To Marx, pauperism is “the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.”

On the relationship between development and employment, Marx says:

The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advancement in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law in a capitalist society – where the labourer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the labourer – undergoes a complete inversion and expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour-power for increasing another's wealth, for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production and the productiveness of labour, increase more rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself, therefore, capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase for its own self-expansion.

While for Malthus the fundamental cause of poverty, unemployment, high mortality, malnutrition, and destitution is the tendency of population to grow beyond the means of subsistence available to it, for Marx, the cause of these factors is the capitalist mode of production. From the Marxist perspective, the changes in population dynamics are governed by the social systems that are created on the basis of relations of productions. The solution to the problems of underdevelopment from this perspective lies basically in the socialistic reconstruction of present day capitalist societies. When population is analysed from historical perspective, it is taken as a socio-economic category. Marx was of the view that population is an abstract notion if the classes of which it consists are disregarded. These classes are also empty sounded if relations of production in general and wage, labour, and capital – three elements in production – are not explicitly considered.