 Reserve army, surplus population, classes of labourHenry Bernstein Chapter 3 in Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work, 2023, pp 53-63 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: 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. Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19739_3 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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