Colonialism, Surplus Population, and the Marxian Critique of Political Economy

This article examines Karl Marx’s critique of Thomas Malthus’s theory of population and his discussion of colonization in the last chapter of Capital. For Marx, Malthus’s theory naturalizes the process of social reproduction specific to capitalism, a process that was disrupted in the colonies, where, owing to the availability of land, the superfluous population of immigrant workers were transformed into independent producers.