Marx-Keynes on Involuntary Unemployment and Alternative Labor Market Indicators

Abstract

The paper revisits Marx and Keynes’s analysis of involuntary unemployment and discusses how to account for this phenomenon by developing a series of alternative labor market indicators. Both Marx and Keynes treated (un-)employment as a function of the long-run consequence of capital accumulation and the presence of a certain type of unemployment as an inevitable outcome of the deficient decentralized capitalist market economy. The goal of this paper is to survey the latest developments in labor force statistics and indicators to see whether a series of alternative indicators of labor markets fare well with Marx and Keynes’s involuntary unemployment. The survey in this paper shows that the labor (under-)utilization framework that the International Labor Office (ILO) has proposed is one of the broadest measures of labor market performance, and that it allows us to examine the relative size and different type of the presence of the reserve army of labor and involuntary unemployment.