Malthusian whatever?

[Rusty Shackleford]

So, i was speaking to this girl who said she was left but then she went on and said some things in mein kampf were right, and that things about this whole malthusianism were pretty much spot on.

what is malthusianism? what she described sounded to utterly reactionarly and anti-human. i will read a wiki on it but i also would like a leftist perspective on it if possible.

[Comrade Gwydion]

Erm, well, it's an economic 'law' which was true, but hopefully defeated in the 18th century (I'll explain later why I say hopefully)

Basicly it says this:
You've got population and (food)production. As population grow, you've got more workers so more food production, which then allows for more population. However, the growth of population is far stronger then the growth of production, and that's why every so many time there has to be a war or a natural crisis (epedemics, mass-starvations) which brings down the populationlevel to it's original level again. This is called the malthusian tension: the tension between population and (food)production.
That's why, ever since the collapse of the Roman empire, there has been a nearly constant number of people. The population grew, but then there was the first plague, which brought it down again and several of these occasions.

This was all true until the 18th century, when industralisation brought means of production which did grow almost as fast as population, and since then we've been in an upwards spiral of unlimited population growth.

At least I hope. It could very well be the fact that we're now in an upwards movement and that the tension will become so strong that we'll crash down big time.

[Rusty Shackleford]

hmm that sounds less ridiculous than what was described to me. she had said that basically people should stop having children, and that only the wealthy should because they could support them, and not the poor.
she went on to explain that why africa and so on is so impoverished was because they were not christian? the who production versus population growth makes sense but what i was told made none...

Thank you

just read the wiki. i dont like it at all. although this is a rather interesting theory.

[bricolage]

Man, fuck Malthus. I don't often do it but here's a link to a socialist worker article;
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=18998

[KC]

Edit

[bricolage]

Why?

Well to be honest what I should have said is fuck what Malthus means today, seeing 'overpopulation' as the main enemy instead of a economic and societal system that could support the current population but refuses to allocate resources in order to do so. However fuck Malthus is a lot easier :)


And that Socialist Worker article is a load of shit, btw. It's correct, obviously, but it mischaracterizes Malthus' views.

Interesting, in what way does it do that?

[Invincible Summer]

hmm that sounds less ridiculous than what was described to me. she had said that basically people should stop having children, and that only the wealthy should because they could support them, and not the poor.
she went on to explain that why africa and so on is so impoverished was because they were not christian? the who production versus population growth makes sense but what i was told made none...

Thank you

just read the wiki. i dont like it at all. although this is a rather interesting theory.

Well she's obviously batshit insane

[RHIZOMES]

hmm that sounds less ridiculous than what was described to me. she had said that basically people should stop having children, and that only the wealthy should because they could support them, and not the poor.
she went on to explain that why africa and so on is so impoverished was because they were not christian? the who production versus population growth makes sense but what i was told made none...


That girl sounds like an idiot.


Well to be honest what I should have said is fuck what Malthus means today, seeing 'overpopulation' as the main enemy instead of a economic and societal system that could support the current population but refuses to allocate resources in order to do so. However fuck Malthus is a lot easier :)

Yeah my far-right high school history teacher was big into his Malthusianism.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Malthusian ideas on "overpopulation" have been used by ruling classes to give a pseudo-scientific backing for genocide in the Irish famine, to starvation in Africa today (as in the OP example).

Malthus himself was very conservative, but I don't know that much about the science behind his overpopulation theories to even attempt to say how valid or not they are. But the crude malthusian arguments are pure ruling class shit on the level of social Darwinism "science".

Domestically it is used to place blame on social problems on the very victims of the system (particularly in Victorian London and New York or densely populated cities today in south asia or South America). No, the problems of street kids in Brazil has nothing to do with the economic system:rolleyes:.

If I'm not mistaken, Marx himself wrote against Malthusian theory.

One of the problems with the "overpopulation" theory is that it does not take human labor or activity into account. In the Malthus view, region A has a finite amount of resources; if Y ammount of resources are used per person, at a certain point if the total Ys are greater than X you get inequality, poverty and an overall lessening of the living standards.

