Montreal internationalist communists havin't any organisational links with the International Bureau of the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) and don't agree with all its political positions. As well we've published the text below about capitalist food crisis from Communist Workers'Organisation (IBRP-United Kingdom) because it's important for our class.

Some internationalist communists, Montreal

Capitalist Food Crisis: A Feast for Speculators, A Turning Point in the Class Struggle?

In the space of a few months, the myth that there not only is no alternative to capitalism, but that there is no need for change has been shattered. The image of a high-tech, global, self-confident capitalism which promised indefinite prosperity for everyone, even if the gulf between rich and poor is getting wider and wider, has suddenly given way to a world of rocketing food and fuel prices and growing protests against the impact on people’s lives.

Even if in Britain the effect of rapidly increasing prices has so far only put Gordon Brown’s premiership into question, there is no doubt that the prospect of a revival of class struggle haunts our political and economic overseers. As we said in our last issue, they are right to be worried because workers are no longer being taken in by the official inflation figures. The economic pundits’ reassuring belief that the working class in capitalism’s consumer heartlands will hardly notice the increased cost of the staples of life because food is a relatively small part of their budget today (down from over 30 per cent of household spending fifty years ago to 15 per cent in 2006) [1] is certainly being challenged by the “facts on the ground”. The proportion of wages going to food and other unavoidable basic outlays is rising by the week. From capital’s standpoint not just a threat to consumer spending but a worrying sign that it is going to be harder for workers to deny their class identity as they are impelled to respond collectively to such a fundamental attack on living standards.

Thus Britain’s debt-laden, consumption-oriented workers who are accustomed to focussing on the domestic here and now with little thought or pensions for the future are being moved to fight back. As yet their struggles are no more than a ripple in response to what one United Nations official described as an inflation tsunami [2] of soaring food and energy prices that is hitting hardest at the urban poor in the so-called developing countries. Unlike earthquakes and cyclones, however, the social consequences of this unnatural capitalist disaster are barely reported by the media whose job it is to smother and distort any sign of revolt for fear that the infection might spread. As it is though there are reports of “food riots” having taken place in over thirty countries so far this year in the face of an “average increase” of 40% for staple food grains and rice. Where the 40% figure comes from is anybody’s guess since the cost of rice, for example, more than doubled from $373 a tonne in early January to $760 by the end of March this year. [3] Even if inflation is taken into account the “real price” of staples has soared. According to a Financial Times article on agricultural commodity prices at the beginning of May, there has been

« a trebling of the real price of wheat since January 2006, allied to a 140 per cent jump in corn and soyabean futures. [4] »

In any case, when the United States starts upping food aid to Africa and talking of the biggest food crisis in the world since World War Two, when the UN produces a report saying that rising food prices threaten political stability round the world, we know that there is more at stake than sporadic rioting amongst dispossessed, jobless shanty dwellers.

To be sure Africa, where the US Agency for International Development reckons more than half the world’s estimated 800 million “chronically under-nourished people” in 82 “low income, food deficit countries” are to be found, is particularly explosive. [5] This year “food riots” have been reported in Sefrou (Morocco), Nouakchott (Mauritania), Dakar (Senegal), Conakry (Guinea), Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Douala (Cameroon), Maputo (Mozambique) as well as Niger, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso… According to the UN’s Agricultural Development Fund, for every 1% increase in food prices, a further 16 million human beings are plunged into

“food insecurity”. Amongst those most at risk are Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Burundi, Zimbabwe and — outside Africa — Haiti (where food protests in Port au Prince in April have already led to the fall of the government). [6] Meanwhile, the World Bank has urged Pakistan “to take rapid action to avert an economic crisis” since “poorer Pakistanis are hit by the fallout from increases in oil and food prices.” [7]

However, protests against dramatic price increases are continuing and worldwide. According to our own inventory of press reports, since the last edition of this magazine, as well as the countries already cited, there have been protests as far apart as Mexico, Indonesia, India, Yemen, Cambodia, Vietnam, Egypt, and Lebanon. The list is hardly complete but it is revealing, not just for its continent-spanning dimensions. From it, we can deduce that in many significant instances “food protests” around the globe involve substantially more than the modern-day equivalent of the pre-capitalist bread riot where an angry populace would round on a profiteering trader who did not keep to the “just price” for bread.

