Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness

In the last decade and a half the concept of worker precariousness has gained renewed currency among social scientists.1 This trend grew more pronounced after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, which left in its wake a period of deep economic stagnation that still persists in large parts of the global economy.2 Most scholars define precariousness by reference to what workers lack, including such factors as: ready access to paid employment, protection from arbitrary firing, possibility for advancement, long-term job stability, adequate safety, development of new skills, living wages, and union representation.3

The origin of the concept of worker “precariousness” is often traced to Pierre Bourdieu’s early work on Algeria.4 Yet researchers routinely pass over Bourdieu’s own mature reflections on the concept, in which he connected the notion directly to Karl Marx’s analysis of the reserve army of labor. “Precariousness,” for Bourdieu, is present when “the existence of a large reserve army…helps to give all those in work the sense that they are in no way irreplaceable.” In line with Marx’s conceptions of the floating, latent, stagnant, and pauperized populations constituting the industrial reserve army, Bourdieu associated precariousness particularly with what he called the “subproletariat.” He tended, however, to see a disjuncture between such “subproletarians” and the “proletariat,” with the latter defined by the stability necessary to initiate a “revolutionary project.”5

As a concept, worker precariousness is far from new. It has a long history in socialist thought, where it was associated from the start with the concept of the reserve army of labor. Frederick Engels introduced the idea of precariousness in his treatment of the industrial reserve army in The Condition of the Working Class in England.6 Marx and Engels employed it in this same context in The Communist Manifesto, and it later became a key element in Marx’s analysis of the industrial reserve army in volume I of Capital. Early Marxian theorists, notably William Morris, extended this analysis, explicitly rooting much of their critique of capital in the concept of “precariousness.” The notion of precariousness was thus integrally related to the Marxian critique of capitalism. It was to gain added significance in the 1970s, in the work of theorists such as Harry Braverman and Stephen Hymer, who explored the relation of surplus labor to the conditions of monopoly capitalism and the internationalization of capital.

For many years, Marx’s analysis of the “general law of capitalist accumulation,” which had pointed to conditions of growing precariousness with respect to employment and to the relative impoverishment of the laboring population, was dismissed by mainstream social scientists as constituting a crude theory of immiseration.7 In recent years, however, the notion of precariousness as a general condition of working-class life has been rediscovered. Yet the idea is commonly treated in the eclectic, reductionist, ahistorical fashion characteristic of today’s social sciences and humanities, disconnected from the larger theory of accumulation derived from Marx and the socialist tradition. The result is a set of scattered observations about what are seen as largely haphazard developments.

Some critical social scientists, most notably former International Labour Organization (ILO) economist Guy Standing, employ the neologism “precariat” to refer to a new class of mostly younger workers who experience all of the main aspects of precariousness. As French sociologist Béatrice Appay explains, the term precariat “emanates from a contraction of the words ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat.’ It regroups the unemployed and the precarious (manual and intellectual) workers in struggle in all sectors of activity.”8 But since Marx himself defined the proletariat as a class characterized by precariousness, the term precariat is often no more than a fashionable and mistaken substitute for proletariat itself (in Marx’s sense)—or else is employed to refer to a subcategory of the proletariat, i.e., the subproletariat. This resembles earlier theorizations of the “underclass” as a separate entity divorced from the working class as a whole.9 In these various formulations, the notion of the precariat is often contrasted with what is characterized as an overly rigid concept of the proletariat—the latter defined as a formal, stable industrial workforce of the employed, usually organized in trade unions (a notion, however, far removed from Marx’s classical definition of the proletariat).

Radical French sociologist Loïc Wacquant suggests that “contrary to the proletariat in the Marxist vision of history, which is called upon to abolish itself in the long run by uniting and universalizing itself, the precariat can only make itself to immediately unmake itself”—meaning that its only choices are to join the formal workforce and obtain “stable wages” or to escape “from the world of work altogether.” For Wacquant, the growth of working-class precariousness is a movement toward “deproletarianization rather than toward proletarian unification.” The fact that Marx himself presented the conditions of the working class primarily in terms of the precariousness of employment and existence—a fact we will elucidate below—is here missed altogether. Instead the concepts of the precariat and of worker precariousness are being advanced as alternatives to the proletariat, often in order to suggest the impossibility of a worker-based revolutionary project in contemporary conditions, in the tradition of André Gorz’s proclamation of Farewell to the Working Class.10

According to socialist critic Richard Seymour, in his essay “We Are All Precarious,” “the ‘precariat’ is not a class, and its widespread acceptance as a cultural meme in dissident, leftist culture has nothing to do with the claim that it is. Rather, it is a particular kind of populist interpellation” (identification), one that “operates on a real, critical antagonism in today’s capitalism”: the growth on a world scale of an increasingly flexible work force, characterized by unemployment, underemployment, and temporary, contingent employment.11

In contrast to such varied discursive views, emanating primarily from sections of the left influenced by postmodernism, establishment sociologists typically conceptualize worker precariousness in more prosaic terms, as nothing more than a widening gulf between “good jobs” and “bad jobs.” Moreover, there is a strong tendency to adopt a corporatist view in which the goal of all classes is to reestablish a “social contract between organized labor and organized capital.”12 The object, in other words, is to regulate working conditions in order to shift back from informal to formal labor. This project is naturally seen as a response to the decline of organized labor.13 But such superficial, reformist analyses rarely explore the historical dynamics of capital accumulation that have driven the resurgence of precariousness at the center of the capitalist world economy. In general, conventional social scientists lack the analytical tools to address a phenomenon rooted in the intrinsic character of capital accumulation. Century-old conceptual blinders block their vision.

In the face of such a confusion of views—most of them merely ad hoc responses to what is presumed to be an isolated social problem—it is necessary to turn back to the classical Marxian tradition, where the issue of precariousness was first raised. Here the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Morris in the nineteenth century, and those of thinkers such as Harry Braverman, Stephen Hymer, and Samir Amin in more recent times are indispensable. Applying the analytical frameworks provided by these thinkers, it is possible to look at the empirical dimensions of worker precariousness, both in the United States and globally, and to arrive at definite conclusions about the evolution of capital accumulation and working-class precariousness in our age, as well as its effect on the current epochal crisis.

 by R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster