Property is the mother of famine on dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger

Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and thethreat of hunger Simon Springer Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada a r t i c l e i n f o Article hi

Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the

threat of hunger

Simon Springer

Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 25 August 2017

Accepted 7 September 2017

Available online xxx

Poverty is rooted in the accumulation of wealth, a process that

plays out through the dispossession of the many so as to secure

excess for the few While this insight is commonly assigned to Karl

Marx (1867)and particularly his understanding of primitive

accu-mulation set forth in the first volume of Capital, Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon (1890)had worked out the contradictory underpinning

of capitalism several decades earlier with his inquiry into the

principle of right and of government, where he declared “property

is theft!” Indeed, the very possibility of poverty, and its expression

as famine, is rooted in the institution of property itself If famine

requires “a combination of political, production and market shocks”

as AlexDe Waal (2017)argues, then it is a construction of

capital-ism, unfurled when and where it is deemed appropriate by state

elites holding the reigns of power For Peter Kropotkin (1906: 220),

“it was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before

accumulating ‘surplus value,’ of which we hear so much, men had

to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to

die of hunger It was poverty that that made capitalists.” I don't

disagree with the sentiment, but I can't help but want to know

what made poverty? Kropotkin (1906: 220) provides a partial

answer when he suggests that, “if the number of poor rapidly

increased during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and

wars that followed the founding of States” So we are starting to see

a picture where capitalism and the state come together e as indeed

they always have e as a dialectics of violence Through the process

of violent expropriation, people were taught to accept “the

prin-ciple of wages, so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they

formerly practised” (Kropotkin, 1906, p 220) The history of

capitalism accordingly suggests that poverty is always and only ever the effect of property, for in its historical and ongoing wars of plunder (Le Billon, 2012), capitalism seeks to secure the right of proprietorship In order to create poverty it was first necessary to establish property It was in the form of dispossession that defi-ciency, deprivation, and destitution first became possible Conse-quently, in its most rudimentary form, capitalism is a process that ensures the production of hunger As Kropotkin (1906:178) put it,

“the threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work” and to secure the lock on that cage, one must be stripped of all possession and removed from their connection to the soil, where the material basis of life is appropriated by private interest

In de Waal's account of famine I was particularly impressed with his refusal of the general pornography of violence that exists Famine isn't as direct as mass execution in gas chambers, and so its slow temporal burn (Nixon, 2011; Springer, 2012) and diffuse geographical embers receive far less attention (Springer, 2011) Yet

to me this is precisely what makes famine so compelling If the original definition of genocide advanced by Rafael Lemkin “dedi-cates more detail and space to… the use of starvation as an in-strument of extermination, persecution and inhumanity, than to mass killing” asDe Waal (2017)argues, then indeed this should tell

us something quite profound about famine as an instrument of control With this being the case, then perhaps capitalism can be understood as the systemic and pervasive specter of genocide, for privation of the majority is precisely what capitalism procures as a state of permanent being This condition is produced through the private appropriation of all material needs e land, water, housing, food, and tools e the result of which is both the institutionalization

of property, and a widespread reliance on wages as people are stripped of their ability to subsist off the land One is enslaved by

E-mail address:simonspringer@gmail.com

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this system, where refusing it means starvation The only thing that

