potential in general, and to the creation of wealth in particular.

The
terms of the Marxian critique of Malthus can be seen as quite central
to this theoretical trajectory.

1. Epistemic Conservatism and Emancipatory Critiques

Modern environmentalisms frequently evoke the spectre of ‘Malthus-

ianism’ and, in doing so, call forth determinedly social-constructionist
responses.12 This broad pattern of ‘natural limits’ arguments in con-
flict with social-constructionisms is, of course, familiar from other
areas of debate. It will be worth digressing very briefly to look at some
of its general features before returning to the special case of the con-
flict between Marxism and Malthusianism. One well-known early
critique of sociobiology as a form of biological determinism concludes:
‘ . . . determinists assert that the possibility of change in social institu-
tions is limited by the biological constraints on individuals. But we
know of no relevant constraints placed on social processes by human
biology. There is no evidence from ethnography, archaeology, or his-
tory that would enable us to circumscribe the limits of possible
human social organizations. What history and ethnography do pro-
vide us with are the materials for building a theory that will itself be
an instrument of social change.’13

Similar oppositions have been widespread in sociology, as between

proponents of functionalist or structuralist positions, and those who
have advocated individualist, voluntaristic, agent-centred alterna-
tives. In psychoanalysis, Freud’s well-known invocation of the
unavoidable sources of human suffering is exemplary: ‘We are threat-
ened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which
is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without
pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which
may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of
destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering
which comes from the last source is perhaps more painful to us than
any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition,

12 Among modern ‘neo-Malthusians’, the Ehrlichs are perhaps the best known: P.R.
Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, New York 1968; P.R. and A.H. Ehrlich, Population,
Resources, Environment: Issues in Human Ecology, San Francisco 1970; and P.R. and A.H.
Ehrlich and J.P. Holdren, Human Ecology, San Francisco 1973. Garrett Hardin’s
‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (in J. Barr, ed., The Environmental Handbook, London 1971)
and ‘Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor’ (in W.H. Aiken and H. La
Follette, World Hunger and Moral Obligation, New Jersey 1977) bring out very clearly
some political implications of modern neo-Malthusianism. The seminal Club of Rome
study The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., London 1972) is also considered by some to
be ‘neo-Malthusian’, presumably because of its emphasis on natural limits and its
reliance on the idea of exponential growth. It does not, however, focus on population
as the key issue (‘The team examined the five basic factors that determine, and there-
fore, ultimately limit, growth on this planet—population, agricultural production,
natural resources, industrial production, and pollution’, pp. 11–12). A useful recent
discussion of neo-Malthusianism in relation to world poverty and famine is O.
O’Neill, Faces of Hunger, London 1986.
13 Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People, in A.L. Caplan, ed., The Socio-

biology Debate, New York 1978, pp. 289–90.

56
although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering
which comes from elsewhere.’14
In view of this widespread pattern of argument, it is useful to distin-
guish two strains of conservatism: evaluative and epistemic. The for-
mer directly advocates patriarchy, inequality, discipline, continuity or
whatever as intrinsically desirable, as constitutive of the good life. By
contrast, what I call ‘epistemic’ conservatism may well share, or affect
to share, the egalitarian, communitarian or emancipatory value-
orientations of the radical. Conservative conclusions are drawn, how-
ever reluctantly, from what are held to be unalterable features of the
human predicament: from our inner natures, from external nature, or
from a combination of the two. Hobbes, Malthus, the later Freud,
Durkheim and many others are open to interpretation as epistemic
conservatives in this sense.
Epistemic conservatisms have provided the most challenging objec-
tions to emancipatory projects and it is arguable that most radical
theories are shaped in important ways by the strategic requirement
that they avoid these objections. There is, indeed, a deeper affinity
between emancipatory thought and epistemic conservatism. Both per-
spectives recognize a conflict between persistent, deep-rooted human
aspirations on the one hand, and structures of internal and/or external
constraint on the other. This is a necessary moment in any emancipat-
ory perspective if it is effectively to indict the existing order. Where
emancipatory thought parts company with epistemic conservatism is
in its insistence that the structures of constraint which frustrate
human potential are neither universal nor necessary: there are reason-
able grounds for hope.
It is important for my subsequent argument to distinguish two alter-
native directions of emancipatory response to epistemic conservatism.
The first, which I will call Utopian, explicitly or implicitly denies the
independent reality of the sources of constraint identified by the epi-
stemic conservative. These oppressive structures of existence take on
the appearance of independence, and can oppress us only insofar as we
take the appearance for reality. Lukács’s argument in ‘Reification and
the Consciousness of the Proletariat’15 is often read in this way, and
the general intellectual strategy has had wide currency in humanist
sociologies. A Utopian rejection of biological limits to human social
possibilities has been widespread among opponents of biological
determinisms, and psychoanalysis, too, is susceptible of readings in
which unconscious determinants of conscious life are thought of as
susceptible of reintegration within the autonomous ego.16
To be contrasted with Utopian emancipatory perspectives are Realist
14 ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, in S. Freud, Civilisation, Society and Religion,
Harmondsworth 1985, p. 264.
15 In G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, London 1971.
16 See, for example, Russell Keat’s telling critique of Habermas’s use of psychoanalysis

