Malthusianism, an unscientific demographic theory, according to which poverty of the popular masses in a bourgeois society is engendered not by the social system, but by the rapid population growth and relatively slow increase in the means of subsistence. It takes its name from Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), an English economist and clergyman. In full contradiction with the reality Malthus believed that the laws of nature condition the inevitability of a growing disparity between the rate of population growth and increase in the means of subsistence. To make his "great law of population" convincing, he provided it with a mathematical basis, according to which the poverty of popular masses and the suffering it entails are the result of population growth in geometrical progression, while the means of subsistence grow in arithmetical. Malthusians say that there is only one way to overcoming this disparity—to keep the population growth at zero or under it. They strongly oppose social aid to the needy and say that wars, epidemics, and legal prohibition of marriages for the poor are necessary virtues. The founders of MarxismLeninism exposed the reactionary essence of Malthusian ideas. They showed that every social mode of production has its own specific law of population, and that there are no "eternal and natural social laws" nor can there be. An inherent feature of capitalist society is not absolute, but relative surplus population or unemployment, which is an objective consequence of the general law of capitalist accumulation. In current bourgeois economics, the ideas of Malthus have been further developed in neo-Malthusianism. Those who espouse it claim that the world’s growing population cannot be provided with the necessary food and so poverty is a natural occurrence, especially in the economically 211 less developed countries. Those of the bluntly reactionary current say that imperialist wars are the main way of establishing balance between the population and resources. There are also currents which forecast the advent of "general doom" as the result of the depletion of life resources and environmental pollution. But they ignore the fact that capitalism rapaciously exploits natural wealth and that the ecological problem can be overcome by establishing socialist relations. A biological approach to and dealing with economic and social problems on a demographic basis are the feature of these theories. They do not take into consideration that the reason for poverty and misery in the developing countries is not high population growth but capitalist production relations, the vestiges of feudal oppression, and neo-colonialism.