Capitalist Domination Questioned when Workers Fight For a Living Wage

In places where there is an employed working class with a weapon of their own — the possibility of collectively withdrawing their labour — the protests are almost certainly going to go beyond elementary outbursts of street anger and despair. In other words, when the working class is involved, protests against rising food prices become part of the wages struggle between capital and labour, exploiter and exploited, over the price of workers’ labour power. Implicitly this struggle involves a challenge to capitalism since the only just price for labour power, the only really fair wage would be to pay the workers the equivalent of what they produce. By definition this is impossible since the whole reason for capitalism’s existence is to make a profit by getting hold of the surplus value that workers produce over and above the value of their wages. The only way the workers who create society’s wealth can thus ever be justly rewarded is when they themselves (i.e., collectively) abolish wage labour and take over production and distribution on the basis of social need. That prospect, remote as it is at the outset of any struggle and unlike a simple “food riot”, is implicitly contained in all struggles between wage workers and their bosses. Obviously, we are not saying that any strike can lead to the overthrow of capitalism, but that the beginnings of working class consciousness of their real collective power and hence the possibility of overthrowing and replacing the present iniquitous system, as well as the precursors of the organisational means to run a new kind of classless society, are born in the class struggle. Moreover, given that workers throughout the world are faced with the same sort of rampant increases in food and fuel prices, it is easy to see that they might be encouraged to fight for themselves and support each other’s struggles if they knew how workers elsewhere were battling. It is no mystery, therefore, that the capitalist press is short on reports about how workers in the rest of the world are fighting back against the massive cuts in their real wages that double digit inflation figures mean.

Beyond Bread Riots: Workers’ Collective Resistance
Take Vietnam for instance,

« At a Taiwanese-owned shirt factory near business capital Ho Chi Minh City, 2000 workers went on strike recently to protest over a wage of $67 a month that they say is not keeping up with inflation. So too did 1400 workers at a South Korean-owned textile plant, and 1200 at a foreign-owned shoe factory, where a strike led to a $9.30 a month wage rise. [8] »

This was last January. Since then “unrest” has continued in Vietnam as workers faced a more than 25% increase in the price of foodstuffs in February and were still “restive” in April when they were striking “for salary [sic] increases to compensate for higher living costs”. [9]

We know more about the class struggle in Egypt where workers from state and private industries combined together last year to fight job losses through privatisations as well as to demand higher wages to compensate for inflation. In Revolutionary Perspectives 44, we printed a report from our comrades in Italy on how workers were managing to make gains by going beyond the unions. The Egyptian government is haunted by memories of bread riots in 1977, and has kept the price of bread down by increasing the state subsidy, but, as the price of everything else has rocketed — up to 50% on some basic items — there has been a corresponding escalation in the class struggle. In March this year, as the bread queues grew and fighting broke out over the limited supply, the government was obliged to increase subsidies on other items, such as sugar, rice and oil. At the same time, a six month export ban from 1st April was announced on rice, a valuable export commodity. Nevertheless, strikes continued against food price rises and, on 10th April, the Financial Times stated blandly that two textile workers were killed and 100 injured during strikes in the Nile delta town of Mahalla al-Kubra involving “working class groups with a history of activism” and who, incidentally, made use of the internet and Facebook to organise and coordinate the strikes. Over the same period public sector workers, including “professionals” such as doctors and university lecturers, were on strike for higher pay since their annual pay award came nowhere near covering the cost of soaring food, fuel and housing expenses. In the short term the public sector workers wrested a 30% higher pay award from the government which also conceded at least a nominal increase in the minimum wage. By May, however, as the workers’ struggle lost its intensity, the government felt confident enough to announce tax increases to cover the wage rises it had conceded in the public sector. Nothing new here. What capitalism appears to give with one hand it will take back with the other. Given the determination of the Egyptian working class to fight their own cause this is not going to be the last of the present wave of class struggle.

The key issue, as the analysis of the Pomigliano struggle by our comrades in Italy tellingly reveals, is whether the recent experience of those militants who organised outside the unions has led them to see the need for independent political struggle and organisation. This is a crucial step in the class struggle which is required, not just in Egypt but everywhere. It is a necessary step towards the creation of an international political organisation of the working class: an organisation whose militants will not lose sight of the revolutionary goal of the working class as they take up their role in each particular struggle. Without this the question of how to get rid of capitalism with its class divisions, money and production for profit will remain an abstract issue while the struggle on the ground will be perpetually diverted from taking on a revolutionary direction by false political friends. (For instance, in Lebanon, where in early May workers responded to food price rises by going on strike and demanding an increase in the minimum wage, the movement was not only organised by the unions it became the political instrument of Hizbollah in its manoeuvres for power.)

Regardless of all the political obstacles and inevitable setbacks, the fact remains that without class struggle the revolutionary political organisation cannot come into existence and we could look forward to a future of unchallenged capitalist barbarism. In so far as the present situation is provoking workers to struggle it is therefore reason for optimism. Otherwise the outlook is bleak, for it is evident that capitalism’s long-running profitability crisis has entered a new phase as the opportunities for speculation are narrowed in the aftermath of the subprime crisis.

