The Rhetorical Transformation of the Masses from Malthus’s “Redundant Population” into Marx’s “Industrial Reserve Army”

Abstract

This article examines the rhetorical transformation of Malthus’s concept of the “redundant population” into what Marx and Engels relabeled the “surplus population” and the “industrial reserve army.” Three rhetorical functions can be observed in this transformation. First, the altered terminology served as a rhetorical marker for a place of theoretical disagreement about economic causality. “Rhetorical marker” refers to a subtle terminological modification that has manifold ramifications for meaning and understanding. Second, this reconstitution of the masses reinforced opposed assumptions about the relationship of people to technology, and third, it provided a type of embodied material proof for Marx’s and Engels’s revolutionary politics.

Notes

1. These judgments come from Marx’s January 24, 1865, letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer and Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value (reproduced in Meek 1971, 18, 136).

2. Malthus scholars tend to refer to the 1798 edition of the Essay as the “first Essay” and the 1803 and subsequent editions collectively as the “second Essay.” Here they are referred to by their modern publication dates: 1970 and 1989, respectively.

3. Marx used Überbevölkerung in the first edition of Capital in a footnote that addresses Malthus’s “redundant [überzählig] population” (1990, 666 [Marx 1989, 5.1, 428]). Citations for Marx 1989 are references to the most pertinent terms and sections in the German editions of Das Kapital collected in the Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe.

4. English translators of Marx and Engels have anachronistically tended to translate references to population “redundancy” as “surplus” in their earlier works written before the authors had adopted their new terminology, as is the case with Kelley-Wischnewetzky’s translation of Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England.

5. Disponible best translates as “available and disposable.”

6. In the footnote to this usage, Marx quotes Ricardo in English (“redundant population”). When referring to the replacement of workers by machinery, Marx often used a synonym for redundancy rather than his own terminology.

7. From Friedrich Engels’s March 29, 1865, letter to Friedrich Albert Lange (excerpted in Meek, 1971, 86–87).