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 of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself". The first section of the "Manifesto", "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or "proletariat", engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the "bourgeoisie". As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending