Inter-Sectoral Labor Movements

F. Inter-Sectoral Labor Movements

We return to the downward secular trend in the real wage. This trend was particu- larly marked in the agricultural sector and had there been under way since the late eighteenth century (MECW 35: 665); indeed, Marx maintained that agricultural wages had actually fallen “to the minimum,” the farm laborer standing “with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism” (637) in consequence of absolute reduc- tion in labor demand (see above, p. 97). Can the wage decline in the advanced industrial sector be explained by an inflow from agriculture (cf. 699; and 673n regarding the inflow from agriculture to mining), as Ramirez (1986: 546) suggests? It seems not. Consider again Marx’s declaration that “a development of productive forces which would diminish the absolute number of labourers . . . would cause a revolution, because it would put the bulk of the population out of the running” (see above, p. 97). This appears to mean that the net increase in labor demand in the advanced industrial sector exceeds the net decrease in agriculture and elsewhere. Under such conditions even were the entire displaced agricultural labor force to flow into the modern industrial sector there should be no downward pressure on the real wage – unless there is some further source supplementing net labor supply in the industrial sector, as I have argued there is.

But there is a further matter. Marx seems to reason as if such transfers as do occur from country to town are largely in response to cyclical peaks of industrial activity. If this is so then a flow from agriculture at the most puts a damper on the extent industrial wages can rise cyclically. We have seen that the primary

F. Inter-Sectoral Labor Movements 103 function of the Industrial Reserve Army is to provide “the possibility of throwing

great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres” (above, p. 101). Agricultural labor provides one source for the reserve: “in England, an industrial country, the industrial reserve recruits itself from the country districts . . . ” (699); but again, the inflow from agriculture is more directly the outcome of an attraction created at high points of the industrial trade cycle: “Part of the agricultural population is . . . constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the look-out for circumstances favourable to this transformation. . . . But the constant flow towards the towns presupposes, in the country itself, a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which becomes evident only when its channels of outlet open to exceptional width” (636; emphasis added).

It remains to consider the so-called “stagnant” category of the “relative surplus population” which “forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment,” primarily “domestic industry” (637). This segment of the urban population provides capital with “an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power.” For “[i]ts conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capi- talist exploitation” – presumably with low skill requirements. “It is characterised by maximum of working time, and minimum of wages.” Now if our case has been well made out the advanced industrial sector draws upon this sector only for its excep- tional needs; as for secular trends, the non-industrial urban sector is impinged upon by tendencies in the advanced industrial sector (and in agriculture) rather than the reverse: “It [domestic industry] recruits itself constantly from the supernumer- ary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population advances.”

It remains to add that net population growth is actually a feature not only of the advanced industrial sector, but of agriculture too – over the decade 1851–

61 the rural growth rate was recorded by the Census as 6.5 percent, the differ- ence with the 17.3 percent of the towns ascribed to migration from the country (636n). 19 The “domestic industry” segment of the urban population is also said to

be “a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking

a proportionally greater part in the general increases of that class than the other elements”(637). It is in this context that we encounter one of the declarations regarding the inverse relation between earnings and population growth (see above, note 12). Adam Smith’s belief that “[p]overty seems favourable to generation” is also cited here, as is Samuel Laing’s to the effect that “[m]isery up to the extreme

19 It is problematic that population growth is positive although “the agricultural labourer is . . . reduced to the minimum of wages.” But the subsistence minimum may have been envis-

aged as flexible downwards.

Economic Growth and the Falling Real-Wage Trend

point of famine and pestilence, instead of checking, tends to increase population” (637n). It follows that even were Marx’s downward wage trend in the advanced industrial sector to turn on an inflow from other sectors, it would still be impossible to ignore the demographic component of the analysis.