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 entered political-science syllabuses in universities, which would only expand after the Second World War. For its centenary in 1948, its publication was no longer the exclusive domain of Marxists and academicians; general publishers too printed the "Manifesto" in large numbers. "In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist document," Hobsbawm noted, "it had become a political classic "tout court"." Even after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, the "Communist Manifesto" remains ubiquitous; Hobsbawm says that "In states without censorship, almost certainly anyone within reach of a good bookshop, and certainly anyone within reach of a