Page under progressive development - early stages as of the beginning of 2026
I spent some of my youth as a Vietnam war protester in Melbourne. Until the late ‘60’s the protests were mostly between those who supported the war in order to stop communism moving southwards, and those who thought pacifism was the appropriate response to a civil war that had become dominated by American interference. The American attack in support of one side was assisted by the Australian Government deciding to send Australian troops to Vietnam. Despite the divisive decision to send Australian troops, the anti-war/pacifist movement in Australia did not gain that much traction, until we radicalised. In the late ‘60’s we started collecting money with the express purpose that the money was to be sent to the Viet Cong to buy bullets to kill the Australian soldiers who were invading their country. This clearly would have infuriated many people and risked us being jailed. However, it was only when the two sides were not pro-war and anti-war but instead were pro victory for one side and pro victory for the other - diametrically opposite - that a majority of Australians began to see that the other side had some validity and the support for the American side diminished. The message that I took from this is that radicalism, in the form of promoting the opposite to the mainstream, can work.
In the case of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), our issue is population pressure on the environment with a sub-issue being pressure on housing. I have sometimes thought that my lesson from the Vietnam protests could apply here too. Don’t build housing, demolish housing. Housing attracts migrants and according to Andrew Irvine, the CEO of the National Bank speaking on the ABC today (The World Today, Radio National, 6/11/2025), that is a reason why we should be building housing. Despite my contrary thoughts, I have been inhibited in disseminating my demolition idea by two considerations – first that there are already perhaps 200,000 Australians without minimally adequate housing and second, that these numbers will be added to by the demographic momentum. The demographic momentum, the excess of births over deaths, will result in further population expansion over the next decade even with zero net migration. This will occur because there is a bulge of people in the fertile age range and relatively few of us in the age range where death is likely, so even if fertility is below long term replacement, births are likely to exceed deaths for about a decade until the fertile bulge becomes older and so less fertile.
The case for advocating demolitions not constructions, has now strengthened. First, the covid epidemic showed 5 years ago that all homeless people could be accommodated in existing housing, when this was necessary to prevent the spread of infection. There are quite a few further options for making existing housing available to the inadequately housed. These strategies include repatriation of overseas students as during the covid epidemic, though this time with adequate compensation, imposing heavy taxation on long term vacant investor owned apartments as judged by their zero electricity and water use, heavy taxation on housing being converted to “air bnb” or similar use and converting office space freed up by the work from home trend, into housing. Second, I have been playing with a model I wrote of Australian demography. It turns out that the demographic momentum with current fertility and no net migration, is a much smaller issue than it once was. With zero net migration, births will exceed deaths for only about 10 years and the peak population will exceed the present population by only half a million. These could all be accommodated in existing housing with an intensification of strategies such as those mentioned above.
I believe it is time to be radical. For dramatic effect, we should get attention for our cause by pushing the opposite case to building houses. We should advocate for demolition, not housing construction. A specific demolition could be advocated – a housing block where people are accommodated in boxes with no balconies, no possibility of drying clothes in the sun, no adequate playgrounds, no possibility of vegie gardens or chooks and in a building that overshadows neighbouring solar panels. Such a building should be promoted for demolition and its replacement by parkland, playgrounds and communal vegie plots with its residents accommodated in more humane and sustainable circumstances. Housing projects in general should be condemned for encouraging overpopulation in the way that freeways are condemned for attracting cars and thus causing traffic jams. Demolitions will need to be limited until the peak of our population with net zero immigration. However, the decade this takes should be used for planning – so we need to be training demolition workers, not construction workers, for a sustainable Australia.
This article argues the case for both degrowth and socialism. Degrowth requires a diminishment of both population size and per-capita consumption. The current paradigm takes individual reproduction to be a sacred individual choice, though there is an underlying prejudice towards encouraging further growth. In liberal society, only soft economic nudges are allowed to encourage further reproduction, nudges like childcare subsidies and taxation benefits though direct payments per baby have been used. If populations are failing to grow, harder measures may be enforced such as a ban on abortions and restrictions on contraceptives. However, in Australia, liberal ideology prevails and we still have access to contraceptives despite our total fertility rate being below the long term replacement level. The socialism part of degrowth socialism, requires the banishment of greed as the economic motor of society. This means the total banishment of advertising that stimulates greed. It also means ultimately the banishment of private ownership beyond the ownership of personal possessions or perhaps the means for individual production. Degrowth socialism could be a utopian vision, but having this vision may guide us more sensibly into a positive future.
