the limits required for the progressive reproduction of capital. Put another way, capitalists can never allow wages to undercut the rate of surplus-value, to the extent that it impedes or halts the reproduction of capital needed at any moment. Conversely, Marx says, this is why labor becomes increasingly subject to capital. In the period of early industrial capitalism, the requirements for accumulation often took the form of lengthening the working day without increasing wages, thereby extracting an even greater amount of surplus-value from the worker in absolute human terms. This is why trade unionism in the second half of the nineteenth century in England fought for and succeeded in reducing the legal limit of the working day from twelve to ten hours. Despite these victories, however, there were limits to what labor could achieve. For Marx, the great and unique irony about the capitalist mode of production was “man … governed by the products of his own hand.”23 What does this mean? Simply this: workers set in motion the greater reliance on the machinery they themselves produce, which ultimately removes them from the processes of production.
These processes became more intense as a result of competition between capitalists. Winners succeed in great part because the surplus-value they appropriate from their workers enables them to sell their commodities at the cheapest price. As winners, they vanquish small businesses and larger competitors as well, either drawing in the capital of those they have overcome, or destroying it completely. Either way, the result is a greater centralization of capital, which pulls together scattered sources of money across the marketplace, helping to fund a credit system that facilitates the further expansion of capital. Marx says that centralization and credit become the “two most powerful levers” in the further development of capitalist production and accumulation.24
On this basis, the joint-stock company, forerunner of the modern corporation, accelerates accumulation “in the twinkling of an eye.”25 Empowered by credit, revolutionary advances in the technical composition of capital—in a word, machinery—continue to raise the proportion of constant capital in relation to variable capital. This is how the value of capital increases. Existing production must always be re-transformed to a higher degree of technical perfection, requiring a smaller quantity of labor to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials.
Marx proceeds to argue how capitalist accumulation creates a “disposable industrial reserve army” of labor that exists solely for the benefit of the capitalists. With the advance of technological innovation, workers are set free into a growing population of the unemployed. Some do find work in other capitalist enterprises, usually older companies that lag behind in new machinery and pay lower wages. Accumulation determines at any given time those employed at various wage levels as well as the unemployed, all who make up what Marx calls “the social capital in its totality.” But this totality is always rocked by fluctuations caused by the changing composition of constant and variable capital, that is, more machines, less human labor. Sometimes these fluctuations are what Marx calls “violent.” When production expands, so does the need for variable capital, though this is temporary. Because growth is based on constant technological innovation in the most advanced industries, fewer workers are required for production over the long haul. This results in the striking and outright loss of jobs in those industries and makes the absorption of labor in the older capitalist enterprises more difficult. The very expansion of production and all that it unleashes is set in motion by a mass of workers whose own productiveness leads to their removal from it. What the laboring population produces on top of accumulated capital is the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus-population; and it does this to an always increasing extent.26
For Marx, a surplus laboring population is a necessary product of accumulation and the development of wealth on a capitalist basis. Regardless of its varying rate at any time in the various phases of production, the outcome is always the same. The rise in constant capital and the diminution of variable capital mean that “with the greater breadth and fullness of all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of labourers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion.” As Marx concludes, “This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.”27 It also is the cause of a disposable industrial reserve army, which is always available to be exploited by capital. Labor ultimately loses out as some workers wind up in lower-paying jobs in lesser industries while others are entirely thrown out of employment. But the one continuous factor is the growth of the reserve army of labor. As Marx says, “The course characteristic of modern industry … depends on the constant formation, the greater or lesser absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus-population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus-population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction.”28
Marx goes to great lengths to explain how work performed by an increasing reserve army of labor takes various forms. At each stage in accumulation, the capitalist can utilize whatever labor he employs to set into motion more production by increased use of machinery, which then allows him to replace skilled laborers with the less skilled, male with female, and adults with children. Nevertheless, the supply of available labor is always greater than the demand for it. Moreover, those who are employed are often forced “to submit to over-work and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.”29
Marx identifies various forms of superfluous labor subject to the worst of conditions. An example of what he calls “floating” employment are young boys—he likely had in mind the doffers who crawled into industrial machinery to clean it, then perhaps mangled or killed because they could not finish before the bell rang to restart the machine—and who became unemployed if they reached manhood. For Marx, this was a glaring contradiction of the needs of accumulation and its impact on labor, particularly when capitalists complained that they needed more of these young hands while many thousands of men were out of work. Another example was in agriculture, where capitalist innovation caused demand for agricultural labor to fall. Here the contradiction was more extreme compared with industry, where the advance of one phase of production might call for additional labor from an existing surplus pool that could be channeled into secondary capitalist enterprises. This was not the case in agriculture, where machines did away entirely with the need for agricultural labor. The workers might find their way to the city, but they would only augment the industrial reserve army there. For Marx, those left behind in the countryside made up a “latent” surplus population that only grew larger. “The agricultural labourer is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.”30
The third example, which made up “the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation,” was that part of the active labor army that faced extremely irregular employment. “Hence,” Marx said, “it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power” whose “conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class.” Apart from the “dangerous classes” that consist of criminals, prostitutes, etc., paupers fall into three categories: those able to work, orphans and pauper children, and the demoralized and ragged. As Marx writes, “pauperism is the hospital of the active labour army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.”31
From this he concludes:
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.32
For
