Tell the People That the Struggle Must Go On: The Thirty-Fourth Newsletter (2020)
20 August 2020 — by Tricontinental, shared with thanks.,
Thami Mnyele (South Africa), untitled, pen and ink, Gaborone, Botswana, 1984.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Young children marvel at an obvious contradiction in capitalist societies: why do we have shops filled with food, and yet see hungry people on the streets? It is a question of enormous significance; but in time the question dissipates into the fog of moral ambivalence, as various explanations are used to obfuscate the clarity of the youthful mind.
The most bewildering explanation is that hungry people cannot eat because they have no money, and somehow this absence of money – the most mystical of all human creations – is enough reason to let people starve. Since there is ample food to eat, and since a lot of people do not have enough money to buy food, the food must be protected from the hungry people.
To that end, we – as human beings – allow for the creation of a police force and for the use of violence to defend food against the hungry. In one of his earliest journalistic reports, Karl Marx wrote of the violence used against the peasants of the Rhineland who collected fallen wood to feed their fires.
The peasants, Marx wrote, know the punishment – including death – but they simply do not know the crime. For what reason are they being beaten and killed? The collection of wood that has fallen on the forest floor cannot be seen as an act of criminality, nor can the basic human need for hungry people to forage for food.
