Protecting Food From the Hungry
August 21, 2020
This absence of money the most mystical of all human creations is enough
reason to let people starve, writes Vijay Prashad.
Untitled, pen and ink, Gaborone, Botswana, 1984. (Thami Mnyele, South
Africa)
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Young children marvel at an obvious contradiction in capitalist societies:
why do we have shops filled with food, and yet see hungry people on the
streets? It is a question of enormous significance; but in time the question
dissipates into the fog of moral ambivalence, as various explanations are
used to obfuscate the clarity of the youthful mind.
The most bewildering explanation is that hungry people cannot eat because
they have no money, and somehow this absence of money the most mystical of
all human creations is enough reason to let people starve. Since there is
ample food to eat, and since a lot of people do not have enough money to buy
food, the food must be protected from the hungry people.
To that end, we as human beings allow for the creation of a police force
and for the use of violence to defend food against the hungry. In one of his
earliest journalistic reports, Karl Marx wrote of the violence used against
the peasants of the Rhineland who collected fallen wood to feed their fires.
The peasants, Marx wrote, know the punishment including death but they
simply do not know the crime. For what reason are they being beaten and
killed? The collection of wood that has fallen on the forest floor cannot be
seen as an act of criminality, nor can the basic human need for hungry
people to forage for food. And yet, social wealth in a society in which the
hierarchies of class are entrenched is sluiced off to build larger and
larger repressive institutions, from the police to the military.
You would think that amid a pandemic, when employment has collapsed and
hunger has risen, social wealth would be diverted from the police to erase
starvation, but that is not how the society of entrenched class hierarchy
works. In July, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and other UN
agencies released a report The State of Food Security and Nutrition in
the World which showed that the trend before 2014 was for a decline in
world hunger; since then the numbers have climbed dramatically, and since
the Great Lockdown they have climbed exponentially.
Half of the worlds hungry are in Asia, with the majority in India. About 3
billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Storehouses of food are opened
only briefly, relief distributed only fleetingly. Afflicted by the hunger
pandemic, when people go onto the streets to demand food or to defend their
rights, they face the cold steel of state repression.
In August 2020, our office in South Africa published dossier no. 31, The
Politic of Blood: Political Repression in South Africa, a powerful text
that demonstrates a painful fact: that the violent state institutions
germinated by the apartheid era have been carried over since 1994 into the
post-apartheid South African state. During the transition, a struggle waged
by millions for the construction of popular democratic power and
participatory forms of democracy was reduced to elections, the courts, a
free commercial press, and the substitution of NGOs, now described as civil
society, for democratic forms of popular organization.
After apartheid, independent forms of self-organisation and popular demands
for more participatory forms of democracy were frequently treated as
criminal. The situation has deteriorated to such an extent, authors argue,
that in South Africa, the police kill people, the vast majority of them
impoverished and black, at a per capita rate that is three times higher than
that of the police in the United States. The numbers are stunning, the
range of violence shocking.
Police barricade the entrance to the City Hall during a march of thousands
of members of Abahlali baseMjondolo protesting against political repression,
Durban, Oct. 8, 2018. (Madelene Cronjé, New Frame, South Africa)
In South Africa, repression against popular organizations trade unions and
shack dwellers formations has not lessened during the pandemic. Almost
300,000 people have been arrested in these months; public gatherings have
been banned, which means that the peoples organizations have had a
difficult time building resistance against the harshness of state violence.
One of the test areas is Durban, where the shack dwellers movement
Abahlali baseMjondolo has led land occupations, and where the local
government has been harsh in its violence against the people in these new
settlements.
On July 28, for instance, the African National Congress-led municipality
attacked the eKhenana Occupation in Cato Manor, a historic, popularly
initiated working-class neighborhood, which in 1959 had been where women
such as Dorothy Nyembe and Florence Mhize forged the uprising against the
apartheid state that began to win popular support for the African National
Congress. All that is forgotten now, as state violence was used despite
court orders to protect the residents to evict them from their homes,
their urban farming project and their cooperative that afforded them food
sovereignty.
