If we don’t abolish capitalism, capitalism will abolish us.

People have been talking about overpopulation for a very, very long time. Overpopulation is a prominent myth that remains largely unchallenged. Liberals, environmentalists, and xenophobes alike assert that the human population is out-growing the “carrying capacity” of the Earth who attribute global warming, mass migration, pollution to the growth of the global human population. However, such claims are emblematic of capitalist attitudes.  Earth is not overpopulated and given current demographic trends never will be. All of the problems that are blamed on 'overpopulation' are not population problems but social problems caused by the nature of our economic system. The idea of 'overpopulation' is rooted in racism and nationalism which targets the poor and people of colour. Africa is poor, not overpopulated. If anything, Africa struggles from UNDER-population. It doesn’t have enough people to effectively exploit its own resources. Africans suffer not because of their own use of its natural resources but because of the manner in which the natural resources are stolen by the West.

The ideal fertility rate is around 2.1 children/woman, but in developing counties (due to war, famine and inadequate medical care), it's closer to 2.3 children/woman. The total global fertility rate for the 2010s (so far) is 2.36 children/woman, and has been consistently falling since the 1950s. If 'overpopulation' was a problem, it seems we've already corrected it. The countries whose fertility rates are above the 2.3 ideal replacement rate are overwhelmingly poor and developing nations: whose citizens consume  fewer resources than the citizens of 'developed' nations. If population rates continue to drop, we're going to need newcomers from high-growth countries to supplement our workforce. We will need immigration from high growth countries to support our ageing populations.

Carrying capacity is a well-known and widely accepted concept. It's basic idea is sustainability requires balance. The idea of Earth's carrying capacity goes something like this: Humans need certain resources to survive, food, water and shelter. A sustainable habitat is one in which supply of and demand for these resources are balanced. Some environmentalists assert that current consumption rates have breached or will breach the carrying capacity of our planet. This view assumes carrying capacity to be static. Carrying capacity is not a fixed number and estimates vary widely depending on availability of resources and differing lifestyles of people in different parts of the world are consuming different amounts of those resources. 

The ideal use of technology is to find ways to make fewer resources stretch much farther and  not the nest fouling result of technological application under capitalism. Nuclear and solar energy are both clearly capable of providing large quantities of energy for large numbers of people without producing much carbon emissions. Adaptive agricultural systems are similarly capable of meeting the dietary needs of many more people.

Technology can cope with the growing demands placed on carrying capacity or planetary boundaries. The problem is that technology is not neutral. In present-day society, it is determined, shaped, and controlled by capitalist social relations from its design through its implementation. Technological innovation under capitalism is overwhelmingly introduced with the fundamental goal of enhancing profits and capital accumulation.  Technological innovations under capitalism come at the cost of the environment. Capitalism lacks any intrinsic mechanism for regulating negative social and ecological side effects, which are deemed “externalities.” The most that can be achieved, and then only under the pressure of social movements, is limited regulation.

The carrying capacity concept is fraught with problems from an ecological point of view. Carrying capacity is an idealised concept not to be taken literally. When applied to ecosystems, and even more, human society, it falls apart. The fundamental flaw is failure to consider the role of social structure and relationships.

It is capital accumulation which is responsible for most resource use and waste, but does not derive from consumption, much less from human need, although it demands increasing levels of consumption and strives toward unending growth. We should ask why must advertisers spend billions of dollars on marketing if people seek never satisfying levels of consumption? If people decide that they (individually and as a society) need to over-consume then socialism cannot possibly work. Under capitalism, there is a very large industry devoted to creating needs. Capitalism requires consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and drives us to consume up to, and past, our ability to pay for that consumption. In a system of capitalist competition, there is a built-in tendency to stimulate demand to a maximum extent. Firms, for example, need to persuade customers to buy their products or they go out of business.  Zero consumption growth would destroy the capitalist economy.

 It is not population growth that leads to encroachment on planetary boundaries but capital’s unquenchable and ever-expanding thirst for profits.

Let us define scarcity and abundance. It is limited supply - versus - boundless demand. Our wants are said to essentially “infinite” and the resources to meet them "limited" is the usual claim. According to this argument, scarcity is an unavoidable fact of life. It applies to any goods where the decision to use a unit of that good entails giving up some other potential use. In other words, whatever one decides to do has an "opportunity cost" — that is the opportunity to do something else which one thereby forgoes; economics is concerned with the allocation of scarce resources.

However, abundance is not a situation where an infinite amount of every good could be produced. Similarly, scarcity is not the situation which exists in the absence of this impossible total or sheer abundance. Abundance is a situation where productive resources are sufficient to produce enough wealth to satisfy human needs, while scarcity is a situation where productive resources are insufficient for this purpose. Abundance is a relationship between supply and demand, where the former exceeds the latter. In socialism, a buffer of surplus stock for any particular item, whether a consumer or a producer good, can be produced, to allow for future fluctuations in the demand for that item, and to provide an adequate response time for any necessary adjustments. Thus achieving abundance can be understood as the maintenance of an adequate buffer of stock in the light of extrapolated trends in demand. The relative abundance or scarcity of a good would be indicated by how easy or difficult it was to maintain such an adequate buffer stock in the face of a demand trend (upward, static, or downward). It will thus be possible to choose how to combine different factors for production, and whether to use one rather than another, on the basis of their relative abundance/scarcity.

Humans behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in. Human behaviour reflects society. In a society such as capitalism, people's needs are not met and reasonable people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard goods because possession provides some security. People have a tendency to distrust others because the world is organised in such a dog-eat-dog manner. If people didn't work society would obviously fall apart. To establish socialism the vast majority must consciously decide that they want socialism and that they are prepared to work in socialist society. If people want too much? In a socialist society "too much" can only mean "more than is sustainability can produce."

There is also in capitalist society a tendency for individuals to seek to validate their sense of worth through the accumulation of possessions. Much of what we falsely consider to be essential to our well-being - the pursuit of status via conspicuous consumption - will be rendered totally meaningless. In socialism, the only way to gain the respect of your fellows is through your contribution to society and not what you take out of it. Capitalism drives us to consume and it has created an entire advertising industry devoted to the psychological manipulation of our desires.  It does not matter how modest one's real needs may be or how easily they may be met; capitalism's "consumer culture" leads one to want more than one may materially need since what the individual desires is to enhance his or her status within this hierarchal culture of consumerism and this is dependent upon acquiring more than others have got. But since others desire the same thing, the economic inequality inherent in a system of competitive capitalism must inevitably generate a pervasive sense of relative deprivation. What this amounts to is a kind of institutionalised envy and that will be unsustainable as more peoples are drawn into alienated capitalism

Socialists are seeking to create a "steady-state economy" which corresponds to what Marx called "simple reproduction" - a situation where human needs were in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating this continuously from production period to production period. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilised at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods. The point about such a situation is that there will no longer be any imperative need to develop productivity, i.e. to cut costs in the sense of using less resources; nor will there be the blind pressure to do so that is exerted under capitalism through the market. Of course, technical research would continue and this would no doubt result in costs being able to be saved, but there would be no external pressure to do so or even any need to apply all new productivity enhancing techniques. Since the needs of consumers are always needs for a specific product at a specific time in a specific locality, we will assume that socialist society would leave the initial assessment of likely needs to a delegate body under the control of the local community (although, other arrangements are possible if that were what the members of socialist society wanted).

In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period, would enable the local distribution committee to estimate what the need for food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period. Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants, builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the bodies charged with coordinating supplies to local communities.

The talk of carrying capacity isn’t particularly helpful and supports the status quo. They claim there are simply too many people and depict the teeming slums of Mumbai, show the starving babies with bloated bellies in Africa, or the over-crowded refugee camps, then they tell us the planet cannot support these numbers. Something’s got to give. And they arguments bring the argument closer to home with the scare stories that Europe or the United States needs to close its borders to immigration from poor countries for having finally gotten our own birth-rate down to more or less stabilise our population, the last thing we need is an invasion of of poor (non-white) using up our social services and crowding us out (since blacks and browns breed faster than we do.) The very concept of carrying capacity is a fabrication designed for social control. The possibility of marginalized populations being subject to genocide, eugenics, and sterilisation to “curb overpopulation” isn’t far-fetched. We have all heard environment activists tell us to bring the poor of the undeveloped and developing nations to the reasonable and decent standard of living of the developed world would mean requiring a half-dozen Earths. It’s a dangerous—and stupid. It’s dangerous because it serves as propaganda to keep activists from working to take down the system. Much of the alleged concern for sustainability is a cover for exploitation. Overpopulation debates rarely centres on Western and Westernized nations as being part of the problem, instead, it targets on how birth rates in Asian and African countries are leading mankind down a road of imminent disaster. For many, a poor family of nine in Niger will contribute to the demise of the Earth more than ONE American, whose energy consumption on average is equivalent to the consumption of over hundreds of people in some countries. Yet, today 1% of the world’s population controls over half of the world’s wealth; the next 9% occupy 40% of the world’s wealth. Western and Westernized nations, make up 90% of the global economy. It is irrational that the blame for why some are forced to eat food made from literal garbage is attributed to them having big families and not to today’s wealth and resource inequality.  Culpability is shifted to the ones who suffer the most because of our capitalist economic system.

 The existence of carrying capacity concept is to maintain the ruling class’s current stranglehold over the lives of the poor—and to extend this stranglehold into the most intimate aspects of their lives such as decisions as family size and childbearing, talking of people in terms of mathematics, X number of people on Y amount of land containing Z amount of resources.  It presumes people do not make rational short-, mid-, and long-term family-planning decisions based on their circumstances, experiences, and social values into which they’ve been acculturated. Nor do they give any thought to the personal, social, or environmental consequences of their decisions. It presumes people — especially poor, black/brown, uneducated people — breed with no thought whatsoever. It presumes they breed like rabbits. It is no coincidence that claims of overpopulation in African and Asian countries are coupled with concern for the diminishing replacement rates of Western/Westernized nations. As people elsewhere are told to breed less, people domestically are told to breed more to preserve national identities and maintain an adequate population size.

“What Rubbish” is the usual response to the socialist analysis “Humans exploit their surroundings! Human needs are in opposition to the natural world. It’s what we do.”  But hunger and misery caused by overpopulation are not inevitable, and we’re not doomed to crowd out the Earth until there’s nowhere left to live. Our ancestors walking out of Africa could not have survived near the Arctic Circle with the Savannah lifestyle they knew – but the Inuit have learned how to thrive there for thousands of years – with only Neolithic technology. There plenty more for us to learn about farming Earth’s various habitats. There is still ample potential in applying what we know now to our surroundings. Figures for carrying capacity are always and utterly tied to current technology and practices. Any talk of carrying capacity should start by saying “If we never, ever do a single thing different than we do today…” 

 By the way, there is no shortage of food in the world.  It’s not a quantity issue, it’s a distribution issue. Overpopulation rhetoric makes those who have had the least impact on the deteriorating condition of the Earth most culpable. It is nonsensical to presume that having fewer children is the solution to abject poverty.