Marx's reserve army of labour is about to go global
By Andrew Glyn, an economics fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and author of 'Capitalism Unleashed' (THE GUARDIAN, 05/04/06):
Apiece of conventional wisdom about the world dear to economists is that the share of national income going to workers stays pretty stable. Karl Marx disagreed; he argued that labour-saving capital investment would limit demand for labour, while also bankrupting small-scale producers, in agriculture for example. They would swell the labour supply, creating a permanent "reserve army of labour" that would prevent real wages growing as fast as labour productivity. Workers would thus spend an increasing proportion of working time producing profits for capitalists - a falling share for labour or a rising rate of exploitation, in Marx's terminology.… Seguir leyendo »