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From Socialist Worker, No. 91, 5 October 1968, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
MAY I answer requests for clarification of my article (The Starving Masses – They Need Guns not the Pill, September 7) – especially as you left out a piece attacking the Pope.
Of course I stand for the right of people to control their own fertility! Also, it is clear that the people interviewed by Terry Bull need to exercise this right immediately. In this connection we condemn the Pope’s sinister Appeal to the Public Authorities to deny them this right.
My point was that birth control as a solution to problems of starvation, bad housing, etc., is essentially a private, short term, partial solution.
It has no relevance for long-term, universal, public solutions of problems, which are essentially those of social organisation – at least until we have seen what a world socialist order is capable of, and what the purely voluntary rate of reproduction turns out to be. (And if it does turn out that mankind is forced to limit its numbers I venture to predict that it will not be because it is impossible to feed people but because the effort to do this will lower the quality of life in ways which are more apparent in London today than India, i.e scarcity of open space, breathable air, etc.)
Imperialist apologetics rely on confusing these points. Ever since the time of Malthus the rich have blamed the fertility of the poor for their woes. This lie must be exposed.
Yet today they are having more success than ever before in diverting attention from their own crimes by playing up a wholly spurious “population problem”
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Chris Arthur |
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