The Brooklyn Rail

Jason E. Smith’s article, “After the Wave, Winter” in the July-August Field Notes provoked much response. Two writers sent in comments. We are publishing them here, with brief responses by Smith.

José A. Tapia offers some critical remarks on my essay on capitalism and demography published in “Field Notes” earlier this summer.¹ I do not have the space here to deal with all of his criticisms in detail, and will focus on one of them in particular. If I may be brutally summary in cataloging his criticisms: I say “very little about” the importance of migration in understanding demographic change; I propose “too close [a] link between fertility rates and the participation of women in the labor force”; and that I don’t see that Marx, whom I take to be an important touchstone in thinking about the relation between “population growth and the development of capitalism,” has inconsistent “views” on population that are “not relevant to the demographic reality of the twenty-first century.”

I will be equally summary in the following responses. Migration: in my essay, I characterize migration as a central political question haunting the demographic reality of the twenty-first century. I underline the conflict in Europe and North America between employers’ demands for the regulated importation of foreign labor to shore up demographically-induced labor “shortages” and a resurgent rightwing populist politics built on the myth of an orchestrated “replacement” of native populations which demonizes these immigrants as criminal in nature. I even speculate on the disquieting prospect of generalizing the kafala system beyond the Gulf region, whose peculiar demographic features Tapia examines in his essay.

Fertility and working women: I propose no link between women working outside the home and declining fertility rates. In my essay, I stress that for much of the nineteenth century in Britain, fertility rates were exceptionally high even while women frequently worked in industry, because the income children earned played an important role in household reproduction. When I suggest it is “no coincidence” that fertility rates fell rapidly in the sixties and seventies at the same time women began to enter the labor force (in the US, for example), I am not making a general claim about the statistical correlation between these trends, but noting the exceptional nature of the period in question. That period—1960 to 1980, roughly—was characterized by the convergence of falling profit rates and therefore the erosion of the norm of the family wage, on the one hand, and the sharpening of women’s struggle for autonomy over their reproductive capacity and family size, on the other. This struggle led many women to seek out, in the labor market and the workplace, the income and the solidarities (or shared grievances) explicitly denied them in the claustrophobic confines of home and family life. In short, many women found themselves forced into the labor market at a moment when wage labor seemed to afford them new forms of autonomy from the privations of domestic life.

This brings us to Marx. Writing about the relation between capital accumulation and population growth at a time of unprecedentedly high fertility rates—they would begin falling rapidly in the UK only at the very moment he published Capital—it is unlikely that Marx could have anticipated the dramatic decline in both rates that industrialized (or “postindustrial”) nations have experienced over the past fifty years. But while Tapia insists that “Marx’s views on population are neither particularly consistent nor particularly relevant to the demographic reality of the twenty-first century,” I remain convinced that Marx’s theory of accumulation provides important insights into the relation between population movements and the course of capitalist development.

Tapia’s charge that Marx’s “views” are inconsistent is odd, however. Tapia holds that “Marx expects indefinite population growth under capitalism” and that “Marx unequivocally stated his view that the accumulation of capital…would imply expansion of the population” (my emphasis). In neither of the passages he cites as evidence of Marx’s “views” on population does Marx envision a scenario in which capital accumulation proceeds in spite of slowing population growth or even outright population decline. Broadly speaking, we can agree that Marx understood the breakneck population growth in the UK and elsewhere between 1770, say, and 1870 to be the result of a radical change in how societies reproduce themselves under capitalist conditions.

But there is a difference between what Tapia describes as Marx’s “views” on population and his theoretical formulation of capitalism’s “law of population.” I agree with Tapia that “it would be difficult to assert whether Marx had a theory of population.” But it is clear as day that he had a theory of “overpopulation,” which he characterized as a theory of “relative surplus population” in order to differentiate the object of his scrutiny from “absolute” population movements, which are the concern of the “economists” and their “dogma.” Marx states over and again that he is not concerned with absolute population size tout court, nor does he consider population growth relative to a given quantity of goods necessary to reproduce that population. He is concerned instead with the size of the working population relative to the demand for labor—that is, relative to its ability to access, by means of waged employment, those goods necessary for its reproduction. What determines the size of a surplus population is not the quantity of resources, but how much labor is required to valorize capital at a given moment in the business cycle. Readers of Marx, but also those who attentively observe the actual functioning of capitalist economies, know that the accumulation of capital requires a reserve army of the unemployed not only as a lever to control wages, but also as a readily-available contingent of labor large enough to be thrown into production in moments of capitalist expansion, as new lines of production and new industries emerge.

When I say, then, that Marx has no theory of population, I mean that he is not concerned with whether the population as a whole is growing, declining, or stagnant. Nothing in his theory allows us to explain why it is that household sizes in deindustrializing societies have contracted so rapidly over the past half a century. It is hard to imagine Marx “envisioning” a fully-developed capitalist society experiencing a population decline of the sort seen in Japan and Italy, and soon elsewhere. But when Tapia contends that “Marx unequivocally stated the view that the accumulation of capital…would imply expansion of the population,” he relies on a passage that only seems to contradict Marx’s fully developed account of this relationship.

In this passage Tapia cites, found in the opening section of Capital’s long Chapter Twenty-Five, Marx does indeed confirm that “the demand for labor…clearly increase[s] in the same proportion as the capital.”² But, far from stating this “unequivocally,” he immediately qualifies this proposition by emphasizing that this proportionality holds only in cases where “the composition of capital also remains constant,” that is, under conditions in which the organic composition of capital does not change. (And it is Marx’s position that an increase in composition is the normal trend.) In fact, Marx’s objective in the chapter on accumulation is precisely to disarticulate the proportionality between population growth and capital accumulation. If he refuses to treat population growth and labor productivity as two independent variables—this is Malthus’s method—he also refuses to make one of the variables depend on the other, which is what Adam Smith does in his chapter on wages in The Wealth of Nations. There it is maintained that the rate of capital accumulation determines, seamlessly, the rate of population growth (for example, according to Smith, China, though a large and wealthy nation, has a stagnant population because the current rate of accumulation is stagnant). When Marx famously equates population growth with capital accumulation (“the accumulation of capital is therefore the multiplication of the proletariat”³), he is restating Smith’s theory, not formulating his own. We need only recall that this equation appears in the opening pages of this chapter on the fate of the working class in capitalist societies, where it is temporarily assumed that the expanded reproduction of capital occurs without any change in the ratio of machinery and raw materials to labor employed. Only under this largely artificial assumption would the working population grow at the same rate capital does.

Unlike Tapia, Jasper Bernes appears to agree with me that Marx’s construction of an abstract “law of population” specific to the capitalist mode of production might still have something to tell us about future trends in both. I see Bernes’s short essay less as a set of critical responses to my essay than an attempt to think through, and perhaps revise, the questions I pose in his own terms. He underlines that my essay seems to address a serious “gap” in current discussions of capitalism’s development, at least among Marxists and those who are convinced that the critical analysis of this trajectory is an unavoidable part of the eventual overthrow of this peculiar way of organizing social reproduction. There is no such gap in the ruminations and anxieties of business elites—those who own productive assets, and whose business it is to consume labor in the production of goods and services—who have loudly aired their anxieties about the effect of slowing population growth (and, in their minds, potential labor shortfalls) on the “growth” of capitalist economies. As Bernes notes, however, demographic considerations have long been skirted by Marxists, for fear of being deemed crypto-Malthusian. A properly Marxist consideration of the relation between population movements and the arc of capital accumulation requires that one come to terms with Marx’s elaborate and extensive treatment of this question, but not in an uncritical way. In my own essay I appeal to feminist criticisms of Marx’s account, for example, less to invalidate than to confirm it.

Bernes’s essay covers much ground, and offers many insights and useful corrections to my speculations. Here again, I cannot address all those aspects of his essay here, for reasons of space. I want only to emphasize one exegetical difference between us, since it bears directly on the interpretation of Marx.

The first half of Bernes’s short essay concerns the relation between population growth and capital accumulation, and traces an inversion he locates in his own shifting understanding of this relation. This shift is the transformation of one question into another, from a poorly formulated question to one correctly posed. This movement from the wrong to right question assumes the form, in turn, of a syntactical and conceptual inversion. The first question, we might say, is one posed by business elites; the second, by Marxist theorists. Bernes begins by asking (I paraphrase) “what role does population growth have in the accumulation of capital?,” only to realize such a question has things backwards. The question Marx poses, and answers, he argues, is “what role does capital accumulation have on population growth”? Bernes answers this question in the following way:

upon consideration we find that the deceleration of population growth which we observe is already itself determined by the (slowing) trajectory of capital accumulation—the countries where the population is falling fastest are those countries which were fully transitioned to capitalism in the last two centuries and are already embarked upon postindustrial stagnation. It is not possible for population to itself become the independent variable of a function for capital accumulation since it is already the dependent one.

On its face, there is little in this paragraph to object to. It is certainly the case that those countries where declining fertility rates are most dramatic are generally nations counted among the high-income, industrialized economies of the world: nations that, in almost every case, are now subject to a seemingly secular postindustrial “stagnation.” Here Bernes suggests that population movements mirror the movement of capital, to use Marx’s language: that population growth does not drive accumulation but, to the contrary, the rate of accumulation (the independent variable) determines the rate of population growth (the dependent variable). For this reason, Bernes concludes his remarks with the suggestion that Marx’s famous line from the first section of Chapter 25—“the accumulation of capital is therefore the multiplication of the proletariat”—can “be reversed: multiplication of the proletariat is accumulation of capital—human population, counted so abstractly, is the mirage of capital accumulation.”

