THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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who was no longer one at all, but already the first hired champion of the capitalist economy. Malthus decided in his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’, 1798, that
the reason for misery lies in the ‘natural’ contradiction between man's boundless striving for propagation and the limited increase in means of nourishment. Malthus
promises: mass misery will only exist until a nation sensibly recognizes this connection and restricts reproduction to a degree which corresponds to the degree of loaves
of bread available. Thus it is proletarian lechery, not capital, which produces social misery; and the so­called law of diminishing crop yield plainly passes sentence on
the proletarian scapegoat. The crisis also simply appears as a shortage crisis, on the assumption of very slowly increasing forces of production, not as one of surplus.
This theory was nevertheless modified many times, indeed a so­called academic socialist, Adolf Wagner, was preaching as late as the Nineties that Malthus was right in
all essentials. But the most essential part of his theory only came into its own when the capitalist age was fulfilled, and only baseness can drag it out further by means of
lies and murder. From the outset Malthus's theory was inherently misanthropic and bigoted, Marx had already certified its distinguishing feature to be ‘a profoundly low
level of thought’, in both the moral and the scientific sense. Consequently its brutality broke out completely in the imperialist stage of capitalism; it is not only féted
among American murderers however, but it is also at least excused by right­wing socialists, like Eduard Heimann, and even ennobled in Georgian* fashion by
particularly slimy fascists, like Edgar Salin. This renewed Malthusianism justifies war, the scrapping of the ‘superfluous’ unemployed, the fascist extermination of entire
nations, and at the same time it is designed to distract from the true causes of capitalist misery those proletarians whose existence is tolerated after they have been
subjected to the numerus clausus† of profit interest. All this recommends Malthus to the final spurt of capitalism; the latter is no longer capable of producing original
ideas anyway, not even about its baseness and in the service of it. As soon as the wish is no longer a progressive one, it does not even become the father of an idea, but
of a plot, or at least of a cover­up. The Malthusian approach, as a diagnosis diverted towards insufficient, socially isolated causes, is thus not just confined to a theory
of overpopulation. For even in circles which know nothing about and want to have nothing to do with the hiring
* reference to the German poet Stefan George.
† Restricted entry to German universities.