Up to now, the popular theory is that the Irish were promiscuous, slothful, and excessively dependent on the potato. His subjects of writing are mainly based on economics. So as we tilt back that Guiness this year and don those Leprechaun hats while doing the Riverdance, let’s also take a closer look at the daily news about migration from abroad and social unrest in poverty stricken areas here at home. It went down, causing a rise in grain prices and extra food. In fact, more than 800 million people around the world suffer from hunger despite the fact that we currently produce enough food to feed two or three times the global population. Run as a colony of the vast British Empire, Ireland was a colonial food-producing operation, much like India and the sugar islands of the Caribbean, but locals were not allowed to eat the very food they were producing. A clothing drop during the famine, from The Illustrated London News, Dec. 15, 1849. These, however, coincided with the greatest catastrophe experienced by the Irish people: the Great Potato Famine, or An Gorta Mór (“The Great Hunger”), of 1845–49. But they chose not to. Inequality within countries is growing at an alarming rate as the rich monopolize industry through trade subsidies and resource wars. to Britain to feed an estimated two million people. Tankus tries to draw parallels between Ireland’s current migration problems and those during the famine. What’s more, this is a history that is not just already written but fairly widely accepted. It went from about 4.5m in 1800 to just over 8m at its peak before the famine set it back on a trend back to around 4.5m where it stabilised by about 1900. Nathan Cedric Tankus ran a piece on Naked Capitalism about Karl Marx’s interpretation of the Irish famine in his Das Kapital. But the existence of an absentee class of landlords - who were both English and Anglo-Irish - was probably a major factor when considering the coldness of the English response. It's pretty well-documented that for both of these capitalist famines, exports remained high, significantly greater than consumption. So now to the main point of this post – to try to create a list of the number of victims that have fallen prey to global capitalism. In both countries, the rulers in London blamed the indigenous poor for their own poverty—creating the myth that they were lazy, socially backward and uncivilized.”. Another World Is Possible Though - But We Must Fight For It. Because he uses the old Marxian framework he concludes this has something to do with contemporary policy producing some sort of “surplus population". Leningrad famine caused by a 900-day blockade by German troops. Most of us were taught in school that the Irish Potato Famine, which took place from 1845 to 1852, was simply caused by a previously unknown fungal blight (Phytophthora infestans) that wiped out the potato crop of the Emerald Isle just at a time when too much of the population was dependent on a single type of potato for daily sustenance. The Bank Act of 1844 precipitated a financial crisis created by a contraction of money as a more restrictive credit policy replaced a loose one. It went down, causing a drop in food production and famine. Capitalism is the Problem. The Famine, though caused by blight, was made worse by the prevailing conservative doctrine of laissez faire. Arizona Slim March 10, 2017 at 9:01 am. The Capitalist Nature of The Soviet Famines. “Poverty, hunger and famine exist today—sadly because the same social structures and attitudes towards poverty still exist.“. include("/home/aleta/public_html/files/ad_openx.htm"); ?>. Well, there are parallels but not the ones he thinks. The whole discussion is shot through with Marx’s dubious method which is basically to take a bunch of statistics, lay them out to give his analysis an air of objectivity and then immediately turn around and engage in rhetoric that borders on conspiracy theory. Irish literature - Irish literature - Irish nationalism and the Great Potato Famine: In step with developments elsewhere in Europe, Ireland in the mid-19th century saw renewed expressions of nationalism. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as An Drochshaol, loosely translated as "the hard times" (or literally "the bad life"). Capitalism has an enormous death toll of its own. “The Ethiopian famine took place with no abnormal reduction in food output, and consumption of food per head at the height of the famine in 1973 was fairly normal for Ethiopia as a whole. This post is the first of a pair of posts looking the relationship between famines and population growth. But while St. Patrick’s Day is cause to celebrate everything Irish-American, it’s also a good time to ponder just why more than a million Irish were forced to leave Ireland while another million were dying of starvation in such a short period of time in the first place. “Those who fled Ireland during the Famine—over one million people in the space of six years—were doing just that. Labor shortages left much of the land unplanted or unharvested. It means that the blight was not just a fact of nature but instead the fault of capitalism - which, of course, if understood correctly then makes the case for socialism. This was an issue intimately tied