On the Concept of the Reserve Army of Labor in Ruy Mauro Marini

Abstract

An analysis of the concept of the reserve army of labor in the work of Ruy Mauro Marini explains the processes that contributed to the Marxist theory of dependency and to the study of the capitalist mode of production.

Uma analise da conceito de exército industrial de reserva na teoria proposta por Ruy Mauro Marini explica quais eram os processos a que ele atribuía especificidade ao mesmo no âmbito da denominada teoria marxista da dependência e do modo de produção capitalista.

Keywords

Reserve army of labor Ruy Mauro Marini Dependency Social theory Latin America

The main thesis of this article is that the concept of the reserve army of labor is central to the theory of the Brazilian Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–1997). A secondary one is that a review of this concept based on Marini’s theoretical legacy presents a crucial perspective for developing the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. At a time when the concept of the reserve army is thought of in globalizing terms and the distance, hitherto well demarcated, between the working classes of dependent and central formations seems to diminish with the global prevalence of precarious work, transformations in the circulation of capital, and their displacement, theories previously limited to the Latin American social sciences are gaining greater acceptance and explanatory power (Felix, 2018b; 2020; Felix and Guanais, 2019; Felix and Sotelo, 2019).¹ In this connection, researchers and activists both in the central countries and in others such as Brazil² and interest in the debates they inspired has been revived. However, Marini’s theses have been recognized and revisited for different reasons and have been employed in different ways, often based on the assumptions of the currents that opposed them in previous decades.

Marini was the main theoretical exponent of the Marxist current that criticized the analyses of the intellectuals linked to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), of the Latin American communist parties aligned with the USSR at the time, and of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In contrast to Cardoso, who analyzed dependency from a non-Marxist perspective (conceiving of associated dependent development and a bourgeois conciliatory political strategy for overcoming the dictatorship), Marini, adopting a revolutionary socialist approach with Marx’s Capital as its main reference, reviewed the way dependency was reproduced through the social relations of capitalist production and the world market. Thus studies of dependency were not divided between “political” and “economic” perspectives but essentially, at least among those who adopted a socialist perspective, focused on the social conditions of the class struggle in dependent formations.

Marini (1974 [1969]; 1976a) differed from other Marxists, such as Nelson Werneck Sodré and Caio Prado Jr., who, although original and singular, represented the national-democracy stageist approach. Later, his work also differed from the sociological analysis that gave rise to the so-called popular-democracy strategy—although, in this case, the brilliant contributions of Florestan Fernandes and some of his disciples did not fully fit into the social democratic perspective that became hegemonic in Brazil in the last decades of the twentieth century (Fernandes, 1976; 1981; Marini, 1966).

However, the debates among the authors of dependency theory were not always analyzed in terms of their main differences, and Marini’s perspective in particular was mischaracterized as being limited in scope or even, curiously, as representing a sociological perspective that was inherently impossible to develop from its premises.³ Since this period of eminently political confrontation, the potentialities and limitations of Marini’s work have been expanded by new studies. In Latin American sociology, for example, the debate between Cardoso and Marini in the late 1970s was controversial and, when aborted by Cardoso, ended up leaving many points unresolved. One of these was the nature and origin of the superexploitation of labor that, according to Marini, characterized dependent formations. Cardoso and Serra (1978) devoted much of their critique to the debate over unequal exchange, and, as a result, revisiting the theoretical controversies over Marxist interpretations of value transfer and dependency is common even today.⁴ However, in addition to this question, Marini’s (1978: 63–64, emphasis added) response to his critics also reaffirmed that

the superexploitation of labor is triggered by unequal exchange, but what it derives from is not that but the profit fever that creates the world market, and it is fundamentally based on the formation of a relative surplus population. But, once an economic process is under way on the basis of superexploitation, a monstrous mechanism is set in motion whose perversity does not mitigate but is accentuated by the dependent economy’s recourse to increasing productivity by means of technological development.

