Necroeconomics: Dispossession, Extraction, and Indispensable/Surplus Populations in Contemporary Myanmar

Keywords: surplus populations, debt, extraction, supply-chain capitalism, de-agrarianization, Myanmar
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 4/11/2021 09:35 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/11/2021 10:50 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

Transformations in uses and conceptions of land in Myanmar are undermining agrarian viability and forcing members of rural households to move – and often keep moving – for labor opportunities. The article ethnographically traces de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar to theorize “surplus populations” as perpetually traversing the “relative/absolute divide”: subjects made absolutely surplus to one form of capitalist operation (production) may be perceived as relatively surplus to another kind (extraction), and hence reinscribed – albeit often for shorter periods and with increased risks, including death. The end of the relative/absolute surplus population dialectic is often the necroeconomy, which describes a particular form of value extraction in which the arrangement of production is either indifferent to human death, cannot avoid the production of death, or even functions more efficiently with a manageable amount of that death. The article builds a model of the necroeconomy by describing three necessary factors that combine to constitute it: willing laborers driven by debt, dispossession, and existential desperation; extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; and governmental acquiescence to the carnage of extraction. It concludes by considering what politics may emerge out of the threshold subject, who is both simultaneously surplus and essential.