Population (population)

POPULATION, population (theory of P.), in elementary understanding, the aggregate of people residing in a particular territory (population of a given country, population of this or that settlement, etc.). This definition in its most general form indicates that the study of population is unthinkable as merely a quantitative study of simple population relations, such as age, sex, marital status, etc., within which bounds population is usually and willingly studied in bourgeois demography. Such conceptions of population as a simple mechanical aggregate of people are characteristic of various shades of the organic school of sociology, developed by positivists (Comte, Spencer) and which has exerted considerable influence on modern demography, which considers population as sociological categories in the form of organic capital (Gold-schneider, Tomilin). The doctrine of population as organic capital depicts people as a simple aggregate of labor units, sources of physiological labor, considers man without regard to the qualitative uniqueness of social man as a productive force, equating human labor with the simple ability to perform work. In the plan of population study, the organic school therefore dominates with interest in the age-sex composition of the population as the main indicator of a country's labor resources. This school builds its entire forecast of economic development mainly on the basis of accounting for the ratio of separate age-sex groups, studying detailed analysis of mortality tables, etc., with the aim of forecasting the condition of the population's labor fund. The latter is precisely characteristic of all followers of the so-called theory Menschenoko-nomie, developed by Goldschneider. In the same direction develop the modern works of the German statistical administration under the leadership of Burgdorfer, who published a forecast of calculation of the population's labor resources in Germany for the coming decades of the 20th century, up to 2000. The theory of organic capital, as indicated above, is permeated with mechanistic views and contradicts the modern dialectical understanding of life processes. Man is not a simple productive force in the sense that one can speak of productive forces in organic and inorganic nature, adapted by man. Man is a creative productive force, subordinating to itself the development of productive forces as a whole, in the order of awareness of the necessary course of natural processes; thus, man is less an object than a subject of the development of productive forces and the creation on their basis of corresponding production relations. Careful study shows that the distribution of labor in human society least of all conforms to conceptions of man as a source of physiological labor. The huge number of unemployed workers and million-strong contingents of surplus peasantry in the most flourishing age, constantly observed as a permanent companion of capitalist relations, quickly and irreversibly destroy the entire legend of the constant, unchanging interest of society in the organic structure of the population. The very conception of man as a source of simple physical labor or, what is the same, as a machine capable of performing work, is easily and quickly destroyed by the processes of peculiar changes in the age composition of workers, observed at present in the stage of decay of capitalism. Characteristic are the data published by American business statistics, indicating a systematic lowering of the age of persons engaged in wage labor in individual branches of industry, indications of the existing age limit established by entrepreneurs in the process of rationalization and now descending below 40 years, dooming to social death huge masses of the proletariat, still far from a state of physiological decrepitude (see, for example, the book by Stuart Chase 'Prosperity of America-fact or myth'). Classical political economy (A. Smith and others), which proclaimed that the quantity of population constitutes the basic wealth of a country, was actually the predecessor of modern supporters of the theory of organic capital. However, the further development of capitalism led to this position being replaced by a peculiar aphorism of Testu de Tracy, cited by Marx: 'Rich nations are those where the people are poor, and conversely, poor are those nations where the people live well.' The doctrine of population as labor resources gave way to the Malthusian doctrine (see Malthusianism), which considers population as a consumer category, as a family of consuming individuals, and Malthusianism investigates this question from the point of view of the ratio of numerical size of population and level of means of subsistence. These two main directions - the doctrine of organic capital and Malthusianism - constitute the essence of modern bourgeois doctrine of P., finding expression either in pure form or in one or another variations, all sorts of additions or in the eclectic combination of both systems. All these diverse stages of the doctrine of P. are a reflection of the existing peculiarities of this or that phase of modern development of capitalism, taking into account the specificity of economic, national and political-state formations of one or another epoch; this for example explains the peculiarities of demographic schools of Germany, Italy, England, America, etc. The precise formulations of the basic problems in this field are given by Marx. The so-called natural structure of P. and processes* of the so-called natural movement of population are determined from his point of view by socio-economic relations, and at the basis of the supposed natural law of population in capitalist society lies the law of capitalist production (Marx). International professional statistics, especially clearly unemployment statistics, shows how little the change in the size of the proletariat is connected with the so-called natural movement