Marx repeated the lie, adding that Malthus had taken the vow of celibacy, and called him “superficial”, “a professional plagiarist”, “the agent of the landed aristocracy”, “a paid advocate” and “the principal enemy of the people.”
In the Marxist tradition, Lenin sharply criticized Malthusian theory and its neo-Malthusian version,[57] calling it a “reactionary doctrine” and “an attempt on the part of bourgeois ideologists to exonerate capitalism and to prove the inevitability of privation and misery for the working class under any social system”.