Technological abundance produces mass unemployment treated as reserve army material.

Evidence

With the threat of unemployment, workers are pitted against one another and are willing to accept higher levels of exploitation, allowing companies to sell their products at lower prices through wage suppression and maintain their competitive advantage. Marx captured this dynamic: “The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital.” — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 258 (#expands, via linked claim)

In July 2024, high interest rates achieved their primary goal of increasing the unemployment rate by a percentage point in one year. An additional 1.3 million Americans were without work—not counting the more than half a million workers who were forced to accept part-time, precarious positions because of a lack of full-time opportunities. While many critical economists dispute that high interest rates actually help tame inflation—especially if it is a profit-driven one—what is indisputable is that through monetary austerity, Fed officials create the conditions for wage compression: people are no longer able to hold off from accepting crummy jobs with lousy pay. And this is what ultimately matters. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 284 (#expands, via linked claim)

Now the ever-more-complete mechanization of labor in advanced capitalism, while sustaining exploitation, modifies the attitude and the status of the exploited. Within the technological ensemble, mechanized work in which automatic and semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labor time remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery—even more exhausting because of increased speed-up, control of the machine operators (rather than of the product), and isolation of the workers from each other. To be sure, this form of drudgery is expressive of arrested, partial automation, of the coexistence of automated, semi-automated, and non-automated sections within the same plant, but even under these conditions, “for muscular fatigue technology has substituted tension and/or mental effort.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 169 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The unemployed reserve army disciplines employed workers into accepting overwork. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 258; Monetary austerity deliberately manufactures unemployment to compress wages. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 284; Mechanization sustains exploitation while shifting its form from muscular to mental exhaustion. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 169

Broader Connections

• The unemployed reserve army disciplines employed workers into accepting overwork. #expands (0.92) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 258
• Monetary austerity deliberately manufactures unemployment to compress wages. #expands (0.88) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 284
• Mechanization sustains exploitation while shifting its form from muscular to mental exhaustion. #complicates (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 169