Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes

ABSTRACT

Refugees and migrants are often studied as though they have no relation to the racial and class structures of the societies in which they reside. They are strangers to be governed by ‘integration’ policy and border management. Refugees and migrants are, however, subjects of contemporary capitalism struggling to render themselves valuable capitalist modes of production. I study the government of refugees and migrants in order to examine capitalist value regimes. Societal values and hierarchies reflected in capitalist modes of production impact on struggles of racialised subaltern groups to translate body power into valued labour. Marx’s account of surplus populations points to the common marginalisations of people called ‘refugees’ and other subaltern groups struggling to translate their body power into valorised labour. The essay includes a study of the gentrification of a district in Budapest, and its transformation into a means for the reproduction of capital, leading to the marginalisation of groups who no longer fit the new value regimes. Studying refugees as surplus populations allows for a sense of the common marginalisations of subaltern and racialised groups before capitalism, and questions the treatment of refugees and migrants as ‘strangers’.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• surplus populations
• colonialism
• Marx
• Foucault

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Volodya Artiukh, Raia Apostolova and, in particular, Celine Cantat and Lisa Tilley for their very helpful thoughts on comments on this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Prem Kumar Rajaram is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology & Social Anthropology at Central European University (CEU) and is Head of the CEU Open Learning Initiative (OLIve) which provides education programs for refugees and asylum seekers in Hungary.

Notes

1 Some may object to considering refugees and migrants ‘together’ in an analytical sense. Refugees are individuals seeking protection and it is of crucial importance to keep in mind the violence and conflict, in multiple forms, that lead to flight. But to say that it is useful to understand the reception, government and ‘integration’ of refugees in the context of the capitalist system does not detract from a focus on the reasons for their flight. Indeed it adds nuance to this by understanding refugees in relation to an ongoing historical political-economic process (the emergence of the state and capitalism as an encompassing political-economic-cultural system) and not as an external population different in its relation to political and economic structures.