5. THE FUTURE ISN’T WORKING
1.Two recent manifestos from India and Germany have also attacked the glorification of work: Kamunist Kranti, ‘A Ballad Against Work’, 1997, at libcom.org; and Krisis-Group, ‘Manifesto Against Labour’, 1999, at krisis.org.
2.Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), p. 820.
3.Research suggests that changes in opportunities (provided by moments such as an economic crisis) are far more important than the level of grievances in generating a social movement. In other words, the idea that making things worse will lead to revolution has little empirical support. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapter 5.
4.Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, transl. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), Part 8.
5.Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 14.
6.As Marx writes, ‘“Proletarian” must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than “wage-labourer”, the man who produces and valorises “capital”, and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorisation.’ Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 764 n. 1 (emphasis added).
7.In the case of groups like unpaid domestic labourers, the proletariat can also rely upon the wages of another for its survival, along with all the problematic dependencies this fosters. In this case, the proletariat is indirectly reliant upon waged labour for its survival.
8.Richard Freeman, ‘The Great Doubling: The Challenge of the New Global Labor Market’, in John Edwards, Marion Crain and Arne Kalleberg, eds, Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream (New York: New Press, 2007).
9.Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown US, 2015), p. 60.
10.The problem of how to define the surplus population is one which is often assumed away in the literature. But there are important issues here that cannot simply be passed by. If the surplus is defined in terms of waged versus non-waged, then are working prison populations not part of the surplus? What about the vast amounts of informal labour that works for a wage and produces for a market? Other problems arise if one defines the surplus in terms of productive and unproductive labour. In particular, one is led to the conclusion Negri and Hardt draw – that since socially productive labour exists everywhere under conditions of post-Fordism, the term no longer has meaning. (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New York: Penguin, 2005], p. 131.) We reject that conclusion and attempt to demonstrate here that the concept still has important analytical and explanatory utility. We believe that the surplus can be defined as those who are outside of waged labour under capitalist conditions of production. The latter qualification means that most informal labour (not under capitalist conditions of production) is included in the category. We are particularly influenced here by the work of Kalyan Sanyal.
11.Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 46.
12.In economics this is associated with the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). Hiring workers when unemployment is at this level is thought to raise wages and eventually cause inflation, thereby setting a floor to how low the unemployment rate should go.
13.For classic statements about the political uses of unemployment, see Michał Kalecki, ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’, Political Quarterly 14: 4 (1943); Samuel Bowles, ‘The Production Process in a Competitive Economy: Walrasian, Neo-Hobbesian, and Marxian Models’, American Economic Review 75: 1 (1985).
14.This emphasis on secular trends, we would argue, is one of the unique characteristics of a Marxist understanding of unemployment.
15.The fear of automation taking jobs has a long history, of which the Luddites were one of the earliest examples. More recently this fear was a major issue in the 1960s with discussions about the idea of cybernation and in the 1980s and 1990s with headline-grabbing journalistic commentary, and has re-emerged again over the past few years. The large number of relevant texts include: Ad Hoc Committee, ‘The Triple Revolution’, International Socialist Review 24: 3 (1964); Donald Michael, Cybernation: The Silent Conquest (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962); Paul Mattick, ‘The Economics of Cybernation’, New Politics 1: 4 (1962); David Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1997); Martin Ford, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future (US: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009); Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
16.These estimates are for the US and European labour markets, though similar numbers undoubtedly hold globally and, as we argue later, may even be worse in developing economies. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? 2013, pdf available at oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk; Jeremy Bowles, ‘The Computerisation of European Jobs’, Bruegel (2014), at bruegel.org; Stuart Elliott, ‘Anticipating a Luddite Revival’, Issues in Science and Technology 30: 3 (2014).
17.Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, transl. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 566–7.
18.Paul Einzig, The Economic Consequences of Automation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957), p. 78.
19.Thor Berger and Carl Benedikt Frey, Technology Shocks and Urban Evolutions: Did the Computer Revolution Shift the Fortunes of US Cities? (Oxford Martin School Working Paper, 2014), p. 6.
20.James Bessen, ‘Toil and Technology’, Finance & Development 52: 1 (2015), p. 17.
21.Evidence already suggests that the global density of bank branches is retreating. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, Technology at Work: The Future of Innovation and Employment (Citi – Global Perspectives and Solutions, 2015), pp. 25–6, pdf available at ir.citi.com.
