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Author’s note:

Every map is a compromise between scope and resolution – the larger the
area documented, the less you can know about the places that make up
that area. A high resolution makes details and differences visible, but
loses the broader context.

I wrote this article as a map of sorts. It serves as an overview of the
current food, energy, and financial crises, with attention to how those
crises reflect working class struggles. The people and places that make
up those abstractions are largely absent from view. The reader will find
here the great clanging gears of production, circulation and the
collective metabolism and momentum of the working class. While I hope
that such a view from above is of use for plotting a course on the
varied and uneven ground that we all live on, those missing details are
the most important things of all. I alone am responsible for any errors
that follow.

May 18th, 2008

We are living in a whirlwind. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz looking
out the window in the midst of a tornado, we see daily economic life
take on unfamiliar and bizarre forms, transforming the mundane into the
unknown and alarming. Like Dorothy’s schoolteacher transformed into a
witch, monstrous things now spin around us – a world in which rice needs
armed guards, money vanishes overnight only to return the next morning
on a Red-Eye from Dubai shrunk by half, cars eat food, people eat oil,
and no one ever gets full. And it all seems to be happening so fast and
from one hundred places at once. To paraphrase Marx, rather than melting
into air, all that was apparently solid has now been flung up into the
air, and we are all along for the ride.

This journal isn’t alone in referring to these times as a whirlwind. The
World Food Programme (WFP) writes that the world faces “a perfect storm”
and a “silent tsunami” of hunger[1]. The president of El Salvador says:
“This scandalous storm might become a hurricane that could upset not
only our economies but also the stability of our countries [2].” In
Vietnam, the newspapers write about the struggles of living in a ‘price
storm.’

Meanwhile, oil companies and agribusiness are making huge profits. In
the first quarter of 2008 alone, Shell had a profit of $9.08 billion (a
25% increase), and BP had a $7.62 billion profit (up by 63%)[3]. Between
2006 and 2007 profits were up for others as well: Cargill $2.3 billion
(up 36%)[4]; ADM $2.2 billion (up 67%); ConAgra $764 million (up 30%);
Bunge $738 million (up 49%). In 2006, among countries with capital
surpluses, ‘petrodollar’ foreign investments made up about a third of
net global capital outflows, and the oil money in the Persian Gulf
countries’ foreign investment holdings equaled $2 trillion.[5]

While these storms have been building for the past several years– and in
the past several months especially– now everything seems to be
accelerating. Images of nodding well-heads and gas flares transform into
corn fields and grain silos, long bread lines in Cairo blur with the
crowded floor of the Chicago Mercantile or New York Stock Exchange. A
skyrocketing trend line could just as easily be the rate of inflation in
China, the number of home foreclosures in Arizona, the price of rice in
Bangkok, or the barrel of oil that seems to cast its shadow over them all.

The Food/Energy/Work Crisis

A crisis is never just a matter of catastrophes and the responses that
attempt to bring them to a halt and fix the damage. Crisis is also a
form of planning or strategy. That’s doesn’t imply conspiracies or
cabals pulling the strings, nor does it diminish the role of droughts,
crop failures, real shortages of oil relative to demand, world
population growth, or other factors in the contemporary crises. Crisis
is strategic not because it’s manufactured. It is strategic because the
way crisis arises and how crises are managed– which solutions are chosen
and which ones are passed by– aren’t obvious or inevitable, but rather
reflect the power and interests of the social, economic, and political
forces involved.

We live in a world deeply marked by the historical and geographical
struggles of the working class for control over their labor and the
conditions of that labor. Capital is a political-economic system that
derives profit from the unpaid labor of the working class. The
contemporary financial, food, and energy crises are all components of
the struggle between the working class and capital.

Food and energy comprise a large part of both the costs of producing
labor-power (the cost of living and bringing up new workers) and of most
other kinds of production. This can be either indirectly (through wages
for food) or in the case of energy, both through wages and directly at
the point of production by replacing labor. When the prices of energy
and food increase more rapidly than wages and other compensation, real
wages decline and the overall rate of exploitation by capital increases
(even while agribusiness and energy corporations make windfalls and
other businesses or sectors suffer difficulties and losses).

Food crisis and energy crisis are further interlinked because the price
of food is in large part the price of energy. The cost of tractors,
rototillers, water pumps, fertilizers, pesticides, and transport costs
are in large part a reflection of the cost of oil. Now with the
development of bio–fuels, the circle is completed – energy can be
conjured out of food as easily as food from energy, linking food and
energy prices even further, making the price of oil that much more of a
global lever commanding the cost of living.

Food and energy hikes are the compulsion of work and/or the direct
looting of workers’ accumulated wealth by capital. Food and energy
prices along with financial implosion, are driving wages for a great
many people below the costs of social reproduction (the cost of
producing more labor-power) – meaning the depletion of workers’
accumulated wealth by capital. Food riots, energy strikes,boycotts,
demands for subsidies and wage increases, as well as the autonomous
production and distribution of energy, food, and credit are forms of
worker refusal of this forced labor and/or pillaging. What is at stake
is not just food or energy or credit as such, but also the relative
share by workers and capital of the total value of social production.

All of these crises are work crises because the commodities in crisis
are the raw materials for making labor-power. Even though the precise
mechanism of exploitation is neither the stretch-out nor speed-up of
work, it’s still more work for less (or no) pay, under pain of
starvation or exposure.

That is why I refer to the overall contemporary situation as the
food/energy/work crisis, or simply The Whirlwind – a term that’s not
only simpler, but also captures the manner in which these simultaneous
crises have fused together into something larger which throws all before
it into confusion. At heart, the Whirlwind is an escalation of the
ongoing compulsion of work and a counter-escalation of working class
refusal of work. The Whirlwind is born as much out of capital’s own
precarious situation as its power and strength.

Fictitious capital and primitive accumulation

Why is this happening here and now? What does a crisis in financial
markets have to do with the price of food and energy? Said differently,
how is the triple crises related to each other – if there is a strategy
behind all this, what is it?

The answer, in brief, can be summed up by just two phrases: fictitious
capital and primitive accumulation. Fictitious capital refers to
financial capital: securities, bonds, stocks, debts, futures,
derivatives, and so on. What makes it ‘fictitious’ is that its value is
based on claims to profits that do not yet exist and may never exist in
the future. Value is detached from the real world of labor value and
production into a netherworld populated by electrons, exchange rates,
pork bellies inside living hogs, and not yet sprouted coffee beans. What
makes fictitious or financial capital important in modern capitalism is
its ability to spread risks throughout time and space, to balance out
rates of return, and to push into the future or elsewhere on the planet
any shortfall of profits. However, this is also its problem. The paper
value of fictitious capital can in theory reach infinitely high levels
based on its own occult rules, bearing no relation to actual production.
However, the realization of those profits still requires real
commodities to exchange for those paper promises. Accumulating those
commodities necessarily means a fight with the working class over its
relative share in the total social product. Fictitious capital
generalizes not just the accumulation process but also class struggle.

Since the 1970s the finance industry has introduced new forms of
fictitious capital: hedge funds, credit default swaps, sub-prime
mortgages, liquidity puts, collateralized debt obligations, and so on.
These new kinds of securities deliver high returns, but they also bring
unpredictable risks. Indeed, they have become so complex that the heads
of the banks selling and buying them apparently don’t know what they
are, never mind how they work.[6] These new kinds of financial
instruments reflect the ongoing ‘financialization’ of capital – the
ever-greater gulf between ballooning investment in fictitious capital
and stagnating real long-term economic growth.[7] The devaluation of all
this funny money has been long in coming, and the current devaluation is
spreading from the paper values held by the mortgage lenders to their
banking partners, now to major international investment houses like Bear
Sterns, whose assets evaporate overnight so that the stability of the
entire global financial system has come into question.

Accomplishing devaluation is neither a technical matter of clearing away
bad debts, nor a private affair of capital. It is political and it is
another aspect of class struggle. Nobody wants their money included
among the many billions of disappearing dollars, but those losses have
to be forced onto someone, somewhere, eventually. Just because the
financial crisis is capital’s problem doesn’t mean that capital is going
to pay for it if it can find somebody else – the working class – to foot
the bill.

The food and energy crises are key ways capital is trying to displace
the costs of devaluation onto the working class. (Foreclosures, the
manipulation of interest rates, and the outright bailout of banks with
public money are other important measures). The transfer of workers’
wealth through energy and food costs to the energy sector is then
conveyed in a concentrated form to save (by buying up) the banks in
crisis. That is where primitive accumulation meets fictitious capital.

Primitive, or original accumulation, otherwise known as “accumulation by
dispossession,” are just fancy ways to describe getting something of
value from somebody without paying – in other words, robbery or looting.
While the name harkens back to the dawn of capitalism (Marx concluded
Volume 1 of Capital explaining the origins of capitalism this way),
primitive accumulation is alive and well and in fact grows in proportion
with the expansion of the most modern forms of finance capital and
high-tech industry. Both Rosa Luxemburg, in her The Accumulation of
Capital (1913), and David Harvey in his recent works (The New
Imperialism and A Brief History of Neoliberalism) explain why these
seeming opposites develop interdependently.[8] Essentially, primitive
accumulation draws new labor-power and loot into capital so as to
counteract the growing divide of real productivity (specifically
capital’s falling share of it under conditions of working class
struggle) from fictitious capital’s ever-expanding claims on that
productivity – it’s the ‘off the books’ income that keeps the balance
sheet of capital out of the red.

By transferring wealth from billions of workers into the energy and food
sectors, the price hikes we’re seeing are the primitive accumulation of
the surpluses necessary to bail out ailing financial institutions so as
to avoid larger, more destructive, devaluation. It is looting because
it’s not about imposing longer hours or greater productivity (although
it certainly can cause that), as much as it is about imposing a tribute
we all have to pay if we want to stay alive. Once looted, the money
enters a circuit of exchange that fairly quickly gets it to the
financial institutions that are in crisis, keeping them solvent.

Think about it like this: You pay $40 at the gas station to get back and
forth from work; so do 100 million other people each week in the U.S.
Those petrodollars pile up in a bank in the United Arab Emirates. Then
they return to bail out New York investment banks stuck with bad loans
to the mortgage companies, who are foreclosing the houses of the people
buying the gas to start the circuit.

However, primitive accumulation by the food and energy sectors does more
than prop up fictitious capital. It is also a means of gathering the
money necessary for a new round of investment. While the money is drawn
from every pore of society, often in tiny quantities, it’s being
reinvested at the opposite end of the spectrum in highly
capital-intensive energy even riskier forms of fictitious capital, like
the commodities market. Also, the further formation of extremely high
organic composition energy capital (meaning almost all investment is in
plant and equipment and a relatively miniscule amount in labor)
reinforces capitalist command over energy to impose more ‘sweating’ of
workers.

Investments in commodities have tripled since 2001 and the number of
contracts has more than quadrupled in the same time.[9] Speculation on
commodities is driving oil and grain prices up (some estimates are of
10-20%), making for a particularly perverse outcome – the more primitive
accumulation by price increases, the more money for speculation, and the
more speculation, the higher the price increases. Here we see the
pinnacle of the Whirlwind’s logic - transforming food into fictitious
capital. We saw this first in the 2007 Mexican ‘tortilla crisis.’ This
involved several factors.

Through the North American Free Tree Agreement (NAFTA) Mexico opened
itself to unlimited imports of maize, its staple food.[10] There has
also been massive consolidation in the grain trading, tortilla
manufacture, and grocery retail sector. The apparent manipulation of the
market and a complacent or complicit government, caused corn prices to
jump 50% in three months even though harvests were good and
international prices stable.[11] This year, a rice crisis has developed
bearing many of the same marks, but affecting many times more people.

Class struggle and the Whirlwind

Leaving matters here would have capital leaping from strength to
strength across the globe while humanity suffers in silence or only
makes ‘local,’ ‘particularist’ (and thus presumably futile) resistance
to these crises. This would be no different than radicals who alternate
between asserting the inexorable, evil genius of capitalist strategy and
appealing to a future socialist state to feed us. [12] Absent from such
analysis is a fundamental reality: the ubiquity and potency of
autonomous working class struggles, acting as not only resistance to
capitalist planning, but as the prime driver of history (including those
capitalist plans themselves). This is as true now as ever before.

The Whirlwind is a sign not of capital’s unparalleled power, but the
fact that it is in deep trouble. The entire structure of fictitious
capital may finally be poised for a general, and thus catastrophic,
devaluation. In the U.S. alone, public and private debt has increased
seven-fold in the past quarter century and is now more than three times
larger than the annual GDP.[12]

It is not strength but desperation that compels the Whirlwind. Energy
crisis, and even more so food crisis, is a highly dangerous strategy of
accumulation because it directly challenges people’s living standards
(or their ability to live at all). The global coordination of energy and
food prices and their circulation through almost every corner store, gas
station, and kitchen on earth, serves to circulate class struggle,
leading to the rapid recomposition of global working class struggles
around those food and energy cost spikes.

The class composition of the working class means its diversity
(including the division of labor, waged and unwaged workers,
nationality, gender, age, sexuality, legality, and other kinds of
difference) and the degree of unity and class power it is capable of
exercising vis a vis capital. What they have in common is not the work
they do, but that they work and struggle against capital’s appropriation
of that work. To say the global working class is recomposing itself
inside the Whirlwind doesn’t mean everyone is receiving orders from a
vanguard party or following a common program – quite the opposite. It
means that class struggles, in their varied and multiple forms, are
taking on a more unified aspect (again, driven largely by the crisis
itself) that translates into greater working class power.

Refusals of price increases, austerity and work are widespread, often
successful, and extremely disruptive of the deployment of the
food/energy/work crisis. They are spreading as rapidly and as widely as
the crisis and increasingly their disparate elements are coming into
awareness of each other.

All over the world controls upon inflation are prescribed by Central
Banks, Prime Ministers and so on as the means of surviving the
Whirlwind. And on the face of it, controlling inflation is a good thing
– after all, rising costs are at the heart of the problem. Yet this term
has two diametrically opposed meanings, each reflecting one side of the
dialectic of class struggle. For inflation means the erosion of real
value – devaluation. And avoiding devaluation means different things to
different classes. For workers, controlling inflation means reducing the
cost of living or otherwise running up wages to keep pace with costs.
For capital, fighting inflation means imposing austerity in wages and
standards of living. Controlling inflation for capital means keeping the
working class from countering the ‘price storm’ by taking back from
capital at the job what is taken from it at the grocery or gas station.
Because if the working class is capable of throwing inflation back upon
capital with wage increases or other forms of refusal of the cost
increases, it threatens to strangle the flow of fresh blood into an
already-anemic fictitious capital.

Thus the appeals for controls on inflation by officials by officials
have a certain dualistic quality – crocodile tears in abundance for the
poor, and a warning against other workers who want ‘too much,’ or are
‘unreasonable.’ An EU official describing the toll that inflation has
had on the poor and the measures to be taken to address the problems
explained how he “cautioned against wage settlements that incorporate
these price rises into pay scales” in most of the EU countries.[13] The
objective of the managers is to spread the pain around. Austerity and
the struggle against it circulate- In both cases, the objective is
‘fighting inflation.’

These are the abstract conditions upon which the present crises stand.
Capital has conjured up the Whirlwind to save itself by imposing crisis
on the global working class. We lack ruby slippers to whisk us back to
before it carried us aloft, so we are just going to have to ride it out.
But if capital has flung the house of humanity up into the sky, humanity
also possesses the power to land that house squarely on capital’s head.

Historical-geographical comparison of working class struggles in the
Whirlwind

In many ways, we’ve been here before – specifically, in the energy
crisis of 1973-1981, although the causal factors aren’t the same. The
main impetus of the last energy crisis was neither an Arab oil embargo
nor inherent ‘Limits to Growth.’ Rather, working class wage, welfare,
and development offensives in the prior decade dried up profits and
threatened capitalist control of production. Energy crisis, then as now,
is a means of ‘recycling’ value from wages back into capital through
higher prices, but was deployed in the 1970s oil shocks in a very
different context. Then, energy prices acted to undermine centers of
worker militancy in the assembly-line industries and inner cities (for
example, the deindustrialization of the ‘Rust Belt’ and Gerald Ford’s
‘Drop Dead’ to the New York City fiscal crisis). The second result was
to concentrate capital into higher organic composition sectors
(especially energy and information technology), seeking to counter the
wage offensive and restore profits by re-centering accumulation on
industries requiring relatively little labor while drawing wealth from
every other part of society.

In a 2008 retrospective on U.S. wages, the New York Times laid it all
out for us:
The slowdown began in the 1970s, with an oil shock that raised the cost
of everyday living. The technological revolution and the rise of global
trade followed, reducing the bargaining power of a large section of the
work force. In recent years, the cost of health care has aggravated the
problem, by taking a huge bite out of most workers’ paychecks.

Real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the
late ’70s. It has risen less than 25 percent in the three decades since.[15]

The median real wage of American workers surged in the 1960s boom and
continued to increase during the energy crisis years. However, during
the 2000-2007 ‘Bush boom’ preceding the Whirlwind, median U.S. wages
actually fell in terms of real value. Stagnant wages make American
workers more vulnerable to food and energy cost increases: Food stamp
use in the U.S. is at the highest rate in over a decade and food price
increases, already double their long-term average, are soon expected to
approach the huge increases of the 1970s, 7-9% per year.[14]

That’s not to say that American workers are doing nothing. Consider the
actions of undocumented workers, independent truck drivers, and
dockworkers. The mobilizations of March, April and May 2006 manifested
the recomposition of one of the largest blocs within the American
working class, essentially nullifying the most extreme proposals for
criminalizing some 14 million workers. One element of the Great Strike
of 2006 was the shutdown of the Los Angeles port on May 1st by
short-haul ‘trocqueros’ over soaring diesel prices, flat wages and
immigration raids. The strike was a continuation of trocquero wildcats
in the two previous years at major ports (in 2007 the Port of Los
Angeles decided to declare May 1st a holiday). [15]

This militancy is not confined to trocqueros. Transport sector workers
are among the most visible in the U.S. in facing the Whirlwind. This
includes those few in highly strategic workplaces, such as the West
Coast dockworkers’ union (ILWU) that shut down all Pacific Coast ports
for May Day 2008 and the far more diffuse, but numerous, independent
long-haul 18-wheeler truckers.

Among American workers, truckers are perhaps the most heavily impacted
by the energy crisis, bearing huge losses because their clients aren’t
paying enough for them to recoup their expenses (another form of
primitive accumulation). On April Fool’s Day 2008, truckers started
using their trucks as a diesel-powered Critical Mass on the nation’s
freeways, snarling traffic in several cities and disrupting business at
ports by driving slow and blocking lanes.[19] In April, there were
slow-downs at the ports of Tampa and Savannah, Georgia, rallies at state
capitols, and a national rally in Washington that included not just
long-haul rigs, but also dump truck drivers from DC.[20] Word is
spreading through websites, CB radio, and public gatherings, like those
that Truckers and Citizens United is holding at truck stops around the
country.[21] Truckers’ tactics, using their means of production and the
public highways to disrupt circulation of goods are both highly
disruptive and hard to counter.

The truckers’ leaders express both an understanding of working class
autonomy – “If all the truckers decide to shut this country down,
there’s going to be nothing they can do about it” and their capacity to
circulate the refusal of energy price hikes throughout the working class
– “It’s about everybody–the homeowners, the construction workers, the
elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not the
action of the truck drivers, but of the people.”[22] The organization
Truckers and Citizens United is an interesting mix of nationalist
(meeting with politicians, boycotting Middle East oil) and radical
responses (organizing a May Day drive-through of Manhattan with the IWW)
to the energy crisis. According to Truckers and Citizens United, the
truckers’ demands include, in addition to minimum wages sufficient to
cover their costs:

- Immediate stoppage to the subsidies being given to big oil.
- A reduction in tax credits being given to big business.
- No selling out of Interstates to foreign countries like the Indiana
toll road.
- Stop the NAFTA Super Highway project…which will destroy the quality of
this great nation.

