And the Poor Get Children: Radical Perspectives on Population Dynamics, edited by Karen Michaelson and published by Monthly Review, offers a radical critique of orthodox economics and overpopulation theories.
The essays in this book confront neo-Malthusianism head-on, similar to what the famous Brazilian doctor and scientist Josué de Castro did in his brilliant book The Geography of Hunger. In his book, Castro brilliantly argues, using extensive scientific data, that overpopulation doesn’t cause famine, but rather famine and poverty cause overpopulation, i.e., the complete opposite of neo-Malthusianism. I want to quote at length one of my favourite passages from Castro’s book:
Growth of population is determined, in the final analysis, by the play of two basic factors: fertility and mortality. Everything that affects the trend of a population does so by means of one or the other of these elements. Since starvation undeniably raises the death rate, it has always been thought that it operated, like wars and plagues, to retard the growth of population. It seems highly paradoxical, then, to say that hunger, far from leading to depopulation, tends to bring about overpopulation.
My statement, however, is based on a series of fully demonstrated facts. First, it is a matter of common observation that, following periods of calamity, famine and pestilence, populations always increase their rate of growth. It is also clearly observable that the countries on the lowest nutritional level, where millions of people regularly and normally starve to death, are also the areas of most violent increase in population: China, India, Egypt, and various Central American countries. On the other hand, the countries at the highest nutritional level show unmistakable evidence of early population decline, with births barely equaling deaths. That is the case in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
That paradox is explained by the fact that while hunger as a social phenomenon increases the death rate, it increases the birth rate even more, so that the net effect is to speed up the rate of population increase. It is commonly noted that the undernourished classes are the most fertile; the ancient Romans had a word for those who, on a starvation diet, had many offspring, or proles—“proletarians.” There is a popular saying in Latin America that “the table of the poor is merger, but fertile is the bed of misery…”
P. 160-161
Castro then quotes an 1853 essay by Thomas Doubleday titled The True Law of Population Shewn to be Connected with the Food of the People:
The Great General Law then, which, as it seems, really regulates the increase or decrease of both vegetable and of animal life, is this, that whenever a species or genus is endangered, a corresponding effort is invariably made by nature for its preservation and continuance, by an increase of fecundity or fertility; and that this especially takes place whenever such a danger arises from a diminution of proper nourishment or food, so that consequently the state of depletion, or the deplethoric state, is favorable to fertility; and on the other hand, the plethoric state, or state of repletion, is unfavorable to fertility, in the ratio of intensity to each state, and this probably throughout nature universally, in the vegetable as well as in the animal world; further, that as applied to mankind this law produces the following consequences and acts thus:
There is in all societies a constant increase going on amongst that portion of it which is the worst supplied with food; in short, amongst the poorest.
Amongst those in the state of affluence, and well supplied with food and luxuries, a constant decrease goes on.
P. 161-162, The Geography of Hunger
Castro focused on the biological factors that cause overpopulation. The essays in And the Poor Get Children use Marxist political economy to expand on Castro’s argument by addressing the economic and social factors that make the poor so fertile.
My favourite is the first essay in the book is Mahmood Mamdani’s The Ideology of Population Control. Mamdani brilliantly examines the social relations that underlie why the poor have so many children. In the African, Asian, and Latin American colonies, although imperialism was economically and politically dominant, capitalist production was limited to areas of colonial settlement. Outside of these colonial settlements, the production unit remained the family, which consequently meant the socialization of labour was carried on within the family. The relations of work were reflected in familial relations.
This has significant demographic consequences. Under capitalist production relations, the production unit is the capitalist enterprise, not the family. The family is a unit of consumption and procreation, and the producer is not so much a family member as a wage labourer. In underdeveloped capitalist relations, the family is the production unit; thus, having more children, like a factory having more workers, can be of considerable material gain to the family.
For the peasant family, since the impoverished peasant producer has no surplus to expand the technical basis of production, the only means for the family to increase its physical product is by increasing the labour-power at its disposal, i.e., through having more children. Mamdani quotes an Indian peasant farmer: “A rich man has his machines; I have my children. It’s that simple.”
For what Mamdani calls the “appropriated masses”—the casually employed urban masses occupying the slums on the fringes of respectable society—a similar process takes place. Children often labour in casual jobs such as shoe-shining, cleaning cars, restaurant work, and as domestic servants. It is not unusual for children to be the primary breadwinners in slum populations. Indeed, children are especially valuable as beggars, and begging can be an organized form of employment. For the “appropriated masses,” just as for the peasant producer, more children means more potential labourers and more labourers means the family’s total earnings can increase.
In both cases, for the peasant producer and the “appropriated masses” living in the slums, the control of children’s labour means that with each additional child, the cost of having a child declines and the potential benefit increases.
High birthrates, Mamdani concludes, are not the cause of impoverishment; they are a response to impoverishment. “The decision by a couple located within the working peasantry or the appropriated masses to have a number of children is essentially a rational decision, a judgement of their social environment. Rationality does not exist in the abstract; it is concrete, the product of a particular social and historical context. The pitfall of neo-Malthusian liberalism is precisely its ‘rationalism’, that it assumes a universal rationality and forgets that in a class society there exists class rationality.”
My second favourite essay in the book is Karen Michaelson’s Population Policy, Family Size, and the Reproduction of the Labor Force in India: The Case of Bombay. Michaelson expands on Mamdani’s earlier examination of family size among the “appropriated masses.” According to Michaelson, just as the poor peasant family will have many children to increase the number of labourers on the farm, the urban poor will have many children to increase the number of wage earners. The wages of children “can increase a family’s income substantially.” Poor parents know “that even a youngster may bring home wages that can make a difference of considerable import in the house.” A large family is the only means to meet present financial difficulties at the household level. This is, as Mamdani notes above, a rational economic decision. Michaelson writes: “In a society where the economic system does not necessarily reward increased education with greater financial remuneration, it is rational to have many children, at a low cost per child, and put them to work early for maximum benefit.”
As well as being a rational decision at the household level, capitalism requires a significant surplus population to meet the labour requirements of its cyclical fluctuations and to maintain a labour force willing to work for low wages. As Marx wrote: “The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of the reserve, while conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces them to submit to overwork and subjugation under the dictates of capital.”
Since having many children is a rational economic decision for a poor household, and since capitalism requires a significant surplus population to fill the ranks of the reserve army of labour, family planning strategies that focus exclusively on contraceptives and birth control education are doomed to fail. Poor families, Michaelson concludes, “are not trying to solve population problems. They are trying to solve poverty problems, even if the solution to those problems is to have a large family, and even if individual decisions to reproduce appear to run counter to class interests limiting numbers to reduce surplus labor. Since such behavior is a rational byproduct of the socioeconomic conditions in which these individuals live, motivation to reduce family size comes not from attitudinal change through propaganda but from changes in the socioeconomic circumstances of family life.”
And the Poor Get Children is an excellent book that radically reinterprets capitalism, population growth, and poverty!
T. J. Petrowski 