22.Wassily Leontief, ‘National Perspectives: The Definition of Problems and Opportunities’, in The Long-Term Impact of Technology on Employment and Unemployment, a National Academy of Engineering symposium (1983).
23.There is some evidence for this currently happening, with businesses reporting difficulties in finding skilled workers and rising wage disparities within occupations between the most and least skilled. Bessen, ‘Toil and Technology’, p. 19.
24.Boyan Jovanovic and Peter L. Rousseau, General Purpose Technologies, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2005, at nber.org; George Terbough, The Automation Hysteria: An Appraisal of the Alarmist View of the Technological Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 54–5; Aaron Benanav and Endnotes, ‘Misery and Debt’, in Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form (London: Endnotes, 2010), p. 31.
25.Barry Eichengreen, Secular Stagnation: The Long View (Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2015), p. 5, pdf available at nber.org.
26.Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and PostColonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2013), p. 55. Notably, this means that this economic sector is eminently contemporary, rather than being a residue of some pre-capitalist mode of production.
27.Gabriel Wildau, ‘China Migration: At the Turning Point’, Financial Times, 4 May 2015, at ft.com; ‘Global Labor Glut Sinking Wages Means U.S. Needs to Get Schooled’, Bloomberg, 4 May 2015, at bloomberg.com. While Africa has yet to be fully integrated into the global capitalist system, it is worth emphasising that the integration of China and the post-Soviet states was a one-off surge in the global labour force. The trend from here on out will be a general decline in the importance of this mechanism for producing surplus populations.
28.We note here that while the first two mechanisms are integral to capitalist accumulation (changes in the productive forces and the expansion of capitalist social relations), the third is a logic distinct from just accumulation. The empirical characteristics of this group also change over time (as with, for instance, the integration of women into the workforce over the past four decades). Lynda Yanz and David Smith, ‘Women as a Reserve Army of Labour: A Critique’, Review of Radical Political Economics 15:1 (1983), p. 104.
29.In other words, these dominations can often be functional for capitalism, even if their function does not explain their genesis.
30.A full 36 million people are considered to be in slavery today: Global Slavery Index 2014 (Dalkeith, Western Australia: Walk Free Foundation, 2014).
31.Edward E. Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Silvia Federici, ‘Wages Against Housework’, in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).
32.In terms of global unemployment, women have faced the brunt of the crisis in recent years. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), p. 18.
33.For example, black males in the United States were particularly affected by the automation and outsourcing of manufacturing. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp. 29–31.
34.Michael McIntyre, ‘Race, Surplus Population, and the Marxist Theory of Imperialism’, Antipode 43:5 (2011), p. 1500–2.
35.These draw broadly upon the divisions Marx drew between the floating/reserve army, latent and stagnant, but are here offered as an updating of his historical example.
36.Gary Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor: A Global Journey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 46.
37.This is what Kalyan Sanyal describes as ‘need economies’. See Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development.
38.The area of ‘vulnerable employment’ now accounts for 48 per cent of global employment – five times higher than pre-crisis levels. This number is also thought to underestimate the amount of vulnerably employed, given its informal, off-the-books nature. ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014: Risk of a Jobless Recovery? (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2014), p. 12; David Neilson and Thomas Stubbs, ‘Relative Surplus Population and Uneven Development in the Neoliberal Era: Theory and Empirical Application’, Capital & Class 35 (2011), p. 443.
39.In Marx’s schema, this can be understood as C-M-C, where commodities are produced and sold on the market in order to receive money to buy goods for subsistence. This differs from pre-capitalist subsistence economies in that goods are not produced for personal consumption, but instead must be mediated through the market. Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, pp. 69–70.
40.Michael Denning, ‘Wageless Life’, New Left Review II/66 (November–December 2010), p. 86; ILO, G20 Labour Markets: Outlook, Key Challenges and Policy Responses (Geneva: International Labour Organization/OECD/World Bank, 2014), at ilo.org, p. 8.
41.Marilyn Power, ‘From Home Production to Wage Labor: Women as a Reserve Army of Labor’, Review of Radical Political Economics 15:1 (1983).
42.David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (London: Verso, 2010), p. 280.
43.ILO, Key Indicators of the Labour Market, 8th edn (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2013), at ilo.org.
44.State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide, Gallup, 2013, at ihrim.org, p. 27; John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna, ‘The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism’, Monthly Review, November 2011; Neilson and Stubbs, ‘Relative Surplus Population’. The International Labour Organization currently estimates that 5.9 per cent of the working population (201 million people) are unemployed – but this relies on a very stringent definition of unemployment. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2015 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), at ilo.org, p. 16. If one works for an hour mowing a lawn, makes a few dollars selling homemade wares on a street, or has a doctorate and works in a call centre, the ILO counts this as employment. In other words, part-time workers, informal workers and underemployed workers all count as employed. The ILO definition of unemployment also improves when people drop out of the labour force: a smaller workforce means lower unemployment. A more meaningful measure is therefore the level of employment among the working-age population, according to which the ILO estimates that over 40 per cent of the world’s population is not employed. ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, p. 18. In a similar measure, they estimate that only half the global labour force is in waged or salaried work. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), p. 28. But these measures still overestimate the number of people employed, and so other measures have attempted to overcome these deficiencies. Gallup, for instance, defines ‘employment’ as formal work for thirty hours or more per week – and concludes that 74 per cent of the global labour force fails to meet this definition. State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide, Gallup, 2013, pdf available at ihrim.org, p. 27. Another study, based on ILO data on the unemployed, vulnerably employed and economically inactive, estimates the surplus population at 61 per cent of the total working-age population (calculated from data by Neilson and Stubbs, ‘Relative Surplus Population, p. 444). The conclusion to draw from these alternative measures is simple: the global surplus population is massive, and in fact outnumbers the formal working class.
45.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, transl. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), Chapter 2; Patricia Connelly, Last Hired First Fired: Women and the Canadian Work Force (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1978).
46.Cleaver here uses the term ‘Lumpen’ to refer to what we have called the ‘proletariat’ condition. Eldridge Cleaver, ‘On Lumpen Ideology’, The Black Scholar, 4:3 (1972), pp. 9–10.
47.Mattick, ‘Economics of Cybernation’, p. 19.
48.Benanav and Endnotes, ‘Misery and Debt’; Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2011), p. 2. Broadly speaking, we can discern two ways in which the concept of surplus populations has functioned in recent debates. One set of arguments is concerned with the overlapping of particular social groups (for example, black minorities) with the concept of the surplus population. Another, much smaller, set of arguments has been interested in the claim that the surplus population has a secular trend to grow in size.
49.Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 798.
50.Richard Duboff, ‘Full Employment: The History of a Receding Target’, Politics & Society 7: 1 (1977), pp. 7–8.
51.While NAIRU is debatable as a measure of full employment, the postwar period saw unemployment typically below NAIRU, and the neoliberal period has seen unemployment consistently above NAIRU. Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker, ‘Full Employment: The Recovery’s Missing Ingredient’, Washington Post, 3 November 2014, p. 10; José Nun, ‘The End of Work and the “Marginal Mass” Thesis’, Latin American Perspectives 27: 1 (2000), p. 8; Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), pp. 46–7; Jeffrey Straussman, ‘The “Reserve Army” of Unemployed Revisited’, Society 14: 3 (1977), p. 42.
52.Economic Projections of Federal Reserve Board Members and Federal Reserve Bank Presidents, December 2014, Federal Reserve Board, 2014, pdf available at federalreserve.gov, p. 1.
53.Claire Cain Miller, ‘As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up’, New York Times, 15 December 2014.
54.Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Civilian Employment–Population Ratio’, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 2014, at research.stlouisfed.org; Deepankar Basu, The Reserve Army of Labour in the Postwar US Economy: Some Stock and Flow Estimates, Working Paper (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2012), p. 7.
55.ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, p. 17.
56.The job growth rate dropped from 1.7 per cent between 1991 and 2007 to 1.2 per cent between 2007 and 2014. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook, p. 16; ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook, p. 29.
57.Ibid., p. 20.
58.Workers in developing economies, of course, have long lived under conditions of precarity. The new concern for precarity is therefore a symptom of the collapse of a model of work peculiar to developed economies in the postwar period.
59.A more thorough exploration of these characteristics can be found in Standing, Precariat, pp. 10–11.
60.Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 789.
61.Francis Green, Tarek Mostafa, Agnès Parent-Thirion, Greet Vermeylen, Gijs van Houten, Isabella Biletta and Maija Lyly-Yrjanainen, ‘Is Job Quality Becoming More Unequal?’, Industrial & Labor Relations Review 66: 4 (2013), pp. 770–1; Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 114.
