Images of thousands of Moroccan migrants storming into Ceuta, attempting to reach Spain, have shocked the world. However, the migration process is not limited to Ceuta; it is global, encompassing billions of people across five continents, and is a product of the horrific inequality, oppression, and poverty caused by capitalism and class society. We are publishing an excerpt from the work The End of Corporations, Chapter 6: Accumulation, which explains this phenomenon. If you want to read The End of the Corporations click here. 

The phenomenon of the accumulation of working-class, popular, unemployed masses and the emergence of megalopolises

The accumulation of masses of workers and the unemployed is the absolute Law of Accumulation, for Marx: "The proportional magnitude of the industrial reserve army, therefore, increases in parallel with the powers of wealth. But the greater this reserve army is in proportion to the active working army, the greater the mass of consolidated surplus population or the working-class strata whose misery is inversely proportional to the torture of their labor. The greater, finally, the strata of the working class formed by the sickly needy and the industrial reserve army, the greater the official pauperism. This is the general, absolute law of capitalist accumulation." (1)

Today, the world is experiencing a mass of surplus population—workers, the poor, the sick, and the unemployed—that Marx described, on a scale never before seen in the history of capitalism. The 2008 UN report states : "In 2008, the world reached an invisible but momentous milestone: for the first time, more than half of its human population, 3.3 billion people, will live in urban areas. It is projected that by 2030, this number will have reached almost 5 billion." (2) This urban overpopulation was developed by multinational and global corporations.

These forms of accumulation have brought about revolutionary changes in demographic structure, the development of social classes, their geographic location and composition, and the displacement of workers and migrations, which have an enormous impact on the world's political and social situation. In other words, parallel to the development of global corporations and the process of concentrating sectors of production, trade, and wealth under their ownership, there has also been a concentration of the world's population in cities.

First, large urban concentrations emerged, such as Mexico City, São Paulo, New York, Bombay, New Delhi, Tokyo, etc., and alongside them, new metropolitan centers defined as megalopolises, which arose as a result of enormous migrations within countries.

Migration movements are silent, ongoing movements with successive waves, veritable demographic revolutions that profoundly impact the social structure of every country in the world, modifying the composition of all social classes, fundamentally the working class. These demographic changes produced the enormous development, growth, and expansion of the global working class with the proletarianization and urbanization of vast masses of peasants and popular sectors worldwide.

Population growth and global migration development

The world's population approached 8.3 billion between 2011 and 2012, and the UN predicts that by 2050 it will exceed 11 billion. The fastest-growing regions are Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, where the population is expected to increase by almost 50%. Within these regions, the poorest countries are projected to double their population. Africa's population is expected to double by 2050, reaching 2 billion.

China, with 1.33 billion inhabitants, and India, with 1.147 billion, alone account for almost 40% of the world's population, and estimates from the Indian Census Bureau project that in less than two decades, India could surpass China in population. Following the two world wars, the genocides, massacres, and widespread destruction of productive forces perpetrated by capitalist powers have led to massive migrations becoming a global phenomenon.

The United Nations Population Division has estimated that the stock of migrants grew at a rate of 1.9% annually, a rate higher than the total growth of the world population, which was 1.8% annually during the same period. According to José Moreno Pau: "...Imperialist plunder pushes workers from colonies and semi-colonies to seek salvation in the metropolis... the need for cheap labor in the metropolises results in the migratory movement of recent decades, coupled with the aging of the European population and the need for cheap labor. We are facing the opposite phenomenon to that which occurred between the 19th and early 20th centuries when some 55 million Europeans emigrated to other continents, mainly to America..." (3)

These migratory flows move in two directions: on the one hand, migration from underdeveloped to developed countries, and on the other, migration from rural areas to cities. In both processes, the global number of migrants is increasing, and they share the same final destination: cities. These cities are increasingly combining different races, cultures, languages, and customs, which is changing the composition of social classes, especially the working class, which is incorporating the immigrant proletariat as one of its most combative components. Migration to the G7 countries breaks down as follows: 50% goes to the US, 40% to the EU, 5% to Canada, and just over 3% to Japan. Immigration to the EU comes from the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, as well as other regions.

The EU hosts approximately 80% of Arab/Muslim immigration to Western societies. Migration waves are directed toward the geographically closest developed countries. Europe receives 78% of immigration from Eastern Europe, 79% from the Middle East, and 93% from North Africa. The US is the preferred destination for 98% of immigration from Central America and Mexico. At the other end of the world, Japan's immigrant population comes almost exclusively from East Asia.

