'Useless Eaters' and Those Who 'Breed Like Rabbits': the Bourgeois, Defeatist, and Anti-Historical Progress of Neo-Malthusianism

Stephen Corry recently had his article, "Too Many Africans?", published; it details how environmental destruction, poverty, and economic crises are rooted in the imperialist nations’ problems of overconsumption and unequal wealth distribution, not "overpopulation". The neo-Malthusian narrative about “useless eaters” and that the world has an “overpopulation” problem is beneficial to the capitalist class because when all focus and blame is shifted away from the contradictions of capitalism and onto such distractions, their profits are protected. While commercial exploitation of poorer countries’ water, food, labour, and resources is the real problem — as opposed to “overpopulation" — the capitalist class will always turn around and pin the blame on the people of those countries, and claim that they are starving because they “breed like rabbits” (to borrow an infamous phrase, regarding the 1943 Bengal famine, from Winston Churchill).

As for independent nations led by anti-imperialist leftist governments — such as Cuba, Syria, the DPRK, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — who refuse to be reduced to backward Third World dependents that allow the U.S. to exploit them, the "overpopulation"-narrative is yet another pretext for waging imperialist wars of aggression against them. These independent nations are well aware of the 'shock doctrine' that awaits them if they were to surrender to U.S. interests; they need not look further than countries such as Chile, Afghanistan (post-PDPA and onwards), Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. Furthermore, and as an example: as Yugoslavia was being dismembered by NATO during the 1990's, it was being depopulated (with Serbs suffering the worst of it) through a combination of economic sanctions, acts of terrorism carried out by the Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovan proxy forces, and bombing campaigns which includes the most infamous 78-day air bombings of 1999. Not only was Yugoslavia being depopulated through the death toll caused by the NATO forces and U.S. sanctions, but it was suffering from a 'brain drain' as well through the forced mass emigration, which unfortunately took away many of their best doctors — thus leaving many vulnerable to preventable diseases. And so, it is quite facetious to call for the world to be depopulated when imperialism and U.S.-led regime change operations still continue to rage on and are already causing a depopulation crisis for those countries, especially when one considers the fact that the U.S. nearly did exterminate the North Korean population in the past. Hypocritically, those who complain about "overpopulation" never seem to extend those criticisms to the wealthiest families in the world, such as the British Royal Family which continues to birth new members to continue its parasitic legacy.

The capitalists are also more than willing to encourage self-identified “progressives” to adopt what is essentially a bourgeois, anti-worker, and defeatist outlook because they need to give the illusion that environmental concerns are being addressed — even if capitalism cannot actually do such a thing in a meaningful way because it is a system built upon inequality that prioritizes profits above everything else.

As Lenin once said, “Why not that they should fight better, more unitedly, consciously and resolutely than we are fighting against the present-day conditions of life that are maiming and ruining our generation?

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The above is an extended version of a brief introductory editor's note from New Power found here with a clipping of the original article by Stephen Corry below. 

Featured image: Thomas Malthus