Bluntly put, he wants to warn us that there are too many angry young men outside the Euro-American world today—above all, too many Muslim young men. It is well known, of course, that world data on age cohorts reveal a higher proportion of the young—a ‘youth bulge’—in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, relative to overall population, in contrast to the higher proportion of the ‘working-age’ population in East Asia and Latin America, or the ‘age bulge’ of Japan and Europe. Heinsohn’s contribution has been to interpret this as one of the principal threats to the West in the first quarter of the 21st century. As he generously acknowledges, Heinsohn picked up this notion from the us Defense Intelligence Agency. Clinton’s dia Director, Lt-Gen Patrick Hughes, had described the ‘youth-bulge phenomenon’ as a ‘global threat to us interests’ and ‘historically, a key factor in instability’ as early as 1997. But like a good Teutonic theorist, Heinsohn saw how to embellish the threadbare empiricism of American military bureaucracy with a world-historical idea: ‘Surplus young men’—the German word is überzähligen, over-numerous—‘almost always lead to expanding bloodshed, and to the creation or destruction of empires.’
(...) On what to do about the angry young men ante portas, Heinsohn is almost as discreet as his masters in Washington and Virginia. The director of genocide research is cautious not to say that killing them off may be the cheapest, most rational solution. Instead, he refers to a us strategy of ‘win–hold–win’, which may be translated into everyday language as kill (by pre-emption)–keep (other enemies down)–kill (next enemy, before he moves). Heinsohn makes clear that the ‘war on terror’ is a long-term offensive—‘our whole life’—against waves of rebellious young men in the Islamic world. The book was written in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, of which Heinsohn was an ardent supporter, and contains its share of sombre meditations on ‘genocidal dictatorships’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In recent interventions, his perspective has become more policy-oriented—perhaps due to the fact that, on the basis of Söhne und Weltmacht, he is now a frequent guest speaker at the German Ministry of the Interior, Intelligence Service (bnd) and nato. Where possible, he argues, the angry young men should be left to kill each other, as in Somalia or Darfur. If that is not working, discreet military aid to the ‘more civilized’ side is suggested, with French arms for the Algerian regime against the Islamists a prime example. But should the angry young men become threatening to Western interests, a pre-emptive military strike will be necessary. No long-term occupations or attempts at ‘state-building’ should follow, however. These are not only costly but futile, as long as the numbers of angry young men continue to grow. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been a grave error, according to Heinsohn. He is strongly opposed to any un or eu aid to Gaza, as it merely finances Palestinians’ ‘demographic armament’. Yet his maverick views can equally disconcert established opinion from the other side—calling in the Wall Street Journal for Europeans to welcome a quarter of a million young Palestinians into their midst immediately, so as to relieve the pressure in Gaza.
(...) Like all other data, demographic statistics can become ridiculous when extrapolated from their broader social-historical context. Sweden, with virtually complete population figures going back to 1750, the oldest in the world, had a ‘youth bulge’ from the 18th century, and most likely before that, until the First World War. This has so far added nothing of any significance to our understanding of Swedish history. Demography, even when deployed in a scholarly manner, is not a moral science—which explains, in part, its attractiveness for military bureaucracies. The youth-bulge argument can tell us nothing of the oppressive character of the Shah’s regime in Iran, the terror of the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the horror of the us wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the insults of the Islamophobes, the hypocrisy of capitalist liberalism, or the stifling closets of patriarchy. The conservative appeal of ideas such as Heinsohn’s is their debunking quality: you think you are protesting against this or that, but in fact you are only competing blindly for status in an overcrowded youth bulge. Yet Pentagon fears of angry young men, from whom a contingent of angry young women should not be a priori excluded, cannot simply be dismissed as irrational paranoia. This rebellious youth may indeed be a harbinger of social change; but the direction of that change will be decided by political struggle.
(...) There have been some strong arguments for a positive demography of economic development: mercantilism saw population growth as an asset, not a social problem. In the 20th century, the Danish agronomist Esther Boserup proposed a sophisticated theory of the positive significance of population growth. Its lived truth for agrarian economics is exemplified most eloquently in the Netherlands: densely populated from early on and the major pioneer of land reclamation and agricultural innovation. In recent years the Harvard economist, David Bloom, has stressed the ratio of working-age to dependent—young and old—population sectors: in this model, children and the elderly are seen as a burden, while ‘prime’ adults are an asset. Bloom and his colleagues have argued that the comparative weight of the working-age population is a major component of the East Asian economic miracle. The Irish bulge of working-age youth, together with a decline of the birth rate, has also contributed significantly to its—by European standards, extraordinary—rise of per capita income over the past two decades. The Arab world and Africa, meanwhile, can look forward to splendid working-age bulges in about thirty years’ time.
(...) The paradox of demography is that, while it informs us about human life, it also facilitates an instrumental view of human beings. Historically close to state-power concerns, it is a science of peoples, as well as of populations. Practised paradigmatically, demography, and historical demography in particular, is a demanding, impressive intellectual effort. The left’s focus on political and economic division and polarization has often missed the weight of sums and their effects. At the same time, demographic arguments have since Malthus been used as a club of raw biology, with which to batter down hopes of popular rights and coexistence. Today we are witnessing the rehabilitation of a neo-social-darwinist discourse, a demonization of extra-European youth on a circuit that feeds from cia and Pentagon strategy papers to Bremen research institutes, and from there into the liberal media, nato commands and Israeli public discourse, on the eve of the Gaza attack. In Gunnar Heinsohn, his reception and his ilk, the world is experiencing a vengeful return of ideas that flourished before 1945, with the same scorn for the uncivilized, for lesser breeds, for the rights of other peoples.

notes on capital
chapter 25: the general law of capitalist accumulation

(763-764): a passage critically important to the question of marx's position on absolute immiseration. ceteris paribus, marx is suggesting that periods of buyoant capitalist growth will lead to increased wages, precisely because growth in capitalist demand for labor-power will outstrip the natural growth of its supply. KEY, again, to note that this explains the narrative of the apologists, without becoming it. for first, this eventuality is highly contingent, and can be combated by variegated tactics on the part of capital (in particular, agitating for artificial growth in labor supply through immigration). secondly, it is periodic--in other words, prone to the contradictions of capitalism, more generally. (note, it may make less sense to separate these two points theoretically, than it does in terms of the presentation. that question, perhaps, depends on how one wants to understand the relation of systemic ebbs and flows to class agency). perhaps most importantly, marx is also calling attention to the contradictions immanent in expansive capitalism--namely, that it cements more widely labor's "enslavement to capital... accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat" as oppressed soul.

(766): in passing, it needs to be made explicit that this discussion for the need of an ever-larger permanent "underclass" is a direct response to malthus' "principle of population." (see FN 6)

(769): on the golden chain in the golden age: "a rise in the price of labor, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-laborer has already forged for himself [sic] is loosened somewhat."

(769): in essence, marx is demanding that we orient our analysis around "the absolute law" of capitalist production: the production of surplus-value. in this sense, the imperfections of the apologists' narrative can themselves be systematized and made coherent. the abiding question, of course, is how we retain this analysis in the face of the alleged success of Capital in the golden age. in other words, that question, again, of whether capitalism has proved more resilient than marx imagined. though i think 1968 often puts paid to those questions, no?

(770): constructing the rate of accumulation as always the independent variable--in this sense, while exploding malthus' principle, marx is, more generally, endeavoring to demonstrate the contingency of all dynamics putatively "natural."

(771): lambasting the currency school, but revealing, in the process, the contingency of his own analysis. for it is certain that monetary phenomenon have become more central to the dynamics of 21st century capitalism--how do we integrate that fact into his argument here? and still, i am tempted to suggest that his scorn here can show the way toward more holistic analyses of the monetary world.

(771-772): the critical passage: roughly, marx is suggesting that the process of capital accumulation, and the process of the growth of the working-class, cannot be theorized independently. rather, the latter follows the ebbs and flows of the former. in the sense that, if capital accumulation proceeds swimmingly, capital requires (by demanding) more laborers at factories (more hands needed to utilize additional capacity, to valorize the additional capital). if, however, profits are low and accumulation is stop-start or stagnant, capitalism corrects itself--a comparatively smaller amount of "paid" labor is needed as a consequence of the slow-down, and wages fall (because labor supply now exceeds demand). [reminder: this is all a "special case", in that marx has not introduced the notion of the decline in the composition of capital]

(772): "just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand."

(773): this commitment to complicate the relationship between the extent of the means of production and the increasing productivity of labor--this assertion that the decreasing organic composition of capital is both the cause of as well as the consequence of the increasing productivity of labor--affirms harvey's attempts to foreground marx' refusal to theorize these dynamics in strictly causal terms. the dynamism of a dialectical framework, if invigorated by history and science, refutes the tired positivism of the liberals.

(776): the endlessness, the limitlessness: "every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation."

(776-777): here, an exposition of the contingent relationship between the proccesses of accumulation and concentration. concentration, marx is arguing, is not a necessary result of the process of accumulation; rather, it can be interrupted and repelled by the intervention of alternative dynamics. though he admits the tendency to concentration (in the sense that these increases in individual capitals are the very bases of the corresponding capitalist enterprises), they meet with limits. here he names two: (1) "the degree of increase of [presumambly others'] social wealth," which i interpret to refer to the competition of other capitalists as well as, perhaps, the increasing demands made by a progressively better-fed, clamoring under-class. and (2) "the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production"--in other words, the impact of laws of inheritance and intra-familial competition on individual capitals. none of this, it must be said, contradicts the general readiness to associate accumulation with concentration (see the succeeding paragraph), but, again, it opens up the general theoretical framework to challenges by specific histories (and, in a sense, immunizes it from the entrepreneurial sorts who, while seizing on these various opportunities (or 'moments), inveigh against the "awful universalisms" of marx' analysis). NB: it would be important, i think, to assess all this with more recent theories of monopoly capitalism in mind.

(777): in fact, here marx seems to suggest an alternative term, centralization, in order to refer to the "transformation of many small into few large capitals." while i have always understood this as concentration, this passage defines concentration, instead, as something akin to the consolidation of capitalist relations--i.e., the concentration of the means of production, which begin as scattered in a medley of capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production (the intermediate forms, let's say), in the hands of individual capitalists. centralization refers to "the next stage", in a very definite sense, where "capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place." needless to say, this triplet of accumulation, concentration, and centralization is critical (but also confusing, given the tendency to use the second to signify the third). (see 779, where engels clarifies the definitions: centralization as concentration in fewer hands, concentration as "another name for reproduction on an extended scale")

(777): barriers to entry, economies of scale--it's all here.

(778-779): further discussion of the triplet. important to complicate my primitive observations above.

(780): centralization as pooling of capitals, not simply cannibalization: "the world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway"

(781-782): the dynamics underlying the creation of a "relatively redundant working population"--have to better understand what is necessary and what is contingent in this process. but it is all here, of course.

(782-783): marx here highlights how the pejorative consequences of capitalism's dynamism--the "violent fluctuations"--conspire to produce, "temporarily", a surplus population. importantly, though each of these moments is individually fleeting, their systemic origins means that the assemblage of redundancies they represent is emphatically permanent. it is in the failure to substantively theorize the latter fact, i think, that lies the rub.

(783): the tragedy of simple reproduction: "the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing"

(784): repudiating, again, malthusian attempts to pinpoint a 'natural' law of population increase. this is, of course, monumentally obvious--one cannot understand the relationship of man to nature (or, rather, humans to their reproduction) without history. but critical to re-assert against the population planners.

(784): the latent question, i suppose, remains: how does one understand the fact of this necessity of an industrial reserve army while also appreciating the fervent honesty of these ideologues fixated on population control? as always, i suspect this is not really a question for the economists, but rather a topic to be tackled by the theorists of conscoiusness. why do well-meaning people hold--really hold--patently mistaken beliefs?

(785-786): here marx mentions the relationship between the formation of this reserve army and the industrial cycle, but not in much detail. there is some confusion, i think, over what he identifies as the independent variable--though perhaps we're moving past causal-talk, in general? (there is much to close-read here, i think--especially in conjunction with volume III)

(786): clearly, these pages lay the groundwork for theorizing emigration in capitalism: while a source of bolstering this reserve army, of course, it interacts in complicated ways with the sanctitiy of identities which sustain capitalist hegemony by feeding forms of false-consciousness. indeed, in the latter dynamic, contradictory forces are at play: on the one hand, the immigration of non-nationals threatens the stability of that national identity (through diffusion, assimilation, cross-national solidarity)--this may be a boon for workers, in a long-term sense, but in the short-term it surely appears as any number of individual injustices ("they're stealing our jobs!"). in this way, it helps divide and rule. on the other hand, the restriction of immigration, marx is pointing out, threatens the very fabric of capitalist production--the existence of a reserve army is foundational to the healthy functioning of the system. this bewildering skein of competing considerations (along with whatever i have ommitted), of course, implies a masterful agency, the likes of which it would impossible to track, i suspect (this, in a sense, is the abiding impression of this section--there is an overriding logic to the system's operation which is at once rational and efficient yet also decidedly destructive and violent (NB: even the former is not at all the neoclassical narrative)).

(788): under capitalism's watch, the 'natural' limits to population growth are malleable, moulded to its aims.

(789-790): overwork and enforced idleness as twin symptoms of the same systemic patterns.

(791-792): an explicit critique of bourgeois analysis, arguing that the ideologues extrapolate from a local rise in wages to claim the infallibility of capitalist production, whereas the pattern really needs to be theorized and understood in the context of its place in the overall assemblage (i.e., its definitively local origins and ramifications--which sphere of production, etc.). in other words, "local oscillations" are mistaken for universal, timeless trends.

