With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, &c., so that, as the capital increases, instead of ½ of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, &c., is transformed into labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production. Since the demand for labour is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.443

Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a whole, now distributes its various phases simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the composition of capital occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour power absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues growing for a time on its given technical basis, and attracts additional labour power in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic change, and lessens its variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of the variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of labourers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and transitory production of surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of the repulsion of labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less real form of the more difficult absorption of the additional labouring population through the usual channels. […] The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.443

It [the surplus population] forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. […] there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation supplies these masses. The course characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction. This peculiar course of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also impossible in the childhood of capitalist production. The composition of capital changed but very slowly. With its accumulation, therefore, there kept pace, on the whole, a corresponding growth in the demand for labour. Slow as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of more modern times, it found a check in the natural limits of the exploitable labouring population, limits which could only be got rid of by forcible means to be mentioned later. The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the preliminary to its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase, in the number of labourers independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free” a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.444

The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism. The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society – where the labourer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the labourer – undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour power for the increasing of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production, and the productiveness of labour, increase more rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself, therefore, capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase for its own self-expansion. We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.451

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.450-451

If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the “setting free” of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent, independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As soon, therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as the productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even their function as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and more precarious for them; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by Trades’ Unions, etc., they try to organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class, so soon capital and its sycophant, Political Economy, cry out at the infringement of the “eternal” and so to say “sacred” law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed and unemployed disturbs the “harmonious” action of this law. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.448

This is the secret of the “general law”: labour-saving technologies tend to generalise, both within and across lines, leading to a relative decline in the demand for labour. Moreover, these innovations are irreversible: they do not disappear if and when profitability is restored (indeed, as we shall see, the restoration of profitability is often conditioned on further innovations in new or expanding lines). Thus left unchecked this relative decline in labour demand threatens to outstrip capital accumulation, becoming absolute. […] What Marx is here describing is not a “crisis” in the sense usually indicated by Marxist theory, i.e. a periodic crisis of production, consumption or even accumulation. In and through these cyclical crises, a secular crisis emerges, a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation itself. If expanded reproduction indicates that workers and capital pushed out of contracting industries will try to find places in new or expanding lines, the general law of capital accumulation suggests that, over time, more and more workers and capital will find that they are unable to reinsert themselves into the reproduction process. In this way the proletariat tendentially becomes an externality to the process of its own reproduction, a class of workers who are “free” not only of means of reproduction, but also of work itself. For Marx this crisis expresses the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, people in capitalist social relations are reduced to workers. On the other hand, they cannot be workers since, by working, they undermine the conditions of possibility of their own existence. Wage-labour is inseparable from the accumulation of capital, from the accretion of labour-saving innovations, which, over time, reduce the demand for labour: “The working population ... produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing” [Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), p. 638]. It might seem that the abundance of goods, which results from labour-saving innovations, must lead to an abundance of jobs. But in a society based on wage-labour, the reduction of socially-necessary labour-time — which makes goods so abundant — can only express itself in a scarcity of jobs, in a multiplication of forms of precarious employment. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

