Marx and Malthusianism: Comment
批评Hollander关于马克思模型中实际工资长期下降源于人口增长的观点，指出劳动力价值下降源于劳动生产率提高，而非人口与劳动力需求增长率差异，且人口控制并非防止实际工资下降的必要条件。
In a recent article in this Review (1984), Samuel Hollander suggests that the secular path of real wages in the Marxian model tends toward a subsistence wage at which population growth ceases. He attributes this decline to a higher growth rate in population relative to a positive but decreasing rate of growth in the demand for labor power. From this he contends that, in contrast to the Malthusian prescription, Marx . . is open to the objection that, with no check at all to the population growth rate, the deterioration would have been sharper still (p. 148). The implication of Hollander's argument is clear enough, for if accepted, it would necessarily lead one to dismiss Marx's claim that: ....every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered with them (Capital, I, 1967, p. 632). This comment takes issue with the thesis advanced by Hollander on two major points. First, the secular decline in the value of labor power is a result of the increasing productivity of labor rather than the divergence between the respective growth rates in population and the demand for labor power. Second, this is perfectly consistent with constant or even rising absolute real wages (price of labor power) for the active part of the working class.1 Thus, population control is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition in assuring against falling real wages for a changing social productivity of labor. Put differently, the supply of labor power to the advanced capitalist sector is the crucial supply variable -not the rate of population growth. I begin by reviewing Hollander's useful distinction between Marx's value of labor power and the classical school's minimum subsistence wage. Next, it is shown that the value of labor power is determined by the social productivity of labor rather than factors exogenous to the system (population). The discussion is brought to a close by focusing on the prime mover of the path of relative real wages in the Marxian model: the endogenously determined supply of labor power (surplus population) to the advanced capital sector.