William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
This chapter requires a summary of its thesis before it is developed. That is, that the rapidity of accumulation of capital due to centralization leads, first, to a constantly relatively diminishing demand for labor; secondly, to a worsening of the position of labor relatively to capital; thirdly, to the absolute worsening of labor conditions, in any area where a given capital exploits it; fourthly, to the formation of a reserve army of labor, fluctuating but always present, consisting of unemployed, paupers, or occasional labor; and fifthly, to the use of that body of misérables as the permanent lever for depressing wages below value. In addition, of course, the rivalries of national capitalism reflect the immense concentration of capital within each country, and the need for markets and investments leads to wars, which are fought primarily by the workers and farmers. This account will guide us through the long analysis to follow.
The demand for labor is determined not by total capital but by its variable constituent alone. Therefore it falls progressively with the accumulation of capital, that is, it falls relatively to the magnitude of capital, and falls at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude of capital further accumulates.
The increase of variable capital (as a quantity), though, continues, but at an ever slackening pace. And where, in the earlier forms of accumulation there were pauses in which the organic composition of capital might remain constant for a while, now these pauses are shortened.
Apparent Surplus Population
This accelerated relative diminution of variable capital, that moves faster than the increase of total capital, takes the reverse form, on the other hand, of an apparent increase of the laboring population. The number of laborers seems to be increasing at a rate greater than that of variable capital, which is their means of employment.
But, in fact, it is the accumulation of capital that constantly creates, in direct ratio to its development and extent, a relatively surplus population of workers. That is, capital accumulation produces a population of workers greater than its own needs for self-expansion can utilize, and so this population is a surplus population only because that capital cannot use it.
But the centralization of capital has consequences peculiar to itself. In some branches of industry a change in the composition of capital can occur without an increase in its total quantity, and this would happen because of simple centralization. In others, growth of total capital diminishes the proportion of labor-power it absorbs; in still others capital grows for a time on the same old technical basis, and so adds more labor-power than before, etc.
Uneven Movements of Variable Capital
That is, the movement of accumulation in various spheres permits each industry, or type of endeavor, simultaneously to exhibit the most varied combinations in the growth of capital and its constituent sections.
But this means that there are great irregularities within the total production, violent fluctuations, needs for adjustments, to catch up or to deflate. Workers are constantly thrown out of certain occupations when employment is gaining elsewhere, or the absorption of labor becomes stickier in certain industries, though very slowly.
This simultaneous development of every type of change in variable capital becomes characteristic of the system even during periods of average prosperity.
For example, it is notorious that in all industries employing large capitals, in the United States, where these capitals were invested primarily in labor-saving machinery, there was a decline in men employed even during the period of boom from 1922 to 1929. This was compensated by an enormous increase of white-collar workers, agents, etc., and those engaged in what are called the service industries.
That is (as before stated in the study of machinery), the relative surplus-value which throws out millions of workers is diverted into supernumerary expenditure and employs persons in those occupations where the variable capital is still high compared to the constant. As soon as there is a crisis—that is, as soon as surplus-value is available in extremely small quantities—the superstructure of non-mechanical employment topples.
The Capitalist Law of Population
The laboring population, then, by its very exertions in creating new capital, produces the means by which it renders itself relatively superfluous, and it does this to an ever increasing extent. This is the law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production. It is not biological. Plants and animals may be governed by Darwinian law, but man’s social system produces a special law of population valid only for each historic method of producing wealth.
Special Capitalist Use of the Unemployed
The relatively surplus laboring population now becomes a lever of further capitalist accumulation. More, it is the very condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms an industrial reserve army that belongs to capital, which does not pay for it. It creates, for the expansion needs of capital, a mass of human material ready to be used at such temporary junctures as it shall be required.
With accumulation, and above all with centralization, as we have seen, capital acquires the new capacity of developing by leaps. The elasticity of capital is greater, the absolute wealth of society increases, credit places social accumulation at the service of certain sections of capital. But these are aids, not special new features.
It is rather that the technical conditions of production themselves, such as automatic machinery, swift transport, now permit of the quickest possible transformation of means of production into new capital. When new capital must throw itself frantically into sudden expansions of older forms of production, or into new forms, it must have at its disposal great masses of men who can be hurled into these decisive spots without injury to the functioning of production in its more steady manifestations.
Industry becomes Napoleonic; like that military genius it keeps regiments in reserve for the moment of decision. It gets these reserve battalions in the way most armies get new recruits, from the unemployed, from the so-called surplus population.
Now that industry has come to operate in cycles, years of prosperity followed by years of disaster,1 boom and stagnation or crisis alternating, it needs the constant formation of new reserves for expansion and a really gigantic human scrap-heap when the crisis comes.
So, by turns, the industrial cycle recruits the reserve army and, through its crises, is the most potent agency in forming ever greater reserves. This is an absolutely new phase of human history. Whatever the lucubrations of economic historians who seek to assimilate the crisis of 1562 to that of 1929,2 the fact is that the rise and fall of human employment is an innovation of capitalism.
Malthusianism Is Irrelevant
Marx points out that here the effect of the accumulation of capital produces a relatively surplus population for its requirements, and of course the relative surplus population is declared to be a surplus population and its excess to be the cause of its nonemployment, of its misery.
This is the doctrine called Malthusianism. It has never explained why it is that with the birth rate progressively declining for the last eighty years the percentage of unemployment, on a secular basis, has gone just as steadily forward. Britain, with the lowest net reproduction rate in Europe after the war, had a frightful increase of permanent unemployment for more than a decade, and even during its stimulated prosperity, the residue of unemployment remained large.
Variable Capital Not a Reflection of Numbers Employed
There is an important re-enforcement to unemployment apart from the diminution of variable capital as a proportion of the total capital. The number of laborers may be diminished while variable capital increases. If each laborer employed yields more labor, and his wages increase, the mass of labor may fall, although a smaller number of persons receive individually larger sections of the variable capital.
Increase of variable capital, in such circumstances, is a sign that more labor is put into production but not that more workers are employed. It is the interest of every employer to get as much possible labor out of a smaller number of workers than out of a greater number, even if the labor cost is the same. The outlay of constant capital would be increased somewhat more in proportion were the greater number employed, and so it is more economical to drive fewer workers than more workers, even if the wages bill be no greater. The more extended the enterprise, the greater its quantity of constant capital involved, the greater its need of intensive rather than extensive use of labor. The force of this pressure increases as does the concentration of capital.
To sum up: The development of the capitalist mode of production and of the productive power of labor (which is both cause and consequence of capital accumulation) enables the capitalist, even on the same variable capital, to exploit labor more intensively or more extensively or, also, to use the substitution of skilled for unskilled labor, of immature or female labor, or to pay the skimpy wages of occasional labor. Thus it can get more labor in action without increasing the number of workers, or get more labor out of the same mass of labor-power, or, if it extends the number, a greater mass of inferior labor-power may substitute for a smaller mass of higher-grade labor-power.
Proportion of Active and Reserve Workers
Thus the overwork of part of the employed groups of workers, by reducing the possibilities of jobs, swells the army of the unemployed. But equally, the presence of that crowd of unemployed stimulates the employed to overwork, so that the others may not step into their shoes. Idleness on one hand, and labor-drive on the other, are the left and right arms of profit.
The general movements of wages, as a whole, are regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army. These correspond to the changes of the business cycle.
It is not, therefore, the absolute numbers of the workers that matter but the proportions in which they are divided into active and reserve sections. Thus the movement of wages about the general level of its value is affected by the degree to which the expansion of capital varies the proportions of these two armies of workers.
But naturally the helplessness of labor created by the army of the unemployed is erected into a permanent tendency toward a decline in the historic standard of living, that is, to a lower value of labor-power. This is a basic decline apart from all oscillations.
The proof that it is capital that creates the surplus population and not the fertility of the workers is shown by the fact that whenever labor is too costly (from the standpoint of interference with capital expansion) it pays to introduce machinery to replace the workers, so that they become a “surplus population.”
This is obscured by the fact that when a given industry is expanding, its demand for labor may suddenly be greater than that for the supply of labor in its trade. Other labor is attracted and until it becomes a glut the demand for labor raises wages.
Thus it seems that an increase of workers in that trade, that is, an increase of population in a certain area, is the determining factor, whereas it is the temporary need for expansion of that industry that shifts the workers from one sphere of industry to the other. But the need for expansion of capital is the determinant of labor population, not the contrary.
