Bio(necro)polis: Marx, Surplus

Populations, and the Spatial Dialectics

of Reproduction and “Race”1
Michael McIntyre and Heidi J. Nast
International Studies Program, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA;
mmcintyr@depaul.edu; hnast@depaul.edu

The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital,

also develop the labor-power at its disposal. The relative mass of
the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy
of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the
active labor-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus
population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture
it has to undergo in the form of labor. The more extensive, finally,
the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve
army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general
law of capitalist accumulation (Marx 1990 [1976]:798, emphasis in
original).

Introduction
This collection of papers re-examines Marx’s notion of surplus
populations in light of contemporary capitalism and a world marked by
tremendous global shifts in fertility rates, almost unprecedented rates
of outmigration to hegemonic nation-states and enclaves, heightened
levels of investment in (and hyper-exploitation of) formerly colonized
nations, and massive degradation of the environment. Taken together,
these processes trace the current configuration of Anibal Quijano’s
“coloniality of power”, a concept that, as Marion Werner (this issue)
tells us, “indexes the ways that capitalist accumulation is constituted
through the reworking of hierarchies of racialized and gendered
difference, thus redrawing the social and spatial boundaries between
hyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its
relations” (Quijano 2000; Werner this issue). What is most remarkable
about all of these processes is how thoroughly racialized they are,
and how thoroughly intertwined racial formations have become with
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regimes of reproduction. Arguably, “race” has never been deployed

so variably nor constructed so contingently and quixotically in the
subordination of truth to power and life to death as it has since the
beginning of the long downturn of the 1970s and its heightening into
global recession and industrial restructuring in the 1980s (McIntyre
this issue; Nast and Elder 2009; Winant 1994, 2001). One cannot,
therefore, understand surplus populations without understanding how
the geographical dynamics of accumulation have become increasingly
racialized. Nor can one understand the shifting forms of racialization
without taking into account the hierarchical regimes of reproduction
that constitute them (cf Gilmore 2002).
There are two main ways to engage a collection as empirically rich
and wide-ranging as this one. We might begin by talking about how the
collection came into being and rehearse both the body of literature to
which each paper belongs and the substantive contributions that it makes.
We have chosen, instead, to use the introduction as a means for building
a meta-theoretical framework through which the essays might come into
productive relation with one another. In this way, the articles propel us
into thinking beyond the empirical confines of any one article and into
new ways of conceptualizing how surplus populations, reproduction, and
race have been geographically interconnected. To accomplish this, we
look at capitalism over the longue durée, not to totalize, but to complicate
ways of thinking about how exploitation has worked dialectically
through different geographical scales and governmentalities. We argue
that colonization and imperialism worked from the outset through
racially ontologized hierarchies of space, which permitted the hyper-
exploitation of certain (colorized) bodies and lands, but not others. The
racially hierarchical organization of global space and the cheapening
of racialized bodies were made possible through differing regimes of
governmentality which, calling upon the works of Foucault (2010) and
Mbembe (2003), we below refer to as biopolitical and necropolitical,
respectively. In either case, the regulation of reproduction proves key.
Beginning in the 1970s, with the relocation of highly developed
industry overseas (producing what we call neo-industrialization),
reproduction’s meaning, importance, regulation, and governance
fundamentally changed. For a variety of reasons, fertility rates fell
in many de-industrializing and neo-industrializing contexts, eventually
reaching (or going below) replacement levels. By contrast, fertility
rates in many impoverished regions remained comparatively high. This
difference provided valuable grist for the making of surplus populations
and new kinds of racialized geographies of hyperexploitation.
In de-industrializing regions, whiteness continues to be biopolitically
exalted even as non-white populations grow in absolute and relative
terms. The power of whiteness derives in large part from corporate
revenues gained overseas through racially inflected forms of foreign

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direct investment. But it also draws strength from the hegemonic cultural
practices of the privileged (and privileging) social formations from
where foreign direct investment derives and with which it is integral
and consonant. These practices are inscribed in a variety of vernacular
spaces tied to privileged (and privileging) forms of consumption and
are possible to the extent that there is a continuum between the kind of
consumption of goods and services that is done purely for consumption
sake (eg eating food) and the consumption of good and services that
produce higher income (or extract surplus) for the benefit of the person
consuming. For instance, undocumented workers allow many persons to
hire labor that they could not otherwise afford. This labor might be used
to renovate an apartment building or house, allowing an owner to benefit
from higher rent or a higher purchasing price. The (hyper)exploitation
of the undocumented worker both allows the owner to live at a higher
class level than they would otherwise be able to do and makes possible
profits that can be invested accordingly. The massive racial subsidies
derived from racialized hyperexploitative production overseas are thus
in keeping with the hyperexploitation of racialized labor domestically,
the ties between the two deepening and complicating the geographical
contours and formations of “race” (below).
Reproductive regimes in certain neo-industrializing regions,
meanwhile, have been thrown into racialized flux. Such flux has been
subtended both by state mandates (eg China and Vietnam), and free-
market pressures (eg Eastern Europe and Mexico). Surplus populations
have resulted in the latter case not only from heightened industrial
efficiencies, but through displacement from traditional lands, forced
migration, and glocal conflicts. Today, the gathering of these surpluses
threatens to put an end to capitalism’s “spatial fix”, despite any forceful
shoring up of the body biopolitic through hypermilitarization (below).
We begin this paper by introducing two geographical concepts that we
think are analytically useful in terms of thinking about how racialized
hierarchies of surplus populations have been spatially, politically and
economically made. The first we call the necropolis, after Mbembe’s
(2003) work on “necropolitics”, a form of governmentality distinct from,
and opposed to, Foucault’s (2010) biopolitics. The necropolis is, in the
first instance, a space of negation and the socially dead, produced by
expropriations and alienations in and outside European nation-states.
By contrast, we refer to the second as the biopolis, after Foucault’s
“biopolitics”, a form of governmentality that presumes that the sovereign
subject must be conserved and shored up in order for the modern nation-
state to thrive. Necropolis and biopolis, while initially geographically
distinct, have always made one another “through specific histories of
accumulation, disinvestment, violence, dispossession, and resistance”
(Werner this issue). Operating materially and psychically, this dialectic


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was bent to shore up sovereign European lands and subjects (Nast and
Elder 2009).
Having introduced these two key concepts, we trace in broad terms
the socio-spatial dialectics that have obtained between the biopolis
and the necropolis. In so doing, we point to two possible unities we call
the bio(necro)polis and necro(bio)polis, designations that emphasize
the geographical fluidity of accumulation and racialized difference.2
The dialectic also allows us to see how surplus populations have
always been tied to a reproductive racial politics in which certain
lands and persons could reasonably be disregarded and treated as
waste.3 Last, we offer speculative notes on the potential of neoliberal
capitalism to collapse any spatial distinction between biopolis and
necropolis, invaginating exploitation’s spatial ordering to produce a
necro(bio)polis of global proportions. This necro(bio)polis can be
found not only in obvious centers of new, rapid industrialization such
as Shanghai, but also in areas previously considered disconnected from
the global economy. Dennis Arnold and John Pickles (this issue) show,
for instance, how states, NGOs, and both international and regional
agencies have intervened in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, in areas as
previously peripheral to capitalist accumulation as the Thai–Burmese
border. In so doing, they temporarily stabilize a regime of accumulation
in East and Southeast Asia.
In the end, we argue that surplus populations are the effect of racially
striated regimes of biological reproduction, and that the workings of
capitalism must be understood in terms of the linked contradictions
of reproduction and race. Marx makes reproduction central to value
theory when he notes that the worker’s wage must not only pay for the
survival of the worker, but for the reproduction of the working class
(Marx 1990 [1976]:275–277). Engels made similarly radical theoretical
assertions about the primacy of the maternal and childbearing when he
theorized the origins of the patriarchal family, private property, and the
state (Engels 2000 [1884]).
We build on both their insights to show how there have been multiple,
racialized political economies of maternal or biological “surplus”. As
Merrill (this issue) avers, these political economies have been articulated
through “the hegemonic production of racialized populations” in a
spatial regime that codes nations and bodies along axes that may
be as diverse as gender, racial difference, productivity, reproductivity
(fecundity), technological advancement, and patriarchal fitness (among
others). Together, these codings constitute the coloniality of power that
inscribes imperial body-space. Merrill (this issue) shows how such an
imperial body space is constituted in northern Italy, where glocal racial
formations have coded Africa as “an integrated space of inferiority
and difference . . . where African women migrants have been popularly
classified as prostitutes, those who sell themselves and are sold as

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commodities, and as the most expendable of all human populations,

the most easily exploited” (see also Merrill 2006).

Biopolis
England’s first industrial proletariat was created by enclosure and
displacement.4 As Engels (1987 [1845]) shows, the earliest generations
of mill workers suffered a kind of living death, their mortality of little
concern as long as capital could draw labor from the countryside’s
dispossessed. Many of the most exploited laborers were Irish who
had long been racialized through earlier rounds of conquest and
displacement. Similarly, Merrill (this issue) shows how, early on
in the industrial life of Italy, southern Italians, long racialized and
exploited, were hyper-exploited in the factories of the north. In both
cases, racialization was a political and economic accomplishment, an
instrumental and exploitative device honed over time and place.5
Nonetheless, there was a certain proxemics advantageous to early
class conflict. In the early industrial city, workers and capitalists lived
in close proximity, unlike the case of most neo-industry. This proximity,
crossed with the logic of capital accumulation, produced an alienated
intimacy “in which every individual is a totality of needs and only exists
for the other person, as the other exists for him, insofar as each becomes
a means for the other” (Marx 1988:128 as cited by Hudson this issue).
This alienated intimacy, while grounded in the necessarily exploitative
relationship of capital to labor, eventually provided for a certain spatial
regime of bargaining between capital and labor, facilitating labor’s
capture of a larger portion of the value it creates for capital (Allen 2001;
cf Gilmore 2002:16). Such proportionalities could obtain, however, only
because of the necropolis’ hyper-exploitation. The racialized negation
of the necropolis effected an invisible subsidy for the biopolis, helping
further to shore up wages.
Marx divided surplus populations into three categories: latent, made
up of those with insecure employment; floating, composed of those
cycling rapidly in and out of the labor force; and stagnant, comprised
of those only rarely employed.6 Within the biopolis, the majority of
the surplus laboring population is either latent or floating. Here, labor is
periodically (systematically) shed through a bipolarity in which workers
are drawn into the labor force during economic expansion and excreted
during downturns. Such labor has likewise been stranded through spatial
and technical reconfigurations of capital investment that have made
workers redundant.
By contrast, racially denigrated sections of the working class make up
most of the stagnant surplus population. These have historically been
deployed for strikebreaking or other instrumental purposes—often to
the detriment of otherwise racially privileged workers (Norwood 2002;

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Whatley 1993). Their irregular employment, relative poverty, and

negative instrumentality have resulted in these workers being cast as
predatory, criminal, or dangerous (Lewis 1995; Roediger 1991).
During periods of capitalist downturn, when the floating surplus
population of the biopolis expands significantly, at least modest
biopolitical measures are taken to insure the racialized survival of those
made temporarily redundant; this, so that their labor remains available
once growth resumes. Even during more extended periods of capitalist
crisis within the biopolis, when long-term unemployment threatens to
transform the floating surplus population into a (racially denigrated)
stagnant population, whiteness works to hold such stagnation at bay. In
particular, white workers’ privileged embeddedness in, and symbolic
value to, the body biopolitic gives them a competitive edge over
racially denigrated members of the stagnant surplus population, should
employment levels rise.
Outside the biopolis, the situation is often reversed. Here, most surplus
populations are stagnant rather than latent or floating. Michelle Yates
(this issue) reminds us of this fact when she points to how many “third
world” (necropolitan) cities, today, are overwhelmed by stagnant surplus
populations, displaced from the countryside, with little chance of ever
being employed. “Once relegated as permanent surplus, meaning that
capital no longer needs these populations as labor, these populations are
little more than human waste, excreted from the capitalist system.”7

Necropolis
Historically, the necropolis was borne through displacements,
enclosures, and containments, both in the context of slavery, the colony
and (initially) the nation-state, albeit to vastly differing geographical
degrees. Dispossession has preceded capital accumulation everywhere.8
The enclosures of England turned the peasantry into an agricultural
(and later industrial) wage-labor force, whereas the conquest of Ireland
dispossessed the Irish of most of the best land in favor of English
(and to a lesser degree Scottish) landlords, thereby creating a diaspora
of Irish wage-laborers. Later waves of colonization would repeat Irish
dispossession on a global scale.9 In the southern USA the plantation
system likewise served to enclose, displace, and capture, its racist
topography and consequent misery rejuvenated during the Clinton era
(Woods 1998). The authors in this collection trace accumulation through
dispossession into the present, whether in the Thai–Burma border zone
around Mae Sot (Arnold and Pickles this issue), the IT parks and
corridors in Delhi and Bangalore (Gidwani and Reddy this issue), or
the Dominican–Haitian borderlands (Werner this issue).10
Accumulation through dispossession is often glossed as
“development” (Rodney 1972). Lack of industry can be, and often is,

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coded as a racial characteristic, a way of marking necropolitical subjects

as inherently wasteful and stagnant (surplus), in need of colonial (or
neo-colonial) coercion to make them productive (see Gidwani 2008:
ch 1). As an example, Gidwani and Reddy (this issue) show how the
colonial authorities of British India coded any land not immediately in
agricultural production as “waste”, left unimproved by an insufficiently
industrious Indian population. The land settlements of British India
simultaneously determined property rights in land and the colonial
state’s revenue rights from that land. Though these land settlements
varied from one province (and sometimes even one district) to the next,
they were invariably constructed around and justified by discourses that
privileged the population represented as best suited to “improve” this
“waste” land and put it to productive (and therefore taxable) use (see
also Guha 1963). We also see this in Britain’s early-nineteenth-century
fashioning of the concept of terra nullius, a legal device where lands
not belonging to any modern (European) sovereign nation were seen as
wastelands best brought into productivity through foreign occupation
(Borch 2001).
The racial marking of lands and bodies continues to be a way of
rendering certain bodies superfluous: Arnold and Pickles (this issue)
note that the Burmese laboring bodies in Thailand are paid less than
half the Thai minimum wage, while simultaneously being represented
as a racial threat to the Thai national body; Werner (this issue) notes the
denigratory racialization of Haitian laborers by Dominican managers
in the Ouanaminthe special economic zone (SEZ) along the Haiti–
Dominican Republic border—and this between populations that, in
the biopolis, are equally denigrated as African; while Merrill (this
issue) shows how the racial cheapening of African industrial workers in
northern Italy has allowed southern Italians to re-imagine themselves as
white and for all Italians to re-imagine themselves as ethnically unified.
In the USA, such cheapening qua racialization has long taken place
in the context of African American, Mexican American, and Mexican
migrant lives (eg de Oliver 2004, 2001; Gilmore 2007; Mitchell 1996;
Pulido 1996; Woods 1998, 2010) as well as the lives of other such diverse
groups as the Chinese, Japanese, southern Italians, Irish, Greeks, and
“Arabs”.11
Whereas capitalists attended, however inadequately, to the problem
of biological and social reproduction in the biopolis, no such concern
extended to the necropolis. So long as surplus laboring populations were
sufficiently large, little regard was given to the symbolic or practical
course of local reproduction. Thus the populations of the Americas
were largely extirpated (primarily, though not exclusively, through
disease) with those remaining frequently subjected to coercive labor
regimes such as encomienda. Even as the indigenous population shrank,
the Spanish and Portuguese changed their treatment of indigenous

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persons but little, turning instead to the transatlantic slave trade to meet
their continuing labor needs. Whether purchased or conquered, then,
necropolitical subjects were rendered a free gift of nature to be taken
and used at will.12 Motherhood became an externality, the costs of
which were to be absorbed by subaltern networks of caring labor within
and beyond the household and on marginal lands allowed workers for
purposes of reproduction. The necropolis consequently experienced
the wasting of bodies and lands without measure (Davis 2001;
Mbembe 2003; Winant 1994).
Werner, Yates, and Hudson (this issue) all refer to Melissa Wright’s
exemplary study, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global
Capitalism (2006), which shows how factories in the export zones of
Mexico and China use up the laboring capacity of women in highly
accelerated and calculated fashion. Arnold and Pickles (this issue) call
attention to the unregistered and therefore unprotected migrant laborers
of Mae Sot who endure “precarious employment without clear-cut
employment contract or social protection”, all for a wage of scarcely
more than $2 per day. Gidwani and Reddy (this issue) paint a Dickensian
portrait of the “squalid” conditions in the slums of Bangalore and Delhi.
Merrill (this issue) reports the insouciance with which “the Italian public
watches television news report of the bodies and body parts of dark
skinned immigrants being lifted out of the seas”. From the colonial past
to the neoliberal present, the lives of necropolitical subjects have been
wasted through forms of racialized hyper-exploitation determined via
a calculus of death. Race has become the final arbiter of waste and
wastage. Facilitated by geographical estrangement from the biopolis,
little heed is paid to the needs of labor to reproduce itself. Instead, the
over-riding concern is to subject workers to the most accelerated form
of exploitation possible to optimize profit.

Bio(necro)polis
The biopolis and necropolis do not merely sit opposite one another;
they constitute a spatial dialectical unity. Within this dialectic, colonies
subsidized the biopolis on a massive scale: slavery and the sugar
plantations of Haiti helped pay for the Palace of Versailles; the human
and environmental life wasted in the Belgian Congo helped embellish
Brussels and establish the Union Minière’s dominance within the
Congo’s colonial economy; British exploitation in India and Africa built
the Docklands of London and provided the flora with which to cultivate
Kew Gardens; while revenues from the slave trade allowed the Brown
family to build a formidable Brown University.13 The biopolis could not
have emerged without massive transfers of value over hundreds of years
from the necropolis. These transfers are most immediately evident in

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the unusually large rates of profit from certain biopolitical enterprises

placed in the necropolis, and from the more ever-present mechanism of
unequal exchange (Emmanuel 1972; Lewis 1954). Unequal exchange,
as Lewis and Emmanuel noted, transfers surplus by lowering prices
rather than raising profits. As such, it constitutes a subsidy to both labor
and capital in the biopolis.

