Human behaviour (2002)

Book Review from the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect’. By Paul R. Ehrlich. Island Press.

This is the same Paul Ehrlich who, thirty years ago, irritated Socialists by his shrill claims that it was “overpopulation”, rather than capitalism’s production for profit, that caused environmental deterioration and other ecological problems. However this, his latest book, will go a long way to restoring his reputation.

He sets out his intention without ambiguity in the preface. It is to refute

“the erroneous notion that people possess a common set of rigid, genetically specified behavioral predilections that are unlikely to be altered by circumstances. ‘After all’, we’re often told, ‘you can’t change human nature’. The notion that there is one such nature to change allows us to be painted in the popular mind as instinctively aggressive, greedy, selfish, duplicitous, sex-crazed, cruel, and generally brutish creatures with a veneer of social responsibility. Our better selves are seen to be in constant battle with a universal set of unchanging, primitives ‘drives’, which frequently break through the veneer and create many of the serious ills that afflict humanity. It is a view as dismal as it is wrong, considering what is actually known about our behavior”.

The basic answer he gives to the “human nature argument” is that there is no such thing as a single, unchanging human nature but, insofar as behaviour is the public display of our nature, there are and have been many different human natures (hence the book’s title) which change over time. This is a different approach from ours which distinguishes between a more or less unchanging biologically-determined human nature and human behaviour which is socially and culturally determined and which can, has and does vary depending on the type of society people were brought up in or live in. But this is essentially only a different of terminology to arrive at the same conclusion that our behaviour is not narrowly determined by our genes but that, on the contrary, one of our biologically-inherited characteristics is precisely the capacity, as a species, for behavioral flexibility and adaptability.

Ehrlich sets out the current state of scientific understanding of the issue which confirms that our behaviour is predominantly determined not by our genes but by our cultures (“socially transmitted behaviors, beliefs, institutions, arts, and so on”). Culture is transmitted by non-genetic means, basically by learning (which assumes of course a genetically-inherited capacity to learn), and is different at different times and in different places. Hence the great variety of behaviors exhibited by humans. Such complicated and changing behaviours, says Ehrlich, could not possibly be governed by our genes since aren’t enough of them. Writing before the first results of the human genome project Ehrlich quotes a figure of 100,000 for the number of human genes. The human genome project suggests a figure less than half this, so reinforcing Ehrlich’s “gene shortage” shortage argument against biological determinism.

Ehrlich writes as a member of the American school of “cultural evolutionists” which is not too far from Marx’s materialist conception of history. In fact, he refers at one point to “the great political economist Karl Marx”. He also takes a materialist approach to the mind: “consciousness, thinking, reasoning – activities of the ‘mind’ – are all centred in the brain and are phenomena as natural (and as material) as the legs’ actions of standing, walking, running, and kicking”.

So, a very useful book, even if Ehrlich does ramble on a bit in the last few chapters.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: Top of the Pop Charts (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

While the Cop15 delegates were largely copping out at Copenhagen recently, one fairly relevant aspect of the world’s dire whether forecast (that is, whether we survive or not) scarcely rated a mention, which was the question of global population. This oversight was duly noted by the Chinese delegation (China Daily, 10 December) which, possibly anxious to offset western criticism of their tactics at Copenhagen, seized the opportunity to justify the country’s unpopular and repressive One Child Policy as a positive contribution to global emissions reduction. The news report quotes research by postgraduate student Thomas Wire of the London School of Economics: “Each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO2 emissions by more than one ton whereas it would cost $13 for reduced deforestation, $24 to use wind technology, $51 for solar power, $93 for introducing hybrid cars and $131 electric vehicles.” Such research will no doubt bolster China’s already unparalleled enthusiasm for reducing its, and other countries’ populations, either by birth control or firing squad.

There’s no question that population growth is going to pass the carrying capacity of the planet at some point. The world is currently pushing 6.8 billion people and if you go to the website of the Optimum Population Trust at http://www.optimumpopulation.org/ you can watch the ticking counter go up at the rate of two per second. David Attenborough, a patron of this trust along with Jane Goodall, James Lovelock and other notables, takes the same doomsday view (Horizon Special, BBC1, repeated 5 January) as that other famous patron and author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich.

Socialists have often criticised Ehrlich’s view in the past, in particular his claims, written prior to the flowering of the Green Revolution of the 1970s, that population had already outstripped food capability and that hundred of millions would starve to death. But as food yields have gone up, so have populations, and the argument is not going to go away. Global population by 2050 is estimated at between 9.2 and 10.6 billion (http://www.un.org/popin/), with most of the growth occurring in the least developed countries, while in developed countries there is a steady decline in fertility and death rates. Population is likely to be a factor in the resource wars we can expect to see in the next century.

Ehrlich, the Trust, and David Attenborough in the Horizon programme all argue the same simple view, that the population growth rate can be slowed or reversed by just two factors, contraception and education. This view has the benefit of being uncomplicated by questions of culture, politics or religion and thus palatable to the broadest audience, but is it true? Yes, says John Guillebaud, emeritus professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College, London, who argues that conventional wisdom, which says that couples in poorer societies actively plan to have large families to compensate for high child mortality, to provide labour, and to care for parents in their old age, is wrong. According to Prof Guillebaud, half of all  pregnancies worldwide are accidental conceptions rather than insurance policies, and demand for contraception increases when it is available, regardless of a society’s wealth or child survival rates: “The evidence is clear within a wide variety of settings that – despite no prior increase in per capita wealth or child survival or other presumed essentials – demand for contraception increases when it becomes available, accessible, and accompanied by correct information about its appropriateness and safety.” (http://www.optimumpopulation.org/releases/opt.release26Mar09.htm).

One wonders how the professor knows that fifty percent of all children are accidents, but population growth rates do indeed seem to correlate roughly in inverse ratio to the rate of birth control, if one compares figures (see [Dead Link).

However, to imply from this that the issue is simply a practical ‘numbers game’ with no ethical or political dimension is a bit contra-perceptive. The UN estimates that over 200 million women worldwide lack access to effective contraception, but it is not necessarily because it is unobtainable, but because religion opposes it or men refuse to use contraceptives. Globally it is women who take responsibility.  The number one method of contraception worldwide is female sterilisation, IUDs are second, the pill third, and male condom use is number four, and mostly confined to Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, as is well known, the Pope and his ilk have been going around sub-Saharan Africa helpfully telling locals that condoms spread AIDS (TimesOnline, March 17, 2009). Thus at the least there are gender and religious issues to be addressed.

And let’s get population numbers into perspective. It used to be said you could fit the world’s population comfortably onto the Isle of Wight. Well, times have changed, and one enterprising commentator has recalculated this figure to show that, as of October 2007, you would have to add in the Isle of Man, as well as Jersey and Guernsey (http://www.ampneycrucis.f9.co.uk/PARK/Population.htm). As of 2010 you would need to start on the Scottish islands as well. But the basic point remains the same – humans don’t take up that much space by themselves. It’s what they do with the rest of the space that counts.

And that is a political issue, because rich countries demand far more space and resources than poor ones, and rich people far more than poor people even within rich countries. Carbon emission footprints also increase in lock-step with income, not population. Though population growth is clearly not sustainable long-term, it is made a much worse problem because of the disparities in wealth and consumption that capitalism causes.

Paddy Shannon

World population (1984)

From the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

. . .  if the human population of our planet were to continue to expand at the doubling time of 35 years then within a period no longer than that of recorded history the entire substance of the universe would be converted to human tissue and the diameter of the resulting human mass would be expanding at the speed of light. (Dr Paul Ehrlich, quoted in the Guardian, 18 June 1979)

Many figures and doomsday predictions like the above have been cited to express the urgency of the “problem" of population growth. In response to this the United Nations declared 1974 World Population Year, the key event of which was a conference in Bucharest. Last month, after a period of ten years, the second such conference was held in Mexico City; attended by delegates from over 140 countries, it discussed population in the light of the poverty and widespread hunger of humanity.

The real boost to concern with population growth came in the United States from the President's Commission on Material Policy in 1952. This report considered the question of “whether the US had the raw materials to sustain its civilisation". This was considered likely only "if Third World raw materials remain reliable". The report concluded that the greatest threat to those reliable resources was population growth. From then on population control gained respectability, growing to prominence in aid programmes and the activities of the World Bank, which sees population control as a necessary consideration in its lending activities: “The Bank does not feel it can legitimately allocate funds of its bond holders and contributing states to countries which are bad risks — don’t have population under control”. (Science for People Journal, No. 26)

This concern is not new. In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population at a time when the British population was rapidly increasing. The reason for this, as the Third World Quarterly explains was: "Until the seventeenth century, world population grew, on average, by less than one per cent a century. The extraordinary growth in human population occurred primarily after the Industrial Revolution” (Wasim Zuman, “The World Population Situation”. Third World Quarterly, July 1980).

Malthus took the view that widespread poverty was due to the fact that human population tended to increase more rapidly (by a geometric expansion) than their means of subsistence (arithmetic growth). Thus "to remove the wants of the lower classes of society is an evil so deeply seated that no human ingenuity can reach it". This "law of nature" therefore could justify starvation, slums and all the problems of poverty because “to prevent the recurrence of misery is alas! beyond the power of man". But this relied on a vastly oversimplified model of the relationship between human population and human environment.

The Malthusian view, and that of the quote at the top of this article, are based on very selective trends; they view human population as being solely subject to some constant and incontrovertible natural law. In so doing they fail to take account of the ability of humans to rationally apply themselves to their environment and so control nature.

Malthus was disproved by the first 150 years of industrial capitalism, when the population of England grew threefold and there was an unprecedented growth in the productive forces. In this period the supposed "superior power of population" was checked without producing "misery or vice” on the scale predicted. However these ideas of population control have been revived in recent years, appearing in the 70s in the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, which claims that “The greatest possible impediment to more equal distribution of the earth's resources is population growth".

Is there then a problem of overpopulation? If so, then the reader should be well aware of it. for the United Kingdom is the ninth most densely populated country in the world and England and Wales is fourth in the demographers' league of overcrowded nations. For that matter, the whole world’s population could be accommodated, packed like passengers in the rush hour, in an area of only 20km by 20km.

If we accept though that overpopulation exists, when the population exceeds the available resources, we must then ask if the concept is a natural law or a relative one which holds in certain situations and not in others. Harry Rothman in his book on pollution and resources Murderous Providence answers this by detailing different situations:

In societies of nomadic shepherds one finds population densities of 40-100 per square mile; nomads with agriculture 200-300; with intensive agriculture 200-500; regions with intensive agriculture 2,000-4,000. In regions of India where irrigation makes multiple cropping possible over 10.000 people per square mile can be kept alive, and finally, in the metropolitan areas of industrial societies densities of over 15,000 per square mile are found.

Rothman concludes that “with the development of more advanced productive forces the capacity of areas to support human populations can be increased” (page 330). This was precisely the criticism that Marx had of Malthus, when he showed how capitalism artificially swelled or shrank the population according to its requirements — in recession the population appears large; in times of boom it appears too small.

As well as varying from time to time, it can be similarly seen that the requirements of capital will seem to vary the population from place to place — the initial rise of capitalism brought with it the first large- scale concentrations of men and women in cities to meet demand for a large number of wage slaves. Indeed, current concern for the problems of poverty in the Third World is largely due to the greater rate of urban population growth compared to rural in countries undergoing very rapid industrialisation. Yves Benot points out that “many of today’s underdeveloped countries could well show up as underpopulated if they were to experience the same developmental process as that experienced by 19th century Europe”. (Qu'est-ce que le developpement?, p. 9.)

The effect of capitalist requirements dictating what is the “natural level" of population at any one time can be seen in the large-scale movement of migrants to the United States, Canada and Australia, into Arab OPEC countries and in the guest workers of Western Europe. David Eversley describes this process: "In a country like Germany a dilemma threatens to arise: in the 60s they had the problem of their foreign workers; when the economic growth rate slowed down, they sent home as many as they could; but if, for instance, there is a new boom in the early 80s they will face this with an ever-shrinking indigenous labour force entry, and the necessity therefore to invite the guest workers back again until the next recession”. (“Zero Population Growth: Problems for the 21st Century”, New Internationalist, June 1977.)

This prompted a German politician to say in 1980 "the nation is dying beneath the blankets". In fact, a German ministerial report earlier this year expressed serious concern over shortages in the labour force, a lack of recruits for the armed forces and high unemployment in the teaching profession (Population Today, February 1984). This would really endanger the interests of the owning class in Germany, or any other country — “by the end of the century the army will be severely below strength" (The Times, December 15. 1983). Similarly in America a recent internal study for the Cabinet Council of Economic Affairs viewed with alarm the decline in the youth population as far as filling the volunteer armed forces goes (Population Today, March 1984).

This shows in exactly whose interests population levels are thought to be too great or too small from time to time, or place to place. Malcolm X (for one) noted this: "Whenever they are speaking of the population explosion, in my opinion they are referring primarily to the people in Asia or in Africa . . ." But he goes on: “. . . in fact in most of the thinking and planning of whites in the West today, it’s easy to see the fear in their minds . . . that the masses of dark people . . . will continue to increase and multiply and grow until they eventually overrun the people of the West" (Malcolm X Speaks, p.46).

This apology for an explanation conveniently ignores the fact that the worldwide capitalist system of society is run in the interests not of the "whites in the West" but in the interests of the minority who own virtually all the land and productive resources on it, regardless of the country or colour of skin of exploiter and exploited.

The Declaration of the United Nations International Conference on Human Rights in 1968 stated that "... couples have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children". But rights or no rights, regardless of any "free and responsible decision", there is a real material basis which "for most people in the underdeveloped countries is the stark reality that there is little or no economic security in old age or in case of disease, other than one's own children. not all of whom will survive until adulthood" ("Not Better Lives, Just Fewer People”, Science for People, No.26). This is summed up by a village blacksmith in India: "A rich man invests in his machines. We must invest in our children, it’s that simple" (quoted in The Myth of Population Control, Mahmood Mamdani). Therefore any attempt to reduce fertility by changing people’s awareness of their best interests, without trying to change their material basis, fails because, quite simply, people are unlikely to plan their families if there is no possibility of their being able to plan their whole lives.

Similarly countries like China, (held up by the Mexico City Conference as having ideal birth control measures) have problems with female infanticide because of the desire for sons, which occurs in the strict One Glorious Child scheme. The Scotsman, (25 May 1984) also considers other countries in South East Asia where ". . . children were so little valued that they were being bought and sold in markets". The article quotes Professor Scorer saying that people don’t care about their children "because they don't have any material opportunity to do so".

A few weeks before the World Population Conference, the media discovered that people were starving to death in drought-hit Ethiopia. This is despite the statement by the editor of the Observer to his staff (8 April 1984) that "Hunger is boring" — no doubt the hungry wish it were so. Boring or not though, the BBC did not think twice about perpetuating a few myths by laying the blame for hunger squarely on the 2½  million hungry: "They expected too much from the land which could not provide enough . . .” (roughly quoted from Jan Leeming on the News Report, 22 July 1984). With “overpopulation" mistaken for the cause of the problem of poverty and starvation, any attempt at a solution amounts to little more than trying to do away with the poor rather than the cause of poverty.

What the conference ignored is that the world has the capacity almost immediately to provide enough food, drink, housing and health care for the world’s population many times over — yet one out of every ten babies born today will die within a year, victims of a system that must put the profits of the owning minority before the needs of millions who cannot put money where their hungry mouths and swollen bellies are.

Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute. Washington, disputes this, putting forward a falsely simplistic relationship between population and food production which does not recognise that capitalism requires food to be produced and distributed only when it can be sold. "Throughout most of human existence”, he claims, "there were more fish in the oceans than humans could ever hope to catch or consume. As world population expanded following World War Two. population continued to grow, but the fish catch did not". As well as oceanic fisheries he cites grasslands as a second global life-support system that is under mounting pressure. He sees this as evidence that "human needs have begun to outstrip the productive capacity of many local biological systems". This may well be true, but the world under the capitalist system has effectively become an integrated unit of production of all wealth and has the potential (which cannot be realised under the profit system) to overcome specific problems of failing harvests and famines.

Nevertheless it is still commonly held that attacking the population levels provides some solution to the problems of poverty. Lester Brown, for example, suggests that, short of an abrupt slowdown in world population growth, there will come a time when "the rationing of scarce supplies through rising prices in the world market may leave some people unable to get enough food while others enjoy a surfeit". But there is no maybe about it. People were starving to death in the early 1970s, when food production was at its highest levels in the areas Brown cites — fish in 1970; mutton 1972; cereals 1971. And the last two decades have seen a doubling in the world beef production. Yet every so often we face the sickening sight on television of mass burials of children, and the only slightly less unpleasant sight of Frank Bough or some other talking head appealing for a few pounds for charity in the hope that it will keep this quiet carnage of capitalism off the television screens for at least a few months.

Brian Gardner

Are we heading for mass starvation? (2023)

From the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The very existence of hunger, and even more so, pockets of outright starvation, has sometimes encouraged the idea that we are witnessing the unfolding of some vast Malthusian tragedy. Inexorably, it is suggested, this will come to engulf a sizeable chunk of humanity. The irreconcilable tensions between the world’s haves and have-nots will plunge society into an unending state of barbarism.

Of course, if this truly was the case there would unquestionably be strong grounds for thinking a post-capitalist alternative to capitalism would be closed off completely. Those Malthusian-inspired ‘deep Greens’ who habitually present us with this bleak scenario, all too often coupled with such startling pronouncements along the lines of Agent Smith’s memorable comment in The Matrix, that ‘Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet’, would do well to consider the implications of what they are saying. If there is no hope for the future then we are lumbered with the very system that has brought us to this sorry impasse. Unfettered brutal competition would be the only game in town. It is but a small step from uttering such callously misanthropic sentiments to the calculated culling of one’s fellow citizens. We might just as well set about building our bunkers, fortifying our gated communities and fatalistically await the coming apocalypse like a scene out of The Walking Dead.

Way off the mark

In the 1960s and 70s a spate of books, uniformly alarmist in tone, appeared on the scene. In 1967 William and Paul Paddock spoke of this supposed looming global catastrophe and earnestly recommended applying the medical principle of the ‘triage’ (practised in the First World War to decide which wounded soldiers should be treated and which left to die) by giving food aid only to those countries that could be saved, while allowing the rest to perish. (William Paddock & Paul Paddock, Famine 1975! America’s decision: who will survive?, 1967). Paul Ehrlich reinforced this message of impending doom in his best seller, The Population Bomb (1968), declaring that ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death’. And the 1972 Club of Rome Report, The Limits to Growth, gloomily predicted in the same vein that the world was rapidly running out of key resources in the face of runaway population growth.

In fact, all these dire predictions of impending disaster proved to be way off the mark. As the free-market cornucopian, Julian Simon, pointed out in The Ultimate Resource (1981), the short term price food rises of the early 70s caused by such factors as drought, the decision of the Russians to import animal feed to boost meat consumption, and concerted attempts to reduce the huge food stockpiles of previous decades, did not really tell us much, if anything, about the long-term trends in the price (and, hence, availability) of food. Indeed, the poor harvests of the early 1970s subsequently gave way to gluts with grain prices plummeting to the consternation of US farmers in particular.

Much the same is true of more recent events. In the few years up to 2008, food prices climbed steadily but then fell back quite dramatically albeit not quite to their earlier levels. Later, from June 2010 onwards, the price of some foodstuffs, like wheat, once again rose – in this case, by nearly 50 percent in two months – following Russia’s decision to freeze grain exports after another serious drought (‘Global wheat crisis recalls Moscow’s “great grain robbery”‘, Observer, 8 August 2010).

Erratic, often speculatively driven, short-term fluctuations of this nature in the price of food are to be expected. Nevertheless, contends Simon, the historical trend is towards a gradual reduction in food costs as agriculture becomes more productive and efficient. This bodes well for tackling the problem of global poverty.

The demand for food is, after all, relatively inelastic – that is to say, it is not going to vary much with changes in food prices. Since food represents a significant component of the cost of living of the global poor (who typically spend at least half their income on food) the benefits of such long-term price reductions would be far reaching. It would mean they would then have more to spend on things like education and healthcare. A virtuous circle of self-improvement would ensue. A better-educated and healthier population will also be a more productive one and rising productivity will, in turn, generate yet more benefits. However, the converse to this argument is also true. The inelasticity of food as a human priority means that any price increases will require people to cut back on precisely these other things that might benefit them in the long run.

As regards the Malthusian obsession with population growth, contended Simon, far from this growth constituting a threat to living standards, the very opposite is true. It actually helps to raise these standards by increasing the productivity of farming itself – for example, by making it more economically feasible to develop good road networks that then makes it easier and cheaper to transport both agricultural inputs and outputs. Some of the wealthiest parts of the world, after all, also happen to be some of the most densely populated. Just as there are economies of scale in production so are there economies of scale in population size.