The eKhenana Occupation flew the flag of Abahlali and, as part of their
ethos of international solidarity, the flag of their comrades in the
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), the landless workers
movement of Brazil.
Families had tear gas hurled at them during eviction proceedings at the
Quilombo Campo Grande in Minas Gerais, Brazil, July 14, 2020. (MST, Brazil)
Last week, in Brazil, the ruthlessness of state violence was on full display
against the Quilombo Campo Grande community. After 60 hours of resistance
against the military police, the community had to retreat from what they had
built. Noam Chomsky and I wrote a message of solidarity to the families of
the community, which is given below.
Statement by Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad on the Eviction of 450 families
from Quilombo Campo Grande
On 12 August, Governor Romeu Zema of Minas Gerais sent in the military
police to evict 450 families from the twenty two-year old Quilombo Campo
Grande. For three days they surrounded the camp, intimidating families, in
an attempt to force them to leave their land, but the landless families
resisted. On 14 August, using tear gas and sound grenades, they were finally
successful. They destroyed a community that had built homes and grew organic
crops (including coffee, sold as Café Guaîi). In 1996, the families,
organized by the Landless Workers Movement (MST), had taken over an
abandoned sugar plantation (Ariadnópolis, which was owned by the Azevedo
Brothers Agricultural Company). Jodil Agricultural Holdings, one of Brazils
largest coffee producers, owned by João Faria da Silva, wanted the eviction
so that it could take over production from the cooperative.
As a sign of disregard, the Governor and the military police destroyed the
Eduardo Galeano Popular School, which educated children and adults. As
friends of Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), the conscience of South America, we
are especially pained by the eviction and the destruction.
This eviction took place a few days after the death of Bishop Pedro
Casaldáliga (1928-2020), whose life was a tribute to the struggles for the
emancipation of the poor. This eviction is an insult to his memory, the man
who sang:
I believe in the International
of heads held high,
of speaking as equal to equal,
and of hands linked together.
That is the way to live, hands linked together, not through tear gas and
bullets fired at the peasantry by the military police.
We condemn the eviction of the families, and the destruction of their land
and their school. We stand with the families of Quilombo Campo Grande.
Tell the People the Struggle Must Go On
Benjamin Moloise, a factory worker and poet, was born in Alexandra, in
Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He joined the then-banned African
National Congress (ANC) and wrote poetry. In 1982, Moloise was accused of
having killed Philipis Selepe, a warrant officer. The ANC leadership in
Lusaka (Zambia) admitted that it had ordered the execution of Selepe, but
said that Moloise did not kill him. An international campaign to free
Moloise did not dent the determination of the apartheid government to murder
Moloise.
On the day of his execution on Oct. 18, 1985, Pauline Moloise Benjamins
mother saw him for 20 minutes. He told her that while he did not kill
Selepe, I do not regret my involvement. Tell the people that the struggle
must go on. Almost 4,000 people spread across Johannesburg mourning his
death. Mayihlome, the people cried out, a call to arms to deepen their
struggle against apartheid.
Women protest against evictions and relocations to a new housing
development in the Siyanda shack settlement in Durban, South Africa, March
2009. (Kerry Ryan Chance, South Africa)
A study published in mid-July showed that two out of five adults in South
Africa said that their households had lost a main source of livelihood since
March 27, 2020, when the lockdown started in the country. The impact that
this has on starvation is dramatic, with government policies to shield the
population from hunger being minimal. Instead of sending out armed men to
tear down the shacks of the people and uproot their farms, it would be far
better for a state to work with local structures to arrange the distribution
of necessary supplies.
This is where things are confusing: the protection of private property is
far more important for these states than the protection of precious life.
Tell the people that the struggle must go on, said Moloise before he was
hung inside a cold prison surrounded by jacaranda trees.
Vijay Prashad, an Indian historian, journalist and commentator, is the
executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the
chief editor of Left Word Books.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.