Reserve Army Of Labour Research Articles

The permanent global crisis of working-class social reproduction: ten propositions

The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the labourer’s drives for self-preservation and propagation. (Marx [1867] 1976: 718) The capitalist mode of production gives rise to a crisis of working-class social reproduction from the outset, and continually exacerbates that crisis in the course of its development. Far from being in principle a crisis for the capitalist mode of production itself, then, crises of working-class social reproduction are the empirical effects of changes in the capitalist economy, reflecting capitalist power over the fate of the propertyless population. The inherent characteristics of the capitalist mode of production – competition between individual capitals, uninterrupted scientific and technological revolution, an ever-increasing division of labour on local to global scales, the constant process of ‘creative destruction’ as obsolete capitalist enterprises die and new ones are born, the universalisation of commodity production, concomitant to proletarianisation and the creation of a permanent ‘reserve army of labour’, and the tendency for capital to invade and take over any form of production more ‘primitive’ than itself – all continually disrupt areas of social and economic activity within capitalist social formations and those which capitalism has not fully penetrated yet. The effect of state government policies and governance on the part of international organisations is to induce or exploit crises of working-class social reproduction in order to further the hegemony of capital over their own territory and the world market as a whole.

Protecting and promoting the rights of the 'reserve army of labour': a policy analysis of structural determinants of migrant worker health in Pakistan and Qatar.

Labour migrants who travel overseas for employment can face deep health inequities driven in large part by upstream social and structural determinants of health. We sought to study the 'labour migrant health ecosystem' between one sending country (Pakistan) and one host country (Qatar), with a focus on how the ecosystem realizes the rights of labour migrants when addressing the social and structural determinants (e.g. housing, employment law, etc.) of health. Study objectives were to (1) undertake an in-depth review of policies addressing the structural and social determinants of the health of labour migrants in both Pakistan and Qatar, analysing the extent to which these policies align with global guidance, are equity-focused and have clear accountability mechanisms in place, and (2) explore national stakeholder perspectives on priority setting for labour migrant health. We used a mixed methods approach, combining policy content analysis and interviews with stakeholders in both countries. We found a wide range of guidance from the multilateral system on addressing structural determinants of the health of labour migrants. However, policy responses in Pakistan and Qatar contained a limited number of these recommended interventions and had low implementation potential and minimal reference to gender, equity and rights. Key national stakeholders had few political incentives to act and lacked inter-country coordination mechanisms required for an effective and cohesive response to labour migrant health issues. Effectively addressing such determinants to achieve health equity for labour migrants will depend on a shift in governments' attitudes towards migrants-from a reserve army of transient, replaceable economic resources to rights-holding members of society deserving of equality, dignity and respect.

Dock Labour and a Connected History of Workers in Early Twentieth Century Calcutta


 
 
 This article argues that class formation and labour radicalism in the industrial cities of colonial India need to be located in connected histories of workers, which go beyond analysis of single industries. It shows that the horizontal mobility of workers in early twentieth-century Calcutta was a result of a pervasiveness of casual work, both among the ‘unskilled’ and the skilled. Skill levels and occupations were crucial in defining the boundaries of not one, as is frequently posited, but several labour pools. It was in this form that the reserve army of labour was ever-present in the city, which gave workers networks beyond one workplace, one neighborhood and frequently, even one industry. The special role of segments of skilled workers has rarely been studied in relation to labour militancy and politics. The article sustains an emphasis on the role of industrial centres, such as the docklands, through which a high degree of interconnectedness across industrial processes in terms of shared occupations and skills across several industries and neighborhoods, can be excavated and mapped onto episodes of labour militancy. The neighbourhood, the trade unions, and nationalist events have all hitherto been studied to understand the shaping of workers’ protest. This article, by contrast, focuses on other crucial elements: the workplace and the industrial processes, which tied workers together in concrete, everyday, and proximate relationships.
 
 

Using Marx to Understand the Working Class in the Philippines

In the Philippines, service workers outnumber workers in industry and agriculture. Wage workers are the majority, but there is substantial nonwaged employment. Marxist categories as a relational theory of social classes can unpack these characteristics of the working class. Production relations and the labor theory of value are relevant concepts. The working class is defined by its situation—it is the propertyless mass who must sell their labor power in return for wages to the capitalist class who own the means of production. Thus, service workers are no less proletarian than industrial workers. Moreover, service workers engaged in the supply chain of commodity production—from engineers designing products to workers transporting goods to wholesale and retail employees laboring at the point of sale—all contribute to the creation of value and surplus value. Proletarianization subjugates sections of the working class and even independent producers to the industrial regime characterized by division of labor and mechanization of work. Capitalism simultaneously creates, destroys, and reconstitutes sections of the working class as it develops. For Marx, the working class is composed of the army of labor and the reserve army. The reserve army of labor is the nonwaged population or the urban and rural poor in the Philippines. They are the semi-proletariat, which connotes their similarity yet distinctiveness from the proletariat.

