Enough to go around

ONE OF the arguments made by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels is that capitalism has created the conditions of material abundance that has eliminated scarcity and created conditions for the end of class division, inequality and poverty--provided capitalism is superceded by socialism.

As wrote Engels in The Housing Question:

It is precisely this industrial revolution, which has raised the productive power of human labor to such a high level that--for the first time in the history of humanity--the possibility exists, given a rational division of labor among all, to produce not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also to leave each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture--science, art, human relations--is not only preserved, but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society, and further developed.

This isn't "common sense." Common sense is that there isn't enough to go around, and it's this scarcity in our society that accounts for famines and poverty.

There is no doubt that such arguments serve capitalism well. The belt must be tightened! Not their belts, mind you--they get bonuses and bailouts--but ours.

Are such arguments about scarcity true, or was Engels right?

First of all, it is obvious that the wealth of the world is not fairly distributed. We only have to note the fact that in 2005, the wealthiest 20 percent of people in the world accounted for 76.6 percent of total private consumption, whereas the poorest fifth accounted for 1.5 percent. That means, by the way, that the three-fifths accounted for 21.9 percent of consumption, and four-fifths for 23.4 percent!

The not-enough-to-go-around crowd would tell us that while this may be true, doling everything out more equally would only mean that we'd all share scarcity together. Hence, though it may be a hard pill to swallow, inequality must remain.

The late neo-Malthusian biologist Garrett Hardin, went even further. "Sharing wealth globally according to the formula 'to each according to his needs' amounts to embracing a commons of distribution," he wrote.

"But a commons-driven distribution system eventually ends in total ruin. A 'just' sharing of the world's wealth among all the inhabitants...would result in a continual, exponential growth of the human population," creating even more suffering.

If this piece of nonsense were true, then the birth rate would increase as we went up the income chain, an idea flatly contradicted by reality. But it's convenient to have a trained biologist able to explain solemnly and with a straight face that income redistribution is bad for the poor as well as the rich.

Admittedly, pointing out that wealth is obscenely distributed to a tiny number of extremely rich people at the expense of the rest of us isn't doesn't fully discredit the not-enough-to-go-around argument. But it's a good start.

If the issue is a superfluity of mouths to feed, then a strong case can be made, notwithstanding Hardin's crackpot theories, that the do-nothing idle rich deserve less than poorly paid workers and farmers, who produce something useful and whose labor allows the tiny minority at the top to consume so much.

The world's billionaires--497 people (about 0.000008 percent of world population)--were worth $3.5 trillion, or over 7 percent of annual world GDP in 2005. They would still be filthy rich even if they gave up 90 percent of that wealth. Let them eat cake.

IT'S COMMON sense to say that there isn't enough food to feed the world's growing population. The argument is wrong. According to the WorldHunger.org Web site:

World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day. The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.

That makes it all the more disturbing that 6 million children die every year from hunger-related diseases. The fact is that these deaths are preventable.

This fact is only surprising if we ignore that there has been, along with the industrial revolution, an agricultural revolution that has tremendously increased agricultural output per area of land and per unit of labor.

In the U.S., for example, one of the world's biggest agricultural producers, half the population lived on farms in 1900. In 1940, there were more than 30 million farmers in the U.S.; today, only 960,000 people claim farming as their principle occupation. Seventy-five percent of total agricultural output today is produced on only 125,000 farms. Yet agricultural output has increased enormously--it is 152 percent higher than it was in 1948.

That is why the neo-Malthusians--so named because their arguments echo the ideas of the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus--who claim that population growth is putting pressure on food supplies are so wrong.

The argument assumes that new people on the planet are nothing more than new mouths to feed, forgetting that they are also new hands able to produce, and that we have the technical capacity to produce more food than ever before. The new Malthusians never bother to explain how it is that there can be more food available for everyone when fewer and fewer people are producing it.

Finally, the Malthusians are wrong because they invert the relationship between poverty and population growth. As many studies show, poverty tends to lead to increasing rates of population growth, and increased affluence tends to reduce them--as a comparison of demographic trends in, for example, Sub-Saharan African versus Japan would show.

KARL MARX had a much more fruitful approach to the question of population and overpopulation. He wrote that overpopulation is "a historically determined relation in no way determined by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited rather by specific conditions of production [along with] the conditions of reproduction of human beings."

So, for example, a group of small foraging bands can experience overpopulation if they over-hunt the animals and over-forage the plants on which they depend. Such a society will have to adapt new sources of food, and if those sources become depleted, they must either move to new territory or, barring that, turn to new techniques, such as agriculture or domestication, in order to survive. But these new methods of production, in turn, allow for larger populations to thrive.

Under capitalism, surplus population is not a product of scarcity, but of unemployment--the fact that the growth of the productive forces and the accompanying growth of human labor power leads to a tendency for capital to employ, per unit of investment, less and less labor.

In spite--or even because--of the great abundance associated with capitalist production, labor becomes superfluous, and there develops what Marx called a "reserve army of labor."

This isn't to downplay the serious threats to our environment that jeopardize our ability to sustain life on the planet. But these are problems not of population, but of the way in which production and distribution is organized under capitalism. As Engels wrote:

As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account.

In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.

This blind drive toward profit-making has meant that capitalists have treated world resources as things to be plundered without thought and its ecosystems as sinks to dump waste, leading to the environmental crisis we face today.

Yet we possess the technology, the tools, the ideas and the resources necessary to reorganize production and plan it in such a manner that all can live decent lives--without hunger and want--in a way that is sustainable for ourselves and our environment.