Migrations and new expulsions: accumulation by dispossession or crisis of capitalist societal reproduction?

Abstract

The present paper discusses the relation between population dynamics and accumulation of capital, with special emphasis on a critical dialogue with the theory of accumulation by dispossession as presented by Marxist geographer David Harvey. We depart from a discussion on the so-called primitive accumulation as conceptualized by Karl Marx, in order to identify the fundamental meaning of the said historical process: the formation of capitalism, rooted in the separation between owners of means of production, on the one hand, and owners of the workforce commodity, on the other. From there on, we present a critical appraisal of the land grabbing scholarship, in which we spotlight similarities between land grabbing's expulsive and expropriating effects and the so-called accumulation by dispossession and its supposed capacity to resolve capital's crises. However, we problematize such an interpretation in light of the fundamental crisis of capital, that is, capital's tendency to absorb less and less workers into productive processes, due to capitalist competition and technological development, that in turn undermines capital accumulation itself. Lastly, we explore how contemporary expulsion processes, in a multiscalar register, go hand in hand with distinct confinement strategies as forms of surplus population management, typical of the barbarism provoked by the collapse of capitalism.

Introduction

The theoretical contribution of De Gaudemar (1977) offers important analytical and critical pathways to interpret the relationship between migrations, territorialization, and the accumulation of capital, especially the concept of “labor mobility,” based on the writings of Karl Marx. The present paper presents a critical understanding of the so-called “accumulation by dispossession” framework (Harvey, 2004)—and the processes of expulsions and population confinement understood through the said framework—that departures from De Gaudemar's (1977) contributions and, consequently, the necessary and contradictory relationship between labor mobility and capital reproduction. By investigating the contradictory nexus between these two terms through the specific temporal dynamic of capital (Postone, 1993), we delve into how, on the one hand, the experience of labor superfluidity and, on the other, the fictionalization of capital promote expulsions and confinement on population contingents at the world scale. In other words, we suggest that the private appropriation of financial assets through processes of dispossession, in spite of appearances, is incapable of circumventing the continual expulsion of workers from productive processes, while simultaneously amplifying new migratory processes that increment a relative surplus population (Marx, 1976) submitted to a wide range of population management devices.

We start our argument by demonstrating that migration studies have for long been engaged with discussions around the processes of capital accumulation. As shown is the first section, this engagement was theorized in the 1990s as a relation between flexible accumulation and transnational migrations, whereas contemporary studies are based on the framework of new expulsions and accumulation by dispossession. However, as we argue in the second section, the labor mobility theoretical approach allows for a critique of both the transnational and new expulsions perspectives by reframing the nexus between migrations and capital accumulation. In the third section, we depart from literature on land grabbing to frame how these studies linked dispossession processes to a permanent recreation of primitive accumulation. Thus, we show that the theoretical approach of accumulation by dispossession is a common basis for debates that are apparently separated, including contemporary literature on migrations, expulsions, and land grabbing. Subsequently, in our fourth section, we critique that approach, having the critical theory of value-dissociation as a point of departure. We argue that processes that appear to be a permanent recreation of primitive accumulation actually express the fundamental crisis of the categories of capitalist societal reproduction, determined by the specific temporality of capital. By way of conclusion, we show how empirical processes of migrations, expulsions, and population confinement correspond to a concrete manifestation of this fundamental categorial crisis.

Recent changes in migrations and its interpretations

Questions concerning the relationship between dynamics of population mobility and capital accumulation are incorporated into the theoretical field of migratory studies, based on an understanding that the particular processes of migration have an intrinsic link with forms of capital reproduction that unfold on a global scale. One such perspective on the interweaving of international migrations and capital accumulation was the transnational perspective (Glick-Schiller et al. 1992, 1995; Sassen, 1988) that attributed new migration patterns to the flexible accumulation regimes (Harvey, 1989). More recently, through a critique on transnationality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm, migration scholars such as Glick-Schiller (2018) and Feldman-Bianco (2018a) have turned to emerging research on new expulsions (Sassen, 2014) and the accumulation through dispossession framework (Harvey, 2004).

In the 1980s, Sassen (1988) identified the formation of a transnational space of circulation of capital linked to the restructuring of strategic economic sectors and to a rearrangement of capital on a global scale, reconfiguring international migration regimes. In this context, the author spotlighted the creation of a global supply of labor whose circulation depended also on objective and ideological links established between the countries of origin and destination of the invested capital (Sassen, 1988). Thus, immigrant labor also acquired specific characteristics—such as low wages and political disciplining—demanded by strategic sectors and locations for the restoration of the capital and, in turn, for the global economy.

Concurrently, migration scholars developed the “transnational perspective” as a theoretical-methodological framework to address what they considered to be new migratory experiences. Although the main legacy attributed to this perspective is the critique of the centrality given to the concept of a nation-state (Glick-Schiller 2018), Glick-Schiller et al. (1992, 1995) tried to highlight the importance of the flexible accumulation regime for the formation of that seemingly new migratory pattern. For these authors, the concept of transnationalism had been essential to highlight links between global economic processes and social relations, political actions, and migrant identities in the countries of origin and destination. Similarly to Sassen (1988), Glick-Schiller et al. (1995) argued that the possibility of transnational migrations was created by the global restructuring of capital, through the productive restructuring of certain economic sectors and by the disruption of local economies in the so-called Third World during the transition from Fordist production to flexible accumulation.

In this perspective, during the Fordist regime, immigrants’ assimilation and permanence were possible through their entrance into formal labor markets. However, in flexible accumulation regimes, this possibility deteriorates and, as a result of maintaining the ties configured by transnationality, migrants can expand their range of reproduction and social mobility strategies, such as circulating between countries according to local economic crises or working in the destination country to purchase properties in their country of origin, argue Glick-Schiller et al. (1992, 1995). In this context, the authors spotlighted the emergence of transnational families, which functioned as units of labor and reproduction, and even made unified decisions, although their members were divided between two countries (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992, 1995). This schematic framework, however, failed to consider that transnational patterns of migration, including transnational families, already existed during the Fordist era. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, the Bracero Program in the USA only accepted Mexican male workers, who were then forced to leave their families in Mexico and support them through remittances whenever possible (Méndez 2021a, 2021b)—a pattern of transnationality quite similar to those described by Glick-Schiller et al. (1992, 1995).

After its initial formulation, the transnational perspective became a paramount theoretical-methodological framework in migration studies for at least two decades. In a critical review of this approach, Glick-Schiller (2018) points out that it lacked a notion of temporality, which became crucial in later studies as it differentiated the relationships of contemporary transmigrants from those established by previous groups. This temporal change in migration patterns, according to Glick-Schiller (2018), includes migrants’ daily practices as well as the dynamics of capital reproduction and accumulation that circumscribed their migratory processes. Glick-Schiller (2018) acknowledges that this overlook of temporality immobilized the transnational perspective and prevented it from seeing new ongoing processes inserted in new accumulation regimes.

Conversely, the emergence of unprecedented mobility and displacement phenomena was extensively documented by Sassen (2014), who highlighted the emergence of a “new logic of expulsions.” This widely comprehensive concept includes processes of varied scales whose common characteristic is the removal of people from the places where they live, whether it be through losing their homes, leaving their region, or migrating to a new country, thus forming a global system of expulsions (Sassen 2014). These are caused, according to Sassen (2014), by processes such as the financialization of the real estate market, environmental disasters, and the formation of a global land market that are in turn articulated within a new context of capital reproduction.

For Glick-Schiller (2018), in this new crisis of capitalism, processes of expulsion and dispossession are transformed into capital, configuring a regime of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004). Such expulsion and dispossession processes—wars, climatic disasters, land expropriations, and privatizations—unfold in physical and social displacements around the world, resulting in the formation of new migratory processes, as well as the precarization of living and working conditions, including in “advanced capitalist countries.” Consequently, Glick-Schiller (2018) denies the applicability of the transnational perspective in the current context, since forms of mobility have been reconfigured and re-signified by this new hegemonic regime of capital accumulation.

The intrinsic relationship between new migrations and the accumulation by dispossession regime also appears in Feldman-Bianco (2018a), who highlights the central role of dispossession in the execution of neoliberal projects. To Feldman-Bianco (2018a, 2018b), gender and race are fundamental categories to understand what groups are most affected by violent and brutal expulsions—Indigenous communities, people of African descent, immigrants, refugees, and residents of urban occupations—as well as to emphasize the necessary link between new migrations and power structures imposed in the historical processes of racialization and colonization.

Therefore, migration scholars have for long been engaged with debates on processes of capital accumulation; however, the said engagement derived from in vogue theories of accumulation and eluded an explanation of the totality of the migratory process under reproduction of capital processes. As we argue in the next section, the concept of labor mobility allows us to find that totality.

Mobilization of labor as a founding category of the relationship between migrations and expulsions

As we have seen, the interpretations that relate population mobility dynamics to forms of capital accumulation and reproduction have regained centrality in the field of migration studies, achieving considerable relevance in recent research on new expulsions. However, the prominence of this correlation had already been anticipated by Marx (1976) in his writings on the formation of free labor and “the so-called primitive accumulation.” For him, the expulsion of the people from their lands on the countryside had been responsible for the formation of a contradictory freedom that would originate several forms of displacement, among them migrations.

Occurred between the 15th to the 18th centuries, the so-called primitive accumulation corresponded to the moment of capitalist development when accumulation could not yet stand on its own feet. Under these conditions, processes such as expropriation, the advent of bloody legislation to discipline the newly expropriated, and the creation of forced labor houses, among other strategies, contributed to the genesis of the capitalist landowner, the industrial capitalist, and the worker, converging in the formation of the capital-relation. In a categorical sense ¹ , the capital-relation is defined by the existence of workers expropriated from any means of production or subsistence on the one hand and means of production privately appropriated on the other.

This relation unfolds by pushing workers to labor for owners of production means and transforming the physical and intellectual capacities of the former into the workforce commodity, the only one they possess to sell under the risk of seeing their physical and social reproduction cripple. In turn, as far as owners are concerned, only the employment of workers can ensure the reproduction of the means of production they appropriated as capital. This operation includes the creation of value through the productive consumption of labor forces, which is always greater than what is paid to the worker in the form of wages (restricted to defray the mere reproduction of labor forces), and establishes the tautology in which consists the blind process of valorization of value ² . The contract between worker and capitalist owner takes the fetishist form of concealment of this inequality between necessary and surplus labor, while the law corresponds to the asymmetry between expropriated and owners through the constitution of a legal equality between the earnings and its sources.

De Gaudemar (1977), reacting to the centrality of this violent historical process of production of the workforces in Marxian production, distinguishes its three moments, namely, extraction, utilization, and the circulation of labor-power, synthesized in the concept of labor mobilization. For the author, the mobility of labor has a contradictory character, as workers are free to come and go, to choose where, how, and for whom to work, as they are subjected to the workforce commodity that they own. However, they are entirely coerced to work, since they are expropriated of the conditions to reproduce autonomously, and find themselves free of any other means of production and subsistence, having only their workforce, which they are subjected to, as means of reproduction. Therefore mobility, as the condition of the capital appreciation process, acts as a basis for the reproduction of labor as a historically determined form of social mediation ³ (Kurz, 2014; Postone, 1993). Besides coercing workers into abstract labor, mobility also conditions the flexible character of the workforce, since capital demands from labor the same fluidity it possesses. This fluidity relates to the ways in which workers enter labor markets and interact with its multidimensional characteristics, as they are constantly subjected to migration as well as changes in occupation, content of their productive activities, and number of working hours, given that capital can at any moment lay off workers, change their labor, or the conditions under which they work. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that De Gaudemar's concept of labor mobility puts forward some contributions by Foucault, specially the notion of “docile bodies” (Foucault, 1977), to qualify the transformations over the bodies of expropriated populations. Such transformations ultimately shape workers’ bodies to the fetishist necessities of the emergent industry during primitive accumulation, since the productive consumption of workforce requires disciplining the bodies that personify it through continuous measures of docilization, constraining, and training. These strategies deepen the naturalization of labor as a social mediation and the violence intrinsic to the work experience, obscuring the historical determination of both (Marx, 1973; Postone, 1993). Although such transformations in the exercise of labor mobility may result from class struggles and the dispute over surplus value throughout modernization, our argument points to the need to observe it from the specific temporal dynamics of capital that carries a categorical character, as opposed to just empirical. In that sense, history possesses its own logic, which surpasses mere concrete and particular characteristics of each moment or set of events. This means an immanent, critical, and negative temporality of capital that, as soon as it stood on its own feet, also kick-started the uninterrupted process of increasing the organic composition of capital, pushed by competition between capitalists. The said process gradually jettisons, first relatively and then absolutely, living labor from the productive process, undermining the bases of capital accumulation itself. Therefore, if it is right to say that labor mobility and capital appreciation are inextricably linked, producing a necessary relation in which the first sustains the enlarged reproduction of the second, the historical dynamic of capital undermines this inextricable relation without, however, offering a horizon of reproduction of the working class beyond abstract or waged labor. In other words, given the exponential productivity of labor promoted by intercapitalist competition throughout the 20th century, this relationship has become anachronistic, as have the ways in which biopolitical devices act in the management of a population that has become increasingly superfluous (from the point of view of capital). However, although superfluidity has a categorial character—since it is related to the contradictory relation that the workforce as a commodity establishes with the enlarged reproduction of capital—an exclusive gaze at the generalization of labor mobility and its crisis would hide a set of gender and racial issues that cannot be understood in terms of, on the one hand, the domination of abstract labor and, on the other, the strictly appropriation of the surplus labor by capital, both responsible for sustaining the enlarged reproduction of the latter. Therefore, those dissociations (of both gender and race) conform a totality whose character is fragmentary (Scholz, 2004), although each of them respond to specific concrete historical and geographical processes.

