Darwin, Malthus, and Marx walk into a bar...

In my previous post, I discussed the brief moment when Charles Darwin and Karl Marx almost became pen pals, along with since-debunked rumors of further correspondence. Although they didn’t develop much of a relationship, Darwin’s intellectual impact on Marx is still interesting to untangle.

When Marx mailed Darwin a copy of Capital I, he signed the inscription “On the part of his sincere admirer.” Marx really was Darwin’s “sincere admirer.” He recognized the importance of Darwin’s work, once writing that The Origin of Species “is the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views.” But Marx’s admiration was not absolute. He saw Darwin as something of a wealthy nineteenth-century Englishman with a side-business in biology. (Darwin and his cousin/wife were from the Wedgwood family—British industrialists with a very successful pottery factory.) And this, Marx argued, impacted Darwin’s science. As Marx wrote to Friedrich Engels, “It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’”

This is not just Marx projecting. In his introduction to The Origin of Species, Darwin describes the “Struggle for Existence” as “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.” In the third chapter, helpfully entitled “Struggle for Existence,” Darwin states that “as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life,” and then reiterates that this “is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.” And in his autobiography, Darwin writes,

In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on […] it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.

Darwin reiterates over and over again that Malthus’ theory of population provided a framework for him to understand the origin of species. Why would Marx find this upsetting? Well, in part because just about everything about Malthus upset Marx.

Thomas Robert Malthus was an Anglican priest and social scientist, whose most famous work, 1798’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, appeared about eleven years before Charles Darwin’s birth. In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens used Malthus as a model for Ebenezer Scrooge. When Scrooge, whose name has become synonymous with miserliness and disdain for the poor, explains why he won’t contribute to charity, he states, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” which is a very Malthusian thing to say. So Darwin was influenced by Malthus, while Dickens thought he might be redeemable if visited by sufficient ghosts. But Marx had absolutely nothing nice to say about him, and often went out of his way to remind his readers exactly how he felt. When Marx mentions in passing that Sir Frederick Morton Eden was the only disciple of Adam Smith to produce any important work in the eighteenth century, he adds a footnote that fills most of the next two pages. It begins:

If the reader thinks at this point of Malthus, whose Essay on Population appeared in 1798, I would remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiarism of Defoe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, etc., declaimed in the manner of a sermon, but not containing a single original proposition of Malthus himself.

In this wildly influential work of allegedly schoolboyish plagiarism, Malthus argues that increased food production can only temporarily improve conditions for the poor, as more resources will encourage population booms, causing per capita resources to return to their original levels. His thesis is built around the idea that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio.” Population will inevitably double, then double again, and on and on, while the productive power of society will make comparatively small gains. Malthus determines that “the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” 

This, for Malthus, is a law of nature no human institution could ever overcome. Whenever the means of subsistence become more plentiful, the poor won’t increase their comforts, but will produce more babies instead, thus negating the gains that had made the babies possible in the first place. Or, even worse, “all that is beyond their present necessity goes, generally speaking, to the ale-house.” And charity will not help. Malthus maintains that you can’t just feed everyone when there’s already not enough food to go around, and makes the frustratingly tautological claim that “a part of society must necessarily feel a difficulty of living, and this difficulty will naturally fall on the least fortunate members.”

For Malthus, natural laws of population make poverty unavoidable. These laws prevail in all times and places. But for Marx, “every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population, which are valid within that particular sphere.” The corvée labor that kept feudal peasants subject to a landlord function differently from the wage labor that puts urban workers on the precipice of poverty. Each of these systems impacts population in its own unique ways. 

In fact, Malthus’ supposedly unavoidable facts of nature have been reversed in the 223 since he published his book. Between 1960 and 2020, annual global gross domestic product increased from about $11 trillion to around $80 trillion. Over that same period, global population grew from 3 billion to 7.5 billion. So productivity increased more than seven times, while population slightly more than doubled. The basic assumptions on which Malthus built his entire argument have changed. (Assuming they were true at the time.)

Marx has an explanation for how capitalism changed human population dynamics. As the Industrial Revolution got underway, industries expanded and streamlined to create more commodities and greater profits in less time than ever before. But to achieve still-greater profits, further expansion and streamlining took place. Even fewer workers were used to produce even more things and greater profits in less time. And so, “not only are the workers directly turned out by the machine set free, but so are their future replacements in the rising generation.” Through this process, capitalism generates an “industrial reserve army” of unemployed urban poor. 

This reserve army serves several functions. It discourages currently employed workers from demanding higher wages. If the streets are full of people who would happily take your job, gripes and strikes seem foolish. But even more important for the ongoing expansion of capital, when new industries emerge, like railways in Marx’s time or computers in ours, “there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men into decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres.” With an industrial reserve army in place, emerging industries can hire at will without impacting other industries. The new urban poor of the industrial working class that Malthus saw all around him were a creation of capital. They were newly possible at that moment, a historically contingent consequence of a new form of production.

While writing The Origin of Species, Darwin took Malthus’ law of population, accepted it as an ahistorical phenomenon, and then utilized it in his scientific work. The social Darwinists of the late-nineteenth century, like Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot, detected the ideas Darwin had brought into evolutionary biology from Malthus, and then acted as if they had thereby found empirical scientific proof for their views. It was science. It was Darwin. Who could argue? 

The social Darwinists popularized the neo-Malthusian notions that the poor were “unfit” and losing the “Struggle for Existence.” Providing aid would interfere with the natural processes that helped control population. All the proof they needed was right there in Darwin’s supposedly objective science. Darwin had claimed that there is “one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, and let the strongest survive.” For the social Darwinists, passages like these helped prove that nature operates on Malthusian principles. But those Malthusian principles walked off the ship with Darwin. He found them in nature because he brought them there.