The quest for a huge change in society calls for a theory of how this change could come about. Before Karl Marx in the mid nineteenth century, early communists would have relied on principle. They would have thought that the principle of equality and cooperation, the principle of "From each according to their ability; to each according to their needs", was argument enough. Moreover, it was obvious that under the capitalist system a large majority were disadvantaged and a small minority benefitted greatly. If principle, pure and simple, wasn't enough of a motivator, the logical argument that a large majority of the people would be better off, could be used to motivate change as well. However, motivating people by principle and by the logic that the existing system disadvantages the majority, hadn't been sufficient to motivate a communist revolution against the cruelty of early capitalism. Marx added another element of logical pursuasion. He argued that communism should be seen as being inevitable. This inevitability came from his academic theory of history. He saw humanity in the stone age as being in a state of primitive communism with small bands of hunter gatherers wandering around without hierarchical organisation. This state was undermined by the invention of agriculture which required people to attach themselves to a particular place for years and led to ownership of land. Agricultural society out competed the hunter gatherers by being far more productive per unit of land. However a system of ownership eventually led to inequality and eventually a slave owning society and a feudal society. In feudal society the rich wanted to benefit from their position by obtaining luxury goods and this motivated the development of artisans and traders. The latter competed with each other in terms of skills in making the luxury goods and there was the development of machines and ultimately the competing manufacturers became the most innovative and prominent group in society and we had the industrial revolution and capitalism. At each transition - from primitive communism to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism, growth in productivity had been a factor in the transition. With these insights, Marx had developed a new theory about the processes at work behind the broad sweep of history. It seems that Marx came to believe that growth in productivity was a key factor in these transitions of history. As explained next, he saw this broad sweep of history as ending in communism. He called his theory "scientific socialism".
Marx's belief in growth adulterated the focus on a self evidently good principle, fairness and benefit for the large majority, as a motivator for positive societal change. On the one hand scientific socialism gave a boost to the large majority of communists who accepted the theory by reassuring them that they were ultimately on the winning side. On the other hand it reduced the focus on the original communist principle of equality as a motivator. Marx argued that a future communist system would outdo the capitalist system. In particular, it would certainly outdo capitalism when it reached its late stage of monopoly capitalism. The development of monopolies signify that one particular capitalist has won. There is no longer any need for them to continue to compete and win against their rivals when those rivals have disappeared. Growth in productivity would slow down. With this slowdown, the potential of increasing productivity, if fairly shared, to bring general prosperity would also slowdown. He argued in remarkably flowery language in his book "Capital" that "The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."
In effect he argued that capitalism would be overthrown because almost no-one benefitted from the extreme inequality in a system of private ownership of productive capacity. Perhaps think of billionaires organising an appreciable proportion of the whole world's workforce to produce all the varied inputs needed for a billionaire, not a scientific investigator, to travel to Mars. The overthrow or expropriation of the capitalists would be by almost the entire society, for almost no one would benefit from a billionaire's exotic travel plans when it was clear that the money involved could be better spent on earth. The next stage would then be a communist society. It would outdo capitalist society in terms of growth and give endless prosperity. He saw the end result as a stable system, for with equality, there would be no more sectors of society brewing up, with an incentive for radical change. Marx denigrated earlier communist thinkers who without his theory of scientific socialism had thought that principles alone would change society so that it moved away from a system based on greed as a motivator to a system based on equality and cooperation. He labelled these thinkers utopian communists. However Marx failed to question whether part of his theory, endless growth, was a good thing.