Somebody must be getting nervous about the trajectory of all this
because the permit for a truckers’ NYC May Day rally was cancelled
shortly before the action was to take place. Both the Democratic and
Republican Parties have been largely absent in mediating (and thus
containing), these ‘high-entropy’ transport workers. Similar to the
anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s, the resistance of specific
populations to energy price hikes has the potential to circulate
throughout the working class. The concern here is not so much the
elitism of the core group but the possibility that this anger and
momentum will be turned away from anti-capitalist tendencies towards
bashing Arabs and OPEC. Truckers have a very different class composition
than the No Nukes movement, which was composed largely of rural New
Englanders, particularly ex-urban intellectuals. In the No Nukes case,
its principal weakness was the lack of appeal to broader, working class
refusals of energy price hikes, instead opting for visions of solar
employment and labor-intensive farm work.[24] Appealing to the working
class isn’t a question for the truckers so much as the course that their
analysis and actions will take.

As much as these transportation workers represent a narrow but sharp
edge of the American working class, wage pressures in the U.S. are not
yet countering the energy, food, or financial crises. One part of the
world where such wage struggles do seem to be strongly implicated in the
Whirlwind is East Asia.

East Asia (specifically China), as well as parts of Southeast and South
Asia became the ‘Workshop of the World’ in the period of capitalist
expansion between the energy crisis of the1970s and the present crisis.
Accumulation centered on the circuit between U.S. fictitious capital and
East Asian manufacturing exports. Foundations of this trans-Pacific
circuit included cheap food and cheap energy, thereby reducing the costs
of industrial production and the reproduction of labor-power. As well,
an expensive U.S. dollar fueled a consumption boom and ballooning debt
in the U.S.; this debt was bought up by those same East Asian
manufacturing states that supplied the exports, completing the circuit.

U.S. debt financed new highways, hotels, and industrial parks in Asia,
while the primitive accumulation of land, labor, and resources
discounted the cost of reproducing laborers and the means of production.
In recent decades, 120 million Chinese people have moved from the
countryside to join the floating population of industrial workers. This
is due to a widening of income inequality between city and country, as
well as the combined burdens of low prices, high taxes and land seizure
faced by farmers.[25] Just a few years ago, it seemed this circuit could
go on forever, but then the foundations of the circuit vanished: the
dollar fell, oil and food prices shot up, and financial capital went
into retreat.

It was then that we started to hear about the Chinese ‘labor
shortage.’[26] This might seem contradictory: a labor shortage in the
world’s most populous country, with millions of people pouring off of
farms and out of downsized state enterprises every year. Business Week
translated the enigma, writing candidly that the problem is “managers
can no longer simply provide eight-to-a-room dorms and expect laborers
to toil 12 hours a day, seven days a week.” Labor shortage, decoded, is
a weakening of capitalist command over the labor force. It is the
refusal of Chinese workers to bear the dispossession and
non-reproductive wages that drive migration to the cities and coastal
provinces, as well as the subsistence wages, barracks housing, and poor
food that await them once they arrive.

One factor of this is the resistance by farmers and workers to what
might be called ‘primitive accumulation with Chinese characteristics ’
[27] – unpaid wages, land seizures, sacking of state-owned enterprise
workers through privatization, police harassment of informal-sector
workers, and recent transport cost increases. The Chinese government
itself was willing to estimate that there were 74,000 ‘mass incidents’
in 2004, involving everything from petitions to riots and arson. These
‘incidents’ involved 3.5 million people, a four-fold increase from a
decade before.[29] In order to counter these refusals and rebellions,
new subsidies and tax relief have been extended to farmers and poor
rural workers. This has had the effect of slowing down rural to urban
migration. This shrinking reserve army of new laborers for industry
makes it that much harder to check the widespread (and growing) wage
struggles of workers.

The rapid escalation of oil and grain prices has a double effect on wage
struggles in China: On one hand, the cost of living eats into
working-class buying power, eroding real wages; on the other hand,
rising costs serve to accelerate the wage push by workers. Workers go on
wildcat strikes demanding higher pay and lower living expenses while
employers and the State labor union negotiate wage increases. These
increases are usually lower than workers’ demands, or come attached to
employer plans for increasing productivity or cutting expenses on food
or other benefits, thus setting off new rounds of struggle.

Chinese workers face a big obstacle to generalizing their struggles. The
autonomous organization of workers generally, and organizing between
enterprises particularly has resulted in repression by the police.[30]
Given the rapid increase in food and energy prices, the wage increases
workers are winning have only allowed them to tread water against the
rising cost of living. Despite these problems, the scale of autonomous
wage struggles in East Asia can be seen indirectly. For their employers,
these small scale actions compound into an attack on their profit
margins waged at a nation-wide scale. Employers have also been unable to
translate rising wages into productivity increases to recover their
profitability,[31] leading the multinationals to seek even lower wages
in inland China, Vietnam or Indonesia.

However defensive and isolated in their specific instances these
struggles may be, their collective effect has been to drive the global
circulation of inflation through the rising price of Asian manufacturing
exports. It’s yet to be seen to what degree capital or the working class
will bear these costs- currently, they’re being tossed between
subcontractors in China, parent companies in South Korea or Japan,
retailers in the U.S. or Europe, and all the people who work or shop at
these places. Wherever this inflationary hot-potato finally lands,
industrial workers in China and the other export-oriented ‘Tiger
economies’ are pushing energy and food costs partly off their own backs
through their wildcat wage struggles.[32]

But even as capital runs off to Vietnam, it’s finding an equally hostile
reception to sub-survival wages. Waves of wildcat strikes in footwear,
textiles, seafood processing, shipbuilding, and toys have followed
manufacturers seeking low labor costs and to offset their dependence on
China. In response to a strike wave in 2007 and rising inflation, the
Vietnamese government raised the minimum wage by 12% overall and of 25%
in the foreign-owned, export-oriented sector.

Yet this has not stopped the wage pressures and wildcats, which have
grown in size and organization in 2008. Just before the Tet holiday in
January, workers launched a new round of strikes from the North near Hai
Phong to the urban periphery of Ho Chi Minh City. They sought to force
the implementation of the new wage tables on resistant bosses and to
push up the wages of older, more skilled employees who didn’t benefit
from the minimum wage increases. Vietnamese workers also struck against
insufficient and disgusting food in the factory cafeterias and against
employer plans to work them on the day before Tet, when people have
traditionally left for their family homes in the countryside. In March,
workers at a Nike shoe factory in Long An province near Saigon (where
the January strike wave was particularly intense) struck for a 22% wage
hike, which the State and the factory negotiated down to 10%. When
workers tried to return to work, those that didn’t accept this dilution
of their demands and fought with security guards and other workers,
forcing the factory to close again.[33]

One of the debates swirling through the Whirlwind is the role that
rising prosperity in the Global South has played in absorbing global
food surpluses. The boundaries of this debate are generally that it’s
either the fault of fat Americans, or of the Indians and Chinese that
want to be like them. A bit of history is useful here. Let’s remember
the big grain deal that prefigured the last food/energy crisis – the
wheat sales from the U.S. to the USSR in 1972. The Russian grain sales
were a geopolitical strategy of the U.S. government to negotiate with
Russia and China, but more importantly for this discussion, they were a
bid by the Soviet government to increase the quality of food for
industrial workers without further exploitation of Eastern Bloc farmers,
both of whom were particularly volatile after decades of ‘socialist
primitive accumulation.’[34] Rising real wages, improved diets, and food
imports in India and China in recent years have many causes to be sure,
but those causes include the class struggles of farmers (refusing to
sell products for nothing) and industrial workers (demanding higher
wages and better food), as sketched out in the previous pages about East
Asia.

At the bottom of the global accumulation pyramid are the large numbers
of unwaged or precariously waged workers in Middle East, Africa,
Southeast and South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. For these
people, food prices have life-and-death implications, especially since
so many have moved from the countryside to urban areas following earlier
waves of primitive accumulation. This not only includes the formal era
of imperialism from the 1880s to 1960s but the combined effects of the
debt crisis, the collapse in commodity prices, and IMF structural
adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s that separated millions of
people from means of subsistence like land, state employment, and
natural resource revenues.[35]

Indeed the current moment is almost a repeat of the late 1980’s anti-IMF
intifada. Drawing from the experience of the Palestinian uprising, riots
against IMF policies spread far and wide, to Algeria, Venezuela, Jordan,
and elsewhere, demanding the end of austerity measures. Austerity had
reduced real wages significantly while billions of dollars in public
funds went to servicing foreign debt. There is no doubt that the
experience of those earlier struggles is a resource guiding current
situations. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of
the UN[37] ), the proletariat of 37 countries are in revolt against
rising food prices. Many of these countries are chief allies of the U.S.
Egypt, for example, is the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid
in the world. Food imports and subsidized bread are, apart from the
army, one of the few tools available to the Mubarak government to keep
power. In Haiti, which has drawn the most attention, food riots are
destabilizing a regime that was installed by a U.S.-engineered coup in
2004 against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Iraq, currently the most
important country to U.S. foreign policy, is one of six countries facing
the most severe food crisis according to the FAO. Iraq was first a major
importer of U.S. grain during the Iran-Iraq war. In following years, it
was subjected to twelve years of hunger through sanctions that killed
perhaps 600,000-1 million people. Five years after the U.S. invasion,
the food situation in Iraq is actually markedly worse than before 2003.
and in the past year the subsidized food available to Iraqis was cut in
half.[38]

State responses to the explosions caused by food price hikes often takes
the form of urban war, whether by local and national police or armies in
any of thirty countries, UN Blue helmets in Port-au-Prince or the U.S.
Army in Sadr City. Yet the struggles circulate as fast as prices rise
through telecommunications and mass media. Thus the efforts at
containing the circulation of images, ideas, experiences, as evidenced
by actions such as the raids on TV stations in Senegal reporting on food
riots.[39]

Where all this is heading isn’t clear. Capital is not above using famine
to compel work. This was the case in the 1970s in the Sahel, the Horn of
Africa, Bangladesh and Chile,[40] where “food for work” meant the
driving down of wages to the absolute minimum and associated seizure of
resources and land. Yet that may not be the fate of a great many places.
In some countries, the scale and power of mobilizations have compelled
governments to reduce the price of food, largely by entering into more
debt. Such measures are leading to new crises elsewhere in the economy
while raising questions as to who will get the subsidies and who will
pay for them.

