I am not saying people alive now should never have been born or that they should be starved or killed (which, since you - rather predictably - raised the first, I figure might be coming next... but then again it was you, the anti-Malthusian, who referred to your use of data from Lester Brown, the Malthusian). The difference between us, it seems to me, is that you focus on the supply of food to increased populations (which, once you have such populations is a good thing however much capitalism has screwed it up) and I focus on the ways capitalism (and other associated forces) produced and continue to produce the populations, their needs and the form of need satisfaction.
I heard very clearly and responded with support for Michael P's argument, which you've responded to with ever more of the same rather than an actually counterargument. I believe, if you're listening, you're not actually making a case for your perspective by simply repeating yourself. You've reduced productivity to output per acre. Period. Completely abstracting that output from all the power-laden, population increasing and commodified need producing networks of associated mechanical and chemical inputs; genetic theft and simplification (and associated nutritional consequences); proprietary rights regimes; transportation networks; processing tendencies; retail hierarchies; Ford Foundation-funded, Cold War-driven and CIA-integrated independent, self-provisioning farm family-displacing Green Revolution technologies; World Bank mega project-associated and faux-democratic and fake NGO related Green Neoliberalism.
The primary fount of increased health around the world, btw, is not tied to increased food production but is primarily associated with better sanitary conditions across the board and secondarily tied to medicine... two things that were infrastructually possible primarily in the context of national development programs before the intensification of integrated global development as Cold War constraints on go-go capitalism fell away.
Nope, Marx's singular contribution was to rubbish Malthus' focus on natural increase and to point out that the rate of population growth under capitalism is driven by the need for surplus populations and has absolutely nothing to do with natural increase. Capitalism, accelerating the turn-over time of capital, accelerates the growth in population and the associated need for the more capital-efficient - if ecologicall, personally, communally, politically and economically contradictory - production of commodified food.
Nice try with a reference to a footnote (which, I guess, isn't in and of itself a bad thing, though secondary - rather than primary points tend to be put in footnotes by skilled writers)... I believe the quotes you skipped are these from Section 4:
"In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labour is carried out, large numbers of boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is once reached, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus-population, growing with the extension of those branches of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in fact capital that has emigrated. One consequence is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male, *teste* England. That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is not more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of hands, while at the same time many thousands are out of work, because the division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry."
.....
"The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. *This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. *Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.
The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism"
On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:09 AM, James Heartfield < Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> I said: 'The four billion human beings alive today because of the greater
> productivity of human labour, have better lives that they would have had
> without it.'
>
> To which Alan replies: 'Please go to the slums of Mexico City, or a raft of
> other cities across the South, and tell this to the burgeoning population
> who, however relatively impoverished, used to life off their own land, in
> their own communities, relying on each other, and most often in healthier
> conditions with access to cleaner water air and without anything like the
> rampant crime, corruption and drugs of their contemporary existence.'
>
> But you are not listening, Alan. Those people would not be alive without
> increased output of grains and other foodstuffs. The population increased
> from 2 billion to 6.6 billion from 1900 to 2010. World grain output rose
> from 400 million tons in 1900 to 1.9 billion tons in 1998 - without that,
> those 4.6 billion would either have starved, or never been born.
>
> When I said that they had better lives than they would have without
> increased productivity in agriculture, I was taking it as read that it is
> better to be alive than dead. Is it really your position that people would
> have been better off not being born?
>
> As to increased agricultural productivity, either relative to land or
> people, there really is no question that has increased over the last 110
> years. It is not a question of maligning the sources, it is recorded fact.
> (I don't think Michael says that it didn't happen, he puts a question mark
> over the calculation, which is not the same thing.)
>
> We know that agricultural productivity increased because more food is grown
> while proportionally fewer people work in agriculture, and (since 1981) on a
> declining share of the land.
>
> Again you pooh-pooh cheaper food and insist that it is unhealthy, but
> statistics of rising life expectancy and declining infant mortality, not
> just in the west but in the developing world, show that people are, on the
> average, healthier today than they were in 1900.
>
> You trumpet Marx over population, but fail to note that his singular
> contribution to the population debate was to rubbish Malthus' 'libel against
> the human race' that overpopulation would lead to starvation.
>
> This is Marx on population: 'the "principle of population," slowly worked
> out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social
> crisis, proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the
> teachings of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English
> oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development.
> '
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#n6
>
>