Relative surplus population and social constitution: concrete forms of neoliberal capitalist work

Labor relations have undergone enormous transformations in recent decades. Despite the vast existing literature, much of it focuses on a misguided notion of precarization, which excludes the idea of the reserve army as a constitutive mechanism of labor relations and social classes as a totality. Even studies centered on the concept of the reserve army often restrict themselves to its relation to the rhythms of capital accumulation, diminishing its importance as a generative process of class struggle. Therefore, this work proposes to analyze the reserve army as a social relation, not only merely reduced to an effect of accumulation but also as its cause and condition. Through the notion of the reserve army as a social relation, it becomes possible to understand its different concrete forms of realization, such as the current historical moment of neoliberalism.

The concept of the reserve army established by Marx in “Capital” has two theoretical analytical moments. The industrial reserve army is analyzed both as a social relation pressuring workers to constantly return to the labor market as sellers of their labor power and as an effect of the dynamics of capital accumulation, becoming a mechanism for regulating distribution within cycles. Although Marx clearly has the notion of unity between these moments, the vast majority of studies on the reserve army have focused only on its more direct relationship with accumulation, erasing the perspective of relative surplus population as a presupposition of the social relation, that is, as a moment of the constitution of social classes.

The constitution of the specificity of the capitalist relation, of individuals “free” from their capacities of reproduction except through the sale of their labor power, becomes internalized in the accumulation itself, in which a surplus population is generated, pressuring workers toward proletarianization. The reserve army thus becomes “the greater pressure (...) to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital” (Marx, 1992, p. 789). The reserve army does not only signify the phenomenal appearance of the group of people who do not find employment as a result of the realization of accumulation but also a necessary social relation for the reproduction of the specific form of capitalist labor. It is through this social pressure exerted by the relative surplus population that its moment as a constituent of class struggle is understood, i.e. as part of the process of forming the capitalist labor relation.

Being a moment of class struggle for the constitution of labor, the reserve army does not have a fixed form, as if it were only the appearance of the unemployed population. “The relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed” (Marx, 1992, p. 794). The relative surplus population, as a social relation, thus possesses not only distinct social forms but also different modes of manifestation (floating, latent and stagnant) as well as distinct historical forms. The concrete way in which each manifestation of the reserve army materializes depends on the historical moment in which it is embedded. Therefore, to understand the specificities of labor transformations under so-called neoliberalism, the reserve army must be grasped as a social relation within the class formation process – encompassing both formal workers and those deemed informal or precarious.

Within this context, this article is divided into three sections, in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The first section analyzes the intrinsic necessity in capitalism of forming the reserve army, understanding it as an internal logic to the constitution of the capitalist relation. In the second section, the same logical concept of relative surplus population is examined at a more concrete level of abstraction to understand its logic within the process of constituting the working class. In the third section, the reserve army is analyzed in its current concrete form, with the intention of understanding its specificities within neoliberalism as well as its relationship to the generation of precarious and informal forms of labor.

It is not an exaggeration to state that the industrial reserve army is one of the most well-known categories in Marx’s work, widely disseminated and utilized by both “Marxists” and various theoretical lines in economics, sociology and geography. Despite the widespread use of this category, in general terms, its meaning is reduced to only one part of Marx’s original exposition. As we will present in this section, Marx’s concept of the industrial reserve army inherently contains a contradiction between the condition and the effect of capitalist accumulation.

Marx’s analysis of the reserve army in capital oscillates between the interrelation of the reserve army with the rhythms and cycles of accumulation and its role as the social relation that exerts continuous pressure for workers to sell their labor power, in other words, as a reproduction relation of the conditions of worker exploitation (Marx, 1992 [1867]: chapter 25). However, this apparent duality of meanings, as posited and presupposed, disappears in the majority of analyses. Instead of demystifying this false duality through the unity of capitalist social abstraction constituted through the universality of value, traditional analyses of the reserve army erase this duality by focusing only on its direct relation to accumulation. In conventional analyses, social classes are categorized by their apparent identity, erasing their specificity as a social form. Therefore, this section intends to emphasize the need to understand the other aspect of this concept, namely, its sense as a social form for the reproduction of the capitalist labor relation.

