Scarcity as a Myth [Archive]

Vyacheslav Brolotov

5th March 2012, 00:54

I am going to announce a theory which I am almost 100% sure is not new: The theory of scarcity as a myth. Scarcity is the side effect of all the previous modes of production which oppressed the producing classes (including our current one: capitalism), imperialism, and globalism. Capitalists use the argument that internationalist Marxism cannot work because, other than us wanting useless dictatorships, we are too utopian for believing that one day the world can unite under one cause, humanity, and have an equal distribution of wealth across the planet with a free association of all human beings. This argument is the argument of scarcity, the argument that claims that the world will always have different distributions of wealth in different locations. We Marxists know this to be incorrect, yet I have not yet heard any Marxist claim that scarcity is a myth. Perhaps a concept like this is just common knowledge among Marxists. Well, here is some evidence in support of our common knowledge:

Does the world produce enough food to feed everyone? (http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm#Does_the_world_p roduce_enough_food_to_feed_everyone)
The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day according to the most recent estimate that we could find.(FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.

Scarcity is just a result of some people having too many materials and others withholding large amounts of materials, like food, in order to sell them and manipulate the markets with them. So, when we see a picture of a starving African child, we know whose fault it really is (capitalism’s and Wal-Mart’s), and we also know that giving money to charities that work with these African children (which capitalist liberals have wet dreams about) is just a temporary fix. The only real, long term fix would be if we put humanity on the path to communism, which will ultimately eliminate the myth of scarcity. The funniest thing is that they teach you about scarcity in school as if it is an absolute and undeniable truth.

To protect their myth, capitalists use the forces of selective truth. One of their favorite things to say in defense of scarcity is the undeniable truth that different locations on the globe produce different resources. No one is going to deny this fact, yet the context in which they are using this fact in is completely unrelated. It is like saying that international trade is not possible, or that commodities cannot circulate around the planet. Is not the massive and global exchange of materials the central ideal of globalism, a system of repression that neo-liberal capitalists cherish so much? Scarcity is not the result of a lack of local resources, at least not in this global era. Scarcity is the result of capitalist manipulation, greed, repression, and imperialism. Perhaps in the past, when we lived in an era in which nations were more isolated according to their locations due to the lack of technology, scarcity could have been universally accepted. That is not the case anymore.

Myths are meant to be debunked. We, as communists and revolutionary leftists, should be hard at work debunking this great myth of scarcity, not only theoretically, but also materialistically. To rid this planet of scarcity, our first order of business is motivating the international working class to liberate themselves from the chains of capitalism. Once that has been achieved world-wide, nation by nation, the international working class must begin to spread the riches of the wealthier nations around the world, particularly to the nations that have not been as lucky under capitalism. This will be the final step of socialism and will most likely commence the withering away of the state.

Any thoughts?

GoddessCleoLover

5th March 2012, 01:01

The anarchy of production under capitalism perpetuates scarcity. Food scarcity in particular is a product of imperialism and could be greatly alleviated by a revolutionary transformation of the system.

Prometeo liberado

5th March 2012, 04:17

Ostrinski

5th March 2012, 04:18

Idk, there's an intentional shortage of goods to keep prices up.

ckaihatsu

5th March 2012, 04:59

The US has been under the supply-side economics theory for quite some time now. This system purports that the need or use of goods is of secondary importance to production. If this is true then scarcity of goods would have to be a matter of natural causes(storms, earthquakes, pestilence), domestic labor strife or transportation issues.

So I think the real issue may be market manipulation of goods based on said criteria. If that is indeed the case then market speculation may be a better direction.

I agree that the presiding economic philosophy is *entirely* 'supply-side', to where any insufficiencies are seen only in terms of subsidizing -- bribing, actually -- those in ownership positions to hopefully get them to produce more. In this framework, though, there's absolutely nothing that *obliges* ownership to fulfill outstanding mass demands for more-available, less-expensive-or-free goods and services. Incidentally, this is the very definition of Reaganomics.

It would obviously make more sense to subsidize the *demand* / consumer side of the equation so that those with limited funds would be able to directly make the purchases they need to, as government does for the military, for example.

Reaganomics ( /reɪɡəˈnɒmɪks/; a portmanteau of Reagan and economics attributed to Paul Harvey[1]) refers to the economic policies promoted by the U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, also known as supply-side economics, or pejoratively as voodoo economics or trickle-down economics. The four pillars of Reagan's economic policy were to:[2]

- Reduce government spending increase

- Reduce income tax and capital gains tax

- Reduce government regulation of economy

- Control money supply to reduce inflation

[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics

A couple of distinctions need to be made here:

- That of 'demand' as being money-backed vs. 'demand' in the sense of real human needs for life and living.

- Market forces on-the-whole vs. 'market-makers' at the cutting-edge of determining which companies and industries are to be favored, from their sheer bulk purchasing / banking power. Regular market speculation would have to do with the former, in that aggregated economic decisions give rise to certain overall trends, like the direction a whole swarm of fish may move in. Market manipulation has more to do with what political power is conferred onto which major market players, like government favoritism for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch, but not for Lehman Brothers in the '08 crash.

Prometeo liberado

5th March 2012, 06:38

Ya, I didn't make it clear after rereading my post. What I was trying to say is that what the OP may actually be refering to is market speculation as opposed to scarcity.

Left Leanings

5th March 2012, 12:56

Scarcity is a myth for the most part.

Food shortages, for example, such as those experienced in the so-called third or developing world, are put down to incompetence or Nature. In reality, the food shortages are artificial. The rich and powerful have the technology, money, resources and personnel, to secure the basic essentials for all. What they lack is the humanity and the political will, to give up the ghastly business of feathering their own nests, and deploy resources in a more humane and just direction.

ckaihatsu

10th March 2012, 00:35

The equation of handouts to big business with “job creation,” once the stock in trade mainly of the Republican right, has become the common line of both parties. The Obama administration has been the quintessential expression of this shift, responding to the greatest crisis since the Great Depression with corporate handouts and tax cuts.

“[I]f you’re a CEO that’s willing to bring jobs back to America, we want to do everything we can to help you succeed,” Obama said Tuesday in an appearance before the Business Roundtable. “That means working together to reform our tax system... making sure that we are able to cut our tax rate.”

Along these lines, Obama is seeking to cut corporate taxes from 35 percent to 28 percent, with an even lower tax rate for manufacturing companies.

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/pers-m09.shtml

ChrisK

11th March 2012, 07:16

In capitalist economics this is called artificial scarcity and is an admitted phenomenon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

16th March 2012, 06:14

Yes Comrade, the FAO World Food Report of (i think 2009) mentions that enough food is produced now to feed 12 Billion humans 2,700kc, but yet: 100 000 humans die of starvation a day, in 2002 68 million humans died whle 36 million of those died of hunger and the direct causes of undernourishment. I am reading a book by the 'U.N. Commissioner for the humanright for food' Jean Ziegler's Book "The Empire of Shame" in which he lists the main tools and ways of the ruling class (through the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Org., E.U., U.N. , and systematic corruption of Transnational corporations) to create an "artificial underdevelopment" in vastly rich countries. Such as the richest country on the planet, the Democratic Republic of the Congo which has over 20% of its population in an alarming state of undernourishment as the U.N. says. Rwanda and Uganda, which are still supported by the U.S. although Obama wrote the report on stopping foreign aid to these regimes years ago; with Ruanda for instance egtting a bank credit in the 90's of 1 Billion dollars from the Banque de France, to buy machetes from China to invade and ravage the Congo. It is not, as many dogmatic anti-imperialists like to portray it as, that the west causes each of these wars (although of course there are historical examples where the west has done this, such as in Nigerian civil war of the '60's) it just finances them when they come about. BUT, talking about westernBanks, i recommend re-reading the third volume of Marx's Das Kapital, theory of "The theory of the falling rate of profit" and then reading Rosa Luxemburg's "The Accumulation of Capital"... !

MarxSchmarx

17th March 2012, 15:21

OP here's a counter argument - time.

I'd like to live forever in my present form (that is, I don't merely want my memories grafted onto some machine). This won't happen, certainly not in my lifetime and very likely never. Therefore there is less time than there is desire for time. Therefore my time is scarce.

Zulu

18th March 2012, 16:00

The theory of scarcity as a myth.I'd say that today it is a fact of life. Both scarcity and the theory of it.

Scarcity is the side effect of all the previous modes of production which oppressed the producing classes (including our current one: capitalism), imperialism, and globalism.
Scarcity is a relation between the amount of "stuff" available to a population, and the population numbers.

Of course, the artificially created scarcity plays its role, but the whole thing is not that easy.

If you take a closer look at the example with food, you'll see that it ignores the key word "available". There may be enough metric tons of rice in the world, that if divided on paper by 7 billion, it'll to meet the average persons' sustenance requirements. But if the bulk of that food is in one place (say, America), while the starving folks are in another (say, Africa), then that food is not available, not accessible. And then there are 3 more things:

1. Even if we manage to deliver all that food to all those people, that does not eliminate scarcity in general, because people always want more something. So you have to speak not about feeding everybody, but about raising everybody's standard of living to a certain level (at least the level which you wouldn't like to go below yourself). Are there enough goods and services in the world, or at least productive capacity to make and deliver them to everybody in the world so that everybody would have a decent (western lower middle class) standard of living? I think, today the answer is "no".

2. The Mathusian rule: humans, just like any other species tend to populate the environment to capacity, which means that no matter how much of "stuff" is available, the population numbers will exceed that limit, and some fraction of it will always live on the brink of starvation, food being the most basic natural limitation factor. But in the broader sense this rule is not limited to food, but is true to any resource: medical supplies, housing, education, jobs (obviously a resource too, from an individual's perspective under capitalism), ets. Social Darwinists and the like find it actually a good thing, regarding it as the primary motor of progress which is the way to overcome those limits. If there were total abundance, people (who are naturally lazy) would do nothing to improve their position, they say.

3. The Earth's resources are finite. This speaks for itself.

Capitalists use the argument that internationalist Marxism cannot work

It can, but only if it accounts for the three aforementioned points. While the classic Marxism proposes that the higher productivity of labor will solve first issue and that there is a reasonable limit beyond which the needs of individuals cannot rationally go (adios, marketing!), it disregards the other points.

So measures must be undertaken during the transition period to ensure that population growth would not eat up (quite literally) all the benefits of the new social order. Namely, there must be a strict global birth control and population planning policies, to the point that the "pro-life" activism (that is actually pro-death, see: scarcity, Malthus) must be treated as a counterrevolutionary offense.

The third point unequivocally hints that time is of the essence, if civilization is to remain (and the mankind is to survive as a species, probably), the social revolution must take place before this planet is rendered uninhabitable, and better well ahead of this point, because the number one imperative of the new society will be colonization of the Solar system, with the eventual goal to found extra-solar colonies. And that task will require our home base stay functional for quite a while.

giving money to charities that work with these African children (which capitalist liberals have wet dreams about) is just a temporary fix.
It's not a fix at all. It actually helps uphold the current system. For what it's worth, it only conserves the situation, and some people do a good business on it.

ckaihatsu

18th March 2012, 19:51

Social Darwinism (biological determinism) devalues the human intellect and the potential of society to organize around conscious like-mindedness into action.

People and human society are obviously *more* than animal-like reactions to their environment -- we can actively determine our own fates, *and* the fate of the planet, to some degree based on how we socially organize ourselves.

This certainly extends to matters of food production, population expansion, and technology production.

PhantomRei

18th March 2012, 21:55

"If you take a closer look at the example with food, you'll see that it ignores the key word "available". There may be enough metric tons of rice in the world, that if divided on paper by 7 billion, it'll to meet the average persons' sustenance requirements. But if the bulk of that food is in one place (say, America), while the starving folks are in another (say, Africa), then that food is not available, not accessible."

The naturalization of poverty is bogus. If you look our actual productive capacity, we definitely can produce more than enough food and we certainly can transport it.

"Even if we manage to deliver all that food to all those people, that does not eliminate scarcity in general, because people always want more something. So you have to speak not about feeding everybody, but about raising everybody's standard of living to a certain level (at least the level which you wouldn't like to go below yourself). Are there enough goods and services in the world, or at least productive capacity to make and deliver them to everybody in the world so that everybody would have a decent (western lower middle class) standard of living? I think, today the answer is "no"."

First relating "scarcity" to supposedly "unlimited" human wants instead of actual human NEEDS is very bourgeois. And I think today the answer is yes.

2. The Mathusian rule: humans, just like any other species tend to populate the environment to capacity, which means that no matter how much of "stuff" is available, the population numbers will exceed that limit, and some fraction of it will always live on the brink of starvation, food being the most basic natural limitation factor. But in the broader sense this rule is not limited to food, but is true to any resource: medical supplies, housing, education, jobs (obviously a resource too, from an individual's perspective under capitalism), ets. Social Darwinists and the like find it actually a good thing, regarding it as the primary motor of progress which is the way to overcome those limits. If there were total abundance, people (who are naturally lazy) would do nothing to improve their position, they say."

Except that Malthusian catastrophe has never actually happened, precisely because of technological advancements he never anticipated. The starvation that accept as "natural" has absolutely no relation to our actual supply of resources.

3. The Earth's resources are finite. This speaks for itself.

LOL the solar system is finite too, yes, but that doesn't mean much. The minerals that we need for industrial technology are extremely abundant, the entire Earth's crust is made of them. The amount of energy in the form of solar, geothermal, etc. theoretically accessible is literally thousands of times our current global energy usage. Provide we use the most efficient technologies and methods possible, we are in absolutely no danger of running out of resources, ever. And we can always mine space.

