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Featured article The reserve army of labour is a Marxist economic concept denoting a deliberate surplus in the supply of available labour-power created and maintained by the bourgeoisie in order to drive down the wages of the working class. According to this concept, the bourgeoisie exercise their political power to keep employment artificially lower than it would otherwise be, and maintain a large body of unemployed, underemployed or non-proletarianised people who can serve as scabs or strikebreakers in the event of labour unrest. Before the concept came into its own, bourgeois authors writing in the early 19th century mentioned lowering wages by increasing the labour supply. The concept from the standpoint of labour activism was first described in a prototypical form by the Chartist James Bronterre O'Brien in the 1830s, subsequently discussed by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England, then given its most familiar form by Marx in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. It was subsequently commented upon and expanded upon by many other economists and political figures, including Karl Kautsky, Eugene V. Debs, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. Despite its origins with English Chartism, and its usage by bourgeois economists, it is sometimes treated as a strictly Marxist hypothesis in academic literature. Lenin said that the reserve army of labour are "the workers needed by capitalism for the potential expansion of enterprises, but who can never be regularly employed." read more...