The Anti-Malthusian Struggle In The Communist Party of China
Mao was previously for population growth.
But increasingly as the trend in the party and country trended toward collaborating with imperialism this robust defence of human beings was slowly ground down.
In 1974 the United Nations held a meeting in Bucharest on depopulation. One hundred and thirty seven countries (all except the Vatican) made commitments aimed at reducing fertility, after which the world population growth rate went down.
The Chinese delegation issued this against the filthy provable lies and imperialist propaganda of accusations of “overpopulation”.
The claim that “overpopulation is the reason why the have-not countries are poor” is a worn-out tune of the superpowers. What a mass of figures they have calculated in order to prove that the population is too large, the food supply too small and natural resources insufficient! But they never calculate the amount of natural resources they have plundered, the social wealth they have grabbed and the super-profits they have extorted from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Should an account be made of their exploitation, the truth with regard to the population problem will at once be out. Their multitude of population statistics will not help them a bit either. The average population to a square kilometer is only 12 in Africa, and 15 in Latin America. Though population density in the developing countries of Asia is a bit higher, it is nonetheless lower than that in the developed countries of Western Europe. How can it be said then that the have-not countries are poor because of over-population? They claim that poverty can be overcome by reducing the rate of population growth. If so, why are there still so many jobless and underfed people in the two superpower countries where the rate of population growth is relatively low and population density fairly small? 1
American Christian fundamentalists and anti-abortion activists would later threaten to pull funding for China because of the eugenics policies that the American imperialists had pushed on China. China was merely implementing the eugenics policies drawn up in American organisations, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council and Kissingers National Security Memorandum 200.
Yet American “conservatives” (what do they conserve? The Nation? They sold that to multi-nationals. The family? Don’t make me laugh. Culture? They’ve degraded culture into the lowest common denominator filth and pornographied everything) would associate Communism with the brutal eugenics policies of Mao, then Deng waged against their own people under the pressure of American imperialists.
The Revisionists Win
The pathetic Deng Xiao Ping would claim by 1986
‘Certain people abroad who oppose China’s family-planning policy are secretly hoping that China would stay poor forever. Birth control measures are helping China to develop more rapidly.’ UPI, Deng says abortion foes want China to be ‘poor forever’, April 23, 1986
American Monopolies Push For Depopulation Under Kissinger
Julian Simon pointed out how it became US foreign policy to depopulate the globe to keep the world safe for Anglo-American monopolies.
the Population Branch of the U.S. State Department Agency for International Development (AID)-for many years the single most important U.S. population official-publicly said that the United States should act to reduce fertility worldwide for the country~ own economic self-interest.[enf_note](Julian Simon, Ultimate Resource 2, p55) [/efn_note]
And a secret policy assessment issued by the National Security Council in 1974 (U.S. National Security Council1974; Sobo 1991b)-finally declassified in 1989, but with many pages still blacked out-specifies population-control activities for U.S. governmental agents to carry out in various countries, especially Africa; this includes twisting the arms of foreign governments in a variety of ways to ensure “cooperation.” (ibid)
The Malthusians Are Pushing Bourgeois Pseudo Science
Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage slave society is as foolishly naive as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital. (Lenin, Marx-Engels-Marxism, p57)
And like the rest of his book (Ultimate Resource 2) he proves how scientifically incorrect the Malthusian scaremongers are. A litany of bourgeois pseudo-Science.
Afterall a “mouth to feed” has arms and legs to labour. What’s more the increased concentration of people means more effiecient production processes.
Please note that “technological advance” as used in these examples most definitely does not mean only “science.” Scientific geniuses-if that term is meaningful-are just one part of the knowledge process. Much technological advance comes from people who are neither well educated nor well paid-the dispatcher who develops a slightly better way of deploying the taxis in her ten-taxi fleet, the shipper who discovers that garbage cans make excellent cheap containers, the supermarket manager who finds a way to display more merchandise in a given space, the supermarket clerk who finds a quicker way to wrap the meat, the market researcher in the supermarket chain who experiments and finds more efficient and cheaper means of advertising the store’s prices and sale items, and so on.(ibid p421)
And the huge concentration of industry results in
The larger the industry relative to the U.K. or Canada base, the higher its productivity. This effect is very large. Productivity goes up roughly with the square root of output. That is, if you quadruple the size of an industry, you may expect to double the output per worker and per unit of capital employed.(ibid p442)
Now, Malthusianism was largely discredited by the Neo-Malthusians (Kissinger, Club of Rome, Rockefeller Foundation) etc and their supporters being discredited in real time.
Like bourgeois cretins revisiting countries after 10 years only to be proven wrong in every instance.
…anthropologist Richard Critchfield began “in the early 1960s reporting the seemingly hopeless crisis of people surplus and food scarcity in India and China” and gave up his beliefs in doom and gloom only after he revisited villages all over the world that he had studied earlier, and saw how they had progressed along with a growing population. “[T]here is a much happier ending than I ever expected to write when I set out ten years ago.” (ibid p61)
Resources
Julian Simon, over 800 odd pages lays out whilst human beings will never run out of resources. Largely because human beings have brains able to work out complex problems. We’re not beasts. And as technology progresses human beings substitute resources for better and different ones. Many bourgeois writers in the 19th century lamented the use of wood for ships, predicting that we would run out of trees in the entire world by the mid 20th century. Lacking the imagination that we would substitute wood for steel in shipmaking.
