Raymond Aron’s Asia Between Malthus and Marx is a short essay published in 1955 as an Eastern Economist pamphlet, with a preface by the journal’s editor, E. P. W. da Costa. Aron, a French liberal scholar writing for an Indian readership shortly after his 1953 tour of the country, examines whether the Soviet or the American path of economic development offers a usable model for Asia—and argues that neither does. The essay is an exercise in hard-headed comparative political economy, moving from the Soviet experiment to the American example to Meiji Japan, and ending with a sober assessment of India’s democratic prospects.
“One often hears of “the vicious circle of poverty”.”
The Western Theory That Communism Is Asia’s Destiny
Aron opens by noting a strange reversal: a West that once failed to take Communist messianism seriously now sometimes seems to understand Communists better than they understand themselves. Since 1917, he observes, the gap between Marxist ideology and actual events has only widened—the Russian Revolution resembled nothing like the proletarian uprising Marx predicted, and the “revolutions from above” that delivered Eastern Europe to Soviet control cannot be read as capitalism destroying itself through its own contradictions. Yet the West has produced its own sophisticated pseudo-Marxist theory of under-developed countries, set out in journals like The New Statesman and Nation, which presents the Communist case more persuasively than the Communists do.
That theory has three parts. First, conditions in under-developed countries are supposedly ripe: rural overpopulation, a hated agrarian order, urban poverty, and the disintegration of old social structures under wartime pressure. Second, a single party—in practice almost always the Communist Party—is credited with a unique political role, its general staff drawn from intellectuals and its cadres made professional revolutionaries. Third, the “people’s democracy,” however brutal, is said to accomplish the one essential task of industrialising a backward country: the Party substitutes for missing private entrepreneurs, collective state-enforced savings replace private savings, and discipline plus fanatical ideology forge an elite suited to industrial society. Much of the “progressive camp” accepts this account: Communism as the revolt of hungry peasant masses, replacing capitalism as the agent of development while warding off colonial domination through foreign capital.
Aron’s response is to test the theory against facts. He grants the “vicious circle of poverty”—countries too poor to save, unable to invest, therefore unable to stop being poor—but insists the formula must be made precise. Progress requires output to grow faster than population, with the surplus reinvested rather than consumed, which in turn requires moving surplus rural labour into productive urban industry while keeping agricultural output up. In principle the Soviet regime looks uniquely capable of meeting these conditions: a strong state can extract savings against the population’s will, through low state prices paid to peasants and a turnover tax on workers, and investment decisions are made resolutely by Party leaders rather than left to the moods of a minority. Industrial construction becomes a collective task, with ideology supplying the discipline industrial society demands.
The Soviet Record: Steel Without Bread
Then comes the empirical check, and it is devastating. Tsarist Russia, Aron notes, had already begun escaping the poverty trap before 1914 with foreign capital’s help: between 1900 and 1913 the cereal-growing area rose 8 percent, the harvested crop 38 percent, and national income 39.4 percent while population grew 19.1 percent—real income per head advanced. The Soviet record, by contrast, is bleak. The best observers of Soviet affairs find that cereals available per person in 1938 were actually below the 1913 level, and the 1952 figure roughly equal to it; only sugar beet and industrial fibres advanced much faster than population. Livestock farming lagged partly by design, since grain yields more calories per acre than meat or milk.
Population growth after 1914 was itself held back by catastrophe: 8.3 million lost in 1918–1920, five million to the 1921 famine, nine million in the famine years of 1933–34, and 37.5 million to the Second World War including the deficit of births. Civil war, famine, and foreign war played a classically Malthusian role in Russia. Even so, population tended to outrun subsistence, growing about three million a year—1.5 percent—with no comparable advance in agricultural production.
From this Aron draws several conclusions. The antithesis “Malthus or Marx” is false as applied to Asia: Communism does transfer surplus rural labour to the towns and can mechanise agriculture, but capitalism does exactly the same—indeed, according to the author of the Communist Manifesto, that was capitalism’s historical function. More broadly, the Russian experiment reveals the inner contradiction of the Communist economic system: grand plans centred on heavy industry bring no immediate increase in the means of subsistence, forcing the state to appropriate a larger share of agricultural output to feed the cities. Since the state has no consumer goods to pay with, force becomes inevitable—and forced appropriation dries up the source, because a peasant whose profits never return to him has no reason to grow more. This contradiction, Aron says, is more flagrant than any Marx posited of capitalism in Das Kapital.
