Pauperism and “minus-labour”
“It is already contained in the concept of the free
labourer, that he is a pauper…“
Pauperism and surplus population play brief but strategic roles
in the Grundrisse, appearing in the three fragments on pages 397-423,
604-610, and 704-711, respectively, that all deal with the inverted
relationship between necessary labour and the superfluous – the first and third
fragments also revolving around disposable time. These two themes – or two moments
of the same theme – return with a vengeance in the climactic chapter 25 of Capital,
volume 1, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”
Closely related to pauperism, at least analytically, is
unproductive labour, which Marx gives fleeting attention to in the Grundrisse
and relegates to the unpublished “Chapter Six” of Capital. Marx’s “does
not belong here” footnote, however, hints at a more prominent role for servant
work as a companion to the reserve army, in that, “the creation of surplus
labour on the one side corresponds to the creation of minus-labour, relative
idleness (or not-productive labour at best), on the other.” In The Source
and Remedy, Dilke identified the expansion of the “unproductive classes” as
one of the two primary methods by which capital avoided a terminal reduction of
the rate of return on investment. Thomas Chalmers celebrated the role of this
“disposable population” as a measure of national prosperity. Marx, however,
never fully articulated the relationship between the disposable population of
servants and the disposable reserve army of the unemployed. Chapter 52 of
volume 3 of Capital begins a discussion of classes that ends in the
middle of the second page with the note from Engels, “At this point the
manuscript breaks off.”
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