In the wake of the worldwide scandal of meat products
boosted with horse, investigations into contaminated cakes sold by IKEA are
certain to reveal more links in a contaminated global food chain. The actual
cause will stay hidden, however.
Chinese inspectors discovered high levels of coliform
bacteria in cakes exported by a Swedish supplier, Almondy, to IKEA outlets
throughout the world. Close to two tonnes of the product were destroyed and it
was withdrawn from sale in 23 countries.
Coliforms can be found in soil, vegetation, water and
everyday human environments, as well as in the faeces of humans and other
warm-blooded animals, though so far at least, there’s no report suggesting the
presence of human intestinal bacteria.
As public safety concerns grow and more inspections are
carried out, the physical causes will look different under the microscope as
each new case of a polluted product comes to light. But the true cause common
to them all can’t be seen through any laboratory equipment.
In the capitalist economy, the over-riding concern is for
profit. If the shareholders in a company, now mostly giant investment funds, see their unearned incomes – their shares in
the profits extracted from the production and sale of commodities – falling,
they move their capital elsewhere.
So to stay in business every company has to continuously
compete to attract investors by driving the rate of profit up, and one of the
key ways they do that is by reducing the costs of production.
As we’ve seen, the price
of horsemeat is less than a quarter the price of beef – even the cheapest,
worst quality beef. So there’s really no contest. The temptation to
fraudulently change the composition of a product using less and less costly
ingredients is irresistible.
It’s a law governed process that drives the dominant
capitalist system of production in all its guises. Control systems involving
regulations and inspections attempt to keep a lid on it, but they are always
overwhelmed by the inbuilt inevitability of polluted, debased, denatured
production and its consequent despoliation of the planetary ecosystem.
There’s another law, a universal. Everything – including
every social system – is governed by specific laws that regulate its origin,
existence, development, passing away and perhaps, as the science of evolution
tells us, its replacement by one more suited to the changing
circumstances.
The profit which defines capitalist society is derived solely
from the work people do in creating products. The cost of that labour lies at
the heart of the problem. Competition means that the cost of labour must be
continuously reduced.
Reducing the cost of food helps to reduce the cost of labour.
So there’s a downward spiral: competition demands cheaper food, cheaper food
means lower wages, people on lower wages must have cheaper food.
It’s been a brilliantly successful strategy for a couple of
centuries, alternating periods of rapid explosive growth with sudden, brutal
and destructive contractions, extending its reach to every part of the globe
and overwhelming all opposition.
But there are limits. There always are. That’s another universal law of nature.
So when the process of competition finds IKEA feeding bacteria that occurs in sewage to its customers worldwide you know that the social system has arrived at a limit of its development.
Fortunately, nature has ensured that the replacement for
capitalist society has been developing in opposition to it for some
considerable time. It takes the form of democratically-run, not-for-profit
organisations like worker-owned cooperatives, credit unions and community
banks. These are mushrooming in the United States , of all places, as Marjorie
Kelly explains.
The author of the book Owning
Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution:
is right when she says: “When economic relations are designed in a generative
way, they’re no longer about sole and despotic dominion. Economic activity is
no longer about squeezing every penny from something we imagine that we own.
It’s about being interwoven with the world around us. It’s about a shift from
dominion to community.”
It’ll take a co-ordinated push to end the age of profit, but
it can be done. It has to.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
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