The Geography of the Everyday by Sullivan Rob;

Author:Sullivan, Rob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Surplus Army of Labor

and the Working Class

”The flight of serfs into the towns continued without interruption through the entire Middle Ages,” writes Marx in The German Ideology. “They never managed to organize themselves and remained unorganized rabble. The need for day labor in the towns created the rabble” (Marx 1994, 134). However, “the rabble” ended up fulfilling much more of a role in the history of feudalism and capitalism than merely being available for day labor, though they certainly fit that bill and at cheap prices as well. As members of what Marx calls the reserve or surplus army of workers, the rabble has also stood as markers or signals to “ordinary” workers that there is a group of desperate men and women willing and at least somewhat able to readily take their jobs, should ever that need arise. In fact, to fulfill the function of serving as a sign to workers that other things being equal, things certainly could be much worse, the rabble doesn’t even have to be employable, they merely have to survive. Then they can exist as living symbols, human signposts, of what can happen to those who somehow slip from the halter and either cannot or will not work. Engels, writing of Manchester and Birmingham in the 1840s, describes this semiotic operation thusly: “While I was in England at least twenty or thirty people died of hunger under the most scandalous circumstances. . . . Of course, only a few [of the poor] actually die of hunger. But what guarantee has the worker that this will not be his fate to-morrow? Who will give him security of employment?” (1958, 32).

Moreover, the reserve army can be counted on whenever capitalists require (or simply desire) a quick influx of cheap labor, depressing wages as they flood into the workforce, a positive by-product of their recruitment as far as the capitalist is concerned. “The role of the Reserve Army is to provide a pool of available labor to satisfy sudden bursts of activity characterizing expansion phases of the business cycle. . . . That inadequate labor supply does not constitute a constraint upon the ‘elasticity’ of the system is accounted for precisely in terms of the operation of the Reserve Army” (Hollander 2008, 100; italics, Hollander). Giddens also notes the importance of the reserve army in Marx’s schema as a necessary ingredient for the capital class to ensure themselves against economic stagnation as it “acts as a constant depression upon wages” (Giddens 1971, 56).

But then the question arises: how are these people to be maintained until that time? What are the means of their reproduction until they are needed? Frequently, this is the nexus in which capital welcomes government into the equation, as the state can be used to pick up the slack, offering up such benefits as food stamps and unemployment insurance to reproduce this sector until its members are required by capitalists. However, when the workforce becomes a global entity, then the requirement for the

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