Too many Percyites

"Too Many People?" is a book by Ian Angus and Simon Butler, two eco-socialists from Canada and Australia, respectively. While the book never reveals their exact political identity, they are clearly Marxist in political orientation, and seem to be connected to the Australian group known as the DSP or "Socialist Alliance". A less dogmatic eco-socialist, Joel Kovel, have written one of the forewords. The book comes with positive blurbs from Raj Patel, John Bellamy Foster and others.

Angus and Butler attack what they call "populationism", otherwise better known, rightly or wrongly, as Malthusianism or Neo-Malthusianism. Typical representatives of populationism include Paul Ehrlich, Garret Hardin, David Pimentel, Dave Forman and the so-called Cairo Consensus. The authors acknowledge that populationism is a broad spectrum of opinions, but its lowest common denominator is the idea that overpopulation is one of the main roots of environmental destruction (or *the* main root), and that meaningful action to stop pollution, climate change and other environmental hazards must include population control as a top priority. Populationists may also demand an end to immigration, and often blame voluntary consumer choice for the profligate consumption habits in the rich nations.

In the opinion of Angus and Butler, environmental destruction isn't caused by overpopulation, immigration or voluntary consumer choice. Rather, the culprit is capitalism, a system based on an irrational drive to accumulate super-profits no matter what. As long as capitalism remains firmly in place, a drop in population numbers will not affect the level of environmental destruction. It will remain the same, or might even get worse! The authors call for an "ecological revolution" that will replace capitalism with eco-socialist governments devoted to the interests of the workers and farmers. They mention Cuba and Bolivia as positive examples, while criticizing China and the Soviet Union.

It can hardly be denied that the authors score quite a few points against the populationists. The worst polluters are the developed countries in the "global North", despite their smaller and in some cases contracting populations. By contrast, the global South has an enormous population and demographic momentum, but due to poverty and underdevelopment, its "carbon footprint" cannot match that of North America, Western Europe and Australia. (China might be catching up.) Nor is everyone in the rich nations equal: multi-national corporations both consume and pollute more than ordinary citizens, let alone low-paid or unemployed immigrants. As for voluntary consumer choice, Angus and Butler believe that mass manipulation of consumer demand through advertising, popular culture and "planned obsolescence" makes consumer choices anything but strictly voluntary. Population control programs in India, China and other Third World nations don't seem to have stopped global (or local) environmental destruction.

Despite this, I nevertheless found "Too Many People?" both frustrating, simplistic and dogmatic. That really existing populationism has many things wrong, doesn't mean that population levels are unimportant, or become important only at some ridiculously high level (say 20 billion people). The bottom line of this book is that overpopulation isn't really a problem at all. The world's population will peak at 10 billion in 2050, and then stabilize or even go down. Therefore there is apparently no need to worry. The authors believe that 10 billion people can easily be fed even by organic agriculture! Feeding our present numbers using the food industry we have today, would therefore be even easier. Peak oil, pesticides, destruction of the soil, overfishing and the accumulated effects of climate change are strangely absent from this scenario. Yet, Angus and Butler are aware of these problems (with the possible exception of peak oil) when not discussing population. Their agnostic or negative attitude to population issues comes straight from Marx and Engels, who believed that rapid economic growth and high technology would end scarcity and thereby liberate humanity from class society. Engels acknowledged overpopulation only as an "abstract possibility", and didn't propose any specific measures against it. Please note that a centralized planned economy logically means control over both production and consumption, yet Marxists are strangely myopic when it comes to controlling the number of actual consumers! This is connected to the idea of near-unlimited economic growth and progress, an idea Marxism (ironically) have in common with the cornucopian strand of pro-capitalist ideology. Are we to believe Angus and Butler, there is no such thing as carrying capacity either, not even among insects?!

