Without stepping too much outside of my wheelhouse, As I am not a demographer or historian of biostatistics, I wanted to do a synthetic thread on ‘population’ & its role in traditional discourses, particularly political economy & of the liberal state. We’ll see if I finish it.

Mostly I want a determinate thread I can refer to whenever anyone either makes flawed over population arguments OR tries to argue ecologists are eugenicists OR when SocDems/libs try to hide that they actually DO support population control as social control.

To start I’m gonna link to other threads I’ve already written on the subject just to get some basic things out of the way.

The first I’m going to link to is a point i am going to center on later—Malthus, and by extension, the liberal capitalist state, all actually support population growth, but they also want *social control* & forced scarcity https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1237104618959560704?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1237104618959560704

This will be the central thesis:
1. Both capitalism & the state, for their own reasons, require constant positive population growth, modulated by the (ultimately finite potential )growth in productivity, resources, & the age structure of the society.

2. But Children, parenting, marriage/divorce, youth, teenagers, education, college, training, healthcare, crime, aging, & the elderly pose costs, constraints & capacities on both capitalism & the state, that they wish to reduce.

3. What's more, capitalism & the state rely on the existence of but continually commodify & eliminate tradition, kinship, community, convention, & social ties, which are instrumental in balancing the contradiction above (thus it's a double 'contradiction')

4. In addition, as population, especially young people, rise, and labor rise, then the capitalists & state have higher burdens of employment, social cost etc, less opportunities for control, and can potentially be overwhelmed or overthrown

5. However, the converse, where there is 'intensive', rather than extensive, population changes--namely, fewer, but more educated, well trained, etc., children--raises the cost of social reproduction of labor & thus of labor as such.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/omoav/roes_99811.pdf

6. They can try to shift these costs to the individuals, as Harris describes in 'Kids these Days', but the intrinsically social nature of labor, institutions, employment, and training makes this ultimately limited in the long run.

7. Some industries, like finance, education, retirement, insurance, medicine, policing, the military, arms, manufactures, agriculture, & manual labor, as does state taxation, money, & employment need a mix of a:
a. growing &/or
b. a young &/or
c. a healthy
population

8. However, these also represent costs to these institutions, as well as constraints & a population to be controlled. The only solutions therefore depend on inflows (from abroad or migration), or from stock depletion (capital, money, land, nature, energy, etc).

8a. Migration would be the most efficient, equitable & just solution, as it benefits the immigrant, their ancestral society, & the new country. It'd also help capitalists (hmmm), but it disrupts racism, white supremacy, national borders, sovereignty, homogeneity, control etc

It also equalizes wages, capitals & trade across societies, and makes it possible for a global working class to form. Thus, capitalists & the state want the benefits from migration, but not the costs, so they create porous carceral borders & globalization.

8b. Stock depletion can only work for so long, and thus states are trapped in a dynamic familiar in antiquity & feualism, where they grow & extract in greater increases intensities & extensiveness, and eventually stretch too thin & burst at the seams.

9. These dynamics are not Malthusian--they result from revolt, invasion, secession, as much as collapse--but they are what Malthus wanted to *prevent*, as forced settlement, stratification, enclosure, extractivism, & centralization create their own contradictions.

These contradictions, apparent in the economic, cultural, demographic, ecological, infrastructural, literary, & written record, created patterns familiar in Antiquity & Feudalism, which seem gone, but are merely obfuscated by capitalism.

10. Thus, states & capitalism have a vested interest in population growth, but also in population & social control, AND, they have a vested interest in using population growth & collapse as a threat/cudgel to suppress dissent & resistance.

11. As such, the repressive & ideological organs of state/capital have a vested interest in advocating both pop growth & social control, & to advocate population control/eugenics while presenting the opposition as doing so.

These are my theses, and I will now try to illustrate them more in depth. I may give up on writing this thread half way through however, as i've already made my main point & have other threads with sources but alas.