The World's Future

Doomsayers have been warning about the dangers of unchecked population growth for centuries. The 18th-century Anglican clergyman and scholar Thomas Malthus believed the world's population would continue to expand rapidly until it was brought under control by famine and disease. He made this prediction when there were about 800 million people on Earth. By 1930, there were 2 billion. In the late 1960s, American biologist Paul Ehrlich envisaged a faster demise. In The Population Bomb, he said devastating famines would mean hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s and '80s. But Malthus and Ehrlich got it wrong.

Although people are living longer, the world's population is growing more slowly than it was in the 1960s and '70s. Population growth has been slowed not by famine or disease, but by women having fewer children. Today, globally, mothers have an average of two children; in 1965 they had close to four. This drop is due to many things, but the improved status of women has had the greatest influence.

''The best population policy that any poor country can have is to bring the population out of poverty.'' explained Graeme Hugo, a geography professor at Adelaide University and one of Australia's most respected demographers.

As most babies will become working adults - every extra human being born brought with him not only an extra mouth but also an extra pair of hands - their contribution to the labour market can boost productivity - a phenomenon known as the demographic dividend. (And also with a longer life expectancy those extra hands can be also be put to use for much longer time.)

Graeme Hugo warns that population reduction is not a silver bullet: ''You need good environmental policy as well as good population policy.''

SOYMB, however, says what is required is a social revolution and the establishment of a society that can provide a rational approach to population and resources. Hunger has been blamed on overpopulation, while the waste of the world's resources is attributed to people being greedy. SOYMB reject these explanations. In our view, the reason millions die of hunger, the reason the world's resources are plundered, is that we are living under an economic system that is geared to making profits rather than to satisfying people's needs. These problems are caused by the existence and the operation of the profit system. They are an inevitable consequence of that system and cannot be eradicated as long as it remains in being.

Marx showed that there is no such thing as a general law of population that applied to all societies and to all times. At times under capitalism there seemed to be overpopulation and at others underpopulation. But this had nothing to do with the birth rate. It was not just a question of the number of people, productivity had to taken into account. Beginning with the industrial revolution, technological development increased social productivity so that more food was provided for the increasing population. However, food is not produced directly to meet human needs but rather for profit. Capitalism is a system of artificial scarcity, so creating poverty amidst potential abundance and the illusion that there are too many people and not enough to go around.

There’s no question that population growth under capitalism is going to pass the carrying capacity of the planet at some point. Socialists can only hope that the world doesn't have to starve half its population to death before coming to the conclusion that capitalism is the real problem that requires addressing. Socialism with production solely for use instead of for sale on the market, will release the labour and resources at present wasted by capitalism to be used, as necessary, for producing food.

But to conclude in the words of Engels:
"There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty. It does not seem to me that it would be at all difficult in such a society to achieve by planning a result which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning, in France and Lower Austria. At any rate, it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when, and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ for the purpose. I do not feel called upon to make proposals or give them advice about it. These people, in any case, will surely not be any less intelligent than we are."