politicalcdnmama:

entitledrichpeople:

butt-princess:

entitledrichpeople:

entitledrichpeople:

the-bitter-idealist:

entitledrichpeople:

Capitalism produces scarcity artificially where there is none.

There are enough houses.

There is enough food (in fact there’s currently massive amounts of “overproduced” grain being left to rot)

There is enough water.

Even without changing the horribly designed production systems, there is no real shortage.  People don’t starve, have no fresh water, have no houses to live in, etc. because there are not enough of these things.  People don’t have access because capitalism denies them it.

There’s enough to share for everyone.  It’s not a zero sum game for poor and oppressed peoples. 

I known the argument that only GMOs can save us is untrue for the reasons above, but is overpopulation draining resources and killing the earth a lie promulgated by capitalists as a diversion as well? Would we be fine with this many people under a different economic/social system?

Yes, overpopulation is a capitalist/racist myth too.  It originated in racist eugenics theory and ignores issues of distribution, infrastructure/technology, and disparate impact in favor of fearmongering about poor/brown people having too many babies.

This one pops up a lot, so I’m going to post some links on it here:

Here’s a website dedicated to debunking overpopulation.  It’s 101 and simple, but might be a good intro point for some.

Here’s a BBC article on the lack of good basis to even say how many people is the maximum the Earth could support.

A child in the US on average will use 13 times the energy of one in Brazil and 35 times one in India.

The wealthiest 10% of the world contributes 50% of emissions, but the poorest 50% only contributes 10% of emissions.

And even those estimates are off, because much of the energy use in the developing world is spent on resources sent to already developed/wealthy countries.

Within developed countries income has a stronger impact on household energy use than having another child does (with the wealthy consistently using more).

Just 100 companies contribute 70% of emissions globally-replacing those 100 companies with fully sustainable energy would fix 70% of emissions.

It’s impossible for developing countries to generally adopt Western style energy consumption development models on a large scale.  And China, one of the larger developing countries whose government is a bit less under the thumb of Western imperialist powers, doesn’t intend to keep trying that either (instead investing in more renewable energy).  

So, yes, it’s absolutely not the number of people that’s the main problem, but how resources are used and environmental management practices are done.  If you were going to get rid of people to fix environmental problems, you would start with rich white Westerners, the opposite of who gets targeted by “overpopulation” panics.

I’m reblogging this post from last year, because I see so many opinions about the environment that repeat this nonsense.

It’s racist imperialist capitalist bullshit, and it leads to the exact opposite of real solutions.  

Capitalism doesnt create artificial scarcity, corporatism does that

Not to pick on this individual, but I want to address this argument because it pops up a lot.

There is no such thing as “corporatism” separate from capitalism, corporations exist because of capitalism and to maintain capitalism.

Corporations are not somehow a natural universal constant.  They are social and legal fictions created to enable the mechanics of industrial capitalism, and they essentially did not exist at all prior to around the mid 1800s.  A lot of early Marxist theory predates corporations.  

This is basic history, even the most basic, pro-capitalist history sources acknowledge this legal shift that created corporations arose the around the wealthy controlling industry, factories, etc. (what Marx would call “the means of production”) and the (capitalist) state taking action to enable that.  Corporations are not some ancient order, they arose beginning in around the 1840s (with a scattering of more localized examples in the 1830s in some areas) as a means of solidifying bourgeoisie class cooperation and establishing a set of capitalist laws to address the shift into modern industrial capitalism-they are a tool to maintain capitalist rule as the old mercantile capitalism was replaced with industrial capitalism.  If you want to learn about the impact of the creation of international corporations on Marxist theory, I’d recommend Lenin on this, because, again, Marx was facing an earlier form of capitalism, try Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

The older Marxist arguments against this “overpopulation” line also largely predates the large scale rise of modern corporations, and certainly predates their current form that Lenin addresses.  Engels wrote a critique of Malthus in 1845.  It’s a very dense work, and one that probably won’t make a ton of sense to people who don’t have any background understanding of communist theory, but addresses roughly similar points to the ones I made above.  The argument that production geared towards accumulating capital for the bourgeouisie is what is the cause of scarcity isn’t just about corporations, it was already being made before corporate power was well established.

Okay, sorry, this is getting complicated, but I just want people making this sort of “it’s corporatism not capitalism!” argument to think of what a corporation is, where they come from, when corporations first developed, who benefits and who suffers from them, why corporate laws exist and why the state maintains them, etc.  Because I think that if people actually start to investigate this even a bit I think they would recognize that there is no corporation without capitalism.

@allthecanadianpolitics