The Malthusians of the modern era are as equally lacking in imagination.
Julian Simon states with certainty on our resources
Summing it all up, for nearly all of the important nonrenewable resources, the known or confidently expected world stores are thousands of times as great as the annual world consumption. For the few which like petroleum are available in relatively small quantities, substitutes are known or potential sources of alternative supply are at hand in quantities adequate to meet our current needs for many thousands of years. There is no prospect of the imminent exhaustion of any of the truly essential raw materials, as far as the world as a whole is concerned. Mother Eanh’s storehouse is far more richly stocked with goods than is ordinarily inferred. (ibid 95)
And that a declining population is a cut in real wages.
Low population growth brings a cut in real salaries for many, and a lack of the excitement that growth usually brings for all. In the 1960s Singapore gave people financial incentives to have fewer children. But after observing the results, Singapore turned completely around in the 1980s and gave incentives (though only to the middle class) to have more children.
(ibid p538)Another sort of study plots the growth rate of per capita income as a function of population density. Roy Gobin and I found that density has a positive effect on the rate of economic growth, as seen in figure 34-1.5
(ibid p540)And Kelley and Schmidt (1994) have massively confirmed the Simon-Gobin finding.
(ibid p540)
The Bourgeois Abandon The Resource Argument
The resource argument comes up every now and again yet the bourgeois prostitutes, pessimists and Malthusians are discredited on a scientific front. They enjoy so much popularity in the media because they are prostitutes in the harem of the bourgeoisie. An issue that has existed for hundreds of years. From natural resources laid out the criminal bourgeois outfit Club of Rome Limit’s To Growth to the bedwetting climatistas or the equally bedwetting “peak-oil” enthusiasts.
I would never have learned so much about the pitiful nature of men and how little they care about the pursuit of truly noble aims if I had not put them to the test through my scientific work.
I saw then that science, for most of them, is just a means of earning a living and that they will glorify error itself if it pays wages.[enf_note] Goethe [ /Goethe]
By the 1980s they came up with the “carbon” argument that the world contains too much carbon. It does not. Carbon is a necessity for life. And one of the elements Julian Simon pinpoints that humanity actually couldn’t do without.
Our technical message is clear: dwindling mineral resources in the aggregate, with the exception of reduced carbon and hydrogen, are per se unlikely to cause Malthusian catastrophe …. In the Age of Substitutability energy is the ultimate raw material. The living standard will almost surely depend primarily on the cost of prime energy. (ibid p96)
Which is why Alexander King, member of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, stated in the First Global Revolution
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.(Alexander King, The First Global Revolution: A Report By The Council Of The Club Of Rome, p115)
Sensationalism Sells
Julian Simon points out how much fake science there now is. I think he would be stunned off his clogs to see todays fake science.
The fact that there are any such reports in print is amazing, because people try to hide evidence of dishonest tactics. The existence of such public reports is strong evidence that a lot of this is going on. And it suggests that the participants are so convinced of the virtue of their ends that they believe that any means are justified, no matter how indecent.
p622
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the [Alaska National Wildlife Refuge pollution) debate is the false information being disseminated by well-meaning zealots who oppose any human activity on the Coastal Plain. Do they believe that their cause is so just that they are above and beyond the truth? (Walter Hickel, former governor of Alaska, 1991)
p624
Reagan administration was closer to this view than the previous Caner administration, and closer than the Democratic Congress, Planned Parenthood has spent large sums of money “accusing” those who are against population control of being the “Radical Right.”
p624
Realism On The Other Hand Does Not Sell
During the post World War 2 era the United States could not imagine a world without US rule and domination. Reaching the height of it’s global influence it is unsurprising that it would now become the headquarters for malthusianism worldwide. Something spelled out quite plainly by George Kennan who is largely responsible for starting the Cold war.
‘We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.’ – George Kennan, architect of the Cold War
Realism and positivity does not sell at all well however. In the post World War 2 Malthusian environment books like the below were withdrawn twice admist the torrent of drek, fake science and bourgeois pessimism pushed onto the population.
The great geologist Kirtley F. Mather wrote a book called Enough and To Spare in 1944 that reassured the public that resources would be plentiful; it was withdrawn from the University of Illinois library just twice in 1945 and 1952-prior (ibid p575)
Most Marxists today are a cultural phenomenon rather than a political phenomenon. Unable to understand the meaning of working for the working class they take on ridiculously ultra left moralistic terms and in reality push demands. Either demanding wholesale deindustrilaisation under Green quackery or shilling for degrowth.
Like CPGB-ML (shilling for Chinese revisionism on top)2.
Or CPB pushing degrowth 3.
These parties may have abandoned the working class. Julian Simon however is of course forced to pay tribute to the greatest anti-Malthusians of all time
It should be noted here, however, that the nineteenth-century writer who had the soundest understanding and presented the best statement of population economics, taking into account the role of knowledge creation, was Friedrich Engels, and through him, Marx.(ibid p642)
REFERENCES
- Population Council, Chinese Statements on Population at Bucharest, 1974, and Mexico City, 1984
- https://www.lalkar.org/article/4719/chinas-progress-shows-socialism-is-the-only-viable-political-framework-for-saving-the-planet
- https://www.diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/30/whores-of-the-genocidal-labour-party-revisionist-before-even-stalin-died-the-communist-party-of-great-britain-goes-in-for-degrowth/
