"The property in the soil is the original source of all wealth" - Marx
Food shortages are becoming a pervasive danger and food insecurity a constant worry. More than half of Pakistan’s population is food insecure, anaemic and malnourished. For those who are categorised as surviving on less than a dollar a day, a meal is just a naan or chapatti with a cup of tea, or maybe an onion or chillies. Even those on middle incomes are unable to afford meat every day
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has disclosed that up to 60 per cent of all the land in the world may soon become degraded unless urgent steps are taken to ensure sustainable management of land across the world. “More than 20 per cent of all cultivated land, 30 per cent of forests and 10 per cent of grasslands are under degradation,” FAO, headed by the Director-General, Jose Graziano da Silva, stated.
The UN agency stressed that land users around the world must understand that this resource is vital for the continued support of flora, fauna and human life and as such must treat it as a finite material.
Every minute, 23 hectares of land face desertification, 5.5 hectares of land are transformed by urban encroachment (severely disturbing soil functions), and 10 hectares of soil are degraded, causing the soil to lose the capacity to support ecosystem functions.
Paradoxically, there’s enough food in the world to feed everyone. Despite global food sufficiency, its inequitable distribution within countries and within households, affects individuals at every level, with too much for some and too little for others. Poor women and children suffer more from food insecurity and malnutrition. 60 per cent women in Bangladesh consume diets, which do not provide adequate micro- and/or macro-nutrients.
That capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor was already being expressed in the 19th century by Marx and Engels. Marx argued that capitalism is inherently unstable, fraught with contradictions and prone to deep crises. Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty were not problems that could be solved by the market system, he said. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by the wealthy and devoted to profit above all else. Only a democratic socialist society, where people are empowered to make the key decisions about the economy and society themselves, can open the path to genuine freedom and liberation. They were scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a “free gift of nature” to business.
In Capital Marx says “All progress in capitalist agriculture, is not only a process in robbing the labourer but robbing the soil. All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the last sources of that fertility. The more a country develops its foundations of modern industry, the more the rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production therefore develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the labourer.” He writes "Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil."
The rise of modern cities meant that food, grown in the country, had to be transported to the city. The mineral components of the food then were flushed into rivers as sewage waste, depleting the soil's fertility: the agricultural cycle of natural fertiliser was broken. Marx argued that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were sent in the form of food and fibre sometimes hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities, where, instead of being recycled back to the land, these nutrients ended up polluting the urban centres, with disastrous results for human health. Marx stated that "Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]."
The market system is incapable of preserving the environment for future generations because in its drive for short-term profits it cannot take into account the long-term requirements of people and planet. The competition between individual enterprises and industries to make a profitable return on their investment tends to exclude rational and sustainable planning.
Engels warned “Let us not however flatter ourselves over much on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and the third cases has unforseen effects, which only too often cancel out the first. With everyday that passes, we are learning to understand these laws more correctly (laws of nature), and getting to know more about the immediate and more remote consequences of our interference in the traditional course of nature. But the more this happens, the more will humans not only feel, but also know their unity with nature, and thus more impossible will become the senseless, and anti-natural idea, of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, body and soul.”
When a peasant plowed a field with ox or horse-drawn plows, used an outhouse, accumulated compost piles, etc., the soil's nutrients were replenished naturally. As capitalist agriculture turned the peasant into an urban proletariat, segregated livestock production from grain and food production, the organic cycle was broken and the soil gradually lost its fertility.
Capitalism is a system based on competition and the production of profits for an elite. The foundation and maintenance of capitalist economies relies on the dual exploitation of the working class and the environment. Capitalism produces things, commodities, to be bought and sold on the market. This process divides nature into “things” to be exchanged on the market and in effect separates nature from itself—that is, it removes natural resources from their role in the ecosystem. Industrial logging destroys forests, industrial fishing destroys fisheries and industrial use of fossil fuels creates the greenhouse effect. The narrow-sightedness of capitalist production is a product of the system itself.
The root of environmental destruction is capitalist production. Creating a sustainable society requires the overthrow of the existing relations of production. Socialism is aimed to end class exploitation and also re-establish a blance between people and Nature. This is impossible unless the profit motive is removed from determining production in human society. As Marx said "To live on other people's labour will become a thing of the past. There will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from society itself! Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production, will gradually be organised in the most adequate manner. National centralisation of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan. Such is the humanitarian goal to which the great economic movement of the 19th century is tending."
Food shortages are becoming a pervasive danger and food insecurity a constant worry. More than half of Pakistan’s population is food insecure, anaemic and malnourished. For those who are categorised as surviving on less than a dollar a day, a meal is just a naan or chapatti with a cup of tea, or maybe an onion or chillies. Even those on middle incomes are unable to afford meat every day
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has disclosed that up to 60 per cent of all the land in the world may soon become degraded unless urgent steps are taken to ensure sustainable management of land across the world. “More than 20 per cent of all cultivated land, 30 per cent of forests and 10 per cent of grasslands are under degradation,” FAO, headed by the Director-General, Jose Graziano da Silva, stated.
The UN agency stressed that land users around the world must understand that this resource is vital for the continued support of flora, fauna and human life and as such must treat it as a finite material.
Every minute, 23 hectares of land face desertification, 5.5 hectares of land are transformed by urban encroachment (severely disturbing soil functions), and 10 hectares of soil are degraded, causing the soil to lose the capacity to support ecosystem functions.
Paradoxically, there’s enough food in the world to feed everyone. Despite global food sufficiency, its inequitable distribution within countries and within households, affects individuals at every level, with too much for some and too little for others. Poor women and children suffer more from food insecurity and malnutrition. 60 per cent women in Bangladesh consume diets, which do not provide adequate micro- and/or macro-nutrients.
That capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor was already being expressed in the 19th century by Marx and Engels. Marx argued that capitalism is inherently unstable, fraught with contradictions and prone to deep crises. Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty were not problems that could be solved by the market system, he said. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by the wealthy and devoted to profit above all else. Only a democratic socialist society, where people are empowered to make the key decisions about the economy and society themselves, can open the path to genuine freedom and liberation. They were scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a “free gift of nature” to business.
In Capital Marx says “All progress in capitalist agriculture, is not only a process in robbing the labourer but robbing the soil. All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the last sources of that fertility. The more a country develops its foundations of modern industry, the more the rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production therefore develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the labourer.” He writes "Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil."
The rise of modern cities meant that food, grown in the country, had to be transported to the city. The mineral components of the food then were flushed into rivers as sewage waste, depleting the soil's fertility: the agricultural cycle of natural fertiliser was broken. Marx argued that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were sent in the form of food and fibre sometimes hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities, where, instead of being recycled back to the land, these nutrients ended up polluting the urban centres, with disastrous results for human health. Marx stated that "Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]."
The market system is incapable of preserving the environment for future generations because in its drive for short-term profits it cannot take into account the long-term requirements of people and planet. The competition between individual enterprises and industries to make a profitable return on their investment tends to exclude rational and sustainable planning.
Engels warned “Let us not however flatter ourselves over much on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and the third cases has unforseen effects, which only too often cancel out the first. With everyday that passes, we are learning to understand these laws more correctly (laws of nature), and getting to know more about the immediate and more remote consequences of our interference in the traditional course of nature. But the more this happens, the more will humans not only feel, but also know their unity with nature, and thus more impossible will become the senseless, and anti-natural idea, of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, body and soul.”
When a peasant plowed a field with ox or horse-drawn plows, used an outhouse, accumulated compost piles, etc., the soil's nutrients were replenished naturally. As capitalist agriculture turned the peasant into an urban proletariat, segregated livestock production from grain and food production, the organic cycle was broken and the soil gradually lost its fertility.
Capitalism is a system based on competition and the production of profits for an elite. The foundation and maintenance of capitalist economies relies on the dual exploitation of the working class and the environment. Capitalism produces things, commodities, to be bought and sold on the market. This process divides nature into “things” to be exchanged on the market and in effect separates nature from itself—that is, it removes natural resources from their role in the ecosystem. Industrial logging destroys forests, industrial fishing destroys fisheries and industrial use of fossil fuels creates the greenhouse effect. The narrow-sightedness of capitalist production is a product of the system itself.
The root of environmental destruction is capitalist production. Creating a sustainable society requires the overthrow of the existing relations of production. Socialism is aimed to end class exploitation and also re-establish a blance between people and Nature. This is impossible unless the profit motive is removed from determining production in human society. As Marx said "To live on other people's labour will become a thing of the past. There will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from society itself! Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production, will gradually be organised in the most adequate manner. National centralisation of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan. Such is the humanitarian goal to which the great economic movement of the 19th century is tending."
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