Malthus, people and pollution
Dear Editors,
Your article. “Ecology and revolution” (April 1991), accepts the seriousness of the world ecological crisis but rejects Jonathon Porritt's claim that environmentalism has superseded the class struggle. Fair enough; I agree that environmentalism cannot wish away the conventional issues of politics.
However, you then change tack and question the seriousness of the crisis itself, beginning with the effects of population growth, which you tackle by rubbishing what you think Malthus said. (If you want to know what he really said. I recommend articles and reviews by Jack Parsons in People, 1977, No.3, and No.4; 1984, No.2 and New Scientist, 11 October 1979). Your approach to the alleged dangers of industrialisation is to argue that since it has been a good thing for millions of men and women (undoubtedly true), fears about its environmental consequences can be dismissed. Dr Pangloss might agree, but I do not.
Looking at the actual situation as it is now, it may be possible to find some common ground if you agree that, broadly speaking, the deleterious effects of human activities on the environment (enhanced greenhouse effect; loss of ozone layer; soil erosion; loss of forests, etc) are a multiple of number of people and per capita use of energy and materials. Not only is world population projected to double by about 2030, but an immense increase in per capita consumption would be inevitable if the poor countries emulate the lifestyles of the rich. Would you not agree that both factors should be reduced, as a matter of common prudence? If you do, then we can discuss the political implications.
John Davoll
Shepperton, Middlesex
Reply:
Just because we have a different view as to its cause does not mean that we question the seriousness of the present ecological crisis nor that we think we are living in the best of all possible industrialised worlds. Far from it. There is an ecological crisis and it is serious, but its cause is not the pressure of population nor industrialisation.
The cause of the crisis is the capitalist system where firms compete for profits and where the resulting competitive pressures impose the accumulation of more and more capital out of profits as the over-riding economic goal (what some Greens call “blind economic growth"). This being so, the solution lies neither in depopulation nor in deindustrialisation but in getting rid of the profit system that is capitalism and replacing it with socialism and production for need.
If production was geared to meeting needs, on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, then not only could modern technology and industrial resources be used in a non-polluting way (productive units would no longer be under competitive pressures to minimise costs at the expense of social and ecological considerations) but the whole of the world's present population could be adequately fed and housed.
Pollution is not “a multiple of people and per capita use of energy and materials" but of the waste and profit-seeking of the capitalist system. It is in fact the waste that is built-in to capitalism— the waste of arms and armed forces, of government bureaucracies, and of all activities linked to money and finance—which is responsible for there being a high per capita consumption of energy and materials; since this figure is of course merely such consumption, wasteful as well as useful, divided by total population. With socialism—and the elimination of the waste of arms, the apparatus of repression, and money and finance—this per capita figure will come down even while more resources are devoted, as they must be, to satisfying peoples food, housing, health care and other needs.
Socialists are fully aware of what Malthus preached. After all, we've been combatting for nearly two hundred years now his view that it is impossible to improve the lot of the mass of humanity. But the best way to know what Malthus really said is to read the man himself. This is what he wrote in the very first chapter of his Essay on the Principle of Population:
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio . . . This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way of the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century. And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure: and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families. (Our emphasis)
We repeat this is rubbish. A society where the whole population can live freed from the fear of material want is possible. John Davoll undermines the case for birth control by associating it with the ideas of Malthus.
Editors.
Disgusted
Dear Editors,
I was disgusted by the International Socialists, the Danish sister party of the British SWP, because of the position they took during the Gulf War. In line with their Leninist dogma they gave their backing to Saddam Hussein. Their support was based on the fallacious belief that a blow to American Imperialism is in our class’s interests and that Hussein would have unleashed revolutionary forces that would have toppled him and other dictators in the area. There was actually a split in the IS over their attitude to the war. The local branch broke from the IS because they preferred to give their conditional, rather than unconditional, support. Some internationalists!
Socialists are opposed to such ideas which do nothing other than confuse the real issue. If Iran had won, it would have been American workers’ blood that would be soaking into the desert sands. You could imagine how IS'ers would explain their position to workers on a General Motors factory line—"Sorry Comrades, but its for your own emancipation”.
In times of peace, when they have patched up their differences, the masters are united against the workers in the greater war—the Class War. From Rolls Royce’s wage freezes and sackings to Gorbachev’s strike bans, from cops beating up Korean students to the brutal suppression of the Kurds and Shi’ites, its signs are everywhere.
Only when the workers of the world see through the lies of the capitalists, refuse to continue the idiotic butchering of their fellows and unite to take over the means of producing and distributing wealth so that the products of our hands and brains can be used for their logical purpose—the satisfying of human need, only then will peace truly reign, for when we cease to be plundered, there will be no plunder for a class of plunderers to make war over.
G. C. Taylor
Viborg, Denmark
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