[Marxism] How Hunger Could Topple Regimes

[Eli Stephens <elishastephens@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080414/wl_time/howhungercouldtoppleregimes&printer=1

By TONY KARON

Mon Apr 14, 10:00 AM ET

The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the 
streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since 
capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. Since then, the spectacle 
of 
hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals 
rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past 
month 
suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a 
growing 
number of governments around the world. Ironically, it may be the very success 
of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of 
socialism that has helped create the new crisis.

Haiti is in flames as food riots have turned into a violent challenge to the 
vulnerable government; Egypt's authoritarian regime faces a mounting political 
threat over its inability to maintain a steady supply of heavily subsidized 
bread to its impoverished citizens; Cote D'Ivoire, Cameroon, Mozambique, 
Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia are among the countries that have recently seen 
violent food riots or demonstrations. World Bank president Robert Zoellick 
noted 
last week that world food prices had risen 80% over the past three years, and 
warned that at least 33 countries face social unrest as a result.

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually 
impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt 
and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to 
feed 
their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to 
feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become 
militants with nothing to lose. That's especially true when the source of their 
hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy 
the available food supplies. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the 
current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. 
World Food Program put it last month, "We are seeing food on the shelves but 
people being unable to afford it."

When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and 
beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of 
those who're trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), 
the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing 
whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal 
human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that 
even the global aid agencies - whose function is to provide emergency food 
supplies to those in need - are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their 
current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around 
the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.

The hunger has historically been an instigator of revolutions and civil wars, 
it 
is not a sufficient condition for such violence. For a mass outpouring of rage 
spurred by hunger to translate into a credible challenge to an established 
order 
requires an organized political leadership ready to harness that anger against 
the state. It may not be all that surprising, then, that Haiti has been one of 
the major flashpoints of the new wave of hunger-generated political crises; the 
outpouring of rage there has been channeled into preexisting furrows of 
political discontent. And that's why there may be greater reason for concern in 
Egypt, where the bread crisis comes on top of a mounting challenge to the 
regime's legitimacy by a range of opposition groups.

The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, 
even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to 
generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated 
industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation 
crisis - by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources. The 
rapid industrialization of China and India over the past two decades - and the 
resultant growth of a new middle class fast approaching the size of America's - 
has driven demand for oil toward the limits of global supply capacity. That has 
pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s, which 
has also raised pressure on food prices by driving up agricultural costs and by 
prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. 
Moreover, those new middle class people are eating a lot better than their 
parents did - particularly more meat. Producing a single calorie of beef can, 
by 
some estimates, require eight or more calories of grain feed, and expanded meat 
consumption therefore has a multiplier effect on demand for grains. Throw in 
climate disasters such as the Australian drought and recent rice crop failures, 
and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created 
to feed people in emergencies is warning that it lacks the funds to fulfill its 
mandate.

The reason officials such as Zoellick are sounding the alarm may be that the 
food crisis, and its attendant political risks, are not likely to be resolved 
or 
contained by the laissez-faire operation of capitalism's market forces. 
Government intervention on behalf of the poor - so out of fashion during 
globalization's roaring '90s and the current decade - may be about to make a 
comeback. View this article on Time.com


_________________________________________________________________
Going green? See the top 12 foods to eat organic.
http://green.msn.com/galleries/photos/photos.aspx?gid=164&ocid=T003MSN51N1653A
________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu