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and the ensuing demand for higher wages. This is a process one can
clearly see in the wake of the present crisis.
Since the crisis broke out in 2007, sending over 8 million Americans
into the ranks of the reserve army of labor, corporate profits have not only
rebounded, but soared to new heights. In fact, the third quarter of 2012
saw corporate profits assume a greater percentage of GDP than ever
before. Conversely, as we are to expect, worker wages have fallen to
historic lows. Such are the true splendors of the “opportunity society”
proffered by our “free enterprise system.”
Of course, the role of mass unemployment in suppressing wages and
ensuring continued profitability necessarily extends to the global capitalist
system as a whole. And as John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney
argue in their latest book, The Endless Crisis, a massive global reserve
army of labor remains a defining feature of the world economy.
In 2011, for instance, Foster and McChesney report that the global
reserve army of labor stood at some 2.4 billion people, as opposed to the
1.4 billion found in the active labor market. That is, the global reserve
army of labor stood 70 percent larger than the active world labor market.
“The existence of an enormous global reserve army of labor forces
income deflation on the world’s workers,” Foster and McChesney explain,
“beginning in the global South, but also affecting the workers of the global
North, who are increasingly subjected to neoliberal ‘labour market
flexibility’…labor everywhere is on the defensive.”
And where labor is on the defensive, capital is on the offensive.
Hence, amid rising corporate profits we see a vicious and varied global
attack on labor—stretching from the state house in Lansing, Michigan to
the garment factories of Bangladesh and beyond.
A serious effort to attain full and dignified employment in such a
world, then, actually requires nothing short of an international struggle
against the forces of capital. Such a struggle must be international since
failure to do so would necessarily expose one to the perverse forces of
labor competition meted out by the global reserve army of labor.