Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

– Thomas Robert Malthus, The Principle of Population

The laissez faire economics of Adam Smith may have given Darwin an insight into natural selection, but as Engels remarked:

Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the Animal Kingdom.[75]

Darwin was inspired by Malthus’s Essay on Population written in 1798. This theory purports to show that population grows geometrically and food supplies only arithmetically, unless checked by famine, war, disease, or restraint. It was shown to be false.

Unlike Spencer, Darwin understood “fitness” in relation only to a given environment, not to an absolute scale of perfection. In fact, neither of the two terms with which Darwin’s name is chiefly associated, “evolution” and “survival of the fittest”, occurs in early editions of The Origin of the Species, where his key ideas are expressed by the words “mutability” and “natural selection”. On 18 June 1862, Marx wrote to Engels: “Darwin, whom I have looked up again, amuses me when he says he is applying the ‘Malthusian’ theory also to plants and animals, as if with Mr. Malthus the whole point were not that he does not apply the theory to plants and animals but only to human beings – and with geometrical progression – as opposed to plants and animals.” Engels also rejected Darwin’s crude description or jargon, and says: “Darwin’s mistake lies precisely in lumping together in ‘natural selection’ or the ‘survival of the fittest’, two absolutely separate things:

1. Selection by the pressure of over-population, where perhaps the strongest survive in the first place, but where the weakest in many respects can also do so.

2. Selection by greater capacity of adaption to altered circumstances, where the survivors are better suited to these circumstances, but where this adaption as a whole can mean regress just as well as progress (for adaption to parasitic life is always regress).

The main thing: that each advance in organic evolution is at the same time a regression, fixing one-sided evolution and excluding evolution along many other directions. This, however, (is) a basic law.[76]

Clearly, there exists a struggle for survival – though not in the Spencerian sense – in nature where scarcity exists, or danger to the members of a species through predators.

“However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naïvely and uncritically,” says Engels, “nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles are required to perceive the struggle for existence in nature – the contradiction between the countless host of germs which nature so lavishly produces and the small number of those which ever reach maturity, a contradiction which in fact for the most part finds its solution in a struggle for existence – often of extreme cruelty.”[77]

Many species produce vast numbers of seeds or eggs to maximise their survival rate, particularly in the early years of life. On the other hand, the human species has survived in other ways, as its development is very slow, and where a great deal of energy and effort is invested in raising very few, late maturing offspring. Our advantage lies within our brain, and its capacity for learning and generalisation. Our population growth is not controlled by the death of large numbers of our offspring, and so cannot be compared crudely to other species.

History itself provides the final answer to Malthus. AN Whitehead has pointed out that from the tenth to the 20th century, a continually rising population in Europe was accompanied by generally rising living standards. This cannot be squared with the Malthusian theory, even if the question of “checks” is introduced, a means of “delaying the inevitable outcome”. A thousand years should be sufficient to demonstrate the correctness or otherwise of any theory. “The plain truth,” as Whitehead says, “is that during this period and over that area (i.e., Europe) the so-called checks were such that the Malthusian Law represented a possibility, unrealised and of no importance.”[78]

Whitehead points out that the alleged “checks” were not even in proportion to the density of the population. For example, the plagues were mainly the result, not of population size, but of bad sanitation. Not birth control, but soap, water, and proper drains would have been the remedy. The Thirty Years War cut the population of Germany by half – quite a drastic “check” on population growth. The war had several causes, but excessive population has never been mentioned as one of them. Nor, to the best of our knowledge, has it played a noticeable role in any of the other wars in which European history is so rich. For example, the peasant uprisings at the end of the Middle Ages in France, Germany and England were not caused by excess population. As a matter of fact, they occurred precisely at a time when the population had been decimated by the Black Death. At the beginning of the 16th century, Flanders was thickly populated, yet enjoyed far higher living standards than Germany, where the grinding poverty of the peasants contributed to the Peasants’ War.