The “general law of capitalist accumulation”, with its clear implications for the interpretation of Capital, has been overlooked in our own time because under the name of the “immiseration thesis” it was taken up and abandoned many times over in the course of the 20th century. It was held that Marx’s prediction of rising unemployment, and thus the increasing immiseration of the working population, has been contradicted by the history of capitalism: after Marx’s death, the industrial working class both grew in size and saw its living standards rise. Yet quite apart from the fact that these tendencies are often over-generalised, more recently their apparent reversal has made the immiseration thesis seem more plausible. The last 30 years have witnessed a global stagnation in the relative number of industrial workers. A low-wage service sector has made up the difference in the high GDP countries alongside an unparalleled explosion of slum-dwellers and informal workers in the low GDP countries. So is the immiseration thesis correct after all? That is the wrong question. The question is: under what conditions does it apply? Marx wrote about the growth of consolidated surplus populations in 1867. Yet the tendency he described — by which newer industries, because of their higher degree of automation, absorb proportionally less of the capital and labour thrown off by the mechanisation of older industries — did not play out as he had envisaged. As we can see from the graph on the facing page, Marx’s view was correct, in his own time, for the UK: the rising industries of the early second Industrial Revolution — such as chemicals, railways, telegraph etc. — were not able to compensate for declining employment in the industries of the first Industrial Revolution. The result was a steady fall in the rate of growth of manufacturing employment, which looked set to become an absolute decline sometime in the early 20th century. What Marx did not foresee, and what actually occurred in the 1890s, was the emergence of new industries that were simultaneously labour and capital absorbent, and which were able to put off the decline for more than half a century. The growth of these new industries, principally cars and consumer durables, depended on two 20th century developments: the increasing role of the state in economic management, and the transformation of consumer services into consumer goods. The emergent industries of which Marx wrote in the 1860s — gas-works, telegraphy, and railways, (we would add only electrification) — were already in his time beginning to be made available to consumers. Yet the consumer services generated from these technologies — initially reserved for the enjoyment of a wealthy elite — were secondary to the services they provided within the internal, planned economy of industrial firms. Railways emerged as a labour-saving innovation within mining, which was subsequently extended to other industries. It became a service offered to consumers only after extensive national-rail infrastructures had been developed by state-supported cartels. Even as costs fell and mechanised transportation via rail became available to more and more people, as a consumer service it preserved many of the features of its initial employment as a “process innovation” within industry. National railways, carrying passengers in addition to freight, absorbed large amounts of capital and labour in their construction but were subsequently relatively automated processes requiring less capital and labour for their upkeep. The advent of the automobile industry, subsidised by state funding of roads, eventually transformed the consumer service of mechanised transport into a good that could be purchased for individual consumption. This segmentation and replication of the product — the transformation of a labour-saving process innovation into a capital-and-labour absorbing “product innovation”— meant that this industry was able to absorb more capital and labour as its market expanded. A similar story can be told of the shift from telegraphy to telephones, and from electronic manufacture to consumer electronics. In each case, a collectively consumed service — often emerging from an intermediary service within industry — was transformed into a series of individually purchasable commodities, opening up new markets, which in turn became mass markets as costs fell and production increased. This provided the basis for the “mass consumerism” of the 20th century, for these new industries were able to simultaneously absorb large amounts of capital and labour, even as productivity increases reduced relative costs of production, such that more and more peasants became workers, and more and more workers were given stable employment. Yet, as the unprecedented state deficit-spending which supported this process indicates, there is no inherent tendency to capital that allows for the continual generation of product innovations to balance out its labour-saving process innovations. On the contrary, product innovations themselves often serve as process innovations, such that the solution only worsens the initial problem. When the car and consumer durables industries began to throw off capital and labour in the 1960s and 70s, new lines like microelectronics were not able to absorb the excess, even decades later. These innovations, like those of the 2nd industrial revolution described above, emerged from specific process innovations within industry and the military, and have only recently been transformed into a diversity of consumer products. The difficulty in this shift, from the perspective of generating new employment, is not merely the difficulty of policing a market in software — it is that new goods generated by microelectronics industries have absorbed tendentially diminished quantities of capital and labour. Indeed computers not only have rapidly decreasing labour requirements themselves (the microchips industry, restricted to only a few factories world-wide, is incredibly mechanised), they also tend to reduce labour requirements across all lines by rapidly increasing the level of automation. Thus rather than reviving a stagnant industrial sector and restoring expanded reproduction — in line with Schumpeter’s predictions — the rise of the computer industry has contributed to deindustrialisation and a diminished scale of accumulation — in line with Marx’s. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

