No Time to Lose! Confronting Global Inflation Through the Construction of Autonomous Relations of (re)Production, Exchange and Livelihood

“The evidence tells us that we are living in the late stages of a very long price-revolution, perhaps in its critical stage. It also tells us that these are global processes. Our destiny is now closely linked to the condition of all humanity. The patterns of the past also suggest that what will happen in the future depends in no small degree on the choices that we make…We can use this power wisely or foolishly. Our choices will make a difference for our children and grandchildren, and for generations yet unborn.” (Hackett Fischer 1996: 251)

“For the working class in particular, inflation has the direct effect of reducing the one commodity that class has to sell: its labor-power. For the capitalist class it is the reverse. Since they own the commodities whose prices are rising, their wealth embodied in those commodities, tends to rise with the prices, and, therefore, so does their income derived from the sale of those commodities. Other factors assumed to be equal, inflation tends to reduce the income of the working class and increase that of capital – causing a shift of value from one class to the other.” (Cleaver 1979: 87)

“The price hikes themselves have taken on the character of a natural disaster…Far from being natural, this dependence has been constructed step-by-step, policy-by-policy against the criticism of anti-globalization scholars and a long series of oppositional demonstrations, general strikes, and rebellions throughout the world.” (Caffentzis 2008)

“Millions are now calculating that unless they obstruct the “normal” circuit of capitalist reproduction by taking to the streets they will face starvation” (Caffentzis 2008)

“Historic  systemic failures of governments and international institutions are responsible… For these reasons, they have lost legitimacy and confidence of the world’s peoples …We call on the Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice to investigate the contribution of agribusiness, including grain traders and commodity speculators, to violations of the right to food and to the food emergency…The oligopolies and speculators, who operate throughout the food chain, must be investigated and suspected criminal behaviour must be brought to justice.” (IPC 2008)

We are in the early stages of what may be a prolonged period of global inflation in food, land, energy, key raw materials (e.g. steel and copper) and other basic goods. Without suitable, and rapid, responses from global anti-capitalist networks, there will be devastating effects on people’s lives throughout the world for many years to come, as well as on our collective abilities to struggle. In little over a decade these networks have proved excellent at organizing large global meetings, global days of action, emergency global responses in support of local struggles, as well circulating information and news throughout the world. Now these networks face the urgent task of building on this success in order to go beyond protest and actually construct long term alternative relations of production, exchange and livelihoods that go beyond the nation state, world-market, money and wage relations. In a period of rising inflation, this is not just an ethical imperative, but rather an urgent material demand, the difference between life and death. Time is limited. The task is huge. Nonetheless, movements are in a strong position to confront the situation in an optimistic manner.

Historical Lessons

In the 13th Century prices in Europe rose sky high. A chaotic and traumatic century of war, pestilence, social unrest, and famine followed, resulting in the breakdown of feudal relations. In 18th Century France, the price of grain and bread skyrocketed. Chaos ensued and the French revolution followed quickly behind. In Weimar Germany prices skyrocketed. Chaos ensued and the Nazis came to power. In the 1970s energy and food prices skyrocketed and famine and the neo-liberal counter-revolution took shape…

Hackett Fischer asserts,

“most inflation in the past eight centuries has happened in four great waves of rising prices. The first wave continued from the late twelfth century to the early fourteenth century. The second…began in the fifteenth century and ended in the mid-seventeenth. The third wave started circa 1930, and reached its climax in the age of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The fourth wave commenced in the year 1896 and has continued since, with a short intermission in some nations during the 1920s and early 1930s (Hackett Fischer 1996: 3-5)… [despite important differences] all great waves had important qualities in common. They all shared the same wave-structure. They tended to have the same sequence of development, the same pattern of price-relatives, similar movements of wages, rent, interest-rates; and the same dangerous volatility in the later stages. All major price revolutions in modern history began in periods of prosperity. Each ended in shattering world-crises and were followed by periods of recovery and comparative equilibrium.” (Hackett Fischer 1996: 9)

While history never repeats itself, and cumulative changes have occurred with each successive wave, a number of regularities are highlighted. Each wave has entailed a long term redistribution of wealth and income (both monetarized and non-monetarized), with polarization and concentration occurring along class lines. Middling layers of wealth have simply disappeared. Responses to inflation have repeatedly included government instigated price controls, as well as the speculation and panic buying, often fuelled by an injection of increasing amounts of devalued currency into the financial system. Price instability and rapid inflation has also entailed the break down of markets, public indebtedness and bankruptcy. Consequently, it has also provoked breakdown of established political structures, at local, regional and national levels, as well as internationally, frequently involving increased social unrest and also interstate military conflict. On the other hand, periods of price stability have been periods of comparative political and cultural flourishing, economic growth, reduced inequality and democratization. One major cumulative change that has been observed over time is that successive waves have been less destructive, but have provoked more organized and coherent social and political resistance from those most negatively effected by the inflation.

