Marx and Engles on the Population Bomb

I am gradually scanning in the book and I hope to make large sections of it available, either as straight HTML or hyperlinks to the marx/lenin archive.

Back in 1798 – a year in which the French Revolution was still conjuring up hopes of the perfectibility of man and of society – the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus issued his famous law of population: mankind’s propensity to beget, he warned, would soon outstrip the earth’s capacity to provide. Half a century later another prophet branded the good parson "a shameless sycophant of the ruling classes" and "a bought advocate" of those who opposed a better life for Merrie England’s poor. By arguing that poverty was a natural condition and misery a necessary check on growing numbers, the contemptible Malthus was, Karl Marx claimed, simply selling scientific and moral arguments to selfish opponents of reform. The real problem wasn’t too many people or too little food, said Marx, but that private capitalists owned the means of meeting men’s needs. Today this war of words roars on, Professional ecologists chastise the political left for "blindly following the outdated Marxist line that the population problem can be ignored until we reform the economic system." And a new generation of unregenerate Marxists yells back that "the population bombers only divert attention from the real issues and pave the way for world-wide race war and genocide." The debate is classic, and classically dull. Rhetorically, at least, it would be better left to those endless meetings in out-of-the-way auditoriums and to unread forewords to scholarly reprints such as this. But the issue won’t disappear. Because of the debate, many who have worked together against imperial adventure, poverty and racism now find themselves fighting each other across ill-defined barricades. Without the debate, many more – either fearful of the deep dark masses stirring below, or freaked by the whole modern trip and anxious to end it with a quick cultural vasectomy – are making the population control movement into a far-too-holy crusade. The whole scene is scary, and perhaps more immediately dangerous than the life-and-death questions which the neo-Malthusians confusedly pose and the Marxists contemptuously ignore. More words, especially old words, won’t undo the danger: survival is just not the kind of question which encourages sanity. But this collection of Marx’s and Engels’s scattered critiques, together with the omnipresent editions of the old Malthus, does offer a firsthand view of the old and recurring controversy and, as this preface attempts to show, an opportunity to get beyond "the outdated line" of both Marx’s followers and their critics.

Properly speaking, the problem posed by the neo-Malthusians isn’t really Malthusian at all. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, Parson Malthus offered some rather common-sense projections on the geometric growth of populations, and compared them unfavorably to an off-the- top-of-his-head assertion that "subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio." In practice, of course, it didn’t work out that way. Common sense in nineteenth-century Europe was changing, and in the process undoing Malthus’s geometry. Large peasant families had provided extra farmhands and a measure of social security for old age; in the new industrial Europe of the nineteenth century, extra children were simply extra mouths to feed – and, with the breakdown of family solidarity, ungrateful ones at that. Seeing this, and the parallel rise in health care and life expectancy, people quite sensibly started having fewer children. Scientists later termed this cutback in child production the "demographic transition"; our great great grandparents simply called it separate beds, unnatural devices, or pulling out. Except for the work of a few pioneers like Francis Place, there was no major family planning campaign and certainly no pill. Scientific farming and technology were even more unkind to Malthus’s agricultural arithmetic, which woefully (and rather geometrically) understated the enormous nineteenth- century rise in food production. The neo-Malthusians, even as they resurrect the old par- son’s fame and pessimism, are undermining his science still more, undoing the original terms of the population-food equation. They still hawk the old geometry, and with population now doubling once every thirty-five years, paint some rather ghastly nine-hundred-year projections of earth as a standing-room-only sardine can and spaceship. But that is just a showman’s ship. The doubling – and quite possibly the old can herself – won’t go on that long, and few of the population controllers are optimistic enough to think that it will. What they see as the limit, moreover, is not simply the limited potential’ of food production. "In the long run," writes Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, "the progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than any conceivable food-population gap." Mankind, even in our present numbers, is wrecking the entire life support system. We are eating up not just hard-grown food but also water, minerals, fuels and even air much faster than nature can regenerate them. We are dumping into the soil, sea and sky, fertilizers, pesticides and chemical wastes faster than nature can absorb and recycle them. We are disrupting complex natural cycles and interactions, mass-producing a simplified and unstable environment that is increasingly vulnerable to massive and quite natural disaster. Everything, the first law of ecology explains, is connected to everything else, and it is this everything, this entire ecology, which we are progressively destroying, and which, with the poetic justice of a more classic (and simplified) age, might destroy us.