up, not so much with the development of English capitalism, but rather with the relationship between England and Ireland in this period. The 1927 famine killed as many as 6 million. Currently he is pursuing an MA in economics. Clearly then, Ireland accumulated a massive population on the back of the potato crop. Vatch March 10, 2017 at 9:43 am. Here we consider whether population growth causes famine and hunger. Showing how the famines in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR in the early 1930s were the result of capitalism, rather than "communism". Severe drought killed as many as 13 million Chinese in the two-year famine beginning in 1876. “Ireland’s economy had always been made subservient to British interests,“ Quinnipiac University Professor Christine Kinealy says. “Refugees generally leave their homeland out of desperation,” Kinealy says. Capitalism isn’t usually blamed for mass starvation or famines because capitalism doesn’t control the weather, the failure of monsoons to arrive on time, the arrival of immensely powerful monsoons that flood thousands of square kilometres of cultivated land, the arrival of swarms of hungry locusts, the sudden appearance of new pests that destroy crops, or massive volcanic eruptions like Tambora that upset … Clearly Ireland was producing an agricultural surplus.”. But consider that there are seven times as many Irish-Americans in the U.S. than Irish in Ireland—which is largely due to the Great Famine migration—and the pattern is clear. Whatever they could find. It is for this reason that the famine did not produce a major socialist movement in Ireland but instead strengthened and, in some ways radicalised, the nationalist movement who recognised that at the root of the problem was self-governance. Our own modern-day stark examples include wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other regions like Syria, all of which funded by taxpayer dollars, while poor people at home go without food. The blight caused a third of the potatoes to fail, capitalism caused a million to die. All Rights Reserved, to buy millions’ of dollars worth of staples like cheese, most American food stamp recipients are employed full-time. by Philip PilkingtonNathan Cedric Tankus ran a piece on Naked Capitalism about Karl Marx’s interpretation of the Irish famine in his Das Kapital. Many horses, the main animals used for plowing, had been lost or severely weakened by an earlier famine in 1931-32. The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine, Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972 [1921]. Put on the U2 and The Cranberries and let’s down some green brew folks, it’s that time of year again. But this was not so much the fault of capitalism, as Marx claims, as it was the cruelty with which the English clung to their free-trade laws. Capitalism … This was the prime example of politicians believing the free market will solve everything, that it would be unethical for the government to intervene and that helping the poor would only make them lazy and dependent. Blair's statement draws attention to the question of what caused the famine. He says that, by contrast, England “would have bled to death with such a drain of population as Ireland has suffered". This food was instead sold abroad as exports. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain -growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan . From this perspective, the potato blight was socially produced since small farmers were pushed into monocropping as the only crop that a family could survive farming on such small plots. Even those problems which aren’t actually caused by overpopulation are usually worsened by it. This Web Page by Steven Hansen ---- Copyright 2010 - 2015 Econintersect LLC - all rights reserved, was in large part responsible for allowing the population boom of the 19th century across much of the world, seeing a massive population boom from around 1800 up until the famine. “Ireland produced large amounts of other foodstuffs—mostly for exportation to Britain.”, “On the eve of the Famine for example, Ireland was exporting sufficient quantities of corn, wheat, barley, oats etc. Like Ireland during the famine, these millions are starving because of bad policies and ideologies, not because there is not enough to go around. None of this is remotely true, of course. Yes, it’s a nice story. The idea lying behind this is that the landlords actually need the blight in order to clear the land for livestock and so, while Marx never actually goes into conspiracy territory and claims that the landlords instigated the blight, he paints it as a seemingly inevitable outcome of the capitalist transformation of Irish farming. Mike Davis’s book Late Victorian Holocausts complicates that story significantly. This leads to a situation in which the failure of this crop would then lead to massive amounts of the population being wiped out - which is precisely what happened in the famine. This is a good chance to examine the pure capitalism without state interference that libertarians love so much and see how it dealt with starvation. But this is not at all what the parallel is (after all, famine caused by reliance on the potato and unemployment due to lack of effective demand are two rather different creatures). No, the parallel is that Ireland today, as in the 19th century, has a crisis of governance. As we can see the level of population increase in Ireland was enormous. Am I then claiming that the famine was, in fact, a wholly “natural" event? Likewise “communism” is often compared to Nazism and Fascism. Follow him on his Twitter account. The potato was a very cheap source of certain nutrients that were not available from other foods and this allowed the population to grow at a previously unprecedented rate. They could have easily imposed protectionist measures that would have channeled resources toward the domestic population during the famine. About one million Leningrad residents starved, froze, or were bombed to death in the winter of 1941–42, when supply routes to the city were cut off and temperatures dropped to −40 °C (−40 °F). The famine led directly to Lenin's introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which re-introduced elements of capitalism and free trade into the Soviet economy - allowing farmers to sell some of their produce privately, rather than solely to the state. In Yemen the famine is caused largely by a bitter civil war where the side the US and Saudi Arabia backs is deliberately blockading ports to stop … He attributes this to the fact that Ireland is simply an “agricultural district" of England. “Refugees generally leave their homeland out of desperation,” Kinealy says. Irish peasants were often systematically denied access to food during the famine, which was caused more by capitalism than crop failure. In other words, a million Irish starved for no reason other than greed. He allowed capitalism in new economic zones. In 1917, toward the end of World War I, the Russian Civil War was started between the Bolshevik Red Army and the White… The main cause for famine in the 20th century was distribution failure, in other words unwillingness to share. Nowlan, Kevin. “The British government at the time of the Famine is often described as being committed to ‘laissez faire’, that is, non-intervention in the market place,” says Professor Kinealy. Author of several books on the Irish Potato Famine, including a graphic novel for young adults on the subject entitled The Bad Times, Kinealy is also the director of the Great Hunger Museum in Connecticut. This is the history taught to every Irish student in secondary school (that is, “high school") history class. No, absolutely not. “The issues that faced the Irish people in 1840 are not unique to this time or place,” Kinealy says. The truth is that the forces behind the Great Irish Famine are still at work today and we are going to need all the “Fighting Irish” spirit we can muster to change that. “The Political Background.” In The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52, pp. This has nothing to do with capitalism as such let alone something called “surplus population" which is a bizarre concept, but rather to do with who pulls the levers of power and whether they have Ireland’s interests at heart. It is well recognised that English free-trade laws prevented food produced in Ireland from being given to the starving population. Please share this article - Go to very top of page, right hand side, for social media buttons. This is also made further ridiculous by the point that not only has famines occurred under capitalism, but there is an exact and proven mechanism to how capitalism caused the deaths in the famine. Steven Devereux: "Famine in the Twentieth Century" IDS, 2000. Blaming poor people for being too lazy or unmotivated to succeed is an extremely popular pasttime in the U.S., despite the fact that, just as the Irish who starved were hard at work producing profit for their rich British landlords, most American food stamp recipients are employed full-time. “Those who fled Ireland during the Famine—over one million people in the space of six years—were doing just that. [The British] refused to do so on the grounds that merchants would bring food in under free market forces.”. Second: Famine is a disproportionately prevalent outcome of socialist systems, as illustrated in the following table summarizing the thirty famines of the 20 th century. Thirteen million children in the United States go hungry every day as the “land of the free” now has the highest child poverty rate of any developed country in the world despite its tremendous economic output. I contacted her to find out just exactly what happened in those bleak days of starvation and mass exodus and how the systematic forces behind that great tragedy may still be in play today. Kinealy is right. Anyone wondering how the richest empire in the world, as Britain was at the time, could allow millions of its subjects to starve while there was a actually a food surplus going on need simply to look a little closer at the modern-day United States. Philip Pilkington is a London based writer and blogger. These wars are also producing a refugee crisis of epic proportions that the world is struggling to understand. It causes War, Famine, Poverty, Homelessness, Facism, Environmental Destruction and is Responsible for the Covid19 Pestilence and many other diseases.
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