Population Theory by Karl Marx

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were both teenagers in Germany when Malthus died in England in 1834, and by the time they had met and independently moved to England, Malthus’s ideas already were politically influential in their native land, not just in England. Several German states and Austria had responded to what they believed was overly rapid growth in the number of poor people by legislating against marriages in which the applicant could not guarantee that his family would not wind up on welfare (Glass 1953). As it turned out, that scheme backfired on the German states, because people continued to have children, but out of wedlock. Thus, the welfare rolls grew as the illegitimate children had to be cared for by the state (Knodel 1970). 

Causes of Population Growth

Neither Marx nor Engels ever directly addressed the issue of why and how populations grew. They seem to have had little quarrel with Malthus on this point, although they were in favor of equal rights for men and women and saw no harm in preventing birth. Nonetheless, they were distrustful of the eternal or natural laws of nature as stated by Malthus. The basic Marxian perspective is that each society at each point in history has its own law of population that determines the consequences of population growth. For capitalism, the consequences are overpopulation and poverty, whereas for socialism, population growth is readily absorbed by the economy with no side effects. This line of reasoning led to Marx’s vehement rejection of Malthus, because if Malthus was right about his “pretended ‘natural law of population’”, then Marx’s theory would be wrong.

Consequences of Population Growth

Marx and Engels especially quarreled with the Malthusian idea that resources could not grow as rapidly as population, since they saw no reason to suspect that science and technology could not increase the availability of food and other goods at least as quickly as the population grew. Engels argued in 1865 that whatever population pressure existed in society was really pressure against the means of employment rather than against the means of subsistence (Meek 1971). Thus, they flatly rejected the notion that poverty can be blamed on the poor. Instead, they said, poverty is the result of a poorly organized society, especially a capitalist society. Implicit in the writings of Marx and Engels is the idea that the normal consequence of population growth should be a significant increase in production. After all, each worker obviously was producing more than he or she required. And if there were more people, there ought to be more wealth, not more poverty (Engels 1844).

Not only did Marx and Engels feel that poverty, in general, was not the end result of population growth, they argued that England was enough wealth to eliminate poverty. Engels had himself managed a textile plant and he believed that in England more people had meant more wealth for the capitalists rather than for the workers because the capitalists were skimming off some of the worker’s wages as profits for themselves. Marx argued that they did that by stripping the workers of their tools and then charging the workers for being able to come to the factory to work. For example, if you do not have the tools to make a car but want a job making cars, you could get hired at the factory and work eight hours a day. But, according to Marx, you might get paid for only four hours, the capitalist (owner of the factory) keeping part of your wages as payment for the tools you were using. The more the capitalist keeps the lower your wages and the poorer you will be.

Furthermore, Marx argued that capitalism worked by using the labor of the working classes to earn profits to buy machines that would replace the laborers which would lead to unemployment and poverty. Thus, the poor were not poor because they overran the food supply, but only because capitalists had first taken away part of their wages and then taken away their very jobs and replaced them with machines. Thus, the consequences of population growth that Malthus discussed were really the consequences of capitalist society, not of population growth per se. Overpopulation in a capitalist society was thought to be a result of the capitalists’ desire for an industrial reserve army that would keep wages low through competition for jobs and, at the same time, would force workers to be more productive in order to keep their jobs. To Marx, however, the logical extension of this was that the growing population would bear the seeds of destruction for capitalism, because unemployment would lead to disaffection and revolution. If society could be reorganized in a more equitable (that is, socialist) way, then population problems would disappear.

It is noteworthy that Marx, like Malthus, practiced what he preached. Marx was adamantly opposed to the notion of moral restraint, and his life repudiated that concept. He married at the relatively young age of 25, preceded to father eight children, including one illegitimate son, and was on intimate terms with poverty for much of his life.

Critique of Marx

Marx actually cannot give any new idea of population control, he only criticize Malthus.

Marx, the Malthusian principle operated under capitalism only, whereas under pure socialism there would be no population problem. Unfortunately, he offered no guidelines for the transition period. At best, Marx implied that the socialist law of population should be the antithesis of the capitalist law. If the birth rate were low under capitalism, then the assumption was that it should be high under socialism; if abortion seemed bad for a capitalist society, it must be good for a socialistic society.

Furthermore, Soviet socialism was unable to alleviate one of the worst evils that Marx attributed to capitalism, higher death rates among people in the working class than among those in the higher classes. Moreover, birth rates dropped to such low levels throughout pre-1990 Marxist Eastern Europe that it was no longer possible to claim that low birth rates were bourgeois.

In China, the empirical reality of having to deal with the world’s largest national population has led to a radical departure from Marxian ideology. As early as 1953, the Chinese government organized efforts to control population by relaxing regulations concerning contraception and abortion. Thus, despite Marx’s denial of a population problem, the Marxist government in China dealt with one by rejecting its Marxist-Leninist roots and embracing instead one of the most aggressive and coercive government programs ever launched to reduce fertility through restraints on marriage, contraception, and abortion. 

Sources:

POPULATION by John R. Weeks