Malthusianism: The Tactic of Saving a Dying System.

Many people, especially in the post-COVID era, are reacting to what are called “degrowth” policies, particularly those associated with the so-called “green agenda”. Whether it is Port Talbot shutting down two of its blast furnaces, cutting 2,500 jobs at least, to “reduce emissions” or the restrictive law on farms, particularly in the Netherlands and Germany in recent years. Why is this all happening now, many may be asking, often in panicked fear.

The Theory of Thomas Malthus
So to get into the root of all the issues facing the workers, be it green policies or maybe even reducing living standards with other excuses thrown at it, expected to stick like the proverbial blutac to a wall. We must look at a man named Thomas Malthus.

So who is Thomas Malthus, you may wonder? Thomas Malthus was a cleric and an economist. He argued that growth would stall because of population growth which would stall economic growth.

Malthus wrote a 1798 treatise named ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ in which he wrote of his concern that the proletariat and peasantry would only abuse abundance, and would breed far too prodigiously. Malthus also argued that workers were inclined towards “inert or sluggish behaviour” unless compelled to work harder by necessity.
Does any of this sound familiar?  If it does it is because certain factions of the ruling class talk in a similar manner today. Be it people like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab or King Charles the (hopefully) last. It is clearly the same rhetoric, even if they had to dress it up as sounding “progressive”.

What was happening when Malthus was alive that influenced him in drawing such reactionary conclusions? Malthus lived from 1766 to 1834 and he witnessed the transition from feudalism to capitalism. At his time, he would have witnessed the French Revolution, one of the bourgeois revolutions against the aristocracy. This sent shock-waves to the world,. The bourgeois media, to this day, are still conflicted over it as it solidified the rule of their class. As far as going on how it’s “violent”, but there is a major contradiction to this: they wouldn’t have been where they are today were it not for bourgeois revolutions, which allowed their class to exist as a mode of production. Whereas those who viewed it probably looked at it as a new dawn of freedom or as heroic, even Beethoven wrote the Eroica Symphony which was initially dedicated to Napoleon (until he crowned himself emperor!), this is the level of influence the French Revolution had worldwide.

Why is the transition so important? Because it sent panic to the older versions of the ruling classes at the time, hence a person named Thomas Malthus came in who echoed the pessimism and fear that were espoused by those who criticized the revolution or benefited worse from it. They needed to blame humanity or growth of population and production be the problem, and that it will lead to apocalyptic scenarios. Thus, production and progress must be scaled back. The French revolution, combined with the industrial revolution in Britain, terrified the bourgeoisie doubly because of the formation of the industrial working class. Suddenly, the cities became vast concentrations of proletarians, which the capitalist class needed but the presence of which utterly terrified them. The French revolution also saw the property-less masses assume a very important role in bringing down the old aristocracy, and that also sent the British ruling class into a spiral of panic. Malthus’s theories reflect all of this. 

And this has since influenced capitalist societies to use the philosophy ever since to drive down production, even as early as during the Irish Potato Famine, where the British Ruling Class used the population question and the food growth question to create a famine to protect their system in crisis in Ireland.  It was also particularly popular in Fascist circles, be it Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany, which used that and social Darwinism (which itself was influenced by Malthus) to enforce ideas and policies

Marxist author R. Palme Dutt even covers this relation in Fascism and Social Revolution:
“Overpopulation” (like the simultaneous “overproduction”) is only relative in capitalist conditions of production. This reactionary and vicious propaganda conceals, under the cover of obsolete clerical superstitions, the true social causes of poverty and misery. – Fascism and Social Revolution (1934)

Dutt also argues that fascism is used as a response by the capitalist classes to stifle any proletarian revolution, which is itself a response to overthrow the bourgeoisie as a way of resolving the crises of imperialism. Imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, perfectly put by Lenin. It is not a surprise that “overpopulation” is a problem for the bourgeoisie because that population could be used against them. In any case, it’s a tactic to deal with the crises and contradictions of the decay of imperialism.

Why Reactionaries Call it “Marxist”:
You will see many reactionaries: be it Jordan Peterson, Nigel Farage, or others coin this as outright Marxism or Communism. Now, let’s investigate why this is indeed wrong.

Marx and Engels in the 19th Century and Lenin and Stalin in the 20th all argued for growth in abundance and all at a few points even criticized Malthus’ theories outright or this idea of “overpopulation”.

Marx in fact even goes far to say in the Critique of the Gotha Programme:

If [Malthus’] theory of population is correct, then I can not abolish this [iron law of wages] even if I abolish wage-labor a hundred times, because this law is not only paramount over the system of wage-labor but also over every social system.

Lenin would say this in his A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism

Malthus, as we know, tried to explain it by attributing it to natural-historical causes; he denied absolutely that it sprang from a certain, historically determined system of social economy and simply shut his eyes to the contradictions revealed by this fact.

Both these quotes more than contradict the claim of what those so-called critics of “communism” allude to its so-called association with depopulation. The question is why do those reactionaries call the overpopulation question “Marxism”?

There is a relatively simple answer here: they defend capitalism, and they know that Malthusianism is used to defend capitalism. . They cannot associate the thing they mean to criticize with the mode of production they constantly defend. After all, they too need to save a system that cannot be saved.

And the reactionaries need public support to have their deified system to survive, so they need to lump it onto a system that opposes theirs.


The ruling class are caught in a trap of their own making. They need ever greater amounts of cheap labour to try and restore profitability to the system. They do this by creating a vast number of unemployed workers whose mere presence can be used to force wages down as employed workers fear being replaced easily if they go on strike. Workers in the west are having fewer children because of the long term suppression of wages leading to having children becoming unaffordable to many. The ruling class justify this decline in population using “green” language infused with Malthusian arguments but (just as in Malthus’s own time) they still need an ever greater pool of human labour to exploit as this is where the profit of capital comes from. The reactionaries who see the stagnating birth rate and say they want to address it also have no more solutions to offer our class than the “progressives” do as they want to reinvigorate a capitalist system that is long passed its use by date. 

There is no party to vote for in the bourgeois democratic system,even parties which proclaim themselves to be “socialist” in the imperialist countries rapidly capitulate because they seek to only reform the system, not do what is necessary which is to smash it.  The only way forward  is to explain to our class the decline of imperialism in a Marxist Leninist manner Our class must come to see not only the necessity of smashing the rule of the bourgeoisie but that we, the proletariat, are the ruling class in waiting.The proletariat must reject the “green” propaganda which is only designed to justify destruction of industry, commodities and people to attempt restore profitability to the system. We must also reject the fake solutions peddled by Trump, Farage and Le Pen who only seek to preserve capitalism as much as their more “progressive” opponents do. Only when workers understand that the entire framework of bourgeois propaganda must be rejected can we move forward. The future must be socialist but we proletarians must free ourselves in order to get there.

By Luke Whittle