Surplus Population Research Articles

“Masterless Men”

On the basis of fieldwork in Kinshasa, this essay makes a link between riots, the recent anthropology of “surplus populations,” and distributive politics in low-income countries, especially Africa. Tracing the history of a political demonstration turned riot, it shows how distribution structures the interactions between rich and poor in the city. Situating the riot in a context in which subjects are dependent on the market for goods but are not able to sell their labor, the essay shows the riot to be a rational intervention in a place where elites do not see popular support as especially important and where occupying space and controlling circulation and distribution are the primary political-economic imperatives.

Is There an Indian Precariat? Evidence from the Auto Manufacturing Industry

ABSTRACT Guy Standing’s precariat thesis, which suggests that precarious workers have distinctive class interests, has resonance in India where the overwhelming majority of workers lack adequate social protection. Among many criticisms, researchers have responded that this thesis ignores the historical experience of workers in poor countries and erroneously frames precarity as the province of a separate social class. As part of this debate, Erik Olin Wright argued that precarious workers were better understood as a potential fraction of the working class whose interests sometimes complemented and sometimes conflicted with the interests of other workers depending upon the regulatory scale and political terrain of struggle. Using an ethnography-based case study of automotive manufacturing in India’s National Capital Region, this article considers which of these frameworks – Standing’s or Wright’s – is better able to address the dynamic of contemporary struggle in a local labour control regime which has displaced an established core of “regular workers” with a surplus population of precarious “contract workers.”

There’s a riot goin’ on

ABSTRACT In this paper we take up the concept of the ‘chorus’ as explored by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In that book, Hartman imagines the chorus as a collective expression of resistance and survival – the sound of many voices speaking out and speaking up. We argue that the concept of the chorus can be understood in Marxist terms as an expression of surplus population, and as such, is always provoking crisis. We consider surplus populations in relation to three historic moments of upheaval and resistance, and the representation of these events (or lack thereof): the riot of Black girls at the Bedford Hills Reformatory in 1919; cafeteria riots led by trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people in the 1950s and 1960s in California; and the 2004 Palm Island riot that irrupted in the wake of the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. In each case, the riots (and their expression in the form of a chorus) responded directly to aggressive policing and the violence of the state. These riots are not merely about responding to the violence of policing but also about defending that irreducible and generative excess that might variously be described as Blackness, queerness, and Indigeneity.

Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare

AbstractThis article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon's thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon's view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this “surcharge of people” is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon's thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon's political aims and thought more broadly.

Homeless victimisation in South Africa and its potential inclusion in the Hate Crime and Hate Speech Bill

Homelessness is widely seen as a persistent social issue, one that has existed for many years. Although notably under-researched, there exist some reports of severe experiences of victimisation. Due to the very nature of their lifestyle and other external factors, homeless individuals can expect to, and often do experience violence and victimisation at disproportionate rates. Furthermore, homeless individuals are commonly viewed as a surplus population or a disposable mass that cannot possibly be regarded as what society considers an ‘ideal victim’. With the presence of negative socially constructed labels, they are frequently exposed to harsh treatment by other members of society and consequently stripped of their basic constitutional rights, where in many contexts, their very existence is criminalised. Protective legislation at a domestic level is a neglected area and is yet to align with some major international developments, where homeless victimisation has already been identified as a serious enough problem that arguments for its inclusion under hate crime legislation have already started to surface. This paper therefore aims to put forward an argument regarding the plausibility of including the status of homelessness as a new category under the developing Hate Crime and Hate Speech Bill of South Africa.

Educating 'surplus population': uses and abuses of aspiration in the rural peripheries of a globalising world

Increasing school enrolment has been a focus of investment, even in remote rural areas whose populations are surplus to the requirements of the global economy. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in primary schools and their neighbouring communities in rural areas of Lesotho, India and Laos, we explore how young people, their parents and teachers experience schooling in places where the prospects of incorporation into professional employment (or any well rewarded economic activity) are slim. We show how schooling uses aspiration, holding out a promise of a 'better future' remote from the lives of rural children. However, children’s attachment to such promises is tenuous, boosted yet troubled by the small minority who defy the odds and succeed. We question why education systems continue to promote occupational aspirations that are unattainable by most, and why donors and governments invest so heavily in increasing human capital that cannot be absorbed.

