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60 L. SCHLOGL AND A. SUMNER
process leads, in Marxâ view, to a âconstant transformation of a part
of the laboring population into unemployed or half-employed handsâ
(ibid., p. 278), i.e. a surplus population relative to the labor demand of
industry (rather than an absolute overpopulation in a Malthusian sense).
Marx had a strong interest in the relationship of technology and labor
in the production process, and he specifically points to the âautomatic
factoriesâ where âonly a very small number continue to find employ-
ment,â while the majority who get laid off form a âfloating surplus pop-
ulationâ (ibid., p. 281). He speaks of workers being degraded to the
estranging status of an âappendage of a machineâ (ibid.) and, in Das
Kapital, Marx sees the process of technology-driven capitalistic develop-
ment as an âaccumulation of miseryâ (ibid.). This line of argument is
stark techno-pessimism.
Although Lewisâ conception of surplus labor as a population defined
ârelatively to capital and natural resourcesâ sounds Marxian (and also
Malthusian), there are some differences in that Lewis really means dis-
guised rather than actual unemployment. In other words, Lewisâ sur-
plus population receive wages and, moreover, these wages exceed
their marginal productivity (cf. Lewis, 1954, pp. 141f.).8 Marx (2012,
p. 283), on the other hand, distinguished multiple forms of surplus labor:
a âfloatingâ form where workers have to constantly change employers;
a âlatentâ form of precarious agricultural (under)employment; a âstag-
nantâ form characterized by irregular employment at minimal wages;
and a âpauperist formâ which is made up of criminals and âdangerous
classes.â Lewisâ conception of surplus labor thus resembles that of Marxâ
latent surplus, whereas he explicitly disagrees with the notion of produc-
tivity-driven labor surplus:
âMarx offered a third source of labor to add to the reserve army,
namely the unemployment generated by increasing efficiency. (âŚ)
Nowadays we reject this argument on empirical grounds. It is clear that
the effect of capital accumulation in the past has been to reduce the size
of the reserve army, and not to increase it, so we have lost interest in
arguments about what is âtheoreticallyâ possibleâ (Lewis, 1954, p. 145).
Lewis was thus a technological optimist. Indeed, if the industrial-
ized/urban/capitalistic sector in his model is also assumed to produce
surplus labor, the model of labor exchange would arguably break down.
Marx and Lewis concur that the reserve army is central to capi-
tal accumulation in modern capitalism. Lewis (1954, p. 145), though,
Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation