Lenin describes the three forms of the relative surplus population, or reserve army, set out by Marx – Floating overpopulation, Latent overpopulation, and Stagnant overpopulation. The first consists of unemployed workers in industry. These might be thought of as merely frictionally unemployed, workers moving from one employment to another. As the economy expands, their absolute numbers grow, even though they may represent a smaller proportion of the workforce. The second comprises all those not normally employed, but who can be drawn into employment. Peasants may be dispossessed, or may just find that they can have a higher standard of living/net income from industrial employment. Women and children can be brought into employment, immigration can be encouraged. Finally, the stagnant reserve consists of those that are chronically unemployed or underemployed. They may lack even the education and skills for unskilled work. They are often involved in petty crimes and so on, and only brought into the labour force when labour supplies are very tight, and wages high, or else into the kinds of precarious employment that other workers will not take on.
Lenin notes,
“Thus, on this problem, too, theory arrived at a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of the romanticists. For the latter, the surplus population signifies that capitalism is impossible, or a “mistake.” Actually, the opposite is the case: the surplus population, being a necessary concomitant of surplus production, is an indispensable attribute to the capitalist economy, which could neither exist nor develop without it.” (p 180-1)
And, Lenin is again, here, absolutely correct, and to be distinguished from those who, today, also see high levels of unemployment as, in some way, representing a crisis of capitalism, rather than what it actually is, which is a crisis of labour, and a fundamental requirement of capital, for a high rate of profit, and basis for rapid expansion. A crisis of capitalism does not exist when there are high levels of unemployment, but, quite the contrary, when there is very low levels of unemployment, when there is no sizeable reserve army to keep wages down, no potential for expanding the social working-day, and, thereby, increasing absolute surplus value. It is those conditions that represent an overproduction of capital, and no potential to accumulate additional capital without exacerbating that condition, causing wages to rise further, so that relative surplus value is reduced, profits are squeezed, and whole areas of production become loss making. Its that condition, which Marx describes in Capital III, Chapter 15, as representing a crisis of overproduction of capital.
And, today's, catastrophists are like the Narodniks and Sismondists, who seized upon such unemployment as evidence of the “impossibility” of capitalism, and its imminent demise. Those who wait expectantly for the next recession do so in the same way that Sismondi and the Narodniks could only see, in such events, the impossibility of capitalism.
Lenin gives a series of quotes from Sismondi in which he expounds not only this petty-bourgeois, moral view of overproduction, but also extends it into a series of moral pronouncements on the behaviour of workers. In short, he bemoans their lack of control over the size of families, and he criticises religion for not teaching the workers the necessity of such behaviour.
““Religious morality should teach people that having produced a family, it is their duty to live no less chastely with their wives than celibates with women who do not be long to them” (II, 298)” (p 183)
The same kinds of views are propounded, today, by those that seek to blame poverty on overpopulation, and whose reactionary solutions involve restrictions on families, and on limiting economic growth so as to reduce the use of resources.
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