4
Malthus and the war on the fat and the poor

We shouldn’t still have to talk about Malthus. For at least fifty years, writers on population have been dismissing him as outdated and irrelevant; that a nineteenth-century parson feared the poor would outbreed their resources and starve should not be worthy of any more than academic interest.256 Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. Not only are Malthus’ arguments about population still cited as worthy of serious consideration, some ways of thinking about overconsumption also seem to owe a considerable debt to a Malthusian world view.

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) published the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society in 1798, followed by a revised and extended second edition in 1803.²⁵⁷ It sets out to show the existence of a natural Law of Population: that populations would grow until they outstripped their food supplies. This was, Malthus argued, because available food supplies increase arithmetically: you might be able to double your agricultural production in twenty-five years, but it would be unlikely that in the following twenty-five years you would be able to repeat the feat. However, in the same time, the population could double, and then double again, so your two-fold increase in food supply would be trying to feed a four-fold increase in population.²⁵⁸ So, inevitably, people who could not afford the scarce supplies of food would starve, thus bringing the population back into line with its natural limits.

There are modern defences of Malthus’ calculations. An essay in the Optimum Population Trust journal in 2008, for example, defended the basic correctness of Malthus’ population equation, maintaining that while he had not been proved right yet, ‘the truth of his proposition has long been apparent to anyone willing to see it, and the consequences of having ignored it will bear down on us in the immediate future’.259 In the main, however, this outright defence of even the details of Malthus’ arguments is a minority view; he is more often portrayed as both wrong and irrelevant. As the 1953 Introduction to Malthus pointed out, Malthus’ approach to social policy was essentially that there should be no social policy, and that ‘the social policies of industrialised countries are all alike, and Malthus could approve of none of them.’²⁶⁰ Whether he can even be regarded as a precursor of the ‘neo-Malthusian’ school of population studies has been called into question, since it requires this defender of ‘moral restraint’ to have given rise to a movement which embraced contraception as the key method of population control (even if he might have approved of the neo-Malthusians’ enthusiasm for forced sterilisation and eugenics).²⁶¹

However, while the Law of Population is tacitly left to one side, the essential ideas of Malthus are clearly influential in modern population writing, whatever the writers take Malthus’ central message to have been. Although Malthus lived long before the green movement, he is sometimes presented almost as an environmental activist. A ‘bicentennial Malthusian essay’ published in 1997, for example, did not try to defend Malthus’ calculations on food production, but instead tried to adopt him as a climate change visionary. Malthus’ importance, according to this view, lies not in the precise details of his Law of Population argument, but in his identification of what would go on to be the cause of climate change, ozone depletion and our other environmental ills: our ‘indifference to limits’.²⁶²

This line of argument clearly relates Malthus’ views on population to current debates about overconsumption, framing Malthus’ Law of Population in terms of more widely accepted concepts of fundamental limits and carrying capacities. The idea that Malthus was a green could seem nothing more than a clever attempt by a fringe Malthus-enthusiast to fit his subject into a more relevant debate; a reaction to the irrelevance of the Law of Population to overconsumption and climate change. However, it is clear that even when Malthus is not referenced, Malthusian ideas fit naturally into much of the modern discussion.

The carrying capacity concept

As noted above,263 population is a significant factor in the arguments about overconsumption. Even if overconsumption is considered as a measure of consumption per head, it seems obvious that consumption would increase along with the number of heads. While lifestyle and consumption choices may come into it, in these views ultimately the rate of consumption of resources, including food, across the globe is ‘determined by the size of the human population’.²⁶⁴ This is sometimes expressed as a direct, mathematical relationship, so, for example, it was calculated in 1986 that humans were already using 40% of the net primary product of photosynthesis, enabling others to draw the conclusion that a doubling of the human population would therefore mean that we would be using a clearly unsustainable 80%.²⁶⁵

A rather more sophisticated approach is that of the steadystate arguments. For the steady state, population is a key question, as an increasing population is seen as a major driver of the economic growth which causes environmental degradation. A zero-growth population would be a prerequisite for a steadystate economy, and this link at the theoretical level has also produced a degree of linkage between steady-state and population campaigning. The US-based Negative Population Growth calls for a no-growth, steady-state economy,²⁶⁶ while the UK-based Population Matters is (at time of writing) listed by the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) as an organisation which has adopted a steady-state position.267 In return, CASSE links to Negative Population Growth on its website, albeit with the caveated comment that ‘Negative Population Growth is a national membership organization that tackles a very difficult issue head-on. We may not all agree on all their findings, but they have adopted a logical position called, “A No-Growth, Steady-State Economy Must Be Our Goal.”’²⁶⁸

The connection between the steady-state theory and theories about the undesirability of population growth may provide a useful synergy for both. It works, but not because a no-economic growth position is inherent to the anti-population growth position. Malthus himself, after all, was very far from a protosteady statist. In his later work, the Principles of Political Economy, he showed a distinct concern for economic growth in the absence of a growing population. The development of his theory of moral restraint was supposed to provide a stimulus to demand and therefore economic growth. His point was to make a distinction between ‘prudential restraint’, which he identified with restricting the number of children you have so as to fit your lifestyle to your income, and ‘moral restraint’, in which you strive to earn more money to be able to support the larger number of children which your industry enables you to have.²⁶⁹ Malthus the good capitalist boy was convinced that economic growth was invariably beneficial. The connection of Malthusian arguments to the steady-state theory would probably have horrified him just as much as the use of his ideas to promote contraception. However the connection is a real one, as both the steady-state theory and the population arguments proceed from the same idea of fundamental limits – that the planet has a ‘carrying capacity’.

The idea of a planetary carrying capacity is that it can only physically sustain a certain size of human population; that there is a fundamental limit beyond which human labour and technological development would not be able to extend the numbers which the world could support. As Pimental, a prolific writer on consumption and population puts it, ‘When human numbers exceed the capacity of the world to sustain them, then a rapid deterioration of human existence will follow. As it does with all forms of life, nature ultimately will control human numbers.’270 As discussed, this is a common concept in discussions of overconsumption,²⁷¹ but it’s rarely acknowledged that the concept that nature limits us is also inherent to Malthus’ arguments about population.

