MARX, KARL

(1818–1883)

Karl Marx was born in Trier, Germany. He studied law in Bonn and Berlin and received his doctorate in 1841 at the University of Jena. Marx then devoted himself to the fields of classical philosophy and political economics. He earned his living as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung and as the author of various books and articles in which he analyzed the origins of industrial capitalism and its effects on the living conditions of the working classes. His scholarly studies were soon combined also with political activism, both often in collaboration with his life-long friend and supporter Frederic [Friedrich] Engels. Their most famous joint writing (albeit thought to be primarily Marx's), the Communist Manifesto, appeared in 1848, offering a summary of the Marxian theory of history as well as a political program statement. The first section of the Manifesto contains a compelling description of what today is called globalization–as a consequence of expanding capitalist markets. It also displays the literary verve characteristic of many of Marx's writings:

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life…. The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together in one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery… whole populations conjured out of the ground–what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

Marx moved to London in 1849 working on his magnum opus, Das Kapital, the first volume of which appeared in 1867 and was soon translated into many languages, serving as an ideological rallying point for political action. The main passages in that work that specifically address population questions are in Chapter XXV, Section 3. They set out the thesis that capitalism generates and is dependent upon a constantly renewed surplus population–an industrial reserve army that leads to unemployment and immiseration–and present a critique of Malthusian population theory.

The labouring population…produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus-population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone.

The attack on Malthus is developed more elaborately in Section F of the Foundations [Grundrisse] of the Critique of Political Economy, a compilation of Marx's 1857–1859 notebooks, published more than half a century after his death. Marx recognizes Malthus's work as significant in two respects: "(1) because he gives brutal expression to the brutal viewpoint of capital; (2) because he asserted the fact of overpopulation in all forms of society." But he vehemently rejects the Malthusian theoretical construct, in terms spiked with unrelenting invective: "clerical fanaticism," "motley compilations from historians and travellers' descriptions," "a conception [that] is altogether false and childish."

Marx's own interpretation of the population law of capitalism, a topic to which he returned in passages of his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), fueled much theoretical discourse. Among Marx's critics were Paul Mombert (1876–1938) and Georg Adler (1863–1908); they pointed out flaws in his use and interpretation of statistical surveys. Above all, they accused Marx of failing to take sufficiently into account changes in population dynamics and wages. And where capitalism flourished, history itself refuted the notion of the immiseration thesis, along with conception of the mechanisms, including population dynamics, that were supposedly leading to that state.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY KARL MARX.

Marx, Karl. 1993 [1857–1858]. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics.

——. 1992 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin Classics.

——. 1933 [1875]. Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT KARL MARX.

Adler, Georg. 1968. Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx-schen Kritik der bestehenden Volkswirtschaft. Kritische und ökonomisch-literarische Studien. Hildesheim: Olms.

McLellan, David, ed. 2000. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. New York: Oxford University Press.

Meek, Ronald L. 1971 [1953]. Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb. Berkeley, CA: Ramparts Press.

Mombert, Paul. 1929. Bevölkerungslehre. Grundrisse zum Studium der Nationalökonomie. ed. Karl Diehl und Paul Mombert. Bd. 15, Jena: Fischer.

Petersen, William. 1988. "Marxisms and the Population Question: Theory and Practice." In Population and Resources in Western Intellectual Traditions, ed. M. S. Teitelbaum and J. Winter. Supplement to Vol. 14 of Population and Development Review, pp. 77–101.

Tucker, Robert C., ed. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.