Inflicting the Structural Violence of the Market: Workfare and Underemployment to Discipline the Reserve Army of Labor[1

Christian Garland

doi:10.32855/fcapital.201501.011

Abstract

Inflicting the Structural Violence of the Market: Workfare and Underemployment to Discipline the Reserve Army of Labor[1

Highlights

As the ongoing crisis of capitalism continues beyond its sixth year, the effects have been felt with different degrees of severity in different countries
This data takes into consideration the official unemployment total and combines it with the number of Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) claimants ‘self-employed’ who work in various odd jobs such as catalogue selling or holding an eBay account claim Tax Credits to supplement their meager earnings
Capital being an abstract social relation formed by living labor, once rendered dead, accumulated abstract labor reverses this dependency and in so doing determines the very terms of material existence in a world in which wage labor is the means through which ‘labor’ materially reproduces itself

Summary

Introduction

As the ongoing crisis of capitalism continues beyond its sixth year, the effects have been felt with different degrees of severity in different countries. In a society based on precarious and ‘flexible’ wage labor, which demands that the overwhelming majority of the population work at all costs, even if there is not enough actual wage labor available, work assumes once again, a virtuous ethic of self-discipline, pious resolve, and thrift, comprising an ideological narrative of ‘self-help’ and ‘individual responsibility.’[22] This narrative of the inherent virtue of work aims at shifting the burden for unemployment back onto the shoulders of the individual: societal problems become individual failings, and a matter of ‘not trying hard enough’, just as ‘there is work out there, but some people don’t want to work.’ The workfare industry applies the existing state model of material compulsion and elements of the same ideology of work as being a good in and of itself,[23] regardless of whether the person engaged in it is paid enough to reproduce their labor power which, it is worth remembering, is only ever the relative value of wage labor.

Results

Conclusion