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From Socialist Worker, No. 87, 9 September 1968, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The press has condemned the Pope’s attitude to contraception – but he is just a scapegoat for the real merchants of hunger
IN RECENT WEEKS, the Pope has been promoted to scapegoat number one in the press. As one letter-writer to The Times said:
“In 1965 world food production increased by one percent, but world population increased by two percent. Every day twice as many people are born as die. Our eyes are perpetually assailed, and our hearts torn by press photographs of starving children. Yet the Pope forbids any method of contraception except one which is notoriously unreliable. I should not be able to sleep easily at night if I had his latest edict upon my conscience.”
That writer is a victim of the big lie that the monopoly press has been drumming into our heads for years – that most of the troubles of the world are due to the poor Indian not knowing one end of a contraceptive from the other. Yet the Pope himself gave the start of an answer to this argument in his Encyclical:
“Neither can one, without grave injustice, consider divine providence to be responsible for what depends instead, on a lack of wisdom in government, on an insufficient sense of social justice, on selfish monopolisation, or again on blameworthy indolence in confronting the efforts and the sacrifices necessary to ensure the raising of the living standards of a people and of all its sons.”
Absolutely correct! If millions starve today this is not because of a so-called “population problem”, it is because or an economic, social and political problem called imperialism – the giant world powers that bleed the smaller nations dry for profit.
The Pope’s statement of the solution is still abstract. If you spell out the kind of change which would “ensure the raising of living standards” the answer can be shown to be only revolutionary socialist politics. And here the Pope’s hypocrisy is exposed, for the Church has always been an implacable enemy of socialism.
But the Pope’s hypocrisy is. preferable to the imperialist spokesmen who self-righteously lecture their starving slaves for their ill luck.
Imperialism has discovered the most staggering alibi in history, It blames for its crimes – its own victims!
The arguments are quite fascinating. In the Tory-owned press you never read that not enough people are being fed, you always read that there are “too many mouths to feed.”
In this way the accusing finger is shifted away from a system that will not or cannot, feed its people, to the starving themselves, who have the insolence to exist, and disturb the sleep of good citizens who have other things to worry about – such as obesity.
This attitude underlines the anti-human character of the capitalist system. It has only one God – Profit – and this is the measure of all things, including human beings. Human needs enter into the system only in disguise as demand.
If you are a pensioner who needs a bucket of coal but haven’t got the cash to clothe this need with dignity and respectability, to make it into the demand, then capitalism does not recognise your need. It even makes you ashamed to draw attention to it.
If you are a starving ex-miner in Kentucky, USA, you may wonder why you can’t be given some of the billions of dollars worth of “surplus” food stored in caves by the American government. The answer is:
“Let’s see the colour of your money friend. Are you a man, a fully qualified member of the market society? Or are you a population problem, a mere bundle of needs, a workless layabout who should be ashamed of himself?”
If you are a hungry Asian who wonders why the US government doesn’t stop paying farmers to take millions of acres out of cultivation, you will be asked, “and knock the bottom out of the cereals market? Where is the profit in that? What are you – a communist or something?”
A world socialist order could easily support many times the present population. There are millions of acres of uncultivated land in the underdeveloped world, as well as the millions withdrawn from cultivation in America.
Even with present techniques the productivity of the land could attain staggering levels, and new methods such as sea farming can extend the horizons.
It is just a question of organising to do the job. But four square in the way of such a reorganisation and rationalisation of the world’s material and human potential, stands the reactionary imperialist class whose power and privilege depend on the present set-up which they will defend with all the diabolical weapons at their command.
Yes, imperialism has a population problem all right, but for that population to begin to solve its problems, it will have to smash the system.
To do this the starving millions don’t need the pill – they need guns.
Chris Arthur is co-editor of the Bulletin of Marxist Studies.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020