The Participation Rate

G. The Participation Rate

We have thus far implicitly identified population and labor supply, subject to the qualification that in the cyclical context expansion proceeds by “fits and starts” requiring “an increase in the number of laborers independently of the absolute growth of the population,” that increase provided by pools of periodically unem- ployed or underemployed labor (above, p. 101). But what of the secular trend itself? Can it be that Marx after all allowed for the falling wage trend independently of net population growth in consequence of secular increase in the participation rate and/or increased effort per worker? 20

Marx was certainly preoccupied by the tendency towards an increase of family labor with its depressant impact on the earnings of the adult male laborer:

The value of labour power was determined, not only by the labour time necessary to maintain the individual adult labourer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labour market, spreads the value of the man’s labour power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labour power. To purchase the labour power of a family of four workers may, perhaps, cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labour power of the head of the family, but, in return, four days’ labour takes the place of one, and their price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus labour of four over the surplus labour of one. In order that the family may live, four people must now, not only labour, but expend surplus labour for the capitalist. Thus we see, that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms the principal object of capital’s exploiting power, at the same time raises the degree of exploitation (MECW 35: 398–9).

And citing Ure: “The effect of improvements in machinery, not merely in super- seding the necessity for the employment of the same quantity of adult labour as before, in order to produce a given result, but in substituting one description of human labour for another, the less skilled for the more skilled, juvenile for adult, female for male, causes a fresh disturbance in the rate of wages” (436). It is further observed that the trend respecting male juveniles has major implications for the significance of adult female labor:

In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labour is carried out, large numbers of

20 Sinha 1998 cited above, p. 87. See also Gottheil: “The rate of population growth . . . is exoge- nous to the Marxian model. While Marx was aware of the population influx, he attached little

significance to it as a cause of changes in the level of wages. Marx was interested in demon- strating that the capitalist system, not biological drives, created the excess supply of labor” (1966: 155)

105 boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is once reached, only a very

G. The Participation Rate

small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, growing with the extension of those branches of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in fact capital that has emigrated. One consequence is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male, teste England. (635; emphasis added).

Now at this point, Marx points out that absolute decline in the employment of male adults is consistent with net expansion of employment (see above, Section D) account taken of the demand for “youthful labourers:” “That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of adults” (emphasis added).

What are we to make of this proposition? In a section “Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the Factory System,” Marx maintains that “in some cases . . . an extraordinary extension of the factory system may, at a certain stage of its devel- opment, be accompanied not only by a relative, but by an absolute decrease in the number of operatives employed” (451; emphasis added) – referring here specifi- cally to adult male operatives: “we have considered this question entirely apart from the fact, that everywhere, except in the metal industries, young persons (under 18), and women and children form the preponderating element in this class of fac- tory hands” (452). But this applied only “in some cases,” implying that on the whole net employment of adult male labor expands; and indeed the text goes on account for net expansion explicitly with reference to such operatives: “Never- theless, in spite of the mass of hands actually displaced and virtually replaced by machinery, we can understand how the factory operatives, through the building of more mills and the extention of old ones in a given industry, may become more numerous than the manufacturing workmen and handicraftsmen that have been displaced.”

Let us, nonetheless, suppose that Marx intended an absolute decline in the demand for adult male labor and see where this leads us. There would then apparently be no need to introduce expanding population to account for the supposedly falling wages of this category and our earlier argument would have to

be revised. This would be a fortiori the case were allowance also made for increasing effort supply per adult male laborer, both extensive and intensive (629), though as far as concerns increased effort as source of additional labor supply Marx himself emphasizes the limits to raising exploitation in this manner, as we shall see in Chap-

ter 4, 21 suggesting that increasing effort is at most a supplementary force exerting downward pressure on the wage rather than as an alternative to expanded labor supply.

21 There are also the restraints imposed by legislative intervention.

Economic Growth and the Falling Real-Wage Trend

The complexity of an increased participation rate is more interesting as we are now obliged to widen our vision to encompass the entire work-force. 22 When we do so, it seems fair to suppose that Marx’s “increasing immizeration” also applies across-the-board to include child and female labor. (Vide the graphic accounts of conditions given in Capital 1: Chapter 10: Section 3.) Now in dealing with

a generalized labor supply, we must not lose sight of Marx’s reference to pop- ulation expansion in the sense of “the additional labour-power, annually sup- plied by the working-class in the shape of labourers of all ages” (580; cited above pp. 93, 98). Equally important is the actual stimulus provided population growth via early marriage and birth rates (636; above p. 93), enduced by (1) “the conditions in which the labourers of modern industry live” – doubtless the crowded living conditions which constitute an aspect of poor earnings, and (2) “the premium that the exploitation of children sets on their production,” which evidently refers not to high child earnings but to growing opportunities for child employment. Population growth is thus actually stimulated by accumulation given capitalist factory conditions, such new additions finding their way rapidly into the labor market – there is no need to wait the standard generation of 20–25 years. Considering the net expansion of demand for labor as a whole that is supposed, demographic considerations must, we conclude, be introduced to account for falling wages in the broad market for labor. 23