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Saturday, March 21, 2026
Paul Ehrlich’s "population bomb" theories: the Marxist refutation
These two articles from The Militant provide a consistent Marxist critique of Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" theories, framing them not as scientific inevitabilities but as ideological tools used by the capitalist class to shift blame for social crises away from the profit system.
Based on the articles, here is a summary of the core arguments used to refute Ehrlich's Malthusianism:
1. Productivity vs. Distribution
The Marxist perspective argues that hunger and resource scarcity are not caused by an absolute lack of food or space, but by the social relations of production. As noted in the Brian Williams article, Frederick Engels pointed out as early as 1844 that capitalism creates "poverty amidst plenty." The problem is not that there are too many babies, but that food is produced for profit rather than human need, leading to artificial scarcity and waste.
2. The "Food Explosion" vs. the "Population Explosion"
The articles highlight that Ehrlich's predictions of mass starvation in the 1970s and 80s failed because he ignored the "food explosion." Scientific and industrial advances—the application of labor and technology to land—have allowed food production to grow far faster than population. The articles argue that human labor is a source of wealth and innovation, not just a "mouth to feed."
3. Malthusianism as a Political Weapon
The Marxist critique views Ehrlich's "hysteria" as a way to justify:
* State Control and Coercion: The articles link population control theories to the history of forced sterilizations (noting that 33 U.S. states had eugenics boards) and the targeting of women in the semicolonial world (such as Puerto Rico).
* Austerity and Rationing: By claiming the planet has reached "carrying capacity," liberal pundits and "experts" provide a pretext for rationing healthcare, nutrition, and resources for the elderly and the working class.
4. Human Beings as the Solution, Not the Problem
While Ehrlich views humans as "cancerous" or a burden on nature, these articles emphasize the socialist view that human beings are the most precious form of capital. They argue that under a planned economy—one run by the working class—society could effectively combine labor power and science to provide for 8 billion or 10 billion people without destroying the environment.
5. Legacy of Joseph Hansen
The articles reference Joseph Hansen's 1960 pamphlet, Too Many Babies?, which was written specifically to combat the early waves of this hysteria. Hansen's work serves as the foundational Marxist text for The Militant, asserting that "overpopulation" is a myth designed to mask the failures of the capitalist system.
In short, these refutations characterize Ehrlich's work as Neo-Malthusianism: a pessimistic, anti-working-class ideology that seeks to "check" the population rather than overthrow the capitalist system that fails to support it.
Saturday, March 14, 2026
You have to learn what fascism is in order to fight it and win – The Militant
[F]ascism is not a way of organizing capitalism. Instead, it is a radical petty-bourgeois movement in the streets — the most horrible, malignant such movement in history. Banal, mediocre, figures — but ones adept at radical demagogy, nationalism, phrase-mongering, and organization — rise to leadership in these movements. Thugs rise among the cadres. The fascists ape much of the language of currents in the workers movement. “Nazi” was short for National Socialist German Workers Party.These movements never begin with broad ruling-class support. At first, the rulers in their majority alternately scorn and fear this rowdy “rabble”; only handfuls of capitalists back them at the outset. But as the bourgeoisie become convinced they confront an irresolvable social crisis, and as the working class puts up an increasingly serious challenge to capitalist rule itself, growing layers of the exploiters start supporting, or tolerating, the fascists in order to try to smash the workers and their organizations. That is the job the fascists are finally enlisted to do by the bourgeoisie when the threat to capitalist rule reaches a certain threshold.The fascists’ stock of “ideas,” encrusted with historical mystification, are borrowed from the sewers of the bourgeoisie’s own views, values, and attitudes. The things the capitalist rulers say privately among themselves, the subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry they promote, are taken up as the banners of a radical mass movement. The demagogues use these banners to mobilize and channel the energies of radicalized layers of the frightened, resentful, and ruined middle classes in bourgeois society.The fascists initially rail against “high finance” and the bankers, lacing their nationalist demagogy with anticapitalist rhetoric. When they come to power with support from weighty sectors of finance capital, however, the anticapitalist rhetoric slacks off quickly. That is what happened in Italy under Benito Mussolini in the early 1920s after il duce also became premier. That is what happened in Germany under Adolf Hitler a decade later after the führer also became chancellor. Once these new regimes set about reviving industry, building roads, and preparing for war, radical diatribes against capital went into rapid decline.SWP leader Joseph Hansen wrote quite a bit about the experience of the working class with fascist movements in this century. He pointed out that when a fascist movement conquers, its character rapidly changes. The new government demobilizes many of the most radical sectors on which the movement rose to power, bloodily suppressing some of its own cadres if need be, and begins functioning basically as a military-police dictatorship. In mid-1934, a year after he was appointed chancellor, for example, Hitler disbanded the Storm Troopers — the “Brownshirts” — that he had mobilized for more than a decade as the party’s radical, street-fighting squads against the workers movement. He summarily executed their chief, Ernst Röhm, and murdered dozens of other leaders of the Nazis’ longtime cadre.The regimes that come to power on the back of fascist movements are capitalist governments. It is misleading to talk about “a fascist regime” for that reason. It is not something historically different in class terms from a capitalist regime. Once fascist movements come to power, they use the state and forms of capitalist economic planning to bolster the strongest components of the bourgeoisie against smaller rival capitalists and against the toilers. Historically, these governments are short-lived. They become more and more bureaucratized, corrupt, and brittle. But a horrible logic is played out — a drive toward war, a monstrously brutal crushing and atomization of the labor movement, a drastic reduction in the value of labor power, crimes such as the scapegoating and extermination of the Jews in Germany and others that challenge language to describe. This is how a declining capitalism, in an unplanned and pragmatic manner, attempts to restabilize itself. …The workers vanguard must chart a course to mobilize and lead the working class and our allies to take power. Along the way, the labor movement will have to defend our organizations and those of other oppressed layers against fascist thuggery and murderous violence.