Malthus’ theories are worthless from a scientific point of view but have consistently served as an excuse for the most inhuman application of so-called market policies. In the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, as a result of which the population of Ireland was reduced from over 8 million to 4.5 million, the English landlords in Ireland continued to export wheat. Following sound free market principles, the “Liberal” government in London refused to introduce any measure which might interfere with free trade or prices, and cancelled the supply of cheap maize to the Irish, therefore condemning millions to death by starvation. The Malthusian principles of the English government were defended by Charles Grenville, secretary to the Privy Council thus:

…The state of Ireland is to the last degree deplorable, and enough to induce despair: such general disorganisation and demoralisation, a people with rare exceptions besotted with obstinacy and indolence, reckless and savage – all from high to low intent on doing as little and getting as much as they can, unwilling to rouse and exert themselves, looking to this country for succour, and snarling at the succour which they get; the masses brutal, deceitful and idle, the whole state of things contradictory and paradoxical. While menaced with the continuance of famine next year, they will not cultivate the ground, and it lies unsown and untilled. There is no doubt that the people never were so well off on the whole as they have been this year of famine. Nobody will pay rent, and the savings banks are overflowing. With the money they get from our relief funds they buy arms instead of food, and then shoot the officers who are sent over to regulate the distribution of relief. While they crowd to the overseers with demands for employment, the landowners cannot produce hands, and sturdy beggars calling themselves destitute are apprehended with large sums in their pockets. 28th November, 1846.

The real state of affairs was described by Doctor Burritt, who was horrified to see men working on roads with their limbs swollen to almost twice their normal size. The body of a twelve-year-old boy was:

“swollen to nearly three times its usual size and had burst the ragged garment which covered him. … Near a place called Skull, we passed a crowd of 500 people, half naked and starving. They were waiting for soup to be distributed amongst them. They were pointed out to us, and as I stood looking with pity and wonder at so miserable a scene, my conductor, a gentleman residing at East Skull and a medical man, said to me: ‘Not a single one of those you now see will be alive in three weeks: it is impossible.’ … The deaths here average 40 to 50 daily. Twenty bodies were fortunate in getting buried at all. The people build themselves up in their cabins, so that they may die together with their children and not be seen by passers-by.”[79]

There was no more reason for these people to die of hunger than it is for millions to starve today, while farmers are paid not to grow food in the European Union and USA. They are not victims of the laws of nature, but of the laws of the market.

From the beginning, Marx and Engels denounced the false theories of Malthusianism. Answering the arguments of “Parson Malthus”, in a letter to Lange dated 29 March 1865 Engels wrote: “The pressure of population is not upon the means of subsistence but upon the means of employment; mankind could multiply more rapidly than modern bourgeois society can demand. To us a further reason for declaring this bourgeois society a barrier to development which must fall.”

The introduction of machinery, new scientific techniques and fertilisers means that world food production can easily keep abreast of population growth. The spectacular growth in the productivity of agriculture is taking place when the proportion of the population involved in it continues to fall. The extension of the agricultural efficiency already attained in the advanced countries to the entire farming world would yield a huge increase in production. Only a very small part of the vast biological productivity of the ocean is used at present. Hunger and starvation exist mainly due to the destruction of food surpluses to keep up the price of food and the need to maintain the profit levels of the agro-monopolies.

The widespread hunger in the so-called Third World is not the product of “natural selection”, but very definitely a man-made problem. Not the “survival of the fittest”, but greed for profits of a handful of big banks and monopolies is what condemns millions to a life of desperate poverty and actual starvation. Just to pay back the interest on their accumulated debts, the poorest countries are compelled to grow cash crops for export, including rice, cocoa and other food, which could be used to feed their own people. In 1989, Sudan was still exporting food, while its people starved to death. In Brazil, it is estimated that about 400,000 children die of hunger every year. Yet Brazil is one of the biggest exporters of food. The same discredited ideas continue to re-surface from time to time, as an attempt is made to blame the nightmare conditions of the Third World on the fact that there are “too many people” (meaning black, yellow and brown people). The fact that in the absence of pensions poor peasants need to have as many children as possible (especially sons) to keep them in old age is conveniently ignored. Poverty and ignorance causes the so-called population problem. As living standards and education increase, the growth in population tends to fall automatically. Meanwhile, the potential for increased food production is immense, and is being held down artificially in order to boost the profits of a few wealthy farmers in Europe, Japan and the USA. The scandal of mass starvation in the late 20th century is even more repugnant because it is unnecessary.

  1. Engels, F. Dialectics of Nature, p. 19, 1946 edition.

  2. Engels, F. Dialectics of Nature, p. 236, 1946 edition.

  3. Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, p. 86.

  4. Whitehead, A. Adventures of Ideas, p. 77, our emphasis.

  5. Johnson, P. Ireland, a Concise History, pp. 102 and 103.