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hunger, poverty & capitalism
The article below is a modified version of a speech delivered at Northland College this past fall by Mark Ostapiak, an activist with Youth for Socialist Action.
We all know that world hunger and world poverty are paramount problems for our young generation to address. What could be more problematic than the systematic denial of basic needs such as food, shelter, clothing and clean drinking water? What’s irking is that these basic needs could be provided for all, yet still there are billions of people in this world who continue to suffer from poverty and malnutrition. In my talk this evening I hope to convey to you, number one, the seriousness of these problems; two, to explain from a class conscious perspective explain why these problems exist, and three, what can be done, since yes, there is a solution.
First, I’d like to elaborate on the seriousness of poverty today. Right now there are more than 3.1 billion people in the world living on less than $2 a day. Another telling fact is that the net worth of the 358 richest billionaires is equal to the combined income of the poorest 45% of the world’s population. 45% translates into 2.3 billion people! Nearly a billion people in just the Third World are landless or have too little land available to them to feed their households. In the advanced countries, 100 million people live below the poverty line, 5 million of them without homes.
Closer to home, here in the United States, the income disparity is now the widest it has been since the 1929 stock market crash and it is continuing to grow. These previous examples illustrate the unequal distribution of wealth, an irreversible symptom of the ailing capitalist system. Capitalism is characterized by perpetuated poverty that results from, among other attacks on the working class, workers’ wage cuts, an increase in the cost of living without an increase in minimum wage and layoffs, all motivated by capitalism’s drive for profit profit. Remember, the income disparity continues to grow, so it’s true that, as the old saying goes, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
But, one may ask, doesn’t the government provide poor and hungry people with social programs such as welfare and health care? Yes and no. Programs exist, but they were never adequate and the capitalists cutting federal funding for these benefits and this makes many people feel hopeless and angry. Yet, their sentiment is quickly pacified when a somber and seemingly sincere politician is quoted, “that there isn’t enough in the budget to cover these benefits for the poor.”
This is entirely false. Did you know that “wealthfare” for the rich costs us about 3.5 times as much as the $130 billion we spend each year on welfare for the poor? And since the publication of that figure, the 1996 welfare “reform” bill has cut that amount of money given out for welfare dramatically. We weren’t able to end poverty before the welfare reform bill, so how does one expect the poor to feed themselves and get out of poverty when there is even less money and less social programs spent than before?
So where are the priorities of the United States, the wealthiest, and supposedly, the most benevolent and free of nations? Taking a look at where the majority of U.S. subsidies end up we can see a telling reflection of those priorities. A total of $327 billion a year is spent on the military for example. Of course the argument goes that the military provides semi-decent jobs, but let’s look at what $1 billion can do when spent on the military compared to more socially beneficial purposes. $1 billion to the military created 25,000 jobs. If that same figure were spent on social programs it could create 30,000 jobs in mass transit, 36,000 jobs in housing, 41,000 jobs in education or 47,000 jobs in health care.
U.S. military spending is far from the best solution for the Third World as well. And while countries that are made are made subordinate to the U.S. by having their cities and coutnrysides bombed and destroyed end up needing their infrastructure rebuilt, this is a very double edged sword in terms of creating jobs to say the least. But the U.S. doesn’t just utilize the weapons they make; they sell them and are in fact the largest seller of weapons in the world. These weapons are used by U.S. puppet governments in other countries to ensure the poor are kept poor, subordinate, landless and hungry.
Let me give you a good example of what I mean. During the 1950s in Nicaragua there was a cotton bonanza. Campesinos who worked the land to grow crops and feed their families were forced off their land. When they resisted, the Somoza dictatorship’s National Guard burned their homes and crops. None other than the U.S. Marines set up the Nicaraguan National Guard. Why? In order to secure a highly profitable market at the expense of land that provided Campesinos both with life giving food and some money from the corps they grew to sell. This, once again, is the nature of capitalism, folks. They compromise the meeting of basic human needs to ensure an increased profit.
Another product of capitalism that sinks countries further into poverty is the policies of the IMF and World Bank. These institutions are intended to smooth world commerce by reducing foreign exchange restrictions and tariffs, among other things. By using its funds to bail out governments that are confronting problems these bastions of capitalism ensure that trade can continue with minimum interruption. Basically, money is lent to these bankrupt countries, which are already deeply in debt, and place as conditions for these loans economic restructuring that involves cutting or eliminating food and social programs for the poor and hungry.
I hope I’ve shown that the system of capitalism is exploitative and oppressive. That only the rich benefit from this system while the poor are further trampled under its heel. From all of this we can surely deduce that it is, above all, not a democratic system. It does not represent the interests of the majority, because the majority are the poor and hungry. This is just is. According to Joseph Collins of Food First, the root cause of hunger isn’t scarcity of food or land; rather, it’s a scarcity of democracy! Democracy has everything to do with hunger because democracy carries with it the principle of accountability. Democratic structures are those in which people have a say in decisions that affect their well being. Leadership can be kept accountable to the needs of the majority. The U.S., the world’s self-appointed policeman, has lacked the fundamentals of democracy from the beginning. Alexander Hamilton, one of our founding fathers, went so far as to say “the mass of people seldom judge or determine right,” and therefore “a permanent body composed of the rich and well-born should check the imprudent of democracy.”
There are examples, though of how this unfair and unjust state of affairs has been overcome to benefit the poor and huddled masses of hungry and homeless. Here is how a revolution overcame poverty and hunger. In 1959, the Cubans defeated the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship. And afterward, they threw off the chains of capitalism with a socialist revolution. After the revolution, Cuba is still considerably less wealthy than its neighbor 90 miles north, but through a planned socialist economy, according to a Food First report, all citizens are guaranteed enough rice, pulses, oil, sugar, meat and other food to provide them with 1,900 calories a day. And this is the face of the ongoing U.S. embargo against Cuba.
Listen, the world today produces enough grain to provide every human being on the planet with 3,600 calories a day, but the U.S. still has upwards of 1 million homeless and hungry. This is terribly wrong, and a real solution needs to be embraced. That is why we need a socialist system with a planned economy that can provide for basic human needs.
Accordingly, Youth for Socialist Action (YSA) supports revolutionary change and simply band-aid reformist solutions that just end up failing. It is the working class that will lead such revolutionary change, so we aim to reach out to the working class and its natural allies (students, farmers, etc.) by trying to mobilize the labor movement and campaigning against hunger, racism, xenophobia, women’s oppression, etc. We do this in order to unify the workers of the world under a common consciousness that knows that the social and economic ills are perpetrated by capitalism. And when they reach this level of understanding real social and economic change will happen because the working class is the only social force that is large enough, powerful enough and positions in society to be the formidable force that can topple and replace capitalism. We, as Marxists aspire to become what Fidel Castro said is the mark of a true revolutionary: “The best [revolutionary] is not one that fights for his comrades daily bread. The best [revolutionary] is one who fights for everybody’s daily bread . . . “
