Revision summary
Reserve army: surplus labour that capital expands and contracts to discipline wages. Floating, latent, and stagnant forms in Marx. Feminists: women as flexible wage reserve and unpaid reproductive labour. Oakley and social-reproduction theory make housework part of the army’s base. NSSO “low participation” often hides that tank.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Marx’s reserve army of labour is the surplus population that capital can draw in or expel as accumulation needs. It disciplines the employed by the threat of replacement. Feminist scholars asked who that army is, and how unpaid care fills and hides it.
Body
The Marxist concept
- In Capital, the industrial reserve army includes the floating, latent, and stagnant surplus.
- Unemployment is not an accident. It is a lever of wages and a condition of expansion.
- Informal and migrant workers in India often live this function even without a factory roll.
Feminist positions
- Heidi Hartmann and later Marxist feminists argued that women are a flexible reserve: drawn into wartime and export factories, sent back to the household.
- Silvia Federici and social-reproduction writers treated unpaid domestic labour as the hidden condition of the wage, not a private leftover.
- Ann Oakley made housework visible as work. The “non-working” woman is already labour.
- Indian scholarship on home-based garment work and SHGs shows women as both cheap wage labour and a care reserve. NSSO low female labour-force rates often misread this.
Tension
- A reserve-army story that only counts the male unemployed misses the household as a labour tank.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD CAP[Capital accumulation] --> RA[Reserve army] RA --> WAGE[Wage discipline] HH[Unpaid care] --> RA FEM[Feminist reading] --> HH
Conclusion
The reserve army is capital’s surplus labour that regulates the wage. Feminists relocate much of that surplus in gendered households and informal shops. Oakley, Hartmann, and social-reproduction theory make the concept usable for India only if unpaid care is counted.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Discuss the importance of interpretative understanding of social phenomena and explain its limitations
Next question on this syllabus topic (2019 · Q3(a)). View answer →
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Is every unpaid carer in the reserve army?
Not as a factory statistic. As a social-reproduction argument, the household is the latent tank.
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Did Marx ignore women?
He noted female factory labour. He did not theorise unpaid care as feminists later did.
Same topic · past papers
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2019 · Q7(b) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
Feminist scholars argue that 'New media' is masculine and hence reinforces structural hierarchies rather than reconfiguring them. Comment -
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Critically examine the position of women in the informal economy.
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