Mark Jones' alleged raising of the overpopulation question leads us once
again into a discussion of the Marxist critique of Malthus. I would refer
PEN-L'ers to Michael Perelman's "Marx's Crises Theory: Scarcity, Labor and
Finance", specifically chapter two on "Marx, Malthus, and the Concept of
Natural Resource Scarcity". It is one of the best things I have ever read
on the subject.
Michael states that Marx avoided a direct confrontation with Malthusianism
itself. The reason for this was German socialists, under Lasalle's
initiative, had incorporated Malthus's doctrines into their program through
their notion of the "Iron Law of Wages." Marx decided that he had enough on
his table in explaining the labor theory of value without taking Malthus
head-on, besides wanting to avoid factional warfare with the German party.
This has caused a serious misinterpretation of Marx's views today, because
it would lead to the conclusion that Marx did not think that the question
of natural resources and their scarcity had any importance. It would
fortify the arguments of "deep ecologists" and "green anarchists" who view
Marx and Engels as treating nature as nothing but a huge faucet and drain.
Ore, water, crops, etc. come out of the faucet in unlimited supply; labor
turns them into commodities; and the waste products go down the drain. This
interpretation does not do justice to Marx.
Marx treats the question of overpopulation itself as an function of
capital's need to deploy labor in the social relations surrounding
production. A "relative surplus of population" or "industrial reserve army"
comes into existence when traditional means of production are abolished,
such as village-based, communal agriculture. As Perelman comments:
"The apparent 'overpopulation' that then arises is relative, not to natural
conditions or food supply, but to the needs of capital accumulation; that
is, capital requires a reserve army of labor power on which it can draw
quickly and easily, one that holds the pretensions of the working class in
check. Scarcity in this context is scarcity of employment owing to the
concentration of the means of production under the control of a small class
of capitalists operating according to the logic of profit and competition."
(Perelman, p. 31)
Besides providing a theoretical approach to the question, Marx also dealt
with the historical example of Ireland, which Malthusians cited as a
classic example of overpopulation. Marx took another tack entirely. He
argued that the massive exodus of people following the potato famine did
not improve the standard of living in Ireland. It mirrored a decline that
began before 1846, the year of the famine. The depopulation of Ireland was
engineered by an English and Irish landlord class that transformed the
island from a wheat-producing nation, protected from foreign competition by
the corn laws, into a huge pasture for wool-producing sheep.
Scarcity of natural resources, like population, could not be understood on
its own terms. It arises as a consequence of historically determined social
relations. His understanding of scarcity comes into the sharpest focus when
discussing agriculture.
At first Marx believed that agriculture's problems were the heritage of
pre-capitalist formations. The bourgeois revolution would fix everything.
In the Communist Manifesto, he includes the "application of chemistry to
industry and agriculture" as among the greatest accomplishments of
capitalism. In a letter to Engels from this period, Marx states that
capitalist agriculture breakthroughs "would put an end to Malthus' theory
of the deterioration not only of the 'hands' [i.e., people] but also of the
land."
The more he studied agriculture under capitalism, the more pessimistic Marx
became of these prospects. This change occurred between 1861 and 1863 when
he was writing "Theories of Surplus Value," a work which while still
promoting the view that capitalist agriculture might even progress at a
faster rate than industry, contains a new "greenish" view that is less
optimistic:
"The moral history...concerning agriculture...is that the capitalist system
works against a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is
incompatible with the capitalist system (although the latter promotes
technical improvements in agriculture), and needs either the hand of the
small farmer living by his own labor or the control of associated producers."
Marx came to these views not because he became convinced of an early
version of the Gaia principle, but because he had been studying agronomy
and organic chemistry in some detail. He believed that agricultural
chemistry was more important than all of the economists "put together." His
agricultural research led him to the conclusion in 1868 that capitalist
agriculture "leaves deserts behind it." His section on "Large Scale
Industry and Agriculture" in volume one of Capital is virtually a red-green
manifesto:
"Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and
causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one
hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other
hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e.,
prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form
of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to
lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time
the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural
labourer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the
maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its
restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and
under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In
agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the
sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer;
the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and
impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of
labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the
workman's individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of
the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance
while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern
agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and
quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste
and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in
capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the
labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility
of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting
sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the
foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the
more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production,
therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various
processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all
wealth-the soil and the labourer."
Louis Proyect
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