Re: population: real problem, or capitalist plot? (fwd)

Richard,

It is very unfair to call Andy dogmatic here. What Andy is concerned as of
so far (as much as I do and some others) are hidden political agendas
behind population control strategies (pro and anti). We folks are not
living in the ideal world; we are living in the real world where
scientific knowledge is subject to all sorts of ideological manipulation. 
I think we Marxists should all share some critical concern about why
over-population problem is constantly presented as a problem of the third
world in such a way to control people over there. This is not to suggest
that over-population problem is a myth or has no real existence. On the
contrary, we have been saying that it has a _real_ basis, and this basis
has its roots in capitalist world system and the scientific enterprise
built to reproduce this system. I have been giving examples of how women
bear the burden of population when they are given no opportunity of
controlling their lives (and bodies) if these opportunities are given to
men only as a way of controlling women's lives. Western societies have
raised their level of wealth in the core by creating at the same time a
periphery in the world system, and that is how they gained reproductive
freedoms and _partially_ liberated their women. Nothing happaned as a
magic, and now the same western societies think those people overthere are
a bunch of trouble makers because they are so called over-reproducing
uncivilized people. Women are targeted to purify and modernize
"underdeveloped" nations through family planning projects that
reconstitute rather than substitute patriarchal gender relations.I
read the times that the Turkish government in the 1930s encouraged
women to reproduce more and more in order to create healty, prufied,
Turkish sons: "the stronger the family, the stronger the nation state"
sort of masculinist ideology. The notion of nuclear family, the
reproductive unit of capitalist economy, still needs critical examination
as part of the internal agenda of population control strategies.. That is,
actually, what we mean by hidden agendas...

Mine
 
>If *you* think there has been no compelling countervailing argumentation,
>that just indicates to me that perhaps you share Andy's dogmatism,
>whatever he and you would like to call it. 

>RH