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Selective Hegemony andBeyond-Populations withNo Productive Function: AFramework for EnquiryGavin A. Smith aa Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto,Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 18:238, 2011Copyright 2011 Crown copyrightISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 onlineDOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2011.593413

Selective Hegemony and Beyond-Populations with NoProductive Function1: A Framework for Enquiry

Gavin A. SmithDepartment 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 eitherreferring to new principles of rule or more broadly to include the nature of theeconomy. The paper argues that it is more fruitful to explore how these changesreflected a shift in the dominance of forms of capitalprincipally from produc-tion to finance. The dominant class blocs in the former period pursued hegemonicprojects described here as expansive; in the latter period such projects becameselective. 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) anabsolute residual population. The politics of the former is one of negotiation, of thelatter counter-politics beyond negotiation. Exploration of this difference becomes acrucial 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 withinits borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand achance?

Arundhati Roy, Ghandi but with guns The Guardian 27 March2010: 34.

Consensus. . . means the attempt to get rid of politics by ousting thesurplus 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? SouthAtlantic Quarterly 2004: 306.

Introduction

Recently, there has been a flurry of literature on that part of thepopulation, which the Victorians used to call the residuum.2 Despitethe urgent sense of this literature, it is best seen as coming in the

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wake of a much larger and more long-standing discussion in whichthe challenge of understanding the population has increasingly beenthe problem of heterogeneity: the fact that the analyst must find con-ceptual tools for understanding the multiple ways in which people areembedded in the social world. This is often addressed in terms of juridi-cal and ethical dilemmas, multiple forms of citizenship, complexitiesover human rights, and so on. Once all this work is done, inevitablywe are left with what Ranciere (1999) refers to as the part of thosewith no partthe bits and pieces that are part of none of the cate-gories that operate in this heterogeneous world. This article is both acontribution to the growing literature and a response to it.

Although much that is useful in current work has resulted fromwhat Butler calls norms of recognisability (2009: 7), these discussionshave tended to be removed from the specificity of the crisis ofreproduction facing current capitalist formations and their attendantpolitical regimes. The problem is that we confine ourselves to thecritical analysis of discursive chains and political programmes thatclassify people in this way. As a result, classifications and categoriesappear to occur in a realm beyond the tensions in social reproduc-tion that face the capitalist political economy from one conjuncture toanotherand the successive historically distinct attempts to resolvethose tensions.

To propose that we need to break out of this confinement is not justa question of insisting on one theoretical approach over another: forthe importance of a critique of political economy for our understandingof the world we live in, over say discourse theory or governmentalityapproaches. Rather, it is a question of how intellectuals assess the con-ditions of possibility that might contribute to the success of what I callrevindicative politics. For example, as I note below, Marx embarked onhis critical analysis of capital for just such a purpose. And as his anal-yses of conditions changed so too did his political interventions. So itdoes 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 inthe Global North the past two centuries can be seen in terms of atension between demands that the body politic (represented by thestate) be the expression of popular sovereignty versus demands thatit be shaped to enhance productivity. Social democracy was not justthe 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 ofle mode de production tatique (Lefebvre 2001: 775). Despite persis-tent real heterogeneity among people in terms of ethnicity, gender,

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regional identity, etc., in liberal states through much of the twentiethcentury, there was a drive toward uniformity both in terms of citizen-ship and in terms of mass production. This culminated after WorldWar 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 (discussedbelow) the hegemonic projects of various dominant blocs began tobe directed at selected groups of people. Selectivity, in turn, meantthat both in the realm of population and in the realm of productivity(broadly conceived) the drive toward uniformity had to be replacedby criteria of difference. As a result, the tension between people andproductivity 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 heterogeneousmembership in late-modern society. These authors help us to producea tentative framework, but I then try to advance on that framework bymeans of a critique of political economy rather than the emphasis ongovernance, which they use. This leads to an initial way of understand-ing capitalist production and the characterization of the population inproductivist terms. To get at this I refer to a tension between whatI call tecnos and demos. I suggest that dominant blocs resolved thesetensions through a variety of hegemonic projects, which were generallyexpansive.

But to apply the principles of this argument to more recent forms ofcapitalism I need to introduce a second couplet: freedom and enclosure,and I suggest that, taken together, these lenses help us to understandcurrent forms of capital and the configurations of the population. Ithen suggest that expansive hegemony no longer serves the purposesof dominant blocs, resulting in a shift toward selective hegemony.

This exercise is undertaken to help us identify the conditionsof possibility for revindicative politics.3 Taking his inspiration fromMarxs exhaustive analyses of mid-nineteenth century society, Gramsciinsisted that the success of revindicative politics would depend onwhat he called organic ideologya counterforce that arose outof, and in response to, the specific features of the current condi-tions of possibility.4 Along with a number of more recent authorswho have made a similar kind of argument, suggesting that just asmid-nineteenth century capitalism called forth a certain kind of coun-terforce, so analysis of current neoliberal conditions suggests differentappropriate politics, I seek to follow Gramscis 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 thefield of negotiable politics to selected participants, so there is a sphere

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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 momentin the relationship between the economy and society, both nation-ally and internationally. The quarter century that followed witnessedquite comprehensive state planned interventions in the form of thewelfare state and, post-Bretton Woods, international interventionstermed development. While in both cases these interventions weremeant to produce better conditions for economic development, theywere also supposed to offset tendencies understood to be inherentin capitalist reproduction. Within the so-called developed countries,they were supposed to address questions of generalized redistributionas against capitalist polarization (social and spatial). Regulatory pro-grammes were to provide social security for that part of the demos whowere not the beneficiaries of the industrial capitalist economy. Esping-Anderson (1990) speaks of this in terms of preserving or providingspaces of decommodification against the predations of entirely com-modified relations (health care, pensions, public schooling, etc.), andJessop speaks of this as the era of the Keynesian National WelfareState [KNWS] (Jessop 2006).

In the so-called developing world, programmes were likewise aimedat the population as a whole, but largely in reverse terms. The absenceof commodified relations and a thoroughgoing market in the tradi-tional sector were seen to be an impediment to the development ofa properly capitalist economy. For this, programmes were introducedfor the purposes of various kinds of goals: most obviously to ease thetransition from the so-called traditional sector into the modern sector;but where this seemed an excessively long-term or even insuperablegoal, to enact a kind of trusteeship of that population (Li 2009); spacestoo could be protected in which populations could be reproduced toprovide cheap labour for the so-called modern sector (Wolpe 1980;Meillasoux 1980).

Although 1945 is frequently used as the watershed moment for theenactment of these two variations on the theme of planning directed ata coherent population within a bounded polity, Cowen and Shenton(1996) show that we need to return to the nineteenth century todiscover their origins. The term development, they suggest, is inher-ently problematic because it means two different things: immanentchange (which we frequently refer to as development) and the intent todevelop. The latter consists of the ordering or management (they call it

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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, sothe compensatory need for the state or international bodies to handleits fallout grew.

From the end of the 1970s onward, economic conditions and theregimes for their regulation shifted away from this formula. In thelast twenty years of the twentieth century these changes came to beknown as neoliberalism. The dominant economic and political classesreversed their understanding of the relationship between the economyand the state. Those actions of the state that were once taken to offsetthe tendencies of the economy were now seen as a handicap to thefree development of the economy. The function of the state (and insti-tutions functioning to the same ends internationally) was thereforereversed; it was now to cultivate the ground of optimum capitalistactivity. Speaking of the earlier era and its antecedents, Cowen andShenton (1996:438) explain the internal contradiction in the idea ofdevelopment:

While an immanent process of development encompasses the dimensionof destruction, it is difficult to imagine why and how the intent to destroyshould 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 enhancequite 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 asa broad process attending to the interlinkage between elements of acoherent, bounded polity. This affected development itself as a plan-ning exercise. As policies were aimed at enhancing the advantages ofspecific sub-national regions, populations, or sectors, planning itselfas a coordinated intervention aimed at anticipating the effects of thedynamics of one part on that of anotherbecame problematic.6 Sothe shift away from social and national criteria for planning to pro-grammes based on business models and so-called economic measureswas not just a shift in the criteria by which development targets weremeasured; it was also a shift in the scale at which it was proposed planscould 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

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might emerge therefrom? Two recent interventions have addressedprecisely these questions, and in so doing they link distinctions amongthe populace to the question of surplus populations.

Chatterjee and Ong on the current conjuncture

Chatterjee (2008)7 begins his argument, following Sanyals (2007)Rethinking Capitalist Development, by noting the importance for theongoing development of capitalism of the separation of peasants andartisans from their means of subsistence through political interven-tions of one kind or another. In the past he suggests this has produceda variety of what he calls narratives of social transition (2008: 5455).Today, however, although capitalist growth in a postcolonial societysuch as India is inevitably accompanied by the primitive accumulationof capital, the social changes that are brought about cannot be under-stood as a transition (ibid: 55; emphasis added). The reason Chatterjeegives for this leaves the impression that, in India at least, the oldnotions of trusteeship and welfare are far from dead.8

There is a growing sense now that certain basic conditions of life must beprovided 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 oflabour because of the primitive accumulation of capital should have nomeans of subsistence. (ibid 55)

Yet, using the idiom of governmentality, Chatterjee presents us witha sectoral image of Indian society that requires political programmesto be selective rather than the earlier universalist programmes Idescribed above.

. . . [T]he activities of governmentality require multiple, cross-cuttingand shifting classifications of the population as the targets of multiplepolicies, producing a necessarily heterogeneous construction of the social(2004: 36).

The major distinction that Chatterjee identifies is a split in the fieldof the political between a domain of properly constituted civil societyand a more ill-defined and contingently activated domain of politicalsociety (ibid: 40). Civil society includes the middle class and seeks to becongruent with the normative models of bourgeois capitalist hegemony(2008: 57), while large sections of the rural population and the urban

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poor relate to society through making demands on the state and itsappendages who respond in terms of political expediency (rather thanan expansion of political participation). This latter Chatterjee refers toas political society.

In civil society the hegemony of capitalism (including presumably itsneoliberal, class concentrating accent) goes uncontestedthe require-ments of corporate capital [are] given priority (ibid: 57) and indeeda significant feature in recent years has been the withdrawal of theurban middle classes from political activities altogether (ibid: 62). Asthe name implies, this is far from the case for political society, thespace of management of non-corporate forms of capital, (ibid) made upof units with low composition of capital where profits are subordinatedto livelihood needs. People here are not regarded by the state as propercitizens possessing rights and belonging to the properly constitutedcivil society (ibid 63: 1). Evidently weak qua multitude or mass, thesepeople engineer political negotiation (in which the threat of violence isnot entirely absent) through various temporary or more long-standingassociations. These associations are in part an effect of particulargovernment programmes that target certain groups, as Chatterjeesgovernmentality imagery would imply. Moreover, the political arenais far from the one E.P. Thompson (1968) proposed for the Englishworking class; quite the contrary, here political struggles do not accu-mulate to produce an emergent culture; rather, peoples victories arealways recorded as exceptions beyond the law, temporary, contextualand unstable (ibid: 57).

As we might expect from the governmentality point-of-view (despitethe name), these are not politics in the historical sense, but rather theeffect of forms of governance.9 Even so, a careful reading of Chatterjeereveals that associations do have a life beyond their form as Platonicshadows cast by government programmes. It is through these insti-tutions of collective membership that political society negotiates withstate agencies, rather than as individual citizens. So, though limitedfrom reshaping structural power through their designation as excep-tions politics acquires what little leverage it has from institutions ofcollective membership.

Chatterjees 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 broadenparticipation into this arena and thereby extend civil society. Nor dopeople in this arena partake in the hegemonic values of civil society.10

But Chatterjee argues that there is a politics of negotiation for thesepeopleone in which the dominant bloc seeks to cast each success asan exception to hegemonic norms.

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Though the vast majority of Chatterjees article and, indeed, hisPolitics 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 meansto make effective claims on governmentality. In this sense, thesemarginalized groups represent an outside beyond the boundaries ofpolitical society (ibid: 61). So Chatterjee does suggest a field of politicsand something beyond, but what happens in this latter sphere is nottaken up.11

Aiwa Ong (2006), on the other hand, deals with heterogeneity specif-ically in terms of exceptional groups. She does so, moreover, by settingher argument within a space wider then any one national polity.[G]raduated sovereignty is an effect of states moving from beingadministrators of a watertight national entity to regulators of diversespaces and populations that link with global markets (ibid: 78).

Like Chatterjees analysis, Ongs analysis places administrativeexpertise at centre stage. For her, placement within or without is theresult of the interplay between politics [again, politics without politics(ibid: 3); see endnote 8] and ethicsethnographic milieus where theinterplay between exceptions, politics and ethics constitute a field ofvibrating relationships (ibid: 4). Also like Chatterjee, she sees neolib-eralism (which she confines entirely to a form of governing) as blurringthe 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 merelyone of multiple schemes for (re)ordering and (re)evaluating humanity(ibid: 24).