This basis to which Marini referred has been little analyzed and constitutes one of the unresolved points of his debate with Cardoso and Serra and others.⁵ In addition, in the absence of greater systematization of the relationship between the regime of superexploitation of labor and the formation of a relative surplus population, many enthusiasts have resorted to theories alien and sometimes contradictory to his proposal, especially in considering issues related to the relative surplus population or the reserve army in dependent formations or aspects of the class struggle in terms of his legacy or in attempting to “update” and/or revise particular historical processes in terms of dependency.⁶ However, while he did not systematize his observations about the reserve army in any specific text, Marini pointed on several occasions to its centrality to the theoretical scheme he proposed. Therefore I briefly introduce the concept of the reserve army of labor and then analyze its role in Marini’s theory of dependent formations.

Capital Accumulation and The Reserve Army

The concept of the reserve army of labor or relative surplus population was formulated by Marx in Volume 1 of Capital to account for a phenomenon that was directly related to capital accumulation.⁷ Marini developed and analyzed the forms that the reserve army assumed in dependent social formations, which, because of the conditions of their formation and historical development, “maximally aggravate[d] the contradictions inherent in capitalist production” (Marini, 1978: 102). In Chapter 23 Marx (2013: 689) examined “the influence of capital increase on the destiny of the working class.” Its most important factor was the composition of capital and its variations in the course of accumulation. He demonstrated that there was a relative decrease in variable capital (the part that referred to the value of the labor force) depending on the rate of accumulation and concentration. The greater the accumulation and the productivity of labor, the greater the change in the composition of capital in relative terms of value, with its constant part assuming greater importance than its variable part. Thus capitalist accumulation constantly produced what Marx called a reserve army, a portion of the working class that became surplus with regard to the needs of capital valuation. According to Marx (2013: 707), in the case of capitalism, the existence of a surplus population was both a necessary product of capital accumulation and a lever for this accumulation and “even a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production.” Given competition, the existence of an industrial reserve army disciplined the labor regimes of the active army of workers, whether in the sense of capitalists’ demanding the intensification of work and/or the extension of working hours or in the sense of their imposing the cost of labor power, wages, or other dictates of capital.

For Marini (2008a [1973]: 108), the analysis of capitalism in Latin America pointed to what he called a sui generis capitalism that “made sense only from the perspective of the system as a whole, both at the national and, especially, at the international level.” In other words, it was under the conditions of the world market that it formed and developed, historically and structurally, its distinguishing features. Thus it was the knowledge of the particular form that Latin American capitalism had taken that made it possible to understand its gestation and the trends that led to its constitution as “dependent.” The phenomena by which it was distinguished were simply manifestations of the effects on it of the general law of capital accumulation, and the foundation of dependency was the superexploitation of labor. Superexploitation was the phenomenon that underlay the formation of the export economy and later determined the development of the dependent industrial economy in its various phases and its productive expansion.

At the same time, the basis of the regime of superexploitation of labor was, according to Marini, the “immense industrial reserve army” that characterized dependent social formations and differentiated them from others. It was therefore necessary to understand a reserve army that was formed and socially reproduced with certain specificities imposed by the dependent social formation—what I hereinafter describe as an “expanded reserve army.” In the case of the dependent economy, the existence of the reserve army supported the superexploitation regime, and the existence of this regime made the reserve army an expanded one. The superexploitation of labor was characterized by the intensification of work, the extension of the working day, and the reduction of the workers’ consumption fund—the reproduction of a regime of deteriorating value of the labor power of the worker. For Marini the existence of “an immense reserve army” was the basis of this regime in that it created the conditions for its imposition on the whole working class in a dependent social formation. Given the singularities of this regime when applied to the active army of workers, a reserve army was formed and reproduced in enormous proportions and with the characteristics that were present in the capitalist periphery. The processes he identified as leading to the production of this expanded reserve army in dependent social formations were dependence on foreign capital, increased productivity, increasing concentration and centralization of capital, and the absorption of “precapitalist structures.”