Alert to this whole world of troubles, and not simply to food production, the neo-Malthusians quickly confound the answer given Reverend Malthus by the nineteenth century, and by most Marxists. This time around, we can’t simply wait for science and technology to get us out of the hole. New miracle grains, mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation might well do for agricultural growth in the Third World what an earlier green revolution did for food in the old world. But we now know the cost in environmental destruction: modern agriculture will destroy the soil, rob foods of needed nutrients, and spread DDT and other poisons into everything from mothers’ milk to the fish ponds which provide essential proteins to the single-celled sea algae which (normally) produce about half the world’s oxygen. Worse, since the large expanse of undifferentiated seed strains offers an invitingly simple target for some super-pest or crop disease, the present hastily produced green revolution might not even deliver the agricultural goods. We can’t simply wash our hands of these problems and forswear the modern world. But the next modern-day technocrat – or Marxist – who simply echoes the nineteenth century’s paean to progress should get his foolish mouth shut with a good-sized fistful of organic dirt.

Preservation of the whole earth also re- quires a little more quiet from the neo-Malthusians them- selves, for – by their own testimony – it is now clear that population growth, while a very real problem, is not the prime problem, and population control is not the first solution. Long before the DDT sets in, the "teeming masses" are discovering that there is now too much food and too few people who can afford to buy it. The reason is simple: the green revolutionaries are not growing food for people, they are producing commodities for profit. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations produce seeds which require costly applications of fertilizer and pesticide; the petrochemical companies (like the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil) produce the fertilizer and pesticides to sell at a profit; the larger farmers find it easier to afford the new methods if they displace already underemployed farmhands and tenants with new machinery; the "excess farm populations," many of them now in the cities, have no money to buy bread. Let them eat cake? Even rationally organized and distributed, there might by now still be too little nourishing food for too many people, and even that balance at possibly disastrous cost to the entire ecosystem. But, equally important to a holistic, ecological view, it is capitalism which creates this irrationality and hastens the destruction of the environment in most of the world, and without destroying capitalism, neither green revolutions nor population control will put food in the mouths of those who cannot afford to pay for it. Population is even less the chief culprit in the advanced capitalist countries. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich paints a devastating picture of our dying planet: "too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying Contrails inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide" – all traced to a single source, "too many people." Yet pollution is now growing, by rough estimate, some six or seven times faster than population growth. Demands for power are growing about eight times faster, and Environment magazine even suggests that in two centuries, not nine, the doubling population of power plants alone – without counting fuel supplies, water for cooling, transformers and transmission lines – could take up all the physical space in the United States. Similarly, the growth of detergents correlates less with population growth than with merchandising budgets and soap operas, while growing automobile populations seem to have a very close relationship to suburban sprawl, planned obsolescence, the organization of our cities, and – again – advertising. Jet contrails and the coming SST, of course, have nothing to do with more people. The comparisons could go on, but the point is a simple one: the growing number of people – whether as consumers, drivers, clothes-wearers, or clothes-washers – is far less the cause of environmental destruction than our society’s dynamic efforts, direct and indirect, to get more people to have more "needs," to buy more products and to accept more waste. Merchandisers, to make their work a little easier, might prefer baby booms and population explosions. But cut back population and they’ll simply sell more second cars and recreation vehicles, more expensive "anti-pollutant" gasoline, summer homes, electric toothbrushes, and paper sleeping bags to help enjoy the wilds. Industrial polluters are already arguing that people are the problem behind pollution, and no wonder. They know it’s cheaper to create consumers out of a smaller population than to clean up production or possibly cut it back. It’s called capitalism, and it’s the very same system which the two nineteenth-century political-economists, Marx and Malthus, described at such length and so differently. The different descriptions, discussed by Ronald Meek in his introductory essay to this collection, still divide socialist and bourgeois economists, and neither approach is adequate. Marx and the socialists, basing their theories on labor as the measure of value, are unsatisfying in their explanations of prices, the workings of the market, and the sphere of consumption; Malthus and the capitalists, taking the self-serving categories of the marketplace for science, ignore power and celebrate the crucifixion of mankind on the iron cross of supply and demand. Yet both sides, with some quibbling over language, would have to agree that it is capitalism which determines the way in which we in the "free world" dominate ourselves and our environment. Other societies, socialist or communist, can and often do choose to follow in our footsteps, trampling on man and nature. But, as long as we retain the private, profit-seeking control of capital, we have no choice. Our economy has to keep trying to grow and expand, creating new needs and new wastes, and our social institutions have to fall in behind. Why don’t we simply stop our silly growthsmanship? We can’t. If one producer slows down in the mad race, he’ll be eaten up by his competitors. If all conspire together to re- strain growth permanently, the unemployment and cutbacks will make today’s recession look like full employment, and the resulting unrest will make today’s dissent look like play- time at Summerhill. "Accumulate, accumulate," cried Marx. "That’s Moses and the prophets."