By limiting neoliberalism to a particular kind of relationshipbetween the authorities and the people, Ong invokes a heterogeneoussocial field along different criteria to Chatterjees. She suggests thatit is a mistake to see Southeast Asia as uniformly under the sway ofneoliberal 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 tobe found alongside spaces in which claims on and by the state can bemade in terms of established norms that are specific to the history ofthat state, or claims can invoke transnational institutions. The resultis 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 inone sphere while using precisely its instrumental understanding of

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social membership12 to exclude populations and places from neolib-eral calculations (ibid: 4) elsewhere. Moreover, since inclusion in theneoliberal project is not an unalloyed advantage so exclusion from itcan be favourable or not, protecting some of the population with exist-ing social safety nets or stripping away all forms of political protectionby excluding migrant workers from the living standards [sic] createdby market-driven policies (ibid).

What are these mutually constituting relationships then? They are[privileged?] spaces where liberal reason ideally prevails, though inits local variant. In this sense it is resonant with Chatterjees civilsociety. 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 thatare exceptions to neoliberalism. First, there are those that are framedin terms of traditional political culture in which the state protectsthe population from the predations of hard-nosed neoliberal calcula-tion (e.g., individual competition and the absence of social security) byinvoking the specificities of national or sub-national histories. Thenthere are the Special Economic Zones or less administratively formalspheres that are nonetheless analogous. And crosscutting all theseare complex claims that can be made by those without territorializedcitizenshipon non-state institutions like the UN, religious organi-zations, and NGOs. Ong speaks too of claims made directly on drugcompanies on behalf of the diseased and starving.

Thus, in moving away from [neoliberal] civil society Ong shiftsaway from normative citizenship claims, as does Chatterjee by use ofhis notion of political society; in Ongs case, however, these constella-tions appear more complex because they invoke claims in terms wellbeyond those of citizenship. Moreover, Ong sees the politics here quitedifferently from Chatterjee. Political leverage in this case is not to befound through institutions of collective representation that arise likeChatterjees associations. Rather, intermediaries negotiate on behalfof 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 deservinghumanity. (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 throughthose who negotiate on their behalf. Though we do learn that there areothers who may more specifically fall within Chatterjees marginalized

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groups: - Illegals who slip into the country have no legal or socialrights (ibid: 83), while Southeast Asia is riddled with internal coloniesof poverty and neglect (ibid: 84) and where aboriginal peoples are thevictims of accumulation by dispossession.

In both cases then the social itself is rendered as a heterogeneousfield 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 theselectivity of regimes of rule. While broadly informed by the percep-tions of Marx, their approaches evade the Marx who felt it necessaryto conduct his critical analysis of contemporary society through athorough study of Capital. They are, in this sense, not so much post-Marxist as tangential to Marxism; their analyses (like Foucaults) areinconceivable without their Marxist antecedents, yet are made tidy bybeing cleansednot of capitalism itself, which can be understood assimply a presencebut rather of the frenetic imperatives inherent inthe 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 thepast. Ong does entertain the possibility that certain kinds of capi-talists, mostly global capitalists, have an impact on the form of thestate. But the fixation on states and techniques of governance seemsconvincingly tidy at the expense of two interconnected forces, whichsurely cannot have recently simply fled the stage of history. The direc-tion in which the social world goes is crucially a function of what isrequired for the reproduction of capital, and the direction it should gois the outcome of power struggles that are emergent from and aboutthe relations of capital; in a word, class. It may indeed be the case thatcurrent imbalances of power give undue leverage to power blocs ratherthan popular classes, but to address the issue of current social formsas though the imbrications of power blocs and forms of capital were ofperipheral concern seems problematic.

One way in which we see this is that Foucaults important obser-vation that modern power intervened to enhance productivity andnational well-being (Rose 2000: 7), far from expanding our field ofenquiry, is used to limit it to matters of governance. Tasteless jokesabout shepherds aside, we need to remember that the pastoral carethey devote to their sheep is not for love of them nor to provide fortheir well-being sui generis. It is to enhance their value. If too much

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government destroys the dynamism and creative potential of the lifeprocesses 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 liberalismis simply about freedom entirely detached from capitalismas anindividual and from governmentand therefore must induce a self-regulated subject. We can agree that the problem to which modernforms of power were a response was a problem of productivity inits broadest sense. Initially, the sphere to which modern power wasdirected was containable and could be imagined as coherent, be it thespace of production narrowly conceived (workshop, factory, or the hier-archically organized firm) or the national space in which productivitytook on a broader meaning. But the neoliberal variant was a responseto a slightly different set of issues, namely, the problem of harnessingthe flow of value under new conditions of social space. As these sphereschanged 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 forcesand conditions. Invoking as his model France, rather than ChatterjeesIndia, Lefebvre (1977), for example, suggests a different understandingof a politics of popular sovereignty and governance as expertise. Thereis a tension between the building of a late-modern state on the basis ofthe national-popular, in which the state becomes the condensation ofpopular sovereignty and the expanding interconnections of scale in therealm of production that relies increasingly on coordination at the levelof the state. Les gens de lEtat invent new instruments, for example, aspace which is at one and the same time quantified, homogenized andcontrolled (Lefebvre 2001: 774775).

Less a teleology in which peoples politics are succeeded by the ruleof experts, in this reading the modern state is inherently an inter-nally contradictory institution that condenses popular sovereigntyand national productivity. I will call these, respectively, the impetustoward demos and the impetus toward tecnos. So, while it is truethat from 1789 to the Paris Commune of 1870 there were a seriesof attempts to insist that the state should be a condensation of thecommunity, the people (Sayer 1987), this was not just subsequentlyreplaced by a concern with national productivity. Well before thatthe absolute monarchy had been interested in its enhancement in aline from Colbert that crosses 1789 to Napoleon.13 What followed theRevolution was a perpetual tension between concern with securitiz-ing the economyexpressed, for example, in the legalization of jointstock companies (which increased security by spreading investor riskthrough shares or securities)and popular demandsfor the right

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to property, the right to representation and subsequently the right tosecurity of society (i.e., social security)14 (Marshall 1963).

The point, then, is not to focus exclusively on governance and invokea line from participation to expertise nor to resort to a cynical argu-ment for some kind of functional link between expansions of liberaldemocracy solely for the purposes of enhancing national productiv-ity (which, during the period we are speaking of, was effectively theenhancement of national capitalisms). Rather, we need to note the ten-sions that arise as the power of these two forces play off one anotherat the level of society as a whole, resulting in different state forms.Directing attention to governance and governmentality naturally leadsto an interest in what their effects are on society [understood aspopulation]; society becomes an effect of the state. But the reverseis also true. For Marx the tension between the demos and tecnos arosein a wider arena than just the state. For him a key moment in thisregard had to do with the passing of the factory acts of the 1840s andthe response of industrialists. He argued that the acts were a [state]intervention to limit child labour and increases in the length of theworking day since they were a danger to the reproduction of the work-ing class. The effect was to reduce concrete labours contribution toproduction to which factory owners responded by increasing productiv-ity through techne (efficiency of instruments, rationalizing the labourprocess, etc.) so as to produce relative surplus value (Marx 1973). So weneed to counter the fashionable fixation on state effects with a broaderpicture that would allow for a dialectical interplay between people andproduction in terms of an ongoing struggle emanating from a contra-diction that becomes a perpetual preoccupation for the state, not justin terms of struggles among experts, but in terms of power blocs andpopular masses.

We can take tecnos to refer to a set of strategies to increase pro-ductivity broadly conceivedbringing human energy to bear on evermore efficient instruments, enhancing skills, and increasing the speedand quality of information flow, and such like. But under capitalismthe impetus to increase productivity generates a tension having todo with the enhancement of the creative potential of people and itsharnessing within an enclosure that captures the value that resultsand directs it back toward capital. People acting freely (albeit self-regulating) are inclined to be more fruitful than people locked inchains (Bourdieu 2000: 20320415). But the fruits of that labour areof no use to either governor or capitalist unless their flow can be chan-nelled. It is a principle of capitalism (much respected by Marx) thatenclosure 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,

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it is the tension/balance between freedom/enclosure that we need tokeep in mind, for this will allow us to see what happens when enclosurebecomes a more vital concern than productivity.

The effect of enhancing productivity through capitalist relations isthat certain populations are rendered surplus. The surplus nature ofthese populations may be relative: temporarily because they may sub-sequently be reabsorbed or spatially in the sense that, not needed inone sphere, they are absorbed into another (though market segrega-tion may limit the latter). But capitalist production may require lesshuman input permanently. This may be the case in a general sense,or it may result from the fact that, made surplus in one sphere, theyare not absorbed into another. The populations that result are absolutesurplus populations economically speaking (i.e., in terms of productionin the narrow sense). This is one way in which capitalist reproductionconfigures 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 directionof capitalenclosure16can also effectively result in people becomingsurplus or in excess, but the existence of such populations does notperform a latent function vis-a-vis the reproduction of capital underthese 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 eachcase 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 issueby reference to two kinds of hegemonic project: the one expansive, andthe 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 termsof juridical or ethical concerns. But these approaches do not seek tounderstand the way in which such populations are generated by thekind of social arrangements we live with today. Where there has beensome attempt to do so, the decisive moment is said to be a politicalonea contemporary form of primitive accumulation. Primitive or pri-mary accumulation is here used to refer to a form of coercion that isthe inevitable barbarous side of the modernist coin. It allows thoseconcerned 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

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propose that Marx got it wrong: capitalism did not need coercion onlyfor its primary moment, but perpetually needs it. From here, it is easyto conclude that it is only this political moment of capitalism to whichwe owe the evils of dispossessed and, hence, surplus people.

Neither Marx nor Harvey would suggest that capitalism ticks alongnicely innocent of police or protest. Marx was perfectly aware of thepersistent role of forceful political intervention for the stable reproduc-tion of established capitalism.17 If current resort to the term, hijackingHarveys accumulation by dispossession along the way, is used pre-cisely to avoid the dynamic features inherent to capitalist reproductionthat drive it toward expanded reproduction, then we let capitalismand capitalists off the hook and attend instead to the state and itsexperts.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 thesubsistence needs of this population so that it was available for capital-ists in a new round, when they would again be needed. The problem ofsurplus population arises because such a circuit can only be completedideallyfor various reasons. We need to rehearse this argument beforewe can move on.

1. Capital as tecnos and expansive hegemony

Marx notes how capitalists pursuit of profit through ever increasingproductivity generates problems beyond the narrow confines of thelabour process. On one side, there is a perpetual emergence of a relativesurplus of populationwhat Marx referred to as a law of populationpeculiar to the capitalist mode of production (1973: 630); on the otherside, 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 attainits value only when its surplus labour adds value to capital, when it isnot adding value to capital it appears as a surplus. So the term sur-plus in the expression surplus population here refers exclusively tomarketable labour capacities. Put another way, it is only when a pop-ulation is valued just for its marketable labour capacities that it willappear to be surplus when it cannot realize those capacities.19 (2) Theaccumulation of this population is inherent to the moment when cap-ital uses instruments (machines) to increase the surplus it extractsfrom labour.20 (3) The maintenance of these populations (either intheir temporary down time or over a longer term) must either accrueto society in whole (or to some element of its parts), or become an

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insoluble problem or threat to that society.21 This threat can bemerely an economic one. What capitalists produce is worthless untilits 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 asegment of the population who is contributing neither to productionnor 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; onthe other are the resources. Cumulatively higher levels of productiv-ity are inclined to require more resources for processing into the endproduct: oil, tin, wood, and so on. Within a bounded territory thesecan be bought from those who have rights over them, specifically theright to sell them. There may then be need for some political and legalinterventions to make such resources into property. In any event,the result will be to make a distinction between those who hithertoused themusufructand those who claim rights of sale. The lattermay benefit from capitals need for scarce resources; the former maybecome what we could call the absolute surplus populationin thesense that they are not relatively so in terms of cycles in capitalistdemand. Rather, they are absolutely surplus in that particular spaceat any rate.22 (As we will see, there are other ways in which popula-tions may be rendered surplus directly through rigours of the capitalisteconomy.) Although this looks quite similar, it does not in fact repli-cate the primary accumulation to which Marx referred. Dispossessionis certainly involved but it results not from accumulation by disposses-sion, but dispossession as a result of accumulation. Where in the onethe politics precedes the economics, in the other the economics is wellin 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 mechanismin each case was slightly different. Just as the effect of the domi-nance (though not pervasiveness) of the wage relationship was to makeall of labour that was necessary commodifiable labour (the remainderbeing 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 todecommodify crucial spheres of society in order to compensate for thesedestructive 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 populationit had produced or the problem of scarcity in resources that resultedfrom the demands of productivity. The result was what Harvey (1982)termed the spatial fix (see also Smith 1984; Cowen and Shenton

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1996). This, in turn, generated people who appeared as surpluses, mostnotably 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 towhich we refer. But there is nothing determinist or teleological thatresults from this understanding of capitalist reproduction. What Marxis talking about here is a certain kind of iron logic, one that inclinesproduction capital toward expanded reproduction. It doesnt happenall the time; it is not something spread uniformly throughout socialformations in which capitalist social relations are dominant; and, aswe would expect, resolutions to this problem do occurlargely in therealm of political society.