My misgivings about this conclusion stem from the fact that Bernes here appears to take the celebrated proposition found in the first section of this chapter as Marx’s own, rather than a proposition to be criticized. The reversibility of the equation—note that Bernes’s final inversion drops the “therefore” after the “is”—is the object of Marx’s critique. From the first lines of the second section of the same chapter, it is said the conditions of accumulation assumed in the first section are insufficient to describe the relation between the two terms in question. Such conditions would apply only to the “infancy,” as Marx puts it, of capitalist social relations; only in a still nascent capitalist society would “proportional growth in the demand for labor…correspond to the accumulation of capital.” But under such conditions, Marx underlines, the growth of capital would still be bound by a “natural barrier” or external limit, in the form of the current size of the existing working population. When accumulation encounters such a limit—where it can no longer rely on the existing labor supply in a given situation to expand output—it must depend instead on the “development of the productivity of social labor.” Under these conditions, the accumulation of surplus labor no longer takes the form of incorporating new units of labor (or extending the time of the working day, the other possibility), but of generating more such labor from each individual worker. This requires replacing some units of labor with labor-saving machinery. Under these altered conditions, which are those prevailing in fully-developed capitalist economies, the “demand for labor falls progressively with the growth of capital, instead of rising in proportion to it, as previously assumed” (my emphasis).⁴

Marx relentlessly belabors this point throughout the third section of the chapter on accumulation. He insists in these pages that “capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labor-power which the natural increase of population yields,” and that “the demand for labor is not identical with the increase of capital, nor is supply of labor identical with the increase of the working class.”⁵ Nevertheless, it can be argued that throughout this chapter, when discussing the unfettering of the pace of accumulation from the “natural” growth of the population—the rupture of the “proportionality” between capital growth and population size, so that accumulation is “independent” of the absolute size of the population—Marx is still assuming a rapidly increasing population, such as was actually the case in England throughout the middle part of the 19th century. The emphasis is simply on the discrepancy between two growth rates, and on the fact that the growth of capital need not be hindered by the pace of population growth. But since the model Marx constructs characterizes the relation between two growth rates, we need not assume that the population is actually growing for the model of accumulation to work. Establishing the independence of accumulation from the natural limits of population size means capital growth would proceed apace even under conditions of stagnating, or even declining, population growth. Here is where Marx breaks decisively with Smith’s model, and with the equation (or identity) implied in the assertion that the accumulation of capital is therefore the propagation of the proletariat.

I noted earlier that one reason Marx might seem not “particularly relevant” for the demographic reality of the twenty-first century is that it is difficult to imagine Marx “envisioning” a fully-developed capitalist society experiencing a population decline of the sort seen in Japan and Italy, and soon elsewhere. In the final pages of this long chapter, however, Marx does in fact treat an example in which capital accumulation occurs under the exceptional conditions of declining population growth, namely the dramatic depopulation of Ireland, due to famine and mass emigration between 1846 and the time Marx was writing. Here is a case in which the movement of “population” is explicitly declining in absolute terms. And Marx’s analysis is intriguing, insofar as it notes that though this meant a “decrease in the total product,” the “surplus product” actually increased relative to that total product, since the depopulation of the island was accompanied by an “agricultural revolution” in which the consolidation of small holdings into large estates, the conversion of arable land into pasture for cattle and sheep breeding, and the use of labor-saving machinery where needed, reduced the demand for agricultural labor dramatically. Indeed, where a Malthusian would point to the contracting labor supply as necessarily improving the lot of the rural working class, according to the model of the “Black Death” in which English laborers’ wages rose as they were progressively emancipated from feudal bondage, in Ireland the conditions for laborers in the mid-1860s were worse than was the case in the decades before the island lost half its population.⁶ Despite this unprecedented depopulation, “the relative surplus population is just as great today as it was before 1846,” since the rate at which labor productivity has risen—and demand for labor fallen—has outstripped the rate at which the population has declined. “The revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration,” Marx concludes, and the “production of a relative surplus population has more than kept pace with absolute depopulation.”⁷

The implications of this passage for Marx’s theory, and for our own demographic reality, will have to be developed elsewhere. For the time being, I hope my signaling of this important passage or example, and my restatement of what I take to be Marx’s argument in this chapter, will allow other readers to make their own assessment as to the consistency, and relevance, of Marx’s theoretical model for understanding the current relationship between demography and capitalist development.