ABSTRACT
Donella Meadows remains silent on class struggle, of course, when she seeks “the solution for homelessness” in “attention, engagement, the willingness to focus on homeless people not as statistics but as individuals who need to be welcomed back as full members of the human race” (1991: 29). Nevertheless her humanitarian impulse resonates with many of us engaged in low-income organizing against capital’s hegemony. But merely to call for including, aiding, respecting, or empowering the dispossessed may serve more to reinscribe than counter the mentality of “government” as policy,“population” as a target, and “political economy” as rationality.2 To engage in the struggle for emancipation by pursuing a strategy for radical inclusion one must open up the question of representation by paying as much attention to questions of framing as to the problems articulated within their purview. My approach to the surplus population seeks to rethink its position in anti-capitalist struggle by raising the possibility that the genocidal decimation of this part of our humanity provides the frame within which commodified labor-power produces capital.3 Perhaps it makes more sense to approach the surplus population as an hors d’oeuvre, outside the main work of political economy, a foreclosure of life without which capitalist expropriation could never be (over)determined.
