Thiago writes:
> there also is an issue here about what it means to be unemployed
> these days. It doesn't necessarily mean one is not working: here in Oz we
> have these hare- brained and politically expedient work-for-the-dole schemes;
> there are also whole communities which are pulled together by pensioned
> activists. From a fairly totalising social perspective, are these people's
> labours so different from those of someone on a state payroll? As unemployment
> controls become ever more draconian and people are forced to 'volunteer' in ever
> larger numbers, unemployment could become the labour relations version of
> parole, although at some point, I suppose, it must all go a wee bit Speenhamland...
I think it's useful to keep unemployment _per se_ (as with the official definitions) separate from these near-unemployments. Monetary economists do something similar, talking about different measures of the money supply and distinguishing them from near-moneyes.
Or perhaps we could talk about there being three different "reserve armies of the unemployed":
1) the "floating surplus population" refers to those laid off by downsizing capitalists; they float off to eventually get new jobs.
2) the "latent surplus population" refers to those expelled from (or held in reserve in) non-capitalist organizations (including the patriarchal family) that are conquered by capital.
3) the "stagnant surplus population" refers to those in sectors that have been abandoned and destroyed by capital.
This distinction -- made by guess who? -- doesn't seem to capture the full experience of unemployemtn, however.
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Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
