Do We Need a Bigger Population? (1945)

From the March 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

A revolution in ideas regarding population has taken place since 1798, when Malthus wrote his coldblooded “Essay on Principles of Population.” It had a favourable reception from the ruling class of the day, but the passing of time has shown his ideas to be fallacious, and they have been superseded by ideas which are quite contrary to his conclusions. His doctrine, which declared that there is a universal tendency for population to outrun the means of subsistence, expressed the ignorance of his time.

The only solution Malthus saw to the poverty of his day was to get a decrease in the population and so raise the standard of living among the remainder. He does not seem to have been quite so heartless as some of his contemporaries, who regarded the lower class as a variety of animals requiring even less care than domestic animals. Commenting on one of them, the notorious Count Rumford, who had concocted recipes for cheap soups as a suitable diet for the common people, Malthus writes:

“They (the soups) are excellent inventions for the public institutions and as occasional resources; but if they were once universally adopted by the poor, it would be impossible to prevent the price of labour from being regulated by them . . . perhaps some cold politician might propose to adopt the system with a view of underselling the foreigners in the markets of Europe. … I really cannot conceive anything much more detestable than the idea of knowingly condemning the labourers of this country to the rags and wretched cabins of Ireland, for the purpose of selling a few more broadcloths and calicoes.” (Essay on the Principles of Population, page 232-233.)

So Malthus was not completely unaware of the trend of wages, although he knew nothing of surplus value !

The housing problem was then, as always, acute among the poor, but Malthus saw in it a weapon for keeping down the population.

“One of the most salutary and least pernicious checks to the frequency of early marriages in this is the difficulty of procuring a cottage, and the laudable habits which prompt a labourer rather to defer his marriage some years in the expectation of a vacancy, than to content himself with a wretched mud cabin like those in Ireland.” (Ibid, page 250.)

Portal houses are now to be produced for precisely the opposite reason.

As Socialists profiting by the work of Karl Marx, we realise that workers are short of the means of life, not because production falls short of demand, but because the present anarchy of production is concerned merely with profit-making and not with supplying people’s needs the latter being incidental.

Turning to recent writers on population, we find them arguing in the opposite direction to Malthus. The writers and investigators on the subject—Glass, Carr Saunders of the Eugenic Society, Titmuss, Charles and Ginsberg, to mention just a few—are full of woe and gloomy prognostications. They foresee something like extinction for the Western nations in 200 years time, and for the near future they predict more old people in bathchairs than infants in prams.

They relate it to economics too. D. V. Glass states :

“The population will suffer from a much higher degree of invalidity and the burden of State health insurance will be greater. So, too, will the relative cost of old age benefits. On the other hand, this large section of aged and therefore unemployed people will have to be supported by a relatively much smaller proportion of able-bodied persons. That is, proportionately the amount of taxation per head will rise, while the ability to bear it will fall. Moreover, the position of industry is likely to be more difficult. In the last century the industrial system recovered fairly easily from the depressions through which it passed, and one of the major factors in this case of recovery was undoubtedly the growth of the population. An increase in the numbers of people meant an increase in the demand for the products of industry, and with it the slump period of the trade cycle was shortened. The much reduced rate of the increase of the population of the world since the war has no doubt helped to intensify and prolong the economic crisis, and if population actually falls in the future, the effect of the trade cycle upon economic prosperity is likely to be much more severe.” (“The Struggle for Population,” pages 14-15.)

To a Socialist such fears appear fantastic; to the orthodox economist, however, they are very real : immersed in a vain effort to reform and prevent the worst trends of capitalism, the real solution escapes them. Under Socialism people would not deny themselves the pleasures of children and the play of their normal instincts. Generally speaking, contraception is practised because would-be parents either cannot afford children or wish to do better for the ones they have. The working class, possessing only their power to labour, possessing no resources of wealth on which they can draw in bad times, find the inclination is not strong to procreate merely to create a reserve army of unemployed for the capitalist to draw upon in boom periods and that will languish on the dole during slumps. The worker is not interested in falling populations, but he is well aware that after successful strikes or negotiations for a rise in wages, a usual practice in the times called peace is to turn off many workers and instal bigger and better machines to do their work, and thus reduce the wages bill.

In an effort to stem the falling birth rate (rising temporarily in the present war), the Government of this country are about to institute some form of family allowances. As an inducement to parenthood it does not bear the stamp of originality. Family allowances were first given in France in 1854 but did not become general until 1916, when rising prices were making it increasingly difficult for the parents of children to maintain their standard of living. It was resisted by the trade unions, who claimed that it would reduce real wages. Until 1932, when the Equalisation Fund was set up, the scheme was a voluntary one run on contributions obtained only from employers. We dismiss at once any suggestion that it might be due to their innate generosity or love of little children (for it is not characteristic of employers as a class), and look for a more likely reason. Possibly the following quote fills the bill:

“Among other factors which may have influenced employers is the one given by the Director of the Fund for the Stephanoise Region. He believes that the granting of allowances has effectively withdrawn the family man from the ‘class struggle.’ If this is true, the employers had very strong grounds for extending the system.” (D. V. Glass, “The Struggle for Population,” page 52.)

The Fascist powers, in their rise to domination, in Italy and Germany, made a determined attempt to increase the birth rate. The Nazis made loans free of interest to young couples, cancelling repayments at the birth of each child. Promotion was also given to fathers of families, together with opportunities to obtain the best houses or flats.

The Italian plan, though on the same principle, had different features. A bachelor tax was levied, and financial burdens decreased in large families, by means of tax exemptions. The large family, however, consisted of seven children among State employees and ten children among other workers! In both countries improvements were made in maternity and child welfare.

