From biopower to necroeconomies: Neoliberalism,biopower and death economies

Abstract

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings of labor, value and politics, forcing a revaluation of biopower and of extant understandings of the global economic and political order. Death as a source of value marks an entirely new space in capital that exceeds its former limits. This process can be seen in examples of genocidal warfare, ethnic cleansing, environmental “disasters” and globalized poverty that function as industries of death, mining the accumulated stored value of life, as death, and as an activity itself, instead of the old extractive exploitation of living labor.

Keywords

biopower necropolitics neoliberalism labor political economy critical theory genocide Marx Foucault globalization

Introduction

The 21st century is marked by new technologies, gleaming cities and easy rapid consumerism. It is also, however, marked by polluted and ravaged parts and peoples of the world. The dichotomy of rich and poor, north and south, has received great attention, if little amelioration, over the past century and a half. This inequity has simply been called “capitalism” or “colonialism” or “globalization.” Yet most treatments and analyses of social inequities to date remain moored in the historic figures of each epoch of accumulation—namely, the slave and colonized native during the era of European expansion and empire, the alienated worker of 20th-century industrial capital, and most recently, the feminized worker of the global south. This focus upon living labor is important but should not serve as the limit of our understanding of capitalist expropriation and accumulation. Especially as death itself has emerged as a central activity and commodity form and even the very source of value—a value beyond war profiteering, the military industrial complex, empire, the mundane economies of the funeral and bereavement industry (Suzuki 2002) or the fragmented cadaver (Sharp 2001).

Instead, value has permeated previously excluded social spaces that could not or would not be commodified, and historically could not be spaces of capital accumulation. Death—the loss of a human who possesses labor power, the very antithesis of living labor—has thus become a source of value, particularly in spaces of uneven development such as the global south. What was so shocking to some about the Balkan wars of the 1990s was that the linear modern progressive narrative that argued for a global convergence appeared hollow and empty as rape camps and mass killings again appeared in continental Europe. And without the easy, convenient, and absolving explanation of a “mad” authoritarian ruler or the rise of fascism, commenters struggled to explain it all away. These spaces of uneven development, spaces in which death could not only be unleashed but form the very basis of an economy, knocked at Europe’s doors, disturbing the long and comfortable geography of empire that held at arm’s length the “savagery” of the “uncivilized” parts of the world (Ferguson 2006, 66).

Death as a source of value marks a new space in capital that exceeds the former limits identified under modernity (in the broad sense of the term) in which living labor is the primary source of value. This new space of capital, I suggest, exceeds commodification, entering instead the realm of equivalency and abstraction of all, including life and death. My argument is that this is a direct product of neoliberalism’s tendency to marketize all aspects of human activity and I maintain that this is a new space of capital that profits in killing and death, not to produce commodities, but as the commodity itself—a necroeconomy.

The problem of the productive and positive ambition of biopower generating if not feeding off of its putative opposite has not gone unnoticed by social theorists and philosophers. The conventional understanding is that biopower optimizes, fosters and intensifies life in order to “make live” while being haunted by the specter of a vast geography of exclusion, annihilation and death. The conjuncture of life and death is central to any discussion of biopower whether ontological, historical, or ideological, and reveals that what appears at first as a paradoxical and antithetical relationship is instead central to the biopolitical project. Yet, while death is always present, its positioning and effect differs not according to a historical telos beginning with the ancient regime’s sovereign negativity and ending with modernity’s positive intensification of “life.” If we did remain ensconced in that progressive narrative, then how could we make sense of contemporary geographies of death if not as an integral component to the logic of capital itself which intensifies biopower’s negative or positive tendency as a response to the market. When life is being “optimized,” as it was in the late 20th century, we can clearly understand these tendencies as the traditional notion of biopower. When the negative is the dominant mode of activity then we can think of it as a necroeconomy, a biopolitical intensification of death in the service of market forces.

In this article, I mark how the extraction of value from the masses and the accumulation of capital under neoliberalism extends the neoliberal subject as an agent even unto death, superceding living labor as the sole repository of value. I begin by briefly engaging the biopolitical trajectory already mapped by those theorists grappling with biopower’s negative tendency to produce death. Then, I explore neoliberalism as the condition under which death as an extension of biopower becomes the primary activity of the conjunctural space of capital and biopower procuring economies of death and death subjects. I thus conclude by demonstrating that the space in which neoliberalism extends the logic of capital is what produces necroeconomies by extending the logic of equivalencies beyond the usual and familiar spaces of capital that are normalized and reified as formal and informal “economies” to the obfuscated zones of abandonment, genocide and death.

Death as a quantum of value

To begin, let us turn to a moment that many historians have identified as the beginnings of modern capitalism: the slave trade. Over a three-day period, from November 29 to December 1, 1781, the captain of the ship Zong ordered 132 human beings thrown overboard while handcuffed. Later, at trial, it would become known that those in power had calculated that the insured value of enslaved peoples as “lost property” would exceed the benefit of bringing them to port. Most disturbingly, the court would agree with this cold, mathematical, rational and efficient assessment. The events on the Zong illustrate not only the brutality of slavery as a force that dehumanizes and commodifies but also capital’s hegemonic and global process of abstraction and equivalency in which human beings become convertible currency. The murdered Africans were not just “objects to be exchanged but ‘empty bearers’ of a real quantum of value […]” (Baucom 2005, 139). And it is this “quantum of value” that embodies the most disturbing and, and for the purposes of this paper, relevant tendency in which “through the metaphoric imagination of capital, death and the money form name one another as literal equivalents” (2001, 62). Hence, it is not slavery that transforms human life into a pure abstraction that can be quantified, rather, it is the “imagination of capital” that converts labor, time, life and in the case of the Zong, death itself into a quantum of value. In the same sense that this moment can be read as a glimpse into the imagination of capital, it is also a glimpse into a necroeconomy, an economy based upon death.

The value of death seems dismissively clear in historical examples like that of the Zong. But what of widespread death under late capitalism? How can we understand the admonition to “let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth”? (Derrida 1994). I suggest we turn to neoliberalism’s ubiquitous parasitical imbrication with multiple economic and social systems, past and present, along with its hegemonic power to reformulate society along free-market rule (Peck 2013) as a condition for the creation of necroeconomies. Specifically, an ever-expanding market logic that captures death as a component in a universal market economy while producing geographic distinctions which “appear to be what they are truly not: mere historical residuals rather than actively reconstituted features within the capitalist mode of production” (Harvey 1982, 416). And further, wars, genocides and now environmental engineering (global warming) produce death-subjects that can be commodified within a global market. This is capital “encountering barriers within in its own nature,” which force it to produce new forms of geographical differentiation (ibid). So, let us expand Harvey’s concept, as capital expands in the face of barriers within its own nature, by posing that death under neoliberalism appears to be what it is truly not: mere war and tragedy rather than actively reconstituted features within the capitalist mode of production, in other words, a new market of death. The Zong massacre then appears not as an accident of the slave trade, or a particularly depraved crew, but rather a premonition of what economies would come to be under a particular form of capitalism.

My thesis is not to be confused with several other “necro” and “thanato” theories that see death as significant to political, economic and juridical orders but not as an economy unto itself, a new type of economy with a novel form of labor. For instance, Banerjee’s colonial reading of economies of death, what he calls necro-capitalism, “is accumulation by dispossession and the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts” (Banerjee 2006). Specifically, Banerjee astutely argues that the global militarized industries form a kind of neo-colonial legal and social space that is oriented towards plunder and appropriation through violence. Another rendition focuses upon the necessity of death as the fundamental component of the free-market. In a Heideggerian flourish (Dasein, Being-toward-death), death as a particular underpins the universality of exchange in a rereading of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (Montag 2005). Montag explores the unspoken premise of market capitalism as one of deliberate scarcity and exclusion that uses the power of the state as violence to create and maintain life-threatening poverty, compelling some populations to death, sacrificial lambs for the market. He writes “Thus alongside the figure of Homo Sacer, the one who may be killed with impunity, is another figure, one whose death is no doubt less spectacular than the first and is the object of no memorial or commemoration: he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market” (2005, 17). Both Banerjee and Montag extend Achille Membe’s analysis of necropolitics in which living people cease to be part of the normative social world, a type of existential political excess that opens them to be killed with impunity (Mbembe and Meintjes 2003). Nor is the immunological metaphor of thanatopolitics (Esposito 2008), in which some groups are targeted for elimination after being classified as pathological to the social body, capable of accounting for what I see as the key element under the current neoliberal moment—the monetization of death and its insertion into a regime of value, an economy. Only by resituating death and killing as part of a neoliberal regime can we begin to unravel the ways in which death and dying have become profitable ventures tied to an entire economy and logic. And that shift is about the labor of death-subjects.