In his introduction to the second edition of the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that ‘Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms Nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand; but has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them’.²⁷² While his Law of Population was about the comparative rates of increase in population and food production, the concept of a fixed, natural limit to production seems to underlie Malthus’ thinking just as it does modern arguments about overconsumption. In discussing the potential to increase production in Britain in pace with population, for example, Malthus commented that ‘In a few centuries, it would make every acre of land in the island like a garden’.²⁷³ His calculations of the possible increase in production might place ‘no limits whatever to the produce of the earth’²⁷⁴ but an awareness of a fundamental limit was surprisingly close to the forefront of Malthus’ work.

When overconsumption writers argue that the population has to be restrained to enable everyone to have a decent standard of living, they are echoing Malthus, sometimes explicitly, as Herman Daly, the founder of the steady-state school, did when he commented on that reasonable standard of living: ‘We cannot precisely define “a good life”, but most would agree with Malthus that it should be such as to permit one to have a glass of wine and a piece of meat with one’s dinner’.²⁷⁵ It is a measure of the development of the arguments about food and climate change that a comment written in 1996 should now sound so out of touch, since to achieve a steady state we are now told that a glass of wine and a piece of meat are precisely the things we should avoid having with our dinner, at least except on the most special of occasions. That Malthus as well as Herman Daly was concerned about carrying capacity is not just of historical interest, as these antecedents give a clue to the role of class in modern arguments about population.

Biological determinism

Malthus’ theories were controversial as soon as they were written. Intended to refute an argument put forward by William Godwin that humanity could perfect itself through the application of human reason, the proliferation of Principle of Population editions was an attempt by Malthus to answer the criticisms he received. In the introduction to the second edition, he commented that ‘I am aware that I have opened a door to many objections, and, probably, to much severity of criticism’, although he found solace in the importance of his subject.276 The third edition represented a distinct toning down of the first and second - ‘I have endeavoured to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first Essay’,²⁷⁷ Malthus said – and introduced the idea of restraint as an alternative to starvation for the poor. The central idea however remained, and so did the criticism. In 1830, for example, William Cobbett called the notion that people would always reproduce beyond the means of subsistence ‘the infamous and really diabolical assertion of Malthus’.²⁷⁸

To Malthus and his supporters, this would appear as a form of shooting the messenger: he felt he was pointing out unpalatable but unavoidable natural truths, which would not become any less true as a result of critics railing against him. It’s a form of argument which, over the last two centuries, has become part of the standard repertoire of right-wing social commentators. Claims that differences in average IQ test results between ethnic minority and white children are due to inherent differences in natural intelligence279; that all human behaviour is determined by our ‘selfish genes’²⁸⁰; or indeed that women can’t read maps²⁸¹ all proceed from this same standpoint: that inequalities in society are natural, rooted in biology, and can’t be changed through political or social action. Indeed, for E O Wilson, whose Sociobiology launched a biological determinist school of studying human society when it was published in 1975, the ‘ecological steady state’ was itself dependent on advances in neurobiology, since until these were achieved ‘a genetically accurate and hence completely fair code of ethics must also wait’.²⁸²

Malthus himself was at pains to present the unfortunate tendency of human populations to face mass starvation as a natural law, as a reality which affected all living things and which humans could also not avoid. As he said in the seventh edition: ‘The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law; and man cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it’.²⁸³ However, what was naturally-ordained was that the poor should be the ones who starved. In the second edition, indeed, Malthus seems to be arguing that unemployment is a natural phenomenon, with the laid-off worker being rejected not only by the capitalist employer but by nature itself: ‘At nature’s mighty feast there is no cover for him. She tells him to begone.’²⁸⁴ It was for this reason that Engels, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, called Malthus’ work ‘the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie on the proletariat’.²⁸⁵ What Malthus presented as natural and immutable was, as so often turns out to be the case, an intensely class-driven argument.

It has been pointed out that biological determinist arguments have a tendency to emerge at particular political moments. Stephen Jay Gould comments in his criticism of IQ testing that the use of the IQ test as a measure of the hereditary intelligence of different ethnic groups was popularised in the US in the 1920s against the backdrop of anti-immigration measures and lynchings, while the three psychologists leading the charge reconsidered their position in the 1930s when ‘PhDs walked depression breadlines and poverty could no longer be explained by innate stupidity’.286 What Gould doesn’t say is that the 1920s were also a decade of reaction against the upsurge of class struggle during the First World War and after. This had culminated in the ‘Red Year’ of 1919 and the Seattle general strike, which the mayor of Seattle called an ‘attempted revolution’.²⁸⁷ The idea that the poor were innately so was part of the vicious ruling-class reaction, just as the recurrence of the IQ arguments in 1969 was part of the reaction to 1968, and the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 part of ‘a new age of social meanness’.²⁸⁸ In the same way that these upsurges of biological determinism are fully understandable only as part of the class struggle, so the background to Malthus’ writing is as important to an understanding of the continuing meaning of the argument as the details of what he said.

A war against the poor in the nineteenth century…

The most obvious backdrop to a work about inescapable food shortages might be expected to be persistent food shortage and famine, but for the Principle of Population, this was not in fact the case. Malthus’ lifetime saw significant increases in English food production, with grain production up by approaching 50% between 1760 and 1800.²⁸⁹ Between 1750 and 1840 the population doubled, but production kept pace. In the 1830s, domestic grain production still covered 98% of domestic consumption.²⁹⁰ This was the result of the eighteenth-century agricultural revolution, with advances in farming methods, development of new machines for threshing, harvesting and so on, and the introduction of new animal feeds all enabling food production to rise. It’s this background which leads to the oft-repeated comment that Malthus was outdated even in his own lifetime, as industrialisation meant that the food crises which could hit communities reliant on subsistence farming could never again affect the Western world. We’ll come back to this notion; for now it’s simply worth noting that while Malthus was able to ignore food production soaring even as he wrote, he wasn’t living in the past. If the Principle of Population was not reflecting an actual food crisis, it was nevertheless written out of a sense of an even more serious problem: increasing demands from the poor threatening the well-to-do.