Zulu

19th March 2012, 09:16

First relating "scarcity" to supposedly "unlimited" human wants instead of actual human NEEDS is very bourgeois.
Bourgeois or whatever, that's what we got now. And in socialism, who gets to define, what the "actual" human needs are? I'd say the vanguard party, without taking a breath for it, but that would blow some anarchists' minds away, I suppose...

And I think today the answer is yes.

Really? You think it's possible today to produce (and deliver) enough goods and services so that all 7 billion people can live like the "lower middle class" in the West?

The key problem is that capitalism continues to rely on manual labor quite heavily in many areas. In Japan industrial automation and robotization was deliberately stalled in the nineties already for the fears of unemployment (cutting the work day and keeping the wages does not enter the capitalists' minds, of course, because that would eliminate profits and look too awful badly like communism...). While in the third world where the raw materials, bananas, cane and such are gathered, there is little problem in keeping labor as cheap as dirt. Therefore the average productivity of labor in the world is lower than the total abundance would require.

Except that Malthusian catastrophe has never actually happened

Except Malthus was talking not so much about the final catastrophe (and that it hasn't happened doesn't mean it's not going to), but about the perpetual scarcity and hunger, which, as you might be aware, indeed continues to exists, despite all the "technological advancements he never anticipated". The living conditions were continuously improving throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. So what? It only led to the population boom, and a fraction of the population continues to live in abysmal conditions. Only the poverty and destitution got sort of "exported" and "outsourced" from the West to the third world, although in the latter decades there have been signs that it may come back either in the form of extensive immigration, or in the form of the downward pressure on labor and capitalist "austerity" measures , but most likely both.

The starvation that accept as "natural" has absolutely no relation to our actual supply of resources.
That's pretty much what Malthus said himself. He said, that the amount of the resources does not matter, because people tend to breed till they begin dying of starvation (the population reaches its environmental limit, in ecological terms).

(1) Resources scarce => people die;
(2) Resources plenty => people breed till the resources become scarce; goto (1).

LOL the solar system is finite too, yes, but that doesn't mean much. The minerals that we need for industrial technology are extremely abundant, the entire Earth's crust is made of them. The amount of energy in the form of solar, geothermal, etc. theoretically accessible is literally thousands of times our current global energy usage. Provide we use the most efficient technologies and methods possible, we are in absolutely no danger of running out of resources, ever. And we can always mine space.
Yes, but there is one resource that is currently very scarce: the number of planets to live on, and in the foreseeable future no other resource could be substituted for it in adequate amounts to meet the humanity's need in living space. And some say that this resource has already begun to deplete.

To make myself clear: I'm, of course, not arguing that communism is impossible due to the eternal scarcity. I am, on the contrary, arguing that it is imperative to build communism to overcome scarcity. Communism is an objective need of the humanity as a whole (not just the working class).

But the whole formulation, that "scarcity is a myth" is totally wrong, and only plays in the hands of the Social Darwinists, who can rightfully just catch lulz at the stupid leftists who deny the obvious.

The right position is to agree with the Social Darwinists on the obvious but correct their wrong conclusions. We have to say to them: "Yes, there is scarcity, but as you, assholes, suggest to do nothing about it, get lost! We are taking the matter in our hands and seeing to it that the progress, stimulated by scarcity or whatever, continues - in the form of the communist solution to the problem of scarcity, which will ensure that the whole human species is fit for survival, and will not go extinct just because some idiots think they are personally fitter than the rest." Come to think of it, even Social Darwinists could arrive to correct conclusions themselves if they were able do think dialectically and do all the math within their own paradigm.

.

PhantomRei

19th March 2012, 09:43

Zulu

19th March 2012, 11:15

Look, resources are not scarce, and they never will be. They are finite, but so astronomically vast it's not even funny. Scarcity does not and never will exist except as deluded economists totally non-nonsensical definition as "not infinite". Again, starvation has absolutely nothing to do with there being "scarcity". Now, obviously, you are correct that if population growth continued for perpetuity then barring FTL we will exhaust the resources of even the entire galaxy at some point. However you are totally and completely wrong that destitution is the result of there not being enough resources to go around. It is a result of capitalism, not "natural limits".

"Resources" is not the same as "available resources". Iron in the Earth's crust and H2O in the ocean have no value to them (in Marxism, at least). And available resources are scarce, and will remain scarce for quite a while even during the socialist transition. There may be enough enough resources, but not enough of them are available. That's what scarcity is: not enough available resources.

You can always argue that with advanced enough technology there will be a way to produce rare earhts elements out of thin air, but the problem is that currently we don't even have the technology to facilitate a global sans-oil economy. This problem is there, of course, due to capitalism and its pursuit of profit, but that doesn't make the present (and all the past) scarcity any less real.

Saying scarcity is the result of capitalism and at the same time a myth is a bit self-contradictory, don't you think?

Anyway, if it were a myth, wouldn't that mean that no social revolution was necessary to overcome it, and the present system should be only tweaked a little... Basically this could lead to the conclusion that only the corporate/governmental corruption is the problem, while the "true capitalism" with many "small businesses", "ideal competition", "perfectly informed decisions", "rational customer's behavior" and "the invisible hand of the market" is the correct answer to the all societal problems... And good luck with that libertarian nonsense.

And very importantly, the belief that abundance absolutely necessitates population growth is flatly contradicted by pretty much any developed nation.
Not at all. People in the "developed nations" breed slower these days because they have reached a new scarcity limit. Their basic needs are met, but there is still scarcity: housing, jobs, heathcare, education, entertainment are all resources too. And in the end it boils down to energy consumption per capita. You may have a stable population in numbers, but its ecological footprint continues to grow.

And also, there is a serious immigration pressure. In a way, humanity is having a good time here and breeds elsewhere, and the newly bred come to share the party. Although the "developed nations" try to limit it these days, because, like I said, the policy is to "outsource" the poverty. You can't really point to them without mentioning that they are imperialist, or at least beneficiaries of the imperialism. Which means that this argument is simply not applicable, as the entire world cannot become "developed" in the same way.

.

PhantomRei

19th March 2012, 12:12

""Resources" is not the same as "available resources". Iron in the Earth's crust and H2O in the ocean have no value to them (in Marxism, at least). And available resources are scarce, and will remain scarce for quite a while even during the socialist transition. There may be enough enough resources, but not enough of them are available. That's what scarcity is: not enough available resources.""

They are not, and will remain so.

"You can always argue that with advanced enough technology there will be a way to produce rare earhts elements out of thin air, but the problem is that currently we don't even have the technology to facilitate a global sans-oil economy. This problem is there, of course, due to capitalism and its pursuit of profit, but that doesn't make the present (and all the past) scarcity any less real."

Nope. We can use 100% percent renewable energy right now.

"Saying scarcity is the result of capitalism and at the same time a myth is a bit self-contradictory, don't you think?"

Maybe, but I didn't say that. I did that capitalism causes destitution even even though we can provide, which is entirely different.

"Anyway, if it were a myth, wouldn't that mean that no social revolution was necessary to overcome it, and the present system should be only tweaked a little... And good luck with that libertarian nonsense."

Yeah, of course if aren't a Malthusian you aren't a true revolutionary. :lol:
No, to meet human needs we need to destroy capitalism, but we don't need to destroy ourselves. And good luck with your authoritarian nonsense.

"Not at all. People in the "developed nations" breed slower these days because they have reached a new scarcity limit. Their basic needs are met, but there is still scarcity: housing, jobs, heathcare, education, entertainment (lol) are all resources too. And in the end it boils down to energy consumption per capita. You may have a stable population in numbers, but its ecological footprint continues to grow."

Ha. No, consistently even in developed countries the poor have significantly higher fertility rates and the rich significantly lower.

Zulu

19th March 2012, 12:59

Nope. We can use 100% percent renewable energy right now.

Oh really??? Why don't you flip the switch then?

Ha. No, consistently even in developed countries the poor have significantly higher fertility rates and the rich significantly lower.
That only proves my point. The richer you get, the more scarcity you experience. Didn't Socrates demonstrate that some 2K years back, on the example of the resource called "knowledge"?

ellipsis

19th March 2012, 16:16

as somebody who dumpster dives several times a week, yes.

MarxSchmarx

20th March 2012, 05:18

ckaihatsu

20th March 2012, 06:08

[W]hat about time?

[T]ime is a resource, which may or may not be finite, but from the perspective of an individual's life is clearly so

This is mixing scales, though -- we're talking about the aggregate of society, not individual lives.

robbo203

21st March 2012, 10:31

Bourgeois or whatever, that's what we got now. And in socialism, who gets to define, what the "actual" human needs are? I'd say the vanguard party, without taking a breath for it, but that would blow some anarchists' minds away, I suppose...

The only person who is really in a position to determine what you need is YOU. That in fact is what communism entails. Individuals giving according to their ability and taking according to their needs. Vest this power to determine what you need in some "Vanguard" and you have the sure-fire certainty of descending into a world of endless corruption and chaos. Frankly, this is the very last thing a communist would recommend

Really? You think it's possible today to produce (and deliver) enough goods and services so that all 7 billion people can live like the "lower middle class" in the West?

The key problem is that capitalism continues to rely on manual labor quite heavily in many areas. In Japan industrial automation and robotization was deliberately stalled in the nineties already for the fears of unemployment (cutting the work day and keeping the wages does not enter the capitalists' minds, of course, because that would eliminate profits and look too awful badly like communism...). While in the third world where the raw materials, bananas, cane and such are gathered, there is little problem in keeping labor as cheap as dirt. Therefore the average productivity of labor in the world is lower than the total abundance would require.

This entirely overlooks several important productive advantages communism has over capitalism. One, in particular, is the fact that a huge and indeed steadily growing chunk of what counts towards the "average productivity of labor" today actually produces nothing socially useful at all. All those money related jobs, for example -and there are a lot more than these - dont actually do anything to enhance human welfare and wellbeing at all: they simply exist to keep capitalism as a system ticking over. They arise out of systemic needs of capitalism and draw massive amounts of labour and resources away from socially useful production.

Communism at a stroke effectively eliminates all this structural waste. What that means is that, by most estimates, it at least doubles the amount of labour and resources available for socially useful production. There are other considerations too that bear on the matter of "average productivity of labor" and you have hinted at one or two such yourself - namely the way in which capitalism can restrain technological development. Check out the database section of this website for good examples of this

http://andycox1953.webs.com/

Except Malthus was talking not so much about the final catastrophe (and that it hasn't happened doesn't mean it's not going to), but about the perpetual scarcity and hunger, which, as you might be aware, indeed continues to exists, despite all the "technological advancements he never anticipated". The living conditions were continuously improving throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. So what? It only led to the population boom, and a fraction of the population continues to live in abysmal conditions. Only the poverty and destitution got sort of "exported" and "outsourced" from the West to the third world, although in the latter decades there have been signs that it may come back either in the form of extensive immigration, or in the form of the downward pressure on labor and capitalist "austerity" measures , but most likely both.

That's pretty much what Malthus said himself. He said, that the amount of the resources does not matter, because people tend to breed till they begin dying of starvation (the population reaches its environmental limit, in ecological terms).

(1) Resources scarce => people die;
(2) Resources plenty => people breed till the resources become scarce; goto (1).

This is precisely why the Malthusian law of population is demonstrably false. People dont breed like rabbits when more resources become available pulling them back down to basic subsistence levels where they succumb to famine once again. What typically happens and has happened is that mortality rates first decline, followed by birth rates, so that eventually population growth slows down and may even come to a complete halt at a standard of living well above mere subsistence level. Indeed Malthus fatally contradicted his own thesis by admitting the possibility that "moral restraint" might induce lower birthrates

Some countries have already gone through the "demographic transition" fully and indeed are registering birth rates below replacement level and are dependent on inward migration; others - particularly in the so called Third World -are still in the process of a demographic transition and it is this lag between differential birth and death rates that accounts for their still rapid population growth. But even in the Third World birth rates are falling steadily Part of the reason for this is the shift from an agrarian-based economy (in which household labour plays a key role and why it makes sense to have many children in the absence of a system of comprehensive social welfare) to an urban based economy in which the need to have large families no longer really applies and where access to medical facilities reduce infant mortality rates (which in turn affects fertiloty rates for obvious reasons)

Yes, but there is one resource that is currently very scarce: the number of planets to live on, and in the foreseeable future no other resource could be substituted for it in adequate amounts to meet the humanity's need in living space. And some say that this resource has already begun to deplete.

To make myself clear: I'm, of course, not arguing that communism is impossible due to the eternal scarcity. I am, on the contrary, arguing that it is imperative to build communism to overcome scarcity. Communism is an objective need of the humanity as a whole (not just the working class).

But the whole formulation, that "scarcity is a myth" is totally wrong, and only plays in the hands of the Social Darwinists, who can rightfully just catch lulz at the stupid leftists who deny the obvious.

The right position is to agree with the Social Darwinists on the obvious but correct their wrong conclusions. We have to say to them: "Yes, there is scarcity, but as you, assholes, suggest to do nothing about it, get lost! We are taking the matter in our hands and seeing to it that the progress, stimulated by scarcity or whatever, continues - in the form of the communist solution to the problem of scarcity, which will ensure that the whole human species is fit for survival, and will not go extinct just because some idiots think they are personally fitter than the rest." Come to think of it, even Social Darwinists could arrive to correct conclusions themselves if they were able do think dialectically and do all the math within their own paradigm.

