The Famine

The British reaction at the time was largely one of schadenfreude. "Total Annihilation;" suggested The Times leader of September 2, 1846; and in 1848 an editorial crowed "A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan." Efforts to alleviate distress had more to do with the preservation of public order i.e. British rule in Ireland, and the prevention of the overspill of the great catastrophe onto "the mainland". James Anthony Froude, professor of history at Oxford, once wrote that the Irish were "more like squalid apes than human beings". He can hardly then be accused of being any friend to Ireland or the Irish. Yet in his book "English in Ireland", we find the following passage: "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe." It is a judgement echoed by many other historians, and bluntly illustrated in reality by the Great Famine. The single greatest legacy of the Famine was an enduring hatred and mistrust of the British, who had let so many people die.

However, there is another interpretation. "Ireland's greatest natural disaster" (my emphasis), says ex-President Mary Robinson's preface in the Strokestown "Famine Museum" book. Natural disaster? That myth was most memorably scotched by the words of Malone in Shaw's "Man and Superman":

Malone: "My father died of starvation in Ireland in the Black '47. Maybe you've heard of it?"

Violet: "The Famine?"

Malone: (with smoldering passion) "No, the Starvation. When a country is full of food and exporting it, there can be no Famine."

Why didn't the Irish rise up? They tried, belatedly, in 1848. The rising was little more than a farce. the country was so weakened by starvation and disease that people had more than enough to do simply staying alive. Starvation had been a weapon used against the Irish for centuries, since at least the time of Spenser. By the 1840s, the Irish had been reduced to the level of serfs. There was little leadership, and what there was befuddled by Christianity.

To understand the Famine, it must be put in context, the context of what England was doing in Ireland for many years prior. Karl Marx, in "Capital", devotes several chapters to what he calls "primitive capitalist accumulation". That's a mouthful: what does it mean? We have grown used to considering capitalism as the natural state of affairs, so that we forget how unnatural it is compared to the thousands of years when a natural economy did indeed exist. This natural economy was ever an economy of scarcity, contrasting sharply with the economy of relative abundance with which capitalism has provided us. It was an economy tied to the rythyms of the seasons. It was, crucially, an economy that left very little surplus. Its essential condition was stasis. Accumulation is the sine qua non of capitalism. Today, with an abundance of capital, this is matter of fact. But whence came the inital capital, to make the leap out of the natural economy? From "primitive capitalist accumulation". What this meant was extracting a greater surplus from the natural economy than had ever been attempted. This is the root explanation of the famine. The native population was driven into ever deeper poverty by their English landlords, who exported the surplus value to England, where it ultimately ended up invested in mills and mines and factories.

We are not speaking now of conditions in which ground-rent, the manner of expressing landed property in the capitalist mode of production, formally exists without the existence of the capitalist mode of production itself, i.e., without the tenant himself being an industrial capitalist, nor the type of his management being a capitalist one. Such is the case, e.g., in Ireland. The tenant there is generally a small farmer. What he pays to the landlord in the form of rent frequently absorbs not merely a part of his profit, that is, his own surplus-labour (to which he is entitled as possessor of his own instruments of labour), but also a part of his normal wage, which he would otherwise receive for the same amount of labour. Besides, the landlord, who does nothing at all for the improvement of the land, also expropriates his small capital, which the tenant for the most part incorporates in the land through his own labour. This is precisely what a usurer would do under similiar circumstances, with just the difference that the usurer would at least risk his own capital in the operation. This continual plunder is the core of the dispute over the Irish Tenancy Rights Bill. The main purpose of this Bill is to compel the landlord when ordering his tenant off the land to indemnify the latter for his improvements on the land, or for his capital incorporated in the land. Palmerston used to wave this demand aside with the cynical answer: "The House of Commons is a house of landed proprietors."

A degraded peasantry forced down to subsistence level was inevitably more vulnerable to crop failure, since they had no margin of reserve when things went wrong. But even reducing the native population to a standard of living lower than any other in Europe proved insufficient; as capitalism developed, so did the hunger for investment in Britain. In the drive to extract ever more from the country, the human population became superfluous. So when things did go wrong — and a monoculture will sooner or later fail — the British concentrated on containing the problem — trying to prevent the spread of disease to the garrison, ensuring that England was not swamped by Irish paupers — rather than feeding the hungry. The ultimate explanation for the Great Hunger is simply this: that it was a convenient "natural" way to remove surplus mouths from land more profitable as pasture.

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