Montana labor news., 1932-08-11

Vi Neeuiess want ana suffering
The world stands face to face with
mass hunger.
Until recent years, people in west.
ern Europe and North America re.
fused to consider seriously the posi-
bility of wholesale starvation. They
explained the famines in China ano
India on the ground that these were
backward, uncivilized countries. They
believed that poverty was being sue
cessfully handled by charity societies,
and that general starvation in the
great industrial and commercial cen
ters of the west was ~unthinkable.
"Starve?" they protested. "What
nonsensel How could we starve, with
u endless fields of grain, our mod
ern diaries, u flour mills, food fac
tories and canneries, our cold storage
plants and well-stocked warehouses ?"
And yet starvation appeared in the
midst Of this plenty during the years
that followed 1914. Millions of war
refugees were driven from their
homes and left stranded without food
or shelter. Whole nations were block
AIDED and reduced to famine rations.
But the responsibility for this desti-
tuition was laid to a temporary war
emergency. Once the devastated areas
were reconstructed and business-as-
usual restored, the problem would be
automatically solved by the re-estab-
lishment of general prosperity.
This belief in the return Of pros
perity was shattered by years of slack
times. Central Europe lay wrecked;
Great Britain was deep in chronic de-
preston; coal mines, shipyards and
textile factories stood idle throughout
the world; economic paralysis brought
millions to the verge Of starvation.
But yer at the height of prosperity,
before the beginning of the economic
recession, multitudes of human beings
had been spending their lives under
conditions Of chronic starvation. This
was true of the low-paid workers in
Birmingham, Essen and Chicago. 1t
was also true Of the tenant farmers
and landless farm laborers in Georgia,
and of the plantation hands in Mexico
and Ceylon. Year in and year out
these victims Of poverty ate bad food;
wore rags; slept in wretched rooms
or novels, lacking the simplest decen-
cies and comforts of life. Babies were
born into filth; they grew up in
squalor; married; eked out a bare
existence; and died wretchedly. Miser-
able, poverty stricken masses lived
in the centers Of capitalist imperial
ism-in the slums of London, Tokyo,
Hamburg, Chicago. Their lives con-
sisted Of one long round Of want and
suffering.
The chronic starvation incident to
poverty was accepted as a normal as
pect Of social life-a necessary evil.
The flood tide Of starvation that
swept across the world after 1929 sub
merged millions who had never known
poverty. Many who had kept away
from starvation all their lives found
themselves, through accident or sick
ness or old age, suddenly plunged be-
low the dark surface. 1t brought the
masses of industrial society face to
face with the question: Must we
starve?
The rising tide of starvation bears
no relation to wheat fields, grain
elevators, machine tools, locomotives,
tractors, refrigerator cars, canning
factories and other meal of produc-
ton and distribution. These agencies
are all far more efficient than they
were ~ years dSOs ~ - al depNNb Va
unemployment, of part-time work, of
wage and salary cuts, and Of the de-
creased incomes of the farmers. 1t is
the direct result of the increasing gulf
between producing power and pur-
chasing power. Millions face starva-
ton because ever when they can find
jobs, their entire incomes will not buy
the simplest n%ecessaries Of life.
Day after day facts are piling up
which make it more and more unlikely
that the capitalist world will eve
again reach the level Of pre-war pros
perity and security. These same facts
point Enthusiastically to the conclusion
that mass hunger has come to stay
as long as the remnants of a dying
capitalist order can be held together.
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