Ian Angus is the editor of Climate and Capitalism. This is an abridged version of an article in two parts, the first of which was published in Socialist Voice and in The Bullet (Socialist Project), in April 2008.) "If the government cannot lower the cost of living it simply has to leave. If the police and UN troops want to shoot at us, that's OK, because in the end, if we are not killed by bullets, we'll die of hunger." - A demonstrator in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
In Haiti, where most people get 22% fewer calories than the minimum needed for good health, some are staving off their hunger pangs by eating 'mud biscuits' made by mixing clay and water with a bit of vegetable oil and salt.
Meanwhile, in Canada, the federal government is currently paying $225 for each pig killed in a mass cull of breeding swine, as part of a plan to reduce hog production. Hog farmers, squeezed by low hog prices and high feed costs, have responded so enthusiastically that the kill will likely use up all the allocated funds before the program ends in September.
Some of the slaughtered hogs may be given to local Food Banks, but most will be destroyed or made into pet food. None will go to Haiti.
Record prices for staple foods This is the brutal world of capitalist agriculture - a world where some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide food price inflation that has driven prices to their highest levels in decades. The increases affect most kinds of food, but in particular the most important staples - wheat, corn, and rice.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that between March 2007 and March 2008 prices of cereals increased 88%, oils and fats 106%, and dairy products 48%. The FAO food price index as a whole rose 57% in one year - and most of the increase occurred in the past few months.
Another source, the World Bank, says that that in the 36 months ending February 2008, global wheat prices rose 181% and overall global food prices increased by 83%. The Bank expects most food prices to remain well above 2004 levels until at least 2015.
The most popular grade of Thailand rice sold for $198 a tonne five years ago and $323 a tonne a year ago. On April 24, the price hit $1,000.
Increases are even greater on local markets - in Haiti, the market price of a 50 kilo bag of rice doubled in one week at the end of March.
These increases are catastrophic for the 2.6 billion people around the world who live on less than $2 a day and spend 60% to 80% of their incomes on food. Hundreds of millions cannot afford to eat.
Now the hungry are fighting back.
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LORENTER Taking to the streets In Haiti, on April demonstrators in the southern city of Les Cayes built barricades, stopped trucks carrying rice and distributed the food; they then tried to burn a United Nations compound. The protests quickly to the capital, Port-au-Prince, where thousands on the presidential chanting "We are hungry!"
President René Préval, who initially had said nothing could be done, announced a 16% cut in the wholesale price of rice. This was at best a stop-gap measure, since the reduction was for one month only, and retailers were not obligated to cut their prices.
The actions in Haiti paralleled similar protests by hungry people in more than twenty other countries.
day general strike by unions and shopkeepers demanded "significant and effective reductions in the price of rice and other staple foods. In Bangladesh over 3. 20,000 workers from textile factories in Fatullah went on and higher wages. sent thousands of troops into the Mahalla textile complex spread in the Nile Delta, to prevent La general strike demanding marched palace, union, and lower prices. Two people were killed and over 600 jailed. In Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, police used tear gas against women who had set up barricades, burned tires and closed major roads. Thousands marched to the President's home, chanting armed soldiers have been In Burkino Faso a twostrike to demand lower prices The Egyptian government higher wages, an independent "We are hungry," and Life is too expensive, you are killing • In Pakistan and Thailand Food riots in Port-au-Prince, Haiti deployed to prevent the poor from seizing food from fields Similar protests have taken place in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Peru, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Zambia. In April the president of the World Bank told a meeting in Washington that there were 33 countries where price hikes could cause social unrest.
A senior editor of Time magazine warned: "The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War... And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world... when cireumstances
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render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose."? What is driving food inflation? Since the 1970s, food production has become increasingly globalized and concentrated. A handful of countries dominate the global trade in staple foods. Six exporters provide 80% of wheat and 85% of rice. Three countries produce 70% of exported corn. This leaves the world's poorest countries, the ones that must import food to survive, at the mercy of economic trends and policies in those few exporting countries. When the global food trade system stops delivering, the poor pay the price.
