The net addition of people in India per year is, astonishingly, almost exactly equal to the total Dutch population (about 16.7 million) - a net population growth rate which is twice as large as the Chinese one. The net increase of mainland Chinese per year is close to the size of Austria's total population.
It seems cruel and inhuman to say to these people "you are not welcome in the world" or seek to prevent people from having children, but I guess that, unless there is a radical reorganisation of society the majority of these new people will not have much of the goodies of life. The "overpopulation" is specifically overpopulation relative to capital requirements per capita. In general, the world bourgeoisie seems to lack a program for the social reorganisation of society, and thus if a very large mass of poor people appears, the only solution is that "they should not breed so much". Just only the cash assets held by the world's millionaires and billionaires in the top 20 tax havens are estimated at circa $4.4 trillion - with that sort of financial backing you could in principle solve a lot of poverty, environmental and infrastructural problems. But it happens only on a very modest scale, compared to the capital resources available. In 1847, when Karl Marx first thought of the concept of the organic composition of capital and began to theorize the general law of accumulation of capital, he jotted: "Since capital only increases when it employs workers, the increase of capital involves an increase of the proletariat, and, as we have seen, according to the nature of the relation of capital and labour, the increase of the proletariat must proceed relatively even faster. The above theory, however, which is also expressed as a law of nature, that population grows faster than the means of subsistence, is the more welcome to the bourgeois as it silences his conscience, makes hard-heartedness into a moral duty and the consequences of society into the consequences of nature, and finally gives him the opportunity to watch the destruction of the proletariat by starvation as calmly as other natural event without bestirring himself, and, on the other hand, to regard the misery of the proletariat as its own fault and to punish it. To be sure, the proletarian can restrain his natural instinct by reason, and so, by moral supervision, halt the law of nature in its injurious course of development." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/12/31.htm The original meaning of the "proletariat" in antiquity was the propertyless class which is "only fit for breeding" and had nothing to offer but their sons. Preventing people from breeding is thus a direct attack against the proletariat's right to existence. Remember how GW Bush recommended the "abstinence theory" to Africans? To say nothing of compulsory sterilization programs... J. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