Neither Moscow Nor Detroit
If Soviet Russia offers Asia no working model, Aron argues, neither does America. Under-developed countries need only import industrial civilisation, not invent it, but the transfer brings problems the Western pioneers never faced. Two risks attend the attraction to Western industrial economies. First, in an age of virulent nationalism every government wants great-power armaments, yet armament industries are ruinously costly, forcing poor countries to choose between military dependence and expensive imitation of the 1954 Western world; certain industries imported into Asia—the motor industry, electronics—have probably been false steps, hard to undo. Second, and more insidiously, the West—especially the United States—presents far too modern a model, one that emphasises consumption rather than production. The American example discourages saving, and the American standard of living as displayed by Hollywood, glossy magazines, and tourists breeds astonished envy and an unhealthy appetite for consumption: the Asian businessman wants an American car, the middle classes see only their inferiority beside their European or American counterparts.
The Western model also has a demographic effect. It brings an inevitable insistence on the most up-to-date medicines, and mortality falls accordingly. In Europe before 1800 the birth rate stayed static or declined slowly while mortality dropped—a period of rapid population growth—but there the fall owed mainly to economic progress; in today’s under-developed countries it owes mainly to medicine. Aron cites the French scholar Sauvy: the coexistence of a mortality rate below 15 percent with a birth rate above 40 percent is no longer exceptional. The Western mortality rate on the eve of the First World War was 15 percent, so many under-developed countries now have the fertility of Europe in 1750 combined with the mortality of 1900—a time-lag of at least a century and a half.
Applied to India, the Soviet method would mean extracting more from agriculture without producing more, and pouring investment into heavy industry while denying peasants the consumer goods that would make them sell their grain. The “elimination of useless mouths” to which India would then have to resign itself would easily surpass the 60 or 70 million Russia has lost since the Revolution. The twentieth-century American method is simply inapplicable to Asia; perhaps the American methods of the eighteenth or nineteenth century would work, but modern Asia, heir to the welfare economics of the day, would find them unacceptable. Asia’s situation has no analogy in Western history, not even Russia’s: in 1913 Russia, with 170 million people, produced 30 million tons of steel, while India in 1950 produced 1.5 million. Russia then had more grain and livestock per head than France, and knew nothing like India’s recent pattern of population rising three or four million a year while the output of principal crops stayed flat. Industrialising India without raising agricultural output would lead to catastrophe; the only practicable path without inhuman violence lies elsewhere.
Meiji Japan as the Usable Model
That path, Aron suggests, is Japan’s. The Meiji leaders did three things. They diverted enough agricultural output to feed the cities and fund reinvestment without discouraging peasant production—after the feudal regime was suppressed, the state tax was much lower than the rent peasants had previously paid to the daimyo and samurai. They restricted consumption so that a large share of increased production was invested, with the redemption of feudal rights in bonds devalued by inflation supplying initial resources, supplemented by taxes and self-financing enterprises. And they balanced development so that demand from new factories never fell below supply. Mass incomes did not rise as fast as national income during industrialisation, yet Colin Clark’s statistics in Conditions of Economic Progress show income per head of the working population almost tripling and agricultural income per head doubling between 1889 and 1925.
Aron attributes this unprecedented success to the foresight and resolution of the ruling class. The Meiji leaders—nobles themselves—had the intelligence to liquidate the feudal structure, free the peasants, create a class of landowners, and organise universal education. The aristocrats, parasitical under the Shogunate, no longer fighting and kept by the peasants, staffed the new army, the universities, the public administration, and some of the new industries.