Foreign Capital

Marini (1979a) demonstrated the ways in which dependence on foreign countries was manifested in dependent economies and their effect on domestic production. To this end, he analyzed the three phases of the capital cycle: circulation, production, and recirculation. In the first phase, money capital took the form of commodities (means of production and labor power). In the dependent economy, this money capital had three sources: domestic private capital, public (state) investment, and foreign capital. Of these, state and foreign capital were of great importance. Foreign capital assumed two forms: direct investment (the form prevalent in Latin America until the 1960s) and indirect investment (loans or financing), a way to avoid the risks of producing and realizing surplus value. Foreign capital moved both toward the dependent economy and toward the outgoing economy in the form of transfers of surplus value abroad to the extent that foreign capital—external to the dependent economy and totally beyond its control—was internalized and constituted a factor in the capital cycle on which the accumulation and production process and the rest of the cycle depended.

This economy depended both on the external flow of capital (to complete the first phase) and on means of production acquired abroad, which made the capital cycle doubly articulated and doubly dependent on foreign countries. While part of the means of production (particularly equipment and machinery) came from abroad in any economy, in the dependent economy industrialization was not “organic”; the consumer goods industry did not require it, and its consequence was the development of the capital goods industry. According to Marini, the dependent economy lacked the dynamic capital goods industry of the advanced countries and therefore goods were bought abroad through the world market, and this dependency expanded beyond equipment to the knowledge needed to operate it and sometimes even to the technology required to manufacture it. Among other consequences, the incorporation of this machinery and technology, developed for an economy based on a different pattern of production and productivity, led to a rapid expansion of the reserve army in the dependent economy. The new production techniques were developed in contexts in which there was a pursuit of greater productivity of the workforce and reduction of the number of workers.

The second phase of the cycle of accumulation and production developed from the first. Foreign or associated companies with access to more advanced technology operated with means of production that guaranteed their superiority to national companies, generating extra surplus value and increasing the concentration of investment in the dependent economy. Medium-sized and small companies, which operated under average or below-average production conditions and transferred part of their surplus value to monopolist companies, restored their profit rates by increasing the surplus value rate, extracting more unpaid work from their workers without significant variation in productivity—in other words, by the superexploitation of labor. In turn, monopolist capitals paid workers similarly to other companies—with wages below the value of labor power—and thus the vicious circle was complete.

Production, therefore, was carried out under conditions of superexploitation of labor and was based on the rapid creation and expansion of a reserve army that developed from features inherent in the capital cycle in the dependent economy—especially the use of foreign investment. On the one hand, the superexploitation of labor compressed the active army and caused it to grow slowly, requiring more work from the occupied part of the working class. On the other hand, foreign capital, on which the capital cycle had depended since the beginning, promoted the incorporation of “labor-lean” technologies and machinery, creating an expanded reserve army. In the dependent economy, the increase in productivity radically expanded the reserve army. Here, as in all other aspects, the dependent formation was once again distinctive, “maximally aggravating the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production” (Marini, 1979a: 53).

Increased Productivity

As suggested above, the increase in productivity in dependent economies was linked to a radical expansion of the reserve army and was not inconsistent with the superexploitation of labor, which hindered the transition from the production of absolute surplus value to that of relative surplus value as a hegemonic form of extraction of surplus value in dependent formations. Contrary to what occurred in the historical development of classical capitalism in advanced countries, the production of relative surplus value did not become dominant in the relationship between capital and labor in dependent formations, because the superexploitation of labor, the basis of dependency, was the predominant regime. The increase of productivity in the dependent economy was aimed at producing surplus value not by reducing the value of labor power but by increasing the mass of value produced. Under a regime that valued the intensification of work, the increase in working hours, and the indefinite reduction of wages, this production turned to articles that were never or hardly ever included in the individual consumption of workers.

