Modern demography can point to "population pressures" without being Malthusian, because there can be clear and logical explanations for such things as
(1) why population grows (poor agricultural families need kids, women don't have control over their bodies, etc.) and
(2) why labor productivity doesn't rise enough so that the increasing number of hands can't handle the increasing number of mouths to feed.
Both of these get beyond TM's blame-the-victim approach.
Bob Brenner, despite not being targeted by the Horowitz Gang, has a useful point or two here, specifically with regard to point (2). He suggests that Western European societies -- and by implication, many other societies -- went through "Mathusian" cycles. Before capitalism's rise, the response to the "Malthusian crisis" was to intensify the working of the land. This actually made things worse. Under capitalism, however, the response was to improve the way in which the land was worked (ignoring external, environmental, costs of course). This allowed W. Europe to escape the cycle. Of course, a lot of the rest of the world was then dominated by W. Europe (and the US), often encouraging "pre-capitalist" methods and "Malthusian" crises to persist. And of course, now we have a world-wide environmental mess (global warming, etc.)
In any event, my comment was just about the _overemphasis_ of overpopulation. I think that the unequal Tutsi/Hutu relationship -- imposed by W. Europeans -- is more crucial to explaining the genocide in Rwanda than anything else.
{JKS gave me permission to forward the following}
In response to what I said at the bottom of this message, andie
nachgeborenen wrote:
>I got the Malthusian stuff from Jared Diamond's Collapse. He's not a
Malthusian in general, but he offers evidence of the applicability of
the theory here here. Malthus was not wrong about everything even if
he failed to offer a general TINA justification for the proposition
that the poor you shall always have with you.
>He also points out that quasi-Malthusian sorts of factors have often
played into the collapse of pre-modern societies, particularly when
certain intensive agricultural policies (or environmental change)
causes ecological degradation that undermines the long term productive
capacity of the earth while giving a short term boost to population.
This does not seem implausible. It seems to have played a role in the
collapse of the Mayan empire, the first wave of the Greenlan Norse,
and several native North American peoples' cultural demise. That does
not mean (Diamond emphasises) that Malthusian factors are the only
ones at play even when they are at play or that there might not have
been sensible ways to avoid them if these had been foreseen.
>Diamond is a liberal egalitarian who does not advocate Malthusian
solutions to current problems -- although he quotes any number of
Rwandans, how representative they are is anybody's guess, who do have
the grim view that war and massacre are a solution to such problems. <
JKS had written:>>>In Rwanda, the genocide was the product of years of careful preparation, including the prior purchase of hundreds of thousands of machetes and other deliberate plans by a clique in the government bent of mass murder which had to assassinate the President to carry through their scene, many previous massacres on a lower level, ethnic oppressions, and Malthusian conditions in circumstances of severe environmental degradation. The final call to "exterminate the cockroaches" would have fallen on deaf ears without some such background. ...<<<
I replied:>> also, the colonists had created the artificial Hutu/Tutsi distinction, giving the latter more privileges (the old divide and rule). And it's not as much a matter of "Malthusian conditions" as much as spiraling inequality between the two groups. That encouraged environmental degregation to get worse, as I understand it, which in turn made antagonism toward the Tutsis grow.
>> (If someone is an expert on Rwandan history, I am ready to be corrected.) <<
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