Malthusianism

Two Postulata, Two Ratios

The argument is short. Malthus lays down two postulates: 'First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.' The conclusion follows at once.

'Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.'

Because the two powers are unequal, the balance has to be forced, and the forcing is done by checks. The first edition divides them into preventive checks (late marriage, celibacy) and positive ones (hunger, disease, war). The much-enlarged second edition of 1803 adds moral restraint as a third. Malthus published six editions in his lifetime (1798, 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, 1826) and reading him from the commonly summarised first edition alone loses what later separates him from the neo-Malthusians.

What the Book Was Written Against

The first edition appeared anonymously, and its target is stated in chapter I: Godwin and Condorcet. Against the prospect of human perfectibility opened by the French Revolution (the claim that changing institutions can abolish poverty) the book answers that this is not a question of institutions but of arithmetic.

The structure of that answer is what matters. Move the cause of poverty from society to nature and the demand to change society becomes meaningless on its own terms. That is why the book had such a long life, and why Marxism went after it so persistently.

When the Theory Became Law

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 is the result. Drafted on the report of the Royal Commission, it took Malthus, Bentham and the iron law of wages as its theoretical grounds. Two devices carried it: the principle of less eligibility, holding relief below the lowest labouring income, and the ban on relief outside the workhouse. The reasoning that relief feeds population and so breeds poverty was transcribed directly into institutions.

Marx's Reply: Laws of Population Are Historical

Chapter 25 of Capital vol. I goes straight at the doctrine. What Marx denies is not that surplus population exists but that it is natural.

'This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits.'

Surplus population is produced by accumulation, not by nature. As capital accumulates and raises its technical composition, a relative surplus population forms, and that surplus becomes in turn the lever of accumulation: 'a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost'. From there the argument returns to wages: 'the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army.'

The force pressing wages toward subsistence is real, then, but it is the movement of accumulation and not the natural pressure of numbers. Being a social relation rather than a law of nature, it can be changed.

In a footnote to the same chapter Marx also settles accounts on the history of doctrine: the Essay in its first form is 'a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c.' containing not one sentence thought out by its author, and the sensation it caused 'was due solely to party interest'.

Engels's Verdict of 1844

Engels had reached his conclusion at twenty-four, in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: the Malthusian population theory is 'the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed, a system of despair'. His counter-evidence is simple. Surplus population is invariably tied up with surplus wealth, surplus capital and surplus landed property. A country is overpopulated only where its productive power as a whole is too large.

The Line Into the Iron Law of Wages

Lassalle's iron law of wages stands on this doctrine, since it locates the reason wages fall back to subsistence in the pressure of numbers. That is exactly where Marx set his trap in Part II of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. Take Lassalle's law in his sense and you must take its Malthusian substantiation with it. And if that theory is correct, the law survives the abolition of wage labour a hundred times over, because it then governs not the wage system alone but every social system. This is the reasoning on which economists had been proving for fifty years that socialism cannot abolish poverty but only spread it evenly across society.

Malthusianism Now

Neo-Malthusianism parts from Malthus on one point. The clergyman rejected contraception and asked for self-control; the neo-Malthusians of the nineteenth century advocated birth control. The conclusion was inherited and only the means changed.

The twentieth-century revival came with Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1972). The standard criticism is that the productivity gains of the green revolution and the demographic transition in developed countries falsified the predictions.

The entry earns its place less through the record of those predictions than through the form of the argument. Treating scarcity as a fact of nature and declining to ask about distribution and ownership is a move that is not reserved for population. Food, energy, carbon: every time a limit is located in nature, the same question comes back. Where nobody asks first who holds how much, the limit is always charged to the poorest.