For several years, the global trade in staple foods has been heading towards a crisis. Four related trends have slowed production growth and pushed prices up: the end of the 'green revolution', climate change, agrofuel production, and rising oil prices. The end of the green revolution In the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to counter peasant discontent in south and southeast Asia, the US poured money and technical support into agricultural development in India and other countries. The 'green revolution'-new seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, agricultural techniques and infrastructure-led to spectacular increases in food production, particularly rice. Yield per hectare continued expanding until the 1990s.
Today, it's not fashionable for governments to help poor people grow food for other poor people, because 'the market is supposed to take care of all problems. The Economist reports that 'spending on farming as a share of total public spending in developing countries fell by half between 1980 and 2004°3 Research and development money and subsidies have dried up, and production growth has stalled.
As a result, in seven of the past eight years the world consumed more grain than it produced, which means that rice was being removed from the inventories that governments and dealers normally hold as insurance against bad harvests. World grain stocks are now at their lowest point ever, leaving very little cushion for bad times. Climate change Scientists say that climate change production in parts of the world by half in the next 12 years. But it's clear that the global climate crisis is already here, and it is affecting food.
For example Australia is normally the world's secondlargest exporter of grain, but a savage multi-year drought has reduced the wheat crop by 60% and rice production has been completely wiped out. In Bangladesh in November 2007, one of the strongest cyclones in decades wiped out a million tonnes of rice and severely damaged the wheat crop, making the huge country even more dependent on imported food. Agrofuels It is now official policy in the US, Canada and Europe to convert food into fuel. US vehicles burn enough corn to cover the entire import needs of the poorest 82 countries.* Ethanol and biodiesel are very heavily subsidized, which means, inevitably, that crops like corn (maize) are being diverted out of the food chain and into gas tanks, and that new agricultural investment worldwide is being directed towards palm, soy, canola and other oil-producing plants. The demand for agrofuels increases the prices of those crops directly, and indirectly boosts the price of other grains by encouraging growers to switch to agrofuel.
As Canadian hog producers have found, it also drives up the cost of producing meat, since corn is the main ingredient in North American animal feed. Oil prices The price of food is linked to the price of oil because food can be made into a substitute for oil. But rising oil prices also affect the cost of producing food. Fertilizer and pesticides are made from petroleum and natural gas. Gas and diesel fuel are used in planting, harvesting and shipping."
It's been estimated that 80% of the costs of growing corn are fossil fuel costs so it is no accident that food prices rise when oil prices rise. By the end of 2007, reduced investment in third world agriculture, rising oil prices, and climate change meant that production growth was slowing and prices were rising. Good harvests and strong export growth might have staved off a crisis -but that isn't what happened. The trigger was rice, the staple food of three billion people.
Early this year, India announced that it was suspending most rice exports in order to rebuild its reserves. A few weeks later, Vietnam, whose rice crop was hit by a major insect infestation during the harvest, announced a four-month suspension of exports to ensure that enough would be available for its domestic market.
India and Vietnam together normally account for 30% of all rice exports, so their announcements were enough to push the already tight global rice market over the edge. Rice buyers immediately started buying up available stocks, hoarding
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whatever rice they could get in the expectation of future price increases, and bidding up the price for future crops. Prices soared. By mid-April news reports described 'panic buying' of rice futures on the Chicago Board of Trade and there were rice shortages even on supermarket shelves in Canada and the US. Why the rebellion? There have been food price hikes before. Indeed, if we take inflation into account, global prices for staple foods were higher in the 1970s than they are today. So why has this inflationary explosion provoked mass protests around the world?
The answer is that since the 1970s the richest countries in the world, aided by the international agencies they control, have systematically undermined the poorest countries' ability to feed their populations and protect themselves in a crisis like this.
Haiti is a powerful and appalling example. Rice has been grown in Haiti for centuries, and until twenty years ago Haitian farmers produced about 170,000 tonnes of rice a year, enough to cover 95% of domestic consumption. Rice farmers received no government subsidies, but, as in every other rice-producing country at the time, their access to local markets was protected by import tariffs.
