Reserve army of labour army of labour in Marx's writing occurs in a manuscript he wrote in 1847, but did not publish: The idea of the labour force as an "army" occurs also in Part 1 of "The Communist Manifesto", written by Marx and Engels in 1848: Marx introduces the concept of the reserve army of labour in chapter 25 of the first volume of "", twenty years later in 1867, stating the following: His argument is that as capitalism develops, the organic composition of capital will increase, which means that the mass of constant capital grows faster than the mass of variable capital.
The Communist Manifesto in theory; Marxist works such as the "Manifesto" or "Das Kapital" were read primarily by party theoreticians. On the other hand, small, dedicated militant parties and Marxist sects in the West took pride in knowing the theory; Hobsbawm says "This was the milieu in which 'the clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of earmarks on his Manifesto. Following the October Revolution of 1917 that swept the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolsheviks to power in Russia, the world's first socialist state was founded explicitly along Marxist lines. The Soviet Union, which Bolshevik Russia would become a part of,