Methods employed in Russia are akin to the Fascist powers in this as in other matters. A 50 per cent. increase has been made in maternity benefit and endowments given to mothers of six or more children, whilst the mother of ten qualifies for a medal. L. Ginsberg, in a Fabian pamphlet, “Parenthood and Poverty”, thinks, in the Fabian manner, that it is merely an extension of the social services and an attempt to raise the standard of living; we prefer to view them in a more realist manner. The anti-abortion law of 1936 marked the commencement of a new policy regarding population which finds expression in the more recent changes.

A method used by these countries is discouragement of birth control propaganda and sale of appliances. In Italy the latter became illegal, but was avoided in a truly commercial manner by selling certain articles under the heading of preventatives of disease.

Individual capitalists are not concerned with the state of the population in a hundred years’ time; they want their profits now.

Sweden, claimed as one of the most democratic countries, has adopted a saner method. Deciding that wanted children thrive best, birth control information is disseminated, whilst granting allowances and improving maternity and child welfare.

Most Western countries now grant allowances for children. These include Spain, Hungary, Holland and Belgium. So also do Australia and New Zealand. The Baltic countries and Switzerland, Austria and Bulgaria grant them to State employees.

The latter grants seem to indicate the desire of these countries to keep State servants loyal to the government and to induce them to refrain from following their class aspirations. We find Britain only recently tackling her problem. The proposed allowance for each child (after the first) is to be 5s. and not the 8s. suggested by Beveridge.

From Malthus to his modern counterparts, no solution to the so-called population problem along their lines can be effective!. Malthus advised continence among the “lower orders,” the moderns advise the opposite, and neither solves any real problems for the working class.

In a world torn and bleeding by a ruthless and brutal war, it is sheer humbug, cant and hypocrisy to talk of a population problem. Capitalism, which dooms millions to hunger in a world of plenty, wastes the lives of millions in useless toil, and periodically sends millions to their death in futile wars in every part of the globe, will appeal in vain to the working class to solve capitalism’s future population problems. There can be only one answer to such appeals-— a determined purpose to change the basis of society on the part of the workers, and to win a world with natural resources so vast and with productive forces so great that the needs of all can and will be supplied. Intelligent men and women will not then deny themselves the joys that children can give, and no special incentives need be offered to induce unwilling people to procreate. Family allowances and medals are devices of a ruling class endeavouring to solve its particular problems.

Workers should cease looking to family allowances and social services for the solution to their present troubles. Why ask for paltry sums when the world is yours to win ?

W. P.

Pathfinders: The Baby Bust (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The existential crisis of global warming as well as rocketing inequality have made many people start to question the viability of capitalism as never before. But you still hear some dismissing the idea of post-capitalist common ownership with the time-honoured objection that ‘there are too many people.’

There’s sometimes a suspicious whiff of racism or Nazi-style eugenics about this argument, but it’s not hard to see why people might innocently believe it, particularly in the crowded urban environments most people inhabit nowadays, and particularly if they remember China’s infamous one-child policy, and Indira Ghandi’s even more infamous forced sterilisation programme in India. Ever since the 1970s (or indeed Malthus in the 1800s) people have been banging the drum of doom about an impending population catastrophe. It’s been a staple trope of Hollywood movies from Soylent Green (1973) to Avengers Infinity War (2018). And last month, to great fanfare and only 11 years after passing the 7 billion milestone, the world passed the 8 billion mark, with the population still increasing at around 3 people per second, at least according to the population clock at bit.ly/2UKMS7c.

But it’s not rising everywhere. Indeed, it’s not rising almost anywhere. If you look at the 20 largest populations on the clock, India is the only one visibly ticking upwards. China isn’t moving. The USA isn’t moving. Globally, almost all populations outside sub-Saharan Africa are either stable or in decline, with fertility rates generally well below replacement levels. At current rates, China’s population, along with that of Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and most European countries, is set to halve by 2100. Japan is ‘super-ageing’, with the oldest median age, 48, in history. Latvia is worried that it’s running out of Latvians (bit.ly/3hPBvr0 ). Instead of a baby boom, the future looks more like a baby bust. In July this year the UN downwardly revised its 2019 projection of 11 billion and rising by 2100 to a peak by 2080 and declining by 2100 (bit.ly/3TMMbUx), while other studies suggest a peak by 2070 (bit.ly/3tVZO9D ). One HSBC economist, following the work of two Canadian demographers, is even predicting a peak in 2040, declining to 4 billion by 2100 (bit.ly/3ApdoG2).

What’s happened to overturn the received wisdom of decades, if not centuries? There are lots of reasons, including more women in the labour market choosing to delay parenthood, high housing costs, high childcare costs, and understandable insecurity about the future. But the two main global drivers of falling birth rates are better female education, which leads to better prospects and more independence for women, and female access to contraceptives. Regardless of income, wherever women gain control of their own fertility, the birth rate declines, giving the lie to that old saw about poor people deliberately breeding children as insurance policies for old age. Where these drivers are not present, as in sub-Saharan Muslim countries where girls do not go to school and men don’t allow them to use contraception and won’t use it themselves, you see dramatic population increases.

Capitalist states regard declining populations not with enthusiasm but with alarm, because low birth rates combined with longer lifespans mean a relative reduction in the young workforce and hence a reduction in profits, combined with an increasing burden of ‘economically inactive’ old people who constitute a considerable cost to profits, via government taxation. Immigration would in theory solve the problem but has been made politically toxic, so many countries have instead adopted what are called ‘pro-natalist’ policies, involving financial and other incentives to have more babies. In France they give the woman a medal. In Iran they give the man a promotion at work, or a zero-interest loan (yhoo.it/3TKfPtA). But such state intervention to increase the birth rate would only yield very long-term results, and is anyway thought to be much harder, and more expensive, than intervention to reduce it, because of the need to incentivise young couples to take on the considerable extra financial cost and loss of personal freedoms. In the UK, the Child Poverty Action Group’s November 2022 estimate of the cost of raising a child to age 18 is £160,000 for couples and £200,000 for lone parents (bit.ly/3E8zbCU).

