On the Concept of the Reserve Army of Labor in Ruy Mauro Marini

• Date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Gil Felix
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211045402
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles: Reflections on Historical Thought

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211045402

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 242, Vol. 49 No. 1, January 2022, 75–90

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211045402

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

75

On the Concept of the Reserve Army of Labor

in Ruy Mauro Marini

by

Gil Felix

Translated by

Patricia Fierro

An analysis of the concept of the reserve army of labor in the work of Ruy Mauro

Marini explains the processes that contributed to the Marxist theory of dependency and

to the study of the capitalist mode of production.

Uma analise da conceito de exército industrial de reserva na teoria proposta por Ruy

Mauro Marini explica quais eram os processos a que ele atribuía especificidade ao mesmo

no âmbito da denominada teoria marxista da dependência e do modo de produção capi-

talista.

Keywords: Reserve army of labor, Ruy Mauro Marini, Dependency, Social theory, Latin

America

The main thesis of this article is that the concept of the reserve army of labor

is central to the theory of the Brazilian Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–1997). A sec-

ondary one is that a review of this concept based on Marini’s theoretical legacy

presents a crucial perspective for developing the analysis of the capitalist mode

of production. At a time when the concept of the reserve army is thought of in

globalizing terms and the distance, hitherto well demarcated, between the

working classes of dependent and central formations seems to diminish with

the global prevalence of precarious work, transformations in the circulation of

capital, and their displacement, theories previously limited to the Latin

American social sciences are gaining greater acceptance and explanatory power

(Felix, 2018b; 2020; Felix and Guanais, 2019; Felix and Sotelo, 2019).1 In this con-

nection, researchers and activists both in the central countries and in others

Gil Felix is a social scientist and a professor at the Instituto Latino-americano de Economia,

Sociedade e Política of the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana. His research is

focused on the working class, mobility, circulation, the reserve army, and the superexploitation of

labor and based on various studies conducted with Brazilian workers and peasants in the 2000s

and 2010s. He is the author of Mobilidade e superexploração do trabalho: O enigma da circulação (2019)

and O caminho do mundo: Mobilidade espacial e condição camponesa em uma região da Amazônia Oriental

(2d edition, 2021). Patricia Fierro is a translator in Quito, Ecuador. A first version of this article was

drawn up during a research internship at the Center of Latin American Studies of the National

Autonomous University of Mexico with a grant from the São Paulo Research Foundation. The

author thanks Adrián Sotelo, Ricardo Antunes, Fernando Lourenço, Mauro Almeida, Juliana

Guanais, and other colleagues who commented on the previous version and the editors and

reviewers of Latin American Perspectives.

1045402LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211045402Latin American PerspectivesFelix / On the Concept of the Reserve Army of Labor In Marini

research-article2021

76 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

such as Brazil2 and interest in the debates they inspired has been revived.

However, Marini’s theses have been recognized and revisited for different rea-

sons and have been employed in different ways, often based on the assump-

tions of the currents that opposed them in previous decades.

Marini was the main theoretical exponent of the Marxist current that criticized

the analyses of the intellectuals linked to the Economic Commission for Latin

America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), of the Latin American communist parties

aligned with the USSR at the time, and of the Brazilian Center for Analysis and

Planning, led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In contrast to Cardoso, who ana-

lyzed dependency from a non-Marxist perspective (conceiving of associated depen-

dent development and a bourgeois conciliatory political strategy for overcoming

the dictatorship), Marini, adopting a revolutionary socialist approach with Marx’s

Capital as its main reference, reviewed the way dependency was reproduced

through the social relations of capitalist production and the world market. Thus

studies of dependency were not divided between “political” and “economic” per-

spectives but essentially, at least among those who adopted a socialist perspective,

focused on the social conditions of the class struggle in dependent formations.

Marini (1974 [1969]; 1976a) differed from other Marxists, such as Nelson

Werneck Sodré and Caio Prado Jr., who, although original and singular, repre-

sented the national-democracy stageist approach. Later, his work also differed

from the sociological analysis that gave rise to the so-called popular-democracy

strategy—although, in this case, the brilliant contributions of Florestan

Fernandes and some of his disciples did not fully fit into the social democratic

perspective that became hegemonic in Brazil in the last decades of the twenti-

eth century (Fernandes, 1976; 1981; Marini, 1966).

However, the debates among the authors of dependency theory were not

always analyzed in terms of their main differences, and Marini’s perspective in

particular was mischaracterized as being limited in scope or even, curiously, as

representing a sociological perspective that was inherently impossible to develop

from its premises.3 Since this period of eminently political confrontation, the

potentialities and limitations of Marini’s work have been expanded by new stud-

ies. In Latin American sociology, for example, the debate between Cardoso and

Marini in the late 1970s was controversial and, when aborted by Cardoso, ended

up leaving many points unresolved. One of these was the nature and origin of

the superexploitation of labor that, according to Marini, characterized dependent

formations. Cardoso and Serra (1978) devoted much of their critique to the debate

over unequal exchange, and, as a result, revisiting the theoretical controversies

over Marxist interpretations of value transfer and dependency is common even

today.4 However, in addition to this question, Marini’s (1978: 63–64, emphasis

added) response to his critics also reaffirmed that

the superexploitation of labor is triggered by unequal exchange, but what it derives

from is not that but the profit fever that creates the world market, and it is fundamen-

tally based on the formation of a relative surplus population. But, once an economic

process is under way on the basis of superexploitation, a monstrous mecha-

nism is set in motion whose perversity does not mitigate but is accentuated by

the dependent economy’s recourse to increasing productivity by means of

technological development.