Marx as a Reader of Malthus

• In Event: Community and Cohesion in German Political Thought

Abstract

Though capitalist growth economics is doubtless a major driver of the current climate emergency, many remain convinced that capitalism also offers the necessary solutions. This fundamental predicament, the paper argues, has an important precedent in Marx’s Capital, which provides a valuable, often overlooked model of political ecology. The paper recovers a classical economics of sustainability by tracing Marx’s numerous references to Malthus and the population problem more broadly. Marx, the paper shows, took pains to systematically refute classical economists’ delinking of capitalism and the Malthusian principle of population. Much like contemporary technological optimists, Ricardo, Mill, and others argued that capitalism is not the cause but the answer to population fears. While he contested their reasoning, Marx did not disagree with this conclusion. Capitalism and its supporting government institutions, he argued, are a problematic and cruel answer to overpopulation, but an answer nonetheless. Dismantling the capitalist system, therefore, as Marx envisioned it, was a political program that wholly rejected any capitalist solution to a largely capital-driven social problem. While this may be unsurprising, it is rarely noted that Marx had acknowledged the severe social costs such a program would risk, and the duty it imposed to find alternative answers to what was essentially a sustainability problem.

Author

• Roni Hirsch, Haifa University