In the case of Vietnam, the national government has frozen the price of
fuel for the next six months and is limiting rice exports, as well as
propping up their currency’s value. But these efforts are leading to a
severe shortage of credit and the inability of businesses to convert
U.S. dollars into Vietnamese money. This leads to farmers not receiving
payment for their produce and being unable to purchase fertilizer and
seeds except through moneylenders who charge triple the normal interest
rates. This has the potential to cascade into a severe crisis for the
entire export-oriented agriculture and aquaculture sector of the country.

In Argentina, cattle ranching, dairy, and wheat production have largely
been pushed aside to make way for the planting of soybeans for export.
In order to deal with the response of the urban population to the food
and energy crises, the government sought to increase the tax on soy
exports, one of the only prosperous economic sectors in the country.
Farmers, who find in soy the last refuge of production, see the money
from this tax going to Buenos Aires and not to their rural provinces.
Thus farmers blockaded the highways, preventing the transport of food to
the capital city for a month in February-March 2008. While soy
production is largely for the profit of domestic oligarchs and
international agribusinesses [41], the small farmers that remain see the
tax as a last straw that could break their ability to survive.[42]

The blockading of national capitals over food and energy prices is not
restricted to Argentina. In a modern version of Mao’s encirclement of
the cities, the tactic of immobilization is being deployed in Nicaragua,
where transportation workers are waging a thirty-day strike demanding
reduced and stabilized fuel prices. Inside Managua, road blockades have
been set up to stop traffic while taxis have to drive around with their
signs obscured.[43] Will these struggles devolve into fights between
rural or transport workers and urban workers dependent? Will workers’
struggles in nations where ‘Left’ governments hold power act to
strengthen those reformist regimes, or undermine them?

The elements of working class counter-offensive are also coming into
place. In South Africa, the recent wave of protests over the inadequate
(or nonexistent) delivery of housing, water, and electricity to shack
settlements [44] is articulated through long-standing movements around
privatization, basic services, and the realization of the economic
objectives of the ANC Freedom Charter and the anti-Apartheid
struggle.[45] The international farmer’s organization, Via Campesina,
has developed the doctrine of food sovereignty over the past decade,
emphasizing the rebuilding of domestic food production, greater access
to land and inputs for farmers, fair food prices for the producer and
consumer, gender equality in agriculture, and regulation of the
international agricultural trade. These principles are being applied
widely: from American food banks, family farmers and environmentalists
seeking to change the U.S. Farm Bill to the Landless Workers’ Movement
in Brazil, who reject the Workers’ Party government’s plan to make
Brazil an agro-fuels superpower, instead wanting to fulfill the dream of
a Brazil in which no one is hungry. Thus, new languages, tactics,
experiences, all flow out of the chaos of the Whirlwind.

If, dear reader, you can permit yourself to close your eyes, and imagine
the recomposition of the global working class within the eddies of the
swirling Whirlwind, you might find a North American trucker (either the
redneck or trocquero variety), meeting up with a factory worker from Ho
Chi Minh City sharing a cup of tea with an Egyptian street vendor. While
none of the three lack brains, courage, or a heart, each of their
struggles lacks something that the others can contribute to. In their
encounter within the circuits of the crisis, they possess the power to
transform themselves, and in so doing, transform our world.[46]

__________________________________________________________

1. WFP says high food prices are a silent tsunami, affecting every
continent. World Food Programme News – Press Release, April 22nd, 2008.
Available at: http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2820; Julian
Borger. Feed The World? We Are Fighting a Losing Battle, UN Admits. The
Guardian, (UK) February 26, 2008.

2. Marc Lacey. “Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger.” New
York Times, April 18th, 2008.

3. Julia Werdigier. “Record Profits Reported for BP and Shell.” New York
Times, April 30th, 2008.

4. GRAIN. Making a killing from hunger. April 28th, 2008. Available at:
http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=39

5. Steven Weisman. “Oil Producers See the World and Buy It Up.” New York
Times, November 28, 2007.

6. David Leonhardt. Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club. New York
Times, March 19th, 2008.

7. Harry Shutt (1998) The trouble with capitalism: An enquiry into the
causes of global economic failure. London: Zed Books.

8. Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital is online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/index.htm.

9. Henriques, Diana. Commodities: Latest Boom, Plentiful Risk. New York
Times, March 20th, 2008.

10.Even though there is an corn import quota in NAFTA, the Mexican
government has allowed about twice the minimum to be imported since 1994.)