This points us toward Gramsci who addressed the issue of powerand production through the two notions of hegemony and Fordism. Hisconcern was precisely to use the notion of hegemony to explore thepolitical implications of the tension between the dual drive for controlover popular will and the pursuit of profit through the harnessing oflabour. Or, better put: the growing realization that increases in produc-tivity could be made by expanding the arena of influence over popularwill: an intensification of exploitation achieved through new forms ofmanagement and corporatist strategies, and expansion of state inter-vention in the economy and society (Forgacs 2000: 223). Here, Gramsciis clearly referring to hegemony as the project of a dominant bloc tosecure the future. He is talking about how the state and the enterprisedeploy power plus persuasion to penetrate civil society and therebyreshape it.

While Gramsci was writing about interwar Italy, his observationsare helpful when we turn to the post-1945 world. Following theBretton Woods agreement, the core states pursued a broadly corpo-ratist agenda, seeking to enhance productivity and reduce conflictthrough making alliances with the leaders of key stake holders.These regimes functioned through hegemonic expansion so that initialpacts among the leaders of capital and labour were expanded to includeregional and ethnic political classes, and so on. The best resolution ofthe tension between demos and tecnos was some distribution of thesocial good to the population. And the best vehicle for this project wasthe bounded national state within which claims and rights were madein the language of citizenship. The universality of citizenship on whichthe authority of expansive hegemony relied required that the mediumfor claims on the statecitizenshiprecognize 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

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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 thevariations among the population, but in respect to the complexity ofthe sources of national productivity. It was supposed that insofar aspeople not immediately functional for the motor that made societyproductivethe mass production economy systemically producingrelative surplus valueso they were the surplus who were the respon-sibility of the state. Yet even in the core countries the stable worker ofthe salaried society (Nun 1969) never constituted the majority of thework force. Put another way, the reality of society that the post-warstate sought to manage was never neatly divided between wage labourin mass production, on the one hand, and unemployment and non-production, on the other. Rather, the commodified economy was madeup of a vast array of forms of enterprise, all of which depended fortheir reproduction on an extensive arena of non-commodified practicesgenerating less a binary world composed of spheres of moneyed andnon-moneyed relations and practices, but rather an overall world ofintricate commodified relations

Yet, caught between the tensions of demos and tecnos, the juridicalapparatus of the KNWS had to remain coy about its antisocial child, asthough the so-called productive economy were not itself producing theexcesses now appearing as a cost of the state. Expansive hegemonyneeds to be understood in this light: its overt containing of citizenshipagainst recognition of difference, and its covert obscuring of the role innational vitality of spheres of either intricate commodified relations ornon-commodified relations and practices. As the declining productivityof industrial capital set in by the 1970s so greater profits from capitalshifted toward finance. This, in turn, rendered permeable the bound-aries of the manageable state. The longstanding covert operationsof the KNWS began to surface: state costs were increasingly (andexplicitly) going to capital, not supposedly unemployed labour; andthe vitality of the hitherto illegalized sphere of intricate commodifiedrelations (informal economy, black economy, getting by, etc.) beganto emerge, not only as the place of last resort for personal welfare butalso as the source of national productivity it had been for some time.25

This, in turn, reconfigured the way in which tensions between demosand tecnos were to be worked out, as we shall see in the next section.

One final point before moving to that section. Was expansivehegemony extended to the Global South? This is not, in fact, quitethe question that follows from the logic of my argument, since I havebeen suggesting that the modern pursuit of a productivist capitaliststate generated specific tensions between demos and tecnos to which

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expansive hegemony was an attempt at resolution. So, the firstquestion is the one Tania Li raises: Whether or not the pauperizedpopulation of the global South fulfils the same function in relation tocapital as the paupers of industrializing England described by Marx(2009: 1210). I hope it is clear that I have addressed this questionabove. To the crises of surplus population experienced in the GlobalSouth as a result of the way industrial capitalism generates surplusesof population and scarcities of resources on its edges, would need to beadded a vast array of contingent historical realities arising from thevarieties of colonial and postcolonial experience.

Nonetheless, without pursuing these in this article, it is part ofmy argument that, insofar as postwar development programmes werethe product of debates mostly within a Keynesian frame of reference,they were an extension of what I have been saying. As Greg Grandinnotes of United States programmes in Latin America, In the early1960s the goal was to set up functioning welfare states . . . The buzzwas techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuelas (2009: 33). I have not,however, been arguing for an historical moment of the welfare stateper se. Instead, a state increasingly concerned with coordinatingproductivity reflected the political agenda of industrial capitalistpower blocs who responded to the demands for demos at home withexpansive hegemony. Such hegemony was best achieved in a politicalfield (or fields) contained within the bounded national state, whichwas imagined to be sufficiently coherent to make macro-planningfeasible and, thereby, bring the optimum number of the demos into thehegemonic project. A truly vast array of postwar development schemeswere designed to prepare the way, if not actually produce, such a fieldof operation. But it would be wrong to downplay the dispossessiondimension of international geopolitics during this era as a result ofthe ravages of extractive industries, the imbalance in capital flowsfrom South to North on which at least some of core welfare relied, andcontests over political influence up to 1989.

Yet it is clear that as the modern state became increasingly biasedtoward its productivist functions, far from resolving the Malthusianproblem of surplus population, it actually generated its own versionsthereof. In brief, the problems arising from expanded reproduc-tion could be resolved temporarily and spatially through expansivehegemony, but never finally solved.

2. Capital as enclosure and selective hegemony

Three features distinguish the current conjuncture from the onejust discussed. The first of these has a material and an ideological

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dimension: the extremes of social polarization that result from the cur-rent forms of capitalism and the endorsement by both conservative andsocial democratic political elites of class concentration. The second isthe dominance of finance capital. And the third is what Foucault callsthe pervasive social ethic of the enterprisefrom the economic to thesocial sphere, the cultural, artistic, and so on, such that all the basicunits would have the form of the enterprise (2008: 148). This is not anexhaustive 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; Harvey2005; Smith 2005; Jessop 2006), as we have seen in the case of Ong anespecially 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 inconfiguring the nature of truthfirst the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries political economists (e.g., Smith and Ricardo)whose principles authorized the self-limiting of modern governmentand then Freiberg liberals seeking to break with the Marxism of theFrankfurt School (Foucault 2008). It is as though the resolution of thedemos/tecnos tension in the tripartite pact called the welfare regimehappened because Keynes said it should be so, and now we have a dif-ferent regime because Milton Friedman said it should be so. Foucaultsdisclaimers notwithstanding, this does seem to be an especially idealistunderstanding of causality.

