Focaal

The term polycrisis, coined by Edgar Morin at the turn of the millennium (Morin and Kern 1999), has been picked up by a handful of commentators recently, and it was also recently the topic of a special issue of Anthropology Today (Henig and Knight 2023, see also Kalb 2023). Ranging from biodiversity loss and climate change to mounting inequalities both globally and domestically, a widespread sense of powerlessness spreads even in countries considered democratic, often feeding conspirators, ethnonationalists, right-wing populists and others who promise simple answers to complex questions.

 Critical scholarship on twenty-first century capitalist development has called attention to certain structural limits on employment growth. Large populations excluded from formal employment are seen to eke out a precarious subsistence in informal economies, seemingly “surplus” to the needs of capital. This article, by contrast, aims to recast labor in the “peripheries,” not as an externalized quantity redundant to emerging economic formations, but rather as integral if often hidden features of capitalist value extraction. Rethinking, in this way, “surplus populations,” we argue for particular attention to the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalist labor arrangements and to associated patterns of ideological devaluation, which underpin capitalist markets in the South and East as well as in peripheralized spaces in the North and West.

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.

In light of recent trends toward “jobless growth” and increased wagelessness, a debate has arisen concerning whether there is an “outside” of capitalism. Surplus populations that are superfluous to the needs of the capitalist class can, it has been argued, constitute this “outside,” with some among them sustaining a living unscathed by capitalist exploitation. However, in my case study of tenant shopkeepers in South Korea, I demonstrate how supposedly superfluous livelihood activities are subsumed in exploitative capitalist relations when the urban commercial properties in which tenants make their livelihoods become high- return, speculative commodities. By identifying how and when exploitation can be activated well beyond the employment relationship, or even the “disguised” employment relationship, I call for extending the concept of exploitation to include these frontiers of capitalist extraction.

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.

In capitalist Eastern Europe, surplus population is created at the intersection of economic restructuring, leading to the decline of jobs, the absorption of housing in broader circuits of capital accumulation, and the state's disinvestment in social housing. Drawing on the lived experiences of the impoverished Roma from Baia Mare (Maramureș county, Romania), I analyze how racialization produces them as surplus-as-laborer and surplus-as-tenant. The article explores the historically constituted labor-housing nexus. Capitalist enterprises are interested in having permanent access to a cheap and flexible labor force that reproduces in housing conditions that are as low cost as they are inadequate. Private real estate capital excludes those who cannot afford the fast-rising level of the ground rent while the post-socialist state refuses to invest in public housing.

Is the impetus toward “surplus population” in Marx's analysis an effect of capital's law of accumulation or a “function” of it? How might a Marxist analysis of “surplus population” aid in theorizing demographic change under the capitalist mode of production? And to what extent are individuals who lack a “proper job” superfluous to capital accumulation? This article engages these questions through a survey of Marxist and marxisant attempts to theorize the exclusion of certain populations from capitalist employment. The way in which these questions are answered—the way, that is, in which “excluded” populations are understood to relate to processes of capital accumulation—has implications for thinking through appropriate political responses.

The shift in China's national economy from industrial manufacturing to technology and IT has placed constraints on the lives of rural-to-urban male migrant workers from the lower social strata. As the pace of out-migration in China slows, male rural returnees are harnessing self-reliant masculinities to reclaim status and heighten a sense of collective pride in and affiliation with their natal village. Centering on two ethnographic case studies of Dong ethnic minority male rural returnees in the autonomous district of Guizhou Province, the analysis in this article contributes to critique on the recent unfolding of the state-led “crisis of masculinity” to highlight the wider socioeconomic conditions that continue to deepen the inequalities and felt anxieties of male rural returnees.

 Beginning with a dream encounter with the tubuan, an ancestral spirit in Papua New Guinea, this article questions conventional anthropological framings that posit a sharp distinction between Western humanist ontologies and non-Western or indigenous ontologies. The article argues that non-human entities essential for human existence come in and out of being across stereotypical cultural divides and that the creation and acknowledgment of non-human agents is as essential for capitalist modernity as it is for any other form of human existence. Non-human “Objects” as diverse as tubuans and corporations are essential for the construction of human subjectivity as much as they are its outcome. The perspectival construction of such different kinds of object is a process by which humans continuously refashion themselves into different kinds of Subjects.

A feast of flowers is simultaneously grounded in the reality of place and the practice of face-to-face social relations while at the same time being thoroughly shaped by detailed attention to actual global geopolitical economy—not just vague references to globalization, but a thorough engagement with, in this case, finance capital and the way debt has driven Northern ambitions and generated a specific kind of social world in the Ecuador of the Global South.