Malthusianism

Malthusianism is an ideology that claims that the exponential growth of the human population will lead to economic collapse. The idea comes from Thomas Robert Malthus who was hired by the British Royal Family to falsely claim that the causes of the French Revolution was due to population growth, rather than class conflict.

This ideology has become the basis of the degrowth movement and climate activists, who receive enormous funding from the ruling elites.

In contrast to Malthusianism, pro-growth Marxists (such as Deng Xiaoping) propose that humanity is not constrained in the same way as animals are when it comes to their population growth. Lyndon LaRocuhe expresses this ability to increase the human population with technology as the "Potential Relative Population Density."

Marx and Engels were major critics of Malthusian population theory. Marx characterised Malthus' Essay on Population as "nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., [it] does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself." Though they accepted natural selection and other elements of Darwinism, they rejected the influence Malthus had on both The Origin of Species and Darwin's work in general.

Engels wrote in 1843:

Malthus establishes a formula on which he bases his entire system: population is said to increase in a geometrical progression – 1+2+4+8+16+32, etc.; the productive power of the land in an arithmetical progression – 1+2+3+4+5+6. The difference is obvious, is terrifying; but is it correct? Where has it been proved that the productivity of the land increases in an arithmetical progression? The extent of land is limited. All right! The labour-power to be employed on this land-surface increases with population. Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population. What progress does the agriculture of this century owe to chemistry alone – indeed, to two men alone, Sir Humphry Davy and Justus Liebig! But science increases at least as much as population.

This split later became a sharpened contradiction with the rise of Mendelism-Morganism, which was viscerally critiqued by Trofim Lysenko, the infamous Soviet agronomist. While the Mendelist-Morganists promoted Metaphysical concepts such as genes and random mutation from their sterilized, controlled, cobweb-ridden laboratories, Lysenko experimented in the fields barefoot with Soviet farmers and used Dialectical Materialism as the basis of his scientific method. Lysenko, his colleagues, and their teacher (the agronomist I.V. Michurin) arguably synthesized what is now commonly accepted as epigenetics.

Fox Green of the Space Commune has made a documentary called "Consumerism: Can we buy a better world?" which offers a critique of degrowth and Malthusianism.

See also

• Club of Rome