The residual population: non-labourers or non-citizens?

Gavin Smith
University of Toronto

Paper for session “Distribution and abandonment in worlds without work”

AAA Meetings, Montreal 16-20 Nov 2011.

In trying to respond to the issues raised in the abstract for this session I decided to

have a conversation with two authors who have recently published work that discusses

respectively issues to do with people who are made residual by the economy and people

who are made residual by what I would call ‘political society.’ The first of these is

Kalyan Sanyal’s Rethinking capitalist development. The other is Andres Guerrero’s

“Echoes arising from two cases of the private administration of populations”. One is

anchored in work on the Indian sub-continent but provides a framework for broader

application. The other employs historical work on late 19th century Ecuador to

interrogate issues of undocumented people in contemporary Europe.

I have worked in Peru and Spain on various kinds of livelihood arrangements among

poor people – domestic enterprises, confederations of households, jobbing outwork etc

etc. but I don’t think this work is sufficiently recent to be useful to this panel. I do want to

emphasise though that – obviously – what I find challenging about the two authors I

discuss is deeply informed by issues that have arisen in my own work.

In the more extensive paper I try to follow quite faithfully the links in the two

authors’ respective works that bring them to their conclusions. But I don’t have time to

do that here. So I will just outline what I think are important points.

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 1. First both make the case that the dominant society through its actions produces an

‘outside’ a zone of exclusion (a term they both use).

2. Second, they both argue that there is something qualitatively distinct about this

zone of exclusion that distinguishes it from the dominant society, and

3. Thirdly they both argue that the existence of this ‘outside’ is not separate from the

reproduction of the dominant society; rather the material and the discursive

reproduction of the dominant society relies on these other forms.

Thus Sanyal: “In our theorization, capital and its outside mutually constitute

each other.”

And Guerrero: “citizenship takes the form of an extension, but with a crease:

it turns inside on itself like a pair of socks, retaining simultaneously an

appearance of universal equality on the outside and, inside, that of the private

administration of populations.” (nd: 7-8)

In my own terms this means that we cannot speak here of assemblages, but rather of

articulations.

Working mostly in what we might call the dimension of economy, Sanyal argues that

by its very nature present day “capital” generates abandoned populations. Guerrero, on

the other hand, makes the argument that liberal democracy – again, by its very nature –

relies on a private administration of populations that occurs behind the back of the law in

order for it to be liberal democracy for the citizens interpares: those who are equal within

the law. Each author however, tends to stick within their respective arenas – the one

economic, the other political. Yet, if we are to take them both seriously then what we

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would have to accept is that – taken together – both the economy of capital and the

political of liberal democracy are inherently generative of precisely the two problems that

concern this panel: differential distribution and abandonment.

Perhaps many of us – if pushed – would agree on this: that capitalism is inherently

polarizing and that liberal democracy is inherently exclusive. But if this is so then how

does this affect the questions that should be addressed by concerned social scientists?

Could we, for example, work to improve one of these arenas to offset the other? Would a

capitalism that worked quite well in raising overall productivity mitigate against the

exclusivist tendencies of liberal democracy? Or, conversely, could liberal democracy

work sufficiently effectively in managing redistribution to offset the tendencies of the

capitalist economy? If the answers to these questions are negative – as I think they are –

then we are obliged to re-think the questions the social scientist should be addressing.

I will take one or two points from each of these writers, which I think oblige us to

think in this way. I don’t really have much else to say following these points, but I hope

they will be of some interest anyway.

Sanyal and Bhattacharyya

Sanyal’s discussion of a society made up of three tiers of kinds of labour is motivated by

a fact that he takes to be basic: the “‘surplus’ labor force presents the problem of

livelihood on a scale that exceeds the redistributive capacity of most postcolonial nation-

states.”

The economy of current capital in the global south is the result of an external

condition. And what results beyond capital is a result of a condition external to it.

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It is competition that produces the logic of accumulation that characterizes capital and

with globalization competition has become so rampant that capital can only accumulate

through dispossession: “expansion of the capitalist sector involves a flow of economic

assets… from the informal to the formal economy either through coercion or compulsions

of the market.” Always rapacious it is now the external factor of global free-for-all

competition that drives capital to lay waste its hinterlands.