Speculation Vultures Home In on Food

Despite the write-offs by banks and financial institutions there remains a glut of speculative capital, much of it fictitious, raking round for new ways of making quick financial profits. While it is certainly the case that world food supplies have been reduced by the diversion of crops to producing biofuels as well as poor harvests due to climate change, the extent of the price increases and the turbulent fluctuations of recent months can only be accounted by increased speculation on the commodities markets. For the capitalists “commodities” mean raw materials and primary goods. Food crops, including staples such as wheat, rice, maize, are classed as commodities in the same way as oil or tin. Like oil or tin, they are increasingly the object of financial speculation which means that prices are set to fluctuate more than in the past. (Wheat prices, for example, fell 40% between February and May). Even so, the speculators believe that the long-term trend is up. In fact food speculation has become so lucrative this year that in March the Financial Times reported the opening of “UBS Bloomberg Constant Maturity Commodity Food Index”,

« The first commodities index built to allow investors to profit from rising food inflation … [which] will cover 13 commodities directly linked to food consumption. »

5th March 2008

The existence of such an index reveals something of the level of food speculation which is fuelling the birth of more and more investment funds by the likes of Schroders (Agriculture Fund), Baring Asset Management (The Global Agriculture Fund or its Global Resources Fund, based in Dublin), as well as more specialised ventures such as the Eclectica Agriculture Fund whose manager — a Mr Hendry — who assured the Financial Times that corn and wheat prices, when adjusted for inflation, are historically low and still have a long way to go:

Between December 2005 to date corn has gone from $2 to $6 but is still trading 75 per cent below its 1974 real high. It is still early days…
26th May 2008

The speculators’ mouths are watering at the prospect of even higher food prices. The profits of the giant agribusiness companies are flourishing, whether or not the crops they sell go for biofuels, animal feed, rich country supermarkets or to the dwindling food stocks of governments and regimes under threat from an angry and hungry populace. Workers and people even less fortunate living a precarious existence throughout the globe are being told to expect the cost of food (and fuel, and just about everything else) to keep on going up. This, even though on the capitalists’ own admission every 1% increase in the cost of food means another 16 million face “food insecurity”, i.e., are in danger of dying from starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Perhaps the biggest indictment of all against capitalism is that, despite the ravages of climate change, the iniquities of highly subsidised capitalist farming and big agribusiness, the abandoning of food crops in favour of biofuels; despite the increase in the world’s population, even despite the speculators, there is still enough food being produced to provide everyone with a reasonable 2,200 calorie per day balanced diet. [10] Yet the logic of the capitalist market determines that anyone who can’t pay the price must do without.

In this context, there is no hard and fast divide between the working class who are struggling to maintain a living wage in the face of rising prices and the generic “urban poor” who take to the streets when they cannot afford to eat. Revolts of the hungry and desperate can bring down governments (and sometimes induce imperialist powers to boost food aid in order to prop up their client regimes). If the situation is desperate enough, “food riots” may even presage the collapse of a state into warlordism and banditry but in themselves they hardly threaten the existence of capitalism. Only the working class has the collective means to lead the struggle of all the oppressed onto a revolutionary course towards the construction of a new society. The longer this global crisis runs the more the world’s proletariat is finding itself in the same boat, face to face with ruthless capital and with no alternative but to fight back.
ER

[1] Comparison by the Office of National Statistics, reported in the Financial Times, 29th January 2008.
[2] Kemal Dervis, head of the UN Development Programme when interviewed by the FT,
said that the urban poor in the developing countries were already facing “an inflation tsunami” from soaring food and energy prices, which made them up to 25 per cent poorer in less than a year.
Financial Times, 7th May 2008
[3] According to Kanayo Nwanze, vice-president of the UN International Fund for Agriculture, reported in the Financial Times, 4th April 2008.
[4] Financial Times, 5th May 2008.
[5] See http://www.bread.org/assets/images/hunger-report/hr2003.
[6] See the article “Emeute de la faim” in the latest issue of Notes Internationalistes, published by the IBRP’s affiliate in Canada.
[7] Report in Financial Times 28th March 2008.
[8] Ibid, 10th January 2008.
[9] Quotes from the Financial Times, 28th February 2008 and 24th April 2008, respectively.
[10] According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), as reported in Le Monde diplomatique, July 2007.

2008-06-01 in Revolutionary Perspectives Quarterly Journal of the Communist Workers’ Organisation