In the case of the US, this phenomenon is modifying its social structure, and people who define themselves as Hispanic, Latino, or Chicano are becoming the largest minority group, surpassing African Americans for the first time in American history. Following World War II, with the rise of modern multinational corporations amidst the capitalist reconstruction of Europe, capitalist governments and states directed and stimulated this internal migration from rural to urban areas to supply labor for the new emerging industries that spearheaded the global economic boom, thus enabling the reconstruction and reconstitution of the powerful European proletariat.

According to José Moreno Pau : "... It must be remembered that the industrial reconstruction of the main European imperialist powers, after the second world war , was based not only on the Marshall Plan but also at the cost of the displacement of millions of workers from southern Europe, Turkey and North Africa to the industrial zones..." (4)

Today, most immigrants in Europe reside in Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Turks constitute the largest immigrant group in Europe, with a considerable presence in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. But the disastrous situation in which European immigrants live is the same as that faced by their counterparts in the US, Japan, and other imperialist countries .

As José Moreno Pau explains: "...immigrant workers have once again constituted the most exploited sector, occupying the lowest-skilled and hardest jobs (construction, agriculture, industry, cleaning, domestic service...). These sectors have the highest rates of subcontracting and precarious employment. For this reason, immigrant workers are the most affected by workplace accidents. (5)

Globalization has also led to increased migration of more skilled workers from underdeveloped countries to develop areas and sectors suffering from labor shortages, such as industries producing and using information, communication, and high technologies.

This importation of "brainpower" and qualified personnel or professionals is in agreement with the governments that have instituted "green cards" or special permits since the 1980s. For José Moreno Pau: "... On the other hand, they also import skilled labor that in recent years has joined the army of interns and researchers working for multinationals with much lower salaries and minimal health rights. This is part of the brain drain that represents an impoverishment for the countries of origin, which see how the investment in the training of these individuals is lost. The immigrant workforce arrives in the city at working age, so the receiving states have saved years of health and education..." (6)

In short, imperialist countries develop and promote immigration as part of their global plans to advance the exploitation of workers, according to José Moreno Pau: "...The imperialist countries of the EU use immigrant labor to divide the working class by keeping them on increasingly lower wages and increasing working hours. They replace social benefits for the sick, the elderly, and children with domestic workers...the contribution of immigrants to the percentage of the population in developed countries...Today they represent between 10% and 20% of the population of central European countries..." (7)

Migration in Africa has several components: migration to oil-producing countries, migration from the poorest to the most developed countries, and refugee movements due to wars, making it the region with the largest number of refugees, whose total number rose from 3 million in 1985 to 6.8 million in 1995. In Asia and the Pacific, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, and Taiwan joined Hong Kong and Singapore as labor-importing countries, which have a policy of systematically suppressing and curtailing the rights of immigrants with the aim of facilitating their exploitation and use as cheap labor and cannon fodder for imperialist armies.

With increasingly harsh immigration laws, the situation of immigrant workers is getting worse. As José Moreno Pau explains: "...they suffer exploitation, division between those with and without papers, between naturalized and unnaturalized, and finally, division by nationality continues to be fostered. Imperialist governments offer immigrants the opportunity to join invading armies, such as the US in Afghanistan, in exchange for papers and permits to live in the country with their families. But even so, immigrants as a whole suffer racism and xenophobia, the formation of ghettos, and clandestinity..." (8)

However, for decades immigrants have been leading increasingly important struggles to defend their residency and labor rights, against anti-immigrant laws, and for immigrant rights in recent decades. The struggle of immigrant minorities for their rights has placed immigrants and their mobilization against the policies and laws exploiting this sector of the working class by G7 governments at the center of the stage. The immigrant proletariat has become one of the most combative sectors of the global working class, as it is one of the most exploited and oppressed sectors.

The concentration and growth of the working class gave rise to megalopolises

The large urban concentrations that arise from migration are megalopolises. These conglomerations did not exist 60 years ago, but because half of humanity is migrating from rural areas to cities and from less developed to more developed economies, they are developing rapidly and dramatically. The term megalopolis was introduced by the French geographer Jean Gottmann in the 1960s, specifically in his book " Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States ."

In this book, Gottman referred to an urban system with a population of 10 million or more, the core of large cities that expands with satellite cities, creating a megalopolis. These enormous urban concentrations are placed at the center of the world political situation because it is there that the fundamental political processes of mass movements, mobilizations, insurrections, and the most important revolutions unfold.

But also, as we shall see shortly, because these megalopolises are enormous concentrations of workers. Not only do these megalopolises concentrate vast sectors of the mass movement, along with subsequent social groups and class sectors such as the unemployed, the lumpenproletariat and marginalized, and sectors of the rich and poor middle class. Within these gigantic conglomerations, a huge and powerful working class is developing, which, as we shall see, already spans all five continents and, through its mobilization, colors the fundamental political processes of the world.

