-Analysis-
CAIRO — In a recent discussion on the Palestinian cause, my colleague Anush Kapadia, sociology professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, presented a new perspective that grabbed my attention, viewing the Palestinian cause from the perspective of the Israeli authorities’ management of what he called “human surplus.”
That is, human groups that have no “use,” and therefore are dealt with by marginalization, isolation, siege and displacement, through killing, intimidation and starvation if possible, in order to seize control of resources (land or what it contains) without the population.
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Kapadia is fully aware of the historical context; Palestinians have being subjected to occupation aimed at gathering the Jewish diaspora at the expense of the country’s indigenous population. Such perceptions had led to acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, acts that are still occuring.
Yet he believes that managing “human surplus” is a characteristic of our current era. This makes the conflict in Palestine different — in terms of quantity — from other conflicts around the world, some of which take place between countries and others within the countries themselves.
An industrial revolution without workers
Kapadia invoked the analytical concept of “human surplus” from the context of Indian sociology. India has seen widespread use of the concept in recent decades in an attempt to understand the nature of transformations in the densely populated country. India's large population has grown at high rates since its independence in 1947. The majority of its citizens still live in the countryside, and a large percentage of them work in the agricultural sector.
While the Industrial Revolution integrated rural populations and immigrants into labor markets in Western Europe and North America in the 19th century, today's economic development is based on technologies that do not require heavy employment, even in cases of industrialization. The development of mechanization as well as ongoing, frightening transformations in the fields of artificial intelligence have helped technology replace mental as well as physical work.
Over the past four decades, the liberalization of global trade and investments has contributed to the concentration of heavy manufacturing in certain regions in East and Southeast Asia, making it difficult for industrialization efforts to reach other countries of the Global South.
India faces the dilemma (shared by many countries in the Global South) of a large and growing population that has no real hope of moving to work in modern, high-productivity, high-wage economic sectors of advanced industries or services, which could reproduce the experience of the industrial revolution in the West a century and a half ago.
Citizenship without integration
To complicate the issue, the Global South's political independence after World War II paved the way for the people to be absorbed into political institutions in the name of building nation-states, citizenship rights and sovereignty of peoples, regardless of the democratic reality on the ground. This happened without any real integration in the labor markets; these countries joined marginal informal service activities with its weak productivity, lack of job security, and low wages.
This contradiction created a role for state institutions in managing human surplus: creating the material and moral conditions required to maintain the marginalization or exclusion of the majority.
This is in complete contrast to industrialized countries, in which the tools of governance and control developed not for marginalization and exclusion, but for inclusion and exploitation. The production and accumulation of economic value requires employing millions of workers, and then controlling them within a specific system.
The Israel-Hamas war is a harsh and extreme expression of human surplus management in today's world.
Today, however, rather than working to integrate the majority, governing institutions — at the national, regional or international level — often exclude them through repression, scrutiny and systematic violence. In other cases, this repression can be through distributing some resources in the form of aid, or domestic or international support through agreements, understandings to limit migration or concepts, such as the war on terrorism for example.
In India, there are distribution relationships based on electoral bribes, support programs and official social assistance. There is also tolerance for high levels of repression and violence against hundreds of millions of members of religious and ethnic minorities, and those belonging to the lower classes.
Worldcrunch 🗞 Extra!
Know more • Communist philosopher KarlMarx argued that under capitalism, there's a constant push to find cheaper and more efficient ways to produce goods. This means prioritizing machines over human labor. Instead of employing multiple workers, capitalism will instead invest in machines that one person can operate, ultimately reducing labor costs and labor force. Marx predicted that technological advancements would lead to a sort of human surplus: machines taking over jobs, creating a large pool of unemployed workers. Within the capitalist system, the unemployed are seen as a surplus of humans, no longer needed by the economy. — Spencer Hooker (read more about the Worldcrunch method here)
Human surplus is beyond India
Yet current examples of the “human surplus” concept can be found elsewhere in the world. For example, it is difficult to understand the importance of immigration issues in the political systems of wealthy countries in Western Europe and North America, without realizing the dilemmas of managing human surplus.
In this case, it is at the global level, especially because migration is linked to the rise of the far-right and to a set of racist perceptions that are extremely dangerous to the future of human rights. This can be seen in “democratic” countries witnessing a significant decline in their democratic balance. And it can be seen in agreements that those “democratic” countries reach with authoritarian governments in an effort to limit migrants and outsource human rights violations onto those governments.
The Israel-Hamas war is a harsh and extreme expression of human surplus management in today's world. In the case of Gaza, there is no need for integration into labor markets. There are no institutional frameworks that accommodate the majority of Palestinians under the claim of citizenship and basic rights. On the contrary, the ruling institutional and political framework is a framework for a state that defines itself on racist, religious foundations, and officially adopts an ideology based on the elimination of the indigenous population, or denying their existence at all.
Killing machine
Hence, technological innovation is focused on necessary security and military aspects. First to control, monitor and blockade in order to control the Palestinians at the lowest possible economic and human cost. Second, if that fails — as it did on Oct. 7 — try to eliminate them physically.
What is happening in Gaza is not far from the necessities of capitalist accumulation.
Through this theoretical perception, we can understand why the killing machine has been operating in Gaza since Oct. 7, and why there is also a degree of agreement among many leaders in support of the Israeli position.
What is happening in Gaza is not far from the necessities of capitalist accumulation in many regions of the world, or at least about managing the crisis of contemporary global capitalism.