Who Threatens the West: Marx or Malthus?

by Petr Hampl

Petr Hampl presents a perspective by Ivo Budil, who argues that contemporary Western ideological stagnation stems from a pervasive neo-Malthusianism, marking a critical departure from traditional Marxist thought.

It is normal for the more educated inhabitants of the colonies to follow the intellectual happenings in the main city, while the inhabitants of the centre have no idea of the ideas being generated in the colonies. But it is a pity, because it is on the fringes that interesting things are being created. And, after all, the whole of Christian civilisation is based on a cult that emerged in a marginal part of the Roman Empire.

That’s why we follow Anglo-Saxon thinking in our Czech lands. The official one — the politically correct ideology of the globalist empire — but also the oppositional one. Even if it is difficult for us. For example, the view of humanity divided into races — this has always been unfamiliar to the Slavs. But we respect that it is fundamental to Anglo-Saxon thought, even if we find ideas like the establishment of a white ethnostate led by Americans horrible. And we are also keen to understand the constant desire to wage war against Russia, even though it is completely strange to us. Meanwhile, we resist American influences like anti-genderism and multiculturalism.

However, if the English-speaking world would occasionally look into Slavic Eastern Europe, it would find some interesting things too. For example, the ideology of the conservative left, which is natural to us and incomprehensible to Americans. It is linked to the idea of the national state, which defends its citizens against both Sorosian non-profits and multinational capital.

This time, however, I would like to present a different perspective. Its author is Ivo Budil, professor of anthropology, author of many books and founder of two universities. He is also a man who faces a lot of unpleasantness in today’s Czech Sorosian state:

The Western world is facing an attack. For more than three decades, its intellectual, media, academic and political life has been progressively dominated by an activist ideology that has successfully curbed critical and free thinking. A new type of language is being promoted that paralyses the reason of the West. It does so in the name of fighting repression and establishing authentic genderless and cosmopolitan beings free from all history. This language has become the compulsory equipment of the privileged liberal classes and the hallmark of members of the global elite. Many conservatives refer to that worldview as progressivism. This is not the happiest choice, as it can cause historical misunderstanding. Progressivism was born in the late nineteenth century through the eloquent American social reformer and evangelical William Jennings Bryan’s advocacy for a more equitable distribution of social wealth. Bryan’s agenda was taken up by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt and other liberal and conservative statesmen. This American progressivism has nothing to do with the irrational activism of the contemporary West.

Leading spokesmen for Anglo-Saxon conservatism Yoram Hazony, Douglas Murray, Pat Buchanan and many other writers speak of the rise of neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism. They are referring to a diverse stream of modern thought whose roots go back to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School, Michel Foucault’s poststructuralism, or Edward Said’s postcolonialism. The conquest of the mind and heart of the West by neo-Marxism was allegedly initiated, among others, by one of the leaders of the revolutionary left movement of the late 1960s, Rudi Dutschke, with his call for a ‘long march through the institutions’.

However, certain doubts arise. How could it be that the above rather esoteric, intellectually sophisticated and at times difficult to understand doctrines have resulted in the rise of mass activism driven primarily by strong, almost religious collective emotions and hysteria without deeper intellectual self-reflection and immersion? The Cultural Revolution that is supposedly underway in the United States and other Western countries is being led from above by university-educated elites whose goal is to ideologically indoctrinate the working and lower classes who are resisting this ‘awakening’ in their blindness. The result is not the liberation of the broad classes but rather their disempowerment by the material misery and intellectual impotence of the capitalist corporations.

Karl Marx would undoubtedly be alarmed by such a development, considering it a victory of pure reaction. Like Benjamin Franklin, William Godwin, and Lyndon LaRouche, Marx believed in the unlimited potential of human reason. He was convinced that it was necessary to create social and material conditions such that all people, regardless of their origins, could participate fully in the creative transformation of nature on the basis of scientific progress, which is without limits. This ethos persisted even under the declining conditions of real socialism. Nothing is further from contemporary activists, openly proclaiming an ideology of ‘no growth’ and enthusiastically embracing poverty, than this original Marxist aspiration.

