Malthus was wrong, right?
It seems eerily close to being ecofascist
Yes, Malthus was proven wrong not long after publication of his famous book, but malthusianism is still very popular out there because it is the “scientific” theory which speaks to every fascist and racist mind - it provide perfect framework to justify capitalism even in its worst facets, and shift all the blame from that system and its beneficients straight to its victims.
We produce more than enough food and have more than enough houses
exactly
But were not sustainably creating that food. We can’t keep going the way we are
Apart from the good answers in this thread already, the solution to overpopulation is never a change of the system or whatever but always boils down to some form of genocide.
Ask Westerners which group is the biggest problem, and 9/10 you’ll get the answers that it’s some non-white group somewhere. Which is completely ignoring the fact that a US child has like 9 times the amount of pollution that a random African kid has. So 9 African kids can compensate 1 US child. But it’s never the US children that need to go somehow.
People also like to spew the ‘BUT LOOK AT CHINA!!’ argument regarding pollution, which is ignoring why China has to produce these massive amounts of stuff. It’s not because they like to do it. It’s because they are the number one Global supplier of many things. Of course you’ll have a lot of pollution if the majority of the world relies on your factories and labor.
We have the resources to supply even more people than the current population, it’s just how we use the available resources that’s wrong. And that requires a change of the system. The overpopulation argument is just a very simple way of looking at things, while reality requires a very broad understanding of why things are the way they are. Poor people don’t magically breed more, their material conditions force them to. Conditions forced upon them by capitalist society. Their polluting ways of production are forced upon them by capitalist society. It’s not because they are black or poor or Asian or non-white whatever that they are somehow less eco-friendly by nature. Overpopulation and general eco-talk carries a lot of racism with it.
Another thing that frustrates me about the “look at china” people regarding pollution, is that CO2 emissions per capita for the PRC are 7.38 tons. Lots of countries have higher emissions per capita, eg: Germany (9.44), USA (15.52), Canada (18.58), UAE (23.37). source
Also, people fail to consider the cumulative emissions of decades of polluting already industrialized countries have been doing. Countries like China are rapidly industrializing, and “the west” can’t expect countries to increase their living standards without some years of increased emissions.
A just approach would be that industrialized countries would fund a more environmentally friendly development in these countries, no strings attached. But of course they won’t even sufficiently fund environmentally friendly development in their own countries.
Also since China and the global south build a lot of the west’s goods they are basically just spreading the per capita pollution of the west around the world.
some form of genocide
:100:
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Exactly, we have an overpopulation issue, but it’s only an issue because of the economic system being unsustainable.
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It’s a relative overpopulation, Marx wrote about this in “Capital” (while also dunking harshly on Malthus, fun read). That relative overpopulation is purely related to capitalism and poverty, especially since capitalism became the global system.
I wrote this a while ago when someone asked about phosphorus shortages and food insecurity. Short answer: it is neo-malthusian justification of the delieberately inefficient globalized, neo-colonial, capitalist food industry.
Literally from today. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/23/us-imposes-flawed-food-system-on-the-world/
The system, not access to specific chemical products like fertilizer, is the root problem. I believe that the system is not “flawed” as the author puts it, but rather is simply designed to produce a different result than the implementers say. It is designed to subjugate non-western nations via the conditions of IMF loans which inevitably result in the neoliberalization/monopolization of the debtor coutnry’s food markets/land. Furthermore, it gives the West (the US in particular) a key political weapon against any nations that get out of line… food. Food has been weaponized against other nations for many many years now. For example, one of the key contributing factors to the famines in the USSR was the Western powers not accepting the money or gold of the USSR due to a blockade during years of drought.
When you look up fertilizer/phosphorus shortages you get articles from 2011, 2008,2014, etc. I think that while shortages are real they are pretty convenient pretexts for price gouging and shifting blame away from the system itself which dominates the food production/access for most of the globe. The mortgage crisis in 2008 played the same role - the attention was diverted from the BROKEN system that led to the recession and the blame was placed on something that sounded smart, was actually true in part, and could be blamed on a scapegoat. In 2008 it was poor people taking loans they couldn’t afford (I guarantee you that was workshopped and focus grouped) instead of the derivatives market and predatory lending practices (which extend far beyond the housing market) that are the real, systemic, and unresolved problems.
Back to food, one of the key conditions of the IMF loans is the adherence to American Intellectual Property rights/laws. The result is that there is suddenly an enormous barrier to entry to farming in the form of yearly seed purchasing (you must purchase seeds yearly) and other IP royalties. Seeds, biotechnology, techniques, GMOs, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, etc. all are a form of rent which the west can extract from IMF-loan nations in addition to land consolidation. In fact that is a major reason the US wanted control over Ukraine - I have done some digging into the carve-up of Ukrainian farmland by US Private equity. Therefore, they can make farming cost prohibitive to locals, then american FDI can monopolize land and the american biotech/seed firms have been collecting their rent all along. One of the key issues which led to the 2014 coup in Ukraine was Yanukovych’s decision not to sign a 14$ loan with the IMF, and instead sign a better loan with Russia. Literally months after that he was gone.
Anyone saying stuff like “the population is too big” is an ass. We can find solutions, but as you hint at I think there are very real homicidal/eugenicist undercurrents in western leadership. Covid should be a big reveal that even Westerners are not safe from the willingness of our leadership to sacrifice us so that profits go up. This is the end result of what Michael Parenti referred to as the pathology of wealth.
