To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations

TL;DR: The authors examined the question of who would act to keep these people alive and why would they act, by contrasting a conjuncture in India, where a make live program has been assembled under the rubric of the right to food, and Indonesia, where the massacre of the organized left in 1965 has left dispossessed populations radically exposed.

Abstract: A biopolitics of the population, when it succeeds in securing life and wellbeing, is surely worth having. It has become urgent in rural Asia, where a new round of enclosures has dispossessed large numbers of people from access to land as a way to sustain their own lives, and neoliberal policies have curtailed programs that once helped to sustain rural populations. At the same time, new jobs in manufacturing have not emerged to absorb this population. They are thus “surplus” to the needs of capital, and not plausibly described as a labour reserve. Who, then, would act to keep these people alive, and why would they act? I examine this question by contrasting a conjuncture in India, where a make live program has been assembled under the rubric of the “right to food”, and Indonesia, where the massacre of the organized left in 1965 has left dispossessed populations radically exposed.

Summary

Introduction

• Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations.
• How to cite TSpace items Always cite the published version, so the author(s) will receive recognition through services that track citation counts, e.g. Scopus.

Dispossession and the Protection

• My essay concerns the politics of making live, or letting die, and the struggles that shape the way the equation is resolved for different segments of the global population.
• Both letting die, and making live, have a politics, but I reject the idea that the two are in some kind of functional equilibrium – that it is necessary to select some to die, in order for others to live.
• Nevertheless, Kerala confirms that “making live” is more than a 6 counterfactual – it too is here, and not just in the welfare states of the global north.
• Yet I am not convinced that their chronic under-reproduction is, as Araghi (2009:119) has argued, “a strategy of global capital.”.

Surplus Population

• When I use the phrase surplus population, my intention is to provoke some hard thinking.
• Jarringly, despite the Report’s recognition of a globalized regime of agricultural production and consumption, its framework for analyzing agrarian transition is national, as if rural dispossession and the generation of new jobs naturally occur within the same national frame, and unmarked, generic citizens have equal access to national jobs.
• These industries were situated in rural areas, where they dispossessed the in situ populations, but they seldom employed the same people they displaced.
• Contingency plays a part in these misconnections between capital and labour, and for populations rendered “surplus” at a particular place and time, misconnection can be fatal.
• In these chain reactions, one set of events establishes the conditions of possibility for another set, but whether the possibilities will be realized depends on “a series of agencies” that do not necessarily pull in the same direction.

Rural Dispossession in Asia circa 2000

• There are three main vectors of rural dispossession in Asia today, none of which has any intrinsic link to the prospect of labour absorption.
• A great many peasants – up to 150 million by 2003 - were absorbed as temporary labour migrants in the booming manufacturing sector, where employers prefer this highly exploitable labour force over workers with legal “urban” status, who are entitled to welfare benefits.
• Chinese farmers have also been devastated by competition from cheap imported cotton, soybeans and sugarcane, as the government removed tariffs to increase global market access for Chinese manufactures (Walker 2008:465-6).
• For decades to come, the huge swathe of land under oil palm is guaranteed to generate very few jobs, and it is doubtful that much could be done with the land after the oil palm boom ends, so severely is the land modified by the bulldozers, chemicals, and intensive mono-cropping.
• The most egregious contemporary, life-threatening 23 instance of racialized, conservation-backed eviction is Laos, where a program to demarcate forest boundaries in highland villages has forced the population to seek refuge “voluntarily” in lowland resettlement sites, where arable land is extremely scarce, there is little work, and hunger and disease prove fatal for many.

Biopolitical Assemblages and the Protection of Surplus Populations

• Just as the connection between capital and labour that constitutes “capitalist development” needs to be examined in all its historical and spatial specificity, so does the emergence of a biopolitical program that seeks to sustain life.
• Polanyi wrote, for example, of the meeting of the justices of Berkshire at the Pelican Pub in Speenhamland in 1795, when they ruled that parishes should subsidize wages on a scale related to the price of bread, thereby countering the emergence of a “free” market in labour, and inventing the “right to live”(1944:77).
• Sadly, the desolate data on life expectancy I cited earlier gives ample reason to question Polanyi’s confidence that “society as a whole” (1944:152) is equipped with a homeostatic capacity to protect “itself” from the risk of destruction.
• The same discourse arose in 2009, as global recession set in.
• The goal of transnational development intervention, he argues, is not to extend northern-style social protections to the population of the global south, but to keep the latter in their place – ensconced in their nations, communities and families, where they must be selfsufficient, and not make demands.