A significant part of current approaches to labor relations, centered on the concept of precarization, starts from this logic of social reproduction. However, they break with the logic of the constitution of the reserve army. Dominant notions of precarization and informality stem from a supposed logic inherent to these activities and sectors, which would be in opposition to formal and regulated labor ^[1]. Precarious work is conceived within these analyses as a relational concept, being everything different from the “standard employment relationship,” which developed under the aegis of legislation, incorporated a degree of regularity in employment relationships, protected workers from socially unacceptable practices, and provided a core of social stability to underpin economic growth” (Rodgers & Rodgers, 1989, p. 1). Thus, precarious work is considered a specific product of “late,” “mature,” “advanced” and “neoliberal” capitalist development, which would have its own logic of constitution regarding the so-called traditional classes of capitalism.

Precarization became a recurring term starting in the 1990s to define this new phenomenon of work as a consequence of the deregulation of labor laws with the imposition of flexible agreements (Crompton, Gallie, & Purcell, 1996; Letourneux, 1998; Heery & Salmon, 1996). Even studies linked to governmental institutions (Supiot, 1999; European Commission, 2004) argued for the existence of a standard or norm of work compared to other exceptional forms.

In recent years, especially after the financial crisis of 2008, studies on the precarization of work have gained renewed strength. Many of these works were carried out within the framework of the International Labor Organization (ILO), bringing to the forefront the process of globalization and the formation of global value chains. It is in this context that the concept of the “precariat” stood out, which brings the notion of the formation of a new international social class arising from precarious work or as Guy Standing puts it, a “class in the making” (Standing, 2011). The formation of the precariat would occur in opposition to the working class since it would be constituted without the social benefits, legalities, regulations and standard rights, having a much greater profile of informality and self-employment, thus forming two distinct and often conflicting social logics.

Instead of understanding precarization and informalization as moments of the realization of new forms of expropriation, exploitation and intensification of work, dominant current approaches start from a separation of labor forms by post-structuralist notions of multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2004; Mitropoulos, 2006; Papadopoulos, 2017), where there would no longer be a clear distinction between labor and other daily activities, establishing divergent dynamics from the formation of the traditional working class. Current forms of informality and precarization would thus be the result of the immaterialities of contemporary work (Gorz, 2003), which breaks with the same logics of the constitution of the traditional working class ^[2].

This conventional literature on labor precarization, by deconstructing the relationship between class and precariousness, ends up erasing the contradictory processes of struggle in the constitution of this working class. In opposition to these conceptions of the precariat, a return to Marx’s work is essential within the perspective of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” and the inevitability of the formation of an “industrial reserve army” (Pradella, 2015; Jonna & Foster, 2016). Through the materialization of the different concrete historical forms of this reserve army (Denning, 2010; Munch, 2013; Colombini, 2020), different patterns of work are imposed. The precariousness of work in capitalist society is far from being an exception to the neoliberal period, as part of the literature on precariousness and the precariat suggests (Munch, 2013; Colombini, 2020). Therefore, it is important to distinguish the different concrete forms of materialization of this inherent process of precarization in capitalism.

The concept of the industrial reserve army is discussed by Marx in the chapter entitled “The general law of capitalist accumulation,” having in theoretical terms two analytical moments of its presentation. The industrial reserve army, also referred to as relative surplus population ^[3], is analyzed as both a social relation of pressure for the worker to constantly return to the market as a seller of labor power and as an effect of the dynamics of capital accumulation, becoming a mechanism of distribution within its cycles. This duality, in a way, can be interpreted in Bernstein’s question (2023, p. 80): is the reserve army a condition or an effect of the law of capital accumulation? Although for Marx it is clearly both, hardly is this relationship emphasized within the vast existing literature.

Throughout the 20th century, debates on the reserve army of labor were predominantly shaped – across diverse theoretical traditions – by the effects of the accumulation process on its emergence. This analytical framework originated in the early Marxist debates on capitalist crises, particularly in partial interpretations of Luxemburg (1985 [1913]), which centered on crises as a problem of accumulation realization due to insufficient demand. This reduction of the reserve army to a mere byproduct of accumulation – where the social constitution process vanishes – would later be reworked in major 20th-century “heterodox economic theories” (Keynes, 1936; Kalecki, 1971), with clear reverberations in contemporary debates among Post-Keynesians (Dutt, 1990, 2011; Lavoie, 2014), Neo-Kaleckians (Bhaduri & Marglin, 1990) and Sraffians (Ciccone, 1986; Garegnani & Palumbo, 1998).”

This tradition of analyzing relative surplus population also has its strands with remnants of liberal economics, being interpreted mainly as originating from a supposed market failure that would generate different logics between the formal sector and sectors linked to this relative surplus population. Arthur Lewis’s text (1954) became a classic reference within this field, not only for establishing the existence of the reserve army within the framework of liberal economics but also for assuming its perishability in the face of the inherent development of the economy ^[4]. However, Lewis’s original conception of surplus population ended up being incorporated by neoclassical lines (Fei & Ranis, 1964; Meier, 1976; Scully & Britwum, 2019), which argue for the existence of this surplus due to market failures, whether due to misguided government intervention or early stages in the development of market economies. It is also worth noting how classical theories of development, even with an opposite theoretical framework, also start from this dualistic conception of the labor market (Prebisch, 1982; Furtado, 1995) ^[5].

This understanding of relative surplus population is also consolidated by the significant weight of statistical studies in capitalism from the 20th century, which empirically establish the reserve army reduced to a group of people expelled from the labor market by the dynamics of capital accumulation. Not surprisingly, the term unemployment in English was first used only at the end of the nineteenth century (1887) by the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Massachusetts ^[6], Carroll D. Wright, inaugurating a practice that became central to modern states.

Within contemporary Marxist debate, there is greater complexity in the conceptual treatment of the reserve army and relative surplus population. More orthodox versions still carry this reductionism of the reserve army only as a group of people expelled by the dynamics of accumulation. The classic presentation by Sweezy (1970 [1942]), greatly influential in the Marxist debate of the second half of the twentieth century, completely disregards the stagnant form of relative surplus population (Sweezy, 1970, p. 91), making the very possibility of hybrid forms of the reserve army’s constitution as a social relation disappear. However, in several contemporary works, despite not having as their central object the incorporation of the reserve army category as a social relation for the constitution of the capitalist class, there is explicit mention and consideration of it (Carcanholo & Amaral, 2008; Foster & McChesney; Jonna, 2011; Patnaik, 2019).

Within critical debate, one of the main fronts of dispute focuses on differentiating between capitalist forms in the “center and periphery” (or “global north and south” in some analyses), which leads to the need for an effort to demonstrate how many of the critical categories are within this relationship. Therefore, a significant portion of the current Marxist debate on the reserve army focuses on the “peripheral” formation of this relative superpopulation in neoliberal capitalism (Carcanholo & Amaral, 2008; Foster, McChesney, & Jonna, 2011; Neilson & Stubbs, 2011; Basu, 2013; Munch, 2013; Jonna & Foster, 2016; Patnaik, 2019).

On the other hand, a growing critical field of debate on informality and the reserve army has obtained valuable contributions toward incorporating theories of social reproduction (Dalla Costa & James, 1972; Federici, 1982; Vogel, 2013) as a process of constituting relative surplus population. Within these conceptions, the reserve army is not restricted to population groups expelled from the labor market by accumulation dynamics but also incorporates the entire population contingent that carries out reproduction and maintenance activities of daily life in an unpaid manner (Bhattacharya & Kesar, 2020; Bernards & Soederberg, 2021; Choonara, 2020). The incorporation of unpaid social reproduction activities as part of the relative surplus population is a significant advancement in the understanding of the reserve army as a moment of the capitalist social relation of labor form, which further emphasizes the need for a better theoretical redefinition of this concept, as we will undertake in the following.

The relative surplus population should be understood not only as a group of people excluded from the labor market by accumulation dynamics but also as a relation that allows for the reproduction of the constitution of the working class itself. As Marx said at the end of the chapter on “The general law of capitalist accumulation”: “the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army (...) rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock” (Marx, 1992, p. 799).

Within the dynamics of capital accumulation, Marx creates a dialectical unity between the effects of accumulation for the generation of relative surplus population along with the reproduction of the very conditions of accumulation given by the industrial reserve army as a social relation ^[7]. Therefore, the reserve army becomes “the greater pressure (...) to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital” (Marx, 1992, p. 789). Through the reserve army, the process of generating the specific capitalist labor relation is internalized, imposing on the worker the “freedom” to sell his labor power at the expense of even more precarious forms of life of relative surplus population. “ It is no longer a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market. It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labour-power” (Marx, 1992, p. 723).

