I can already hear it. I know, I know, doomerism has been weaponized in order to keep the working class undereducated, depressed, drugged up, inert, or dead, and I’m falling for bourgeois tactics.
At the same time, though, I look around (even from a privileged, western perspective) and see things getting worse and worse, daily. My life and country have both begun to collapse.
I’m pretty white-pilled when it comes to the human race on the whole, especially with China as the rising superpower, but Jesus. Global economy in shambles, political and civil unrest, and the worst existential threat in human history in climate change all at the same time.
What are the next 20 years going to bring?
I’m scared, and I have a really bad feeling about all of this.
General, I respect your opinions but in this case I think you are mistaken.
Do you think the earth can support an infinite number of human beings?
Population growth is not exponential
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That tech stuff is not necessary, it all comes back to how we organize our society. We actually produce a surplus of food globally and have tons of unused arable land or arable land being used for cash crops to export to the global north. the issue of food security is actually legal/political via IMF treaties, not technical in nature.
This is it here. We create enough food for the population. But the distribution is unequal, and what is produced is driven by profit. If we change this, we will be able to feed the whole world
I mean, fertilizer and our industrialized farming practices are powered by oil - a limited resource. How are we to sustainably feed 9, 10, 11 billion people when that will run out?
Asking in good faith I just don’t understand? Like the way we make food now is basically cheating and unsustainable, how do we sustain a HIGHER population without oil and destroying fertile land?
Is it true that we have tons of arable land available?
I’m undereducated in this sector
No problem comrade! Here’s a video that was very informative https://youtu.be/PdQOGNrTEaE
One of the things I have found time after time after time is that if I feel doomer-ish about something I better look closer at who is controlling the narrative around it and what conflicts of interests surround the R&D for those areas. That is not to say that there are risks and challenges in store for humanity but rather that the experts who have revolutionary optimism often have a very different perspective than the bourgeois intellectuals. Many of the problems we face have needlessly reached a point of crisis due to intentional mismanagement by the capitlists (intentional because crises are very profitable).
If we encounter food production issues it will be due to 2 things, climate change and lack of food sovereignty. As it stands the primary obstacle to each country providing enough food for itself (food sovereignty) are actually the conditions attached to the IMF loans given to developing nations. The key thing to know is they are designed to crack open the nations national resources for Western exploitation (arable land key among them). So the ideal scenario is that the US will grow all the wheat and Brazil will grow all the cocoa/coffee/idk exactly what grows in brazil and buy wheat from the US. But here’s the thing, a key conditionality of these loans is “free market” which really means you can’t protect your domestic economy.
So while the US HIGHLY subsidizes it’s grain production, the austerity conditions in the IMF loan prohibit any sort of government subsidy, investment, or protectionist tarrif for the recipient nation. This includes oil prices, import of potash and other fertilizers, etc. Another key condition is that these nations must abide by the Intellectual property laws of the USA (or some international incarnation of them). Well what does this have to do with food? Intellectual property rights extend to biotechnology… aka seeds, fertilizer, and pesticide. So now all the sudden the Ukrainian farmer can’t pay the operating costs for the farming operation that has been in his family 4 generations because gas, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are too expensive, the market is flooded with cheaper goods, and/or etc.
This results in a mass privatization land grab. In fact this is exactly what happened in Ukraine after the 2014 coup. US and EU private equity firms descended on UA like vultures and monopolized the whole thing more or less. So when the news bemoans the theft of Ukrainian grain, it is worth remembering that a significant portion of that grain probably belongs to American companies. (although I actually think those stories are just to slander russia).
So when you think about food production in a simple “can we produce enough” you are missing out on the fact that food production, like energy, diamonds, and other minerals is essentially a cartel. Which btw drugs are also cartels, often financed by exactly the same people look at opium production in SEA and Afghanistan during US occupation - drugs are the ultimate cash crop - it is well documented.
So all across the global south the same situation is replicated, so all those mines owned by the West? They also own the farmland, and if they don’t own it directly they own it through a comprador/latifundia type figure who grows it only for export. The most profitable foods to export are cash crops: tobacco, cotton, tea, coffee, etc. i.e. luxury goods the global north CANNOT GROW!!! This is EXACTLY the dynamic which led to the The Great Irish Famine under british rule. There was enough food to feed the population, James Joyce ( I believe) wrote a poem about watching the ships full of grain leave the bays as his son lay starving. Do not underestimate the cruelty of Western finance capitalism to use food as a weapon, because one of the intended consequences of growing only cash crops across the global south and making them reliant on the Global North for food is that at any moment, they can cut off grain shipments as punishment. i.e. they cannot leave their orbits for fear of starvation…
BTW The deforestation in the Amazon is for cattle production, that cattle fuels the US fast food industry (because cattle ranchers in the US are pretty organized for petty bourgeois).
I don’t want to lose what I have written or waste my time so let me know what you think of this and if you want me to continue
God, I love it when I’m trying explain something but can’t, and this this angel sent from the heavens does it for me. Like Yeah, WE did it!
A good 2/3rds of the questions I wrestled with before becoming an ML are solved by realizing “Oh shit white european capitalist leadership will literally go to that length to get control of x, y, or z resource.” Damn, they suck.
Is that what gotcha to be an ML or were you just using your head?
It was the one two punch of covid then Ukraine. Watching the callous disregard for human life on both sides wrt covid and the government just choosing not to help and then watching corporate loans be forgiven really got me pissed. With Ukraine it was the first time I was old enough and savvy enough (with enough free time) to fact check the official narrative on a war.
But what got me to overcome my anticom programming was after covid started and I was thinking during lockdown with a lot of free time. WRT covid I was lost for a bit then I stumbled upon genzedong when I had a guilt trip remembering the time I wouldn’t date a girl when I found out she was a stripper. Like I was polite as hell with her but I felt like I just couldn’t honestly pursue that relationship. And the way people judged me pissed me off so I got to thinking about the commodification of sex and I googled “why is sex work being normalized reddit” (I still thought reddit was “left”) and came upon genzedong. And the opinions expressed were so in line with my own that it broke down my anti-communist indoctrination. Like I do not hate sex workers, I feel they are kind of victims of a system that aims to commodify everything it can, and generally I have a humane approach to it, but I hate the fact that sex work exists (in a coercive way).
But that just got me to actually read leftists and there is no other framework that addresses the problems I see so comprehensively. It literally explains pretty much everything. and it isn’t seen as like this dead body of work, it is a living, breathing, growing body of work. And it is beautiful
Edit: just realized that’s not really the question you asked… that analysis came after I became a marxist.
Overpopulation is just a spook. You think you’re making it out of this world alive?
And not that history is cruel or whatever; but we are at about 8 bill people now. If we are going to die by mass starvation and lack of resources; what difference does it make if it’s 7 billion or 30 billion? We are talking billions of lives that could be snuffed out by lack of resources NOW. The nightmare cant be any worse than it is IF shit gets that bad. Malthusian worry doesn’t matter anymore. A culling of billions be it natural or man made is either going to happen or it wont.
Bare minimum; we can TRY to save ourselves.