Concluding Remarks: Objections to Malthus

H. Concluding Remarks: Objections to Malthus

We have isolated in Capital a sort of “dual” labor market with the downward secular path of earnings of the “active” industrial workers determined by the market forces described in this chapter, independently of the existence of pools of unemployed and semi-employed. The separation can better be appreciated if we suppose some quali- tative deficiency of the latter precluding regular employment in the modern factory environment (see Cottrell and Darity 1988: 179). However, the compartments are far from watertight and the effect of the “reserve army” does make itself felt by way of cyclical variations in employment and wages.

We shall devote this concluding section to aspects of the Marx-Malthus rela- tion. 24 For both Malthus and Marx the growth of labor demand tends to decline secularly though, of course, for very different reasons. My concern is Marx’s pre- sumption in contrast to Malthus, of a necessary real-wage decline. His purpose, unlike that of Malthus or Ricardo or J. S. Mill, was not, of course, the design of a reform program to improve the living standards of the masses within capitalism.

22 Marx, however, invites his reader to compartmentalize the workforce by describing the employ- ment of women and children in terms of the “Appropriation of Supplementary Labour Power

by Capital” (MECW 35: 398; emphasis added). 23 The inflow from the middle classes into the proletariat, reflecting the “concentration” or

“centralization” process, is also conspicuous in some of Marx’s writings (see Chapter 6, p. 172–3; also p. 495). 24 For a fuller treatment, see Hollander 2003.

H. Concluding Remarks: Objections to Malthus 107 Nonetheless, we are obliged to look more closely into his neglect of the “Malthusian”

solution to falling wages – namely the encouragement of prudential population control. Here we distinguish two issues: prospects for birth control under capi- talism, and the probable effectiveness of population restraint (assuming it to be feasible).

As for the first issue, we have Engels’s famous assertion that “should communist society ever find itself compelled to regulate the production of human beings . . . then it, and it alone, will be able to effect this without difficulty” (Engels to Kautsky,

1 February 1881; MECW 46: 57). The implied difficulties facing population control under capitalism are not clarified, though I suspect they include the “free-rider” phenomenon long before appreciated by Marx (below, Chapter 7, pp. 220–1). But Marx himself in fact recognized the steady decline in the rate of population growth over the years – that “[a]lthough the absolute increase of the English population in the last half century was very great, the relative increase or rate of growth fell constantly” (MECW 35: 642), census data showing a decline in the annual average from 1.533 percent 1811–21 to 1.141 percent 1851–61. And, citing the Registrar General, “[r]apidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress of industry and wealth” (645), evidence for which progress is provided by a wide variety of indexes. Notwithstanding effective population control, living standards were (Marx supposed) falling, presumably because in his view the growth rate of labor demand was declining even faster.

This takes us to our second issue and Marx’s condemnation of the “folly of . . . the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the accommodation of their num- ber to the requirements of capital,” since the “mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment” (638). This is unconvincing. The decelerating growth rate of labor demand is an ongoing process reflecting exogenous technical progress (the general context of the foregoing comment). A simultaneous program of continuous population control acting on the growth rate of labor supply must surely tend at the least to ease downward pressure on real wages.

Marx’s case was reinforced by allusion to Ireland (1840–60), where notwith- standing actual population decline, real wages had failed to improve: “the relative surplus-population is today as great as before 1846 . . . wages are just as low. . . . The revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration. The production of rela- tive surplus-population has more than kept pace with the absolute depopulation” (695–6). But this too is unconvincing, for orthodox classical economics did not constitute a predictive engine forecasting the course of wages. The intervention of “disturbing causes” – in the present case the agricultural revolution involving consolidation of farms, conversion of arable into pasture and use of machinery – does not contradict the general principle that control of population growth would contribute to the maintenance of wages. Population control was considered by the orthodox economists as a necessary but not always a sufficient condition to assure against falling wages.

Economic Growth and the Falling Real-Wage Trend

An objection to population control as an effective means for positively raising wages is stated in terms of substitution against labor. 25 We find an instance in the context of cyclical fluctuations (above, pp. 101–2):

According to [“the dogma of the economists”] wages rise in consequence of accumu- lation of capital. The higher wages stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication, and this goes on until the labour market becomes too full, and there- fore capital, relatively to the supply of labour, becomes insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the reverse of the medal. The working population is little by little decimated as

a result of the fall in wages, so that capital is again in excess relatively to them. . . . Then comes again the time, when the supply of labour is less than the demand, wages rise, and so on (MECW 35: 631).

Marx’s specific objection to this “beautiful mode of motion . . . for developed cap- italist production” is then applied to the increase in real wages in English agricul- tural districts following a sudden and unusual fall in local labor supplies 1849–59: “What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until, in consequence of this brilliant remuneration, the agricultural labourers had so increased and multiplied that their wages must fall again, as prescribed by the dogmatic economic brain? They intro- duced more machinery, and in a moment the labourers were redundant again in a proportion satisfactory even to the farmers. There was now ‘more capital’ laid out in agriculture than before, and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labour fell, not only relatively, but absolutely” (632).

Two points must here be made. First, substitution against labor in the event of an absolute fall in labor supply of the foregoing kind could only limit the resultant wage increase; since such substitution is already reflected in the negative slope of the demand curve there is no reason to expect the creation of an excess labor supply with downward pressure on the wage. This principle, applied to the dynamic context, implies that there is no reason why a reduced population growth rate cannot retard the falling wage trend even should some substitution against labor, affecting the labor-demand growth rate, be induced. Second, the downward secular pressure

25 The textual evidence is complex. In the Grundrisse we find an apparently favorable citation from Ravenstone to the effect that the adoption of machinery is unrelated to labor scarcity:

“Machinery itself can seldom be applied with success to abridge the labours of an individual: more time would be lost in its construction than could be saved by its application. It is only really useful when it acts on great masses, when a single machine can assist the labours of thousands. It is accordingly in the most populous countries where there are most idle men that it is always most abundant. . . . It is not called into action by a scarcity of men, but by the facility with which they are brought to act in masses” (Ravenstone 1824: 45; cited MECW 28: 325, Marx’s emphasis). In the Economic Manuscripts Marx asserts that “[o]nly in isolated cases“does the capitalist intend to secure a direct reduction of wages by introducing machinery” (MECW 30: 319), which may bear on the empirical significance of substitution against labor. But we also find the contrary weighting, based on Ricardo and Barton, when Marx argues (as in Capital) against population control as a means of raising labor’s welfare, in that “diminishing the supply of labour, and, consequently, raising its price, would only accelerate the application of machinery, the conversion of circulating into fixed capital, and, hence, make the population artificially ‘redundant’ . . . ” (MECW 32: 202).

H. Concluding Remarks: Objections to Malthus 109 for Marx reflects a continuous decline in the growth rate of labor demand (due to

exogenous capital conversion) relative to that of labor supply; and Marx has given us no reason why population control would not, at the least, check that decline. Marx’s thus failed to justify what Sweezy has called the “paradoxical effect of creating unemployment” by “slowing down the rate of population growth” (1942: 223).

There is one further matter. If what we have argued in Section G is correct, it also follows that the countervailing potential of population control cannot be neglected; for the increased demand for child labor is met by a high birth rate, a reduction of which would reduce the attractiveness of this source of supply and lessen the downward pressure on the adult wage.