The Politics of Entitlement

• The “right to food” initiative in India took off in 2001, when a group of public interest lawyers from Rajasthan sued the government for its failure to meet its legal obligation to supply famine relief to people afflicted by drought, although government warehouses were well stocked with grain.
• 32 The social forces behind the “right to food” movement in India are strikingly absent in Indonesia.
• These massacres, and the repression that followed, created a crucial gap in the parliamentary system and in public debate that has still not been filled, more than a decade after the end of General Suharto’s rule.
• Villages were stratified into caste-like estates, in which landholding families organized production by incorporating landless farm servants as permanent dependents, and employed roving bands of “free” coolie labour when needed.

Conclusion

• I want to stress that I do not counterpose transition to a rural utopia, in which people reject new products and labour regimes in favour of locally-oriented production on small family farms.
• Yet the sad truth is 35 that this desire is frustrated, especially for the poorest people, who are routinely dispossessed through the very processes that enable other people to prosper.
• Burma’s military junta is utterly selfish, and has maintained itself for more than four decades.
• How the obligation is met, and for which sectors of the population, is a matter that is worked out in specific sites and conjunctures through means that are sometimes grandiose, and occasionally revolutionary, but just as often pragmatic, and unannounced.
• These conjunctures are worth attending to, however, because as Gillian Hart (2004:95) observes, “the ongoing tension between pressures for ‘economic freedom’ and the imperatives of welfare arising from their destructive tendencies opens up a rich vein of critical possibilities.”.

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2010 To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus
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To Make Live or Let Die? Rural
Dispossession and the Protection
of Surplus Populations
Tania M. Li
My essay concerns the politics of making live, or letting die, and the struggles that
shape the way the equation is resolved for different segments of the global population.
While Foucault highlighted the general historical conditions for the emergence of
biopolitics, that is, an orientation to intervene in populations to enhance their health
and wellbeing, he had little to say about when or how this orientation would be
activated. Nor did he say much about the politics of let die scenarios: why governing
1
authorities would elect not to intervene when they could, or select one subset of the
population for life enhancement while abandoning another.
Letting die, I want to stress, is not a counterfactual. Abysmal life expectancy, below 55 in
much of sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of Asia is sad testament to the fact that letting
die is here. Discrepancies within one city are another indicator: African-Americans on
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the South Side of Chicago are “let die” at around 60 years, while the mostly white,
middle-class residents on the city’s Northwest Side can expect to live until the age of 77.
3
Letting die is also signalled by the presence of a billion people in the global south who
must try to survive on less than a dollar a day, a sum that leaves them chronically short
of food, shelter and health care. Letting die is not an apocalypse. It is not a media event,
like a massacre, an earthquake, or a famine that kills large numbers in a compressed
period of time. Nor is it a Malthusian problem of inadequate global food supply. It is a
stealthy violence that consigns large numbers of people to lead short and limited lives.
Both letting die, and making live, have a politics, but I reject the idea that the two are in
some kind of functional equilibrium – that it is necessary to select some to die, in order
for others to live. No doubt such selections are made, according to a whole range of
rationales (race, virtue, diligence, citizenship, location, age, gender, efficiency,
affordability)
but if “the point is to change it,” we cannot concede that selection is
4
necessary. It is possible for social forces to mobilize in a wholly make live direction.
1

Make live possibilities are highlighted by conjunctures such as the one that emerged in
the state of Kerala in India, which has a predominantly rural population and no special
natural endowments, yet has achieved an average life expectancy of around 73, 10 years
longer than the all-India average of 63. This effect was produced by decades of
investment in public health and education, together with rates of pay for agricultural
workers that are 100% higher than elsewhere in India for the same tasks. The social
5
forces that put this regime in place included a strong labour movement, and a
communist party held accountable through democratic elections. The way these forces
came together in Kerala is the product of a struggle with its own, unique history that
cannot be replicated in modular fashion. Further, the gains in Kerala are fragile, and
incompletely realized. Nevertheless, Kerala confirms that “making live” is more than a
6
counterfactual – it too is here, and not just in the welfare states of the global north.
Make live interventions become urgent when people can no longer sustain their own
lives through direct access to the means of production, or access to a living wage. In
large parts of rural Asia, my focus in this essay, these conditions have become
widespread as a result of two sets of forces: 1) a new round of enclosures that have
dispossessed large numbers of rural people from the land and 2) the low absorption of
their labour, which is “surplus” to the requirements of capital accumulation. For the
700 million Asians who live on less than a dollar a day, tiny incomes are ample
testament to the fact that noone has a market incentive to pay the costs of keeping them
alive from day to day, or from one generation to the next.
Yet I am not convinced that
their chronic under-reproduction is, as Araghi (2009:119) has argued, “a strategy of
global capital.” I see their perilous condition, rather, as a sign of their very limited
relevance to capital at any scale. If the population rendered surplus to capital’s
requirements is to live decently, it will be because of the activation of a biopolitics that
places the intrinsic value of life – rather than the value of people as workers or
consumers - at its core. But what are the social forces that would activate such a
politics? And why would they do so? I return to these questions later in this essay. First,
however, I want to consider more fully the implications of the concept of surplus
population.
Surplus Population
When I use the phrase surplus population, my intention is to provoke some hard
thinking. It is, of course, offensive to suggest that some people are surplus, yet as I
argued above, the truth is that large numbers are in fact abandoned. Some are kept
alive in prisons, refugee camps and ghettos, but they are not being prepared for work,
2