Marx also adulterated the original communist principle of equality and cooperation by denigrating other analyses of independent causes of poverty, particularly the analysis of Thomas Malthus in the late eighteenth century. Malthus predicted that the growing human population would eventually outgrow food production. Marx's denigration of Malthus may have been motivated simply because he didn't want any distraction from his own ideas. He wanted sole focus on the idea that the economic pie is sliced horribly unfairly and obstinately refused to accept that the number of people needing a slice of that pie is also a factor in whether people get a reasonable share. However, his denigration of Malthus could also have reflected Marx's conception of the advance of history being tied to growth. Malthus was a clergyman and his linking of excessive human reproduction to a clergyman's prudish attitude to sex, also wouldn't have helped his cause.
Marx was clearly wrong in several respects. As one particular example, it is true that land used for agriculture could support many more people than the same land used for hunter gathering and that this led to agricultural society becoming dominant. However, as well as a major increase in quantity there was also a major decrease in quality. To be fair this was probably not known in Marx's day. Agricultural people live off a very narrow range of foods and are densely settled relative to those living the nomadic lifestyle. Agricultural societies therefore may have nutritional problems and suffer with more pollution with waste and more transmission of germs. Archaeologists can glean information from bones about the general health of a past society in terms of people having enough nutrition to reach their full potential size and in terms of assessing average age of death. Health of people in the Eastern Mediteranean appparently plunged precipitously with the arrival of agriculture and it only regained the stone age health standard 10,000 years later in the twentieth century.
Marx's denigration of utopian communists for relying on the principle of fairness and benefit for the majority, as a sufficient motivator to achieve communism, also seems misplaced in other ways. Even with the extra motivation of believing scientific socialism's prediction that, with the progression of capitalism, communists would ultimately be on the right side of history, it took about 30 years after Marx's time till the first successful communist revolution partly inspired by Marx's theory of scientific socialism. Contrary to Marx's prediction, revolution did not start where the development of monopoly capitalism was most advanced. The Russian revolution took place in a country with one of the least developed capitalist systems in Europe. It is true that utopian communism along with Marxist communism was also insufficient to motivate enough support for a successful communist revolution in the nineteenth century. When the Russian communist revolution came in 1917, non Marxist communists were also prominent - the left socialist revolutionaries (Left SR). It was perhaps just through minor chance effects that this group didn't become dominant in that revolution. Perhaps we might have ended up with a more benign and durable communist society.
Lenin and later communists further adulterated the main communist principle of equality and cooperation, by incorporating ideas about the nationalism of oppressed people. Perhaps some degree of nationalism should be accepted. The tendency of humans to identify more with their own group than with humanity as a whole seems to be an unfortunate reality. Witness the Australian media's focus on the possibility of Australian casualties when there is a catastrophe overseas. Nationalism however distracts from more noble principles such as humanity cooperating to solve global problems and nationalism seems to be a most potent cause of wars. On the other hand, a small dose of nationalism is not all bad. Nationalism fosters heterogeneity of human cultures which may be a survival advantage for the human race in future global crises. Distinct cultures also often incorporate appropriate adaptation to different geographic conditions and hence more environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, there is somewhat of a clash between nationalism and the fundamental communist principle of equality and cooperation rather than competition.
The end result of these adulterations of the main communist principle was that the variant of communism inspired by the leadership of Marx and Lenin was flawed and has not lasted. There is a modern Japanese historian and advocate for degrowth socialism, Kohei Saito. I have yet to read his books, but Kohei apparently tells his readers that towards the end of his life, Marx realised that the impact of capitalism on the environment should have been a bigger feature of his analysis and perhaps was questioning the role he had seen for growth.
I believe we need to go back to a purely principled approach - to a form of utopian communism. Equality and cooperation are clearly noble ideals whereas with capitalism, the economic motor of society is the disgusting encouragement of individual greed. I believe in some circumstances, pure intelligent analysis will be sufficient as a principled and logical motivator for degrowth socialism. This is particularly so when there is increasing awareness that the capitalism implies growth at all costs and that the cost of this growth is the destruction of the natural world and with it a threat to the survival of humanity. Catastrophes due to environmental damage are looming closer. Resource depletion, pandemics and nuclear war threaten. Many realise capitalism is doomed. Perhaps we can hope that a relatively small catastrophe could be sufficient to trigger a successful utopian communist or degrowth socialism overthrow of capitalism. We must also hope that this occurs before too much more of the earth is destroyed by capitalism. Meanwhile a political party advocating degrowth socialism will make this outcome more likely.
