Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science (Jason - Day 7)

Harvey argues that all scientific methods are necessarily founded in ideology, and that any claim to be ideology free is necessarily an ideological claim. Indeed, scientific inquiry of any sort is founded by a specific set of ethical propositions that have very tangible political and social implications. Harvey argues that acknowledging the ideological, ethical and socially and historically contingent bases of scientific inquiry is critical when engaging the population-resources problem.

Harvey invokes the works of Malthus and Ricardo to demonstrate that scientific methods of inquiry are historically and socially-situated. Although both thinkers employ different approaches to the population-resource problem (Malthus uses logical empiricism and Ricardo uses a normative model of social harmony), they arrive at similar class-based conclusions that problematize working-class and poor populations. Such approaches confirm the class-based distinctions of the capitalist social order while proscribing oppressive solutions to fix the population-resources problem. The problem is not the capitalist system, the methods of Malthus and Ricardo lead us to conclude, but the social habits of poor and laboring populations. Harvey then uses Marx’s concepts of “surplus value” and “surplus labor” to illustrate how a non-Aristotelian and dialectical approach to the population-resources debate problematizes poverty as endemic to the capitalist mode of production. Unlike Malthus, argues Harvey, “Marx does not talk about a population problem but a poverty and human exploitation problem” (269). Marx’s method leads us to conclude that poverty is inevitable to a capitalism mode of production and consumption that depends upon scarcity; poverty is eliminated only when capitalism is eliminated.

Harvey argues that Malthus, Ricardo and Marx all express ideological positions in their differing approaches to the population-resource debate. In each case, the ethics-laden methods adopted by each thinker are directly related to each respective conclusion (and policy solution). Convinced by the dialectical approach, Harvey assumes the position that “it is difficult to see how anything other than a relational, constructivist, and internally dynamic method can be appropriate for looking into the future of the population-resources relation, particularly when it is so evident that knowledge and understanding are such important mediating forces in the construction of the future” (271).

Harvey is weary of the political and social implications of Neo-Malthusian solutions to the population-resource debate that are tailored to consolidate the dominant positions of ruling elites within capitalist society while facilitating the continuance of class and ethnic oppression. Such policies, he argues, were instrumental in the transformation of America’s welfare population from a tool for the manipulation of effective demand (as in the 1960s) into a tool for attacking wage rates. As ideas are social relations, it is critical to confront the political and social origins of the ideological propositions that underlie arguments relating to issues as politically charged as the population-resource problem. Indeed, lasting and positive social change starts with confronting the illusion of ideology-free and ethically neutral scientific inquiry. Ignorance of this, as Harvey illustrates, can have devastating consequences by inviting “class and ethnic repression at home and policies of imperialism and neo-imperialism abroad” (274).