Relative Surplus Research Articles

Research on mobile energy storage scheduling strategy for emergency power supply protection of post-disaster isolated loads

Aiming at the problem of insufficient power supply capacity of isolated loads in oceanic islands, a concept based on mobile energy storage and power conservation is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the energy flow and traffic flow characteristics of mobile energy storage are quantitatively analyzed, and an accurate mathematical model is established. Furthermore, the time-space distribution characteristics of load are carefully considered, and the Voronoi diagram and Tyson polygon method are introduced to determine cell differentiation. On this basis, combined with the power demand of load nodes and the energy storage characteristics of mobile energy storage vehicles, the evaluation indicators of cell energy and relative surplus energy of cells are designed, and the agent-cellular automata algorithm is used to schedule the mobile energy storage. The simulation results show that the power supply mode based on mobile energy storage can effectively improve the reliability of isolated loads. This paper provides a new perspective for solving the reliable power supply problem of isolated loads.

Analysis of the Development Trends of Preschool Population and the Demand for Preschool Education Resources under the New Population Situation: Taking Beijing as an example

The development of preschool education has become an important task in the development of education in China. However, under the trend of fewer children and changes in new population policies, the development trend of preschool education population and the demand for semester education resources in China are not clear, which brings many challenges to the allocation of future education resources. This study uses a Population Development Environment Analysis (PDE) model to predict the demand for educational resources among the preschool population in Beijing from 2020 to 2040. The research results show that during the prediction period, the scale of education eligible young children, the scale of preschool children in the first three years, the scale of kindergarten buildings, and the demand for full-time teachers and caregivers all show a trend of first increasing and then decreasing. The demand for education funds and per capita funds is gradually increasing. The future allocation of preschool education resources needs to be adjusted reasonably based on the actual needs and usage of resources. After investing heavily in the allocation of preschool education resources, attention should be paid to the relative surplus of resources caused by the subsequent decrease in resource demand.

Land, natural resources and the social reproduction of South Africa's ‘relative surplus population’

AbstractIn the past few decades, there has been a renewed interest by feminist scholars in social reproduction. Global South scholars have argued that in agrarian societies of the global South that are marked by a high prevalence of surplus population, social reproduction is largely the responsibility of households, facilitated through unpaid gendered labour that is mostly performed by women. In this article, I draw from the Mhlopheni case of former labour tenants who were evicted and later re‐claimed their land in South Africa to demonstrate the centrality of land in social reproduction. I argue that three processes are important and aid social reproduction: (i) land redistribution to the dispossessed, (ii) socially embedded tenure arrangements and (iii) unpaid gendered labour within households which is largely performed by women. These three processes reinforce each other. It is not just land that is crucial for social reproduction, but how that land is used, controlled, accessed and held, and the gendered labour required to turn resources into consumable goods that enable people to live. To support my argument, I draw on empirical evidence collected between 2020 and 2022 where I conducted 56 in‐depth interviews, four focus group discussions and a survey of 32 households.

Necropolitics and Surplus Life: Mbembe and Beyond

This article analyses Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics and surplus life in dialogue with three comparable theorizations: Agamben’s ‘bare life’, Marxist scholarship on ‘relative surplus populations’, and Afropessimist theorizations of ‘social death’. I argue that Mbembe’s work allows us to develop a critique of sacrifice that at the same time (contra Agamben) recognizes how it plays a structural role within necropolitics. Examining the influence of Georges Bataille’s writings on sacrifice allows me to clarify this argument. The second part of the article examines the ‘surplus life’ of necropolitics in comparative analysis, tracing some of the limits of Mbembe’s reading through a dialogue with Marxist and Afropessimist readings. I characterize Mbembe’s work in terms of a poetics and politics of surplus: ‘reserves of life’ are affirmed against the excess of violence characterizing the present. However, this critique of violence relies upon abrupt leaps from politics to abstract ethical appeals in ways that obscure the implications of Mbembe’s own analysis.

