By Michael F. Duggan
A few months ago, a friend of mine observed that as a historian and sociologist, Marx got a lot of the generalities of history as class struggle right, while Marx the optimist, the revolutionary (to the extent that he is one at all), fails utterly.1 He fares even worse in providing a basis for practical politics.
My friend’s point was that power concentrates, and when it does, the newly powerful—whether it is a feudal nobility, capitalist oligarchy, or communist nomenklatura—favor their own and distance themselves from the less powerful. It’s what people in power do. And if an existing system is violently overthrown, the new landlords will eventually act as badly as the old ones. You can replace regimes, but you cannot perfect human nature, with or without holistic ideology. Bertrand Russell makes a similar argument in Why I am not a Communist.2
Between the wars, Ernest Hemingway wrote that the world at the end of the Great War was ripe for revolt and that military debacle was a prerequisite for revolution. Thoroughly defeated countries like Russia dissolved into revolution. Partially defeated nations like Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, and Italy were not too far gone to ward off utopian revolutions from the left.3 If Marx was the man of the moment in 1917-1923, then the man of the present moment and for all time is Malthus.
I knew Marxian professors and students in grad school, but I never warmed up to Uncle Karl and his righteous heirs.4 Their brand of moral rationalism struck me as overly selective, rigid, uncompromising, and reductive, and I saw people as being neither predominantly good or rational. History makes no moral or rational assumptions, and, if the course of events was deterministic, it had more to do with biology or physics than with historical “laws.”5 The chaos of history was not amenable to the imposition of rational order.
When believers would speak to me about Marx and his interpreters, it was as if a key part of their understanding of history and humans—of complexity and nuance—was missing or else dismissed as marginal details. They saw some things a little too clearly and other things not at all. They had latched on to a single current and made it dominant, even monolithic. It was all so simple: the reduction of history and people to categories of economic class could explain everything and Marxism was the basis for an understanding by which all could be fixed. The proof was all around us and apparent to anyone sufficiently evolved or moral enough to notice.
Indeed, their outlook was based on a noble human inclination to set things aright, but there was a real-world disconnect between the scholars and the subject. I came to realize that a lot of American intellectuals know a lot about Marx, but virtually nothing about how working people actually think; your average bartender or Madison Avenue adman/adwoman knows more about how the “masses” think than do most radicals with a Ph.D. As Hemingway observed, you shouldn’t write about the proletariat “if you don’t come from the proletariat.”
To the faithful, the underlying narrative of history was real and singular and Marx had figured it out. Marxism was more than an interpretive frame for them, and, standing analysis on its head, history became a sequence of ideological confirmations.6 For me history was and is about irrationality and power in the pursuit of perceived interests with occasional periods of enlightenment. Economics may be one of the most important avenue of power, but it is not the only one. History is comprised of numerous currents, dominant, complementary, independent, countervailing, and ambiguous. It should not be used as a basis to justify a singular program limited to one or another of these.
To the Marxians, history was a great morality play of good and evil, of haves and have-nots, and, like a heroic tragedy, its outcome was inevitable. By contrast I preferred (and still prefer) sociobiological explanations of human nature that dealt with evolutionary trends tens of thousands of years older than capitalist economics and subsequent commentary. Marxism, like theistic religions, gives itself moral authority by placing blame—something Marxists seem to relish—along with causes; sociobiology attempts to describe causation as well as the basis for why we blame and why we enjoy it.
To be fair, Marx had hit on some real human propensities (we do order ourselves in terms of class, nobody likes to be a “have-not,” and oppressed people will eventually push back) which he misconstrues as historical laws. But they allowed him to extrapolate trends that now seem to be playing out in the globalized economy—something that closely resembles “late stage capitalism” (a term Marx never used). Again, these are just tendencies, but Marx saw them as the material unfolding of the inevitable, as do some, but not all of his latter day acolytes (not all Marxians and Marxists believe in historical determinism). I don’t like true believers, packages of beliefs, and intellectual herds left or right; every true believer, intellectual ideologue, and partisan is the bitch of an idea and usually a faction. In spite of their radicalism, Marxists embody an orthodoxy—they are members of a tribe of the saved frequently at odds with itself. In the real world, discord is the path of Marxism as diverging branches come into conflict with each other (see: Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky).
It is impossible to approach the world without assumptions—ideas. All analyses and observations are theory-laden. Even the most rational of us brings preexisting ideas to analysis, whether it be to the power of the ideas themselves (including rationality and skepticism) or the human authority behind the ideas. Marxists are especially wed to their ideology.
There are rackets and there is orthodoxy, and we must learn to see through the trappings of both. Which does the greater harm is an open question. My sense is that it is the ideologues of the latter category because they are defined and driven by dogma and righteousness, and there is nothing more dangerous than a true believer (and I know that Hemingway also writes about this somewhere).
