Camaradus
5th January 2013, 01:20
Well into the essence of celebration and festivity revolving around annual holiday traditions, there is perhaps never a more befitting moment to broaden one’s interpretation of our present material conditions of existence, our present social relations and our present social life. Further, there is perhaps never a more befitting moment to broaden one’s vision in interacting with them.
While rampant consumerism accompanied by all too often, senseless material extravagance, appears to dominate the calendar day of the masses in the commodity producing societies of the most developed regions on earth throughout the “giving season”, there exists side by side an entirely different set of material priorities and challenges posed to significant portions of the human population on a global scale. The occupants of the most underdeveloped regions on the planet, predominantly, carry with them this cross. It must be comprehended, insofar as an accurate account of real human relations may be tabulated, no categorical division in specificity of material development by way of country, region or hemisphere is relative to the analysis.
Yet judging by the general state of jubilation across the immediate cultural epistemology of the healthiest commodity producing societies, the popular account of the calendar day exhibits divisive flavors and textures precipitated household by household, translating to a more or less, vastly limited comprehension of humanity’s 21st century material conditions of existence. For one must explore well beyond the boundaries of any materially sufficient, independent dwelling place to effectively broaden ones interpretation and/or vision as suggested. When instead, accurately accounting for humanity as a single, unified test group, our present material conditions of existence are anything but meritorious for social jubilee, irrespective of the calendar day. Material conditions of existence which may be effectively defined and demonstrated by the most modest of human requisites: Biological nourishment. These present material conditions of existence, or more specifically, humanity’s indefinite struggle against nature, are as follows:
In approximation; research seems to indicate the total number of people living in the world currently suffering from hunger and starvation exceeds 800 million in tally, while the total number of people eating insufficiently exceeds 900 million in tally. Consequently, the current percentage of the world population formally considered to be starving is thirty-three percent, or one in every three human beings on earth. The total number of hunger related deaths on this particular calendar day will exceed 20,000 in tally. The same tally will in all probability, be materialized tomorrow, the next day and so on. For the same tally was found on the calendar day before.
The total number of people who will perish as a result of hunger this year will therefore exceed 17,000,000 in tally,; with 15,000,000 of these people categorized as children. This translates on a global scale, to one premature death as a result of hunger every 3.6 seconds and counting. The total percentage of the population without enough to eat living in developing nations is approximately ninety-eight percent. The total percentage of the world’s hungry inhabitants currently living in just seven countries is approximately sixty-five percent. The total percentage of United States households, a developed nation to say the least, that are currently at risk of hunger is meanwhile, eleven percent.
This global phenomenon is anything but a recent social trait. Hunger and starvation have stalked, crippled and preyed upon humanity since its very inception, civil society very much included. The historical periscope reveals masses of civilians straddled with languid forces of production, as a consequence shackled by toil of slavery, serfdom and wage labor; just a sunset away from further masses of humankind plagued by natural endeavor to so much as subsist. Humanity in its ostensible, age-old quest for mastery of its own social organization and the subsequent social conditions of life which would reflect the formal disappearances of the struggle for individual existence such as universal biological nourishment, is therefore, a historical underachiever at best, or perhaps an unprecedentedly miserable failure at worst.
The forces of production today found throughout the developed, highly industrialized nations on earth are impressive to say the least. They are, generally speaking, expansive products of a hyper-expansion of modern productive forces which in turn yield the material products for civil society in the commodity form. When coupled with the expansive, technological developments in modern agriculture, food products, predominantly in the commodity form as well, are produced daily in boundless profusion. The United States of America for instance, produces itself approximately 600 billion pounds of food every calendar year.
Meanwhile, as statistics vary in precision as to what percentage of this yield goes unconsumed by its inhabitants, it can be stated that concerning somewhere between 25% and 50% of this yield, such a status holds true. It can therefore be safely deduced that hundreds of billions of pounds of food are wasted in the industrialized nations on earth every calendar year.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations find that 209 to 253 pounds of food per person is wasted by consumers in the United States and Europe each calendar year. On the global scale, they indicate that approximately one-third of the food produced for human consumption is effectively squandered. Staggering all the more, the amount of food produced for human consumption in the industrialized versus developing nations in the world is in virtual equilibrium, at 670 tons and 630 tons of food, respectively. A contrast is relevant at which specific level of the catena of food supply, the waste is actually occurring. The industrialized nations boast the most formidable waste statistics at the retail and consumer level, while the developing nations instead cite the post harvest and processing levels as the predominant catalysts in their own mountains of food waste. In essence, abundances of edible food are discarded in one nation while abundances of food spoil in others prior to reaching the consumer market as a result of insufficient transit, storage, processing, etc. In the North American and Oceania fisheries, approximately half of the fish and seafood initially caught is wasted. “Appearance Quality Standards” would seem to retard the process as well, resulting in human-grade food instead utilized as animal food if not entirely wasted, should the supermarket find items of food “unacceptable” for sale.