The flaw in this is that each person also adds to the productivity potential. In a feudal world, the current population could not be sustained, but in capitalism, more people mean greater production and so now we have the potential to meet the needs of many more people.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Well, in her defense she had not read it and said "i dont agree with this" but still tried to defend it.

either way, it does sound pretty ridiculous and outdated. there still may be some room for overpopulation but the post war era definitely proves malthus wrong. Thanks comrades!

[Zanthorus]

You've got population and (food)production. As population grow, you've got more workers so more food production, which then allows for more population. However, the growth of population is far stronger then the growth of production, and that's why every so many time there has to be a war or a natural crisis (epedemics, mass-starvations) which brings down the populationlevel to it's original level again. This is called the malthusian tension: the tension between population and (food)production.
That's why, ever since the collapse of the Roman empire, there has been a nearly constant number of people. The population grew, but then there was the first plague, which brought it down again and several of these occasions.

This was all true

No it wasn't, it was utter bullshit. The productive forces of society are the labourers which funnily enough increase in proportion to the population. The reason that the population kept dropping massively in the past is because of a lack of scientific knowledge and thus no way of staving off diseases and the expropriation of the labouring classes from their land and their transformation into subordinates which allowed the wealth to be concentrated into a small number of hands which is what caused the famines.

[Vanguard1917]

Malthusian ideas on "overpopulation" have been used by ruling classes to give a pseudo-scientific backing for genocide in the Irish famine, to starvation in Africa today (as in the OP example).

...

Domestically it is used to place blame on social problems on the very victims of the system (particularly in Victorian London and New York or densely populated cities today in south asia or South America). No, the problems of street kids in Brazil has nothing to do with the economic system:rolleyes:.

And, of course, today this kind of outlook is most enthusiatically put forward by environmentalism (an ideology which most of the left has capitulated to), which argues that the world's problems are largely caused by there being too many people -- particularly, in effect, black, brown and 'oriental' people -- whose reproduction needs to be halted if we are to save the planet.



If I'm not mistaken, Marx himself wrote against Malthusian theory.



Yep, and he called it a 'libel against the human race'.



The flaw in this is that each person also adds to the productivity potential. In a feudal world, the current population could not be sustained, but in capitalism, more people mean greater production and so now we have the potential to meet the needs of many more people.


Indeed.

[Jimmie Higgins]

And, of course, today this kind of outlook is most enthusiatically put forward by environmentalism (an ideology which most of the left has capitulated to), which argues that the world's problems are largely caused by there being too many people -- particularly, in effect, black, brown and 'oriental' people -- whose reproduction needs to be halted if we are to save the planet.

The Sierra Club is an example of this - they support ending immigration to the US to "protect the environment". Of course this means they are on the same side as right-wing politicians who also want sell resources right from under national parks, but since when do establishment liberals care about hypocrisy when there's lobbying and backslapping to do?

[Rusty Shackleford]

The Sierra Club is an example of this - they support ending immigration to the US to "protect the environment". Of course this means they are on the same side as right-wing politicians who also want sell resources right from under national parks, but since when do establishment liberals care about hypocrisy when there's lobbying and backslapping to do?

Do you have proof on the Sierra Club acting like this? i would never have guessed this.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Do you have proof on the Sierra Club acting like this? i would never have guessed this.

Good thing you're here to make me do some fact-checking because after a quick Google search I see that I may have been a little hasty. I read about the sierra club and immigration back in 2002 or 3 and saw a PBS interview with the new president of the group at that time who said that immigration was a detriment to the US environment. However, looking at online articles now, it looks like it's more of an open and contentious debate within the organization:

http://www.grist.org/article/sierra-club-immigration-skirmish-again/

In the "yes" corner, Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (http://www.susps.org/) represents the views of insurgents, the most vocal of whom is current Sierra Club board member Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Their argument in a nutshell: Americans are the world's most gluttonous consumers, and when new folks migrate to the U.S., they ramp up their gluttony to fit right in. "Our population is already too large to be sustainable within our resource base," said club member Dick Schneider, who wrote the ballot argument in favor (http://www.sierraclub.org/bod/2005election/ballotissues/2005_population_pro.pdf) [PDF] of immigration limits. "Unless the U.S. population is stabilized and eventually reduced, the Sierra Club will fail in its mission."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Club#Population_control_and_immigration
The Wikipedia entry on the Sierra Club actually seems to clarify the relationship to "overpopulation" politics. It seems like there is clearly a Malthusian strain within the organization, but the leadership and most members actually seem opposed to it.
(http://www.susps.org/)

