Reserve army, surplus population, classes of labour

Who belongs to the global proletariat? Is it growing in contemporary capitalism? Very different answers to these questions divide Marxists today as this entry begins by showing. It then examines what Marx said about ‘surplus population’ and the ‘reserve army of labour’. It suggests that Marx did not formulate a ‘special law of population’ peculiar to the capitalist mode of production that he advised and looks at the problems arising from this in terms of demography, drawing on Benanav’s (2019) observation of an ‘autonomy of demographic processes from economic ones’. This is explored further in relation to doing materialist ‘theory as history’ (Banaji 2010), proletarianization and primitive accumulation, and the theorization of ‘informal’ labour and petty commodity production. It concludes by proposing a conception of ‘classes of labour’ which avoids essentialist notions, both socioeconomic and political, of ‘the proletariat’ in the Marxist canon.