Hungry for change

"Aid agencies warn of famine in Sudan" (Guardian, 7 April). "Starving North Koreans on the border of despair" (Guardian, 14 April). "Famine in Burundi. Why are 600,000 people starving to death?" (Observer, 15 April).

These are indeed harrowing headlines, evoking images of stick-limbed children with oversized heads, of adults, cadaverous and saucer-eyed, scrounging, scavenging and bartering for food. The stories these headlines introduce tell of a combined total of six million facing death from starvation. On a much wider scale, 800 million are chronically malnourished and 1.3 billion inhabitants of the world will today go without food.

The latter are well used figures, and taken with the former echo the absurdity of those obese and confused government officials who gathered together several years ago to label the 1990s the "UN Decade for the Eradication of Poverty". At that time there was only 400 million malnourished, when Henry Kissinger rose to his feet at the 1972 UN Food Summit and vowed to eradicate world hunger within 20 years.

The immediate causes of famine--drought, floods and civil war--often mask the fact that most suffering countries are capable of feeding themselves. Sudan's arable land, for instance, could feed its population, but is instead used for cash crops such as cotton and sugar, and Burundi, as Peter Beaumont recently reported (Observer, 15 April) "is so fecund it cries out to be abundant". Elsewhere, we find that 50 percent of arable land in Afghanistan can't be cultivated because it is land-mined.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisaion readily admits that the world produces more than enough to ensure "adequate food for all" (2,700 calories per person per day). In the 1970s, the World Health Organisation announced that we could feed a world population seven times its then size, and as late as 1995 admitted that Africa could feed a population six times its present size were western farming techniques to be introduced there.

Faced with these facts and while the people of North Korea are having grain rations reduced to 100 grams per day, while the poor of Sudan forage for wild nuts and grasses and while the Burundese bury their dead from starvation at a rate too quick to count, there is no shortage of organisations willing to try to remedy the situation. In North Korea, the World Food Programme appealed in January for 650,000 tons of food and the United Nations Development Programme has drawn up plans to make North Korea self-sufficient by the year 2000. UNICEF and the WHO hold conferences, apportion blame and send representatives to investigate the plight of the starving.

Interestingly, the bulk of these organisations come under the watchful eye of the US-controlled UN, and wasn't it the US which twice in the past--and alone--voted against UN resolutions that sought to recognise "proper nourishment" as a "human right" (14 December 1981--Resolution 36/133 and 18 December--Resolution 37/199)?

The food the aid agencies succeed in sending usually ends up in cities rather than in rural areas where it is most needed. Some 60 percent of EC and 30 percent of US food aid is given to governments to sell on, mostly in cities, and which often provides money that is squandered--i.e. tanks invariably seem a better investment than seeds. And food aid tends to cut food prices, diminishing the incentive for farmers to grow crops, and fosters long-term dependency. Moreover, food aid is often provided minus the transport to deliver it where it is needed and ends up rotting on the quayside. When it can be delivered, it is often the case that camps have to be set up to dispense the aid, resulting in "food drones", maelstroms of hunger and disease.

Charities launch campaigns, telling us what a donation of 20p, £1 and £100 will buy, holding back the more damning statistic that 95 percent of the money donated is eaten up in administration and infrastructure.

Though the relief organisations and charities are undoubtedly well meaning, they address problems for which the solution already exists. Though they have the insight to see the profit-driven market system as a cause of hunger, they err in trying to reform it in the interests of the hungry. While they wave off shipments of food top faraway lands, their own governments are ordering the destruction of food and paying farmers to take land out of production.

Under a system in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit, a system that has expunged the causes of war, a system that can locate people to areas less prone to flooding and drought, famine can then be a thing of the past. And this--socialism--could perhaps be brought about with less effort than goes into organising a world food summit and running the myriad of existing aid agencies. It is not some pipe dream anathema to human nature, for what can be more natural than producing for need?

Lenin's very notion that "imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism" supposes that one nation exploits another, so requiring a "national liberation" movement for the subject nation, which leads the working class of two different countries into a game of slaughtering each other. But the working class has no nation, only a world to win.

We know that, historically, unless a particular class monopolises the means of production and distribution and forces the rest of the people to sell their labour power, no capitalist production is possible. Private property is monopoly. Coupled with the division of labour it is the basis of commodity production as of exchange, money, the market, etc.

But to Lenin monopoly was not this class monopoly but the mere concentration and centralisation of capital. According to Marx, the very existence of capitalist society involves both monopoly (in this sense) and competition, which nullifies Lenin's supposition that such monopoly is only a feature of "imperialism":

"In the economic life of the present time you find not only competition and monopoly but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly" (Letter to Annekov, 28 December 1846).

The basic nature of capital always remains the same both in developed and undeveloped form--production for profit (i.e. the unpaid portion of labour). The defining feature of capitalist production is that it is based on wage-labour. Wages presuppose capital and vice versa. Here also, Lenin failed to understand why different rates of wages prevail in different countries. According to him, wages are higher in imperialist countries because the capitalists there bribe their workers out of the superprofits which they earn from exploiting the subjugated countries.

Marx had a quite different explanation as to why wages were higher in these countries. Both productivity and the rate of exploitation (ratio of paid to unpaid labour) were higher there:

"The more productive one country is relative to another in the world market, the higher will be its wages compared with the other. In England, not only nominal wages but (also) real wages are higher than on the continent. The worker eats more meat, he satisfies more needs. This, however, only applies to the industrial worker and not the agricultural labourer. But in proportion to the productivity of the English workers their wages are not higher (than the wages paid in other countries)" (Theories of Surplus Value, Part Two, pages 16-17).

A lower rate of wages does not make any one country any less capitalist than another: "The different states of the different civilised countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common, they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed" (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).

To be capitalist, a country need not be as industrially and commercially developed as the USA, Britain or Germany. Nor is it necessary that each and every district of every capitalist country should be as developed as the Ruhr in Germany or Sheffield and Birmingham in England. The basic requirement is that the production system of the country is conducted on a capitalistic basis, i.e. is based on employers and employees. A country may be highly industrialised or a developed agricultural one or the chief supplier of raw materials for industry or whatever. This happens due to the division of labour amongst the various capitalist countries. So one "nation" cannot exploit another "nation". Workers all over the world are exploited by the world capitalist class.

The absurdity of Lenin's theory can be proved by a living example from the life of a worker of our Indian subcontinent. Suppose he is 70 years old and now a citizen of so-called independent Bangladesh. He was a subject of Pakistan and before that of the British Empire. According to Lenin's theory, he was subjugated by "British imperialists" up to 1947, then by "Pakistani imperialists" up to 1972. Now by which? Yet all through these years he remained a wage slave, not free, though his masters and nationality changed. What a ridiculous proposition is Lenin's theory!

Lenin's theory of imperialism fails to grasp the world-wide nature of capitalist society by pitting the working class of undeveloped countries against that of the developed ones. It leads to upholding national interest against class interest, which is detrimental to the world working class interest and their emancipation.

It is now crystal clear that as capitalism is a universal and cosmopolitan phenomenon so also is the working class. The working class cannot emancipate itself nationally.

Marx, in his Inaugural Address to the International Working Men's Association in 1864, denounced "a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal design, playing upon national prejudices and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure". But this is precisely what Lenin and his heirs practised in the USSR, East Europe, China, Cuba, etc. from 1917 onwards. Numerous open and secret treaties, wars and proclamations by so-called socialist states testify to this.

That "the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries" (IWMA Rules) should be the guiding principle of the working class of the world.

ASOK KUMAR CHAKRABARTI