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An Anarchist Free Food Initiative

For a long time now, there has been enough food in the world to feed everyone, and yet hunger and poverty are everywhere, and those who do eat well often have to submit to wage slavery or actual slavery to get enough food to eat. At the same time we are told that our "gross domestic product" has grown and grown until it is many times what it was even a few decades ago. No matter how much is produced, or how our powers of production increase, there is never enough to solve simple problems like hunger and homelessness.

The reason is that, along with all the wonders of the industrial world, the capitalist system also produces scarcity. It has to do this or it collapses. That is because the people who are in control of the system, the bourgeoisie, take their social power from their role as managers of scarce resources. If the resources are not scarce, no one needs an elite to control them. To prevent such a situation from arising, the bourgeoisie employ war, imperialism, waste, and consumerism. If they fail – if people stop buying and consuming because they have enough – they are punished with a depression (meaning their masters feel depressed) or a war.

Nevertheless, capitalism also demands that production, consumption, and profits increase. And so -- since the needs of biology and tradition have long since been overcome -- new, fictional "necessities" must constantly be invented. At the same time, new ways of wasting wealth are devised, mostly by using profits, taxes, insurance, and other compulsory charges to move money out of the hands of the poor into the pockets of the rich. The situation becomes increasingly dangerous and unstable as production and consumption become increasingly artificial and spectacular. Meanwhile innocent people go hungry, get sick, live in misery, despair and ignorance in the richest countries, while elsewhere worse happens: the needs of Capital occasion war and support for fascism and terror. Everywhere, the physical and social environment is degraded for the sake of money and power.

What can be done?

The Anarchist Free Food Initiative is an experiment in undercutting the culture of scarcity and domination. We believe that basic, ordinary food should be given freely to everyone, rich and poor, without question or qualification. We think this can be done without the government, the corporations, or other such organizations, and thus demonstrate their uselessness and irrelevance. Many other needs must be met, but because food is cheap and plentiful it is a good way to start. This way of doing things can be called Convivium, word originally meaning a "feast" or "banquet", or literally being alive together. Even a small anarchist movement will be able to demonstrate every day that it is not necessary to submit to the bourgeois State to eat, in any of the roles it offers: employee, beggar, thief. Once free food distribution is underway, distribution of other cheap, plentiful goods like clothing can be planned. Learning as it goes, the Convivium can free more and more people from Capital in more and more ways. The oatmeal cookie – cheap, nutrious, delicious, and free, is both a symbol and a realization of the Initiative and the Convivium – a symbol you can eat and enjoy.

This Anarchist Free Food Initiative has no leadership and no members – it lives only in people's actions. You can become part of it today or tomorrow. A recipe is on the front of this leaflet. You can make a few cookies, give them away, and start bringing down the system of domination and exploitation. Every cookie strikes at its heart and begins the creation of a new world.