Reserve army of Ho Chi Minh City: migrant workers in the Ho Chi Minh City's industrial parks and processing export zones under the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT COVID-19 appeared in Vietnam in January 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially announced the Covid-19 pandemic caused by the new strain of Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) around the globe on 1-3-2020. From 1-4-2020, Vietnam introduced social distancing to prevent the spread of the disease in society, affecting every social class, including ‘internal' migrant workers who were often formerly farmers. This paper reports on research evaluating the impact of the pandemic on the internal migrant ‘reserve army of labour' now working in industrial parks (IPs) and export processing zones (EPZs) in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Internal migrant workers make up the majority of employees, at 70% to 85.5% and this article offers a chance to evaluate Marxist categories of work, along with the point of view of the systems and social network approaches, to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic impacts production activities at IPs & EPZs. The paper asks how management of workplaces in the face of the pandemic imposed coping strategies affecting levels of employment and lives of migrant workers at EPZs and IPs. Looking especially at migrant workers' strategies in facing the challenges of the pandemic, the use of Marx’s “floating, latent and stagnant” categories of the “reserve army of labour” is reconsidered on the basis of information from available statistical data and from detailed interviews and observations in the Project “Improving the effectiveness of dialogue and collective bargaining in private enterprise and foreign directed investment enterprises in HCMC” under a grant from the Ho Chi Minh City Science and Technology Development Fund, 2020-22 - HCMFOSTED.

The Continuing Value of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital

Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) was widely acknowledged to be a significant intervention in the debate on the political economy of work within contemporary capitalist societies. Despite the radicalism of some initial contributors, over time a new orthodoxy hostile to the Marxist foundation of Braverman’s work was established so that today his influence has waned. His legacy is largely restricted to a simplified and linear theory of the labour process, with the focus that work under capitalism is subject to a dynamic of deskilling. The richness of Braverman’s contribution and observations on issues of political economy, such as the separation of ownership and control, class relations, and the reserve army of labour, subjects of initial discussion and criticism, are ignored. The paper summarizes the major themes in Braverman’s work, and challenges many of the criticisms made since its publication. It also discusses some limitations, including those deriving from Braverman’s complex relation to Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s political economy, confusion regarding the position of the ‘middle layers’ within employment, and the absence of a sufficiently nuanced account of labour markets. Finally, it addresses some of the changes to capitalism since Braverman’s day, arguing that contemporary labour processes can be best explored through an engagement with his pioneering work.

The macrodynamics of an endogenous business cycle model of marxist inspiration

This study offers a model that formalizes some of Marx's insights about how capital accumulation generates contradictions that may reproduce never-ending cycles of booms and slumps. The model takes the reserve army of labor as a regulator of the distribution of class-power over the business cycle with a two-sided role: influencing labor productivity, directly through the intensity of labor and indirectly through real wages. The model forms a complex dynamical system capable to yield trajectories for the employment rate, the wage share, and the intensity of labor. Goodwin (1967) model may be considered as a particular case of the model. Complex dynamics may also emerge when we remove some key assumptions and explore and simulate 3-D versions of the system. Though close orbits around non-hyperbolic equilibrium points can be obtained, the possibility of unstable dynamics with increasing amplitudes in the trade cycle and a structural crisis cannot be ruled out.

