Marx
A similar critical attitude towards the classical theoretical system can be found in Karl Marx. His position on the law of population was expressly anti-Malthusian. He rarely lost an opportunity to criticise or ridicule Malthus’s theoretical contribution (see Meek 1953).
In the Grundrisse, he rejected the idea that the laws of population were the same in all countries and in all moments of history, asserting that every stage of development had its own different law of population. In fact he writes that “in different modes of social production there are different laws of the increase of population and of overpopulation; the latter identical with pauperism. Only in the mode of production based on capital does pauperism appear as the result of labour itself, of the development of the productive force of labour” (Marx 1857 [1973]: 604).The progressive impoverishment of wage earners was the condition that explained worker over-population; however, this could not be defined in absolute terms compared to the means of subsistence, but exclusively in relative terms.
Never a relation to a non-existent absolute mass of means of subsistence, but rather relation to the conditions of reproduction, of the production of these means, including likewise the conditions of reproduction of human beings, of the total population, of relative surplus population. This surplus purely relative: in no way related to the means of subsistence as such, but rather to the mode of producing them. (Marx 1857 [1973]: 607-8, original emphases)
The mechanism causing relative overpopulation was therefore part of the process explaining capitalist accumulation. The problem could be unfolded in terms of a oneway process, expounded in Capital (1867), in which the workers became poorer and poorer, adding to the ranks of the industrial reserve army.
The progressive impoverishment of the workers was due to the increase in the organic composition of capital, in other words, to the relative increase in constant capital (machinery and raw materials) at the expense of variable capital (labour).
The effect of this was the progressive reduction of necessary labour (to the mere reproduction of working capacity, that is, what was needed to feed a worker) compared to surplus labour (which was what produced surplus value) and a reduction in the demand for labour, which could be absolute or relative if it referred to the increase in overall capital.The workers’ situation was seriously compromised if there was also an increase in population. This happened because in this case there was an even more rapid increase in unemployment, that is, in the industrial reserve army. In other words, Marx, moving sharply away from the classical tradition, rejected the hypothesis of demographic movements as regulators of the ups and downs of the subsistence wage and the market wage and proclaimed the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve-army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve-army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. (Marx 1867 [1978]: 594)
Keeping in mind that the working population can increase, not only due to demographic dynamics but above all because of the use of women and children in production processes, there will be too many workers compared to the needs of the labour market.
It was owing to this last aspect, according to Perrotta, that in Marx population growth was not considered essentially in demographic terms (unlike the positive difference between birth and death rates), but was mainly connected to the increase in the number of productive workers on the market (Perrotta 2000: 672). The demand for a greater number of productive workers occurred as a result of the capitalist process of accumulation deriving from the growth of industry, which with its increased productivity weakened the economic position of peasants and craftsmen and contributed to the process of “proletarianization” of the society.
Given these premises, for Marx it was inconceivable to talk about a “law of population” responsible for the excessive growth of the wage-earning class.
The law he described as law of capitalist accumulation was a “social law” that “follows from the relationship of labour to capital” (Marx 1847 [1976], s. VI) and enabled Marx to explain why the wage-earning class was so numerous: “by replacing adults with children, modern industry places a veritable premium on the making of children” (ibid.).While for Sismondi poor workers made no calculation about the future composition of their family, for Marx it was exactly the opposite. They were induced by the system of production to “choose” a bigger family group because, seeing that they were getting progressively poorer, they tried to counteract the negative effects produced by the process of accumulation on family income.
In conclusion, though Marx maintained the futility of treating the theory of population autonomously from the theory of accumulation, he managed to clearly show an aspect of the population/resources relation that was different from the previous tradition. It must, however, be pointed out that while on the one hand Marx makes it very clear that overpopulation is a phenomenon generated by capitalism itself, on the other there is no explanation of what would happen to the population after the collapse of capitalism. That is, the demographic dynamic in itself is not explained and it is not clear what effects population growth would have on economic development.
Veblen pointed out this anomaly in Marx, arguing that “the particular point at which the theory is most fragile, considered simply as a theory of social growth, is its implied doctrine of population, implied in the doctrine of a growing reserve of unemployed workmen” (Veblen 1906: 595). The weak point, according to Veblen, lay in the fact that the population in the Marxist system would keep growing regardless of the availability of means of subsistence. Empirical evidence gave “apparent support” to this theory given that poverty had never been an obstacle to population growth, but Marxist theory gave “no conclusive evidence in support of a thesis to the effect that the number of laborers must increase independently of an increase in the means of life.
No one since Darwin would have the hardihood to say that the increase of the human species is not conditioned by the means of living” (ibid.).On the issue of population, for all the authors considered in this section, the decisive fact is that modifications of the demographic dynamics must be considered in a precise institutional context before being studied in all their complexity. This is, above all, because it is also the institutional context that gives rise to the modifications in individual attitudes to reproductive behaviour. Apart from this initial consideration, however, the positions of the authors examined are totally diverse.
For Sismondi, for the Ricardian socialists and for Marx, it is not possible to appeal to a “population law” that is immutable and therefore foreign to capitalism. Furthermore, the fact of challenging the Malthusian principle and the role it played in the classical tradition leads, in different ways for the different authors, to the negation of capitalism itself.
This negation, for Sismondi, is expressed as the development of a society of “small owners” removed from the depersonalization resulting from the system of industrial production. For the Ricardian socialists the negation consists of plans for the reform of capitalism, ranging from the libertarian alternatives announced by Hodgskin to the cooperative scheme of Owen and to the egalitarian collectivist scenario proposed by Thompson. Finally, for Marx there could be no other outcome than the collapse of the entire capitalist system of production, because the very relations of capitalist production contained the innate elements that would lead to its downfall.