in The Politics of Social Theory: Habermas, Freud and the Critique of Positivism, Oxford 1981,
Ch. 4. See also Barry Richards, ‘The Eupsychian Impulse: Psychoanalysis and Left
Politics since ’68’, Radical Philosophy 48, Spring 1988.

57
ones which assert or recognize the purpose-independent reality of the
structures, forces or mechanisms which limit human aspirations.17
The hope of emancipation is sustained by an account of these sources
of constraint which renders them at least partially available for trans-
formation by human intentional action. To be ‘real’, even to be
‘natural’, is not necessarily to be unchangeable! But what a Realist
emancipatory perspective carries with it is a commitment to viewing
transformative action in the context of its real, purpose-independent
conditions of possibility, and its associated limits of effectiveness, its
liability to be frustrated by unforeseen consequences, and so on. At
the limit, a Realist emancipatory perspective must be open to the
empirical possibility of a reconciliation with epistemic conservatism
—in the face of realities which genuinely are invulnerable to human
intentionality, adaptation by modifying or even abandoning our
initial aspirations is itself to be recognized as a form of emancipation.

2. Marx and Engels Against Malthus

To return, now, to my central theme, my argument is that the eco-

nomic thought of Marx and Engels includes important elements of a
Utopian over-reaction to Malthusian epistemic conservatism. The
overall position of Marx and Engels is an unstable and contradictory
compromise between Realist and Utopian elements.

The broad features of the controversy over Malthus’s ‘law of popula-

tion’ are well known and I shall not rehearse them in detail.18 As a
true epistemic conservative, Malthus claimed to share his opponents’
enthusiasm for a new and just order of society: ‘I have read some of
the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great
pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting pic-
ture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such improvements.
But I see great, and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties
in the way to them.’19 Foremost among the ‘speculations’ of which
17
The approach developed here has close affinities with the work of Russell Keat and
John Urry, Roy Bhaskar, Sue Clegg, Andrew Sayer, John Lovering, Andrew Collier,
William Outhwaite, Anne Witz and others. I have been greatly helped in working out
this argument by reading their works, and by personal conversations. I am especially
indebted to the participants in the first ‘Reds and Greens’ Conference, 14–15 May
1988, the annual conferences on ‘Realism and the Human Sciences’, and the Radical
Philosophy day conference on ‘Reason, Hope and Revolution’, 5 November 1988 for
helpful criticism of these ideas. The form of realism here advocated has been furthest
developed by Roy Bhaskar, most especially in his books A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd
Ed., Brighton 1978; The Possibility of Naturalism, Brighton 1979; and Scientific Realism
and Human Emancipation, Verso, London 1986. For my purposes here, Bhaskar’s posi-
tion involves concessions to anti-naturalism which undermine its great usefulness in
other respects. See T. Benton, ‘Realism and Social Science’, Radical Philosophy 27,
Spring 1981, reprinted in Edgley & Osborne, eds., Radical Philosophy Reader, Verso,
1985. My approach here contrasts significantly with the ‘transformational model of
social activity’ developed by Bhaskar, especially in Chapter 4 of Scientific Realism and
Human Emancipation, though I do not engage with his position here. I have also bene-
fited greatly from conversations with Olga Ojeda on these and related issues.
18
A very useful commentary, which focuses on the responses of Malthus’s contempor-
aries, is K. smith, The Malthusian Controversy, London 1951.
19
T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. A.G.N. Flew, Harmonds-
worth 1970, p. 69.

58
Malthus spoke in his first Essay were, of course, the egalitarian and
communitarian proposals of Godwin and Condorcet in the years fol-
lowing the French Revolution. The ‘unconquerable difficulties’
reduced to the elementary matter of a necessarily adverse relationship
between the tendency of population to rise geometrically and that of
food-supply to rise at best only arithmetically. This inescapable
feature of the human condition was sufficient to lay waste to all and
any of the grand visions of an abundant egalitarian and cooperative
commonwealth. The misery and poverty arising from the pressure of
population upon the supply of means of subsistence must necessarily
affect a large part of human kind notwithstanding the best intentions
of would-be reformers.

Marx and Engels were fiercely critical of Malthus’s ‘law’ and there
are numerous references to it throughout their work.20 Polemics
aside, their critique was double-pronged: first, a series of arguments
against the universality and necessity of the law, and, second, a
reconceptualization and explanation of the phenomenon—a relative
surplus population—which Malthus had addressed, as an effect not
of the human predicament, but of the dynamics of capitalist
accumulation. In his (1844) ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political
Economy’ Engels argued that it was ‘absurd to talk of over-
population’ when no more than one third of the earth’s surface
was cultivated, and an application of ‘improvements already known’
could raise the production of this third sixfold.21 Moreover, the
geometrical rise in population was matched by a geometrical ratio
in the advancement of science and, by implication, in its applica-
tion in agricultural production: ‘And what is impossible to science?’
As to the geometrical ratio of population itself, Engels made use of
Malthus’s recognition of the role of ‘moral restraint’ (which was
emphasized in later versions of the Essay): ‘We derive from it [the
Malthusian theory] the most powerful economic arguments for a
social transformation. For even if Malthus were completely right, this
transformation would have to be undertaken straight away; for only
this transformation, only the education of the masses which it
provides, makes possible that moral restraint of the propagative
instinct which Malthus himself presents as the most effective and
easiest remedy for over-population.’22

What these arguments leave rather unclear is whether Marx and

Engels did recognize any ultimate natural limits to population, or to
human transformative powers vis-à-vis nature. In a very useful discus-
sion of this issue, K.J. Walker has argued that Marx and Engels did,
in fact, admit the possibility of such outer limits.23 This would,

20
These are collected in R.L. Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb,
Berkeley 1971—essentially a newly titled reprint of Meek, ed., Marx and Engels on Mal-
thus (1951), with a foreword by S. Weissman situating the text in relation to the neo-
Malthusian challenge of P.R. Ehrlich’s best-seller, The Population Bomb.
21
MECW vol. 3, p. 440.
22
Ibid., p. 439.
23
K.J. Walker, ‘Ecological Limits and Marxian Thought’, Politics XIV (1) May 1979, p.
34.

59
indeed, be consistent with the central premisses of historical material-
ism. However, the emphasis of their arguments, understandable
enough, was that such limits, if they existed, were very far from
having been reached at that time, and were certainly not responsible
for the prevailing poverty and misery. At most, Marx and Engels
recognized ‘the abstract possibility’ that limits would have to be set to
the human population, but this was so distant as to be, for current
practical purposes, irrelevant. Indeed, in a passage just prior to that
quoted above, Engels goes so far as to say: ‘Thanks to this theory, as to
economics as a whole, our attention has been drawn to the productive
power of the earth and of mankind; and after overcoming this eco-
nomic despair we have been made for ever secure against the fear of over-
population.’24

The Malthusian ‘law’ is not, then, to be accepted as a universal law of

nature, but this is not to deny the actuality of the phenomena which the
‘law’ is intended to explain. Like all economic laws, Malthus’s is asso-
ciated with determinate social conditions. Each stage of historical
development has its own law of population, and what is valid in the
Malthusian population doctrine is restricted to its status as a charac-
terization of the necessity of what Marx and Engels variously call a
‘reserve army of labour’ or ‘relative surplus population’ to specifically
capitalist accumulation. Correctly formulated, the law referred to the
excessive numbers of wage labourers in relation to the means of
employment (not, directly at least, subsistence), and the explanation given
to the phenomenon in Capital is that it results from the long-run
tendency of variable capital to decrease as a proportion of total capi-
tal employed.25

This dual strategy against Malthus—denial of naturally imposed

limits, but recognition of historically transitory socially imposed limits
—has clear political consequences. It is equally apparent that the
stand taken against Malthus is intimately bound up with Marx’s and
Engels’s perceptions of these political consequences: ‘But if this
theory is correct, then again I cannot abolish the law even if I abolish
wage labour a hundred times over, because the law then governs not
only the system of wage labour but every social system. Basing them-
selves directly on this, the economists have been proving for fifty years
and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in
nature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously over
the whole surface of society!’26 For political reasons, then, Marx and
Engels were strongly, and understandably, predisposed against
‘natural-limits’ arguments, and they rightly saw the Malthusian popu-
lation doctrine as such a ‘natural-limits’ argument.

3. Natural Limits in Ricardo’s Political Economy

On this question Marx and Engels were on the same side as Ricardo.
24
MECWvol. 3, p. 439, emphasis added.
25
Capital Vol. 1, p. 628.
26
From Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Feuer, ed., op. cit., p. 165.

60
Though the latter incorporated a qualified form of Malthus’s law
into his political economy, he was a determined critic of Malthus
on a range of other issues. The most relevant of these to our con-
cerns were Malthus’s theory of rent and his notion of ‘unproduct-
ive consumption’. On the vexed question of rent, Malthus argued that
it did not derive from monopoly ownership by the landlords, but
was rather a result of that special ‘quality of the earth by which
it can be made to yield a greater portion of the necessaries of life
than is required for the maintenance of the persons employed on the
land’.27 Ricardo’s view was that ‘rent . . . is a creation of value, but
not a creation of wealth’28: it is ‘nothing more than a revenue
transferred from one class to another’.29 A second bone of conten-
tion was Malthus’s view that current economic problems could be
attributed to over-rapid capital accumulation, outstripping the
growth of purchasing power. Since this tendency was inherent to
capitalism, there was a permanent requirement for a class of
unproductive consumers to sustain effective demand. Both argu-
ments were recognized by Ricardo to be apologetics on behalf of
the landlord class, whose interests were antagonistic to those ‘of
every other class in the community’.3° In particular, the rent on land
and landlord’s consumption was seen as an unnecessary limit on the
accumulation of capital: ‘for the country would have a greater dis-
posable fund if its land were of a better quality, and it could employ
the same capital without generating a rent’.31
Ricardo, like Marx and Engels, was reluctant to admit any important
role for nature-imposed limits. As we shall see, in several important
respects Marx and Engels simply took over and developed those ele-
ments of his political economy in which this position was most clearly
expressed. Let us take first what Ricardo has to say in the chapters of
his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation which deal, respectively,
with value, rent and capital accumulation. Ricardo follows Adam
Smith in distinguishing ‘value in use’ from ‘exchangeable value’.
Exchangeable value, he says, has two sources: relative scarcity of the
goods concerned, and the labour, or trouble of acquiring them. He
recognizes that, for a small class of goods, scarcity as such directly
affects their value, independently of the amount of labour expended
in acquiring them: their supply is subject to absolute (qualitative or
quantitative) limits, not alterable by any amount of human effort. But
Ricardo is quite explicit that this applies to a small minority of goods
only, and that for the great majority of commodities in circulation,
exchangeable value expresses the quantity of labour expended in their
‘acquisition’ (or production). He is equally clear that the economic
concepts and laws he is about to expound apply only to this large class
of commodities: ‘In speaking then of commodities, of their exchange-
able value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we
27 Malthus, as quoted in D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,
ed. R.M. Hartwell, Harmondsworth 1971, p. 393.
28 Ricardo, in ibid., p. 392.
29 Buchanan, quoted approvingly in Ricardo, ibid., p. 391.
30 Ricardo quote in Meek (op. cit.), p. 13, to which this account of the Ricardo/Mal-

thus relationship is considerably indebted.

31 Ricardo, op. cit., p. 392.

61
mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity
by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which
competition operates without restraint.’32 Natural scarcity of a
resource, therefore, is excluded from the purview of economic analy-
sis except when and insofar as it is manifested in the form of an extra
expenditure of the labour of acquiring it.

When Ricardo comes to discuss the source of rent, he poses the ques-
tion why it is possible to charge rent on land, but not on other gifts of
nature such as air, water, the pressure of the atmosphere, and so on,
which are likewise involved in the creation of wealth. The answer is to
be found in the fact that these ‘free’ elements in production exist in
boundless quantity and are therefore not susceptible to private appro-
priation: ‘With a given quantity of materials, and with the assistance
of the pressure of the atmosphere, and the elasticity of steam, engines
may perform work, and abridge human labour to a very great extent;
but no charge is made for the use of these natural aids, because they
are inexhaustible, and at every man’s disposal. In the same manner
the brewer, the distiller, the dyer, make incessant use of the air and
water for the production of their commodities; but as the supply is
boundless, they bear no price.’33 These naturally given material con-
ditions of production do not enter into the costs of production, nor
can they impose natural limits on production. Ricardo treats rent on
mines, like rent on land, as a revenue accruing from private approp-
riation, not from value created by the landlord. In mining for metals,
as in agriculture, exchangeable value depends on labour-time only.
Scarcity as such does not enter into economic calculation: its effect on
exchange-value is solely by way of its impact on the labour necessary
for its extraction.

Our final illustration comes from Ricardo’s chapter on the ‘Effects of

Accumulation’. Here he considers another possible source of limits to
the accumulation of capital, this time imposed by our internal
natures: the possibility that there might be natural limits to the demand
for commodities, with consequent ‘glut’ and a fall in the rate of profit
on investments. Ricardo follows Smith in his treatment of this prob-
lem: ‘Adam Smith has justly observed “that the desire of food is
limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach,
but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress,
equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain
boundary.” Nature then has limited the amount of capital which can
at any one time be profitably engaged in agriculture, but she has
placed no limits to the amount of capital that may be employed in
procuring “the conveniences and ornaments” of life.’34 With respect
to demand, then, Ricardo explicitly makes the freedom of capital
accumulation from natural limits dependent upon an assumption
about human nature: limits to our appetite for food are compen-
sated by limitless desires for ‘ornaments and conveniences’ of life.
32
Ibid., p. 56.
33
Ibid., p. 93.
34
Ibid., p. 294.

62
Ricardo sometimes speaks of this limitlessness of desire as
‘occasioned by production’ and sometimes as something ‘implanted
in every man’s breast’.35 Either way, he does not see the assumption
as problematic.
Ricardo does, however, recognize a potential limit to accumulation in
the possibility that wages might, in the long run, rise in relation to
profits to the point where the motive for investment would cease.
Under what conditions might there be such a long-run rise in wages?
Only, Ricardo argues, as a consequence of a similarly long-run decline
in the ‘facility of producing the food and necessaries of the labourer’.36
In this respect, then, Ricardo does recognize a possible natural limit
to accumulation—a concession to Malthus’s population doctrine, if
not to the latter’s views on rent and unproductive consumption.
In conclusion, then, we can say that Ricardo’s political economy
recognizes several classes of nature-given preconditions for the
conduct and expansion of capitalist economic activity. The possibility
that capitalist economic activity might face natural limits as a result of
a non-satisfaction of these preconditions (relatively or absolutely) is,
however, either marginalized or outright excluded by the theoretical
moves just discussed. These moves are of three basic kinds: (1) postu-
lating limitless quantities of some natural conditions/resources; (2)
choosing to disregard, as of little actual economic significance, the
fact that some desired natural goods are absolutely limited in quan-
tity; and (3) recognizing some natural limits only indirectly, by way of
their manifestations within the social-relational system of economic
life (as a rise in wages relative to profit, or as an increase in the value
of certain commodities).
4. Natural Limits in Marx and Engels: An Ecological
Critique

In this part of my argument, I will attempt to show that certain key

concepts of the economic theory of Capital involve a series of related
conflations, imprecisions and lacunae, the net effect of which is to
render the theory incapable of adequately conceptualizing the eco-
logical conditions and limits of human need-meeting interactions with
nature. I also begin to indicate ways in which these theoretical defects
might be corrected. It is, perhaps, worth emphasizing that my main
aim is the constructive one of using Marx’s ideas as conceptual ‘raw
materials’ in order to move towards an ecologically adequate eco-
nomic theory. I make no claim to expository balance. I have acknow-
ledged already, and will do so later on in this paper, that there is
much in the corpus of Marxian historical materialism which is readily
compatible with an ecological perspective. But my focus here is quite
deliberately upon those features of the economic theory which
demand critical transformation if they are to meet this requirement.
Even here, my view is (though I do not argue for it) that Marxian
economic concepts constitute an indispensable starting point for any
35 Ibid., p. 293.
36 Ibid., p. 293.

63