‘Leaving no one unscathed’ in sustainability transitions: The life purging agro-extractivism of corporate renewables

Abstract Amid the growing interest on renewables to fight back the current ecological and social crises, crops like oil palm and trees like eucalyptus, with ever-growing and flexibly interchangeable uses as carbon sinks and sources of renewable energy and biomaterials, are praised as climate stewards and vehicles of transition to sustainable development. Hence, flex crops and commodities complexes consolidate within former strongholds and set off to new territories to take down today's crises. Bridging critical and intersectional political economy, ecology and sociology perspectives, and grounded in Guatemala from 2005 onwards, I discuss the implications of the rise of the flex crops and commodities complexes in transitions to sustainability for jobs, labor regimes, and socioecological reproduction. Specifically, the operations of the flex (sugar)cane and (oil) palm complexes in Guatemala involve a predatory form of agrarian extractivism which is driving a process of ‘impairing destruction’. This works by means of a job-poor, culturally insensitive, toilsome and unpaid labor-based ‘productive’ model, and the manufacturing of environmentally and socially toxic landscapes, to fuel a purge of the countryside that leaves nothing and no one, neither friend nor foe, unscathed. However, the purge hits harder on the many working families (and especially on women) who are deemed redundant for the new renewables-led corporate model of sustainable development and climate change mitigation. Many struggle to avoid falling into this outcast condition. But the life purging agro-extractivism of the cane and palm companies both increases and stagnates the reserve army of labor, while simultaneously pushing the relative surplus population to the limits of subsistence. These findings about ‘renewable but unlivable’ futures call into question business as usual, non-transformative climate stewardship and sustainable development initiatives that constrain the (re)production of fairer and more climate-proof, culturally-sound, and youth-friendly life projects.

The Conditions of the Global Digital Working Class: The Continuing Relevance of Friedrich Engels to Theorising Platform Labour

This paper examines the conditions of the global digital class of platform labourers by drawing on the theoretical paradigm proposed by Engels in his pioneering contribution, The Conditions of the Working Class in England (CWC). Using a host of empirical sources – surveys, oral narrations, medical and legal journals, and journalistic accounts – the paper develops a political-economic understanding of the working conditions of contemporary crowdworkers while paying close attention to the national and gendered disparities within them. Following Engels’s dialectical mode of presentation in the CWC, the paper proposes a framework that contextualizes the lived experiences of crowdworkers in relation to: 1) the technological infrastructure of platforms, 2) emerging contractual and managerial modes of exploitation, 3) the gendered and racial articulation of labour extraction via Engels’s notion of inter-worker competition, and 4) the macro dynamics of “surplus population” that push workers into precarious employment. The paper argues that the four qualitative attributes of capitalist labour identified in the CWC have experienced quantitative transformation under digital capitalism and at the core remain fundamental to a theoretical appreciation of the impact of digital capital on the lived experiences of the global digital working-class.

Housing as a site of accumulation in Amsterdam and the creation of surplus populations

Many major cities around the world have undergone a steep housing price appreciation in recent years, creating windfall profits for some, while for others, the costs of living have risen considerably faster than their income. The resulting social stratification effects have received much scholarly scrutiny, and also raised discussions on whether or not we have to abandon ‘older models’ of class. By extending Marx's notion of surplus populations from primary work-related exploitation to housing-centred secondary exploitation, this article argues that older models are perfectly equipped to account for the various strata of 'asset-haves' and 'asset-have-nots'. Focusing in particular on the 'asset-have-nots’, the article utilizes the Dutch city of Amsterdam as a case study to illustrate how the acceleration of housing as a site of accumulation not only co-creates surplus populations but also an increasing share of people who find themselves at the frontiers of becoming surplus populations.The city of Amsterdam is particularly interesting as it has undergone one of the highest and most rapid real estate price increases in Europe in recent years, which has not only decreased the affordability and accessibility of housing for the low- but increasingly also middle-income strata. The article shows that the accelerated accumulation in the realm of housing, and the concomitant creation of surplus populations, are not mechanical law-like regularities of financialised capitalism. Instead, various forms of state regulation have facilitated and mediated the scale, timing and the way in which overaccumulated surplus capital has been absorbed through housing.

