Distortion
In his reply to my article (both GLW March 16), Allen Myers accused me of distortion yet used that very tactic himself. For instance, he leapt onto my somewhat facetious suggestion that GLW wanted Third World women to go barefoot and pregnant. Well, those on the left have a long track record of putting shoes on the feet of Third World women, but no record at all on the pregnancy aspect. It's been head in the sand all the way.
Claims that Australia's immigration rate cannot be judged on a per capita basis can only be made on the assumption that there is plenty of room in Australia for a higher population, whatever the source. Such an argument only reinforces my argument that GLW is not green, only left. Anyone who has any biological understanding at all will know that our capacity to absorb a higher population is very limited indeed given our severe land degradation, very high extinction rates and pollution of our waterways. Ask the Resource Assessment Commission who completed an Inquiry into the Coastal Zone last year.
Another distortion from Myers is his claim that AESP regards population as the chief cause of the environmental crisis. We have always regarded it as one of a number of factors, but a vitally important element. Myers concedes himself the relevance of population in his example about the depletion of fossil fuels.
With regards to food production, soils are being depleted because of overcropping or overgrazing, or from farming marginal lands such as those on steep, easily eroded slopes. Much of this is a direct result of population pressures. Unsustainable practices are a result of efforts to get too much from the land, to feed too many people.
Why is the focus on people a conservative rather than leftish position? I happen to be of left-wing orientation myself because I believe society has to intervene to assure a reasonably equitable distribution of resources. This has implications for population: all couples must be able to afford contraception if they want it, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities claim there are 300 million couples who would use them if they could get them.
In the end it will only be those who see human beings as part of a wider ecosystem living alongside other species who have a right to survive, who can call themselves green. Allowing the human population to grow exponentially, destroying the habitats of other species, destroying the natural world on which the human economy ultimately depends, is neither green, nor left for that matter.
Jenny Goldie
President, Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population
Canberra
[Edited for length.]
Mekong bridge
Building the "Friendship" bridge over the Mekong river between Laos and Thailand with Australian taxpayers' money is not necessarily the philanthropic gesture it may appear to be.
Prime Minister Keating is also calling for the financial colonisation of Laos by Australian businesses — in other words the plunder of Laotian national resources by foreign investors — and that bridge provides a route for the transport of that loot.
Such promotion of investment overseas makes the PM's previous statements on the lack of local investment being a cause of high unemployment look rather hypocritical.
It also reinforces the view that it is the intention of the Federal Government to force the acceptance of lower wages in Australia by threatening to direct investment to low wage countries overseas.
C.M. Friel
Alawa NT
Costs of empire
The Left has rightly emphasized the human cost of the American Empire; underneath its Hollywood veneer and smoothly tailored suits, the American ruling class looks at the world through gunsights.
The destruction of popular, dynamic, and truly reformist governments — in other words, the suppression of difference — by the American militarists is now a big contributor to global economic problems.
Thus, the enormous inequality of income forced on most Third World populations means that there are a thousand million people who'd buy anything if only they could afford it. However, the more affluent populations demand both impressive presentation and good quality. It is a classic capitalist crisis of overproduction.
In particular, the destruction of State socialism is leading not to permanent prosperity, but to the permanent impoverishment of much of Eastern Europe due to much greater inequality, and consequently the permanent loss of markets for Australian agricultural products. In the case of wool, post-1989 changes meant that there was suddenly no buyer for 25% of the clip.
As PRC managers become more successful at attaining their own personal enrichment through a retrograde move to capitalism, increasingly open social conflict will cause the loss of much of the existing Chinese market.
We cannot afford the luxury of many more victories for Western capitalism.
Roger Raven
Applecross WA
Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Malthus's famous law that organisms grow geometrically in numbers while the resources of their subsistence grow only arithmetically was initially used in his polemic against the old English Poor Law. He advocated a stricter control of the poor so that they would not breed and create social unrest.
Before Australians for an Environmentally Sustainable Population embraced Malthus, Charles Darwin took over this notion of nature to develop his theory of natural selection. The political economy of early capitalism was merely expanded to accommodate a particular view of the natural world. The war of all against all was thought to be as relevant to nature as it was to human society.
This claim that organisms, especially human beings, grow without bound and the world in which they grow is finite and limited are the two basic claims of the modern biological theory of human nature. In the tradition that runs from Hobbes to Malthus, through the social Darwinists, to modern sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson and the human genome project, we are thought to live in the best of all possible worlds because everything about us has evolved by natural selection alone. We supposedly get the society we deserve (even if your mother has to tell you to eat everything on your plate because people are starving in India). To preserve it we need only tinker with our genes and control our gonads.
But there is a major problem with this biological theory: it is not true. And no amount of simplistic algebra can make the world fit the theory.
Dave Riley
Nundah Qld
Postmodernism?
Shivers run down my spine when I see some of the devices used to attract new readers to Green Left Weekly and to the radical movements.
In previous issues of the newspaper graphics such as the one depicting athletes running around a track while another runs in the opposite direction use the notion of "difference" (or "difference elitism") to attract people to what is otherwise a paper without equal. However, "difference" has never been a driving force in progressive radicalism.
The same message is also conveyed in the advertisement with pictures of people in a theatre, all wearing 3D glasses. The caption reads, "Not everyone sees things the same way."
So what!
An ideology which embraces socialism and social change is not dependent on differences between people, races etc. These are the devices of Market Culture espoused by the middle and ruling classes, a culture which we should be trying to moderate. Simultaneously, differences of opinion and culture, ironically, are needed to form the collective culture experience in a democratic manner if we are to achieve a Democratic Socialism.
It is the obstacles common to everyone, which prevent us from reaching our full potential; they become the targets of change around which we unite. There are grounds for uniting people around differences but not for exclusionary movements.
Today the task is to get the majority of people to see the global view. The threat of climactic change, threat of nuclear war, the AIDS crisis, etc presents the view from that perspective, uniting millions in action around the world on behalf of all.
I was horrified for the same reason when I read in a P.S.U. Challenge document that one of its aims was to provide "career paths" for its workers. This also smacks of the same elitism. Surely the aim should be for power to be exercised from below, rather than moving into a decision making position which imposes decisions from above (bureaucratism).
To deny the existence of workers' class, culture and power only serves to break their solidarity. Revolutionary success doesn't come through playing the present game based on climbing over the shoulders of those below, but by everyone reaching the same heights of empowerment; all must become decision makers.
Let's all run in the same direction but let's change the direction and what we are running to.
Peter Perkins
Sydney
[Edited for length.]
Nazis and free speech
David Horton (Write on, March 30) criticises a report in GLW which celebrated the successful routing by anti-Nazis of a recent Nazi rally in Brunswick, claiming that Nazis, like any other political group should have the right to free speech. David believes the Left can not defend free speech by denying it to others.
Free speech for Nazis, however, is a liberal luxury we can't afford. Fascists gain influence, and ultimately power, through street terror, through cowardly racist thuggery, through simplistic demagoguery. They do not rely on reason and argument. And, when in power, fascists systematically and brutally eliminate all free speech and all right to assembly. Every democratic right the working class has ever won — our trade unions, the right to protest on the streets, papers like GLW — are swept aside by fascism triumphant.
Socialists are in favour of free speech. Nazis aim to destroy every jot and tittle of it. Free speech for fascists will wipe out free speech for everyone.
We should be wary of treating all political groups as equally eligible for free speech as David does with Nazi toughs and Blacks organising for their rights. The Nazis deliberately slaughtered Blacks and other "non-Aryans" (as well as persons of other nationalities, non-Christian religions, different sexual preferences, etc). That is what Nazis used their control of the streets for. Free speech for Blacks expands freedom, for Nazis free speech contracts it.
There is a major place for reasoned debate, for the "logical progression in argument" and "precision in the use of language" that David calls for. Trotsky's lucid writings on fascism are a case in point. Workers and the unemployed who are attracted by elements of fascist ideology such as racism should be reasoned with and won over by argument. We can all take our hats off to GLW in this respect.
But linguistic precision and emotion (which David deprecates) must also combine in calling the Nazis the anti-semites, racists and mass murderers they are, and outrage can then take its course when the Nazis show themselves — before more millions die in another Holocaust.
Phil Shannon
Canberra
AESP
Australians for Ecologically Sustainable Population have argued repeatedly that over-population is a key cause of ecological destruction and therefore the environment cannot be saved unless population control measures are implemented. They claim that the role for industrialised countries like Australia (where birth rates are low) is to restrict immigration, for in doing so environmental impact is minimised on a world scale. The "logic" behind their argument is that the migration of third-world peoples to countries like Australia increases environmental destruction because these new arrivals acquire a higher standard of living which (apparently) necessitates greater destruction of the ecology. AESP therefore states that Australia should cut its immigration intake, and believes that this is socially just because the "humanitarian component" of immigration can remain.