For Scholz (2004), the family is a co-constitutive dimension of the capitalist socialization process precisely because the formation of labor is based on expropriation. Accordingly, expropriation would involve the structuring of a universal reified dependence (Marx, 1976) in which the productive effects of the social division of labor, therefore of the social relationship between people mediated by things, erase the temporal dimension necessary for the reproduction of the workers, internalized by family nuclei. The activities associated with this erased time of social reproduction mediated by the commodity form were historically attributed to women throughout the process known as witch hunts in Europe, between the 16th and 18th centuries (Federici, 2004; Scholz, 2004), leading to a consolidation of women's confinement to the domestic sphere. From the preponderance assumed by the abstract labor and the rational logic of the accumulation of capital, unfolds the hierarchy that configures the asymmetry between genders in its historical determinism, even with the entry of women into the labor market (Scholz, 2004). Otherwise, as we have seen, colonialism was also a necessary moment for the formation of the capital-relation in the metropolises that imposed themselves as a radiating center for capitalist expansion, since the (primitive) accumulation necessary for the process of industrialization and reproduction of the working class in England came from the compulsory and unpaid labor in the colonies of enslaved Africans, Indigenous peoples, and impoverished immigrants ⁴ . This erased labor would be sustained only based on the extra-economic violence justified by the racialized constitution of the subaltern humanity (Mbembe, 2017), indelibly marking their integration into the fragmented capitalist totality, even after the end of slavery, through the racist configuration that fundamentally structures it. As Robinson (1983) argues, capitalism is always racial capitalism, since capital accumulation relies on historically determined racial differentiation, constantly re-creating divisions within the working class that facilitate the exploitation of labor. As with genders, the constitution of races averts any intrinsic and/or biological attributes, being the result, on the contrary, of a process laden with historical determinism.

Thus, the formation of labor mobility and modern migration have been inextricably linked to witch hunts and colonialism, shaping a particular configuration of the fragmentary totality. This, in turn, would be transformed over the 20th century by the temporal dynamic of capital and the class struggle, taking on new shapes in the face of the current crisis of labor, as we subsequently argue.

The new expulsions and the so-called land grabbing

The discussion on the emergence of a new accumulation regime by dispossession is also introduced in the debate about land grabbing. Initially used by the global press, databases, and activist groups, land grabbing now describes and/or conceptualizes the transnational transactions of large extensions of land that formed an unprecedented expansion of the global land market. The first phase of academic production on the problem identified the occurrence of land grabbing, elaborated questions about the scale of investments and their territorial extension, and identified the drivers of the process (Borras Jr and Franco, 2010; Edelman et al., 2013; Oya, 2013).

The second phase of studies on the world race for land relied on qualitative and local efforts in an attempt to specify its scope and detail its effects. In addition, as researchers tried to define the process of land grabbing itself, they foregrounded the establishment of imposed changes in the forms of land use, caused by illegal expropriations as well as purchases, leases, concessions, or supply contracts that culminate in expulsions. Finally, the understanding of land grabbing as part of capital accumulation strategies that responded to a convergence between energy, environmental, food, and financial crises would reinforce such a concept (Borras et al. 2013; Peluso and Lund, 2011).

Thus, studies of this second phase, instead of framing the food crisis as an assumed cause of the race for land, treat it as one of its possible consequences. In this sense, land grabbing scholarship made an effort to show how forced displacement is linked to the replacement of family farmers by corporate food regimes (the agribusiness of renewable energies or flex crops) designed to feed not the population but markets or production lines that are circumstantially more profitable, be it food, feeds, energy, etc. (McMichel, 2013; White et al., 2012). The concept of green grabbing, which also appears in this new phase of studies, specifies the process of neoliberalization of nature by underlying the emergence of a market for environmental compensations that would include Payment for Environmental Services (PSE) and the privatization of natural resources (Sauer and Borras Jr, 2016).

Other studies also question the perspectives strictly focused on the need for the regulation of land grabbing, showing how such perspectives naturalize this process, taking it for granted instead of contextualizing it as an accumulation strategy that responded to a convergence of crises in which financial capital acquires a new role, especially as investment funds focused on both the production of commodities and acquisition of land. In this argument, the very rise in food and oil prices is related to financial speculation (Sassen, 2013) while the financialization of the land market figures as an outlet for the need to diversify investment portfolios and choose assets considered safe in the face of the volatility of the stock market, flooded with rotten bonds in the context of the 2008 crisis (Buxton et al., 2012; De Schutter, 2011). For Sassen (2014), the financialization of the land market, linked to that of the real estate market and the broad securitization of numerous non-financial sectors, including the very subsistence of populations functions, in turn, as an important facilitator of the emergence of predatory systemic capacities whose synthesis is the generalized process of expulsions.

Some authors (Peluso and Lund, 2011; Sassen, 2013, 2014; Sauer and Borras Jr, 2016) give a more consequential approach to these expulsions, revisiting the Marxian debate about primitive accumulation, especially after its update by Harvey (2004), to address its role in mitigating recurring capitalist crises. Based on some of Luxembourg's (1963) formulations, Harvey (2004) accepts the thesis of the swallowing of non-capitalist societies by the expansion of capital, provided there is a constant recreation of primitive accumulation reserves.