Contemporary Inflation in Food, Energy and Land

Against the backdrop of Global War on Terror, massive US debts, financial crisis and a collapsing dollar,  food, oil and land prices are again rising. Between May 2007 and May 2008, the price of corn rose 46%, wheat 80%, and soybeans 72%. The price of rice increased by 75% in 2008 over its average 2007 price. Meanwhile, as this article is being completed, the price of oil has reached a new high of $146 a barrel, a rise of 55% since January. Having crept up gradually (and relatively invisibly) for many years, prices are reaching new heights and the rate of inflation is accelerating rapidly, provoking a daily stream of dramatic media headlines.
 
Prices represent a balance of power between buyers and sellers. They are political, not natural. And, of course, it goes without saying (though Marx famously said it) that the division of the world’s population into buyers and sellers is also not a natural division. Rising prices do not hit everyone equally, but translate into a negative redistribution of both power and wealth. While the Food and Agriculture Organization reports a 50 million increase in the number of hungry people in the world in 2007, the agri-multinational, Monsanto made record profits. Net sales in the first nine months of fiscal year 2008 were $9.5bn, 35% higher than the same period last year. Net income was up 83%. The Financial Times cites grain giant Cargill having a 69% rise in profits over last years figures.

Food inflation is the result of years of intentional structural adjustment, trade liberalization in agriculture, privatization of land (both to agribusiness and other industrial spheres), the dismantling of food subsidies, price control mechanisms and marketing boards, and the destruction of national food reserves. These changes have been pushed by multilateral agencies such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, regional (and more recently bilateral) free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, and with support from agricultural multinationals, national governments and economic elites as part of the process of constructing a world-market. The recent drive towards agro-fuels has exacerbated these trends, bringing fuel and food crops into direct competition over land,  and pushing up the price of both food and land due to speculation.

Many factors contribute to oil inflation including: military conflict in oil rich areas; the perception of imminent scarcity (“peak oil”); and the falling dollar. On the other hand, demand for oil is also rapidly rising (in addition to the much touted rise of Chinese and Indian demand, US consumption is also continually increasing). Finally, as with food, there is also the element of speculation. The US  House of Representatives has just passed a motion condemning speculation in oil, and the UK House of Commons are in the process of initiating an investigation on the theme.

Oil, food and land are key commodities, basic to both capitalist production (and exchange), and also the reproduction of life, and hence labor power. If the prices of these basics go up, struggles are unleashed as to who shall pay? Will labor suffer austerity, or will capital pay?

This is provoking a massive and rapid loss of legitimacy as existing national, regional and multilateral political, economic and financial institutions fail to deal with the problem and/or make it worse. The first half of 2008 saw a world-wide eruption of food and fuel protests/riots. Fuel protests have occurred in: Bulgaria, Burma, Chile, France, Greece, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal, Nicaragua, Portugal, Spain, USA, Thailand and UK. Food protests have occurred in Bangladesh, Egypt, Haiti, and Pakistan. In Haiti, a government has fallen due to riots. The majority of this unrest has emerged “spontaneously”, apparently not organized by existing grassroots “political” or “ activist”  organizations.  

It is very likely that the legitimacy of official existing power structures will continue to crumble further and faster in the near future as prices continue to rise. This presents emancipatory movements with enormous opportunities but also with big dangers. While opening up space for massive numbers of people to participate in the long term process of collectively constructing new, and hopefully, liberatory social relations at the global level, it also opens up space for ideas and practices based on a coercive politics of fear, divisions and scapegoating. Should organized emancipatory movements fail to adequately respond, there will be very far reaching effects, not least resulting in these movements becoming irrelevant. Of particular importance here are global anti-capitalist networks.

Contemporary Global Anti-capitalist Networks
 
In the last 10 years, decentralized processes of global communication and coordination between struggles in different parts of the world have played a crucial role in throwing global capitalist institutions such as the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and, more recently, the War on Terror into a crisis of legitimacy. As this article is being completed, big protests are underway in Japan against the G8 summit. The lasting importance of these networks can be seen in the following. The World Trade Organization negotiations are virtually dead, as is the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The EU Constitution died an unglamorous death, and it appears that its successor may go down a similar road, and (perhaps the crowning, but scarcely known achievement) the World Bank/International Monetary Fund are on the verge of bankruptcy. In particular, the following organizational processes have played an important part in this world-wide circulation of struggles: Peoples’ Global Action, World Social Forum, Indymedia, Via Campésina, and various global initiatives around the Zapatista Intergalactic Encuentros. This level of coordination, communication, circulation, as well as sheer inspirational power, amongst struggles worldwide was simply unimaginable scarcely 15 years ago. International networking of struggles are strong processes, very strong.

Rather than going into a detailed history of the emergence of these movements in the last decade and a half,  let us instead remember that global anti-capitalist resistance is far from a new phenomenon. We are standing on the shoulders of an abundant history of international struggle. From the pirates, slaves and sailors of the Atlantic world in construction, to the waves of revolution in the USA, Haiti and France in the late 18th Century; to the European revolutions of 1848 (also the year of the first major women’s rights meeting in the US);  to the simultaneous calls for an 8-hour work day in Europe and the USA in 1864, to the cluster of revolutions which swept the world after World War One and the Russian revolution. From the linking of Black American struggles in Detroit to resistance against Mussolini’s invasion of  Ethiopia, to the internationalism of the Spanish revolutionary civil war. From Pan-African anti-imperialism to the anti-nuclear struggles that helped bringing down the Cold War. From the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals to the Non-aligned Movement, the Tri-continental and the Cuban revolution’s solidarity with African liberation struggles. From the distribution of  Joe Hill’s ashes at an international workers’ gathering after his execution in 1915, to the international campaign to save the Scottsborough Boys from racist lynching in the 1930s. From the 1919 Baku Congress of Peoples of the East, to the exile of Robert Williams in Cuba and China, following his use of armed self defense against the Ku Klux Klan…The circulation of struggles continues today…and these histories will continue to give much inspiration and many lessons to the tough struggles of the future.

Yet, while acknowledging the great strength and novelty of today’s processes, it seems they may also be reaching the limits of their efficacy. The February 15th anti-war actions showed high levels of organizational capacity for globally coordinated protest. They also revealed the inability to go beyond protest. A number of bottlenecks exist in global resistance processes that hinder such a move. These include the fact that organizational process still often center on individuals, the fact that direct South-South communication and exchange is prohibitively expensive and often still functions via Northern intermediaries, uneven distribution of resources such as computer infrastructures, and the fact that the creation of alternative relations that go beyond information and communication flows really requires substantial material resources that are beyond the current capacity of movements to mobilize. Furthermore, key areas of the world are unequally included in global networks, especially Arab countries, as well as (to a lesser degree) Eastern Europe and Africa.  

Beyond Protest: Building New Relations of (re)production, Exchange and Livelihoods

Global networks are, nonetheless, in a very good position to go beyond the limits of protest and denunciation, by collectively redefining processes of revolutionary transformation rooted in the construction of decentralized and autonomous local alternatives. In many parts of the world, including Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, parts of India, etc, such processes are already underway at the local or national level. The global networks mentioned above, and others which may emerge in the coming period, can play an important role in ensuring that such local struggles have the maximum transformatory effect possible on the world-economy as a whole and that their effects are felt beyond specific locations. This is important, since, in an increasingly globalized world, now more than ever the idea of Socialism in One Country, or any modern day reincarnation of this, seems a highly unlikely possibility. Illustrative of this are the difficulties and limitations which the important national transformation that have taken place in both Bolivia and Chiapas are currently facing (especially due to repression and a resurgent right wing agenda), local manifestations of a crisis of viability at the global level. It is world-revolution or nothing.

Global networks have always emphasized the importance of simultaneously resisting structures of domination and creating alternatives from below, and the local struggles that comprise of the networks are firmly rooted in struggles to do precisely this. An important debate, and range of practice, has emerged in this context, especially around the question as to whether the nation state is a vehicle for emancipatory change or whether it is an obstacle to these processes, itself being simply another form of domination. At the local level, this is exemplified most clearly in the different organizational and strategic approaches taken by the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas, the Bolivarian revolution of Chavez in Venezuela, and the Movement Towards Socialism led by Evo Morales in Bolivia. At the worldwide level, these two approaches are best exemplified in the two nascent, but important, movement building statements issued in the last couple years: the (non-state centric) Zapatista 6th Declaration, and the (state-centric) Bamako Appeal, which was issued by and is supported by certain sectors within the World Social Forum process.

In times of inflation, it becomes harder to survive on wages. The key challenges to human well being are how will people sustain themselves in the future? How will global inequalities be addressed? Where do rights come from?

There can only be one appropriate struggle in the face of inflation: resisting commodification at the point of production and consumption, especially in food, land and energy, three areas which are basic to the reproduction of human life. While certain gains may be made through lobbying governments for price freezes or wage rises, and it will also be crucial to resist austerity measures on public and welfare oriented services, results will only be limited as long as the social relations which keep people dependent on the commodity form in the first place continue to exist. In other words, there is an urgent need to break this set of social relation. This entails overcoming the forced separation that exists between people and their means of subsistence, which forces people to be dependent on the wage (and its associated and subordinate forms of unwaged labor). This means creating relations of (re)production, exchange and livelihoods that satisfy human needs rather than the profit needs of the market, money and waged labor. In other words, there is an urgent need to struggle for far reaching land reform, commonly owned means of (re)production, and non-profit food, land and energy and the decommodification of these sectors. Rioting and looting are indisputably a part of this process.

Possible Moments in an Ongoing Conversation of Resistance

I will close this article by pointing to three contemporary global initiatives that may be useful moments to collectively deepen this discussion and prepare actions based on these long term perspectives. These are a) the Zapatista 6th Declaration and the Intergalactica process it proposes, b) the statement issued by the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) 2008 Civil Society Statement on the World Food Emergency: No More “Failures-as Usual”! and c) the upcoming grassroots mobilizations which will take place during the  UN climate change talks, COP 15, which will take place in Copenhagen in December 2009.

The Zapatista 6th Declaration, issued in 2005, is a far reaching invitation for people to participate in a collective process of constructing new material relations between people throughout the world, seeking to go beyond the nation state and world-market. It is a call from Below and to the Left. The process, while slow in developing, has already had an important global resonance. In Chiapas the Zapatistas have already hosted three meetings of the Zapatista Peoples With the Peoples of the World (the last one an all women’s meeting), as well as an Indigenous Peoples of the Americas gathering.  While no date or location has been set for the fabled Intergalactica meeting called for in the Declaration, and while the Zapatistas are facing an intensification of state repression against them, the global process set forth is nonetheless a potentially very powerful vehicle for launching a long term process of constructing new world-wide social relations.  

The IPC statement calls for the prosecution of food speculators at the International Court of Justice. Though appealing to the goodwill of existing power structures to implement benign reforms (a process that has limited chances of success), the demand is nonetheless a confrontational one and highlights the crucial question of justice for speculators in times of inflation. And, though gentler in tone, the proposal is reminiscent of revolutionary ghosts of the past. For better or worse, after the Russian Revolution food speculators, the predecessors of today’s corporate agri-business criminals, were unceremoniously shot in the early days of the revolution. A grim reminder of the issues at stake…

Finally, to Copenhagen. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is expected result in a replacement for the Kyoto protocol and set the global framework to fight climate change. It will be one of the highest-profile global media shows ever, by which the governments will try to convince us that they are doing something about the multiple crises facing us. It will also be a moment in which the future energy system of the world is up for discussion, or at least being discussed. Energy is a key means of production and reproduction, both for capitalist relations and for non-capitalist relations. As such, there is a key struggle for who controls it. If a transition to renewable energy is about to occur, this means that much of the world’s productive infrastructure will be replaced in the coming years. The struggle for control of this process is an open process, since it hasn’t happened yet. The struggle hasn’t yet been lost, since the infrastructure hasn’t yet been built and appropriated. Hence, Copenhagen can offer an important moment for positing the theme of non-commodified and commonly owned energy infrastructures, services and resources and for generating debate on this theme, both amongst anti-capitalist activists and also within the renewable energy sector itself.

And so, as prices of life’s basic needs go up each day, the clock is ticking. Are we ready or not ?

References cited
Caffentzis, George 2008 Starvation Politics: From Ancient Egypt to the Present in Turbulence 2 (forthcoming, August 2008)

Cleaver, Harry 1977 Food, Famine and International Crisis in Zerowork 2.
Available at http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/357Lcleaverfood.pdf

Cleaver, Harry 1979 Reading Capital Politically Harvester Press, Brighton
Available at http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/357krcp.html

Hackett Fischer, David 1996 The Great Wave: Price Revolutions, and the Rhythm of History Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York

Mattick, Paul 1978 Economics, Politics, and the Age of Inflation Merlin Press, London

Midnight Notes 1979 Strange Victories: The Anti-nuclear Movement in the US and Europe Volume 1, Number 1

International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) 2008 Civil Society Statement on the World Food Emergency: No More “Failures-as Usual”! Available at: http://www.nyeleni.eu/foodemergency/CSOdraftStatement-English.pdf

Ramirez, Bruno (1975) Self-reduction of Prices in Italy reprinted in Midnight Notes 1992 Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992 (Autonomedia, New York)