Apart from the natural growth of the population, the freeing of workers from their jobs by the continuous revolution in production creates, again to use Marx's words, a disposable industrial reserve army that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. If we try to verify this from the United States statistics we run up against the difficulty that unemployment figures are kept on very different principles from those embraced by the concept of the industrial reserve army, but these statistics nevertheless have the value attaching to any set of figures that is kept on more or less constant principles over a long period of time. The most striking thing to emerge from an examination of the unemployment statistics from the Second World War to the present is the long-run trend of gradual but persistent enlargement of the pool of officially counted unemployed. There has been throughout this whole period a business cycle, so that the line is a jagged one, but even so it is a line which constantly trends upward. The levels of unemployment, which at the start of the period meant recession, are now regarded as perfectly acceptable prosperity rates. I clipped from yesterday's New York Times an article with the headline “High Joblessness Expected to Persist as a Condition of United States Throughout the Decade." This article points out that although we began immediately after the Second World War aiming for an unemployment rate of 2 percent or 3 percent, we soon gave this up, that the 4 percent unemployment target embraced by President Kennedy in 1962 has been abandoned, and the 5 percent goal of the Nixon administration economists has also lost support. Most economists today, regardless of their political affiliation, believe that 5.5 percent to 6 percent of unemployment is probably the lowest the government can achieve without stirring up virulent inflation again, and even that modest target is a long way from attainment—1979 at the earliest. In other words, the target for unemployment and prosperity nowadays is higher than what was regarded as a recession rate of unemployment only twenty-five years ago.
Now I said a moment ago that these unemployment rates are not the same as the concept of an industrial reserve army, the latter being much larger. This is because the measuring of unemployment is a relatively restrictive count. Let me give you a very graphic instance of this: when the unemployment figures for February of this year were released a month or two ago, they proved to be about 8.3 million, only slightly changed from the 8.2 million counted as unemployed in the previous month of January—but we were told at the same time that employment had fallen by a full half-million persons. How do we explain this paradox? Well, the answer that they give is that in official parlance
almost 600,000 persons had dropped out of the labor force between one month and the next. What does that remarkable statistic mean? It simply means the following: since capitalism does not recognize that every able-bodied adult has either the responsibility or the opportunity to work and contribute to society, the theory is that one cannot distinguish the unemployed from the leisure class except by asking the individual whether he or she had been actively seeking employment during the previous four weeks. Those who cannot show that they have been doing so—and in the largest majority of cases this would mean those who have given up hope of getting a job——are no longer counted as part of the labor force and hence cannot be counted as unemployed. Nothing in official statistics distinguishes them from the housewife who has never worked or from the millionaire in Palm Springs. Thus there is clearly a large mass of non-working people who constitute a reserve army of labor, only a portion of which is counted. Those who rise to the surface in active search of jobs are counted as unemployed; those who sink to the bottom and are forced onto the welfare roll are counted as paupers. The size of this pauperized mass is now between 14 and 15 million persons, and this enormous size was attained back in 1970 and bids fair to go much higher. From all of this we can see that the accumulation of wealth which takes place at one pole of society in the capitalist system is matched at the other pole by an accumulation of misery.
324
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Appendix 2
325