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Food security
The United Nations warned recently of a "new face of hunger" – it no
longer has enough money to keep global malnutrition at bay. Is this due
to drought, pestilence or civil war ? No, it would appear that there is
now a fifth apocalyptic horseman stalking the planet – a hike in the
price of food.
Annual food price increases around the world of up to 40 percent
accompanied by dramatic rises in fuel costs have stretched the already
flimsy safety net of global capitalism to breaking point. Josette
Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) earned her crust
by identifying what might just turn out to be the problem: "There is
food on shelves but people are priced out of the market". Not for the
first time, capitalism appears to have made history of recent attempts
to reform it.
It’s no longer just the countryside that is suffering: famine is coming
to the cities of the third world. There is vulnerability in urban areas
never seen before. Food riots have sparked recently, from Morocco to
Mexico, Senegal to Uzbekistan. An increasingly globalised society
appears to be presenting the same problems worldwide.
Of course the hungry and malnourished have never actually been away.
Famines are just the tip of the iceberg: even between the droughts and
civil wars, fellow members of our species die needless deaths (usually
before their 5th birthday) and in their thousands everyday. The exact
figures are not known or recorded: the Tomb of the Unknown Famine
Victim grows bigger by the minute.
It is clear now however that, for every death from hunger, there is no
genuine technical cause. For every child's life that hangs in the
balance, sufficient food has always been available within a matter of
hours' – if not in some cases minutes' – distance. It’s not a
logistical problem or a matter of distribution. Neither is it an error
in the market: the system is operating as it is meant to.
But isn't the market meant to send signals between consumers and
producers ? That's its claim to fame surely, that it efficiently
lubricates supply and demand, matching the two. In reality the signal
which the market often responds to is not one regarding supply and
demand but the one identifying profitability. The entire edifice of the
money system is not geared to satisfying the needs of the majority for
even the simplest means of living, such as food. Instead the objective
is nothing more or less than profit, and it is an objective shared by
the small minority who own and control the means of producing wealth to
the exclusion of the rest of us.
If you are an individual capitalist, why sell your entire warehouse of
grain for a small profit per unit ? And just to watch the market price
drop? Far better to make just as much profit by restricting the amount
you sell, and keeping the price high, and make just as much profit,
while keeping your stock levels up for making a killing during the next
famine. The invisible hand of the market can send all the signals it
wants, but there is often an invisible hand picking up a telephone to
tell fellow capitalists to keep stuff back, restrict sales and keep
prices up. This society offers little security – food or otherwise –
except the security to make profit.
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Introduction
The Socialist Party
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The Socialist Party is like no other political party in Britain.
It is made up of people who have joined together because we want to get
rid of the profit system and establish real socialism.
Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for
themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring
about the kind of society that we are advocating in this
journal.
We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists
for socialism.
We are not a reformist party with a programme of
policies to patch up capitalism.
We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. We publish
pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and various other informative
material.
We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies, meetings
and demos; run educational conferences;
host internet discussion forums, make films presenting our ideas, and
contest elections when practical. Socialist literature is available in
Arabic, Bengali, Dutch,
Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and
Turkish as well as
English.
The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able
to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to draw
on and greater will be the new ideas for building
the movement which you will be able to bring us.
The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader
and there are no followers.
So, if you are going to join we want you to be sure that you agree
fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied that you
understand the case for
socialism.
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