Rackets are characterized by corruption and sustained by cynicism. A cynic can be won over or bought off; a true believer cannot. But true eschatological zeal is difficult to sustain, much less pass down intact. Kids roll their eyes at their parent’s earnest faith. Last year’s radicalism is this year’s cornball. In the real world, Marxism starts off as dogma and becomes a racket. Over generations, Marxists become just like everybody else in every other gamed-out system. The Soviet Union died of an internal collapse, a crisis of faith that had begin decades earlier. By the late 1970s there were few true believes and virtually no young believers in Marxist ideology. Thus Soviet Marxist-Leninism followed a course similar to American Puritanism.
In some respects, Malthus is even more difficult to warm up to than Marx, but he cannot be dismissed. We must take account of him with the realization that the desire for something to not be true has no bearing on its truth. His projections of population growth have a character that strike us as inevitable and inexorable, unfeeling and unthinking—removed from both the passions and reason. They undermine notions of social progress and the perfectibility of human nature as effectively as Darwin’s natural selection undermines the idea of eternal values and objective morality.7
History has no underlying narrative, but the playing out of natural trends represented by numbers does. Like Marx, Malthus latches on to a human proclivity, but unlike Marx, it is not one of rational tendencies but rather of biological impulses—of reproduction—and the math of reproduction outpaces the math of production. When An Essay on the Principle of Population came out in 1798, the human species looked like it was heading lemming-like toward a cliff.
And then we caught a break, or seemed to, from another historical current. The Industrial Revolution and its applications in agriculture put off the doom implicit in the geometrical tables of human reproduction. By the time Malthus’s third book, Principles of Political Economy was issued in 1820, the world population was already more than one billion, but perhaps it did not matter. The history of technological innovation for the next 200 years would be characterized by a litany of breakthroughs allowing for more and more people live without hunger. For the time being, production outpaced population.
But it was a temporary reprieve, a fool’s paradise born out of a stay of execution and faith in the promise of technology. Technological progress appeared to be the savior of Enlightenment and Victorian notions of social progress. Still, dark realities loomed. Modern capitalism aided by technology is based on the demonstrably false belief in endless growth on a small planet with limited resources. Eventually population would outpace production or production would desolate the biosphere, or both. Malthus, broadly construed, was right. He just got the timetable wrong. Technology merely delays the inevitable.
When I bring up Malthus in conversation, people sometimes push back with numbers showing that with current agricultural methods and resources we could feed the entire world and that getting food to those who need it would be a mere logistical detail, if the political will was there.
This argument does nothing to undermine the Malthusian position. It is also an academic point. Surely the dead and malnourished don’t care about such distinctions. It is irrelevant if they starve for logistical reasons or a lack of political will rather than from a lack of sufficient production (“political will”—what eternal hope must reside in this term, as if it were a thing to be switched on or off like an electric light). We must also realize the broader implications of Malthus: that the production of food (to say nothing of extractive activities) at current levels by current techniques is destroying the planet. As the British philosopher, John Gray observes, with 7.8 billion people in the world “[w]e cannot tread the world so lightly” as to not trample it. Wherever you have human beings in numbers, you will have ecological degradation.8
The sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson, writes that we surpassed the Earth’s sustainable capacity around 1978, and that as of 2002 about 1.4 four planet Earths would be required to sustain its human population.9 We are well beyond that now.
At present there are about 100 million refugees worldwide from all causes. As thus number swell into the multiple hundreds of millions to a billion or more, successive waves (and then a continual tide) of desperate people will break over the rich West. At that point, life for most people will resemble life in a Mad Max film, the way it already does in some of the poorest countries.
Some commentators younger than me have suggested that because the United States and other rich nations have disproportionately benefited from what we have extracted from the planet, and abused people in poorer regions in a variety of ways in the process, we should therefore let in people from these places to share in our fleeting wealth as the planet dies.
If you believe that the world is too far gone to save, then this argument seems to make sense. If you believe that the U.S. could still be a force for good in the world by standing apart from the population bomb, then it makes no sense at all. To let in millions of people with no cultural connection to a country with high unemployment makes no economic sense and it will solve none of the big problems. It also plays directly into the hands of neoliberal wage slavers who would love for the United States to become another low cost production zone.
Young people, too, are more open to ideas like socialism. I have heard some speak of a kind of spontaneous, democratic socialism as a structural panacea to the worlds problems: give people access to power, and they will vote for their clear-sighted interests. In doing so, they will save the world. And yet when you ask advocates of this position how to do it, they are short on answers beyond the necessity of doing so and a blind faith in something close to direct, borderless democracy. There are no historical examples of open-border socialism, and examples of functioning democratic socialism involve small, homogeneous, highly-educated countries (e.g. the Scandinavian nations). It is a harsh fact that past a certain healthy and desirable point, the more diverse and populous a nation becomes, the less governable, and certainly the less democratic it becomes. An enlightened social democracy is a non-starter in a large, overpopulated, polyglot nation.10
In the end, all of the existential problems that face our species other than the possibility of nuclear war are the result of human overpopulation or else are severely aggravated by it: carbon generation/climate change, the loss of habitat and biodiversity, depletion of vital resources, the plastics crisis, water crises, etc. If the world populations was 500 million instead of our current 7.8 billion, most of these issues would be manageable.
This is where we stand. Is there a global Marxist revolution in the offing for the near future? In the West, there is a lot of dissent in the air, but much of it is on the populist far right. Capitalism appears to be succumbing to its own excesses, as Marx predicted, but his solutions remain as impractical as ever, and even with modern communications, there is no way to coordinate a global revolution a la Trotsky. Even if there was, what would its supporters hope to accomplish? The violent overthrow of the existing order? Good luck with that (the dispossessed are more likely to overwhelm it via migration), and even if they succeed, they will inherit a dying planet and not a blank canvass for a workers’ Utopia. No, in spite of his keen historical insights, it is not the vision of Marx that will come to pass, but the apocalypse of Malthus.
The advantage of the study of history in our time is that of a superior vantage point: we see the bigger picture more clearly and fully than any previous, more optimistic time in a similar way that an older person has a fuller idea about the meaning of his or her own life than does a younger person. We know more about the plot at the novel’s end.
As regards global history, this broader perspective is not an attractive one. The meaning of the human story will likely not be that of the triumph of Enlightenment reason or a nineteenth-century belief in social progress. It is not the unfolding of Hegel’s vitalism or the moral rationalism of Marx’s dialectical materialism, the pseudo-scientific monstrosity of National Socialism or the ultra-humanism of the New Left. It is neither the self-created meaning of the existentialists or “the end of history” dreams of globalization beyond the nightmare of the uncontrolled spread of our species across the planet.
The larger meaning of the human experience is one of biological imbalance, an extension of the viewpoint of Malthus and fundamentally linked to his idea of population increase and the subsequent depletion of resources. Combined with the Gaia hypothesis, we have a powerful interpretive frame for history that is more accurate than all previous models. Increasingly, human history appears to be a catastrophic prong of natural history, a runaway project of nature and our own nature. As our population growth continues unabated toward eight billion and beyond, and with a biomass well over 100 times larger than any other large animal that walked the planet, the human project has taken on the appearance of a natural-historical plague species responsible for the Earth’s sixth great extinction.11 We are both the asteroid and its victims.
Please do not misunderstand me, I am no misanthrope—all of my favorite people are human beings. I love innumerable of our kind and our best examples are my greatest sources of inspiration. It’s the species en masse—including myself—and what we are doing to the planet that I loath, but cannot blame. What is a thoughtful cancer cell or locust to do? Sartre was wrong: Hell is not “other people,” it is the teeming swarm.
I have long hoped that humans could rise above biological determinism, rise above our own unthinking biology via cooperation, moderation, and reason. As Hume reminds us, reason is a marginal junior partner to the passions. But there was always hope that we might curb the worst excesses of our nature and in doing so, save ourselves from becoming just another casualty of our own success. Take a look at the world around us. How are cooperation, moderation, and reason doing these days?
Note
- An even more accurate account of class struggle is that of Brooks Adams, brother of Henry Adams. He held that the law served the powerful but that concessions were made by them to keep those without power more or less content. Over time, however, he believed that democracies tended to tear themselves apart. For a description of Brooks Adams’s pessimistic view on class struggle as manifested in the law, see James Herget, American Jurisprudence, 1870-1970 (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1990), 131-134.
- Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Communist, 133-134
- See Hemingway’s December 1934 article “Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba,” reprinted in By-line Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967) 178-185.
- Traditionally a “Marxian” is someone whose economic outlook is influenced by Marx, while a “Marxist” embraces his politics. As originally explained to me, the former tended to be academics while the latter were actual revolutionaries.
- See generally, Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, (London, 1957).
- Karl Popper relates a similar experience of Marxists finding confirmations of their interpretation of history on every page of a newspaper. See Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 2nd ed. (New York: Basis Books, 1965), 35.
- T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford World Classics, 1993 [1798]), 72. The ideas of Malthus gave rise to a stern and unsympathetic kind of economic and political conservatism embodied by Charles Dickens’s character of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Given that better living standards and social factors like women’s rights actually decrease population, I would argue that it is possible to be a Malthusian progressive and social democrat.
- John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002, 2007), 7.
- Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 27.
- Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 69-71.
- On the human biomass, see Wilson, 29.