Migration Regime and “Language Part of Work”: Experiences of Syrian Refugees as Surplus Population in the Turkish Labor Market

The literature on migration, language and employment is dominated by the human capital approach and promotes multilingualism as a universal good. This paper examines the relationship between language and work for migrants illustrating how they are ascribed value as capital according to their position and the “language part of work.” First, we trace a genealogy of the migration regime in relation to the labor and linguistic market of migrants in Turkey, characterized by informality and exploitation. Then, we look at the experiences of refugees qualitatively to show how language is differentially valued and has modest effects on social mobility. We argue that language learning instead of stemming from individuals’ possession of capital should be examined within a broader linguistic and employment framework. This research goes beyond conventional wisdom about the centrality of language as a means to improve employment by shedding light on the structure that shapes language value.

Bright as night: Illuminating the antinomies of ‘gender positive’ solar development

India is undergoing a rapid transition to renewable energy; the Gujarat Solar Park typifies this transition. In addition to mitigating climate change, the Gujarat Solar Park boasts female empowerment through social development schemes. This manuscript is inspired by the following research question: To what extent are ‘gender positive’ processes and projects associated with solar development in India realized on the ground? Utilizing mixed methods fieldwork and drawing on literature from feminist political ecology, this paper demonstrates how the modalities of solar park development represent an antinomy of a nature-society relation. New configurations of labor under the political economy of solar have produced a gendered surplus population of landless peasants who are not absorbed into wage-labor employment in the solar park. Further, associated social development schemes actually disempower women, despite mandates of ‘gender positive’ outcomes by UN-based climate treaties to which this project is beholden. The opportunity to participate in one such scheme for female empowerment was reserved for only women of middle-to-high class status and those of dominant castes, thereby reproducing class and caste-based social power asymmetries. Female (dis)empowerment eclipses ‘gender positive’ guarantees of the solar park. This study highlights some unintended consequences of sustainable energy transitions in the Global South at the local scale. Designing development interventions related to climate change mitigation that boast ‘gender positive’ outcomes must be careful not to exacerbate gender disparities and economic exclusion in rural areas.

Containing the Surplus Rebellion: Prison Strike/Prison Riot

Abstract The 2016 and 2018 wave of prison strikes in the United States presents itself as an extraordinary flashpoint of the prisoner resistance movement. But how might these events be understood in relation to what has been broadly characterized as an “age of riots”? Following Joshua Clover’s characterization of the contemporary riot in Riot. Strike. Riot. as a “surplus rebellion” of racialized “surplus populations” and given the characterization of the contemporary carceral state as a warehouse to contain such racialized populations, this essay characterizes the contemporary wave of prison riots accordingly as a “surplus rebellion.” More specifically, it focuses on the Kinross prison strike-riot that broke out in September 2016 in Michigan’s Kinross prison in order to derive some general parallels between the surplus rebellion and the singularity of recent prison strikes.

Bordering the surplus population across the Mediterranean: Imperialism and unfree labour in Libya and the Italian countryside

In spite of much emphasis on a “migration crisis” and studies on the “refugeeization” of the agricultural workforce in Italy, there is still little research on the impact of the NATO war on Libya and the militarization of EU borders in the Mediterranean on the development of labour exploitation and unfree labour in the sector. Focusing on the period between the 2007/8 global economic crisis, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, until 2018, this article analyses the links between the system of neo-colonial extraction of Libyan resources that imposed itself after the war and the expansion of the reserve army of labour of Italian capital. We show that the militarization of EU borders further empowered militias involved in fuel, weapon and human smuggling, boosting a brutal system of detention, extortion and forced labour that both traps immigrants in Libya and pushes them towards Europe. Agri-business and retail corporations operating in Italy have benefitted from the continuing importation of energy and of vulnerable workers from Libya. The substitution of workers with immigrants with a status of asylum-seekers helps explain the diffusion of unfree labour in Italian agriculture over the last ten years. But immigrants’ experiences in Libya have also encouraged them to mobilize and reclaim their collective rights.

