The Small Farm Future Blog

Marx, Malthus and left/right greens

Posted on June 30, 2013 | 4 Comments

Just when I thought my academic career was over, my first peer-reviewed academic article in five years comes out in the Journal of Consumer Culture, and I get to be a Visiting Researcher at the University of Surrey. The article in JCC is about the veg box scheme I jointly ran for 5 years, and the lessons it holds for green political thought (act local think global, as they say). It’s been published online but not yet in print, so I’ll blog some more about it when it exists on paper. Here I’m going to focus on some subsidiary themes of the paper – a critique of so-called ‘eco-pragmatism’ and the beginnings of an argument for a revised agrarian populism.

The topic occurred to me when a web search took me to the website of my recent golden rice adversary and self-styled ‘eco-pragmatist’, Graham Strouts. His latest post provides an interesting but muddled analysis of the thinking of Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx in the course of an attempt to show that eco/leftwing thought has been tarnished by what Strouts calls the ‘darker forces of environmentalism’, in the latter’s dalliances with eugenics, racial nationalism, right wing occultism and the like. Strouts proceeds from there to suggest that green thinking is largely an ideology of the far right.

Though I don’t agree with this rather extreme interpretation, it’s helped me to understand the ideological basis of ‘eco-pragmatism’ more clearly. My aim here is to pursue a different line of argument regarding Malthus and Marx as a basis for a revised agrarian populism rather than engaging with Strouts’ interpretation directly. But I do first feel the need to observe that you have to be careful with tracing intellectual lineages because, much like human inheritance, if you go far enough back everything turns out to be related to everything else. So while it’s true that there are some unsavoury political skeletons in the green closet, the fact is that eugenics was common coin amongst left and right in the early twentieth century, and one could just as easily argue that the ‘eco-pragmatist’ obsession with cities and technology is heir to the fascism of Italian futurism. Ironically, Strouts relies on an analysis by Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online – formerly the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party known as Living Marxism but now a mouthpiece of right-wing libertarianism – which says a lot about the perils of tracing intellectual history, particularly when the aim is to make any particular political tradition guilty by association with another one.

Anyway, I digress – on to Marx and Malthus. Because Marxism is usually considered a doctrine of the extreme left, it’s often mistakenly thought of as being the most radically anti-capitalist of philosophies. However, as has been shown by various scholars, there are deep continuities between Marx’s thought and capitalist ideology – partly in Marx’s enthusiasm for the necessity of capitalism in order to destroy other kinds of society as a precondition for the emergence of socialism, but more fundamentally in his theoretical apparatus (labour, class, dialectic, mode of production etc) which mirror the categories of capitalist thought. Like everyone, Marx was a person of his time. There’s a brilliance to much of his analysis that remains fresh and relevant today, but with the distance of well over a century it’s not hard to see the limitations: like many nineteenth century intellectuals, Marx had a taste for grand narratives of historical progress which he believed would culminate in the final perfection of an achieved proletarian revolution, and his thinking was deeply grounded in the Victorian concerns with work, class and alienation.

Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798) is well known for advancing the thesis that populations grow geometrically whereas their resource base can only grow arithmetically, so that resource scarcity checks population growth. Notoriously, this led him to opposing poverty relief on the grounds that it would only lead to further unsustainable pressures on resources, and to various other distasteful rightwing positions.

Every generation of social scientists seems destined to exhume the body of Malthus, kick it around a bit, and pronounce it thoroughly dead – but the fact that we’re still talking about him 200 years later suggests that they haven’t quite succeeded, and even perhaps that the enthusiasm to dance on his grave betrays an anxiety that the old dog may have had a point. So let’s try to sort through a few things.

First of all, Malthus was undoubtedly right that resource scarcity can and does check population growth in the natural world. This insight was a key influence on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and it’s apparent in modern ecological studies of population dynamics, although these are very much more sophisticated than Malthus’s rather basic observations. Second, Malthus’s population theory is separable from his unpleasant politics. Marx called Malthus a ‘professional sycophant of the landed aristocracy’, which in many ways he was, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong to suggest that resource scarcities can pressurise human populations, a point that carries no logical implications for poverty policies. Or to put it another way there’s a need to distinguish between absolute and relative effects: resource scarcity may pressure a population and demand a response, but there are many ways the pressure and the response may be distributed across the population.

The main objection to Malthusian thinking is that it neglects the way that resource scarcity is ‘socially mediated’, or in other words transformed by human innovation – for example, agriculture faced a scarcity of nitrogenous fertiliser in the 19^th century, but it no longer does because at the dawn of the 20^th Messrs Haber and Bosch figured out how to synthesise it from air using fossil energy. It’s a fair point, but there are several complications. Here are five: (1) a social innovation enabling a switch from one non-renewable resource to another (eg. coal to oil) may defer a resource crisis, but it doesn’t undermine Malthus’s basic contention; (2) in contrast to Malthus’s rather crude population/resource analysis we now know that the relationships between natural resources and consumption are many, complex and little understood – as in the ugly modern concept of ‘ecosystem services’; it’s fairly clear that human resource use is affecting ecosystem services in all sorts of ways we barely understand with potentially deleterious long-term consequences for ourselves or our descendents; (3) likewise, there can be many complex knock-on effects from the social transformation of limits, one of which is the ‘rebound effect’ of increased population or resource use to take advantage of the newly abundant resource, prompting another Malthusian crisis; (4) although the social mediation of resource limits is almost always talked about in terms of technological innovation enabling new resources to be tapped or old ones to be tapped more efficiently, a society’s decision to limit its resource use or its numbers is no less a social mediation of resource use; (5) the social mediation of resources tells us nothing about the distribution of resources across society. To summarise crudely, if Malthusianism suffers from being an under-socialised theory, Marxism suffers from being an over-socialised one.

One final observation on Malthus – people often say that he’s been proved wrong because technical innovations have staved off Malthusian crises. This is incorrect, partly because there have been plenty of Malthusian crises of varying degrees of severity before and after Malthus (albeit depending somewhat on how you choose to define both ‘Malthusian’ and ‘crisis’) and partly because 200 years (ie. about 0.1% of human history) isn’t really long enough to judge – the ‘sustainable intensification’ brigade are forever telling us that we have to increase agricultural productivity by up to 100% over the coming decades, and the research is increasingly suggesting that this is pretty unlikely. Meanwhile, Ford Denison has pointed out that increases in food productivity have actually proceeded more slowly than predicted by Malthus, and per capita food availability globally has been declining since the 1980s. Maybe we can expect Malthus’s ghost to take another turn around the block soon.

There are endless implications to all of this, but to conclude I want to describe how it feeds into the radically different worldviews of ‘eco-pragmatism’ and agrarian populism.

‘Eco-pragmatism’ has always seemed to me largely just apologetics for business-as-usual capitalism with a bit of spurious greenwash thrown in. But I can see that if you interpret your Marx and your Malthus in certain ways its ideology may seem persuasive.  So if you genuinely believe that history can be read as a series of stages, each one a successive improvement from a barbarous past to a perfectible future, and if you genuinely believe that all resource constraints can be melted away by human technical innovation then I can imagine that you might sign up to the following ‘eco-pragmatist’ principles:

• human history is progressive, involving the emergence of increasingly large-scale societies with increasing rational-technical control of the environment and an increasing rationalism in human affairs
• the environmental problems caused by the rational-technical control of the environment in large-scale societies (resource drawdown,  climate change, soil loss, biodiversity loss etc) can be remedied by further large-scale technical innovation – cheap, plentiful substitutes will be found for costly, rare materials, and the extension of globalised trade will result in greater net benefits for all. Thus planetary resources are effectively limitless.
• challenges to this narrative of rational-technical history-as-progress are empirically groundless and therefore perplexing; they are best understood as mistaken ‘ideology’, for example what Strouts has called ‘retro-romantic reaction’ or ‘back-to-nature woo-woo naturalistic beliefs’
• certain people such as hunter-gatherers, peasants and smallholder farmers are historical losers in this history of progress – yesterday’s people. Their lives are poor and miserable anyway, and it’s better if their lands are expropriated by more efficient producers and they’re incorporated into the productive capitalist economy where, in time, they or their descendents may prosper. Instead of self-provisioning or peasant self-reliance, greater net welfare results from incorporating people into global trading networks.
• anti-progressive environmentalism is a ‘death cult’ in its gloomy Malthusian fears of overshoot and ecological catastrophe and its emphasis on human limits; eco-pragmatism, by contrast, is a life-affirming and optimistic theory of the boundless human potential to transcend natural limits

But none of this is convincing to those of us who read the history and the politics differently. Instead, I’d propose the following elements for a green/agrarian populist vision:

• The empirical evidence simply doesn’t support the notion that human history is progressive, at least not in any straightforward linear way. There are no grounds for projecting this utopian vision at the heart of Marxist-capitalist thinking into the future either – neither a proletarian revolution nor the global ramification of capitalist relations of production will achieve heaven-on-earth
• technological improvement is something to be welcomed, but only inasmuch as it enables us to achieve more efficiently the social goals we set for ourselves, not as an end in itself, and not as something to be fetishised as an exemplar of ‘progress’ in and of itself
• it’s possible that the environmental problems we currently face can be remedied by large-scale, high-tech solutions, but there are plenty of grounds for suspecting otherwise: perhaps the accumulating evidence for the failure of such approaches suggests the model itself may be flawed
• past societies should not be revered as more authentic or holistic than our own, but nor should they be scorned as less ‘developed’. It’s worth looking at how people have thought and acted in other societies past and present, and being open to the possibility of learning from them
• The anti-peasant ideologies of Marxist-capitalist thinking have perpetrated great historical evils – Soviet forced collectivisation, contemporary corporate land grabs and so on – and it’s about time we started treating peasants as real people rather than abstract ciphers of our political ideologies. There are 2 billion peasant farmers on the planet, so they’re going to be a part of the global economy for some time to come whether we like it or not (and, no, they’re not all desperate to stop being peasants). But why not like it? Peasant, land-based lifestyles needn’t be harder or more backbreaking than non-land based work: the ‘hardness’ of peasant life stems mostly from its vulnerability to exploitation by landlords and usurers, and the solution lies in pro-peasant political reform, not expropriation of peasant holdings.
• Trade isn’t altogether a bad thing, but it’s not altogether a good thing either (more on that in another post); human welfare can be improved by extending trade relationships, but not inevitably so. There’s much to be said for self-reliance.
•  ‘back to nature woo-woo naturalistic beliefs’ can be, I admit, a bit of a problem but so too can hyper-rationalism. Rather than scorning the naturalism within green thought it might be worth enquiring into its genesis – not, I would submit, from some dark reactionary core of hidden Blut und Boden nationalism, but from a widespread dissatisfaction with hyper-rationalist Gradgrind ideologies that ultimately miss what it means to be human.
• Thus, far from being a ‘death cult’, anti-progressive environmentalists and agrarian populists emphasise the joy of living self-consciously within limits and of being a part of wider living ecosystems (though I accept that there are contradictions here: I explore them in my paper ‘Genesis and J. Baird Callicott: the land ethic revisted’). Conversely, we view ‘eco-pragmatism’ itself as a ‘death cult’: fearful of death, its adherents cling to a hubristic belief in progress, in the immortality of human civilisation, its ability to transcend ecological limits and its callous willingness to sacrifice other people and other organisms along the way.

Some of these points of difference between ‘eco-pragmatism’ and agrarian populism can be illuminated by empirical evidence, but many of them can’t. Fundamentally they’re matters of political philosophy, not scientific evidence, which is probably why debates between proponents of these different visions so often go round pointlessly in circles. Still, it’s worth trying to clarify the basic assumptions and points of difference, and I hope I’ve been able to do a bit of that here.