The latent relative surplus population is, in Marx's definition, that which is found in the agricultural areas. In these areas, unlike in the centers of capitalist industry, there exists no counter-movement of attraction to offset the repulsion of those “set free" by the revolution in agricultural technology, and hence the movement of labor is out of the agricultural regions and into the cities or metropolitan areas. In the most developed capitalist countries in northern Europe and North America, this pool of latent relative surplus population has been largely absorbed, although in the United States the black population of the rural areas still remains, in dwindling numbers, as part of this pool. The latent form of surplus population now exists chiefly in the neocolonies, and, as has been noted, the capitalist countries attempt a regulated absorption and repulsion of such labor, in accord with the needs of accumulation. This regulated internationalization of the labor market is supplemented by the export of various industrial processes to cheap labor areas in the countries which are kept in subjugation as “undeveloped regions."
Finally, Marx speaks of the stagnant relative surplus population, whose employment is irregular, casual, marginal, and which merges with the “sediment," as Marx called it, of relative surplus population which dwells in the world of pauperism: “Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army . . . ; along with the surpluspopulation, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class."
The stagnant relative surplus population, irregularly and casually employed, "furnishes to capital," in Marx's words, “an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working-class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation."4 The importance of this branch of surplus population for the types of employment that have been increasing rapidly is clear. We will consider it at greater length below.
The activity of capital in breeding masses of labor for its various needs is summarized by Marx in the following familiar paragraph:
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labourpower at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.⁵
This law, Marx maintained, “always equilibrates the relative surpluspopulation, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation. . . . It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital."6 During the 1940s and early 1950s, when the tendencies of the immense upward surge in the accumulation of capital that began (for the United States) in the Second World War were not yet developed or clearly manifest, this “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" was widely taken to be the weakest aspect of the Marxian analysis. From our present vantage point, when the consequences of this cycle of accumulation have worked themselves out more fully and have been given greater visibility by the unrest of the 1960s, the matter takes on a somewhat different appearance.
The scope and energy of the accumulation process that began at the start of the 1940s has completed the annihilation of the agricultural population in the United States and largely transformed it, black and white alike, into an urban “labor force," and this has been supplemented by the import of workers on a considerable scale from Latin America. This immense increase in “the absolute mass of the proletariat" has been accompanied by an equally immense increase in the industrial reserve army. Statistics show a doubling of the number of officially counted unemployed, so that in the early 1970s this part of the working class had mounted into the 4 to 5 million range, but this is the least significant indicator of the growth of the industrial reserve army. Far more significant is the statistical series known as the “labor force participation rate."
This series attempts to establish, by the technique of household sampling interviews, the proportion of the population which is part of the labor market It starts from the assumption that some significant part of the population over the age of sixteen cannot be counted as part of the “labor force" because it is made up of people who are in school, running a household full time, sick or disabled, or retired for reasons of age. All these categories of presumed nonseekers after employment are obviously elastic: when one considers that the total embraced in this “not-in-the-labor-force" group exceeded 55 million persons in 1971, there is clearly plenty of room in it for concealed unemploymentall the more so as it also includes those who are not seeking work because they believe they cannot find it. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that some 4 to 5 million persons in the group, in the last years of the 1960s and the early 1970s, regularly expressed themselves as “wanting a job now, although they are counted as not having been part of the labor force for the preceding period. This alone either doubles or more than doubles the official 7水 unemployment rate in most of those years. 117
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Structure of the Working Class
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