to have a farm sector dependent on migrant labor…”

“…“Food justice” is a term that is intelligible only because oppressed and exploited communities have organized for redress against the predations of US capitalism. The US was made by finding ever lower labour costs, and workers always fought back. Food justice, and its opposite, are of a piece…”

“Although the myth of cowboys insists that they ranged alone, seldom hearing discouraging words, the truth was that they were exploited as a class and knew it. Wages were low and workers were frustrated by wage theft and underpayment. In 1883, they organized an illegal strike, one that spread from Texas to Wyoming. Timing their actions to the spring “harvest”, when investors were about to receive their profits, cowboys united to demand higher wages, better coffee, and the demand that cooks on the trail be paid as well as anyone else. For a while, they won, at least until 1888, when a combination of industry restructuring, anti-worker organizing by bosses, and brutal weather broke the back of worker militancy.

Further down the beef production chain, unions in Chicago’s squalid meatpacking industry were recruiting. In Upton Sinclair’s classic 1907 novel The Jungle, workers aren’t passive amid the filth and horrors heaped upon them. They strike back. For a while, it even looked like they might win sweeping change. The final sentences are a hymn to the inevitability of socialism in Chicago…”

“…Battles over food justice continue in the United States. A recent Guardian/Northwestern University investigation pointed to the persistent racial divide in the food system. In Texas, Black families reported hunger four times more often than white families, and in the week before Christmas 2020, 81 million people were food insecure…”

Full article can be read here

Food injustice has deep roots: let’s start with America’s apple pie | Food | The Guardian