[I don't believe in crossposting but maybe this is relevant (from m-fem,
where I've been telling the feminists it's Good to be Malthusian. Mark]
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
On Behalf Of Mark Jones
Sent: 11 August 2000 12:51
To: Margaret Trawick; Charles Brown; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Lenin on birth control
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Margaret Trawick
> Sent: 11 August 2000 09:50
> To: Charles Brown; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Lenin on birth control
>
>
> Hear, hear!! Go, Lenin!
>
Unfortunately, Lenin's optimism about the working class and his estimate of
the destiny of both it and the Russian petty-bourgeoisie turned out to be
misjudgements. Perhaps it is time to move on a little.
Lenin's social optimism, btw, was also shared by the Haute Bourgeoisie of
his day, which believed in population growth, because it wanted big markets
and it wanted plenty of workers for its factories. Only a fool believes that
surplus population is not a problem *today*. The term surplus population, it
should hardly be necessary to add in this scholarly list, was deployed by
Marx, who wrote extensively about the production by capitalism of what Marx
called 'relative surplus population' or the 'reserve army of labour'.
Since Marx was also concerned about the possible long term effects of
resource depletion, destruction of soil fertility and environmental
pollution, it is safe to assume that if Marx were alive today he would be
correspondingly still more alarmed about these issues which would have
become central to his politics.
>From Lenin's point of view the solution to poor working class living
standards was the expropriation of the bourgeosie and landed interests and
the rapid planned expansion of production by a socialist state. The solution
was not propaganda for abortion or birth control.
The same is not true today.
Socialism *cannot permit unrestrained population growth* (assuming such a
tendency emerges in a socialist state). The experience of China and of India
are both decisive in this respect. And when Clinton argues that the best way
to reduce population growth in places like India is by empowering women,
raising literacy standards, lifting the veil, etc, he is saying no more than
the present Kerala government does, or than Lenin, Krupskaya, Kollontai etc
did, or than Mao and Mme Mao did, in their time.
The fact that the population growth which really menaces the global
environemnt is that which occurs in the USA is true, but is besides the
point. It may be neo-Malthusian catastrophism to argue that the human
population is already too large for the planet's carrying-capacity, as some
ill-informed people like to say, but it is also the recognition of a fact.
In reality, failure to recognise the problem may paradoxically only hasten a
true demographic catastrophe. Mass dieoffs are now common and are occurring
today in Africa, eastern Europe and elsewhere. These events are the
inevitable consequence of unrestrained economic growth by the capitalist
metropoles. It is the predatoriness of the metropoles, of IMPERIALISM, and
its hunger for markets, raw materials and energy, which produces disaster in
the peripheries, and the phenomena of capital-thinning rather than
capital-deepening.
If the Ecological Imperative applied (no growth, and no unsustainable human
activities) then capitalism could not continue, it would cease to exist.
Capitalism entails and depends upon, growth, including above all growth in
the consumption of material resources and growth of relative surplus
population. This was what Marx called the general law of population:
creation of a 'reserve army' is an aspect of accumulation, and not a simply
by-product of capitalism, but something essential and intrinsic to it. Those
who argue that capitalism is not after predicated upon a Grow or Die
dilemma, are wrong. True sustainability is impossible under capitalism,
whose whole history has been evidence of two contradictory but interrelated
and interdependent processes: population growth on the one hand, and
genocides, famines, dieoffs and demographic catastrophes on the other.
Marx's critique of Malthus is one of the least satisfactory of his great
critiques of the philosophical thinkers, economists and socialists of the
Enlightenment (the period 1750-1830). This is not because Malthus was a
greater thinker than Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Ricardo, Smith etc, he was not;
on the contrary, Malthus was a trivialising, pedantic country parson whose
social theory is merely a thin veil over undisguised misanthropy. But
Malthus hit upon a problem which actually has never gone away, and which
strikes to the heart of the unsustainability of capitalism. For this is the
first mode of production which both depends upon and makes possible,
exponential growth rates in production, energy and raw material consumption,
and population. But the planet is not growing.
Doug Henwood recently on Pen-L made the too my mind absurd suggestion that
oil production will increase exponentially until the oil runs out. A
moment's reflection is enough to show that this cannot happen. Production of
any resource is bound to decline before ceasing altogether. We are now
entering (probably did enter a decade or more ago) a period of absolute
decline of energy inputs. Demographic catastrophes are inevitable in the
circumstances. Incidentally, it is not coincidental that some of the fast
and sharpest effects of generalised energy shortages are being felt in the
USA --- the world's grossest user/abuser of finite energy.
Mark Jones
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