The violence of the attacks on Malthus by Marx and Engels and the virulence of their criticism cannot but strike the reader of Capital and especially the Theories of Surplus Value, although they are not overtly political or polemical works (like The Communist Party Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte, The Class Struggle in France or The Poverty of Philosophy). The criticism is directed towards the law of population, which is the very core of Malthus’s thinking and the main complaint against him is the accusation of plagiarizing from James Stewart, Benjamin Franklin,Walace and Townsend.
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Charbit, Y. (2009). Capitalism and Population: Marx and Engels Against Malthus. In: Economic, Social and Demographic Thought in the XIXth Century. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9960-1_5
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