I fear that conservatives like Yoram Hazony or Douglas Murray do not know their enemy. They are fighting a different war in a different century. The Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth century in Great Britain, whose political system was largely dominated by large landowners and a hereditary oligarchy. Its leaders were fully aware of the benefits of the free market and new modes of production. But in the spirit of their caste mentality and hereditary privilege, they were not going to share fully with the broader popular classes in the British Isles or with the indigenous populations overseas the fruits of the modern economy. The task of justifying, in the language of modern science, the unequal distribution of wealth in the new historical conditions fell to the British liberal economist and clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that while food production increases arithmetically, population increases geometrically. This dramatic disparity can only be compensated for by social injustice and constraints such as wars, epidemics and the reproduction of social hierarchy and inequality. There is no escape from the grim laws mentioned above.

Malthusianism was born, which, by emphasising the scarcity of resources or by proclaiming the inherent biological or cognitive inequality among human beings, enables the coexistence of caste and modernity and the existence of global social and ethnic apartheid. It is the most effective modern way of defending oligarchy and denying the equality and rights of human beings and the unlimited potential of human reason. Thomas Robert Malthus believed that every society sooner or later hits its natural limits. Human nature can never overcome natural limits. The progressive development of society does not ensure greater productivity and efficiency in the use of resources. The laws of nature will always eventually prevail over human ambition.

Malthusianism has evolved and changed according to historical circumstances. It has been adopted by many thinkers and public figures espousing liberalism, such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Jeremy Bentham. Ronald Meek wrote that in the first half of the nineteenth century, no idea was probably more debated than that put forward by Thomas Robert Malthus in his early writings. Thereafter, his name appears less frequently. Malthus’s intellectual impulse has been submerged in the subconscious of modern thought and imprinted itself, often in simplified form, on many intellectual currents that influence Western civilisation to this day, without the name of the prime mover being directly mentioned.

The spirit of Malthusianism gave birth during the nineteenth century to racial ideology, social Darwinism and eugenics, whose common denominator was the attempt to justify human inequality and to justify imperial or racial hierarchies within modern civilisation. This meant the suppression of human resources, productivity, creativity, and unprivileged talent in many countries of the world, which became exploited peripheries and colonies of the West. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, neo-Malthusianism in the form of environmentalism, population control, and critiques of rationalism and scientific progress became widespread. In contrast to racial Malthusianism, which emphasised biological inequality, elitist neo-Malthusianism sought to cripple the collective rationality of broad classes that might fall out of the control of the new global oligarchy.

The Green Destiny agenda, culminating in the deindustrialisation of Europe, is the logical outcome of the neo-Malthusian agenda. The development of nuclear power, fusion research and the ambitious space flight programme have been abandoned. The West is losing its productive power and turning into an impoverished but, at the same time, consumerist hedonistic community resigned to rationalism and a positive vision of material and moral progress. Western society is split between individuals who have identified with the interests of a global oligarchy turning into a technocratic neo-feudal caste and an increasingly large stratum of people who instinctively feel they have been deprived of a future drawing on the legacy of humanism and the Enlightenment.

The contemporary activist ideology that pervades Western political, media and academic spheres is not a derivative of neo-Marxism, as is often heard from conservative quarters, but a product of neo-Malthusianism, which by its very nature undermines the power of human reason. Neo-Malthusianism is the ideology of the transnational corporations from which the new aristocracy is recruited. We are thus faced with a global alliance between neoliberalism and neo-Malthusianism, which is not surprising given Thomas Robert Malthus’s affiliation with the English liberal school of economics and the sympathy Malthus’s work enjoyed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among liberal thinkers. Looming over the contemporary West is not the spectre of Karl Marx but the ghost of the spokesman for the British Empire that once turned the world into a planetary apartheid and split England — in the words of Benjamin Disraeli — into two irreconcilable nations: rich and poor.