Johannes, great thanks for posting this report here. It is a very timely topic. On WSNlistserv, a few moths ago, there was a flame war between a couple of sociologist marxists such as Steven Rosenthal, Alan Spectors, Andy Wayne Austin and me who though population control programs sponsored by international organizations like the UN had social darwinist/racist implications as forms of political control over third world people AND those who thought these programs were beneficial in the long run in terms of fighting against population pressures and reorganizing world's population. We were correctly suspicious of the fact the reason why the US suddenly talks about population pressures or becomes interested in the fertility of poor nations is because it wants to reduce the number of poor people in the developing world to sustain the well being of white middle classes in the core of the capitalist world system. I don't have time to go into details at the moment. Accordingly, I am posting Andy Austin's Marxist views on the issue whose ideas I find myself politically close when debating population (as well as other issues like sex-industry, sexism, racism, etc..). ***Andy wrote: First, the industrial reserve army exists because capitalism cannot employ everybody, not because capitalists consciously manufacture more people than they can employ. That the industrial reserve functions to push wages down, that the US state uses the Fed to achieve this effect, that the industrial reserve can be useful in moments of expansion, etc., has nothing to do with why it exists in the first place. Such reasoning is either teleological or indicates a conspiracy (it must be a conspiracy since there is no evidence for it) where the capitalist class connives to increase the fertility of the working class. The only evidence for the ruling class' intrusion into the fertility of the masses is in the other direction, i.e., they desire to reduce the number of those in the "underclass" because they are capitalism's embarrassment (hence the support and funding of chemical and surgical sterilization, public heath departments dispensing birth control, family caps, etc., all designed to reduce the numbers of poor people). Second, this statement - >What makes much more sense is that high fertility levels and large numbers >of proletarians lead to magnified inequality. - Is picture perfect social Darwinism. Lester F. Ward, in his article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics," published in The American Journal of Sociology 18 (1913) argued that the law of population causing the proliferation of the "undesirables" not only "applies to the uncivilized races," but "no less applies to the lower classes of civilized society." These lower classes "furnish the proles, and constitute the proletariat," 752. While Ward agrees with the elimination of undesirables (the especially the "defective," i.e., mentally retarded, physically disabled, etc.), he disagrees with his colleagues that they should fear the "proles" and select them for reduction. He characterizes this fear as a product of an "oligocentric world-view." "It is trying to polish up the guilded pinnacles of the social temple so as to make them shine a little more brightly, while utterly neglecting the great, coarse foundation stones upon which it rests," quoted in D. Collin Wells, "Social Darwinism," published in the American Journal of Sociology 12 (1907), 702. The proletariat, that rough-hewn lot, replenish the ruggedness of the race. Andrew Austin Knoxville, TN Mine Johannes Schneider wrote: > Yesterday the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released The State of > World Population 2000 report. Its just another example what the results of > global capitalism are. The UNFPA sums up the results like this: > > Millions of women are denied reproductive choices and access to health care, > contributing each year to 80 million unwanted or mistimed pregnancies and > some 500,000 preventable pregnancy-related deaths. Nearly half of all > deliveries in developing countries take place without a skilled birth > attendant present. > > Violence against women and girls is widespread-one woman in three will > experience violence during her lifetime, most often at the hands of someone > she knows. Each year 2 million girls are at risk of genital mutilation, and > up to 5,000 women and girls are the victims of so-called "honour" killings. > > Women's lack of control over sexual activity and its consequences is a major > factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS, now the fourth most common cause of death > worldwide and the leading killer in Africa, where infected women outnumber > infected men by 2 million. > > Two thirds of the 300 million children without access to education are > girls, and two thirds of the 880 million illiterate adults are women. > > The whole report is at > http://www.unfpa.org/swp/swpmain.htm -- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 12222 _______________________________________________ Why pay for something you could get for free? 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