Capitalism causes workers to blame themselves for their oppression, and holds out the “solution” of family planning to those who feel unable to meet the expenses involved in adding to their numbers by reckless procreation. It diverts the justifiable anger of deprivation the people forced to live with from an attack on the ruling class that is responsible for the conditions to a “blame-the-people” attack on the working-class. The size of population, be it “too small” or “too large” is held to be an important factor in the misery and suffering of workers. To be sure, “over-population” seems to exist in large parts of the world where people are subjected to famines, floods and disease. While this condition may not always be man-made in every case, it is at any rate maintained by men, so as to secure privileged positions within existing social relations, or international power relations, or both simultaneously. The root of the problem is not over-population but capitalism itself.
Many take their lead from Thomas Malthus such as the writer Paul Ehrlich or the natural life documentary maker David Attenborough. The view present is that pressure of past and present population has resulted in serious and permanent depletion of our soil, water, plant and animal reserves. The predicted future increase in population will not only further deplete our resources but.at an accelerated rate. Soil conservation and restoration throughout the world has not caught up with the present rate of depletion, and in most of the world, little or nothing is being done to check the ravages caused by man’s disruption of the water supply cycle. Irreplaceable topsoil has been and is being washed away, water tables lowered, and the very weather changed. It is argued that there is not enough arable land in the world today to properly feed the present population, and there is little or no new land fit for exploitation. Present conservation practices are limited to treating the effect rather than the cause of depletion.
The “law of diminishing returns” maintains that if one of the three factors of production (land, labour, capital) specifically land is held constant, then successive additions of the variable factors, labour and capital, will eventually result in a diminished added output (marginal product) relative to the amounts of labour and capital added. Certainly a strong case for doom and gloom. George Bernard Shaw responded:
“If any gentleman tries to persuade you that the earth is now under the Law of Diminishing Return you may safely conclude that he has been told to say so at a university for the sons of the rich, who would like you to believe that their riches, and the poverty of the rest, are brought about by an eternal and unchangeable law of Nature instead of by an artificial and disastrous misdistribution of the national income which we can remedy.”
As far back as 1848 Engels provided the theoretical refutation of this law:
“The area of land is limited - that is perfectly true. But the labour power to be employed in this area increases together with population; and even if we assume that the increase in output associated with this increase of labour is not always proportionate to the latter, there still remains a third element -which the economists, however, never consider as important – namely, science, the progress of which is just as limitless and at least as rapid as that of population... science increases at least as fast as population; the latter increases in proportion to the size of the previous generation, and science advances in proportion to the body of knowledge passed down to it by the previous generation that is, it grows in geometrical progression – and what is impossible for science?...To us so-called economic laws are not eternal laws of nature but historic laws which arise and disappear... To us also, therefore, none of these laws, in so far as it expresses purely bourgeois conditions, is older than modern bourgeois society; those which have hitherto been more or less valid throughout all history only express just those relations which are common to the conditions of all society based on class rule and class exploitation. To the former belongs the so-called law of Ricardo, which is valid neither for feudal serfdom nor ancient slavery, to the latter belongs what is tenable in the so-called Malthusian theory. Every stage of development, therefore, will have its own law of population. To understand the emergence of a relative surplus population under capitalism which presses against the means of employment, not the means of subsistence, one must understand the effect of the growth of capital upon the working class.”
Their evaluation of world food resources is both pessimistic and blinkered by existing market relations as the only motive to produce. The dislocations, delays and anarchy of capitalist organization give aid and comfort to the prophets of doom. Analysis demonstrates that we must base our hopes for a world of plenty on a new social and economic order that does not pause to compute profits before proceeding with essential action.
There is the story of a farmer who was urged to attend a meeting on soil conservation. “There’s no use my going to that meeting about farming better,” he replied. “I don’t farm as good as I know how to now.” It is no joke that most farmers today cannot afford, under our present economic system, “to farm as good as they know how.”
Friedrich Engels in 1865:
“Too little is produced, that is the cause of the whole thing. But why is too little produced? Not because the limits of production – even today and with present day means – are exhausted. No, but because the limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies but by the number of purges able to buy and to pay. Bourgeois society does not and cannot wish to produce any more. The moneyless bellies, the labor which cannot be utilized for profit and therefore cannot buy, is left to the death-rate. Let a sudden industrial boom, such as is constantly occurring, make it possible for this labor to be employed with profit, then it will get money to spend, and the means of subsistence have never hitherto been lacking. This is the vicious circle in which the whole economic system revolves. One presupposes bourgeois conditions as a whole, and then proves that every part of them is a necessary part – and therefore an “eternal law.” (Letter to F.A. Lange, Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels)
Only in a socialist world will the benefits of scientific agriculture be given to all of the peoples of all lands , because only a socialist economy can permit the rationalisation of food production. Those who see starvation ahead unless governments impose rigid controls on population growth do not stand for continued human progress on a world-wide scale. They are not the prophets who will lead the peoples of the world into lands “flowing with milk and honey.” In its incipient stages, industrialisation is accompanied by an initial sharp rise in the population curve, followed by a gradual leveling-off and stabilisation. “Over-population” is not the cause but the result of to arrest social development, as may be seen by the fact that wherever hunger is eliminated population tends to decline. But even if it would not do so, there exist for a very long time ample opportunities for an increased production able to feed a world population many times its present size. Only with the suicidal rejection of the socialist future can lead to the conclusion that this classic curve will not continue to characterize continued human progress. It is not really “over-population” which worries the ruling classes. Rather the opposite is true; as is made clear by frantic efforts to increase population at the first sign of its tendential decline, by the fact that birth-control is made a crime, and by the maintenance of conditions that foster a vast increase of the impoverished masses. Conditions of misery for the masses are a prerequisite to the wealth and special social position of the ruling classes.
Marx summed up the law of population under capitalism:
“It is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers i.e. a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus population. The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus-population...”
Marx also had this to say about Malthus:
Marx, himself went part of the way in explaining this phenomenon when he wrote:
“The hatred of the English working class against Malthus is... entirely justified. The people were right here in sensing instinctively that they were confronted not with a man of science but with a bought advocate, a pleader on behalf of their enemies, a shameless syncophant of the ruling classes.”
We, too, should treat those environmentalists who claim people are the problem and not the system as our class enemy. To conclude,we will concede that there exists over-population in places whilst the world as a whole is underpopulated. The slum hovel in Mumbai is over-populated. A council housing scheme in England is overpopulate. Socialism will enable the unfortunate denizens of these plague spots to escape from their cramped crowded conditions.
AJJ
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