File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9712, message 149


Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 09:57:05 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Against Nature


REACTION TO 'AGAINST NATURE - THE MYTH OF TOO MANY'

Firstly thanks for the many interesting comments on the programme.

Two main charges were levelled against The Myth of Too Many, by Mark,
Rebecca and, in part Louis.

They were that capitalism is overpopulated, that there are natural
limits to the resources available; and that capitalist agriculture is
bad for people.

1. Capitalist overpopulation

Both Mark and Rebecca cite Marx's 'law of capitalist overpopulation'. I
believe this point has been answered admirably by Jerry L and Louis P.
Marx's view is that so-called overpopulation is not an absolute but a
relative condition. If one's aim is profit, then people become
superfluous as they are displaced by machinery. If one's aim is human
betterment, then mechanisation is a way of reducing the burden of work,
but not of withholding the means of subsistence.

The argument of the film was a rehearsal of Marx's basic point against
Malthus that there are not too many people, in an absolute sense, only
too many from the point of view of Western policy-makers.

The argument that 'there just is not enough to go round' has been a
staple of capitalist apologetics for centuries. But Marx demonstrates
that scarcity is not a natural condition of the soil, but a social
condition of capitalism: scarcity is something that capitalists
artificially generate to subordinate workers to their rule. The only
surprising thing is to see that capitalist argument reproduced in so
many different forms on these lists.

Mark in particular repeats the mantra 'you people in the third world
just cannot have what we have, I'm sorry, it's not my doing, that's just
the way it is'. Like every capitalist under pressure he is there saying,
I'm sorry lads, there's just not enough money to give you a rise. But
the point of the programme as far as food was concerned was that
whatever absolute limits to productivity, we are light-years away from
them. UN estimates confirm that with the application of fertilisers and
other techniques nobody in the world need go hungry. As long as the West
willfully prevents the Green revolution in Africa, then there will be
scarcity, but man-made scarcity, not natural scarcity. 

2. Capitalist agriculture

I thought Louis' points on this were well put. Louis separates out the
downside and the upside to capitalist agriculture in a balanced way. My
only difference would be that the downside and the upside represent two
distinguishable aspects of capitalist agriculture - the technological
and the social. In a socialist society, one would want to use the best
of the technological advances, like high yields, but without the
narrowly capitalist consequence of high unemployment.

In the here and now the problem faced by African agriculture is that it
is chronically under-productive. That means starvation. African farmers
especially are susceptible to the dumping of US agricultural surpluses,
because their own produce is uncompetetive (because it is labour
intensive). Dumping drives farmers off the land, leading to famine (as
in Somalia).

The Club of Rome, in their most recent report actually advocate labour
intensive farming in Africa. They say that increased productivity will
lead to unemployment. That is true as long as increased productivity
takes place under capitalism. But the Factor Four alternative is equally
grotesque. What they are saying is that African agriculture should be
operated as an outdoor releif scheme, or perhaps as a chain-gang, to
keep Africans gainfully employed. In this case, not only would African
societies be kept at a permanent disadvantage to the West in terms of
productivity, but Africans would be sentenced to the most onerous and
back-breaking labour, while US farmers happily rode along on their
Combine Harvesters.

There is no doubt that increased productivity in any sector leads to the
displacement of peoples under capitalism. But the answer is not to
arrest development at the stage of labour intensiveness, rather it is to
free social production from the narrow constraints of profitability.

Rebecca complains that the programme proposed technical solutions to the
social problems of scarcity. But agricultural yields are a technical
problem, and one that has a technical solution - application of Western
farming techniques. The deliberate witholding of those technologies is a
social problem - the capitalist monopoly over the forces of production.
In the context of African agriculture that monopoly means the West
standing in the way of Africa's green revolution. Challenging that
Western monopoly over those technologies was the point of the programme.

Fianlly, I was a bit surprised that people were so hyper-critical.
Population control has been a central component of Western domination in
the third world sinc the 1970s. I cannot believe that anyone here thinks
it is wrong to criticise the West for deliberately chopping out a
woman's ovaries against her will. Western population policies in the
third world are a form of slow extermination undertaken by Western
governments against people of colour. Isn't that something worth
exposing?
-- 
James Heartfield


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