[Jimmie Higgins]

on a side note (and going full-circle), Paul Watson came to my class when I was in college in 2000. The class was "Issues and Activism in the 21st Century" or something like that. It was a seminar with many different sociologist profs presenting and one of them was a hard-core neo-Malthusian who invited this "eco-warrior", Paul Watson" to come and try and convince students to go one his boat to sink Japanese Whaling ships.

The "eco-warrior" was full of himself and talked about how romantic and bad-ass his life was, all the celebrities who support him, and how he's really the only person in the environmental movement with the guts to put his ass on the line for dolphins and seals and shit -- but didn't really talk about any political issues of course.

Anyway I hated the prof who invited him because he said that overpopulation was the main problem facing the US and everything else was secondary; he was also anti-union and blamed unions for environmental problems. Looking back, this professor is probably some major member of the "Sierrians for Population Stabilization". Anyway, back in 2000, right after the WTO protests I was just beginning to become more radicalized and that's why I enrolled in this class; the class was crap and basically taught college students that the problems facing the US stem from the US population (i.e. the "stupid" selfish workers).

I hated this class so much that when we had to write a paper about one of the sections taught by one of the profs, I tried my best to take the main arguments of the neo-malthusian environmentalist prof and refute them (the best way to fail a assigned paper is to argue against what a History or Sociology prof. argues - in the English department it's the easiest way to get an "A" for "having the guts to make an argument"). It was a research paper so that's when I learned about Malthusian overpopulation theories and how the US government relies on neo-malthusian arguments today to justify not giving debt relief to countries in Latin America and so on. When I discovered that the prof's arguments were based on Malthus, I tried to find other thinkers who refuted Malthus' overpopulation theories... ta-da, the only one I could find was Marx! I had read the manifesto before and was interested in radical politics at this point, but reading the Marxist arguments against Malthus really influenced me and I think probably made me more receptive to Marxism when I eventually became a full-on radical.

So you can say that Malthus made me a Marxist:lol:. Anyway this was probably only interesting for me, but I was just amazed to learn how my personal radicalization, this class, the Sierra Club, immigration, and Marx are all connected.

[turquino]

Malthusianism is taken seriously in economic history. The idea is that the industrial revolution was an aberration, and almost all of human history there has been fast population growth and very slow technical change, leading to less income per person and thus less food and more disease. The population is diminished and income rises until the cycle begins again. In 'A Farewell to Alms' economic historian Gregory Clark argued that modern undeveloped countries are held in a Malthusian trap by cultural or possibly genetic factors that prevent them from attaining the productivity necessary for a wealthy industrial society. Modern medicine has only made life more miserable by increasing the population and diminishing subsistence to the lowest levels ever.

[GPDP]

In 'A Farewell to Alms' economic historian Gregory Clark argued that modern undeveloped countries are held in a Malthusian trap by cultural or possibly genetic factors that prevent them from attaining the productivity necessary for a wealthy industrial society. Modern medicine has only made life more miserable by increasing the population and diminishing subsistence to the lowest levels ever.

Yeah, because imperialism had absolutely nothing to do with this. :rolleyes:

By the way, I found an article at ZNet that you all might find interesting:

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23065

It's an interview of Robert Jensen, who does argue there's way too many people in the world, and he predicts a massive die-off of many millions in the near future. He even argues it's already started, judging by how many people are dying in the third-wold at the moment. He also argues the reason the planet hasn't already been killed off by our massive consumption patterns is precisely because the third world is so far behind the first world, implicitly stating if they were to catch up, the planet would be doomed.

It's some reactionary stuff, and I wonder why the people at ZNet would publish this. But then again, ZNet has a large vulgar environmentalist following, so that may be why. :thumbdown: