MALTHUS REVISIT’D

Prefatory Note: Many people on the radical left —including some of its most intelligent voices—are suspicious if not downright hostile to Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian arguments seeking to limit and ideally reduce the human population footprint on the planet. Besides regarding Malthus as a misguided and above all anachronistic upper class philosopher, they advance a series of arguments that rest on  largely irrefutable facts:

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(a) Malthus lived in an era when humans had not yet developed food technology to a level commensurate with the feeding of billions. Malthus thought that, in general, animal populations, and certainly humans, had "natural limits" to their growth. In his view each species inhabited a semi-stable niche delimited by the balance of life and death, the latter, in the case of humans, dictated by the periodic occurrences of famines, pestilence and wars.

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(b) Radicals correctly point out that all this talk about limiting or reducing human population could be some sort of a convenient and sinister project of the ruling class which can neither employ nor adequately feed a growing "surplus" population in the face of rapid advances in labor-saving automation. They suggest that deliberate population reduction will be implemented via compulsory vaccination campaigns, or via the release of bioweapons designed to attain such ends, including viral agents such as Covid-19.  A smaller world population, they argue, is desired by the plutocrats because it is theoretically easier to manage and less likely to reach volatile levels conducive to revolutionary explosions in the near term.

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(c) Radicals also point out that for the rich countries to forbid or sabotage population growth, or economic development guaranteeing higher consumption per capita in the poor world, is the height of hypocrisy given the developed world's own appalling track record of active destruction of the environment by criminal corporate operations (vide BP's poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico, as just one instance of a widely accepted business practice) in addition to extravagant if not obscene levels of median consumption—especially in nations such as the US. Furthermore, critics argue, every child born in America or Europe or any other developed nation represents an ecological footprint ranging from 12 to 16 times that of a child born in India or Africa, and such trends are both diverging and expanding.

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We could suggest a leveling off of economic growth in developing nations and a freezing of development in rich countries, until the former catch up, but ideas such as these are chimeras in a world lacking peace and equity in political power, and in which one malignant superpower has almost singlehandedly destroyed the possibility of a rational and fair one-world government. People in the poor world are not in a mood to wait much longer, while the leaders of the developed world—the "West"—would hardly entertain such notions as they struggle to maintain their increasingly tenuous hold on power by keeping their home populations minimally satisfied.

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Regardless of what the criminals and misleaders that run most of the world these days decide to do about global population, especially in the "West", something that all Western radicals can support, in fact, should support, is a steady-state economy. A point of agreement to launch this discussion is that growth in the GDP size of any nation does NOT signify income and well being gains for the whole population. In a highly class divided society, most of the gains facilitated by better productivity will be shoveled into the pockets of the already wealthy, with poorer sectors experiencing stationary or shrinking incomes. In other words, size of GDP alone means little; it is the type of distribution of the national pie—egalitarian or unequal— that explains whether the nation is better off as GDP grows or (as we have seen historically in cases like Brazil, for example) or worse off. That is, growing riches in the upper 1% have also meant increasing poverty in the lower sectors.

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Second, and fundamental, continuing—infinite—economic growth, a mantra of capitalist politicians, corporate boardrooms, and economists, especially in the extractive industrial sector, implies a huge contradiction. You can't have infinite growth of any consumption variable (i.e., population) in a very finite planet. It's an impossibility. The idea that we can continue to increase human population indefinitely, with each person born anywhere on the planet, allocated, (as is his/her right) a fair amount of resources to live a decent and rewarding life, is therefore unrealistic and actually destructive, since as environmental tipping points are reached, a negative feedback accelerates the depletion of the remaining global assets. We all know that nature has a wonderful way of renewing its life-giving platforms, but this is severely nullified when androgenic assault literals punctures the biosphere.

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But, what is steady state economics? For one thing, let's say it at the outset: a steady state economy does not signify stagnation. The economy can continue to modernize and become ever more efficient (which technically lightens the human footprint on the environment). And, equally important, the economy can have a much better distribution of its aggregate income, making everyone better  off.

