Don Kalb, the Academic Director of GRIP
, together with Tom Cow and Stephen Campbell has co-edited a newly published theme section of Focaal journal. The theme section focuses on “surplus populations” and provides a critical look on the current capitalistic labour arrangements. It is particularly concerned with “non-standard” labor in peripheral sites of capital accumulation and the ways it is integral to capitalist value extraction.
Articles of the themes section address the material and ideological devaluations of labor from variety of analytical and empirical angles the impact of such deevaluation process that exacerbates value extraction from labour in peripheries. The theme section seeks to engage with questions of exploitation of “non-standard” labourers, bourgeois economist approaches towards “surplus populations”, ideas of economic redundancy in relation to people engaging in non-standard labor arrangements.
Focaal theme section includes following contributions:
- Theorizing peripheral labor: Rethinking “surplus populations” by Tom Cowan, Stephen Campbell, and Don Kalb
- Land and ocean grabs and the relative surplus population in Ghana by Jasper Abembia Ayelazuno
- Relocating exploitation: Tenant shopkeepers, rental relationships, and the speculative commodification of urban space in South Korea by Yewon Andrea Lee
- Surplus population in-situ: Brick kiln labor and the production of idle time by Pratik Mishra
- The making of a racialized surplus population: Romania’s labor-housing nexus by Enikő Vincze
- Where is population in “surplus population”? by Henry Bernstein
All the articles in this theme section provide a critical inquiry into the category and concept “surplus population” underlining the various ways that even such ideologically devalued labor is often firmly integrated into the circuits of capital.
The whole publication is open access and available here: