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| Term Paper 299: Essay about Chapter Twenty-Five |
| [602] Rambis and Dunny: term paper! In Section 4 of Chapter 25, Marx discusses the different forms of existence of the relative surplus population as they relate to the general law of capitalist accumulation. According to Marx “every worker belongs to [the relative surplus population] when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed.” (pg. 794) Marx demarcates these workers into three subgroups or forms consisting of the floating form, the latent form, and the stagnant form. Others have already analyzed thoroughly this section based on the content alone, so in our quest to differentiate this term paper from the others, it is our aim to examine the different forms of this relative surplus population and how they relate to modern, mainstream economics. |
| The first of these forms, the floating form, occurs when workers are repelled and attracted from industry resulting in an overall increase in employment but disproportionate to the growth of output. This is a form of structural unemployment caused by the reallocation of labor from industries that are shrinking, or regions that are depressed, to areas that are growing. Workers caught up in this continuous fluctuation and movement are like anthropomorphic flotsam and jetsam being swept to and from the beach of prosperity by changing economic tides. In Marx's model, workers who reach the age of maturity are no longer considered prime for employment and therefore find it difficult to find continued employment in the selected field. These workers end up following the migration of capital and achieve employment only as they are able to follow capital's movement and perform the very menial labor. The resultant fluctuations of the employment level causes a form of cyclical unemployment because the economy's output and employment are below full-employment levels. |
| The second form, or the latent form, is expressed in the group of the relative surplus population which is forced to “pass over” from one type of economic framework to another, as given in the example of the agricultural society moving towards the urban industries. This form of the surplus population is characterized by “wages reduced to a minimum...with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.” (pg. 796) In modern economics, this is a kind of frictional unemployment where workers search for suitable jobs and firms search for suitable workers. Due to the heavy migration of individuals from the one framework (in this example, the rural agricultural workers) to another (the manufacturing industries), labor supply in the newly emphasized framework greatly exceeds labor demand, thus driving down the wage paid to the workers, leading to the circumstance of low wage bordering pauperism expressed earlier. |
| The third form, or stagnant form, is characterized by “a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages.” (pg. 796) Workers who make up a part of this form “offer capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power” and as a result experience “extremely irregular employment.” (pg. 796) “Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class, and it is precisely this which makes it a broad foundation for special branches of capitalist exploitation.” (pg. 796) Workers in the stagnant form of the reserve surplus population can be considered as the unemployed members of the modern economic labor force; either they didn't work in the past few weeks but were looking for employment, or else they held erratic employment and weren't able to stay with a job with any stability or weren't able to find employment in a stable job. |
| Below this stagnant form is another group, “those in the sphere of pauperism,” (pg. 797) which Marx describes as containing “first, those able to work....second, orphans and pauper children....[and] third, the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work...” (pg. 797) Those in the first subgroup, or “those able to work” make up both the employed and unemployed members of the labor force. The “orphans and pauper children” are among the chronically unemployable, those who are unemployed a large part of the time and because of their personal circumstances have difficulty in overcoming their environment to find employment. These have low skills and are characterized by the lackadaisical attitude with which they approach the employment search. Lastly, the “demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work” account for those suffering from the discouraged worker effect, the unemployed members of the labor force, and those out of the labor force. Marx describes the ‘contribution’ of this class of paupers by saying, “Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.” (pg. 797) In other words, the pauper class is where the ‘sick’ members of the labour-army or those not able to keep up or adjust with the changes in the economy eventually end up, while the industrial reserve army is held back by the “dead weight” burdens placed on it by this class of paupers. |
| Hans: Interesting attempt to rconcile the modern categories of structural unemployment, frictional unemployment, and discouraged workers with Marx's categories. The stagnant surplus population can perhaps be seen as the “dual” labor market consisting of the minimum wages and part time jobs. But in any case, the categories do not quite fit because they tacitly assume quite different mechanisms than Marx's. By the way, I had to laugh about the |
| anthropomorphic flotsam and jetsam being swept to and from the beach of prosperity by changing economic tides. |
| But it sounds like blaming the victim if you say the victims of unemployment are “characterized by the lackadaisical attitude with which they approach the employment search,” and if you complain about the burden which they place on the other workers. |
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