Saral Sarkar
This post is the chapter 2 from the book "Factors of Conflict and Conditions of Peace", written by Saral Sarkar.
According to the opinion of some archaeologists
that also in the stone age, primitive foraging people (hunter-gatherers) did at
least occasionally suffer from material scarcity and poverty – due perhaps to
population growth or vagaries of climate and weather causing droughts and
floods or a combination of both. The question is only how they behaved in such
situations. Did they perpetrate violent attacks on (waged “war” against) the
neighboring group of people who probably had enough and try to rob them? Or did
the latter share whatever food and water they had with the suffering neighbors?
Based on the evidence they saw, archaeologists concluded that “war” was at least
not so uncommon in such situations of dire poverty or even hunger.
Erich Fromm and many anthropologists and ethnologists of
the 19th and early 20th century concluded from what they
observed among primitive people of their times that the latter were, generally
speaking, generous, cooperative, spendthrift even in times of famine, and not
so bellicose as many of their contemporaries imagined.
We know that in today’s world – in fact since the
beginning of civilization, if not already since the Neolithic revolution, when
farmers began a sedentary life – humans, generally speaking, are rather the
opposite of what Fromm and other writers of his ilk think about the character
of primitive people. Most of us think, humans are and have always been, in
general, selfish, greedy, acquisitive, and ready to defend their property and
special rights, if need be, by violent means.
It is a question whether primitive people generally
lived in a state of material scarcity and whether for that reason they had to
toil hard to sustain themselves. The hunter-gatherers Marshall Sahlins (1974:
chapter 1) wrote about worked only three to four hours a day. But why not more?
Were they satisfied with their degree of material “affluence”? As if in reply
to this question, Sahlins (1974: 1-2) writes in a paper entitled “The Original
Affluent Society”:
„For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be
‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little. […] But there
is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different
from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means
unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can
enjoy unparalleled material plenty – with a low standard of living.”
Needs and Wants of the Modern Human Population
We know that as a whole, we modern humans of the
3000 to 4000 years long Age of Civilization are trying to easily satisfy our
wants by producing much rather than by desiring little. This is the course to
affluence that already our forefathers who became the first Neolithic farmers
chose to follow. In the past, there have of course been a few ascetic monks and
sages, who followed the other course, that of desiring little. But they have
always been a miniscule minority. And today, hardly anybody among us subscribes
to the Zen strategy mentioned by Sahlins, not even monks in cloisters.
But it may also have been that the pressure of a slowly
growing population gradually also compelled our forefathers to produce
ever more. In that case, they hardly produced any affluence. And if they
succeeded in producing more, but just enough to satisfy the bare material wants
of their growing numbers, then they hardly achieved it “easily”
Demography historians have presented their estimates of
human population growth in a diagram. It shows that the world population has
been growing continuously and exponentially since the Neolithic Revolution (New
Stone Age) some 10 thousand years ago1.
Figure 1: World population from 10,000 BC to 2000 AD. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population (accessed: 13.4.2024), Public Domain
Let us take just a few numbers from our times:
In 1960 global human population was 3 billion,
in 1974 4
billion
in 1987 5
billion
in 1999 6
billion
in 2011 7
billion
(Data from Schriefl 2021: 60).
And now, at the time of writing (2024), it is over 8 billion.
Parallel to population growth, some other processes have
been taking place in the human world as a whole, but also in every individual
country, more or less.
Chimpanzees, primatologists tell us, invented hammer and
ambos for cracking nuts and crafted thin twigs into tools for angling eatable
ants out of anthills. Among humans, the process of inventing and making tools
went on continuously, far beyond such a simple level, and ever faster. As a
result, producing the basic necessities of life indeed became ever easier. Ever
better and ever more tools enabled us to produce a surplus which, inter alia,
had the effect that less and less people died of hunger and human population
started growing faster than before.
Necessity, i.e. hunger, had been the mother of
invention, as the saying goes. But in the following centuries and millennia the
original spirit of inventing tools gathered momentum, developed its own
dynamics. And it increasingly aimed at producing better weapons of war, and
satisfying new “needs” and wants that human imagination itself created. A
Marxist would say: basic needs are co-related to the level of
development of the productive forces. Otto Ullrich (1979: 108) expressed it
succinctly, but critically, and in a different context:
„In a system that tries to satisfy needs through material
production […] there will always be for every level of ‘material wellbeing’
some new unfulfilled basic material needs, above all because this system is
necessarily very inventive in the production of new luxury goods, which soon
become the models of new basic material needs. This system will always be too
poor […]. What was the day before yesterday the radio, was yesterday the
black-and-white TV, is today the color TV; and tomorrow it will be the
3-dimensional picture projector.” (translated by S. Sarkar)
All kinds of leftists will blame this “system” on capitalism
and its efforts to create new needs by means of advertisement. But it was a
Greek mythology writer who imagined Ikarus und Daedalus flying like birds, and
it was Jules Verne who imagined a journey to the moon. None of them was a
capitalist.
Limits to Growth
The concurrency of population growth and
productivity growth achieved through ever more use of ever better tools and by
other means such as irrigation, use of manures and the three-field system had
its limit. When this limit was reached, population growth had to lead to
extensive agriculture: more and more land under the plough, more and more
cattle in the stable, increasing deforestation, use of marginal land,
emigration to still sparsely populated countries, and finally, conquering new
continents and colonialism. The surplus populations of Europe were accommodated
in the conquered continents, which were by no means terrae nullius
(nobody’s land, unpopulated land), by killing off, partly also through imported
diseases, or pushing away the indigenous populations to more and more
inhospitable bad lands. All that is known history.
Even for the Crusades, allegedly a military expedition
to wrest the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim reign, overpopulation in Europe
was, according to historians, an important causal factor. The umpteen
supernumerary younger sons of the
European nobility were of course knights, but they neither had any chance under
the prevailing inheritance laws to possess their own estate nor wanted to
become a monk or priest. They saw in the crusades an opportunity to have their
own estate. It is they who assumed the leadership in the expeditions. And the
excess rural population also followed them as foot soldiers, accompanied by
their whole families as hangers-on, in order to have a chance to escape poverty
at home.
Historian Robert Bartlett confirms this interpretation
of the Crusades: In the 11th century – due to favorable climatic
conditions and new developments in agricultural technology – there had been a
population explosion in some European countries. This also led to an expansion
in the peripheries of Europe2.
This was partly also the case during the Iberian
conquest of South America. Younger sons of the nobility and young people from the poor underclass took the
initiative in colonizing the American continent.
Malthus Was Not Wrong
Malthus was the first economist who theorized – in
my opinion, convincingly – on the
population problem. But he has been much reviled by all kinds of leftists,
feminists, Marx and Engels themselves, and more recently, also by many people
who claim to be ecologists or environmentalists. He has been dismissed as a
conservative, and, what is worse, as a spokesperson and lobbyist of the
bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy. He has been most reviled for a passage in
an early edition of his essay, which he felt compelled to delete in the
subsequent editions of his book. It reads as follows:
„A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot
get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the
society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest
portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At Nature’s
mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone.”
(quoted in Gide et al. 1953: 140-141, italics by S. Sarkar)
Malthus added that Nature does not fail to bring
even this command to execution.
Even in the 1950s to the 1970s,
I have come across many such hungry men and women in India, who, in fact, had
literally the least right to demand any portion of food. Of course, they had a moral
right, because, after all it is not they who wanted to be born. It is their
parents who brought them into the already occupied world. They were prepared to
give their labor in exchange for food. But neither their parents nor the
society at large could meet this moral demand. Many of course did not care, and
many pretended as if they just did not see.
Anybody who does not turn his back and is willing to
see, can see the hundreds of thousands of hungry, expelled or fleeing refugees
from the drought-, war-, and violence-stricken regions of Africa, the Middle
East, Central America, South Asia etc., who are thronging the refugee camps set
up in the neighboring countries. Millions of others – unemployed young men and
women from such countries, people without a perspective – who are willing to
work in exchange for a better life, are sacrificing their dignity and very
often even risking their life while trying to illegally cross the borders to
Europe and North America.
To understand and appreciate Malthus’s population law,
we must first quote the law and then interpret it. It says: „Population, when
unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio [exponentially]. Subsistence
increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” (quoted in Catton 1980: 126). In his
book, when he said “population”, Malthus always meant human population, and
when he said “subsistence“, he meant food. But, in William Catton’s (1980: 126)
opinion
„[…] the really basic Malthusian principle is so important that
it needs to be restated in the more accurate vocabulary of modern ecology. It
states a relationship of inequality between two variables: The cumulative
biotic potential of the human species exceeds the carrying capacity of its
habitat.” (ibid.)
Malthus also uses the words “when unchecked”, with
which he means to say potentially. We know that in a natural environment, nature sees to it that
every generation of any species of living beings including humans can/does
produce offspring (or seeds) at a rate much higher than the replacement rate. The
surplus is, one may almost say, meant to be devoured/eaten away by the
respective predator species or cannot survive because of various other reasons
– processes that act as checks to the numerical growth of the prey
species. As for humans, we know that there are still countries, where the human
population is growing very rapidly because there the checks to growth are very
weak or even nonexistent. And there are countries where the human population is
decreasing because the indirect checks there, e.g. high cost of better living,
are too many or too strong.
We modern humans have succeeded – thanks to our
intelligence, sophisticated tools and weapons power – in subduing and reducing,
though not eliminating, all current and potential predators and dangers. In
this we succeeded so well that now we have even to save some species that could
potentially harm us – the tiger, the wolf and the lion, for example. However,
apart from natural death and some acts of nature beyond our control
(earthquakes, epidemics of incurable diseases etc.), there are dangers and
causes of decimation that we humans ourselves have given rise to. These are the
checks, though very weak, that are till now keeping our population from growing
faster.
Foremost among them are wars of all kinds. Then come
environmental pollution and global warming leading to climate catastrophes.
These are the best-known and most acknowledged as past and potential causes of
our decimation. Thus, e.g., it is estimated that in the 30-Years War (1618-
1648), the population of Central Europe – in what was then called the Holy
Roman Empire – was decimated to an extent of about 45 percent. Other estimates
speak of 8 million deaths in a total population of 16 million. And today, many
scientists fear that global warming, climate change, environmental pollution
and biodiversity loss may make the planet uninhabitable for humans.3
Rwanda – Genocide – a Malthusian worst case
How right Malthus was and how much population has
still to do with decimation of human numbers can be best illustrated with the
case of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, that culminated in 1994 in the
genocidal killing of ca. 800 000 (mostly) Tutsi perpetrated by the Hutu. I do
not here want to narrate the whole story of that genocide. That has been done
by many competent authors.4 Instead, I shall only highlight the
facts and figures that are relevant to my contention.
In 1993, Rwanda’s population of 6.84 million was growing
at the rate of 3.1 percent per annum. They were living on a total area of 26,338
square kilometers. With 260 people per square kilometer, the country had one of
the highest population densities in the world. Fertility rate in 1993 was 6.5
births per woman.5
Rwanda’s fertile land, adequate rainfall, and mild
climate are quite favorable to agricultural growth. The altitude at which the
country was situated kept malaria away. Yet, the advantages from all these
favorable circumstances were nullified by the high rate of population growth.
In 1990, about 94 percent of the population lived in rural areas. And most of
them had to live off farming. Opportunities for off-farm income through
professions such as carpentry were few.
Because of the high population density, farm-sizes were
small to very small. The few big farms were called so because they measured
more than 1 to 2 acres. Agricultural productivity was low because of absence of
mechanization and other modern methods of farming. To give an example, in the
hilly country, farmers ploughed their land up and down, apparently ignoring the
advantages of terrace cultivation.
When, in the 1960s and again in 1973, many Tutsi were
killed or fled the country, and their land was taken over by the Hutu, per
capita food availability increased. Many Hutu farmers thought then that they
now had enough land to feed their families. But after 1981, it again gradually
fell back to the 1960s level. It had to fall because in these 20 years the
population had not ceased to grow.
Family planning was not unknown in Rwanda. There was
even an office or department of family planning. But it was good for nothing.
It was mainly created to enable foreign donor agencies to give Rwanda
development aid. Also the negative influence of the Catholic Church was too
strong.
Jared Diamond quotes Gerard Prunier, a scholar of East
Africa:
„[…] part of the reason why it [the genocidal killing] was
carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file peasants in their ingo
[= family compound] was the feeling that there were too many people on too
little land, and that with a reduction in their numbers, there would be more
for the survivors.” (Diamond 2006: 326).
