| This question <602|604> overall <602|604> Peaches: <559|7>. |
| Term Paper 299: Essay about Chapter Twenty-Five |
| [603] Peaches: Term Paper: Chapter 25 I will discuss Section IV: DIFFERENT FORMS OF EXISTENCE OF THE RELATIVE SURPLUS POPULATION. THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION. |
| Marx describes relative surplus population as a person being partially employed or wholly unemployed. Marx breaks out relative surplus population into three categories: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant. |
| The floating population are those who generally are rejected, then asked to come back, sometimes at higher volumnes so that the number of those employed increases on the whole although in a constantly diminishing proportion to the scale of production. |
| The latent population are those large numbers of male workers who are employed up to the age of maturity, and not beyond. Once these men reach maturity, it becomes harder for them to find employment in the same branch of industry. The majority of these men stay unemployed. These majority who stay unemployed are part of the floating surplus population which grows within each branch of industry. This causes a contradiction in that the economy is saying that there is a shortage of workers when in fact there is an excess of unemployed workers who have reached beyond that maturity stage, and cannot find employment. This causes the female population to grow more rapidly because the division of labour is looking for people who will fit into these “maturity age discriminations.” |
| The stagnant population is a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. This population exploits the worker by creating a life conditioned below the normal average working class. It allows capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power. This means more hours at less wages. |
| Marx adds another final category, pauperism. In this final stage, Marx divides it into three more categories: those able to work; orphans and pauper children; and the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour army, and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population. |
| The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases with the potential energy of wealth. The greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population. Marx says that the more extensive the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Therefore, Marx states, the higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious becomes the condition for their existence, the sale of their own labour power for the increase of alien wealth, or the self-valorization of capital. |
| It follows that in proportion to capital accumulation, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition to the accumulation of wealth. |
| As the Venetian monk Ortes stated, “the poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active.” |
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