The constitution of the specificity of the capitalist relation, of social beings “free” from their reproductive capacities except through the sale of their labor power, becomes internalized in accumulation itself, where a surplus population is generated, pressuring the worker for proletarianization. The direct violence of primitive accumulation is internalized and naturalized in capitalist accumulation. Thus, “primitive accumulation that apparently disappears in capitalist accumulation does so only to reappear as the natural result of its reproduction” (Bonefeld, 2011, p. 385). The historical presupposition of direct violence of separating the worker from their means of reproduction is naturalized and reproduced through the mere movement of labor market competition. The historical period of direct violence for the separation of the means of production, the produced products and productive control is replaced by the free competition of labor power sale, imposed “naturally” by the forces of labor supply and demand within the fluctuations of accumulation.

The reproduction of the essence of the capitalist relation, of the separation of the worker from their reproductive capacity, is reduced in the appearance of the effects of industrial and commercial cycles. The process of genesis and permanent dispute for the imposition of the capitalist relation becomes, in appearance only, the effects of the variations of accumulation (Holloway, 1999). This does not mean that there is no relation between the variations in the rhythms of accumulation and the reserve army; on the contrary, what needs to be demystified is how, in the real appearance of this movement, the process of struggle and dispute for the constitution of the capitalist relation disappears. What was a historical presupposition becomes a logical presupposition, which disappears as posited in the fetishized appearance of a society built on the backs of workers.

Beyond the positive aspect of labor as a creator of value, which is then expropriated, there is its negation against resistance to the imposition of the reification of this labor (Holloway, 2003), in which the realization of labor occurs through its objectification [Vergegenständlichung], through becoming thing-like [sachlich]. For value production to occur, there must necessarily be a reification of living labor as a generator of an abstract relation capable of being quantified in the market (Bellofiore, 2009). The capitalist relation will only produce value if it wins the class struggle by defining human labor in a reified manner in relation to its concrete content. The appearance of labor as value is, in reality, the naturalization of the success of imposing the capitalist relation in subsuming labor (Arthur, 2001, p. 31).

Value is not the success of the social realization of labor in the production of a good but the success of capital in producing a commodity through the alienation of labor to itself. However, in the phenomenal appearance of commodity exchange, this content vanishes, giving rise to the fetishism whereby the thing appears to possess value in itself. It is through this fetishistic character of capitalist relations that a non-identity emerges between the content of social relations and their social form of manifestation. Indeed, the superficial concrete forms of capitalist sociability appear as autonomous – as if they were mere teleological givens in themselves. This is the case with the reserve army [of labor], which appears here as a self-enclosed social group, posited phenomenally by the autonomous logic of accumulation.

The reproduction of capital, however, depends in reality on this daily struggle for labor’s reification (Holloway, 1999), where the reserve army of labor becomes a fundamental moment, manifesting in distinct concrete forms of presentation. Thus, the existence of a relative surplus population is not merely a byproduct of accumulation but rather a moment within the class struggle itself – essential for both constituting and reproducing the capitalist labor relation. The constitution of capitalism’s social labor relation necessarily involves forming a reserve army relation, which nevertheless takes specific social forms of manifestation. When understood as a moment of reified labor relations, the reserve army exposes capital’s mystifying relationship. What appears as social form qua condition now emerges as result – this posited reality [die gesetzte Wirklichkeit] seemingly becomes no longer the condition for its existence but rather an inescapable effect of its own presence. “These presuppositions, which originally appeared as conditions of its becoming (…) now appear as results of its own realization, reality, as posited by it - not as conditions of its arising, but as results of its presence” (Marx, 1992, p. 460).

The struggle for the constitution of the capitalist relation, that is, the inherent conflict in the separation of workers from their living conditions, disappears to be placed as a natural movement in the search for better material conditions in the labor market. The appearance of the separation between active workers and the reserve army through labor market competition is not merely a law of allocation between labor supply and demand but a struggle relationship for the imposition of exploitation ^[8].

Therefore, the industrial reserve army must be understood not only as a mere result of accumulation cycles but also as a social form in dispute for the very constitution of the worker’s separation. “Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’” (Marx, 1992, p. 786). The reproduction of accumulation, despite the appearance of autonomy in the quantitative sphere of monetary value, depends on the constitution of the specific social elements of this relation.

