Gavin On Selective Hegemony

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Selective Hegemony and

Beyond-Populations with
“No Productive Function”: A
Framework for Enquiry
a
Gavin A. Smith
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Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Selective Hegemony and Beyond-Populations with “No

Productive Function”1 : A Framework for Enquiry
Gavin A. Smith
Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada
A significant shift in the form of the political economy since the 1980s is fre-
quently described as a shift from the welfare state to neoliberalism, the latter either
referring to new principles of rule or more broadly to include the nature of the
economy. The paper argues that it is more fruitful to explore how these changes
reflected a shift in the dominance of forms of capital–principally from produc-
tion to finance. The dominant class blocs in the former period pursued hegemonic
projects described here as expansive; in the latter period such projects became
selective. Insofar as finance capital seeks security through diversification (bene-
fitting from difference) and is not itself productive of value, so it relies on and
[re-]producesrespectively, a) selected populations invested in distinctions, and b) an
absolute residual population. The politics of the former is one of negotiation, of the
latter counter-politics beyond negotiation. Exploration of this difference becomes a
crucial task for social analysis.
Key Words: finance capital, production capital, class, Keynesianism, neoliberal-

ism, hegemony, political economy, governmentality, surplus population, Marx,
Gramsci
When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within
its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a
chance?
Arundhati Roy, “Ghandi but with guns” The Guardian 27 March
2010: 34.
Consensus. . . means the attempt to get rid of politics by ousting the
surplus subjects and replacing them with real partners, social groups,
identity groups, and so on.
Jacques Ranciere, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South
Atlantic Quarterly 2004: 306.
Introduction
Recently, there has been a flurry of literature on that part of the
population, which the Victorians used to call “the residuum.”2 Despite
the urgent sense of this literature, it is best seen as coming in the
2
Select Hegemony and Beyond-Populations with “No Productive Function” 3
wake of a much larger and more long-standing discussion in which

the challenge of understanding the population has increasingly been
the problem of heterogeneity: the fact that the analyst must find con-
ceptual tools for understanding the multiple ways in which people are
embedded in the social world. This is often addressed in terms of juridi-
cal and ethical dilemmas, multiple forms of citizenship, complexities
over human rights, and so on. Once all this work is done, inevitably
we are left with what Ranciere (1999) refers to as “the part of those
with no part”—the bits and pieces that are part of none of the cate-
gories that operate in this heterogeneous world. This article is both a
contribution to the growing literature and a response to it.
Although much that is useful in current work has resulted from
what Butler calls “norms of recognisability” (2009: 7), these discussions
have tended to be removed from the specificity of the crisis of
reproduction facing current capitalist formations and their attendant
political regimes. The problem is that we confine ourselves to the
critical analysis of discursive chains and political programmes that
classify people in this way. As a result, classifications and categories
appear to occur in a realm beyond the tensions in social reproduc-
tion that face the capitalist political economy from one conjuncture to
another—and the successive historically distinct attempts to resolve
those tensions.
To propose that we need to break out of this confinement is not just
a question of insisting on one theoretical approach over another: for
the importance of a critique of political economy for our understanding
of the world we live in, over say discourse theory or governmentality
approaches. Rather, it is a question of how intellectuals assess the con-
ditions of possibility that might contribute to the success of what I call
revindicative politics. For example, as I note below, Marx embarked on
his critical analysis of capital for just such a purpose. And as his anal-
yses of conditions changed so too did his political interventions. So it
does matter what frame is used for ‘confronting the present.’
Even so, this essay seeks only to suggest such a frame; no ethno-
graphic evidence is drawn on the canvass. I begin by noting that in
the Global North the past two centuries can be seen in terms of a
tension between demands that the body politic (represented by the
state) be the expression of popular sovereignty versus demands that
it be shaped to enhance productivity. Social democracy was not just
the expression of attempts to mediate this tension; as Lefebvre noted,
it enveloped the population into the productivity project: “The social-
democratic model. . . [w]as a variant and possibly an improvement of
le mode de production étatique” (Lefebvre 2001: 775). Despite persis-
tent real heterogeneity among people in terms of ethnicity, gender,
4 G. A. Smith
regional identity, etc., in liberal states through much of the twentieth

century, there was a drive toward uniformity both in terms of citizen-
ship and in terms of mass production. This culminated after World
War II in the Keynesian National Welfare State [KNWS] (Jessop 2006).
What emerged I refer to as expansive hegemony.
But in the past thirty years, for a number of reasons (discussed
below) the hegemonic projects of various dominant blocs began to
be directed at selected groups of people. Selectivity, in turn, meant
that both in the realm of population and in the realm of productivity

(broadly conceived) the drive toward uniformity had to be replaced
by criteria of difference. As a result, the tension between people and
productivity was reformulated in what I call selective hegemony.
I describe these two settings and then discuss two important inter-
ventions that provide us with lenses for characterizing heterogeneous
membership in late-modern society. These authors help us to produce
a tentative framework, but I then try to advance on that framework by
means of a critique of political economy rather than the emphasis on
governance, which they use. This leads to an initial way of understand-
ing capitalist production and the characterization of the population in
productivist terms. To get at this I refer to a tension between what
I call tecnos and demos. I suggest that dominant blocs resolved these
tensions through a variety of hegemonic projects, which were generally
expansive.
But to apply the principles of this argument to more recent forms of
capitalism I need to introduce a second couplet: freedom and enclosure,
and I suggest that, taken together, these lenses help us to understand
current forms of capital and the configurations of the population. I
then suggest that expansive hegemony no longer serves the purposes
of dominant blocs, resulting in a shift toward selective hegemony.
This exercise is undertaken to help us identify the conditions
of possibility for revindicative politics.3 Taking his inspiration from
Marx’s exhaustive analyses of mid-nineteenth century society, Gramsci
insisted that the success of revindicative politics would depend on
what he called “organic” ideology—a counterforce that arose out
of, and in response to, the specific features of the current condi-
tions of possibility.4 Along with a number of more recent authors
who have made a similar kind of argument, suggesting that just as
mid-nineteenth century capitalism called forth a certain kind of coun-
terforce, so analysis of current neoliberal conditions suggests different
appropriate politics, I seek to follow Gramsci’s agenda (Martin 2000;
Feher 2009; see also Silver 2003). But I think that insofar as these con-
ditions invoke the features of selective hegemony, which restricts the
field of negotiable politics to selected participants, so there is a sphere
of action beyond such politics where no such negotiation is possible,

invoking the kinds of questions Arundhati Roy asks above.5
Changing conjunctures
The end of World War II in 1945 is often marked as a key moment
in the relationship between the economy and society, both nation-
ally and internationally. The quarter century that followed witnessed
quite comprehensive state planned interventions in the form of the

welfare state and, post-Bretton Woods, international interventions
termed ‘development.’ While in both cases these interventions were
meant to produce better conditions for economic development, they
were also supposed to offset tendencies understood to be inherent
in capitalist reproduction. Within the so-called ‘developed’ countries,
they were supposed to address questions of generalized redistribution
as against capitalist polarization (social and spatial). Regulatory pro-
grammes were to provide ‘social security’ for that part of the demos who
were not the beneficiaries of the industrial capitalist economy. Esping-
Anderson (1990) speaks of this in terms of preserving or providing
spaces of decommodification against the predations of entirely com-
modified relations (health care, pensions, public schooling, etc.), and
Jessop speaks of this as the era of the Keynesian National Welfare
State [KNWS] (Jessop 2006).
In the so-called ‘developing’ world, programmes were likewise aimed
at the population as a whole, but largely in reverse terms. The absence
of commodified relations and a thoroughgoing market in the “tradi-
tional sector” were seen to be an impediment to the development of
a properly capitalist economy. For this, programmes were introduced
for the purposes of various kinds of goals: most obviously to ease the
transition from the so-called traditional sector into the modern sector;
but where this seemed an excessively long-term or even insuperable
goal, to enact a kind of trusteeship of that population (Li 2009); spaces
too could be ‘protected’ in which populations could be reproduced to
provide cheap labour for the so-called ‘modern sector’ (Wolpe 1980;
Meillasoux 1980).
Although 1945 is frequently used as the watershed moment for the
enactment of these two variations on the theme of planning directed at
a coherent population within a bounded polity, Cowen and Shenton
(1996) show that we need to return to the nineteenth century to
discover their origins. The term ‘development,’ they suggest, is inher-
ently problematic because it means two different things: immanent
change (which we frequently refer to as development) and the intent to
develop. The latter consists of the ordering or management (they call it
6 G. A. Smith
‘trusteeship’) of the chaos and disorder resulting from the former

(Cowen and Shenton 1996: 438). As the logic of capitalist reproduc-
tion became more intensive in the core and more extensive beyond, so
the compensatory need for the state or international bodies to handle
its fallout grew.
From the end of the 1970s onward, economic conditions and the
regimes for their regulation shifted away from this formula. In the
last twenty years of the twentieth century these changes came to be
known as neoliberalism. The dominant economic and political classes

reversed their understanding of the relationship between the economy
and the state. Those actions of the state that were once taken to offset
the tendencies of the economy were now seen as a handicap to the
free development of the economy. The function of the state (and insti-
tutions functioning to the same ends internationally) was therefore
reversed; it was now to cultivate the ground of optimum capitalist
activity. Speaking of the earlier era and its antecedents, Cowen and
Shenton (1996:438) explain the internal contradiction in the idea of
development:
While an immanent process of development encompasses the dimension

of destruction, it is difficult to imagine why and how the intent to destroy
should be made in the name of development.
Yet this became precisely the goal of what Peck and Tickell (2002)
call “roll back” neoliberalism (see also Klein 2008). State and interna-
tional development interventions should be designed so as to enhance
quite specific, selected targets to optimize their comparative advantage,
rather than resolving broader issues of (spatial and social) inequalities.
There were then two distinct features of this new regulatory regime:
first, its rollback function and, second, its departure from planning as
a broad process attending to the interlinkage between elements of a
coherent, bounded polity. This affected development itself as a plan-
ning exercise. As policies were aimed at enhancing the advantages of
specific sub-national regions, populations, or sectors, planning itself—
as a coordinated intervention aimed at anticipating the effects of the
dynamics of one part on that of another—became problematic.6 So
the shift away from social and national criteria for planning to pro-
grammes based on business models and so-called economic measures
was not just a shift in the criteria by which development targets were
measured; it was also a shift in the scale at which it was proposed plans
could be made to modify reality.
How might we understand the heterogeneity that arises from selec-
tive regulatory regimes of this kind and the kinds of politics that
might emerge therefrom? Two recent interventions have addressed

precisely these questions, and in so doing they link distinctions among
the populace to the question of surplus populations.
Chatterjee and Ong on the current conjuncture

Chatterjee (2008)7 begins his argument, following Sanyal’s (2007)
Rethinking Capitalist Development, by noting the importance for the
ongoing development of capitalism of the separation of peasants and

artisans from their means of subsistence through political interven-
tions of one kind or another. In the past he suggests this has produced
a variety of what he calls ‘narratives’ of social transition (2008: 54–55).
Today, however, “although capitalist growth in a postcolonial society
such as India is inevitably accompanied by the primitive accumulation
of capital, the social changes that are brought about cannot be under-
stood as a transition” (ibid: 55; emphasis added). The reason Chatterjee
gives for this leaves the impression that, in India at least, the old
notions of trusteeship and welfare are far from dead.8
There is a growing sense now that certain basic conditions of life must be
provided to people everywhere and that if the national or local govern-
ments do not provide them someone else must, whether it is other states,
or intentional agencies of non-governmental organizations . . . It is con-
sidered unacceptable that those who are dispossessed of their means of
labour because of the primitive accumulation of capital should have no
means of subsistence. (ibid 55)
Yet, using the idiom of governmentality, Chatterjee presents us with

a sectoral image of Indian society that requires political programmes
to be selective rather than the earlier universalist programmes I
described above.
. . . [T]he activities of governmentality require multiple, cross-cutting

and shifting classifications of the population as the targets of multiple
policies, producing a necessarily heterogeneous construction of the social
(2004: 36).
The major distinction that Chatterjee identifies is a “split in the field

of the political between a domain of properly constituted civil society
and a more ill-defined and contingently activated domain of political
society” (ibid: 40). Civil society includes the middle class and seeks to be
congruent with the normative models of bourgeois capitalist hegemony
(2008: 57), while large sections of the rural population and the urban
8 G. A. Smith
poor relate to society through making demands on the state and its
appendages who respond in terms of political expediency (rather than
an expansion of political participation). This latter Chatterjee refers to
as ‘political society.’
In civil society the hegemony of capitalism (including presumably its
neoliberal, class concentrating accent) goes uncontested—“the require-
ments of corporate capital [are] given priority” (ibid: 57) and indeed
“a significant feature in recent years has been the withdrawal of the
urban middle classes from political activities altogether” (ibid: 62). As

the name implies, this is far from the case for political society, “the
space of management of non-corporate forms of capital,” (ibid) made up
of units with low composition of capital where profits are subordinated
to livelihood needs. People here “are not regarded by the state as proper
citizens possessing rights and belonging to the properly constituted
civil society” (ibid 63: 1). Evidently weak qua multitude or mass, these
people engineer political negotiation (in which the threat of violence is
not entirely absent) through various temporary or more long-standing
associations. These associations are in part an effect of particular
government programmes that target certain groups, as Chatterjee’s
governmentality imagery would imply. Moreover, the political arena
is far from the one E.P. Thompson (1968) proposed for the English
working class; quite the contrary, here political struggles do not accu-
mulate to produce an emergent culture; rather, people’s victories are
always recorded as ‘exceptions’ beyond the law, “temporary, contextual
and unstable” (ibid: 57).
As we might expect from the governmentality point-of-view (despite
the name), these are not politics in the historical sense, but rather the
effect of forms of governance.9 Even so, a careful reading of Chatterjee
reveals that associations do have a life beyond their form as Platonic
shadows cast by government programmes. It is through these insti-
tutions of collective membership that political society negotiates with
state agencies, rather than as individual citizens. So, though limited
from reshaping structural power through their designation as ‘excep-
tions’ politics acquires what little leverage it has from institutions of
collective membership.
Chatterjee’s framework does then provide us with one form of selec-
tive hegemony: a small field of generalized hegemony (civil society),
and a vast and more amorphous social space where hegemony is selec-
tive. Neither is an attempt made by the dominant bloc to broaden
participation into this arena and thereby extend ‘civil society.’ Nor do
people in this arena partake in the hegemonic values of civil society.10
But Chatterjee argues that there is a politics of negotiation for these
people—one in which the dominant bloc seeks to cast each success as
an exception to hegemonic norms.
Though the vast majority of Chatterjee’s article and, indeed, his

Politics of the Governed (2004) is taken up with this civil and politi-
cal society, the final section of his article is headed “Marginal Groups.”
Here we find “the underside of political society.” Neither “political soci-
ety [n]or electoral democracy have. . . given these groups the means
to make effective claims on governmentality. In this sense, these
marginalized groups represent an outside beyond the boundaries of
political society” (ibid: 61). So Chatterjee does suggest a field of politics
and something beyond, but what happens in this latter sphere is not
taken up.11
Aiwa Ong (2006), on the other hand, deals with heterogeneity specif-
ically in terms of exceptional groups. She does so, moreover, by setting
her argument within a space wider then any one national polity.
“‘[G]raduated sovereignty’ is an effect of states moving from being
administrators of a watertight national entity to regulators of diverse
spaces and populations that link with global markets” (ibid: 78).
Like Chatterjee’s analysis, Ong’s analysis places administrative
expertise at centre stage. For her, placement within or without is the
result of the interplay between politics [again, politics without politics
(ibid: 3); see endnote 8] and ethics—“ethnographic milieus where the
interplay between exceptions, politics and ethics constitute a field of
vibrating relationships” (ibid: 4). Also like Chatterjee, she sees neolib-
eralism (which she confines entirely to a form of governing) as blurring
the purchase of citizenship as an effective social category. But her con-
clusion is more radical. Using the notion of graduated sovereignty,
she argues that citizenship is no longer the sole or primary medi-
ator between people and the state: “. . . legal citizenship is merely
one of multiple schemes for (re)ordering and (re)evaluating humanity”
(ibid: 24).
By limiting neoliberalism to a particular kind of relationship
between the authorities and the people, Ong invokes a heterogeneous
social field along different criteria to Chatterjee’s. She suggests that
it is a mistake to see Southeast Asia as uniformly under the sway of
neoliberal governance in which the individual is formed through prin-
ciples of self-responsibility and the population is seen as a resource,
the better to be managed. Rather, spaces of neoliberal purview are to
be found alongside spaces in which claims on and by the state can be
made in terms of established norms that are specific to the history of
that state, or claims can invoke transnational institutions. The result
is a heterogeneous social space: “a constellation of mutually constitu-
tive relationships that are not reducible the one to the other” (ibid: 9;
emphasis added).
Often, to service global clients, a state may apply neoliberalism in
one sphere while using precisely its instrumental understanding of
10 G. A. Smith
social membership12 to “exclude populations and places from neolib-

eral calculations” (ibid: 4) elsewhere. Moreover, since inclusion in the
neoliberal project is not an unalloyed advantage so exclusion from it
can be favourable or not, protecting some of the population with exist-
ing social safety nets or stripping away all forms of political protection
by excluding “migrant workers from the living standards [sic] created
by market-driven policies” (ibid).
What are these mutually constituting relationships then? They are
[privileged?] spaces where liberal reason ideally prevails, though in

its local variant. In this sense it is resonant with Chatterjee’s ‘civil
society.’ Thus, speaking of the Malaysian middle classes, Ong writes:
“. . . they have a weak and ambivalent role in relation to state power.”
There are also a variety of ‘mutually constituting relationships’ that
are exceptions to neoliberalism. First, there are those that are framed
in terms of traditional political culture in which the state protects
the population from the predations of hard-nosed neoliberal calcula-
tion (e.g., individual competition and the absence of social security) by
invoking the specificities of national or sub-national histories. Then
there are the Special Economic Zones or less administratively formal
spheres that are nonetheless analogous. And crosscutting all these
are complex claims that can be made by those without territorialized
citizenship—on non-state institutions like the UN, religious organi-
zations, and NGOs. Ong speaks too of claims made directly on drug
companies on behalf of the diseased and starving.
Thus, in moving away from [neoliberal] ‘civil society’ Ong shifts
away from normative citizenship claims, as does Chatterjee by use of
his notion of ‘political society’; in Ong’s case, however, these constella-
tions appear more complex because they invoke claims in terms well
beyond those of citizenship. Moreover, Ong sees the ‘politics’ here quite
differently from Chatterjee. Political leverage in this case is not to be
found through institutions of collective representation that arise like
Chatterjee’s associations. Rather, intermediaries negotiate “on behalf
of the politically excluded” (ibid: 9; emphasis added).
In short, bare life does not dwell in a zone of indistinction, but it becomes,
through the interventions of local communities, NGOs, and even corpora-
tions, shifted and reorganized as various categories of morally deserving
humanity. (ibid: 24; emphasis added)
Here then is a second instance of selective hegemony, and Ong ini-

tially appears to propose that even the ‘excluded’ are embraced through
those who negotiate on their behalf. Though we do learn that there are
others who may more specifically fall within Chatterjee’s ‘marginalized
groups’: - ‘Illegals who slip into the country have no legal or social
rights’ (ibid: 83), while ‘Southeast Asia is riddled with internal colonies
of poverty and neglect’ (ibid: 84) and where aboriginal peoples are the
victims of accumulation by dispossession.
In both cases then the social itself is rendered as a heterogeneous
field both in terms of people and spaces and then a further popula-
tion whose politics is not a logical extension of the others is alluded to,
though no link is made between the existence of this kind of popula-
tion and the distinctions made across the social tapestry through the
selectivity of regimes of rule. While broadly informed by the percep-
tions of Marx, their approaches evade the Marx who felt it necessary
to conduct his critical analysis of contemporary society through a
thorough study of Capital. They are, in this sense, not so much post-
Marxist as tangential to Marxism; their analyses (like Foucault’s) are
inconceivable without their Marxist antecedents, yet are made tidy by
being cleansed—not of capitalism itself, which can be understood as
simply a presence—but rather of the frenetic imperatives inherent in
the production of capital.
Demos and tecnos: “freedom” and enclosure

Chatterjee does refer to the idea of states as the institutional expres-
sion of popular sovereignty, but he consigns this to a moment of the
past. Ong does entertain the possibility that certain kinds of capi-
talists, mostly ‘global’ capitalists, have an impact on the form of the
state. But the fixation on states and techniques of governance seems
convincingly tidy at the expense of two interconnected forces, which
surely cannot have recently simply fled the stage of history. The direc-
tion in which the social world goes is crucially a function of what is
required for the reproduction of capital, and the direction it should go
is the outcome of power struggles that are emergent from and about
the relations of capital; in a word, class. It may indeed be the case that
current imbalances of power give undue leverage to power blocs rather
than popular classes, but to address the issue of current social forms
as though the imbrications of power blocs and forms of capital were of
peripheral concern seems problematic.
One way in which we see this is that Foucault’s important obser-
vation that modern power intervened to enhance productivity and
national well-being (Rose 2000: 7), far from expanding our field of
enquiry, is used to limit it to matters of governance. Tasteless jokes
about shepherds aside, we need to remember that the pastoral care
they devote to their sheep is not for love of them nor to provide for
their well-being sui generis. It is to enhance their value. If too much
12 G. A. Smith
government destroys the dynamism and creative potential of the life

processes on which freedom depends (Duffield 2007: 6), it is not free-
dom per se that is the issue, but the creative potential it can unleash.
It is a mistake to propose that the real application of liberalism
is simply about freedom entirely detached from capitalism—as an
individual and from government—and therefore must induce a ‘self-
regulated subject.’ We can agree that the problem to which modern
forms of power were a response was a problem of productivity in
its broadest sense. Initially, the sphere to which modern power was
directed was containable and could be imagined as coherent, be it the
space of production narrowly conceived (workshop, factory, or the hier-
archically organized firm) or the national space in which productivity
took on a broader meaning. But the neoliberal variant was a response
to a slightly different set of issues, namely, the problem of harnessing
the flow of value under new conditions of social space. As these spheres
changed so too did the way power related to productivity.
So, while there is no dispute with the productive nature of mod-
ern power, we need to explore a wider set of interconnected forces
and conditions. Invoking as his model France, rather than Chatterjee’s
India, Lefebvre (1977), for example, suggests a different understanding
of a politics of popular sovereignty and governance as expertise. There
is a tension between the building of a late-modern state on the basis of
the national-popular, in which the state becomes the condensation of
popular sovereignty and the expanding interconnections of scale in the
realm of production that relies increasingly on coordination at the level
of the state. “Les gens de l’Etat invent new instruments, for example, a
space which is at one and the same time quantified, homogenized and
controlled” (Lefebvre 2001: 774–775).
Less a teleology in which people’s politics are succeeded by the rule
of experts, in this reading the modern state is inherently an inter-
nally contradictory institution that condenses popular sovereignty
and national productivity. I will call these, respectively, the impetus
toward demos and the impetus toward tecnos. So, while it is true
that from 1789 to the Paris Commune of 1870 there were a series
of attempts to insist that the state should be a condensation of the
community, the people (Sayer 1987), this was not just subsequently
replaced by a concern with national productivity. Well before that
the absolute monarchy had been interested in its enhancement in a
line from Colbert that crosses 1789 to Napoleon.13 What followed the
Revolution was a perpetual tension between concern with securitiz-
ing the economy—expressed, for example, in the legalization of joint
stock companies (which increased ‘security’ by spreading investor risk
through shares or ‘securities’)—and popular demands—for the right
to property, the right to ‘representation’ and subsequently the right to

security of society (i.e., social security)14 (Marshall 1963).
The point, then, is not to focus exclusively on governance and invoke
a line from participation to expertise nor to resort to a cynical argu-
ment for some kind of functional link between expansions of liberal
democracy solely for the ‘purposes’ of enhancing national productiv-
ity (which, during the period we are speaking of, was effectively the
enhancement of national capitalisms). Rather, we need to note the ten-
sions that arise as the power of these two forces play off one another
at the level of society as a whole, resulting in different state forms.
Directing attention to governance and governmentality naturally leads
to an interest in what their effects are on society [understood as
‘population’]; society becomes an effect of the state. But the reverse
is also true. For Marx the tension between the demos and tecnos arose
in a wider arena than just the state. For him a key moment in this
regard had to do with the passing of the factory acts of the 1840s and
the response of industrialists. He argued that the acts were a [state]
intervention to limit child labour and increases in the length of the
working day since they were a danger to the reproduction of the work-
ing class. The effect was to reduce concrete labour’s contribution to
production to which factory owners responded by increasing productiv-
ity through techne (efficiency of instruments, rationalizing the labour
process, etc.) so as to produce relative surplus value (Marx 1973). So we
need to counter the fashionable fixation on state effects with a broader
picture that would allow for a dialectical interplay between people and
production in terms of an ongoing struggle emanating from a contra-
diction that becomes a perpetual preoccupation for the state, not just
in terms of struggles among experts, but in terms of power blocs and
popular masses.
We can take tecnos to refer to a set of strategies to increase pro-
ductivity broadly conceived—bringing human energy to bear on ever
more efficient instruments, enhancing skills, and increasing the speed
and quality of information flow, and such like. But under capitalism
the impetus to increase productivity generates a tension having to
do with the enhancement of the creative potential of people and its
harnessing within an enclosure that captures the value that results
and directs it back toward capital. People acting ‘freely’ (albeit ‘self-
regulating’) are inclined to be more fruitful than people locked in
chains (Bourdieu 2000: 203–20415 ). But the fruits of that labour are
of no use to either governor or capitalist unless their flow can be chan-
nelled. It is a principle of capitalism (much respected by Marx) that
enclosure of the flow of value so that it can be used to enhance the pro-
ductivity of capital authorizes this capture. But for our concerns here,
14 G. A. Smith
it is the tension/balance between freedom/enclosure that we need to

keep in mind, for this will allow us to see what happens when enclosure
becomes a more vital concern than productivity.
The effect of enhancing productivity through capitalist relations is
that certain populations are rendered ‘surplus.’ The surplus nature of
these populations may be relative: temporarily because they may sub-
sequently be reabsorbed or spatially in the sense that, not needed in
one sphere, they are absorbed into another (though market segrega-
tion may limit the latter). But capitalist production may require less
human input permanently. This may be the case in a general sense,
or it may result from the fact that, made surplus in one sphere, they
are not absorbed into another. The populations that result are absolute
surplus populations economically speaking (i.e., in terms of production
in the narrow sense). This is one way in which capitalist reproduction
configures populations, and it is the one that mostly concerned Marx.
But a second effect of capitalist social reproduction can result from pri-
oritizing enclosure over productivity. Controlling the flow and direction
of capital—enclosure16 —can also effectively result in people becoming
surplus or in excess, but the existence of such populations does not
perform a latent function vis-a-vis the reproduction of capital under
these conditions.
In both cases we may understand capitalism as an inherently polar-
izing (i.e., class concentrating) socio-political system (Harvey 2005).
But the mechanisms that make this happen are not the same in each
case and the politics, both of dominant blocs and of subaltern people,
must differ as a result. So, in the next sections, I reflect on this issue
by reference to two kinds of hegemonic project: the one expansive, and
the other selective.
Surplus populations
As I have noted, authors who have sought to address the issue of ‘sur-
plus population’ in the current period have tended to do so in terms
of juridical or ethical concerns. But these approaches do not seek to
understand the way in which such populations are generated by the
kind of social arrangements we live with today. Where there has been
some attempt to do so, the decisive moment is said to be a political
one—a contemporary form of primitive accumulation. Primitive or pri-
mary accumulation is here used to refer to a form of coercion that is
the inevitable barbarous side of the modernist coin. It allows those
concerned with governance, but not especially with capitalism, to pro-
pose that it is politics, not the economy, that makes people surplus.
Indeed, via a disingenuous reading of David Harvey, these authors
propose that Marx got it wrong: capitalism did not need coercion only
for its primary moment, but perpetually needs it. From here, it is easy
to conclude that it is only this political moment of capitalism to which
we owe the evils of dispossessed and, hence, surplus people.
Neither Marx nor Harvey would suggest that capitalism ticks along
nicely innocent of police or protest. Marx was perfectly aware of the
persistent role of forceful political intervention for the stable reproduc-
tion of established capitalism.17 If current resort to the term, hijacking
Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ along the way, is used pre-

cisely to avoid the dynamic features inherent to capitalist reproduction
that drive it toward expanded reproduction, then we let capitalism
and capitalists off the hook and attend instead to the state and its
experts.18
Broadly speaking, for Marx, at certain moments capitalism pro-
duced people surplus to the needs of capitalists. Various extra-
economic interventions would be needed, therefore, to address the
subsistence needs of this population so that it was available for capital-
ists in a new round, when they would again be needed. The problem of
surplus population arises because such a circuit can only be completed
ideally—for various reasons. We need to rehearse this argument before
we can move on.
1. Capital as tecnos and expansive hegemony

Marx notes how capitalists’ pursuit of profit through ever increasing
productivity generates problems beyond the narrow confines of the
labour process. On one side, there is a perpetual emergence of a relative
surplus of population—what Marx referred to as “a law of population
peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” (1973: 630); on the other
side, there is a relative scarcity of resources.
As for the first of these, Marx based his argument on three propo-
sitions. (1) Because in a capitalist society labour capacity can attain
its value only when its surplus labour adds value to capital, when it is
not adding value to capital it appears as a surplus. So the term ‘sur-
plus’ in the expression ‘surplus population’ here refers exclusively to
marketable labour capacities. Put another way, it is only when a pop-
ulation is valued just for its marketable labour capacities that it will
appear to be surplus when it cannot realize those capacities.19 (2) The
accumulation of this population is inherent to the moment when cap-
ital uses instruments (machines) to increase the surplus it extracts
from labour.20 (3) The maintenance of these populations (either in
their temporary ‘down time’ or over a longer term) must either accrue
to ‘society’ in whole (or to some element of its parts), or become an
16 G. A. Smith
insoluble problem or threat to that society.21 This ‘threat’ can be

‘merely’ an economic one. What capitalists produce is worthless until
its value is realised, which only happens when it is sold to a consumer.
So the economic threat has simply to do with the fact that there is a
segment of the population who is contributing neither to production
nor to the realization of value because they are unable to consume.
This then is the relative surplus population.
So on one side of the reproduction problem is the population; on
the other are the resources. Cumulatively higher levels of productiv-

ity are inclined to require more resources for processing into the end
product: oil, tin, wood, and so on. Within a bounded territory these
can be bought from those who have rights over them, specifically the
right to sell them. There may then be need for some political and legal
interventions to make such resources into ‘property.’ In any event,
the result will be to make a distinction between those who hitherto
used them—usufruct—and those who claim rights of sale. The latter
may benefit from capital’s need for scarce resources; the former may
become what we could call the absolute surplus population—in the
sense that they are not relatively so in terms of cycles in capitalist
demand. Rather, they are absolutely surplus in that particular space
at any rate.22 (As we will see, there are other ways in which popula-
tions may be rendered surplus directly through rigours of the capitalist
economy.) Although this looks quite similar, it does not in fact repli-
cate the primary accumulation to which Marx referred. Dispossession
is certainly involved but it results not from accumulation by disposses-
sion, but dispossession as a result of accumulation. Where in the one
the politics precedes the economics, in the other the economics is well
in place before the politics becomes necessary.
So we can see here that it was the gargantuan demands of produc-
tion capital that produced both forms of excess, yet the mechanism
in each case was slightly different. Just as the effect of the domi-
nance (though not pervasiveness) of the wage relationship was to make
all of labour that was necessary commodifiable labour (the remainder
being ‘surplus’), so the drive for resources was to commodify the com-
mons (understood here, quite broadly as general rights of usufruct).
The welfare state was a hegemonic project of post-war class blocs to
decommodify crucial spheres of society in order to compensate for these
destructive moments of capitalist reproduction.
Beyond the core states, it did not, however, resolve either the prob-
lem of realization resulting from the one kind of surplus population
it had produced or the problem of scarcity in resources that resulted
from the demands of productivity. The result was what Harvey (1982)
termed the “spatial fix” (see also Smith 1984; Cowen and Shenton
1996). This, in turn, generated people who appeared as surpluses, most

notably as a result of the second of the issues I have addressed here:
“one in which places (or resources) are useful but the people are not . . .”
(Li 2009: 1211),23 producing an absolute surplus population.24
When we speak of the emerging productivist state, it is this to
which we refer. But there is nothing determinist or teleological that
results from this understanding of capitalist reproduction. What Marx
is talking about here is a certain kind of iron logic, one that inclines
production capital toward expanded reproduction. It doesn’t happen

all the time; it is not something spread uniformly throughout social
formations in which capitalist social relations are dominant; and, as
we would expect, ‘resolutions’ to this problem do occur—largely in the
realm of ‘political society.’
This points us toward Gramsci who addressed the issue of power
and production through the two notions of hegemony and Fordism. His
concern was precisely to use the notion of hegemony to explore the
political implications of the tension between the dual drive for control
over popular will and the pursuit of profit through the harnessing of
labour. Or, better put: the growing realization that increases in produc-
tivity could be made by expanding the arena of influence over popular
will: “an intensification of exploitation achieved through new forms of
management and corporatist strategies, and expansion of state inter-
vention in the economy and society (Forgacs 2000: 223). Here, Gramsci
is clearly referring to hegemony as the project of a dominant bloc to
secure the future. He is talking about how the state and the enterprise
deploy power plus persuasion to penetrate civil society and thereby
reshape it.
While Gramsci was writing about interwar Italy, his observations
are helpful when we turn to the post-1945 world. Following the
Bretton Woods agreement, the core states pursued a broadly corpo-
ratist agenda, seeking to enhance productivity and reduce conflict
through making alliances with the leaders of key “stake holders.”
These regimes functioned through hegemonic expansion so that initial
pacts among the leaders of capital and labour were expanded to include
regional and ethnic political classes, and so on. The best resolution of
the tension between demos and tecnos was some distribution of the
social good to the population. And the best vehicle for this project was
the bounded national state within which claims and rights were made
in the language of ‘citizenship.’ The universality of citizenship on which
the authority of expansive hegemony relied required that the medium
for claims on the state—citizenship—recognize only a homogeneous,
uniform population. It is not that differences of culture, sexuality,
and gender were not socially recognized; it was that the principles of
18 G. A. Smith
welfare-state citizenship were embedded in a kind of liberal republi-

canism (in the French sense) that was largely incompatible with them.
The ignorance of the KNWS lay elsewhere: not in respect to the
variations among the population, but in respect to the complexity of
the sources of national productivity. It was supposed that insofar as
people not immediately functional for the motor that made society
productive—the mass production economy systemically producing
relative surplus value—so they were the surplus who were the respon-
sibility of the state. Yet even in the core countries ‘the stable worker of
the salaried society’ (Nun 1969) never constituted the majority of the
work force. Put another way, the reality of society that the post-war
state sought to manage was never neatly divided between wage labour
in mass production, on the one hand, and unemployment and non-
production, on the other. Rather, the commodified economy was made
up of a vast array of forms of enterprise, all of which depended for
their reproduction on an extensive arena of non-commodified practices
generating less a binary world composed of spheres of moneyed and
non-moneyed relations and practices, but rather an overall world of
intricate commodified relations
Yet, caught between the tensions of demos and tecnos, the juridical
apparatus of the KNWS had to remain coy about its antisocial child, as
though the so-called productive economy were not itself producing the
‘excesses’ now appearing as a cost of the state. Expansive hegemony
needs to be understood in this light: its overt containing of citizenship
against recognition of difference, and its covert obscuring of the role in
national vitality of spheres of either intricate commodified relations or
non-commodified relations and practices. As the declining productivity
of industrial capital set in by the 1970s so greater profits from capital
shifted toward finance. This, in turn, rendered permeable the bound-
aries of the manageable state. The longstanding covert operations
of the KNWS began to surface: state costs were increasingly (and
explicitly) going to capital, not supposedly ‘unemployed’ labour; and
the vitality of the hitherto illegalized sphere of intricate commodified
relations (‘informal economy,’ ‘black economy,’ ‘getting by,’ etc.) began
to emerge, not only as the place of last resort for personal welfare but
also as the source of national productivity it had been for some time.25
This, in turn, reconfigured the way in which tensions between demos
and tecnos were to be worked out, as we shall see in the next section.
One final point before moving to that section. Was expansive
hegemony extended to the Global South? This is not, in fact, quite
the question that follows from the logic of my argument, since I have
been suggesting that the modern pursuit of a productivist capitalist
state generated specific tensions between demos and tecnos to which
expansive hegemony was an attempt at resolution. So, the first

question is the one Tania Li raises: “Whether or not the pauperized
population of the global South fulfils the same function in relation to
capital as the paupers of industrializing England described by Marx”
(2009: 1210). I hope it is clear that I have addressed this question
above. To the crises of surplus population experienced in the Global
South as a result of the way industrial capitalism generates surpluses
of population and scarcities of resources on its edges, would need to be
added a vast array of contingent historical realities arising from the

varieties of colonial and postcolonial experience.
Nonetheless, without pursuing these in this article, it is part of
my argument that, insofar as postwar development programmes were
the product of debates mostly within a Keynesian frame of reference,
they were an extension of what I have been saying. As Greg Grandin
notes of United States programmes in Latin America, “In the early
1960s the goal was to set up functioning welfare states . . . The buzz
was ‘techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuelas’ ” (2009: 33). I have not,
however, been arguing for an historical moment of ‘the welfare state’
per se. Instead, a state increasingly concerned with coordinating
productivity reflected the political agenda of industrial capitalist
power blocs who responded to the demands for demos at home with
expansive hegemony. Such hegemony was best achieved in a political
field (or fields) contained within the bounded national state, which
was imagined to be sufficiently coherent to make macro-planning
feasible and, thereby, bring the optimum number of the demos into the
hegemonic project. A truly vast array of postwar development schemes
were designed to prepare the way, if not actually produce, such a field
of operation. But it would be wrong to downplay the ‘dispossession’
dimension of international geopolitics during this era as a result of
the ravages of extractive industries, the imbalance in capital flows
from South to North on which at least some of core welfare relied, and
contests over political influence up to 1989.
Yet it is clear that as the modern state became increasingly biased
toward its productivist functions, far from resolving the Malthusian
problem of surplus population, it actually generated its own versions
thereof. In brief, the problems arising from expanded reproduc-
tion could be resolved temporarily and spatially through expansive
hegemony, but never finally solved.
2. Capital as enclosure and selective hegemony

Three features distinguish the current conjuncture from the one
just discussed. The first of these has a material and an ideological
20 G. A. Smith
dimension: the extremes of social polarization that result from the cur-
rent forms of capitalism and the endorsement by both conservative and
social democratic political elites of class concentration. The second is
the dominance of finance capital. And the third is what Foucault calls
the pervasive “social ethic of the enterprise”—from the economic to the
social sphere, the cultural, artistic, and so on, such that all “the basic
units would have the form of the enterprise” (2008: 148). This is not an
exhaustive list; it is simply a selective description of discrete features.
This package (and much besides) has come to acquire a generic name:
neoliberalism.
While this term has been used to refer to a particular form of capi-
talism and its relation to the state (e.g., Peck and Tickell 2002; Harvey
2005; Smith 2005; Jessop 2006), as we have seen in the case of Ong an
especially pervasive use of the term restricts it to a kind of government
(Dean 1999; Rose 2000; Foucault 2008). In this narrative, neoliberal-
ism emerges from the effectiveness of the intelligentsia themselves in
configuring the nature of truth—first the late-eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries’ political economists (e.g., Smith and Ricardo)
whose principles authorized the self-limiting of modern government
and then Freiberg ‘liberals’ seeking to break with the Marxism of the
Frankfurt School (Foucault 2008). It is as though the resolution of the
demos/tecnos tension in the tripartite pact called the welfare regime
happened because Keynes said it should be so, and now we have a dif-
ferent regime because Milton Friedman said it should be so. Foucault’s
disclaimers notwithstanding, this does seem to be an especially idealist
understanding of causality.
Here I try to understand the package of features just described
by use of Marx’s principles of the critique of the original political
economists (i.e., the frame I have just used for discussing the KNWS). I
began that argument by suggesting that we are helped in understand-
ing modern productivist society in terms of a tension between demos
and tecnos. What emerged from these tensions were various forms of
‘welfare’ state (see Smith 1999: 195–227) as increases in relative sur-
plus value at home and expansions through markets and predation
abroad made possible resolutions through actual or promised redistri-
butions. But I also suggested that there is a second way of thinking
about a similar tension inherent to capitalism, which I glossed as free-
dom versus enclosure—freedom of movement and mind versus control
over flows and fancies. This second framing allows us to explore how
the class projects of certain kinds of capitalists get translated into
projects for hegemony, which do not have as their ideal goal universal
expansiveness but rather particularistic selection—with the obvious
corollary of an excess beyond those selected.
What was actually happening in the crepuscolo of Keynesiansism

was a series of initially piecemeal shifts in the vectors of capitalist
profit—from productivity to finance—that gradually became dominant:
financial capital asserted its logic over that of industrial capital and
the institutions into which it had become embedded.26 Thus, Robert
Wade (2009: 159) writes,
The process of financial dominance—what I call ‘financialization of the

economy’ (FOE) is measured quantitatively by ratios such as the total

credit outstanding as a percentage of GDP in the USA which dou-
bled from 170 [percent] in 1981 to more than 350 [percent] in 2007.
FOE is also measured institutionally in the way that other financial
institutions, including corporations, households and pension funds have
been reorganized in support of the capital market as the economy’s
pivotal institution. (Dore, 2000)
The problem to which neoliberal forms of governance were a

response remained those of productivity (in its broadest sense) and
the flow of its end products, but the tension between the freedom (of
movement) and its enclosure so that value flows toward capital now
became acute. Perhaps we can best understand this if we imagine that
we are a finance capitalist looking upon the North Atlantic region in
terms of the potentials of a firm, and use Peck and Tickell’s list of
the conditions that gave rise to neoliberalism as our prospectus: “. . .
competition from Newly Industrializing Economies, a slowdown in pro-
ductivity growth and profits in the Atlantic Fordist zone, the oil shocks,
the internationalization of capital flows, rising inflation and unemploy-
ment, and growing labour-militancy” (2002:386). Financial capitalists
use a variety of instruments to securitize the future. Faced with all
but one of the conditions described here, one response might be to
sell short on this future (of the Atlantic Fordist zone). Another would
be to take advantage of that one exceptional condition—the interna-
tionalization of capital flows—to disperse investment to benefit from
alternate futures to be found elsewhere.
We can formulate this in terms of a series of hegemonic projects
each with a horizon beyond the other. To make such movements pos-
sible, an initial component of the hegemonic project was to secure the
ideological and juridical conditions to free up movement. Especially
in the United States and the UK, neoliberalism was an expression of
the way finance capital used the state to secure two crucial conditions
to enhance the field of its operation. The first was to provide a ratio-
nale for a shift in the notion of ‘good value’ from the use of capital for
deriving profits from productivity to a use of capital to capture profits
22 G. A. Smith
through movement and enclosure.27 The second was to enact a package

of programmes that facilitated international capital flows. This in turn
produced conditions across a second, broader horizon that generated
a shift in a relationship within capital—between finance, commerce,
and industry. Finally, a further horizon affected relations between cap-
ital (dominated by finance) and ordinary people. Distinct from earlier
resolutions of problems of capital reproduction,28 these latter kinds of
capitalist socialization found expression in hegemonic projects directed
toward selected people rather than the population at large, leaving a

residue of people surplus to these projects.
Two resulting features are especially distinctive from the KNWS.
One has to do with the specific problems that arise from attempts to
regulate the reconfigured space on which finance capital depends. The
instruments used to do this at a global level have a knock-on effect
at more reduced scales. The other has to do with the way in which
financial securitization relies first on the distinctions among social
phenomena and then on the means for establishing equivalents among
them. These two features—dispersal and compartmentalization—are
connected in multiple ways. And it is these interconnections that
modify the capitalist socialization process from its earlier form under
KNWS.29
As the ability to make profits from capital mobility increased
through the 1970s and 1980s—not just through the speed and ease of
flow (freedom), but through interrupting and redirecting flows (enclo-
sure)—so it created its own opportunities and its own problems.30 A
global problem had to do with money itself. A major service provided
by the state in the early days of merchant capitalism had been the
provision of a uniform currency across the kingdom and, ideally,
its relative stability over time. With the new order, changes in the
exchange rate between, say, Japanese and German currency could
spell doom for an international contract. Arbitraging across ‘spreads’
of this kind had long been both the solution to the problem and the
source of wealth for those so engaged, but as the sheer number and
speed of such transactions increased, problems of flow arose. Moreover,
the problem was not just finding equivalents across spatial variability.
With ever-greater movements of capital to secure the future of rainfall
in a wheat belt, on the one hand, and the cost of raw iron, on the other,
there was a need for instruments that could assess equivalents across
phenomena with qualitatively different kinds of value. A variety of
financial instruments arose to address these issues.31
Finance capital then, which relies on movement that allows it to
float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, had first to break down barri-
ers that restricted movement and then produce monetary instruments
to resolve issues that arose from the more ephemeral kinds of spaces
that resulted. Financial instruments can be seen as attempts at
regulation in response to these conditions. And then, under the rubric
of securitization, similar instruments were applied to more localized
spheres. This, in turn, changed the balance in the way expropriation
took place—between the capital-labour relationship of production
capital, on the one hand, and expropriation through various forms of
enclosure on the part of finance capital, on the other.
There is nothing new in making profits by taking rents from working

people and selling them access to credit. Indeed, this is and long has
been a means for extracting surpluses from non-capitalist relations.
Nor is there anything new in the way these kinds of extraction have a
polarizing effect, impoverishing some households (or specific members
thereof) while pushing others toward the extension of their working
day or working life. (For a detailed case, see Sider 2003.) But the
integration of these with financial services means that the rationality
of financial instruments “orient domestic life” (Martin 2000: 43).
In the last twenty years or so we have seen labour being treated like
capital, the household being treated like a small business. . . . taking
positions about an unknowable future. It comes back to the issue of the
state withdrawing from guaranteeing the future. And it’s not just deci-
sions about interest payments. It’s about deciding whether or not and
how to ‘invest’ in a range of things. Education . . . my telephone and elec-
tricity. . . . Which superannuation fund or pension fund? . . . The list is
long, and you don’t really have the choice of not playing. So being work-
ing class now means engaging in competitively driven risk calculation
and management. (Bryan 2008: 7)
In the North after 1980, the state intervened “to enlarge credit
demands and then mobilize the national population around the
intrinsic worth of debt management and reduction” (Martin 2000:
44). Meanwhile, in the South sundry NGOs engineered the same
drive through such schemes as micro-credit while the World Bank
adopted a ‘global pension scheme,’ which would impose pension
funds that, unlike pay-as-you-go schemes, link pension payments to
funds’ investment performances (Wade 2009: 146). As Randy Martin
puts it: “The new international division of debt culled labour from
populations around the world and fed it into a spider’s web of financial
exchanges that spread from New York, London, and Frankfurt, to
Tokyo, Singapore and Johannesburg” (2007: 31). This is, of course,
‘taking back the commons’ (a form of accumulation by dispossession),
24 G. A. Smith
but it has an additional socialization effect, which is fundamental to

the way financial securitization is achieved through dispersal.
In financial terms ‘security’ is what you need in return for advanc-
ing a loan to somebody to offset the risk you take in making the loan. It
is an asset (usually physical), which that party (a person, a company,
a municipality and so on) owns that can be possessed if they ‘default.’
What is put up in this way is referred to as ‘collateral.’ This is one
way of acquiring some assurance that you will not lose what you have
advanced. But your assurance is tied to the exchange value of that one
asset. You can acquire further security however by dispersing these
kinds of obligations, so that if one of them loses its asset value, another
may gain. Again, sticking just to financial terms, securitization refers
to the bundling together of multiple credit and debt contracts—from
home mortgages, and student loans, to corporate and government
bonds. It is true then at an initial ‘take’ that securitization depends
on a primary step—to induce rents or interest in credits (usually
through extra-economic means), but it is a mistake to get stuck at this
level. Securitization detaches the rent that can be derived from specific
ownership—of a house, or a factory—or the interest that can be derived
from making advances that allow people specific ownership—of their
health care or their car—and thereby attains a new market value
from the synthetic package that results. This synthetic package is
traded and takes on a value of its own. Securitization draws household
economies as directly into capitalist accumulation as companies or
the economies of national governments. So we should not be misled
into isolating domestic debt and life-course risk management from the
entire reach of financial securitization which, taken as a whole, has
the effect of redrawing the mechanisms for the real subsumption of
labour to capital (Bryan and Rafferty 2010).32
Dispersal then—and the freedom of movement that makes that
possible—is fundamental to securitization. But we need to be cautious
about the spatial metaphor (Smith and Katz 1993). Dispersal can
of course refer to physical geography, but it can also refer to taking
different degrees and kinds of risks and benefiting from their dis-
persal. If these differences are only apparent, then nothing is gained
from this spread, so dispersal only works if the differences are real
from a financial point of view. It is not then just that the pervasive
configuration of social reality in terms of risk benefits finance capital
insofar as security can they be given a price. It is also that real
distinctions in the degree of risk and the kind of risk are essential
for the principles of securitization. This means the carving up of
values within units—the household, the firm, the environment, and
so on—and the insistence on the reality of the differences between
them. Securitization through dispersal depends, in the language of

finance, on diversification—in the language of society, on diversity.
Earlier I was critical of suggestions that neoliberal theoreticians
produced a body of theory that was so powerful that it conditioned
the world we live in. Here I am not simply reversing the idealist bias
with a materialist one. Rather, I am suggesting that the conditions of
capitalist socialization produce a complex of relationships. Neoliberal
rationales are cognate with many of those relations and practices.33
Counter-movement and revindicative politics

As I said at the outset, it is not the task of this article to rehearse in
detail the kind of revindicative politics that might arise from the con-
ditions I have described here. Yet this intervention is motivated by a
conviction that we need to think quite carefully about what these con-
ditions mean for such politics. I believe that the politics of negotiation
revolves around various claims on social membership understood in
terms of diversity rather than universality—“real partners, social
groups, identity groups, and so on,” in Rancière’s words—and I will
discuss these kinds of politics first. But I think current forms of
capitalism, within the core spheres of finance in the North and
beyond—through imperialist impositions of the terms of so-called ‘free-
trade,’ plus military incursions—involve “the ousting [of] the surplus
subjects” (again in Rancière’s words), which give rise to an entirely
different kind of counter-movement lying beyond the various fields of
selective hegemony. As a result, the politics of such people cannot be
some kind of albeit modified extension of the politics of negotiation—be
it New Social Movements or various proposals for local alternatives to
the capitalist economy and the like. I will broach this issue second.
The interpretations of Chatterjee and Ong, which stress [neoliberal]
governmentality, are undoubtedly insightful, but the notion hegemony
embraces a wider arena of the social world: first, because it embeds
politics within features of the political economy and, second, because it
understands the social in terms of force and counterforce. And yet, as
Roseberry (1994) noted some years ago, a characteristic of such politics
is to frame the language of dispute within the terms of the prevailing
hegemonic fields. The politics of negotiation under conditions of selec-
tive hegemony thus induces claimants to collude in the constitution of
social fields of exclusivity made up of concentrations and enclosures.
One dimension of this kind of hegemonic collusion has to do with
different forms of capitalist socialization (i.e., the way people become
embedded in society through the form capitalist relations take at a
given time and place). A politics of negotiation is possible in this
26 G. A. Smith
realm working across the tensions of interdependency and conflict that

are as inherent to finance capital as they are to production capital
(as we have seen). Thus, flexibilization in the spheres of production,
services, and trade creates insecurity and precariousness, which them-
selves increase the contingencies of the future. People’s concern to
‘securitize’ their future then becomes a means for channelling sur-
pluses toward capital via financial instruments. But we then encounter
another kind of ‘security’ there, which relies, in part, on a kind of dis-
persal that is based on diversity. Achieving this kind of ‘spread’ means

differentiating not just among households (geographically, economi-
cally, culturally, ethnically, occupationally, etc.) but also differentiating
within households, breaking down each component that embeds a
person’s life into the future: schooling, health, old age, etc.
But this realm of a politics of negotiation is not identical to the poli-
tics of citizenship and rights—however cultural we want to make that
citizenship or however complex those rights. Obviously, this is not to
conclude that we should compartmentalize the two, but it does seem
important to make a distinction between the inherently tension-loaded
discourse of negotiation through which the capitalist subject is social-
ized and the juridical (and possibly ideological) discourses around
citizenship that also invoke social subjects. There may be a politics of
citizenship that has to do, for example, with recognition of rights in the
public sphere in terms of the autochtoons versus the allochtoons in the
Netherlands, or indigenas versus mestizos in parts of South America,
and so on.34 And these may be conducted in terms of a discourse of
negotiation. Yet although these are the most striking instances of selec-
tive hegemony, they may simultaneously reflect and obscure the differ-
entiations that arise out of specific forms of capitalist exploitation.35
These processes are almost infinitely complex and, therefore, from
the perspective of ethnographic enquiry, deeply forbidding. Even so,
despite the importance of their specificities, the fact is that both these
vectors of socialization perpetually produce and reproduce difference
and fragmentation. The degree to which the two are entwined or not
clearly will vary, but along either plane there is room for the politics of
negotiation.
No doubt aspects of the current conjuncture throw up challenges for
the conceptual and methodological tools we have at our disposal, but
I believe that, working from the kind of frame I have provided here,
we can at least begin this task. For both Marx and Gramsci it was the
conditions by which capitalism socialized the world that gave clues
to effective counter-politics. Such an agenda remains fundamental
today for a politics suited to negotiation within the field of hegemony,
a hegemony that is hard to see as anything but selective.
But the characteristics of current forms of capitalism combine

with configurations of the social in terms of selectivity and spheres of
exclusivity to suggest that an entirely different kind of politics must
be thought for those who are effectively excess to society rendered
in this way. As we have seen, there are a number of quite distinct
ways in which the reproduction of capitalism can produce absolute
surplus populations.36 This was certainly the case prior to the cur-
rent conjuncture. Despite such principles of expansive hegemony as
republican universalism and the state’s responsibility for offsetting

capitalist polarization, neither the KNWS in the North nor ‘devel-
opment’ projects in the Global South addressed these issues. There
were always those ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ expansive hegemony—in short:
lumpen. Even so, the authority rulers derived from appealing to such
principles, and the fact that counter-movements acquired leverage by
being framed in those terms, effectively configured the relationship
between revindicative politics and surplus populations was distinct
from the current conjuncture.
Neoliberal states today do not see their role as one of counteracting
the inequities of capitalism but rather enhancing its field of operation.
And as dominant blocs increasingly represent finance so the role of
social democracy in enhancing the state-productive project is redrawn.
Finance capital may rely on growth but it does not itself produce
it; rather, its purpose—and its effectiveness—is in seeking out the
most microscopic element of surplus and channelling it back toward
capital, for the next round of pursuit. As David Harvey (1982) and
Neil Smith (1984) nearly thirty years ago showed, capital continually
requires difference, produces difference, and having exploited it must
seek out a new coefficient of difference. But insofar as expropriation
of surplus preeminently through movement and enclosure does not in
itself enrich the overall economy, it does not produce wealth. A series
of concentric circles of wealth concentration become ever more intense
at the centre while, taken together as overall wealth, the circles do not
expand but contract, leaving surplus population to a kind of politics
that has to be distinct from those within the hegemonic field, or even
those with the potential of entering it.
Hegemonic projects are directed toward selected groups. And the
recipients of such projects collude in the distinctions that allow their
claims to be made in terms of selective hegemony. This, in turn,
provides the templates that then authorize the distinctions that these
people make vis-a-vis populations beyond that field. There arises a
distinction between this kind of politics and another kind. The ways
in which regimes of regulation deal with ‘the residuum’ produced
by the specific forms of current capitalism suggest that a politics
28 G. A. Smith
of revindication for such people will require features for which the
concepts of social science seem severely limited.
I confess to finding it hard to move into this terrain. One way to
go, however, is to work quite carefully with the principles that drove
Gramsci’s enquiries in the twenties and thirties. As we have seen, for
a long time populations were assessed on the valuation of labour in
terms of its contribution to the production of surplus value through
the labour process. Marx’s point was that, in a typical reversal, this
meant that, however much one may labour for one’s own survival, or
perhaps even communally for the common good, to the extent that
such labour did not produce surplus value for capital it was surplus,
and people who performed only such labour were effectively surplus
people (at least until they were needed again). I have argued that
Gramsci framed his argument in similar terms. Yet, I have spent the
latter part of this article seeking to show that the forms of capitalist
socialization now dominant do not result in a form of hegemony which,
in principle,37 might extend to “the whole of society.”
Before bringing coercion and persuasion together under the rubric
‘hegemony,’ Gramsci separates the two with numerical points:
The functions in question are [those of] . . . social hegemony and political
government. These comprise:
1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the popula-

tion to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant
fundamental group . . .
2. The apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces dis-
cipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or
passively. (1971: 12–13)
Here, Gramsci is talking of two processes directed at two distinct

groups: those who consent and those who do not consent to the project
of the dominant bloc.
The form of hegemony that provided the principles of the welfare
pact is contained in the sentence that follows these numerical points.
“This apparatus [hegemony] is, however, constituted for the whole of
society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction
when spontaneous consent has failed” (ibid: 13). Here, persuasion and
coercion are linked through time because hegemonic projects extend to
‘the whole of society’ in a context of cycles of capitalist expansion and
contraction (just as had Marx’s understanding of the function of the rel-
ative surplus population). So what allows this apparatus of hegemony
to be expansive to “the whole of society” is its sequential link.
Yet when the temporal and spatial connections Gramsci (and

Marx) envisaged are fractured, we are no longer talking of moments
when spontaneous consent fail nor of expansive hegemonic projects
potentially embracing the whole of society, but rather projects directed
toward selective groups. The idea of the state as the condensation of
universal popular sovereignty promised by expansive hegemony and
sustained by the tecnos of increases in productivity cannot be sus-
tained. Extractions of surplus value through various forms of enclosure
rely on flows that concentrate value already produced. Projects must,

therefore, be directed at selective groups. Hegemonic projects of this
kind then, work by being exclusive and thereby render obsolete the
ideological power of universal popular sovereignty. Moreover, because
selective hegemony reflects a form of capitalist socialization based on
surplus extraction through finance capital (as described here; see also
Smith, forthcoming), populations on the threshold of the hegemonic
field do not perform the relative function of resolving the cycles in
production capital (described above) in which their value is measured
in terms of their potential for surplus extraction directly through
the labour process. Not having such a latent value, for these people
coercion is not held off stage as a threat for the future thereby giving
power to persuasion; coercion is exercised in the present, unconnected
to persuasion.
The result is the substitution for a temporal distinction between
now and then, with a metaphorically spatial distinction in the present:
one space in which some are selected to be within hegemonic strategies
and another occupied by an absolute surplus population subjected sim-
ply to coercion. For these people a counter-politics directed uniquely
at neoliberal kinds of governmentality and the juridical features of
citizenship will, in Gramsci’s terms, be more wilful than organic.
Another way of putting this is to note that, as we have seen, the
role of the KNWS in using social citizenship to compensate for the
distributional and polarizing shortcomings of capitalist socialization
have now been supplanted by forms of state intervention that do not
perform this role. So claims to various rights in terms of citizenship
may effectively advance the conditions through which one is selected
in civil society, but they cannot be expected to ameliorate, still less
resolve, those conditions of life that are made impossible by capi-
talist relations themselves. Again, I need to stress that this is not
to argue for some kind of compartmentalization of the two realms,
but rather to argue for assessing political conditions and possibili-
ties in terms of their articulation. Clearly, issues of environmental
destruction as well as the conditions faced by so-called ‘immigrants,’
legal or otherwise, are profoundly tied to nationally specific forms of
30 G. A. Smith
capitalist socialization. But this may mean that it is the latter that
should become the central focus of struggle, rather than claims on
rights in terms of citizenship—however enlightened and encultured
that might be.
If we think in these terms, then it is surely clear that for some
people, just as it would be naïve to demand a more enlightened kind
of citizenship which in practice will not be applied to them, so too it
would be naïve to accept the principles of capitalist socialization and
demand simply that they be redrawn. While both of these strategies

seem to me to embrace most of what left politics is about today, it is
very clear that there are increasing numbers of people who accept
neither the principles of a liberal citizenship that is always grafted on
to capitalism nor a kind of capitalist system that is no longer able to
compensate for their exploitation through ‘growth.’38
We might identify four criteria along which we could assess the
distinction between counter-movement politics that I am suggesting
here:
1. Continuity/disjuncture: the degree to which participants see that

their demands can be met within existing social, political, and eco-
nomic forms versus the degree to which only threats to those forms
would establish the first step toward their goals.
2. Organization/participation: the ways in which political engage-
ment is organized and the forms of recruitment. To some extent
I see this as the ‘popular participation’ feature. Yet evidence of
strong popular participation plays especially to the notion that
the result will be to convince key players (including the players
themselves, but also imagined spectators, and those in power)
insofar as, once they ‘see’ the value of this specific action, they
will be persuaded. To this kind of leverage there is an important
addition. . . .
3. Disruption/production: the forms of leverage they have at their
disposal. One key element here would seem to be leverage that
comes from the potential toward enhancing productivity broadly
conceived that participants can offer, versus the degree to which
their leverage derives from the pressure they can bring on key
points that would produce significant disruption. Where those in
power minimize the productive potential of participants, the latter
strategy offers the only kind of leverage.
4. Subject/agent formation: clearly different kinds of political inter-
vention affect the subject-formation of participants. To some extent
I see negotiated politics versus radical revindicative politics much
in the way I see the distinction between the respective emphases in
this regard of Foucault, on the one hand, and say E. P. Thompson,

on the other. The one stresses the way in which govermentality
shapes subjectivity, and this is likely to be more the case for pol-
itics that involves participants in ‘dialogue’ with those in power
toward the reaching of ‘consensus.’ The other stresses the role of
force and counterforce in the emergence of the subject. Subject for-
mation here is closely associated with the agency of the subject,
collective and individual.
Any incident of political engagement would express different mixes

of these features and they are, of course, deeply interconnected.
The challenge for the left therefore is to explore the means by which
these myriad forms of revindicative politics can be combined as a
counterforce out of which capitalist social relations will be superseded.
Gramsci, of course, spoke of a war of position and a war of manoeu-
vre in the context of mass mobilizations extending out from the
industrial setting. The balance between effective mass popular force
and the technology of oppression was beginning to shift even in his
time and has certainly redrawn the role of mass mobilization today.
But what does remain is the need to identify points where interven-
tion would have a geometric effect on altering the balance of forces
in the interlocking chain of capitalist production and circulation. And
as these become increasingly securitized through military means
both domestic and imperial, it seems likely that the effectiveness of
counterforces will require addressing this coefficient in its own terms.
Perhaps we should take sustenance from James Baldwin who once
remarked: “It is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor
can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him but to
the victims” (1972: 89).
Notes
Received 2 April 2010; accepted 15 July 2010.
This article has benefitted from the insights of so many friends and colleagues in work-
shops, over coffee, in seminars, and across dinner tables that, but for its limitations,
it should really be seen as cooperatively authored. Thanks to Malcolm Blincow, Victor
Breton, Michelle Buckley, Deb Cowen, Jaume Franquesa, Kanishka Goonawadena, Ken
Kawashima, Kundun Kumar, Winnie Lem, Tania Li, Susana Narotzky, Jennifer Ridgley,
Neil Smith, David Sworn, and Judy Whitehead.
Address correspondence to Gavin A. Smith, Department of Anthropology, University of

Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 2S2. E-mail: gavin.gav@gmail.com
32 G. A. Smith
1. “The Turks have conquered Germany exactly how the Kosovars conquered Kosovo:
with a high birth rate . . . a large number of Arabs and Turks [in Berlin] have
no productive function with the exception of selling fruit and vegetables” [italics
added]. Thilo Sarrazin, administrator of the Bundesbank and once Berlin minister
of finance in the Social Democratic Party Le Monde [Online] 12.10.09.
2. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’ (1998), Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted
Lives: Modernity and its outcasts (2004), Mike Davis’s Planet of slums (2006), Mark
Duffield’s (2007) Foucauldian reading of ‘development’ as the liberal ‘enlightened’
form of eugenics, or Judith Butler’s (2009) lives whose ending is ungrieved.
3. I realize that ‘revindicative’ is not to be found in the English dictionary, but I use the
term here because it captures an element of the dialectics of politics that I cannot
find in another word in English. I take it from the Spanish reivindicar—to take
back.
4. He contrasted this to ‘willfulness.’ See Smith (2004, 2006) references.
5. For a response to Roy by Jairus Banaji, go to http://kafila.org/2010/03/22/response-
to-arundhati-roy-jairus-banaji/ (Accessed 16 April 2010).
6. This was the substance of Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama (1968) in which he
referred to the problem of cumulative disadvantage in which the success of growth
poles undermines the economic possibilities of less endowed regions.
7. While my discussion of Chatterjee here refers mostly to his article in Economic and
Political Weekly of 2008, which is confined to India, it is consistent with his book
(2004) (especially chapter 2) whose subtitle is “Reflections on popular politics in
most of the world.”
8. Given his past among the historians of subaltern studies it is surprising to find
Chatterjee reproducing here a picture remarkably similar to that of W. A. Lewis
(1954) and his followers in the 1950s, one in which value flows from the “modern or
formal sector” to the “traditional or informal sector,” this time through government
beneficence.
9. “. . . the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, as
politics without politics” (Zizek 2006: 38).
10. The allusion here is to the two elements of hegemony, its production and its recep-
tion, that I discuss at length in Smith (1999; 2004; 2006). See also Narotzky and
Smith (2006).
11. Ironically Banaji (see Footnote 6) accuses Roy of precisely the reverse omission—of
leaving out of her discussion what we have here seen as ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society.
12. For neoliberalism itself is “an extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed
to include as well as to exclude” (ibid: 5).
13. The shift in measuring the worth of the nation in terms of the wealth of the citizens
toward measuring it in terms of their contribution to overall productivity was a slow
and uneven emergence from mercantilism. Gregory King, who conducted the first
sociological style survey of England, in his General Account of the 1690s, divided the
population into 500,586 nobles, merchants, lawyers, etc., who increased England’s
wealth, and 849,000 labouring people, seamen, servants, etc., who decreased it (cited
in Mount 2004: 119–120).
14. ‘Security’ is a keyword (in Williams’s sense), indicating juridical treaties that reflect
the conjunctural moment in class and imperial wars. From social security, to the
securities and exchange commission, to national security, neighbourhood security
to the securitizing of supply chains.
15. Bourdieu captures the overall ethos that results from the relation of ‘freedom’ to the
reigning in of value back to capital: “Workers may contribute to their own exploita-
tion through the very effort they make to appropriate their work, which binds
them to it through the freedoms—often minute and almost always ‘functional’—

that are left to them . . . This is especially true when the dispositions that Marx
calls ‘vocational prejudices’. . . . find the conditions for their actualization in certain
characteristics of the work itself, such as competition in the occupational space for
example . . . It follows that, in many work situations the margin of freedom left
to the worker . . . is a central stake; it introduces the risk of non-work or even
sabotage, going slow, etc.; but it opens the possibility of investment in work or
self-exploitation. . . . It is on this principle that modern management theory, while
taking care to keep control of the instruments of profit, leaves workers the freedom
to organize their own work, thus helping to increase their well-being but also to dis-
place their interest from the external profit of labour (the wage) to instrinic profit.”
(Bourdieu, 2000) 203–204 [italics in original]).
16. By ‘enclosure’ I wish to stress not just the image of the enclosed field, to which
the small firm might be analogous but also the image of enclosing water through
channels and tubes, to direct flows.
17. For example: “Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist
production, the establishment of a norm . . . presents itself as . . . a struggle between
collective capital, ie. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, ie. the working
class” (Marx 1976: 342–344 [italics added]).
18. Those who debated the masa marginalista in the late sixties by contrast were con-
cerned precisely with the connection between forms of capitalism and the juridical
and normative elements that made it possible to designate a population ‘surplus.’
They began with an understanding of capitalist society as a dynamic tension-filled
process and asked how such a society produces surplus populations, and they then
tried to show how these ‘surpluses’ affect the further reproduction of that society:
“The first element of research . . . the mould . . . of a social formation dialectically
inter-relates three instances: the economic, the jurido-political, and the ideological.
Emergent at the level of the economy, the relative surplus population necessar-
ily involves the other two” (Nun 1969: 225–226 [translation mine]). See Smith,
forthcoming.
19. “necessary labour appears as superfluous, because the superfluous is . . . necessary
only to the extent that it is the condition for the realization of capital” (1973: 609).
20. “If a definite amount of labour capacity is given, the relation of necessary labour
needed by capital must necessarily continuously decline, ie: part of these capacities
must become superfluous, since a portion of them suffices to perform the quantity
of surplus labour for which the whole amount was required previously” (1973: 609).
Marx explicitly notes that this abstract division of labour into its necessary and
its surplus components could actually become a distinction among people, making
some necessary and others surplus.
21. “society in its fractional parts undertakes for Mr Capitalist the business of keeping
his virtual instrument of labour . . . intact as reserve for later use” (1973: 609–610).
22. One way to address this issue is to re-configure such people as in some way dif-
ferent (e.g., indigenous, or tribal) and then tie them to a place like a reserve (Li
2009). Another is to propose that migration eg to urban centres will resolve the
issue (Breman 2009).
23. The social and political implications of these kinds of surplus populations are dealt
with acutely by Li (2009).
24. But we should not overstress North/South distinctions; regional or urban sec-
toral concentrations in the global south can themselves produce their own relative
surplus populations as well as demands for land and resources.
34 G. A. Smith
25. It is important to assert that this is not the de Soto (1986) argument. Rather,
I am simply drawing attention to the obvious—the extent to which monopoly
and competitive industrial capitalism depended on the non-commodified sphere
for what is usually (misleadingly in my opinion) called social reproduction and
on the intricately commodified sphere for a vast array of supplies and services.
Hobsbawm (1984) notes that the huge expansion of factories in mid-nineteenth
century England was accompanied by a multiplication of such operations.
26. It is hard to overemphasise the degree to which financialization occurred in the
United States and Britain. Arrighi (2007: 140 [italics in original]) notes that by
the 1990s in the United States not only had finance, insurance, and real estate
surpassed the share accounted for by manufacturing profits, “non-financial firms

themselves sharply increased their investment in financial assets relative to that in
plant and equipment, and became increasingly dependent on financial sources of
revenue and profit relative to that earned from productive activities . . . manufac-
turing not only dominates but leads this trend towards the ‘financialization’ of the
non-financial economy.”
27. “Buying a property and waiting for its price to inflate was deemed as productive as
investing in new means of production” (Michael Hudson 2008).
28. The capital-labour relationship expressed in the wage, the tripartite pact of the
political representatives of capital and labour mediated by the state, etc.
29. The limitations of what Glick Schiller calls “methodological nationalism” become
especially apparent under these conditions. Problems of exposition are made still
more challenging when we recognize that we are trying to grapple with economic,
juridical, social, and cultural features that are reciprocally connected in a kind of
moebius strip (see also W. R. Scott 2004) The abbreviated discussion here is given
more extensive treatment in Smith, forthcoming.
30. Production capital remains the baseline upon which value (through labour) is gen-
erated. It follows then that finance capital cannot be ‘pervasive’ and old-fashioned
labour has not disappeared (though it may have moved). Rather, finance capital
is dominant in the sense that its principles condition the priorities of production
capital and, as we will see, the priorities of some kinds of labour.
31. Earlier in this article I used the term ‘instruments’ when referring to capital tools,
rather than the more frequently used ‘machines.’ The expression ‘financial instru-
ments’ is in common parlance. Here I use it to refer to a vast array of things from
derivatives like credit default swaps (CDS) or collateralized debt obligations (CDO)
to models like the Gaussian Cupola, as well as the software programmes required
to generate them. Use of the word across these instances is intentional.
32. “the effect of securitization was to aggregate a vast number of otherwise discrete
mortgage transactions . . . into a single mass of exposures; generating a socialized
working class expression in financial markets” (Bryan and Rafferty 2010: 4).
33. As Michel Feher notes for the notion ‘human capital’: “It is precisely as a conse-
quence of [the] desire to overcome the divide between the intimate man and the
entrepreneur that one should understand the promotion of human capital—that is,
the presentation of the individual as ‘investor in him or herself ” (Feher 2009: 33).
The analogy with the firm is brought out further by Feher (ibid: 34), who notes that,
“while labour power is the property of the free labourer, neoliberal subjects do not
exactly own their human capital; they invest in it.” The parallel with shares in a
joint stock company is patent and, lest we still resist the association with finance
capital Feher continues, “the relationship between the neoliberal subject and his or
her human capital should be called speculative, in every sense of the word” (ibid
[italics his]). I am grateful to Drew Gilbert and Andrea Muehlbach for pointing me
to Feher’s reflections.
34. The appearance of selective hegemony is especially obvious in development projects
in the Global South, where particular groups whose names acquire extraordi-
nary symbolic capital, become the selected targets of multiple agencies pursuing
often uncoordinated programmes: creditworthy single mothers, indigenous peas-
ants, pandas . . . and so on, whereas inevitably others—non-creditworthy mothers,
non-indigenous peasants, non-panda consumers of bamboo—do not. And any urban
or regional ‘renewal’ project will reveal the same kind of phenomena.
35. Evidence for the shift from expansive to selective hegemony in Latin America is
provided in Roberts and Petras who remark:

“[Urban policies] mark a shift from the old urban political economy of the highly
centralized states of the Import Substitution Industrialization period to a new
one. . . . An important part of this shift . . . is a decreasing emphasis on the univer-
salistic social policies of the past and an increasing emphasis on policies targeted to
specific groups and individuals in need” (2006: 58).
36. I need to add an important caveat here. It seems to me that the role of ‘surplus pop-
ulations’ has become crucial to a revindicative politics in the future. And I feel that
this is so in a way that was not the case at the height of the KNWS. I have therefore
talked of the distinctions between these two situations. Yet it would be absurd to
imply that this situation is unique. Through history societies have produced people
who appear as ‘surplus’ to that society. Indeed, it has been argued that for Marx and
Engels there was a ragbag of people who were also surplus to revolutionary politics
(Stallybrass 1990). The question I pose, therefore, is whether this remains the case
(if it were ever the case in the first place).
37. In principle only of course. ‘The whole of society” is understood in terms of force and
counterforce so that hegemony has to do with alliances under conditions of conflict.
38. This raises the question as to whether countries like China where production cap-
ital is quite prevalent can indeed address pressures through growth and increased
productivity. Only empirical investigation can offer the beginnings of an answer.
Factors to consider though are the fact that China has tended to increase the dis-
tinctions among the populations in the shift toward capitalism; financialization is
a major source of wealth and hence capital flow; and this in turn has influenced
China’s national and international investment decisions.
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Selective Hegemony and Beyond-Populations with “No

Key Words: finance capital, production capital, class, Keynesianism, neoliberal-

wake of a much larger and more long-standing discussion in which

regional identity, etc., in liberal states through much of the twentieth

that both in the realm of population and in the realm of productivity

of action beyond such politics where no such negotiation is possible,

quite comprehensive state planned interventions in the form of the

‘trusteeship’) of the chaos and disorder resulting from the former

known as neoliberalism. The dominant economic and political classes

While an immanent process of development encompasses the dimension

might emerge therefrom? Two recent interventions have addressed

Chatterjee and Ong on the current conjuncture

ongoing development of capitalism of the separation of peasants and

Yet, using the idiom of governmentality, Chatterjee presents us with

. . . [T]he activities of governmentality require multiple, cross-cutting

The major distinction that Chatterjee identifies is a “split in the field

urban middle classes from political activities altogether” (ibid: 62). As

Though the vast majority of Chatterjee’s article and, indeed, his

social membership12 to “exclude populations and places from neolib-

[privileged?] spaces where liberal reason ideally prevails, though in

Here then is a second instance of selective hegemony, and Ong ini-

Demos and tecnos: “freedom” and enclosure

government destroys the dynamism and creative potential of the life

to property, the right to ‘representation’ and subsequently the right to

it is the tension/balance between freedom/enclosure that we need to

Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ along the way, is used pre-

1. Capital as tecnos and expansive hegemony

insoluble problem or threat to that society.21 This ‘threat’ can be

the other are the resources. Cumulatively higher levels of productiv-

1996). This, in turn, generated people who appeared as surpluses, most

production capital toward expanded reproduction. It doesn’t happen

welfare-state citizenship were embedded in a kind of liberal republi-

expansive hegemony was an attempt at resolution. So, the first

added a vast array of contingent historical realities arising from the

2. Capital as enclosure and selective hegemony

What was actually happening in the crepuscolo of Keynesiansism

The process of financial dominance—what I call ‘financialization of the

economy’ (FOE) is measured quantitatively by ratios such as the total

The problem to which neoliberal forms of governance were a

through movement and enclosure.27 The second was to enact a package

toward selected people rather than the population at large, leaving a

There is nothing new in making profits by taking rents from working

but it has an additional socialization effect, which is fundamental to

them. Securitization through dispersal depends, in the language of

Counter-movement and revindicative politics

realm working across the tensions of interdependency and conflict that

persal that is based on diversity. Achieving this kind of ‘spread’ means

But the characteristics of current forms of capitalism combine

republican universalism and the state’s responsibility for offsetting

1. The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the popula-

Here, Gramsci is talking of two processes directed at two distinct

Yet when the temporal and spatial connections Gramsci (and

rely on flows that concentrate value already produced. Projects must,

demand simply that they be redrawn. While both of these strategies

1. Continuity/disjuncture: the degree to which participants see that

this regard of Foucault, on the one hand, and say E. P. Thompson,

Any incident of political engagement would express different mixes

Address correspondence to Gavin A. Smith, Department of Anthropology, University of