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Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. [1] It refers to the unemployed and underemployed in capitalist society . It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that the unemployed can be defined as those actually looking for work and that the relative surplus ...
Labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly. [2] Under capitalism, according to Marx, the productive powers of labour appear as the creative power of capital. Indeed, "labour power at work" becomes a component of ...
Marx's theory of value differs from the classical view in his definition of labor. Marx separates it into two different types: concrete and abstract labor . [ 15 ] Concrete labor can be thought of as the unique characteristics of labor such as the work of a farmer versus a tailor.
Ken Gelder noted that in cultural studies, subcultures are "often positioned outside of class, closer in kind to Marx's lumpenproletariat, lacking social consciousness, self-absorbed or self-interested, at a distance from organised or sanctioned forms of labour, and so on."
According to Marxian economics, surplus labour is usually uncompensated (unpaid) labour. Marx's first analysis of what surplus labour means appeared in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a polemic against the philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. [1] A much more detailed analysis is presented in the volumes of Theories of Surplus Value and Das ...
This increase in real wages could nevertheless be accompanied by decrease in the labor share, and an increase in the power of the capitalist class. A Marx had recognized as early as Wage Labour and Capital (1847): "If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the ...
Marx viewed the colonization of the Americas, the African slave trade, and the events surrounding the First Opium War and Second Opium War as important instances of primitive accumulation. [6]: 14 In The German Ideology and in volume 3 of Capital, Marx discusses how primitive accumulation alienates humans from nature. [6]: 14
Marx failed to systematically theorize the impact of demographic effects on economic reproduction, except that he studied the reserve army of labour and criticized the "overpopulation" theories of Thomas Malthus. Malthus was anxious that population growth would outstrip the capacity of the economy to sustain all the new people.