OUR last answer looked at the over-simple positions often by pro- and anti- population control campaigners — the former arguing that population growth is the major “cause” of poverty, want and the environmental crisis; the latter that there can never be “too many people” and that under socialism our planet could sustain an infinitely greater population.

Few Marxists would agree with either position. Engels, for example, declared that “there is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase.” 

He continued: “But if at some stage communist society finds itself obligated to regulate the production of human beings, just as it will have already come to regulate the production of things, then it, and it alone, will be able to do this without difficulties.