(793-794): there are here some interesting (though fragmentary) observations on the process of working-class 'awakening'--not chronologically, exactly, but more systemically. marx speaks also of the role that the iron, objective laws of capital play in stifling this tendency to subjective organization. and where these alliances can't be stifled objectively (and this industrial reserve army formed naturally), he alludes, Capital calls summons the Iron Fist ("forcible means"). (see also 808)

(796): Marx deploys these concepts in order to theorize the migration of masses from rural to urban areas, as "capitalist agriculture takes possession of agriculture." Needless to say, this is immensely relevant to the present plight of the Third World--in fact, the whole dialectics of technology (as presented in this and earlier chapters) presage the approach most suited to tackling the corporatization of rural areas today. We simply must be directly concerned with labor absorption.

(797): "along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth"--it is important to note here that Marx's theory of modern poverty (pauperism under capitalism) is inextricably linked to this fact of the necessity of a relative surplus population. Can our classless neoclassicals even compete?!

(798): a summary of "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation"

(798): underlying all this is the uneasy question of what an "actually-existing" socialist society might do with the question of population.

(799): an explicit normative appraisal of the situation of the worker in capitalist society: "it follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse." the objections to this claim seem obvious. yet, in marx's defense, one has to (a) situate this in the context of the importance of dialectics to his general argument, and (b) clarify that he is here employing a much more holistic normative measures than GDP/capita allows. Yet perhaps it is important to complicate his observation, not simply empirically but also theoretically?

(799, FN 23): this prefigures the implications of development-of-underdevelopment analyses, insofar as Marx is here emphasizing the 'modernity' of misery and poverty--it is not that these are symptoms of backwardness waiting to be swept away, but rather that they are emphatically 'modern' phenomenon which are indelible features of a modern capitalist economy.

(800): some words from an apologist, who celebrates the parasitism of his ilk: "'it seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident... that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions" (Rev. J. Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-Wisher of Mankind).

(812): prefiguring, in fragmentary form, the relationship between capital accumulation and space--between development and slum-dwelling. the "developing" city has no place for its poor. (in the pages that follow, he explores this in depth--needless to say, on the "planet of slums," the underlying theoretical framework and consequent empirical investigation are both immensely relevant.)

(815): this continues, as Marx substantiates again the claim that the liberal doctrine of equal rights masks the deep asymmetries at the heart of capitalist society: while the rich displaced by railways and industry receive comfort and compensation, the poor working-classes are indicted for crowding in alternate locations as a result!

(822): lest anyone need be reminded, Marx is under no illusions that the industrial working-class is uniform; here he speaks explicitly of an "aristocracy" of the working-class. though this isn't exactly the michael albert objection, this observation suffices, i think, to show that albert battles a straw-man.

(827): whole working families live worse than sailors, soldiers, and even prisoners (this is Belgium, where the State has not yet interfered with the freedom of Capital).

(833): important section for exploring Marx and the agrarian question--other than the fact that he explicitly complicates the narrative of linear progress (not just by highlighting its non-linearity but also by demonstrating its space-less-ness), he here very directly excoriates the effects of 'labor-saving' technologies on the agricultural populations of 18th and 19th century England. (see particularly 848-849, where all this is tied directly to the concept of the relative surplus population--"there are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary needs of cultivation, and too few for exceptional and temporary requirements")

(840): reminder that the study of migration is not as simple as the study of the exodus from country to city, but also must theorize the changes occuring within rural areas (be it intra-rural migration or reconfiguration of rural areas)--again, this only re-emphasizes, against the lie of the modernists, the fact that everything is "modern" (backwardness, rurality, etc.).

(861-862): all this is applied specifically to Ireland and the mass emigrations of the mid-19th century--Marx is tracking the growth of the relative surplus population, and the consequences of this process for the average Irish laborer (much of this is the story of the transition, in Ireland, from arable to pasture land--to a less labor-intensive method of production. as Marx puts it, "the revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration").

(866): the comparative argument here (between the distinct roles of the surplus agricultural populations in industrial England and agricultural Ireland) begets a further comparison, for the contemporary third world. in Ireland, Marx argues, though the relative surplus population accumulates in the towns, it is constantly needed in the fields (at harvest time or boom time). crudely put, the story of the contemporary third world is not too distinct, with one exception--the agricultural revolution having proceeded farther (the corporatization of farming, etc.) in this day and age, we see instead a burgeoning informal sector (and mass under and un-employment). the similarities are striking, of course: as in 19th century ireland, the relative surplus population in towns across the third world plays a dual role, depresing urban wages while also filling shortages at harvest time (having said that, one needs to think about where, specifically, this labor comes from at harvest time--this can further complicate the schema, requiring a distinct appraisal of emigration to larger and smaller cities). in sum, i suppose, one again needs--as Marx has demonstrated throughout this chapter--a concrete assessment of hard data pertaining to a particular place and time.