In the Rearview Mirror: Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You

Ventura, California not long ago passed an ordinance making it okay for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars. At the height of the Great Recession, a third of the capital equipment of the U.S. economy lay idle. Of the women and men idled along with that equipment, only 37 percent got any unemployment checks from the government and that money averaged a mere 35 percent of their weekly wages. Meanwhile, “ninety-niners,” those who have maxed out their supplemental unemployment benefits because they’ve been out of work for more than ninety-nine weeks, now number two million. They comprise a division in “the reserve army of labor.” That “army” which accounts for 17 percent of the labor force (if one includes part-time workers who want full-time work and those millions who’ve given up looking for jobs) is doing its historic duty, driving down wages, lengthening hours, eroding conditions, and adding an element of raw fear to the lives of those still lucky enough to be working.

The co-existence of idling workplaces and cast-off workers always has been the most severe indictment of capitalism as a system for the reproduction of human society. The coming into existence of a new social category—the “ninety-niners”—punctuates that grim observation. As recently as the 1930s, the numbing, demoralizing experience of year after year after year without work caused people to wonder if capitalism had outlived its usefulness. Nowadays, however, the “ninety-niners” notwithstanding, unemployment has been normalized; not a good thing, of course, but not something that all by itself causes us to question the way the economy is organized.

There was a time when unemployment was so shocking and traumatic that it led people to do just that. We don’t use the phrase “reserve army of labor” anymore. It strikes many as faintly embarrassing, too “Marxist” or perhaps anachronistic in the age of post-industrial flexible capitalism when we’ve supposedly grown accustomed to the casualness and transience of work. But long before leftists began throwing it around, that redolent metaphor, the “reserve army of labor,” was regularly referred to, studied, and worried about by nineteenth-century journalists, government bureaucrats, town fathers, state governors, churchmen, and other citizens. Something new was happening and they weren’t entirely sure what to make of it.

Unemployment, as a recurring feature on the social landscape, only emerged with the advent of capitalism in antebellum America. Before that, the rhythms of agricultural and village life naturally included oscillations between periods of intense labor and down time. But the wherewithal to sustain families remained within the possession of farmers and handicraftsmen. Hard times were common enough, but except in extremis most people retained enough of their own land and tools, as well as common rights to woodlands, grazing areas, hunting, and fishing resources to keep themselves what today we might call “self-employed.” Once these means of subsistence and production became concentrated in the hands of merchant-capitalists, manufacturers, and large landowners, the situation changed fundamentally. A proletariat—those without property of any kind except their own labor power—appeared in increasing numbers, dependent on the propertied to employ them. If, for whatever reason, the market for their labor power dried up, they were set adrift.

Dispossession was a protracted process. In the beginning, during the early decades of the nineteenth-century, its impact was cushioned. Farmers, handicraftsmen, fishermen, and trades people who were swept up into the new textile or shoe factories or farm women set to work out in the countryside spinning and weaving for merchant-capitalists held onto some semblance of their old ways of life. They maintained vegetable gardens, continued to hunt and fish, and perhaps kept a few domestic animals. When the first commercial panics of the 1830s and 1850s erupted and business came to a standstill, many still could fall back on these pre-capitalist ways of making a living, even if a bare one.

Once industrial capitalism exploded after the Civil War, what had been a...