I've seen people defend malthusianist point of views on this board and here's a friendly reminder there's no such thing as overpopulation.
Very good twitter thread with marx extracts showing malthusianism for what it is : psychopathic bourgeois rationalization of class genocide: twitter.com
All countries, as their literacy rate improve, see their natality rates drop dramatically.
Except there is a finite number of resources of energy water and arable land that hasn't been over exploited or paved over climate change will accelerate this within the next ten years you will witness this shit will kick in and turn most of the global south into a dust bow l where nothing grows it's already happening right now with mass migration into the north which will by itself cause all sorts of issues
while it is possible that world overpopulation is not occurring currently, there are areas that have more people than resources.
Also we will eventually have to deal with overpopulation. A finite planet cannot sustain and infinite number of people.
That thread supports what I'm saying except the faggotry about synth food and synth meat it doesnt work and is dumb at. I lived and worked on a farm for years the amount of antibiotics and hormones they pump I to the chicken and livestock is insane they get a pig to grow in fat and body mass within 3 months when it should take a little under a year with natural methods and people eat all that shit in supermarkets and are surprised when Imautism levels decline and everyone feels like shit all the time with no energy niggas are now thinking they can magick food into existance and feed a nigga some plastic shit it wont work humans are part of the biosphere they need nutrients from actual food to function
Most crops are devolved to feeding animals, if humans transitioned massively to an alimentation based around chickpeas, lentils, etc and did away with market logic we could feed everyone fine. Doesn't mean nobody would eat meat ever, just probably a lot less in the USA than they do already.
We will eat the rich.
I don't think having a worse diet in order to feed more people would be popular or preferable
Well that is happening I belive the ruling class is aware that this cannot be sustained for long and are now shilling alk the veganism and insect type shit and this will be the norm in the near future. I'm against eating insects not because it's disgusting but because humans will go through the insects very quickly and we will soon have insect food farms this will further fuck up the biosphere and lead to unknown changes if niggas just eat the bees and the spiders nature itself will mutate. I'm in favor of planned population reduction. In a way they are doing planned population reduction right now by funneling all the high end opportunities and the migrants into cities which function like a demographic drainage system
Explain how planned population reduction isn't a codeword for genocide, I'm intrigued
Was China's one child policy genocide?
If you're talking about 1 child policies then that's something completely different than what is implied by the term "planned population reduction". The thing I don't get about this kind of thing is that it fails to take into account that there are real material conditions that create the outcome of having multiple children, and they are related directly to capitalist development, and are bore out in countless sets of empirical data. The processes by which Capital changes Society through it's propagation naturally reduce population growth, which is in part related to what you're talking about with Migrants. The projected world population is already expected to peak at 10 Billion and then gradually decline. I assume that you don't think these kinds of measures would ever be implemented in the way you're proposing under Capitalism?
Some population reduction in the Capitalist West is happening weather its planned or sompantaneous or a result of social or market forces. I think all play a role. The Wests demographics are only rising through the influx of migrants by assimilating them into "society" they wont be having children either or as many children as they would be having or would have had in the third world.
Yeah 1st generation immigrants tend to have birthrates that are close to those of "native" populations. Ultimately I think that development is the only real force that can actually reduce population growth in the places with high birthrates still in Asia & Africa particularly, because the Capitalist alternative is likely either Genocide or a complete breakdown of Society. I assume you don't consider yourself a Malthusian?
What does "worse diet" mean here?
But no, it wouldn't be popular but neither is any sustainable policy because it goes against the current status quo of maximum consumption. That doesn't mean it isn't necessary for a sustainable society and high basic living standards.
Yep, Marx destroyed this guy over a century ago. We have enough resources to support everyone currently, and a raise in living standards will reduce population growth. What matters most now is creating environmentally friendly methods of production and increasing the productive forces in underdeveloped nations. When we implement communism these things will be relatively easy to achieve.
plant based diet
well there could be many things that can be done in order to sustain ourselves.