Race and Waste: The Spatial Dialectics of Labor

Race has always been the primary indicator of necropolitical body-
space. The racially marked body is, first and foremost, geographically
marked and economically cheapened (Nast and Elder 2009). Race
inscribes the coloniality of power and place onto the body. Colonial
projects of conquest commanded “race” into existence, creating worlds
for hyper-exploitation. As Laura Hudson (this issue) notes, the sphere
of racialized hyper-exploitation today demands a form of colonial
sovereignty grounded in the constant deployment of surveillance
and violence. Colonial sovereignty overwrites racial difference with
a narrative of a “war without end” characterized by bunkers and
checkpoints that monitor and control a resistant, dominated population
that cannot be fully absorbed into the institutions of the state. Taken by
force, colonial lands are built upon the blood and bones of the colonized,
both those killed in the struggle for sovereignty and those consigned to
die in impoverished and invisible excluded spaces of native towns.
Today, race simultaneously consigns some workers to the secondary
labor markets of advanced capitalist economies; divides the population
of the biopolis from that of the necropolis; and divides managers
from production workers, especially in borderlands and (above all) in
the SEZs located in those borderlands (Arnold and Pickles, Werner
this issue). It also marks certain immigrant populations for hyper-
exploitation, especially those without legal status (Arnold and Pickles,
Merrill this issue).
Because race works in the registers of signification and structure
(Winant 1994), the racially marked body-space always appears bearing
multiple stigmata. “Race” is literally absent because it refers to a
nonexistent biological substrate, but this absence forces a presence upon
lives through the topoi it structures. Race is, as Winant (1994:267) so
eloquently put it, both “a present absence and an absent presence”; its
contradictions realized through the spaces and bodies it calls to order.14
The physical and signifying structures of race have consistently
worked to attenuate hegemonic citizenries’ identification with the
subaltern. Subaltern lands and bodies are symbolically and practically
cast (to varying degrees) as that which has no legitimate juridical or
ontological status. The necropolis at its worst is cast as that which
is beyond modern time and space—an entity without value, even as

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the hyper-exploitation of its “primitive” lands and peoples brings great

wealth to biopolitans.
Necropolitans residing in the biopolis are similarly devalued. As we
see in this collection, whether in Thailand or in Italy, labor unions have
at best subsumed alliances with Burmese or African workers under
the category of class, unable to deal adequately with the specifically
racial component of worker exploitation; at worst unions have actively
mobilized anti-immigrant sentiment (Arnold and Pickles, Merrill this
issue). The surplus laboring population, “whose misery,” as Marx notes
(1990 [1976]:798), “is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it
has to undergo in the form of labor”, is disproportionately composed
of workers racially marked as non-white, necropolitans chief among
them. Their irregular employment becomes a convenient focus of white
proletarian resentment. Members of the surplus laboring population
working long hours for low wages are resented for undercutting white
workers’ wages. Those who lack employment, and thus endure misery
(privation), are resented for their putative refusal to undergo torture
in the form of labor. “In a particularly cruel twist”, McIntyre (this
issue) notes, “race becomes a marker not just of irregularly offered
employment, but a marker that one deserves the misery to which one is
consigned”.
Canalized, criminalized, ostracized, stigmatized, the necropolis—that
spatiality through which the necropolitan is defined or constituted—
becomes a reserve of multifarious material proportions: of negative
symbolic potential and death’s liminal pleasures; a reserve of labor (as
noted in chapter 25 of Capital); a nature reserve open for appropriation;
a reserve of potentially fecund land for settlers; and a reserve of waste
land for colonialism’s human and environmental detritus. The “reserve”
part of “reserve pool of labor” can therefore not be separated from the
materiality and spatiality of the reservation per se—of the Bantustans,
Native Towns, hinterlands, boys’ quarters, ghettos, and favelas. In this
sense, the necropolis is a peculiar “spatiality-for” the benefit of the
biopolis. Here, all that is, is situated symbolically beyond the real,
making the necropolitan apparitional. But, as in the case of all negation,
there is always that which exceeds or resists it. Thus, the apparitional
carries within it the threat of the real, provoking new rounds of fear
and negation, and new attempts to move the apparitional back into the
shadows.
The workings of this spatiality-for are apparent in Marion Werner’s
paper (this issue) on the Ouanaminthe SEZ along the Haitian–
Dominican border, supported by both governments, local and global
capital, and the World Bank. Here, beside the aptly named “Massacre
River”, site of Trujillo’s 1937 ethnic cleansing, Haitians enter a fenced
in and heavily guarded border trade zone to work in factories run by


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Dominican managers. Not only do the latter rarely stay long, they
deploy racial hierarchies to denigrate Haitian workers and justify their
exploitation. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republican state, in an attempt
to recuperate losses endured by the migration of factory jobs to Haiti,
promotes the Dominican Republic as a space populated by those fitted
for skilled work. Thus, a set of racial distinctions, policed through at
times extraordinary violence and given form through a regime of tight
spatial controls, separates two Afro-Caribbean populations, both subject
to long-term US occupation and repeated US-led military intervention.
In so doing, the border has become a racialized ontological device
through which to exact glocal forms of economic subordination.
The spatialization of race through which economic extraction takes
place speaks additionally to political contradictions (Winant 1994) in
that they point to ontologized differentiations and hierarchies of space
and of racial ontologies rendered through hierarchies of space (Nast and
Elder 2009). From modern colonization’s beginnings, the contradictions
between the necropolis and biopolis have been made and managed
through opposed governmentalities that have allowed for politically
distinct appropriations and economies of land and labor. Whereas the
biopolis has been ruled modally through consent, the necropolis has
been ruled through violence (Guha 1989). And whereas the spatial form
of the biopolis is the nation, this entity is antithetical to the “spatiality-
for” of the necropolis, and is therefore something against which the
biopolis has had to be guarded (Nast and Elder 2009).
The papers in this collection vividly illustrate the continuing disparity
in such racialized modalities of governmentality and space. In Mae
Sot, Burmese workers are paid shockingly low wages even as they
have registration fees deducted from their wages. They are also forced
periodically to bribe local police, and they face physical intimidation,
even murder, if they protest (Arnold and Pickles this issue). African
immigrants to Italy who are lucky enough to arrive alive (as Merrill
this issue notes, not all do) are relegated to a world of precarity,
working for employers who refuse “to ‘regularize’ immigrant workers”
by “paying taxes, social security and health benefits, and abiding by
labor laws”. Haitian workers in Ouanaminthe who have attempted (with
modest success) to better their wages and working conditions through
work stoppages have had to battle mass firings, lockouts, and military
repression (Werner this issue). Meanwhile, in the world of mercenaries
and corporate private armies, troops from South and Southeast Asia are
assigned the most dangerous and badly paid grunt work, while their
commanders—retired elite soldiers from the USA, the UK, or South
Africa—rake in immensely higher pay (Cowen and Siciliano this issue).
Our discussion thus far has shown how surplus value is differentially
extracted across the biopolis and the necropolis, and how these regimes
of differential extraction draw on and are constituted by racialized

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hierarchies whose force and meaning extend far beyond narrowly

economistic measures of exploitation. These hierarchies simultaneously
help constitute regimes of differential sovereignty that determine
whether capital will extract surplus value primarily through hegemonic
norms and consent, or through direct force and dominance (Guha
1989).

Re-scaling the Biopolis: Doin’ the Hustle

The various financial interests spun out of (and through) de-
industrialization and neo-industry opened up new modalities for
capitalist profit and political gain that would soon become mainstream.
Such mainstreaming had to do with the fact that biopolitical
industrialization provided a racially coherent and affirming basis not
only for (white) subjectivity and social life, but for the nation, through
which both of the latter were interpellated. These facts provided for
a significant reserve of psychical-material capital by which whiteness
could (“naturally”) look after its own.
One of the key mechanisms permitting such subjective resolve
is the way that racialized corporate and state interests have
historically entrained education for racialized hegemonic ends. With de-
industrialization, the profile of higher education has been transformed
from engineering to business, computer science, digital media, and
information technologies (eg Ronchi 2003; Williams 2010). New
cadres of racialized workers have subsequently emerged, albeit through
much more complex geographical regimes of surplus accumulation
and governance. The knowledge economy has permitted a different
sort of biopolitical subject to emerge, one able to engage in surplus
value extraction through privileged and internationalized means of
consumption (above); and one that regards labor (including its own)
as eminently made up of bits that are substitutable, exchangeable,
replaceable, and uncertain. Subjects are culturally encouraged to think
of themselves as sites of capital with “skill sets” that can (and should)
be regularly “upgraded”—or, as dynamic reservoirs for capitalization,
ready to be drawn on in multiple locations for variable periods of time
and for certain purposes. The racialized class advantages of such a
subject are complex and are addressed here briefly and anecdotally in
terms of the privileged “hustle” and the undocumented worker.15
Our first example is taken from Wall Street. It involves a 70 hour
per week employee of Goldman Sachs who relies on an undocumented
caregiver to relieve them of parental labor at a rate allowing net financial
gain. Goldman Sachs also benefits. For in the employee’s hiring of the
undocumented worker, it is able to employ a skilled worker from whom
surplus value can be extracted. The firm consequently benefits doubly:
from exploiting its worker and from the effective salary subsidy that

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come from the undocumented person’s hyper-exploitation—not unlike

the benefits to be had in the biopolis from earlier rounds of slavery and
colonization.
Our second example involves those with some access to capital who
might play the stock market from home via the Internet, compare
prices and contract product delivery internationally—for personal or
small-scale retailing purposes, or run an e-retail business. In calling on
already-existing and considerable networks of social capital, high levels
of informational literacy and/or education, relatively substantial assets
and access to credit, whiteness has managed to stay afloat and find new
means of cultural material reproduction.
At the same time, the changing subjectivity of the biopolitan signals
a fundamental shift in the geography of class. Whereas industrial
capitalists and workers formerly occupied the same nation—their
proximity compelling certain concessions and enabling the creation
of unions—the necropolitan industrial workforce today is separated
transnationally from hegemonic sites of finance capital and capital
accumulation. This separation is yet another of the factors that warrants
distinguishing between industry of the past and neo-industry in the
present. Through ongoing sanctions against (labor’s) transnational
migration, foreign capitalists and investors have been able to use national
borders both to distance themselves from hyperexploited industrial labor
and to fix it in its disadvantaged (and disadvantaging) place. Such
place-fixing has helped prevent the kinds of collective struggles that
historically raised labor’s value.
To ensure the economic viability of these re-configurations, a range of
militarizing strategies and devices have been deployed. Militarization,
like related investments in informational strategies and devices, have
allowed for vast domains of employment to be generated, particularly in
hegemonic nation states. As Cowen and Siciliano argue (this issue), the
military has become one of the central places where the surplus labor of
whites, generated as a result of de-industrialization, has been salvaged
and given new life. In the process, white working class masculinity
has been resuscitated and re-tooled. Whereas the iron man of industry
formerly was charged with the day-to-day administration and security
of the biological nuclear family and home, today’s iron man is de-
industrialized, his bodily ego re-fitted for the machinery of war and
re-oriented offensively beyond the nation. This new man is “deployed”
rather than employed, military training bent on asserting the primacy of
the homeland, corporation and empire (Killian and Agathangelou 2005).
The knowledge economy within hegemonic nations has therefore
become meshed into the world of munitions, weaponry, surveillance
systems, and machinic stealth—afforded in part by state expropriation
of “public” fortunes (cf Gilmore 2002).


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Ordered through ranking systems and elaborate fetishistic modes of

dress, conduct, and demeanor, the new machinic man is disciplined
to assume an outward-bound and proprietary (imperial) disposition.
Militarization has, as Cowen and Siciliano (this issue) aver, become
the new workfare of hegemonic nation-states, its presence expanding
throughout state, public, and private domains. These latter include the
varied corridors of travel and social life, private and public property,
and geographical regions deemed of strategic political and economic
interest. Ever growing amounts of work are thus to be had in national and
international armed forces and through private military contractors—
Singer’s (2003) “corporate warriors”.
Militarism is likewise to be found at “home” in the vast armies of
security guards operating in shopping malls, state buildings, places of
retail and corporate life, prisons, civic institutions, high-rises, office
complexes, gated communities, as well as in transportation venues
and loci, such as public transit lines, airports, sea ports, national and
international borders, immigration venues, warehouses, and so on. In
any case, the deployed are more alienated from the means of production
and reproduction than the employed in that they work not to produce but
to secure the properties and interests of others. As with the proto-fascist
Freikorps, the muscularity of militarized manhood is celebrated through
racialized paternalistic images and practices, cultivated via images of
war and impending danger (Theweleit 1987–1989).
Cowen and Siciliano’s paper (this issue) demonstrates how the US
military, in particular, has played on the contradictions and violences
of race, masculinity, and class to enlarge its voluntary rank and file.
Their work points to differently racialized reserves of masculinity
and masculinized labor: unemployed white men laid off during de-
industrialization or who reside in rural areas similarly economically
devastated (floating); and more or less permanently unemployed men
of color warehoused in US prisons (stagnant). The expansion of private
and public military, paramilitary, and security and policing efforts in
the USA has helped revitalize the muscularity of white working class
masculinity [the demise of which McDowell (2003) clearly describes
in the context of de-industrializing Britain], providing new means and
terrains with which to exercise racial prerogatives and anxieties. To
wit, the emergence and bravado of reactionary citizen groups that
now anxiously patrol the US–Mexico border (the Minutemen) and the
incorporation of white supremacists into US military forces. According
to a 2006 Intelligence Report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, neo-
Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists took advantage
of “lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of
anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces
in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and
explosives” (Holthouse 2008:132).

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By racial contrast, US prisons are a central place where the US

military works to recruit largely men of color, whose masculinity has
long suffered due to a number of historical and present day injustices and
which has assumed differently inflated proportions (see Shabazz 2008).
It is not uncommon today for recruiters to visit ex-cons and those in
youth detention centers and offer them “moral waivers” that allow them
entry into military service and, hence, to procure gainful employment,
social (market) value, and a degree of national enfranchisement. Former
gang members, felons, and those with serious criminal records are
consequently entering the rank and file in record numbers (Cowen and
Siciliano this issue). The masculinity of these groups is historically
and geographically specific, the violence with which they are involved
(imprinted by the inequities of the US social system) now mobilized for
US imperial interests, even as it is awarded lesser (racialized) market
value.
At the same time, the state has begun to intensify its bilingual
recruitment of Mexican Americans, a demographic currently
underrepresented in the military, at least in relation to their proportion
in the nation at large (Alvarez 2006, 2009; Segal and Segal 2007).
The institutional targeting of persons of color for military service
takes advantage of racialized structural inequalities in the USA that
make demographics ripe for employment and enfranchisement (Lutz
2008). Similar racialization (cheapening) is evident in the recruiting of
persons of color overseas who are brought into positions with low levels
of remuneration and high levels of physical risk (eg Gaskell 2008;
Pincus 2008; Singer 2005).
Cowen and Siciliano’s work points to how various formations of
masculinity are capitalized on by major corporate and state players,
not only to securitize private interests and prospects, but to produce
additional security needs. That is, the military–industrial complex
benefits from war and has no incentive to work for peace—just as
the domestic prison–industrial complex is incentivized to expand its
facilities through (lobbying for) new criminalizing legal codes. The
arms industry therefore works to expand theaters of war and to circulate
war-oriented resources and goods, facilitating what Rutherford (2005)
has called the military market complex—just as the prison–industrial
complex expands for its own profitable ends. In the latter case, the
warehousing of ever more criminalized bodies has required the building,
servicing, and staffing of new infrastructure, while prison labor produces
goods and services at discounted (racialized) third world rates. The
contradictions involved in deploying black prison guards to ensure
the docility of black prison populations is even more profound than
that involved in white securitization of international corporate interests
in that the level of exploitation involved is so much greater and


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because it depends so thoroughly on previous rounds of racialized

denigration.

Bio(necro)polis or Necro(bio)polis? The Socio-Spatial

Dialectics of Neoliberalism
Today, industrial production increasingly lies in former colonies or
semi-colonies.16 The pre-eminent example, of course, is China, whose
path from partial domination by rival colonial empires to the world’s
industrial workshop has by no means been smooth or foreseeable by
any simple theoretical schema. Its transformation, beginning in earnest
in the 1980s, relied partly on the state’s re-cultivation of an indigenous
capitalist class, and on substantial capital inflows from Japan, the USA,
and a Chinese capitalist diaspora (Arnold and Pickles this issue).17
But just as capital has flowed out of the biopolis, necropolitans have
flowed in. While Meso-American, South American, Caribbean, East
Asian and Southeast Asian peoples have migrated to North America;
African, West Asian, South Asian and, most recently, East European
peoples have migrated to Western Europe. Such circulatory patterns are
caused by, and partly depend on, differential changes in biopolitical and
necropolitical regimes of reproduction.
As biopolitan women were summoned back into the labor force
in the 1970s, fertility rates in the biopolis fell below replacement
level (2.1). Falling fertility rates created labor shortages filled partly
by necropolitical migrant streams into the biopolis, and partly by
biopolitical capital streaming to the necropolis, where it could better
feed off the children of racialized others. (From a great height of
economic abstraction, it does not matter whether labor moves to find
capital or capital moves to find labor). Today, reproduction of the global
labor force is increasingly reliant on necropolitans whose fertility rates
remain relatively high (many derive from agrarian contexts) and where
life expectancy has increased somewhat as a result of public health-
related “development” projects.18 Necropolitans now supply not only
much of the world’s industrial labor, but (through migration) they carry
out reproductive and productive functions for the biopolis as well.
But how far can the system of capitalist accumulation accommodate
the spatial coalescence of the biopolitan and necropolitan; of biopolis
and necropolis? As the biopolis increasingly draws its life force from
the necropolis—as once biopolitical spaces become annexed to the
necropolis with unprecedented rapidity—can the biopolis endure a
condition of straitened spatial extension and temporal flux?
In the necropolis, falling death rates combined with fertility rates
still well above the replacement level keep populations growing, while
migration from countryside to city produces immense agglomerations
of surplus populations. As Laura Hudson (this issue) notes:

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The new proletarianized populations of developing nations are “freed”

from the land, but in numbers far beyond what the labor market can
absorb and make productive. Immigrants choose the danger of illegal
passage and the risk of death because to stay at home is already a death
sentence. Surplus populations within developed nations are handled
with stricter policing and social control. Prison expansion and gated
communities keep social interaction at a minimum, keeping social
groups in their own kinds of cages.
As the boundaries between the necropolis and the biopolis dissolve,
the biopolis itself becomes a site of accumulation through dispossession.
From the perspective of 2010, we can see that capitalism’s crisis
of accumulation has depressed industrial profit rates in the capitalist
biopolis for nearly 40 years, a crisis masked for a time, but most
emphatically no longer, by financialization.19 The system of capitalist
accumulation has been rescued since its 2008 collapse, but at immense
cost. In the USA alone, rescue of the financial system required financial
exposure of some $14 trillion and disbursement of $4.66 trillion, of
which $1.98 trillion remained outstanding as of April 2010 (Real
Economy Project 2010). While these heretofore-unimaginable outlays
may have averted a second Great Depression, they have left us with little
more than the prospect of Japan’s Lost Decade on a global scale (BRIC
countries possibly excepted).20
We end, therefore, on a speculative note. Are we now seeing a spatial
collapse of the biopolitical into the necropolitical as boundaries become
increasingly porous and, if so, what will result? A quarter-century ago,
Neil Smith (1984) identified a process of see-saw development at urban
and (to a lesser extent) national scales, while uneven development on a
global scale was still characterized by vast disparities between the West
and the rest (Smith 1984:150–152). In 1984, Smith saw “the rigidity
of nation-state boundaries” as an effective brake on the mobility of
capital and labor, locking in place “the rigidly opposite conditions
of development and underdevelopment” (Smith 1984:151). As that
braking mechanism has worn down, the rhythm of capital’s crises has
accelerated, placing into question the continuing efficacy of capital’s
“spatial fix”.
A rapid tour d’horizon reveals the scale and intractability of the
current cascade of crises. A declining hegemon whose last domain of
unchallenged superiority is military has committed itself with renewed
vigor to a policy of global presence, global power projection, and global
intervention (Bacevich 2010). The most severe financial crisis of the
last 70 years was barely contained at immense cost. And the weak
recovery of late 2009 and 2010 is now placed in jeopardy by regimes of
austerity in the UK and the USA, doubled by crises in the Eurozone. Such
crises have placed the Euro’s future in question, its rescue dependent on


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enforced austerity in Greece and Ireland, with Portugal, Spain, Belgium,

and perhaps Italy poised to follow. On the ecological front, the 2009
Copenhagen and 2010 Cancun summits failed to craft an effective
response to global climate change, making an environmental debacle
in the second half of this century ever more certain (Hansen 2009).
Added to these are crises of social and biological reproduction.
Neither an all-but-extinguished communist movement, nor a
compromised social democracy, nor the still-inchoate world of “new
social movements” has the political force to step into the breach.21 In
this impasse, Gramscian morbidity raises its head, whether in the guise
of the British National Party, the Front National, or the Tea Party. In an
era of heightened crisis with no discernible possibilities of revolutionary
change, we may have to take seriously Marx and Engels’ (1848) warning
that class struggle sometimes concludes not with revolution but with “the
common ruin of contending classes”.22

Acknowledgements
Our thanks to Cathy May, Heather Merrill, Shailja Sharma, Alex Papadopoulos, Deborah
Dixon, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments.

Endnotes
1
The author order is alphabetical and in no way reflects a differentiated ranking of
effort or input.
2
“Bio(necro)polis” refers to the irruption of the necropolis into the biopolis,
constituted by those racially devalued bodies long present within the biopolis, the
necropolitans who have recently migrated to the necropolis, and those biopolitans who
are threatened with demotion to the ranks of the surplus population. “Necro(bio)polis”
refers to the emergence of heightened possibilities of capital accumulation within the
necropolis (what we refer to below as “neo-industry”) and the concomitant emergence
of a class of ex-necropolitans whose wealth and life of cosmopolitan luxury ranks with
that the most favored biopolitans, even as most residents of the necro(bio)polis remain
subject to hyper-exploitation or consignment to the category of human waste.
3
By categorizing certain bodies and lands as “waste”, we call attention to the
dehumanization of certain bodies, their relegation to an untheorized “nature” that,
paradoxically, “de-natures” them as humans, while simultaneously calling attention to
the semantic slippage that categorizes as “waste” both those lands that have not been put
to human use and those lands that have been ruined through human overuse. By playing
on the semantic elisions of the term “nature”, then, we try to do our bit to overcome
the opposed understandings of the term “nature” that have made geography, in Noel
Castree’s words, a “divided discipline” (Castree 2005:ch 4).
4
See, inter alia, Brenner (1985a, 1985b); Marx (1990 [1976]; Polanyi (1957). Hudson
(this issue), drawing on Marx (1990 [1976]:897), reminds us that the dispossession of
England’s peasantry did not suffice to turn them into industrial wage laborers. “[I]dlers
could be condemned to slavery and forced into labor . . . Laws against vagabonds and
beggars forced those displaced from agricultural lands forced those displaced from
agricultural lands into cities as labor for manufacture.”
5
See the chapter “Irish Immigration” in Engels (1987). The racialization of the Irish
was not limited to England, of course (see Ignatiev 1995).

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6
“The relative surplus-population exists in every possible form. Every laborer belongs
to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Not
taking into account the great periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of
the industrial cycle impress on it, now an acute form during the crisis, then again a
chronic form during dull times—it has always three forms, the floating, the latent, the
stagnant” (Marx 1990 [1976]:ch 25) On the market imperfections that generate surplus
strata of labor, see McIntyre (this issue).
7
Yates (this issue). In this argument, Yates draws primarily on Davis (2004, 2006).
8
In contrast to David Harvey (2005), who emphasizes accumulation by dispossession
as a distinctive feature of capitalist neoliberalism, we emphasize the continuity of
accumulation by dispossession, especially in the necropolis, in all epochs of capitalist
development.
9
See, for example, the Act for the Settlement of Ireland (1652) and, more generally,
the Cromwellian policy toward Ireland from 1649 onward (Barnard 2000). Marx (1990
[1976]) discusses the dispossession of the Irish in chapter 25, section 5F, and the
dispossession of the English peasantry through enclosures in chapters 27–30.
10
For a conceptualization of accumulation through dispossession as a permanent feature
of capitalist development, see Hart (2006).
11
Much important work has been done on race in Anglophone geography, a disciplinary
review of which is beyond the scope of this paper. Peter Jackson’s (1987) edited
collection on “race” and racism (mostly) in Britain and (less so) in the USA was
exemplary and inspired Dwyer and Bressey (2008) to follow up with a second edited
collection focused exclusively on Britain and Ireland. See Nash (2003) for an excellent
earlier review of how race has been theorized in the subdisciplines of cultural and social
geography. See also Schein (2006). For an early discussion that theorized race and
geography in North America, see Kobayashi and Peake (2004).
12
As Castree (2005:8) notes, “nature” in this sense is conventionally used in reference
to the non-human world. The necropolitical human body, then, occupies a liminal, only
quasi-human space.
13
On Haiti, see Nesbitt (2005); on Belgian Congo, see Hochschild (1998); on the
relationship between Kew Gardens and the British Empire, see Brockway (1979); on
Brown University and the slave trade, see the University Steering Committee on Slavery
and Justice (USCSJ 2006). The Docklands Museum hosts a permanent exhibition on
the port of London, sugar, and slavery (see Museum of London Docklands 2010).
14
The extent to which colonizing nations could use, dispose of, or render surplus
the places and peoples colonized, defined the geographical extent and power to which
“race” could be put. Biological markers of “race” need not have existed (as was the case
with the Irish). What had to exist was a means by which to claim that certain lands and
peoples were valuable as “surplus”, while simultaneously asserting that the conquered
has no intrinsic (practical or symbolic) value. See also Gilmore (2002).
15
We take this term from Sudhir Venkatesh (2002), who describes how Black folks in
Chicago housing projects “hustled” to survive, their entrepreneurial activities typically
based on illegalized activities. Hustling began after Reagan’s devastation of public
housing budgets and the global recession, it becoming commonplace across the USA in
the 1980s and beyond. Both white and black hustling started during the Reagan years,
the only difference being that white hustles operated through hegemonic cultural and
economic channels and were done at the expense of colorized folks. Black hustles were
in many cases defensive gestures born of marginalization and poverty (see Supreme
Understanding 2008).
16
Manufacturing value added in constant 2000 US dollars increased in low and middle-
income countries from $1.1 trillion in 1998 to $2.2 trillion in 2008. During the same time,
manufacturing value added in high-income countries increased from $4.2 trillion to $5.3


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trillion. The share of manufacturing value added in low- and middle-income countries
therefore increased from 21% to 29% of total value added (World Bank 2010).
17
See Arnold and Pickles (this issue) on the external capital investments that underwrote
China’s industrialization, followed by China’s “go west”, “go out”, and “go up” policies.
18
For a comprehensive overview of trends in migration, see United Nations
Development Programme (2009). Table G in the same source documents country-
by-country increases in the Human Development Index from 1980 to 2007.
19
In retrospect, the preconditions of this crisis were best anticipated by Robert Brenner,
who clearly foresaw (1998, 2003, 2006) the combination of declining rates of profit in
manufacturing, masked by temporary, speculative profits in the financial industry.
20
Advanced economies grew 0.5% in 2008 and shrank by 3.2% in 2009. Growth rates
in 2010 and 2011 are expected to be from 2.3 to 2.4%. Among the BRIC countries, China
and India saw robust, though somewhat slowed, economic growth in 2009 (8.7% and
5.7% respectively), while Brazil saw a small contraction (–0.2%) and Russia’s economy
was hurt very badly (a decline of 7.9%). Russia’s recovery is expected to be modest
(4.0% in 2010; 3.3% in 2011), while Brazil expects a strong recovery (5.5% in 2010;
4.1% in 2011). China and India are expected to resume an extremely rapid growth path:
around 10% per year in China and above 8% per year in India (International Monetary
Fund 2010, 2).
21
See the unintentionally dispiriting collection of essays in Castree et al (2010), where
a unanimous diagnosis of the weakness of the left and the seriousness of capitalist crisis
is joined to disparate and wan proposals for a revival of political possibility on the left.
22
We have focused in this section on the irruption of the necropolis into the biopolis
and the morbidity that irruption occasions. It might be objected that we have given
insufficient attention to the emergence of a biopolis within the necropolis, that the
necro(bio)polis is now the site of non-morbid political possibility. While this cannot
be ruled out, Gidwani and Reddy’s (this issue) portrait of India’s cities, including
Bangalore, the IT city par excellence, gives little reason to vest extraordinary hope in
the bio(necro)polis. This collection (and our own scholarly output in this and other
venues) has little to say about China, but the extraordinarily small portion of output
that returns to the economy in the form of wages (“36.7 percent in 2005” according to
Xinhua 2010), combined with the rapid expansion of greenhouse gas emissions there
(266% from 1990 to 2007; United Nations Statistics Division 2010), makes us wary of
placing our bets there, either.

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