It is then the “external coercive laws” that result which produces a different logic in

what Sanyal variously calls “the needs economy” or “the Chayanovian outside”: a kind

of economy that, “accommodates the surplus labor force by maximizing income rather

than profit and then distributing the average product to the family members irrespective

of their contribution to income”

This would appear to produce a kind of two-part capitalist economy, one part in

which there is a direct relationship between capital and labour with the tensions that

produces; and another part that “expands the economy outside the circuit of capital” and

results in a second – now more dominant fundamental tension in capitalist societies: that

between capital and the surplus labour force plus the spatial and material resources on

which they depend.

But in fact, as I have said, Sanyal speaks of three tiers. Between dominant capital and

economy of needs pure-and-simple lies another tier that “expands informal production

activities within the circuit of capital, connected to the latter through a complex network

of subcontracting and outsourcing [and other market relations that tie them into circuits

of capital]”. This by the way is the sphere of what Partha Chatterjee calls “political

society”. For Chattejee the three tiers have their equivalent forms of political expression

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and appropriate goverance: civil, political and – beyond his own discussion – “marginal

groups” unable to make effective demands on government.

Here then is an encapsulation of Sanyal’s framework. What concerns us is the relation

between these “marginal groups”, who Sanyal places in an economy of needs, and

dominant-capital-plus-the-state which enacts coercive laws. A relations we should note,

mediated by a middle sector.

Andres Guerrero

With this marginal group is mind as well as a mediating sector, let me turn very

briefly to Guerrero. I need to remind you that, in making this shift, we are also switching

the lens to highlight political society.

Guerrero finds that after successive acts through the first half of the 19th century that

brought into being the Republic of Ecuador, through the second half of the century

indigenas more or less disappear from the national archives. This is a liberal republic

with the vast majority of citizens being indigenous, so where have they gone? Effectively

we discover that Ecuadorian society was made up of white and mestizo citizens

interpares (in Guerrero’s terms) and the piece-meal settling of disputes and claims of the

indigenous extrapares population by these private citizens: “a process of identification

ruled by the “common sense” of private citizens.” In other words: “an egalitarian social

field folded back upon itself in a structure of domination [which]… operates in the shady

territory ‘behind the State’s back’.”

Not only did liberal democracy depend on this real politique, but Guerrero notes that

across these sites social membership was not a question of citizenship between the state

and its population, but among the populations themselves. Moreover the random or daily

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practice of these moments of private administration of the extrapares population, act as a

perpetual mnemonic of how real social relations actually work.

Guerrero then shifts attention to the Centres for the Administrative Detention of

Foreigners in Spain, noting that here too, the law does not apply. These are

administrative units outside the law of legal citizenship in Spain and by extension

throughout the EU. Most undocumented immigrants manage to bypass these Centres of

course and those thus detained must be released within 40 days, whereupon they are

provided with one document: a perpetual order of expulsion from the national territory. In

effect then, whether or not one actually passes through a Centre it nonetheless defines

one’s condition of being. Moreover, here too we find the random enactment of reminders

in the arena of what Guerrero calls “common sense citizenship” when citizens intrapares,

apply their common sense to the administration of those they take to be extrapares

populations; or constant repetitions raised to the level of spectacle in the press – the

building site accident, or the discovery of a dormitory of Chinese workers, all act as

mnemonics.

Yet it is precisely these instances that produce the conditionalities within which the

securing of livelihood is enabled for residual populations. Guerrero puts it this way:

The definition and indefinition of individuals are not opposed dimensions but

alternatives, both used according to the circumstances and conveniences of the

[different settings in which] the administration of populations [takes place].

It is precisely their condition as undocumented people that makes these people of value to

their intermediate semi-legal, all-but, not-quite-yet, colleagues whose networks generate

survival for them and albeit minimal profits for their sub- sub-contract employees.

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 *****

External Workers

The assumption or problem from which Sanyal and Bhattacharyya start is important

for the agenda of this panel. It is that, the “‘surplus’ labor force presents the problem of

livelihood on a scale that exceeds the redistributive capacity of most postcolonial nation-

states.” (2009: 13 Itals added)1. I can’t stress this enough. The reason why I think we

have to explore the issues raised in this paper is that, both in terms of features inherent to

the capitalist state and in terms of actual historical evidence, there is absolutely no

possibility for a distributional programme that would satisfactorily meet the current or

ongoing reproductive needs of ‘surplus populations’. This is first because the class

features of capital-reproduction always produce concentration and polarization against

the best motivations of the welfare state. In fact, as we have seen, contrasting their own

understanding with Arthur Lewis’s modern versus traditional sectors, Sanyal and

Bhattacharyya argue for a distributional flow in exactly the opposite direction:

“expansion of the capitalist sector involves a flow of economic assets… from the

informal to the formal economy either through coercion or compulsions of the market.”

(ibid: 7)

And second the historical reproduction of classes must surely result in a kind of

real politique. Any abstractly conceived ‘recipe’ for ‘saving the poor’ or any isolated

application of such a programme must first produce an agenda that addresses the political

conditions – the ‘revolutionary work to be done’ if you like, that would make feasible the

application of the recipe or programme. Even if the dominant classes that control the

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State – the Goldman-Sachs moles buried not so deeply in the heart of the US Treasury or

the European Central Bank – were to be persuaded to make such a gift, as Balibar has

noted given the rules of the gift, democracy and equality are not, by definition, things that

can be given. To achieve an afterlife, they must be taken. And yet as Partha Chatterjee,

one of the most sympathetic writers on distributional programmes, observes neither

“political society [n]or electoral democracy have… given [marginal] groups the means to

make effective claims on governmentality.” (2008: 61)

What then does such a society look like? In his earlier and larger work, Sanyal

makes a distinction between capital and capitalism. The former he uses to refer to what

is frequently called ‘the formal economy’ or ‘big capital’; the latter refers to a variety of

relations between capital and labour which he and Bhattacharyya refer to in terms of an

essentially three tier system: 1. Wage workers whom capital directly exploits; 2. A

second tier that “expands informal production activities within the circuit of capital,

connected to the latter through a complex network of subcontracting and outsourcing

[and other market relations that tie them into circuits of capital]” (ibid: 5); and 3. A third

tier, which they refer to as “the Chayanovian outside” or “the needs economy”, “expands

the economic space outside the circuit of capital” (ibid).

What are the distinct conditions that produce the logic of capital on the one hand

and the logic of needs on the other? They argue that what drives the logic of

accumulation in the formal economy is competition. And as global trade has increased

competition so capital has been driven still further toward dispossession as its principle

means for securing surplus value. This in turn has results in the logic of those thus

dispossessed. Here it is not competition but “external coercive laws”(ibid: 16) which

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create the conditions for a kind of economy that, “accommodates the surplus labor force

by maximizing income rather than profit and then distributing the average product to the

family members irrespective of their contribution to income” (ibid: 14. Itals added).

By using the work of Sanyal and Bhattacharyya I have tried to characterize the sort

of economic setting in which programmes for distribution operate, as well as the kinds of

livelihood of the abandoned – very far, of course, from “a world without work”, though

perhaps an assessment of work by different criteria. For the purposes of our panel,

however, it is worth noting that for these authors this is not just a descriptive framework.

They argue for a shift in the major contradiction of capital: from the contradiction

between capital and surplus-producing labour (their tier 1 and 2), to a contradiction

between capital and the surplus-labour force (the outer edge of their tier 2, but pre-

eminently tier 3, by far the most populous of the three tiers). Referencing Nun and

Quijano’s 1960s identification of la masa maginalizada,2 they note that here, “the laborer

is no longer a source of surplus, rather the laborer is an unwanted possessor or occupier

of economic resources from which (s)he must be divorced in order to free those resources

for use in the circuit of capital.” (ibid: 23). This being, in their view, the principle

contradiction of postcolonial capitalism, they identify “the ‘surplus’ labor force as a

potential political force in the postcolonial social landscape. (ibid: 13)

Once disappeared by Stalin, Chayanov has long disappeared a second time, so it is

not surprising that it is controversial to argue that what distinguishes the world of the

abandoned is that they practice an economy driven by needs and subsistence rather than

competition and accumulation/dispossession. For me the issue rests on the idea that the

economic unit – and by extension the entire economic space – maximizes income so as to

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distribute the average product to its members irrespective of their contribution to income

(see above). Were this the case, then this economy would be inherently beneficial, even

altruistic. The only surplus populations we would see, would be these same people: the

3rd tier all equally abandoned by capital and meagerly fed by the postcolonial state.