Sorry but this is quite muddled. Actually, to the contrary, it is precisely your fomulation that plays into the hands of the social darwinists by conceding to their key point that scarcity is a fact of life and therefore communism is an impossibility. Youve got things precisely the wrong way round and in a sense contradict yourself in , arguing that it is "imperative to build communism to overcome scarcity". That in itself by implication concedes that scarcity is NOT something objectively given but ius socially constructed and socially maintained. In other words that it depends on the kind of society we live in

THAT is what is meant when we say "scarcity is a myth". It does NOT mean, as you seem to think, that people dont suffer from deprivation. It means simply that there is no objective need why they should suffer thus and that the potential to produce enough already exists here and now. However, it is a potential that is imprisoned within the structure of capitalist economic relations.

In order to move from capitalism to communism it is actually imperative that we are able to demonstrate that such a potential exists. How else is communism to present itself as a credible alternative?

It strikes me there is an awful lot of confusuon surrounding this concept of scarcity. There are two quite separate senses in which we can apply this notion

There is scarcity in the truistic sense implied in the notion of "opportunity costs". Time itself as Gossen pointed out back in the 19th century, is scarce. If I decided to spend the afternoon playing football I necessarily forego the opportunity to weed my allotment garden. If a factory uses 1000 units of a given resource to produce 100 units of X , that means it cannot use these 1000 units to to produce 150 units of Y. By definition, one might say we have scarcity in this sense

But there is another sense in which we use the term scarcity - namely as a relationship between the demand for a given thing and the supply of it. I live near a spa town in Southern Spain in which water freely flows throughout the year in the many fountains dotted around the town. People have free and unrestricted access to this water and in a sense what we have here is a kind of prefigurative example of how a communist society would operate. People dont waste or abuse this resoruce. Nor do they feel inclined to rush out and fill every available container with water because they know it will always be available on plenitude. Greed becomes pointless

We need to be able to demonstrate as communists that what applies to water in this example could apply to a vast array of goods that could at least satisfy all our basic needs (luxury goods might be another matter and here there might be a role for rationing).

We know the world is fully capable of producing enough food to feed the entire population adequately but it does not. Why? Because access to food is dependent on purchasing power and access to land. There is no real objective reason why anyone should go hungry in the world today. Yet millions do for one simple reason - market capitalism disentitles them to the food they need and deliberately throttles back on output to maintain high prices (the EU has withdrawn millions of hectares of land fromn agriculture in set aside schemes precisely for this reason) .

Similarly housing. Here in Spain for example there are nearly 4 million empty housing units. This is to say nothing of empty offices , warehouses, shopping complexes etc etc. In state capitalist China there are an incredible 64 million empty apartments and the world's largest shopping complex remains almost entirely empty several years after completion

Such figures give the lie to claims that scarcity is an inevitable fact of life. The bourgeois economists who talk in these terms all too often conflate scarcity in the first sense with scarcity in the latter in order to invest their prouncements with an aura of invincibility. But they are talking bullshit and we should not be seduced into going along with such thinking or pandering to their prejudices for the sake of wanting to come across as being "realistic"

Zulu

21st March 2012, 20:40

The only person who is really in a position to determine what you need is YOU.
All right. Then I determine that need a 12-deck cruise ship. Crewed by beauty contests winners. And it has to have an icebreaker capability, because I plan on going to Antarctica to hunt penguins for amusement.

This entirely overlooks several important productive advantages communism has over capitalism. One, in particular, is the fact that a huge and indeed steadily growing chunk of what counts towards the "average productivity of labor" today actually produces nothing socially useful at all. All those money related jobs, for example -and there are a lot more than these - dont actually do anything to enhance human welfare and wellbeing at all: they simply exist to keep capitalism as a system ticking over. They arise out of systemic needs of capitalism and draw massive amounts of labour and resources away from socially useful production.

Communism at a stroke effectively eliminates all this structural waste. What that means is that, by most estimates, it at least doubles the amount of labour and resources available for socially useful production. There are other considerations too that bear on the matter of "average productivity of labor" and you have hinted at one or two such yourself - namely the way in which capitalism can restrain technological development. Check out the database section of this website for good examples of this

http://andycox1953.webs.com/

Although I wouldn't say the structural waste of labor is as high as 50%, the main problem here is that communism cannot eliminate it "at a stroke". Communism needs to be built in a process which the M-Ls refer to as the socialist construction/transition. And it has to start with what we got now - the level at which scarcity is present, productivity of labor is insufficient to create abundance overnight, and even some technology needs to be researched and developed first to upgrade the productivity of to the point at which the ETA of comfortable existence for everyone could realistically assessed.

This is precisely why the Malthusian law of population is demonstrably false. People dont breed like rabbits when more resources become available pulling them back down to basic subsistence levels where they succumb to famine once again. What typically happens and has happened is that mortality rates first decline, followed by birth rates, so that eventually population growth slows down and may even come to a complete halt at a standard of living well above mere subsistence level. Indeed Malthus fatally contradicted his own thesis by admitting the possibility that "moral restraint" might induce lower birthrates

Some countries have already gone through the "demographic transition" fully and indeed are registering birth rates below replacement level and are dependent on inward migration; others - particularly in the so called Third World -are still in the process of a demographic transition and it is this lag between differential birth and death rates that accounts for their still rapid population growth. But even in the Third World birth rates are falling steadily Part of the reason for this is the shift from an agrarian-based economy (in which household labour plays a key role and why it makes sense to have many children in the absence of a system of comprehensive social welfare) to an urban based economy in which the need to have large families no longer really applies and where access to medical facilities reduce infant mortality rates (which in turn affects fertiloty rates for obvious reasons)
The "demographic transition" concept has been mostly unscientific so far, as it ignores the "export of poverty". In today's world, with its global market, any study restricted to the national level is inherently incomplete, and that goes especially to the demographic studies. It is argued that the Industrial Revolution helped the West to escape from the "Malthusian trap", but it can be also argued, that if you look at the humanity globally, it is still pretty much in it: population growth instead of a rise of the mean standards of living.

And while it does stand to reason, even if from the speculative point, that improvement of the standards of living (achieved already on a non-capitalist basis) will naturally reduce the population growth, the per capita consumption will still be increasing (even if only in the public sector) so the Malthusian effects will remain: the ecological footprint, the costs to support the population, the requirements imposed on the environment will be increasing, eventually reaching new limitations.

In any case, by the time an opportunity for an organized deliberate socialist transition may present itself again, the population is likely to reach the 10th billion mark, which will probably be the #1 challenge the communists will face, combined with the scarcity problems also exacerbated by that time due to the systemic crisis of the capitalist system.

And "moral restraint" inducing lower birthrates is, of course, the only way to really escape the "Malthusian trap". Like I said, birth control and population planning, enforced by the vanguard party. In Malthus' time, btw, "moral restraints" came in the form of the Church imposing them on people (Malthus, himself being a bishop or something, definitely knew what he was talking about).

Certainly, population control can't solve anything by itself, but without it, any technological progress will be eaten away, possibly in the most literal sense of the word.

Sorry but this is quite muddled. Actually, to the contrary, it is precisely your fomulation that plays into the hands of the social darwinists by conceding to their key point that scarcity is a fact of life and therefore communism is an impossibility.

Um... Have you actually read what I said? I said, although scarcity as a fact of life has to be conceded, the impossibility of communism does not follow from this fact. What follows from this fact is that population planning must be one of the main features of communism, if it is to overcome scarcity (which it is, by definition).

Youve got things precisely the wrong way round and in a sense contradict yourself in , arguing that it is "imperative to build communism to overcome scarcity".

Yes, because capitalism turns out to be unable to overcome scarcity (as the early critics of Malthus hoped). But how does that contradict the assertion that scarcity is present in capitalism, just as it had been in feudalism? Moreover, the assertion that scarcity will remain a fact of life long into the process of building communism also in no way contradicts that.

That in itself by implication concedes that scarcity is NOT something objectively given but ius socially constructed and socially maintained. In other words that it depends on the kind of society we live in
But the kinds of society we live in are objective, so scarcity, which is characteristic of many kinds of these societies, is objective too.

THAT is what is meant when we say "scarcity is a myth". It does NOT mean, as you seem to think, that people dont suffer from deprivation. It means simply that there is no objective need why they should suffer thus and that the potential to produce enough already exists here and now. However, it is a potential that is imprisoned within the structure of capitalist economic relations.

This way one can assert that the "potential to produce enough" was just as well "imprisoned" in the slavery-based society. That smells too much of metaphysics, and at the same time suggests that the situation is as primitive as if some shady "evil-doers" are the only reason for scarcity. (Hmmm... that reminds me of something...) Although partially true when it comes to the "artificial scarcity" business strategy of the capitalists, it disregards the more fundamental parts of the problem. It's good for propaganda, but it still puts you into the same crowd with the free market enthusiasts, libertarians and other anti-gov&anti-corp folks (all the anarchists, actually), who are all (that a coincidence!) critical of Malthus' views also (and mostly from the same "it doesn't fit our world outlook" PoV too, just like the Marxist classics).

In order to move from capitalism to communism it is actually imperative that we are able to demonstrate that such a potential exists. How else is communism to present itself as a credible alternative?
To "demonstrate" it you'd have to accomplish that move first, so if it's the only way to present communism as a credible alternative, then you'll have to go for it without presenting it as such. Vicious circle is vicious.

But there is another sense in which we use the term scarcity - namely as a relationship between the demand for a given thing and the supply of it. I live near a spa town in Southern Spain in which water freely flows throughout the year in the many fountains dotted around the town. People have free and unrestricted access to this water and in a sense what we have here is a kind of prefigurative example of how a communist society would operate. People dont waste or abuse this resoruce. Nor do they feel inclined to rush out and fill every available container with water because they know it will always be available on plenitude. Greed becomes pointless

But the population in that nice place is obviously checked by scarcity in all other kinds of resources. What is, for example, the unemployment rate in that area? Like I've mentioned, under capitalism, the jobs have become one of the most primary resources from the people's PoV. Although abject hunger is absent in most Western countries, unemployment plays its role quite well.

We need to be able to demonstrate as communists that what applies to water in this example could apply to a vast array of goods that could at least satisfy all our basic needs (luxury goods might be another matter and here there might be a role for rationing).
So I can't have my fancy ocean ship with a bunch of lovely girls serving my most deranged fantasies?.. Oh well. Vanguard party totalitarianism I see.

We know the world is fully capable of producing enough food to feed the entire population adequately but it does not. Why? Because access to food is dependent on purchasing power and access to land. There is no real objective reason why anyone should go hungry in the world today. Yet millions do for one simple reason - market capitalism disentitles them to the food they need and deliberately throttles back on output to maintain high prices (the EU has withdrawn millions of hectares of land fromn agriculture in set aside schemes precisely for this reason) .

Similarly housing. Here in Spain for example there are nearly 4 million empty housing units. This is to say nothing of empty offices , warehouses, shopping complexes etc etc. In state capitalist China there are an incredible 64 million empty apartments and the world's largest shopping complex remains almost entirely empty several years after completion

Do you deny the objective character of capitalism? Yes, particular decisions by certain actors are subjective, but the system as a whole can't be. This is the ABC of the Marxian method! There are some objective premises ripening within capitalism for a transition to a new system which will indeed have no objective reasons for hunger, but the subjective actions of certain other actors have so far largely failed to bring those objective premises to fruition, so objectively, there is all the reason to still have starvation in the world. Because it's still capitalism outdoors!

.

robbo203

23rd March 2012, 07:35

All right. Then I determine that need a 12-deck cruise ship. Crewed by beauty contests winners. And it has to have an icebreaker capability, because I plan on going to Antarctica to hunt penguins for amusement.

Indeed you can - should you wish to be publicly considered a jerk - so decide that this is your "need": for a "12 deck cruise ship" of all things. Interesting that you should bring up this example because its just the kind of example routinely brought up by the anarcho-crapitalist brigade. Perhaps you have something in common?

There is however going to be a slight problem with your alleged "need",come a communist society - how to persuade others not only to build you your cruise ship but presumably to operate it as well. Bit unlikely, wouldnt you say? I said the individual himself or herself is the best person to decide what he or she needs - certainly not your ridiculous idea of some vanguard telling you what you do or dont need - and I stand by that. But I did NOT say that because you will determine what you "need" that your "need" will necessarily be met. - though I assume that in your case you are just trying to play the role of a wind up merchant wanting to take the piss and that you dont seriously believe you actually need such a thing.

All the same there is a serious point to all this which your hypothetical "need" draws our attention to rather well and this has to do with the terms under which needs will be met in a communist society. This requires that we recognise the needs of others besides ourselves and the fact that we all depend on each other. Out of this recognition with inevitably emerge some sense of priorities to govern the directiuon that production takes. To put it bluntly , you are not going to get your cruise ship, however much you cry and stamp your feet like a spoilt child because the opportuinity costs of diverting huge amounts of resources and labour in communism to satisfy your strange whimsical desire for a cruise ship will unquestionably be considered completely unacceptable by 99.99% of the populace when there are much more obviously urgent needs to be met - you know, like expanding production and upgrading the housing stock

Not that Im suggestihg there wont be cruise ships in a communist society, they just wont be the personal property of some rather vain individual.