Israel fights a defensive war against Tehran rulers – The Militant
Anti-Jewish propaganda machine
....To bolster Tehran’s goal of destroying Israel and eliminating the Jews there, an international propaganda machine — made up of a bloc of Islamist fundamentalists and middle-class leftists — promotes the narrative that Israel is a white supremacist “colonial-settler” state.Its backers claim that Israel began as an imperialist colony whose goal was the “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” of Palestinians. This, they say, is why Israel’s destruction and a war against the Jews are necessary.This “narrative” leaves out entirely the key reason millions of Jews fought to move to Palestine at the end of the Second World War: (1) The refusal of the Moscow-led Communist Party in Germany to join forces with the Social Democrats to lead a fight by the powerful working-class movement there to stop the Nazis. This allowed Adolf Hitler and his Nazis to take power and murder 40% of the world’s Jews in the Holocaust during the war; (2) The betrayal by the Stalinized Communist parties of revolutionary movements that could have brought the working class to power in Spain, Greece and other countries; and (3) The refusal of the imperialist rulers in the United States, Canada and Britain to let in Jews seeking to flee the Nazis, sending them back to their deaths.Where were the Jews to go?When the war ended, Jews, many who no longer had homes to go back to, were put in “displaced persons” camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, many of which had been concentration camps under Hitler.Slaughtered by the Nazis, betrayed by the Stalinists and turned away by the U.S. and other capitalist powers, where were the Jews to go?They fought to get to what would become Israel, against armed opposition by the British rulers who controlled Palestine.When the newly created United Nations voted to approve the creation of the state of Israel, Jewish leaders agreed to its partition plan, with one section a majority Jewish state and the other majority Arab. But the semifeudal reactionary Arab leadership refused. Five Arab armies, along with irregular bands of the Arab Liberation Army, attacked the new state of Israel.Amid heavy casualties on both sides, thousands of Arabs fled or were expelled from Israel, which emerged victorious. Thousands of Arabs remained within the new country. Today some 20% of the citizens of Israel are Arabs.In the wake of the creation of Israel, Arab regimes across the Middle East brutally expelled their Jewish populations. Roughly half of the Jews in Israel are descendants of Jews from these Arab countries.Rise in Jew-hatredNone of the key questions that gave rise to Jew-hatred leading up to, during, and after World War II have been resolved. In the imperialist epoch, as the crisis of the capitalist rulers and their system deepens, they turn to Jew-hatred. Their aim is to divide and demoralize the working class and to foster fascist gangs.There is a new rise in violent acts of Jew-hatred around the world, tied to today’s deepening capitalist crisis. Until there is a revolutionary-led labor movement in the United States, France, Britain and elsewhere that views fighting Jew-hatred as a life-or-death question for the labor movement, thousands of Jews will continue to move to Israel every year because it is the only government in the world that defends Jews arms in hand.Nearly half of all the Jews in the world live in Israel, a small country that is 260 miles long and 10 miles wide at its narrowest point, and 70 miles at its widest. One nuclear bomb from Iran would cause a new Holocaust.That’s why Israel’s defensive war against Tehran is aimed at ensuring the bourgeois clerical regime there cannot develop nuclear weapons, nor long-range missiles capable of causing mass destruction.
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