The General Law of US Capitalist Accumulation: Contingent Work and the Working Class

Abstract

For several years now, there has been a minor rekindling of interest in the ideas of Karl Marx, hailed in the New Yorker as “the next big thinker.” Like other articles supposedly professing sympathy with Marx, this exhibits a common misconception. It is also underwritten with the following revisionism: Given that the agents of social change–the “modern working class”–are shrinking drastically and disappearing fast, Marx’s revolutionary hopes are doomed. Nowonly a residual Marx prevails, a Marx‐lite, a mere analyzer of the defects of bourgeois society. This article seeks to contest these distortions. It brings Marx to bear on the present US context, positing him as an apt economic critic and telling political prophet of millennial America. It addresses standard clichés about his class definition and emphasizes how Marx really left us with a flexible, dialectical theory, hinging on the process of capital accumulation. From the standpoint of accumulation dynamics, we can justifiably argue that the working class is still growing, not shrinking in numbers. From this perspective, too, we might better comprehend the whole phenomenon of corporate downsizing and “contingent work” within the remit of Marx’s different forms of relative surplus populations. The attendant questions about working class organization and politics are dealt with in the paper’s conclusion, which illustrates how Marxian‐style resistance is already beginning to take hold in the United States.