Immiseration (was Krugman on Marx)

Mathew Forstater forstate at levy.org
Thu Aug 13 15:13:10 PDT 1998


Fellows, Jeffrey wrote:


> This leads me to ask a question about the nature of the reserve army
> today as it relates to notions of concentrated poverty. If there are
> areas where poverty is excessive and certain segments of the population
> are isolated in those areas without real connections to the (legal)
> system of production, can this portion of the unemployed be considered
> part of the research army?
>
> Jeff

The *research army* are those of us who are supposed to be doing research but instead are playing around on e-mail lists and so are soon to be part of the reserve army.

Seriously (not that the above wasn't) I think you are talking about the latent reserve army. Those areas where non-capitalist forms are present constitute a latent portion of the reserve army. Also, some may have referred to women and children not in the labor force at a point in time as part of the latent reserve army as well, but this may be more complicated if we start to consider household relations and unpaid housework and child rearing as a subsidy to capital.

Whatever Dictionary Tom picks should include these terms, so not the MIT Dictionary please. Maybe the New Palgrave and Bottomore's Marxist Dictionary. The forthcoming Encyclopedia of Political Economy will have a good entry on the reserve army, with latent, floating, etc., all delineated.

The internationalization of the reserve army has been a key development in global capitalism, with implications for those who make up/made up the bulk of the reserve army traditionally in industrialized countries. This point is made in a scary way in Darity and Myers Essays on Race and Unwantedness.

Mat

p.s. what is ope-l? is it really a secret left economists list?



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