Social Problems

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Social Problems Spring 2012 Table of Contents

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Eitzen, Stanley and Maxine Baca Zinn. “Sociological Approach to Social Problems”

1-18

Mills, C. Wright. “The Promise”

19-24

1-51

Davis, Mike. Selections from City of Quartz

25-40

7-22

-52

23-34

Scott, Janny. “Life at the Top in America isn’t Just Better, It’s Longer”

53-60

35-42

Rogers, Joel and Erik Olin Wright. “Health Care”

61-90

43-71

Ferrante, Joan. “Structural Functionalism”

91-96

73-78

Davis, Kingsley and Wilbert Moore. “Some Principles of Stratification”

97-100

79-82

Gans, Herbert. The Uses of Poverty The Poor Pay All”

101-105

83-87

Ritzer, George. “Karl Marx: From Capitalism to Communism”

106-114

88-96

Schactman, Max. “The Fight for Socialism”

115-138

97-119

Mandel, Ernest. “The Causes of Alienation”

139-158

121-139

Terkel, Studs. Selections from Working

159-171

141-153

Schor, Juliet. “The New Politics of Consumption”

172-188

154-170

Gordon, Jesse. “The Sweat Behind the Shirt: The Labor History of a Gap Sweatshirt”

189

171

Silverman, Ben. “Playstation 2 Component Incites African War” Yahoo! Games

190-192

172-173

Francis Moore and Joseph Collins. Why Can’t People Feed Themselves?”

193-199

175-181

Cavanaugh and Anderson. Selections from Field Guide to the Global Economy

201-288

183-270

The Dollars and SenseCollective: the ABCs of the Global Economy

289-299

271-281

Bacon, David. “How US Policies Fueled Mexico’s Great Migration”

301-314

283-296

Wolff, Richard. “Capitalism Hits the Fan”

315-318

297-300

Bauerlin, Monika and Clara Jeffrey. “All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup.”

319-328

301-309

Rodriguez, Luis. “The End of the Line: California Gangs and the Promise of Street Peace”

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Key COIlCCI'I-COIl!illllCd ..

Author, George Ritzer

Thes<:cond is·nonmaterialsocial facls.Th<:.5e arc .SOCial factSlhatMc a!so exlernat and coercive, but which do not take a material form; they are nonmaterial. The major examples of nonmaterial social facts in sociology are norms and values. Thus, we arealso·prev<:nt<:d from playingbaseball",hilealecl\lteisirtprogress~ecaus<:of unwritten and widely shared rules about how one is supposed to behave in class. Furt~ermore, 've have learned to put a high valueoneducation, with the result that weare very reluctant to doanylhirtg lhatwouldadversely affect H. But, .although we can. see how a nonmaterial social fact.is coetciveOver us, in what senseis It also externallous? The answer is that the thinllslike the norms and valucs0fsoclely are the sharedpossession of the collectivity.Some, perhaps most. of them are internalized in theindividualdurlnglhe socialization process.but no singleindividualpossessesanylhing approaching all of them. The entire set of I'lOrms and values is in the sole pOSSession of thecoltectivity.ln this sense we can. say they are external 10 us. Tothls day, marty sociologists concentrate their attention on. social. facts. However, we rarely uselhis now-antiquated term tClday.R<lther. sociologists focus on social structures (malerial soci.al facts) andsocialJnstitlltions (nonmaterial social facts). However, it has become dear that in his effort to dlstinguJsh sociology from psychology and phUosophy.Durkheim came Up with a much too limiteddefirtltion of the subject matter of sociology. As we will sec. many sociologits stud)' an array of phenomena that would not be considered Durkhelmian social facls.

in which everyone is very clear ilboutwhatthecollectiYity beUevesand what they are supposed to do in any given situation. They haveclear'dnd secure Jl100ringsithey do 1101 suffer from anomie.

KARL MARX: FROMCAl?ITALISM TO COMMUNISM The most important. and esthetically pleasing (because analyses, conclusions, and remedies torsodety'sjl1~stem seamlessly frol'n basic premises). theory of the classical age is that of the Cermnnsocialthinker and political activist/Karl Marx (1818--1883). This assertion mightcome asa surprise to the reader who may have prevI01.ls!ycome in contilct only with critical statements about Marx and his thinking. In the popularviewiMarx is~een as some slnt or crazed radical who developed a setof ideas tha tIed many nations, especially the then~SovietUnion,

nonmateriarsocial facts Socialfacls!hatare eXlemal and coercive, but which do not take amaterin! form; they are nonmaterial (e.g., normS and values}.

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Key COIlCCI'I-COIl!illllCd ..

Author, George Ritzer

Thes<:cond is·nonmaterialsocial facls.Th<:.5e arc .SOCial factSlhatMc a!so exlernat and coercive, but which do not take a material form; they are nonmaterial. The major examples of nonmaterial social facts in sociology are norms and values. Thus, we arealso·prev<:nt<:d from playingbaseball",hilealecl\lteisirtprogress~ecaus<:of unwritten and widely shared rules about how one is supposed to behave in class. Furt~ermore, 've have learned to put a high valueoneducation, with the result that weare very reluctant to doanylhirtg lhatwouldadversely affect H. But, .although we can. see how a nonmaterial social fact.is coetciveOver us, in what senseis It also externallous? The answer is that the thinllslike the norms and valucs0fsoclely are the sharedpossession of the collectivity.Some, perhaps most. of them are internalized in theindividualdurlnglhe socialization process.but no singleindividualpossessesanylhing approaching all of them. The entire set of I'lOrms and values is in the sole pOSSession of thecoltectivity.ln this sense we can. say they are external 10 us. Tothls day, marty sociologists concentrate their attention on. social. facts. However, we rarely uselhis now-antiquated term tClday.R<lther. sociologists focus on social structures (malerial soci.al facts) andsocialJnstitlltions (nonmaterial social facts). However, it has become dear that in his effort to dlstinguJsh sociology from psychology and phUosophy.Durkheim came Up with a much too limiteddefirtltion of the subject matter of sociology. As we will sec. many sociologits stud)' an array of phenomena that would not be considered Durkhelmian social facls.

in which everyone is very clear ilboutwhatthecollectiYity beUevesand what they are supposed to do in any given situation. They haveclear'dnd secure Jl100ringsithey do 1101 suffer from anomie.

KARL MARX: FROMCAl?ITALISM TO COMMUNISM The most important. and esthetically pleasing (because analyses, conclusions, and remedies torsodety'sjl1~stem seamlessly frol'n basic premises). theory of the classical age is that of the Cermnnsocialthinker and political activist/Karl Marx (1818--1883). This assertion mightcome asa surprise to the reader who may have prevI01.ls!ycome in contilct only with critical statements about Marx and his thinking. In the popularviewiMarx is~een as some slnt or crazed radical who developed a setof ideas tha tIed many nations, especially the then~SovietUnion,

nonmateriarsocial facts Socialfacls!hatare eXlemal and coercive, but which do not take amaterin! form; they are nonmaterial (e.g., normS and values}.

Page No90 Key Concept

Anomie (and Other Types of) Suicide The concept of ,lOomic played a centra] role in Ollfkheilll':; f,l1110US work, Silicide. He argued that people i1re marC! likely to kill themselves when they do not know what is expected of them. In this situation, regulation of people is low and they arc largely free to run wild. This mad pursuit of anything and everything is likely to prove unsatisfying and, as il result, oJ higher percentage of people in such a situation are ,1pt to commit suicide, specifically anomie suicide. But whi'lt C<:luses the rate of .:loamic suicide to increase? Soci<ll disruption is the main cause, but interestingly, we can see an increase in the f<lte of such suicide in times of both positive and negative disruption. That is, both an economic boom and economic depression can cause a rise in the rate of anomic suicide. Either positive or negative diswptions can adversely affect the ability of the collectivity to exercise control over the individual. 'Without such control, people are more likely to feel rootless; to not know what they are supposed to do in the changing and increasingly strange environment. The unense that this causes leads people to commit anomie suicide at a higher rate than in more stable times. Interestingly, anomie suicide is just one of four types of suicide created by Durkheim in a broad-ranging theory of this behavior. The others are egoistic suicide, which occurs when people are not well integrated into the collectivity. Largely on their own, they feel a sense of futility, meaninglessness, and more of them adopt the view that they. are free (morally and otherwise) to choose to do anything, including kill themselves. In altruistic suicide, people are too \\'e11 integrated into the collectivity and kill themselves in greater numbers because the group leads them, or even forces them, to commit suicide more frequently than they otherwise would. Finally, fatalistic suicide occurs in situations of excessive regulation (e.g., slavery) \vhere p~ople are so distressed and depressed by their lack of freedom that they take their own lives more frequently than otherwise. Thus, Durkheim offers a broad theory of suicide based on the degree to which people are regulated by, or integrated in, the collectivity.

anomie suicide People are more likely to kill themselves when they do not know what is expected of them, where regulation is low, and they are largely free to nm wild. This mad pursuit is likely to prove unsatisfying and, as a result, a higher percentage of people in such a situotion are apt to commit this type of suicide. cgoistic suicide \Vhcn people ilre not weil integrated into the collectivity and largely on their own, they feel a sense of futility, meaninglessness, ,md more of them feel that they am mornJI)' free to kiJI themselves. altruistic suicide \Vhen people ,HC lao well integrll\ed into the collectivity, they are likely to killthemseJves in greater numbers because the group leads them, or even forces them, to. fatalistic suicide In situ,1tions of excessive rl?gubtion (e.g., sbveryl people arc often so distressed and depressed by their lack of freedom that they take their own lives more frequently than otherwise.

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in the direction of disastrous communist regimes. Almost all such regunes have failed or are gradually being transformed into more capitalistic societies. The failure of those societies and the abuses associated 'with them (e.g., the system of prison camps in the Soviet Union-the Gulag Archipelago-where millions died) have been blamed on Marx and his crazed ideas. But while the leaders of those societies invoked Marx's name and called themselves communists, the kind of societies they created would have been attacked by Marx himself for their inhumanity. The fact is that what those societies became had little in common with what Marx would have liked a communist society to be.

Human Potential The starting point for Marx's grand theory is a set of assumptions about the potential of people in the right historical and social circumstances. In capitalistic and precapitatistic societies, people had corne nowhere close to their human potential. In precapitalist societies (say, the Stone Age or the Middle Ages), people 'were too busy scrambling to find adequate food, shelter, and protection to develop their higher capacities. Although food, shelter, and protection were easier to come by for most people in a capitalistic society, the oppressive and exploitative nature of that system made it impossible for most people to come anywhere dose to their potentiaL To Marx, people, unlike lower animals, are endowed with consciousness and the ability to link that consciousness to action. Among other things, people can set themselves apart from what they are doing, plan what they are going to do, choose to act or not to act, choose a specific kind of action, be flexible if impediments get in their way, concentrate on what they are doing for long periods; and often choose to do what they are doing in concert with other people. But people do not just think; they would perish if that was all they did. They must act and often that action involves acting on nature to appropriate from it what is needed (raw materials, water, food, shelter) to survive. People appropriated things in earlier societies, but they did it so primitively and inefficiently that they were unable to develop their capacities, especially their capacities to think, to any great degree. Under capitalism, people carne to care little about expressing their creative capacities in the act of appropriating nature. Rather, they focused on owning things and earning enough money to acquire those things. But capi~ talism was important to Marx because it provided the technological and organizational innovations needed for the creation of a communist society, where, for the first time, people would be able to express their full capacities. Under communism, people were freed from the desire merely to own things and would be able, with the help of technologies and organizations created in capitalism, to live up to their full human potential (what Marx culled "species being").