You might suppose that a smaller population would be better for the planet at least. But many environmentalists now realise that population is not the barrier to sustainable living that many imagine (bit.ly/3g8r1CJ). Rather it’s resource usage that makes the difference. One 2020 study of the global farming system concluded that the present food production system could only sustainably feed 3.4 billion people, but that with certain key changes, particularly in reducing meat consumption and food waste, and being smarter about choices of crops, that could be increased to 10 billion (bit.ly/3gfEbO0 ). Overall, resource use is wealth related, with the carbon emissions of the richest 1 percent being more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 percent (bit.ly/3Of1Tqk).

It might upset an anti-abortionist, but it’s axiomatic to a socialist that the only person with the right to say whether or not a woman has a baby is the woman herself. In a socialist society, money and patriarchal power dynamics would not exist to restrict that woman’s ability to determine her own fertility. If the global population fell as a result, which the evidence suggests could well be the case, what would be the result? Not a crisis of care for the old, because care in socialism would be a matter of communal aid, not taxable profits. The world would simply scale down production to suit what was required. And productive work doesn’t require the labour it used to. As a recent Wired podcast pointed out, ‘we can do more today with fewer workers than at any other time in history’. Might the population rise, perhaps because of zero financial costs and because socialism offers a life worth being born into? Possibly, but even socialism couldn’t socialise the child-bearing process, so the physical costs to women would likely be the limiting factor. In either case, if the need for social debate did arise, it would at least be done in the open, without competing sectional or state interests intervening to weaponise it.

Paddy Shannon

Malthus to Hitler—or Marx (1944)

From the April 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Socialist View of Population Theories

The Government is very worried and has appointed a Commission of sixteen members on Population. “Their main task will be to examine the present population trends in Britain, investigate their causes and consider their probable consequences, and recommend measures to influence the future trend of population.” (News Chronicle, March 3rd.)

The newspapers are solemnly featuring splash stories of the number of children various members of the Commission have, like the News Chronicle, which gives the list of members complete with size of family.

Thus the Earl of Cranbrook qualifies with five children, although why the mother of the Heanor quads has not been asked to serve, we can’t think !

After all, she’s only just started, and got four already; while the father of the quads is surely more qualified than Lady Dollan, who is quite mature and only has one child.

There is actually a “Biological” Sub-committee presided over by a professor—to investigate the reason for the poor response to the Government’s population appeals.

The Evening Standard (March 1st), in an editorial, “From Malthus to Hitler,” declares that “population statistics are notoriously the most uncertain and dangerous field of economic study.”

After summarily dismissing the Reverend Malthus, who, in his notorious “Principles of Population,” reached the conclusion that the only solution was continence by the working class, the editor of the Evening Standard goes on to consider the findings of Mr. Berle, of the U.S. State Department.

“He foresees the future of the nations in terms of rising and falling populations.”

Germany will decline from 69 millions to 64. Britain from 46 millions to 42. U.S.A., with 135,000,000, will slowly increase. Brazil has doubled her population, and “has every chance to become a great nation.” “Russia’s population is likely to rise to 222,000,000.”

“The advantage from these calculations,” says our Editor, “lies heavily on the side of the United Nations.” We have an idea that is the main reason they were made.

But even the Evening Standard smells a rat. “We cannot be content, . . . the economists should be set to work until they have produced a set and recognisable theory.”

There is no need to set “economists” (?) to work. One great economist has already said all that need be said on the subject.

The first point is that there is no such thing as a general abstract law of population—”every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone.” (“Capital,” K. Marx. Kerr Edition, Vol. I, p. 693.)

What we are concerned with therefore is the law of population of the capitalist system. This is a rather complicated business, as everyone who has read Marx’s exposition in “Capital” knows. It depends very largely on the organic composition of capital—or, in other words, on the proportion of machinery to human labour. Thus, in highly developed industries, the. proportion of human labour is low, the amount of machinery high.

With every technical improvement this proportion increases, so that—

“The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.” (“Capital,” Vol. 1. Kerr Edition, p. 692.)

Marx exploded the fallacy that population rises and falls with wages, showing by the example of England from 1849 to 1859 how a rise in agricultural wages, accompanied by a fall in the price of corn (consequent upon the construction of railroads, war, and the exodus of agricultural population to the new factories), placed the farmers in a difficult position.

“What did the farmers do now ? Did they wait until, in consequence of this brilliant remuneration, the agricultural labourers had so increased and multiplied that their wages must fall again, as prescribed by the dogmatic economic brain ? They introduced more machinery, and in a moment the labourers were redundant again in a proportion satisfactory even to the farmers. There was now ‘more capital’ laid out in agriculture than before, and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labour fell, not only relatively, but absolutely.” (“Capital,” p. 700, Vol. I.)

The same applied on a national scale to the United States of America.

The important point to remember, therefore, is that capitalists can always compensate shortage of labour by increasing machinery.

If Mr. Berle had anything, China would be the ruling nation of the earth, with India a close second.

What is important is the degree of development of the constant capital (machinery) to variable (human labour), which is highest in the United States, Britain and Germany.

“Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the setting free of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent, independent of the supply of labourers.” (“Capital,” Vol. I., p. 702.)

“But … as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.), adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army, and with it the absolute dependence of the working class on the capitalist class, capital, along with its common place Sancho Panza, rebels against the ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand, and tries to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.” (“Capital,” Vol. I., p. 703.)