Many societies, traditionalist, capitalist and communist may be utopian to some degree. In capitalist society there was a well known book, “The end of history” written in utopian triumph about the victory of capitalism over communism in 1990. It predicted a stable future for capitalism for ever more. This is despite many people seeing capitalism as both evil and mad in wanting growth without limit to try to satisfy the insatiable greed it creates, and in exploiting nature to the point of total annihilation. The word “utopian” is used for a version of communism I favour, even though we may be unable to achieve a permanent, stable society with no compromise necessary between various ideals. Various quests for utopias have caused great harms, but a reasoned quest for some improvement to the way humanity organises itself is likely to be positive, even if utopia itself is unachievable. The form of any society achieved by utopian communists will still have to compromise between competing ideals. For instance liberty is a reasonable ideal. However some authoritarianism may be necessary at times in a utopian communist society to counter the corrosive effects of capitalist propaganda/advertising preaching greed. There is a mirror image here with some "liberal democratic capitalist" societies banning communism despite these capitalists arguing that liberty is the highest ideal. Despite the limitations of utopianism, one could reasonably hope for a version of communism that didn't follow doctrinaire principles as with scientific socialism and which did not degenerate like the Soviet version into an authoritarianism which became dominated by a violent paranoid leader such as Stalin. Stalin caused mass disillusionment with the promise of communism, even though later leaders like Kruschev and Gorbachov showed that a more positive variant of communism could emerge. Utopian communism of some sort seems likely to lead to a more desirable version of communism than the variant obtained using the ideas of Marx and Lenin.
Another reason for discarding Marx's approach is the opposition that Marxist communists generally show towards the population issue and the analysis of Malthus. Current Marxists seem to share the same antipathy to Malthusian ideas as Marx himself, seeing the population issue as a distraction from a focus on the unfairness of the capitalist system. They may also share Marx's belief that growth is inherently a good thing - part of the advance of history - and that communists can be better at it than capitalists. They admire the Soviet Union for its achievements such as being the first country to send a man into space in 1961, despite the Soviet Union being a largely feudal country only 45 years earlier and having paid a hugely greater price than the USA in the second world war, just 15 years previously.
As stated earlier, just because the economic pie is sliced in a monstrously unfair way, doesn't mean there is not also an issue to do with there being so many people that there would not be a reasonable slice even if the pie was sliced fairly. Malthusians would point out that in 1950 the population of the Soviet Union was roughly the same size as the USA. By 1990 the numbers of children born in the Soviet Union was about 10 million above the births in the USA in the same period. Therefore the Soviet Union had the burden of looking after 10 million more children through their development. Much more of the roughly similar population growth in the USA was by migration rather than childbirth and so they did not suffer the same burden. Economists have a term for this phenomenon regardless of political context. It is termed an adverse dependency ratio issue. Neglect of such population issues would be at least a part of the reason for the USA winning its race against the Soviet Union. We now see President Xi of China, still regarding himself as a communist of sorts, joining the anti-Malthusians, the pro-natalists, in decreasing access to contraceptives in the hope of more growth. There is no acknowledgement that China's enormous population is a huge environmental and social imposition on China itself and on the entire world.
With President Xi we also see the legacy of later Marxist communists in further adulterating the principles and logic of utopian communism. They advocate for the nationalism of oppressed people to be added as an extra motivating force for people in poorer nations to join the communists. Nationalism in effect is people relating more strongly to a smaller grouping of somewhat similar people rather than relating to humanity as a whole. Nationalism may be to some extent a natural tendency. However it also is a leading force in promoting war. With President Xi's thoroughly adulterated communist principles we see the threat of global nuclear war from the nationalistic sentiments he is stoking over Taiwan's separation from China. The world does not need nationalism to accompany communism. On the other hand, there are some positives in what could be termed sub-nationalism, that is large countries splitting into independent provinces. Smaller countries can be better adapted to their local environment. For example, Queensland where I live, had a tradition of wooden houses on stilts which meant that most houses were out of reach of floods and in the absence of air conditioning, were naturally cooler. Interstate migration and globalisation has overtaken this low energy adaptation to a warmer climate. Most housing in Queensland is now similar to housing in affluent but cold parts of the world. This housing is highly dependent on expensive airconditionning for comfort. In general a plethora of local adaptations around the world seems likely to make the world more resilient in the face of a global catastrophe.
The German Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said that people will come to believe a lie on two conditions – the lie is big enough and it is repeated often enough. It is simply paradoxical to believe that the less in common you have with your neighbour the more comfortable you will be with them. However, people are sometimes attracted to ideas that are surprising and even self contradictory. Hence to argue for multiculturalism giving us strength through diversity satisfies Goebbels first criterion. It is a Big Lie because it goes against our initial commonsense. It is a lie that has also been repeated by most of our politicians many times in the last fifty years. Most of us came to believe this Big Lie until the racist massacre at Bondi on 14th December 2025.
Does this lie matter? After all, it is a “white” lie with a positive impact if it increases the proportion of people who see good in humanity in general, rather than being mainly interested just in the welfare of their particular ethnic group.
To answer this question we have to understand why our political establishment perpetrated this lie. The Big Lie was used to get existing Australians to accept non-Anglo and non-white immigration, as the traditional sources of immigrants to Australia was drying up and Australian fertility was starting to fall. Why did the establishment want immigrants? The answer I give is extreme in the terms I put it, but some thought will show that it is the truth. The capitalist establishment wants population growth because it enables the rich to convert our natural environment into their profits at an ever faster rate until the total environmental destruction of Australia.
It is becoming clearer that the global capitalist or “globalist” agenda of the last 50 years is accelerating and is increasingly demanding the globalisation of poverty. Average Australians are becoming poorer and resentment of ethnically different neighbours is increasing. The establishment fears the resulting nationalism, because it opposes globalism. Nationalism opposes what the establishment has become – part of the global elite. The establishment preaches the Big Lie, Strength through Diversity, knowing that multiculturalism weakens not strengthens national unity and makes us less able to resist the globalist agenda.
Does it matter? As a Jew I benefit from living in a tolerant multicultural society and being able to enjoy diverse company. I fear extreme nationalism that could end in gas chambers or in jihadi attacks against both me and my fellow human beings. I am sure many Australians feel likewise. On the other hand, alternative positive ideologies incorporating degrowth and socialism are not on offer. The only real alternative on offer is globalism and endless growth until total environmental destruction, in order to satiate the insatiable greed of the insanely greedy ultra-capitalists. If nationalism is an obstacle for the globalist agenda, should it be supported? Certainly, if we care for the Australian environment, growth through immigration and growth in general, must be stopped. Getting rid of the Big Lie that many believed in till 14/12/2025 could help in this. What of the risk of an evil extreme nationalism? Beyond supporting truth over a Big Lie and supporting zero population growth, I don’t have a good answer.
There are several positive sounding virtues, ideals or guiding principles that could determine the overall pattern of organisation of human society. Liberalism is the belief that we should try to maximise individual freedom for each person in society. Then there is socialism/communism which is the belief that we should give greater weight to social responsibility and, in particular, our individual freedoms should be restricted where necessary. This recognises that with liberal freedom, more greedy individuals can irresponsibly take an unfair share of resources which are needed for the maximisation of the welfare of the collective of all individuals. Then there is environmentalism – a belief that again urges responsibility but this time in favour of the natural environment. Geologists tell us that in the billions of years since the earth was formed there has been five epochs where life came close to being entirely wiped out – the best known being the result of the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. It is said that we are now in the middle of a sixth great extinction with many species being driven extinct by a huge increase of the numbers in our own species. The effect of these huge numbers is further exacerbated by widespread greediness, indeed rapaciousness, which in turn, as we shall see, is a product of liberalism. This is resulting in dramatic changes to the earths surface, its oceans and its atmosphere that threatens most life on earth.
There are other guiding principles that society could be based on. Liberalism indeed is rather new idea in history. There are religious doctrines about how people should live. There has also been a belief in organising to strengthen the nation, a belief in everyone having an inherited position in society with kings and queens at the top and a belief in being guided by the most powerful people such as Genghis Khan or Adolph Hitler.
Liberalism, however has triumphed. Whilst even with liberalism, freedom is restricted in the most obvious cases where it clashes with the common good – for example traffic rules need to be obeyed for everyone’s safety, liberalism is now the main guiding principle for most of the world. With liberalism, the notion of freedom, almost always triumphs over considerations of social and environmental responsibility. Liberalism has an obvious appeal - none of us like to be restricted. However, this sentiment is just a very superficial reason for the triumph of liberalism as the organising principle of our society.
Liberalism has triumphed because it is the doctrine which justifies the freedom of the rich to exploit the rest of humanity whom they employ as cheaply as possible and the freedom to exploit the environment, the source of all material wealth. A billion people going to bed hungry tonight and the sixth great extinction underway now, are the results. Liberalism perpetuates itself by allowing the capitalists to subject the population from cradle to grave with propaganda/advertising encouraging greed and dissatisfaction. Ideas other than the promotion of greed are largely prohibited from consideration in shaping our society. I understand that corporations law forbids companies from having aims other than maximising returns to shareholders. They are allowed to spend money on positive efforts if it buys them a “social licence”, but their fundamental aim must still be to try to satisfy the insatiable greed of the shareholders. Encouragement of greed replaces all moral principles. In that sense, the liberal capitalist system is beyond immoral. It is amoral, it does not believe that morality should exist. Seen in that light, liberalism is the most evil possible of all ideologies. The Nazis and the Taliban are in a sense less evil because they are not totally amoral, are not motivated entirely by greed, but instead recognise some horribly perverted version of morality that tells them to kill Jews or utterly subjugate women.
Whether a social system that is entirely greed focussed and so amoral, is better or worse than having a system whose morals reflect an evil ideology, is perhaps not worth a debate. In practice, I find I have more sympathy for people who are not big capitalists but who have been brainwashed into seeing positives in liberal values, and I have no sympathy for Nazis and religious extremists. The point remains that liberalism and its role in global liberal capitalism, should be seen as pure evil.
One of the freedoms demanded by the ideology of liberalism is reproductive freedom. I absolutely agree that access to contraception and abortion must remain a woman’s right. This liberal right has only come to triumph over earlier religious concerns in recent decades, and the triumph is largely confined to many of the advanced capitalist countries and is in retreat in some. Rights to contraception and abortion I regard as the positive side to the liberal belief in reproductive freedom. It is the opposite aspect of reproductive freedom that is an issue. Liberalism gives people the “right” to reproduce as many times as they wish without any consideration for the impact of excessive reproduction on the welfare of the society into which the babies arrive. I find this freedom particularly concerning because it is an aspect of liberalism that is accepted as holy writ by people who are largely on my side of political debate. In contrast, I live in a town where the council generally insists that no one has more than two dogs. More than two could be too much for some neighbours to put up with. On the other hand the number of children that I can have in my house is limited only by the number of times I can impregnate women. Sure, dogs can make a bit of noise and can be careless with their excretions. But the same is more or less equally true for children. There is no licence required for having a child. In my locality, in recognition of the small burden a dog imposes on the general community, a dog licence is required. The dog licence here is only a few dollars. In bigger cities, a licence to have a dog may now cost several million dollars – the price to own a house instead of owning an apartment. Even in a large, densely crowded city, there is no licence fee whatsoever required to produce a child.
If a couple brings a child into the world in a developed country knowing that they do not have the resources to take care of it, generally the state will take some minimal care of the child who is surplus to the couple’s resources. If the child is unwanted by the couple and is merely the product of negligence, inducements or the ego of the couple in perpetuating their genes, the child is likely to be seriously damaged emotionally. The care of the state may well have to extend to providing the unwanted child a space in a juvenile detention centre and maybe, in adulthood, a bed in a prison. Regardless, the couple themselves who bred the child, are always beyond criticism, for under liberalism it is their holy right to reproduce as much as they want to. If a couple brings a child into the world in a poorer country knowing that they do not have the resources to take care of it, the child is often doomed to die in a famine or to be stunted physically and mentally if it survives. Again it is the liberal orthodoxy to not tolerate any discussion in this context, of the immorality of bringing a child into the world where it will be stunted for life or die through starvation. In any other situation, deliberately stunting a child or killing it would be regarded as a major crime. It is declared to not be a crime, not even an unfortunate act, when such an assertion would raise questions about the holy liberal right to free reproduction.