A new framework for multi-level territorial spatial zoning management: Integrating ecosystem services supply-demand balance and land use structure

The supply-demand balance of ecosystem services (ESs balance) is a research hotspot. Previous studies have explored spatio-temporal patterns of ESs supply, demand, and balance, but have neglected the inherent relationship between ESs balance and land use structure, which impedes the development of direct and effective land use regulatory strategies. This study assessed the balance of six ESs (i.e., timber production (TP), food production (FP), water retention (WR), carbon sequestration (CS), soil retention (SR), and habitat quality (HQ)) by the index of ecological relative surplus ratio (ERSR) at 30 m × 30 m pixel scale, and identified ESs balance bundles (ESBBs) in Lancang County, a typical mountainous region in China. It also defined the land use proportion thresholds for achieving different objectives of ESs balance, and proposed land use regulatory strategies accordingly. The results showed that: (1) From 2010 to 2020, the supply of six ESs exceeded the demand in Lancang County, and the surplus of different ESs changed over time. ESs balance also exhibited spatial heterogeneity, and ESs imbalance aggravated in some areas. Three ESBBs were divided as FP-WR-SR integrated bundle, TP–CS–HQ integrated bundle, and Integrated promotion bundle at the township scale. (2) Cropland, built-up land, and forest were the key land use types that affected the balance of the six ESs. Moreover, the land use proportion thresholds under the objectives of “ERSR ≥0″ and “ERSR ≥1″ were determined, and they differed by ES type and objective. (3) For each ESBB, ESs comprehensive management zones were delineated at the multi-scales of the township and 1 km × 1 km grid. Regulatory strategies oriented by “reducing/increasing/maintaining the proportion of certain land use types” were suggested under different objectives. This study developed a framework for “multi-level zoning management of ‘county – ESs balance bundle – township – grid’ for promoting ESs balance by land use structure regulation” that aligned with China's territorial spatial planning hierarchy at the county and township levels. It could inform the design of a scientific and orderly territorial spatial pattern with a high-level ESs balance at various scales (e.g., counties, agglomerations, provinces, and cities) and regions. However, this framework could not be directly applied to land use spatial optimization at pixel scale. Further research is needed to integrate land use simulation models, such as the mixed-cell cellular automata (MCCA) model, to achieve ESs balance objectives at finer scales.

Surplus population in-situ

Abstract The article follows how migrant brick kiln molders are affected and adapt to short and long periods of suspension of work. In brick kilns near Delhi, involuntary idle time is revealed as an important modality of surplus extraction. While idleness is prevalent within many forms of work, idle time in the brick kilns operates at the intersection of other relations, namely, piece-rate wages, debt bondage, and capital's control over social reproduction space and time. It enables capital to flexibly move workers in and out of paid labor while extracting unpaid work and acts as an in-situ mode of rendering workers relative surplus population. Through enacting literal wagelessness and perpetuating wageless life, the article reads idle time as a time regime of capital, breaching and producing instabilities within workers’ life and leisure.

Land and ocean grabs and the relative surplus population in Ghana

Abstract Situated in the context of the land and ocean grabs in Ghana post-2007–2008 global economic crises, this article argues that the country is experiencing “primitive accumulation” without capitalist industrialization. I draw on the insights of agrarian political economy to argue that this has created cheap laborers without industrial capital to exploit. The corollary of this is the creation of additional “relative surplus population”, worsening the country's (un)employment crisis. However, this “relative surplus population” is not marginal to global capitalist accumulation and exploitation; on the contrary, it is important to them. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghanaian communities to document the voices of the dispossessed and semi-proletarianized about their experiences with the crisis of (re)production inflicted on them by global capitalism.

Proceed with caution: US local governments and the American Rescue Plan

ABSTRACT Will a legacy of fiscal stress limit local governments’ willingness to make equity-focused investments even in the context of the relative surplus that American Rescue Plan funds provide for local governments in the US after COVID-19? Focus groups with local officials show the desire to address basic infrastructure investments (water and sewer) is primary, and concerns over recurring expenditure responsibilities, administrative burden and rising citizen expectations cause them to proceed with caution. However, the flexibility and size of ARPA funds make more progressive investments possible.