Horatio

Population and Poverty. (1926)

From the April 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

A debate took place recently in South London between an alleged Communist and a champion of the New Generation League on the question, “Is Birth Control Necessary for the Abolition of Poverty?” This is not a report thereof, but an attempt to put before our readers the Socialist view of the question raised.

The speaker in the affirmative was decidedly modest in his claims. He did not assert that Birth Control would abolish poverty, or even ameliorate it, but simply that poverty could not be abolished without it. He advanced, of course, the time-worn dogma that population tends to press upon means of subsistence, no matter what the latter may be, and left his audience to conclude that poverty was a result of this pressure and, therefore, short of artificial control of births, unavoidable. He further attached great importance to the facts that Marx formed his opinions prior to the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (based upon Malthus) and was, moreover, a townsman ignorant of agriculture and its limited possibilities.

Let us examine these claims. In the first place poverty is not merely a relative term, it is a description of the condition of a particular class in society, namely, the working class, i.e., the class which produces the antithesis of poverty, which is wealth. This wealth is enjoyed by a comparatively small section of the community, namely, the capitalist, or master, class, who own the material means by which the workers produce it. In this ownership is to be found the cause of their social position and not in the size of their families. Broadly speaking, it is true that the workers have more numerous progeny than their masters, but it is equally true that no amount of abstinence from the function of procreation will make a man a millionaire. Something more is necessary, i.e., the exploitation of social labour.

This fact is ignored by the Malthusian. He talks imposingly about “the struggle for existence” (a term which he never accurately defines), but omits to mention that before the struggle for wealth can commence, it has to be produced by some measure of co-operation. Every historical form of society has involved the co-operative efforts of the labourers as an element in its economic basis. The ancient empires, founded on chattel-slavery, the feudal kingdoms of the middle ages resting on serfdom, as well as the capitalist régime of to-day based upon wage-labour, could not conceivably have existed if the productivity of the workers’ labour had not exceeded their necessary consumption.

The pressure of the workers upon their means of subsistence is thus the product not of “nature” but of society under certain conditions in the course of its development. In other words, the contrast between wealth and poverty is of historical origin and came into existence only when, by dint of labour, mankind had acquired a degree of control over nature’s supply of the means of subsistence sufficient to permit of the existence of an idle class.

Under pre-historical conditions, a primitive form of Communism existed. The small, narrow social groups of those days knew no class distinctions. If nature was niggardly, all suffered ; if generous all benefited. Property rights as understood to-day did not exist. Mankind exploited nature as their state of development permitted, with none but the savage beasts to say them nay. The basis of the group was kinship, i.e., descent from a common ancestor. Under Communism men advanced from the lowest depths of savagery to the threshold of civilisation. They discovered fire, invented the bow and arrow, and the arts of smelting and pottery-making, domesticated animals and initiated horticulture. They laid, in fact, the ground-work for all subsequent progress.

Tribal communism, however, broke up with the advance of chattel-slavery, an institution, the origin of which affords an interesting refutation of Malthusianism. In extremely primitive times, groups engaged in warfare among other objects for women to add to the numbers of their tribe ; the men they slew. With the increase of the fruits of labour, however, a use was discovered for the male captives of war as well. They became slaves of their conquerors, and the wealth of a Roman patrician was in proportion, not to the smallness of his household, indeed, but, on the contrary, to the numbers of these slaves who constituted its most important element. For their maintenance he was responsible just as the farmer is responsible for his cattle ; but the surplus-product of their labour was the source of his wealth, and the same principle has applied under various forms to this day. The wealth of the feudal lord was in proportion to the number of his tenants, while the modern financial magnate controls huge industrial armies.

On the other hand the avowed birth-controlling peasants of France “enjoy a standard of life lower than that of the wage-slaves of Britain and America; a fact which is due, not to any niggardliness of nature in France, but to the antiquated methods of exploitation upon which its rulers depend.

The Malthusian claims that this is due to the absence of coal in France. He forgets that if this is true then the presence of coal would have led to similar results as in England, i.e., a higher degree of exploitation and unemployment !

It is clear in any case that the progress of industry and, consequently, in the long run the progress of society, depends upon the further development of social labour. The restriction of population can at best play but a negative part in this progress, while, pushed to extremes, it can only produce stagnation. Modern industrial development necessitates the existing population with its massing of the workers in highly organised productive centres. As a remedy for poverty, therefore, birth control is a policy of reaction and despair, whatever its value may be from a hygienic point of view.

To recapitulate, present poverty is due to capitalism, i.e., to the monopoly by a diminishing class of the fruits of social effort. It can be abolished so soon as the class which suffers from it realises the cause of it and removes that cause. When the workers organise as a class, seize political power, and convert the means of living into the common property of all, then and then only will class distinctions and their social and economic accompaniments disappear.

The struggle between the capitalists over the surplus wealth wrung from their slaves on the one hand and the struggle between the slaves for jobs on the other are the fruits of immature development. They will vanish when in the struggle between these two classes as a whole, the workers, are victorious. Production will then be carried on in conscious co-operation in order to secure the fullest possible development for every individual.

The limits of productive possibility no one can foresee, and it behoves the workers in their own interests to study existing conditions for the solution of existing problems. Mathematical calculations with regard to the number of elephants per square yard likely to result from unchecked multiplication may be ingenious and even exciting to an overheated imagination, but they have no bearing upon the problem of poverty. As for Marx, whatever his views on Darwin may have been, he was able to expose Malthus for the plagiarist he was (see footnote 1 to page 345, “Capital,” Sonnenschein edition).