as they were in the workhouses of industrializing Britain (Bauman 2004). The key to
their predicament is that their labour is surplus in relation to its utility for capital.
Marx used the term “relative surplus population” (Marx 1986: chapter 25), with the term
“relative” serving, first, to distinguish his concept from that of Malthus, who argued
that population would outstrip resources; and second, to highlight the continuous
tendency of capital to concentrate labour’s productive capacity into labour-displacing
technologies. Among the relative surplus population, Marx further distinguished
between the floating part, people who were cyclically unemployed; the latent part,
namely rural people not fully integrated into capitalist production; and the stagnant
part, including people who are elderly or injured, and among whom the lowest stratum
“dwells in the sphere of pauperism.” Pauperism, Marx argued, “is the hospital of the
active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is
included in that of the relative surplus-population, its necessity in theirs; along with the
surplus-population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the
capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production;
but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to
those of the working-class and the lower middle class” (Marx 1986).
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, is an
urgent question. To answer it fully would require trying out his categories to see what
they reveal, or what they occlude, in a range of contemporary conjunctures. Minimally,
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we have to recognize that the spatial and temporal unevenness of capital investment,
already present in Marx’s time, is far more prominent today, as capital incorporates
some places and peoples, and ejects or rejects others. James Ferguson (2005) captures
part of this dynamic with his image of transnational investment capital “hopping” over
Africa’s useless people and places (Afrique inutile) to land in the few spots where
superior profits can readily be made. There is another dynamic, however, that is
potentially more lethal: one in which places (or their resources) are useful, but the
people are not, so that dispossession is detached from any prospect of labour
absorption. This is the dynamic that forms the core of my analysis in this essay.
Too often, hard thinking about the predicament of surplus population is avoided by the
repetition of some remarkably resilient narratives about agrarian transition that
assume a linear pathway, and a predictable set of connections. According to these
narratives there will be – sooner or later – a transition from agriculture to industry,
country to city, and peasant to entrepreneurial farmer or wage worker.
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A recent example of the transition narrative is the World Bank’s World Development
Report (2008), Agriculture for Development, which organizes the nations of the global
south along an axis that heads resolutely towards the city. According to the Report, the
principal task of governments in the “transforming countries,” a category that includes
most of Asia, is to manage transitions out of agriculture for rural populations whose
labour is surplus to the requirements of a more efficient agricultural sector, and to
supply targeted “safety nets” for a residual few who cannot make this transition,
namely the old and the infirm. Jarringly, despite the Report’s recognition of a
globalized regime of agricultural production and consumption, its framework for
analyzing agrarian transition is national, as if rural dispossession and the generation of
new jobs naturally occur within the same national frame, and unmarked, generic
citizens have equal access to national jobs. Generalized welfare provisions to keep the
dispossessed alive do not figure in the Report. A full chapter on “Reducing
Vulnerability and Chronic Food Insecurity,” anticipated in the Report outline, is not in
the final version. Somehow, the Report assumes, hundreds of millions of deeply
impoverished rural people will find their way onto the transition path.
A competing version of the agrarian transition narrative, that takes its inspiration from
Marx, relates dispossession to the emergence of capitalism through three effects: a grab
for land and other resources that furnish initial capital, so-called “primitive
accumulation;” the production of proletarians; and the formation of a labour reserve.
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In a recent re-statement of this narrative, that takes in a global scale, Farshad Araghi
links “enclosure-induced displacement” to “camps of surplus labour in urban
locations,” and the conditioning of partially dispossessed peasantries as “a potential
reserve army of migratory labour,” or labour power freed “for global
consumption”(2009:111-2, 134-5). Yet Araghi’s narrative short circuits an important
question: how much of this labour is really necessary for accumulation?
Confronting the concept of surplus population challenges the residual functionalism
sometimes embedded in the concept of a labour reserve. In order to fulfil the functions
of a labour reserve – that is, to depress wages, and be ready to work when needed - the
population must not die. Yet accounts that stress the utility of a labour reserve for
capital often fail to specify the causal mechanisms that would keep the members of this
“reserve” alive, even on a minimal basis. The case for a labour reserve can be made, and
the Bantustans of South Africa were a clear example: dispossession was designed to
generate labour for the mines, and Bantustan land and remittances served to reproduce
the reserve population (Wolpe 1980). But the Bantustans also became dumping
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Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "To make live or let die? rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations" ?