There is not and never has been, as much as Marini’s (2008a [1973]; 1979a; 1979b; 2008b [1973]) theory has been debated, any lack of increase in productivity in the dependent economy, although it is true that the increase in productivity developed under conditions of superexploitation of labor was perhaps not the same as the production of relative surplus value that occurred in the advanced countries, especially since the great period of the English Industrial Revolution (given that, along with the technical transformations of the productive system, workers were gradually incorporated into the consumption of the goods produced by the factories). Thus Marini specifically distinguished the concepts of productivity and relative surplus value. He explained that greater productive capacity of labor did not necessarily mean an increase in relative surplus value even though it was a fundamental condition for its occurrence. By increasing productivity, the worker created more products at the same time but not more value, and this permitted the capitalist to reduce the value of those goods in relation to their social value—what was attributed to them by the general conditions of production—and thus obtain more surplus value than others. The pursuit of the appropriation of this extra surplus value—of extraordinary profit—was, in fact, what moved him. But this did not change the rate of surplus value (the degree of exploitation of labor in the economy), which would occur only if there was a change in the relationship between increased working time and necessary working time in the capitalist’s favor—if the time in which workers reproduced the value of their labor power was reduced. And, in order for the value of the labor force to be reduced, the devaluation of the goods produced had to be focused on those that were necessary for the reproduction of labor power, the wage goods—those that workers purchased with their wages for their social subsistence. Only when the value of wage goods was reduced did the rate of surplus value and therefore the production of relative surplus value occur. Thus, the increase in productivity caused this devaluation of wage goods, but it did not necessarily occur, and this was precisely what caused the production of extraordinary surplus value and an increase in the intensity and productivity of work without the production of relative surplus value. This, Marini (2008b [1973]: 163) concluded, was the underlying problem that the Marxist theory of dependency was urgently faced with:

the fact that the conditions created by the superexploitation of labor in the dependent capitalist economy tend to hinder its transit from the production of absolute surplus value to that of relative surplus value as the dominant form in the relationship between capital and labor. The disproportionate significance of extraordinary surplus value in the dependent system is a result of this and corresponds to the expansion of the reserve army and the strangling of the capacity for production. More than mere accidents in the course of dependent development or elements of the order of transition, these phenomena are manifestations of the particular manner in which the economy depends on the general accumulation of capital. To analyze them we ultimately have to refer to the superexploitation of labor.

The difficulty in generalizing relative surplus value did not mean the absence of any increase in labor productivity in dependent economies, and in some of these countries the opposite occurred. As described by Marini (2008a [1973]), the increase in productivity combined with the superexploitation of labor and was even made possible by it in that capitalist production did not suppress the mechanisms of the deterioration of the workers’ labor power but accentuated them whenever it achieved a way of producing more in less time or in the same time as before. There was a close interdependence between the increase in productivity, the intensification of work, and the length of work shifts, each enabling the increase of the other.

In turn, the increase in the productive capacity of labor led, as Marx showed, to an expansion of the reserve army, since it meant the reduction of the labor force component of the composition of capital. Under the conditions of the dependent social formation, this tendency was maximized, since the increase in productivity developed under a regime of the superexploitation of labor, requiring more work from the active army of workers while expelling workers to become part of the reserve. When this was the case, the increase in the composition of capital represented greater deterioration of the labor power of the active army of workers (intensification, increase in the number of working hours) and not necessarily the incorporation of more labor power in absolute terms.

These conclusions regarding the increase in productivity in dependent economies allowed Marini to criticize the theories of marginality in vogue in the 1970s, especially the theses of José Nun and Aníbal Quijano. The production and reproduction of an expanded reserve army was mainly due to the effects of the increase in productivity on the dependent economy, which, as Marini pointed out, served to accentuate the superexploitation of labor and not the other way around. This explained the enormous size of the reserve army in these formations; it was the way the general law of capitalist accumulation in Latin American societies was expressed (Marini, 2008b [1973]: 159):

The first [point] [that capitalist production, as it develops productive labor power, does not suppress but accentuates the exploitation of the worker] is fundamental if one wants to understand how the general law of capitalist accumulation works—the reasons the polarization of wealth and misery is produced by societies in which such accumulation operates. Only from this perspective can the studies of so-called social marginality be incorporated into the Marxist theory of dependency. In other words, only in this way can the theory resolve the problem posed by the growth of the relative surplus population, with the extreme characteristics it presents in dependent societies, without falling into José Nun’s eclecticism, which Cardoso himself so rightly criticized, or the scheme of Aníbal Quijano, which, whatever its merits, leads to the identification of a marginal pole in those societies that is unrelated to the way in which class contradictions are polarized there.

Nun’s eclecticism was characterized by a functionalist theory of the role of certain population groups in relation to production systems.⁸ It did not refer to a theory of accumulation, as expressed by Marx in Capital in the development of the notion of the reserve army, which made Nun’s (2001) “marginal mass” a concept that was part of neither a Marxist argument nor Latin American social reality. For Marini, the theory of social marginality made sense only if it was related to the way in which accumulation in dependent societies developed—for example, to the processes that led to an increase in productive labor power and the formation of a particular reserve army in those societies. Marini (2008b [1973]: 162, emphasis added) concluded:

According to the degree of development of the national economies that make up the system, which is verified in the sectors that make up each of them, the greater or lesser incidence of the forms of exploitation and the specific configuration that they assume qualitatively modify the way in which the laws of movement of the system affect them, in particular the general law of capital accumulation. It is for this reason that so-called social marginality cannot be treated independently of the way in which the increase in the productivity of labor, which is derived from the importation of technology, and the greater exploitation of the worker are interwoven in dependent economies that such increases of productivity enable. This is the reason marginality acquires its full expression in Latin American countries only when an industrial economy develops in such countries.

Increasing Concentration and Centralization of Capital

It is necessary to examine even more closely the effects of the so-called foreign investment in Marxist dependency theory. It is from this that, in large part, the main Latin American countries industrialized, especially after the 1940s, as I have already emphasized. Marini (1977a: 26) drew attention to the increasing concentration and centralization of capital that this entailed:

This occurs along with the expansion of the scale of capitalist accumulation, and it is a natural phenomenon. However, because of the economic conditions of advanced countries, with greater technological levels and minimum capital required for the start-up of production, foreign investment, by influencing a more backward economy, suddenly causes a strong concentration of capital and promptly leads to centralization.

He cited examples such as that of Chile, where, in 1968, about 3 percent of manufacturing industry controlled 44 percent of the labor, 58 percent of the capital, and 52 percent of the surplus value generated in the whole industry. Such processes would have produced a capital much greater than that of the rest of the capitalist class and an industrialization with low job creation that, combined with the structural phenomena of Latin American social formations, led to a reserve army of enormous proportions and therefore a great mismatch between job demand and supply (Marini, 1977a: 27):

There has been a double process: on the one hand, the forms of land tenure and the introduction of technological innovations in agriculture, as well as the expectations of growth and salaries brought about by the manufacturing industry, have generated strong migratory movements and accelerated urbanization. On the other hand, largely because of the increase in the level of technology but also because of limited investment, the workforce has faced increasing difficulty in finding work.

Again he cited examples. For example, in Venezuela, in the rapid industrialization process of the postwar period, the unemployment rate doubled, from 6.2 percent in 1950 to 13.7 percent in 1960. He also mentioned that, according to the International Labor Organization, so-called disguised unemployment or underemployment in urban areas of Latin America amounted to 30–40 percent of the workforce.⁹

The Absorption of “Precapitalist Structures”

Another relevant factor in the formation of an expanded reserve army was the absorption of “precapitalist structures,” which Marini described as a “slow process” in dependent formations.¹⁰ He commented on the aspects that caused the Latin American bourgeoisie in these formations, divided as it was into classes and class fractions, to be weak vis-à-vis the state (Marini, 1997b: 76). This process, with all its contradictions, was evident throughout Latin American industrialization, one of the most striking phenomena being the aforementioned mismatch between the masses seeking jobs in the cities’ industry and the limited supply of jobs and the low wages offered. The result of this process was an urban formation consisting of huge pockets of poor people, immense peripheries and agglomerations with little or no structure of basic services such as electricity, sanitation, health care, transportation, etc. Along with the expectation of jobs and wages, Marini cited other factors that led to rural-urban migration and accelerated and precarious urbanization in the dependent countries, in particular, the forms of landownership, the absence of agrarian reform, and the introduction of new technologies in agriculture.¹¹ The industrialization of the 1950s therefore fostered the opposite of what ECLAC expected, as Marini (2012 [1989]) summarized.

