By MH. A serialisation of a chapter from the forthcoming book 'Capitalism's Endgame', which is an attempt to deepen the understanding of capitalist decadence in the 21st century from a left communist perspective.
Introduction
‘In this chapter we shall consider the influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class.' (Marx)’[1]
Marx’s ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’ has largely been ignored by the left communist political current. This may be because it has previously been misinterpreted as a prediction that real wages must inevitably fall in capitalism and that workers’ conditions can therefore only worsen.[2] Also, when the surviving left communist fractions were attempting to deepen their understanding of capitalism’s decadence in the 1920s and ‘30s, this period seemed to be characterised by a cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction and it may have been assumed that the ‘general law’ could no longer be valid, while the post-World War II economic boom, which saw a growth of workers’ real wages, appeared to further contradict the idea of ‘immiseration’.
The return of capitalism’s crisis in the 1960s should perhaps, with hindsight, have provoked more interest in the Communist Left. Instead, more recently the general law has been taken up by those associated with ‘communisation’ theory, like the group publishing the Endnotes journal who have used it to support the argument that the working class as a whole is becoming superfluous to capitalist accumulation and is therefore no longer a revolutionary subject,[3] while responses to this argument from the Communist Left have tended to reassert that the working class is still numerically growing rather than address the issues raised by the law itself.[4]
We don’t intend to deal with these arguments directly here. Rather our aim is to promote an informed discussion of the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’ described by Marx, and of its potential contribution to our understanding of capitalism in its phase of descent.
We comment below on some of the problems we face in trying to use official data and identify key trends in capitalism, especially today when so much of what really happens in capitalist society is deliberately distorted and disguised by a cynical bourgeoisie. But as materialists we have no option but to try to ascertain the facts…
The general law of capitalist accumulation
In general, Marx argues, we might expect that the more rapidly capitalism accumulates, the more the demand for labour increases, causing wages to rise. But if the trend for wages to rise continued unchecked, profits would decline and eventually threaten the future of accumulation. What happens in reality is that the more rapidly capitalism accumulates, the more it tends to produce a surplus population of workers, which forms an ‘industrial reserve army’; a pool of disposable labour power that becomes a means both to regulate wages and to ensure the domination of capital. As the proletariat grows in size, so this industrial reserve army also tends to grow, and the more this grows in proportion to the active, working section of the proletariat, the more it tends to become a consolidated surplus population, resulting, according to Marx, in the pauperisation of the working class.
At the same time, the more rapidly that capitalism accumulates, the more the productivity of labour grows, resulting in a tendency for the demand for labour to diminish in proportion to the growth of capital, even as the size of the working class increases:
The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, 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. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production… [5]
The more that capitalism accumulates, in other words, the more the condition of the working class as a whole must worsen, whatever the level of wages:
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases 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 the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.[6]
For Marx this was ‘the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’, and he considered it important enough to devote a whole chapter to its workings in the first volume of Capital.
At one level, the law can be understood as a gauntlet thrown down to the bourgeois political economists, exposing the brutal reality of their utopia of a capitalist society based on free competition. But for Marx, the fact that the demand for labour tends to diminish the more labour productivity grows expresses an inherent contradiction of capitalism; labour time for this mode of production is the only determinant of value, and yet the more it develops the productive forces, it is driven to reduce this to a minimum.[7] The same contradiction that inexorably leads to the worsening of the condition of the working class also demonstrates that capitalism must in theory reach a point where it becomes a barrier to the further development of the productive forces.[8] So by examining the extent to which the workings of this law are observable today, we are also exploring whether we can say this point has been reached.
Marx also gives a detailed breakdown of the relative surplus population in English capitalist society in the 1860s; while it changed according to the cycles of production, the ‘industrial reserve army’ always contained three elements:
floating: industrial workers, even the best paid, who are partially or wholly unemployed during periodic crises;
latent: agricultural workers, whose wages are reduced to the minimum due to the advance of capitalism into agriculture, ‘with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism’;
stagnant: those existing in the most precarious conditions, with extremely irregular employment, long hours and low pay, including part-time and casual workers, domestic outworkers, p, often women or children. This ‘stagnant’ population ‘finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism’; constantly replenished by rapidly exhausted industrial workers and surplus agricultural labour, it grows out of proportion to the working class as a whole, providing capital with ‘an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power’.
From this picture we can see that the definition of the relative surplus population includes not only the unemployed but even high-paid, part-time workers as well as all those in precarious and low-paid work. But before we address the question of the extent to which we can observe such a surplus population today, we need to obtain a brief overview of the size and composition of the working class as a whole.
The size and growth of the working class today
In general, we would expect the proletariat to be growing in size; the world’s population has risen from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to over 10 billion by 2100.[9] This has been driven fundamentally by the growth of capitalist accumulation, and the resulting advances in medical science and agricultural productivity, etc. This is despite the destructiveness of capitalism’s growth in its descent; the world’s population has in fact risen more rapidly in this period, the growth rate reaching a peak during the post-World War II economic boom before starting to fall steadily.[10]
In relation to the ‘general law’, the key question is whether the surplus population is growing in proportion to the active, working section of the proletariat. There are of course all sorts of problems in trying to obtain an answer to this question using official data, which not surprisingly does not provide an accurate picture of the working class in ‘classic’ Marxist terms, ie. as the class of wage labourers that produces surplus value for capital, but also as the class of associated, collective labour (and this is before we begin to consider the implications of changes in capitalism like the growth of unproductive labour, of the role of the state, the service sector). So we need to find proxy indicators and focus on key trends, accepting that what we find are approximations.
According to official data, 3.3 billion people were in employment in 2019, of whom 1.7 billion were defined as wage and salaried employees. This will include senior managers, high-paid state functionaries and others who we would not consider part of the working class, and it will exclude some ‘gig workers’, freelancers, temp agency workers and others officially deemed to be ‘self-employed’, at least some of whom we would probably include. But it still gives us an approximation of the size of the working class. This 1.7 billion compares to 1.2 billion in 2000, so broadly the working class, as we might expect, is growing numerically.[11] It is also growing as a proportion of the total number of people in employment, from 45 percent in 2000 to 53 percent in 2019[12] – although there is some evidence that this proportion has remained relatively static since the start of the 20th century .
However, the number of people in employment as a proportion of the world’s working-age population is falling, and has been for at least three decades (see Figure 1).
Figure 1 Global and regional labour force participation rates, 1990-2030
(ILO, Labour Force Estimates and Projections (LFEP) 2018 Key Trends, July 2018. The labour force participation rate measures the proportion of the working-age population that is either working or looking for work; i.e. it includes those officially unemployed)
There are some obvious reasons for this: life expectancy is rising and fertility rates are falling, so the working population is ageing. More people are retiring earlier and living longer, and there are also higher numbers in education, at least in the more advanced capitalist economies. Those people of working age (15 years and older) not in the labour force include full-time students and carers, as well as the retired and disabled. But they also include workers who have been marginalised to different degrees by the system – so-called ‘discouraged’ workers who fall into Marx’s ‘stagnant’ population, the most pauperised portion of the proletariat – along with the criminal element, the ‘lumpenproletariat’.
In summary, the working class is growing numerically, but it is not growing as a proportion of the world’s working-age population. There also appears to be a growing population that is outside of the workforce, partly because of global demographic factors that did not exist in the period of capitalism’s ascent when Marx was writing, but also because capitalism is producing a surplus population of workers.
Before examining this surplus population, we next want to quickly look at what for Marx is a key driver of the ‘general law’: the growth of labour productivity.
To be continued
References
[1] Marx, Chapter 25, Capital, Volume 1 (Penguin, 1976), p.762 [2] For a description of these views see J Bellamy Foster et al, ‘The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism’, Monthly Review, November 2011 [3] See for example ‘Crisis in the Class Relation’ and ‘Misery and Debt’ in Endnotes no. 2, April 2010. [4] For the Communist Workers’ Organisation see CP, ‘The Disappointed of 1968: Seeking Refuge in Utopia’, Revolutionary Perspectives no. 16, Series 4, August 2020. The other main representative of the Communist Left, the International Communist Current, has so far made no attempt to respond to the specific arguments of the ‘communisers’. [5] Capital Volume 1, Chapter 25, p.783. [6] Ibid, p.798. [7] ‘Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth’ (Grundrisse, ‘Chapter on Capital, Section Two’ (Penguin, 1973), p.706). [8] ‘Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter.’ (Grundrisse, ‘The Chapter on Capital, Section Three’, p749) [9] Our World in Data, <https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth> ; United Nations, World Population Prospects 2022: Summary of Results, p.i. [10] UN data shows that the world population’s annual growth rate fell from a peak of 2.24 percent in 1963 to 0.83 percent in 2022 and is currently projected to fall to 0.11 percent in 2100 (<https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-growth-rate>) [11] International Labor Organization, World Employment Social Outlook, Trends, 2020, p90 [12] Ibid, pp84-5