For Harvey (2004), today these reserves include all the historical dimensions of primitive accumulation, such as peasant expropriation, formation of a landless proletariat, privatization of common resources, such as water, suppression of homemade sources of production and consumption, replacement of family farming by agribusiness, privatization of national industrial heritage and even enslavement of trafficked populations. Moreover, in Harvey's (2004) argument, these primitive accumulation reserves rely on the enhancement of the credit system and financial capital as springboards for theft and predation, because of their speculative nature, through the fraudulent valuation of shares, the destruction of assets by inflation, mergers, acquisitions, and the promotion of debt charging levels that imprison entire populations, thus constituting as true vanguards of the current dispossession. Either way, such reserves work as counteracting factors to the progressive reduction of properly capitalist conditions of accumulation.

These arguments were widely accepted in studies that discussed land grabbing from the perspective of the expulsions it causes. However, if we go back to the Marxian analysis that Harvey (2004) intends to update in his theory of accumulation by dispossession, it is clear how the overall conceptualization of this issue is incomplete or insufficient. The supposed mitigation of the crises is explained by the process of releasing assets such as land and natural resources at low costs, in general, resulting from land grabbing. But, despite the idea that land control by some implies the spoliation of the others, the real effects that it has today, which historically had already been one of the main roles of primitive accumulation—namely, the production of people contradictorily free from everything and ready to give themselves to extracting the surplus value, as we argue on section two—are not directly taken into account. Nevertheless, it can be said, at least for Harvey (1989, 2004), that the role attributed to absolute surplus value in the current flexible dynamics of capital reproduction, i.e. assuming the incorporation of low-paid workers, can also presuppose, albeit implicitly, the equal production of the workforce as a low-cost asset.

Some authors, however, do not ignore the role of the production of workers concerning the new expulsions. White et al. (2012), for example, discuss the inclusion conditions of expropriated subjects, given the insignificant creation of jobs or partnerships by businesses that appropriated their lands, as well as by the industry or other sectors of national economies. Li (2010, 2011) calls the promises of transition from farms to factories and education a failure, considering the number of educated people who are also unemployed. She even claims for a governmental solution to the problem, through job creation or universal basic income subsidy, and proposed that these be sieves for the debate on land grabbing, given the lack of survival conditions and the impoverishment left for those who lose their parcels.

For Sassen (2014), finally, the extraction and destruction character defines advanced and traditional capitalism, even though today land expulsion leads more and more people to squalor as they lose their function as producers and consumers, due to the set of other expulsions that surround them (from state social rights, the labor market, consumption and national societies—as in the case of the unemployed, living in slums, incarcerated en masse, displaced by force, refugees—and even from the biosphere, through the transformation of natural environments into dead land and water). However, she suggests that such trends are not anomalous, nor the result of a crisis, but solely of the systemic deepening of capitalist relations.

The impossible “Cristopher Colombus Forever” in the current capitalist crisis

It is worth mentioning that Marx’s (1981) studies on the formation of land ownership show how it never functioned as an antediluvian pre-capitalist limit, with which capital needs to negotiate, but rather as a category created by capital itself. Among his arguments, Marx (1981) reveals that the primary role of property was to deprive the expropriated of any conditions of societal reproduction that were not mediated by capital. Additionally, he contributes, despite the controversies, to the denaturalization of labor itself, showing how its abstract character resulted from the division of labor and broad wage earning, that is, showing its historically specific constitution (Postone, 1993).

In addition, Marx (1976) described a general law of capitalist accumulation that revealed its character as an automatic subject, with relevant implications for discussing the role of expulsions and the meaning of today's migrations. In short, the competition between capitals that structures capitalist social relations imposes on them the constant need to lower production costs in order to increasingly appropriate surplus profit. This process can occur in several ways, but it has historically manifested as increasing labor productivity so that more could be produced in less time (relative surplus value), in addition to the production through the capital itself of an unemployed population contingent whose role would be that of lowering the wages of the employed, both belonging to capital, therefore, in precisely the same measure. Marx (1976) called the unemployed contingent a relative surplus population, showing how that surplus population was related to the needs of capital at a certain level of its development and refusing any similarities with Malthusian formulations.

To achieve such effects, capital must promote a constant increase in its organic composition through the development of productive forces. This process requires, on the one hand, the advancement of increasingly more significant portions of capital. On the other hand, it promotes the progressive expulsion of living labor from productive processes, although it remains as the basis for valorization. Among the consequences of such a process, Marx (1976) spotlights the concentration and centralization of capital, which add to the increase in the organic composition of capital, and produce a tendency of the rate of profit to tall. Through a reduction of the mass of living labor in relation to the mass of labor objectified in the means of production that is set in motion, there is a reduction in the share of unpaid labor in relation to the value of global capital employed. Since the profit rate corresponds to the relation between the mass of the surplus-value and the value of the global capital, it would, therefore, end up falling (Marx, 1981).