We may then think of subjectivities appearing under neoliberalism in two forms: living and dead. The former takes many forms, such as the enterprising citizen consumer (Ong 2006), data, genetic information, the womb and what has been generally termed as “biocapital” (Rose 2006)—the intersection between capitalisms and the life sciences (Collier and Ong 2005; Helmreich 2008; Rajan 2006; Vora 2008). Yet, the latter is singular in that death has become a commodity formed both as an activity (killing) and from the myriad of fragments of value produced and released in the death of a person. There has already been a substantial body of work on the ways in which life and its management intersect as governmentality (Burchell et al. 1991; Lazzarato 2002; Nadesan 2010), the variegated subjectivities produced in the gaze of the panopticon (Foucault 2012) and the concern with life of biopolitics (Foucault 2010). Yet the subjects of governmentality belong to the old realm of living labor and the instrumental rationality of liberal or late capitalism (Jameson 1991). Foucault, “comes to a halt right at the threshold of a current revolution of the system which he never wanted to cross” (Baudrillard 1987, 16). Foucault’s eloquent discussion of power and the continuation of that tradition are important, and unlike Baudrillard who condemns it as “a magistral but obsolete theory,” (Baudrillard 1987, 34) I see it as a component of a neoliberalism but not the whole story. Unlike biopolitics, which is the agglomeration of multiple forms of state-centered regulatory control over populations, groups and individuals that are oriented towards life and its productive capacities, necroeconomics includes populations in death and thereby extends the market past the historical limits of capital as physical organic commodities such as labor-power, human organs, and genome (or “biocapital”). This new space of capital incorporates as an economic force a realm formerly left to philosophers and theologians, what used to be considered the existential liminal space of being and non-being: death, the corpse, and by incorporating death into the market the old separation between the sacred and the profane is effaced. The secularization of the sacred and sacralization of the securely is a widely noted phenomenon. Religion embracing the “spiritual marketplace” (Roof 2001) such as televangelism, proselytizing as marketing, and faith as a brand (Einstein 2007) are all examples of sacralizations (Belk et al. 1989). Necroeconomies do more than invert the sacred and the secular; they change how value is produced and by whom, from living labor to killing and death.

From neoliberalism to necroeconomies

It is telling that recent critical discussions of neoliberalism have focused on the historical emergence of a particular pattern of economic and political rhetoric, practice and policy that has ushered in new regimes of brutal inequities to the sometimes forced but always deafening silence of the subjects upon whom it works. This shift, ideas justifying and catalyzing individual action and general economic and social policies (creating consent and acquiescence if not agreement), meets the classic definition of ideology. And neoliberalism does indeed constitute the ever-more dominant ideology dressed in economic theory and enacted as a politic. If we are to take one of neoliberalism’s more well-known critics, David Harvey’s, twofold point that neoliberalism is both a cosmology, “the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world” (Harvey 2007, 3), and a methodology, or revolutionary strategy, as Harvey channeling Gramsci notes when he writes that “consent and hegemony must be organized ahead of revolutionary action” (Harvey 2006, 16), then it becomes all too clear that what we have witnessed since the 1980s is not just a shift in the global economic system but the very logic of that system. Further, this shift is the hegemonic reorganization of not just economic production but also socio-cultural production. Neoliberalism is more than an old economic idea made new. It is not simply the old Marxist critique updated for the new millennia. It is more than traditional economic liberalism since it operates on and in different segments of the social domain in a different fashion. For Harvey, the totalizing economic logic of the neoliberalism is essentially a revanchist class war in which the gains made by the middle and working classes over the 20th century have been speedily reversed with devastating effect and consequence.

