A Modest Proposal
In 1729 Jonathan Swift penned an essay proposing that poverty in Ireland be ameliorated by butchering the children of the Irish poor and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords.
While the piece was clearly intended as satire, one has to wonder if today’s billionaire philanthro-capitalists would be able to see the irony.
I struggle to see how the rush to inject the entire population with a dangerous gene therapy does not go hand in hand with an agenda to reduce the human population by, I don’t know, 14 or 15 percent. If not by directly poisoning us, then perhaps indirectly, through damage to reproductive health.
We are, as we are repeatedly told, dealing with a ticking population bomb and working within the constraints of finite resources. There are simply too many people on planet earth.
It’s a good thing we have billionaires like Bill gates to save us.
One of the things we are also repeatedly told is that capitalism is the best system of production and distribution that there ever was. After all, it has lifted millions out of poverty. So we are told.
The problem is, the capitalist mode of production has all sorts of inherent problems, one being that we waste about two thirds of what we produce. In short, it is better for the market to dump food rather than give it away for free. Capitalism is also prone to crises arising from overproduction, which leads to an over-supply of goods and services where no demand exists, and a constant need to create new markets, by any means necessary – whether that be by invading and colonizing other people’s countries, or constantly reinventing the wheel. Indeed we see no shortage of new products which nobody conceivably needs, certainly not while more than half the world lives on less than a dollar a day. Did you know your washing machine needs cleaning too? Yeah, you can buy a special cleaning product now to wash your washing machine. I’ll take over-production for 200, please.
I’m just going to say it, capitalism is a pretty shitty system, really. It is just not designed to serve humanity’s needs at all. If we’re really dealing with finite resources, then a system which depends on constant growth probably isn’t the best model for us.
There is another problem with capitalism which is not talked about much. That is what happens when we plug the capitalist mode of production and distribution into the population graph.
Somehow, for some unfathomable reason, it seems to be the poorest countries which have the highest rates of population growth, while ‘first world’ economies have aging populations. How does that work?
Could it be as Michael Parenti likes to say, that poor countries are not so much ‘under-developed’ as ‘over-exploited’?
When we look at the world’s poorest countries, do we notice any commonalities? Like perhaps an abundance of natural resources? Predatory lending by global financial institutions? Restricted access to trade? Repeated coup attempts backed by Western governments? All of the above?
Is it in fact the case that we see an obvious overlap between extreme poverty and good old fashioned colonialism?
Is it also the case that these backward, over-exploited countries tend to have high rates of child labour and infant mortality? And that high death rates correspond to high birth rates? Is it the case that people are inclined to have fewer babies when they know their children will be around to take care of them in later life? Is it also the case that these exploited countries tend to lack access to education, particularly for women? Could it possibly be that extreme poverty and lack of access to education and reproductive health choices might lead to women having more babies? Might we deduce from this that the problem of overpopulation, if such a thing exists, can be traced directly to the capitalist-imperialist system itself?
Can you see how a statement like this is just plain arse-about backwards?
“Overpopulated, developing countries face more food shortages, water scarcity and stunted economic growth by far than more developed nations. ... Uncontrolled fertility causes poverty, which causes hunger, scarcity and distress. The solution to problems of world hunger, therefore, is population control.”
Arse. About. Backwards.
Poverty is the leading cause of overpopulation. Period. So here is my proposal. Rather than butchering children, or killing off the global poor so that billionaires can continue their wanton, wasteful exploitation, how about we dismantle the entire capitalist-imperialist project, and then watch what happens to population over the next 10 to 20 years.
I’m not suggesting we eat the rich. I cant think of anything more revolting to be honest. But perhaps turning them into pet food is an option we could consider?