"The Malthus Factor" by Eric Ross: A Review

Eric B. Ross: The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics, and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, New York/London, 1998).

At long last! One has unearthed a book that contains one of the most salutary arguments in the contemporary world -- an argument one has long desired to hear. One only wishes that argument were somewhat better made.

Dr. Ross's book can't always be described as felicitously written; it has its share of copy errors, which for once I won't bother counting up. It also makes its claims with a stridency and absolutism that it hasn't always earned. In other words, at several critical junctures, the book seems to assume the argument it should be presenting.

This is particularly a shame, though, because that argument is an important and much-needed one.

Ross has written one of the few book-length studies I am aware of -- perhaps the only one in existence-- to address the dangerous influence of Malthusian thinking on modern development policy -- including the set of agricultural changes known as the "Green Revolution." In the course of it, Ross takes on many of our most dearly-held assumptions about capitalism and the course of industrial modernity.

Some aspects of this argument have aged better than others. Ross is evidently a committed Old Leftist, with all the problems that entails. The book contains a potted Revisionist-style history of the Cold War, for instance, that none of us asked for or needed in a book of this sort. With its tattered line that the Soviet Union was solely the victim of outside forces, it is an argument that has not borne up well under the test of time.

On the other hand, what Ross has to say about conventional approaches to "development," global warming, and the way in which the neoliberal trade policies and restrictive immigration regimes favored by wealthy countries trap people in the Global South in a double bind, all seem remarkably prescient for 1998. They still hold true today, if not more so.

It may be objected that we hardly need at this moment of history to look back to a critique of Malthusianism that was published more than twenty years ago, however. After all, the old fears about a so-called Third World "population bomb" and resulting famine-- since they never materialized -- have largely been justly forgotten. Many a once-feted Cassandra has now come to be seen as more of a Chicken Little.

Meanwhile, warnings about "over-population" have largely disappeared from environmentalist discourse -- partly because of the creepy eugenicist overtones they always contained, but even more so because they do not correspond to the factual landscape. Demographic growth has slowed or reversed itself in the most "developed" countries, yet these wealthy countries are also still responsible for the largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions and the most disproportionate consumption of resources.

Plainly, the dangerous types of energy use and resource depletion are not coming from the Global South, that is to say, and equally plainly, they do not track solely alongside overall population growth. In such a world, scare stories about "population pressures" in the Third World have been revealed as the racist tropes they always were.

As much as the "population" rhetoric has fallen out of favor with most of the Green movement, however, I can attest personally that not everyone has received the memo. I was at a conference the other week, and an NGO director from a Pacific Island nation was describing the problems related to food security and climate change her country is experiencing. She noted that much of the country's native food industry has disappeared, as it is unable to compete with the influx of cheap imported products from wealthy countries. Meanwhile, their territory as a whole is a risk of receding or disappearing due to rising sea levels.

After she had explained all of this, someone from the audience raised his hand and asked: "Have you considered population control?"

Huh? It was not merely a non-sequitur, but an offensive one that implicitly blames the victims. A cringe-inducing moment.

(Side note: I am reminded of that massively disappointing Christopher Hitchens book, The Missionary Position, which was supposed to be a bold exposé of the "truth" about Mother Theresa. In reality, the bulk of Hitchens' argument rests on the claim that poverty is attributable to high birth rates, and so by opposing family planning, Mother Theresa cannot truly claim to be advancing the interests of the poor. In the midst of the many good arguments for access to reproductive rights, this is a very bad one. It is, essentially, Malthusian thinking. It suggests, as Ross would put it, that the cause of poverty is "too many poor people," rather than the maldistribution of resources. Coming from an erstwhile and perhaps ersatz Trotskyist like Hitchens, it is particularly unfortunate.)

Apart from showing that Malthusianism is alive and well in some quarters, however, the exchange at the conference showed the continued relevance of Ross's book in another aspect as well. The situation that the NGO director described in the Pacific Islands was not at all the product of "runaway population growth" -- but it was very much a product of the Green Revolution, which Ross examines in detail, and which -- as he shows --  has often been justified by appeal to Malthusian arguments.

All of this is to say that if overt Malthusianism is nowadays considered impolite in many circles, the Green Revolution and its impacts are still very much with us. Moreover, the conventional historical narrative of how that Revolution unfolded -- Mathusian overtones and all -- is still in circulation.

A recent example came my way in a podcast about "existential threats" -- the same podcast I spent a whole blog post complaining about. In that earlier post, I devoted so much time to all of the philosophical objections to the podcast's argument, I didn't even get around to the subject of its creepy moral and political overtones. Let us turn to those now.

The podcast presents in one of its sections the conventional story of the Green Revolution. It goes like this: the world was facing the specter of Malthusian mass-starvation in the mid-twentieth century due to population growth. Then, heroic scientist Norman Borlaug saved the day by introducing new high-yielding crops, massively increasing the world's food supply. This, in the podcast's telling, purchased humanity a little more time against the clock of Malthusian annihilation.

(The fundamental logical contradiction in the idea of people breeding themselves into famine has been at the heart of all versions of the Malthusian doctrine, and remains there today. Ross captures it beautifully through a quote from Engels - addressing the arguments of the original Malthus: "how [can] a people die of hunger from sheer abundance[?]")

It makes sense that this version of events would appeal to that podcaster's mentality. The whole rest of the series is devoted to inflating the menace from supposed "existential threats," which leads to the argument that only technological fixes can save the future of our species. In the course of building this case, our podcaster frequently has harsh words for democracy and representative decision-making. He also, in this vein, admiringly invokes all the chief villains of Ross's book -- including "tragedy of the commons"-author Garrett Hardin and the Rev. Malthus himself.

The podcast is not unique in this, however. We may not hear so many warnings about overpopulation anymore, but the general account our narrator provides of twentieth century global development is one that is still in widespread currency. Tell me if this does not describe the general impression most of us have of how that process unfolded:

Capitalist modernity, by raising the living standards and general affluence of the human species beyond its ancient limits, ignited a wave of population growth. As more children were able to survive past infancy and human reproductive habits did not change in the developing world to reflect this new reality, the number of people in the Global South swelled to unprecedented numbers. This created new pressures on the global food supply, which would have led to mass hunger and resource depletion if new agricultural technologies associated with the Green Revolution had not arrived in the nick of time.

So the story goes.

But Dr. Ross begs to differ. The Copernican Revolution he seeks to effect in the face of this narrative is to swap the order of events. He suggests -- intriguingly -- that it was actually human reproductive habits that changed in order to suit the needs of capitalist modernity.

As an expert on fertility in pre-industrial societies -- who appears to have co-authored a book on the subject with the great founder of "cultural materialism" Marvin Harris -- Ross has some claim to be able to speak with authority on this subject. And the argument he makes is plausible enough, on the face of it. Pre-industrial peoples, he claims, actually did successfully regulate their own reproduction, even in the absence of modern birth control techniques, by using such primordial methods as coitus interruptus.

What led to the growth of early modern families, therefore, was not the perennial Malthusian bugaboo of the "irresponsibility of the poor," nor a lack of acquaintance with workable methods of controlling fertility, but the fact that the arrival of capitalist modes of production suddenly made it economically rational -- even necessary for survival -- to bear more children.

The two historical instances in which Ross lays out this chain of events in detail are in the early modern British Isles and twentieth century Colombia. In the first, he plausibly argues that it was the economic premium placed on children and full households in the new industrial relations of early capitalism that led working class people to begin having larger families.

Similarly, in Colombia, he shows how the violent -- and deliberate -- destruction of peasant holdings made way for large-scale plantation agriculture focused on export crops. This forced the rural poor into industries -- like coffee cultivation -- where the only way to survive was through bearing large numbers of children to work in the fields. "Fertility was therefore directly related to the means of diversifying sources of income," writes Ross. "There was nothing Malthusian here."

This is a fascinating -- and basically credible -- argumentative counterpoint to the traditional narrative of the relationship between capitalist development and demographic change. To make such a complete subversion of the conventional wisdom, however, one wishes that Ross had provided a few more examples -- and tackled more seriously the objection that, however plausible this account is in itself, it does not furnish a complete explanation of the global demographic explosion. But more on that below.