Were the average product, however, not distributed to its members irrespective of

their contribution to income, then within the 3rd tier we would expect to find specific

kinds of people who would be surplus populations even for the abandoned population

itself. Chayanov’s notion of an evenly distributed self-exploiting peasant household was

of course long ago criticized by feminists for the way it obscured the differentiations

within households and the forms of control a non-commodified sphere of labour relations

is likely to rely on. And Sanyal and Bhattacharyya themselves note that, given the

extreme scarcity of resources within this sector these kinds of non-commodified relations

allow “informal production units to supplement… scarce resources by drawing on

household resources for consumption. (ibid 24. Itals added). But why just “for

consumption”? Surely we have ample evidence that under these conditions household

resources are not drawn on for consumption; rather household resources of consumption

are drawn on to enhance income and they are not drawn on equally for all members.

Moreover this 3rd tier has by definition an open door for entry. This means that

pressures in the direction I am suggesting are gigantic. For these authors their ‘needs

economy’ can only operate up to a point – a point where average income is at the

subsistence level. Further entry “jeopardizes the social reproduction of the…economy

itself” (ibid: 16). This notion of an average subsistence level distributed evenly among

people in this sector seems more a requirement of the model than a likelihood in real life.

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Beside: surely it is almost a definition of ‘the abandoned’ that what they don’t have is a

subsistence income.

Perhaps all I have so far said is so obvious that it doesn’t need a marxisante

economics argumentation. But it does raise the question I posed at the outset. If there is

evidence that surplus populations produce their own forms of distribution distinct from

the formal economy, what are the principals of this distribution internal to the sector?

And if this sector perforce produces its own ‘abandoned’ – in terms of what we have been

asked to consider for this session: how are such people ‘chosen’. (see, for example, Sider

1986).

This brings us to the second intervention I want to consider, since Andreas

Guerrero asks how a certain kind of administration of populations can result, not just in

forms of exclusion by the governors, but among the populations themselves.

External Citizens

Partha Chatterjee (2004; 2008) , whose discussion of the politics of the governed I

have discussed elsewhere (Smith, 2011), relies quite strongly on Sanyal’s economy of

needs, though his own interest has more to do with different kinds of politics than

economics. The three tiers for Chatterjee would be 1) what he calls ‘civil society’:

people sufficiently integrated into what Sanyal would call the economy of accumulation

to collude entirely in the prevailing hegemony; 2) a very large arena of politics in which

members of the urban informal sector use their associations as a means for collectively

confronting government when the conditions of their livelihoods are being attacked.3 And

then 3) the article ends, almost as a kind of addendum, with a heading, “Marginal

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Groups”, where we find what he calls “the underside of political society”. “These

marginalized groups represent an outside beyond the boundaries of political society”

(2008: 61) It is these people that concern me here. I have so far discussed them from the

perspective of economic society; now I want to use the work of Andres Guerrero to try to

think of issues of distribution and abandonment through the lens of political society.

I have argued so far that there are a number of reasons why problems of

distribution and abandonment are not social issues with a comprehensive solution, but

rather are inherent to contemporary capitalism. Likewise I want to argue – with Guerrero

(and also with Domenico Losurdo (2011) who uses different historical materials but

comes to similar conclusions) – that the political society of liberal democracy works not

despite but precisely through selective distribution to citizens within, and a residual

population beyond. The implication here is much the same as in the realm of the

economic: the politics of liberal democracy is the problem: making it look like social

democracy or even welfare democracy doesn’t change this; it merely turns up the volume

to drown out the clamour of its inevitable victims.

In the tone of amused irony Guerrero begins, like Gyan Prakash and Dipesh

Chakrabarty, by noting how much the tropes used in histories of countries of the global

south are entrapped by the Master Narratives of the north, and suggests the value of

reversing the process – seeing how a feature of the history of a country of the south might

cast light on something happening in the north. “The vibration set up should provoke a

destabilization of the Master Narrative of the construction of the system of citizenship in

both places and times.” (n.d: 5)

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 The vibration begins in Ecuador where, from the second half of the 19th century,

the state simultaneously declared itself to be a liberal democracy in which all citizens

irrespective of race or culture had equal rights – what he calls “citizens interpares”, while

simultaneously abandoning the administration of Indian subjects to whites and mestizos.

Civil disputes among indigenas were settled by the local white or mestizo and where

communities might make claims to the state, then these people became ventriloquists

standing in for them. He writes,

[The] distinction between white-mestizos and indigenas was no longer a function of

the Republican State, but was left to a process of identification ruled by the “common

sense” of private citizens. The historical “astuteness” of this paradoxical construction

(an egalitarian social field folded back upon itself in a structure of domination) lies in

that it operates “behind the State’s back”, in the shady territory of a legal exception…

In these cases, within the sphere of citizen equality and beneath the sovereignty of

national law, we find nested states of exception, areas of political and juridical

indeterminacy which concern those populations of extrapares who have lost their

identification… (nd: 8, 7)

Here then is the case drawn from the south, specifically from Ecuador, where

Guerrero shares with us the apparent mystery of the absence of indios – the majority of

the population – from the state archives and then their re-discovery as he journeys out to

explore the jumbled documents of disputes and settlements in remote communities and

latifundias, where the white-mestizo group by mutual recognition “exercised domination

over the Indians in the intimacy of the citizens’ homes and haciendas, and in the areas of

contact such as the streets, the markets, the Church.” 22-3

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 The haciendas were not just political arenas for the private administration of

populations of course; they were also the major institution of the Ecuadorian agricultural

economy. And likewise, just as Sanyal notes for the household in his 3rd tier, the ‘home’

was as much a site of production as it was the intimate sphere of the family. The social

relations that made these arenas of livelihood possible were then, intimately connected to

the “private administration of populations” that Guerrero has described. And across these

sites, citizenship, as he points out, was not just a question of relations between the State

and the population, but among the populations themselves: through the institutions of the

hacienda, the domestic enterprise and the Church; and then too, in the common-sense

arena of the street and the market. “We must decentre the view that conceives of

citizenship exclusively as a relation between the State and the citizens, and shift to the

relationship established between the citizens and the populations: common-sense

citizenship.” (24) And then he speaks of the way the actual practice of these constructions

through the latter half of the 19th century come down to the present-day like non-

degradable plastic. Through repetition – daily allusions, off-hand remarks in a newspaper

article and so on – the notion of “common-sense citizenship” perpetually configures the

lines between interpares and extrapares. And, by being common sense rather than

juridical, it does the citizenship work in daily affairs that the law can’t reach, only

selectively reaches or reaches only restrospectively – to justify a settlement made by

force majeur through the post hoc application of a ‘law’.

What Guerrero shows us with this Ecuadorian case are three operations of

citizenship and population: State recognition of citizens interpares; the State’s silent

acknowledgement and reliance on the private administration of populations in sites like

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the haciendas and communities where the law is not applied; and, finally, common-sense

administration in the daily truck and trade of ordinary life – by whites and mestizos (the

citizens interpares) of indio extrapares. Yet these are not self-constituting, contained

sites; they are profoundly interconnected – not so much in a line of dominance from the

State down through citizens interpares to the residuum – but rather interconnected in the

sense that the form taken by the one relies on the others and in fact is constituted by the

others.