To the extent that basic reforms do not exist and that there are not enough jobs in cities, the process of absorption of precapitalist structures under way in Latin America brought about the development of an expanded reserve army in these formations. Thus it must be considered that, as a slow historical process develops in which more and more fractions of these populations move to cities, there is an increase in the reserve army, since the proletarianization of these populations occurs through their transformation into a reserve army.

Furthermore, according to Marini (2008a [1973]), only with proletarianization was the regime of superexploitation of labor fully guaranteed. He demonstrated that other labor relations constituted an obstacle to the institution of superexploitation of labor in that only when there were “free” individuals who were led to sell their labor power was it possible to have a regime in which the price of this commodity was systematically kept below its value. When the commodity was not the worker but labor power, from the capitalist point of view the worker was left responsible for the nonproductive time. The capitalist claimed only the time that was usable in production, and with that the remuneration fell below its value.

Thus, in terms of Marini’s theory, in dependent formations, in addition to the movement described by Marx of relative decrease in variable capital and increase in the reserve army, there was also a compression of the active army of workers (due to the concentration and centralization of capital), a regime of superexploitation of labor, and an increase in productivity that, under these conditions, together with a slow process of proletarianization and absorption of precapitalist structures, produced an expanded reserve army. This reserve army was partially incorporated into (and later discarded by) a regime of superexploitation of labor in the production process.

The Expanded Reserve Army and The Superexploitation of Labor

The existence of an expanded reserve army in dependent social formations enabled and reproduced the superexploitation of labor that characterized them, and it did so in terms of a series of dynamics established by their social actions. The threat to the situation of the active army of workers and the weakening of the class as a whole were some of these dynamics. Analyzing the accumulation and production phase of the capital cycle, Marini (1979a: 50) pointed to the industrial reserve army as fundamental to the superexploitation by which capital weakened the working class. Thus there was a political dynamic exercised by the reserve army in dependent formations that created the conditions that distinguished them from other formations. It was the pressure of workers who were not employed or irregularly employed on the employed sector of the class that maintained the regime. Along with this pressure, capital used the state to establish procedures that increased the effectiveness of the function performed by the reserve army, such as the facilitation of layoffs, hiring, and rehiring, the elimination of job stability, the suppression of the right to strike, and the establishment of salary caps (Marini, 1979a: 37–38).

The dictatorship implemented in 1964, for example, was effective in this regard. Marini (1978: 87–88) cited obligatory social insurance as a mechanism that facilitated the operation of the reserve army by allowing a “greater turnover of labor.” With this system it was possible for companies to dismiss workers on the eve of collective layoffs and rehire them later or hire new workers for lower wages than those established in the wage agreement. In addition, the payments that workers began to receive under the regime were less than they had received for the same number of years under the previous regime. The turnover provided by the new regime also indirectly influenced wage levels because it favored new over older workers who were more likely, for example, to be union members.

The pressure from the expanded reserve army also influenced the level of wages and allowed the minimum wage to be reduced or set below the value of labor power. Marini (1977a) noted that the proportion of wages in the value of the manufacturing sector in Brazil was half what it was in the United States and England. Elsewhere he went so far as to claim that the Brazilian military dictatorship even set the real wage below the value of labor power (Marini, 1978: 89). The expanded reserve army therefore served to support the superexploitation of labor, guaranteeing the tendency to exploit the workforce of the occupied sector of the class to the fullest extent while allowing its replacement and the setting of labor power price below its value.

The operation of the expanded reserve army was observed, in particular, at times when there was greater incorporation of its components into the active army of workers, as was the case when capital accumulation was rapid and more labor power was employed in the production process. Marini (1977a) analyzed the period between 1956 and 1974 in Brazil, in which there was an increase in the number of employed workers—in particular those who received up to one minimum wage—and demonstrated that, together with this increase, there was a decrease in the value of wages. In other words, the incorporation of the reserve army was accompanied by a reduction in real wages even in the period of the so-called Brazilian economic miracle between 1968 and 1973. Thus in dependent economies the expanded reserve army guaranteed the incorporation of more labor power without altering the superexploitation of labor regime, especially at times when there was economic growth and an increase in the active army of workers.

In other words, maximizing Marx’s general law of accumulation, the existence of an expanded reserve army made accumulation almost completely independent of the wage conditions that resulted from it. The incorporation of larger proportions of the reserve army, even in the expansion cycles of capital and the consequent increase in the active army, did not mean a change in wage levels. In dependent formations these were relatively independent variables. Given, according to Marini (2008a [1973]), that accumulation in dependent economies depended more on the increase in the mass of value than on the rate of surplus value, the dynamic of accumulation in these social formations had little to do with the level of wages.

Marini believed that the distinctiveness of dependent capitalism was due to the particular way in which the general law of accumulation affected it, in which the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production were maximized. The formation and reproduction of the expanded reserve army—a reserve army with the specific characteristics of dependent formations—expressed these contradictions in terms of the regime that underlay them.

Final Comments

In this article I have presented Marini’s thoughts on the Marxist concept of the reserve army in dependent social formations, drawing on his work to analyze the relationship between this reserve army and the superexploitation of labor and to analyze capitalist accumulation under dependent conditions. On this basis I have described what constitutes an expanded reserve army.

Considering the current renewed interest in Marini’s theories and the controversies involved in the rereading of his work both in Latin America and elsewhere, this is a démarche or, if you will, a systematic contribution to a critical rereading of research from other approaches.¹²

With regard to accumulation in Latin America, the main point that I stress in this study is that it amounts, fundamentally, to an analysis of the social conditions of the class struggle, which perhaps best represents Marini’s Marxist theoretical legacy on dependency compared with that of others, who have presented little or nothing to overcome the bourgeois ideological limitations of the opposing theoretical currents by exaggerating or exclusively emphasizing trade relations to the detriment of production relations and by focusing on the issue of so-called national or associated development at the expense of class exploitation/domination.

The text clarifies Marini’s approach, which understood, in Marxist terms, the specificities of Latin America in the dialectical universe of capital accumulation, class formation, and emancipation, and his dissent from approaches such as social marginality and Cardoso’s on dependency.¹³ I expect it to contribute to the development of this theory for a class analysis of the current dependent formation and its more recent transformations, which, in spite of the revisiting of Marini’s theory, insist on reviving curious myths such as the belief in some bourgeois fraction committed to a project of “nation” and the belief in a “national or autonomous capitalist development” that would guarantee the overcoming of dependency through bourgeois institutions.

Footnotes

Notes

Gil Felix is a social scientist and a professor at the Instituto Latino-americano de Economia, Sociedade e Política of the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana. His research is focused on the working class, mobility, circulation, the reserve army, and the superexploitation of labor and based on various studies conducted with Brazilian workers and peasants in the 2000s and 2010s. He is the author of Mobilidade e superexploração do trabalho: O enigma da circulação (2019) and O caminho do mundo: Mobilidade espacial e condição camponesa em uma região da Amazônia Oriental (2d edition, 2021). Patricia Fierro is a translator in Quito, Ecuador. A first version of this article was drawn up during a research internship at the Center of Latin American Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a grant from the São Paulo Research Foundation. The author thanks Adrián Sotelo, Ricardo Antunes, Fernando Lourenço, Mauro Almeida, Juliana Guanais, and other colleagues who commented on the previous version and the editors and reviewers of Latin American Perspectives.

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