Each social system has its own demographic equilibrium whose breakdown can be catastrophic.

Evidence

This situation is not unique to Italy; to a greater or lesser extent it exists also in all countries of Old Europe and it exists in an even worse form in India and China, which explains the historical stagnation of those countries and their politico-military impotence. (In the examination of this problem, what is immediately in question is not the form of economico-social organisation, but the rationality of the proportional relationships between the various sectors of the population in the existing social system. Every system has its own law of fixed proportions 355 in its demographic composition, its own “optimum” equilibrium and forms of disequilibrium which, if not redressed, by appropriate legislation, can be catastrophic in themselves in that, apart from any other disintegrative element, they dry up the sources of economic life.) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1063

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: The ‘law of fixed proportions’ / ‘optimum equilibrium’ concept is a framework for demographic structure the reader could carry into analyses of how colonial economies distort population distributions.
• QUESTION: Gramsci’s claim that demographic disequilibrium explains India and China’s ‘historical stagnation’ invites scrutiny — this is a pre-Third-Worldist framing worth comparing against later postcolonial readings.