The massive increases in agricultural production in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were achieved on the back of a programme of enclosure which saw over six million acres of land, equal to about a quarter of the total cultivated land in England, turned from common, open or waste land into private fields.291 Enclosure didn’t happen to the same degree everywhere – it’s been pointed out that in some areas by the mid-eighteenth century there was no common land to enclose – but coupled with the general inability of the rural poor, trying to support themselves from small pieces of land and some home-based manufacturing, to compete with industrial production and capitalist agriculture, it made it virtually impossible for them to be self-supporting. Poor people in the countryside were now reliant on wage labour to earn the money to feed themselves, rather than having direct control of their means of production. Flora Thompson, in her fictionalised autobiography about growing up in an Oxfordshire hamlet in the 1880s, described the difference enclosure made to the lives of the rural poor in the life story of the hamlet’s oldest inhabitant, Sally, who ‘could just remember…when [the hamlet] still stood in a wide expanse of open heath’.

Country people had not been so poor when Sally was a girl, or their prospects so hopeless. Sally’s father had kept a cow, geese, poultry, pigs and a donkey-cart to carry his produce to the market town. He could do this because he had commoners’ rights and could turn his animals out to graze, and cut furze for firing and even turf to make a lawn for one of his customers. Her mother made butter, for themselves and to sell, baked their own bread, and made candles for lighting.

By contrast, Sally’s husband worked all his life as a wage-labourer, ‘for the cow, geese and other stock had long gone the way of the common’.292

The effect of enclosure was to drive up the requirements for poor relief, especially as agricultural employers relied on payments of poor relief to subsidise their low wages and maintain a permanent cheap labour reserve in the countryside which they could call on for temporary, seasonal labour. The amount paid nationally in poor rates increased from around £2 million a year in the 1780s to more than £4 million in 1803 and over £6 million in 1812.²⁹³ Malthus’ argument that the misery of the poor was both natural and all their own fault therefore gave ideological cover for the enormous theft of rural land by the bourgeoisie to which the enclosures amounted, justifying the effects of a process of which he must have been well aware. More than this, Malthus’ Law of Population also provided ammunition for those who were getting tired of covering for their own and their competitors’ disinclination to pay their labourers a living wage. His argument that the poor should not be enabled to reproduce if they couldn’t afford it certainly helped the move towards the 1834 Poor Law, which limited the amounts paid in poor relief by denying any support except the workhouse to those deemed capable of working. Conditions in the workhouses were deliberately designed to be unpleasant, based on a much-admired workhouse in Southwell, where conditions were ‘as disagreeable as was consistent with health’, and importantly, husbands and wives admitted to the workhouses were deliberately kept apart so that they couldn’t have any more children.294 It is not for nothing that the 1834 Poor Law has been dubbed as Malthus’ gift to the bourgeoisie.²⁹⁵ As an ‘early and intimate friend’ of Malthus wrote shortly after his death in 1834:

No intelligent and well-educated person can have observed what has been passing in the civil economy of this country for the last forty years without being convinced that a great change has been gradually wrought into the public mind respecting the poor laws and their administration, and that the works of Mr Malthus have been exceedingly influential in bringing it about.²⁹⁶

Saying that the rural poor were dependent on poor relief was therefore a convenient way of concealing the lack of the means of employment by confusing them with the means of subsistence. As both Marx and Engels pointed out, the problem for the rural poor was not that there was an absolute lack of resources to feed them, but that they were deprived by enclosure and capitalist agriculture generally of the means to support themselves, leaving them reliant on low-paid, intermittent wage labour for subsistence.²⁹⁷ This was a point made vividly by William Cobbett, writing in 1830 about the poor of the Avon valley, when he commented that the population of the area seemed to have fallen compared to earlier periods, but that the people who remained seemed to be no less poor, despite the fact that the land could presumably have supported many more. He asked ‘where, then, is their natural tendency to increase beyond the means of sustenance for them? Beyond, indeed, the means of that sustenance with which a system like this will leave them.’²⁹⁸ Malthus conflated the effect of capitalist relations of production with carrying capacity by constructing the former as part of the latter: at least as far as the first edition of the Principle of Population was concerned, choices made by employers to lay off workers were an expression of the natural limits of possible support for the poor. Capitalism’s need for a reserve of cheap, seasonal agricultural labour was for Malthus an aspect of the inescapable iron law of nature, which no human society could escape.

…and in the twentieth century

This tendency to conflate the effects of economic and social structure with absolute natural limits seems to have been inherited by some of the most infamous modern writing about population. Malthus may have been inspired by the growing requirements for poor relief at the end of the eighteenth century. In the same way, a sense of privilege being besieged by growing hordes of poor people, reminiscent of Malthus’ writings, pervades notorious works like Paul Ehrlich’s 1969 The Population Bomb. Here he explained how he was on holiday with his family in Delhi when he first reached the conclusion that the world was so overpopulated that a billion people would starve by 1983. It’s a passage which it seems almost obligatory to quote when discussing population, but it does need to be read to appreciate the full classist and racist horror of the white, middle-class academic facing the poor, numerous and brown: ‘The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing and screaming…People, people, people, people. As we moved through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened.’ He concluded, ‘since that night, I’ve known the feel of overpopulation’.299

Ehrlich belonged to an apocalyptic school of population thought which is perhaps less fashionable now than it was forty years ago, although this style of argument has not entirely disappeared. The obvious point that the number of people in a crowded city street is in no way an expression of the size of the population of a country (or even of a city), let alone evidence of said population’s relationship to its productive capacity, has been made many times, but it is still possible to find arguments about overpopulation which refer directly to Ehrlich’s Road to Delhi experience. Lindsey Grant, for example, writing in 1996, claimed that the evidence for catastrophic overpopulation was there for anyone to see: ‘The numbers are visible enough. Try a visit to Calcutta or New York.’300 The choice of these particular cities for evidence of the population problem shows that the racist assumptions underlying Ehrlich’s writing are unfortunately still there in more recent population arguments. Indeed, there is a clear synthesis between anti-immigration arguments, particularly in the US, and the idea that the population of poor, non- white countries is out of control.

However, even leaving aside this racist, explicitly right-wing line of argument, in more respectable discussions of population the lines of descent from Ehrlich and Malthus can be clear. Given that the argument is supposed to be about the ability to feed the entire population, it’s notable how frequently concerns about population appear as concerns about literal space. When this takes the form of discussions of congestion, pressure on public spending and so on, the most obvious sources are wider discussions of immigration, which routinely use the arguments that migrants will push up housing costs and cause longer traffic jams in major cities, as support for restricting numbers. Alongside this however are concerns not about the addition of people to already crowded spaces but the incursion of people into previously unpopulated areas. It hardly seems the most serious of the concerns in the population debates, but the idea that national parks will become too heavily used turns up with surprising frequency.³⁰¹ Indeed, Virginia Abernethy in her introduction to Ester Boserup’s famous work The Conditions of Agricultural Growth criticised Boserup, and by extension a general approach to population, for ignoring what she felt was the deeply important national parks issue: ‘the value that some people place on wilderness, space, mobility and other intangibles that lose out to crowding and population growth’.302

The point is that this is not only a continued use of a visceral idea of overpopulation unrelated to population statistics, but also that it identifies a key effect of overpopulation as the incursion of additional people, presumably poor, possibly non-white, into previously privileged spaces. The references to national parks in the US is indicative, as these are spaces once the preserve of those with relatively rare time and transport to reach them but now accessible to the wider population, with the implied concomitant that they are now spoiling them for the more discerning. This is, of course, the same basis on which consumption becomes problematic overconsumption: when it’s consumption by the masses and not by the privileged few.

The elements of racism and overtly right-wing sentiments which appear in many expressions of concern about population have made it an uncomfortable issue for much of the environmental movement, but it is not easy to get away from it. How to treat the population issue remains a controversy within the Green Party of England and Wales, for example. When the Green Party leader, Natalie Bennett, wrote a letter to The Guardian in July 2013 to take issue with the ‘vicious rhetoric on immigration’ poisoning British political debate,³⁰³ three Green Party members wrote in reply to take her to task on the basis that immigration was a key driver of population growth and should therefore be opposed by any environmentalist party.³⁰⁴

The argument that immigration is an environmental issue has also been raised in a US context and it has differing explanations depending on who is proposing it. In the US, the argument seems to be mostly that immigration from a Third World to a First World country would usually raise the living standards of the immigrants, therefore meaning that their per capita emissions would be higher. They might even visit a national park or two while they were at it. Others indeed take the view that not all parts of the globe have the same carrying capacity, so that, for example, an increase in potential visitors to Yellowstone would be a problem, or that it might be better for the environment if Poles remained in Poland where there is more space per person rather than moved to the UK.

Sandy Irvine, one of the authors of The Guardian letter, says that the Green Party leadership do not want to engage with the population question, to the extent of preventing Population Matters (of which he is a trustee) from putting a leaflet into the party publication, Green World.305 He is determined that a concern about population is neither right- nor left-wing and that environmental campaigners are making a mistake in ceding the ground on immigration to the likes of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). We were speaking a week after the 2014 European elections in which UKIP gained the highest vote across the UK, so this was a topical concern. For Sandy, an environmental position which leaves out population is omitting a third of the areas it should be covering. Greens, he says, have to consider the technological causes of climate change, consumption per head and the numbers of heads doing that consuming; anything else simply ignores huge aspects of the problem, including the hard truths that shifting to a sustainable society with this many people will have to involve significant sacrifice of living standards in the West.

His own understanding of population as a serious issue came, like Paul Ehrlich’s, from personal experience of overcrowding. Growing up on a council estate in Huddersfield but with family in the Shetlands, as a child he was always very struck by the difference between the estate and the family croft, ‘the difference between a crowded place and a very uncrowded place’. It was this experience of the contrast which first made him think about issues of space, density and privacy, an experience which he brought with him when he went on to study town-planning in Newcastle. This was 1968, and the focus of the course was on coping with growth. The students were expected to design big new towns, which would have flattened local villages like Stannington, to the north of the city. While part of this was a drive to provide better housing, Sandy saw it as also, in part, a response to growing human numbers which meant that uncrowded, green spaces had to be sacrificed. At the same time, the famous ‘Earthrise’ photograph (the picture taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968 of the Earth rising from the Moon) brought home to him that we live on a finite planet: human numbers could not simply go on increasing.306 This realisation took him politically from the International Socialists to the Ecology Party (later the Green Party) and the Optimum Population Trust (later Population Matters), but his story also emphasises how the population issue and discussions about overconsumption are interconnected.

While the political orientation of many of those proposing population as the key environmental problem might seem to set the population arguments aside from much of the environmental movement’s discussions of overconsumption, it appears that the underlying views of the problem are more similar than it might be comfortable to admit. For both, it is the existence and consumption of the poor which is the problem, whether it is the food choices of working-class people in the First World, or the reproductive choices of the poor in the Third World. Approaches to these problematic people can be more or less sympathetic: some of those concerned about overcrowding in US national parks give the impression that they would prefer access to them to be restricted only to the privileged, while Sandy Irvine, for example, clearly came to his position through his own experience of growing up in a working-class area. It is worth noting, however, that whether they are to be condemned or not, the effect of the population arguments, and their off-shoot that immigration is an environmental issue in particular, is that they cast as the world’s number one climate criminals not the chief executives of oil companies (to take an example at random) but recent immigrants to the West. The same people, in other words, who are singled out as the sharp end of the obesity explosion, destroying the world with their fast food habits. The overconsumption and the population arguments come together here to identify the problem as one of growth of the working class in the developed world.

The idea of out-of-control population growth clearly carries with it the threat of redistribution from the rich to the ever more numerous poor. As Susan George put it: ‘Certainly we are afraid – afraid that increasing numbers in the Third World will one day demand from us their due and lower our own standard of living; fearful that the pressures of population may finally demonstrate that the “only solution is revolution”’.307 This is the same fear that Engels invoked in 1892, when he commented that the idea of allowing the surplus population to starve was ‘simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation…the workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population’.³⁰⁸ The overconsumption arguments are more likely than discussions about population to embrace the idea that the just way to deal with this situation would be to equalise consumption across the world, rather than to take punitive measures to prevent the First World being deemed the surplus population. However, even with this approach it is difficult to see this view of the cause of climate change and environmental destruction as positive for the working class.

Technology versus carrying capacity: arguments against Malthus

The statement that on a finite planet there is a fixed, natural limit to production may seem an obvious one, but its practical implications can be disputed. While it may be that, logically, a limit to the productive capacity of the earth must exist at some point, it is by no means so certain that we are likely to be anywhere near that limit. Against the Malthusian view of a fixed, proximate carrying capacity, there is therefore the argument that human ingenuity and technological developments will be able to increase production for all practical purposes indefinitely. This was argued by Engels in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy in 1844, only a decade after the last edition of Malthus’ Principle of Population, when he stated that human labour could always extend what might appear to be natural limits to production: ‘the productivity of the land can be infinitely increased by the application of capital, labour and science’.309

This can’t be dismissed as simply an expression of a nineteenth-century belief in ‘progress’ as the idea was developed in the 1960s by Ester Boserup into a full-scale theory of agricultural innovation. Boserup argued that population pressure, far from being a threat to human societies, was actually the key driver of technological development. She took issue with Malthus’ view of static or only slowly-increasing production; looking at pre-industrial societies, she found that they were able to produce more food as their population increased through developments in agricultural techniques. The Malthusian way of looking at the relationship between food production and population was in fact the wrong way round: Malthus saw population size determined by food availability, so the population would increase if more intensive farming methods made more food available, whereas lack of food would reduce the population through famine. On the contrary, Boserup argued that the population increase came first: it caused the intensification of agriculture and greater food production, not the other way round.310

Boserup’s theories were influential for thinking about population and development. In 1984, for example, the World Bank gave a decidedly Boserupian summation of the problem of population for developing countries: ‘The difficulties caused by rapid population growth are not primarily due to finite natural resources, at least not for the world as a whole’,³¹¹ but to the lack of capital to invest in technologies to expand production. Boserup had developed her theory on the basis of pre-industrial, non-capitalist societies and argued herself that it would be difficult for poor rural communities to industrialise, even if that would increase the amount of food they could produce.³¹² This general school of thought about the effect of technology on production also managed to win over some Malthusians, who were reduced to arguing that Malthus was right, but only up to the Industrial Revolution. The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, for example, believed absolutely that the peasants he studied in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Languedoc were subject to the ‘Malthusian curse’, as were ‘certain peoples in today’s [1966] Third World’, but in general, industrialised agriculture had made Malthus irrelevant to most modern societies. He was ‘a clear-headed theoretician of traditional societies, but he was a prophet of the past; he was born too late in a world too new’.³¹³

The fairly widespread acceptance of the idea that technology would trump limits to production means that it can’t be categorised as a purely left-wing one. Indeed, it would be difficult to claim as purely socialist any argument adopted by the World Bank. However, just as the concept of a relevant and proximate carrying capacity can be linked to right-wing arguments about the superfluity of much of the working class, so arguments which maintain the value of human labour over natural constraints have tended to be used as a rebuttal by the left. This is sometimes on ideological grounds. Lenin, for example, saw neo-Malthusianism as the pessimism of the petty bourgeoisie, compared to the determination of the proletariat not to have to despair of the future. The workers, in contrast to the petty bourgeoisie, were ‘fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious.’314 More often, however, the argument appears as one of empirical fact rather than one of political approach: conveniently for those of us who find the implications of the carrying capacity argument disturbing, it happens to be factually incorrect. So, a recent pamphlet on Marxism and Ecology cites a UN FAO report that cropland could be doubled, and that in the Guinea savannah only 10% of land suitable for farming is actually being cropped.³¹⁵

These are comforting statistics, but it isn’t as easy as that to dispose of the idea of carrying capacity. The first problem is that, while Malthus may have used the image of the entire land surface being taken up eventually by farming, carrying capacity as it has developed is not mainly or even primarily about land use. It is unusual to find arguments that there are physically no more pieces of land which could be turned over to agriculture; indeed, figures for the amount of land which could potentially be cultivated but isn’t tend to be both contradictory and surprisingly hard to come by. It is perhaps for this reason that overconsumption writers like Goodland who want to put their arguments on a mathematical basis adopt measures like the percentage of the primary product of photosynthesis in use rather than estimates of land surface availability.³¹⁶ In any case, a measure of how much land is not currently being used for farming would not be a measure of how much could be brought into use. With deforestation a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions, the climate effects of clearing land are an integral part of the modern idea of carrying capacity, as are water resources, the shortage of which, exacerbated by climate change, may be as effective a brake on agricultural development as land availability per se.

The point is that carrying capacity has to be understood not just in terms of how much production can be physically wrung from the planet, but also of the effect that a certain size of population has on the biosphere. In this view, population size and production go hand in hand, although this is of course arguable. Climate change here is itself evidence that we have exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity. The effects of trying to fit too many people on to the planet are not first evident in starvation, as Malthus thought they would be, or certainly not in the developed world, but although we aren’t yet suffering the personal consequences, the size of our population means that we are treading too heavily upon the earth. In this argument, it might be possible for us to continue to produce enough food to feed everyone for some time, but the climate effects of such an attempt would mean that it would be too destructive to the environment for us to continue to try to do so. Whether or not the argument goes on to conclude that the remedy is to reduce the numbers of people, or for everyone in the West to modify their living standards, it’s clear that simply thinking about the amount of land which is not currently being farmed is insufficient to answer this argument.