Although I wouldn't say the structural waste of labor is as high as 50%, the main problem here is that communism cannot eliminate it "at a stroke". Communism needs to be built in a process which the M-Ls refer to as the socialist construction/transition. And it has to start with what we got now - the level at which scarcity is present, productivity of labor is insufficient to create abundance overnight, and even some technology needs to be researched and developed first to upgrade the productivity of to the point at which the ETA of comfortable existence for everyone could realistically assessed..

Actually, most estimates Ive come across put the extent of structural waste at considerably higher than 50%. You are are probably overlooking the indirect aspect of structural waste such as the provision of support services and the construction of infrastruture and buildings in which such socially useless (from the standpoint of meeting human needs) activies are carried on. At any rate the great bulk of such activities can, and will be, literally eliminated at a stroke unless you entertain some kind of illogical notion of somehow phasing out, say, banks or insurance companies in a communist society. There are other things - notably the physical infrastructure - that will take a bit of time to convert to socially useful production - the swords into ploughshares phenomenon - but I dont think anything like the huge amount of time you seem to envisage. How long does it take to internally modify a building that once housed a bank into a comfortable apartment block?

The "demographic transition" concept has been mostly unscientific so far, as it ignores the "export of poverty". In today's world, with its global market, any study restricted to the national level is inherently incomplete, and that goes especially to the demographic studies. It is argued that the Industrial Revolution helped the West to escape from the "Malthusian trap", but it can be also argued, that if you look at the humanity globally, it is still pretty much in it: population growth instead of a rise of the mean standards of living.

And while it does stand to reason, even if from the speculative point, that improvement of the standards of living (achieved already on a non-capitalist basis) will naturally reduce the population growth, the per capita consumption will still be increasing (even if only in the public sector) so the Malthusian effects will remain: the ecological footprint, the costs to support the population, the requirements imposed on the environment will be increasing, eventually reaching new limitations.

In any case, by the time an opportunity for an organized deliberate socialist transition may present itself again, the population is likely to reach the 10th billion mark, which will probably be the #1 challenge the communists will face, combined with the scarcity problems also exacerbated by that time due to the systemic crisis of the capitalist system.

The "demograpjic transition" is a concept that describes the process by which societies tend to move from high birth/high mortality rates to low low birth/ low mortality rates . This is a process primarily driven by economic development and structural changes likethe shift from an agrarian to an urban based society. Initially mortality rates decline aand then only latter birth rates, for which reason societies in the middle of this demographic transition tend to experience rapid population growth. As birth rates continue to fall population growth starts to slow and eventually may cease altogether as stabilisation is reached

Your criticism of the concept strikes me as somewhat nitpicking and pedantic; as a generalisation it is essentially sound. Of course an ecological footprint is entailed in the process of improving living standards and a communist society will indeed have to have due regard for this. In fact, by eliminating the massive and steadily growing aforementioned structural waste of capitalism this will in itself have a significant impact on our collective ecological footprint . So too will the fact that without the reckless pursuit of profit at all costs fulled by a system of economic competition, a communist society will be able to take a more long term and considered view of production and modifiy its production technquies accordingly. For instance, I would argue that the highly capitalised industrial model of agriculture adopted by present day commercial farmers would be increasingly abandoned in favour of more organic and labour intensive approaches to farming which incidentally, in terms of output per hectare, are significantly more productive than the former

To decribe the great majorty of global popilation ation as being caught in trhe "malthusian trap" seems to me to be simply a variant of the crude Victorian argument that the poor are to blame for their own poverty. The assumption is that if only they stopped breeding like flies/rabbits or whatever, their poverty would ease and only then might they be able to lift themselves out of their current economic malaisie. This is plainly rubbish. In fact if anything there is a stronger case for saying population growth is a stimulus to economic development rather a hindrance although I dont necessarily along with this idea either. However, it has to be said that increasing population densities tend to make it more economical to build the basic infrastructure upon which economic development depends. Some of the poiorest partrs of the world - as in africa - are perhaps not coincidentally sparesely populated; conversely some of the the most densely populated areas also amongst the most highly developed. China the most populous country in the world with over a billion people is now poised to overtake the USA as the world's leading economy.

So much for your "Malthusian trap". It is a bogus argument

And "moral restraint" inducing lower birthrates is, of course, the only way to really escape the "Malthusian trap". Like I said, birth control and population planning, enforced by the vanguard party. In Malthus' time, btw, "moral restraints" came in the form of the Church imposing them on people (Malthus, himself being a bishop or something, definitely knew what he was talking about).

Certainly, population control can't solve anything by itself, but without it, any technological progress will be eaten away, possibly in the most literal sense of the word.

Malthus was a vicar for whom Marx had the utmost scorn. That you seem to hold Malthus in such esteem, says a lot about your own political viewpoint not to mention your anti-Marxist faith in the so called Vanguard Party

The facts of historical development contradict your claim. It is simply not true that "moral restraint" by compelling people to have lower birthrates is the only way to to escape the "Malthusian trap". Demonstrably, many societies were and are escaping the malthusian trap despite having high birthrates. Youve got it completely the wrong way round. There is no Malthgusian trap. There is dire economic poverty and as poverty recedes and morality rates i is then then you begin to see a decline in birth rates. This is what has happened in the past and this is what we see happening today even in the Third World where birth rates are now falling. Birth rates are a dependent variable rather than independent variable as dar as economic development is concerned. There is however a time lag between declining mortality rates and declining birth ratres and that is as I say why you see an intervening period of high population growth

Um... Have you actually read what I said? I said, although scarcity as a fact of life has to be conceded, the impossibility of communism does not follow from this fact. What follows from this fact is that population planning must be one of the main features of communism, if it is to overcome scarcity (which it is, by definition).

Yes, because capitalism turns out to be unable to overcome scarcity (as the early critics of Malthus hoped). But how does that contradict the assertion that scarcity is present in capitalism, just as it had been in feudalism? Moreover, the assertion that scarcity will remain a fact of life long into the process of building communism also in no way contradicts that.

You are missing the point here arent you? . Unless you can point to the productivie possiblity of overcoming factual scarcity you deprive communism of any basis upon which it can present itself as a credible alternative to capitalism. It not so much a malthusian trap as a a rhetorical trap youve trapped yourself in . Youve bought into the whole Marlthusian mumbo jumbo about population growth growing exponentially while production grows only arithemetically - which is in fact the fundamental argument underlying Malthus - and you cant seem to see just damaging such an argument is to the communist cause. As a so called law, if it has any truth in it, it necessarily foredooms humanity society to perpetual scarcity and theforem by its very nature precludes communismn as an option. Thatis why being a communist entails having no truck with Malthusianism.

This way one can assert that the "potential to produce enough" was just as well "imprisoned" in the slavery-based society. That smells too much of metaphysics, and at the same time suggests that the situation is as primitive as if some shady "evil-doers" are the only reason for scarcity. (Hmmm... that reminds me of something...) Although partially true when it comes to the "artificial scarcity" business strategy of the capitalists, it disregards the more fundamental parts of the problem. It's good for propaganda, but it still puts you into the same crowd with the free market enthusiasts, libertarians and other anti-gov&anti-corp folks (all the anarchists, actually), who are all (that a coincidence!) critical of Malthus' views also (and mostly from the same "it doesn't fit our world outlook" PoV too, just like the Marxist classics).

There is nothing "metaphysical" at all about asserting the potential to produce enough already exists but cannot be effectively realised within capitalism. It can inferred from the wealth of empirical data available to us such as that concerning the extent of strucutural waste iun capitalism which I note not even you are foolish enough to completely deny.

Its laughable thatyou should try to shoe horn me into some kind of free market anti government outlook when you are the one who is relentlessly advancing the mantra "scarcity is an inevitable fact of life ". Precisely the same dogma relentlessly advanced by your free market enthusiasts

But the population in that nice place is obviously checked by scarcity in all other kinds of resources. What is, for example, the unemployment rate in that area? Like I've mentioned, under capitalism, the jobs have become one of the most primary resources from the people's PoV. Although abject hunger is absent in most Western countries, unemployment plays its role quite well.

Well since communism gets rid of the wage system and employment altogether I fail to see how this presents a problem. There will be no unemployment in communism becuase there will be no employment either
.

Do you deny the objective character of capitalism? Yes, particular decisions by certain actors are subjective, but the system as a whole can't be. This is the ABC of the Marxian method! There are some objective premises ripening within capitalism for a transition to a new system which will indeed have no objective reasons for hunger, but the subjective actions of certain other actors have so far largely failed to bring those objective premises to fruition, so objectively, there is all the reason to still have starvation in the world. Because it's still capitalism outdoors!
.

Of course capitalism exists as an objective fact out there. But so too is the productive potential for banishing scarcity by eliminating capitalism itself. That is my point

Zulu

23rd March 2012, 11:36

Indeed you can - should you wish to be publicly considered a jerk - so decide that this is your "need": for a "12 deck cruise ship" of all things. Interesting that you should bring up this example because its just the kind of example routinely brought up by the anarcho-crapitalist brigade. Perhaps you have something in common?

Who are the "anarcho-crapitalist brigade"?

There is however going to be a slight problem with your alleged "need",come a communist society - how to persuade others not only to build you your cruise ship but presumably to operate it as well. Bit unlikely, wouldnt you say? I said the individual himself or herself is the best person to decide what he or she needs - certainly not your ridiculous idea of some vanguard telling you what you do or dont need - and I stand by that. But I did NOT say that because you will determine what you "need" that your "need" will necessarily be met. - though I assume that in your case you are just trying to play the role of a wind up merchant wanting to take the piss and that you dont seriously believe you actually need such a thing.

All the same there is a serious point to all this which your hypothetical "need" draws our attention to rather well and this has to do with the terms under which needs will be met in a communist society. This requires that we recognise the needs of others besides ourselves and the fact that we all depend on each other. Out of this recognition with inevitably emerge some sense of priorities to govern the directiuon that production takes. To put it bluntly , you are not going to get your cruise ship, however much you cry and stamp your feet like a spoilt child because the opportuinity costs of diverting huge amounts of resources and labour in communism to satisfy your strange whimsical desire for a cruise ship will unquestionably be considered completely unacceptable by 99.99% of the populace when there are much more obviously urgent needs to be met - you know, like expanding production and upgrading the housing stock

Not that Im suggestihg there wont be cruise ships in a communist society, they just wont be the personal property of some rather vain individual.

Actually, most estimates Ive come across put the extent of structural waste at considerably higher than 50%. You are are probably overlooking the indirect aspect of structural waste such as the provision of support services and the construction of infrastruture and buildings in which such socially useless (from the standpoint of meeting human needs) activies are carried on. At any rate the great bulk of such activities can, and will be, literally eliminated at a stroke unless you entertain some kind of illogical notion of somehow phasing out, say, banks or insurance companies in a communist society. There are other things - notably the physical infrastructure - that will take a bit of time to convert to socially useful production - the swords into ploughshares phenomenon - but I dont think anything like the huge amount of time you seem to envisage. How long does it take to internally modify a building that once housed a bank into a comfortable apartment block?

Alright, I cant seriously challenge your vision of communism, because everyone's is as good as everyone else's at this time. The difference between us is that you think rather naively it can be achieved like tomorrow. And I think it'll take a couple of hundred years to build it 90%, and the last 10% will take maybe thousands of years, depending on the extent the human genetic make-up will need to be tweaked to, in order to produce the "New Man" and make the "selfish jerks" an anomaly rather than the norm they are now.

The "demograpjic transition" is a concept that describes the process by which societies tend to move from high birth/high mortality rates to low low birth/ low mortality rates . This is a process primarily driven by economic development and structural changes likethe shift from an agrarian to an urban based society. Initially mortality rates decline aand then only latter birth rates, for which reason societies in the middle of this demographic transition tend to experience rapid population growth. As birth rates continue to fall population growth starts to slow and eventually may cease altogether as stabilisation is reached

Your criticism of the concept strikes me as somewhat nitpicking and pedantic; as a generalisation it is essentially sound. Of course an ecological footprint is entailed in the process of improving living standards and a communist society will indeed have to have due regard for this. In fact, by eliminating the massive and steadily growing aforementioned structural waste of capitalism this will in itself have a significant impact on our collective ecological footprint . So too will the fact that without the reckless pursuit of profit at all costs fulled by a system of economic competition, a communist society will be able to take a more long term and considered view of production and modifiy its production technquies accordingly. For instance, I would argue that the highly capitalised industrial model of agriculture adopted by present day commercial farmers would be increasingly abandoned in favour of more organic and labour intensive approaches to farming which incidentally, in terms of output per hectare, are significantly more productive than the former

To decribe the great majorty of global popilation ation as being caught in trhe "malthusian trap" seems to me to be simply a variant of the crude Victorian argument that the poor are to blame for their own poverty. The assumption is that if only they stopped breeding like flies/rabbits or whatever, their poverty would ease and only then might they be able to lift themselves out of their current economic malaisie. This is plainly rubbish. In fact if anything there is a stronger case for saying population growth is a stimulus to economic development rather a hindrance although I dont necessarily along with this idea either. However, it has to be said that increasing population densities tend to make it more economical to build the basic infrastructure upon which economic development depends. Some of the poiorest partrs of the world - as in africa - are perhaps not coincidentally sparesely populated; conversely some of the the most densely populated areas also amongst the most highly developed. China the most populous country in the world with over a billion people is now poised to overtake the USA as the world's leading economy.