Capitalist society, is now seriously concerned that current reproduction rates are insufficient for growth. Capitalism is founded on the the liberal ideology of freedom, with this freedom to be used in a race of all against all to maximise wealth. Capitalism becomes a race for growth. Capitalists are seiously disturbed when one of the material bases for growth, populations size, looks like it may begin to shrink, rather than continue to grow. The capitalist establishments in most nations regard it as calamitous when birth rates fall below the 2.1 children per woman needed for replacement. They regard it as a calamity even though most of them have some consciousness of a sixth mass biological extinction being underway as the result of pressure of human numbers. They regard it as a calamity even though they have some awareness of the threat to a human future due to exhaustion of resources or pollution. Shrinking freshwater resources and climate change worries the capitalists far less than the threat of a shrinking workforce and shrinking customer base. The capitalist establishments of various nations have a widespread response - to provide incentives for women to have more babies.
There is some small rationale to concerns about sub-replacement fertility. Fertility at about replacement level over the long term results in a population with a reasonable proportion of working age people in comparison to the proportion of those who are dependent in that they are unable to contribute sufficiently to their own welfare because they are either too young or too old. However, society coped in earlier times when reproduction rates were such that numbers were doubling every generation and should cope when numbers are halving per generation. Indeed, a halving per generation should be easier to cope with than a doubling per generation. It should be easier, because a doubling per generation makes for an excess of children whereas a halving per generation makes for an excess of elderly, and children require more resources and for a longer period of time than the elderly generally require. Growth in population, unlike shrinkage in population also requires new infrastructure to be built. All things being equal, if society became more comfortable in the advanced capitalist countries as populations doubled it certainly could cope comfortably with population halving.
With the threats to humanity and the environment caused by our sheer pressure of numbers, a reasonable aim would be for a halving of numbers per generation for the next few generations. Over the next century, this would take nations back to the population size they had a century earlier. With a couple of generations of further effort, populations would be at pre-industrial levels. History shows that at such levels humanity lived in a truly sustainable way for millennia. A future population of pre-industrial size and with replacement fertility thereafter, would not need to be kept in check by the four horseman of the apocalypse – war, famine, pestilence and death, and would be comfortable and truly sustainable.
As a result, I believe that for a century or so, a one child policy globally is desirable. This raises the spectre of the Chinese one child policy which was enforced from about 1980 to 2010. People are often horrified by the idea of enforcing limits on liberal ideas about the freedom for an individual to reproduce irresponsibly. My response is that the virtue of liberal ideas are overemphasised. Liberal freedoms are often reasonable, but they are over valued because they are a sugar coating for the horrible capitalist idea of freedom. This is the freedom for those most successfully greedy, to exploit workers and exploit the environment to further their greed without limits. My sense is that when it is in the interest of humanity and the rest of life on earth, it is both ridiculous and evil, for a liberal freedom to reproduce irresponsibly, to be prioritised over a duty to act responsibly in terms of reproduction. The related question is enforcement. Taken in isolation, restrictions on freedoms, are unfortunate. In current circumstances however, I believe that enforcement of a one child policy would be absolutely appropriate. For me the most important concern is that it may be counterproductive due to people resenting limits. However, China has shown that successful enforcement is possible. On the other hand, inducements to limit reproduction may be successful enough to make any unfortunate need for enforcement, unnecessary in many countries.
Note to myself on further paragraphs: In the discussion points two above add in the advantages of nationalism or at least diversity - enviro adaptation , some resistance to global catastrophe the role if any of immigration internationalism not globalism And add future paragraphs eco communism vs utopian communism and revolutionary change. Advantages of separatism of provinces. for separaate article on liberalism