Here I try to understand the package of features just describedby use of Marxs principles of the critique of the original politicaleconomists (i.e., the frame I have just used for discussing the KNWS). Ibegan that argument by suggesting that we are helped in understand-ing modern productivist society in terms of a tension between demosand tecnos. What emerged from these tensions were various forms ofwelfare state (see Smith 1999: 195227) as increases in relative sur-plus value at home and expansions through markets and predationabroad made possible resolutions through actual or promised redistri-butions. But I also suggested that there is a second way of thinkingabout a similar tension inherent to capitalism, which I glossed as free-dom versus enclosurefreedom of movement and mind versus controlover flows and fancies. This second framing allows us to explore howthe class projects of certain kinds of capitalists get translated intoprojects for hegemony, which do not have as their ideal goal universalexpansiveness but rather particularistic selectionwith the obviouscorollary of an excess beyond those selected.

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What was actually happening in the crepuscolo of Keynesiansismwas a series of initially piecemeal shifts in the vectors of capitalistprofitfrom productivity to financethat gradually became dominant:financial capital asserted its logic over that of industrial capital andthe institutions into which it had become embedded.26 Thus, RobertWade (2009: 159) writes,

The process of financial dominancewhat I call financialization of theeconomy (FOE) is measured quantitatively by ratios such as the totalcredit 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 financialinstitutions, including corporations, households and pension funds havebeen reorganized in support of the capital market as the economyspivotal institution. (Dore, 2000)

The problem to which neoliberal forms of governance were aresponse remained those of productivity (in its broadest sense) andthe flow of its end products, but the tension between the freedom (ofmovement) and its enclosure so that value flows toward capital nowbecame acute. Perhaps we can best understand this if we imagine thatwe are a finance capitalist looking upon the North Atlantic region interms of the potentials of a firm, and use Peck and Tickells list ofthe 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 capitalistsuse a variety of instruments to securitize the future. Faced with allbut one of the conditions described here, one response might be tosell short on this future (of the Atlantic Fordist zone). Another wouldbe to take advantage of that one exceptional conditionthe interna-tionalization of capital flowsto disperse investment to benefit fromalternate futures to be found elsewhere.

We can formulate this in terms of a series of hegemonic projectseach with a horizon beyond the other. To make such movements pos-sible, an initial component of the hegemonic project was to secure theideological and juridical conditions to free up movement. Especiallyin the United States and the UK, neoliberalism was an expression ofthe way finance capital used the state to secure two crucial conditionsto 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 forderiving profits from productivity to a use of capital to capture profits

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through movement and enclosure.27 The second was to enact a packageof programmes that facilitated international capital flows. This in turnproduced conditions across a second, broader horizon that generateda shift in a relationship within capitalbetween finance, commerce,and industry. Finally, a further horizon affected relations between cap-ital (dominated by finance) and ordinary people. Distinct from earlierresolutions of problems of capital reproduction,28 these latter kinds ofcapitalist socialization found expression in hegemonic projects directedtoward selected people rather than the population at large, leaving aresidue 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 toregulate the reconfigured space on which finance capital depends. Theinstruments used to do this at a global level have a knock-on effectat more reduced scales. The other has to do with the way in whichfinancial securitization relies first on the distinctions among socialphenomena and then on the means for establishing equivalents amongthem. These two featuresdispersal and compartmentalizationareconnected in multiple ways. And it is these interconnections thatmodify the capitalist socialization process from its earlier form underKNWS.29

As the ability to make profits from capital mobility increasedthrough the 1970s and 1980snot just through the speed and ease offlow (freedom), but through interrupting and redirecting flows (enclo-sure)so it created its own opportunities and its own problems.30 Aglobal problem had to do with money itself. A major service providedby the state in the early days of merchant capitalism had been theprovision of a uniform currency across the kingdom and, ideally,its relative stability over time. With the new order, changes in theexchange rate between, say, Japanese and German currency couldspell doom for an international contract. Arbitraging across spreadsof this kind had long been both the solution to the problem and thesource of wealth for those so engaged, but as the sheer number andspeed 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 rainfallin 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 acrossphenomena with qualitatively different kinds of value. A variety offinancial instruments arose to address these issues.31

Finance capital then, which relies on movement that allows it tofloat like a butterfly and sting like a bee, had first to break down barri-ers that restricted movement and then produce monetary instruments

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to resolve issues that arose from the more ephemeral kinds of spacesthat resulted. Financial instruments can be seen as attempts atregulation in response to these conditions. And then, under the rubricof securitization, similar instruments were applied to more localizedspheres. This, in turn, changed the balance in the way expropriationtook placebetween the capital-labour relationship of productioncapital, on the one hand, and expropriation through various forms ofenclosure on the part of finance capital, on the other.

There is nothing new in making profits by taking rents from workingpeople and selling them access to credit. Indeed, this is and long hasbeen a means for extracting surpluses from non-capitalist relations.Nor is there anything new in the way these kinds of extraction have apolarizing effect, impoverishing some households (or specific membersthereof) while pushing others toward the extension of their workingday or working life. (For a detailed case, see Sider 2003.) But theintegration of these with financial services means that the rationalityof financial instruments orient domestic life (Martin 2000: 43).

In the last twenty years or so we have seen labour being treated likecapital, the household being treated like a small business. . . . takingpositions about an unknowable future. It comes back to the issue of thestate withdrawing from guaranteeing the future. And its not just deci-sions about interest payments. Its about deciding whether or not andhow to invest in a range of things. Education . . . my telephone and elec-tricity. . . . Which superannuation fund or pension fund? . . . The list islong, and you dont really have the choice of not playing. So being work-ing class now means engaging in competitively driven risk calculationand management. (Bryan 2008: 7)

In the North after 1980, the state intervened to enlarge creditdemands and then mobilize the national population around theintrinsic worth of debt management and reduction (Martin 2000:44). Meanwhile, in the South sundry NGOs engineered the samedrive through such schemes as micro-credit while the World Bankadopted a global pension scheme, which would impose pensionfunds that, unlike pay-as-you-go schemes, link pension payments tofunds investment performances (Wade 2009: 146). As Randy Martinputs it: The new international division of debt culled labour frompopulations around the world and fed it into a spiders web of financialexchanges that spread from New York, London, and Frankfurt, toTokyo, Singapore and Johannesburg (2007: 31). This is, of course,taking back the commons (a form of accumulation by dispossession),

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but it has an additional socialization effect, which is fundamental tothe 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. Itis 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 oneway of acquiring some assurance that you will not lose what you haveadvanced. But your assurance is tied to the exchange value of that oneasset. You can acquire further security however by dispersing thesekinds of obligations, so that if one of them loses its asset value, anothermay gain. Again, sticking just to financial terms, securitization refersto the bundling together of multiple credit and debt contractsfromhome mortgages, and student loans, to corporate and governmentbonds. It is true then at an initial take that securitization dependson a primary stepto induce rents or interest in credits (usuallythrough extra-economic means), but it is a mistake to get stuck at thislevel. Securitization detaches the rent that can be derived from specificownershipof a house, or a factoryor the interest that can be derivedfrom making advances that allow people specific ownershipof theirhealth care or their carand thereby attains a new market valuefrom the synthetic package that results. This synthetic package istraded and takes on a value of its own. Securitization draws householdeconomies as directly into capitalist accumulation as companies orthe economies of national governments. So we should not be misledinto isolating domestic debt and life-course risk management from theentire reach of financial securitization which, taken as a whole, hasthe effect of redrawing the mechanisms for the real subsumption oflabour to capital (Bryan and Rafferty 2010).32

Dispersal thenand the freedom of movement that makes thatpossibleis fundamental to securitization. But we need to be cautiousabout the spatial metaphor (Smith and Katz 1993). Dispersal canof course refer to physical geography, but it can also refer to takingdifferent degrees and kinds of risks and benefiting from their dis-persal. If these differences are only apparent, then nothing is gainedfrom this spread, so dispersal only works if the differences are realfrom a financial point of view. It is not then just that the pervasiveconfiguration of social reality in terms of risk benefits finance capitalinsofar as security can they be given a price. It is also that realdistinctions in the degree of risk and the kind of risk are essentialfor the principles of securitization. This means the carving up ofvalues within unitsthe household, the firm, the environment, andso onand the insistence on the reality of the differences between

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them. Securitization through dispersal depends, in the language offinance, on diversificationin the language of society, on diversity.Earlier I was critical of suggestions that neoliberal theoreticiansproduced a body of theory that was so powerful that it conditionedthe world we live in. Here I am not simply reversing the idealist biaswith a materialist one. Rather, I am suggesting that the conditions ofcapitalist socialization produce a complex of relationships. Neoliberalrationales 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 indetail the kind of revindicative politics that might arise from the con-ditions I have described here. Yet this intervention is motivated by aconviction that we need to think quite carefully about what these con-ditions mean for such politics. I believe that the politics of negotiationrevolves around various claims on social membership understood interms of diversity rather than universalityreal partners, socialgroups, identity groups, and so on, in Rancires wordsand I willdiscuss these kinds of politics first. But I think current forms ofcapitalism, within the core spheres of finance in the North andbeyondthrough imperialist impositions of the terms of so-called free-trade, plus military incursionsinvolve the ousting [of] the surplussubjects (again in Rancires words), which give rise to an entirelydifferent kind of counter-movement lying beyond the various fields ofselective hegemony. As a result, the politics of such people cannot besome kind of albeit modified extension of the politics of negotiationbeit New Social Movements or various proposals for local alternatives tothe 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 hegemonyembraces a wider arena of the social world: first, because it embedspolitics within features of the political economy and, second, because itunderstands the social in terms of force and counterforce. And yet, asRoseberry (1994) noted some years ago, a characteristic of such politicsis to frame the language of dispute within the terms of the prevailinghegemonic fields. The politics of negotiation under conditions of selec-tive hegemony thus induces claimants to collude in the constitution ofsocial fields of exclusivity made up of concentrations and enclosures.

One dimension of this kind of hegemonic collusion has to do withdifferent forms of capitalist socialization (i.e., the way people becomeembedded in society through the form capitalist relations take at agiven time and place). A politics of negotiation is possible in this

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realm working across the tensions of interdependency and conflict thatare 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. Peoples concern tosecuritize their future then becomes a means for channelling sur-pluses toward capital via financial instruments. But we then encounteranother kind of security there, which relies, in part, on a kind of dis-persal that is based on diversity. Achieving this kind of spread meansdifferentiating not just among households (geographically, economi-cally, culturally, ethnically, occupationally, etc.) but also differentiatingwithin households, breaking down each component that embeds apersons 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 rightshowever cultural we want to make thatcitizenship or however complex those rights. Obviously, this is not toconclude that we should compartmentalize the two, but it does seemimportant to make a distinction between the inherently tension-loadeddiscourse of negotiation through which the capitalist subject is social-ized and the juridical (and possibly ideological) discourses aroundcitizenship that also invoke social subjects. There may be a politics ofcitizenship that has to do, for example, with recognition of rights in thepublic sphere in terms of the autochtoons versus the allochtoons in theNetherlands, or indigenas versus mestizos in parts of South America,and so on.34 And these may be conducted in terms of a discourse ofnegotiation. 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, fromthe perspective of ethnographic enquiry, deeply forbidding. Even so,despite the importance of their specificities, the fact is that both thesevectors of socialization perpetually produce and reproduce differenceand fragmentation. The degree to which the two are entwined or notclearly will vary, but along either plane there is room for the politics ofnegotiation.

No doubt aspects of the current conjuncture throw up challenges forthe conceptual and methodological tools we have at our disposal, butI 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 theconditions by which capitalism socialized the world that gave cluesto effective counter-politics. Such an agenda remains fundamentaltoday for a politics suited to negotiation within the field of hegemony,a hegemony that is hard to see as anything but selective.

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But the characteristics of current forms of capitalism combinewith configurations of the social in terms of selectivity and spheres ofexclusivity to suggest that an entirely different kind of politics mustbe thought for those who are effectively excess to society renderedin this way. As we have seen, there are a number of quite distinctways in which the reproduction of capitalism can produce absolutesurplus populations.36 This was certainly the case prior to the cur-rent conjuncture. Despite such principles of expansive hegemony asrepublican universalism and the states responsibility for offsettingcapitalist polarization, neither the KNWS in the North nor devel-opment projects in the Global South addressed these issues. Therewere always those beyond or outside expansive hegemonyin short:lumpen. Even so, the authority rulers derived from appealing to suchprinciples, and the fact that counter-movements acquired leverage bybeing framed in those terms, effectively configured the relationshipbetween revindicative politics and surplus populations was distinctfrom the current conjuncture.

Neoliberal states today do not see their role as one of counteractingthe inequities of capitalism but rather enhancing its field of operation.And as dominant blocs increasingly represent finance so the role ofsocial democracy in enhancing the state-productive project is redrawn.Finance capital may rely on growth but it does not itself produceit; rather, its purposeand its effectivenessis in seeking out themost microscopic element of surplus and channelling it back towardcapital, for the next round of pursuit. As David Harvey (1982) andNeil Smith (1984) nearly thirty years ago showed, capital continuallyrequires difference, produces difference, and having exploited it mustseek out a new coefficient of difference. But insofar as expropriationof surplus preeminently through movement and enclosure does not initself enrich the overall economy, it does not produce wealth. A seriesof concentric circles of wealth concentration become ever more intenseat the centre while, taken together as overall wealth, the circles do notexpand but contract, leaving surplus population to a kind of politicsthat has to be distinct from those within the hegemonic field, or eventhose with the potential of entering it.

