Overpopulated world, or not?

Many people have come to see the tragic refugee situation as though it were more a problem for us than for the migrants. We have stopped caring about them. The reality of this on-going crisis is nothing short of a modern-day slave trade, with migrants treated as commodities. It’s as though nothing has changed in the 300 years since desert tribes used the very same routes to bring slaves to north Africa: Nigerian women told they are going to Italy to work as housemaids only to be trafficked into desert brothels with no idea when they might leave, young men cruelly beaten and held captive for months until their families pay a ransom

Three rival governments preside over the failed state of Libya, and the real power lies in the hands of armed militias. Libyans may rely on their own militias for protection, the migrants have nothing and no one to protect them.  Not only are desperate migrants at the mercy of people smugglers but also the authorities themselves – in the main, armed militias with no one to hold them to account and few other sources of income apart from the migrant trade. 

In the Libyan detention centres, migrants are locked up and left to rot. It’s a humanitarian disaster with barely any humanitarian organisations there to help. For tens of thousands of migrants in the country at the moment, they have no means of escape.   EU leaders have signed a deal with Libya. Far from helping people escape, this deal is aimed at keeping them there. The next step is to forcibly returning asylum seekers in Europe to Libyan prisons.

Despite the illusion of diversity we do all have more in common with workers worldwide than with the capitalist class as 95% of the worlds population own little more than their ability to work for a wage or a salary and the 5% capitalist class constitute a parasitic class to whose ends the diversity propaganda serves.. The overpopulation myth threatens to overtake the human nature myth as the chief explanation for the evils of the modern world where hunger, disease, the retarded development of backward countries, social unrest, political instability, urban sprawl, destruction of wildlife, city squalor, crowded mental hospitals, violence, all kinds of pollution and ecological upset, the shortage of housing and the desecration of the countryside are all confidently attributed to the problem of an excess of human beings. The readiness to accept the "overpopulation" argument arises from a lack of understanding of the way capitalism works.

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. "There isn't enough to go round", so we must be restricted in what we are allowed to consume. It has become a cliché to speak of "this overcrowded planet” yet if, for example, the entire world's population were now placed in the United States, the population density in that country would still be little more than that of Holland.

It is not overpopulation is the problem but the private, corporate or state ownership of the means of production and distribution with its competitive ethos and accumulative 5% minority parasitic profit system allied with the coercive state apparatus and war machines to aid , back-up its plundering and wasteful use of nature given raw resources as well as the exploitation of the 95% human resources in pursuit of accumulation of profits.

We are more than capable, with a commonly owned world, of sustaining a superabundance of the necessities of life with production for use and not for sale, allied to free access to them, with democratic control exercised by all through delegation, not government or states allied to a self-regulating equilibrium of virtuous, holistically sustainable and ethical environmental standards. Poverty is caused in the developed world by capitalism, it takes place at the point of production. It is INEVITABLE. The political differences are small between the governing and aspirant governing parties and in the less developed world poverty is caused by the same capitalist exploitation of resources in which tribal and other organised clan, family or ethnic differences are exploited to capital's advantage in power grabs over natural resources and raw materials.


Each new mouth to feed produces a pair of hands to be exploited by the parasite class.
All wealth springs from labour. A democratic, post-capitalist, commonly-owned, production-for-use society can utilise resources and technology to introduce a fully automated luxury communism with free access to the wealth thus socially produced. We can run society ourselves, rid the planet of government over us, war between rival capitalist concerns over, trade routes, raw materials, markets and spheres of geopolitical interests.

 Housing and anything else in capitalism is produced to make a profit from market for a parasite class and not to satisfy human needs. Capitalism is responsible for this , deliberate creation and manipulation of markets in human misery and for driving down wages and reducing availability of essential commodities if profit is not derived form their production, not immigrants. We are quite capable of producing for use to satisfy all human needs and ushering in the post-capitalist future. If ownership and control of production and distribution was in the hands of all and production was for use instead of for profit, with free access,there would not be the same wasteful production in wasteful competition to satisfy markets with duplication of efforts, while human needs go unmet. Capitalism depends on poverty stricken workers selling their ability to work for a minimum ration of what they need to survive and reproduce future wage slaves and these conditions of waged slavery ensure a ready supply of workers to exploit now and in the future.


Wee Matt