Nor will a recourse to human ingenuity do any longer as a counter-argument to carrying capacity. The industrialisation of agriculture which for writers like Ladurie made Malthusianism irrelevant is of course reliant on fossil fuels, which are not only a major cause of climate change but subject themselves to fundamental resource constraints. It is likely that we are at, or nearly at, ‘peak oil’, the point at which depletion of global oil reserves means that output begins to decline, and it’s clear that this will have serious effects on food production. In 2008, for example, Chatham House’s report on the future of food considered various different scenarios for future food production in which significant differences in food availability depended almost wholly on the price of oil. In the worst option, as food production falls in the face of fundamental resource constraints, ‘the view spreads that peak oil has arrived’, making clear that for Chatham House, the resource which determines carrying capacity is not land, but oil.317

Oil is clearly subject to relevant and proximate constraints; even if new sources of oil are found to avoid peak oil, the climate requires that we don’t attempt to use them. Attempts to use oil sources which have previously been thought too difficult to be worth the expense of extraction, like the Canadian tar sands, will cause immense environmental damage even before the oil extracted is used. The obvious counterargument here is that human ingenuity does not have to stop at fossil fuels: we could develop new technologies which enable us to develop industrial-scale agriculture without the currently-attendant greenhouse gas emissions. However, the problem from the perspective of much of the green movement is that attempts to expand food production through technological development do not have a good track record. We can no longer justify the confidence of the 1840s, or indeed the 1960s, that capitalism will always be able to work and invent its way out of food production limits.

The problem with the green revolution

The backdrop to the confidence of writers like Ladurie in all-conquering modern technology was the green revolution. This was a development programme for higher yield crops, begun in the 1940s when the Rockefeller Institute started funding research into wheat strains, which was beginning to see results in the 1960s as the first higher yield strains developed were being planted. The results were spectacular: in Asia, for example, green revolution rice strains increased yield by 30% more than the increase in population between 1963 and 1993 across the continent as a whole.318 It’s easy to see how, from the standpoint of the 1960s and 1970s, the green revolution could have seemed to have solved the contemporary problem of low food production, and averted the population apocalypse being predicted by people like Paul Ehrlich. With this as an example, the idea that future food problems could always be averted by new research and development was an obvious one, but it’s not so obvious now.

The green revolution is controversial because it didn’t just create higher-yield varieties of staple crops, but higher-yield varieties of staple crops which were reliant on large-scale, mechanistic farming methods. While overall yields certainly increased, this wasn’t always a benefit to the poorest farmers, who were unable to compete with marketised agricultural concerns and were often driven off the land altogether. There is a clear comparison between the effects of the green revolution and the effects of enclosure and capitalist agricultural production in Britain in the eighteenth century, which as discussed was the background for Malthus’ thinking on population. The high yields of green revolution crops were gained under the assumption that intensive commercial agriculture is the only way to produce large amounts of food, despite alternative evidence that peasant agricultural techniques can be both more productive and more efficient.³¹⁹

It could be argued that these aspects of the green revolution do not invalidate the advances it represents in terms of food production. Fred Pearce, for example, takes on scepticism about the benefits of the green revolution in particularly forthright style:

Many people I know regard the green revolution as a disaster. They say it has tied billions of the world’s peasants to a marketised, globalised, mechanised, energy-guzzling, climate-warming, biodiversity-destroying way of feeding the world. I see their point. And it might have been done differently. But would they prefer billions starving?320

This holds out the hope that future developments of food production technology could indeed ‘be done differently’; that we don’t have to abandon belief in human ingenuity simply because the green revolution turned out to be a two-edged sword. However, it relies on seeing the environmental and social consequences of the green revolution as extrinsic to the project, when a more appropriate view may be to see them as an indivisible part of advances in capitalist agriculture.

The introduction of the limited numbers of high-yield strains has had the effect of destroying diversity, and therefore increasing vulnerability to disease among the remaining strains of the crops. In India, for example, one result of the green revolution has been forty new insect pests on rice and twelve new rice diseases.³²¹ The new crops tend to require large amounts of pesticide, and have also proved to be much thirstier, and therefore require more water, than older strains. Both of these factors make the crops difficult to justify on sustainability grounds, as both water and oil resources become scarcer as a result of peak oil and climate change. Again, it could be done differently next time, although the development of genetically-modified (GM) crops along the same lines, with similar problems of corporations expropriating crop strains, reliance on expensive fossil-fuel fertilisers and pesticides and destruction of diversity, suggests that these issues are rather more intrinsic to this type of development than defenders of the green revolution would like to think. In addition, however, it is also possible that the expansion and improvement of agriculture through technology itself is subject to limits.

The green revolution worked not by simply supplying existing cultivators with higher yield crops, but through the appropriation of peasant holdings to create neoliberal agro-export regimes. Just as with enclosure in eighteenth-century Britain, this did lead to increased production, but it is not an increase which can be repeated indefinitely, even if we were prepared to put up with the social costs. The production gains of the green revolution were pretty much exhausted by the 1980s, and even if a way were found of increasing yields without requiring more fossil fuel or water resources, the initial gains might not be repeatable.322 This of course is not to argue that it would never be possible, under any system, to improve agricultural production. However, the green revolution should be seen as not so much the application of superior technology as an exercise in bringing agricultural land into capitalist production; an exercise which can only happen once.

Capitalist exploitation of natural resources works through the availability of new areas, outside those currently used for production, to expand into: continued profit requires ever more new resources to exploit. The green revolution was an expression of this as it worked by bringing land which had not previously been part of capitalist agriculture into the global market system. If the increase in productivity which it achieved were to be repeated in the same way, it would require there to be more land currently outside the capitalist system, which could be brought into it to be exploited. This availability, the existence of non-capitalist areas for capitalism to expand into, obviously cannot be infinite, whatever we might think of human ingenuity’s ability to invent new technologies. As Engels pointed out, despite his optimism about the ability of technology to improve production, within capitalism, the hope of feeding the world’s population, including the burgeoning population of industrial cities, came ultimately from the fact that there were large areas of the world which had not yet been exploited. Writing in 1865 of the untapped resources in places like the western USA, he commented that ‘If all these regions have been ploughed up and after that shortage sets in, then will be the time to say caveat consules’.323 The Latin translates as ‘let the consuls (rulers of republican Rome) beware’, an indication of the revolutionary possibilities of an era of profound food shortages and a far cry from Malthus’ conclusion that if the poor are starving, they should resign themselves to doing it quietly.