In this paper, a critique of the linear narrative of agrarian transition is presented, and the authors do not counterpose transition to a rural utopia, in which people reject new products and labour regimes in favour of locally-oriented production on small family farms. 

Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "To make live or let die? rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations" ?

These conjunctures are worth attending to, however, because as Gillian Hart ( 2004:95 ) observes, “ the ongoing tension between pressures for ‘ economic freedom ’ and the imperatives of welfare arising from their destructive tendencies opens up a rich vein of critical possibilities. ” These possibilities are both analytical and political, and my essay has offered but a small glimpse of them. 

Q3. What was the main driver of the price hike?

The main driver of the price hike was large institutional investors switching out of dollars and into commodities, among them oil and food. 

Q4. What was the purpose of resettling landless people to the forest frontier?

Resettling landless people to the forest frontier was a way to avoid redistributive land reform, while abating a communist threat. 

Q5. How many people were unemployed in 2006?

In 2006, “an estimated 11 percent of Indonesian workers (11.6 million) were unemployed, and underemployment was over 20 percent (45 million workers)”. 

Q6. How much of the oil palm area is under direct management?

About 60% of the oil palm area is under direct management by private corporations or parastatals, with the balance managed by smallholders, mostly under contract. 

Q7. What was the main topic of the scores of detailed protocols in the report?

Effective ways to monitor the performance of the government apparatus at each level, from the state to the village, were the main topic of the scores of detailed protocols in the tightly printed, 111 page report. 

Q8. What is the recent example of the transition narrative?

A recent example of the transition narrative is the World Bank’s World Development Report (2008), Agriculture for Development, which organizes the nations of the global south along an axis that heads resolutely towards the city. 

Q9. What are the problems of enfranchising the destitute?

There are also problems in reaching destitute families, since destitution strips away political personhood, while survival strategies (begging, prostitution, and itinerant trading) and vagrancy are criminalized, casting the destitute into the category of the undeserving and licensing brutal treatment. 

Q10. What was the main reason for the left stream in Indonesian politics?

There was a clandestine but organized left stream in Indonesian politics from the 1920s, and visions of social justice were prominent in the anti-colonial struggle. 

Q11. What was the purpose of the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 90s?

Echoing the late colonial holocausts, as Davis (2006:174) observes, the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 90s deliberately exposed rural populations of the global south to the full blast of market discipline, while withdrawing social protections. 

Q12. How many people have been evicted from protected areas?

the number of people evicted from protected areas and deprived of access to land and former sources of livelihood over the past few decades has been estimated at 8.5 million (Cernea and Schmidt-Soltau 2006:1818). 

Q13. What did Polanyi say about the role of cross-class alliances in promoting?

he highlighted the role of cross-class alliances in promoting life enhancing interventions, their adoption by European regimes across the spectrum from left to right, and their emergence under authoritarian conditions as well as democratic ones. 

Q14. Why was the scandal that started the “right to food” movement?

and most broadly, if famine was the scandal that started the “right to food” movement, it was a scandal only because an entitlement to famine relief was already established in India. 

Q15. What is the knock-on effect of cutting off access to the forest frontier?

This is the knock-on effect of cutting off access to the forest frontier that has long provided a “safety-valve” for the dispossessed – a place to find land and start over. 

Q16. What is the argument for a non-teleological reading of capitalism?

Jason Read (2002) argues persuasively for a non-teleological or “aleatory” reading of capitalism, also present in Marx’s own historical writings, which examines how capital and “free” labour connect – or fail to connect – at particular conjunctures.