In Marx’s presentation of relative surplus population, there is a strong emphasis on it not only being about the unemployed but also about all semi-employed and partially occupied forms. The essence of the relative surplus population lies in this pressure movement toward proletarianization; therefore, it cannot be reduced to a group of people as a result of the productive cycle. Its constitution occurs through the struggle for the worker’s separation from their living conditions. The social form of this materialized struggle in labor relations is not limited to the unemployed but to a wide range of social relations given by the concrete forms of the historical moment. “The relative surplus population exists in all kinds of forms. Every worker belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed” (Marx, 1992, p. 794).

Marx highlights the general distinct forms of manifestation of relative surplus population: floating, latent, and stagnant ^[9]. However, the concrete form in which each of these categories is realized depends on the historical moment in which it is inserted. The reserve army occurs in various concrete forms of pressure for proletarianization through the competition of free workers for better living conditions. Not surprisingly, the last section of the chapter, “The general law of capitalist accumulation,” is the part of Capital with the most historical/concrete analysis, presenting the specificities of the forms of constitution of the British working class through the dispute for the formation of the reserve army.

The industrial reserve army must be understood as a social relation, which therefore has different concrete forms of realization in each historical moment of capitalism. Analyzing the formation of the reserve army is understanding, within each historical moment, the disputes for the constitution of the working class, which obviously encompasses the rhythms and cycles of accumulation but is not restricted to them. The formation of relative surplus population, more than a mere economic result, is also a constituent moment of the capitalist relation as a class struggle.

Understanding the reserve army of labor and relative overpopulation with a logic dissociated from the constitution of the working class stems from the mystified vision of the formation of the capitalist relationship, wherein social processes are objectified and reified as a given or a separate group from the social whole. Within this traditional view, as presented at the beginning of the previous section, relative overpopulation would constitute its own logic as a group apart from active workers in the accumulation of capital. This separation is actually a false appearance stemming from the fetishized logic of capitalist relationship formation, which necessitates understanding the reserve army as a central element in the formation of the working class, with distinct peculiarities within each historical moment.

Classes are not a thing or a defined group in some fixed position within an imagined economic structure. “There is currently a widespread temptation to suppose that class is a thing,” to the extent that it could be capable of being defined “almost mathematically – a quantity of men which stands in a certain proportion to the means of production” (Thompson, 2004, p. 10). Class should not be understood as a structure or a given category but as a social relation of classification and objectification of the human being. Thus, the proletariat is neither a group of individuals in contrast to capital (empiricists) nor a place in the productive structure (structuralists) (Gunn, 1987). The objectified view of class as a position in the productive structure leads to the disappearance of its social constitution when naturalized as an autonomous social logic, erasing the social character of its process.

In sociological readings, class (along with other concepts) is taken as a given, as a fixed category, rather than being understood as the process of constituting the own relationship they are theorizing ^[10]. “If we remember that class is a relationship, not a thing, we cannot think in that way. ‘It’ does not exist, either to have an interest or an ideal consciousness, nor to extend itself like a patient on the operating table of adjustment” (Thompson, 2004, p. 11).

Even the Marxist worldview (Heinrich, 2012) holds this reductionist view, understanding social classes as a group with a specific function within production, reducing social constitution to a mechanics of income distribution, where all other spheres of life, beyond the economic, disappear or become secondary. The existence of class and its constitution cannot be separated; in affirming the existence of class, the process of constituting a certain relationship must be evidenced (Holloway, 1999). Social classes should not be seen as reduced to economic groups but as a process of classifying the human being. The class struggle cannot be reduced to a struggle between social groups, as this is precisely what this form of domination wants to appear and be seen. “The class struggle is a struggle to classify and against being classified” (Holloway, 1999, p. 115).

Class is a social relation of domination that, through its appearance of competition and struggle between social groups, divides the human being from its notion of collective being and separates it from its conditions of autonomous life (Dalla Costa, 1995), categorizing groups as superior and inferior – as legitimate winners, losers or reserves that do not even deserve to be in the game. The class struggle requires a richer social notion, where the totality of practices are in question, thus fighting against the process of classification, against being inferiorized, objectified and separated. Therefore, the conception of the reserve army as a moment of the struggle for and against class constitution is central.

The separation of the notions of proletarians, informal workers and precarious workers (sub-proletarians) is precisely what erases the possibility of understanding relative overpopulation as the foundation of the capitalist relationship. What the dialectical conception of class allows is precisely to escape reductionism, such as the case of the fragmentary and pluralistic analysis of structuralism, which ends up “falsifying the fundamental contradiction that it intends to analyze” (Gunn, 1987, p. 6).

