Malthus' essay on population at age 200: A Marxian view

Monthly Review

Volumn 50, Issue 7, 1998, Pages 1-18

  Foster, John Bellamy ^a  

^a NONE

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Indexed keywords

EID: 0343518610     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-07-1998-11_1     Document Type: Review

References (6)

1. Ted Benton, "Marxism and Natural Limits," New Left Review, no. 178 (November-December 1989), pp. 58-59, 82. In referring to Malthus as an "epistemic conservative" Benton accepts at his word Malthus' early rhetorical claim that he found the utopian visions of society offered by Condorcet and Godwin attractive, but was forced to reject them as incompatible with the human condition on earth (a rhetorical device common in Malthus' time). Given the nature of Malthus' class alliances and the character of his work as a whole it is clear that Malthus was being disingenuous here. He was an early ideologue of capitalism, not a disappointed representative of revolutionary Enlightenment thinking. For a critique of Benton see Paul Burkett, "A Critique of Neo-Malthusian Marxism: Society, Nature and Population," Historical Materialism, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 118-42. For a reply to the charge of Prometheanism see John Bellamy Foster, "Marx and the Environment," in Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, ed., In Defense of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), pp. 149-62.
2. Ted Benton, "Marxism and Natural Limits," New Left Review, no. 178 (November-December 1989), pp. 58-59, 82. In referring to Malthus as an "epistemic conservative" Benton accepts at his word Malthus' early rhetorical claim that he found the utopian visions of society offered by Condorcet and Godwin attractive, but was forced to reject them as incompatible with the human condition on earth (a rhetorical device common in Malthus' time). Given the nature of Malthus' class alliances and the character of his work as a whole it is clear that Malthus was being disingenuous here. He was an early ideologue of capitalism, not a disappointed representative of revolutionary Enlightenment thinking. For a critique of Benton see Paul Burkett, "A Critique of Neo-Malthusian Marxism: Society, Nature and Population," Historical Materialism, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 118-42. For a reply to the charge of Prometheanism see John Bellamy Foster, "Marx and the Environment," in Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, ed., In Defense of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), pp. 149-62.
3. Ted Benton, "Marxism and Natural Limits," New Left Review, no. 178 (November-December 1989), pp. 58-59, 82. In referring to Malthus as an "epistemic conservative" Benton accepts at his word Malthus' early rhetorical claim that he found the utopian visions of society offered by Condorcet and Godwin attractive, but was forced to reject them as incompatible with the human condition on earth (a rhetorical device common in Malthus' time). Given the nature of Malthus' class alliances and the character of his work as a whole it is clear that Malthus was being disingenuous here. He was an early ideologue of capitalism, not a disappointed representative of revolutionary Enlightenment thinking. For a critique of Benton see Paul Burkett, "A Critique of Neo-Malthusian Marxism: Society, Nature and Population," Historical Materialism, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 118-42. For a reply to the charge of Prometheanism see John Bellamy Foster, "Marx and the Environment," in Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, ed., In Defense of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), pp. 149-62.
4. Malthus was very consistent in avoiding references to the overpopulation of the earth in the modern sense, even correcting those few passages in his work where he had inadvertently left the impression that human population had surpassed the means of subsistence, changing this to "easy means of subsistence." See Edwin Cannan, A History of Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy from 1776 to 1848 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1917), p. 108.
5. See Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: The New Press, 1996).
6. Eric B. Ross, "Malthusianism, Counter-revolution and the Green Revolution," Organization & Environment, vol. 12, no. 1 (December 1998), pp. 446-450.