of population. Even Ricardo emphasized that for example the quantity of the industrial proletariat of England in the main branches of industry from 1812 to 1867 changed quite insignificantly (from 66% to 80%), while the natural increase of population for the same years increased by 76%. Furthermore, the progressive world unemployment is in no way diminished in countries possessing a small natural increase, and moreover world unemployment covers the adult population and has no relation to the number of births of a given year. Thus neither the vulgar problem of physiological labor nor the problem of consumer resources constitute a scientific resolution of population problems. These bourgeois demographic schools represent so-called only the usual attempt to cover up the relations of exploitation existing in capitalist society and to replace it with reasoning about the natural biological processes occurring in human society, similar to the animal and plant world, allegedly determined by higher regularities already lying outside social processes. The revelation of the true essence of the population problem belongs, as indicated, to Marx and was further most fully developed by Engels, Lenin and to some extent Plekhanov. In the pre-Marxian classical political economy one can find a number of individual thinkers (Mandeville, Ideas, Ricardo, Smith, etc.), who to a certain extent also critically related to the basic positions of the organic school and Malthusianism, since the study of facts showed that under conditions of capitalist production the use of labor of the worker is least of all connected with the so-called natural processes of population movement and least of all corresponds to the correspondence between the latter and the level of means of subsistence. They noticed that 'strangely enough the harmonious development of capitalism precisely requires constant violation of the harmony of human consumption. For a free nation, where slavery is not allowed, the surest wealth lies in the mass of industrious poor. Not to mention that they serve as an inexhaustible source for manning the fleet and army, without them there would be no pleasures and it would be impossible to use the products of the country. To make society (which of course does not consist of workers) happy and the people content even with their miserable condition, it is necessary that the vast majority remain ignorant and poor. Knowledge expands and multiplies our desires, and the less a man desires*, the more easily his needs can be satisfied'. Marx gave the most consistent critique of the views of bourgeois political economy and sociology in the field of P., and his doctrine of population represents one of the brilliant examples of the concretization of the method of dialectical materialism in its concrete application to the doctrine of social development in the form of historical materialism. The so-called law of Marx on population comes down to three propositions: 1) in human society there is no absolute law of population for all epochs.

Each mode of production has its own law of population increase, which has only temporary historical significance; 2) the abstract law of population exists only in the world of animals and plants, until man interferes in this sphere; 3) the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the law of relative overpopulation. By denying in his first position the absolute immutable principles that lie outside social development and on which the organic theory and especially Malthusianism are based, Marx does not establish, as many critics (Lange) seem to think, the existence of an unchanging law of population in quantitative and qualitative terms in the world of animals and plants. Marx and Engels themselves, as well as Lenin, gave a critique of such superficial assumptions. 'Marx contrasts man with plants and animals,' writes Lenin, 'on the grounds that the former lives in various historically changing social organisms determined by the system of social production, and consequently also by distribution' (Lenin, 'The Economic Content of Narodnichestvo,' Chapter IV). (For how to understand the 'abstract' law in the world of animals and plants - see Malthusianism.) Marx's brilliant analysis of the population problem is based on the basic premises of historical materialism concerning the relationship between distribution and production. The opposition of these two categories of relations among organic bourgeois thinkers led to a one-sided and therefore fundamentally incorrect analysis of the problem. According to Marx: 'Before distribution becomes distribution of products, it is 1) distribution of means of production and 2) what represents a further determination of the same relation - distribution of members of society according to different kinds of production (subordination of individuals to definite production relations)' (Karl Marx, 'Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy'). Consequently for Marx, the population problem does not lie in the mechanical interpretation of man, on the one hand, as a machine, as a simple source of physiological labor, as the organic school did, and in the interpretation of man as consuming, destroying economic goods, man as an eater, consumer - on the other hand, as the Malthusians did. For Marx, society does not exist as a mechanical aggregate of human organisms, but as the most complex social phenomenon, which in the process of its own development modifies and subjugates human individual nature. And human labor, organized into social production, and individual consumption, and the reproduction of man himself are carried out not outside, but as an inevitable consequence of social production, determined by it and subordinated to it, and constitute an inseparable concrete unity. Marx studies the concrete relationship between the processes of capitalist development, expressed in the processes of expanded reproduction of capital, and