Did North Carolina Economically Breed-Out Blacks During its Historical Eugenic Sterilization Campaign?

Evidence exists that the state of North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program was racially biased insofar as it specifically targeted black Americans. In this paper, we consider the extent to which state-sanctioned eugenic sterilization in North Carolina was motivated by a desire to reduce the size of a presumably genetically unfit and unproductive surplus population. We utilize data on 2,163 eugenic sterilizations in the state of North Carolina between 1958-1968. Count data parameter estimates from a specification that conditions county-level eugenic sterilizations on measures of race-specific components of the surplus population reveals that the number of state-sanctioned eugenic sterilizations increased only with a county’s black surplus population. Our results suggest that over the 1958-1968 time period North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization was apparently tailored to asymptotically breeding-out the offspring of a presumably genetically unfit and undesirable surplus black population. This suggests that the presumption of genetic inferiority was unique to, and a burden born by blacks, as only their eugenic sterilizations in North Carolina were a function of their surplus population shares.

Surplused in Dubai: Filipino professionals as surplus entrepreneurs

We focus on Filipino professionals, skilled and technical workers in Dubai as a relative surplus population. Though they seek employment in Dubai because they are surplused from the Philippine labour market, their remittances are essential to the Philippine political economy. Labour precarity in Dubai and uncertain prospects of return to the Philippines are ever present for these workers. They are employed on short (typically three-year) contracts, are of low status in a racialised labour market in Dubai, and will be required to return to the Philippines at the end of their work lives. In recent years the Philippine government has given more attention to reintegration programs for return Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), who are framed as both a problem and a resource. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic methods, we analyze entrepreneurship training for return OFWs in Dubai, which seeks to equip migrant workers with the right entrepreneurial mindset and business skills prior to their return. We document the inculcation of neoliberal values of educational uplift and self-responsibilization through this training. Middle-class OFWs are also envisioned by government representatives (and the OFWs themselves) as a kind of development strategy whereby middle-class surplus entrepreneurs, through their inventive social enterprises, take responsibility for other surplus populations (e.g., lower status OFWs such as domestic workers, disabled persons and drug addicts) in the Philippines.

Italy in East Asia: Colonial Ambitions, Power Politics and Failures

The demographic-migration issue was to become a key alibi in Rome’s effort to take colonies, in which Italians were promised cultivable land, opportunities, social stature and advancement. The channeling of the surplus population in other areas constituted one of the pillars of Italian colonial policy and, by extension, reinforced the rhetoric linking the demographic issue with the quest for colonies. This justification of Italian colonialism as an alternative solution to the population problem had a more logical basis compared to the potential economic and raw material benefits of Africa or Asia.