The politics of student loan in Turkey: regimenting the youth through authoritarian debtfarism

ABSTRACT The mass-scale expansion of student loan schemes in Turkey over the last two decades has been accomplished by a governance technique which the article defines as authoritarian debtfarism. By restructuring the Credit and Dormitories Institution (KYK) as subordinated to the executive and insulated from democratic intervention, the authoritarian neoliberal state in Turkey has sought to fulfil its new economic function, i.e. enabling the societal reproduction of the youth by increasing their financial dependency on credit money. The state-led student loan expansion in Turkey emerged in a tuition-free higher education setting without a sophisticated financial infrastructure and in an economic environment marked with perpetual graduate unemployment as well as inflationary pressures on repayment amounts. Based on a detailed interrogation of the official documents and in-depth interviews with defaulters, this article argues that authoritarian debtfarism has imposed a rigid market discipline over the university youth by using non-transparency and arbitrariness as its governance mechanisms. Consequently, future labour of the graduates is put on hold through a long-term debt relation, compelling them to integrate into labour market precariously as a new segment of the relative surplus population.

Marx’s Capital and the concept of super-exploitation

This article explores the theory of exploitation which Marx sets out in Capital. It argues that Marx assumes that there are five modes of extraction of surplus value. These are associated with the following principles: (1) extended duration of the working day; (2) enhanced productivity (due to the introduction of new technology); (3) efficient organization of the process of production; (4) increased intensity of labour and (5) depressed consumption of the labourer. The article argues that Marx’s theory of exploitation is not as systematic as it could have been. For this reason it is ripe for a theoretical reconstruction. The article also discusses the views of recent commentators who have developed the idea of ‘super-exploitation’, which is taken from Marx’s writings. There is a tendency in this literature to associate this notion with the principle of depressed consumption and to argue that it is especially relevant for understanding of what is happening in the societies of the Global South. Those concerned identify this as a third mode of extracting surplus value, in addition to the principle of extended duration (absolute surplus value) and enhanced productivity (relative surplus value). The article argues that this procedure overlooks certain aspects of Marx’s theory of exploitation, especially those having to do with the efficient organization or rational administration of labour within the process of production.

The transformation of resource-rich countries in the International Division of Labour: ‘backward' industrialisation and relative surplus population in Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT This article explains independent Uzbekistan’s transformation starting from its integration into the global economy as a primary commodity exporter. It argues that, in line with other resource-rich countries of the Global South, this transformation exhibited two enduring and interlinked features, namely rent-subsidised ‘backward’ industrialisation and the rise of a vast relative surplus population (RSP). First, the end of collective agriculture expropriated most of the Uzbek rural population from the land, so rents from cotton exports could subsidise ‘backward’ industries manufacturing for the domestic market. Second, as these industries could only absorb a minority of the population due to their limited (largely domestic) scale of production, the majority was turned into a vast RSP that struggles in the informal sector, including as labour migrants. Third, cotton’s replacement by gold and natural gas as the main export commodities laid the basis for the current liberalisation. Still, Uzbekistan endures as a raw material exporter, hence as a ‘backward’ industrialiser and reservoir of RSP. As such, the paper problematises the transition literature’s framing of Uzbekistan as an example of failed reform or successful developmentalism, showing instead how these enduring features of its development paralleled similar dynamics in other raw-material-exporting countries of the Global South.