the conditions of existence of the broadest masses of workers. Analyzing these relationships, Marx reveals that the conditions of existence of the broadest masses of workers are determined not simply by the ratio of the size of the proletariat to the availability of means of existence produced by society, but represent a direct function of the processes of expanded reproduction, finding its expression in the constant change in the structure of capital. According to Marx's general scheme of the structure and reproduction of capital, the advanced social capital consists of the constant part 'c' and the variable part 'v'. Variable capital determines the absolute and relative share of social capital which at a given phase of development is presented by the given social structure as the fund of means of existence of the proletariat in the form of wages received by the worker. However, this fund of means of existence is neither absolutely nor relatively constant, as Lassal taught, who substantiated the so-called iron law of wages. On the contrary, the fund of existence allocated by the given social structure (capitalism) for the broadest masses of the proletariat - variable capital - is in constant change, expressed in the systematic alternation of processes of increasing and decreasing the share of variable capital and accordingly decreasing and increasing constant capital. That is, in other words, social capital continuously changes its organic structure, and Marx showed that the main tendency of capitalist society is the increase in the organic structure of capital, consequently the decrease in the share of variable capital, which in turn leads to a decrease in the rate of profit, but with a constant increase in the absolute magnitude of profit, i.e., mass. This process of the change in the absolute and relative magnitude of variable capital leads to the constant reproduction of the reserve army, the ranks of unemployed workers. The absolute or relative or both decrease in the share of variable capital, manifesting itself in the form of an economic crisis, makes itself felt by the worker in a very tangible form of lockouts, increasing unemployment, etc. On the other hand, the periods replacing these periods of increase in the share of variable capital, i.e., the prosperity of capitalism, can arise only if there is a reserve army of proletariat, unemployed, reproduced by previous periods, from among which the restructured social capital will satisfy the newly arisen need to expand the contingent of workers. Thus the reserve army of the proletariat, which is a consequence of these automatic changes, is at the same time the most essential condition of the entire process of expanded reproduction in capitalist society. Relative overpopulation of capitalist society is a necessary consequence of the capitalist mode of production and at the same time a necessary condition for its existence and development. Thus, concludes Marx, 'the law of capitalist production, which forms the basis of the apparent natural law of population, simply amounts to the following: the relation between capitalist accumulation and the level of wages is nothing other than the relation between unpaid labor, transformed into capital, and additional labor necessary to set in motion additional capital. Consequently this is by no means a relation between two quantities independent of each other, between the magnitude of capital on the one hand, and the quantity of working population on the other. On the contrary, this is ultimately a relation only between unpaid and paid labor of the same working population. The law of capitalist accumulation, which takes the form of a law of nature, is thus merely an expression of the fact that the nature of accumulation excludes any such decrease in the degree of exploitation of labor or any such increase in the price of labor as could seriously threaten the constant reproduction of capitalist relations and moreover its reproduction on an ever expanding scale. Otherwise it cannot be under a mode of production in which the worker exists for the needs of increasing already existing values instead of, conversely, material wealth existing for the needs of the development of the worker. As in religion the product of his own head dominates man, so under capitalist production the product of 'his own hands' dominates him' (Marx, 'Capital,' Vol. I, Ch. 23). The way out of this vicious circle is through social revolution, and one of the factors revolutionizing the proletariat is precisely the presence of the reserve army of the proletariat. Marx distinguishes here three forms of overpopulation: floating, latent, and stagnant. By the first Marx means the constant phenomenon of the repulsion and attraction of workers to the centers of modern industry. By latent overpopulation Marx meant the phenomenon of the constant expulsion from agriculture under the influence of the development of capitalism of huge masses of rural population, not finding immediate application in industrial centers. The continuity of its flow to the cities indicates that there is also latent overpopulation in the countryside itself. Finally, the third category of overpopulation, according to Marx, constitutes stagnant overpopulation; this includes home labor, which is, according to Lenin, the worst form of slavery, the labor of workers in dying branches of industry, mainly small, semi-handicraft, etc. To these three forms of overpopulation are added the lower strata of relative overpopulation (pauperism), which besides the lumpen-proletariat also partly includes their family members and finally the incapacitated, i.e., the elderly, victims of industry, cripples, the sick, widows, etc. Pauperism is the poorhouse of the active working army and the ballast of the industrial reserve army. And Marx concludes: 'As capital accumulates, the position of the worker must deteriorate, however high or low his wages may be.'