But surely, according to AESP's own "logic" it is precisely the humanitarian component of immigration that must be eliminated? After all, it's all those impoverished people (overwhelmingly black, Asian and Muslim) from third-world countries who have the greatest potential affluence differential; so it is they who pose the greatest threat to the environment (because they just might move over here).
If AESP's "logic" was repeated throughout the first-world then places like Western Europe would be closing their borders to the world's poor. Sound familiar? AESP's demands are being made at a time when fascists and neo-Nazis are regrouping around the demand: "Foreigners out!" That is why the arguments made by AESP lack intelligence and judgment.
Rohan Gaiswinkler
Hobart
Immigration
Jock Collins in his interview-article (GLW 16/3/94) on "Migration, racism, and the environment" seems to have made the discovery of the century about how immigration and population increase affect Australia's environment.
Apparently demographers have got it wrong, and "The impact of tourism is much greater than immigration". Unfortunately the interviewer failed to press Collins on any of his claims. With a different interviewer we might have had an interesting Socratic dialogue. e.g.:
Q. Jock, how do you prove your claim?
A. Well, about 2 million tourists pass through Australia each year, whereas it takes over a decade to bring in 2 million immigrants.
Q. But Jock, those 2 million tourists don't stay. Their average visiting time is about a fortnight. There are less than 100,000 tourists in the country at a time; whereas immigrants and their children stay, and over the years they increase our population by millions.
A. There you go, racist, scapegoating immigrants again!
Collins used ad hominem arguments in response to almost every question. He repeatedly claimed, even 3 or 4 times per question, that those who think differently are racists or (at best) unconscious racist sympathisers.
Collins would also seem to have invented the non-eating, non-driving, non water-using, sewageless, houseless human being — at least to judge from the arrogance with which he dismisses half of his own stated topic: viz. the connection between immigration and the environment problems. The connection, he pontificates without giving reasons, "is a long one", "a complex problem", but the important point is that it leads to "xenophobia", "scapegoating" and — yup, you guessed it — "racism".
Australia over the past decade has had by far the world's highest per capita rate of immigration — indeed at times twice as high as any other of the world's 200 nations. Collins of course assumes that this is a situation that requires neither comment nor explanation, and seems to think that those who believe otherwise can only be racists.
It is dishonest to use "racism" as a loose term for any kind of prejudice or preferences towards one culture or ethnic group rather than another — unless one agrees with Hitler and Goebbels that every cultural division is really a racial one and genetically determined. Logically, the latter view is what Collins would have to be expressing when he classes NESB European migrants as victims of "racist" prejudice.
Although Collins calls himself a Marxist, he shows little concerns for the effects of his policies on Australian workers. Indeed he seems to have no understanding of the contemporary class basis of his own New Class assumptions and dogmas.
Mark O'Connor
Convenor, Writers for Sustainable Population
Canberra
[Edited for length.]
Poverty and population
David Kault (Write on, April 13) tells us that while "poverty causes overpopulation" it is also true that "overpopulation causes poverty". Before he tells us that this "vicious cycle" is an example of dialectics, I would point out that he has overlooked a possibility: that poverty and overpopulation, although they interact on and "cause" each other in that sense, are both caused by some third thing.
I did not, despite the words David puts in my mouth, say that "poverty causes overpopulation". I said that the present system of social/economic/political injustice — capitalism — causes both poverty and overpopulation (and much more as well).
Thus the project of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population is utopian at best. Any number of people in a capitalist society will appear as overpopulation both economically (unemployment) and ecologically (environmental destruction). This is why David and other AESP members cannot respond to my challenge to specify what level of population they regard as ecologically sustainable: with our present social order, there is no such level.
Finally, on the meaning of words. Jenny Goldie of AESP attacks this view for being too left. David of AESP calls it a right view "by definition". This is because David tries to define left and right in idealist terms of beliefs about "individual freedom and social responsibility" rather than in terms of whose material interests are being defended. It also accounts for his rather peculiar notion of "Alcoa ... supporting the general Victorian community via employment", rather than the reverse.
Allen Myers
Sydney