Contemporary agricultural research would indicate that the aggregate of world production generating humanity’s staple diet, grain, is capable of comfortably providing each and every living person with approximately 3500 calories a day. When accounting for the immediate material availability of additional, commonly consumed foods such as vegetables, beans, nuts, root-crops, fruits, grass-fed meats and seafood, research would indicate that such an aggregate is capable of providing each and every person with over four pounds of food each and every day throughout the calendar year. In spite of never before seen world population growth over the course of the last four decades, increases in food production have actually managed to exceed the alarming growth rate by over 15%.
With the estimated growth of world population still seemingly rising, research can interpolate the global population of human inhabitants to exceed 9 million as early as 2050, reaching a “capacity” of sorts according to the general scientific field of expertise on the matter of feasible subsistence and coexistence on earth. There is little doubt, that productive forces will be compelled to expand at even greater echelons than today’s breakneck litmus in order to keep pace with the approaching social phenomenon. This being said; from a certain material point of view which may be statistically corroborated by the world market, there exists in the immediate, not merely ample production of food to universally nourish humanity, but additionally; the sizeable overproduction of food within the world market which ultimately yields the substandard material produce to humanity. Substandard insofar as the preceding, grim statistical analysis of world hunger would seem to indicate. Substandard insofar as humanity’s inability to triumph over one more particular element of nature. Substandard insofar as nature’s undying dominion over man remains present.
One need not categorize themself a humanist in order to tremble indignation at such sobering, material counterintuition. If in fact, scarcity of available food on earth cannot be accurately blamed for humanity’s shortcomings in dealing with the crisis afoot, then what precisely can be indicted as responsible for the human tragedy? Diminutive finances? Ineffective political leadership? Adverse climate conditions and drought?
The answer, while perhaps all of the above on their part, is at the same time, none of the above and instead, the most basic presupposition of all: The presupposition of insufficiently planned economies. The presupposition of anarchy in production. Translated: the presupposition of free markets, generally speaking, piloting material production in all corners of the world. For there is no ostensible need to sufficiently plan production and economic activity, reproaches the defenders of the free market, in insisting its own self-regulation is second to none in dealing out social prosperity? Ostensibly, indeed.
Food products, regardless of their designation as an essential requirement for the biological subsistence of human beings, no different from the species beings directly engaged in the process of material production themselves, are effectively commoditized by way of capital on this day. Food products along with the labor power that socially produces them, along with all other forms of material commodities, exist through the binding laws of private economic relations, to prioritize a course of self-expansion of existing values instead of the more rational priority which underlines the products’ actual use value: the satisfaction of human needs.
Consequently, no validated design or arrangement is immediately present insofar as food is produced, distributed and consumed about the world market. For any planned economy for the sake of human development is not only diametrically opposed to the economic mode of production geared by capital, it is a material threat to its very existence. As stated, modern forces of production in the industrialized countries and the overproduction of food which they capably yield, are tangible evidence of the material ability to produce sufficiently for those inhabiting the developed commonwealth. Should this data prove inadequate in corroborating the position, one need look no further than the escalating obesity rates of individuals living in these same industrialized nations. Case in point, in 2010 the Centers for Disease Control reported that 35.7% of American adults and 17% of American children were obese.
At the same time, evidence suggests that in many of the developing, third world countries most often plagued by hunger and starvation, enough food is already produced to not merely mitigate, but eradicate the biological strife. In 1997, the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that nearly 80% of children under the age of five suffering from malnutrition were living in nations with anything but food shortages. On the contrary, food surpluses, appropriated by private ownership of the means of production alongside no other aspiration than reckless pursuit of private profits, could be materially accounted for. This of course, generally speaking, alongside masses of indigenous people unable to afford the price of commoditized food.