True Technological Unemployment
The industrial reserve army not only weighs down the active labor army when times are dull or bad, but even during the rare moments of paroxysm or boom, the memory of that residue and the possibility of its re-emergence hold the workers in check. The machinery of capitalism, by the use of the balance wheel of unemployment, eliminates the possibility of running basically out of gear.
What a light is cast on the so-called freedom of capital to employ labor, once machinery has replaced the workers! It has been pretended that if a machine is invented that throws 300 out of 400 workers into the street, the capital released would soon employ the displaced workers. That argument we have examined statically.
But look at it when there is a previously existing army of unemployed. Capital did not employ them to begin with; now there are more recruits. So that even if the new capital reemploys them the amount of unemployment remains the same as before; the labor-supply position is not changed. Thus an absolute increase of capital, even, is not accompanied by a corresponding rise in the general demand for labor.
Marx sums up: The dice are loaded in the game of capital and labor. If capital accumulation causes an increased demand for labor, on the other hand the process of accumulation, by the nature of its operation, supersedes some of the employed, while the pressure of the unemployed compels the employed to give more labor, and, by so doing, to diminish the need for employing others.
Only by a combination of trades unions and of mass organizations of the unemployed, working in concert to stop this double-play, can the ravages of “supply and demand” in the labor market be limited.
Three Forms of the Reserve Army of Labor
The reserve army of labor has three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant. The first is the great body of labor that is periodically hired and fired with the ups and downs of business. That is the floating division.
This floating population may be relative. Thus, in a given woolen industry, there may be a shortage of trained skilled labor, but that cannot assist the unemployed silk weaver of Paterson.
In the United States we have had a situation in 1937 where with millions of unemployed certain highly skilled branches have lacked labor. And that was because during six years of depression there was mass unemployment in those trades, and training of young men had not been undertaken. These gaps and contradictions are now common.
The latent elements are made up of many groups. The aged worker is the largest. He is rarely employed but is useful in emergencies. Now “aged” is a word that is not similarly employed for workers and well-to-do people. The life insurance companies indicate a longevity difference of more than twenty years between factory workers and the ordinary suburbanite executive or professional man. As for those with a sure living and no work, like English country gentlemen, nobles, and bishops of the Established Church, an English investigation showed that their average longevity is in the eighties, whereas coal miners die in their forties.3
Worn out, “too old at forty,” the once skilled but weak workers form a large latent supply. So does the agricultural population.
In 1916 when European immigration was interrupted, the expansion of war industries in the North was carried on by a mass of emigration of Negroes from the Cotton Belt. Since then the Mexican and West Indian sources of labor have been tapped. In Europe, two races, the Poles and the Italians, have served for generations as a miserable latent population, used in prosperity and scornfully expelled as “superfluous antinational elements” when business is bad.
Of course, the budding supply of youngsters must be added to the latent group. The necessity for Civilian Conservation Corps policies and the Federal Youth Act shows the importance they have assumed. From the kitchens, mother and daughter also can be and are summoned to mill and workshop.
The third group, the stagnant, are extremely irregular workers. Such are the despised “hoboes,” condemned to celibacy, and without whom sporadic and seasonal occupations like lumbering and harvesting are inconceivable. Their standard of living is lower than that of the average population, as they provide for neither home nor family. This is the most completely exploited form of all labor. Deprived even of the minimum properties of the poor, they are recruited from propertyless and adventurous youth. Nomadic in habits, they are outside of political thinking, and it is characteristic that their classic form of labor organization, the I. W. W., declared the ballot to be useless for labor struggles.4
On a higher income basis we have the retailers who fail in business, the professional men who never obtain a career, decayed artisans, persons displaced from any trade by technical improvements, etc. The war of 1917 showed, for example, what a large reservoir of labor-power could flow into the factories from the hundreds of thousands of poor women vainly struggling to make a mean living out of shabby lodging houses.
So great is the need for income on the part of these latent groups (who include literally millions not counted in any unemployment figures)5 that they are forced to calculate income on a family basis. So it comes about that for the first time in social history the latent working class has the highest birth rate, while persons of higher income have few children.
Undernourished young persons, who are told by a biological instinct that they cannot live long, try to have children at twenty to help sustain them at thirty-six, which for them is advanced middle age. In Shakespeare’s day it was the gentry and the higher clergy who had large families; the artisans in London were comparatively less well provided.
Below the latent, stagnant, floating elements is the famed “submerged tenth,” the center of attention of the Salvation Army and like philanthropic ventures. These are paupers. There are three categories: those who can work (as is shown by the diminution of pauperism in a boom); those who are foundlings, orphans, etc. (these work at errand-boy jobs, or as newsboys, especially, in “blind alley” employments); the demoralized, the ragged, the mendicant, aged maniacs, the mutilated, crippled, sickly and poor widows. They have little economic resilience or ambition. Pauperism, says Marx, is the hospital of the reserve army of the unemployed.
Then come the elements excluded from labor at all, the criminals, prostitutes, “tramps,” the so-called dangerous classes. These groups are used only against labor; from this social stratum are quarried the strikebreaker, the anti-labor thug, and, in Germany, large segments of the Storm Troopers (as was the beatified Horst Wessel). But pauperism, with its need for charitable expense and its use for socially negative purposes, is to be debited rather to the overhead costs of capitalism.6
The Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
Such is Marx’s review of the army of the disinherited and their varying economic requirements. According to his economic theory, the greater the social wealth, the extension of capital, the absolute mass of the workers and the productiveness of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. No statistics can reveal the immense impact of this class. The same causes that expand capital expand unemployment. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. It may have a thousand modifications, it may show temporary and startling ameliorations, but the general law must always obtain, always finally prevail, always determine the great mass of economic facts.
Then comes Marx’s indictment. For him the capitalist system has turned from its superb service to mankind, the multiplication of its wealth beyond that of any previous society, into its opposite, one that merits destruction, for it has become the enemy of human welfare.
It raises production only at the cost of labor; it transforms production from its purpose into a means of dominating labor; it makes the laborer live to serve the factory or business.
He is a fragment of a human being. The system estranges from him intellectual participation in toil, while utilizing everything that outside science can offer. By accumulation, which his labor brings about, this condition is intensified. Production no longer makes goods for man; no one remembers what it all started for. Man makes goods for others to make money.
The more the system develops the worse off the worker is. The unemployed chain him to the cycles of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is accumulation of misery at the other, that is, of the class that alone produces capital.
The Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
Capitalism took mankind out of a productive level so low that, as a Frenchman put it, “it decreed universal mediocrity.” A small leisure class could almost have justified itself before as the carrier of culture. For even if it were overturned there would be little its social productive capacity seriously to raise the then level of prosperity. At that time, the now meaningless saw, “If you divided X’s fortune every poor man would have only an extra orange,” would have had some pertinence. For the question belongs only to a society where the means of production are few and inelastic.
Out of the so-called primitive accumulation, by loot and crime, the original accumulation of modern capital began. Once the capitalist system is fully developed, competition reduces the number of capitalists. One capitalist kills many.
The labor process grows increasingly co-operative and social, the world an economic unit. The magnates who monopolize all the advantages of social knowledge, common production, and world markets, become fewer; they shrink to a small collection.
The misery and exploitation of the workers grows. But their training as masses grows, too, for they are organized in production and they learn its lessons. They fight together as they work together.
The monopoly of capital becomes a drag on its development; it produces crises more frequently and these crises become more acute. In its struggle it seeks to recur to its methods of primitive accumulation—wars, colonial plunder, even to political tyrannies.
The centralization of ownership of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they are incompatible with their capitalist skin. That skin is burst asunder. Private property is doomed. The expropriators of others’ labor are themselves expropriated.
Marx predicted that while the transfer of social resources from the few to the working people, the immense majority, would be difficult, it could not compare in length or horror with the four hundred years of war and terror during which the capitalists established their dominion. For the many must find it easier to displace a few usurpers than the usurpers found it to engross all the goods of mankind.
1. For some reason crises are always equated to the seven fat and seven lean years of Joseph in Egypt. His panic was real; the crops were short. Ours arise when they are abundant.
2. Henri Hauser of Paris is typical of these.
3. The British exchequer depends largely on death duties. So tenacious of life are plutocrats that the despairing First Lord of the Treasury in a budget debate repeated for them the general’s cry to his unwilling soldiers, “Come on, you rascals, do you want to live forever?”
4. See Paul F. Brissenden, The I.W.W.
5. They are so implicit in the economic system that not even Communist statistics include whole classes as really unemployed.
6. The special economics of this population is so amusingly given in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) and by his modern disciple, the German novelist Bert Brecht, that all learned books are cast in the shade.