[Peace-discuss] Re: Population control

[Tom Mackaman]

Sorry to get in on this late, but this particular discussion raises in acute fashion the need to struggle for socialism.
   
  The political outlook of organizations that make population control (btw, sounds a bit too much like "pest control") the center of their activity or the central global problem is indeed Malthusian and reactionary to the core.  The great ecological catastrophe confronting humanity is not the result of population growth.  Instead, it arises inexorably from the capitalist profit system, which subordinates human need--including the need for a clean, healthy, and beautiful environment-- to the profit imperatives of rapacious corporate bodies and national governments.  We in the Socialist Equality Party and at the World Socialist Web Site insist unequivocally that there is enough for all, but that resources will continue to be needlessly squandered and the environment destroyed so long as economic decision-making remains confined to the thouroughly irrational and chaotic private profit system.
    
  This is a problem that needs to be clarified on the left, and beyond just the organizations mentioned in this discussion.  There is a Malthusian left in the US, much of which is found in the upper of the environmentalist movement.  Dave Foreman of Earth First (and later to sit on the Exectuive Board of the Sierra Club) it may be recalled, welcomed the 1980s Ethiopian famine that killed millions because he ludicrously believed that it would reduce pressure on African resources.  He also defended the practic of tree-spiking, an act which could potentially lead to the killing or injury of lumber industry workers.  His was a struggle not against American capitalism--the world's greatest threat to both people and nature--but against workers and the poor. 
    
  And of course, there is a significant, if minority, section of the Sierra Club that joins the far right in calling for greater immigration control in order to lessen the burden on the American ecosystem, or so the argument goes.
   
  Much of the Green Party as well as Ralph Nader attempt to pawn off as good coin the notion that some sort of sustainable, eco-friendly capitalism can be built.  "Green capitalism" is the slogan, I believe.  Or that a new, sustainable economy can be built in commune fashion, one town at a time.  And a great many reduce the question of ecological disaster to personal guilt.  In this view, problems such as global warming are reduced to an aggregate of individual consumer choices.  There could not possibly be a view more accommodating to the status quo and impervious to the need for social change. 
   
  The salvation of the environment, like the struggle against war, requires first and foremost a complete political break with both parties of big business and all those political formations that seek to pressure capitalism and capitalist politicians from the left.  The last several decades have rendered ample historical testimony to demonstrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that pressure politics and the politics of personal choice only serve to divert sincere environmental concerns into a blind alley.
    
  Required, instead, is the building of an international movement of the working class that holds as its aim the reorganization of society under the democratic control of working people, in order to meet pressing human and social needs.  Central among these needs, and of increasing urgency daily, is the defense and restoration of the ecosystem.
   
  Regards,
Tom
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