India’s position, Aron judges, is worse than Japan’s at the start of Meiji and worse than Russia’s at the start of the twentieth century, for one reason: population growth has far outstripped the means of subsistence. Three economic necessities follow—raise agricultural production without letting peasants consume the whole increment, save an increasing share of national income, and channel investment through well-balanced development rather than a rigid plan or pure market automatism. He doubts that India’s regime is incapable of these. The officials behind the Five-Year Plan compare well with Western counterparts, and the technical and administrative capacities Japan drew from its old ruling class India either possesses or can acquire through friendly experts. Less certain is the government’s capacity to direct the transformation: its leaders are intellectually equal to Japan’s or any Western country’s, but the capacity to govern differs from the talent for thought or writing—it demands managing men, grasping essentials, and the courage to act, and for any team the rarest virtue is holding together amid internal rivalries. Too little time has passed since the British withdrawal, and Nehru’s authority is too absolute, for a categorical judgment; but for the next ten or fifteen years the chances that the new elite maintains sufficient coherence are good.
On agrarian reform, especially eliminating the zamindars, Aron is clear that no such reform can cure the basic ills of land shortage and excessive population—but without freeing the peasant from the usurer there is no prospect of improvement. A democratic regime proceeding legally will move more slowly than a despotism; in India the responsibility belongs to the States rather than the central government, yet reform seems on its way. Better methods, dams, and irrigation are under way, with results visible only in time.
Savings, Aid, and the Democratic Wager
Raising savings is the hardest point. Savings stand at about 5 percent of national product, drawn from private enterprise and individuals, especially a privileged minority. The government now seems inclined to finance investment by budgetary deficit, hoping a moderate deficit encourages industrial expansion without provoking price rises; loans or gifts will probably be needed, at an annual total not exceeding a billion dollars—small relative to the donor nations’ economies. Western indifference to India’s effort, Aron writes, shows egoism and a lack of foresight; answering Nehru’s neutralist declaration by cutting aid is neither generous nor intelligent, since the free world has a major stake in India’s success. But everything finally depends on India itself: gifts can cover external deficits for a few years, yet internal savings must grow with national income, and the present savings rate is tragically small.
A footnote sharpens the point: a regime that respects its subjects’ personalities is at a disadvantage compared with despotism. Once improved living conditions for all are accepted as the goal, the Indian attitude toward animals looks scandalous—must monkeys destroy a substantial part of the crops, perhaps equal to food imports, and could not the enormous number of cows be put to some use while respecting the ban on killing them? In India it is age-old tradition, more than the resistance of privileged classes, that impedes reform.
Would an authoritarian regime do better or faster? It would use violence without hesitation—but would violence be efficacious with peasants? Everything Aron has seen in Russia makes him doubt it. In India, where order holds, competent officials are not lacking, and the ruling group has been won over to economic progress, the democratic regime must prove a triple ability: to modify rural social relations so as to encourage production, to gradually modify beliefs incompatible with economic Westernisation, and to impose substantial savings despite widespread poverty. For some years Nehru’s state, successor to the one the English built after the Great Moguls, faces no threat of a Communist electoral victory—only the disintegration of the party in office. As long as democracy lasts, the masses will be stirred by the propaganda of various parties, by economic change, and by the creation of linguistically homogeneous States. The essay closes with questions rather than answers: will the democrats hold the masses, gradually eliminate habits and traditions incompatible with industrial civilisation, and bring India out of poverty—freeing her from the caste system and other superstitions—without impatiently appealing to drastic discipline?
The Argument’s Shape and Its Wager
The essay’s central concepts form a chain. The “vicious circle of poverty” is the starting problem; the “contradiction” of Communist economics—forced extraction of agricultural surplus destroying the incentive to produce—is the reason the Soviet answer fails; the “demonstration effect” of Western consumption, and the medicine-driven fall in mortality that Sauvy’s figures capture, are the reasons the American answer fails. Japan’s Meiji transformation, driven by a far-sighted ruling class, is the one historical precedent Aron finds genuinely instructive. Running through all of it is a liberal’s wager: that a democratic regime, though slower and gentler than despotism, can accomplish the same transformation without the catastrophes Russia suffered—provided its elite holds together and its savings rise. The Eastern Economist’s preface notes that Aron paints a less optimistic picture of India than the journal itself would, quoting a lower rate of capital formation than was actually occurring; the editor prints the essay anyway, calling it full of provocative ideas. That exchange captures the book’s character: a sympathetic outsider’s audit, offered in friendship, of the most ambitious democratic development experiment of its time.
