What is the Reserve Army of Labor? What is its role in the determination of the valueof labor power?

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The Reserve Army of Labor One aspect of the qualitative changes that accompany the accumulation of capital is fluctuations in the demand for labor-power. Periods when the demand for labor-power rises rapidly as a result of the quantitative increase in capital alternate with periods when rapid increases in labor productivity reduce the number of jobs and employed workers. In Marx's vision these fluctuations in employed labor are accommodated by fluctuations in the "reserve armies of labor," pools of potential labor-power that absorb unemployed workers in periods of slack and provide supplies of labor in periods of high demand. The reserve army of labor thus plays a role in regulating the level of wages and the rate of profit. When rapid accumulation raises the The Severest Critic / 125 demand for labor-power and competition among capitalists threatens to raise wages, competition from the unemployed will tend to reduce the pressure on wages. When rapid technical change disemploys large numbers of workers and threatens to create a glut of labor-power, in-flows from the reserve armies of labor diminish or even reverse, reducing the downward pressure on wages. Marx distinguishes three categories of the reserve army of labor. The "floating" reserve army is closest to what modern economists call unemployment: the pool of workers temporarily displaced and actively seeking new jobs. The floating reserve army consists of people who are proletarianized, that is, dependent on wage labor for their reproduction and survival, even though they are not actually employed. Some part of the floating reserve army never finds work, and falls into the "stagnant" reserve army of laborproletarians who fail to find industrial employment and fall into lives of crime and dependency. Only extreme ups and downs of the labor market affect the stagnant reserve army. Most important to the long-term development of capitalism is the "latent reserve army," the huge mass of potential proletarians that exist at the margins of the capitalist system in traditional agricultural societies and groups of people who don't participate in the labor market within capitalist society. In nineteenth-century British capitalism, for example, the latent reserve army consisted in the first place of British landless agricultural workers who were displaced from the rural agrarian economy by the enclosure of common lands and the rationalization of agricultural production, and in the second place of landless Irish agricultural workers. The phenomenon of the latent reserve army continues to be important in the development of world capitalism. During the European "economic miracle" recovery after World War II, European countries depended on flows of mi126 / ADAM'S FALLACY grants from southern Europe, northern Africa, and Turkey to meet rapidly growing demand for labor-power. The U.S. economy has drawn on migrations from Europe, the Caribbean and Mexico, Central America, and Asia at various points in its growth. Marx's analysis suggests that these flows of migration play an important role in regulating the fluctuation of wage levels in growing capitalist economies. In many developing economies, a crucial role is played by the flow of labor from traditional villages to urban industrial employment. Often these flows start with a migration of young men and women who enter the urban labor force temporarily, hoping to amass enough wealth to return to their villages to marry, buy land, and start families. Over time these temporary migrations become more and more permanent as people stay in the cities to marry or because they prefer to live there.5 It is not hard to see that the great economic drama on the world scene of the next twenty-five to fifty years is going to be the mobilization of the latent reserve armies of labor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America through the accumulation of capital in the advanced capitalist countries. How this process will take place, what institutions will evolve to shape it, and what transformations it holds in store for the economies involved are fascinating unresolved questions. The Severest Critic / 127 5. In the last forty years women have constituted an important part of the latent reserve army of labor for advanced capitalist economies, as labor force participation rates for women have risen and women have increasingly become waged workers. Current research in economic history suggests that women typically played an important economic role in traditional agricultural societies, and that the period from around 1920 to 1960 in the United States, when many women spent most of their lives in non-wage labor in the household, was an anomaly.