While Harvey’s treatment of neoliberalism charts its history, “briefly,” by tracing the intellectual origins of neoliberalism and its reversal of what the 20th century theorist of political liberalism T. H. Marshall proclaimed all modern industrial democratic states would naturally gravitate toward: an increasingly humane, democratic and just state based upon the last and most universal form of enfranchisement, “social citizenship” (Marshall and Bottomore 1987), what we used to call the welfare state, instead, Harvey argues neoliberalism gives us the denial altogether of the promise of an ever-expanding civil, political and economic right. Rather, “we” are superseded by the right to the profit rate and capital accumulation. Harvey’s treatment—from the intellectual origin of the idea of neoliberalism in think tanks such as the Institute for Economic Affairs in London and the University of Chicago, its intellectual popularization through publicly exalted economists such as Milton Friedman and Hayek, and its fledging deployment in the global south starting in 1973 with Pinochet’s Chile—all set the stage for the assault upon Keynesianism in the United States (Lee and Raban 1988) and rise of the New Right and Thatcherism in Britain (Green 1987; Kavanagh 1987; Marquand 1988) resulting in neoliberalism’s eventual ideological, if not technical, global triumph. Even if all the world economies have not been liberalized, and even if all of the collective capital of the commons represented in the pension funds, utilities, ports, roads and natural resources have not been privatized, the idea that they should be, or that they eventually will be, as an inevitable consequence of economic and social necessity, is the essence of neoliberalism’s success. Forcing an acceptance or submission to a “society in which the inalienable rights of the individual (and, recall, corporations are defined as individuals before the law) to private property and the profit rate trump any other conception of inalienable rights you can think of” (Harvey 2006, 56).

Neoliberalism, however, is more than a set of “revanchist” government policies or set of economic principles and practices that enshrine the market and private property. It is also more than a new political regime based upon juridical decisionism, such as the permanent state of war or state of exception (Ong 2006). These are important moments in neoliberalism’s emergence and articulation but when liberated from old structuralist schema of state apparati, hegemony or intellectual vanguardism, it is a production of different kinds of space, some of which are operating, at least on the surface, according to modernity’s proclaimed ideals and even intensifying those ideals, while other spaces are zones of abandonment (Biehl 2013). In some spaces it manifests as an intensification of consumption and private property, in other spaces as concentration camps, and each is strongly linked to one another via the same dominant logic of the market that permeates all social space producing new spaces of capital and a geography of death peopled by neoliberal subjects some of whom are “rational actors” and others who are “acted upon.” In this patchy geography of uneven development, the abandoned and targeted are death-subjects. Their value is in their exclusion from the market as living labor or labor power. The historic calculation that surplus value is generated from the exploitation of an underclass, while still present in the factories of the global south, is not the activity of capital in these spaces of death. What is the work of a genocide? Or an environmental disaster such as climate change which, as Neil Smith reminds, is never just an accident or “natural disaster”? What of the abandonment of swaths of humanity to starvation, disease and war?

