Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 17:88–97, 2014 Copyright © American Society for the History of Rhetoric ISSN: 1536-2426 print/1936-0835 online DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2014.886933 The Rhetorical Transformation of the Masses from Malthus’s “Redundant Population” into Marx’s “Industrial Reserve Army” IAN E. J. HILL University of British Columbia 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 transfor- mation. 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 understand- ing. 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. Criticizing Thomas R. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Karl Marx accused Malthus of committing “libel against the human race,” “sin against science,” and “shameless and mechanical plagiarism.” 1 Marx’s main objection to Malthus’s population theory was that it abandoned the masses to a dismal capitalistic fate. Marx’s barbs were not mere polemics about a topic ancillary to political economy. The population problem served as a focal point for the development of economic theory in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries for such writers as Malthus and Marx who drew attention to the increasing indebted, unemployed, and destitute masses. Moreover, Malthus based his entire conception of political economy on the popula- tion problem. And a half-century later in The German Ideology (1845–1846), Marx and Friedrich Engels named the physical organization of humans as Address correspondence to Ian E. J. Hill, Department of English, University of British Columbia, 397 - 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada. E-mail: ianhill@mail.ubc.ca 88 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia], [Ian Hill] at 08:34 25 March 2014