Reserve army of labour

The Reserve army of labour are workers who are unemployed in a capitalist economy due to its inherent disorganization and inefficiency, a "permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people". It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that the unemployed can be defined as those willing and able to work and that the relative surplus population also includes people unable to work. The use of the word "army" refers to the workers being conscripted and regimented in the workplace in a hierarchy, under the command or authority of the owners of capital. "Unemployment" and "employment" are concepts of the capitalist era. A permanent level of unemployment presupposes a working population which is to a large extent dependent on a wage or salary for a living, without having other means of livelihood, as well as the right of enterprises to hire and fire employees in accordance with commercial or economic conditions.

Karl Marx argued that there are no substantive laws of population that hold good for all time; instead, each specific mode of production has its own specific demographic laws. If there was "overpopulation" in capitalist society, it was overpopulation relative to the requirements of capital accumulation. Consequently, demography could not simply just count people in various ways, it also had to study the social relations between them as well. If there are enough resources on the planet to provide all people with a decent life, the argument that there are "too many people" is rather dubious.

Marx's discussion of the concept
Although the idea of the industrial reserve army of labour is closely associated with Marx, it was already in circulation in the British labour movement by the 1830s. The first mention of the reserve army of labour in Marx's writing occurs in a manuscript he wrote in 1847 but did not publish:

Marx introduces the concept in chapter 25 of the first volume of Das Kapital, which he did publish twenty years later in 1867, stating that:

His argument is that as capitalism develops, the organic composition of capital will increase, which means that the mass of constant capital grows faster than the mass of variable capital. Fewer workers can produce all that is necessary for society's requirements. In addition, capital will become more concentrated and centralized in fewer hands.

This being the absolute historical tendency, part of the working population will tend to become surplus to the requirements of capital accumulation over time. Paradoxically, the larger the wealth of society, the larger the industrial reserve army will become. One could add that the larger the wealth of society, the more people it can support who do not work.

However, as Marx develops the argument further, it also becomes clear that, depending on the state of the economy, the reserve army of labour will either expand or contract, alternately being absorbed or expelled from the employed workforce. Thus,

Marx concludes that: "Relative surplus-population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works." The availability of labour influences wage rates, and the larger the unemployed workforce grows, the more this forces down wage rates; conversely, if there are plenty jobs available and unemployment is low, this tends to raise the average level of wages - in that case workers are able to change jobs rapidly to get better pay.

Composition of the relative surplus population
Marx argues the relative surplus population always has three forms: the floating, the latent and the stagnant.


 * The floating part refers to the temporarily unemployed ("conjunctural unemployment").


 * The latent part consists of that segment of the population not yet fully integrated into capitalist production - for example, part of the rural population. It forms a pool or reservoir of potential workers for industries.


 * The stagnant part consists of marginalised people with "extremely irregular employment". Its lowest stratum (excepting criminals, vagabonds and prostitutes) "dwells in the sphere of pauperism", including those still able to work, orphans and pauper children, and the "demoralised and ragged" or "unable to work".

Marx then analyses the reserve army of labour in detail, using data on Britain where he lived.

The reserve army of labour is sometimes referred to by the abbreviations I.R.A. (industrial reserve army) or R.A.U. (reserve army of the unemployed).

Precariat
In recent years, there has been a growing use in Marxist and Anarchist theory of the concept of "the precariat," to describe a growing reliance on temporary, part-time workers of precarious status, who share aspects of the proletariat and the reserve army of labor. Precarious workers do work part-time or fulltime in temporary jobs, but they cannot really earn enough to live on, and depend partly on friends or family, or on state benefits, to survive.