LET us imagine a common, but often unnoticed, sight that a penniless and hungry person is roaming about the roads of the capital amidst thousands of people. Let us also visualise that the penniless, hungry person is passing by scores of food outlets packed with items, each of which can satisfy his hunger. Now, even though there is abundance of food all around, that person might die of hunger for the inability to pay for the food so desperately needed. This is an insoluble predicament, caused by an economic system that we loftily call political economy, for the penniless person. People’s right to food — the natural connection between hunger and food — is violated by a system that even makes the suffering people think that they have no right to the food around, which are property of others. Political economy, anyone conversant with the term, works thus by validating rights of personal property ad infinitum and by protecting that property.

The bursting shops are out of reach of the penniless people’s cringe hands, which have been rendered inactive and empty. The penniless, hungry people can now be saved by some good souls who would love to stretch out their hand with charity, which, in effect, is a denial of the person’s right to food. We live in a system where our rights are translated as charity and the system, with its ingrained ideological framework, has made us believe that when we ask what we need, we ask for charity, reliefs.

To cite, for example, some real pictures, we can look into what is happening around us right now. A few million people marooned by heavy flood mostly in Bangladesh’s north and east are asking for charity, for handouts made by the government and, sometimes, by other organisations and individuals. To make the picture broader, people in different parts in the world are asking for charity as they have been made, but are not, penniless and, therefore, hungry.

A complete disregard to people’s rights to what we call the basic necessities, coupled with the governing economic and political system that allows and facilitates the amassing of wealth by a few, has led to a situation where people growingly become hesitant to exercise their rights and demand their rightful shares.

We are not in a position, not even philosophically let alone politically, to say that hungry people have their right to everything that is edible around. Political economy, which Marx said starts with the fact of private property, is, in fact, a system that corrodes not only people’s rights but their thoughts that they have the rights.

Political economy, which speaks its own language and is governed by its own laws, does not recognise the penniless, hungry people unless it can turn one into a cog in the big profit-generating machine. Human compassion is something that is completely incompatible with political economy. ‘The only wheels which political economy sets in motion’, writes Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ‘are greed, and the war amongst the greedy.’

The world produces enough food though to feed the total population that inhabits it, millions of people in almost every corner of the world go hungry — not because of food crisis, but because the political-economic system denies them their right to food. It is pertinent to remember, in this connection, Indian economist Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel prize for showing that famine or food crisis are rarely caused by food shortage.

Environmentalist and researcher Timothy A Wise writes in an essay shedding light on the issue, ‘Though the world already grows more than enough food to feed 10 billion people, which is nearly 3 billion more than we currently have, the world hunger is on the rise.’ The surplus food that is always there will come to no good to the people who need them; it will, rather, go waste or will fill the coffers of a few.

It, therefore, does not mean anything if the world produces more than the required food for all its population or if there is God’s plenty, because there is a system that will set the wheels of greed in motion, eventually leading to endless wars disregarding people’s rights to food and health. That is why the most robust economic growth and development, a surprising increase of per capita income or an eye-popping growth of the gross domestic product, rhetoric of which we hear almost every day, will never translate into any benefits for the toiling mass, for the penniless and the hungry.

Let us look at another rough and revealing estimation, given by eminent literary critic Professor Terry Eagleton as a concluding remark to his very academic and widely read 1983 book Literary Theory: An Introduction.

Eagleton wrote back in the early 1980s: ‘It is estimated that the world contains over 60,000 nuclear warheads, many with a capacity a thousand times greater than the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima…. The approximate cost of these weapons is 500 billion dollars a year, or 1.3 billion dollars a day. Five per cent of this sum — 25 billion dollars — could drastically, fundamentally alleviate the problems of the poverty-stricken Third World.’

After 30 or so years since Eagleton gave the estimation, it can fairly be guessed that the world now contains more nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction, spends more money on the production and maintenance of those weapons that are ready to be used. Meanwhile, the penniless and the hungry will have to suffer and perish and look for charity until we come up with a system that guarantees people’s rights.