It would be an easy response to the arguments which make ordinary people essentially responsible for overconsumption and therefore climate change to be able to argue that human labour and ingenuity will always resolve the problem, but it is difficult to make this case with as much confidence as Boserup did in 1965. The idea that humans can always overcome natural limits in fact appears to be a product of a type of alienated thinking which sees the natural world as separate from, and therefore potentially exploited and dominated by, human society. It is a similar view of nature, incidentally, which sees it essentially as untouched wilderness, without the despoiling presence of poor, working-class humans: nature as something the wealthy go to visit, rather than the world of which human societies are part. We have now seen in climate change the effects of this view of the environment as separate from us, and the onward march of progress is no longer an attractive argument.

Neither Malthus nor capitalist production: a way through the impasse

If we can’t argue any longer that technological development within capitalism has and will continue to make Malthus irrelevant, does this then mean that we have to accept Malthusian-influenced notions of a carrying capacity? This would still leave us room to dispute ideas about how close we are to the limits of that capacity, and what we might do about it. Simon Fairlie, for example, defended meat-eating in 2010 on the basis that limited livestock farming could be a strategy for avoiding the otherwise inevitable drift of human populations towards outgrowing their resources, essentially by acting as hoofed miners’ canaries for overconsumption.324 Whatever the conclusions might be about the precise composition of our ideal diets, it could seem at this point that, without the trump card of the Industrial Revolution, we are stuck with Malthus’ conclusion that at some point, whether imminent now or not, there will be too many people in the world and the only solutions will be the drastic reduction of per capita consumption, or reduction of population. Fortunately though, we aren’t.

The problem with the notion that human work or human inventiveness will overcome natural limits is that it assumes that there are natural limits to which, if humans are too idle or too conservative, they will be subject. This is a trap which Boserup largely avoided, since she was working on peasant communities mostly using non-industrial methods of improving their harvests, but which writers like Ladurie fell into wholesale in concluding that only industrialisation invalidates Malthus. The general idea here is that pre-industrial societies were subject to recurrent absolute dearths of food sufficient for their populations because their agricultural production methods were so inefficient, and it is only the advances of industrial production which has enabled our food production to keep up with population. There is a long list of catastrophic famines in the medieval and early modern periods to substantiate the idea that human societies before the Industrial Revolution have always been no more than one step ahead of starvation. This however relies on a key assumption about the causes of those famines which is not borne out by the evidence. A review of the history of famine shows that it is not that Malthus was wrong about food and population in his own time, after industrialisation. It is that he was never right.

A (very) short history of famine: all about class

The classic view of pre-industrial agriculture is of a system at the mercy of drought, storm, disease and other factors which could cause harvest failures. If in good years all the food produced was required to feed the population, then the surplus saved against bad harvests would be very small. Hence instances of famine caused by harvest failures can be taken as evidence of an underlying Malthusian problem: that the population was pressing on the limits of production. This attribution of single events to an underlying Malthusian cause is extended by some from famines to disease, as Ladurie, for example, blamed even the Black Death on overpopulation, calling it the ‘holocaust of the undernourished’.325

This doesn’t exactly hold up historically: while some recurrences of the plague did seem to affect specific groups, like the 1361 outbreak which seemed especially to hit young adults, one of the many horrifying things about the Black Death for contemporaries was the way in which it wasn’t restricted to the poor or already ill. The high death rates among well-fed groups like the clergy are indicative of this. Ladurie seems to have been thinking of the Black Death as a Malthusian consequence of overpopulation in much the same sense that Malthus himself thought that an aware, teleological Nature would tell the unemployed farm labourer to ‘begone’. The medieval world was overpopulated and hence asking for it. It is possible to speculate that writers like Ladurie had to introduce disease as a Malthusian mechanism because famine is actually an ineffective reducer of population. Out of all recorded famines, only the Chinese Great Leap Forward may have come close to killing more people than the 1919 flu pandemic, while in sub-Saharan Africa, the bigger killer is now not famine but Aids.³²⁶

The Industrial Revolution is of course indivisible from capitalism, and underlying arguments that pre-industrial Europe was in a Malthusian situation is the idea that only the market economy can provide the stimulus both for technological development and to make peasants work harder to produce more food. There are medieval precedents for this view, but it fails to understand the real constraints on peasant production. It is probably true that pre-modern European agriculture was underproductive, but laziness on the part of individual peasants who would rather starve than work is unlikely to have been the cause.

One clear instance of underproduction, for instance, was the reliance through much of late medieval Europe on one cereal crop per year. This exacerbated the risk of catastrophic harvest failure and clearly limited the amount of food which could be produced, whereas even with pre-industrial agricultural techniques it should have been possible in many places to get two crops in a year. It has been suggested that the reason for this failure to maximise food production lay in the structure of late medieval society, in which landlords’ demands on their peasants acted as a positive disincentive to produce surplus grain, as the lion’s share of it would simply be appropriated. The exploitation of the peasantry also meant that it would have been very difficult for peasants to raise the capital, or indeed to devote the physical resources, to grow a second crop.327

This is an illustration of the fact that production before the Industrial Revolution was determined, just as much as production after it, by the structure of the society doing the producing. The tendency of the Malthusian arguments is to regard pre-industrial society as one in which individual peasants confronted natural food production with no social structure intervening, but this is of course inaccurate. Famine is not a natural phenomenon, unmediated by the mode of production operating in the society in which it occurs; it is a social phenomenon. Indeed, an examination of the history of famine reveals that it has always been all about class.