El movimiento obrero organizado ante la ofensiva de la oligarquía financiera

En diciembre de 2015 retornó al gobierno la fuerza social acaudillada por la oligarquía financiera dando continuidad al período contrarrevolucionario iniciado a mediados de la década de 1970 que acompaña el desarrollo del capitalismo predominantemente en profundidad y genera una creciente masa de población sobrante para las necesidades del capital. Ese retorno, en un momento descendente de la lucha de la clase obrera, fue posible por la fractura del movimiento sindical y de la alianza social popular. Los resultados de la política económica del nuevo gobierno fueron una fuerte caída de la actividad productiva, aumento de la desocupación, fuerte inflación con deterioro del salario real e importante crecimiento de la pobreza. Pronto comenzaron las protestas, tanto de la capa más acomodada de la clase obrera como de la más pobre, que en general, y a diferencia de las décadas anteriores, no sólo se movilizaron conjuntamente sino establecieron relaciones orgánicas, a pesar de las numerosas fracciones político-sindicales en que estaban divididas. La resistencia se manifestó en seis huelgas generales y numerosas protestas callejeras entre las que se destaca la de diciembre de 2017, que desbordó el sistema institucional. Las demandas sindicales planteadas apuntaron a reivindicaciones económicas inmediatas (paritarias libres, contra despidos) y contra la política económica del gobierno en general, especialmente contra la implementación de las reformas laboral, jubilatoria y tributaria y el acuerdo con el FMI.

El devenir del sistema universitario público en la Argentina a través de sus olas expansivas: Diferenciación en la formación de fuerza de trabajo y acumulación de capital (1971-2015)

A lo largo de las últimas cinco décadas, el sistema universitario atravesó tres intentos de reforma destinados a mejorar su performance y transformar algunas de sus características. Sin embargo, si bien estos procesos resultaron en una expansión cuantitativa del número de instituciones, no lograron cambios cualitativos de conjunto. En este trabajo, procuraremos analizar el contenido de estos procesos en relación con el carácter específico de la acumulación de capital en la Argentina. Nuestra hipótesis consiste en que, por una parte, el proceso de acumulación de capital requiere que sólo una pequeña fracción de trabajadores expanda sus atributos productivos en un grado que se corresponde con la finalización de una carrera universitaria, mientras que le basta con que otra fracción mayor realice un avance parcial en la cursada. Y, por la otra, en que la consolidación de una gran masa de población sobrante en las últimas décadas tuvo como consecuencia que el capital dejara de requerir el mismo grado de desarrollo de atributos productivos a la generalidad de individuos que finalizaban el ciclo de educación media, lo que se expresó en la degradación de parte de dicho ciclo. Este proceso, sin embargo, ha avanzado a tal punto que la formación de trabajadores con atributos productivos no degradados no alcanza a cubrir la demanda existente por ellos. De este modo, el sistema universitario comenzó a desempeñar también el rol de permitir a una fracción de esta población alcanzar o sobrepasar dicho desarrollo.

Living Amidst the Catastrophes of “the Living Contradiction”:

Two hundred years after Marx’s birth, we find ourselves living amid thecatastrophes of what Marx terms “the living contradiction.” I argue here thatMarx’s immanent critique of capitalist society’s “economic law of motion”remains the indispensable basis for any coherent understanding of capital todayand, hence, of any revolutionary project to bring about capital’s demise andsupersession. This essay develops a careful reading of a discrete section fromGrundrisse where we find key elements of Marx’s critique in concentrated form. Ifocus on the way that Marx consistently frames capital as contradiction – a set ofbarriers or limits that capital posits, presses past, and in superseding, posits againat a higher level of contradiction – culminating in Marx’s formulation of capitalas “the living contradiction.” In conversation with contemporary value-formtheory I consider what makes this contradiction living; in particular I considerthe intertwined phenomena of class decomposition and surplus population asthe phenomenal expressions of what value-form theorists have termed “asocialsociality,” the characteristic condition of commodity-subjects under capital.Ultimately, I contend that Marx remains the seminal theorist of capitalism, andthat his immanent critique of the capital-relation and the value-form remains notmerely relevant, but necessary and indispensable if we are to understand, and,more important, survive the pervasive crises of the present.

The public and the privative: Honig’s Public things and the politics of the psychoanalytic setting

This article turns to psychoanalytic theories of the setting in an effort to build on Bonnie Honig’s concept of ‘public things’. A privative (and not just private) dimension to public things is posited. The privative is defined as a violence that emanates from an unrepresentable thing in the setting. Like transitional objects, settings manage the privative’s violence, but the thing thwarts these attempts at management. The public is thought to be managed through a reduction of surplus populations to things, and this reduction is illustrated through a brief discussion of the neocolonial setting.