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production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of
population, historically valid within its limits and only in so far as man has not interfered with
them.
But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the
development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the
lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of
production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as
absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual
increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass
of human material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the
productiveness of labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows
also; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not
merely because the absolute wealth of society expands, of which capital only forms an elastic
part, not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of
this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it grows, also, because
the technical conditions of the process of production themselves – machinery, means of transport,
&c. – now admit of the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus-product into additional
means of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation,
and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production,
whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need
for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the
possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the
scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation supplies these masses. The course
characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of
periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the
constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve
army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the
surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction. This peculiar
course of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also
impossible in the childhood of capitalist production. The composition of capital changed but very
slowly. With its accumulation, therefore, there kept pace, on the whole, a corresponding growth
in the demand for labour. Slow as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of more
modern times, it found a check in the natural limits of the exploitable labouring population, limits
which could only be got rid of by forcible means to be mentioned later. The expansion by fits and
starts of the scale of production is the preliminary to its equally sudden contraction; the latter
again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without
an increase, in the number of labourers independently of the absolute growth of the population.
This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free” a part of the labourers;
by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased
production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the
constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed
hands. The superficiality of Political Economy shows itself in the fact that it looks upon the
expansion and contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes of the
industrial cycle, as their cause. As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into a certain definite
motion, always repeat this, so is it with social production as soon as it is once thrown into this
movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects, in their turn, become causes, and the
varying accidents of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the
form of periodicity. When this periodicity is once consolidated, even Political Economy then sees
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that the production of a relative surplus population – i.e., surplus with regard to the average needs
of the self-expansion of capital – is a necessary condition of modern industry.
“Suppose,” says H. Merivale, formerly Professor of Political Economy at Oxford,
subsequently employed in the English Colonial Office, “suppose that, on the
occasion of some of these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of
getting rid by emigration of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms,
what would be the consequence? That, at the first returning demand for labour,
there would be a deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all
events, the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the
profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the
prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for
the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured to them only by the
command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have hands ready by
them, they must be able to increase the activity of their operations when required,
and to slacken it again, according to the state of the market, or they cannot
possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of competition on which the
wealth of the country is founded.”
16
Even Malthus recognises overpopulation as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his
narrow fashion, he explains it by the absolute over-growth of the labouring population, not by
their becoming relatively supernumerary. He says:
“Prudential habits with regard to marriage, carried to a considerable extent among
the labouring class of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and
commerce, might injure it.... From the nature of a population, an increase of
labourers cannot be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand till
after the lapse of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by
saving, may take place much more rapidly: a country is always liable to an
increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the
increase of population.”
17
After Political Economy has thus demonstrated the constant production of a relative surplus
population of labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic accumulation, she very aptly, in the guise
of an old maid, puts in the mouth of her “beau ideal” of a capitalist the following words addressed
to those supernumeraries thrown on the streets by their own creation of additional capital: –
“We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital
on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your
numbers to the means of subsistence.”
18
Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power
which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve
army independent of these natural limits.
Up to this point it has been assumed that the increase or diminution of the variable capital
corresponds rigidly with the increase or diminution of the number of labourers employed.
The number of labourers commanded by capital may remain the same, or even fall, while the
variable capital increases. This is the case if the individual labourer yields more labour, and
therefore his wages increase, and this although the price of labour remains the same or even falls,
only more slowly than the mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital, in this case, becomes
an index of more labour, but not of more labourers employed. It is the absolute interest of every
capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of