This chapter seeks to provide a very modest contribution to the theoretical conceptualization of population studies by suggesting the incorporation of a social dimension in any population theory. It therefore looks past the superficial spatial and sectoral appearance of population movements at the inner essence and the social nature of these movements. Using some empirical evidence from the Sudan, it looks into the hypothesis that under capitalism the major spatial and sectoral population movements emanate from deep and multiple, but dialectically interrelated, social processes, and that the population landscape is determined mostly by the needs of capital. The distinction between private and public capital is immaterial when both are guided by the same laws of accumulation.

Theoretical framework

Classical theories of population are only an integral constituent of the whole body of bourgeois social science, popularizing the same concepts and perpetuating the same mode of thought and ideology. Bourgeois social science, including population theories, equates ideological validation with scientific verification through the segmentation of total reality, distortion of rational knowledge, and presentation of ideological concepts as universal truth. Most models of man presented by these population theories are examples of abstract man; likewise, populations are projected as isolated, competitive individuals or, at best, aggregations of individuals. ‘Average’ man and abstraction of population are used as concrete categories. These theories, and, indeed, all bourgeois social science, are ideological postulations and a conscious mystification of the social forces at work in society and of the class division of population.