Ken wrote:
> You ask elsewhere for the reader to imagine a (successful)
> capitalism with an absolutely declining population level.
> Indeed, unthinkable! And yet, there have been one or two people
> on this list who boldly and brashly advocate massive,
> unrestricted immigration as a "socialist" measure. I would ask
> all who take this question seriously (which presumably includes
> the bulk of this list) to comment on immigration policies
We must oppose anti-immigration laws. We must oppose all controls on free
movement across borders. This is surely fundamental. Otherwise you are
defending the worst kinds of chauvinism and racism and practically
guaranteeing the emergence of mass right-wing movements ready to take up
arms to defend 'their' capitalism, 'their' state etc, in times of deep
crisis.
Incidentally, there are good sources for arguments *in favour* of population
growth, eg Population Research Institute, which says it is a "non-profit
research and educational organization dedicated to objectively presenting
the truth about population-related issues. Our mission is threefold:
To document abuses of human rights in the name of population control, which
have occurred in China, Bangladesh, and dozens of other countries around the
world, and work for their elimination.
To make a case against the widely held, but fundamentally wrongheaded,
development paradigm which places economic and population growth in
opposition to each other.
To articulate the material and social benefits of moderate population growth
and promote economic development through models which respect the dignity
and rights of the individual human person and the family. "
url: http://www.pop.org/
For the opposite view try http://www.zpg.org/
the zero-poulation people (they are on this list).
There is an obvious problem about opposing anti-immigration laws, in that it
is superficially against the self-interest of those who got there first and
have already established themselves. Trade unions and many mass civic
organisations with good environmentalist, pro-choice etc credentials, are
going to line upo in favour of immigration controls. The left is, or should
be, AGAINST immigration controls, but will have unholy allies: banks,
finance capital, people like Vicente Fox.
There's no help for it, because it is not just a left-wing demand -- the
most powerful supporters of ending immigration controls and opening borders
are finance and banking capital and the TNC's. So yes, it is also an issue
for finance capitalism. This is logical. To take neoliberal ideologues at
face value, why should there be no barriers to capital movements, why should
individual states be asked (told) by the IMF to dismantle all the controls
on capital flows and expose their helpless populations to hurricanes of
change, as happened in the Asian meltdown, and yet at the same time the
world's labour market is supposed to remain hogtied by restrictions, and in
fact there is almost no free movement of labour? Actually, while I
sympathise with Tony Abdo's criticisms of new Mexican president Vicente
Fox's calls for open borders and the creation of a giant unified N American
market, I also think Fox is at least being consistent. And it really is much
in the interests of big capital, of the MNC's, banks, and global financial
markets generally, to allow free movement and have open borders. It is a
socialist demand of fundamental principle, that workers should be free to
migrate, but it si also a practical matter of self-interest of big capital.
This inevitably means 'reverse globalism', ie the Third Worldisation of the
capitalist metropoles. What we've already got is the creation of third world
megacities right in the heart of capitalism: eg Los Angeles and many other
places. This is one of the main brakes on US wage rises -- the creation of
a pool of highly insecure (even terrorised), economically-marginal workers ,
desperate to get a foot on the ladder, and their presence is a huge
disiciplining factor on the workers who've already made it, the 'indigenous'
community (ie, people whose*grandparents* immigrated; and BTW, having
immigrant origins is not confined to the US, this process of flux and
immigration is evident even for eg in conservative, culturally-chauvinist
France -- more than 25% of the present French population had an immigrant
grandparent, according to the last census).
Immigration is important to finance capital, and it's a commonplace that
immigrant communities are often the hardest-working, most entrepreneurial
etc; actually no modern capitalist state escapes some degree of dependency
on immigrant labour, especially in core public and health services,
low-waged services etc. This is why journals like The Economist and the
Financial Times are ambivalent about the issue, but at root capital which is
internationalised, which has long ago transcended the nation-state, demands
and will impose free movement, and the only constraint is about how much,
and when? Mass immigration into the EuroAmerican heartland and even Japan
WILL grow, but the timing and volume will depend on how volatile is the
opposition of nationalist and chauvinist-inclined electorates.
I don't think there us much that is new here. The Nazis easily equated
Bolshevism + International Finance Capital + International Jewry in one big,
cosmopolitan conspiracy against the native German working class. The left
and finance capital do share similar concerns, don't they, at least
superficially, on many important issues?
In the second world war people talked of a historic alliance between the
left and the 'progressive wing' of capitalism. But this was true only
superficially. Finance capital is not irrational and obscurantist, as
fascist ideology at heart always is, but it is not progressive either. The
calculus of profit, which is all the finance capital knows, is exactly what
breeds social desperation, mass panics and atavistic hysterias.
If economic desperation drives people into the arms of black reaction and
nationalist outrages, this is no more than a side-effect of the working of
finance capitalism, with its constant redivisions of the spoils, constant
uprooting of communities, traditions and historical orders, its constant
revolutionising of production processes, constant striving to dematerialise
space and annihilate time, by reducing turnover-times, increasing
information flows, by concentration and centralisation of wealth and power.
