The Superfluous Class

The reporting done on the U.S. election addresses mainly the theatrical and rhetorical aspects of the campaign. Occasionally — one could say almost coincidentally or even almost by accident — one stumbles across something that produces cold chills. That was the case last week when we learned (thanks to the research done by the American magazine Mother Jones) what an unmuzzled Mitt Romney tells his audience behind closed doors.

Day in and day out he regales the public — as every candidate does — with promises of how he intends to help them. How he is increasingly concerned that so many of them are now dependent on food stamps (by the latest count 47 million, nearly one-sixth the entire population). The devout Mormon generally says his campaign is for the 100 percent of Americans who need help.

In Florida, however, before a group of extremely wealthy supporters, Romney said — his voice dripping with scorn — that 47 percent of Americans were parasites, dependent on government assistance while paying zero taxes and demanding that the state support them because they were victims of the system.

Romney’s Window Dressing

Immediately after this public gaffe, he was forced to throw together a hasty news conference where — this time in sugary tones — he announced that his intention was to create jobs for everyone who wanted to have a better standard of living. However, this is merely window dressing.

As an internationally successful entrepreneur, he certainly knows that with advancing globalization and automation it would be impossible to create jobs for the bulk of the world’s population. The automotive supplier Sensada of Freeport Illinois, a company founded by the Bain Capital Equity Fund, is in the process of closing its doors and moving production to China. In other words, the workers have become redundant.

A few days ago, I spoke to an investment banker who smugly asked me how I was reconciling my social and ecological convictions with the reality of the times, namely that the earth was overpopulated. Within so-called elite circles, a post-humanitarian jumble of neo-Malthusian and neoliberal philosophy has been circulating of late.

As early as 1966, CNN founder Ted Turner said in an Audubon magazine article, “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95 percent decline from present levels, would be ideal.” Having mellowed in his old age, he told the Philadelphia World Affairs Council in 2008 that the world’s population should be reduced to two billion people. His friend, John Malone, who replaced Turner as the largest land owner in the U.S. in 2011, recently said he is more inclined to think that mankind was in no danger of disappearing any time soon.

Bill Gates also advocates drastic population reductions, a view that he elaborated on in a 2010 speech: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

Bill Gates’ Fantasies

Gates’ statement is truly shocking, as we know it’s neither polio vaccine nor reduced infant mortality but rather better education of women (see the example of the Indian state of Kerala) and increased wealth (see the example of Germany) that drives population growth toward zero. However, this cannot massively reverse the trend.

Neo-Malthusians aren’t just experiencing a boom in the United States. The Russian magazine Ecological Postmodernism published an article several years ago that included a table for 2007 showing “over-populated nations of the world.” The table listed 107 nations that were home to 80 percent of the global population: 5,470,982,000 souls living in a space with a “biologically permissible population” of 1,922,121,200.

The overpopulation back then was 3,548,868,800. The biggest offenders were, presumably, China (860 million) and India (938 million).

That’s going to require austerity of a special kind. What’s noticeable in the tables is the fact that neither Russia nor the United States are included. It’s probably inopportune to look for members of the superfluous class in one’s own back yard. Like those who insist people limit themselves to one child while they engage in producing multiple offspring: Ted Turner has five kids, Bill Gates has three.

Redundancy is limited to that portion of the labor force that cannot be profitably exploited in capitalist circles. A subsistence or family farmer is thus far more redundant than an urban dweller, even if he lives more modestly than his city counterpart. If it were really all about ecological priorities, they should look for the superfluous first among the super-rich like Romney and his crowd whose personal consumption equals or exceeds that of some African nations.

The more materially successful a person in the ruling system is, the more ecologically destructive he or she is. That’s not immediately evident, since a white man thinks of himself as being worth a thousand brown, yellow or black skinned men. Collectively, it’s always those “others” who are killing our planet.

It was probably a waiter who recorded Romney’s speech in Florida and released it to the world. That’s another hubris inherent in this patriarchal/individualistic class: The precariat, from which cheap labor is recruited by the wealthy in order to shine shoes and serve drinks, may eventually tire of living on the crumbs that fall from the opulently set table.

There’s a wonderful English film from the 1980s titled “Eat the Rich.” It was a satirical rebuttal to Margaret Thatcher’s reign.

Who will end up eating whom today has yet to be determined.