Ongoing global urbanization and demographic transformations demonstrate the level of development achieved by the working class with globalization. As Chris Harman explains in his excellent work "The Workers of the World," he gives the following figures: "...The working class (exists) as never before as a class in itself... with a core of perhaps 2 billion people ," around which there are another 2 billion whose lives are "subject to the same logic as its core... 2.474 billion people participated in the global non-domestic workforce in the mid-1990s. Of these, about a fifth, 379 million people, worked in industry, 800 million in services, and 1.074 billion in agriculture." (9)

He continues: "...Capitalism has created a global working class in the last century and a half. Industry and wage labor exist today in virtually every part of the globe. The industrial working class has a global presence. But the uneven and combined development of the system means that it is very unevenly distributed among the different regions. Rough estimates indicate that 40% of the nearly 270 million industrial workers are in OECD countries; in China, Latin America, and the former USSR, about 15% in each country; in Asia, approximately 10%; and about 5% in Africa..." (10)

The establishment of multinationals in China and India, which causes a growth of the proletariat in those countries, did not prevent the growth of the proletariat in developed countries, as Harman points out "... in 1998 the number of workers in industry was about 20% higher than in 1971, almost 50% higher than in 1950..." (11) In the remaining first world countries the number of industrial workers grows unevenly, in Japan the industrial workforce has grown to more than double between 1950 and 1971 and had another increase of 13% in 1998.

In Great Britain it fell by a third, and in France by more than a quarter, but overall there were 112 million industrial workers in the G7 countries in 1998, an increase of 25 million in the number of industrial workers in the most developed countries compared to 1950. The weight of the working class is decisive in the most important country in the world, the United States. According to Harman, "...Overall there are at least 42 million 'service sector workers' in manual or routine white-collar jobs in the United States. If we add the 33 million workers in traditional manual industries, we find that about three-quarters of the American population is made up of workers." (12)

Baldoz, Koeber, and Kraft state: "... There are now more Americans employed in the manufacture of cars, buses, and auto parts than at any time since the Vietnam War..." (13) According to World Bank data, the total number of workers worldwide is growing faster than ever before in history. The global workforce has increased from 1.887 billion people in 1980 to 3.102 billion in 2008, an increase of 1.215 billion workers in the last 30 years. The global proletariat is growing rapidly; in China alone, there are 18 million internal migrants per year who find employment in industry.

Globally, according to the data above, at least one-fifth of the total increase of 1.215 billion between 1980 and 2008 are industrial workers, which means that the industrial proletariat is growing and expanding worldwide . Globally, the working class has a more complex structure with diverse layers due to the changes that have occurred.

As Roberto Antunes explains: "...our first challenge is to try to understand what the working class is today, what the proletariat is today, in the broadest sense of the term, not understanding workers or "the proletarians of the world" as exclusively the industrial proletariat...it includes all wage earners, men and women who live by selling their labor power and who are dispossessed of the means of production...the working class today incorporates all social labor, all collective labor that sells its labor power in exchange for wages" (14) .

Antunes analyzes the various layers of the world working class: "... the working class also includes the wide range of wage earners in the service sector, but who do not directly create value...also incorporating the rural proletariat who sell their labor power to capital, the so-called "swallows" of the agro-industrial regions...the precarious proletariat...which is part-time, characterized by temporary work, by precarious work such as the workers of McDonald's, of services...according to ILO data there are today more than one billion working men and women who are precarious and underemployed...or are unemployed..." (15)

One of the most striking examples of the growth and strength of the global working class is precisely China. In that country, 30 million peasants migrated to the cities in 1986; this number rose to 50 million in 1988, to between 60 and 80 million in 1989, and reached 98 million by 2003. In 2001, China's industrial proletariat numbered over 160 million workers, a figure higher than the number of industrial workers in the OECD (131 million), India (25 million), and Indonesia (13 million).

But if we add to the forces of the industrial proletariat that has emerged in China the other sectors that make up the working class—the agricultural proletariat and the service proletariat—we find that the largest proletariat in the world has arisen, comprised of billions of workers. The same phenomenon has occurred in India and throughout Southeast Asia, especially the " Tigers," which were the dynamic pole of the world economy during the transition from Keynesian economics to globalization.

In those regions, 50 years ago, the powerful proletariats that exist today did not exist. If we consider the existence of these hundreds of millions of workers who did not exist 50 years ago, the development of the working class in the rest of the colonial countries, and the fact that the working class has grown in the G7 countries, we can then conclude that, in the era of globalization, the working class has reached a magnitude and influence greater than in the entire history of capitalism.