After 1973, the situation changed. Markets for manufactures were becoming saturated, and it was increasingly the case that a few countries could provide the manufactures for all of the world (one chinese firm currently supplies over half the world's microwaves). Thus the resulting crisis of the capital-labour relation, which is to say, a combined crisis of over-production and under-consumption, signalled by a global fall in the rate of profit and issuing in a multiplication of forms of unemployment and precarious employment. As the capital-labour accord snapped, having always been based on healthy rates of growth worldwide, wages stagnated. Capital in all countries became even more dependent on international trade, but from now on, capitals in some countries would expand only at the expense of those in others. Though they had not yet caught up to the high-GDP countries, the low-GDP countries took part in the same international crisis. Structural Adjustment Programs only accelerated their transition to a new, unstable international framework. Deindustrialisation, or at least the stagnation of industrial employment, set in almost universally among industrialising countries in the 1980s and 90s. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Yet if the “general law” [Marx’s “general law of capital accumulation” leading to increased surplus population] was suspended for much of the 20th century for the reasons we have outlined above, the current growing global masses of under-employed cannot be attributed to its reassertion, at least in any simple sense. For the trajectory of surplus capital distorts the trajectory of surplus labour described by Marx, and not only in the ways that we have already described. Most importantly, surplus capital built up in international money markets over the last 30 years has masked some of the tendencies to absolute immiseration, through the growing debt of working class households. This tendency, which has kept the bottom from falling out of global aggregate demand, has equally prevented any possibility of recovery, which would be achieved only through the “slaughtering of capital values” and “setting free of labour”. For while asset-price deflation may raise the possibility of a new investment boom, the devalorisation of labour-power will, in this context, only lead to increasing levels of consumer default and further financial breakdowns. Thus it is not only its capacity to generate employment, but the sustainability of the recovery itself which remains in question today. The coming decades may see a series of blowouts, if states fail to manage global deflationary pressures, or they may see a long and slow decline. While we are not catastrophists by inclination, we would warn against those who might forget that history sometimes rushes forward unpredictably. Regardless, the catastrophe for which we wait is not something of the future, but is merely the continuation of the present along its execrable trend. We have already seen decades of rising poverty and unemployment. Those who say of the still-industrialized countries that it is not so bad, that people will soldier on — in a phrase, that the proletariat has become indifferent to its misery — will have their hypothesis tested in the years to come, as levels of debt subside and household incomes continue their downward trend. In any case, for a huge chunk of the world’s population it has become impossible to deny the abundant evidence of the catastrophe. Any question of the absorption of this surplus humanity has been put to rest. It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons, marginalised in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by war. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Marx defines the surplus population as workers without regular access to work: a worker “belongs to” the surplus population “when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed”. [Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35) pp. 634-635.] Marx refers to this surplus population as a “relative surplus population”, because these workers are not absolutely surplus, as in a Malthusian account (which is to say, it is not a matter of there not being enough food, water, shelter, etc). Instead, these workers are surplus relative to the needs of capital — that is, relative to capital’s demand for labour. In the history of capitalist societies, large masses of people have been absorbed into the labour market and have come to depend entirely upon earning wages in order to survive. They cannot leave the labour market unless they can get other workers to support them. In other words, workers have to work regardless of what sort and how much work is available. They are at the mercy of capital’s demand for labour. When that demand falls and there isn’t enough work to go around, workers do not stop working altogether — unless they really have no options, in which case they become paupers. Instead, they enter one or another branch of an extensive and variegated surplus population. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

Marx thought that the problem of the surplus population — ultimately a problem of the growing oversupply of, and under-demand for, labour — would intensify over time and, as a result, people would increasingly find themselves disconnected from labour markets, and hence from regular access to the wage. Indeed, Marx describes this as the “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation”. What happens is that capital’s ongoing accumulation process leads to rising labour productivity, which in turn expands the “industrial reserve army”, causing the “consolidated surplus population” — “whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour” — to grow, and increasing “official pauperism”; that is, those who cannot make enough in wages to survive, and so must beg for their bread.5 The overall result is that the accumulation of wealth occurs alongside an accumulation of poverty. In Marx’s account, the main reason capitalist development leads to the growth of the surplus population has to do with what we have called “technological ratcheting”.6 In essence, Marx argues that the demand for labour in each industry eventually falls as labour productivity rises. New industries do come on line, at a faster or slower pace, increasing the demand for labour. However, these new industries never start out from zero: they do not need to reinvent e.g. steam power, the assembly line, the electric motor. Instead, new lines absorb technological innovations that preceded them. As a result, the emergence of new industries is less and less effective in increasing the demand for labour. Hence capital has what Marx terms a “rising organic composition”. Marx argues that it is the older lines, which have not yet been technically renewed, which tend to absorb the most labour. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

[…] today, what renders many workers surplus to the requirements of capital is a dual tendency: on the one hand, towards overaccumulation — which reduces profit rates and hence slows the expansion of output — and on the other hand, towards the ongoing growth of labour productivity, which arises out of capitalist competition and results in a loss of jobs in those economic sectors where output does not increase at a rate equal to productivity. The combination of these factors ensures that, in an economy wracked by overaccumulation, the demand for labour will fail to keep up with its supply. That, in turn, will expand the surplus population. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

According to an old developmental narrative, agricultural employment would decline as agriculture became more productive, precipitating lots of potential new workers into towns, who would then be taken up by expanding industrial production. These developments would eventually bring every country into modernity. For orthodox Marxists, this would tendentially form a proletariat unified under the hegemony of its most “advanced” fractions in industry. But as the global peak of industrialisation recedes into history, it looks like something else is now happening. While agricultural employment has not halted its decline, those workers shed are less likely to join the ranks of the industrial working class than to enter a vast and heterogeneous service sector. At the world level, there are now twice as many workers in services as compared to industry: services account for 44 percent of global employment, while industry accounts for just 22 percent. […] Just as agriculture comes to employ a decreasing share of the workforce, since there are limits to growth in the demand for food, so too with manufacturing: there are supposedly limits to the demand for goods (apparently, there is, however, a limitless demand for services). The result, according to this perspective, is that over time, a rising demand for services will dynamically pull workers into the service sector, just as in an earlier phase workers were pulled into the industrial sector. In reality, the dynamic draw of manufacturing during industrialisation was unique to that sector. To manufacture something is to take a good — or to transform a service, such as dishwashing, into a good, such as a dishwasher — and to produce that good in a factory, according to ever-more efficient techniques. It is the resulting rise in the efficiency of production within the space of the factory that rapidly lowers costs of production in manufacturing lines. That leads, in turn, to a rapid fall in relative prices. Markets for manufactures expand, making possible a dramatic expansion of output. Concomitantly, huge masses of humanity are pulled into work in manufacturing lines. That is the key to the dynamic growth of manufacturing output and employment: the former is very rapid, and that is why, in spite of high rates of labour productivity growth, the latter expands, raising the manufacturing employment share. The same does not take place in the service sector. Services are precisely the sorts of activities that cannot be — or have not yet been — substituted by goods. In services, labour productivity tends to increase slowly if at all, and concomitantly, prices follow the same trajectory. In fact, as long as real wages are rising, the relative price of services will itself tend to increase. Since relative prices do not fall dramatically, there is no impetus for markets for services to expand rapidly. Hence, there is no dynamic tendency to dramatically expand output and thus to draw lots of labour into the sector; instead, employment in the service sector expands slowly. […] The shift from industrialisation to deindustrialisation is necessarily the shift from an economy that grows rapidly, with big booms and busts, to one that grows slowly, tending towards stagnation. In such a context, booms and busts are given merely by financial bubbles being blown up and deflated around the world by surplus capital. There is a corollary to this theory, which explains why a large portion of the surplus population ends up in the service sector, particularly in the low-wage, super-exploited section and in the informal, self-exploiting section. As service work tends to be labour-intensive, a large proportion of the final costs are made up of wages. Because real wages do not usually fall across the economy, it is difficult for service sector firms to lower their costs on a regular basis (general tendencies towards falling costs in industry and agriculture are due to increases in the efficient use of more expensive labour). This results in a relatively low level of output growth in services. But precisely for that reason, when workers are expelled from other sectors, it is possible to get much cheaper workers into services — as those discarded as surplus will usually have to accept a lower wage level. This lowers costs and allows for some expansion in demand for, and output of, services. In the service sector, there is greater room to expand the market by lowering wages. By contrast, in most manufacturing activities, wages make up only a small portion of the final cost of the product, so there is less room for manoeuvre. […] While it is difficult to identify a precise and determinate “logic” as to why some activities become really subsumed and others do not, the fact that certain activities require delicate work or direct human contact, and therefore must remain labour-intensive, is clearly key. There appears always to be a remainder of such activities, an assortment of differentiated tasks, mostly in services. Insofar as services remain services, they tend predominantly to be a source only of “absolute”, and not “relative” surplus value. This is simply another way of saying that there are limits to raising productivity. Consequently, economies that are “post-industrial” and concentrated around service work tend to be low-growth. In such conditions, it is imperative for capitalists to get as much out of their workers as possible, by increasing the duration or intensity of labour. To some extent, the prerequisite for the existence of many jobs becomes pressurised work conditions. If super-exploited sectors take up a growing share of the labour market, this also puts downward pressure on all wages, and increases insecurity, as workers lose bargaining power and bosses are emboldened to demand ever more flexibility. With this, the door is opened for a whole range of abuses to be unleashed upon the worker — sexual, emotional and psychological, as well as the stealing or retention of wages and chronic overworking. Certain positions, such as that of the low-wage service sector worker, thus appear as a kind of special category of surplus worker, akin to the informally self-employed in low-income countries (and in high income countries over the past decade or so). Low-wage service workers must become extreme self-exploiters, as well as being super-exploited, if they are to get work. Many of these jobs (deliveries, house-cleaning, supermarket baggers, and so on) can only exist because the wages of the people performing the service are a fraction of what those consuming the service are paid. Thus, the condition for finding a job in a growing service sector is often accepting a significantly lower than average wage. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

