Re: population and inequality

First, the industrial reserve army exists because capitalism cannot employ
everybody, not because capitalists consciously manufacture more people
than they can employ. That the industrial reserve functions to push wages
down, that the US state uses the Fed to achieve this effect, that the
industrial reserve can be useful in moments of expansion, etc., has
nothing to do with why it exists in the first place. Such reasoning is
either teleological or indicates a conspiracy (it must be a conspiracy
since there is no evidence for it) where the capitalist class connives to
increase the fertility of the working class. The only evidence for the
ruling class' intrusion into the fertility of the masses is in the other
direction, i.e., they desire to reduce the number of those in the
"underclass" because they are capitalism's embarrassment (hence the
support and funding of chemical and surgical sterilization, public heath
departments dispensing birth control, family caps, etc., all designed to
reduce the numbers of poor people).

Second, this statement - 

>What makes much more sense is that high fertility levels and large numbers
>of proletarians lead to magnified inequality.

- Is picture perfect social Darwinism. Lester F. Ward, in his article
"Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics," published in The American Journal of
Sociology 18 (1913) argued that the law of population causing the
proliferation of the "undesirables" not only "applies to the uncivilized
races," but "no less applies to the lower classes of civilized society."
These lower classes "furnish the proles, and constitute the proletariat,"
752. While Ward agrees with the elimination of undesirables (the
especially the "defective," i.e., mentally retarded, physically disabled,
etc.), he disagrees with his colleagues that they should fear the "proles"
and select them for reduction. He characterizes this fear as a product of
an "oligocentric world-view." "It is trying to polish up the guilded
pinnacles of the social temple so as to make them shine a little more
brightly, while utterly neglecting the great, coarse foundation stones
upon which it rests," quoted in D. Collin Wells, "Social Darwinism,"
published in the American Journal of Sociology 12 (1907), 702. The
proletariat, that rough-hewn lot, replenish the ruggedness of the race.

Andrew Austin
Knoxville, TN