Neo-Malthusianism: Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, and the Crisis of Capitalism

 

The American Eugenics Society’s flashlight exhibit at the 1926 Fitter Families Contest, emphasizing the “overpopulation” of “defectives” in the American gene pool.

Neo-Malthusianism is the notion that the world needs to be drastically depopulated and that “humans are a cancerous tumor eating up the world’s resources.” Its proponents would have the poor believe that they themselves are responsible for their own misery — rather than the real culprits, the capitalist class who profit from imperialist plunder and environmental destruction. Now that capitalism is entering into a new crisis, alarms are once again being raised for “overpopulation”, and Neo-Malthusianism is making a resurgence, particularly in environmental discourse, with encouragement from the capitalist class. There is no doubt that climate change is a very real and urgent matter, with greenhouse gas emissions leaking into the Earth’s atmosphere due to significantly increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and thus contributing to higher-than-normal temperatures and rising sea levels. However, in spite of the U.S. military having the largest and most destructive carbon footprint on the planet, with a staggering 1.2 billion metric tonnes of carbon, the capitalist class is actively shifting all blame and attention away from imperialism and the system of capitalism so that they can continue to protect their profits.

The bourgeoisie are shifting that blame onto everyday, ordinary working people, encouraging them to blame themselves and each other; even going so far as to point the finger at the most vulnerable members of society, such as those that require inhalers for debilitating asthma. Poor, working class women around the world who choose to have children are also unfairly accused of contributing to “overpopulation” (a non sequitur) and of “irresponsibly” bringing children into a world full of suffering. And 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, especially African 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). Rather than advocating for sustainable energy, a centrally planned economy, and putting an end to overproduction, the capitalist class instead pushes crippling austerity measures which posits that human beings are nothing more than beasts of burden. The myth of overpopulation has indeed become a convenient and reliable cover for the capitalists who have no intention of redistributing wealth and resources, and who need to give the illusion that environmental concerns are being addressed. To add to the absurdity, the myth of overpopulation is becoming more widely accepted in Western “left” circles who seem to have forgotten that population control is a branch of eugenics.

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