The FAO celebrates its 80th anniversary. Goods will never feed mankind. Nature's resources as a limit to capital

“Capitalist production therefore develops technology and the combination of the social production process only by simultaneously undermining the sources from which all wealth springs: the earth and the worker” (Marx, Capital, Book I, Chapter 13, Large-scale industry and agriculture)

Data provided by the SOFI   report  which monitors the state of food and nutrition security in the world and is published annually by the FAO, states that in 2024, approximately 800 million people (or slightly less), or about one-seventh of the entire human family, suffer from hunger, with an estimated 11 million deaths per year from hunger, malnutrition, or related causes: practically the figures of what can be considered the bloodiest of humanity’s unfought wars.

In the early 1950s, the Party devoted a series of articles to the agrarian question, as a re-exposure of the marxian rent theory, focusing on the sixth section of the third book  of Capital, confirming that it is “precisely in the field of the agrarian question and its theoretical assumptions,” the central reason for marxist criticism of the capitalist mode of production, namely its inability to develop “the technique and combination of the social production process” without “at the same time undermining the primary sources of all wealth: the land and the worker” (cf. Marx, Capital, Book I, Chapter 13, “Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture”).

Marx writes in the third book of Capital:

“Large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, managed industrially, operate in common. While they are originally divided by the fact that the former mainly squanders and ruins labor power, and therefore man’s natural strength, and the latter more directly the natural strength of the land, instead they later join hands, in that the industrial system in the countryside also sucks the energy out of the workers, and industry and commerce, for their part, provide agriculture with the means to impoverish the land.”

And “on the other hand, large land ownership reduces the agricultural population to a continuously decreasing minimum and contrasts it with a continuously growing industrial population concentrated in large cities; thus creating conditions that cause an unbridgeable rift in the organic social exchange prescribed by the natural laws of life, as a result of which the strength of the land is squandered and this squandering is exported through trade far beyond the borders of one’s own country.”

Published between 1953 and 1954 in Il Programma Comunista (and later collected in the volume “Mai la merce sfamerà l’uomo – la questione agraria e la teoria della rendita fondiaria secondo Marx” [Commodities will never feed man – the agrarian question and the theory of land rent according to Marx]), it is in these articles that we find, on the basis of solid Marxist science, the harshest criticism of capitalism as a form of production far removed from the Ricardian idea of linear development and continuous progress and which, instead, exhausts the resources of the soil and makes the problem of feeding the entire world population unsolvable.

“The more capitalism cultivates and civilizes, the more it creates hunger,”  

“Capitalism brings nothing but hunger” (Commodities will never feed man).

More than fifty years after the Party restated the theoretical cornerstones of the agrarian question, the essence and limit of the current mode of production, bourgeois science itself is now forced to take stock of two centuries of capitalist “development” supported by the consumption of fossil fuels as the dominant energy resource, admitting retrospectively, despite itself, and in hindsight, the unsustainability of the capitalist system.

However, the bourgeois regime resolves the serious contradictions within the capitalist mode of production within capitalism itself through the implementation of unlikely reforms, plans, and projects that inevitably fail because they fail to identify the real cause that, in a system that produces beyond belief, starves millions of people.

Marx’s theory of rent, which considers both differential and absolute rent, “irrevocably establishes the historical limitations of the capitalist way of resolving the relationship between production and consumption in human communities: their food needs will never be resolved by the process of capital accumulation, no matter how much the technology, the organic composition of capital, and the mass of products obtainable from the same amount of labor time, may develop. The modern antagonism between social classes necessarily corresponds to the formation of surplus profits, the emergence of absolute rents, the anarchy and waste in social production. The equation capitalism equals hunger is irrevocably established. […] Although the sphere of food production is fundamental to the dynamics of any society, Marx’s theory of rent is central to the description of the capitalist mode of production: we would say that, from a revolutionary and anti-possibilist point of view, it is the decisive part.” (from “Commodities will never feed man”).

The theory of rent therefore demonstrates beyond any doubt that in the chaotic and senseless capitalist mode of production, based on an indefinite number of individual commercial acts, which involve the waste of a large part of the social product, it is impossible to satisfy needs according to social utility. Capitalism is the era of the satisfaction of artificial needs and the dissatisfaction of primary ones.

“The foundation and development of modern capitalist industrial production, by mobilizing immense new productive forces, have also brought about countless new types of needs and new forms of consumption among human beings. But this does not detract from the fact that the fundamental basis for the satisfaction of vital needs in society is the natural product of agricultural land.

The relationship between agricultural and industrial production offers one of the most obvious demonstrations of the senselessness and absurdity that underlie the capitalist system and the bourgeois era.” (Terra acqua e sangue [Earth, Water, and Blood], Battaglia Comunista, no. 22, 1950)

The theory of rent, in establishing the market price of wheat, i.e., the “fundamental crop” and therefore of foodstuffs in general, demonstrates that, despite the “grandiosity of capitalist production, it is not possible to feed the human species, however high the level of productive forces may become.”

The machinery of the capitalist system, in which the size of surplus value depends on the organic and technical composition of capital, incessantly and inexorably pushes capital and labor towards industry where, despite the general historical decline in the rate of profit, determined by ever-improving technology, the social mass of profit can grow enormously with the growth of global capital. The prices of industrial manufactured goods are falling, making it possible to access ancillary goods that were prohibitive to the majority of human beings in the age of craftsmanship.

This process is, however, blocked in agriculture not only by the private monopoly of land but also and mainly by the mercantile leveling that determines prices based on the costs of the most barren land and the unfavorable population-land ratio, i.e., the fact that land is a finite and non-reproducible resource. The market price that regulates agricultural products is ‘pegged’ to the production price under the most unfavorable conditions (i.e., it depends on the production price on the worst land) plus another margin of increase that represents the absolute rent. For most people, feeding themselves or accessing quality food becomes a luxury.

The theory of rent must apply, however, not only to agriculture, but to all natural forces.

The same rule that applies to the least fertile land also applies to “the most despicable mineral and therefore the least fertile mine, regulates the general market,” that is, “they regulate the international price well” that “the rentier of cultivation” of the most valuable fuels and minerals “will make us pay dearly” “the warm nest of capitalist super-profit on the raw materials of civil and military death” (from ‘Nel dramma della terra parti di fianco’ [In the drama of the earth, go alongside], from “Il Programma Comunista”, May 14-28, 1954).

As mentioned above, the rigorous Marxist theorems on rent are therefore able to account for recent phenomena (previously announced by the party), typical of capitalism in its monopoly and imperialist phase, because, from the moment they were enunciated, they were applied not only to agriculture but to all natural forces: they therefore also apply to the economy of coal- or gasoline-powered machines; hydroelectric power, and nuclear power, all of which are bases for superprofits, monopolies, and parasitic income, which exacerbate the imbalance and disharmony inherent in the capitalist social form.

Already in “Vulcano della produzione o palude del mercato?” (Volcano of production or swamp of the market?), published in Il Programma Comunista, no. 13, July 9-23, 1954, and no. 19, Oct. 15-29, 1954, we wrote:

“It should be noted that surplus profit in agriculture is not the only type of surplus profit that appears in a typical capitalist society, and it is transformed into rent enjoyed by the class of landowners, one of the three basic classes in our model.

Excess profits and analogous rents are enjoyed by those who dispose, with the same title deed, to agricultural land, water resources, mines, deposits of all kinds, and building land, as well as various buildings and manufactured goods necessary for industrial entrepreneurs.

In all these cases, the organization of bourgeois society, based on the security of private property, forms and guarantees a series of monopolies that are inherent in its nature. It is therefore not the free competition that is the basic characteristic of bourgeois economics, but the system of monopolies, which allows a whole range of products, including the most important ones from agricultural land and the extractive industry, to be sold at prices higher than their value, i.e., the sum of the social effort they cost”.

The agrarian question in real Marxist terms therefore does not only mean land, peasants, and landowners, but also means the theory of rent, or the distribution of surplus value, in the forms of modern monopolistic and parasitic capitalism. Thus, anticipating today’s inevitable historical scenarios with the force of theory, the goods, other than than agricultural ones,  that cannot be reproduced capitalistically, such as natural resources, oil for instance, are identified.

Thus, in the capitalist system of production, the price of agricultural products is determined not only by the value of absolute rent but also by the law of ‘worst land’ (i.e., the benefits of technological progress and increased productivity are blocked in this sector by the rent barrier, which prevents any compensation between industrial and agricultural prices). This also applies to energy resources, which are different in quality and energy power and are distributed in differently accessible geological areas and therefore have extremely different extraction and marketing costs, resulting in an enormous differential rent.

