Marx’s Capital Volume 1,
Part 9a
Unemployment
Chapter 25 of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, called The General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation, is about the effects of Capital on the workforce.
Section 3 of Chapter 25 is
concerned with what we nowadays refer to as Unemployment. Marx argues very
directly and very convincingly in this section that unemployment is a
necessary, constant, conscious and deliberate part of the capitalist system. He
writes:
“The over-work of
the employed part of the working-class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst
conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on
the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the
dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working-class to
enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes
a means of enriching the individual capitalists”.
In the light of what Marx says here, it can be argued that all
protestations from bourgeois democrats that they are intending to provide
"jobs" for all of the unemployed are false.
Early in this chapter, Marx writes:
“[The]
accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along
with the accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than
this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently
absolute increase of the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly
than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it
is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in
the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant
population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for
the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a
surplus-population.”
In other words, whatever may
be the intention, it is capitalism itself that creates unemployment. The stories
about the birthrate being too high, the immigration too much, the rand too
high, the interest rate too high, et cetera, are wrong. The truth is that
unemployment is intrinsic to capitalism, as much as employment is.
Although we are obliged to do
everything possible to increase employment and to reduce unemployment, yet
there is eventually no escape from unemployment within the capitalist mode of
production.
What is required, as Marx
wrote in “Value, Price and Profit”, is “abolition of the wages system”, and the
wages-system’s replacement with another mode of production.
Picture: A South African mine worker (AP).
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1, C25, Section 3
on Unemployment.