In 1798 Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population. It posed the conundrum of geometrical population growth’s outstripping arithmetic expansion in resources. Malthus, who was an Anglican clergyman, recommended late marriage and sexual abstinence as methods of birth control. A small group of early 19th-century freethinkers, including Jeremy Bentham, Francis Place (himself the father of 15 children), and John Stuart Mill, suggested more pragmatic birth control methods such as coitus interruptus, vaginal barriers, and postcoital douching. Robert Dale Owen, the son of a Scottish social reformer, helped spread these revolutionary ideas in North America, and in 1832
The left has not become marginalized because of exhaustion or infighting. Its decline was caused by the US government’s more than century long police state operations, purging the left from its historic home in the working class movement, so that it now has only tenuous connection with the organized working class. The national security state
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