Marx himself presents causes contrary to this trend, related to the role of relative surplus populations, an increase in the degree of exploitation of the workforce, and the lowering of wages below their value (Marx, 1981). However, what Marx identified as a trend and allowed him to draw the terms that generated the ever-deepening imminent crisis of capitalist reproduction undergoes a definitive break with the third industrial revolution. Since then, the incorporation of new territories and the development of new products and even sectors of capitalist production no longer compensate for the losses resulting from the increase in the organic composition that follows development itself (Kurz, 2014).

At the same time, the decrease in the relative capacity to absorb living labor in production increases the number of investments required to set it in motion, making capital dependent on the credit system since the beginning of the 20th century, as it was pointed out by scholarship on the rise of financial capital. To mobilize its reproduction, capital always had to pledge labor to be consumed in the future while it continued to be progressively expelled from production, until the irreversible autonomization between labor and money (Kurz, 2014).

A relative autonomization between the two had already been compensated in the capitalist development through the absolute expansion of the production of value by the absolute incorporation of workers throughout the so-called imperialist phase. Subsequently, the expansion of the relative share of the surplus-value that characterized Fordism offset the rising costs with infrastructure and expansion of unproductive labor associated with such process, so that the interest mobilized by capital reproduction could still be paid by the valorization of value. However, this process would greatly increase that critical trend whose limit, achieved during the third industrial revolution, undermined the promises of further expansion to the peripheries. In the so-called Third World, Fordist development would be interrupted halfway by the famous debt crisis that erupted in Latin America in 1982. In the Asian Tigers and more recently in China, who overcame the gigantic limits on preliminary capital and infrastructure costs to reach the lowest production costs as well as the top level of world productivity, the result was the reproduction of the same critical dynamic whose expansion expels more labor than it incorporates.

This means that capitalist reproduction does not include any constant return of labor, but keeps an internal temporality, or a temporal dynamic in the words of Postone (1993), which made Marx capable of anticipating the critical character that would only later manifest itself definitively (Kurz, 2014). In this sense, Glick-Schiller's (2018) claim on the incorporation of temporality in migratory studies is absolutely relevant, but in a categorical and not just in a descriptive sense, as the author suggests. Differently from Glick-Schiller (2018), the notion of temporality we claim here is rooted in the notions of abstract time and abstract labor presented by Postone (1993). That is, a form of temporality determined by the contradictory social form of commodity (value and use value), which is radically different from a contingent and undetermined understanding of history. The root of this specific form of temporality is the productivity of labor and its contradictory effects over labor, understood as a form of social mediation (Postone, 1993).

This critical process does not mean, however, any end of the line, but a significant transformation insofar as the bases were laid for a fictionalization of capitalist reproduction, in reference to the Marxian concept of fictitious capital (Kurz, 2014). This has engendered a bubble economy like that of the deficit circuit in the Pacific, NASDAQ, or the dot-com companies, commodities, erupted with the 2008 crisis. Although numerous authors relate the problem to the deregulation of the financial market, the creation of secondary markets and neoliberalism, the formation of an economy whose accumulation, already a mere simulation of real appreciation, depends on the constant inflation of its property titles—until the next burst—results from the described autonomization process (Pitta, 2020).

With a more sophisticated formulation, Harvey (2004) seems to reach the problem when he attributes the role assumed by finance to the over-accumulation of capital that no longer finds opportunities for profitable investment in the production. However, he identifies constantly orchestrated devaluations as temporary solutions to the crisis or the shift between monetary and material wealth. This conception includes the prospect of liquidation of over-accumulated surpluses that guarantee that capital is be substantialized again through labor exploitation, combining the forms of relative and absolute surplus-value, currently amplified once more. For this reason, Harvey's (2004) criticism focuses on the brutal capacity of the international financial system to impose devaluations that affect economic sectors or entire territories as effective massacres: each bubble burst causes active assets to be sold at low prices, on which the survival of the population, already financialized, depends.

Thus, despite the critical trend regarding the reproduction of capital, the crisis arising from the secular autonomization between labor and money appears to Harvey (2004) as a kind of cyclical crisis, since the conditions of accumulation could be resumed by new rounds of over-accumulation and crises. However, it is not clear how these devaluations allow the relative incorporation of more labor, even without lowering the average global productivity levels required for productive capital investments. Contrary to Marx's reasoning, for whom the category of value does not represent the truth regarding the labor expropriated by capitalists for the benefit of their private accumulation, Harvey (2004) establishes an immediate association between labor expenditure, exploitation, and accumulation. The fetishistic character of the social form requires thinking of value as a negation of concrete expenditures or means of production and not as its measure, a phantasmagoric average that is established behind subjects’ backs as a result of productivity and whose effectiveness consists in money into more money (Leite, 2015). Therefore, regardless of the vast masses of overexploited workers, value remains a miserable measure in terms of joint capital, when compared with the investment mobilized in its production, with the alarming value of the securities traded on the financial market in the order of quadrillions of dollars (Tooze, 2018), or the asymmetry between the approximate value of annual global GDP (80 trillion dollars) and the sum of public debts of all national states (280 trillion dollars), about 3.5 times greater than the first (Menegat, 2020).

It can also be concluded that Harvey (2004) was not entirely consequent with the internal temporality or the historical dynamics of capital, which moreover supports his interpretation of a constant return of primitive accumulation. In the face of inter-capitalist competition and the equalization of profit rates, as we argue in this essay, concentration and centralization appear as a tendency, by allowing individual capitalists to grab a larger share of the global surplus-value. This possibility would incite the very development of the productive forces, although its long-term effects implied a lowering of the profit rate. Regarding centralization, there is also the possibility of surplus profit arising from advantages given by the monopoly of technological differentials of productivity, fertility, or land location. Thus, land grabbing is explained by the effort of incorporating land rent as an attempt to circumvent the tendency of rate of profit to fall, revealing itself in the genesis of massive oligopolies and their unrestrained growth. However, it cannot be taken as fact the possibility of substantializing the reproduction of an already fictionalized capital, nor as a recreation of primitive accumulation, in the face of a real crisis of labor that results from the extraordinary increase in the organic composition, the absolute production of relatively superfluous workers, and their disposability, whose results we previously laid out in this essay (Leite, 2015).

In this context, the growing precariousness of labor and the lowering wages of those who still manage to get a job after being expelled from the land, from secured jobs, and, finally, from the job market itself is just a transitory moment toward superfluity, even when the labor market sounds the alarm of labor shortages, currently seen in the USA and a few countries in Europe (ref.). There may be some one-off shortages in particular sectors of the social division of labor, especially because qualification might produce a dual market and even temporal gaps between demand and supply. However, such economic (in a strict sense) events have the structural and irreversible superfluity as their background. The refusal on the part of the American working class in accepting any kind of work in the tertiary sector is predicated on lowering wages and lack of benefits, which, in turn, is the economic evidence of the workers’ disposability in labor markets in relation to the needs of capital. Anyway, each of those cases must be observed and discussed in their particularities, still mediated with the totality of capital crisis that we claim. For Scholz (2019), objective superfluity is the true category, disguised in the experience of precariousness requiring unconditional maintenance of any professional activity, even if in the condition of petty entrepreneurs of their own squalor (Giavarotti, 2018).

New migrations, expulsions, and confinement by way of conclusion

Herein, we have presented the relationship between migrations and expulsions, nevertheless questioning its meaning in the light of specific temporal dynamics inherent to the capitalist reproduction, which, as we sought to show, has a critical character. This problematization started from the collating between the nexus of primitive accumulation, when the conditions for the enlarged reproduction of capital are effectively created, and the processes of dispossession understood as failed fetishistic attempts to overcome the de-substantialization of capital. Both processes, despite the differences determined by the temporal dynamics of capital reproduction, are similar because they occur through the establishment of amity lines (Schmitt, 2003) inextricably linked to the process of capitalist territorialization. It is the definition of groups and territories subjected to extra-economic violence means, employed to submit them to the fetishistic purpose of valorization of value. Such lines, established to legitimize the colonialist intentions of the Old World, define on the one hand sovereign states governed by law and rights and on the other the territories “where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end’” (Mbembe, 2003: 23), that is, spaces without rights. Or even, the rule of law on the one hand and the state of exception on the other (Schmitt, 2003).

However, despite Schmitt's own political and legal prerogative, in which such a configuration is a necessary condition for the maintenance of law in the Old World—just as for Harvey (2004) permanent primitive accumulation is an unavoidable necessity of capital accumulation—the wealth itself expropriated from the colonies would transform the Old World by replacing the supremacy of mercantile capital with that of industrial capital (Marx, 1976) and overcoming colonialism as a form of capital accumulation. The new geopolitical reconfiguration triggered by the prohibition of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery led to a permanent process of internal colonization (Leite, 2015) by the then-new nation-states, as happened with the Land Law in Brazil and the Homestead Act in the USA. That is, even in the face of the expansion of the space circumscribed by the amity lines, promoted by the political emancipation of the former colonies, the creation of conditions for the reproduction of the general law of capitalist accumulation (Marx, 1976) in these new nation-states requires the internalization of new amity lines to bound territories and populations subjected to war. In other words, new rounds of expropriation and incorporation of land and workers occur internally so that the hegemony of mercantile capital is overcome.

