... and a Happy new Year!
Eva
THE PEOPLE
JANUARY 1998
VOL. 108 NO. 10
ERLICH AT IT AGAIN--
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
'THE POPULATION BOMB?'
BY KEN BOETTCHER
In 1968 Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, in his book, THE
POPULATION BOMB, predicted that worldwide starvation due to
overpopulation would result in death for hundreds of millions of
human beings during the 1970s. In THE END OF AFFLUENCE, written
with his wife Anne and published in 1974, the Ehrlichs upped the
estimate--and stretched out the timetable--to a billion or more
dead from starvation by the mid-1980s.
Despite his notoriety as a failed prophet of doom, Ehrlich's ego
still fuels an occasional foray into the public eye. In one such
recent foray, Ehrlich, still pushing overpopulation as the
primary cause of the world's problems, rounded out his
reactionary world view by adding "overconsumption" as a
secondary cause.
At a recent Stanford University public forum, Ehrlich almost
apologetically observed that, "The good news is that we've
started affecting the population. Twenty years ago, I would have
thought this to be dreadfully hard." But population growth,
despite slowing its rate somewhat, has proceeded well beyond the
point at which Ehrlich postulated catastrophe. Increased food
production, rather than slower growth, was responsible for
averting mass starvation--although capitalism's profit-motivated
production still made for imbalances responsible for plenty of
human misery, malnutrition and starvation on a smaller scale.
In short, Ehrlich's theories were just plain wrong. In THE
POPULATION BOMB, he had asserted that, "The battle to feed
humanity is over....Hundreds of millions of people are going to
starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon
now. Population control is the only answer."
Having set up this straw man, Ehrlich, in his "scientific ardor"
to solve the "population problem," pushed some truly draconian
proposals for population control. At a 1969 conference of the
United States Commission for the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization, for example, he suggested
that "the government might have to put sterility drugs in
reservoirs and in food shipped to foreign countries to limit
human multiplication."
In the context of the world as it was then and remains now--a
world dominated by capitalist relations and a wealthy capitalist
class centered in the advanced industrialized nations--such a
view amounts to a variation of racism, a form of genocide, and a
defense of the capitalist status quo in social relations that
nourishes the growth of mass poverty and misery. It puts the
blame for the world's problems on the victims of class-ruled
society rather than on the system of class rule itself.
It is not surprising, then, to find Ehrlich in 1998 still
spouting similar explanations for the world's problems--and
similar solutions. A recent article in the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
summarized his thesis as follows:
"The explosive population growth in developing nations is
accelerating ecological degradation, but in developed nations,
consumer lifestyles are just as seriously straining the earth's
resources." "What I worry about in the next 30 years," Ehrlich
says, "is: How can we change the picture of consumption? That is
more challenging than the population side of the equation." He
now advocates what the MERCURY NEWS described as "consumption
reduction policies."
An associate of Ehrlich, Stanford professor Stephen H.
Schneider, made it clear what this might mean for workers.
"People need to pay for what they destroy--whether disposable
diapers or fuel-inefficient sports utility vehicles." Though the
sentence is almost unintelligible, the presumable implication
would be a regressive surcharge on some consumer goods that
again puts the onus for today's socioeconomic problems on the
victims of class-ruled society--on workers who under capitalism
have little say in what is produced or under what conditions
production is accomplished.
But the most important criticism of Ehrlich and associates is
that the major and basic problem in the world today is NOT
population growth in the face of insufficient production of the
good things in life, or their "overconsumption" by the majority-
-the great working class that must sell its labor power in order
to live.
After all, the working class is ROBBED of the major portion of
the goods it produces--robbed right at the point of production.
The workers receive in wages just a FRACTION of their total
product. In general, starvation--when it exists and on whatever
scale it exists--comes from the workers' inability to buy food
on the capitalist market, not from any inability to produce it--
even under the limiting, profit-motivated capitalist system.
Exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class is the
fundamental cause of poverty and human misery all over the
world.
Ehrlich's draconian proposals cannot solve that problem. That
remains for the workers themselves to solve--by abolishing
capitalism and taking, holding and operating the industries and
services for the good of all. By building a Socialist Republic
of labor to replace capitalism and its political state, social
ownership of the means of life will replace private ownership;
production for use will replace production for profit; and
planned production by the democratically elected administrative
councils of socialist society will replace the anarchy and chaos
of the outmoded political state.
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