I'm sure limiting mass third world immigration will be popular with everyone in the first world once our diets are forcibly alternated
It's not malthusianism but accelerationist antinatalism
It would be very easy to ease doomer-minded liberals or apolitical proles into understanding anticapitalist ideas with antinatalist talking points. For instance, pointing out that when there is a shortage of labor due to a lack of births porky will begin to slash social programs and so on as it will put too much strain on them to care for ageing population without new workers being born. This is already being discussed in bourgeoisie media: "archive.is
"Dying world" leads into my next point. Ecologically minded liberals could easily be radicialized by pointing out that refusing to have children is morally correct is evidenced by the impending environmental crisis and how refusing to have a child, even more so than stopping meat and dairy consumption or buying an electric car, is the number 1 way to personally reduce emissions. From here we could argue that it makes no sense to furnish the ruling class with more workers until we prevent or at least lessen the environmental catastrophe and that the only way to do that is the abolition of the capitalist system. With liberals as well you can strike their fetishization of "personal freedom" by pointing out that the only reason to have a child right now if you don't have the means to raise then in a healthy and happy environment is to please porky with another wageslave and why should you sacrifice the little free time you have in neoliberalism for that?
If a significant portion or the world was brought around to an antinatalist mindset which was tied to an anticapitalist mindset the already dropping birthrates could be accelerated and combined with mass strikes. This would have a one two punch on porky because automation isn't going to develop far enough to replace jobs for another few decades (which is why porky is freaking the fuck out about both low birthrates and nationalist who threaten to limit immigration) and because unemployment is so low right now that if repeated and prolonged work shortages were coupled with a prolonged lack of new workers it would inflict massive economic damage particularly if it follows the next financial crash.
I've heard places in Africa where birth control methods have been made public are having more stable birth rates, does anyone remember this?
But a plant based diet isn't worse than the standard diet. It's just worse than the optimal diet, which no one other than a segment of the bourgeoisie follows anyway and so is irrelevant.
" Devlopment" doesnt just happen it's not a case where all the politicians in the third world are just evil dumb af people who are preventing their own development and are being kept down by the west although that too plays a role. And it's not a case of just getting good and smart politicians and good and smart institutions replacing bad institutions. We all live in a global capitalist economy and world system if you develop one region start manufacturing and selling goods and services that means those goods and services are not being sold and manufactured in another region who loses that market share. Capitalism is guaranteed winners and losers. It's also not the case where all the major players can just have a sit down and plan who is gonna get developed and where. It's also a case that due to reasons of established capital accumulation over centuries and decades some regions like the US and Yurop will simply be more developed than most of the rest of the world forever even if that gap is somewhat bridged over time it's also not the case where everyone in the world can just develop to the level of the US and Yurop and with the same rate of resource and energy consumption and the planet not becoming a fuxking Hell World that cannot sustain this with the food and resources we have.
The entire centre left developlemral discourse is dumb af targeted for internal consumption and ignores reality. In the Peterson debate Zizek said this shit adurr fuxk the migrants coming here we should just develop their countries instead! And all the smooth brains in the centre left and alt right clapped this rhetoric is targeted for feels and internal consumption as in fuck these people coming here and polluting muh Aryan genes and muh wonderful Weatern culture let's develop them over there instead they will keep coming here and it cannot be stopped
Who said this? The primary issue with any kind of development in Africa is the rampant Imperialism affecting the continent, whereby they're net debtors because of the almost $1 Trillion in profits annually extracted by firms and then offshored, precluding any kind of ability for Politicians to enact anything; if they're not complicit in such things which many of them are. Then, due to these deficits in things like Tax Revenue even if we accept the first order of Imperialist domination, these countries are then further preyed upon by the IMF, offering them loans in order to service these debts (many of them false debts instituted at the end of anti-colonial movements by powers such as France), under stipulations of all policy essentailly being dictated to them by Western powers. This leverage is then used to further enable the extraction mechanisms from these nations whilst they get further and further into debt peonage.
Yes this is irrelevant and a Liberal framework, who advocates for this? Any set of politicians or leaders who even attempt to oppose the Western powers are quickly dispatched regardless of their political affinities. We see this with Communists such as Sankara, Social Democrats with Gaddafi, or even Liberals of different flavours in the case of various nations in the MENA region.
100% agreed, my positions are wholly consistent with this, if I made it seem like I was advocating for this then I guess I wasn't clear enough. I've outlined my position on how radically we will have to change more or less all facets of Society in other threads. Capital & Climate Change are going to force this to happen.
The vast majority of the Third World is going to become a dust bowl within the next 50 years so you're not going to get any arguments from me on this, but the fact remains we will need to massively develop certain inhabitable parts of these regions as a Communist Project in order to manage the transition of mass migration north by the global south.
You guys seem to think Malthus was making some sort of socioeconomic statement when he was simply publishing biological mathematics. Like you're not actually arguing against anything Malthus wrote but people who are worried about overpopulation. This is "stalin killed people and he read marx so marx was evil" level thinking.
This may be true but it's not Malthusianism.
Malthus was basically correct about pre-capitalist conditions. There was just no way he could have predicted the demographic transition that came as a result of the industrial revolution.
We tend to underestimate the historical importance of capitalism. We've broken through the limits that ordinarily govern animal populations. It's crazy.
We don’t have an infinate number of people, and will never have one.
Than the solution is to cut production on consumer goods. Not kill people.
The fertility rate is declining. By the end of the century it will be near zero.
one does not simply cut production in capitalism
Also your little image there is misleading as it implies a population decline by 2100.
your source for the image
Today, the world’s population continues to grow, albeit more slowly than in the recent past. Ten years
ago, the global population was growing by 1.24 per cent per year. Today, it is growing by 1.10 per cent
per year, yielding an additional 83 million people annually. The world’s population is projected to
increase by slightly more than one billion people over the next 13 years, reaching 8.6 billion in 2030, and
to increase further to 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100
I'm not sure he was. In urban areas with greater security and stability (if not better quality of life) than less developed areas, even before the industrial revolution, people were having fewer births, and the sheer capacity to cause linear growth is already a break from the Malthusian cycle.
too little too late especially in regards with incoming climate collapse before the end of the century, a few degree difference which is already locked in, means obliteration of large swathes of current arable land and that's before addressing topsoil and phosphorus depletion along with issues around any modern food "network" that relies extensively on unsustainable fuel sources to exist
How do you figure you maintain those areas? You need a shitty agricultural basis to support them.
The only way a pre-capitalist society could possibly break out of the Malthusian trap is with severe birth control policies. It's pure utopianism though. For such a revolutionary change to take place you need a globally integrated society like we have now.
see pic related
Population growth is slowing down. And it’s very likely that after 2,100 it will start decreasing.
aquifers are drying up fool
that will btfo crop yields
As long as a growing population is involved, it is. We are already experiencing preludes to wider conflicts over dwindling resources. The Central American conflict has in part to do with some energy bullshit. And modern agriculture is energy intensive. Technological growth has added a lot of slack, but we're close to stretching it to its limits.
How does global warming interact with this?
Also not Malthusianism. Malthus describes a self-limiting cycle, not limit of resources to be drawn from
Malthusianism is a question of the rate of production compared to the popluation, not in terms of whether or not the earth has enough resources to sustain people.
You know the person who had the greatest positive impact on the environment of this planet? Genghis Khan, because he massacred 40 million people. There was no one to farm the land, forests grew back, carbon was dragged out of the atmosphere. And had this monster not existed, there'd be another billion of us today, jostling for space on this dying planet.
Urban & social life spontaneously allowed selective breeding, crop improvement, agronomical research, natural science discoveries, in a word, technology, read Marx.
this would be good because it would increase the amount of labor being used for production, including for environmental research tech.
lol
Did you read Malthus?
Can you give any evidence for the claim that Genghis Khan 's killing spree had actually any influence on the number of people alive today, given that Khan lived between 1162 – 1227.
There is several centuries time for the population to recover and reach the population cap set by agricultural limitations. So that by the time the industrial revolution comes around and changes the population equation there would have been no difference.
I think that in that show (Utopia) they use a virus to make everybody infertile except for a small group of people, that is selected by their ethnicity because the virus will detect that and spare them, or something.
Anyway it's kind of contradictory to think that Humanity is incapable of self-managing to mind resource limitation, and at the same time, think that this giant biogenic culling is going to change anything. The Survivor group would according to this logic just expand uncontrollably again, and humanity would be back were they started.
This always struck me as ethnic clean.sing fantasy, combined with ruler mentality of hating the masses, that uses the environmental problems as pretext.
