European Capitalism's Reserve Army

Abstract

In For the Revision of the Party Program Lenin speaks of the "measureless and shameless" exploitation of foreign workers from less developed countries as "especially characteristic" of imperialism. Today some eleven million people from the underdeveloped nations of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean are living and working in the industrialized nations of Northwestern Europe, under conditions of measureless and shameless, if often discreetly veiled, exploitation. These foreign workers—"guest workers," to employ the charming German euphemism for them—have become a necessary element in the maintenance of the capitalist structure of industrialized Europe. At the same time, the workers' mass emigration has constituted for their homelands an enormous drain on limited resources, and has been a principal contribution in the Mediterranean countries to what Carlos Almeida has termed "the development of underdevelopment." In this and a following article I will examine some of the effects of this migration, first on the industrialized countries of Northwestern Europe, with special reference to the German Federal Republic, and then on the Mediterranean countries from which the millions have emigrated.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.