11.Ana de Ita. Fourteen Years of NAFTA and the Tortilla Crisis. Americas
Program and Center for International Policy, January 10, 2008. Available
at: http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4879

12. For an example of this sort of analysis, see Fred Magdoff, The world
food crisis: Sources and solutions. Monthly Review, April 2008.
Available at: http://www.monthlyreview.org/080501magdoff.php

13. See Kevin Phillips, Democracy Now!, May 6th, 2008. Available at:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/6/bad_money_reckless_finance_failed_politics

14. Carter Dougherty, Europeans see inflation penalizing the poorest.
New York Times, April 29th, 2008.

15. David Leonhardt, “For Many, a Boom that Wasn’t.” New York Times,
April 9, 2008.

16. Robert Gavin. Food prices surging at highest level since 1990 pose
major risk to consumer confidence. Boston Globe, March 10th, 2008.

17. Chris Kutalik. As Immigrants Strike, Truckers Shut Down Nation’s
Largest Port on May Day.
Counterpunch. June 2nd, 2006. Available at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/kutalik06022006.html

18. Barbara Ehrenreich. Truckers Hit the Brakes. The Nation, April 8th,
2008.

19. Clarissa Kell-Holland. Demands for action on fuel prices gain
momentum. Land Line Magazine, April 7th, 2008. Available at:
http://www.landlinemag.com/todays_news/Daily/2008/Apr08/040708/040708-01.htm;

20. Barbara Ehrenreich. Truckers Take Their Case to the Capitol. The
Nation, April 29th, 2008.

21. You can read about Truckers and Citizens United at:
http://truckersandcitizensunited.theamericandriver.com/

22. Both quotes from Ehrenreich, April 8th, 2008.

23. Frederick Schaffner. Truckers and citizens united – “goals.”
Available at: http://www.theamericandriver.com/files/wp/long_term_goals.html

24. See Midnight Notes Collective, (1979) Strange Victories, available
at : http://www.midnightnotes.org/pdfstrangvic0.pdf and (1980) No Future
Notes: the Work/Energy Crisis & The Anti-Nuclear movement, available at
: http://www.midnightnotes.org/workenergynofuture.html

25. Ching Kwan Lee and Mark Selden. China’s Durable Inequality: Legacies
of Revolution and Pitfalls of Reform. Japan Focus, January 24th, 2007.
Available at: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/2227

26. David Barboza. Shortage of cheap labor in China. International
Herald Tribune, April 3rd, 2006.

27. Dexter Roberts. How Rising Wages Are Changing The Game In China.
Business Week, March 27th, 2006.

28. A play on the Chinese government’s notion of ‘Socialism with Chinese
characteristics’ – An ideological term that in reality means the
adoption of the most savage aspects of capitalist economics alongside
the Communist Party’s retention of authoritarian political power.

29. 20,000 farmers and workers riot in China. Libcom.org March 12th,
2007. Available at:
http://libcom.org/news/20-000-farmer-workers-riot-china-12032007

30. Stephen Philion and Chi Hua. A Response to Robert Weil’s “Conditions
of the Working Classes in China.” March 20th, 2007. Available at:
http://stephenphilion.efoliomn2.com/

31. Dexter Roberts. How Rising Wages Are Changing The Game In China.
Business Week, March 27th, 2006.

32. Keith Bradsher. Inflation in Asia Begins to Sting U.S. Consumers.
New York Times, April 8th, 2008.

33. Jeff Ballinger. Squeezed Vietnamese workers strike back.
Counterpunch, April 16th, 2008. Available at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/ballinger04162008.html

34. Harry Cleaver. (1977) Food, famine, and the international crisis,
pp. 24-25. Available at: www.libcom.org/files/Food_Famine_Int_Crisis.pdf

35. Midnight Notes Collective (1990) The New Enclosures. Available at:
http://www.midnightnotes.org/newenclos.html

37. Thalif Deen. Global hot spots of hunger set to explode. Inter Press
Service, April 15th, 2008

38. Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail. Iraq: Corruption eats into food
rations. Inter Press Service, May 3rd, 2008.

39. Marc Lacey. Across globe, empty bellies bring rising anger. New York
Times, April 18th, 2008.

40. See Harry Cleaver (1977) Food, famine, and the international crisis,
pp. 33-35.

41. For more on soy production in the Southern Cone of Latin America,
see the ‘Soy kills’ website: http://lasojamata.org/

42. Maria Trigona. Argentina’s soy storm: Tensions rising among farmers.
Upside Down World,
April 28th, 2008. Available at:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1253/1/

43. Mneesha Gellman and Josh Dankoff. Rising fuel costs provoke
transportation strike in Nicaragua. Upside Down World, May 12th, 2008.
Available at: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1279/1/

44. Amandla! magazine, pilot issue #2, October 2007. Available at:
www.amandla.org.za

45. Richard Pithouse. Struggle is a school: the rise of a shack dwellers
movement in Durban, South Africa. Monthly Review, February 2006.
Available at: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0206pithouse.htm

46. For those interested in reading more on food, energy, and global
class struggle, see: Midnight Notes Collective (1992) Midnight Oil:
Work, energy, war 1973-1992 (much of which is available online at:
www.midnightnotes.org) and Harry Cleaver (1977) Food, famine and the
international crisis, available at:
http://libcom.org/files/Food_Famine_Int_Crisis.pdf

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