62.Carrie Gleason and Susan Lambert, Uncertainty by the Hour, pp. 1–3, pdf available at opensocietyfoundations.org.
63.While this aspect of precarity has often been emphasised, irregular work still remains a small portion of the labour market in most advanced capitalist countries. Kim Moody, ‘Precarious Work, “Compression” and Class Struggle “Leaps”’, RS21, 10 February 2015, at rs21.org.uk. It is estimated that about a quarter of workers in developed economies are on temporary contracts or without a contract. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook, p. 30.
64.Self-Employed Workers in the UK – 2014 (London: Office for National Statistics, 2014), pdf available at ons.gov.uk.
65.Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Employment Level – Part-Time for Economic Reasons, All Industries’.
66.Official business surveys find that 1.4 million people are working under zero-hours contracts in the UK. See Analysis of Employee Contracts that Do Not Guarantee a Minimum Number of Hours (London: Office for National Statistics, 30 April 2014), pdf available at ons.gov.uk.
67.Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein, Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2013), p. 12.
68.Bernstein and Baker, ‘Full Employment’.
69.In a poll of mainstream economic experts, a weighted 43 per cent of respondents agreed that technology played a central role in wage stagnation, versus 28 per cent who disagreed. ‘Poll Results: Robots’, IGM Forum, 25 February 2014, at igmchicago.org.
70.ILO, G20 Labour Markets, p. 5; The Slow Recovery of the Labor Market, US Congressional Budget Office, February 2014, at cbo.gov, p. 6; Ciaren Taylor, Andrew Jowett and Michael Hardie, ‘An Examination of Falling Real Wages, 2010–2013’ (London: Office for National Statistics, 2014), at ons.gov.uk.
71.The level of personal savings in America has dropped drastically since the 1970s. US Bureau of Economic Analysis, ‘Personal Saving Rate’.
72.‘Share of U.S. Workers Living Paycheck to Paycheck Continues Decline from Recession-Era Peak, Finds Annual CareerBuilder Survey’, CareerBuilder, 25 September 2013, at careerbuilder.com; 8 Million People One Paycheque Away from Losing Their Home, Shelter, 11 April 2013, at england.shelter.org.uk.
73.Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 54.
74.Carlos Nordt, Ingeborg Warnke, Erich Seifritz and Wolfram Kawohl, ‘Modelling Suicide and Unemployment: A Longitudinal Analysis Covering 63 Countries, 2000–11’, Lancet, 2015, p. 5; Justin Wolfers, Is Business Cycle Volatility Costly? Evidence from Surveys of Subjective Wellbeing, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2003, at nber.org; Nikolaos Antonakakis and Alan Collins, ‘The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide: On the Empirics of a Modern Greek Tragedy’, Social Science & Medicine 112 (July 2014); Karen McVeigh, ‘DWP Urged to Publish Inquiries on Benefit Claimant Suicides’, Guardian, 14 December 2014.
75.Ben Bernanke, ‘The Jobless Recovery’, paper presented at the Global Economic and Investment Outlook Conference, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 6 November 2003, at federalreserve.gov.
76.Olivier Coibon, Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Dmitri Koustas, Amerisclerosis? The Puzzle of Rising US Unemployment Persistence, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Brookings Institution, Fall 2013, pdf available at brookings.edu.
77.Natalia Kolesnikova and Yang Liu, ‘Jobless Recoveries: Causes and Consequences’, Regional Economist, April 2011, at stlouisfed.org.
78.Slow Recovery of the Labor Market, p. 2; Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Employed, Usually Work Full Time’.
79.ILO, G20 Labour Markets, p. 4.
80.It has been suggested that one reason for this connection is that, in the wake of a recession, firms are risk-averse in relation to hiring for occupations that are automatable. Nir Jaimovich and Henry E. Siu, The Trend Is the Cycle: Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012, at nber.org, p. 29.
81.The distinction between routine and non-routine better explains the data than either a division between low and high levels of education, or between manufacturing and service jobs. Ibid., pp. 3, 16–19.
82.Over the past three decades, a full 92 per cent of the job losses in automatable mid-skill positions have occurred in the twelve months from the onset of a recession. Ibid., p. 2.
83.In previous recessions, the routine jobs have never returned. Ibid., p. 14.
84.ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, pp. 11–12; Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Of Total Unemployed, Percent Unemployed 27 Weeks and Over’, Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 1 January 1948; Eurostat, ‘Long-Term Unemployment Rate’, Eurostat, 2015, at ec.europa.eu.
85.Alan Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho, ‘Are the Long-Term Unemployed on the Margins of the Labor Market?’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2014.
86.Loïc Wacquant, ‘The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on Its Nature and Implications’, Acta Sociologica 39: 2 (1996), p. 125; Richard Florida, Zara Matheson, Patrick Adler and Taylor Brydges, The Divided City and the Shape of the New Metropolis, Martin Prosperity Institute, 2014, at martinprosperity.org.
87.William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 15.
88.Loïc Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America’, Socialism and Democracy 28: 3 (2014), p. 46.
89.Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 191.
90.Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2012), p. 218.
91.The number of black males working in manufacturing was nearly cut in half between 1973 and 1987. Wilson, When Work Disappears, pp. 29–31.
92.Ibid., p. 42.
93.Ibid., p. 19.
94.Wacquant, ‘Rise of Advanced Marginality,’ p. 127.
95.While the size of the informal economy is notoriously difficult to measure, by all accounts it forms a significant part of the global economy. For an overview of methods to measure the global shadow economy, see Friedrich Schneider and Andreas Buehn, Estimating the Size of the Shadow Economy: Methods, Problems, and Open Questions (CESifo Working Paper Series No. 4448, 2013), pdf available at papers.ssrn.com. For a more detailed, ethnographic account of one urban informal economy, see: Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
96.The United Nations suggests that two-fifths of workers in developing economies are in the informal sector, while other research notes a significant growth in this proportion between 1985 and 2007. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), p. 176; Friedrich Schneider, Outside the State: The Shadow Economy and the Shadow Economy Labour Force, Working Paper, 2014, pdf available at econ.jku.at, p. 20.
97.UNHabitat, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (Nairobi: UNHabitat, 2003), at mirror.unhabitat.org, p. 46.
98.Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2001), p. 41.
99.Jan Breman, ‘Introduction: The Great Transformation in the Setting of Asia’, in Outcast Labour in Asia: Circulation and Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 8–9; Nicholas Kaldor, Strategic Factors in Economic Development (Ithaca, NY: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 1967).
100.Jan Breman, ‘A Bogus Concept?’, New Left Review II/84 (November–December 2013), p. 137.
101.Sukti Dasgupta and Ajit Singh, Manufacturing, Services and Premature Deindustrialization in Developing Countries: A Kaldorian Analysis, Working Paper Series, World Institute for Development Economics Research, 2006, at ideas.repec.org, p. 6; Breman, ‘Introduction’, p. 2; Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor, p. 58; Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 15.
102.Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 175; Breman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–8; George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), Chapter 9.
103.Sassen, Expulsions, Chapter 2.
104.Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, p. 69.
105.Davis, Planet of Slums, pp. 181–2.
106.Rather than a 30–40 per cent manufacturing share of total employment, the numbers are closer to 15–20 per cent, and manufacturing now begins to decline as a share of GDP at per capita levels of around $3,000, rather than $10,000. Dani Rodrik, ‘The Perils of Premature Deindustrialization’, Project Syndicate, 11 October 2013, at project-syndicate.org, p. 5.
107.Over 30 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 1996. Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee and Michael Spence, ‘New World Order’, Foreign Affairs, August 2014.
108.Manfred Elfstrom and Sarosh Kuruvilla, ‘The Changing Nature of Labor Unrest in China’, ILR Review 67: 2 (2014)
109.Real wages rose by 300 per cent between 2000 and 2010. ILO, Global Wage Report 2012/13: Wages and Equitable Growth (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2013), pdf available at ilo.org, p. 20.
110.ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, p. 29.
111.International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics: Industrial Robots 2014 (Frankfurt: International Federation of Robotics, 2014), pdf available at worldrobotics.org, p. 19; Lee Chyen Yee and Clare Jim, ‘Foxconn to Rely More on Robots; Could Use 1 Million in 3 Years’, Reuters, 1 August 2011; ‘Guangzhou Spurs Robot Use amid Rising Labor Costs’, China Daily, 16 April 2014, at chinadaily.com.cn; Angelo Young, ‘Nike Unloads Contract Factory Workers, Showing How Automation Is Costing Jobs of Vulnerable Emerging Market Laborers’, International Business Times, 20 May 2014.
