A Malthusian defense of Marxism?

Let's for a moment set aside accepted norms of polite conversation to discuss the realities of public policy for the next fifty years, when we are well into the age of global squalor.

Marxists generally supported unchecked population growth as it provided the manpower for a future proletarian army. Industrialists generally supported population growth as a source of cheap labor and future markets for its products. Theocrats supported population growth as a continual supply of faithful tithers. It is primarily overpopulation and its humanitarian enablers that has led to our modern ills.

Every attempt at partial privatization of the Social Security pyramid scheme has failed. Even an attempt at a slow-down of the rate of Medicare expenditures fell in defeat. The runaway train of entitlement spending is on its way off a cliff, a spectacle we will see in our lifetimes. Perhaps there is a perverse logic behind the promotion of tobacco, alcohol, narcotics and red meat; the sooner thy neighbor drops dead, the safer my Social Security check. Who says individual interest is subsumed in collectivist societies? But one cannot depend on the population's ability to self-destruct and remove itself from the entitlement payee pool.

Mass collectivism as manifested in the 20th century was the most efficient decimator of souls. If one accepts the Malthusian argument of exponential population growth, then one accepts population reduction an ideal. What better way to quickly bring population levels down to a more sustainable carrying capacity than to precipitate the famines which Marxism has caused? I am not offering a defense of Marx for what he wrote, I'm offering the logical and historically proven OUTCOME of Marxist policy as a tool of planetary depopulation. My main concern with such a scenario is that there is no mechanism for the survival of the desirable elements of society; the self-organizing communities of vigilant citizens who retain a culture of free thought and civil government. Spencerian Darwinism, that the good will always triumph over evil, is naive at best. Any community of survivalists will be looked upon jealousy by the starving and desperate masses. Those who desire to preserve their culture must include protocols of self-defense or perish at the hands of neighbors who have fallen from civilized behavior into a "state of nature." The meme of freedom and reason necessitates overwhelming firepower to counter the meme of looting and anarchy.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. It is apparent that democracy has proved corrosive of private property, constitutional republicanism and other aspects of Anglo-American Enlightenment statecraft. The PEOPLE have spoken and the PEOPLE want their neighbor's paycheck.

The inescapable trend towards confiscatory rates of taxation will lead to an ever-diminishing pool of private industry. The ever-growing public sector, whose less-efficient units do not bear the same risks as the private producers who subsidize their salaries, will become naturally entrenched in rent-seeking machinery fully focused on maintaining their job security. None of the transfer payment recipients will care that someone else has to pay for their meal. None will care about the multitude of interconnected steps and investments and processes, bound by economic transactions and relationships that go into their distribution of unearned income.

Greece is a case in point. Corrupt officials, a bloated public sector, the brain drain, heavy industry outsourced long ago. It is a tragedy that the cradle of Western civilization is now on the verge of fiscal meltdown. But the cold hard fact is that the rent-seekers up and down the chain in that nation have brought this upon themselves. All the protests and demonstrations won't be able to magically make their economy productive and investment-friendly again. The Modern World has only one question for every society, regardless of their quaintness, or heritage or culture: What can you produce at a comparative advantage? At a competitive price? At optimal efficiency?

No answer is necessary. The answer speaks for itself in the stifling socialism of comfortable bureaucrats. Removing the risk of failure, guarantees the certainty of collapse. How can one cherish life without the threat of death? Now can one excel in industry without the risk of bankruptcy?

The benefactors of the entitlement programs will also become entrenched in whatever internal dynamic the capital government operates under in order to ensure a steady market for their services. Public debt will explode and each successive administration and legislative session will pass the problem to the next generation. The last desperate measure of the modern world will be currency devaluation. A downward spiral of unstable commerce brings productive activity to a grinding halt. Police and soldiers, whose paychecks are unable to catch up with skyrocketing prices, simply abandon the streets to the gangs and predators. The dialetic materialist will not be able to explain why someone won't get out of bed in the morning to complete a productive task (much less manage a massive enterprise).

Perhaps because he isn't compensated for his labor. The materialists won't be able to explain why the lumpenproletariat can't produce doctors or engineers, much less competent leaders and managers to make their systems "go." Every rationalization will be offered to justify mass conscription in the name of freedom from want. The spirit of gainful commerce will be murdered and everyone will live only to leech off of his neighbor. All the enlightened progressive pundits and commentators run out of people to blame.

Since the problem is unsolvable by lawful means, the only way to get out from under the tangle of regulation is to let the system collapse under its own weight. The problem is if the universal suffrage system survives the upheaval, the mass dislocation of the most dependent will mark capitalism as an evil and elevate collectivism for ten centuries, leading to endless cycles of famine. Few will care that their comfort was an artificial bubble to begin with. What matters is restoring order to keep the government checks coming and therefore any brutal despot that can demonstrate that ability will be preferable to any futile call for a return to a distant past of ballots and inaugurations. The masses will get nor deserve democracy.

Perhaps this cynical outlook will make the culling of the wretched masses more palatable or even invoke schadenfreude. But then, a collectivist outcome would not by definition, be a complete civilizational collapse. The paradox is that if enough of the desirable aspects of civilization survive, will the collectivist, sentimentalist memes be carried into the next epoch with the survivors? A complete collapse would not guarantee the preservation of the desirable elements, which defeats the purpose of our speculation in the first place. A collapse may throw out the baby with the bathwater if even the hardened subcultures can't hold the walls from the looter-horde. And even if the masses are held back by sheer firepower, the survivors will no longer be "innocent" in their worldview, having had to lose precious warrior/intellects and inflict mass death upon their former neighbors.

Civilizations evolve and devolve in cycles (Toynbee, Gibbons, Spengler, Huntington). The pioneers and founders bravely forge the new state. The second generation builds up the inheritance of their forefathers to staggering heights. The third generation, comfortable and lacksidaisical, ignorant of the struggles of the previous generations will squander their inheritance through "enlightened" policies or drug-induced apathy. Once the last generation enters such nihilism and despair, they will be surpassed by another milieu that is ignorant or undeterred by the fact that they arrived that the party in time for the last dance. With the debt bubble, peak oil, etc. no answers will be found in the history books on how to manage unprecedented crowding in an unprecedented technological era of toxic memetic amplification.

The organizations that survive into this brave new world will be the ones that are already self-sustaining and can weather lawless conditions, the military and the gangs, will be only semblence of goverment and they won't care about who didn't get their Social Security check. Once again, there will be two types of people in the world: Those with guns and those that don't.