Just as the contradictory unfolding of capital once led colonialism and its primitive accumulation to crises, repositioning and internalizing the territorialization of those imaginary lines in the newly formed nation-states, the contemporary labor crisis also changes the direction of the new expulsions. However, these are more and more determined by population and crisis management strategies than by the perspective of effectively incorporating the expropriated population into productive processes.

We reference the production of new technocratic categorizations to reiterate and produce population cleavages within the generalized labor society itself, and no longer among those who would be “inside” or “outside” of it in its global expansion and imposition process, like the “boomerang effect,” formulated by Foucault and revisited by Graham (2011), especially if considered in a multi-scalar way. This effect suggests that certain biopolitical techniques of population control, typical of the mobilization of labor in the colonies, later become part of the repertoire of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Fascism. They are updated in a context that Graham (2016) qualified as a new military urbanism. As seen, for example, in the proliferation of frontiers and technocratic categories destined to manage the populations that continue to be expelled (Winkler, 2022), although they do not end up being incorporated, which means that they are not limited to specific nations—as the contemporary movement of migrants and refugees reveals—blurring the strict separation between the First and Third world ⁵ .

Frontiers will often distinguish population groups subjected to procedures of exception. From potential objects of exploitation, they become qualified (and produced) as a potentially dangerous population to be managed in a permanent state of exception. This situation reveals not only the limits of Christopher Columbus today (Scholz, 2019) but the emergence of other territorial patterns, such as confinement (Leite and Giavarotti, 2020), which set the tone for the growing security-focused characteristics of political borders, as well as the new military urbanism (Graham, 2011): checkpoints, fences, biometric surveillance, mass incarceration, dissemination of refugee camps, slums as open-air concentration camps, etc.

In this dialectic between transformation and reconstitution of borders, the “war on terror,” triggered after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in the USA, operates as an important catalyst for an increasing “de-legalization” (Kurz, 2003) of the relationship between the State and civil society. The production of “new threats” by the State linked, according to the international community, to drug trafficking, terrorism, human trafficking, and undocumented migration (Feldman-Bianco, 2018b) contributes to the worsening of social reproduction conditions that in turn deepens the critical character of the relations organized around the family nucleus and traditional gender roles. Nevertheless, the obsolescence of men as bread-winners, the double socialization of women, the commodification of the sphere of reproduction, and the feminization of migrations reiterate the hierarchy and violence of the patriarchy, unfolding in precarious forms of labor and reproduction that occur in racialized and migrant communities (Ribeiro, 2019). In this social experience, superfluity, the production of disposable subjects and the production of abject and racialized bodies (Butler, 2011) are indelibly associated. Superfluidity then extrapolates itself, since it is no longer reserved only for Black people ⁶ , as an image of subordinate existence in a castrated humanity, and eventually incorporates unemployed workers, immigrants, slum dwellers, etc. into “the becoming black of the world” (Mbembe, 2017).

The multiplication of these new frontiers, which will legitimize the constant violation of human rights, is nevertheless accompanied by a growing humanitarian discourse, which shapes a new regime of migratory policies marked by neoliberal capitalism that overlaps humanitarianism and securitization (Feldman-Bianco, 2018b), through global agendas that defend border and migratory control based on concepts from the human rights lexicon. In this sense, projects that fight human trafficking, by claiming increased control and security, end up creating new layers of criminalization of migration, since they also affect undocumented migration (Feldman-Bianco, 2018b). In Europe, Pallister-Wilkins (2022) identifies the existence of “humanitarian borders,” which represent the contradiction between draconian border regimes, that by denying immigrant entrance to Europe push them into dangerous journeys of unauthorized border crossings, and the effort of preserving immigrants’ lives at these border zones as a part of the other side of these same policies. In this context, the transition from “undesirable migrants,” who introduced themselves even if precariously in the societies of destination, to “disposable migrants,” as suggested by Feldman-Bianco (2018b), is manifested in mass deportation policies of generally non-whites (Indigenous, black, refugees, among others) in the USA and Europe. This must be placed under the sign of the collapse of this society of labor and not just as a new political-institutional figure of capitalism (Dardot and Laval, 2013) or a crisis of legitimacy (Collyer and King, 2016), that is, neoliberalism.

Considering the entire path developed up to here, we conclude that both expulsions and confinement, despite being empirically located in opposite poles and triggering distinct concrete processes, coexist on a multi-scalar way as patterns of territoriality specific to the labor crisis and the collapse of modernization. If, on the one hand, expulsions no longer create capital, either at the origin or destination, and, on the other hand, population management devices no longer operate in order to form docile bodies for labor, but to produce categories and frontiers to distinguish one from the other, we affirm that both express a present time that can only be characterized as a worldwide waiting area (Arantes, 2014) made up of true refugees of modernization.