Poverty and Hunger, The Necessities Of Capitalism.

        To those who need a little explaining as to how capitalism and poverty go hand in hand, and why poverty is necessary for capitalism to function, you could do worse than read the article by Simon Springer, of the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada,  called Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger:

          Poverty is rooted in the accumulation of wealth, a process that plays out through the dispossession of the many so as to secure excess for the few. While this insight is commonly assigned to Karl Marx (1867) and particularly his understanding of primitive accumulation set forth in the first volume of Capital, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1890) had worked out the contradictory underpinning of capitalism several decades earlier with his inquiry into the principle of right and of government, where he declared “property is theft!” Indeed, the very possibility of poverty, and its expression as famine, is rooted in the institution of property itself. If famine requires a combination of political, production and market shocks” as Alex De Waal (2017) argues, then it is a construction of capital-ism, unfurled when and where it is deemed appropriate by state elites holding the reigns of power. For Peter Kropotkin (1906: 220),“ it was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating ‘surplus value,’ of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that that made capitalists.” I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I can't help but want to know what made poverty? Kropotkin (1906: 220) provides a partial answer when he suggests that,“ if the number of poor rapidly increased during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States” .So we are starting to see a picture where capitalism and the state come together as indeed they always have as a dialectics of violence. Through the process of violent expropriation, people were taught to accept“ the principle of wages, so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised” (Kropotkin, 1906, p. 220). The history of capitalism accordingly suggests that poverty is always and only ever the effect of property, for in its historical and ongoing wars of plunder (Le Billon, 2012), capitalism seeks to secure the right of proprietorship. In order to create poverty it was first necessary to establish property. It was in the form of dispossession that deficiency, deprivation, and destitution first became possible. Consequently, in its most rudimentary form, capitalism is a process that ensures the production of hunger. As Kropotkin (1906:178) put it, “the threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work” and to secure the lock on that cage, one must be stripped of all possession and removed from their connection to the soil, where the material basis of life is appropriated by private interest. In de Waal's account of famine I was particularly impressed with his refusal of the general pornography of violence that exists. Famine isn't as direct as mass execution in gas chambers, and so its slow temporal burn (Nixon, 2011; Springer, 2012) and diffuse geographical embers receive far less attention (Springer, 2011). Yet to me this is precisely what makes famine so compelling. If the original definition of genocide advanced by Rafael Lemkin “ dedicates more detail and space to …the use of starvation as an in-strument of extermination, persecution and inhumanity, than to mass killing” as De Waal (2017) argues, then indeed this should tell us something quite profound about famine as an instrument of control. With this being the case, then perhaps capitalism can be understood as the systemic and pervasive spectre of genocide, for privation of the majority is precisely what capitalism procures as a state of permanent being. This condition is produced through the private appropriation of all material needs land, water, housing,food, and tools the result of which is both the institutionalization of property, and a widespread reliance on wages as people are stripped of their ability to subsist off the land. One is enslaved by This system, where refusing it means starvation. The only thing that prevents our genocide is the acceptance of wages, an agreement that secures our political value. Without this exchange our lives are rendered useless to capital.

Read the full article HERE:
    Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger,

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       THE IMF, PREDATOR!!

        Recently the Cameron/ Clegg cabal of millionaires were waiting for the IMF to pass judgement on the Osborne hatchet job being perpetrated on the British public. Of course there were loud cheers from the millionaire public school thugs when the IMF gave its vote of approval. Only an idiot would have expected any other verdict. If we consider what the IMF is, we get the general picture. It was created back in 1944 when the it became obvious who the winners were going to be in the final stages of WW2. The new masters of the world came together to form an organisation that would create a world financial system that would guarantee the world's wealth and resources would flow rapidly and only towards them, they wanted total control, the birth of the IMF. According to an examination by ActionAid, of the Malawi famine of 2002/3 its conclusions were that the IMF policies, “bears responsibility for the disaster.” IMF restructuring has devastated countries across Africa and South America. It is an organisation that works towards complete privatisation and low wages. After the 2008 collapse, the IMF congratulated Hungary for continuing to pursue its deficit reduction arrangements by slashing public services. The Hungarian people however had other ideas and got rid of that government, electing a government that promised to make the banks pay for their errors and greed. It introduced a levy on the banks and the IMF blasted the Hungarian government and its people with all the threats it could muster stating that the banks would flee the country and in an act of intimidation, it shut down its entire Hungarian program. Hungary didn't collapse, its people benefited.

 

         IMF policies have nothing to offer the people of any country, its only purpose is to keep syphoning the wealth up to the elite, to create an ever more powerful corporate world that controls all the planet's resources. Its policies have created famine, deprivation, abject poverty and death to thousands, if not millions across the globe. So why should it do anything else except applaud millionaire Osborne and his millionaire public school thugs when they devastate the public services, destroy the social fabric of our society, slash wages and pensions, and privatise everything in sight. All to make sure that “our” deficit is cleared, which in other terms means that we make sure that the bankers and the bond markets don't lose any of their unearned money that they greedily gambled and lost. It is two different worlds, it is their world of every lower wages and no social services controlled by a bunch of parasites, or it is our world of a decent society with all the social services necessary to keep it a decent society, a society based on needs, mutual aid and sustainability.

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