A Model of Economic Growth and Long Cycles

The purpose of this article is to derive an endogenous growth and cycles model that integrates the general law of capital accumulation, the reserve army of labor, technological change, devaluation of capital, and the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The phase space of this model is analyzed by estimating its equilibrium solutions and exploring its economically meaningful stability properties. The so derived endogenous growth-and-cycles model is then simulated with realistic parameter values. The solutions of our model display periodicity, which may be treated as long cycles like attractors conditioned by the long-run movement of profitability. The salient feature of our model is the growth of the rate of surplus value, which becomes the regulating variable of our system for it explains the deviations from equilibrium and at the same time provides a realistic solution to Harrodian instability. JEL Classification: C61, E11, E32, O41

Roma Workers under Czech Racial Capitalism: A Post-Socialist Case Study

This article contributes to the theory of racial capitalism by focusing on racialization of labor in the post-socialist context. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Roma workers in the city of Ostrava, the Czech Republic, the paper investigates the role of the Czech state in confining Roma to low-paid, precarious and informal work—and how dynamics of racialization figure in this relationship. State policies like job placement programs, I claim, explicitly target Roma workers, channelling them into stigmatized and low paying positions, reproducing racial prejudices and confining them to precarious and often dangerous work. Using the category of “racialized surplus population,” I examine the functionalist relationship between racialization and capitalism in the Czech Republic, which I argue is manifest both economically—enabling capital to rely on racialized workers as a reserve army of labor—and politically, as the exclusion of Roma from the white proletariat mediates class conflict.

Marx and Me

This is the story of how I encountered Marxism and how I have used it to make sense of the world, and hence to inform my political activism. I describe how humanist materialism has helped me interrogate social structures so as to discover underlying interacting forces and the role played by human praxis and understandings. On the way, I examine debates about the researcher as outsider; criticisms of political multiculturalism; difficulties of being a Marxist after the cultural turn when many academics will no longer even engage with Marxist arguments; problems in writing about and working with Islamists; struggles to excavate housing studies from being buried in policy detail; uncomfortable truths about immigration and the reserve army of labour; and warnings from the failure of revolutionary stages theory. I end with lessons from the Kurdish freedom movement on human relationships and bottom-up democracy, and with its inspirational example of a society attempting to live as if in the early days of a better world.

Anxiety, Ambivalence, and the Violence of Expectations: Migrant Reception and Resettlement in Sicily

ABSTRACT Throughout Europe, the arrival of irregular migrants in recent years has triggered the expression of nativist anxieties, witnessing a broad recourse to violent rhetoric and the embrace of exclusivist models of national and regional community. With an ethnographic focus on migrant resettlement in Sicily, this paper argues that the elaboration of a cosmopolitan ethic that rejects the politics of exclusion can be met with ambivalence by local people who share neither the middle-class sensibilities of refugee advocates, nor their access to the public funds by which it is possible to earn income as social service and resettlement workers. Consequently, migrant advocacy is dogged by the widespread presumption that its aims are not necessarily altruistic, and that the apparatus of migrant resettlement is staffed by actors best positioned to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities presented by the migrant crisis. At the same time, newcomers’ incorporation into the body politic as a reserve army of labour, and the expectation imposed upon them to adapt to host communities and contribute productively to the local economy in any way they can, represents a key element of migrant marginalisation that even their own advocates do not explicitly question. Finally, this marginalisation is further exacerbated by contemporary populist rhetoric that positions newcomers as an existential threat to the society.

Inter-regional underemployment and the industrial reserve army: Precarity as a contemporary Greek drama

We explore the 2008/2009 economic crisis in Greece and its impact upon employment precarity. Specifically, we focus upon changing regional patterns of waged part-timerism during three periods: the 2005–2008 pre-crisis period; the 2009–12 deep recession; and the 2013–2016 period of mild stabilization. Our analysis reveals important geographical and sectoral variations in the growth of this type of underemployment. In particular, we find that metropolitan regions have experienced the heaviest losses in full-time waged employment and a significant expansion of underemployment. Moreover, they have struggled to bounce back effectively during the period of stabilization. By way of contrast, island regions orientated towards tourism weathered the crisis to a much better degree, with many avoiding the acute flexibilization felt in more urbanized regions. Our study observes a “downwards convergence” of regional employment figures that is caused by Attica’s disproportionate crisis. This contrasts popular accounts that focus upon productive output. Moreover, by documenting distinct sectoral trajectories, such as the substantial flexibilization of tourism-related activities, we shed light upon the specifics of an industry often praised for its adaptiveness. Ultimately, through exploring the changing spatialities and sectoral specificities of growing flexibility during a period of recession and recovery, our study provides a geographically sensitive perspective on the emerging dynamics of the Greek reserve army of labour. In so doing, we further historical geographical materialist understandings of the capitalist crisis in Southern Europe.

