[Marxism] Marx and Engels on Malthus

[Barry Brooks]

I've been reading Marx and Engels on Malthus, trying to understand
their opposition. So far all I've been able to find are:

1. The theory is not being applied to plants and animals, but only —
with its geometric progression — to humans as against plants and animals.

2. A general increase in fertility accompanies the development of society

3. Population can not increase faster  than the means of sustenance.
– the means of sustenance must exist before population can grow.

4. Malthus was not original.

3 and 4, while clearly true, provide no basis for rejecting Malthus.

1 is a valid basis for rejection of Malthus. Malthus was wrong to
ignore the possibility of the green revolution, which has vastly
extended the fertility of land. However, the problems resulting from
that extension of fertility have grown too large to ignore... see below.

2 is doubtful because it assumes the green revolution can increase soil
fertility without limit. Geometric, arithmetic, or whatever shape the
curve may have is beside the point. The question is how high and how
quickly can the upward trend be extended? .. see below.

What other arguments against Malthus did Marx and Engels make?

Barry


Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The biggest threat to global stability is the potential
for food crises in poor countries to cause government
collapse
By Lester R. Brown
Scientific American
April 22, 2009
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=civilization-food-shortages&sc=WR_20090428

One of the toughest things for people to do is to
anticipate sudden change. Typically we project the
future by extrapolating from trends in the past. Much of
the time this approach works well. But sometimes it
fails spectacularly, ...

The third and perhaps most pervasive environmental
threat to food security-rising surface temperature-can
affect crop yields everywhere. In many countries crops
are grown at or near their thermal optimum, so even a
minor temperature rise during the growing season can
shrink the harvest. A study published by the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences has confirmed a rule of
thumb among crop ecologists: for every rise of one
degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the norm,
wheat, rice and corn yields fall by 10 percent.

In the past, most famously when the innovations in the
use of fertilizer, irrigation and high-yield varieties
of wheat and rice created the "green revolution" of the
1960s and 1970s, the response to the growing demand for
food was the successful application of scientific
agriculture: the technological fix. This time,
regrettably, many of the most productive advances in
agricultural technology have already been put into
practice, and so the long-term rise in land productivity
is slowing down. Between 1950 and 1990 the world's
farmers increased the grain yield per acre by more than
2 percent a year, exceeding the growth of population.
But since then, the annual growth in yield has slowed to
slightly more than 1 percent. In some countries the
yields appear to be near their practical limits,
including rice yields in Japan and China.

...


We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mind-
set. The thinking that got us into this bind will not
get us out. When Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New
Yorker, asked energy guru Amory Lovins about thinking
outside the box, Lovins responded: "There is no box."

There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if
civilization is to survive.