The archaic delinquency of philanthropy amid unplanned capitalist economies only reinforces the pointlessness of delving into greater rhetorical detail in confronting the challenges of world hunger. What we have in philanthropy, much to the chagrin of many the modern propertied classes, is a historically disproven method of resolution. Capital, through its own inherent economic laws of concentration and accumulation, has actually evolved and adopted mechanisms of increasing surplus appropriation while providing philanthropic assistance to underdeveloped regions on earth. Due to the persistence of world hunger, starvation and poverty despite decades of assistance, the mechanism from the humanist point of view, could only serve to perpetuate the crisis while simultaneously perpetuating the unplanned economic mode of production which engenders its status from the outset. A fictitious feather in the hat of capital.
The argument is tired one, historically. Nevertheless, it is to be put over simply:
Concerning food and perhaps far more; Only a systematically calculated economy which accounts not only for the products which it produces, but does so in agreeable correlation with the total population of inhabitants which require them in order to maintain their subsistence, can suffice in providence of the solution to the problem at hand. Only a dedicated choreography of production, in which all who take part in production are yielded the products which are ultimately materialized, distributed and consumed, in which developing regions on the planet are internationally subsidized necessary expanded forces of production to overcompensate for natural disadvantages in production, in which tax in kind is substituted for surplus appropriation via collective ownership of resources and means of production, in which a socialistic planned economy is substituted for the capitalistic one; could possibly suffice.
Only then, when again accurately accounting for humanity as a single, unified test group, could the dominion of the product over the producers finally meet its bitter end. On such a day, nature will of course retain its dominion over man, though a far cry from the unspeakably despondent reign of the previous day.
However, until such a day arrives, humanity’s struggle is to continue as is. Evidently, the present limitations of free markets in commanding modern industry and the world market are dialectically robust considering the objective, human cost in the equation. Limitations which appear to render capital either powerless or worse yet, negligent in addressing the matter upon the triumphant plain that humanity would seem adequately qualified to stand. While international, socialistic planned economies are admittedly, a theoretical resolution to humanity’s predicament regarding world hunger in the 21st century, one can invest a reasonable amount of confidence in the notion that nothing would please the hundreds of millions of people suffering from hunger and starvation throughout the world during this holiday season, quite like a theoretical resolution tested in praxis.
Tis certainly one available ‘resolution’ to ponder for those fortunate enough to usher in the New Year…
Season’s Greetings from Notes For Tomorrow.
While rampant consumerism accompanied by all too often, senseless material extravagance, appears to dominate the calendar day of the masses in the commodity producing societies of the most developed regions on earth throughout the “giving season”, there exists side by side an entirely different set of material priorities and challenges posed to significant portions of the human population on a global scale. The occupants of the most underdeveloped regions on the planet, predominantly, carry with them this cross. It must be comprehended, insofar as an accurate account of real human relations may be tabulated, no categorical division in specificity of material development by way of country, region or hemisphere is relative to the analysis.
Yet judging by the general state of jubilation across the immediate cultural epistemology of the healthiest commodity producing societies, the popular account of the calendar day exhibits divisive flavors and textures precipitated household by household, translating to a more or less, vastly limited comprehension of humanity’s 21st century material conditions of existence. For one must explore well beyond the boundaries of any materially sufficient, independent dwelling place to effectively broaden ones interpretation and/or vision as suggested. When instead, accurately accounting for humanity as a single, unified test group, our present material conditions of existence are anything but meritorious for social jubilee, irrespective of the calendar day. Material conditions of existence which may be effectively defined and demonstrated by the most modest of human requisites: Biological nourishment. These present material conditions of existence, or more specifically, humanity’s indefinite struggle against nature, are as follows:
In approximation; research seems to indicate the total number of people living in the world currently suffering from hunger and starvation exceeds 800 million in tally, while the total number of people eating insufficiently exceeds 900 million in tally. Consequently, the current percentage of the world population formally considered to be starving is thirty-three percent, or one in every three human beings on earth. The total number of hunger related deaths on this particular calendar day will exceed 20,000 in tally. The same tally will in all probability, be materialized tomorrow, the next day and so on. For the same tally was found on the calendar day before.
The total number of people who will perish as a result of hunger this year will therefore exceed 17,000,000 in tally,; with 15,000,000 of these people categorized as children. This translates on a global scale, to one premature death as a result of hunger every 3.6 seconds and counting. The total percentage of the population without enough to eat living in developing nations is approximately ninety-eight percent. The total percentage of the world’s hungry inhabitants currently living in just seven countries is approximately sixty-five percent. The total percentage of United States households, a developed nation to say the least, that are currently at risk of hunger is meanwhile, eleven percent.
This global phenomenon is anything but a recent social trait. Hunger and starvation have stalked, crippled and preyed upon humanity since its very inception, civil society very much included. The historical periscope reveals masses of civilians straddled with languid forces of production, as a consequence shackled by toil of slavery, serfdom and wage labor; just a sunset away from further masses of humankind plagued by natural endeavor to so much as subsist. Humanity in its ostensible, age-old quest for mastery of its own social organization and the subsequent social conditions of life which would reflect the formal disappearances of the struggle for individual existence such as universal biological nourishment, is therefore, a historical underachiever at best, or perhaps an unprecedentedly miserable failure at worst.
The forces of production today found throughout the developed, highly industrialized nations on earth are impressive to say the least. They are, generally speaking, expansive products of a hyper-expansion of modern productive forces which in turn yield the material products for civil society in the commodity form. When coupled with the expansive, technological developments in modern agriculture, food products, predominantly in the commodity form as well, are produced daily in boundless profusion. The United States of America for instance, produces itself approximately 600 billion pounds of food every calendar year.
Meanwhile, as statistics vary in precision as to what percentage of this yield goes unconsumed by its inhabitants, it can be stated that concerning somewhere between 25% and 50% of this yield, such a status holds true. It can therefore be safely deduced that hundreds of billions of pounds of food are wasted in the industrialized nations on earth every calendar year.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations find that 209 to 253 pounds of food per person is wasted by consumers in the United States and Europe each calendar year. On the global scale, they indicate that approximately one-third of the food produced for human consumption is effectively squandered. Staggering all the more, the amount of food produced for human consumption in the industrialized versus developing nations in the world is in virtual equilibrium, at 670 tons and 630 tons of food, respectively. A contrast is relevant at which specific level of the catena of food supply, the waste is actually occurring. The industrialized nations boast the most formidable waste statistics at the retail and consumer level, while the developing nations instead cite the post harvest and processing levels as the predominant catalysts in their own mountains of food waste. In essence, abundances of edible food are discarded in one nation while abundances of food spoil in others prior to reaching the consumer market as a result of insufficient transit, storage, processing, etc. In the North American and Oceania fisheries, approximately half of the fish and seafood initially caught is wasted. “Appearance Quality Standards” would seem to retard the process as well, resulting in human-grade food instead utilized as animal food if not entirely wasted, should the supermarket find items of food “unacceptable” for sale.
Contemporary agricultural research would indicate that the aggregate of world production generating humanity’s staple diet, grain, is capable of comfortably providing each and every living person with approximately 3500 calories a day. When accounting for the immediate material availability of additional, commonly consumed foods such as vegetables, beans, nuts, root-crops, fruits, grass-fed meats and seafood, research would indicate that such an aggregate is capable of providing each and every person with over four pounds of food each and every day throughout the calendar year. In spite of never before seen world population growth over the course of the last four decades, increases in food production have actually managed to exceed the alarming growth rate by over 15%.
With the estimated growth of world population still seemingly rising, research can interpolate the global population of human inhabitants to exceed 9 million as early as 2050, reaching a “capacity” of sorts according to the general scientific field of expertise on the matter of feasible subsistence and coexistence on earth. There is little doubt, that productive forces will be compelled to expand at even greater echelons than today’s breakneck litmus in order to keep pace with the approaching social phenomenon. This being said; from a certain material point of view which may be statistically corroborated by the world market, there exists in the immediate, not merely ample production of food to universally nourish humanity, but additionally; the sizeable overproduction of food within the world market which ultimately yields the substandard material produce to humanity. Substandard insofar as the preceding, grim statistical analysis of world hunger would seem to indicate. Substandard insofar as humanity’s inability to triumph over one more particular element of nature. Substandard insofar as nature’s undying dominion over man remains present.
One need not categorize themself a humanist in order to tremble indignation at such sobering, material counterintuition. If in fact, scarcity of available food on earth cannot be accurately blamed for humanity’s shortcomings in dealing with the crisis afoot, then what precisely can be indicted as responsible for the human tragedy? Diminutive finances? Ineffective political leadership? Adverse climate conditions and drought?