Diamond also quotes two other observers, André and
Platteau:
„The 1994 events provided a unique opportunity to settle
scores, or to reshuffle land properties, even among Hutu villagers. […] It is
not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe
out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available
land resources.” (ibid: 326)
Let us now come to the end of this part of the
story. After 1994, many outside observers had thought that the genocide was the
result, the tragic culmination of a decades-long hateful power struggle between
the two ethnic groups Hutu and Tutsi. That this power struggle, this hatred,
existed cannot be denied. These were facts. Fact was also that after the Hutu
took over power, there emerged different factions among them who competed for
dominance. But the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic conflict need not have been resolved
through such a barbaric genocide. I find the conclusion arrived at by Jared
Diamond convincing. He writes:
„I am accustomed to thinking of population pressure, human
environmental impacts, and drought as ultimate causes, which make people
chronically desperate and are like the gun powder inside the powder keg. One
also needs a proximate cause: a match to light the keg. In most areas of
Rwanda, that match was ethnic hatred whipped up by politicians cynically
concerned with keeping themselves in power.” (ibid: 326)
The Israel-vs.-Palestine conflict
Since October 2023, we are witnessing the
Israel–Hamas war in Gaza. Here too, many people first think of ethnic or
religious hatred as the cause of the long-drawn conflict. Some people also
speak of an anti-colonial liberation war being carried out by the Palestinians.
These points are of course partly true. But what most
observers and commentators leave unmentioned is the deeper cause of the
intractability of the conflict: that it is a war over birthrates. As
soon as I opened the internet and searched for the population growth rate of
the two ethnic groups, I found the following lines: Let me quote them verbatim:
„The estimated Palestinian world population has increased
10-fold since the Nakba from 1.37 million in 1948 to an estimated 14.3 million
by mid-2022, some 7.1 million of them inside historic Palestine, representing
49.9% of the total population (Israelis and Palestinians).“6
The population of Israel is also growing?
„In this war over birthrates, it may seem like good news for
Israel that by 2040, the country's overall population is projected to increase
by another two million people, reaching 12 million. However, the Jewish
population is growing mostly thanks to one community, the haredim, or the
ultra-Orthodox.”7
That means there is no solution until and unless
the population of both the population groups stops growing. Because land and
resources available in Palestine are limited.
Notes and References
1. In roughly the first 10 millenia after the Neolithic
Revolution (dated about 10,000 BC), the human population was growing very
slowly. If, during these times, it had been growing exponentially at all, then
at a very low growth rate.
2. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzzug (accessed:
13.4.2024), Bartlett (1993).
3. According to David Wallace-Wells (2019) who interviewed
many high level scientists working on the subject of climate change and
environmental pollution.
4. See e.g., Diessenbacher (1998), Diamond (2006)
5. Daten der Weltbank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=RW
(accessed: 13.4.2024)
6. Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of
International Affairs, Factsheet Population, http://passia.org/media/filer_
public/50/f1/50f1cdf6-42d6-430c-b5bc-1078b7ce5845/factheet_
population.pdf (accessed: 24.4.2024)
7. https://aspeniaonline.it/israel-a-demographic-ticking-bomb-in-todays-one-state-reality/
(accessed: 14.4.2024)
Literature
Bartlett,
Robert (1993): The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural
Change 950 – 1350. London (Penguin)
Catton,
William R. Jr. (1980):Overshoot –The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary
Change. Urbana etc. (University of Illinois Press)
Diamond, Jared (2006):Collapse – How societies choose to
fail or survive. London (Penguin)
Diessenbacher,
Hartmut (1998):Kriege der Zukunft –Die Bevölkerungsexplosion gefährdet den
Frieden. München, Wien (Hanser)
Gide,
Charles et al (1953): A History of Economic Doctrines. London etc.
(George G. Harrap)
Sahlins, Marshall (1974): Stone Age Economics:
London (Routledge), reprint from the first edition (1972)
Schriefl,
Ernst (2021): Öko-Bilanz – Wo wir stehen, was zu tun wäre, wohin wir steuern.
Norderstedt (Books on Demand)
Ullrich,
Otto (1979): Weltniveau – In der Sackgasse des Industriesystems. Berlin
(Rotbuch)
Wallace-Wells,
David (2019): The Uninhabitable Earth – Life After Warming. New York (Tim
Duggan)