The broad contours of Ross's case are convincing, however, so far as they go. I am fully persuaded -- indeed, the historical record is inarguable on this point -- that the basic mechanism of industrial development throughout the world has been to displace peasant smallholders, bankrupt small traditional industries, and force small farmers to migrate to industrial areas or into exploitative tenant relations with big landowners. (This is how capitalist modernity erupted into European traditional societies beginning with the enclosures and continuing into the industrial age, and it is still how the system operates now. Even the proponents of capitalist development often accept that such a process is "inevitable," and defend it on the promise of future alternative forms of employment.)

This is a process of destruction that is very much continuing to this day. The Green Revolution, as much as it increased the overall global food supply, also rendered livelihoods unsustainable for peasant cultivators throughout the Third World, who could not compete with the new large-scale commercial agriculture in their own countries (let alone heavily-subsidized agribusiness or free food aid coming from the developed West). At the very time it was making food more plentiful, therefore, this Revolution was also forcing peasants to the brink of starvation, unless they picked up and moved.

What the NGO director from the Pacific was describing, in short, is the world the Green Revolution created. The people of her country have food to eat -- so much so, in fact, that many of their greatest health risks are those we tend to associate with the dietary problems of the developed world - diabetes, obesity, etc. But they are almost wholly dependent on imports, and producing their own food in-country is not economically feasible.

It is a modern-day version of the Max Havelaar problem -- that is, the situation prevailing in the East Indies under Dutch colonial rule, which 19th-century writer Multatuli denounced with such prophetic fire. The only viable and externally-rewarded industries are those focused on exports to the developed world. This means that no labor power is left over to produce the food for local people to eat. They thus are forced to rely even more on the wealthy countries of the Global North to meet their basic needs.

This sort of "global interdependence" would be a noble thing if it were a partnership on equal terms. It is, however, manifestly not.

One of the most moving and prophetic parts of Ross's 1998 book comes at the end, when he describes the hypocrisy of wealthy countries who have tightened their immigration laws at the same time they have made livelihoods unsustainable at home for people from poor countries. If capitalist "development" is to be foisted upon all humanity -- if peasant agriculture and the traditional industries of rural and indigenous peoples are to be driven out of business throughout the world -- then mass migration is inevitable. It becomes the only mechanism people have to survive. To the extent there is any "bargain" that is struck under capitalist development -- however Faustian -- it is this: labor mobility will theoretically allow people to survive and even thrive, after they have been displaced from their prior modes of living, by allowing them to find work in new industries.

To force people from their homes on such a premise, and then to bar the gates of global human mobility, is perhaps the cruelest paradox of a modern world that has combined "free" neoliberal trade flows with the ever-tightening screws of First World border regimes.

In all of this, Ross is on solid footing.

There do seem to be some other inescapable demographic facts, however, for which his argument on its own is less prepared to account.

It is probably true that working class people changed their fertility patterns in order to respond to increased labor demands in factory and plantation industries, and that this in part explains the enormous population growth around the world that has followed in the wake of capitalist modernity.

The question is: is this sufficient on its own to explain the vastness of the demographic change the world has seen since the start of the twentieth century? It is hard to escape the feeling that Ross's book does not fully appreciate what is perhaps the most salient thing -- the most significant event that has ever happened -- throughout all of our history as a species: namely, the fact that the number of humans on this planet has septupled in the last hundred years.

Can all this be accounted for by increased demand for family-based labor, and the changes in working people's reproductive habits that came about to respond to it?

Such an explanation does not square with the fact that global population growth has been accompanied not just by a rise in the absolute number of people on the planet, but by increased per capita nutrition intake and broadly increasing life expectancy as well -- what Robert Fogel famously called "the escape from hunger and premature death."

Similarly, Ross's book fails to do justice to the fact that the Green Revolution - as much destruction as it has wrought for peasant farmers - has also indubitably increased the overall global food supply. And while this increased supply has plainly been maldistributed, it is also reaching the world's poor in part, as evidenced by the fact that malnutrition has declined worldwide.

In short, the human species is eating better and living longer and in greater numbers than it has at any time in the past, and it seems plausible the technologies associated with the Green Revolution had something to do with making this possible.

An honest stocktaking of the record of capitalism, modernity, and the Green Revolution, then, cannot portray the three as unmitigated disasters. Rather, I suggest we see these processes as essentially Janus-faced. On the one side, they manifest as forces that are inherently destructive -- even genocidal -- as they render impossible all alternative modes of life. On the other, they emerge as sources of the most profound humanitarian transformation of the life prospects of our species that has ever occurred.

The important question that Ross's book urges us to consider, then, is whether these two faces must always appear together. Could there not have been alternative modernities? Ross suggests that at various points in the history of modern development, opportunities emerged to support labor-intensive peasant agriculture, and to allow this system to grow, perform well, and thrive. He notes that collective agricultural systems like the ejidos of Mexico are capable of far greater productivity than they were ever allowed to achieve, due to the opposition of Western-backed think tanks and foundations (who were acting on Malthusian premises and committed to a Green Revolution-style set of prescriptions).

This is essentially the alternative modernity proposed by some leftist thinkers of the nineteenth century European periphery who departed from the stage-based thinking of Marxist historical determinism. Herzen and his affection for Russian peasant communes comes to mind.

It seems to me, likewise, that there is no essential contradiction between the blessings of capitalist modernity and the conservation of alternative modes of livelihood. There is no reason why a society cannot have a market economy and private ownership, while also using democratically-controlled political structures to invest in and render economically feasible small businesses and co-ops and small or collective farms -- nor why private corporations of a certain size cannot have mandated a level of industrial democracy in their internal operations, such as the system gestured toward in some of Elizabeth Warren's recent policy proposals  (a system that might broadly be described as "distributist").

Such a Herzen-style system would not be capitalist in the classic sense -- certainly not in that system's neoliberal varieties. Nor would it repeat the evils of the twentieth century totalitarianisms for which Ross is -- in his worst moments -- a semi-apologist. (And it is important to note, while we're on the subject, that Communist societies ultimately proved even more committed to genocidal projects of mass displacement for the sake of industrialization than any "capitalist" economy ever was).

Such a distributist system would not even be particularly revolutionary. It would be the opposite, in fact - it would be an exercise in conservation.

Wouldn't this get in the way of innovation, however? Wouldn't it prevent the kinds of technological leaps forward that characterized the Green Revolution?

Well, maybe it would allow different groups of people to innovate. And maybe, even more important to suggest, innovation is not the only or highest human value. Maybe, like all values, it must be balanced against those with which it may conflict. Maybe there are circumstances in which the preservation of people's livelihoods and ways of life is a higher imperative than the benefits to be gained from technological change and economic growth.

 In such a vision I find unlikely support in the collected poems of Robert Frost.

I say unlikely, since the vision these poems present of the world is intransigently apolitical, and Frost was, if anything, a man of conservative instincts. In one poem, for instance, "The Lost Follower," he subverts the classic Browning poem "The Lost Leader," with its condemnation of Wordsworth for forsaking the radical cause. In contrast to Browning's message, Frost suggests that the true threat to poetry comes not from the loss of political conviction, but the gaining of it.

In another, earlier poem, Frost begs leave of the need to take sides at all -- of having to name "who is a contemporary liar --/ Who in particular" when so many could bear the name.

Precisely because of his conservative instincts, however, Frost has left us a beautiful poetic objection to the principle of so-called "creative destruction." He makes a defense of the idea that innovation is not always the only or the highest human good. I think it stands as an excellent rejoinder to those who would promote the Green Revolution and capitalist modernity, unchecked by any countervailing human values, unimpeded by humanitarian scruples about the livelihoods and communities they overthrow along their way. Here is a Herzonian/distributist proposal to support peasant communal agriculture if ever there was one. Frost writes:

Even while we talk, some chemist at Columbia
Is stealthily contriving wool from jute 
That when let loose upon the grazing world 
Will put ten thousand farmers out of sheep.
Everyone asks for freedom for himself,
The man free love, the businessman free trade [...]
Political ambition has been taught,
By being punished back, it is not free: 
It must at some point gracefully refrain.
Greed has been taught a little abnegation [... So too,]
None should be as ingenious as he could,
Not if I had my say. Bounds should be set
To ingenuity for being so cruel 
In bringing change unheralded[.]

May it be so!