If you have time I recommend this video from Breakthrough News regarding food sovereignty from the perspective of a Marxist Brazilian Agricultural Economist. https://youtu.be/PdQOGNrTEaE
Excerpt showing the role of Intellectual Property
As a result the demand as well as the grant of patents in plant breeding technology rose very high under the Patent Co-operation Treaty in the USA, Europe and Japan (Atkinson et al. 2003). The international agreements forces the national governments to include some sort of intellectual property rights to the plant genetic resources (Blakeney 2009). This incident eventuated in several overlapping claims over the genetic resources and often the example of golden rice is given which has approximately 70 different patented technologies
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289008337_Intellectual_Property_Rights_and_Food_Security
Great post!
I think you’re right about the eugenecist / fascist tendencies aligned with Malthusianism.
Another factor to consider is that the overpopulation argument assumes that people in the ‘overpopulated areas’ – by which the Malthusians mean there global south and the places in the global north where immigrants live – want big families. But:
- This isn’t necessarily true. There have been global campaigns to discourage the use of contraception in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. (Hello Mother Theresa.)
- Due to the uneven geographical and economic development of capitalism, medical care is lacking in most parts of the world, so not everyone has access to e.g. contraception or ‘family planning’ advice even if it’s legal or accepted.
- I remember this one from school, so I’m unsure how rigorous the reasoning is: the low wages and lack of pensions, social security, and healthcare in many parts of the global south means that people need bigger families because (a) family members may die young, and (b) otherwise there will not be enough people to help the elders and those who cannot work.
- Richard Titmus, one of the architects of the British Welfare State (and unfortunately a eugenecist) showed that social security could be used to limit population growth. Now my memory is a little hazy here, and I’ve misplaced his book to check. I’m 80% sure it was him: he went to an island nation (possibly Mauritius) and helped the government set up a system to discourage people having more than two children (what else is a eugenecist to do on their holidays?). Anyway, the system worked, so far as I know. Population growth slowed. Essentially, IIRC, ‘families’ got very generous benefits if they had two children (yay), but then were penalised quite heavily for having three or more children (I did warn you: a eugenecist isn’t going to handle this kind of thing very well). My point is: if the wealth of the global south were not siphoned off to imperialists, the resources might be available to curb population growth without killing off or targeting certain groups. Caveat: I’m not saying this should be done or is necessary. It’s a question to be answered democratically by all the people of each place. But then we face the ‘problem’ (for want of a better word) that if there West stopped stealing from the South, population growth would likely slow down naturally: (a) current policies encourage and require ‘over population’ to create lots of workers and a reserve labour army; and (b) when conditions improve, people tend to have fewer children and later, to pursue e.g. career goals / higher education (although this may change if it were financially possible to have children and a career, etc).
Sorry, that was far more rambling than I intended. I started with good intentions and succinct bullet points, then, well, as you can see… Essentially, my point is: capitalism has created the conditions for current population levels. Whether this is manageable (it is, with better distribution) or seen as unmanageable (by Malthusians), the dynamic would shift in a socialist world (and so any ‘solution’ in a socialist world would have to solve a different population ‘problem’ than the existing, so called overpopulation).
Overpopulation is the neoliberal excuse to kill minorities, that’s it.
This
I’ll just link Hakim’s video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUJmZ5hUy84
Tl:dr overpopulation is an ecofascist lie and only a “problem” through capitalism
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Not only was he wrong, if I remember the story correctly he basically went into the whole thing to come up with “scientific evidence” on why poor people should be fucked over even more.
The irony of neo-malthusians is that (if implemented) their policy ideas and general fear of new technology would create the conditions for a pretty conservative limit on a sustainable population.
Overpopulation is not a problem, moreover if humanity will continue to develop itself (everyone gets education, industrialization), we will face the opposite — aging and declining population.
No. Overpopulation is a racist myth used to justify genocide.
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It wouldn’t be a problem for our world in the foreseeable future, and by the time it would become a real problem, we would likely not be bound to a single planet anymore.
Malthus was accurate only if you never consider developing new technology or food sources. His ideas were fundementally limited by narrow sighted racism assuming that minorities wouldn’t develop agriculture. And that they wouldn’t be able to have higher yields than achieved than were already achieved.
Even as his ideas have been applied to population genetics in ecology fields for environments undergoing change researchers are realizing that unless a species is very specialized to just one food source they’ll find something new. And that may have other ecological impacts, but it stands to reason humans will find alternative sources as well.
Nope, even with current tech we can sustain 10 billion at worst.
We can sustain more if capitalism is abolished.
Yes. The global plutocracy wants us to think the world can support an infinite number of people. It can’t. The capitalists want more people for a cheap labor pool, a market, more people to fight the wars they think will be profitable, more people to pay taxes instead of them. Why do you think the rich are supporting forced birth. Why do you think we’re running out of everything? Why is the biosphere being destroyed? Why are so many animals going extinct? Too many people. I’m not saying the wealthy aren’t making it worse. They are. But still, too many people.
Now I can’t change your minds. So death will take the world.
Lmao what? We can sustain 10 billion with our current indsutrial capcity.
Sustainably?
Industrialized food practices are not sustainable… how can we?
