In periods of rapid capital accumulation, such as that which has taken place throughout the capitalist world since World War II, the relative surplus population which is the “natural" product of the capital accumulation process is supplemented with other sources oflabor. In northern Europe and the United States, the capitalist economies have increasingly made use of the masses of former agricultural labor in the colonies and neocolonies. These masses are thrown off by the process of imperialist penetration itself, which has disrupted the traditional forms oflabor and subsistence. They become available to capital as its own agricultural surplus labor (that part of the relative surplus population which Marx called the “latent" portion) is used up. As a result of this, the movement of labor has to some extent become internationalized, although still regulated in each country by government action in an attempt to make it conform to the national needs of capital. Thus Western Europe and the United States now draw upon a labor reservoir which extends in a broad band from India and Pakistan in the east across northern Africa and southernmost Europe all the way to the Caribbean and other portions of Latin America in the west. Indian, Pakistani, Turkish, Greek, Italian, African, Spanish, West Indian, and other workers supplement the indigenous underclass in northern Europe and make up its lowest layers. In the United States, the same role is occupied by Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other Latin American workers, who have been added to the pool of lowest-paid labor which is made up chiefly of black workers.
At the same time, in a process which cuts across racial and national lines, the female portion of the population has become the prime supplementary reservoir of labor. In all the most rapidly growing sectors of the working class, women make up the majority, and in some instances the overwhelming majority, of the workers. Women form the ideal reservoir of labor for the new mass occupations. The barrier which confines women to much lower pay scales is reinforced by the vast numbers in which they are available to capital. These vast numbers are in turn guaranteed, for a considerable period of time, by the lower rate of participation in the working population with which women entered into the era of monopoly capital. While the male population, even in its prime working ages, is suffering a slowly declining labor force participation rate (which is only a concealed form of the rise in unemployment), women have been participating in employment at a very rapidly rising rate throughout this century. For capital, this is an expression of the movement to the poorly paid, menial, and “supplementary" occupations. For the working class, it is in part an expression of the increasing difficulty of keeping up with customary and unavoidable needs of subsistence in the society created by capital, without having two or more family members at work at the same time. In this manner, an ever increasing portion of human work is incorporated into capital.
The Reserve Army of Labor
Thus the mass of employment cannot be separated from its associated mass of unemployment. Under conditions of capitalism, unemployment is not an aberration but a necessary part of the working mechanism of the capitalist mode of production. It is continuously produced and absorbed by the energy of the accumulation process itself. And unemployment is only the officially counted part of the relative surplus of working population which is necessary for the accumulation of capital and which is itself produced by it. This relative surplus population, the industrial reserve army, takes a variety of forms in modern society, including the unemployed; the sporadically employed; the part-time employed; the mass of women who, as houseworkers, form a reserve for the “female occupations"; the armies of migrant labor, both agricultural and industrial; the black population with its extraordinarily high rates of unemployment; and the foreign reserves of labor.
Marx distinguished three forms of the reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant. The floating form is found in the centers of industry and employment, in the form of workers who move from job to job, attracted and repelled (that is to say, hired and discarded) by the movements of technology and capital, and suffering a certain amount of unemployment in the course of this motion. With the simplification of job operations and the spread of the number and variety of jobs for which the “qualifications" have become reduced to the minimums of simple labor this stratum has grown to encompass large parts of the working population The extraordinary mobility provided by automobile transport in the United States has widened the geographical range of such jobs for each worker, has greatly enlarged the “labor pool" available to each factory, office, warehouse, retail establishment, etc., and has broken down ties to localities and communities. An ordinary working life for many workers now consists of movement among a considerable number of jobs, so that such workers are in turn part of the employed and the reserve labor populations. This has been reflected in the system of unemployment insurance, which provides for periods of unemployment at a reduced wage with monies collected during periods of employment; it is in part a safeguard against the economic, social, and political effects of widespread and prolonged unemployment, and in part a recognition of the roles workers play, now as part of the employed and now as part of the reserve armies of labor.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Structure of the Working Class
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