The answer, while perhaps all of the above on their part, is at the same time, none of the above and instead, the most basic presupposition of all: The presupposition of insufficiently planned economies. The presupposition of anarchy in production. Translated: the presupposition of free markets, generally speaking, piloting material production in all corners of the world. For there is no ostensible need to sufficiently plan production and economic activity, reproaches the defenders of the free market, in insisting its own self-regulation is second to none in dealing out social prosperity? Ostensibly, indeed.
Food products, regardless of their designation as an essential requirement for the biological subsistence of human beings, no different from the species beings directly engaged in the process of material production themselves, are effectively commoditized by way of capital on this day. Food products along with the labor power that socially produces them, along with all other forms of material commodities, exist through the binding laws of private economic relations, to prioritize a course of self-expansion of existing values instead of the more rational priority which underlines the products’ actual use value: the satisfaction of human needs.
Consequently, no validated design or arrangement is immediately present insofar as food is produced, distributed and consumed about the world market. For any planned economy for the sake of human development is not only diametrically opposed to the economic mode of production geared by capital, it is a material threat to its very existence. As stated, modern forces of production in the industrialized countries and the overproduction of food which they capably yield, are tangible evidence of the material ability to produce sufficiently for those inhabiting the developed commonwealth. Should this data prove inadequate in corroborating the position, one need look no further than the escalating obesity rates of individuals living in these same industrialized nations. Case in point, in 2010 the Centers for Disease Control reported that 35.7% of American adults and 17% of American children were obese.
At the same time, evidence suggests that in many of the developing, third world countries most often plagued by hunger and starvation, enough food is already produced to not merely mitigate, but eradicate the biological strife. In 1997, the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that nearly 80% of children under the age of five suffering from malnutrition were living in nations with anything but food shortages. On the contrary, food surpluses, appropriated by private ownership of the means of production alongside no other aspiration than reckless pursuit of private profits, could be materially accounted for. This of course, generally speaking, alongside masses of indigenous people unable to afford the price of commoditized food.
The archaic delinquency of philanthropy amid unplanned capitalist economies only reinforces the pointlessness of delving into greater rhetorical detail in confronting the challenges of world hunger. What we have in philanthropy, much to the chagrin of many the modern propertied classes, is a historically disproven method of resolution. Capital, through its own inherent economic laws of concentration and accumulation, has actually evolved and adopted mechanisms of increasing surplus appropriation while providing philanthropic assistance to underdeveloped regions on earth. Due to the persistence of world hunger, starvation and poverty despite decades of assistance, the mechanism from the humanist point of view, could only serve to perpetuate the crisis while simultaneously perpetuating the unplanned economic mode of production which engenders its status from the outset. A fictitious feather in the hat of capital.
The argument is tired one, historically. Nevertheless, it is to be put over simply:
Concerning food and perhaps far more; Only a systematically calculated economy which accounts not only for the products which it produces, but does so in agreeable correlation with the total population of inhabitants which require them in order to maintain their subsistence, can suffice in providence of the solution to the problem at hand. Only a dedicated choreography of production, in which all who take part in production are yielded the products which are ultimately materialized, distributed and consumed, in which developing regions on the planet are internationally subsidized necessary expanded forces of production to overcompensate for natural disadvantages in production, in which tax in kind is substituted for surplus appropriation via collective ownership of resources and means of production, in which a socialistic planned economy is substituted for the capitalistic one; could possibly suffice.
Only then, when again accurately accounting for humanity as a single, unified test group, could the dominion of the product over the producers finally meet its bitter end. On such a day, nature will of course retain its dominion over man, though a far cry from the unspeakably despondent reign of the previous day.
However, until such a day arrives, humanity’s struggle is to continue as is. Evidently, the present limitations of free markets in commanding modern industry and the world market are dialectically robust considering the objective, human cost in the equation. Limitations which appear to render capital either powerless or worse yet, negligent in addressing the matter upon the triumphant plain that humanity would seem adequately qualified to stand. While international, socialistic planned economies are admittedly, a theoretical resolution to humanity’s predicament regarding world hunger in the 21st century, one can invest a reasonable amount of confidence in the notion that nothing would please the hundreds of millions of people suffering from hunger and starvation throughout the world during this holiday season, quite like a theoretical resolution tested in praxis.
Tis certainly one available ‘resolution’ to ponder for those fortunate enough to usher in the New Year…
Season’s Greetings from Notes For Tomorrow.