Free-market optimism

Simon’s Panglossian-like technological optimism and his unabashed faith in the market economy to deliver the goods in due course, is justified in some respects but not in others. For a start, food prices, on the whole, don’t seem to be quite following the broad trend he predicted. They tend to be volatile – more so than for other goods – and while many food items have become more affordable over long stretches of time (if you compare median weekly earnings to the average price of selected food items), quite recently food prices seem to have been trending upwards for various reasons and more to the point, setting new records. It is frankly difficult to square this with the idea of a long-term downward trend. It makes the latter seem more like an article of faith than a deduction based on rigorous scientific enquiry.

As Otaviano Canuto noted:

‘The world food price index collected for the last 60 years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hit its highest record in March, declining gently in April. Pandemic, war and death in Ukraine, and droughts in the last 2 years… Such a combination looks apocalyptical. Now it is adding global hunger risks, because of the food price crisis’ (Otaviano Canuto, The Global Food Price Shock, Policy Center for the New South, May 18, 2022).

Other factors, as the article goes on to point out, such as supply-chain disruptions triggering food stockpiling and bans on exports, as well as mobility restrictions on migrant farm labour negatively impacting on harvests in many parts of the world, have also played a role in pushing up prices to these record levels. What lies behind these various factors is the division of modern capitalism into competing nation-states and giant corporations.

A mere handful of the latter control the great bulk of the global grain trade and these corporations, particularly following the onset of the Ukrainian war (Ukraine being a major grain exporter), have significantly boosted their profit margins by raising prices (albeit at the expense of profit margins elsewhere in the economy). A similar picture of corporate dominance pertains in the case of agribusiness suppliers of farm inputs like seeds and fertilisers with just three multinationals – Bayer-Monsanto, Dupont-Dow and Chem-China Syngenta – controlling 60 percent of the trade. And among retailers, a mere 10 grocery businesses account for half of all food sales in the EU (Fiona Harvey, ‘Food price rises around the world are result of ‘broken’ system, say experts’, Guardian, 24 August 2022).

This oligopolistic situation is far removed from the rosy vision of small-scale ‘corner shop’ capitalism promoted by free-market devotees, like Simon. Indeed, were such a vision ever to magically materialise, one can safely assume it would ineluctably lead us back, sooner or later, to the self-same situation we now find ourselves in. Competition itself, after all, tends to generate monopoly or oligopoly. The strong tend to drive out the weak. In any event, the outcome we now have is a food system that, in the view of many commentators, is irredeemably broken. It works not only against the interest of consumers who have to pay for these higher food prices but also numerous small farmers, struggling to survive in the face of mounting costs.

Enough for 10 billion . . .

And yet, despite everything, this same food system has also demonstrably created the potential for food abundance – even if it fails to deliver on that promise. According to one often-cited, if somewhat dated, source the world, as it happens, already grows enough food to support 10 billion people – compared to an existing global population of 8 billion (Holt-Giménez, Eric & Shattuck, Annie & Altieri, Miguel & Herren, Hans & Gliessman, Steve July 2012, ‘We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can’t End Hunger’, Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 36 (6) p595-8).

Furthermore, contrary to the dire Malthusian predictions of exponentially growing populations, population growth peaked sometime in the 1960s and has been slowing ever since then. In 1950, the average birth rate was about 5 children per woman; by 2021 this had fallen to 2.3, according to the United Nations Population Division, with the world becoming increasingly urbanised (World Population Prospects: Summary of Results, UN Report 2022). Partly this is because, living in a town, you don’t need more children to look after your goat herd or tend your crops. Also, living in a town means you have better access to medicines that have significantly reduced rates of infant mortality. If people had larger families in the past it was precisely because so many of their children died young.

These declining birth rates have meant an increasing number of countries are now experiencing below-replacement level – or negative – growth and, remarkably, there is more and more concern being expressed about the prospect of depopulation and a steadily ageing population, rather than overpopulation. Some countries, worried about their waning influence on the international stage, have begun to institute pro-natalist policies with a view to reversing their relative population decline. For them the link between power and population is compellingly self-evident: big is obviously better in a competitive global economy.

. . . so why hunger?

However, despite the aforementioned productive potential to adequately feed the world, hunger, seemingly bafflingly, continues to scar the lives of hundreds of millions of people:

‘The UN estimates that more than 820 million people are undernourished, a jump of 60 million in five years. Nearly a quarter of all children under five are stunted and 1.9 billion adults are overweight, according to the World Health Organisation’ (John Vidal, Guardian, 4 March 2021,)

How is this possible? If agricultural output is already more than sufficient to meet the need of the world’s people why do so many go hungry? It’s because the bulk of food produced today is produced to be sold on a market and so access to it is dependent on purchasing power. If you lack the means to buy food then you are denied it in a market economy. This essentially explains why people go hungry today. They are unable to express enough ‘market demand’ to meet their needs. It’s as simple as that.

If you don’t earn much money you face a serious problem. If the price of food goes up your problem gets even worse. That is why rising food prices translate into more and more people becoming hungry. They might choose to allocate a rising portion of their small budgets to food purchases and a shrinking portion on other things, but there will come a point when this will simply no longer be feasible. Something will have to give. When that happens this often results in an explosion of food riots and violence on the streets that can, and has, toppled governments.

Robin Cox

Life and Times: Too many people? (2022)

The Life and Times column from the September 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a Facebook group I’m a member of called ‘Moneyless Society’. Recently someone posted the following message: ‘We could sustainably feed, clothe and house the world five times over. Overpopulation arguments ignore the elephant in the room, which is unequal distribution and consumption of resources. The Earth can support billions but not billionaires’.

This statement, as per usual on social media sites, gave rise to many different and contrasting comments. Samuel Wascuteh, for example, disagreed: ‘The Earth cannot support billions of people living a first world lifestyle, including billionaires. I’d like to see the numbers on the sustainability claim’. Carly Morgan wrote: if every human went back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, the Earth would still be stripped of its resources faster than they could be replenished’. Eric Fernandez’s reply to this was: ‘Based on what? What in the world are you talking about? Do you realize the entire human population of Earth can live in Texas?’ Derrick Seeto weighed in: ‘Most of our resources are renewable and recyclable. We need to stop using fossil fuel, that’s the only major problem. The second problem is waste, and making sure it’s recycled and gases recaptured. The third is at some point, livestock will have to be limited because of how much it limits food productivity. But none of this has to do with sheer numbers. Our food is solar powered. The limits are probably at least 100 times more people than we have now’. Dave Luxemburg seemed to agree but came at it from a different angle: ‘Population size has nothing to do with it, it’s unequal resource distribution that’s the problem’.

Population bomb?

These opinions probably reflect the kind of divergent views on this topic we find both in the media and among so-called experts. As far back as 1968 a book called The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich latched on to talk of ‘population explosion’ by predicting that the two decades to come would bring mass starvation due to overpopulation. That didn’t happen and doesn’t show signs of happening now, but it hasn’t put an end to widespread fear of things falling apart owing to there being too many people for available resources. That is illustrated in some of the social media posts above and also argued by such well-supported and ‘respectable’ organisations as ‘Population Matters’ (David Attenborough is one of its patrons).

The population has of course grown considerably since the Ehrlichs wrote their book. Then, over 50 years ago, it was close to 4 billion compared with 7.7 billion now. But growth has been slower than they predicted, and of course the development of technology has brought an increase of resources and production to help provide, at least in part, for the increase in the number of people. And most well-evidenced predictions now are that, in the years to come, population growth will be slower still owing to factors such as the spread of methods of birth control and increased education for and empowerment of women, the latter being the strongest determinant of falling birth rates. The United Nations’ forecast is that by 2100 humans will reach peak population of 10.9 billion, while a study from The Lancet last year suggested that global population will peak at 9.7 billion in the 2060s and be well below 9 billion by 2100.

Unequal access

But is the supply of goods and services nevertheless being outstripped by the growth of population, as Thomas Malthus, in his famous 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, wrote would always happen? Will there always not be enough to go around? Is evidence of this that even today (according to a Food and Agriculture Organisation estimate) 9 percent of the global population is suffering extreme hunger with an estimated 11 people every minute dying from malnutrition? And is overpopulation the cause of this? Or is the ‘elephant in the room’ mentioned by one of the Facebook writers (i.e. ‘unequal distribution and consumption of resources’) the important factor here? In other words, is enough actually already available to feed, clothe and house the world perhaps many times over, but without there being equal access to it?

Many believable sources say that this is the case and that this needs to change. But can it change in a system where production and distribution take place with the aim of selling goods and services for profit on the market? All experience suggests that it cannot and that decent survival will always be limited to those who have the means to buy what is essential for them to live comfortably. The supermarkets may be groaning with goods, but we can only get them if we have money. It’s can’t pay, can’t have. This brings us back to Dave Luxemburg’s point that ‘population size has nothing to do with it, it’s unequal resource distribution that’s the problem’, a point emphasised in even stronger terms by another, so far unmentioned, contributor to that Facebook discussion. Thomas Fouquet St Clair states flatly, and perhaps somewhat despairingly: ‘The problem has never been overpopulation but in fact mismanagement of the Earth and its resources. I have said that forever, but now it seems that people are still brainwashed to see otherwise’.

Mismanagement and brainwashing

And this comment on ‘brainwashing’ seems to hit the nail on the head. People’s attention is easily diverted from the real problem – the way society is organised. The ‘overpopulation’ problem is really a misuse-of-resources problem. Capitalism, as a system of rationing via the market, is justified in people’s minds by a belief in scarcity and the idea that ‘there isn’t enough to go around’. Yet, whatever the future rate of population growth, what is abundantly clear is that, if resources were utilised rationally on the basis of production for use rather than profit in a properly democratic system of moneyless, wageless co-operation, everyone’s reasonable needs could be satisfied the world over.

So ‘overpopulation’ is just another distraction from the need to focus on the real problem – getting rid of the senseless, irrational system that builds in rationing of goods and everything else according to the money an individual happens to have in their pocket or their bank account. Socialist society will use the resources of the Earth to ensure that every man, woman and child is amply fed, clothed and sheltered. The current system of society – capitalism – cannot do this, quite simply because it does not exist for that purpose.

Howard Moss

Bird’s Eye View: ‘Don’t you wish you were free…?’ (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

‘Don’t you wish you were free…?’

‘There’s a debate going on among the disaffected/terrified over which dystopian novel we’re now living in. Some point to social media addiction and designer drugs to suggest Brave New World. Others see mass surveillance and pandemic lockdowns. Each of these opinions seems valid, which is confusing… Turns out we’re not in a single dystopian novel. We’re in all of them simultaneously’ (dollarcollapse.com, 17 December).

George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 also form part of the Venn diagram of our overlapping dystopian oppression along with A Handmaid’s Tale, Brazil, Clockwork Orange, Gattaca, Logan’s Run, as well as Soylent Green, Farenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, and The Matrix.

‘You’re bought as soon as they pay you a salary.’

The film Soylent Green, which is loosely based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!, dates from 1973 and depicts a future (2022!) in which food shortages and overpopulation feature prominently – New York City alone has forty million inhabitants, which is over four times the current total – and there are many who opine that such ‘problems’ form part of reality today. They are wrong.

‘In 1798, Thomas Malthus argued that human populations tend to increase more rapidly than their food supplies, which would lead to mass starvation. More than 150 years later, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “hundreds of millions would starve to death” in the 1970s and ’80s due to overpopulation. What both men missed is mankind’s propensity for problem solving and innovation, which, thanks to capitalism and globalization, has seen rates of food insecurity decrease, while the world’s population has skyrocketed’ (nationalpost.com, December 23).

Yet under capitalism, where the profit motive reigns supreme, food is destroyed and famines persist in a world of potential abundance.

‘Do you ever read any of the books you burn?’

Socialists do not call for The National Post to be censored because it promotes the dystopia known as free market capitalism. Indeed, we oppose censorship and, of course, its extreme expression in the form of book burning.

‘It had started two meetings prior when two parents addressed the board during Public Comments to complain about two books on the high school’s shelves, Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman and 33 Snowfish by Adam Rapp. In response, the board voted 6-0 to remove all “sexually explicit” books from the high school shelves, though it never defined what constituted “sexually explicit”. Going further, two members, Mr. Rabih Abuismail and Mr. Kirk Twigg, suggested that they might burn any books they found to be inappropriate’ (bookandfilmglobe.com, 19 December).

Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 has itself been censored, but not, like copies of Capital and the Communist Manifesto, burned in public. His novel concerns a future American society where books are outlawed and ’firemen’ burn any that are found. Arguably, perhaps the most horrifying depiction of book burning appears in Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. Guy Montag, a fireman in Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, who becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge (he eventually quits his job and commits himself to the preservation of books) might just agree.

‘Who cares?’

William Golding, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, is (in)famous for his debut novel Lord of the Flies which concerns a group of schoolboys who are stranded on an uninhabited coral island and their struggle to survive. The boys’ differing personalities soon determine their function within the group: leaders, followers, outcasts. Soon they are organised hierarchically and, shortly after, divided into tribes. The adventure is provided by the boys’ growing fear of The Beast, an apparently natural danger which threatens to destroy them. Life adapts to a chain of ordered survivalism in defence against the Beast. There are those who think The Beast an invention and others who seek to hunt and kill it. But the reader, guided by Golding, comes soon to see The Beast is neither an infantile invention of self-torment nor a conquerable enemy from without. Few novels have so eloquently served the cause of capitalist ideology which contends that humans are inherently aggressive, gullible, self-serving, easily led and un-cooperative. Growing evidence from modern anthropology and archaeology tells us otherwise. Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything ‘reins in history’s rules and replaces them with a radical, uncompromising play, not such that we are overwhelmed with an infinity of nihilistic political choices, but so we may finally articulate and follow the values that lead to our better possible world’ (theqiuetus.com, December 18).

Neo: ‘What truth?’ Morpheus: ‘That you are a slave.’

We have a choice, not unlike that of Morpheus in The Matrix 4.

‘As Bugs offers Morpheus a blue pill or a red pill, she remembers her own experience with initially discovering the truth about the Matrix and receiving the same offer to pursue the truth or return to her false reality…For characters such as Bugs and Morpheus, once they have realized the deeper truth about existence they could never be satisfied going back to living a lie. In a franchise about enlightenment and self-discovery, this quote speaks to the powerful nature of truth’ (screenrant.com, 26 December).

We need to take the red pill of socialist understanding. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind… He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race’ (The Communist Manifesto, 1848).

We can feed the world (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jack Kloppenburg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that hi-tech agriculture is frequently justified by the rationalisation that it will feed the world. Kloppenburg says that is the wrong approach.

‘People need to feed themselves — they need to be allowed to feed themselves’ (Link).

We should concentrate attention upon the economics which drives agriculture and the food industry rather than disproportionately focus upon specific technologies and techniques.

The farming industry rarely asks ‘What do we grow that is best for the land?’ or ‘What can we grow that will benefit our community the most?’ or ‘What crop will be most nutritious and damage the land the least?’ Those are not questions that the food corporations ask. Instead they usually have just one question, ‘How much money can be made out of the land?’

The Malthusian overpopulationists gained popularity with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (propped up by Garret Hardin’s later ‘Tragedy of the Commons’) which claimed that the world population was exploding and food production would fail to keep up with the numbers of people.

It led to what is known as the Green Revolution, and it is a policy still being emulated in modern times by the Bill Gates Foundation. What it did was basically to take fertilisers and pesticides, an integral part of intensified industrial farming methods, and transfer the practices elsewhere to increase production. Today Gates and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa have joined various corporations such as Monsanto, manufacturers of the Round-Up herbicide, to introduce genetically modified crops with the same end of increasing harvest yields.

However, such pessimistic predictions did not materialise because the rate of population growth dropped. The world population no longer is expected to reach the earlier projection of 12 billion. Now the estimate is 9 billion or even 8 billion and the world already is well able to supply sufficient food if wastage is reduced.

Sweet-sounding statements from government ministries are frequently rendered meaningless by businesses bent on maintaining their expansion and growth. Capitalist accumulation is limitless. The purpose of capitalism is endless expansion of production for profits and an ecological nightmare has arisen from irrational, unplanned, undemocratic production, rather than a rational, democratically planned economy. Capitalism will poison and pollute the planet beyond recovery if it is not replaced.

Spurred by UN population projections and its calculation of the degree that food production has to increase, ie that the world must produce 70 percent more food by the year 2050 through yield growth to feed the expected rise in population, many commentators determined that the world needed to upgrade its farming methods with innovations such as genetically modified seeds and foods. We are told that the agribusiness corporations manufacturing fertilisers and pesticides, and the food processing companies, are the only sector capable of feeding the planet’s population and that family-owned, small farms are not equipped to do so. The food industry has no motivation other than to derive more profits from the food chain. Corporations expend a huge budget on public relations in defence of their business plans.

Yet there is no global or regional shortage of food other than some localised supply deficiencies caused by armed conflicts or temporary pest problems like, for example, a locust plague. Many countries are net food exporters. Wherever we look, farmers are already producing a surplus. There is no food scarcity. Food security could be provided for all people, all the time. Currently substantial crop harvests go to bio-fuels to drive vehicles. Crops that could fill the empty bellies of the hungry are diverted to fill fuel tanks or to fatten up cows and pigs. A 2013 estimate is that 4 billion additional people could be fed if animals were absent from the global feed chain, and that figure excludes nomadic pastoral livestock rearing, which often takes place on marginal land less suitable to arable farming and could easily continue to be practised.

Then there are plantations growing cash crops such as palm oil, coffee and tea. Cut flowers are a major export of Kenya’s horticulture. These may bring in valuable foreign currency for local elites but has very limited ability to feed the local people. World agriculture possesses the possibility to substitute non-edible crops for nutritious sustenance but Big Ag chases the stock market as well as the food market and states assist by providing generous financial and tax subsidies to it.

We cannot lay out any detailed alternative but we can broadly predict that in socialism the people would likely adopt a more flexitarian diet, supplied by the use of mixed cropping, agro-ecological production systems, and conservation agriculture, using more appropriate soil and watering procedures and requiring much less chemical input. A method called the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has the potential to feed a further seven billion if universally applied.

The World Socialist Movement long ago determined that increasing production does not solve hunger as it is not a technological issue but a political and economic problem.

An editorial in Journal of Sustainable Agriculture agrees:

‘Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity…the world produces more than 1 1/2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak. But the people… cannot afford to buy this food…The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people’ (Link).

In anticipation of more people living on the planet, we already have the knowledge and skills to feed those extra mouths. Socialism will exercise these to provide sufficient nourishment and end scarcity whereas it is in capitalism’s interest to maintain malnutrition and food shortages to keep prices up.

ALJO

Population and Pollution (1971)

Book Review from the April 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

If someone says that the world is now overpopulated, most people would take him to mean that the resources of the world were not sufficient to support the present population of the world. [In their recent book Population Resources Environment (W. H. Freeman. £4.20)] two American biologists, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, have convinced themselves that the Earth is, in their other words, “grossly overpopulated”; they compare the Earth to a spaceship which “is now filled to capacity and beyond and is running out of food”. They can only present some sort of case for this by using a definition of overpopulation that is slightly, but significantly, different from its normal meaning. They say:

 The question of how long the population is to be maintained is important. An area must be considered overpopulated if it is being supported by the rapid consumption of non-renewable resources. It must also be considered overpopulated if the activities of the population are leading to a steady deterioration of the environment  (our emphasis).

This would mean that any area which, for whatever reason, was rapidly using up its natural resources or polluting its environment would have to be considered overpopulated. For instance an area which was doing this through the misuse of technology rather than through pressure of population would still on the Ehrlich’s definition be “overpopulated”. So all the Ehrlich’s have to do to prove that there is “overpopulation” now is to point to the undeniable fact that there is pollution and that the world’s resources are being plundered. This of course is much easier than proving that the world really is overpopulated in the sense that the needs of its people can only be met by doing these things.

Apparently contradicting their main argument the Ehrlich’s believe that pollution can be abolished. “State and federal legislatures”, they say, “could, easily stop pollution if they wished to do so”. They use their knowledge as biologists to reject the view that food production can only be maintained by using pesticides like DDT.

 It is commonly claimed that only current patterns of chemical control stand between us and starvation or death from insect-borne disease. Nothing could be further from the truth; the alternatives are not death or the continued dosing of ourselves and our environment with chlorinated hydrocarbons.

The Ehrlich’s are unconcerned about the extra cost of their proposals to maintain the natural fertility of the soil. Speaking of the way sewage is at present wasted they say that “regardless of the cost, manure should be returned to the land to help build humus”. 

But when earlier they discussed suggestions for increasing world food production put forward by those they dismiss as “technological optimists”, they adopt a different standard: cost is the great objection.

After conceding that only a quarter of the land that could be used for farming is now actually under cultivation they say:

  But the term ‘potentially arable’ can be misleading. Actually, almost all the land that can be cultivated under today’s economic circumstances is now under cultivation” (our emphasis).

The costs of massive irrigation projects are “staggering” while desalting sea water “has serious economic limitations”. Discussing synthetic foods such as protein from petrol they concede that “theoretically, much if not all of the world’s protein deficit in the last two decades of this century could be made up with protein from such sources”, but go on to ask whether the purification costs might not make this “uneconomical”. Obtaining more food from the sea is dismissed on the grounds that most such schemes are “based on the premise that fish stocks will be harvested rationally” while “the history of fisheries so far gives little hope that rationality will prevail”.

These objections to the argument that mankind has the technical knowledge and ability to produce much more food are not technical at all (which is what they should be if the Ehrlich’s are to prove that the world is overpopulated in relation to technology) but economic. “Today’s economic circumstances”(that is, capitalism with its class ownership of the means and instruments for producing wealth and its profit motive) are a barrier to the production of abundance, but these circumstances can be changed by human action. Capitalism in fact gives rise to the illusion of overpopulation by creating an artificial scarcity of food. The Ehrlich’s have been taken in by this illusion.

They also argue that the supplies of certain key minerals like gold, silver, lead, zinc and tin are being rapidly exhausted. Again they dismiss proposals for overcoming this — the extraction of trace metals from ordinary rock and the sea as well as the mining of lower grade ores — on grounds of cost, but still do not deny that mankind could get metals from these sources if it had to. 

Later on in their book, again contradicting their main argument, the Ehrlich’s themselves advocate ways of conserving metals: the recovery of waste and scrap; making articles so that their materials can conveniently be used again; replacing planned obsolescence with articles made to last; disarmament (arms are surely not only a great waste of resources in the first place but could also be an important source of scrap metal for many years to come). One very important way of overcoming this problem which the Ehrlich’s do not discuss is the manufacture of plastics which as synthetic organic products do come from renewable sources.

As far as sources of energy are concerned the Ehrlich’s are forced to concede :

  It does not appear … that availability of energy itself will place a limit on population growth.

and have to fall back on the well-known fact that “all the energy used on the face of the earth … will ultimately be degraded to heat”. Ultimately, fortunately, is a long time and the Ehrlich’s make no attempt to show that it is near.

Although they claim that the world is now overpopulated and at one point predict “a drastic rise in the death rate”, they also believe that something can be done about it. They correctly point out that technology alone is not the answer since a changed attitude to its use is also required. They think that this is just a question of attitudes, but it is much more than this. What is required is a change in the basis of society so that the profit motive and vested interests no longer operate. Naturally birth control is their main plan for ending the overpopulation they mistakenly believe exists. Indeed they are driven by their mistake to seriously consider the propositions that the people of India should be left to starve and that it should be illegal to have more than two children. Socialists of course have no conscientious objections to birth control. It is absurd that knowledge about contraception and contraceptives, are banned in countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland where the Catholic Church still has political influence. But no more than technology can birth control (which is only a part of technology anyway) be the answer, for as long as capitalism lasts it could only palliate the artificial scarcity and organised waste that are built-in to this system.

Apart from birth control the Ehrlich’s make a number of other suggestions for overcoming “overpopulation” some of which we have already mentioned. These other proposals amount to a call for an economic system that is not wasteful and that is not driven to go on plundering the world’s resources. They even wonder, as well they might, whether such a system would be compatible with capitalism:

  Marxists claim that capitalism is intrinsically expansionist and wasteful, and that it automatically produces a monied ruling class. Can our economists prove them wrong?

Capitalism, as a system geared to producing profits out of which those who own the means of production accumulate more and more capital, is quite incapable of serving human interests, mankind does have the technical knowledge to provide for much more than its present numbers. The problem is not overpopulation, but the underproduction and waste that are built-in to capitalism. The plundering and pollution of the world is not caused by modern technology but by its misuse in the service of profit. If the resources of the Earth, natural and man-made, belonged in common to all mankind they could be used in a conservationist and non-polluting way to provide for the needs of all. If overpopulation were ever to become a potential problem in a socialist world, then mankind also has the knowledge of how to control births.

The Ehrlich’s comments on political and economic matters are generally very simple, but oddly enough two of their ideas could only be realised in a socialist world; indeed they would be essential features of it. They call for some arrangement “which will permit all peoples to have access to the basic needs of adequate food, shelter, clothing, education and medical care, regardless of the economic value of their productivity.” Again in discussing how to preserve the world’s resources and environment they advocate the establishment of what they call “world commons” and a “comprehensive Planetary Regime” that could control “the development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources, renewable and non-renewable.”

This book is one of a number that have been published recently claiming that pollution is due to overpopulation but, as we have seen, it fails to prove its case.

Adam Buick

Capitalism Causes Pollution (1972)

From the April 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many opinions voiced on the resources/population/ pollution problem are in direct conflict with the Socialist claim that, with the present state of our knowledge, and with the present level of technical development, the world is capable of abolishing scarcity. That of course is hardly surprising. Socialist ideas are in conflict with generally held opinion on most things — war, poverty, human nature, leadership, nationalism — even on “socialism”. That does not make our ideas wrong — or right.

Briefly the argument runs to the effect that pollution is caused by an expanding population acting and reacting on an expanding technology. The human race is heading for various forms of disaster unless population is either reduced or stabilised and technology halted or reversed.

Now it is not necessarily the case that where two phenomena occur together that one is the cause of the other. It may be that both, or either, are caused by some other phenomena not taken into account. We argue that the present environmental crisis arises not from population or technology but from the nature of capitalism, the world society in which we live.

The driving motive for production in capitalist society is the hope of making a profit from the sale of commodities on the world’s markets. The surplus value produced by working people and realised by sale is appropriated by the owning class and accumulated as capital which is, by and large, re-invested for the further exploitation of human labour power. Anything which interferes with or diminishes this accumulation is to the detriment of the capitalist class.

When we say that capitalism causes pollution we mean that because production is for profit there is an artificial (economic) barrier to the implementation of known solutions. Technologically, the problem should no longer exist; but solutions cost money and as such bite into profits since increased costs, if taken in isolation, can lead to disadvantaged positions in the never-ending struggle for markets. That this is so has already been admitted by politicians and businessmen alike. For example, Lord Kennet, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government under the Labour government, said: “The techniques are already available by which contamination of air, water and land can be avoided; all that is needed is the will and the money to apply them . . . However politicians are most unlikely to insist on firms spending money on preventing pollution if this means the loss of their competitive position in world markets” (The Times, 5 July 1969). The Confederation of British Industry put their point this way: “If consumers like certain commodities at a certain prices — a low price — they cannot expect industrialists to spend vast amounts of money on environmental controls”; and, wrote Industrial Management in October 1971, the conservationists “do seem blind in many cases to the cost factor; in short, if they want to preserve and save they will have to pay more for the goods. Such moves, unless enforced on a worldwide basis, would make our products uncompetitive abroad. The economy would creak and crash.”

Some frightening predictions have been made as to what might happen if nothing is done pretty soon. “The crisis will be upon us in the next 25 years . . . The self purifying process will be stressed to destruction” warns Barry Commoner at a conference on The Future of Man’s Environment (Soil Association press release 30 July 1969). Nixon’s advisor on Urban Affairs, Moynihan, was even more alarming when he stated, “We may have even less than a 50-50 chance of living until 1980” (The Times, 22 October 1969).

