[2. Ricardo’s Fundamental Principle in Assessing Economic Phenomena Is the Development of the Productive Forces. Malthus Defends the Most Reactionary Elements of the Ruling Classes. Virtual Refutation of Malthus’s Theory of Population by Darwin]
Marx would have little time for the moral socialists of today, many of whom claim to tread in his footsteps. He had little time for the same strand in his own day. In The Communist Manifesto, he notes that this strand of socialist thought, represented by people like Sismondi, always becomes reactionary, because it continually harks back to some previous golden age, as a means of avoiding the horrors that necessarily accompany progress. Lenin noted the same trend among the Narodniks in his writings on economic romanticism. For Marx, economists like Ricardo represent the true scientific approach, because they, present the conclusions of their theory honestly and brutally.
“He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself. To oppose the welfare of the individual to this end, as Sismondi does, is to assert that the development of the species must be arrested in order to safeguard the welfare of the individual, so that, for instance, no war may be waged in which at all events some individuals perish. Sismondi is only right as against the economists who conceal or deny this contradiction.) Apart from the barrenness of such edifying reflections, they reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.” (p 117-8)
The impact of Darwin on Marx's thought can also be discerned here. The dispassionate, scientific analysis of the historical, socio-evolutionary process shines through. It is seen elsewhere in Marx's writing, for example in Capital I, when he talks about the human actors on the economic stage being nothing more than personifications or agents of these economic forces, and forms of property. Similarly, in The Poverty of Philosophy, he writes that “time is everything, man is nothing. He is merely times carcass”.
For Marx, socialism is not some moral imperative, or nice idea, but the logical and necessary conclusion of human social evolution. Logical, because all of the development of the productive forces drives towards the socialisation of the means of production, and the extension of co-operative labour, as the basis of the division of labour, and the process of social reproduction; necessary because without social ownership and control over the means of production, the contradiction between production and consumption - between value and use value - leads to continual crises, which themselves hamper further human progress.
For Marx, not only is socialism impossible without the development of the means of production that capitalism brings about, but socialism is in many ways an extension of capitalism and the modernism it brings, in a way that capitalism was not simply an extension of feudalism. Socialism completes the work that capitalism cannot. Consequently, as Marx sets out bluntly in the passage above, and he describes similar sentiments in the Grundrisse, in relation to the civilising mission of capital, this kind of ruthless focus on the development of production for the sake of production, promoted by Ricardo, is precisely the work that socialism requires capital to do for it.
“Thus Ricardo’s ruthlessness was not only scientifically honest but also a scientific necessity from his point of view. But because of this it is also quite immaterial to him whether the advance of the productive forces slays landed property or workers. If this progress devalues the capital of the industrial bourgeoisie it is equally welcome to him. If the development of the productive power of labour halves the value of the existing fixed capital, what does it matter, says Ricardo. The productivity of human labour has doubled, Thus here is scientific honesty. Ricardo’s conception is, on the whole, in the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, only because, and in so far as their interests coincide with that of production or the productive development of human labour. Where the bourgeoisie comes into conflict with this, he is just as ruthless towards it as he is at other times towards the proletariat and the aristocracy.” (p 118)
By contrast, Malthus only plagiarises the work of others insofar as it suits the interests of the landed aristocracy, and insofar as he can use it to draw conclusions that achieve the same end. Marx cites Malthus' essay on population, in that regard, as an apology for the status quo, and a justification of England's war against revolutionary France.
“His writings of 1815, on protective tariffs and rent, were partly means to confirm the earlier apology of the poverty of the producers, in particular, however, to defend reactionary landed property against ‘enlightened’ 'liberal' and 'progressive' capital and especially to justify an intended retrogressive step in English legislation in the interests of the aristocracy against the industrial bourgeoisie.” (p 119)
Malthus' Principles of Political Economy, directed against Ricardo, sought to limit capitalist progress. It shares that with the ideas of Sismondi, except Sismondi sought to achieve such a limitation in a naive belief that, in doing so, it could protect the interests of workers, whereas Malthus did so solely in the interests of landlords.
