Mandi Smallhorne : Thank you, Sam. I love your term, 'members of the reserve army of labour' - I have always thought of this group as the 'non-working workers', in other words people who would like to work - whether they've given up on looking for work or not.

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Just a footnote. I do not think you need the qualifier "who would like to work." The reserve army includes huge numbers of men & women who are 'outside' capitalism: peasants, petty producers & artisans, share-croppers, and some even of those Marx _did_ call "lumpen." (Like Sam, I never use the term myself, and doubt its usefulness.) In the 1950s in the U.S. married women were an important part of the reserve army of labor. Chinese peasants turned out to be a crucial part of the reserve army drawn on by U.S. capitalists from around 1980 on to limit the power of workers here. The radical reduction in the number of "family farms" after 1950 revealed that U.S. farmers had been part of the reserve army of labor.

Carrol