Shifting to Spain and contemporary Europe we are focusing now on the so-called

“undocumented” immigrants vividly captured in the pictures of their cayucos (open,

wooden boats) arriving on the shores of the mainland or the Canaries, and evoked more

virtually and threateningly in illegal immigrants’ supposed infiltration into acute settings

of everyday life. After interrogation these people finally arrive in Centres for the

Administrative Detention of Foreigners where the law of European citizenship is

suspended. These are sites of arbitrary administration by the police, supervised by an

appointee of the state.4 In this sense they are analogous to the site of the hacienda in late

19th century Ecuador. As Guerrero puts it

According to the laws in force, entering the country is not a crime but rather an

“administrative fault”…. But this is the point. The situation of the immigrants is that

of people who do not enjoy the full light of the law, but have entered an area of

indeterminacy, in the shadows of legal normality. (33)

And then this institutional arrangement conditions at least one form of the common-sense

administration of populations beyond the Centres. By Spanish law people cannot be held

in the camps for more than 40 days, whereupon they are released with an expulsion order

15
in their hands – their only documentation. With this of course they are vulnerable to

arrest and detainment from one day to the next. And, while most undocumented

immigrants never pass through them the principles of the Centres extend to their lives,

the only difference being that they don’t actually have the expulsion order in their

pockets. So this space of the Centres – of “administrative fault” rather than law – where

one finds oneself extrapares rather than citizen – produces the perpetual netherworld in

the quotidian hinterland beyond it. Guerrero provides us with instances in which

extrapares are confronted by what he calls the common sense administration of

populations by the European equivalent of white and mestizo intrapares citizens in

Ecuador – what the Dutch call the autochthones. Here the threshold is like a darkened

one-way glass that can hide the alien until some momentary inflection of light shows

through the glass and the autochthones, haunted by the figure of the extrapares

population among them, alert figures of administration – the police officer, the airline

pilot and so on – to assert “the Law”.

But he also speaks of a more permeable threshold: the networks provided by those

“immigrants” now occupying a space somewhere between documentation and illegality.

The hazards these people face in the marginal space on the edge of citizenship produce

conditions that make them analogous to Sanyal’s 2nd tier in the economic sphere. Many

of them put together a livelihood by facing one way toward the dominant political society

and its economy of accumulation, and facing the other way toward the entirely

undocumented – and then they work the territory in between.

Guerrero tells a story of the deaths of five people on a building site in Barcelona

which we would find bizarre were it not so common. They of course were found to have

16
no documentation of their own, though after investigation it was found that they did gain

access to the work through documents provided by other “immigrants”. The firm that

drew up the contract was found to be a shell which led to another supposed firm which

turned out to be a telephone booth. There were in fact three ‘levels’ of intrapares,

altrapares and extrapares with interlocking forms for the administration of populations

in each setting. As Guerrero points out,

The definition and indefinition of individuals are not opposed dimensions but

alternatives, both used according to the circumstances and conveniences of the

[different settings in which] the administration of populations [takes place]. 33

These levels or sites within a network are in fact entrepreneurial moments in which

livelihood is pursued, moments which rely on the strategic “definition and indefinition of

individuals.”

The Centres for the Administrative Detention of Foreigners (as well as their

negation in the possibility of avoiding them – which is the case for most undocumented

immigrants) provide the institutional beacon that authorizes the perpetual but apparently

random moments when autochthones, ie. citizens intrapares, apply their common sense

to the administration of those they take to be extrapares populations.5 These constant

repetitions, heralded in the press, and frequently raised to the level of spectacle through a

building site accident, or the discovery of a dormitory of Chinese workers, act like the

degradable plastic cups that Guerrero speaks of.

In the case of Europe, it is then these instances that constitute the figures of a

residual population. An instance perhaps of the external coercive laws that Sanyal speaks

of as the force that gives rise to an economy of needs. Here we see this in quite specific

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terms: it is the combining of political abandonment with the economic circumstances it

produces that precisely makes these people of value to the semi-legal sub-contract

economy in what Sanyal calls the 2nd tier. Guerrero’s use of ‘levels’, Sanyal’s distinction

between the sub-contract economy and the economy of needs, and Chatterjee’s

distinction between ‘political society’ and ‘marginalized groups’ obscure the fact that the

movement between these is both potentially a moment of abandonment for somebody and

– by being so – a potential moment for profit for somebody else.

