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

Political Geography xxx (2017) 1e3 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo 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 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 accumulation 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 Alex De Waal (2017) argues, then it is a construction of capitalism, 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 principle of wages, so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised” (Kropotkin, 1906, p 220) The history of E-mail address: simonspringer@gmail.com 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 deficiency, deprivation, and destitution first became possible Consequently, 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 “dedicates more detail and space to … the use of starvation as an instrument of extermination, persecution and inhumanity, than to mass killing” as De 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 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.007 0962-6298/© 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger, Political Geography (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.007 S Springer / Political Geography xxx (2017) 1e3 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 accumulation (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 accommodates since it requires our productivity to keep its gears turning So when De 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 capitalism 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 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 “humanitarian responses are driven by the politics of the supply of aid rather than by the actual needs of people in crisis” as De Waal (2017) contends, we can make a better argument for the power of mutual aid and the transformation of our economic systems towards its principles The fact that certain armed groups and governments reject aid reinforces this argument While aid agencies make those in control nervous, mutual aid that is born of community 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 organizing 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 recognizes 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 neoliberalism As the spell of neoliberalism is being broken and our subjectivities 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 political projects any less lamentable? De Waal (2017) recognizes that these forms of famine are caused by “governments and other political 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 interchangeable 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 consequence 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 leadership 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 within De Waal's (2017) argument, one statement stands out as particularly problematic: “what politicians have created, politicians e under pressure 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 revolutionary 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 politicians when the historical record clearly demonstrates that pressure from the public is irrelevant given the very fact that famine continues? De Waal (2017) seems to intuitively recognize this limitation 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 relationship between famine and property, capitalism and the state Instead of appeals to law, which reinforce the privations and privileges 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 principle 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 suggested, 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.” Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger, Political Geography (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.007 S Springer / Political Geography xxx (2017) 1e3 Conflicts of interest I have no conflicts of interest References Bookchin, M (1971) Listen, marxist! [1986] In Post-scarcity anarchism Montreal (pp 193e242) Black Rose Bruff, I (2014) The rise of authoritarian neoliberalism Rethinking Marxism, 26, 113e129 De Waal, A (2017) The End of Famine? How the politics of war and mass atrocity determines whether or not the world faces mass starvation in the future Political Geography Gahman, L (2016) Zapatismo versus the neoliberal university: Towards a pedagogy against oblivion In S Springer, R J White, & M D Souza (Eds.), The radicalization of Pedagogy: Anarchism, geography and the spirit of revolt (pp 73e100) London: Roman & Littlefield Knapp, M., Flach, A., & Ercan, A (2016) Revolution in Rojava: Democratic autonomy and Women's liberation in the syrian kurdistan Chicago: University of Chicago Press Kropotkin, P (1906) The conquest of bread Mineola, NY: Dover Publications [2011] Le Billon, P (2012) Wars of Plunder: Conflicts, profits and the politics of resources New York: Columbia University Press Marx, Karl (1867) Capital (Vol 1) New York: Vintage [1976] Nixon, R (2011) Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1890) What is Property? An inquiry into the principle of right and of government New York: Dover [1970] Springer, S (2009) Renewed authoritarianism in southeast asia: Undermining democracy through neoliberal reform Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 50, 271e276 Springer, S (2011) Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies Political Geography, 30, 90e98 Springer, S (2012) Neoliberalising violence: Of the exceptional and the exemplary in coalescing moments Area, 44, 136e143 Springer, S (2013) Violent accumulation: A postanarchist critique of property, dispossession, and the state of exception in neoliberalizing Cambodia Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103, 608e626 Springer, S (2016) The anarchist roots of Geography: Toward spatial emancipation Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press Tyner, J A., & Rice, S (2016) To live and let die: Food, famine, and administrative violence in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975e1979 Political Geography, 52, 47e56 Watts, M J (1983) Silent Violence: Food, famine, and peasantry in northern Nigeria Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press [2013] Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger, Political Geography (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.007 ... 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. .. toward the conquest of bread: “with this watchword of Bread for All the Revolution will triumph.” Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession,. .. Sins of commission and omission are interchangeable 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