Eric Boden

50 Years Ago: Population and Poverty (1986)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have long been familiar with the argument that poverty is due to over-population, and that if the workers would only decrease the size of their families they would all be better off. Now we are introduced to the opposite argument, from a catholic, Father Woodlock. In a statement to the Evening Standard (January 15th) he pointed out that a falling population means fewer soldiers to defend the Empire, and that in addition it means greater poverty for the workers.

 Only short-sighted economists fail to notice that fall in the birth rate will not help the condition of the working classes, but accompanied by the noticeably increased longevity of our people, will put a much heavier burden on the workers.
 They will be fewer, but in the future they will have to support a much increased number of aged and unemployable dependants. Propagandists of the spread of the birth-control movement never seem to aver this.

We can agree with Father Woodlock that those who preach birth control as a cure for poverty and unemployment are completely in the wrong, but in rejecting that fallacy Father Woodlock embraces another. It is true that a population containing a large proportion of people unable to work may be at a disadvantage compared with one containing a higher proportion of able-bodied men and women in the prime of life, but we are not living in a system of society in which the problem of wealth production is as simple as that. Under capitalism large numbers of people — the propertied class — are not engaged in wealth production and have no desire or necessity to be so engaged. Consequently the burden resting on the shoulders of the workers is not that of keeping only themselves and their own dependants, but, in addition, of keeping the propertied class in luxury and idleness or non-productive activity. and of keeping all the military and civil hangers-on of the capitalist system. The wealth producers are not engaged in producing for themselves, but of producing wealth for the capitalist class alone to own and control.

(From an editorial Quins, Quads and Poverty, Socialist Standard, February 1936.)

It's the Poor What Gets the Blame — Official (1974)

From the December 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

One way of assessing Sir Keith Joseph’s comments on “whole groups and classes of people” is to imagine a speech he would have made if Britain were at war. Would he then have said a large section of the working class was moronic, lecherous and irresponsible, and should be stopped from breeding the criminals and lowlifes who are its heirs? Ah, no. “Social classes 4 and 5” would be the bulwark of civilization, and their babies — however many — deserve orange-juice and vitamin pills. These kinds of bombast are exchangeable as an organ-grinder’s tunes, though the underlying contempt remains the same.

Joseph’s speech was made to Conservatives on 19th October. He suggested they put aside economic affairs —“never really the main thing”—and instead aim to “remoralize our national life”. His case was that present- day society is a decadent morass. It has been made so by “socialist intellectuals” and “permissiveness” and, in particular, letting the working class into universities. As an example of the ruin these tendencies have led to, “our human stock is threatened” by the persistent breeding now from parents unsuitable to have children:

   Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most are of low educational attainment . . . They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births.

It may be useful, before going further, to say what is meant by “classes 4 and 5”. The groupings are made by the Government on the basis of the job of the family breadwinner, and these two divisions comprise semi-skilled and unskilled workers If they are assumed to be about two-fifths of the population, Joseph’s protest because they have one-third of the births is absurd. Summaries from the 1971 Census, given in the Sunday Times on 27th October, show that family size is practically the same in all five groups—about three-and-a- quarter persons.

Capitalist Hacks Unanimous
The central point of Joseph’s attack might have been, had it come from a more thinking person, a demonstration of the uselessness of social — including “moral” — reform as tried equally by the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties.

  Real incomes per head have risen beyond what anyone dreamed of a generation back; so have education budgets and welfare budgets; so also have delinquency, truancy, vandalism, hooliganism, illiteracy, decline in educational standards.

But he was only reviving his political forefathers’ dictum that if you give the undeserving poor money they only get into trouble, and if you teach them to read they write rude words on walls. The working class is used to this sort of thing, and being told it is to blame when capitalism has problems. Indeed, Joseph was being unfair to his Labour opponents: they share that standpoint. Following the Budget on 12th November the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, announced on TV that if he failed to stop a slump or inflation it would be the fault of “the British people”:

  The choice is yours. If you really prefer mass unemployment and rising prices you can always have it.

To add more, practically no-one in the chorus of critics of Joseph denied his thesis. Other Conservatives thought it “a sad mistake . . . which would inevitably cause serious doubts about his political judgement”. Frank Field of the Child Poverty Action Group acknowledged Joseph’s “problem” of breeding by sub-standard people, and “blamed this on the failure of the family planning system and suggested that the solution was to give women more incentive to limit their family size”. (Both quotations from The Guardian, 21st October.) The Bishop of Southwark put it down to “Conservative policies of 50 years ago” (Observer, 20th October) and “human nature” (News of the World, 27th October).

Official Labour replies were on the same lines. Ian Mikardo, the party chairman

  appeared to accept the gist of what Sir Keith Joseph said in his controversial weekend speech on the nation’s morals, but he neatly turned it to Labour’s advantage . . . he blamed individualist, self-centred Conservative doctrine.

(Guardian, 25th October)

Mrs. Castle, the Secretary for Social Services, accused Joseph of wrong statistics and expressed herself as equally anxious over the problems named. And Renee Short, another Labour MP, spoke of the need for a minister to deal with population problems and said:

  It is absolutely right for Sir Keith to say we need considerable extensions of education about family planning, but it is not only needed in the fourth and fifth social groups.

All agreed that the working class must be kept decent, and sneered at one another for legislation having failed to do so.

Class and Intelligence

None of the critics appears to have noticed one extraordinary implication of Joseph’s speech. Like the Victorian moralists, over human behaviour he wants to have things both ways—people are born bad but also influenced to be bad: the teaching of Eric, or Little by Little. But, in addition, Joseph was propounding what looks like Lysenko’s theory that acquired characteristics can be transmitted. Given mothers of “low educational attainment” who have learned immoral attitudes, there will be babies destined to be illiterates and criminals. Since reform cannot change heredity, the prevention of birth is the only answer — “the lesser evil”, he said.

