I learned about a strange and terrible thing today. In America’s breadbasket, it’s becoming harder and harder to get fresh food. Let me put that in context: in the agricultural heart of the world’s richest country, good food is becoming not just unaffordable…but unavailable.

What the? Doesn’t that strike you as a bizarre and gruesome paradox?

And yet it should also remind you of the Soviet Union — and how it collapsed. There was a time when Americans used to make fun of Soviet breadlines — which were a real thing — but now Americans find themselves in just such a position, maybe a worse one. After all, breadlines mean…you eventually get bread. But what do you do when there are no grocery stores in a hundred mile radius? You don’t get it at all.

Now, the reason that fresh food is becoming a luxury in America’s agricultural heartland is that it’s becoming what scholars call a “food desert.” There are fewer and fewer grocery stores left — because American capitalism seeks perpetual efficiency and maximum profit. So those rural stores are shuttered, and ones on the edges of cities opened — because they’re more profitable per square foot.

What’s left out there in the rural areas? The dollar stores move in — the bottom feeders, the vultures. But they only sell the lowest-common-denominator. Those weird terms the American food industry uses: “salty snacks”, “carbonated beverages.” They have a “food” section, sure — but even a middle class Third Worlder eats better. Because the food aisles at the dollar store are chips, soda, ramen, and candy bars. You can live on all that, maybe — but not a very healthy, happy life.

All this is one of economic history’s most perfect examples of what Marx simply called exploitation. Think about it. The farmer and his family who toil away all day, waking up at the crack of dawn, to till those fields, milk those cows, and so on — they can’t get fresh food. The irony is staggering. If anyone should be able to get fresh food — isn’t it those in the agricultural breadbasket of a society…let alone the world’s richest country?

That impossibly ironic failure reveals a great truth about why capitalism implodes — just like communism before it. An American economist would probably say something like “resources are being allocated efficiently!!”, meaning that fresh food goes to those who can “afford” it most, like rich Googlers in San Francisco gorging on Whole Foods. But a smarter economist would note that there is a kind of market failure here: an “incomplete market”, meaning a market in which some things aren’t available to some people at all. In this weird, ironic, evocative case, the market failure is for fresh food…but not in any old way. American capitalism fails to feed good food to the very people who produce it, farmers. What the?

Marx would have called all this “exploitation” precisely because his idea of that word wasn’t just that people are abused or neglected — but that they are deprived of the very things that they produce, create, imagine, cultivate. Capital takes a larger and larger share of what people make — until, at last, in many cases, the laborer is deprived of the good he makes at all. Think of factory workers who can’t afford the luxury cars or designer jeans they make. They are “alienated from their labour” precisely because they are exploited — they can’t afford to have the very things they labour to produce, since capital pays them as little as it possibly can.

There couldn’t be a clearer example in history perhaps of classic Marxian exploitation than farmers in the world’s richest country being deprived of…fresh food…the very thing they produce…while the rich become the super ultra rich mega rich. That’s labour being exploited by capital in nutshell — in such an extreme way that I’d go beyond “exploitation” and call it something more like economic perversion. It’s mind-boggling.

What happens in the American system is that capital purchases what those farmers have to sell, and feed it to rich city dwellers — but there’s no profit in feeding those very things to the farmer. Especially at this juncture in capitalism, where demands for profit have become as steep as they’ve become perpetual. Try to open a grocery store in a rural community, as a CEO — and pretty soon, some “hedge fund manager” — read some billionaire’s idiot son — in a ten thousand dollar suit will be ripping your face off, and firing you. The system can’t feed the farmer. Marx might have said: because it is too busy gorging on him instead — instead of feeding the farmer, it is feeding the farmer to the billionaire. (And if you think that’s an exaggeration, take a hard look at the tragic surge in suicide rates in farming communities.)

That is an eerie, striking parallel to Soviet collapse. The Soviet system, too, couldn’t feed the farmer, or give the factory worker the things he made. Like the American system, it degenerated into a kind of plutocracy — where elites skimmed so much cream off the social cup, nothing was left for anyone else in the end.

The Soviet economy was struck by perpetual, chronic shortages of basics. And the American economy is at precisely that point now, too. Only the mechanisms are slightly different. In the Soviet case, there was a market failure driven by poor information, a failure of central planning. This “Soviet”, meaning this committee, would say that this town needs five hundred new coats, or cars, or fridges, when it actually needed six, ten, or twenty, and so on. In the American case, there’s a market failure of incompleteness — corporations have simply stopped providing many things to many people because they aren’t profitable any longer. But the failure’s result is just the same: chronic, persistent, devastating shortages.