Alienation The idea that people must appropriate \.... hat they need from nature is related to the view that people, in Marx's view, need to work. Work is a positive process

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in which people use their creative capacities, and further extend then1, in productive activities. However, the work that most people did under capitalism did not permit them to express their human potential. In other vvords, rather than expressing themselves in their work, people under capitalism were alienated from it. One cannot understand what Marx meant by alienation without understanding further what he meant by human potential. In the circumstance (communism) \\'here people achieve their human potential there is a natural interconnection between people and their productive activities, the products they produce, the fellow workers with whom they produce those things, and with what they are potentially capable of becoming. Alienation is the breakdown of these na tural interconnections. Instead of being naturally rela ted to all of these things, people are separated from them. So, under capitalism, instead of choosing their productive activities, people have their activities chosen for them by the owners, the capitalists. The capitalists decide what is to be done and how it is to be done. TI1ey offer the workers (in Marx's terminology, the "proletariat") a wage and if the workers accept, they must perform the activities the way they have been designed to be performed by the capitalist. In return, they receive a wage that is supposed to provide them \vith all the satisfaction and gratification they need. The productive activities are controlled, even owned, by the capitalist. Thus, the workers are separated from them and unable to express themselves in them. Second, capitalists also own the products. The workers do not choose \vhat to produce; when the products are completed they do not belong to the work ers, and the products are unlikely to be used by the workers to satisfy their basic needs. Instead, the products belong to the capitalists, who may use them, or seek to have them used, in any way they wish. Given the profit orientation that serves to define capitalism, this almost always means that they will endeavor to sell the products for a profit. Once they've made the products, the \vorkers are completely separated from them and have absolutely no say in what happens to them. Furthermore, the workers may have very little sense of their contribution to the final product. They work on an assembly line and perform a very specific task (e.g., tightening some bolts) and may have little idea what is being produced and how \vhat they are doing fits into the overall process and contributes to the end product. Third, the workers are likely to be separ'lted from their fellow workers. In Marx's view, people are inherently social and, left to their own devices, would choose to work. collaboratively and cooperatively to produce what is needed to live. However, ·under capitalism, workers, even when they are surrounded by many other people, perform their tasks alone and repetitively. Those around H

alienation The breakdown of, the separation from, the natural interconnection benveen people and their productive activities, the products they produce, the fellow workers with whom they produce those things, and with \vhat they are potentially capable of becoming.

Page No93 them are likely to be strangers who are performing similarly isolated tasks. Often it is even \"orse than this: The capitalist frequently pits workers against each other to see who can produce the most for the least amount of pay. Those 'who succeed keep their jobs, at least for a time, while those who fail are likely to find themselves unemployed and on the street. Thus, instead of working tow gether harmoniously, workers are pitted against one another in a life-and-death struggle for survival. Even if they are not engaged in a life-and-death struggle with one another, it is clear that workers in capitalism are separated from one another. Finally, instead of expressing their human potential in their work, people are driven further and further from what they have the potential to be. They perform less and less like humans and are reduced to animals, beasts of burden, or inhuman machines. Consciousness is numbed and ultimately destroyed as relations with other humans and with nature are progressively severed. The result is a mass of people who are unable to express their essential human qualities, a mass of alienated workers. Capitalism Alienation occurs within the context of a capitalist society. As we have seen, capitalism is essentially a hvo-class system composed of capitalists and the proletariat, in which one class (capitalists) exploits the other (proletariat). The key to understanding both classes lies in what Marx called the means of production. As the name suggests, these are the things that are needed for production to take place. Included in the means of production are such things as tools, machinery, raw materials, and factories. Under capitalism the capitalists own the means of production. If the proletariat want to work, they must come to the capitalist, who owns the means that make most work possible. Workers need access to the means of production in order to work. They also need money in order to survive in capitalism, and the capitalists tend to have that too, as well as the ability to make more of it. The capitalists have what the proletariat needs (the means of production, money for wages), but what do the workers have to offer in return? The workers have something absolutely essential to the capitalist-labor and the time available to perfonn it. The capitalist cannot produce and cannot make more money and profit without the labor of the

capitalism An economic system composed mainly of capitalists and the proletariat, in which one class (capitalists) exploits the other (proletariat). means of production Those things that are needed for production to take place (including tools, machinery, raw materials, and factories). capitalists Those who own the means of production under capitalism and are therefore in a position to exploit workers. proletariat Those who, because they do not own means of production, must sell their labor time to the capitalists in order to get access to those means.

Page No94 Karl Marx A Biographical Vignette After graduation from the University of Berlin, Marx became a writer for a liberal-radical newspaper and within ten months had become its editor-in-chief. However, because of its political positions, the paper was closed shortly thereafter by the government. The early essays published in this period began to reflect a number of the positions that would guide Marx throughout his life. They were liberally sprinkled with democratic principles, humanism, and youthful idealism. He rejected the abstractness of philosophy, the naive dreaming of utopian communists, and those activists who were urging what he considered to be premature political action. In rejecting these activists, Marx laid the groundwork for his own life's work: Practical attempts, even by the masses, can be answered with a cannon as soon as they become dangerous, but ideas that have overcome our intellect and conquered our conviction, ideas to which reason has riveted our conscience, are chains from which one cannot break loose without breaking one's heart; they are demons that one can only overcome by submitting to them.

proletariat. Thus, a deal is struck. The capitalist allows the proletariat access to the means of production, and the proletariat are paid a wage (albeit a small one, as small as the capitalist can possibly get away with). Actually the worker is paid what Marx called a subsistence wage, just enough for the worker to survive and to have a family and children so that when the worker falters, he can be replaced by one of his children. In exchange, the proletariat give the capitalist their labor time and all the productive abilities and capacities associated with that time. On the surface, this seems like a fair deal: Both the capitalist and the proletariat get what they lack and what they need. However, in Marx's view this is a grossly unfair situation. Why is that so? It is traceable to another of Marx's famous ideas, the labor theory of value. As the words suggest, his idea is that all value comes from labor. The proletariat labor; the capitalist does not. The capitalist might invest, plan, manage, scheme, and so on, but to Marx this is not labor. Marx's sense of labor is the production of things out of the raw materials

subsistence wage The wage paid by the capitalist to the proletariat that is just enough for the worker to survive and to have a family and children so that when the worker falters, he can be replaced by one of his children. labor theory of value Marx's theory that all value comes from labor and is therefore traceable, in capitalism, to the proletariat.

Key Concept

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Exploitation To Marx, capitalism, by its very nature, leads to exploitation, particularly of the proletariat, or working class. His thinking on exploitation is derived from his labor theory of value, and more specifically the concept of surplus value, defined as the difference between the value of a product when it is sold and the value of the elements (including worker's labor) consumed in the production of the product. Surplus value, like all value from the perspective of the labor theory of value, comes from the worker. It should go to the worker, but in the capitalist system the lion's share of it goes to the capitalist. The degree to which the capitalist retains surplus value and uses it to his own ends (including, and especially, expansion of his capitalist business) is the degree to which capitalism is an exploitative system. In a colorful metaphor, Marx describes capitalists as "vampires" who suck the labor of the proletariat. Furthermore, the more of proletariat's ''blood'' the capitalist sucks, the bigger, more successful, and wealthier he will become. In capitalism, the deserving (the proletariat) grow poorer, while the undeserving (the capitalist) grow immensely wealthy.

provided by nature. The proletariat and only the proletariat do that, although under capitalism the raw materials are provided by the capitalists and not directly by nature. To put it baldly, since the proletariat labor and the capitalists do not, the proletariat deserve virtually everything; the capitalists, almost nothmg. Of course, the situation in a capitalistic society is exactly the reverse: The capitalists get the lion's share of the rewards and the workers get barely enough to subsist. Thus (and this was another of Marx's famous concepts), the proletariat are the victims of exploitation. Ironically, neither capitalist nor worker is conscious of this exploitation. They are both the victims of false consciousness. The workers think they are getting a fair day's pay. The capitalists think that they are being rewarded, not because of their exploitation of the workers, but for their cleverness, their capital investment, their manipulation of the market, and so on. The capitalists are too busy making more money, in money grubbing,

surplus value The difference between the value of a product when it is sold and the value of the elements consumed in production of the product (including worker's labor). exploitation In capitalism, the capitalists get the lion's share of therewards and the proletariat get enough to subsist even though, based on the labor theory of value, the situation should be reversed. false consciousness In capitalism, both the proletariat and the capitalists have an inaccurate sense of themselves, their relationship to one another, and the way in which capitalism operates.

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ever 10 gel il true 11l1dQrstill1dil1~;of the L:'xploitil\ivC' niltlll'C' of their rebtionship with workers. However, the prolet<1ri<lt do h<lve the cilp<lcity to achieve such an llndcrst<lnding, portly bCC,ll1SC cvcllltl<llly they ilre so exploited lind impoverished {hat there is nothing to hide the re<llity of what is transpiring in capitalism. In }.:larx's tenn5, the proletMiat is capilble of ilchieving class consciousness; the capitalists arc not. Class consciollsness is a prerequisite to revolution, but the coming revolution is aided by the dynamics of capitalism. For example, capitalism grows more ilnd mo're compelitive, prices Me slashed, ilnd <In increasing number of cilpitalists ilrC' driven (lui of business ilnd into the proletari<lt. Eventually, the proletariM swells while the cilpitlliist cJ,lSS is reduced to <l smllll number who TI1nintllin their position because of their skill i\l exploitation. When the massive proletari<ll finilHy llchievc class (onsci011.snl'~~ ,llld decide to ,Kl, there will be no contest beclluse the 50MlI number of ci1pit,llists ore likely to be ei1sily brushed aside, perhaps with little or no vioknce. Thus, cilpitalisll'l will not be destroyed <1nd communism will nOI be crented without the proletMillt taking <lclion. In Marx's terms, the praletnriat must engage in praXis, or concrete action. It is 110t enough to think about the evils of cnpitalism ordc\'clop great theories of it and its demise; people must take to the streets ilnd make it happen. This does not necessarily mean that they must behll\'c in violent wnys, but it does m(',1n they c,lnnot sit bilCk and walt for capitillism to collapse on its OWI1.

Communism Mi1fX had no doubt tlwt the dyn,lll1ics of capitalism would lead to such a revolution, but he devoted little time to describing the chnracter of the communist society that would replace capitalism. To Marx, the priority was gaining an understanding of the wny capitalism worked and communicilting that understanding 10 the prolet.J.rial, thereby helping- them gain e111SS consciousness. He WllS criticill of the many lhinkers who spent their time dllydreaming about same future utopian society. The immediale goal \Vil5 the overthrow of the alienating i1nd exploit,ltive system. WhM was to come next would have to be dealt with once the revolution succeeded. Some say that this lack of a plan Illid the groundwork for the debllcles th"t took place in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Marx did have some speCific things to StlY about the future state of communism, but \\!e get n better sense of communism by returning to his basic liS· sumptions about hUJnlln potential. In "sense, communism is the social systc:m

c!.lSS consciousness The <lbility of a Cl.1SS, in p<lrllculilr the proletariat, 10 overcome false consciousness <lnd alt<lill <In aCCUl""lc lInoerstanding of the capitalist system. pr.1Xis The ide" that people, especi<llly the proletilriaL must tilkc concrete ilction in order \0 (wcrCOl11e c,lpitillism. communism Till.' sl'ciill S)'.o;t1.'111 thilt pl.'rn1its, for the first timl.', the expression of full h(11),ll1 potenti,ll.

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Studs Terkel: Selections from Working

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Colonialism appeared to me to be the link. Colonialism destroyed the cultural patterns of production and exchange by which traditional

But when looking for the historical roots of the predicament, I learned that my picture of these two separate worlds was quite false. My two separate worlds were really just different sides of the same coin. One side was on top largely because the other side was on the bottom. Could this be true? How were these separate worlds related?

When I started [ saw a world divided into two parts: a minority of nations that had "taken off through their agricultural and industrial revolutions to reach a level of unparalleled material abundance and a majority that remained behind in a primitive, traditional, undeveloped state. This lagging behind of the majority of the world's peoples must be due, I thought, to some internal deficiency or even to several of them. It seemed obvious that the under- developed countries must be deficient in natural resourees--particularly good land and climate--and in cultural development, including modem attitudes conducive to work and progress.

OUf

Response: In the very first speech I, Frances, ever gavc after writing Dietfor a Small Planet, I tried to take my audience along the path that I had taken in attempting to understand why so many are hungry in this world. Here is the gist of that talk that was, in truth, a turning point in my life:

Question: You have said that the hunger problem is not the result of overpopulation. But you have not yet answered the most basic and simple question of all: Why can't people feed themselves? As Senator Daniel P. Moynihan put it bluntly, when addressing himself to the Third World, "Food growing is the first thing you do when you come down out of the trees. The question is, how come the United States can grow food and you can't?"

By Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins From Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Random House, 1977

Why Can't People Feed Themselves?

We have gotten great satisfaction from probing into the past since we recognized it is the only way to approach a solution to hunger today. We have come to see that it is the force creating the condition, not the condition itself, that must be the target of change. Otherwise we

To answer the question "why hunger?" it is counterproductive to simply describe the conditions in an underdeveloped country today. For these conditions, whether they are the degree of malnutrition, the levels of agricultural production, or even the country's ecological endowment, are not static faetors--they are not "givens." They are rather the results of an ongoing historical process. As we dug ever deeper into that historical process for the preparation of this book, we began to discover the existence of scarcity-creating mechanisms that we lad only vaguely intuited before.

That was in 1972. I clearly recall my thoughts on my return home. I had stated publicly for the first time a world view that had taken me years of study to grasp. The sense ofreliefwas tremendous. For me the breakthrough lay in realizing that today's "hunger crisis" could not be de- scribed in static, descriptive terms. Hunger and underdevelopment must always be thought of as a process.

"Underdeveloped," instead of being an adjective that evokes the picture of a static society, became for me a verb (to "underdevelop") meaning the process by which the minority of the world has transformed--indeed often robbed and degraded-the majority.

societies in "underdeveloped" countries previously had met the needs of the people. Many precolonial social structures, while dominated by exploitative elites, had evolved a system of mutual obligations among the classes that helped to ensure at least a minimal diet for all. A friend of mine once said: "Precolonial village existence in subsistence agriculture was a limited life indeed, but it's certainly not Calcutta." The misery of starvation in the streets of Calcutta can only be understood as the end-point of a long historical process-one that has destroyed a traditional social system.

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None the less, viewing the agriculture of the vanquished as primitive and backward reinforced the colonizer's rationale for destroying it. To the colonizers of Africa; Asia, and Latin America, agriculture became merely a means to extract wealth--much as gold from a mine--on behalf of the colonizing power. Agriculture was no longer

Nowhere would one find better instances of keeping land scrupulously clean from weeds, of ingenuity in device of waterraising appliances, of knowledge of soils and their capabilities, as welI as of the exact time to sow and reap, as one would find in Indian agriculture. It is wonderful too, how much is known of rotation, the system of "mixed crops" and of falIowing... .I, at least, have never seen a more perfect picture of cultivation." (I)

The colonizer viewed agriculture in the subjugated lands as primitivc and backward. Yet such a view contrasts sharply with documents from the colonial period now coming to light. For example, AJ. Voelker, a British agricultural scientist assigned to India during the 1890s wrote:

The Colonial Mind

might change the condition today, only to find tomorrow that it has been recreated--with a vengeance. Asking the question "Why can't people feed themselves?" carries a sense of bewilderment that there are so many people in the world not able to feed themselves adequately. What astonished us, however, is that there are not more people in the world who are hunglY-considering the weight of the centuries of effort by the few to undermine the capacity of the majority to feed themselves. No, we are not crying "conspiracy!" If these forces were entirely conspiratorial, they would be easier to detect and many more people would by now have risen up to resist. We arc talking about something more subtle and insidious; a heritage of a colonial order in which people with the advantage of considerable power sought their own self-interest, often arrogantly believing they were acting in the interest of the people whose lives they were destroying.