This kind of rubbish was exploded long ago. However, there is a more cogent answer to Joseph’s contentions. Being in classes 4 and 5 — or any of the others — has nothing to do with intelligence or probity. People are in these “classes” because of their relationship to the means of production: specifically, because they own nothing and have to work as capitalism allows them. In fact the groupings are not social classes at all, but lists made for administrative purposes. The only two classes are of owners and non-owners of the means of living. People are born not into “free choice” but into one or the other class and all the implications of its position.

If intelligence were a factor, we should like to be told the intelligence quotients of, say, shareholders in big companies; the royal family; or politicians who have their speeches written for them. Would Joseph say that breeding by any number of these who were of “low intelligence” was a threat to human stock? Of course not. There are, in any case, different answers for them. The slow-learning or recalcitrant offspring of the well-to-do are put out to private tutors in country vicarages to get them in shape for Oxbridge. The idea of intelligence is irrelevant to that sort of life. It is a yardstick-concept by which the ruling class picks over the working class for its own purposes; the working class insults itself by accepting it.

Different Meanings

Joseph spoke about “responsibility”. The fact is that the capitalist system which he represents and upholds depends on irresponsibility. To hand over control of one’s life, have its activity appropriated and accept the say-so of leaders and rulers, is irresponsible. Yet that is precisely what Joseph requires, the “choice” he wants exercised. It is not a question of Doublethink, but of class terminology. For his class, following its interests, the working class acts “responsibly” by not following its own!

If you look at the occupations which make up groups 3, 4 and 5, the matter becomes clearer still. They are nearly all useful occupations — manufacture, building, mining, transport, the essentials for social existence. Not so most of the occupations in groups 1 and 2. A few are; the majority are about as useful as a tapeworm. What do “intelligence” and “educational attainment” mean when they are put to the non-uses generated by capitalist society? A former drama student has remarked to the writer that when he sees acquaintances on TV it is always in commercials: singing the praises of canned soup, zooming through space with packets of Tasty Morsels. For this, they studied Shakespeare and toiled at voice and movement—now, humans behaving like idiots.

Let us tell Sir Keith Joseph and the co-diagnosers of his “problem” the truth. The working class is the intelligent, educated class which makes the wonders, and competently carries out the humdrum tasks, of the world we live in. Without that being so, there would be no electronic marvels or university buildings. Nor would there be the sumptuous dinners from which capitalist politicians rise to make their self-important speeches. Or dividends for the shareholders of Bovis Ltd., of which Joseph is vice-chairman.

Moral Humbug

The so-called moral questions can be put in perspective by referring to the 1949 Report of the Royal Commission on Population. This was concerned with finding ways to induce people of all groups and grades to have more children: to maintain the work force, for "military strength and security”, and for “the maintenance and extension of Western values and culture”. There was no talk then of threatening the human stock, or the immorality of girls under twenty having babies.

Of course the family as a socio-economic unit has largely broken down, but Joseph’s conception of why this happens is extremely naive. Apparently he believes a currency of “immoral” ideas is the cause of such a breakdown, whereas the opposite is true. The family’s life and functions were disrupted by the extension and intensification of the division of labour; following that, fresh ideas of morality were generated — without, however, affecting the existence of capitalism.

But what kind of society are we living in? Sex and reproduction are the strongest of human instincts and pleasures. The tragedy for the poor is being swindled out of enjoyment and fulfilment by poverty, inadequate housing, worry, and living on the edge of a high-priced culture. Many girls in that situation, said Joseph, are unmarried or deserted or divorced: how nice of him to point it out, from the comfort of Class 1. How nice of Mrs. Castle too, to deny that “socialism is synonymous with permissiveness”. Indeed, she is right. “Permission” means condescending to allow, and that has nothing to do with the free, responsible world Socialists envisage: Mrs. Castle’s “socialism” is not synonymous with Socialism.

It will not be too long before the working class demonstrates its intelligence, and its contempt for the Josephs and Castles, by getting rid of the system they stand for.

Robert Barltrop

Birth Control and Unemployment (1942)

From the September 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

“New Generation,” a journal which exists to popularise “the voluntary control of population in all countries,” prints in its July issue criticisms of articles in the June Socialist Standard. The gist of the criticisms is that unemployment is caused by density of population. “New Generation” writes as follows:—

  Let us next remark that unemployment would have been much rifer than it is now if it had not been for birth control. Since 1876 the birth rate has fallen from 36 to 14 per thousand. If unemployment is rife even with a birth rate of 14. what would it have been if the birth rate had remain at 36?

The theory behind this argument is that if the annual increase of population were larger than it is at present, the excess population could not find employment, or alternatively if they did find employment wages would be depressed. The first point of notice is that whereas the population in 1876 was under 36 millions it is now about 48 millions. From which we might deduce, according to the reasoning of the “New Generation,” that the additional 13 million would all be unemployed, or alternatively the wage level would be much lower than it was in 1876. But “New Generation” is not prepared to maintain either of these propositions, as will be seen from their two further statements:—

  There is no reason to believe that unemployment has increased within historical times.

and

 Birth control has not abolished unemployment, but it has enabled both the employed and the unemployed workers to have a far higher standard of life than they could have had if the birth rate had remained where it stood 65 years ago.

The fallacy of the theory of the birth controllers is in supposing that unemployment is a direct result of the size of population in a given area of land, thus ignoring the form of social organisation, capitalism. If their theory were correct how could the big fluctuations' of unemployment be explained, that take place without a material change of population? In June, 1924, registered unemployed numbered about one million. In June, 1932, the figure was not far short of three millions. In June, 1939, it was 1,350,000. It will take more than birth control to explain such fluctuations.

