1. Printing: This poster is 48” wide by 36” high. It’s designed to be printed on a large- format printer. Customizing the Content: The placeholders in this poster are formatted for you. Type in the placeholders to add text, or click an icon to add a table, chart, SmartArt graphic, picture or multimedia file. To add or remove bullet points from text, click the Bullets button on the Home tab. If you need more placeholders for titles, content or body text, make a copy of what you need and drag it into place. PowerPoint’s Smart Guides will help you align it with everything else. Want to use your own pictures instead of ours? No problem! Just click a picture, press the Delete key, then click the icon to add your picture. The Labour-Reserve Army in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Vol. 1: Jarred A. Luján Faculty Mentor: Dr. John Glassford Abstract In a world still reeling from the economic crisis of 2008, many questions regarding our market system arose. Notorious philosopher Karl Marx had asked many of these questions before. Marx has a longstanding position against capitalism, for many reasons. However, I aimed to look at one of the most prominent economic issues of all crises, unemployment. With this in mind, I read Karl Marx’s masterpiece: Das Kapital, Vol. 1 to see how he explains the problem that the unemployed (what he calls the labour-reserve army) are faced with in economic systems. The project included mass amounts of research into Das Kapital, with a full reading of the text and discussions as to what the author was attempting to get across. At times, I made sure to go back to older readings and to look for aid in understanding the full scope of what Marx’s criticisms are. Conclusion Marx’s analysis leads to the idea that capitalism can never allow full employment. At that, capitalism helps create it. A labour-reserve army allows for the price of labour-power to be driven downwards. If the workers were to gain full employment, they would be able to have control over their labour- power, and be able to raise the cost of it. The idea, then, is that capitalism must have periodic crises to ruin employment. So, from a Marxist perspective, 2008 was certainly not the last economic crisis. Furthermore, capitalism needs crises such as 2008, in order to constantly refill the pool of available potential labour-power. This “surplus population” must also be kept poor enough to be forced to constantly sell their labour-power. These lower market prices allow an initiation of a new regime of accumulation of profit. Works Cited Capital, Vol. 1 by Karl Marx. Published by Penguin Classics, 1990. Quotes “[A surplus population of workers] forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements.” (784) “Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour- power which the natural increase of production yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits.” (788) A Look at the Romance Between Capitalism and Unemployment Israeli Socio-Economic protests in 2010 to Flickr user Eman