Rather than helping the peasants, colonialism's public works programs only reinforced export crop production. British irrigation

The same happened in Indochina. About the time of the American Civil War the French decided that the Mekong Delta in Vietnam would be ideal for producing rice for export. Through a production system based on enriching the large landowners, Vietnam became the world's third largest exporter of rice by the 1930s; yet many landless Vietnamese went hungry. (4)

Prior to European intervcntion, Africans practiced a diversified agriculture that included the introduction of new food plants of Asian or American origin. But colonial rule simplified this diversified production to single cash crops-often to the exclusion of staple foods-and in the process sowed the seeds of famine. (3) Rice farming once had been common in Gambia. But with colonial rule so much of the best land was taken over by peanuts (grown for the European market) that rice had to be imp0l1ed to counter the mounting prospect of famine. Northern Ghana, once famous for its yams and other foodstuffs, was forced to concentrate solely on cocoa. Most of the Gold Coast thus became dependent on cocoa. Liberia was turned into a vit1ual plantation subsidimy of Firestone Tire and Rubber. Food production in Dahomey and southeast Nigeria was alI but abandoned in favor of palm oil; Tanganyika (now Tanzania) was forced to focus on sisal and Uganda on colton.

seen as a source of food for the local population, nor even as their livelihood. Indeed the English economist John Stuart MilI reasoned that colonies should not be thought of as civilizations or countries at alI but as "agricultural establishments" whose sole purpose was to supply the "larger community to which they belong." The colonized society's agriculture was only a subdivision of the agricultural system of the metropolitan country. As MilI acknowledged, "Our West India colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries The West Indies are the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a fcw other tropical commodities." (2)

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Although raw force was used, taxation was the preferred colonial technique to force Africans to grow cash crops. The colonial administrations simply levied taxes on cattle, land, houses, and even the people themselves. Since the tax had to be paid in the coin of the realm, the peasants had either to grow crops to sell or to work on the plantations or in the mines of the Europeans. (8) Taxation was both an effective tool to "stimulate" cash cropping and a source of revenue that the colonial bureaucracy needed to enforce the system. To expand their production of export crops to pay the mounting taxes, peasant producers were forced to neglect the farming of food crops. In 1830, the Dutch administration in Java made the peasants an offer they could not refuse; if they would grow government-owned export

As Walter Rodney recounts in How Europe Underdeveloped, cash crops were often grown literally under threat of guns and whips. (5) One visitor to the Shale commented in 1928: "Cotton is an aI1ificiai crop and one the value of which is not entirely clear to the natives " He wryly noted the "enforced enthusiasm with which the natives . have thrown themselves into ....planting cotton." (6) The forced cultivation of cotton was a major grievance leading to the Maji M~,ii wars in Tanzania (then Tanganyika) and behind the nationalist revolt in Angola as late as 1960. (7)

t

These marketing boards, set up for most export crops, were actually:' controlled by the companies. The chairman of the Cocoa Board wa~ none other than John Cadbury of Cad bury Brothers (ever had a ~

'C

~

None of the benefits went to Africans.. but rather to the British r government itself and to the private companies Big companies like: the United African Company and John Holt were given...quotas to '~ fulfill on behalf of the boards. As agents of the government, they '" were no longer exposed to direct attack, and their profits were secu~ (II) ~

1

The marketing board concept was born with the "cocoa hold-up" in~ the Gold Coast in 1937. Small cocoa farmers refused to sell to the ~ large cocoa concerns like United Africa Company (a subsidiary of • the Anglo-Dutch firm, Unilever--which we know as Lever Brothers; and Cad bury until they got a higher price. When the British ~ govemment stepped in and agreed to buy the cocoa directly in placet of the big business concern, the smallholders must have thought th1 had scored at least a minor victory. But had they really? The ~ following year the British formally set up the West African Cocoa % Control Board. Theoretically, its purpose was to pay the peasants a; reasonable price for their crops. In practice, however, the board, as sole purchaser, was able to hold down the prices paid the peasants fil their crops when the world prices were rising. Rodney sums up the ~ real "victory":

Marketing boards emerged in Africa in the 1930s as another ~ technique for getting the profit from cash crop production by native~ producers into the hands of the colonial government and internation8 firms. Purchases by the marketing boards were well below the worl~ market price. Peanuts bought by the boards from peasant cultivator~ in West Africa were sold in Britain for more than seven times what ~ the peasants received. (10)

Because people living on the land do not easily go against their natural and adaptive drive to grow food for themselves, colonial powers had to force the production of cash crops. The first strategy was to usc "physical or economic force to get the local population to grow cash crops instead of food on their own plots and then turn them over to the colonizer for export. The second strategy was the direct takeover of the land by large-scale plantations growing crops for export.

Forced Peasant Production

crops on one fifth of their land, the Dutch would remit their land taxes. (9) If they refused and thus could not pay the taxes, they lost their land.

works built in nineteenth-century India did help increase production, but the expansion was for spring export crops at the expense of millets and legumes grown in the fall as the basic local food crops.

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Java is also a prime example of a colonial government seizing territOly and then putting it into private foreign hands. In 1870, the Dutch declared all uncultivated land--called waste land-- property of the state for lease to Dutch plantation enterprises. In addition, the Agrarian Land Law of 1870 authorized foreign companies to lease village-owned land. The peasants, in chronic need of ready cash for taxes and foreign consumer goods, were only too willing to lease

After the conquest of the Kandyan Kingdom (in present day Sri Lanka), in 1815, the British designated all the vast central part of the island as crown land. When it was determined that coffee, a profitable export crop, could be grown there, the Kandyan lands were sold off to British investors and planters at a mere five shillings per acre, the government even defraying the cost of surveying and road building. (13)

A second approach was direct takeover of the land either by the colonizing government or by private foreign interests. Previously self-provisioning farmers were forced to cultivate the plantation fields through either enslavement or economic coercion.

Plantations

These marketing boards of Africa were only the institutionalized rendition of what is the essence of colonialism- the extraction of wealth. While profits continued to accrue to foreign interests and local elites, prices received by those actually growing the commodities remained low.

Thc marketing boards funneled part of the profits from the exploitation of peasant producers indirectly into the royal treasury. While the Cocoa Board sold to the British Food Ministry at low prices. the ministry upped the price for British manufacturers, thus netting a profit as high as II million pounds in some years. (12)

Cadbury chocolate bar?) who was part of a buying pool exploiting West African cocoa farmers.

In some cases a colonial administration would go even further to guarantee itself a labor supply. In at least twelve countries in the

The stagnation and impoverishment of the peasant food-producing sector was not the mere by-product of benign neglect, that is, the unintended consequence of an overemphasis on export production. Plantations--just like modern "agro-industrial complexes"-- needed an abundant and readily available supply oflow-wage agricultural workers. Colonial administrations thus devised a variety of tactics, all to undercut self-provisioning agriculture and thus make rural populations dependent n plantation wages. Government services and even the most minimal infrastructure (access to water, roads, seeds, credit, pest and disease control information, and so on) were systematically denied. Plantations usurped most of the good land, either making much of the rural population landless or pushing them onto marginal soils. (Yet the plantations have often held much of their land idle simply to prevent the peasants from using it--even to this day. Del Monte owns 57,000 acres of Guatemala but plants 9000. The rest lies idle except for a few thousand head of grazing cattle.) (15)

Suppressing Peasant Farming

4

The introduction of the plantation meant the divorce of agriculture from nourishment, as the notion of food value was lost to the overriding claim of "market value" in international trade. Crops such as sugar, tobacco, and coffee were selected, not on the basis of how well they feed people, but for their high price value relative to their weight and bulk so hat profit margins could be maintained even after the costs of shipping to Europe.

their land to the foreign companies for very modest sums and under terms dictated by the firms. Where land was still held communally, the village headman was tempted by high cash commissions offered by plantation companies. He would lease the village land even more cheaply than would the individual peasant or, as was frequently the case, sellout the entire village to the company. (14)

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The many techniques of colonialism to undercut self-provisioning agriculture in order to ensure a cheap labor supply are no better illustrated than by the story of how, in the mid- nineteenth century. sugar plantation owners in British Guiana coped with the double blow of the emancipation of slaves and the crash in the world sugar market. The story is graphically recounted by Alan Adamson in Sugar without Slaves. (18)

The forced migration of Africa's most able-bodied workers--stripping village food farming of needed hands--was a reculTing feature of colonialism. As late as 1973 the Portuguese "exported" 400,000 Mozambican peasants to work in South Africa in exchange for gold deposited in the Lisbon treasury.

The tax scheme to produce reserves of cheap plantation and mining labor was particularly effective when the Great Depression hit and the bottom dropped out of cash crop economies. In 1929 the cotton market collapsed, leaving peasant cotton producers, such as those in Upper Volta, unable to pay their colonial taxes. More and more young people, in some years as many as 80.000, were thus forced to migrate to the Gold Coast to compete with each other for low- wage jobs on cocoa plantations. (17)

eastern and southern parts of Africa the exploitation of mineral wealth (gold, diamonds, and copper) and the establishment of cashcrop plantations demandcd a continuous supply of low-cost labor. To assure this labor supply, colonial administrations simply expropriated the land of the African communities by violence and drove the people into small reserves. (16) With neither adequate land for their traditional slash-and- burn methods nor access to the means--tools, water, and fertilizer--to make continuous fanning of such limited areas viable, the indigenous population could scarcely meet subsistence needs, much less produce surplus to sell in order to cover the colonial taxes. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were forced to become the cheap labor source so "needed" by the colonial plantations. Only by laboring on plantations and in the mines could they hope to pay the colonial taxes.

Adamson relates how both the Governor of British Guiana and the Secretary for the Colonies Earl Grey favored low duties on imports in order to erode local food production and thereby release labor for the plantations. In 1851 the governor rushed through a reduction of the duty on cereals in order to "divert" labor to the sugar estates. As

5

Perhaps the most insidious tactic to "lure" the peasant away from food production--and the one with profound historical consequences-was a policy of keeping the price of imported food low through the removal of tariffs and subsidies. The policy was double-edged: first, peasants were told they need not grow food because they could always buy it cheaply with their plantation wages; second, cheap food imports destroyed the market for domestic food and thereby impoverished local food producers.

Would the ex-slaves be allowed to take over the plantation land and grow the food they needed? The planters, many ruined by the sugar slump, were determined they would not. The planter-dominated government devised several schemes for thwarting food selfsufficiency. The price of crown land was kept artificially high, and the purchase ofland in parcels smaller than 100 acres was outlawed-two measures guaranteeing that newly organized ex-slave cooperatives could not hope to gain access to much land. The government also prohibited cultivation on as much as 400,000 acreson the grounds of "uncertain property titles." Moreover, although many planters held pali of their land out of sugar production due to the depressed world price, they would not allow any alternative production on them. They feared that once the ex-slaves started growing food it would be difficult to return them to sugar production when world market prices began to recover. In addition, the government taxed peasant production, then turned around and used the funds to subsidize the immigration of laborers from India and Malaysia to replace the freed slaves, thereby making sugar production again profitable for the planters. Finally, the government neglected the infrastructure for subsistence agriculture and denied credit for small fanners.

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In the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia and Dutch New Guinea) colonial policy in the middle of the nineteenth century forbade the sugar refineries to buy sugar cane from indigenous growers and imposed a

We have talked about the techniques by which indigenous populations were forced to cultivate cash crops. In some countries with large plantations, however, colonial governments found it necessary to prevent peasants from independently growing cash crops not out of concern for their welfare, but so that they would not compete with colonial interests growing the same crop. For peasant farmers, given a modicum of opportunity, .proved themselves capable of out producing the large plantations not only in terms of output per unit of land but, more important, in terms of capital cost per unit produced.

Suppressing Peasant Competition

Many colonial governments succeeded in establishing dependence on imported foodstuffs. In 1647 an observer in the West Indies wrote to Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts: "Men are so intent upon planting sugar that they had rather buy foods at very dear rates than produce it by labor, so infinite is the profit of sugar workers..." (20) By 1770, the West Indies were importing most of the continental colonies' exports of dried fish, grain, beans, and vegetables. A dependence on imported foods made the West Indian colonies vulnerable to any disruption in supply. This dependence on imported food stuffs spelled disaster when the thirteen continental colonies gained independence and food exports from the continent to the West Indies were interrupted. With no diversified food system to fall back on, 15,000 plantation workers died of famine between 1780 and 1787 in Jamaica alone. (21) The dependence of the West Indies on imported food persists to this day.

Adamson comments, "Without realizing it, he [thc governor] had put his finger on the most mordant feature of monoculture: ... its convulsive need to destroy any other sector of the economy which might compete for its labor." (19)

6

These are concrete examples of the development of underdevelopment that we should have perceived as such even as we read our history schoolbooks. Why didn't we? Somehow our schoolbooks always seemed to make the flow of history appear to have its own logic--as if it could not have been any other way. I,

Colonialism: • forced peasants to replace food crops with cash crops that were then expropriated at very low rates; • took over the best agricultural land for export crop plantations and then forced the most able-bodied workers to leave the village fields to work as slaves or for very low wages on plantations; • encouraged a dependence on impol1ed food; • blocked native peasant cash crop production from competing with cash crops produced by settlers or foreign firms.

The answer to the question, then, "Why can't people feed themselves?" must begin with an understanding of how colonialism actively prevented people from doing just that.

The suppression of indigenous agricultural development served the interests of the colonizing powers in two ways. Not only did it prevent direct competition from more efficient native producers of the same crops, but it also guaranteed a labor force to work on the foreign- owned estates. Planters and foreign investors were not unaware that peasants who could survive economically by their own production would be under less pressure to sell their labor cheaply to the large estates.

discriminatory tax on rubber produced by native smallholders. (22) A recent unpublished United Nations study of agricultural development in Africa concluded that large-scale agricultural operations owned and controlled by foreign commercial interests (such as the rubber plantations of Liberia, the sisal estates of Tanganyika [Tanzania], and the coffee estates of Angola) only survived the competition of peasant producers because "the authorities actively supported them by suppressing indigenous rural development." (23)

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I. Radha Sinha, Food and Poverty (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), p. 26. 2. John Stuart Mill, Political Economy, Book 3, Chapter 25 (emphasis added). 3. Peter Feldman and David Lawrence, "Social and Economic Implications of the Large-Scale Introduction of New Varieties of Food grains," Africa Report, preliminary draft (Geneva: UNRISD, 1975), pp. 107-108. 4. Edgar Owens, The Right Side of History, unpublished manuscript 1976. 5. Walter Rodney, How Europe Under- developed Africa (London: Bogle- L 'Ouverture Publications, 1972), pp. 171-172. 6. Ferdinand Ossendowski, Slaves of the Sun (New York: Dutton, 1928), p. 276. 7. Rodney, I-low Europe Underdeveloped Africa, pp. 171-172. 8.lbid.,p.181. 9. Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 52-53. 10. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, p. 185. 11. Ibid., p. 184. 12. Ibid., p. 186. 13. George L. Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p.99. 14. Ibid., p. 99, quoting from Erich Jacoby, Agrarian Unrest in Southeast Asia (New York: Asia Publishing I-louse, 1961), p. 66. 15. Pat Flynn and Roger Burbach, North American Congress on Latin America, Berkeley, California, recent investigation.

Notes

Frances, recall, in particular, a grade-school, social studies pamphlet on the idyllic life of Pedro, a nine-year-old boy on a coffee plantation in South America. The drawings oflush vegetation and "exotic" huts made his life seem romantic indeed. Wasn't it natural and proper that South America should have plantations to supply my mother and father with coffee? Isn't that the way it was meant to be?

7

16. Feldman and Lawrence, "Social and Economic Implications," p. 103. 17. Special Sahelian Office Report, Food and Agriculture Organization, March 28,1974, pp. 8889. 18. Alan Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven and Lon- don: Yale University Press, 1972). 19. Ibid., p. 41. 20. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavety (New York: Putnam, 1966), p. 110. 21. Ibid., p. 121. 22. Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, vol. I (New York: Pantheon, 1966), pp. 448- 449. 23. Feldman and Lawrence, "Social and Economic Implications," D. 189. (From Lappe, Frances Moore, and Joseph Collins Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. Random House, 1977, pp. 99-111.)

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