It is necessary to break with the conventional notions of structuralist Marxism (Althusser & Balibar, 1997; Poulantzas, 1975), where the class becomes a correlate with some “relative autonomy” in relation to the interests of class fractions. Instead of incorporating the reserve army as just another objectified fraction in the dynamics of capital accumulation, it is necessary to understand the struggle for the constitution of classes as the hierarchization of social beings. More important than knowing whether a group has grown or decreased as if it were an arithmetic datum, the notion of relative overpopulation implies understanding the mechanisms of constitution of social classes.

The way society is hierarchized under capitalism goes through the constitution of the reserve army at a given historical period. The specificity of the capitalist relationship lies precisely in the inability of the worker to reproduce with their own means; once this condition is given, the worker is hierarchized and classified within the class struggle. The labor contract is not the founding moment of the capitalist relationship (Denning, 2010), the starting point is not having autonomous conditions for the reproduction of life, which imposes the need to sell labor power. The way the reserve army is constituted, therefore, determines the assumption of the class constitution struggle in capitalism. The way the reserve army is constituted changes in each concrete period of capitalism, taking on different forms of realization of active labor, floating or stagnant reserve.

The concrete realization of the capitalist relationship has distinct periods with specific historical particularities (Clarke, 1992), which impose different forms of active labor or reserve. The relationship between an active worker and the reserve in the 19th century in England, for example, is different from their relationship in the 1960s at the height of Fordism-Keynesianism. The concrete constitution of the floating reserve army needs to be understood within each historical moment.

The way labor relations occur is not fixed in the history of capitalism. What is standard and what is formal varies within each moment, just as partial and regular forms of realization of capitalist work change. However, understanding the concrete particularities of these labor relations does not signify mere historiographic curiosity but rather comprehending the very form of class struggle in which the capitalist social relation is constituted at a certain historical moment.

The analysis of the concrete forms of labor and the constitution of social classes cannot start from the apparent categorical separation of capitalist society, as if there were autonomized logics between formal and informal work or between workers and the unemployed. The constitution of the capitalist relationship starts exactly from the feedback of the class struggle as a social unity, where this social separation arises as cause and effect of capital reproduction. Hence the need to understand the specificities of the concrete forms of this separation, how the distinctions between the concrete forms of labor materialize for the process of struggle and social hierarchization in the form of classes.

With the crisis of the Fordist-Keynesian pattern in the 1970s, as widely reiterated in the literature, so-called flexible forms of production and labor relations began to consolidate (Harvey, 1992). Instead of controls and discipline directly imposed on workers by the company and the state, there is a trend toward self-imposed normalization of capitalist labor (Han, 2015; Laval & Dardot, 2017; Chiappello & Boltanski, 2007).

The high costs of post-war human control to ensure capitalist forms of social relations are diluted with the normalization of the “individual as a business of oneself” ^[11]. The so-called “Fordist” employment form, with institutional stability and guarantees of constant wage growth, is broken ^[12], to establish new competition instruments, which demand constant “self-improvement” or “self-capacitation.” The rationalization of desire and effort becomes central to the process of transforming personal entrepreneurship.

In this neoliberal society ^[13], the individual becomes their own achiever, responsible for generating their specificities through the market. Post-war discipline, with the importance of the family and respect for certain codes and institutions, gives way to unrestrained competition, where each individual becomes the manager of their “own assets.” Within these new labor relations, individuals must work for companies as if they were working for themselves, apparently abolishing any sense of alienation and even the distance between individuals and the companies that employ them.

The control and discipline of concrete labor, which were previously imposed through rules, norms and sanctions of the factory, now occur in the very constitution of the subject. The previous divisions between formal workers (who adhered to factory discipline) and reserve workers are being diluted in these new social forms of labor control. In today’s class struggle, the imposition of subsumption to capital in the very constitution of the social being as a capitalist individual and the need for separation between formal and informal labor control tend to dissolve. With the emergence of new forms of labor control and discipline, the concrete forms of realization of the reserve army and relative overpopulation also change.