In 1995, as a condition of providing a desperately needed loan, the International Monetary Fund required Haiti to cut its tariff on imported rice from 35% to 3%, the lowest in the Caribbean. The result was a massive influx of US rice that sold for half the price of Haitian-grown rice. Thousands of rice farmers lost their lands and livelihoods, and today three-quarters of the rice eaten in Haiti comes from the US."
US rice won out because rice exports are heavily subsidized by the US government. In 2003 rice growers in the United States received $1.7 billion in government subsidies, an average of $232 per hectare of rice grown.? That money, most of which went to a handful of very large landowners and agribusiness corporations, allowed US exporters to sell rice at 30% to 50% below their real production costs.
In short, Haiti was forced to abandon government protection of domestic agriculture-and the US then World Bank income groups HIGH used its government protection schemes to take over the There have been many variations on this theme, with rich countries of the north imposing 'liberalization' policies on poor and debtridden southern countries and then taking advantage of that liberalization to capture the market. Government subsidies account for 30% of farm revenue in the world's 30 richest countries, a total of $280 billion a year,® an unbeatable advantage in a 'free' market where the rich write the rules.
In addition, for several decades, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund refused to advance loans to poor countries unless they agreed to structural adjustment programs (SAPs). These programs required loan recipients to devalue their currencies, cut taxes, privatize utilities, and reduce or eliminate support programs for farmers.
All this was done with the promise that the market would produce economic growth and prosperity. Instead, poverty increased and support for agriculture was eliminated.
"The investment in improved agricultural input packages and extension support tapered and UPPER MIDDLE eventually disappeared in most rural areas of Africa under SAP. Concern for boosting smallholders productivity was abandoned. Not only were governments rolled back, foreign aid to agriculture dwindled. World Bank funding for agriculture itself declined markedly from 32% of total lending in 1976-8 to 11.7% in 1997-9"9 During previous waves of food price inflation, the poor often had at least some access to food they grew themselves, or to food that was grown locally and available at locally set prices. Today, in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, that's just not possible. Global markets now determine local prices-and often the only food available must be imported from far away.
Food is not just another commodity—it is essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should expect from any government or social system is that it try to prevent starvation-and above all that it not promote policies that deny food to hungry people. That's why Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was absolutely correct in April, to describe the food crisis as 'the greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model. LOWER LOW MIDDLE How to end the crisis To truly address the problem of world hunger, we must understand and then change the system that causes it. Our starting point must be that there is no shortage of food in the world today.
Contrary to the 18th century warnings of Thomas Malthus and his modern followers, study after study shows that global food production has consistently outstripped population growth, and that there is more than enough food to feed everyone. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,
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enough food is produced in the world to provide over 2800 calories a day to everyonesubstantially more than the minimum required for good health, and about 18% more calories per person than in the 1960s, despite a significant increase in total population.'° Scientific research is vitally important to the development of agriculture, but initiatives that assume in advance that new seeds and chemicals are needed are neither credible nor truly scientific. The fact that there is already enough food to feed the world shows that the food crisis is not a technical problem—it is a social and political problem.
The global food industry is not organized to feed the hungry; it is organized to generate profits for corporate agribusiness.The agribusiness giants are achieving that objective very well indeed. This year, agribusiness profits are soaring above last year's levels, while hungry people from Haiti to Egypt to Senegal were taking to the streets to protest rising food prices.
Six companies control 85% of the world trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa: three control 80% of the banana trade." ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the world's corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each year's crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food.
As the editors of Hungry for Profit write, "The enormous power exerted by the largest agribusiness/food corporations allows them essentially to control the cost of their raw materials purchased from farmers while at the same time keeping prices of food to the general public at high enough levels to ensure large profits.*12 Over the past three decades, transnational agribusiness companies have engineered a massive restructuring of global agriculture. Directly through their own market power and indirectly through governments and the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization, they have changed the way food is grown and distributed around the world. The changes have had wonderful effects on their profits, while simultaneously making global hunger worse and food crises inevitable. Brazilian women of La Via Campesina demonstrating 8 March for International Womens Day.... The assault on traditional farming Over the past three decades southern countries have been convinced, cajoled and bullied into adopting agricultural policies that promote export crops rather than food for domestie consumption. These policies favour largeCOMMENTO BOS TRE KES RURAIS SER BRASIL scale industrial agriculture that requires single-crop (monoculture) production, heavy use of water and massive quantities of fertilizer and pesticides. Increasingly traditional farming, organized by and for communities and families, has been pushed aside by industrial farming organized by and for agribusinesses.
That transformation is the principal obstacle to a rational agriculture that could eliminate hunger.
The focus on export agriculture has produced the
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absurd and tragic result that millions of people are starving in countries that export food. In India, for example, over one-fifth of the population is chronically hungry and 48% of children under five years old are malnourished. Nevertheless, India exported $1.5 billion worth of milled rice and $322 million worth of wheat in 2004.13 In other countries, farmland that used to grow food for domestic consumption now grows luxuries for the north. Colombia, where 13% of the population is malnourished, produces and exports 62% of all cut flowers sold in the United States.
In many cases the result of switching to export crops has produced results that would be laughable if they weren't so damaging. Kenya was self-sufficient in food until about 25 years ago. Today it imports 80% of its food -and 80% of its exports are other agricultural products.' The shift to industrial agriculture has driven millions of people off the land and into unemployment and poverty in the immense slums that now surround many of the world's cities. The people who best know the land are being separated from it; their ....and La Via Campesina demonstrator after attacks by Brazilian military farms enclosed into gigantic outdoor factories that produce only for export.
Contrary to the claims of agribusiness, the latest agricultural research, including more than a decade of concrete experience in Cuba, proves that small and mid-sized farms using sustainable agroecological methods are much more productive and vastly less damaging to the environment than huge industrial farms.! Fighting for food sovereignty The changes imposed by transnational agribusiness and its agencies have not gone unchallenged. One of the most important developments in the past 15 years has been the emergence of La Vía Campesina (Peasant Way). This umbrella body encompasses more than 120 small farmers' and peasants* organizations 56 countries, ranging from the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil to the National Farmers Union in Canada.
La Vía Campesina initially advanced its program as a challenge to the World Food Summit, a 1996 UNorganized conference on global hunger that was attended by official representatives of 185 countries. The participants in that meeting promised (and subsequently did nothing to achieve) the elimination of hunger and malnutrition by guaranteeing "sustainable food security for all people" 16 Outside the doors of the summit La Vía Campesina proposed food sovereignty as an alternative to food security. Simple access to food is not enough, they argued: what's needed is access to land, water, and resources, and the people affected must have the right to know and to decide about food policies. Food is too important to be left to the global market and the manipulation of agribusiness. World hunger can only be ended by reestablishing small and midsized family farms as the key elements of food production."
The central demand of the food sovereignty movement is that food should be treated primarily as a source of nutrition for the communities and countries where it is grown. In opposition to free trade, agro-export policies. it urges a focus on domestic consumption and food selfsufficiency.
Contrary to the assertions of some critics, food sovereignty is not a call for economic isolationism or a return to an idealized rural past. Rather, it is a program for the defence and extension of human rights, for land reform, and for protection of the earth against capitalist ecocide. In addition to calling for food self-sufficiency and strengthening family farms, La Vía Campesina's original call for food sovereignty included these demands: • Guarantee everyone access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain a healthy life with full human dignity. • Give landless and farming people- especially women ownership and control of the land they work and return territories to indigenous peoples. • Ensure the care and use of natural resources, especially land, water and seeds. End dependence on chemical inputs, on cash-crop monocultures and intensive. industrialized production. • Oppose WTO, World Bank and IMF policies that facilitate the control of multinational corporations over agriculture. Regulate and tax speculative capital and enforce a strict code of conduct on transnational corporations. • End the use of food as a weapon. Stop the displacement, forced urbanization and repression of peasants. • Guarantee peasants and small farmers, and rural women in particular, direct input into formulating agricultural policies at all levels.!
La Vía Campesina's demand for food sovereignty constitutes a powerful agrarian program for the 21st century. Labour and left movements worldwide should give full support to it and to the campaigns of
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working farmers and peasants for land reform and against the industrialization and globalization of food and farming. Plan of action We in the global north can and must demand that our governments stop all activities that weaken or damage Third World farming.
The development of industrial agrofuels should be halted and agricultural production should focus on food as a priority.!5/19 In April Canada announced a special contribution of C$10 million for food relief to Haiti. 6/20 That's positive - but during 2008 Haiti will pay five times that much in interest on its $1.5 billion foreign debt, much of which was incurred during the imperialist-supported Duvalier dictatorships.
The total external debt of Third World countries in 2005 was $2.7 trillion, and their debt payments that year totalled $513 billion.2' Ending that cash drain, immediately and unconditionally, would provide essential resources to feed the hungry now and rebuild domestic farming over time.
The regressive food policies that have been imposed on poor countries by the World Bank and IMF are codified and enforced by the World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture. The AoA should be abolished. and Third World countries should have the right to unilaterally cancel liberalization policies imposed through the World Bank.
IMF. and WTO. as well as through bilateral free trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA.
Current attempts by the US to destabilize and overthrow the antiimperialist governments of the ALBA group-Venezuela. Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada—continue a long history of action by northern countries to prevent Third World countries from asserting control over their own destinies. Organizing against such interventions 'in 1 the belly of the monster is thus a key component of the fight to win food sovereignty around the world.
The food crisis and farm crisis are rooted in an irrational, anti-human system. To feed the world. urban and rural working people must join hands to sweep that system away. Visit http://www. socialistvoice.ca for the full text of this article. FOOTNOTES Kevin Pina, Mud Cookie Economics in Haiti. Haiti Action Network, Feb.
10, 2008. http://www.
haitiaction.net/News HIP/2 10 8/2 10 .html 2 Tony Karon, 'How Hunger Could Topple Regimes. Time, April 11. 2008. http://www.
time.com/time/world/ article/0,8599,1730107,00.
html 3 "The New Face of Hunger.' The Economist, April 19, 2008.
Mark Lynas. 'How the Rich Starved the World.' New Statesman, April 17, 2008.
http://www.newstatesman.
com/200804170025 Dale Allen Pfeiffer. Eating Fossil Fuels. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island BC, 2006. p. 1 6 Oxfam International Briefing Paper, April 2005.
Kicking Down the Door.
http://www.oxfam.org/en/ files/bp72_rice.pdf Ibid.
OECD Background Note: Agricultural Policy and Trade Reform.
http://www.oecd.org dataoecd/52/23/36896656.
pdf 9 Kjell Havnevik, Deborah Bryceson, Lars-Erik Birgegård, Prosper Matondi & Atakilte Beyene. 'African Agriculture and the World Bank: Development or Impoverishment?' Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, http:// www.links.org.au/node/328 10 Frederic Mousseau. Food Aid or Food Sovereignty? Ending World Hunger in Our Time. Oakland Institute, 2005. http:// www.oaklandinstitute.org/ pdfs/fasr.pdf.
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge.
Science and Technology for Development. Global Summary for Decision Makers. http://www.
agassessment.org/does/ Global_SDM_210108_ FINAL.pdf 11 Shawn Hattingh.
Liberalizing Food Trade to Death. MRzine. Mav 6, 2008. http://mrzine.
35 monthlyreview.org/
hattingh060508.html 12 Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel.
Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers. Food, and the Environment. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2000. p. 11 13 UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Key Statistics Of Food And Agriculture External Trade. http://www.
fao.org/es/ess/toptrade/trad casp?lang=EN&dir=exp&c ountry=100 14 J. Madeley. 'Hungry for Trade: How the poor pay for free trade. Cited in Ibid 15 Jahi Campbell, Shattering bull Myths: Can sustainable agriculture feed the world?
and Editorial. Lessons from the Green Revolution.
Food First Institute. www.
foodfirst.org 16 World Food Summit. http:// www.fao.org/wfs/index_ en.htm 17 La Vía Campesina. Food Sovereignty: A Future Without Hunger. (1996) http://www.voiceoftheturtle.
org/library/1996%20 Declaration%20of20 Food%20Sovereignty.pdf 18 Paraphrased and abridged from Ibid 19 La Vía Campesina. A response to the Global Food Prices Crisis: Sustainable family farming can feed the world. http://www.
viacampesina.org/main_en/ index.php?option=com_con tent&task=view&id=483&I temid=38 20 By way of comparison, this year Canada will spend $1 billion on the illegal occupation of and war in Afghanistan 21 Jubilee Debt Campaign.
The Basics About Debt. http://www.
jubileedebtcampaign.org.
uk/?lid=98
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RESISTANCE www.socialisti resistance.org Socialist Resistancewhat is it?
Socialist Resistance is a magazine produced by a group of people who are convinced that capitalism is a system that offers most of humanity a future of war, environmental catastrophe and poverty. We used to produce a monthly paper called Socialist Resistance but we shut it down so that its resources could be used to allow Respect Renewal to have a paper. We have now decided to launch a quarterly magazine We are Marxists because we can see that human society is divided into conflicting social classes. We take the side of the working class, the poor and the oppressed in Britain and internationally. Our political activity has the aim of putting society under thedemocraticpoliticalandeconomic control of working class people. They are the majority of the population. Political control in Britain today is in the hands of tiny numbers of politicians and business people who make the decisions that affect all our lives. They are much more concerned with profit than human need. We are revolutionary socialists because it is clear from history that social classes only give up power when they have been overthrown by a revolution. Some of us are in the International Socialist Group which is the section of the Fourth International in Britain but many of us are not. We are keen that our magazine is seen as a space in which a spectrum of Marxists, socialists environmentalists from all sorts of backgrounds can collaborate both in the practical sphere and in working out the ideas needed to change the world. New class struggle parties Supporters of Socialist Resistance argue that the Labour Party has become so right wing that, even though millions of workers still support it, the big job for socialists in Britain is to help create a new anti-capitalist party that supports workers' struggles, defends asylum seekers, women's rights and opposes imperialist wars. We are working hard to make sure that Respect Renewal is a success because we think that it is an important step along this road. Our supporters in Scotland are in the Scottish Socialist Party for exactly the same reasons. We are in favour of rebuilding democracy in the trade unions and the fighting strength of the labour movement. Socialist Resistance members are active in their workplaces and trade unions fighting to defend and extend workers'h jobs and conditions through mass action. We are also active in trying to building fighting democratic broad lefts within our unions. SocialistResistancestandsinopposition to racism and Islamophobia and to the oppression of women, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people and disabled people. We believe that the most effective way to fight these forms of discrimination is through the coming together of those who directly experience them. Ecosocialism Revolutionary socialists have always been in favour of the development of the economy, on a global and national basis, to meet the needs of humanity. But that doesn't mean we favour the production of an increasing number of commodities of any type whatsoever. Much of what is produced under capitalism is socially useless, and either redundant or directly harmful.
Some products - like cars - harm the environment directly; others are useless and just use up huge amounts of the planet's resources.
Our critique of the so-called 'commodity spectacle does not mean we are against all further economic development, especially in the third world. Neither does it mean that decisive new inventions in the future should not be applied, and the level of technology should remain stagnant. New development and production can be planned and go ahead if it meets human needs and is not environmentally destructive.
We are the only Marxist organization in Britain that calls itself ecosocialist. We know that the ruling class will look for solutions to the environmental disaster that capitalism has created but they will try and make the poor,the working class and the developing world pay. They will also carry on destroying the environment as a result of their need to make profits. It is the people who are young today who will have to live with the consequences of this capitalist created disaster. We therefore want the working class to develop their own solutions. Young people will have a big part to play in this fight. Why we produce a magazine From our political practice we have learned that it is necessary for Marxists to produce their own distinctive publication. We write for and sell Respect's newspaper. But there will be occasions when we will disagree with some of Respect's tactics or policies. By producing our own magazine we are able to argue, our positions more fully and clarify what we think. It also allows us to explore history and ideas in more depth than a newspaper does. Having our own magazine is also important for us because along with our books, leaflets and meetings it allows us to organise independently around things that we think are important. Ifyou wanttosupportamagazinethat is socialist, revolutionary, ecologist, feminist and anti-imperialist-join us in trying to change the world.