no. it's all crap. 'coupling' it with class analysis would assume changing the sense of what 'mode of production' means entirely. it might allow one to pretend for a moment that stupid presumptions presented the opportunity for a new downbeat narrative of objective capitalist decline, a la "the increase in population/resource ratio will inevitably lead to increased struggle for shrinking shares and may upset the existing institutionalized class division." yeah sure.
from Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, "The Economics of the Final Solution: A case Study from the General Government", _Common Sense_, 11, 1991.
"Population as a Variable
The German spatial planners and economists considered 'overpopulation' the main problem of the economic order in the General Government [of Poland]. This troublesome condition, however, was not caused by too high population density per square mile. Overpopulation was -- and always is -- defined relatively and by its proportion to insufficient productivity and underemployment, that is, to the efficient utilisation of the available labour force. Moreover, the additional factor of 'mentality' explained why the labour force in the General Government was 'less efficient than the German one' since it 'generally lacked what was natural to the German worker, namely the motivation to organise his own work with the purpose of attaining the highest labour efficiency possible ... (and also lacked) the impulse to reach a higher standard of living by increased productivity'.
...Meinhold was not satisfied with just describing the phenomena of overpopulation and the 'law of labour return'; he also postulated the mathematical relationship of the two factors to each other. He adopted from Oberlander the so-called Mombertain Formula which reads as follows:
'The space available for food (Nahrungsmittel, of N) equals the size of the population (Volkszahl, or V) times the cost of living (Lebenshaltung, or L).
In abbreviated form: N = V x L.'
The actual function of this formula lies in its being abstracted from its substantive content and thereby suggests the possibility that individual factors can be manipulated and written, for example, as: V = N/L. (Population size equals the space available for food divided by the cost of living.) But if the space for food was limited and the cost of living had already been reduced to subsistence level, then the thing to do would be to reduce the size of the population (V).
Thus expressed in manageable terms, the population size became a magnitude that was, alongside others, variable as well. Mass murder, forced resettlements, invasion of others' countries, or the deliberate policy of starvation were equated with 'reduction of the size of the population', 'expansion of nutritional space', or 'reduction of living costs'; and, thus, metamorphosed into sanitized scientific terms, they became part of the repertory of economic planning. ...
The intellectual planners did not use the concept ['the solution of the Jewish question'] emotionally, as if they were filled with hatred, but scientifically as technical terminology. Hate and base motives were thus transformed into the necessity of population and structural policies. Only thus, rendered rational endogenously, could the 'final solution' be implemented with the appearance of being a reasonable measure."
[all the citations herein are from the German planning documents.]
Angela _________