Neo-Malthusians, at least the more liberal of them, are coming closer to this critique of capitalism. They sometimes sound so radical that they might well work themselves free of their grants from foundations. "The battle to save our planet is not just a battle for population control and environmental sanity," Ehrlich has said; "it is also a battle against exploitation, against war, and against racism." But this nouveau radicalisme notwithstanding, the first priority is still population control. "Whatever your cause," Ehrlich concludes, "it’s a lost cause unless we control population." Stop population growth first; then take on "the other causes," or even the system itself. This liberal, one-step-at-a-time problem solving seems at first quite practical. But in practice it’s the same tunnel vision that brought us to the brink of ecocide in the first place. We could as well urge DDT as a solution to the food shortage, or nuclear power as a replacement for fossil fuels, and then pray that we solve the radiation problem sometime before we all die of poison. The danger of the population control priority is most clearly marked in the poorer nations. Seventy per cent of the world’s present population lives in the "developing" countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. These people live with hunger, poverty and generally oppressive dictatorships, and also with record-shattering birth rates, averaging three- and-a-half per cent per year. The "untrammeled copulation of these spawning millions," the neo-Malthusians argue, drains off resources that could otherwise be used for education, industrialization, and the exploitation of natural re- sources. Only when population growth levels off, they contend, will we see growing per capita living standards, political stability, and the long-awaited development of the Third World. Like most development economics, the emphasis on population growth is a shuck. Per capita numbers tell us nothing about which groups in the population get how much, or about what part of the social surplus goes to build schools and hospitals rather than into Swiss bank accounts and the New York Stock Exchange. Reduce the number of people and, likely as not, those who control the processes of production and distribution will simply reduce the share which they let trickle down to the poor. Control, just as the Marxists claim, is key, and it is largely the control of development by international financial interests which causes both the relative abundance of people and the laggard growth of industrial and even agricultural employment. Probably the largest single cause for the Third World population explosion, particularly since World War II, is the export from the developed to the underdeveloped world of highly advanced death-control technology. In Latin America, for example, the American army at the turn of the century drained the fever-producing swamps of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone, a nd then during World War II rid the Brazilia n Northeast of malaria. The Rockefeller and Kellogg foundations and the United States government helped eliminate a whole rash of diseases, first in the port cities and then in the interior, while United Fruit and Standard Oil provided modern health care for their workers. Motives obviously were mixed, from canal-building and military occupation to commercial penetration and the social gospel of wealth. Yet, whether the intent was crass or Christian, the overall effect was the same: the creation of health enclaves as little integrated into the rhythms of indigenous development as the oil fields, banana plantations or tin mines. The same foreigners of course controlled the other side of the development equation – the job-creation technology – and here they were not so open-handed. Where Europe’s industrial revolution provided factories to absorb growing urban populations, the colonial developers were more interested in preserving the flow of raw materials to their own over- developing factories, and then selling finished consumer goods and light machinery back to the colonies. This might create more waste in the metropole and even more unemployment among uncompetitive colonial craftsmen or displaced agricultural workers, but such was the way of progress. Even when foreign capital finally did invest in local factories, it brought in overdeveloped technology, perhaps a bit too backward for serious competition with metropolitan production but always too advanced and capital-intensive to give much work to idle hands. The two processes – death control and disemployment – continue, to the point that Western capitalism has no prospect at all of ever exploiting, in the Marxist sense, the world- wide surplus of non-value-producing people. They are, to the capitalist, simply a waste, no longer even useful as a reserve army of the unemployed. Worse, they are a threat: idle hands for the devil’s work of revolution and, if successful, competitors for their own markets and raw materials.

