Page - (000067) - in Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation

60 L. SCHLOGL AND A. SUMNER process leads, in Marx’ view, to a “constant transformation of a part of the laboring population into unemployed or half-employed hands” (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 “automatic factories” where “only a very small number continue to find employ- ment,” while the majority who get laid off form a “floating surplus pop- ulation” (ibid., p. 281). He speaks of workers being degraded to the estranging status of an “appendage of a machine” (ibid.) and, in Das Kapital, Marx sees the process of technology-driven capitalistic develop- ment as an “accumulation of misery” (ibid.). This line of argument is stark techno-pessimism. Although Lewis’ conception of surplus labor as a population defined “relatively to capital and natural resources” sounds Marxian (and also Malthusian), there are some differences in that Lewis really means dis- guised rather than actual unemployment. In other words, Lewis’ 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 “floating” form where workers have to constantly change employers; a “latent” form of precarious agricultural (under)employment; a “stag- nant” form characterized by irregular employment at minimal wages; and a “pauperist form” which is made up of criminals and “dangerous classes.” Lewis’ conception of surplus labor thus resembles that of Marx’ latent surplus, whereas he explicitly disagrees with the notion of produc- tivity-driven labor surplus: “Marx offered a third source of labor to add to the reserve army, namely the unemployment generated by increasing efficiency. (…) 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 ‘theoretically’ possible” (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,