Will the global economy prove Karl Marx right? "His argument was that unemployment, which was the reserve army of labour, would hold wages down," said Andrew Glyn, a fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford.
Speaking at an economic conference at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Mr Glyn described the increasing share of national income that labour has enjoyed since the 1860s.
However, labour's share of national income in most countries is now declining, Mr Glyn told the group of economists and sociologists gathered for the Growth and Crisis, Social Structure of Accumulation Theory and Analysis conference in Galway this weekend. The conference is the first to focus solely on the social structures of accumulation economic framework, which examines both institutional sources of capitalist growth and economic differences between countries.
"If you read the communist manifesto, Marx talks about the bourgeousie chasing all over the globe," Mr Glyn said. "Before the global rise of the proletariat - which may never happen - you're getting the incorporation of these large amounts of people into the capitalist system."
Mr Glyn referred to the unparalleled size of the Chinese labour market, which is 10 times the size of labour markets in Japan and South Korea combined.
Mr Glyn's lecture at the conference, Will Marx be Right - China and the World Economy, discussed China's integration into the world economy and its implications for workers in the developed economies, especially the fact that capital now has access to a "reserve army of labour" that is unprecedented in size.
But not everyone at the conference was convinced that China's growth was sustainable. "You have a huge country growing at 10 per cent a year based on exports to places that are growing 2 to 3 per cent a year," said David M Kotz, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts.
"It can happen for a while because they're displacing producers in the country they're exporting to, and they're displacing other countries' exports, but you reach a saturation point."