Unemployment actually grows because the capitalist, for the time, cannot sell his products at a profit, and this in turn accompanies a huge glut of products on the market. If, like the “New Generation,” we ignored capitalism and treated unemployment as if it resulted directly from population we could re-write the paragraph quoted at the beginning of this article, as follows:—
 
“Since 1876 the birthrate has fallen from 36 to 14 per thousand. There are therefore far fewer young children who do not compete for jobs themselves and are all the time consuming goods and thus making work for the unemployed. If only we could get back to a birthrate of 36 per thousand how much more work there would be to absorb the unemployed.”

It will be seen that this statement is nearly as absurd as the reverse statement made by the “New Generation.” It is not quite as absurd, however, because in fact capitalism flourishes on waste, as can be seen during this war. The amount of wealth produced for destruction in the form of war material is enormous. Millions have been withdrawn from industry yet simultaneously the production of home grown food has been increased so that now two-thirds of the food is home grown. At the same time there is no longer any unemployment to speak of. Capitalism cannot do this under peace conditions when the amount of employment is determined by the ability of the capitalists to make profits, but given Socialism the energies now devoted to war and waste could be added to the existing production of food, clothing, etc., so that all could live in comfort.

Is it only necessary to add that “New Generation” also ignores the failure of their theory to fit the facts of different countries. They quote Professor Kimble that “more land has usually meant better conditions of life,” and illustrate this by asking “Why is the standard of life so much higher in the U.S.A. than in Germany or Japan ?”

Now it happens to be true that density of population is greater in Germany and Japan than in U.S.A., but it happens that population per square mile is greater in England and Wales than it is in either Germany or Japan. Is then the standard of life lower?

Also they quote Russia as a country where the wage level is low, yet on their theory it ought to be almost the highest of all countries because the population per square mile is only 55 in European Russia and only 8 per square mile in Asiatic Russia; compared with 703 per square mile in England and Wales and 43 per square mile in U.S.A.

It looks as if there is something radically wrong with birth control as a cure for unemployment and poverty.

Edgar Hardcastle

Material World: Population - What Explosion? (2016)

The Material World Column from the July 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many doomsday predictions are cited to express the urgency of the ‘problem’ of population growth. It is commonly held that reducing the population levels provides a partial solution to poverty, while some environmentalists consider the population problem as one of the most pressing ecological problems. The over-population argument is simple. Global population is 7 billion today. It will rise to 9 billion (or whatever) by X year. The planet cannot support this size population. Disaster will loom. Thus reducing the global population growth rate is crucial if disaster is to be avoided. But is there an overpopulation crisis? For sure, world population has risen over the past century from 1.6 to 7 billion and the problem of overpopulation appears to exist in large parts of the world where people are subjected to famines and disease.

Population projections are determined basically by the number of children women bear. The number of children a woman of child-bearing age will have during her lifetime over the last half-century has fallen from 4.91 to 2.36. In order to replace herself and her husband, a woman must have two children, plus a bit more on average to make up for women who never give birth and for children who die. In most of the advanced economies, the rate is 2.1 . According to Joseph Chamie, a former director of the United Nations Population Division, historic declines in fertility rates is occurring, resulting in a halving of the world’s average rate to 2.5 births per woman in virtually every country. 75 countries, or close to half of the world’s population, are experiencing fertility rates below the replacement level and  by mid-century that number is expected to nearly double, reaching 139 countries and by the end of the century, it will be 184 countries with the global fertility rate falling below two births per woman.

But why is global population still climbing? Because of lifespan.

John Wilmoth, director of the population division at the United Nations, explains that the decline in child mortality and increased life expectancy are the primary reasons for the population growth. Since 1960, longevity has increased almost 50 percent, from low 50s to nearly 70 globally. But it is not at the beginning of the lifespan where the problem is found, for although children consume without producing, they are the future who will build their communities and the world. They represent future production that outweigh their current consumption. The problem is either voluntarily or out of sheer necessity, old people cease to produce, but they do not cease to consume. In fact, their consumption of resources, such as in health care, increases.

Environmentalists should ask themselves, what will be the solution if people reject socialism as the answer? Is it the euthanasia of the elderly and the culling of babies?

The EU Commissioner for Justice, Franco Frattini pointed out in 2007:

‘In spite of the recent enlargement, which has pushed the EU’s total population up to some 490 million, the number of people living in the EU is set to decline in the next few decades.  By 2050 a third of them will be over 65 years of age.  Labour and skills’ shortages are already noticeable in a number of sectors and they will tend to increase.  Eurostat’s long-term demographic projections indicate that the total population is expected to decline by 2025 and the working age population by 2011.’

Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, commented after the news that the country's birth rate – 8.4 per 1,000 people – is its lowest since the foundation of the modern state in 1861. ‘We are at the threshold where people who die are not being replaced by newborns. That means we are a dying country.’

Italy is not the only European country facing a population in decline.  Germany has fewer children than any other country in Europe. The lower number of young people in Europe could put its social systems under strain in the future because there will be fewer taxpayers to fund care for the elderly.

The percentage of over 65s in the total population has doubled in France between 1901 and 2005 and nearly trebled in the UK. Europe faces the ‘profound structural challenge’ of almost half its population being aged 50 or over by 2050, according to Eurostat.  Dr. Robin Niblett, the director of the think-tank Chatham House, said that significant net migration is necessary to keep worker-dependency ratios across the EU at their 2020 levels. In order to keep the workforce at its 2010 level, total Europe-wide immigration of 25 million is required by 2020.

The anti-immigration lobby should ask themselves how they will reverse the population declines if they reject the idea of a world without borders. Is it to turn women into baby-making machines?