[…] the tendency towards increasing superfluity is not a tendency towards a literal extrusion of a part of the working class from the economy. Surplus workers still need to buy at least some of what they need to survive, and therefore they must earn or acquire money in order to live. Those who are produced as surplus to the needs of capital may still receive wages in super-exploited sectors, or they may be informally self-employed and thus self-exploiting (since they lack access to capital). […] It would thus be a mistake to identify surplus populations with “the unemployed”. This category is, to some extent, an artifact of 20th century high-income countries’ provision of unemployment insurance. In the 19th century, as in most low-income countries today, “being unemployed” in this sense was simply not an option. Unemployment insurance did not exist — and today covers few workers in low-income countries — so workers could not afford to be without work for long: they needed to find employment as soon as possible, regardless of the degree to which their labour was demanded by capital. If there was no demand, they needed to set up shop for themselves, without any employer — by picking through rags, for example. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

Additionally, in the global economy — in which mobile flows of surplus capital discipline states — high-income states must do everything they can to prevent outright unemployment, and thus unemployment provisions, from growing too dramatically. Welfare expenditures, which are ultimately funded from tax receipts, must be kept to a minimum to avoid worrying bondholders and taxpayers. Current UK government policy, for example, is to try to eradicate, as far as possible, possibilities for unemployment as any kind of stable category, transforming welfare into workfare. As a result, in the high-income countries, many workers fall in and out of relative superfluity during their lifetime, due both to the increasing flexibilisation of the labour market and its destabilisation of categories of employment at a structural level, as well as the falling demand for labour. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

On the one hand, this relatively simple theory of the tendential production of surplus population can help greatly in explaining various key aspects of the present global situation. It gives us a basis for explaining deindustrialisation, the relative growth of services, the spread of forms of insecure and flexible labour, and the numerous abuses for which this opens the way. In turn, these tendencies intensify and exacerbate the difficulty of unifying the working class under the hegemony of the industrial worker, in the way traditional Marxism anticipated; it thus gives us a basis for explaining the crisis of the left and present strategic predicaments. It also seems to offer an explanation for declining growth rates over recent decades, as relative surplus value-producing labour has become a diminishing share of global labour. […] On the other hand […] What seems to be a standard misinterpretation or over-extension of the theory of surplus population is characterised by a hypostatisation of “the surplus population” as a singular social subject, with the apparent implication that this may be viewed as the new revolutionary agent, or at least that it is the agent behind various forms of contemporary struggle. This involves a conceptual slippage between general tendency and particular sociological or empirical cases. While it would of course ultimately be false to separate the two, it is also important not to identify them too immediately or simplistically. Thus, the theory of surplus population does not involve some kind of neo-Bakuninite romanticisation of a surplus subject “more radical” or “more dangerous” than the organised working class; nor does it involve a reading of present struggles as those of some “surplus” subject. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject