The word “overpopulation” makes it seem as if the issue lies with the amount of human beings alive today, while in reality the issue is the unjust distribution of resources.

@Erik

Well, it's both....

No. We have enough food to feed the planet 8 times over. It’s distribution of resources, not amount of people. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the people running our economic system made you think the amount of people alive today are the problem, not them?

Additionally, birth rates are deeply tied to wealth, so even to that extent the amount of people alive today is due to our broken global economic system.

@Erik

Erik, it is both. We do have the food and material resources to get through any number of crises, but the distribution is a whole other pathetic issue.

Add to that the development of Agri practices to ensure land decreases in productivity and access .

There are way too many people, too. Wild animals are suffering from too many people encroaching on their territory.

It's never just one thing that causes problems.

The entire population of planet earth could live in a US state like Wisconsin if they’d live in the density of New York City. Now imagine some walkable city superblock concept with plenty of greenery and nature and you got yourself a way to prevent any human interaction with most of nature at all.

You are not giving any logical argument as to why you think there are too many people alive today. We have enough resources to feed them, yet hundreds of millions go hungry. We have enough resources to house them, yet billions are homeless.

You truly think the issue lies with the people, not the distribution of resources?

Humanity always had poor, always had hungry, always had homeless, no matter the amount of people alive. Yet you look at poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc. today and say the way to fix that is by reducing population size?

The distribution isn’t a hard to solve issue. The issue lies within the capitalist incentive of our global economy to act in the interest of capital, not people. If our economy was focused on feeding people instead of making luxury products for the rich, we’d have zero people alive today still going hungry.

Again, the monoculture nowadays commonly done in agriculture isn’t something humans have just decided to do - the profit motive forces each corporation and individual to do so. Additionally so much land is merely used to create food for animals, not people! Make veganism the norm, you can feed the world.

Additionally, my argument that populations stagnate in growth the moment their country gets to a certain level of wealth (demographic change) isn’t discussed in your comment at all - by simply redistributing wealth we’d have a fixed, if not declining, number of people anyway.

Now, veganism, zero homelessness, no poverty nor hunger, and redistristribution of wealth sounds a lot better than “decreasing population size” i.e. genocide.

I opt out of both. The control state needed to redistribute and limit where we can live is more dangerous the any other disaster that we might face (if any)

Democratic control over the means of production and redistribution is much better than having no control at all (or the neoliberal idea of “voting with your wallet” which is fundamentally unfair as individualist consumer action is the least effective method and it is always an unfair vote due to some people’s wallets holding billions and other’s having a few scraps).

We do not have the voting with your wallet idea, that is capitalism, which is in many ways the opposite of neoliberalism. Currently, companies survive mainly by using government to get special treatment and kill competition. But more fundamentally, real capitalism is the only system in a free society. What you describe requires near total government control and has never gone remotely well.

@gvs @Erik

Here's the problem with voting with your wallet: other factors enter in.

I loathe our local supermarket, but it's close. I don't have a car. I have no alternative except for the limited bus service here. It stops running before I can go downtown.

I really hate the Coca-Cola company. Regrettably, some of their products are far better than the alternatives, particularly in the sugar-free category.

Humans are complicated.

Not really, it works just like that. The location of the store is in this case it's appeal to you and you don't hate Coca Cola enough to buy either other brands or not drink cola at all.

Individualist consumer action is the least effective method to bring change. Additionally “voting with your wallet” isn’t what the means of production being in private hands means, it also means corporations being able to invest billions without you having any control over it.

Pharmaceutical corporations have no incentive to research life saving medicine, only medicine that saves lives in paying countries.

Think of Juicero. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested - no one needed it. It was a meaningless tech product funded by corporations that have no idea how to allocate resources efficiently.

Democratic control over the economy fixes all of the mentioned problems and gives people, as well as their will, a voice!

Democratic control over the economy is a long way of saying communism. It gives control to bureaucracies who not only do not allocate resources well, but in the process tend to kill millions.

More to the point, what is your democratic control going to do if I don't want to move to megacities or hand over the business I've build for over 10 years?

No, it’s a long way of saying socialism.

Here are some definitions:

Communism: A term describing a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production. “Communism” can also describe the revolutionary movement to create such a society.
Socialism: An umbrella term used to describe social ownership of the means of production. Social ownership can include common ownership, state ownership or collective ownership. “Socialism” can also refer to an intermediate and transitional form of society between capitalism and communism featuring a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (sometimes referred to as “lower” or “the first phase of” communism).
Means of Production: An all-embracing term that describes every non-human material factor involved in the process of socially useful production.
Bourgeoisie: The capitalist class; the ruling class in capitalist society. The social class which owns the means of production and exploits hired labor. The buyers of labor power. This class is made up of a very small minority of the population.
Proletariat: The working class; the class of people in capitalist society who, deprived of any ownership of the means of production, must sell their labor power to the capitalists in order to survive. The exploited class; the producers of surplus value.
Exploitation: Exploitation is making use of some vulnerability in another person in order to use them to attain one’s own ends at their expense. Marxists specifically use the term to refer to the expropriation (theft) of the labor of a worker (via the extraction of surplus value) by the owners of the means of production. Capitalists make their profit from exploitation.
Dictatorship of the Proletariat: A state of proletarian rule where the working class organizes to democratically control the means of production, defend against bourgeois reaction, and create the material basis for a gradual transition to communism. “Dictatorship” in this sense does not mean rule by one individual; Marxists view any state as being under the “dictatorship” of a class. This term is the antithesis of the “Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie” that exists under capitalism where the minority class rules society.
State: The state, in Marxist terminology, is a mechanism for class rule. It is the primary instrument of political power in class society, consisting of organs of administration, and of force. A state of one kind or another will exist as long as social classes exist.

The business you’ve built isn’t of much concern, one could imagine an economic system where only businesses of a certain size need to be democratized.

Additionally democratically controlled ≠ state-controlled. A democratic economy doesn’t need centralized control, it’s very much possible to plan an economy even with individual corporations acting under democratic control.

Capitalism kills hundreds of millions, whilst socialism increases quality of life, life expectancy, access to medicine, etc.: Economic development, political-economic system, and the physical quality of life

Read the abstract: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.76.6.661

Or download the entire PDF here: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/epdf/10.2105/AJPH.76.6.661

Here is a nice section of the conclusion that I think summarizes it perfectly:

Socialist countries provided a higher daily per capita calorie supply as a percentage of requirement than did the capitalist countries at a similar level of development. The difference between capitalist and socialist countries averaged 12 to 15 percent. Nutritional supply of all socialist countries exceeded the 100 per cent requirement.

They are mostly the same.
Secondly, we do not have capitalist countries today, we have neoliberalism, which has private ownership of production but government control over them (Mises made a good point in control vs ownership). Beginning with control over the currency supply.

No, communism and socialism are very different.

Socialism implies having a state. Socialism can exist even without a classless society. Socialism exists in a world with money!

Democratic socialism is possible as socialism is merely an economic system, not a political.

The German Supreme Court even checked whether a socialist economy was possible with Germany constitution / basic law and it is! Perfectly is in almost every EU country.

Communism requires the abolishment of a state, socialism can perfectly continue to exist with our current forms of government.

@Erik @canusfeminacanis @gvs No it can't. At that point you're still renting from the government, workers don't actually own the means of production.

The company type eG (eingetragen Genossenschaft - Registered cooperative) exists within Germany today. It requires the corporation to be run democratically. If the German government passes a law that each private company type (meaning GmbHs, UGs, AGs, etc.) are converted to eGs, Germany’s economy would be socialist, as every worker working for a particular company has democratic control over it, and the government continues to work as before.

Now, if you think of a specific implementation of socialism, where everything is seized / expropriated by the state (which the worker still democratically controls) even that means “owning” the means of production.

I’d be for a separate election for the economy involving lots of directly democratic actions, but again, those are specifics.

What I’m mostly also arguing is that: currently the workers control nothing, under socialism workers have direct control over the economy. Even if everything is merely seized by the state, not all states are dictatorships, Germany ain’t, for example. Since you democratically control the government you democratically control the economy, it’s a huge leap forward considering the current state is having zero control.

@Erik @canusfeminacanis @gvs Modern voting systems are hardly democracy. Direct/liquid democracy is really the only practical solution, but at that point there isn't much of a state to make decisions really.