Hegemonic projects are directed toward selected groups. And therecipients of such projects collude in the distinctions that allow theirclaims to be made in terms of selective hegemony. This, in turn,provides the templates that then authorize the distinctions that thesepeople make vis-a-vis populations beyond that field. There arises adistinction between this kind of politics and another kind. The waysin which regimes of regulation deal with the residuum producedby the specific forms of current capitalism suggest that a politics

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28 G. A. Smith

of revindication for such people will require features for which theconcepts of social science seem severely limited.

I confess to finding it hard to move into this terrain. One way togo, however, is to work quite carefully with the principles that droveGramscis enquiries in the twenties and thirties. As we have seen, fora long time populations were assessed on the valuation of labour interms of its contribution to the production of surplus value throughthe labour process. Marxs point was that, in a typical reversal, thismeant that, however much one may labour for ones own survival, orperhaps even communally for the common good, to the extent thatsuch labour did not produce surplus value for capital it was surplus,and people who performed only such labour were effectively surpluspeople (at least until they were needed again). I have argued thatGramsci framed his argument in similar terms. Yet, I have spent thelatter part of this article seeking to show that the forms of capitalistsocialization 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 rubrichegemony, Gramsci separates the two with numerical points:

The functions in question are [those of] . . . social hegemony and politicalgovernment. 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 dominantfundamental group . . .

2. The apparatus of state coercive power which legally enforces dis-cipline on those groups who do not consent either actively orpassively. (1971: 1213)

Here, Gramsci is talking of two processes directed at two distinctgroups: those who consent and those who do not consent to the projectof the dominant bloc.

The form of hegemony that provided the principles of the welfarepact is contained in the sentence that follows these numerical points.This apparatus [hegemony] is, however, constituted for the whole ofsociety in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and directionwhen spontaneous consent has failed (ibid: 13). Here, persuasion andcoercion are linked through time because hegemonic projects extend tothe whole of society in a context of cycles of capitalist expansion andcontraction (just as had Marxs understanding of the function of the rel-ative surplus population). So what allows this apparatus of hegemonyto be expansive to the whole of society is its sequential link.

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Yet when the temporal and spatial connections Gramsci (andMarx) envisaged are fractured, we are no longer talking of momentswhen spontaneous consent fail nor of expansive hegemonic projectspotentially embracing the whole of society, but rather projects directedtoward selective groups. The idea of the state as the condensation ofuniversal popular sovereignty promised by expansive hegemony andsustained by the tecnos of increases in productivity cannot be sus-tained. Extractions of surplus value through various forms of enclosurerely on flows that concentrate value already produced. Projects must,therefore, be directed at selective groups. Hegemonic projects of thiskind then, work by being exclusive and thereby render obsolete theideological power of universal popular sovereignty. Moreover, becauseselective hegemony reflects a form of capitalist socialization based onsurplus extraction through finance capital (as described here; see alsoSmith, forthcoming), populations on the threshold of the hegemonicfield do not perform the relative function of resolving the cycles inproduction capital (described above) in which their value is measuredin terms of their potential for surplus extraction directly throughthe labour process. Not having such a latent value, for these peoplecoercion is not held off stage as a threat for the future thereby givingpower to persuasion; coercion is exercised in the present, unconnectedto persuasion.

The result is the substitution for a temporal distinction betweennow and then, with a metaphorically spatial distinction in the present:one space in which some are selected to be within hegemonic strategiesand another occupied by an absolute surplus population subjected sim-ply to coercion. For these people a counter-politics directed uniquelyat neoliberal kinds of governmentality and the juridical features ofcitizenship will, in Gramscis terms, be more wilful than organic.

Another way of putting this is to note that, as we have seen, therole of the KNWS in using social citizenship to compensate for thedistributional and polarizing shortcomings of capitalist socializationhave now been supplanted by forms of state intervention that do notperform this role. So claims to various rights in terms of citizenshipmay effectively advance the conditions through which one is selectedin civil society, but they cannot be expected to ameliorate, still lessresolve, those conditions of life that are made impossible by capi-talist relations themselves. Again, I need to stress that this is notto 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 environmentaldestruction as well as the conditions faced by so-called immigrants,legal or otherwise, are profoundly tied to nationally specific forms of

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capitalist socialization. But this may mean that it is the latter thatshould become the central focus of struggle, rather than claims onrights in terms of citizenshiphowever enlightened and enculturedthat might be.

If we think in these terms, then it is surely clear that for somepeople, just as it would be nave to demand a more enlightened kindof citizenship which in practice will not be applied to them, so too itwould be nave to accept the principles of capitalist socialization anddemand simply that they be redrawn. While both of these strategiesseem to me to embrace most of what left politics is about today, it isvery clear that there are increasing numbers of people who acceptneither the principles of a liberal citizenship that is always grafted onto capitalism nor a kind of capitalist system that is no longer able tocompensate for their exploitation through growth.38

We might identify four criteria along which we could assess thedistinction between counter-movement politics that I am suggestinghere:

1. Continuity/disjuncture: the degree to which participants see thattheir demands can be met within existing social, political, and eco-nomic forms versus the degree to which only threats to those formswould 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 extentI see this as the popular participation feature. Yet evidence ofstrong popular participation plays especially to the notion thatthe result will be to convince key players (including the playersthemselves, but also imagined spectators, and those in power)insofar as, once they see the value of this specific action, theywill be persuaded. To this kind of leverage there is an importantaddition. . . .

3. Disruption/production: the forms of leverage they have at theirdisposal. One key element here would seem to be leverage thatcomes from the potential toward enhancing productivity broadlyconceived that participants can offer, versus the degree to whichtheir leverage derives from the pressure they can bring on keypoints that would produce significant disruption. Where those inpower minimize the productive potential of participants, the latterstrategy 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 extentI see negotiated politics versus radical revindicative politics muchin the way I see the distinction between the respective emphases in

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this regard of Foucault, on the one hand, and say E. P. Thompson,on the other. The one stresses the way in which govermentalityshapes subjectivity, and this is likely to be more the case for pol-itics that involves participants in dialogue with those in powertoward the reaching of consensus. The other stresses the role offorce 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 mixesof these features and they are, of course, deeply interconnected.

The challenge for the left therefore is to explore the means by whichthese myriad forms of revindicative politics can be combined as acounterforce out of which capitalist social relations will be superseded.

Gramsci, of course, spoke of a war of po