To realize these neoliberal specificities of labor, there are alterations in the forms of realization of the reserve army as a cause and presupposition. Therefore, as exposed throughout this work, there is a need to understand relative overpopulation as a social relationship that acquires different forms within the framework of struggles for the constitution of the working class. What is argued here, therefore, is not only an increase in the reserve army (mainly in the Global South) due to the so-called neoliberal processes of globalization and the formation of global value chains ^[14] (Foster et al., 2011; Basu, 2013, 2022; Herod, Gourzis, & Gialis, 2021; Fernandez, 2022) but also changes in its concrete form.

The constitution of this worker as a “self-entrepreneur” depends on the intensification and expansion of market competition in every sphere of this social being’s life. It is within this framework that the tendency for so-called precarious work grows, with modalities of “zero-hour,” “uberized,” “pejotized,” “intermittent” and “flexible” contracts, where the worker, believing to be a self-entrepreneur, remains permanently available (Antunes, 2018), being remunerated only for the hours worked and able to accumulate a large amount of different jobs. The active worker, within these new labor relations, now routinely coexists with the social pressure exerted by the reserve army. It is not that the reserve army, in precarious and informal forms, has only grown; as a social relationship, it becomes more internalized even in the so-called active forms of work ^[15].

With the consolidation of these new forms of work, the working class, in its broadest sense, composed of both active workers and the industrial reserve army, assumes a more fluid configuration, where the distinctions between active workers and the industrial reserve army blend. In the concrete context of contemporary capitalism, Marx’s classic categories, such as the stagnant and floating industrial reserve army, begin to institutionalize and mimic themselves as standards of active labor. Within these new forms of work, with the worker as a self-entrepreneur, it becomes increasingly blurred who is active and who is reserve or what is standard and what is precarious?

Jobs performed through digital platforms, new permissive labor laws and outsourced companies, often with informal or short-term contracts, while constituting the active and legally regulated workforce, can also be understood within the notion of the reserve army as a social relationship of pressure for proletarianization. The precarization and informalization of work, in their so-called neoliberal forms, represent a moment in the generation of this new reserve army, impacting the dynamics of the constitution of the working classes. This concrete form of the reserve army doesn’t represent merely an increase in stagnant and irregular forms, but its own symbiosis with active forms, enhancing the mechanisms of pressure for proletarianization.

The pressure originating from relative overpopulation, aiming at the expansion and intensification of work, is no longer limited to the competitive risk of becoming part of the reserve army; the very realization of the active worker incorporates the formation of this surplus. Even the “most active” worker of an outsourced company, a digital platform or a freelance service provider faces constant pressure to be a reserve, as, after completing a work activity, they somehow join the vast contingent of relative overpopulation. The pressure from the “Hephaestus chain” applies both to the reserve army and to the worker who is partially active themselves. Through individualized, outsourced hiring mechanisms and variants of digital platforms, the intensity level of competition imposed by the reserve army increases exponentially, as the active worker is simultaneously pressured to seek a new activity.

This concrete form of the reserve army obviously presents peculiarities among different regions, notably between the center and the periphery of capitalism. However, it is crucial to emphasize that, although the processes of informalization and precarization are historically constitutive elements of peripheral labor markets, this does not imply a static maintenance in the forms of these relations. While, on the one hand, the Fordist-Keynesian pattern with social welfare can only be identified for a restricted portion of the global population and for a restricted historical period, the forms of constitution of informality and precarization in the peripheries are not static. Also in the periphery of the world market, there is a reconfiguration of new forms of informality and precarization. If previously precarization occurred mainly through processes of segregation and direct exclusion, there is now greater relative inclusion in labor markets, although following the patterns of these neoliberal relations,” which, paradoxically, include while excluding.

The formation of capitalism on the periphery of the world market is marked by a strong segregation of part of its population, whether by economic, racial or regional mechanisms. The constitution of this relative overpopulation originating from historical processes, such as colonization, slavery and immigration, is internalized in the very logic of capitalist social reproduction in the periphery ^[16]. The trajectory of capitalism’s development on the periphery is marked by the constitution of a large reserve army, mainly through processes of exclusion of part of the population from formal labor markets and access to markets for consumption of more sophisticated goods. With the advancement of neoliberal forms, there is no elimination of this relative overpopulation; on the contrary, in addition to its expansion, there is also the incorporation of new, more fluid forms of the reserve army.

There has been a huge intensification of capitalist relations on the periphery in recent decades, with the incorporation of a huge mass of workers into global markets. However, this process does not purely mean the incorporation of part of this population as active workers and the other part as a reserve army. The vast majority of these workers are inserted into labor and consumption markets through these new neoliberal forms of the reserve army, which have been characterized as precarious and informal. A significant part of the so-called “new working classes” in Asia and Latin America are precisely composed of activities through new permissive labor laws, outsourced companies and digital platforms.

Within the logic of global market capitalism, this reserve army with more diffuse forms allows for the simultaneous increase in the workforce and effective demand through consumption, along with the pressures for proletarianization exerted by relative overpopulation. In a way, this concrete form of capitalism allows for an expansion of accumulation along with the increase in reserve army social pressures ^[17]. The current forms of the reserve in the world market, therefore, tend to have a tendency to increase the employed workforce while maintaining social pressures for proletarianization as if in times of crisis (or low points) in the accumulation dynamics.

It becomes evident how the reserve army as a social relationship is not simply an effect of accumulation rhythms, since it is also a condition and cause for its determination. To make the dynamics of struggle for social constitution a given or an exogenous variable is to erase the very determinants of the process being explained. Therefore, relative overpopulation must be understood as a social relationship within the process of class constitution, both of formal workers and of the so-called informal and precarious workers.

In this article, an analysis of Marx’s concept of the industrial reserve army was carried out, presenting the main interpretations and their limitations. There is a strong tradition of the centrality of accumulation for understanding relative surplus population, often obscuring the reverse path, namely, the effects of different forms of the reserve army on the determination of the accumulation trajectory. Therefore, it is argued in this work for the need to incorporate the relative surplus population not as a group or a defined structure, but as a constitutive relation of the class struggle process.

The social form of this struggle materialized in labor relations is not limited to the unemployed but to a wide range of social relations given by the concrete forms of the historical moment. The transformations of labor relations that have occurred in recent decades are analyzed within this constellation of disputes for the imposition of neoliberal forms of the reserve army. With the crisis of the Fordist-Keynesian pattern in the 1970s, as widely reiterated in the literature, new forms of control and discipline over labor began to be consolidated through class struggle. The control and discipline of concrete labor that were previously imposed by the rules, norms, and sanctions of the factory now occur in the very constitution of the worker’s subjectivity. The previous divisions between formal workers (who adapted to factory discipline) and reserve workers are being diluted in these new social forms of labor control.

With the consolidation of these new forms of labor, the working class, in its broadest sense, composed of both active workers and the reserve army, assumes a more fluid configuration, where the distinction between these categories becomes blurred. In the concrete context of contemporary capitalism, Marx’s classic categories, such as the stagnant and floating industrial reserve army, begin to institutionalize and mimic themselves as patterns of active labor.

The pressure originating from the relative surplus population, aiming at the expansion and intensification of labor, is no longer limited to the competitive risk of becoming part of the reserve army, since the realization of active workers comes to incorporate the formation of this reserve. Activities carried out through digital platforms, recent flexible labor laws and outsourced companies, often using informal or short-term contracts, not only make up the legally regulated active workforce but also can be interpreted as part of the reserve army, establishing a social relation that pressures for proletarianization.

Thus, within the logic of capital at the level of the world market, this concrete form of capitalism allows for an expansion of accumulation together with an increase in the pressure of the reserve army for proletarianization and overwork. The precarization and informalization of labor, rather than being dissociated logics of class formation, represent a moment in the generation of this specific reserve army, impacting the dynamics of accumulation and the constitution of the working classes.

By framing the reserve army as a social relation – one that exerts continuous pressure for proletarianization and shapes class struggle – the article challenges conventional analyses that isolate precarity as a recent or peripheral phenomenon. A forward-looking research agenda should therefore prioritize three key dimensions: (1) the historical and dialectical analysis of how precarious labor forms (e.g. platform work and informalization) emerge from the internal logic of capital accumulation and class constitution; (2) the global and intersectional dimensions of precarity, particularly how racial, gendered and geographic hierarchies are reproduced through the reserve army’s concrete forms and (3) the subjective and political implications of precarity, including how labor resistance and solidarity can be reimagined amid the blurring boundaries between “active” and “reserve” workers. This approach demands moving beyond descriptive accounts of labor market fragmentation to interrogate how precarity functions as a mechanism of social control and exploitation, while also identifying potential sites of rupture in capital’s fetishized logic.

Funding: This study was supported by FAPERJ - Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro, through the Young Scientist of Our State program (JCNE).