prevents our genocide is the acceptance of wages, an agreement

that secures our political value Without this exchange our lives are

rendered useless to capital But this agreement represents a false

choice It is made under the duress of property's violent

accumu-lation (Springer, 2013), as dispossession and our removal from the

means of production ensure that there is no alternative for us to

select instead Wage labour is the compromise we make to ensure

that we don't starve It is a Faustian pact that capitalism

accom-modates since it requires our productivity to keep its gears turning

So whenDe Waal (2017)argues that starvation on a massive scale is

effectively counterproductive to the state, we can also read this in

terms of its utility for capitalism While widespread starvation is

not sensible, the perpetual threat of hunger is what moves

capi-talism forward It keeps people in chains At the same time,De Waal

(2017)is encouraging us to re-think the concepts that shape our

agendas, and in particular, contends that “starvation is transitive: it

is something that people do to one another” In the spirit of this

sentiment we can look to property as the mother of all famine

Starvation is indeed transitive, but the sequence begins at the

moment of dispossession, where the very possibility of famine is

indivisible from the concept of property itself

While the reduction of human suffering may make a plausible

argument for the importance of the aid business, where

“human-itarian responses are driven by the politics of the supply of aid

rather than by the actual needs of people in crisis” asDe Waal

(2017)contends, we can make a better argument for the power of

mutual aid and the transformation of our economic systems

to-wards its principles The fact that certain armed groups and

gov-ernments reject aid reinforces this argument While aid agencies

make those in control nervous, mutual aid that is born of

com-munity cohesion and the strength that comes with solidarity is the

most feared principle among despots, warlords, and tyrants This

understanding is precisely why experiments with anarchist

orga-nizing have become so pivotal in places like Chiapas and Rojava

(Gahman, 2016; Knapp, Flach, & Ercan, 2016), as mutual aid offers a

powerful counter narrative to that of scarcity and division It

rec-ognizes the abundance that the Earth can provide when we come

together as the expression of reciprocity What is fascinating about

the contemporary ‘resurgence of famine’ then, is that it coincides

with a moment where there is significant resistance to

neoliber-alism As the spell of neoliberalism is being broken and our

sub-jectivities shift, renewed forms of coercion become necessary for

those wanting to maintain control It suggests that famine can also

perhaps be thought of as capitalism's revenge, where the tyranny of

starvation is once again required to sew the seeds of fear For this

reason I have significant reservations about the classification of

famines that de Waal lays out by way of David Marcus Are deaths

that might appear as collateral damage to the pursuit of other

po-litical projects any less lamentable?De Waal (2017)recognizes that

these forms of famine are caused by “governments and other

po-litical authorities that regard human lives as without value,” so he

seems to share my concern Yet aren't those deaths that arise from

indifference and an ostensible lack of culpability also decidedly

political inasmuch as each represents a necropolitics of letting die

(Tyner & Rice, 2016)? Sins of commission and omission are

inter-changeable Lack of capacity doesn't clean the blood off of one's

hands It is an excuse States apparently exist to protect and care for

us, and if they can't even be held responsible for that, what good are

they? Not incidentally, this is a key question for governments under

neoliberalism as they actively remove themselves from a politics of

compassion In doing so they ratchet up the security apparatus to

keep us ‘safe’, but therein an inherently authoritarian nature is

exposed (Bruff, 2014; Springer, 2009) The function of states is

never about care It is instead always centred on control, where certain concessions are made So any supposed lack of capacity is a reflection of either a state's failure or its self-interested nature Elites are never subjected to hunger and privation and the ruling class is always taken care of Famines have no immediate conse-quence on their wellbeing Thus, in all instances and without exception, states are very much culpable for famine, either owing to the social contract that beguiled people into accepting such lead-ership in the first place, or in terms of their outright disregard for human life To argue otherwise is to accept the lie of the state at face value We should not allow ourselves to be deceived

In pushing back on the statism that lingers withinDe Waal's (2017)argument, one statement stands out as particularly prob-lematic: “what politicians have created, politicians e under pres-sure from their publics e can remedy.” Except they can't They don't They won't Continuing to vest one's faith in a politics of statism is to likewise accept the precepts of capitalism, as the two are inextricably linked This is the failure of Marxism A statist politics always coincides with capitalism, where “by an incredible irony of history, Marxian ‘socialism’ turns out to be in large part the very state capitalism that Marx failed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism The proletariat, instead of developing into a revolu-tionary class within the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organ within the body of bourgeois society” (Bookchin, 1971, p 196) So to believe that politicians might change our fate is to believe in a politics that continually breathes life into the very possibility of famine States are no different than warlords Both seek to dominate, where the only difference is that the former maintains a false air of legitimacy by claiming the monopoly of violence, while the other's violence has not yet appropriated that perverse right The so-called “general benevolence of democracy” (De Waal, 2017) consequently reflects a testament to the need to placate a population so that it does not revolt against the status quo Why should we continue to vest our hope for the future in politi-cians when the historical record clearly demonstrates that pressure from the public is irrelevant given the very fact that famine con-tinues?De Waal (2017)seems to intuitively recognize this limita-tion insofar as he acknowledges famines as “a form of political crime,” calling out lawyers for not stepping up to prosecute those responsible Yet this misunderstands the function of law, which is the bedrock of sovereign authority Law is a tool in the hands of the powerful Its primary function is not to prevent violence, but rather

to maintain the functioning of property that forms the basis of capitalism And so we come full circle in acknowledging a rela-tionship between famine and property, capitalism and the state Instead of appeals to law, which reinforce the privations and priv-ileges of the state, we need to start engaging a prefigurative politics that disavows not only neoliberalism as the latest incarnation of capitalism, but equally the state (Springer, 2016) We need to turn

to anarchism, to refuse the expropriation of our means to survive under the tenets of property, and to cast off the chains of slavery that we euphemize as wage labour Only by returning to the prin-ciple of mutual aid can famine ever be averted, whereby reciprocity becomes the compass of our collective morality So if “the threat of famine is omnipresent”, as Michael Watt's (1983: xix) has sug-gested, it is owing to the pervasive reach of the two-headed abomination of capital and the state Yet the present situation is not a foregone conclusion of the human condition Instead, it is a political choice Alternatives exist To forestall the ongoing conquest of famine we must move once more, as Kropotkin (1906:65) proclaimed, toward mutual aid, toward the conquest of

bread: “with this watchword of Bread for All the Revolution will

triumph.”

S Springer / Political Geography xxx (2017) 1e3

Conflicts of interest

I have no conflicts of interest

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