So much for your "Malthusian trap". It is a bogus argument

Actually, all those studies just provide complementary information that may only help further detail the Malthusian theory. His geometric vs. arithmetic progression assertion was a rough estimate, or even a "not to scale" illustration of his speculation to begin with. He simply did not have enough hard statistical data, and draw conclusions from rather randomly recorded observations. However, I repeat, the 20th century global population boom has marvelously confirmed his main thesis on the largest scale imaginable: progress leads to population growth, not to elimination of poverty.

BTW, this argument that population growth is a stimulus for economic development is exactly what is wrong with the present day capitalism - that it puts the extensive type of development over the intensive, at the time where there is no more room for extensive development. Communism does not need any other stimulus for economic development other than the resolve of conscious people to make it happen. And congratulations on saying the Malthusian law is good, because, hey, it's a stimulus!

Malthus was a vicar for whom Marx had the utmost scorn. That you seem to hold Malthus in such esteem, says a lot about your own political viewpoint not to mention your anti-Marxist faith in the so called Vanguard Party

Problem: Marx held Darwin in such esteem, that he sent him a signed copy of "Capital" with a letter about how happy he was to read "The Origin of Species". Word is Darwin put "Capital" in his library and never opened it once. Who do you think Darwin held in high esteem?.. Correct, Malthus.

And there can't be a thing more anti-Marxist, than rejecting science, just because Marx or Engels wrote something once upon a time. Insufficient understanding of the matters of natural sciences by the communists, including Lenin, Stalin and Mao, led them to most tragic mistakes and significant material losses. This must not be repeated again.

The facts of historical development contradict your claim. It is simply not true that "moral restraint" by compelling people to have lower birthrates is the only way to to escape the "Malthusian trap". Demonstrably, many societies were and are escaping the malthusian trap despite having high birthrates.
There are no "societies" any more. There is one global society in which not only resources and people are easily moved in large quantities across long distances, but also the effects and impacts of socio-economic developments.

Youve got it completely the wrong way round. There is no Malthgusian trap. There is dire economic poverty and as poverty recedes and morality rates i is then then you begin to see a decline in birth rates. This is what has happened in the past and this is what we see happening today even in the Third World where birth rates are now falling. Birth rates are a dependent variable rather than independent variable as dar as economic development is concerned. There is however a time lag between declining mortality rates and declining birth ratres and that is as I say why you see an intervening period of high population growth
The question is: why do the birth rates drop? You're saying yourself it's a dependent variable, so what does it depend on? I've already told you: unemployment, low wages, scarcity of higher education, of quality heathcare, of affordable housing, etc... Food, entertainment and basic services are plenty, but it's not enough. In other words, people stop breeding not because they become smarter, but because they become greedier. Satisfy their greed, and they are likely to breed again, if only for fun.

You are missing the point here arent you? . Unless you can point to the productivie possiblity of overcoming factual scarcity you deprive communism of any basis upon which it can present itself as a credible alternative to capitalism. It not so much a malthusian trap as a a rhetorical trap youve trapped yourself in . Youve bought into the whole Marlthusian mumbo jumbo about population growth growing exponentially while production grows only arithemetically - which is in fact the fundamental argument underlying Malthus - and you cant seem to see just damaging such an argument is to the communist cause. As a so called law, if it has any truth in it, it necessarily foredooms humanity society to perpetual scarcity and theforem by its very nature precludes communismn as an option. Thatis why being a communist entails having no truck with Malthusianism.

Even if it were damaging, you couldn't just ignore that argument, because you don't like it. But in reality it isn't damaging anything. Let's say it's precisely so - production growth arithmetic, population growth geometric. So what? Stop the population growth and Bob's your uncle! You still have to have the production growth, and if you do, in time there will be overabundance. Then there remains the problem that with the constant population but increasing production the ecological footprint still grows (bringing the prospect of a global Mathusian catastrophe closer). There is, of course, a solution to this too, and I really hope it will be communists to implement it, because, if it is capitalists, it'll look verrrry ugly.

Its laughable thatyou should try to shoe horn me into some kind of free market anti government outlook when you are the one who is relentlessly advancing the mantra "scarcity is an inevitable fact of life ". Precisely the same dogma relentlessly advanced by your free market enthusiasts

Um, no, the free market enthusiasts are anti-Malthusian. Pro-Malthusian are the rich corporate guys who support free market only in the sense that it's where they've come from. In reality they support deregulation and oppose anti-trust legislation, but trample all day on most of the other key principles of free market, such as fair competition, freedom of information, small government (they don't want the government to regulate them, but they want big government nonetheless so that they could get juicy contracts payed for in Joe Doe's tax money). Basically they are the smartest of the capitalist sharks - what's how they've got to be big coprs in the first place, and that's why they know Malthus was right. But they don't want to change the rules, because they are selfish assholes.

Well since communism gets rid of the wage system and employment altogether I fail to see how this presents a problem. There will be no unemployment in communism becuase there will be no employment either
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Well, once your type of communism gets rid of all problems and creates abundance, and you don't have a restrictive population control policy in place, expect a baby boom.

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EvoMorales

23rd March 2012, 20:24

Scarcity is not a myth, it is very real and concrete. Indeed, many resources are scarce due to our specific mode of production, but this does not make it any less real.

robbo203

23rd March 2012, 22:22

Who are the "anarcho-crapitalist brigade"?

Its a joke - a play on the word "anarcho-capitalist"

Alright, I cant seriously challenge your vision of communism, because everyone's is as good as everyone else's at this time. The difference between us is that you think rather naively it can be achieved like tomorrow. And I think it'll take a couple of hundred years to build it 90%, and the last 10% will take maybe thousands of years, depending on the extent the human genetic make-up will need to be tweaked to, in order to produce the "New Man" and make the "selfish jerks" an anomaly rather than the norm they are now.

I dont think it can be achieved tomorrow but nor do I think it requires hundreds, let alone thousands, of years. The face of change is speeding up and what might seem impossible today can very rapidly seem credible in a very short span of time

Nor does a communist transformation require any tweaking of the human genetic make up. People's genetic make up is just fine as it is. Oh, and also it does not require the elimination of selfishness. This is, if I might say so, a complete caricature - that communism requires us all to be 100% altruists. All societies operate on the basis of a mixture of altruistic and selfish motives. Communism will be no different in that respect

Actually, all those studies just provide complementary information that may only help further detail the Malthusian theory. His geometric vs. arithmetic progression assertion was a rough estimate, or even a "not to scale" illustration of his speculation to begin with. He simply did not have enough hard statistical data, and draw conclusions from rather randomly recorded observations. However, I repeat, the 20th century global population boom has marvelously confirmed his main thesis on the largest scale imaginable: progress leads to population growth, not to elimination of poverty.

On the contrary, Matlhusianisn has been absolutely and comprehensively refuted and it is rather odd not to say extremely rare to come across individuals these days, willing to stick their neck out and be prepared to defend Mathus's ideas. The cornerstone of Malthusianism is Malthus' claim that " Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio." (The Principle of Population.). This is bunk. It it were remotely true we would all be living at the rock bottom subsistence level and the global popiulation would be much smaller today than it actually is.

But the truly damning evidence against Malthus and the thing that really drives the nail into the coffin of Malthusian ideas is the simple fact that increasing standards of living have been accompanied by a long term secular decline - not an increase - in the rate of population growth so much so that alkready we begin to in a few countries zero if not negative ,growth.

How did this come about? Certainly not by the the various external "checks" that Malthus suggested would come into play - famine, disease, war and so on. On the contrary compared to century or two ago the population are relatvely well fed. The rate of poplatuion should be increasing but it is not - it is slowing down across the worldf. Population is still growing rapidly in absolute terms but not the rate of growth. This is only because many countries are still in the demographic transition , Birth rates are falling but they have not yet fallen as low as mortality rates .Even so there are now as many people in the world who are cliniucally obsese - over 1 billion - as the numbers suffering from lack of food.

Point is if Malthus 's idea held any water at all this would simply not have happened. You dont seem to grasp this very simple point buit it is key to understandining why Malthusianism is simply not a credible position to take up

BTW, this argument that population growth is a stimulus for economic development is exactly what is wrong with the present day capitalism - that it puts the extensive type of development over the intensive, at the time where there is no more room for extensive development. Communism does not need any other stimulus for economic development other than the resolve of conscious people to make it happen. And congratulations on saying the Malthusian law is good, because, hey, it's a stimulus!

What oin earth are you on about? I can,t make any sense of this. My point was a pretty uncontroversial one and I was talking about what happens in capitalism - not what might happen in communism. The pioint was simply that sparsely populated parts of the world are constrained by the simle fact that it is often not considered "economical" in capitalist terms to put in place in the areas such basic infrastructural facilities as good communication links, educational establishments, hospitals and what not. Economies of scale come into into play here. It requires certain minimal threshold in terms of population density for it to be considered "economical" to install such infrastructural components

Problem: Marx held Darwin in such esteem, that he sent him a signed copy of "Capital" with a letter about how happy he was to read "The Origin of Species". Word is Darwin put "Capital" in his library and never opened it once. Who do you think Darwin held in high esteem?.. Correct, Malthus.

How is this a "problem" and what exactly are you trying to say?. Are you trying to deny that Marx has a low opinion of Malthus or are you trying to suggest that this low opinion was unwarranted - because Marx had a high opinion of Darwin who was influenced by Malthus. What you dont seem to understand is what Marx valued in Darwin - he was certainly not an uncritical supporter of Darwin as is quite evident from his correspondence with Engels . For iunstance On the 18th June 1862, he wrote to Engels: "Darwin, whom I have looked up again, amuses me when he says he is applying the ‘Malthusian’ theory also to plants and animals, as if with Mr. Malthus the whole point were not that he does not apply the theory to plants and animals but only to human beings—and with geometrical progression—as opposed to plants and animals." What Marx admired in Dawrin was his scientific materialist approach and body blow he delivered to teleology but he did not approve of everything he wrote. That said Dawrin was not exactly a spocial dawrinist' it was Herbert Spenser who gave Darwin this particlaur twist

And there can't be a thing more anti-Marxist, than rejecting science, just because Marx or Engels wrote something once upon a time. Insufficient understanding of the matters of natural sciences by the communists, including Lenin, Stalin and Mao, led them to most tragic mistakes and significant material losses. This must not be repeated again.
.

But malthusianisn is not science ; its a pseudo science, an idelogy. Even you attest to the sloppy approach the Malthus employed in coming to the conclusions he reached. That aside, the point is that the basic claim that Malthus made has been refuted as explained above. Denying this would indeed be " rejecting science". Do you deny it?

There are no "societies" any more. There is one global society in which not only resources and people are easily moved in large quantities across long distances, but also the effects and impacts of socio-economic developments..

Pedantic. You knowe exacrtly what I mean by societies in this context

The question is: why do the birth rates drop? You're saying yourself it's a dependent variable, so what does it depend on? I've already told you: unemployment, low wages, scarcity of higher education, of quality heathcare, of affordable housing, etc... Food, entertainment and basic services are plenty, but it's not enough. In other words, people stop breeding not because they become smarter, but because they become greedier. Satisfy their greed, and they are likely to breed again, if only for fun...

Absolute rubbish. Consider what you are saying here. If birth rates drop because of "unemployment, low wages, scarcity of higher education, of quality heathcare, of affordable housing" then well educated well paid employees must be "breeding like rabbits" which is a condescending expression usually reserved for lumpen proletariat on some goddam awful sink estate somewhere.

Where is the evidence to back up your claim? On the contrary all the evidence suggests quite the opposite - certainly in the field of development economics. Better health care, for example, means infant mortality rates drop which cause birth rates to drop. One reason why, in the absence of adequate health care, people tend to have large families in parts of the so called Third World is the expectation that some of their childten are not going to make it to the age of 5 and allowance is made for this. That seems coldly clinical but it is a fact. Better education also helps obviously in relation to things like the use of contraceptives and the social position of women in a macho culture. The absence of a some kind of social welfare system is a further consideration, In such a situation individuals tend to look upon children as an investment for their future when they reach a ripe old age and will be totally dependent on them in the absence of a pension.

All these facters point to a quite opposite conclusion to the one you reach. In fact there are some writers who even posit a biological link between high fertility and poverty. There was someone called , I think, Jose Castro who wrote quite an influential book on precisely this subject some years back

Even if it were damaging, you couldn't just ignore that argument, because you don't like it. But in reality it isn't damaging anything. Let's say it's precisely so - production growth arithmetic, population growth geometric. So what? Stop the population growth and Bob's your uncle! You still have to have the production growth, and if you do, in time there will be overabundance. Then there remains the problem that with the constant population but increasing production the ecological footprint still grows (bringing the prospect of a global Mathusian catastrophe closer). There is, of course, a solution to this too, and I really hope it will be communists to implement it, because, if it is capitalists, it'll look verrrry ugly.
.

No one is suggesting unlimited increases in production for the sake of it in a communist society. Im well aware of the implication of all that for our ecological footprint. But can't you see where this ties in with your whole argument about "scarcity being inevitable fact of life". If scarcity is a relation between supply and demand then the moderation of demand is just as important as increasing the supply in order to overcome such scarictiy. If you dont overcome you will be stuck with greedy behaviour - and capitalism to boot. So your argument condemns you to a vicious circle

I am saying that a communist society will indeed lead to a moderation of demand for many different reasons - partly because we will be much more inclined as social animals to see the link between what we consume ourselves and what others consume - which is why i was having a go at you for your absurd "I need a 12 deck crusie ship" argument- but also so much the business of accumulating and consuming wealth today has to do with status aquisition.

