Malthus' assertion – as Marx says he can provide no evidence to support it – that the population grows faster than the ability of the land to support it, is indeed based upon an abstract law of population, and applying the conditions of natural economy to the situation under capitalism. Initially, there is some truth in this, as Marx describes, because capitalist production develops in industry long before it enters agriculture. Technological development in agriculture continues at a slow pace compared to the advances in industry, which results in the land being overworked etc. Its only, eventually, when these demands of capitalist industry can no longer be met by pre-capitalist agriculture that capital begins to invade the agricultural sector. But, when it does, it quickly begins to reorganise it, as seen in the agricultural revolution in Britain in the 18th century.
It results in farms being consolidated and enclosed. Tenant farmers, and serfs became wage labourers, employed by landlords who turn, themselves into capitalist farmers, or employ farm managers to undertake that role. The free-holding peasant farmers, undergo a process of differentiation, in which a minority become capitalist farmers, employing wage labour, and take over the the land of their neighbours, or they go under having to rent out or sell their land to their more fortunate neighbours, themselves becoming agricultural day labourers, or moving to the towns to become industrial workers.
Some of those that had become capitalists as a result of the prior development of industrial and commercial capital, in the towns, themselves buy land to become capitalist farmers, or else rent farmers, renting out the land to other capitalist farmers. It is this investment of capital in agriculture that brings about the agricultural revolution, and enables the significant increase in output to meet the rising industrial demand. The new capitalist methods sharply raise productivity, as a result of more rational farming methods, economies of scale, the use of capital for drainage, irrigation, the provision of farm buildings, roads, canals, and other infrastructure, as well as the use of machines, fertilisers, and so on. Agricultural output, now, contrary to Sismondi, Malthus and Ricardo can expand much faster than population.
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