Things look pretty bleak then — which doesn’t say much for capitalism. But what nearly all the prognostications, and most of the criers of doom assume, and what they fail to question, is the continued existence of capitalism, of production for the market, of buying and selling. When confronted with all the evidence for the need for a new way of life all Paul Ehrlich, the shrillest of the population scaremongers, can offer is the observation that “It will involve governmental intervention, changes in tax structure, and formidable changes in attitude” (in Harold W. Helfrich The Environmental Crisis, 1970).

We are due, it seems, for another bout of political reforms. Tough legislative measures have been promised to curb and reduce the menace of pollution. This is nothing new; we have heard it all before. It is in fact the treatment as before. There have been twenty or more Acts of Parliament dealing with water pollution but there are still 950 miles of “grossly polluted” river in England and Wales and it is reported that years of intensive effort are still needed. Some local authorities have recommended the use of pure bottled water for babies as the mains supplies are heavily contaminated by nitrate from agricultural runoff (The Times, 8 January 1969). A survey by two scientists from the University of Liverpool found, in tap water taken by random samples from an area with a population of seven million, that phenolic substances were at concentrations of more than 16 times the World Health Organisation maximum; and that that lead and cyanide were also to be found at dangerous levels.

The fact is that governments cannot legislate capitalism out of business. If the laws are too harsh, or if the cost involved is too heavy, they will be either circumvented or ignored. A World Health Organisation committee of experts who looked into this matter came to the conclusion that “Countries with severe laws against pollution have not in fact avoided the occurrence of wide spread pollution” (Use and Conservation of the Biosphere, UNESCO, 1970).

Yet in all this there are hopeful signs. There is a growing awareness that pollution is a world problem and that as such needs world answers. Effective action however is hampered by the existing division of the world into competing and often mutually antagonistic nation states.

Dr. Kenneth Mellanby, of the Nature Conservancy, is in no doubt that our environment could be safeguarded and improved if we gave it our full attentions and energies: “The same technology that is causing so much destruction could, properly used, safeguard the future” (Soil Association).

Frank Fraser Darling argues:

The deterioration of the quality of the environment may be easily explained, if not excused. It should not however be equated with doomsday . . .  A rationalisation of use of the resources of the biosphere on a world-wide scale is imperative if satisfactory living conditions of future generations are to be guaranteed . . . The problems which mankind faces in this area cannot be tackled piecemeal. The biosphere, and man's place in it, must be envisaged as a whole (UNESCO, our emphasis).

It is precisely this that the establishment of Socialism will bring about: a society based on the satisfaction of human need (both present and future) through the rational application of human knowledge and energies on a global co-operative scale. The spectre of pollution will then be finally laid.

Gwynn Thomas

No wonder they hate him! (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Which Way for the Ecology Movement? by Murray Bookchin, AK Press, £4.50.

According to Bookchin, the ecology movement has a choice: either it can realise that capitalism is the cause of ecological damage and work to end capitalism or it can retreat into "ecomysticism" blaming science, technology and reason as such, calling on individuals to adjust their personal lifestyles so as to better attune with “nature”.

Bookchin takes up basically the same position as us that, for humanity to produce and consume in ecologically acceptable ways, it must first replace capitalism and its drive to make profits with a system of common ownership, democratic participation and production for use, which can make full use of modern science and technology but for ecological and human ends instead of profit.

Bookchin is a good polemicist and it is a pleasure to read him berate the “deep" ecologists (who say a fly is of equal worth with a human), the ecofeminists (who extol “feminine intuition” as opposed to "male” rationality), the Earth Firsters (or People Seconders), the population bombers (like Paul Ehrlich), the Gaia worshippers and the rest of the New Age irrationalists. No wonder they hate him! But they deserve it, since what they advocate is not just a diversion from the real solution but, in attacking technology, science and reason, is also a rejection of the body of knowledge and mode of thought that, once capitalism has been ended, would have to be used to clear up die ecological destruction wrought by capitalism. 

Adam Buick

Voice From the Back: Too many people (2015)

The Voice From the Back column from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Too many people?

While only 59 percent of lay respondents believe that a population boom will become a problem, 82 percent of scientists are concerned about overpopulation (goodtherapy.org, 6 July). Is the world overpopulated? Socialists are convinced there is good evidence to the contrary. Dr. Paul Ehrlich recently opined that women should not be allowed to have as many babies as they want as this is akin to letting everyone throw as much of their garbage into their neighbour's backyard as they want. Does he or most of the scientists surveyed, no doubt seeing this 'problem' through a capitalist lens, not know that half of all food is thrown away or that we could all move to New Zealand and experience a population density less than that of Manhattan?

Sultan Erdogan and his golden throne

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denied (Today's Zaman, 3 July) that his gigantic presidential palace is fitted with gold-plated toilet seats. Should we believe him? A more interesting question is what would a socialist world do with the tens of thousands of tonnes of gold currently locked away in vaults? Well, some may take inspiration from More's Utopia and use gold to make bathroom fixtures. We would also have to decide what to do with Erdogan's 1,150-room palace, which was built at a cost of around €490 million when money still existed.

No nations

William Morris wrote ‘While theologians are disputing the existence of a hell elsewhere, we are on the way to realising it here: and if capitalism is to endure, whatever may become of men when they die, they will come into hell when they are born.’ Haiti is certainly one candidate for hell on Earth as in addition to natural disasters and the rule of the one percent, our class there has recently suffered from the attention of the United Nations and Red Cross. The former is responsible for the ongoing cholera outbreak, an epidemic which has killed thousands and hospitalised hundreds of thousands, as well as exchanging food and medicine with over 200 women and underage girls for sex. The Red Cross raised half a billion dollars and built just six homes leaving most of the population existing in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, and without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. Now 'some half a million stateless Haitian-Dominicans face mass deportation from Dominican Republic in what's been called an 'ethnic purge.' Poverty-stricken Haiti has condemned the expulsion measures and signalled it is not equipped to deal with the security issues posed by a massive influx of migration' (Telesur TV, 1 July).

Let them eat Campylobacter

Nearly three-quarters of fresh supermarket chicken in the UK tested positive for a food poisoning bug. Campylobacter is the UK's leading cause of food poisoning and a year-long survey by the Food Standards Agency showed 73 percent of chickens tested positive for the pathogen, with one in five (19 percent) within the highest band of contamination (foodqualitynews.com, 3 July)

K.I.S.S.

Socialists are smart. We do not know the answer to life, the universe and everything, but we have the solution to war, pollution, and many other global 'problems'. We are members of the working class, smart enough to run society from top to bottom for the enrichment of the vestigial capitalist class. Until we learn better, even 'the smartest people in the world' will find 'problems of hunger and poverty are wickedly difficult' (grist.org, 2 July). D'oh! As long as capitalism remains so will its attendant 'problems'.

Looks like a duck

So-called socialist or communist states (actually a contradiction in terms) show the hallmarks of capitalism. State capitalist Venezuela and Guyana are in an uncomradely argument over resources:

’This particular border controversy covers an area of some 160,000 sq. kilometers (62,000 sq. miles), which signifies some three-quarters of the territory of Guyana, according to a decree signed recently by Maduro. For its part, Guyana claims that Venezuela modified its maritime borders to include the area in dispute, which includes territory where large petroleum deposits were recently discovered’ (Fox News Latino, 4 July).