A self- governing reserve army of labour? The commodification of the young unemployed through welfare policy, practice and discourse

A self- governing reserve army of labour? The commodification of the young unemployed through welfare policy, practice and discourse

‘The dice are loaded’: history, solidarity and precarity in Australian universities

This article responds to debate over casualisation within the Australian Historical Association (AHA) and within the history profession in Australia more generally. It is argued that competing interests increasingly govern relations between salaried and casual academics. The article seeks to historicise these competing interests within the discipline in the history of Australian universities since the late 1980s. The authors draw on Marx’s descriptions of the ‘reserve army of labour’ and recent sociological debates over precarity to describe the political economy that has produced a casual academic workforce. By also analysing the effects of recent shifts in the structure of academic work more widely, the article advocates for solidarity, on the basis of academic historians’ shared precarity in the university sector. It then points to how historians might marshal their research resources to derive lessons from the past, in the service of protecting historians as a community, particularly for those most affected by the trend towards precarity.

Women, Art and Wartime Industries: A Feminist Inter/Modern Analysis

ABSTRACTThis article interrogates the gendered nature of modernism via analysis of the art work of two modern women painters, the American Edna Reindel and the Australian Sybil Craig. Each portrayed women working in shipbuilding, aircraft and munitions factories during the Second World War. While their paintings of women at work could be seen as complicit in the hegemonic masculinist political regimes which considered women a reserve army of labour, a feminist inter/modern reading runs counter to the conventional view that the masculinity of modern times was barely disturbed by women stepping into unusual roles under exceptional circumstances.

Violent proletarianisation: Social murder, the reserve army of labour and social security ‘austerity’ in Britain

This article examines social security policy for working age people in Britain in the ‘age of austerity’. Drawing upon critical approaches to understanding social policy and violence, the article a...

A pedagogia do capital e o sentido das resistências da classe trabalhadora

Este artigo analisa as condições objetivas e as forças sociais e políticas da pedagogia do capital na atual conjuntura política e econômicabrasileira, destacando a formação da força de trabalho, sobretudo, preparada para a conformação social mediante a intensificação da precarização e da exploração; a composição do exército industrial de reserva; e o robustecimento das trincheiras formadas pelos aparelhos privados de hegemonia do capital. Discute a pedagogia do capital no tocante às “reformas” nos sistemas educacionais para a formação do jovem trabalhador – a reforma do Ensino Médio e a Base Nacional Comum Curricular. Essa pedagogia também contribui para a ressignificação da condição de trabalhadores em ocupações irregulares e eventuais regulamentadas como empreendedores – constata que, na maioria, são jovens com baixa escolaridade. E, por fim, problematiza o sentido das resistências da classe trabalhadora, indicando debilidades e alternativas possíveis de unificação das agendas das forças políticas progressistas no campo da educação.

The Reserve Army of Labor in China's Economy, 1991–2015

Since the late 1990s, China's economic expansion has depended on an immense pool of cheap labor. Today, as wages increase and manufacturing operations leave the country, there are constant complaints about shortages of peasant workers. But has China really entered a new era of labor shortage?

MEMPERBESAR TENTARA CADANGAN PEKERJA: “BONUS DEMOGRAFI” DAN EKONOMI POLITIK NEGARA NEOLIBERAL DI INDONESIA

Demographic dividend which means that the amount of productive age (ages 15-65 years) has been interpreted by liberals as an opportunity for great improvement in the economy of a country. In a report from the World Bank, ILO and Bappenas said that the demographic dividend that occurred in Indonesia and reached its peak in 2035 is a golden bridge towards progress. This means that Indonesia if it is able to use it believed to be a country with high income and can transform into an industrial country. This paper seeks to elaborate on the structural condition of the emergence of the demographic dividend and associate it with the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) which was implemented in 2015. Through analysis of the political economy of this paper will discuss about the problems faced by the reserve army of labour in relation to the neoliberal state. The findings of this paper is: 1) the impasse in the agrarian transformation process; 2) the demographic dividend entangled in the framework of the neoliberal state; 3) the reserve army of labour into specific mechanisms of capitalism in controlling wages and depoliticize the labor movement.

Informal Employment and China’s Economic Development

We measure the size of informal employment using both labor market as well as energy consumption approaches. We find that the share of informal employment in total employment was increasingly most of the time between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and started steadily decreasing after that until now. This has two contradicting implications for the Chinese economy. On the one hand, it is good news for China’s progress in human development as the process of formalization often brings better income and welfare. On the other hand, for China’s capitalism this could be bad news since the labor costs are likely to continue increasing with a decline in the reserve army of labor.