112.Majority of Large Manufacturers Are Now Planning or Considering ‘Reshoring’ from China to the US, Boston Consulting Group, 24 September 2013, at bcg.com; Stephanie Clifford, ‘US Textile Plants Return, with Floors Largely Empty of People’, New York Times, 19 September 2013.
113.Dani Rodrik, Premature Deindustrialization, BREAD Working Paper No. 439, Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, 2015, at ipl.econ.duke.edu, p. 2.
114.Fiona Tregenna, Manufacturing Productivity, Deindustrialization, and Reindustrialization, World Institute for Development Economics Research, 2011, at econstor.eu, p. 11.
115.Out of a labour force of 481 million, approximately 1 million work in this sector. Fields, Working Hard, Working Poor, p. 51.
116.Frey and Osborne, Technology at Work, p. 62; Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 184–5.
117.Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 344–5.
118.This is why, despite the massive size of China’s proletarian population, this surplus labour supply is becoming a problem as real wages surge upwards.
119.Göran Therborn, Why Some People Are More Unemployed than Others: The Strange Paradox of Growth and Unemployment (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 23–4.
120.Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, p. 280.
121.The political intervention to bring this about is often missed by commentators who are sanguine about the historical experience of automation. See, for example, George Terbough, The Automation Hysteria: An Appraisal of the Alarmist View of the Technological Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), Chapter 5.
122.Lewis Corey, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici Friede, 1934), p. 272.
123.Harry Braverman, ‘Automation: Promise and Menace’, American Socialist, October 1955, at marxists.org; Benanav and Endnotes, ‘Misery and Debt’, p. 36; Duboff, ‘Full Employment’, p. 1.
124.Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 259–60.
125.Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, transl. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2014), p. 67.
126.ILO, ‘Trends’, World Employment and Social Outlook, p. 23.
127.Peter Cappelli, ‘The Path Not Studied: Schools of Dreams More Education Is Not an Economic Elixir’, Issues in Science and Technology, 27 November 2013, at issues.org; Stanley Aronowitz, Dawn Esposito, William DiFazio and Margaret Yard, ‘The Post-Work Manifesto’, in Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, eds, Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 48; Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012); Andrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education (London: Pluto Press, 2013).
128.Standing, Precariat, p. 45.
129.Notably, even Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers are doubtful that skills training will be able to solve the upcoming problems. Paul Krugman, ‘Sympathy for the Luddites’, New York Times, 13 June 2013; Lawrence Summers, ‘Roundtable: The Future of Jobs’, presented at The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine, Hamilton Project, Washington, DC, 19 February 2015, at hamiltonproject.org.
130.Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed, pp. 27–31.
131.Harvey, Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, pp. 284–5.
132.PMI surveys suggest the annual growth rate has been 2 per cent, which is far below what has been standard for global GDP growth. (Chris Williamson, ‘January’s PMI Surveys Signal First Global Growth Upturn for Six Months’, Markit, 4 February 2015, at markit.com.) Other studies find that growth is higher than this, but potential output has been declining in developed economies since before the crisis, and estimates of global potential output have continually been revised down after the crisis. World Economic Outlook 2015: Uneven Growth: Short-and Long-Term Factors (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2015), pp. 69–71, pdf available at imf.org.
133.We do not pretend to adjudicate between the competing explanations here, but merely point to the growing consensus about a new era of lower growth: Andrew Kliman, ‘What Lies Ahead: Accelerating Growth or Secular Stagnation?’ E-International Relations, 24 January 2014, at e-ir.info; Robert Gordon, Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2012, at nber.org; Lawrence Summers, ‘US Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound’, Business Economics 49: 2 (2014); Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin, eds, Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures (London: CEPR, 2014).
134.Cowen, Great Stagnation, pp. 47–8.
135.Thor Berger and Carl Benedikt Frey, Industrial Renewal in the 21st Century: Evidence from US Cities? (Oxford Martin School Working Paper, 2014).
136.Calculated based on data from: Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Table 1. Private Sector Gross Jobs Gains and Losses by Establishment Age’; Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Table 5. Number of Private Sector Establishments by Age’.
137.This is the position of a variety of centre-left economists. See Baker and Bernstein, Getting Back to Full Employment; Pavlina Tcherneva, Beyond Full Employment: The Employer of Last Resort as an Institution for Change, Annandale-on-Hudson: Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, September 2012, pdf available at levyinstitute.org.
138.Denning, ‘Wageless Life’, pp. 84–6.