"That law, which maintains the relative overpopulation or the industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the scale and energy of accumulation, binds the worker to capital more firmly than Hephaestus' hammer bound Prometheus to the rock. It entails the accumulation of poverty in proportion to the accumulation of capital; therefore, the accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time the accumulation of poverty, agony of labor, slavery, ignorance, barbarism, and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class which produces its own product as capital" (Marx, "Capital", Vol. I, Ch. 23). For social hygiene and the problem of public health in capitalist society, the existence of relative overpopulation and Marx's analysis of the entire problem have cardinal significance. Relative overpopulation in the form of a reserve army must be studied by social hygiene in two respects: first, in itself as constantly reproducing and growing layers of the working class whose standard of living is below the starvation norm. Second, the threat posed by the reserve army to the employed part of the proletariat. Over every employed proletarian hangs the constant threat of being pushed into the ranks of the reserve army, and at the same time the reserve army is not something mechanical, existing separately from the employed part of the proletariat; it is inseparably connected with it. Every working family has representatives of the reserve army in its composition, often to a greater extent than representatives of the employed part of the proletariat. This leads to the reserve army pressing on the employed part of the proletariat in two directions: it affects the fighting capacity of the employed part of the working class in the class struggle, in the struggle for payment for their labor, and at the same time it shifts onto the employed part of the proletariat the obligation to maintain its own existence, and thereby relative overpopulation excessively worsens the position of the entire proletariat and above all its sanitary living conditions and the level of its health. The main negative indicators of sanitary condition (high general mortality, high child mortality, increased morbidity, etc.) are consequences of the constant existence of relative overpopulation in capitalist society. Thus, Marx's analysis of the population problem once again brilliantly shows that the problem of health improvement in capitalist society is insoluble and that ultimately this problem of health improvement must transcend the capitalist mode of production. Thus, the problem of P., being the cornerstone of the general methodological part of social hygiene, most vividly reveals the social nature of the health improvement problem and the social nature of the pathology of the collective and indicates that only the revolutionary transformation of the capitalist mode of production into the socialist mode of production can solve the problem of health improvement. The law of population discovered by Marx is not merely a particular case of the doctrine of population for a given historical and socio-economic formation, but gives us the application of the philosophical weapon of the proletariat—the method of dialectical materialism—to the entire doctrine of the development of social processes. During the period of establishment of the socialist mode of production in the USSR, the concrete application of Marx's doctrine of population must be a guide to the practical activity of health authorities taking into account the corresponding peculiarities and new qualitative content determined by this stage of socialist construction ("building the foundation of socialist society"). Marx not only formulated the historicity of the law of population, but also revealed the essence of this law in human society, profoundly different from "natural" processes; he disclosed the main, decisive, most important side of this problem not in the process of reproduction, but in the dynamic structural changes occurring in the proletariat, in the intermediate classes of the petty bourgeoisie, and in the peasantry and finding expression in the formation of the reserve army and in relative overpopulation. Such an understanding of the law of population was least characteristic of the practice of modern demographic statistics, which especially developed the issues of natural movement and statics of population in isolation from the study of the processes of change in the dynamic structure of the working population, and in the USSR in isolation from the fact of the collapse of the capitalist mode of production and the establishment of the socialist one. The October Revolution, by destroying the capitalist system, although it did not eliminate unemployment and agrarian overpopulation during the restoration period, already at the very beginning deprived them of the attributes of relative overpopulation of capitalist society, of which they are a legacy, and thus gave a weapon for a more radical improvement of the living conditions of the working people. A feature of this period is that from the very beginning of economic construction during the transition period, the army of unemployed ceased to exert direct pressure on the employed part of the proletariat due to the fundamentally changed law of wages in conditions of socialist industry compared to capitalist. At the same time, this period from the beginning of the October Revolution was characterized by the presence of a significant army of agrarian overpopulation, maintaining and even increasing the ranks of urban unemployment, at the same time deprived of the main attributes mentioned above of the form of relative overpopulation of capitalist society. With very few exceptions, all the more significant works in the field of research on agrarian overpopulation in the USSR in recent years belonged to the so-called Kondratiev-Chayanov group (Chayanov, Chelintsev, Sukhanov, Lubny-Gertsyk, etc.). The theoretical conclusions of these authors are fundamentally contrary to the viewpoint developed above on the problems of population and in particular on the problems of agrarian overpopulation. The basic theses of Chayanov are as follows: "Thus we see that the capacity for development of agricultural culture and its intensification can be increased dozens of times, however this increase in capacity is obtained at the cost of directing an ever-increasing proportion of the country's population to agricultural labor and a strong relative, and at higher phases of development also absolute weakening of urban industry in the sphere of national economic turnover." The unjustifiability and counter-revolutionary nature of these positions are obvious. The development of the national economy for Kondratievs and Chayanovs is depicted in terms of maximum labor input with minimum mechanization. Their ideal is the Chinese peasant caring for each ear of rice. In his utopia "Journey of my brother Alexei to the country of peasant utopia" Chayanov says: "Our crop, yielding over 500 poods per dessiatine, is obtained almost by individualized care for each ear of grain. Agriculture has never been so manual, and this is not a whim, but a necessity given our population density." The mechanistic ideology of the right deviation also gave its own population theories close to these bourgeois interpretations. Bukharin in "Historical Materialism" essentially gives an exaggerated Malthusian formulation about the alleged direct connection between the level of population and the development of productive forces. The more the latter develop, the more the population multiplies and vice versa. All these theories are also a direct reflection of liberal-populist views, based on Malthusian views on the population problem. Agrarian overpopulation is revealed by neo-populists and mechanists either in terms of excess labor without application due to land shortage, or in terms of excess mouths exceeding the level of means of subsistence. Lenin in his works against the populists and Struve in his classic "The Development of Capitalism in Russia" gave an exact analysis of the essence of this agrarian overpopulation in Russia. He showed that agrarian overpopulation in Russia had a pronounced capitalist character, that it was a direct consequence of the penetration of capitalism into agriculture, as Marx also asserts. The penetration of capital into agriculture first in the form of the creation of an internal money market, and later in the form of the settlement of industrial capital and the introduction of markets for agricultural and industrial labor, leads to the disintegration, degradation, and fragmentation of a significant part of agriculture and at the same time to the crystallization of capitalist forms of agriculture, creating the same two poles of poverty and capital in the countryside. The disintegration of small-scale commodity economy in conditions of capitalist society is a source of the production of the proletariat, supporting the expanded reproduction of capitalist relations. It is precisely in the framework of this concept of Lenin that the existence of agrarian overpopulation in the transition period should be considered as a result of the continuing similar development of small-scale commodity economy, similar to capitalist economy in general."

Statistics on peasant departures reveal that the areas of greatest population departure for earnings do not coincide at all with either the areas of greatest population density or the areas of least land provision. On the contrary, the history of industrial development in our country shows that the formation of large new industrial centers (Donbas, Leningrad, Moscow textile areas) has destroyed the small commodity relations that previously existed in all adjacent areas, without any direct dependence on land provision or labor utilization. Collectivization in the USSR cut off the last remnants of relative overpopulation in the form of agricultural overpopulation. This stage of socialist construction, prepared by the previous rapid pace of industrialization in the USSR, has led to the fulfillment of Marx's predictions at the present time about the transformation of surplus population into a shortage. The problem of population surplus has been replaced at this stage of socialist construction by the problem of an acute shortage of personnel, and, like all the main difficulties of socialist construction, this problem is being resolved through persistent planned overcoming of it through active struggle for personnel, their regulation and redistribution. Labor reserves in the collective farm sector of agriculture have already raised the question of their proper use in industry (see the decree of the USSR Council of People's Commissars on departures from agriculture of June 30, 1931). According to data from the Collective Farm Institute relating to the autumn of 1930, labor power is utilized only 43.2% during the spring, summer, and autumn periods (not counting winter). In place of the pre-revolutionary "departure out of necessity," the question is now being raised about the planned use of labor reserves in agriculture for the needs of the entire national economy (industry, transport, forest and peat development, housing construction, etc.). Despite the expansion of production in collective farms compared to the level in individual farms, despite the expansion of sown areas, the widespread development of gardening, livestock farming, poultry farming, the growth of technical crops, the increasing mechanization in collective farm agriculture and the greater labor productivity in large farms, the development of socialist competition and shock work will increasingly free up labor power in agriculture, which can and must be used for industry. This movement of labor power from the countryside to the city has tremendous socio-hygienic significance, creating new forms of labor and way of life among workers coming from the countryside. On the other hand, this same stage of socialist reconstruction represents the initial stage of implementing Marx's second prediction about the transformation of labor from a necessity into a primary need. Socialist competition and shock work are a new form of attitude toward labor at the stage of socialist reconstruction and at the same time one of the most important conditions for overcoming difficulties in the struggle for personnel. Thus, for the current stage of socialist reconstruction, the problem of population turns into the problem of personnel. The main thing is the accounting of population as personnel of socialist construction both in their relation to the organization of socialist production and the reproduction of the personnel themselves (training of personnel and public consumption). Accordingly, the tasks of demography and sanitary statistics change at this stage of socialist reconstruction. This understanding of the population problem in the USSR provides every reason for optimism also in relation to the main problem of health improvement: a problem that cannot be resolved under the conditions of the capitalist system becomes an integral property of the socialist mode of production. Practically, this new approach to understanding the problem of Population raises a number of new specific questions in the field of sanitary statistics, making the latter an active participant in the socialist reorganization of the country and resolving many specific questions of the proper use and sanitary service of various population groups (see Sanitary Statistics).