Many people tend to associate green campaigners with tree-hugging liberals but sadly there are few on the fringes of the environment movement determined to use the climate change crisis by blaming over-population as its cause to promote xenophobia and anti-immigration. Nor is it a new development but one that can trace its roots to the ‘blood and soil’ nationalism of Nazism.
What does "overpopulation" mean? It is not a simple question of numbers. It would be absurd to suggest that the uninhabitable Arctic regions are under-populated as compared with, say, the U.S.A., obviously natural factors must be taken into account. It is equally obvious that the same natural resources in succeeding ages with improved means of wealth production can support larger populations. Again, it is true that, as the industry is organised today, it will be found generally that dense populations can more conveniently be maintained in industrial areas than in agricultural areas.
The workers are not poor because of over-population, or low-wage immigrants, or foreign competition from high or low-waged nations, or because America bars further immigration, or because of protection or free trade, or because they don't work hard enough, or because they work too hard, or because raw materials are monopolised by certain capitalist groups.
The workers are poor because they are workers. They live in a capitalist world, where private property in the means of life means wealth, and being propertyless means the necessity of working and the accompaniment of economic subjection and poverty. The conditions of work and of the worker's standard of living are set by the capitalist system. Ending exploitation, utilising existing powers of production to the full, eliminating waste, are all dependent on the solution of the political problem of the conquest of political power.
Many environmentalists dismiss the contention that Nature is sufficiently bountiful for our needs. They ignore that more than half of the working population are not engaged in producing wealth at all, but are either idle or are carrying on purely wasteful services called into being by the capitalist system. There obviously are problems of population, but the problem of working-class poverty is not one of these.
Does anybody really believe that if the world’s population was drastically reduced to a few billion, the forest would not be logged to depletion, the pollutants would not be spewed, and greenhouse gas wouldn’t still accumulate in the air? These would just advance at a slower pace, not disappear.
The World Socialist Movement (WSM) has always held that a society of abundance for all is possible and can be quickly become a reality.
Technology has developed to the point where society can produce enough for everybody. What is lacking is the required movement to bring such a society into being.
Some scenarios assume that people love luxury and that they loathe work.
We suggest that neither of these is fully correct and take their reasoning from projecting into socialism the capitalist ethos.
Our critics remain fixated on what we can call the ‘Lazy, Greedy Hypothesis’ which simplistically preaches the conventional wisdom about peoples ‘selfishness’ and rejects a system that abolishes money, prices and the whole exchange economy, asserting that a money-free scheme would permit the least socially responsible to ‘win’ out because they would take more and give less.
Are some innately selfish and inherently idle? We say no and don’t share in this pessimistic perspective.
We have always thought we left ‘Original Sin’ to the religious blinkered, not for the progressive-minded to accept.
Human behaviour reflects society. In a dog-eat-dog society such as capitalism, people feel insecure.
Unappreciated and humiliated, there is a tendency for individuals to validate their sense of worth through the accumulation of possessions and conspicuous consumption to compensate for low status and low self-esteem.
Capitalism requires consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and there is a huge industry devoted to persuading us to consume.
Businesses are compelled to produce more in order to maximise profits with the effect that it creates the enormous waste of consumerism. Obsolescence is built into products that are designed to be irreparable and disposable so that customers are trapped in a throwaway cycle of purchasing upgrades and replacements.
The destruction of ecosystems and the capitalist exchange economy are inseparable parts of the same problem. The capitalist system depends upon growth and accumulation to sustain itself.
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