The primary problem doesn't seem to be the number of people , but rather what they do. I don't think that capitalism can be "green" or recirculate resources. Consider the path resources take in money-market schemes they are dug out of the ground, modified/combined in production and then dispersed all over the place in distribution. If you wanted to recirculate resources, you have to have dispersed-resource-collection and disassembly of products. Commercial recycling is a tiny niche sector with low margins. A planed economy that calculates in labour time and resource can easily have a sophisticated recycling sector, and for example require people to trade in their trash for resource tokens.
We need another ghengis khan tbh
In Utopia the intent is to use a vaccine for a form of flu to make 19 out of every 20 people infertile. The organisation intending to use it however does not seek to do so on an ethnic basis, while the creator of the virus seeks to use it to preserve a group in South East Asia with low cancer rates, low rates of heart disease, etc.
In the end, he decides instead to limit the vaccine to only save Roma people from sterilisation, and later then he alters it to only save Roma people from the actual flu virus. He does this to protect his own daughter, and also because he's become a paranoid schizophrenic.
The show works pretty hard to make clear the plan of the organisation (The Network) is totally unfeasible and most of its devotees are either brainwashed or insane.
youtube.com
I must have misjudged that then, thanks for clearing that up
To be fair, the shows creator outright says "Their plan is horrible but no one else is offering a solution" (to the issue of the environment), and at times their position is made very sympathetic (in that they are trying to save the world). This is juxtaposed with the organisation doing various atrocities, such as;
They also bring Margaret Thatcher into power.
This must be the brainlet from the last thread like this, claiming that carrying capacity doesn't apply to humans because of tool use.
The green revolution didn't prove Malthus wrong, though it did exacerbate and greatly extended the underlying problem of ever more resources required for ever more people that he was warning people about. This is a Jordan Peterson tier take, like bringing up the Simon-Ehrlich wager from the 80s in that recent debate. "Someone in the past had a bet that we'd hit resource scarcity by now but they were wrooooong malthLOSIANS btfo again lol it's impossible to run out of food, have you been to a grocery store lawl the market will always and has always proved food for cheap and there's never been starvation under capitalism get real commies, global warming is a hoax and you can grow corn and soy even in 200 degree weather without soil and with no water during a civil war it's literally impossible to not have food shut up already problem solved.".
This is a way bigger series of interconnected problems with their own feedback loops than simply food production and distribution, brainlet. Treating malthus like collapse-jesus is simply strawmanning. Pretending that An Essay on the Principle of Population is what people are arguing about in the modern era is either a display of willful ignorance or, again, simply strawmanning so hard that it makes you look like a retard. Malthus was writing in the late 1700s-early 1800s. Do you really think that this is as far as the evolving conversation on resource scarcity went?
High as fuck on hopuim, detached from the material conditions of this planet, unable to live with the terror of your own reality. The mindset of a child is on display here.
So far the only person to raise an interesting vein of discussion in the thread is and they've been totally ignored. Step your game up, Zig Forums, and purge these poorly disguised climate denialist threads.
This is true
citations please
Those are some bold claims in the face of empirical data. The birthrate may be dropping, but the growth in population is still exponential. A population of 7.7 billion growing at a rate of 1.07% in 2019 is still more than 3.8 billion growing at a rate of 2.01% in 1972. Also this
No they aren’t. It’s the UN’s projection of the rate of population growth. Which will be at near zero by 2,100.
Long term decrease in the rate of growth is not exponential growth. It’s logarithmic.
The population is expected to keep growing until 2,100. However the amount of growth will be a manageable amount.
Your graphs are outdated. Get better ones.
If everyone lived like the avg person in a western industrialized, of course there would be a concern of overpopulation. However, the main contradiction now as was in Marx's time is not overpopulation but the fact that there is too much product being hoarded by a tiny minority. Only viable way to create a sustainable environment is through the appropriation of all wealth and production by the working class who will democratically make decisions which is in the interests of all of humanity. The working class will plant trillions of trees and millions of sq. miles worth of seaweed and aquatic plants. It will heavily invest in renewable energy and through mass education and stable economic conditions create a population which will breed just enough to replenish the population.
The stances being advanced here are fundamentally anti-Marxist and pessimistic, which is counter-revolutionary at a time when the working class is again waking from its slumber