The Theorists of the "End of the Working Class"

Over the past 15 years, particularly during the 1990s, numerous authors have spoken of the end of the working class. Many essays with pseudo-scientific pretensions presented the reality of capitalism as the beginning of a new era, in which technology would eliminate the working class or significantly diminish its social importance and political weight. Books like Jeremy Rifkin's "The End of Work" proliferated , discussing the decline of the global workforce.

This flourishing of pseudo-scientific literature, which heralded the "End of the Working Class," purported to portray an idyllic and angelic capitalism in which technological advances would alter the conditions of production to such an extent that they would disprove Marx's thesis that capitalism, through accumulation, engenders a large working class and masses of unemployed people. "Post-working-class" literature flourished alongside the "post-Marxist," "post-socialist," "post-ideology," and other such literature that characterized the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the chapter "Requiem for the Working Class" of Rifkin's book, one could read things like the following: " In many communities, the poorly lit factories of the second industrial age have already disappeared. The atmosphere is no longer polluted by industrial fumes, the floors, the machines, and the workers are no longer covered in grease and grime. The hiss of the baking ovens and the incessant clanging of the gigantic machines are, at present, a mere memory of the past."

Clearly, Rifkin was talking about a dreamlike place that doesn't exist, far removed from the reality of capitalism as seen in the industrial complexes of China and India, and the appalling working conditions endured by the majority of the world's population. But the rhetoric about a "new capitalism" that supposedly leaves the planet with fewer and fewer workers and with exquisitely beautiful working conditions clashes with overwhelming facts that contradict this notion.

There is not a single piece of evidence to suggest that the working class has regressed; on the contrary, its sociological importance is enormous and growing. And of course, nothing demonstrates that capitalism has lost its brutally exploitative character, which subjects the majority of the world's workers to increasingly degrading working conditions. In Chapter II, we analyze the terrible conditions of poverty and exploitation to which capitalist corporations and governments currently subject the masses of the world. Other authors have developed the thesis concerning the loss of political importance of the working class.

Tony Negri, in his books Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005), and John Holloway, in his 2001 book "Changing the World Without Taking Power ," were among the representatives of the school of thought that argued the working class had lost its political importance and that the confrontation with capitalism would now be led by other social sectors. From this thesis, another would follow: that "new revolutions" would emerge, carried out by a "multitude," without the class content of the processes being of any importance.

These theorists of the self-managed and autonomist " new revolution" were a version of Rifkin's vision of capitalism, but "from the left ." This vision culminated in a reinterpretation of capitalism from a different angle: capitalism can be changed from within; organized in "networks" and "nodes," the multitude will bring about change without needing to alter the existing power structure.

Therefore, the working class is not necessary as a social agent fighting for alternative power, since capitalism will be modified from within by the action of the "multitude ." The emergence of the Indignados movement in Europe and Occupy Wall Street in the US would seem to vindicate these theorists of the "new revolution ." But in reality, Holloway, Negri, Rifkin, and so many others are being categorically refuted by reality. The new movements that are emerging are children of the capitalist crisis that began in 2007.

The perspective of the young activists and the leaders who drive them is critically focused on the concentrated power of multinational corporations, a far cry from the naive and innocent view of Negri and Holloway, who saw capitalism as easily dismantled from within. The wave of general strikes in Europe and around the world, the resurgence of unionism in the US, shows that the working class, in all its strength and vitality, has begun to confront the brutality of the capitalist powers that seek to destroy its living conditions. Far from the "idyllic " world painted by Rifkin, reality shatters all his rhetoric.

The youth and indignant movements, along with workers' strikes, will converge as they build the beginnings of a global struggle against capitalism. And in this struggle, we will witness not only the greatest crisis in the history of capitalism, but also how it mobilizes the largest and most important working class in the history of capitalism. The crisis has only served to bring Marx's ideas back with renewed force. And the return of Marxism will put an end to so much petty-bourgeois charlatanism and illusionism from those who formulated the existence of a "new capitalism," reformable with "networks" and "nodes."

The return of Marxism, at a time when 99% of left-wing forces renounce it, is the most important task we promote from the Marx International to put an end to capitalism and class society once and for all.

Notes:

(1) Karl Marx. Capital, Book I, Chapter XXIII, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

(2) UN. State of World Population 2007

(3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8) José Moreno Pau "Immigration in Europe". with the collaboration of Jan Talpe. Living Marxism 15, 2007

(9), (10), (11) and (12) Chris Harman. "The Workers of the World" (Part 1) Source: International Socialism 96 Date: 6/12/2003

(13) Baldoz, Koeber and Kraft "The Critical Study of Work: Labor, Technology, and World Production"

(14) and (15) "The New Proletarians of the World at the Turn of the Century." Roberto Antunes, Living Marxism, June/September 2000