Surplus Populations

While individual capitalists can only make a profit by exploiting workers, competition with other capitalists forces them to economize on labor. As Karl Marx showed in Capital, this rising productivity results in a long-term growth of the number of workers surplus to capital’s requirements — and thus unable to find productive employment. Recent research estimates the size of this “surplus population” at approximately 40 and 60 percent of humanity today. This ratio is also clearly growing.

The longer capitalism endures, the more often the average worker, globally, will be exposed to unemployment and poverty. But there is no pure dichotomy, here: rather than divided into two stable pieces, the proletariat tends to be stratified into different fractions, each associated with a particular level of access to stable employment. Most often, this is tied to categories such as race, caste, religion, and gender. Increasingly stringent border controls make citizenship, in particular, a crucial factor of relegation to the surplus group.

Even if capital doesn’t constantly need their labor, it often finds other uses for surplus populations. It is happy to utilize surplus workers, including immigrants, as a “reserve army” that can be hired quickly in boom times, fired during downturns, and otherwise manipulated to push wages down. Capitalist development also progressively lowers the cost of basic necessities, making it relatively affordable to keep surplus populations alive with humanitarian aid.

Yet capital is fundamentally free of any commitment to these populations’ long-term reproduction across generations. Given the chance, it is happy to experiment with methods that combine exploitation with depleting their living standards. The destruction of state support for social reproduction in Global South countries like Bangladesh through “structural adjustment” has not hindered global capital from exploiting their increasingly immiserated working classes.

From Hyperexploitation to Genocide

Monstrous as it may be, such hyperexploitation is not genocide. It can, however, shade into it, as Adam Tooze’s history of the Nazi economy demonstrates. Tooze links the annihilation of the Jews of Eastern Europe to Adolf Hitler’s settler-colonial Generalplan Ost, which sought to turn the region into Germany’s agrarian hinterland. Under this plan (enthusiastically supported by German capitalists), all the region’s Jews and many of its other inhabitants would become surplus, and thus destined for expulsion or death.

But Nazi logic demanded both the utilization of all available labor-power and the conservation of food and other means of subsistence for German soldiers and civilians. Hence the structure of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, which aimed at a “rational” combination of exploitation and annihilation. Those prisoners who could not provide any surplus labor were murdered immediately, while the rest were worked to death, as maximum effort was extracted from their undernourished bodies, as scientists experimented with optimizing the relevant physiological functions. Though not accompanied by the same ultraracist ideology, the British policy of “forced transfer” of calories from Indian civilians to the military also led to the starvation of millions (as did analogous practices in the Soviet Union).

In the decades following World War II, growing agricultural productivity made it much cheaper to feed people, and imperial states no longer had to choose between feeding the metropole and the colony. As critical agrarian scholarship has shown, the dumping of food surpluses in the Third World as “aid” shored up Western profits while undermining the Southern peasantry’s hold on its land, paradoxically rendering it more vulnerable to hunger despite global food surpluses. Deepening market dependency in the South led to the further growth of surplus populations, now concentrated in urban areas.

The Formation of the Gaza Strip

In the Middle East, today the world’s most food-dependent region, this dynamic has been particularly stark. Within the Middle East, the Gaza Strip is a particularly extreme case. The Palestinian peasantry, largely expelled in the Nakba of 1948 and collected in refugee camps surrounding the new state of Israel, became the region’s quintessential surplus population.

The tiny coastal territory, which would become the Gaza Strip, emerged from the catastrophe as an Egyptian protectorate hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from all over southern Palestine. In this, it was quite different from the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, a larger zone where the local peasantry managed to hold on to much of its land.

Following the occupation of both territories in 1967, Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank entered the Israeli labor market. By 1986, 46 percent of the Gazan workforce was working in Israel, helping to fuel the country’s long economic boom. But Israel’s policy of de-development perpetuated Gaza’s precarity. It prevented the emergence of a productive base within the strip, while working to prevent Israeli businesses from becoming unduly dependent on Gazan labor, which it saw as a potential political liability.

This potential became real with the First Intifada of 1987–91, which triggered the gradual expulsion of Palestinian workers, and Gazans in particular, from the Israeli economy, and their replacement by migrants from the Global South. The Oslo “peace process” and Israel’s strategy of “separation” accelerated this trend, and by 2022, only 3.5 percent of the Gazan workforce was employed in Israel. With the outbreak of war in 2023, they were entirely locked out. Thus, virtually all Gazans have been pushed even out of the ranks of the periodically employed layer of the surplus population.

Meager Autonomy

The arrangement forced on the leadership of Gaza between 2007 and 2023, described by Tareq Baconi in Hamas Contained, indicates what is on offer to surplus populations in today’s world. Blockaded on three sides by Israel and one by Egypt, Gaza was granted a measure of internal autonomy and food aid sufficient to ward off famine.

In return, the strip’s residents were expected to acquiesce in routine rounds of punitive violence, grinding poverty, separation from the rest of the Palestinian people, and international oblivion. This deal, notably, involved not only Hamas’s adversary Israel, which committed to refrain from overthrowing its rule, but also its ally Qatar, which provided the funds necessary to keep Gazans alive but in a state of economic and political suspended animation.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas upended this arrangement by launching a surprise offensive on the Israeli region surrounding Gaza, targeting civilians and soldiers alike. The very same day, the Gazan population (which was not somehow consulted about plans for the attack) began paying the price: an Israeli onslaught of indiscriminate bloodletting, replete with a kill ratio of at least seventy to one (to date) and deliberate, wholesale destruction of infrastructure including hospitals and schools.

Palestinian scholars and activists, citing the declarations of Israeli leaders as well as their actions, immediately declared this an incipient genocide, an opinion by now corroborated by any number of legal and academic authorities. Regional actors acting in solidarity with Gaza — Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran — have been targeted one after the other, always with the tacit or enthusiastic support of the United States, the EU, and Israel’s “Abrahamic” allies in the Middle East. Even Israel’s recent attack on Qatar, a faithful US ally, has not shaken this support.

The Cost of Rebellion

Obviously, Israel’s genocide cannot be explained exclusively by economic factors. Other levels of analysis, from Benjamin Netanyahu’s expert manipulations of the Israeli political scene to the ideological confluence between Evangelical and Zionist messianism, are also relevant. But understanding how capitalism leads to the emergence of surplus populations, and why capital is indifferent at best to their fates, helps us grasp why those manning the commanding heights of empire are now committed to supporting Israel’s castigation of Gaza.

The motive, to put it simply, is to set an exorbitantly high price tag for these populations rebelling against their containment. To that growing portion of humanity that can see its own immiseration in the figure of the Palestinians, Israel’s Western-backed annihilation sends a precise message: stay in your “shitholes” (as Donald Trump calls them), and you will be allowed a meager, vegetative living, but no productive work or meaningful control over your collective future. Attempt to break out — and you will be destroyed.

Bloodcurdling as this message is, there is nothing in it that is opposed to the interests of capital. Genocide is never inevitable — it is always the criminal responsibility of particular individuals and states. But in a world governed by a system that treats humans themselves as superfluous, it is an ever-present and growing danger.