Environmental Neo-Malthusianism and the Communist Alternative

Overcoming the false dichotomy of ecologically destructive growth or degrowth with the notion of sustainable development. China leads the way!

Like rotary phones, typewriters, and VHS tapes, capitalism has outlived its usefulness.

If at certain moments in its historical development it served an important role in unleashing the productive forces from the shackles set on it by feudal relations of production, today in our highly financialized, ultra-parasitical decaying capitalist-imperialism, it is as evident as ever that social utility has long ago stopped being an unintended side-effect of capital accumulation. Well past are the times of capitalism’s vitality, when Marx and Engels could confidently proclaim that the form of life had “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”[1] Today these wonders are erected in China, Russia, and the flowering multipolar world.

Western Imperialist Financialization and the Global South’s Economic Development

Faced with the culmination of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and of the unwillingness to return to the government intervention which dominated most capitalist economies in the Second World War, the crisis of the 1970s forced capitalists in the West to choose primarily two lifelines to recover worthwhile profit margins and prolong the life of the system. On the one hand, it could export productive capital abroad, increasing the rate of profit through buying labor power cheaper (and hence, lowering the cost of what Marx calls “variable capital”).[2] On the other hand, it could seek to make profits in more financialized and parasitic forms, through, for instance, interest rates, rents, and stock buy backs. Both led to general deindustrialization in the West and the gutting of any semblance of a productive economy.

The American capitalist class took both routes; it exported productive capital to the global south and deviated investments towards profiting from rents, interest rates, and stock buybacks. Today, as the economist Michael Hudson has shown, 92% of the profits of the Fortune 500 companies have been used to buy stocks – their own stock buyback programs – or to pay out as dividends. Only 8% is used on new investment.”[3] As Radhika Desai argues, the U.S. and Britain, therefore “led [most of] the world down the path that could only weaken productive economies and expand predatory and speculative finance.”[4] 

Faced with the fact that most profits in the Western capitalist states, especially its imperial heartland in America, are coming from activities which produce absolutely no real economic growth, the capitalist class has had to abandon the promethean attitude to growth that characterized its position on economic development in the 20^th century. Today, faced with the objective devastation produced by capitalist growth on the environment, it has resuscitated Malthusianism with an environmentalist garb. I’ve called this Environmental Neo-Malthusianism (ENM).[5]

Instead of seeing the ecological crisis as rooted in capitalist production, which is fundamentally uncapable to develop ways to grow in harmony with nature, it has blamed growth itself. Both economic and populational growth are pinned as responsible for the product of Western capitalist-imperialism. How convenient that at a stage when productive development occurs primarily in the BRICS+ countries, especially in a China that outpaces U.S. production by two, that bourgeois ideology turns to ENM and paints real economic growth as the villain.

This is, of course, an abstract view of growth. It is exactly what should be expected from bourgeois ideology, which is fundamentally unable to ascend to the concrete, i.e., to understand the concrete concretely. Everything for them is reified, disconnected from the processes and webs of interconnections in which things are located. Growth in general is then blamed for the effects of a particular, historically and geographically situated, capitalist growth.

The intention here is clear. As the Western capitalist class shows itself incapable of any real economic growth, it condemns growth itself. Of course, the growth it condemns is of the kind that occurs in the global South and East, where productive development often outpaces even the U.S. It has no problem praising the growth obtained by parasitic Western finance capital. This is nothing but the form imperialist ideology has to take today to sustain a position that promotes the impoverishing of the global South.

Imperialism, as Lenin taught us, aims to fundamentally suffocate the ability of the colonized and imperialized to grow. Amilcar Cabral echoes Lenin when he tells us that “We have seen that violent usurpation of the freedom of the process of development of the productive forces of the dominated socio-economic whole constitutes the principal and permanent characteristic of imperialist domination, whatever its form.”[6] This is why leaders of the socialist and anti-colonial struggles in the 20^th and 21^st centuries have so fiercely pronounced the importance of economic, scientific, and technological development.

For Mao, central to the project of Chinese sovereignty was socialism, because “only socialism can save China.”[7] This is because, as Mao writes, “the socialist system has promoted the rapid development of the productive forces of our country, a fact even our enemies abroad have had to acknowledge.”[8] Writing in the early 1960s, Mao would say that their “main accomplishment has been to clear the way for the development of the productive forces.”[9]

Deng Xiaoping would write that “A Communist society is one in which there is no exploitation of man by man, there is great material abundance and the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs is applied. It is impossible to apply that principle without overwhelming material wealth. In order to realize communism, we have to accomplish the tasks set in the socialist stage. They are legion, but the fundamental one is to develop the productive forces so as to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism and provide the material basis for communism.”[10]

Cabral himself emphasized the futility of the comprador bourgeoisie in “direct[ing] the development of the productive forces,” urging us to remember that “the productive forces are the motive force of history, and total freedom of the process of their development is an indispensable condition for their proper functioning.”[11]

Kim Il Sung emphasized that “without building an independent national economy [i.e., economic self-sufficiency], it is impossible to guarantee the firm political independence of a country, develop the productive forces and improve the people’s standard of living.”[12] To be “in conformity with socialist society,” Il Sung urged the need to “develop the productive forces [and] place all sectors of the national economy on the basis of modern technology.”[13]

Writing out of Cuba, Che Guevara would say that “The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colonial or neocolonial shackles, which is being carried out by means of politi­cal weapons, arms, or a combination of the two, is not separate from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are stages on the same road leading toward the creation of a new society of justice and plenty.”[14] This requires the unleashing of the productive forces currently being suffocated by Western imperialism.

“Degrowth Communism” Contra the Classics of Marxism

Today, however, the new fad in the so-called bourgeois academy is ‘degrowth communism’. Thinkers like Jason Hickel, Kohei Saito, and others, who uphold a distorted caricature of Marxism which condemns economic growth and urges economic ‘degrowth,’ are propped up as a ‘radical’ form of Environmental Neo-Malthusianism.[15] Matt Huber is right to point out, in his critique of the degrowth “communists,” that “it would be quite sad to build a socialist movement capable of seizing the means of production only to prohibit from the outset the further development of the productive forces. Socialism is not stasis. What about fusion power? Curing cancer? We still have so much left to accomplish as a species that capitalism might be holding us back from.”[16]

Seeking to always confuse the mass of people into thinking that theories which are fundamentally anti-Marxist and anti-communist are actually their opposite, the bourgeoisie has set the stage for these characters to present the public with a Frankenstein Marxism, a Marxism put together by an eclectic mix of liberalism, abstracted quotes from random unpublished manuscripts (Saito), and a general hodgepodge of decades of CIA-MI6 funded anti-communist ‘leftism,’ aimed at creating a compatible, imperialism friendly “left.” At a time when most of the American people are living paycheck to paycheck, drowning in debt-slavery, and living lives plagued by desperation and material insecurity, to pitch communism as ‘degrowth’ is to confirm the McCarthyite lie that socialism will make everyone poor. Instead of debunking this ruling class lie and showing how communists seek to create the sort of material abundance that allows for universal human flourishing, these so-called “socialists” embrace it. Perhaps their socialism has Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum characteristics, because it sure sounds a whole lot like telling poor working class people that they’ll “own nothing and be happy.”

We must be clear, this ‘degrowth communism’ is nothing more than the ‘radical’ form environmental neo-Malthusianism has to take to win over the middle-class leftists to their side. These are the priestly class that ensures, through the iron triangle of the media, NGO’s, and the academy, that this junk is fed into wrongly self-proclaimed popular, grassroots, or even ‘socialist’ organizations. It is, however, anti-Marxist and anti-communist through and through.

The Marxist tradition has always understood that only in the development of the forces of production can socialism flourish. In Capital Vol. I, for instance, Marx writes that:

The development of society's productive forces… [create the] material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.^[17]

It is the development of “the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production” which “ripens,” in the capitalist mode of life, “both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.”^[18] As with other modes of life, Marxist have long understood that capitalist relations of production, while at one point being “forms of development [for] the productive forces,” have in time “turn[ed] into their fetters.”^[19] Socialist relations of production have always been understood to have the capacity of breaking through these fetters and helping unleash the forces of production. As Marx famously writes in Capital Vol. I.,

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.^[20]

A similar argument is made by Engels in his celebrated Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself.^[21]

In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” while elaborating on some general characteristics and preconditions for the highest phase of communist society, Marx would say that,

In the highest phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!^[22]

Capitalist relations of production in time become a barrier for human progress, as it is evident in today’s fully financialized Western capitalist-imperialism. But the fetters are not just for the forces of production, i.e., the economic base of society, but also for culture, politics, arts, philosophy i.e., the superstructure of society. The decadent and degenerate culture of today’s Western capitalism should itself demonstrate how profoundly fettering it is to the cultural development of humanity.

Overcoming the “System of Waste”

While more progressive than the feudal orders which preceded it in Europe, capitalism also produces enormous waste. It is in this wastefulness and inefficiency, this anarchy of production, that capitalism has been able to produce an environmental crisis it is unfit to deal with. Capitalism wastes labor, human potential, nature, and everything in between. As British socialist William Morris eloquently stated, “The truth is that our system of Society is essentially a system of waste.”^[23]

Not only would socialist relations of production remove the artificial fetters created by a society wherein production is aimed at profit, but also the extreme wastefulness in labor, life, and things created by such anarchic production for-profit. As Engels argues,

The social appropriation of the means of production puts an end not only to the current artificial restrictions on production [i.e., capitalist fetters], but also to the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products… It sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and products by putting an end to the senseless luxury and extravagance of the present ruling classes and their political representatives. [This affords] the possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence which is not only perfectly adequate materially and which becomes daily richer, but also guarantees him the completely free development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties.^[24]

The emphasis on the development of the forces of production has led critics of Marxism to argue that socialism would reproduce the same ‘productivism’ as capitalist society. This depicts a fundamental poverty of dialectical thinking. Yes, socialism seeks to unleash the productive forces and create the sort of abundance wherein the human community can “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”^[25] However, this growth is people-centered, not capital-centered. The aim of the development of the forces of production is not the accumulation of endless profit in a small group of hands. Far from this capitalist telos, which grows without regard for nature and human life, socialist growth is centered on creating conditions for the greatest amount of human flourishing – something which necessarily implies de-alienating humans from nature and overcoming the metabolic rifts anarchic capitalist production creates.^[26]

Instead of carrying out production in environmentally unsustainable ways – as capitalism does – socialist production allows for both developments in the productive forces and – because of its efficiency and elimination of superfluous waste – for this development to be carried out in a metabolic harmony with nature. As Marx argues in Capital Vol. III., communist production would

Govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.^[27]

China, Sustainable Development, and Socialist Ecological Civilization

This harmonious metabolism, or balance, can be seen most clearly in China’s efforts to build a socialist ecological civilization – a task it proposed for itself at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2007. As it reads in the latest update to the CPC’s constitution, following the 20^th National Congress of the CPC in 2022, the Party must “work to balance … relations between humankind and nature.”^[28] “Harmony between humankind and nature,” as the constitution argues, is a fundamental component “in building a socialist ecological civilization” capable of creating “a positive path to development that ensures increased production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems.”^[29]

This dialectic of sustainable development, central to Marx and Engels’s understanding of socialism, finds its highest concrete form to date in China’s efforts to construct a socialist ecological civilization. As John Bellamy Foster, who has spearheaded the movement towards emphasizing the ecological dimensions of Marx and Engels’s thought, argued in one of his older works: China’s “developments reflect the recognition of a dialectic in this area that has long been part of Marxist theory.”^[30] In so doing, Foster argues, “China’s role in promoting ecological civilization as a stage in the development of socialism can be seen as its greatest gift to the world at present in terms of environmental governance.”^[31]

Far from accepting the false binary of growth with ecological devastation or degrowth, we must (as China has done) sublate this spurious dialectic by positing the necessity of sustainable growth, a reality that can only be actualized through planned control of the economy to serve peoples needs. Only socialism can both provide the abundance necessary for all to live fulfilling, flourishing lives, and do so in a manner that doesn’t destroy the nature upon which human existence is premised.