This churning-up the everyday lives of the masses practically guarantees the
resurgence of ethnic, religious, racial and communalist processes and
discourses as people search for some anchorage to cling to. It's the
unevenness of the flows of capital which are so terrifying. Capital
deepening in one place mirrors capital-thinning elsewhere, and the process
of wealth-centralisation on one side and impoverishment on the other is
accelerating, casting hundreds of millions of people outside the global
economy and its circuits.
When in a (?)1995 paper, David Pimentel forecast a US population of 500m by
2050 (Hanson has archived the paper) this prediction was greeted with scorn
and even outrage. But even the US census bureau has a central prediction of
400m. I know from earlier debates that many (even well-educated) Americans
are simply in denial about this. In the next 40 years the US population will
more than double.
US + Canada population growth is currently 0.8% p.a. (UNEP GEO2000); the
population grew from 156m in 1950 to 304m in 1995.US population would reach
700m by 2190 on this basis, but by other estimates which allow for higher
immigration/more porous borders, ie the Fox scenario, the US population will
reach one billion by 2190.
Note: In order to calculate the doubling time of a population, divide the
annual growth rate into 70 (The"magic number" 70 is derived from a
logarithmic equation). For example, 70/1.31 = 53 years. This is the doubling
time for world population at current lowest estimate of annual growth, ie
1.31%.
If present growth trends continue and there is no crash, energy-slump etc,
then the high-end forecast is plausible. This is the reality behind Vicente
Fox's vision of the Tex-Mex future. But such an appalling prospect, ie that
within some people's lifetimes there will be one billion North Americans,
that each settlement and every urban area, will be more than tripled in
size, tells you why a Crash or at least a step-change really is inevitable:
for either there would be 300-700m "new" US citizens living in true 3rd
world poverty, or else for eg, US oil consumption would have to increase to
around 30bn/bbls a year (ie current world production), to give everyone an
even break. That's impossible. SOMETHING has to give. But the demographic
trends are what they are. Huge growth is already built-in just by
demographic inertial-momentum. The US is like a big battleship; it can't
spin on a dime; it needs much space and time to change course smoothly.
There are now 220m vehicles in the US, 5x more than in 1950; but US oil
production today is now lower than in 1950. There are 100 times more cars
per capita in the US than in India or China (Worldwatch Inst 2900). The
US-alone population is now 275 m. Here's some other key facts from UNEP's
Geo2000 report:
"North Americans use more per capita energy and resources than any other
region. This causes acute problems for the environment and human health. The
region has succeeded, however, in reducing some environmental impacts.
The North American region is at a critical environmental cross-roads:
important decisions have now to be made that will determine whether the
region's economic activity and patterns of production and consumption will
become more sustainable.
There is continuing concern about the effects of exposure to pesticides
and other toxic compounds on human health and the environment in general.
Emissions of CO, VOCs, particulates, SO2 and lead have been markedly
reduced over the past 20 years.
Fuel use is high � in 1995 the average North American used more than 1 600
litres of fuel (compared to about 330 litres in Europe).
The oxygen-depleted 'dead zone' that now appears off the US Gulf Coast
each summer � at the peak of fertilizer run-off from the Corn Belt � is the
size of New Jersey.
Global warming could move the ideal range for many North American forest
species some 300 km to the north, undermining the utility of forest reserves
established to protect particular plant and animal species.
The impact of development on critical biological resources is an important
issue across the region. Changes to ecosystems caused by the introduction of
non-indigenous species are of particular concern.
Fish stocks off the east coast have nearly collapsed. The Atlantic finfish
catch declined from 2.5 million tonnes in 1971 to less than 500 000 tonnes
in 1994."]
Where does it leave us? Anti-immigration politics are not only wrong in
principle, they are a dead-end in practice. There is no future for
fortress-Amerika. Intercommunal and ethnic violence, race-riots and
suchlike, are surely inevitable anyway. But the simple facts of the case
tell us that it is *not in the interests of ordinary Americans themselves*
to oppose immigration. This is one tiger we don't want to ride. However
superficially attractive immigration-controls may seem, the propaganda is
wrong. Now the Sierra Club is on this bandwagon; but the wildernesses, the
Ogallala, the Everglades etc, will NOT be preserved by immigration controls.
We have to remember that Fascism doesn't work not just because it is nasty
and unfair but because it cannot resolve capitalism's underlying, and
inherently insoluble problem. Fascism can get rid of some of the people for
some of the time, but it cannot get rid of enough of the people all of the
time, to make capitalism viable again. Immigration controls are dilute
fascism. They are a preparation for the real thing. The purpose of fascism
is to give a vampiric after-life to capitalism. It's the problem, not the
solution. If you want to avoid having the tired and huddled masses
clamouring at your door, don't hog 50% of the world's resources, don't make
them tired and hungry to begin with. It's the unevenness of capitalist
accumulation, its spectacular inequalities, which create the problem in the
first place.
Mark
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