Unemployment

Abstract

In Marxian terms, unemployment represents the reserve army of labour in capitalism and this is fundamental to the workings of the capitalist system. Unemployment is created by and is a necessary coadjutor of the capitalist system itself. Marx explains this as follows:

… in all spheres, the increase of the variable part of the capital, and therefore the number of workers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and the temporary production of a surplus population. … Owing to the magnitude of the already functioning social capital, and the degree of its increase, owing to the extension of the scale of production, and the great mass of workers set in motion, owing to the development of the productivity of their labour, and the great breadth and richness of the stream springing from all the sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of workers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion; an increase takes place in the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital and in its technical form, and an increasing number of spheres of production become involved in this change, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes alternatively. The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent that is always increasing.