I've posted about this before, but it can't hurt to do so again. Two pieces in today's Guardian draw attention to the growth of food poverty in this country and the work of food banks. From one of them:
Many people find it hard to believe that there are so many people who are hungry and in need in a country like Britain.
From the other:
Falling incomes and welfare spending cuts have triggered an explosion in demand for emergency food parcels as Britain's poorest families struggle to put a meal on the table, say charities.
.....
The Guardian's Breadline Britain investigation revealed last week that up to 3.6m UK households were at risk of slipping into poverty as a result of spiralling living costs, shrinking incomes and welfare benefit reforms.
Since these times of economic and financial crisis began, there has been a certain amount of chat concerning the continued relevance of Marxism - or otherwise. This mostly centres on capitalism's endemic tendencies toward crisis and the possibility of some alternative to it. I won't go into any of that in the present post other than to say that the anti-capitalist left still has much work to do to persuade significant numbers of people, in any democratic electorate, of the viability of an alternative. Here I will only observe that among the continued attractions of Marxism, such as they are, is surely the thought that even in the wealthiest societies the world has known there are people struggling to feed their families, to feed their children - after capitalism has already had a pretty long historical lifespan - and that this state of affairs cannot possibly be accounted a just one.