It’s easy to assume that famines represent the absolute lack of food in a particular area: not necessarily that there is literally no food at all, but that the amount of food available divided by the population ends up with shares which are insufficient to sustain life. However, it seems that this situation is actually extremely rare. It is possible that an Indian famine in 1344-45 may have involved an absolute lack of food, since its effects seem to have been felt so far up the social scale that it affected a king, but as this same king is also described as organising relief efforts, even this example is disputable.328 Even if it is accepted as an example of a famine in which no-one was able to get enough to eat, its rarity shows that the correct understanding of what a famine usually entails is that it is not an absolute dearth of food, but a situation in which some people go hungry while others eat.

The best known, although by no means the only example that demonstrates this point, is the Irish Potato Famine of 1846-51, in which at least one million people died. In reaction to Malthusianstyle thinking about famines as demonstrations of populations which have outgrown their food supplies, some have argued that famines do not have to entail a food production problem at all. Amartya Sen thought that this was the case, for example, with the Bengal famine of 1943-44, attributing it to hoarding done to raise prices and to the diversion of grain from Bengal to elsewhere in the British Empire for the war effort.³²⁹ His point was that starvation represents a failure not of the production of food but of people’s entitlement to it: ‘The law stands between food availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.’³³⁰ Sen’s interpretation of the causes of the Bengal famine has been criticised, as despite attempts by British officials at the time to blame the problems on hoarding by merchants, there is evidence of genuine food shortages arising from harvest failures.³³¹ These would not, however, have led to a famine on their own; ultimately, the poor in Bengal would not have starved in 1943 had the war not put them far down the list of British imperial priorities. The Irish Potato Famine demonstrates a similar dialectic between the proximate causes of famine and the structural reasons for famine deaths.

There certainly was a fundamental food shortage in Ireland, as the potato blight fungus destroyed much of the potato crop in 1845, 1846 and 1848. This was however only part of the story, as the British government failed to organise anywhere near sufficient famine relief. They spent £8 million on dealing with the famine, much of that on protecting landlords’ property from their starving tenants, compared to £70 million spent on the Crimean War. Not only that, they also refused to take the obvious initial step once the potato crop failed and continued to allow grain exports from Ireland. In 1846-47, Irish people who objected to seeing grain which could save their lives being sold abroad for profit started taking matters into their own hands, with agrarian secret societies threatening farmers who sold their grain for export and even shooting the horses used to take the grain to market.332 As some critical voices pointed out at the time, the million Irish who died, died from the application of market forces as much as from potato blight.

The diehard Malthusian response to this would be that even if the effects of the famine were exacerbated rather than ameliorated by the British government, the Irish were put in the position of requiring famine relief in the first place because the population had outgrown its productive capacity. The population of Ireland increased rapidly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and potato cultivation was a way of feeding large numbers of people on little land. The Malthusian view of the famine would be that the Irish, improvidently unaware of the dangers of reliance on a monoculture, created their own tragedy. However, it was not the size of the population which drove the increasing Irish reliance on potatoes.

Potato cultivation had been an important part of agriculture in Ireland since the seventeenth century, but for most it was a supplement to, rather than replacement of, cereal farming; a backup in case the grain harvest failed. More and more of the rural poor became entirely reliant on potatoes for subsistence during the course of the eighteenth century, not because they were having too many children to be able to support them any other way, but because of the effects of British imperialism. Large-scale agriculture in Ireland was increasingly aimed at grain production for export to England, while the poor were forced on to smaller plots in more marginal land.333 This was a process that continued as a result of the famine itself, as Irish landlords used the famine and non-payment of rents to evict about half a million people, in what John Newsinger rightly calls ‘one of the most terrible acts of class war in modern European history’.³³⁴ The failure of the potato crop made a crisis out of a situation which had arisen not because of the existence of the poor in Ireland but because of the expropriations of the landlords and the British. The famine was the creation of the system, not of the size of the population.

The importance of the mode of production

The concept of carrying capacity posits a limit to food production which is outside any economic or social structure. It says that regardless of how we organise ourselves to produce food, there is an absolute limit beyond which we will not be able to go. For Malthus, and for enthusiastic Malthusians like Ladurie, the proximity of this absolute limit is illustrated by the history of famines in non-industrialised societies. This is a history which it could seem we are facing again, unless we make significant cuts in food consumption, a discussion which appears to focus on consumption by the comparatively poor, rather than by the rich. However, what the history of famine indicates is not fundamental limits but the effects of exploitation. Even looking at pre-capitalist societies does not allow us to think that we are looking at the effects of natural limits to food production, rather than the effects of the mode of production.

Marx pointed out that what Malthus was seeing with his Law of Population was not a natural law but the process by which capitalism produces a surplus population. Capital is divided into constant and variable capital: the money used to buy machinery, property and so on versus the money available to pay for labour. As capital’s demand for labour is determined by the variable component of capital, it falls as more capital is accumulated. In effect, workers produce the means by which they are turned into a surplus population, as it is the surplus value which their work generates which allows capital accumulation in the first place. The existence of a surplus population, while bad for workers, is very useful for capitalist businesses, as it provides a pool of labour from which they can recruit quickly if they need to expand production, and the means to keep labour costs down through the constant threat of unemployment for any workers who might think of demanding better pay and conditions. It is an intrinsic part of how capitalism works, but capitalism is not a natural phenomenon.

Malthus’ argument works by treating the effects of capitalism as if they are both natural and universal. For him, the tendency of capitalism to produce a surplus population was a fundamental resource constraint. The Chatham House report on the future of food treats our current dependence on oil in a similar way, as a universal truth about food production which cannot be changed. But if we are considering whether we are now up against the carrying capacity of the planet, we have to be able to look outside the constraints of the current system. It is part of the atomising effect of capitalism to consider food consumption as a matter of individuals with problematic behaviours. If we really want to understand how the food production system is contributing to climate change, and whether we can all continue to be fed, we have to go beyond individual actions to consider the actions of the food production system within capitalism. It may come as a shock, but we may not have the most efficient, least wasteful way possible of producing food and living within any fundamental limits that might exist.