Intensification of Labor and the Rate and Form of Exploitation

Does the intensification of labor increase the rate of exploitation? Does it produce absolute surplus value or relative surplus value? This article develops a framework to answer these questions by incorporating intensity of labor in the widely used linear model of production, both in its one- and two-department forms. We show that (a) an intensification of labor always leads to an increase in the rate of exploitation, and (b) the increase in the rate of exploitation takes the form of the production of absolute surplus value in all realistic situations. We also highlight, in the case of any model with more than one industry or sector, an interesting difference in short- and long-run changes in the rate and form of surplus value. JEL Classification: B51, C02

ЕКОНОМІКА НАДЛИШКУ ГРОШЕЙ

The article is devoted to the formation of an economy in which there is a relative surplus of money. Excess money is seen as a consequence of the policy of quantitative easing, which was carried out by the central banks of developed countries. Peculiarities of growth in the ratio of money supply and gross domestic product for individual countries have been studied. It is shown that financing the reconstruction of Ukraine corresponds to the own economic interests of the donor countries, as it will help to correct certain systemic imbalances of monetary circulation in their economies. This imbalance is embodied in a relative surplus of money. This surplus is of a different nature than that implied by the quantity theory of money. From the point of view of behavioral economics, money is a tool for motivating the subject to action (or, when necessary, inaction). Stimulation of activity, in particular, entrepreneurial activity, due to the opportunity to get more money is a characteristic feature of the capitalist economy. Considering that the value of money is important not in itself, but in relation to what it is used for, we can imagine that the creeping inflation of even the most seemingly basic and solid world currencies (the US dollar, the British pound, the euro) is evidence of a certain loss of vision of what money is needed for and, accordingly, how much money is needed in the economy. The dynamics of the ratio of the money supply to the manufactured product can serve as an indicator of the existence of a problem in the monetary supply of the functioning of the world economy. A gradual increase in the ratio of money supply to GDP is observed in all countries. The rate of growth of this indicator in developed countries is generally close to the world average. In poor countries characterized by low rates of economic growth, the ratio of money supply to GDP remains quite low. Moreover, in our opinion, the leading role here is played not so much by low per capita income as by low rates of economic growth. According to the group of countries with an average level of per capita income (and especially, with “above average” incomes), the ratio is significantly higher than the world average level. The growth of the ratio of money supply to GDP is especially noticeable in the countries of the Far East, which took as an example the strategy that led to the Japanese “ economic miracle.” This strategy involves the acceleration of economic growth at the expense of the preemptive development of export-oriented industries. Periods of accelerated economic development precisely reveal the motivational role of money. Entrepreneursinnovators should receive more money. the state, or rather, its monetary regulator, the central bank, facilitates the conditions providing loans to help innovators dare and take a decisive step into something new. Entrepreneurs have separated the desire to earn money from the desire to spend to meet real needs. Due to the saturation of the economy with money, the state has already reached a high level of monetization, which indicates accumulated monetary wealth. The owners of this monetary wealth need new directions of investment, because after the ideological and motivational potential of Internetization was exhausted, the banking and financial infrastructure began to fail. A series of crises (2001, 2008-2009, 2020) was the result of a mismatch between the large accumulated monetary wealth and the lack of ideas for its profitable investment. Reconstruction of Ukraine can become such a profitable investment idea.

Universities, imperialism and the collective work ahead.

Universities, imperialism and the collective work ahead.

A diffuse-domain-based numerical method for a chemotaxis-fluid model

In this paper, we consider a coupled chemotaxis-fluid system that models self-organized collective behavior of oxytactic bacteria in a sessile drop. This model describes the biological chemotaxis phenomenon in the fluid environment and couples a convective chemotaxis system for the oxygen-consuming and oxytactic bacteria with the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations subject to a gravitational force, which is proportional to the relative surplus of the cell density compared to the water density. We develop a new positivity preserving and high-resolution method for the studied chemotaxis-fluid system. Our method is based on the diffuse-domain approach, which we use to derive a new chemotaxis-fluid diffuse-domain (cf-DD) model for simulating bioconvection in complex geometries. The drop domain is imbedded into a larger rectangular domain, and the original boundary is replaced by a diffuse interface with finite thickness. The original chemotaxis-fluid system is reformulated on the larger domain with additional source terms that approximate the boundary conditions on the physical interface. We show that the cf-DD model converges to the chemotaxis-fluid model asymptotically as the width of the diffuse interface shrinks to zero. We numerically solve the resulting cf-DD system by a second-order hybrid finite-volume finite-difference method and demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach on a number of numerical experiments that showcase several interesting chemotactic phenomena in sessile drops of different shapes, where the bacterial patterns depend on the droplet geometries.

