Published: Buffalo Student, Volume 1, Number 7, April 10, 1972.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Currently the Buffalo Savings Bank, the board of trustees of SUNYAB and various expert spokesmen for the monopoly capitalist ruling class such as Courtland Hastings, field director for the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, are dishing up the pro-fascist propaganda that pollution and overpopulation are the cause of the problems of the American and world’s people. They are organizing various meetings and symposiums on the “crisis of overpopulation and pollution” and a so-called Earth Day designed to “unite everyone concerned with the environment.” In short, their program is to call for genocide against the American and the world’s people, particularly against Asian, African and Latin American peoples under the guise of dealing with the “problem of mass starvation and increasing poverty” and to call for billions of dollars and new governmental agencies staffed by fascist experts to solve the “problem of pollution”. The ideological basis of this program is that the people are irrational and therefore destined to overpopulate and pollute the earth: in other words, the fascist mouthpieces for pollution and population control do constant propaganda that the people are to blame for the crimes of the monopoly capitalists! The same cutthroats and marauders who are daily carrying out world-wide plunder and pillage are now moaning about the “environmental crisis” caused by “man, the dirty animal, the polluter.”
From the point of view of the working and oppressed people, the main problem is U.S. imperialism and fascism which is viciously exploiting the land and labour of the world’s people and the people are organizing for and waging people’s war in order to solve their problem; from the point of view of the U.S. monopoly capitalist ruling class, the main problem is the working and oppressed people who are rebelling against imperialism’s evil rule and the imperialists are frantically organizing fascism at home and abroad in a desperate effort to suppress the people and maintain their parasitic existence. In this context we see clearly the nature of such pro-population control statements as that by Dr. Binay Sen: “The ever-mounting tidal wave of humanity now challenges us to control it, or be submerged along with all our civilized values,” or a well-known newspaper ad: “A world with mass starvation in underdeveloped countries will be a world of chaos, riots, and war. And a perfect breeding ground for Communism.”
This propaganda is part of the program of the monopoly capitalists for creating public opinion for the increasing fascistization of American society. The propagandists of “doom,” the neo-Malthusian.1 advocates of the pollution and overpopulation crisis are helping their masters, the U.S. monopoly capitalists, prepare material conditions for fascism in two ways: l) concocting and propagating pseudo-scientific “theories.” The theory that the “earth already or soon will have too many people for its possible food supply” is completely bogus. The temperate zones alone can provide enough food for more than 150 billion people (more than 37 times the present world population). What these imperialist toadies like Hastings do is to raise the issues of ecology and starvation and poverty as completely isolated from the social relations which produce them—imperialist relations of exploitation and oppression, 2) These ideas are anti-people in their essence and particularly anti-working class and pro-racist. Fascist experts like Paul Erhlich, author of the Population Bomb and a founder of Zero Population Growth, calls for fascist sterilization programs to control the irrational ”breeding masses.” Thus according to this fascist logic the people are incapable of solving any problem and must be controlled by fascist experts and fascist techniques. Widescale sterilization programs are carried out in Asia, Africa and Latin America under U.S. imperialism’s sponsorship and programs are now under way for the forced sterilization of welfare recipients who produce “too many children.”
All in all the propagandists for pollution and overpopulation control raise the slogan “pollution is a problem which concerns us all” in a vain attempt to unite the working and oppressed people under the banner of fascism by promising some reformist swindle. Well, gentlemen, we have news for you. The American working class and people are definitely organizing to put an end to pollution and to solve such problems as mass starvation caused by imperialist exploitation. You, sirs, would have us unite under the banner of imperialism to carry out genocide against Asian, African, and Latin American people and to pay you billions for fascist pollution control devices and experts. Well, gentlemen, with every passing day the American people see more and more clearly that the only solution to our problems lies in the American working class exercising leadership in everything, by uniting around itself the overwhelming majority of the people so as to overthrow the handful of monopoly capitalists and their fascist agents who are definitely “polluting” the whole world.