Capitalism has a way of accelerating and magnifying the gravity of these issues. A few years back, in an essay discussing these questions, I noted that,

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this is a non-negotiable feature that defines it. You can make a man agree to many things, but you can't negotiate with him to stop breathing. That's a non-negotiable demand. Same with capitalism and growth. Constant growth is buried deep in the dynamic of capitalism and now in its mature executive sociology. It's not subject to negotiation. Yet —as anyone, except capitalist diehards and those influenced by them can see—eternal growth is impossible in a finite planet that is growing smaller all the time, especially against the backdrop of continually expanding human populations. Thus, a system like capitalism, that posits endless economic expansion as the key element in the road to "the good life"is insane, by definition.

• Capitalism, a highly hierarchical, inegalitarian system did not clash with the exploitative values of feudalism. Capitalism is grounded in unequal distribution of income. At the sociopolitical level, capitalist uprisings merely forced feudalism to amplify its privilege/exploitative sphere to embrace the rising class of rich merchants and bankers—the bourgeoisie. Given this value orientation, capitalism can be clearly perceived as inherently indifferent and even hostile to democracy. Not surprising, then, that capitalism simply thrives in right-wing dictatorships. Chomsky calls capitalist structures "tyrannies" and he's not exaggerating.

• As time goes by, the capitalist crisis can only worsen—the disappearance of jobs, environmental degradation, deeper recessions and inequality, antisocial production, etc.—grows in intensity and there is no possible cure within boundaries acceptable to the capitalist class. This crisis is a direct result of capitalism's core dynamic, and its social relations. 

Regarding capitalism's GDP fetish, I argued that, 

From Lou Dobbs to Alan Greenpan, to the regular business class teacher, the media "expert" trotted out to "explain the economy," the corporate executive, or politico on the stump, the mantra is always the same: the GDP is a good barometer of the nation's economy, and it better be growing. But this worship of the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] as a reliable yardstick for general social well-being, intimately connected to the growth obsession, is just one of the multiple ways in which bourgeois economics contributes to the miasma of false consciousness. The operating assumption is that there's a close correlation between constant economic growth and increases in the quality of life for all, although there are several enormous flies in this lovely ointment.

To begin with, a bigger GDP does not automatically mean a better life for the vast majority. The truth depends on how the national income is being distributed. Forget the fabled "trickle down" effect and "the lifting of all boats" economic rapture expected to take place when the superrich are allowed to get away with practically anything. Unadulterated poppycock. A smaller pie in which everyone gets a fair share is probably much better than a much larger pie in which 5% of the top take 90% of the pie. What's more, averages, so widely used in official statistics, lie.

The GDP is a rather obtuse, and severely biased yardstick. It takes no account of infamous externalities: mounting social inequality, widespread environmental pollution, damage to people's health as a result of industrial practices, or lethal threats to the planet itself. It's also stubbornly blind to the many realities that underscore the best things in life not only for us, but for every sentient creature on earth—like the pure oxygen that a beautiful tree quietly affords us, or the advantages, let alone wonderfulness, of clean rivers and oceans—while it computes as "gains" things that in actuality represent tragedy and loss. Thus a crackup on the highway resulting in a demolished car and someone's death or somebody's prolonged hospital stay, turns up on the capitalist ledgers as income generated for hospitals, doctors, nurses, drug companies, garages, funeral parlors, and car dealerships. Similarly, the GDP robotically celebrates any construction, whether it be of prisons or family homes. And following the same blind logic, it treats crime, divorce and other elements of social breakdown as economic gains. It's a measurement model in urgent need of revamping. (See P. Greanville, Understanding American Capitalism, The Greanville Post, Jul 8, 2011)

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Lastly, it's worth pointing that due to their aversion to any redistribution of wealth, the ruling elites rely on constant growth to keep increasing their share of the pie while also managing to pacify the masses. In short, the worship of "economic growth" as an unquestioned good is not only misguided, it is inherently dishonest.