“But when a man seeks to accommodate science to a viewpoint which is derived not from science itself (however erroneous it may be) but from outside, from alien, external interests, then 1 call him 'base'.” (p 119)
Although it may be brutal, therefore, when Ricardo treats the proletariat as only commodities, labour power, and so no different to other commodities, machines or beasts of burden, it is not base, it is scientifically honest.
“This is stoic, objective, scientific. In so far as it does not involve sinning against his science, Ricardo is always a philanthropist, just as he was in practice too. (p 119)
Marx's analysis and writings, in this regard, are more important and relevant today than they have been for many decades, because not only has a lot of the Left been prone to a similar kind of moralistic approach as those like Sismondi, but it has also led to a severe crudeness of theory. In place of the richness and complexity of Marx's analysis, set out in his economic analysis, and applied in his social and political analysis, for example, in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, we have, today, instead essentially a simplistic division of society into the rich, or the one per cent, and the rest. Marx analyses the significance of different forms of property and the revenues that arise from them as the basis of his class analysis; the division into classes of landlords, industrial capitalists, merchants, money capitalists, and workers. He sets out the divisions and contradictions that exist between these different classes and class fractions, identifying which are progressive and moving forward and which are stagnant, holding back progress, or moving backwards. So, for example, he writes in relation to Malthus.
“... when these same demands of production curtail the landlord’s 'rent' or threaten to encroach on the ‘tithes” of the Established Church, or on the interests of the 'consumers of taxes'; and also when that part of the industrial bourgeoisie whose interests stand in the way of progress is being sacrificed to that part which represents the advance of production—and therefore whenever it is a question of the interests of the aristocracy against the bourgeoisie or of the conservative and stagnant bourgeoisie against the progressive—in all these instances 'parson' Malthus does not sacrifice the particular interests to production but seeks, as far as he can, to sacrifice the demands of production to the particular interests of existing ruling classes or sections of classes.” (p 119-20)
By contrast, we have today all of these contending classes lumped into, at best, “capitalists” on one side, as though they are some homogeneous blob, and workers on the other, or worse still a division into “the rich” and the rest. It is vulgar economism that does not even present as vulgar socialism, but merely as vulgar “anti capitalism”, and vulgar “anti imperialism”; the reduction of political analysis to the level of the black hats versus white hats of a 1950's TV western.
Malthus falsifies his conclusions, Marx says, in the interests of the ruling classes.
“But his conclusions are ruthless as far as they concern the subjugated classes. He is not only ruthless;he affects ruthlessness; he takes a cynical pleasure in it and exaggerates his conclusions in so far as they are directed against the poor wretches, even beyond the point which would be scientifically justified from his point of view. (p 120)
Cobbett, who Marx describes as England's greatest political writer of the century, called Malthus the mountebank parson, and reflected the hatred of the working class for Malthus.
“Because the first edition of Malthus’s work On Population contains not a single new scientific word, it is to be regarded purely as an obtrusive Capuchin’s sermon, an Abraham a Santa Clara version of the discoveries of Townsend, Steuart, Wallace, Herbert etc. Since in fact it only wants to impress by its popular form, popular hate rightly turns against it.” (p 120)
Marx quotes Darwin from On The Origin of Species, where he speaks of the geometric increase of organic life, commenting that it is the application of Malthus' theory to "the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms." But, as Marx points out,
“... Darwin did not realise that by discovering the 'geometrical' progression in the animal and plant kingdom, he overthrew Malthus’ theory. Malthus’ theory is based on the fact that he set Wallace’s geometrical progression of man against the chimerical 'arithmetical' progression of animals and plants. (p 121)
Not only does Darwin's theory refute Malthus, but, insofar as Malthus theory of population rests on Anderson's theory of rent, it had long since been refuted by Anderson himself on the same basis of the potential for expansion of agricultural production beyond whatever might be required to meet the needs of population growth.
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