The obvious solution, short of shared industrialization, was birth control. Elsewhere I have tried to show in detail just how completely the rich and well-born have perverted a humanitarian movement to their own ends, or in brief, "why the population bomb is a Rockefeller baby." ’ Here it is enough to remember that the top population planners have consistently integrated their thinking with capitalist strategies to keep the less-developed countries in their place. Through their efforts, the existence of an approved population planning program is now an official string on American aid for "economic development," and a world population policy is part of liberal plans to channel foreign aid through the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program. Where we once intervened to defend the free world from communism or to promote free enterprise economic development, our interventions will bear the banner of population control. "We must," Ehrlich writes in The Population Bomb, "use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control." The likely outcome of all this humanitarianism, in short, is genocide. Population controllers already talk of putting temporary sterilants in food and water, while some of their more adventurous colleagues, no doubt impressed by pin-point bombing in Southeast Asia, would spray whole populations from the air. If we’re so willing to napalm peasants to protect them from communists, we could quite easily use a little sterilant spray to protect them from themselves. Yet, short of genocide, the program has little chance of significantly reducing population growth. For by locking countries into the capitalist scheme, we reduce the possibility of providing the economic security, political trust, and new roles for women which motivate people to reduce the size of their families. In the absence of these motivations, traditional villagers, understanding sterilization and other techniques to be a plot, will more than likely fight to protect themselves and their families.

Making population control the priority raises similar problems with American blacks, who, with unusual unanimity, regard it as just another approach to their extermination. Ehrlich, aware of their fears and in contrast to most Malthusians, directs his appeal for smaller families to the high-consuming, high-waste-producing middle-class whites. "We can’t expect members of rninorities, or the poor, or any other group which is not given a fair share in our society to cooperate in an effort to save our civilization – unless we make it their civilization, too," he explains. But again, the very appeal for voluntary middle-class family planning seems destined to produce a coercive middle-class self-righteousness that will support the enforcement of yet another middle-class standard on the minority poor. Population controllers Kingsley Davis and Garret Hardin are already branding voluntary family planning hopelessly futile, while Ehrlich publicly favors a rather coercive and discriminatory elimination of tax exemptions for more than two children. In a class- and race-divided society such as ours, this child tax or other uses of state power in family planning will lead in the direction of outright genocide. But long before that point, coercive family planning campaigns will spark the militant reaction of the minorities and, from their point of view quite rightfully, encourage the traditional nationalist cry for more children, until there is a rational and equitable planning of society. Even within the already privileged middle class, the priority on population control is counterproductive. Behind the apparent success of family planning campaigns among the college-educated middle class is the overall disillusionment, especially among women, with their life’s allotment of a corporation-based social life, a suburban home, and 2.2 children. Women are leading the move to define new social roles and, in the process, are challenging the entire male-oriented domination of man and nature. It is still too early to speak of any generally accepted ecological ethic, or of a new post-scarcity demographic transition to normal single-child and childless families, but these revolutionary social and cultural changes, and the movements for their realization, seem far more productive of ecological sanity and reduced family size than the largely negative neo-Malthusian goal of zero population growth. The effort to reform our civilization is, in fact, the only way to save it.

1. Caught up in their misdirected and self- defeating priority, the population planners refuse to take their ecological warnings and their holistic ecological perspective seriously. The backsliding is of course well lubricated by Ford and Rockefeller, and encouraged by their own social and intellectual preferences. Few have tried seriously to put their scientific training directly to the cause of revolution from below, or to think through the problems of population and ecology from the perspective of the Black Panthers, Women’s Liberation, or the Cuban and Chinese revolutions. Given their education, their access to the powerful, and their friends and neighbors, they always find it more sensible to work for reform from within and from above. Yet, as their more far-reaching critique is rejected by the elite they want so desperately to reform, the neo- Malthusians, or at least the ecologists among them, will increasingly turn toward the movements for revolution. Ideas without a social force are impotent and, to their proponents, frustrating. Hopefully, the Marxists will at that point be able to tear themselves away from their prejudices and welcome the ecologists as something other than "ideological criminals." For, even apart from their large following, the ecologists do bring a perspective which, integrated with Marx’s emphasis on social class and economic process, might once again give the revolutionary movement a claim to ideological hegemony in the advanced industrial countries. Earlier Marxists viewed capitalism as a closed system, in which advances by the capitalists would increase the misery of the workers. Then, when they saw the fantastic growth of the overall economic pie, if not of the workers’ share, they emphasized the relative impoverishment of the working class compared to the capitalists, and located this avoidance of the initial capitalist contradiction in imperial expansion and the impoverishment of the colonial world. Now, with the perspective offered by ecology, it is clear that the West’s economic growth involved a massive deficit spending of our natural environment, impoverishing the entire world, and especially future generations. Capitalism will only carry us beyond any hope of repayment. A democratic and revolutionary socialism at least offers the chance of balancing our accounts with nature and with man – and, as the ecologists are the first to comprehend, it is not simply workers and peasants whose very lives depend upon that chance.