A Critique of the Simultaneist Interpretation of Work Intensity in Marx’s Value Theory from the TSSI perspective

This article makes an analytical critique of the position of Basu, Haas, and Moraitis, who, by extending the conventional linear system for the simultaneous determination of value, argue that in Marx’s economic theory the intensification of work generates absolute surplus value and is not relative. This position is also contrasted with the original theory of Marx to verify its incompatibility. As an alternative in search of a rectification of the role of labor intensification as a generator of relative surplus value, this work incorporates labor intensity into the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI), showing its full compatibility with Marx’s original theory.

Rise of the Surplus Population? Land Decollectivization, Class Stratification, and Labor Precarization in Uzbekistan

AbstractThis article identifies decollectivization as one of the central policies through which the so-called “Uzbek model” mediated independent Uzbekistan's incorporation into the global economy as a cotton exporter. As such, it problematizes the way in which the dominant literature on transition framed the country's independent history since 1991 as a “paradox” of no transition and transformation. Since it theorizes the former as the application of privatization, liberalization, and macroeconomic stabilization, the literature cannot explain why, absent this standard reform package, Uzbekistan still underwent a momentous transformation from full employment and low migration to mass informalization of economic activity and rural outmigration. Instead, I contend, decollectivization entailed a process of mass expropriation of the rural population from the land—primitive accumulation in Marxian terminology—in order to put it to production for capital accumulation. As such, land use was shifted from the collective reproduction of the rural population during Soviet times to the rent-subsidization of capital accumulation after independence, particularly via import-substitution industrialization. The result has been the class stratification of Uzbek society, most evident in the rise of a vast relative surplus population of landless peasants struggling in the precarious informal economy, including as daily workers and labor migrants.

The techfare state: debt, discipline, and accelerated neoliberalism

ABSTRACT In this exploratory article, we aim to open a research agenda for renewed attention to the relationship between the capitalist state and the technology ecosystem. Over the last decade, private technology companies have increasingly become enmeshed with the activities of the state in arenas such as policing, healthcare, and welfare administration. At a time when so many facets of state activity are being infiltrated by technology firms and their products, we ask how we should theorise the relationship between the capitalist state and technology capital? This paper develops one approach to answer this question by aligning the priorities of tech capital with those of the neoliberal state namely, through the disciplining and managing of the relative surplus population. In this arena, we argue, a form of techfare has begun to take shape: a technology-assisted extension and intensification of the disciplinary logics that work to lock the relative surplus population into exploitative market relations and punitive institutions in advanced capitalist countries like the United States. We explore techfare and the disciplining of labour through two avenues: the business of consumer finance vis-à-vis debt and credit instruments, and various forms of tech-enabled strategies of law-enforcement.

A Study on the Value Philosophy of the Automatic Machine System in Das Kapital

Marx made a scientific exploration of the automatic machine system as the material carrier of fixed capital under the condition of capitalist production, and put forward the theory of compound value, including the concepts of concrete value, exchange value, abstract value, absolute surplus value, relative surplus value and so on. The value of automatic machine system is a new value form of sublation and capitalization of surplus value, which is characterized by materiality, historicity, practicality, subjectivity and objectivity.

Rescaling the land rush? Global political ecologies of land use and cover change in key scenario archetypes for achieving the 1.5 °C Paris agreement target

ABSTRACT Advancing future-oriented perspectives in political ecology and critical agrarian studies, this paper examines projected land use and land cover change (LULCC) dynamics in four ‘archetypal’ scenarios foregrounded by the IPCC for limiting global warming to 1.5°C by 2100. Focusing on the Global South, we explore how these archetypes project a radical reversal of historical LULCC and rural population trends, potentially implying a considerable rescaling of contemporary land rush dynamics. Taken together, land-based climate mitigation futures highlight risks related to the (re)production of relative surplus populations through processes of rural enclosure and accumulation by dispossession in the Global South.