Of what? After all, Americans think they live in a rich society. But scratch just beneath the surface — look just a little harder — and reality’s very different. What’s in shortage? What’s not, is the better question. How about all those basic medicines that capitalism stopped making, from antibiotics to painkillers? Why is that painkillers cost pennies in Europe — really — but dollars in America? Because capitalism doesn’t make the ones that aren’t profitable. Then there’s insulin — which is in such desperate shortage that Americans form caravans to Canada. Why in insulin in shortage? Because, just like painkillers, Big Pharma won’t produce the old, simple — and perfectly effective — version, but a newer, more expensive one, since that old one’s not very profitable.

What else is in shortage? How about healthcare itself? Then there’s money itself, which is in such scarcity that the average American dies in debt. There’s also dignity — think of all those desperate souls “crowfunding” — begging their neighbors for help — thanks to an emergency, illness, or minor stumble. Then there’s belonging — trust collapsed in America, thanks to all the shortage above. Why?

Because when a society is made to fight itself for the basics of life — when everyone must wake up, every day, and perform a kind of mortal combat, for things like healthcare, medicine, food, water — then of course people turn against each other, too. They see each other as adversaries and enemies and rivals for the basic resources needed to live. That is what capitalism has made them. But that isn’t all that they need to be — or even what human beings inherently are.

Yet when people are made to do endless, brutal battle with one another for the very things they are making — since they are not getting a fair share of those things to begin with — then of course a society will implode into a bitter frenzy of rage. Fascism will erupt. People will blame their poverty on those even more vulnerable than them. And that is precisely what happened in America. You can hardly blame rural communities for becoming Trumpism’s strongholds — they are the places exploited most by capitalism, by the wealthy capitalists in the cities, and their well-paid neo-bourgeoisie. It was perfectly predictable that they would turn to fascism first, most, and hardest — since they were the ones being exploited the most by the system, too.

When you understand that the American rich became super rich by taking more than 100% of the economy’s gains over the last decade — perhaps it’s no surprise the farmer who cultivates fresh food can’t have it. The latter is the human face of the cold statistic. The farmer walking the aisles of the dollar store to feed his family is the human face of America’s grotesquely Soviet collapse.

And yet it’s an old story — but one Americans just don’t seem to get. The moral of that story is very simple, and brutally clear. There are many things capitalism just can’t and won’t provide. Some of those things are healthcare, affordable education, functioning transportation systems, clean energy, and so on. When the system breaks down to the point that the people who create the basics of what a society needs — food, water, education, safety — can’t give them those things right back, then implosion is on the horizon. In a capitalist society, that implosion is fascist — because the hungry prole will blame his starving family on the migrant laborer, on the subhuman, whom he cannot exploit enough, as he is exploited in turn by those above him.

And that link between economic perversion and capitalism is the point. The American economy isn’t “booming” just because dummy economists see the stock market roaring. How broken is the American economy? It is a sign of a profoundly, devastatingly imploded economy that a system can’t give the farmers who make the food…fresh food. But it’s not the only such example of such perversion. I noted this on Twitter, and Sarah Kendzior quickly pointed out that people by the Great Lakes are the ones without potable drinking water. She’s right, of course. We could go on almost endlessly, in fact.

What about the doctor who’s “denied coverage” for that “pre-existing condition”? Or the teacher who struggles to educate her kids, because she’s so busy buying stuff for the class at her underfunded school? How about the adjunct professor who doesn’t even make enough to buy books to teach from? Or how about the average person who puts their money in a bank account…but never sees a penny of all those bailout trillions?

The American economy is full of economic perversity now — exploitation to such an extreme degree, that it’s boggles the mind. A system so broken that it’s become fully Soviet, unable to supply the very things that people make to those making them, because those things are effectively reserved for the rich, super rich, ultra rich, or super ultra mega rich. Yet those things aren’t just idle luxuries, like designer watches. Just as in the Soviet system, they are basic, everyday necessities. Medicine. Water. Food. Safety. The stuff of life itself.

It’s no surprise, then, that just as during Soviet implosion, American life expectancy is plummeting, right along with happiness, trust, and faith in the future. If you live in a society where decent food, medicine, and water have become luxuries — what kind of society are you really living in? A collapsed one. But I don’t mean that in some kind of poetic way. I mean it in a literal one. One where democracy seems to have collapsed into fascism, as the economy turned into a kind of trap, where everyone must find someone to prey on, or become the prey themselves.

Umair

November 2019