"Too Many People?" strike me as naïve or simplistic on a number of other points, too. The authors conjure up a picture of a First World working population virtually *forced* into mass consumption and pollution by raw corporate power and manipulative advertising. At one point, they opine that it wasn't the consumers who forced Exxon Mobil to build oil wells and extract oil. What they pretend not to notice is that oil is the ultimate fuel, almost too good *not* be used due to its high amount of energy, the ease with which it's transported, etc. The alternatives proposed by the authors (wind, geothermal, wave and solar power) aren't anywhere near oil and other fossil fuels in efficiency. If given a voluntary choice, consumers in the rich nations are more likely to demand that Exxon Mobil (or a state-run, socialist version of the same company) continue extracting oil, rather than substantially lowering their standard of living. The same is doubly true of low-paid or unemployed immigrants, who moved to the North precisely to get a bigger slice of the global pie. Nor is it likely that Third World nations with vast oil reserves will give them up in favour of "wave power" or organic bean-stalks. (This would include Hugo Chavez' Venezuela, which the Socialist Alliance supports!) Even from a Marxist perspective, the authors' view of the global North is curious. Do they really believe that the system works only because a small clique of billionaires manipulates public opinion? Are there no classes in the global North whose material interests are objectively pro-capitalist? How about the vast middle classes? The labour aristocracy? Kulaks? If the entire system is simply based on clever lies, it should have exploded long ago...

I think a fundamental problem with "Too Many People?" is precisely its attempt to weld together Marxism and environmentalism. (Or perhaps make eco-socialism more dogmatically Marxist?) As already pointed out, Marxism is based on the idea of unending growth and progress, a very fundamental presupposition of modern, industrial civilization. True, Marxism wants planned growth for the benefit of the working people, but the bottom line is still accumulation until a stage of superabundance is reached and communism ushered in. Small wonder Marx and Engels saw capitalism as a progressive and inevitable stage in world history! Socialism isn't the negation of capitalist accumulation, but rather its Hegelian "Aufheben", a very different thing. Thus, a consistent Marxism must criticize capitalism not on the ground that it accumulates, expands and grows, but rather on the ground that it does so in an irrational manner, which in the end might lead to a collapse that ends growth altogether. The "productivist" view of socialism prevalent in the Soviet Union (which Butler and Angus criticize) was in reality a perfectly reasonable exegesis of the Marxist project. By contrast, a consistent environmentalism questions precisely these simplistic ideas of Progress, making the Greening of Marxism a problematic proposition. In effect, many contemporary Marxists want to believe in a transition to renewable energy sources and more energy conservation, which will nevertheless still somehow lead to economic growth enough for 10 billion people (or more?). But this is simply another version of the current, "capitalist" growth paradigm: "sustainable growth"! At least judging by "Too Many People?", Greened Marxism hasn't been able to solve this contradiction between two worldviews that are at bottom very, very different.

Personally, I find the book's seemingly sensible proposals for world-wide eco-socialism to be utopian even at best. At one point, the writers admit that time really is running out (they are dead right, there!), contradicting their indifference towards population issues. But if time is running out, how likely is it that an eco-socialist program can be implemented on a global scale, especially in the global North, where the centres of capitalism are located? Apart from Cuba and Bolivia, Angus and Butler can point to no example of a regime that even resembles eco-socialism (their silence on Venezuela is interesting!). A global collapse is more likely than global eco-socialism, and when that happens, Herr Engels' dictum about overpopulation being "abstract" will no longer apply. Take Cuba. Do the authors really believe that Cuba could have survived on organic agriculture if the island's population had been twice or thrice as large? What will happen to Venezuela when peak oil hits home? Or to Saudi Arabia or Iran, for that matter? (Perhaps a relatively isolated nation like Bolivia can make it?) Of course, a global crisis will also make it impossible to sustain (pun intended) the illusion that a large part of the North's affluent population will somehow benefit from eco-socialist "wave power"...

Ian Angus and Simon Butler might not want to face the twin problems of overpopulation and taken-for-granted overconsumption, but I think these very problems will hit us - and I do mean "us" - hard in the decades to come. It won't be pretty, and it probably won't be very eco-socialist either. While global capitalism would have to go, the remaining societies and communities will probably have to find other survival strategies than a combination of solar power and Marxism...