Lenin then turns back to how Struve seeks to build on Lange's “correction” of Marx. The underlying position of Struve, based on Lange, is that overpopulation invariably arises in society whether the economy is based upon commodity production and exchange or not. Commodity production and exchange for him constitutes only a complicating factor. This is really the position of today's Malthusians, even though some of them try to disguise it by talking about overuse of resources being a consequence of capitalism. An examination of their arguments shows that their attacks on capitalism come down to nothing more than an attack on economic growth, and the consumption of resources. The only role they seem to suggest for “Socialism”, thereby, appears for it to “choose” to reduce the rate of growth, with utopian suggestions that all that is required, then, is for a more equitable distribution, to “save the planet”, which, in practice, would come down to a privileged elite making that decision – almost certainly, therefore, a privileged elite in already developed and affluent countries – against the wishes of the vast majority of the world's workers. In other words, nothing actually to do with Socialism at all.
Lenin, therefore, examines Struve's unsubstantiated claim that overpopulation is inevitable also under natural economy. I have elsewhere referred to the work of Colin Clark, in demonstrating that overpopulation in natural economies is a consequence of poverty, not that overpopulation is a cause of poverty. To disprove Struve's argument, Lenin cites the data for Russian population growth, in the period prior to the expansion of commodity production and exchange. Between 1762-1846, the annual increase varied between 1,07% and 1.5%. In other words, not rapid. Struve picks on the fact that, according to Arsenyev, the increase was more rapid in grain producing areas. According to Struve, this confirms the Malthusian theory that population growth is a function of the production of means of subsistence. Marx demonstrates both theoretically and empirically that this theory is wrong, in Theories of Surplus Value.
According to this theory, the greater the available land area, and natural fertility of the land, the greater is the natural growth of the population. Lenin is focusing on an analysis of Russian conditions, but an easy refutation of the argument can be made by considering North America, whose large area, and fertile lands were sparsely populated until European settlement. Struve bases his law on the fact that population growth was smallest in the Vladimir and Kalaga gubernias, but the argument is fallacious, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, as Marx demonstrated in his analysis of rent, you can't determine output simply from land area. It depends on the fertility of the land, and that fertility is not just determined by its natural fertility. It also depends on the application of capital. Some land may be naturally more fertile, but is inaccessible without roads, canals, railways being introduced to get to it, or the land may be badly drained or irrigated. Its natural fertility can only be obtained when the required drainage and irrigation, the clearing of stones etc. is undertaken.
But, even if that were the case, this greater output does not equate to greater means of subsistence for the producers. Even in systems of natural economy, the producers have to share their outputs with the landlords and the state. In the Nile Delta, the fertility of the land meant that the Pharaohs were able to utilise the surplus product paid to them in tribute to finance the employment of thousands of builders to build the pyramids.
“Is it not clear that the different types of landlord farming—quitrent or corvée, the size of tributes and the methods of exacting them, etc.— exerted a far greater influence on the amount of “means of subsistence” available to the population than the expanse of territory, which was not in the exclusive and free possession of the producers? More than that. Irrespective of the social relations that were expressed in serfdom, the population was bound together, even then, by exchange: “The separation of manufacturing industry from agriculture,” rightly says the author, “i.e., the social, national division of labour, existed in the pre-Reform period, too” (189). The question, then, arises why should we presume that the marsh-dwelling Vladimir handicraftsman or cattle-dealer had a less abundant supply of “means of subsistence” than the rude tiller of Tambov with all his “natural fertility of the soil”?” (p 458-9)
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