ALJO

Quins, Quads and Poverty (1936)

Editorial from the February 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been stated that the interest taken in the Quins and Quads by “poor working-class mothers is astonishing." The interest certainly does not stop there. Dr. Josiah Oldfield, speaking at the London School of Dietetics, on January 14th, attributed “the present outburst of multiple births” to birth control. It is, he says, “a throw-back towards the primitive. All primitive creatures were full of fecundity so that by good chance some of their early offspring would survive the perils and mortalities of early life.” What support there may be for his view does not, however, concern us here. What is of greater interest is that this led other commentators to link up the population question with working-class poverty in a novel way.

We have long been familiar with the argument that poverty is due to over-population, and that if the workers would only decrease the size of their families they would all be better off. Now we are introduced to the opposite argument, from a Catholic, Father Woodlock. In a statement to the Evening Standard (January 15th) he pointed out that a falling population means fewer soldiers to defend the Empire, and that in addition it means greater poverty for the workers.

   Only short-sighted economists fail to notice that a fall in the birth-rate will not help the condition of the working classes, but accompanied by the noticeable increased longevity of our people, will put a much heavier burden on the workers.
   They will be fewer, but in the future they will have to support a much increased number of aged and unemployable dependants. Propagandists of the spread of the birth-control movement never seem to aver this.

We can agree with Father Woodlock that those who preach birth control as a cure for poverty and unemployment are completely in the wrong, but in rejecting that fallacy Father Woodlock embraces another. It is true that a population containing a large proportion of people unable to work may be at a disadvantage compared with one containing a higher proportion of able-bodied men and women in the prime of life, but we are not living in a system of society in which the problem of wealth production is as simple as that. Under capitalism large numbers of people—the propertied class—are not engaged in wealth production and have no desire or necessity to be so engaged. Consequently the burden resting on the shoulders of the workers is not that of keeping only themselves and their own dependents, but, in addition, of keeping the propertied class in luxury and idleness or non-productive activity, and of keeping all the military and civil hangers-on of the capitalist system. The wealth producers are not engaged in producing for themselves, but of producing wealth for the capitalist class alone to own and control. What the workers get is wages, based on their cost of living. If the cost of maintaining a working-class household is reduced by smaller families or increased by larger ones, wages will sooner or later adjust themselves, leaving the workers no better and no worse off than before. As for unemployment, it is the over-production of commodities in relation to the demand of the market, and the encroachment of the machine, which the worker has to consider, not the size of the population. Experience has shown that these forces work just as powerfully in the countries with a stable or declining population as in those which are expanding.

Father Woodlock and those he criticises are alike in error through ignoring the economic laws or even the very existence of capitalism.

Before things could work out in the way Father Woodlock assumes, we have got to get rid of capitalism, lock, stock, and barrel. When that is done, and not before, we shall be able to consider the problem raised by him.

Incidentally, when we have cleared the ground by removing capitalism, we shall not have to consider the problem of population from the standpoint of the necessity of producing more cannon-fodder.

The Terror-Torn Capitalist (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

As thinkers we Socialists are pitifully shallow. We don't seem to get to the root cause of things, like the panders of the capitalist Press.

Not, for instance, like Lady McLaren, who has recently illumined the World (both this terraqueous globe and the newspaper of that name) on the subject of race suicide. The decline of the birthrate, it would appear, is causing consternation in our Upper Circles. So her ladyship, instead of wasting time in absurd condemnation of an economic system which slaughters wholesale the children of the very poor, dives below the mere surface and makes the problem plain.

In a tense drama the comedian need not be excruciatingly funny to excite amusement; amid the tragedy of penal courts the magistrate calls forth laughter without being inordinately witty. But to arrest public attention on the peril of the race, writers in our prostitute Press must be beyond exception profound, persuasive, gushing. Lady Mac squares the circumference to a nice-T.

Admire her penetration. She maintains that the marked tendency of the birthrate to decline is due more to the unwillingness of husbands to support children than to the unwillingness of wives to become mothers. When you walk along our dirty proletarian streets and watch our ill-clad, half fed kids, meditate on the meanness of workingmen, who, although blessed with 24s. 9d. s week and acquiescent helpmates, refuse to bring into this happy land families of more than seven, nine, eleven, or thirteen potential wage slaves.

But, behind the obdurate father, someone else is primarily to blame. Who? Unthinking Socialists, you would never guess. The modern politician!

Yes. “The child is no longer an asset; it is a financial burden," our titled sociologist discovers. Formerly “the man depended for comfort upon the extra earnings of his children, and both parents regarded sons and daughters as an insurance against starvation in their old age. Modern politicians have changed that condition of things." So now you know.

We Socialists pass nasty strictures upon old-age pensions, exposing their fraudulent pretence, insulting insufficiency, and rate saving reality. As usual, we only skim the surface, and it has been reserved for the McLaren genius to explore their true hideousness. Listen and perspire.

“The granting of Old Age Tensions is merciful. But the effect on population will be marked. As certainly as old age is sheltered from want without the aid of children, so certainly will families be smaller."

Shade of Malthus, painfully invoked from deserved oblivion! 'What a monstrous shape is taken by this demoniac gift of five bob a week at the long last of life! In the affluent independence of a secured future, tho workingman will override his wife's willingness, capitalism's claims, and nature's dictates. He will set at naught the laws of God and the exigencies of the labour-market. We see him, selfishly unproletaneous, march onward to his septuagenary, careless as to what becomes of the industrial reserve army, unmindful as to who will bear arms, do the dirty work, and create surplus-value. Rosebery's “end of all" is on the horizon. The cloud of the weekly dollar, albeit not so large as one's palm, portends a cataclysmal storm. 

A. Hoskyns