Reserve Army of Labour

Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It refers to the unemployed and under-employed in capitalist society. It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that the unemployed can be defined as those actually looking for work and that the relative surplus population also includes people unable to work. The use of the word "army" refers to the workers being conscripted and regimented in the workplace in a hierarchy, under the command or authority of the owners of capital.

Marx did not invent the term "reserve army of labour". It was already being used by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 book The condition of the working class in England. What Marx did was to theorize the reserve army of labour as a necessary part of the capitalist organization of work.

Before the start of the capitalist era in human history (i.e. before the 1500s), structural unemployment on a mass scale rarely existed, other than that caused by natural disasters and wars. Indeed, the word "employment" is linguistically a product of the capitalist era. A permanent level of unemployment presupposes a working population which is to a large extent dependent on a wage or salary for a living, without having other means of livelihood, as well as the right of enterprises to hire and fire employees in accordance with commercial or economic conditions. The expression "unemployed" in English, in the sense of "temporarily out of work", dates back to the 1660s; reference to "the unemployed" as a group was first made in 1782; and reference to "unemployment" as a general condition is first attested in 1888.

Marx argued that there are no substantive laws of population that hold good for all time; instead, each specific mode of production has its own specific demographic laws. If there was "overpopulation" in capitalist society, it was overpopulation relative to the requirements of capital accumulation. Consequently, demography could not simply just count people in various ways, it also had to study the social relations between them as well. If there are enough resources on the planet to provide all people with a decent life, the argument that there are "too many people" is rather dubious.