China will stay committed to promoting ecological conservation. As I have said many times, we should never grow the economy at the cost of resource depletion and environmental degradation, which is like draining a pond to get fish; nor should we sacrifice growth to protect the environment, which is like climbing a tree to catch fish. Guided by our philosophy that clean waters and green mountains are just as valuable as gold and silver, China has carried out holistic conservation and systematic governance of its mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, grasslands and deserts. – Xi Jinping

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[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 487.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1982), Ch. 8.

[3] Michael Hudson, “Debt, Empires, Oligarchs and a More Perfect State,” DSPod (July 2023): https://demystifysci.com/transcripts/2023/7/22/michael-hudson-on-debt-empires-oligarchs-and-a-more-perfect-state

[4] Radhika Desia, Capitalism, Coronavirus, and War (London: Routledge, 2022), 85.

[5] Carlos L. Garrido, “Overcoming the Dangers of Environmental Neo-Malthusianism and the Errors of Degrowth Ideology,” Philosophy in Crisis (January 2024): https://carlosgarrido.substack.com/p/overcoming-the-dangers-of-environmental

[6] Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” (January 1966), Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm

[7] Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works Vol. 5 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1977), 394.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Mao Tse-Tung, “Reading Notes On The Soviet Text Political Economy,” (1961-2) Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_64.htm

[10] Deng Xiaoping, “Reform is the Only Way for China to Develop Its Productive Forces,” (August 1985) The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/reform-is-the-only-way-for-china-to-developed-its-productive-forces/

[11] Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory.”

[12] Kim Il Sung, Works Vol. 19 (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Press, 1984), 266.

[13] Kim Il Sung, Works Vol. 13 (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Press, 1983), 229.

[14] Ernesto Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics & Revolution, ed. David Deutschmann and María del Carmen Ariet (Havana: Ocean Press, 2013), 340.

[15] See, for instance, Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the Planet (New York: Penguin, 2020); Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Michael Löwy, “Nine Theses on Ecosocialist Degrowth,” Monthly Review 75(3)  (July 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/07/01/nine-theses-on-ecosocialist-degrowth/ (It is unfortunate that the great American Marxist journal and editorial, Monthly Review, has accepted ‘degrowth.’ While most of the other work is still great, the turn from sustainable development rooted in Marxist ecology to degrowth has been disheartening).

[16] Matt Huber, “The Problem with Degrowth,” Jacobin (July 2023): https://jacobin.com/2023/07/degrowth-climate-change-economic-planning-production-austerity

[17] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I., (London: Penguin, 1982), 739.

[18] Marx, Capital Vol I., 635.

[19] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 21.

[20] Marx, Capital Vol. I., 929.

[21] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: Revolutionary Classics, 1993), 109.

[22] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 24, 87.

[23] William Morris, “As to Bribing Excellence,” William Morris Archive: http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/items/show/2322. 

[24] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 109.

[25] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 110.

[26] Capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (London: Penguin, 1991), 949. For more see John Bellamy Foster’s older works, especially Marx’s Capital and The Return of Nature, and Ian Agnus’s work, especially Facing the Anthropocene. While the theory of metabolic rifts is today used to defend a notion of ‘planetary limits and ecological overshoots’ which is foundational for the degrowthers, this is itself rooted in an abstract and static understanding of nature’s metabolisms. Metabolisms are dynamic, they can speed up or slow down. When rationally planned and subjected to more advanced technologies and instruments of production, nature’s metabolisms can be adapted to the ever-growing needs of humanity. The rift occurs when, thanks to the capitalist profit motive, no consideration is given to how a certain form of growth could have detrimental effects for the nature upon which that growth itself is premised. When human needs and nature are operative and central factors in the considerations behind economic development, one could still have their development and prevent the rifts capitalism creates.

[27] Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, 958-9.

[28] “Constitution Of The Communist Party Of China (Revised and adopted at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 22, 2022),” Qiushi (October 2022): http://en.qstheory.cn/2022-10/27/c_824864.htm 8.

[29] “Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” 10.

[30] John Bellamy Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?,” Monthly Review (October 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/10/01/why-is-the-great-project-of-ecological-civilization-specific-to-china/

[31] Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?”

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Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2024) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.