In a communist society based on free access to goods and services all this crap goes out the window. Its pointless trying to obtain status through the accumulation of wealth when everyone has free access to the same. If you want to earn the respect and esteem of your fellows the only way to do that is through what you put into society not what you take out of it

Zulu

24th March 2012, 03:01

I dont think it can be achieved tomorrow but nor do I think it requires hundreds, let alone thousands, of years. The face of change is speeding up and what might seem impossible today can very rapidly seem credible in a very short span of time

Nor does a communist transformation require any tweaking of the human genetic make up. People's genetic make up is just fine as it is. Oh, and also it does not require the elimination of selfishness. This is, if I might say so, a complete caricature - that communism requires us all to be 100% altruists. All societies operate on the basis of a mixture of altruistic and selfish motives. Communism will be no different in that respect

The pace of change speeding up presents also a threat of losing any sort of control of society, which in case of a revolution may go spiraling into complete chaos, rather than achieving a new plane of order. Therefore a "thermidorian reaction" to follow the next revolution may be more actual than ever before, when the revolutionaries will have to put more restraints on the society to preserve the revolutionary gains at each particular stage of transition. (Lucky me no Trotskyist is reading this, or we'd have their brains and skull fragments sprayed all over the thread now...)

And I dislike the word altruism to describe the opposite of selfishness. Altruism is silly. Collectivism - considering oneself a part of a bigger whole - is the trait that needs to be nourished in people. And no, people's genetic make up isn't just fine as it is, not for communism definitely. You see, Stalin and the Marxist-Leninists of his time did not believe in genetics because they thought it's some kind of a bourgeois diversion, and people can be simply fostered to be communists, that a few lectures and ceremonies in the Lenin's Pioneers might cut it. Too bad, the Mendelian genetics trumped the Michurinian agrobiology, and Morganism-Weismannism turned out to be a real deal, unlike Lysenkoism.

On the contrary, Matlhusianisn has been absolutely and comprehensively refuted and it is rather odd not to say extremely rare to come across individuals these days, willing to stick their neck out and be prepared to defend Mathus's ideas. The cornerstone of Malthusianism is Malthus' claim that " Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio." (The Principle of Population.). This is bunk. It it were remotely true we would all be living at the rock bottom subsistence level and the global popiulation would be much smaller today than it actually is.
Even though not unchecked by wars, deceases and famines, the population has grown exponentially since Mathus' times. ~1bn during his time, ~2bn a century later, ~4bn after a century and a half, >7bn in less than 2 centuries, and still climbing. Does it look like it's slowing down? Oh yeah, between the PRC's "one child" policy and the reports of the ice-free North Pole, it does.

As for Malthus' precise formula "geometric vs. arithmetic progression", I've already said, that it's in no way a Holy Scripture, but the principle that population always pressed against the scarcity limits until "checked" was hit like a nail on its head by Malthus. Any biologist will tell you that what Malthus speculated on about the humans was just a particular case of the general rule in population ecology, a law of nature, which all species are subject to.

But the truly damning evidence against Malthus and the thing that really drives the nail into the coffin of Malthusian ideas is the simple fact that increasing standards of living have been accompanied by a long term secular decline - not an increase - in the rate of population growth so much so that alkready we begin to in a few countries zero if not negative ,growth.

How did this come about? Certainly not by the the various external "checks" that Malthus suggested would come into play - famine, disease, war and so on. On the contrary compared to century or two ago the population are relatvely well fed. The rate of poplatuion should be increasing but it is not - it is slowing down across the worldf. Population is still growing rapidly in absolute terms but not the rate of growth. This is only because many countries are still in the demographic transition , Birth rates are falling but they have not yet fallen as low as mortality rates .Even so there are now as many people in the world who are cliniucally obsese - over 1 billion - as the numbers suffering from lack of food.

Point is if Malthus 's idea held any water at all this would simply not have happened. You dont seem to grasp this very simple point buit it is key to understandining why Malthusianism is simply not a credible position to take up

I'll summarize the main points explaining this demographic transition phenomenon:

1. The better people leave, the greedier they become, thus being subject to more "checks". And the poor (and thus not so greedy people) become subject to more "checks" too over time: narcotics addiction, petty street crime, etc., which although not being immediately lethal still downgrade their chances of having offspring thus contributing to the "demographic transition" even in the affluent countries. Even such thing as tolerance to homosexuality may be regarded as a natural biological mechanism correcting the population dynamics.

2. The "demographic transition" theories completely disregard the "export of poverty". Or, in more classic Marxian terms, the inequality of appropriation of the socially created wealth. Step 1: wealth is created; Step 2: population hits the new highs; Step 3: the First world robs/swindles the Third world of its share of wealth. The reason for the First world to have little population growth is thus not that it creates a lot of wealth (as you bourgeois "demographic transition" theory seems to imply - probably to whitewash the First world), but that it acquires all its wealth from other places, where it is largely created, and where the population grows faster (in full accordance with Malthus' hypothesis). Thus the theory of "demographic transition" simply isn't applicable to a situation, when all the world is supposed to become the First world (or the Second, for that matter).

3. The ecological footprint of the countries that have already undergone the "demographic transition" keeps growing. This is, of course, closely connected to the #2, but has a distinct meaning that the "demographic transition" doesn't even matter (even if attainable on the global scale, which it is not), because all the problems presented by the growing population remain in place, despite it formally not growing. Perhaps, it could help, if you counted the population not by heads, but by biomass, thus making all those clinically obese people reflected in your stats. Maybe, you'd even have a more clear sight of the picture about the escape from the Malthusian trap, supposedly performed by those "societies", who knows...

4. People don't have to breed literally "like rabbits" for the exponential growth to be there. Even 3 births per woman will give you a runaway exponential growth. And studies show that in the Western countries on average, the more wealthy people are likely to have more children (2-3 per family in the middle class), than those in the "high risk zone" (1-2 per family in the working class, see #1 also). This suggests that if all were released from the "risk zone" (working class joined the middle class' living standards), they would then begin produce surplus kids too, making the exponential growth inevitable (albeit at a slower pace, than that in the Third world). So even in this respect the theory of "demographic transition" ignores such an important question, especially for us Marxists, as the class composition of society.

How is this a "problem" and what exactly are you trying to say?. Are you trying to deny that Marx has a low opinion of Malthus or are you trying to suggest that this low opinion was unwarranted - because Marx had a high opinion of Darwin who was influenced by Malthus. What you dont seem to understand is what Marx valued in Darwin - he was certainly not an uncritical supporter of Darwin as is quite evident from his correspondence with Engels .

The bolded part. You pushed me with the authority of Marx's opinion on a guy, and I push you with the authority of Marx's opinion on another guy, who had a certain opinion on the first guy. There is a clearly distinct contradiction of authoritative opinions here. But you shouldn't have used an authoritative opinion as an argument, especially when it is exactly what your opponent challenges. It's not a materialist method of argumentation.

For iunstance On the 18th June 1862, he wrote to Engels: "Darwin, whom I have looked up again, amuses me when he says he is applying the ‘Malthusian’ theory also to plants and animals, as if with Mr. Malthus the whole point were not that he does not apply the theory to plants and animals but only to human beings—and with geometrical progression—as opposed to plants and animals." What Marx admired in Dawrin was his scientific materialist approach and body blow he delivered to teleology but he did not approve of everything he wrote. That said Dawrin was not exactly a spocial dawrinist' it was Herbert Spenser who gave Darwin this particlaur twist

Well, that passage is highly compromising of Marx in the eyes of any scientist. Marx's opposing human beings to plants and animals so completely that re-application of some hypothesis concerning the human beings to a wider multitude of species by Darwin "amuses" him, leaves one with an impression that Marx was ignorant of the fact that human beings belong to the animal kingdom. Did Malthus think that his theory was not applicable to all plants and animals, but only to humans? If he did, he was clearly mistaken, and Marx repeated that mistake.

But malthusianisn is not science ; its a pseudo science, an idelogy. Even you attest to the sloppy approach the Malthus employed in coming to the conclusions he reached. That aside, the point is that the basic claim that Malthus made has been refuted as explained above. Denying this would indeed be " rejecting science". Do you deny it?
Of course, Malthus was not a scientist, but he scored a lucky guess, which was scientifically elaborated on by Darwin among others and has been used to describe many phenomenons in quite academic studies, incorporating strict mathematical and statistical methodology.

Look at that, for a quick instance:

http://escholarship.org/uc/search?keyword=Malthusian

This one is quite recent and looks particularly interesting:

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/82z9c3p6

Pedantic. You knowe exacrtly what I mean by societies in this context

"Pedantic" is practically a synonym of "scientific", so thank you for the compliment. And what you mean by "societies" in this context are not closed and isolated systems, so the theory of "demographic transition" which completely disregards the fact, and ignores all its implications, is therefore just as unscientific as Malthus' theory. However, due to its flaws it's unlikely it'll have as much importance for the future science as Malthus' theory has proved to have.

Absolute rubbish. Consider what you are saying here. If birth rates drop because of "unemployment, low wages, scarcity of higher education, of quality heathcare, of affordable housing" then well educated well paid employees must be "breeding like rabbits" which is a condescending expression usually reserved for lumpen proletariat on some goddam awful sink estate somewhere.

Where is the evidence to back up your claim? On the contrary all the evidence suggests quite the opposite - certainly in the field of development economics. Better health care, for example, means infant mortality rates drop which cause birth rates to drop. One reason why, in the absence of adequate health care, people tend to have large families in parts of the so called Third World is the expectation that some of their childten are not going to make it to the age of 5 and allowance is made for this. That seems coldly clinical but it is a fact. Better education also helps obviously in relation to things like the use of contraceptives and the social position of women in a macho culture. The absence of a some kind of social welfare system is a further consideration, In such a situation individuals tend to look upon children as an investment for their future when they reach a ripe old age and will be totally dependent on them in the absence of a pension.

All these facters point to a quite opposite conclusion to the one you reach. In fact there are some writers who even posit a biological link between high fertility and poverty. There was someone called , I think, Jose Castro who wrote quite an influential book on precisely this subject some years back

See my summary above.

No one is suggesting unlimited increases in production for the sake of it in a communist society. Im well aware of the implication of all that for our ecological footprint. But can't you see where this ties in with your whole argument about "scarcity being inevitable fact of life".
My statement is that scarcity is NOT an inevitable fact of life, but it can only be avoided in communism with population planning.

If scarcity is a relation between supply and demand then the moderation of demand is just as important as increasing the supply in order to overcome such scarictiy.

And population planning is one of the major ways of the "moderation of demand". I think the future Marxist-Leninist vanguard party can even arm itself with that as an euphemism for the propaganda purposes.

I am saying that a communist society will indeed lead to a moderation of demand for many different reasons - partly because we will be much more inclined as social animals to see the link between what we consume ourselves and what others consume - which is why i was having a go at you for your absurd "I need a 12 deck crusie ship" argument- but also so much the business of accumulating and consuming wealth today has to do with status aquisition.

In a communist society based on free access to goods and services all this crap goes out the window. Its pointless trying to obtain status through the accumulation of wealth when everyone has free access to the same. If you want to earn the respect and esteem of your fellows the only way to do that is through what you put into society not what you take out of it
As I've said, I'm not against your vision of communism. The tricky part is how to get there.

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MotherCossack

24th March 2012, 04:45

well scarcity exists cos we have all been genetically modified to never be satisfied.... so having insatiable appetites for food and stuff /things results in a perpetual shortage, perceived at least.
and the apparent lack of supplies becomes the overriding focus of all the people, who are deliberately propelled into a perpetual state of mild to moderate anxiety.... all of which is misguided and which is designed to occupy them just a little .... it helps control the masses.... always a good idea even in the best of times.... and allows for relatively easy introduction of additional more severe measures .....
like austerity!!!!

robbo203

24th March 2012, 12:33

The pace of change speeding up presents also a threat of losing any sort of control of society, which in case of a revolution may go spiraling into complete chaos, rather than achieving a new plane of order. Therefore a "thermidorian reaction" to follow the next revolution may be more actual than ever before, when the revolutionaries will have to put more restraints on the society to preserve the revolutionary gains at each particular stage of transition. (Lucky me no Trotskyist is reading this, or we'd have their brains and skull fragments sprayed all over the thread now...).

Neither of us possess a crystal ball. Neither of us can really determine when a communist society is likely to come about. It could pretty happen soon. It could happen in a long time. It might even never happen. The pace of change speeding may well present a threat of "losing any sort of control of society" but that might well be a very positive - even necessary - thing from the standpoint of a communist revolution. In fact it is in a way good news that the credibility ratings of politicians are plummeting that people are cynical as never before. I am minded of that ultra conservative Irish poet, WB Yeats who penned these words in that famous poem of his , "The Second Coming" written in 1920

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

Be aware where the reactionary kind of sentiments can take you

And I dislike the word altruism to describe the opposite of selfishness. Altruism is silly. Collectivism - considering oneself a part of a bigger whole - is the trait that needs to be nourished in people. And no, people's genetic make up isn't just fine as it is, not for communism definitely. You see, Stalin and the Marxist-Leninists of his time did not believe in genetics because they thought it's some kind of a bourgeois diversion, and people can be simply fostered to be communists, that a few lectures and ceremonies in the Lenin's Pioneers might cut it. Too bad, the Mendelian genetics trumped the Michurinian agrobiology, and Morganism-Weismannism turned out to be a real deal, unlike Lysenkoism.

