Breadlines Proliferate Amid Capitalist Decay
En route to the Toronto launch rally of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) April 6, I passed dozens of people lining up for bread as police kept a close watch. Each Saturday, workers and volunteers from the Freedom City charity meet in my Toronto neighbourhood of St. James Town to distribute food, as well as other essentials like clothing, hygiene products and household supplies. But it was the sight of loaves of bread stacked up for the growing number of those in need that stood out the most, and reminded me why I support the RCP in the first place.
The use of food banks has exploded in Canada, one of the richest countries in the world. At Toronto’s Fort York Food Bank, hundreds of people wait for hours almost every day of the week to collect food, with lineups spanning an entire city block. Workers and the poor are struggling to stay afloat as the cost of living skyrockets—battered by inflation, the housing crisis, and price gouging of essentials like groceries. Rent has reached such extortionate prices that Toronto is now more expensive to live in than New York or Miami.
The capitalist class has lately ramped up efforts to blame immigrants for the housing crisis. But make no mistake: responsibility for this crisis lies squarely with the capitalists themselves, who have created one of the largest housing bubbles in the world through real estate speculation. Rather than investing in production, this parasitic class prefers to throw its money into speculation that drives up housing prices, while cutting vital social services. As the cost of rent grows ever more obscene, workers have less and less money to spend on anything else. Hence the breadlines.
We’re told “communism” means lining up for basic goods. It should be noted the Stalinist regimes that saw shortages of consumer goods were countries that had always been poorer than the advanced capitalist countries in the West. Due to the absence of workers’ democracy, the parasitic bureaucracies that ruled these states further aggravated shortages through their own privileges, which disproportionately consumed wealth produced by the working class. Regardless, waiting in line for basic goods was supposedly not an ordeal one had to suffer under capitalism. That the opposite is true is plain for anyone with eyes to see, walking around Canada’s largest and richest city to see people lining up for bread because they can’t afford food in grocery stores.
That more and more people in Canada need to resort to food banks is not just because of inflation, or the extortionate cost of rent, but the blatant profiteering and price gouging of the grocery monopolies. Oligarchs like Galen Weston Jr., president and chairman of Loblaw and one of Canada’s wealthiest men, enrich themselves by jacking up prices of essential food items while millions go hungry. These same grocery chains throw out vast quantities of food that is not purchased, an unspeakable waste at a time when food insecurity is the worst it’s ever been. We need to expropriate the grocery giants and put our entire system of food production and distribution under the democratic control of the working class, just as we need to expropriate the property developers and big landlords to end the housing crisis.
Capitalism is a system in decay. It cannot provide for basic needs such as food and shelter. It condemns future generations to a worse standard of living than their parents, despite the fact that society has ever greater technology and wealth at its disposal. It offers nothing but poverty, war, disease, repression, and environmental collapse. It is an irrational and unjust system that must be overthrown.