This in turn obliges us to note that the legal features of liberal citizenship generate

the conditions necessary to produce ‘illegals’ much as the economic features of 1st and

2nd tier accumulation produce beneath-subsistence ‘informals’. It is true that the

principles of legal citizenship and the labour relations that drive the high-tech capitalist

economy may in fact to all intents and purposes lie well beyond this residual population –

in the sense that the criteria for selection – as citizen or worker – are unlikely to be even

remotely relevant within the daily workings of their world. But we need to recognize that

the principles that hold for that dominant world create the conditions of possibility by

which selection, distribution and abandonment occur within and among the so-called

‘residual population.’

Tentative Conclusions

What these two interventions suggest then is that draconian selections of this kind are

first made obligatory by the dominant economy of accumulation and then contoured,

given shape, identified, by the principles prevailing in the dominant society of liberal

democracy. Despite the built-in altruism Sanyal ascribes to the Chayanovian outside, he

himself notes that the context of coercive laws enabling perpetual dispossession

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jeopardize the social reproduction of the needs economy itself – pinched between

declining resources on one side and the expanding entry of people cast off by tiers 1 and

2 on the other.

One clue to a feature of how this process works might lie with a rejection of the

image of an economy or polity divided pre-eminently between an inside and an outside –

albeit one in which each conditions and defines the other, as both authors argue: an

accumulation economy and a needs economy, or citizens interpares and populations

extrapares. – because these images tend to blindside the crucial role of the threshold

populations in each arena, the economic or the political. Sub-contract or semi-legal

people face in one direction towards the economic and juridical conditions produced by

the dominant society. Then, when they face in the other direction it is these conditions

that effectively shape the principles that facilitate their use of residual populations.

If then we were to return to a question I asked at the outset – where does the

responsibility for distribution and abandonment lie: with the dominant society, or among

the abandoned themselves? I think our response has to be that by speaking of the issue in

these ethical terms we side-line the awkward truth of what we are speaking of here: that

what matters are the structural features essential to contemporary capitalism and liberal

democracy respectively.

We can of course focus our enquiries on the innovative or traditional projects of

liberal or social democratic governments to address problems of distribution or

abandonment. And we can likewise invoke an internally coherent needs economy in

which what people are deprived of is ‘work’. But the need among social scientist to

convince ourselves (and of course our various constituents) that we do have a useful role

19
to play may simply feed a perpetuating kind of myopia about the fundamental logics by

which the societies in which we live –both economic and political – are reproduced. In

other words, if instead of tackling these structural features at their source we continue to

make the central foci of our discussions remedial issues of distribution and ethical

concerns about abandonment then we are into the dangerous business of trying to pin

cicada’s wings onto a scorpion.

References Cited!!

Balibar, Etienne. 2002: Politics and the Other Scene. Verso. London

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000: Provincializing Europe. Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 2004: Politics of the governed: reflections on political politics in most
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1
Page references for both Sanyal/Bhattacharyya and for Guerrero are for original
manuscripts. The former was published in Economic and Political Weekly in 2009. I am
grateful to Tania Li for letting me have a copy of this. The latter is a translation by
Tristan Platt of the last chapter of Guerrero’s (2010) book, shortly to appear in Focaal –
Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.
2
In 2000, Nun reflected on this earlier work saying, “I tried to show that in many places a
surplus population was growing that in the best of cases was simply irrelevant to the
hegemonic sector of the economy and in the worst of the cases endangered its stability.
This presented the established order with the political problem of managing such
nonfunctional surpluses to prevent them from being dysfunctional (Nun (2000) Pg12.)
For a fuller discussion of Nun et al, see Smith, 2010.
3
Striking in the context of this paper is Chatterjee’s point that any agreement reached as
a result of these often violent moments are always treated as exceptions – forms of
legislation for example, which are simply temporary and will not get into the law books
or become precedents. Obviously they are a form of politics, but the authorities cast
them into a kind of historical no man’s land of non-historical politics, a sort of
inoculation against the making of the Indian urban working class á la Edward Thompson.
4
Guerrero points out that the word arbitrio in Spanish “has the triple meaning of:
capacity for decision, dependence on someone, and a discretional power. (Ft 9)
5
The figures called out as extrapares by “we the citizens” – let’s say the two young men
who “look like terrorists” on a plane who Guerrero discusses – do not have to be of the

21
same “kind” as those to whom I am referring here. The repetition and fetishization of the
altrapares among us, is enough.

22