Altruism is not "silly". It simply means "other regarding " - having a concern for the welfare and wellbeing of others, seeing others as having value in themselves and not simply existing in instrumentalist sense as a means to serve your own ends. In fact altruism is a necessary ingredient of the "collectivism" you talk of.

On genetics, come on, this is just bullshit you are talking. Look Im not a blank slater by any means - but there is nothing in our genetic endowment that forbids communism. In fact, if you are going to use the genetic endowment argument it would if anything point to the quite opposite conclusion. Given that the great bulk of our existence as a species has been under a kind of primitive communistic mode of existence one would have thought, on the face oif it, that this would have entailed the selection of traits highly conducive to communism. The simple fact is that our genetic endowment allows for a considerable degree of variability.

It always amuses tme when people talk about the need to tweak their genetic endowment. There is something utterly contradictory about it when you think about it

Even though not unchecked by wars, deceases and famines, the population has grown exponentially since Mathus' times. ~1bn during his time, ~2bn a century later, ~4bn after a century and a half, >7bn in less than 2 centuries, and still climbing. Does it look like it's slowing down? Oh yeah, between the PRC's "one child" policy and the reports of the ice-free North Pole, it does.

What do you mean " even though not unchecked"??? Malthus whole argument was that population would be checked, that population growth would press relentlessly gainst the resouce base to such an extent that it would be forcibly curtailed by starvation and the like. It hasnt turned out like that at all, has it? The population has indeed grown considerably since Malthus' day but the means of prpduction have grown even faster - quite contrary to his claim that the latter grows only arithemetiucally while the former grows geometrically. Morevoer, and this is what you overlook in your eagerness to defend Malthus, as the resource base has expanded so the birth rates have started falling and quite dramatiucally in some cases. Like I said there are now as many people who are judged to be clincally obese in the world as there are people who dont get enough food to eat. This simply would not have happened had Malthus' ideas held any water

As for Malthus' precise formula "geometric vs. arithmetic progression", I've already said, that it's in no way a Holy Scripture, but the principle that population always pressed against the scarcity limits until "checked" was hit like a nail on its head by Malthus. Any biologist will tell you that what Malthus speculated on about the humans was just a particular case of the general rule in population ecology, a law of nature, which all species are subject to.

Really? Youve just been telling me about China's one child policy . Can you find an analogue of this in nature? Besides. as Ive just explained to you the geometric v arithmetic formula of Malthus is bullshit. People are in general better fed today than in Malthus's for the simple reason that production has grown faster than population . Quite the opposite to what Malthus predicted. Not only that, there is no reason to say population inevitably grows geometrically. Birth rates are declining but NOT becuase of the implementation of Malthusian checks

I'll summarize the main points explaining this demographic transition phenomenon:

1. The better people leave, the greedier they become, thus being subject to more "checks". And the poor (and thus not so greedy people) become subject to more "checks" too over time: narcotics addiction, petty street crime, etc., which although not being immediately lethal still downgrade their chances of having offspring thus contributing to the "demographic transition" even in the affluent countries. Even such thing as tolerance to homosexuality may be regarded as a natural biological mechanism correcting the population dynamics..

You are talking nonsense frankly because you dont understand Malthus' concept of a "check". Population growth in Malthusian terms is "checked" by things like starvation because of its alleged tendency to outstrip food proiduction. People who live better are not subject to more checks but - on the contrary - less. Malthus' thesis was that people will not be able to live better - contra Godwin's view - becuase the checks he spoke of would bear down on them precisely at the point at which they were experiencing extreme poverty at a subsistence level

2. The "demographic transition" theories completely disregard the "export of poverty". Or, in more classic Marxian terms, the inequality of appropriation of the socially created wealth. Step 1: wealth is created; Step 2: population hits the new highs; Step 3: the First world robs/swindles the Third world of its share of wealth. The reason for the First world to have little population growth is thus not that it creates a lot of wealth (as you bourgeois "demographic transition" theory seems to imply - probably to whitewash the First world), but that it acquires all its wealth from other places, where it is largely created, and where the population grows faster (in full accordance with Malthus' hypothesis). Thus the theory of "demographic transition" simply isn't applicable to a situation, when all the world is supposed to become the First world (or the Second, for that matter)...

This is quite incoherent becuase you are mixing up two quite different theories. Apart from anything else can you not see the glaring contradiction that stares at you right in your face. The first world robs the Third world of its share of the wealth, you say. That means the resources available to the First world are considerable, It does not matter HOW those resoruces are come by . According to Malthus more resources only creates the opportunity for populations to expand and this geometric growth of population will eventually be checked in due course. But what has actually happened? Tne very opposite has happened. First world populations with all this wealth swilling around which "they" have supposedly robbed from the Third World have not expanded geometrically to the point at which they are now threatened with mass starvation. On the contrary there are a number of First world countries population growth is zero or even below zero and but there hardly anyone in these countries literally starves.

Fertility are decli ning not just in the First world but elsewhere too
The world’s decline in fertility has been staggering (see chart 2). In 1970 the total fertility rate was 4.45 and the typical family in the world had four or five children. It is now 2.45 worldwide, and lower in some surprising places. Bangladesh’s rate is 2.16, having halved in 20 years. Iran’s fertility fell from 7 in 1984 to just 1.9 in 2006. Countries with below-replacement fertility include supposedly teeming Brazil, Tunisia and Thailand. Much of Europe and East Asia have fertility rates far below replacement levels.
http://www.economist.com/node/21533364
As for the First world robbing the Third can you substantiate this generalisation? The primary mechanism by which such a wealth transfer is usually held to be effected is via Foreign Direct Investments resulting in the repatration of profits. You need to know - since you obviously dont - that the vast bulk of FDIs from the First world goes to the First world and not the the Third world. Here's how one commentator put it
Imperialist investment, particularly in the global South, represents a tiny portion of global capitalist investment. Foreign direct investment makes up only 5% of total world investment - that is to say, 95% of total capitalist investment takes place within the boundaries of each industrialized country. Of that five percent of total global investment that is foreign direct investment, nearly three-quarters flow from one industrialized country - one part of the global North - to another. Thus only 1.25% of total world investment flows from the global North to the global South. It is not surprising that the global South accounts for only 20% of global manufacturing output, mostly in labor-intensive industries such as clothing, shoes, auto parts and simple electronics. ("The Labor Aristocracy Myth" , International Viewpoint Online magazine : IV381 - September 2006)

Besides it is significant that you should talk in terms of Third world and First world quite oblivious seemingly to the class divisions that exist within both. You say nothing of the role of the local capitalists in the so called third World nor about the fact that the working class in the so called First world can hardly be presented as the beneficiaries of the wealth supposedly robbed from the Third World. .

3. The ecological footprint of the countries that have already undergone the "demographic transition" keeps growing. This is, of course, closely connected to the #2, but has a distinct meaning that the "demographic transition" doesn't even matter (even if attainable on the global scale, which it is not), because all the problems presented by the growing population remain in place, despite it formally not growing. Perhaps, it could help, if you counted the population not by heads, but by biomass, thus making all those clinically obese people reflected in your stats. Maybe, you'd even have a more clear sight of the picture about the escape from the Malthusian trap, supposedly performed by those "societies", who knows..

There is no malthusian trap - thats just very bad science or pseudoiscience. It is capitalism that traps people in poverty. Like I said , Im fully aware of the significince of the concept of the ecological footprint but this is a concept that needs to be approached from the perspective of the extant mode of production, not by mere population numbers per se

4. People don't have to breed literally "like rabbits" for the exponential growth to be there. Even 3 births per woman will give you a runaway exponential growth. And studies show that in the Western countries on average, the more wealthy people are likely to have more children (2-3 per family in the middle class), than those in the "high risk zone" (1-2 per family in the working class, see #1 also). This suggests that if all were released from the "risk zone" (working class joined the middle class' living standards), they would then begin produce surplus kids too, making the exponential growth inevitable (albeit at a slower pace, than that in the Third world). So even in this respect the theory of "demographic transition" ignores such an important question, especially for us Marxists, as the class composition of society...

No this is not correct. According this academic article the declining fertility and reduction in famility size has been more strongly associated with high status socio economic groups. This reverses what used to be the case a long while ago. Higher income families now tend to have less children than lower income families. This conforms to the situation internationally - richer countries tend to have lower population growth rates (if any at all) than poorer ones

http://www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol18/5/18-5.pdf

Also the world population is NOT experiencing "runaway exponential growth". Population growth rate , I repeat, is slowing down markedly. The number of years it takes to add an additional million people is steadily growing

Well, that passage is highly compromising of Marx in the eyes of any scientist. Marx's opposing human beings to plants and animals so completely that re-application of some hypothesis concerning the human beings to a wider multitude of species by Darwin "amuses" him, leaves one with an impression that Marx was ignorant of the fact that human beings belong to the animal kingdom. Did Malthus think that his theory was not applicable to all plants and animals, but only to humans? If he did, he was clearly mistaken, and Marx repeated that mistake...

Er no Marx was not " ignorant of the fact human beings belong to the animal kingdom". What he was trying to say that that does NOT mean you can just extrapolate everything to be found in the "animal kingdom" to human society, There is that famous quote of his about what differentiates the products of human labour from the elaborate structures to be found in the animal kingdom *(like the spiders web for instance). Human beings first raise these structures wn their mind consciously before setting about creating them.

Marx made the point that different modes of production have their own laws of population. There is not one natural universal law of population. In capitalism we seemingly have a surplus population in the form of the unemployed when there is an economic crisis - this ironically despite the fact that in a crisis there has been overproduction (in relation to the market)

Of course, Malthus was not a scientist, but he scored a lucky guess, which was scientifically elaborated on by Darwin among others and has been used to describe many phenomenons in quite academic studies, incorporating strict mathematical and statistical methodology....

This is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whatever Malthus's indirect and unintended contribution to Darwinian , it is of no consequence as an explanation of poverty. Poverty is not to be accounted for as the natural outcome of population growth inevitably pressing against the resource base

My statement is that scarcity is NOT an inevitable fact of life, but it can only be avoided in communism with population planning.

And population planning is one of the major ways of the "moderation of demand". I think the future Marxist-Leninist vanguard party can even arm itself with that as an euphemism for the propaganda purposes.

...

Population planning will no doubt happen in a communist society, But one can desire this without go along with the whole malthuysian claptrap and its diversionary explanation of global poverty which puts the blame on the poor for reproducing rather than the economic system of capitalism.

For instance, I personally value wild uninhabited (by human) spaces and habitats very much and would be sad to see them disappear under a tidal wave of human settlement. I dont see any thing wrong in itself with advocating population planning as a particular approach to the question of moderating demand* with a view to limiting our ecological footprint in a communist society (*though of course I completyely reject your notion of a vanguard party but thats another matter).

All this is fine as far as it goes. But the problem with malthusianisn is that it directly stands in the way of achieving a communist society - not surprisingly considering that Malthus took up the cudgels against the anarchist , Godwin, with his communist sympathies. This is why it needs to be opposed fundamentally and uncompromisingly

ColonelCossack

24th March 2012, 21:51

There's enough to go around. Trouble is in Capitalism it's just so concentrated.

A Marxist Historian

26th March 2012, 04:46

There's enough to go around. Trouble is in Capitalism it's just so concentrated.

Certainly food shortages and housing shortages and shortages of other such immediate consumer goods are simply the result of capitalism.

But what about energy?

Well, there is in fact no real factual shortage of energy resources. The supply of coal in the earth is good for thousands of years. However, as we all know, coal has its downsides.

Oil is somewhat better ecologically, and there probably is plenty of oil for a good while, despite the "peak oil" conspiracists, but oil is problematic too.

And solar, wind, hydropower and other forms of non-polluting energy all have serious limitations, there are a whole string of technical reasons making it impossible to for them to power up a worldwide capitalist economy, much less a socialist one, which will have far larger energy requirements, as in a socialist world people in the Third World will obviously have just as much access to the good things in life as the kind of people who own computers and get to post to Revleft.

What's the solution? Nuclear energy? Questionable after Fukushima. However, there is a lot of discussion recently of thorium based nuclear power plants, which may well not have nearly as many downsides as standard nuclear plants.

In any case, given the huge size of the human population, and the far larger energy needs of a socialist society, not even to speak of a communist society in which the rule will be "to each according to his need," which might require downright infinite energy sources, this is a serious consideration.

I believe however that once the limitations on scientific advance and technological progress that capitalism imposes are overcome, solutions will be found for this difficult problem. Who knows, we might even be able to avoid too much global warming, though some is surely inevitable at this point.

-M.H.-

Zulu

27th March 2012, 15:53

Altruism is not "silly". It simply means "other regarding " - having a concern for the welfare and wellbeing of others, seeing others as having value in themselves and not simply existing in instrumentalist sense as a means to serve your own ends. In fact altruism is a necessary ingredient of the "collectivism" you talk of.

"Other" is not the same as "the whole". An altruist is likely to either learn to know better after being cynically swindled by an egotist, or slide to particularism towards a small ring of people next to him which will ignore the interests of society. Collectivist on the other hand will always critically examine his options on the possible negative trade-offs for the larger community, and will also help others do the same.

On genetics, come on, this is just bullshit you are talking. Look Im not a blank slater by any means - but there is nothing in our genetic endowment that forbids communism. In fact, if you are going to use the genetic endowment argument it would if anything point to the quite opposite conclusion. Given that the great bulk of our existence as a species has been under a kind of primitive communistic mode of existence one would have thought, on the face oif it, that this would have entailed the selection of traits highly conducive to communism. The simple fact is that our genetic endowment allows for a considerable degree of variability.
Problem is those communistic traits are not the only ones, there are much more selfish traits that have been positively selected for millions of years. Such traits will lead to the deterioration of communism in the future if left unaccounted for.

It always amuses tme when people talk about the need to tweak their genetic endowment. There is something utterly contradictory about it when you think about it
Admitting own imperfection is the number one commandment of a perfectionist... Yeah, that sounds contradictory, but makes perfect sense, when you think about it.

What do you mean " even though not unchecked"??? Malthus whole argument was that population would be checked, that population growth would press relentlessly gainst the resouce base to such an extent that it would be forcibly curtailed by starvation and the like. It hasnt turned out like that at all, has it? The population has indeed grown considerably since Malthus' day but the means of prpduction have grown even faster - quite contrary to his claim that the latter grows only arithemetiucally while the former grows geometrically.

Let it go already! Just forget that Malthus said such words as "geometric" and "arithmetic". That's not relevant. The relevant part is that the demand always catches up and then exceeds supply, even though regularly "checked" at the previous stages of this mindless race.

Morevoer, and this is what you overlook in your eagerness to defend Malthus, as the resource base has expanded so the birth rates have started falling and quite dramatiucally in some cases. Like I said there are now as many people who are judged to be clincally obese in the world as there are people who dont get enough food to eat. This simply would not have happened had Malthus' ideas held any water
And the clinically obese people require more food to sustain themselves. So a "small society" of two clinically obese people may be in a greater want of food, than a "big society" of 5 slim people. Even if the productivity of labor in the former is twice as high as in the latter, the former gets "checked" more severely.

Really? Youve just been telling me about China's one child policy . Can you find an analogue of this in nature?There was no "one child" policy at the time Malthus lived. And that's exactly what I've been talking about all the time: UNLESS THERE IS ACTIVE POPULATION CONTROL, which the PRC's "one child" policy has been the only decent example of, to my knowledge thus far. (But see also a couple of paragraphs below how this "unless" is not exactly breaking the Malthusian model.)

People are in general better fed today than in Malthus's for the simple reason that production has grown faster than population. Quite the opposite to what Malthus predicted.There is still a certain percentage of people experiencing suffering from starvation or malnutrition, but food is not the only resource in the equation. Malthus original model was simplistic and inaccurate, but its principle, nevertheless, has been confirmed as one that is critical to understanding of all too many population/resources relations. In the article I linked to my previous post the greenhouse gas emissions quotas - an entirely abstract and immaterial thing - is regarded as a publicly available resource that introduces a Malthusian "check" on the society.

If you were a little bit more open-minded, you could see a certain Malthusian pattern in something as basic for Marxism as the capitalist crises of overproduction. The workers and industrialists live on the solvent demand for the commodities they specialize in production of; that solvent demand is the resource they must have access to. Over time, the number of those who live on that solvent demand grows too high, so there is not enough demand for them all, so many of them they go bankrupt / get locked out. Does this approach invalidate the Marxian one? Not at all, it's just its dialectical downside, so to say, which has been much like the other side of the moon for the Marxists so far.

You are talking nonsense frankly because you dont understand Malthus' concept of a "check". Population growth in Malthusian terms is "checked" by things like starvation because of its alleged tendency to outstrip food proiduction. People who live better are not subject to more checks but - on the contrary - less. Malthus' thesis was that people will not be able to live better - contra Godwin's view - becuase the checks he spoke of would bear down on them precisely at the point at which they were experiencing extreme poverty at a subsistence level
No, it is you who doesn't understand the concept of the Malthusian "checks". Malthus himself spoke of the three main checks - famine, disease and warfare, but that did not mean there could be no others. And birth control policies are also a "check", which, due to its artificial, deliberate and rational character, can allow people to take control of the whole system. And by the way, all those original Malthus' "checks" are not discarded as possible and in case of a dire need quite acceptable as active means of population control by the imperialists. That's why I really hope the communists will be able to solve the scarcity problem with the less drastic measures (which, however, requires them to grasp it first), but if they won't, oh well...

This is quite incoherent becuase you are mixing up two quite different theories. Apart from anything else can you not see the glaring contradiction that stares at you right in your face. The first world robs the Third world of its share of the wealth, you say. That means the resources available to the First world are considerable, It does not matter HOW those resoruces are come by . According to Malthus more resources only creates the opportunity for populations to expand and this geometric growth of population will eventually be checked in due course. But what has actually happened? Tne very opposite has happened. First world populations with all this wealth swilling around which "they" have supposedly robbed from the Third World have not expanded geometrically to the point at which they are now threatened with mass starvation. On the contrary there are a number of First world countries population growth is zero or even below zero and but there hardly anyone in these countries literally starves.
There is no contradiction, because I hold the whole world for a single system, where the redistribution of wealth occurs not between separate similar entities, but between social classes, the exploiters and the exploited. If there was a contradiction, Malthus would have to expect that the aristocracy and the merchants outbred the commoners in his time, and, even more absurdly, that they should have suffered from the famines and deceases to the same extent as the commoners. Instead, the exploiters wage a perpetual "cold war" on the exploited, known in Marxism as the class struggle, which serves as one of the Malthusian "checks". The more resources available to the population as a whole, the more of them gets accumulated by the exploiters, the more of them may be left or dished back out to the exploited - so they could breed, to make the exploiters even richer. Classic Marxism excels at uncovering the nature of relations inside the social system. But the social system is an element in a wider and more fundamental system, which is biological and is regulated by the principles that are billions of years older than human society. Marx mistook Maltus' theory for a purely social one, while Darwin valued it for the brilliant insight into biology it provided.

I understand that it might come across as incoherent, but I guess it would take a book probably bigger that "Capital" and "The Principle of Population" combined to lay out a framework for Marxism in the Malthusian model of the world, so I will not persist here. I'll also cede the 4th point to you, although looking on the article you've linked I do have some reservations concerning its ability to refute my statement as undeniably as you seem to think it does. But instead, how about we focus on the point 3, which is, frankly, the most important of them all?

Imperialist investment, particularly in the global South, represents a tiny portion of global capitalist investment. Foreign direct investment makes up only 5% of total world investment - that is to say, 95% of total capitalist investment takes place within the boundaries of each industrialized country. Of that five percent of total global investment that is foreign direct investment, nearly three-quarters flow from one industrialized country - one part of the global North - to another. Thus only 1.25% of total world investment flows from the global North to the global South. It is not surprising that the global South accounts for only 20% of global manufacturing output, mostly in labor-intensive industries such as clothing, shoes, auto parts and simple electronics. ("The Labor Aristocracy Myth" , International Viewpoint Online magazine : IV381 - September 2006)

What happened to the labor theory of value? You have to look not at the capital investments but at the man-hours put into some real product (and such capital-intensive things as stock brokerage and financial consultancy are not real products, sorry), first and foremost if you're a Marxist. At best you could argue that those capital investments in large part derived from the labor of former generations in the First world, so suck it Third world, but that's not of major importance once we've started treating both worlds as two parts of the same world-system.

Like I said , Im fully aware of the significince of the concept of the ecological footprint but this is a concept that needs to be approached from the perspective of the extant mode of production, not by mere population numbers per se

Let's first take a good look at the picture you've so kindly provided:

http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20111022_FBC807.gif

What do we see here? We see that the rate of the decline of the world-average fertility rate is slowing down, and it's going to plane out at some 2.4 per woman. That's above the replacement level, so there will be growth. Slow, but still a growth. Not to say the mortality rates are supposed to continue dropping. So the ecological footprint will be rising (and when we're talking ecological footprint, the amount of toxic waste and such is only a part of it, while the more important part is the amount of the resources that needs to be extracted/generated to maintain the population).

And even if we eliminate all inefficiency "at a stroke" (of a magic wand, I guess), and "dekulakize" the richest, I highly doubt we'll be able to rise the standards of living of the majority of the world's population enough to bring them on the level with the First world's lower middle class at least. Which means we'll need to extract/generate even more resources (no matter the mode of production), or we'll have to lower the standards of living for the western folks, which, in light of your favorite theory's of demographic transition assertion - that the population dynamic naturally adjusts itself to the standards of living in a certain way - poses the question of the possibility of a backward "transition", a return to the pre-transition pattern as a reaction to the dropping standards of living.

So one way or another, we'll have to deal with the demographic problem. Why not accept the inevitable and declare the population planning as an inherent feature of the communist society? And just as capitalism has relied on the population growth as one of the stimuli and means of its expansion, socialism must rely on the deliberate limitation of population growth (and ideally long term reduction of population) as the main stimulus for development. What with that new mode of production talk anyway? Not to say that no matter what, we're going to experience a certain "bump" of pressure against labor when the time comes for there to be more old people than young, when those that were born in the baby-boom years begin retiring en masse. That might be a good starting point for the implementation of all the intensive task-oriented (as opposed to profit-oriented) production and distribution techniques.

Er no Marx was not " ignorant of the fact human beings belong to the animal kingdom". What he was trying to say that that does NOT mean you can just extrapolate everything to be found in the "animal kingdom" to human society,Actually, in that quote he was trying to say the opposite, namely that you can't extrapolate something to be found in human society onto the animal kingdom. Well, seems that other Charlie just found a way. (BTW, "kingdom" is the universally accepted official term in biology for encompassing the entire multitude of the animal species, as well as that of plants, fungi, and single-cell species. So no need to put it in quotes really).

There is that famous quote of his about what differentiates the products of human labour from the elaborate structures to be found in the animal kingdom *(like the spiders web for instance). Human beings first raise these structures wn their mind consciously before setting about creating them.
And that is important for us humans, but not for the Ugly Step Mother Nature who doesn't give a damn about how we adapt to her whims. For her the spider's web is just as a quality adaptation as the human's nuclear power plant. Human self-awareness is nothing but a useful adaptation. But, to cut the rant short, from an outsider's PoV (say, a hyper-advanced extraterrestrial form of life), any human city wouldn't look that much differing from an ant-house.

Marx made the point that different modes of production have their own laws of population. There is not one natural universal law of population. In capitalism we seemingly have a surplus population in the form of the unemployed when there is an economic crisis - this ironically despite the fact that in a crisis there has been overproduction (in relation to the market)
And like I've pointed above, that irony smiles at you with a Malthusian smile. The law of population is not different under capitalism, it is the same old Mathusian-Darwinian law, only with more resources and factors and "checks" added to the mix, so that it gets way more complex than in the wildlife, and it takes social science and political economy to make sense of it. However, that can't cancel out the basic principles and laws, underlying the relation of all living organisms to the environment. Therefore, disregarding those principles will only lead you to unpleasant surprises, no matter how good you political economy might be as of itself.

This is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whatever Malthus's indirect and unintended contribution to Darwinian , it is of no consequence as an explanation of poverty. Poverty is not to be accounted for as the natural outcome of population growth inevitably pressing against the resource base

Why not? Yeah, I know, poverty is the result of the capitalists being evil and all, but why are they evil? How did the vicious circle of exploitation begin at the time when the first tribes settled down and began developing agriculture? What made them settle down in the first place? Why the "paradise" of the primitive communism was lost, and what will guarantee that the "paradise" of the modern scientifically based communism be not lost?

Population planning will no doubt happen in a communist society, But one can desire this without go along with the whole malthuysian claptrap and its diversionary explanation of global poverty which puts the blame on the poor for reproducing rather than the economic system of capitalism.

For instance, I personally value wild uninhabited (by human) spaces and habitats very much and would be sad to see them disappear under a tidal wave of human settlement. I dont see any thing wrong in itself with advocating population planning as a particular approach to the question of moderating demand* with a view to limiting our ecological footprint in a communist society (*though of course I completyely reject your notion of a vanguard party but thats another matter).

Malthusianism doesn't put "the blame" on anybody at all. It just provides certain type of models, which you may or may not take into account. If you don't and suffer for it, well, then that's something that would justify being put some blame on. Good to see you're ready to have population planning regardless, only your ideas of how to implement it must be pretty vague with the vanguard party being not an option.

All this is fine as far as it goes. But the problem with malthusianisn is that it directly stands in the way of achieving a communist society - not surprisingly considering that Malthus took up the cudgels against the anarchist , Godwin, with his communist sympathies. This is why it needs to be opposed fundamentally and uncompromisingly
Malthusianism doesn't stand in the way of achieving a communist society, obviously, as you could have already judged from my example. Malthus' own conservative outlook is irrelevant. The problem with Godwin, and many like him, was that he was a wishful thinker and regarded the better organization of society more as a goal, rather than a means to an end. That's why he was unable to reconcile his vies with Malthus' legitimate objections and therefore unable to beat Malthus at his own game by introducing the factor of the population control to his version of utopia. And Marx, BTW, repudiated all social utopianism that wasn't grounded in the hard facts of life. He was just missing some of those facts himself, but surely he would have corrected himself if he could, wouldn't he? Also, what's with Godwin's daughter writing Frankenstein? She got too sick of his wishful thinking maybe?

.