Population Factor

Also known as “demographic factors”. A philosophical category that marks the subject of social life and includes the laws of quantity, quality, composition, density and distribution of population and its development and change. The population factor is an important component part of social existence, and together with the geographical environment and the means of production of material means, constitutes the conditions of the material life of society.

Population factor has an important influence on the existence and development of society. Man is the subject of society, and society is the society of man. Man is the subject of material production and the consumer of the results of production, and the bearer of all social relations. The existence and development of society is inseparable from a certain amount of population. It is only based on a certain amount of population that social production can take place and that society can be formed. Without a certain minimum population, there can be no social production and social life, nor can human society exist. Marx said that the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. The demographic situation can accelerate or retard the development of society. The quantity, density and growth rate of population must be appropriate to the level of productive forces of a certain society as well as to the natural environment. On the one hand, men are producers, and an increase in population will lead to a growth in the productive forces of labor; on the other hand, men are also consumers, and the number and growth rate of population inappropriate to the level of productive forces and environmental resources will put pressure on the means of life and the natural environment and influence the development of society. The composition, distribution and number of population are also closely connected with the development of society. Therefore, the development of society requires a size and growth rate, composition as well as a distribution of population appropriate to material production and natural environment, and requires the improvement of population quality and the optimization of the population factor. Marxism advocates a conscious regulation of the production of population. Engels said that if at some stage communist society finds itself obligated to regulate the production of human beings, just as it does the production of things, it will be precisely this society and this society alone which can carry this out without difficulty.

Population factor, although important, is not the determining force of the development of society. Population factor does not determine the nature of society. The quantity, density and growth rate of population cannot explain the nature of society of a country. The population factor cannot determine the supersession of societies. Changes in population are not the fundamental motive for the revolutions that change social systems. The change and development of the population factor are conditioned by the mode of production, the level of economic development and the social system of a certain society. Marx said that every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population. Only in the socialist society based on the public property in the means of production can mankind implement a conscious regulation of the demographic situation.

Malthusian theory of population fabricated the “law” of the increase in population in geometric series and the increase in the means of life in arithmetic series, advocating a mass annihilation of population through war, plague and famine. In Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, Engels criticized this doctrine and analyzed how it “arrived at this crazy conclusion”.