With its development in capitalism, therefore, the dominance of rent increases more and more, and, at the same time, also the tribute that the proletarian class pays in the form of excess profits to the owner class.

The Party anticipated, decades in advance, the ‘ecological’ problem, i.e. the conflict between capital and nature that today’s bourgeoisie so hypocritically cares about, predicting the impossibility of maintaining a balance between the human species and the rest of the world under capitalism:

“It’s a matter of seeing whether the cycle of exchanges between the natural environment with its reserves of matter and energy and the living species tends to achieve a dynamic equilibrium (theoretically indefinite), or tends to fall into a progressive imbalance and thus become unsustainable, in historical time, leading to the regression and end of the species” (from “Mai la merce sfamerà l’uomo” [Commodities will never feed man]).

The phase of capitalism studied by the Party more than fifty years ago (while even the false “Italian Communist Party” pursued production and employment policies at the cost of damaging the environment and human and animal health) was already the phase of ecological and environmental disasters, exploitation, erosive depletion, and plundering of natural resources.

The Capital, the “cold monster of materialized labor,” has harbored within itself a curse that inextricably links science and technological progress to the subjugation of man rather than his true liberation, and to the indiscriminate exploitation of nature and animals rather than their peaceful cooperation with the human species. In capitalism, “the conscious and rational treatment of the earth as eternal common property, as an inalienable condition of existence and reproduction of the chain of successive human generations, is replaced by exploitation, by the squandering of the earth’s energies” (Book Three of Capital).

We wrote in “Trajectory and catastrophe of the capitalist form in the classic monolithic theoretical construction of Marxism” published in Il Programma Comunista no. 19 in 1957:

“Denying Ricardo’s contemporary counter-revolutionaries, who flirted with the feudal Middle Ages, and our own contemporary counter-revolutionaries, who flirt with the now antiquated society of Capital, any right to give life to objectified labor, to the mechanical Automaton, we dishonor him for the reason that Ricardo dishonored him; but the dialectical greatness of our construction is that once the cycle that Ricardo saw as eternal has been closed in a new revolutionary cataclysm, the cold monster of materialized labor changes its face, its task, and its destiny; it takes on (if we dare say so in the presence of a wonderful formulation that Marx believed in after turning off some dazzling lights) a new and human soul, resurrected from the tears and mourning of generations crushed by class systems, breaking the curse that bound science and social oppression, and allowing the bond between the knowledge of the species, conquered in an unspeakable series of struggles, and the secure well-being of social man, of man as a species, free from misery and from individualistic, privatist, and subjectivist infamies. Perhaps Karl Marx also had to pay a tribute to romanticism on our behalf when he turned living labor into a dead object, and then redeemed it with prophetic language as a gift of happiness and life. But this was not Hegelian coquetry, as he later wrote without regret, but powerful experimental science, if today we respond with his pages to the shortcomings and ravings of a social form that has reached putrefaction. And they vibrate with truth, and although centuries old, they shed a light that is unknown to the elucubrations of this time.

Let it be understood by us and our readers that fixed capital, machine, automated system of machinery, production plant, instrument of production in capitalist form, objectified or dead labor are, in the course of this discussion, equivalent terms.”

There are no miraculous interventions to stem hunger under the yoke of Capital; commodities will never feed man. Only a communist economy, freed from mercantile constraints and planned as a project for the liberation of man, will ensure the fulfillment of his needs and fruitful coexistence with nature and all its resource

It is the Party’s perspective, visible to the “explorers of tomorrow,” that is the only one possible for the realization of true salvation: Communism understood as a unified social plan measured by physical quantities not of individuals, not of a class, nor even of an entire society, but of the species, “defined by a life without death, which cultivates, manages, and transmits to itself the organized nature, the equipped shell of the planet, without solutions of time.”

From the point of view of a higher economic formation of society, the private ownership of the globe by individuals will appear as absurd as the private ownership of one man by another. “Even an entire society, a nation, and even all societies of the same era taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and they have a duty to pass it on improved, as boni patres familias, to subsequent generations.” (Marx, Capital, Book III)