Malthusianism

MALTHUSIANISM, a population theory named after the English economist and clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), who published a work entitled "An Essay on the Principle of Population" (London, 1798; Russian edition - "An Essay on the Law of Population or the Significance of Past and Present Effects of This Law on the Welfare of the Human Race with an Account of Several Studies on the Hope of Preventing or Mitigating the Evil Caused by It," vols. I-IX, St. Petersburg, 1868, and an abridged translation, Moscow, 1895). The basic tenets of Malthus can be summarized as follows. In human society, as in all of living nature, there exists an absolute law according to which all living beings have a tendency to unlimited reproduction. At the same time, nature contains obstacles to this unlimited reproduction in the form of destructive processes. In human society, such preventing/counteracting measures are poverty and destitution as negative factors, which, in Malthus's opinion, should be replaced by conscious restraint from births through sexual abstinence (moral restraint). In human society, the processes of reproduction proceed much faster than the growth of means of subsistence. The increase in population goes on in geometric progression, while the growth of means of subsistence occurs according to the law of arithmetic progression. The consequence of this contradiction is a sharp increase in the shortage of means of subsistence for the existing population, which leads to the growth of pauperism. Malthus justified the slowed growth of means of subsistence by the law of diminishing soil fertility, later much more fully developed by Ricardo, Mill, and others. According to the latter law, the effectiveness of labor costs invested in agriculture does not increase proportionally to them. In accordance with these provisions, Malthus placed the responsibility for pauperism directly on the working class itself, which reproduces unreasonably, denying it the right to any care and assistance and declaring that the poor, by the very nature of things, have no right to demand from the rich to provide them with work and sustenance, and that the main constant cause of poverty does not depend at all on the form of government or on the uneven distribution of property. Malthus's theory is not in any way original, and Marx and Engels repeatedly and with full justification called Malthus a charlatan and a plagiarist, and the aforementioned works of Malthus - nothing but a superficially student-like and pompously inflated plagiarism, containing not a single independently thought-out position. Malthus owes his exceptional fame to the fact that, as Bebel put it, he said the right word for the English bourgeoisie at the right moment. "Therefore," Bebel continues, "despite the fact that his works do not contain a single independently thought-out position, he became a great and famous man, and his name gave its name to the entire doctrine." The reactionary nature of M. is revealed both in his justifications and in his conclusions, and becomes especially clear if one takes into account the social conditions of the era to which Malthus's "creativity" belongs. According to Engels's extremely vivid characterization, the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century was a period of the first most severe crises of the capitalist system. The Great French Revolution, the continental blockade, the violation of freedom of the seas, and finally the most essential thing - the appearance on the social arena of the permanent reserve army of the proletariat - fundamentally changed the attitude of the bourgeoisie to the problem of population. At this time, the young capitalist countries, such as France and Germany, for the first time encountered pauperism as a broad social phenomenon. The Convention fights, cutting off the heads of the rich, Napoleon issues orders to suppress begging, conducts raids on beggars and imprisons them. The newly born German absolutivism appeals to the mercy of the rich, believing that only it can cope with the growth of pauperism through broad philanthropy, while the older English capitalism finds a much more correct and reliable means, clothed in the dogma of an "infallible" scientific theory - Malthusianism - and produces, based on it, a thorough revision of its entire attitude to the problem of pauperism. For two to three centuries before that time, legislation concerning the poor existed in England, the origins of which go back to the time of Edward III (14th century). Regarding this legislation, Marx remarks that it is inextricably linked with the great plague that visited England in the 14th century and (the coal) having reduced the population, which, according to one writer, made the difficulty of finding workers at reasonable prices, i.e., at prices that would leave their masters a reasonable amount of surplus labor, truly unbearable. The legislation of the Elizabethan era continued the development of the position according to which the obligation to labor for each (of course for the non-propertied) was the basis of all care for the poor. It took relatively little time for the bourgeoisie to go from compulsion to labor to defense against the right to labor put forward by the working class. The bourgeoisie had to carry out a corresponding diversion, a clever maneuver, to rid itself of all obligations to provide for the poor issued during the previous period, so as not to give the working class the opportunity to use the existing legislation to demand from the bourgeois state the maintenance of the reserve army of the proletariat. This mission was fulfilled by Malthus and his doctrine through the falsification of scientific facts. The theoretical provisions of Malthus served as a justification for the practical policy of English legislation and were laid as the foundation for the change in the poor law in 1834, which created a regime of houses of compulsory labor, nicknamed by English workers "houses of horror" and "bastilles of the poor." Malthus's position on the absolute tendency to reproduction existing in all of living nature, including human society, is entirely borrowed by him from Franklin and later had a significant influence on Darwin, which considerably contributed to strengthening Malthus's authority. However, for Darwin, the Malthusian theory was a pretext for the further development of a series of provisions, the meaning and content of which have nothing in common with the Malthusian theory. There is no absolute tendency to unlimited reproduction as an absolute law of all of living nature, not only in human society, but also in the animal and plant world. Spencer had already pointed to a completely different position, allowing one to speak of the variability of forms and norms of reproduction depending on the processes of evolution. One can consider Spencer's formula, according to which there is an inverse relationship between reproduction, maintenance of the species, genesis, and individual development, improvement, as not sufficiently successful, but still one should recognize it as significantly higher than Malthus's absolute tendency. In any case, it can be asserted that even in the animal and plant world, the norms of reproduction represent an ordinary adaptive trait in the most diverse quantitative variations: from the enormous reproduction of individual species of plants, insects, fish, etc., to the limited reproduction of other species of plants, certain orders of reptiles, higher orders of mammals, etc. A kind of abstract law for the plant and animal world could be formulated as follows: the methods and forms of reproduction are a species trait; its magnitude corresponds to the possibility of preserving the species under the conditions of its natural existence and is subject to variability in the process of natural evolution and selection. Similarly, Malthus's grossest error is the transfer of the laws of the animal and plant world to human society. To support this position, Malthus derived his famous progressions. The dishonesty of the evidence was brilliantly exposed even by Chernyshevsky, who proved the complete untenability of Malthus's arithmetic exercises. Malthus operated with data on the population of America during the period of stormy colonization and substituted the process of immigration for the process of population reproduction. Demography gives brilliant proof that the population of modern, so-called civilized countries (and also non-civilized ones) does not show the slightest tendency to increase in geometric progression; on the contrary, with respect to the same America, with the data of which Malthus operated, according to the testimony of the foremost statistician Dublin, there is a real danger that the country, which showed the miracle of population growth in geometric progression, would not show a second miracle of population decline in the same geometric progression. Malthus's position on the lag in the growth of means of subsistence behind the growth of population was refuted by Marx and Engels, whose views were subsequently confirmed by the entire course of economic development. Capitalism, as Marx had predicted, led to a colossal growth of production, the incalculable accumulation of wealth with growing relative overpopulation and the associated impoverishment of the proletariat.