139.Aaron Bastani, ‘Weaponising Workfare’, openDemocracy, 22 March 2013, at opendemocracy.net; Joe Davidson, ‘Workfare and the Management of the Consolidated Surplus Population’, Spectre 1 (2013), at spectrecambridge.wordpress.com; Marta Russell, ‘The New Reserve Army of Labor?’ Review of Radical Political Economics 33: 2 (2001).
140.Aufheben, ‘Editorial: The “New” Workfare Schemes in Historical and Class Context’, Aufheben 21 (2012), pdf available at libcom.org, p. 4.
141.‘In 1820 Britain had a population of 12 million, while between 1820 and 1915 emigration was 16 million. Put differently, more than half the increase in British population emigrated each year during this period. The total emigration from Europe as a whole to the “new world” (of “temperate regions of white settlement”) over this period was 50 million.’ Foster, McChesney and Jonna, ‘The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism’; Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 183.
142.For example, in the 1970s and 1980s Switzerland maintained low unemployment despite slow growth by repatriating Italian immigrants. Therborn, Why Some People Are More Unemployed than Others, p. 28.
143.Tara Brian and Frank Laczko, eds, Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost During Migration (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2014), pdf available at publications.iom.int, p. 12.
144.Dennis Arnold and John Pickles, ‘Global Work, Surplus Labor, and the Precarious Economies of the Border’, Antipode 43: 5 (2011).
145.Between 1998 and 2013, prison populations have increased from 25 to 30 per cent, while the overall world population has increased by 20 per cent. Roy Walmsley, World Prison Population List (London: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2013), 10th edn, pdf available at prisonstudies.org, p. 1.
146.Molly Moore, ‘In France, Prisons Filled with Muslims’, Washington Post, 29 April 2008; Scott Gilmore, ‘Canada’s Racism Problem? It’s Even Worse than America’s’, Macleans, 22 January 2015, at macleans.ca; Jaime Amparo-Alves, ‘Living in the Necropolis: Homo Sacer and the Black Inhuman Condition in Sao Paulo/Brazil’, presented at Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide, University of California at Riverside, March 2011, at repositories.lib.utexas.edu.
147.Alexander, New Jim Crow, p. 13.
148.George S. Rigakos and Aysegul Ergul, ‘Policing the Industrial Reserve Army: An International Study’, Crime, Law and Social Change 56: 4 (2011), p. 355.
149.Angela Y. Davis, ‘Deepening the Debate over Mass Incarceration’, Socialism and Democracy 28: 3 (2014), p. 16.
150.It suffices to point to two facts here: that the spike in prison construction came during a period of declining crime rates, and that if the crime rate is held constant over the past thirty years, the United States is six times more punitive now. Alexander, New Jim Crow, p. 218; Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration’, p. 45.
151.Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration’, p. 42.
152.In California, 80 per cent of defendants required representation by state-appointed lawyers. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism’, Race & Class 40: 2–3 (1998–99), p. 172.
153.Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration’, p. 44.
154.Derek Neal and Armin Rick, The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress After Smith and Welch, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014, at nber.org, p. 2.
155.Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration’, p. 43.
156.Wacquant, ‘From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the “Race” Question in America’, New Left Review II/13 (January–February 2002), p. 42.
157.Ibid., p. 53; Alexander, New Jim Crow, p. 219.
158.Wacquant, ‘From Slavery to Mass Incarceration’, pp. 57–8; Rocamadur, ‘The Feral Underclass Hits the Streets: On the English Riots and Other Ordeals’, Sic 2 (2014), at communisation.net, p. 104 n. 10.
159.Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steve Redburn, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014), p. 258; Neal and Rick, Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress, p. 34.
160.The mechanics of getting unions and social movements to adapt to new goals must necessarily be worked out in practice and in the context of local conditions. Union habits and structures differ from country to country and from sector to sector, making tailored responses necessary.
161.For example, recent fast food strikes brought forth numerous predictions that raising the minimum wage would lead to automation. Given how deplorable these jobs are, we consider their automation an unambiguous positive. Steven Greenhouse, ‘$15 Wage in Fast Food Stirs Debate on Effects’, New York Times, 4 December 2013.
162.Paul Lafargue, ‘The Right to Be Lazy’, in Bernard Marszalek, ed., The Right to Be Lazy: Essays by Paul Lafargue (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), p. 45.
163.For thoughts on how this might practically be achieved, see Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), Chapter 6.