How can too much food be a threat to a sane society?

The whole world today is dominated by the market system. Goods and services are only produced if they can be sold in the market at a profit. Each year, millions of people die of starvation. But in the market system, their hunger is not “effective demand”; they have no money with which to buy food. While those people starve, food is stored and even destroyed just in order to keep up prices and profits. The Daily Express (6/2/81) carried a large photograph of an ex-RAF hangar containing a 10,000-ton stock of barley. Across Europe there arc several millions of tons of “surplus” barley. The Daily Express suggests the feeble solution of Britain leaving the Common Market. The only real solution is for there to be no market, with food produced simply to be eaten by people who need it.

Workers who are taken in by the advice of Geoffrey Howe and Keith Joseph should take note of this: “Most of the workers at a Yorkshire wool mill who accepted a 10 per cent wage cut to save their jobs are to be made redundant after all, because trade has continued to decline” (Guardian 12/1/81).

The government are planning an “anti-scrounger” campaign for April. Social Security claimants will be investigated if they have a “suspiciously high” standard of living. Will this include Denis, Thatcher’s husband, or Elizabeth, Thatcher’s queen, both of whom enjoy luxurious life-styles without ever doing a day’s work?

The Office of Health Economics have published a report (Suicide and Deliberate Self Harm) showing that there were 4,200 suicide cases in 1979 in Britain (as against only 571 homicides): 500 more than in 1975. The last surge in suicides was in the 1930s. It is probably no coincidence that the ’30s was the last period of mass unemployment.