The law of diminishing soil fertility, which even after Malthus bourgeois economists tried to elevate to a basic principle of economic development, taking technical progress for a temporary tendency, Lenin viciously mocks in the following words: 'This is exactly the same as saying that stops of trains at stations represent a universal law of steam transport, and the movement of trains between stations—a temporary tendency, paralyzing the action of the universal law of standing.' The entire setup of the 'theory' of Malthus amounted to justifying the capitalist system, which leads to the impoverishment of the vast masses of the working class despite the colossal growth of wealth produced by them, and to shift the responsibility for unemployment, pauperism and other social ills onto the 'tendency' of the working class toward 'unreasonable multiplication.' However, as Engels noted, Malthus's theory was undoubtedly a necessary intermediate stage, useful in that it drew the attention of Marxists to the questions of the productive forces of the land and the multiplication of humanity, and forever guaranteed against fear of the 'danger of overpopulation.' On the negation of Malthus's theory find their justification strong economic arguments in favor of social transformation. Malthusian theory, alive under capitalism, and to this day represents an extremely useful tool for the bourgeoisie in the class struggle, for the purpose of dulling the vigilance of the working class, weakening the will to fight. Modified in the mid-19th century by Mill into a neo-Malthusian system, Malthusian theory became the banner of the radically-bourgeois movement and even penetrated the ranks of the working class. The propaganda of neo-Malthusianism began already during Malthus's lifetime. These ideas first appeared in print in an article by James Mill in the Encyclopedia Britannica. After that, the propaganda of neo-Malthusianism weakened for a period of about 50 years. However, during this interval several well-known books were published: R. Owen's 'Physiology of Morality' in 1830, 'The Fruits of Philosophy' by Knowlton, 'Elements of Sociology' by Drays-de-la in 1833. Any attempts to persecute neo-Malthusianism caused only greater enthusiasm among the propagandists. A 'Neo-Malthusian League' was founded. Then the movement went abroad, dying down in England. In the 1870s, Annie Besant founded a Malthusian league in England, and at present the Malthusian, or rather neo-Malthusian, movement has gained considerable spread in a number of countries (in the pre-war and especially in the post-war years). It is known under the name of the so-called movement for birth control (birth control, Geburtenregelung), which includes representatives of both radically-democratic and purely proletarian organizations. This movement differs from M. only in practical methods. While Malthus recommends means of moral abstinence, neo-Malthusism is based on the widespread propaganda of contraceptives for the purpose of reducing the birth rate. The Malthusian League in England publishes a special journal ('The Malthusian, a crusade against poverty', L., 1879-1921; from 1922 under the title 'The new generation'). Under the contradictions of the capitalist system, Malthusianism experiences all the vicissitudes of fate, sometimes being an official doctrine, as for example in England or Germany, sometimes being persecuted in countries where the corresponding peculiarities of development suggest population ideas (Italy, France). Modern social-fascism in the period of the sharpest crisis of capitalist rationalization readily resorts to the Malthusian doctrine as a favorite means of propaganda, proposing restriction of the birth rate as the only way out of the economic crisis, thereby shifting the responsibility for the impoverishment of the broadest masses not onto capitalism, but directly onto the working masses. The English Labor Party together with the Liberals readily propagates reduction of multiplication as the basic way of fighting unemployment. Similar views found echoes in radically-democratic circles in Russia, and at one of the last before the revolution Pirogov congresses a number of radical elements (Astrakhan, Vigdorchik and others) came out with propaganda for the cessation of births, so as not to put the oppressed in such a dire situation in which they would be maimed. Lenin in the article 'The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism' mercilessly condemned the petty-bourgeois essence of such 'revolutionariness,' stating: 'conscious workers will always carry on a merciless struggle against attempts to impose this reactionary, cowardly teaching on the most advanced, the strongest, the most ready for all kinds of transformations class of modern society.'