Food prices have risen rapidly as a result of disturbances to supply and demand due to the virus and lockdown. Over the past year, I have argued that the economy has headed off towards a hyper-deflation cliff. Despite the recent rise in prices, I stand by that analysis.

We saw grocery prices rise nearly 3 percent in the month of April. Yet this came at a time when meat production saw declines of 40 percent and shortages even of wheat flour began to appear. Demand for food should have increased due to the shutting down of the food service industry, driving people to grocery stores.

The market could have supported, under such conditions, a twenty or forty percent increase in prices. Why did that not occur, in order to spur production of that basic necessity? Farms, during this massive increase of demand and decrease in supply, instead cut supply even more, destroying large stores of milk, vegetables, and likely every type of food.

A shock as great as the Covid-19 virus and shutdown only caused a small spike in prices. Relative to where the prices should have gone considering the crisis, we obviously still need to deal with the economic reality of hyper-deflation. A disaster of the Coronavirus variety may have caused massive damage to human life and property in terms of lost production, but destruction on this scale still will not suffice to return major corporations to profitability.

As the old economy starts back up, the same imbalance will remain, creating the conditions for far greater destruction, on the order of, not trillions, but 10s of trillions or even more than 100 trillion dollars in property and the consequent destruction of 10s of millions or hundreds of millions of lives.

The situation comes down to the unstoppable force of class conflict. Capitalism wants to pay workers close to nothing while charging everyone high prices. Competition over sales drives prices down, causing Capitalists to lockdown businesses and later demolish and scrap good assets. They put workers into unemployment, forcing down demand and putting even more downward pressure on prices. As I predicted, prices in general fell in May: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/economy/consumer-prices-may/index.html

To put enough money into the hands of workers through sales would require raising prices and wages at the same time. That, however, raises the political situation in which workers fear political organization while, in those cases where organizing does occur, government fails to respond out of allegiance to the “employers”. This organizational failure gets compounded by deliberate subterfuge of established “social leaders”.

The two conflicting forces, the drive to war and destruction as a path to profit, combined with a political struggle against dead organizations in the form of human beings unable to give impulse to a humane order, must unite into a single revolutionary movement to destroy much of what maintains the old order and make a series of quick decisions over whether to revive or bury the dead organizations that linger on the surface of the earth like casualties on the battlefield.

In the case of the revolutionary party, what remains to be seen is whether or not the party must fail under control of a Nano-Bureaucracy, setting the revolution back decades or revive itself through acceptance of the artificial respiration of an openly factional democracy on the model envisioned by the Declaration of the 46.