Harvey’s insights are both useful and important and I would like to extend them beyond the objective, quantitative or positivistic set of modalities, objects and areas, so as not to replicate the very logic that any investigation or critical engagement of neoliberalism seeks to counter. Neoliberalism does not come from a ruling elite, dominant class or state bureaucracy. Rather, it operates on the quotidian, mundane level of the everyday (Luxton et al. 2010). It is in us and all around us, even if neoliberalism’s force comes from the structural and ideological realignments it is enacted on and through the individual, and it is at the level of the individual that it is sustained and replicated. The silence and acquiescence by which the majority of humanity has greeted increasing relative poverty, political marginalization, endless war, terrorism, and the denial of what Henry Giroux (2011) calls the psychosis of individualization of the social, are due to this quotidian characteristic. It is the everyday experience of buying and selling, making economic decisions or calculations, that “maximize” what economists call “utility” (what most of us would refer to as happiness or pleasure) that is then transposed across the social domain that naturalizes a particular view of society as always and ultimately an economic marketplace. As well as reshaping our image of society as merely and always a market (you can buy love as well as death), it also determines both: a political ideal of how the state should look and act, what it should and should not do, and, most importantly, what its capacities and responsibilities are; and the core of human existence, who and increasingly what we are, and the ways in which we become value calculations. Neoliberalism then is an economic idea based upon an interpretation of laissez-faire economics in which austerity, deregulation, privatization, and public disinvestment are demanded. The erosion of the public-sector and wholesale transfer of assets, institutions, infrastructure and natural and collective resources into private hands is posited as ultimately more efficient and beneficial to society—and therefore necessary. The public good can only be met through privatization—from roads, to schools, to air and water. The “free-market” must be maintained, paradoxically, by the State which must be reduced to the bare minimum. But these large-scale structural mandates also work upon the individual, making a particular kind of subject. And as David Harvey argues, it is an ideological shift that privileges individual profit and autonomy above all else.

Under neoliberalism, the subject is no longer a fully embedded social being but is transformed instead into a discrete, monadistic, isolated object floating in a world market governed first by logic of a system oriented towards profit accumulation and second by a political regime invested in protecting and perpetuating both the logic of the system and the system itself. While calling itself into question as something superfluous, unnecessary and damaging to the social (which it conflates with the individual), there is also the tendency for populations, groups and individuals to exceed the market, to become themselves unnecessary, in which case they become excess labor, redundant, socially useless, economically unviable, unemployable or, simply put, social excrement (Bauman 2004; Wright 2006). For these people, of whom there are more and more in an age of jobless recoveries and potentially jobless futures (Aronowitz and DiFazio 2010), becoming “extra” means a form of “social death” (Patterson 1982). These are the abandoned death-subjects. Unemployment, or the inability to fit into these new economic and increasingly social orders that masquerade as economic systems, relegates one to the dust bin or rubbish heap of humanity, the forgotten masses of surplus labor in parts of the globe that do not have the social safety net of the welfare state, even in a highly eroded welfare state such as that in the United States, or the material excess and affluence that provide spaces for a scavenger class (Keyes 1974; Medina 2007) who live off the scraps of the well-to-do.

What’s more, in some cases these individuals are reconstituted as death-subjects, persons not just ignored or excluded but actively killed. It is with the former that Foucault was concerned when writing, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1990, 138), which the neoliberal condition begins to appear in its full range of effect upon the subject. But the abandonment of “life”—the individual subject, population group or category of living being that comes under the strategies, discourses and modes of subjectification of a biopolitical order—does not sufficiently cover the resonance of a global economic system that produces regimes that cannibalize their own population as vessels for a “quantum of value.” To abandon life is simply to ignore it, or to exclude segments of the population from any share of the social product. This is certainly one tendency under neoliberalism, the tendency toward undoing of the welfare state and assault upon the poor (Ferguson 2010). But exclusion alone—denial of various social benefits such as free public education, health care, pensions, retirement funds, unionization, and housing to name but a few—is but one side of the process that also directly and deliberately instrumentalizes human life and human death.

This instrumentalization of human life needs closer examination because it is never part of the overt discourse surrounding neoliberalization even though it is inherent to the very logic of the neoliberal condition. While David Harvey has charted the policy shifts that have produced a global condition of increasing scarcity in the face of massive wealth production, several philosophers of biopolitics provide additional insight into the ways we have internalized this logic, what they call subjectivizing, and the ways it is totalizing—both in terms of how we are produced as citizens, subjects (people) and laboring bodies (workers) and in terms of how it ultimately transforms the simple abandonment of populations into the deliberate killing of populations for profit, in other words, the transformation of surplus populations and the unemployed and unemployable into death-subjects.

Biopower

Foucault presents us with an image of biopower and biopolitics as regimes (in the broad sense of governments and governmentality, power and techno-ideology) that are invested in promoting and protecting life, “making live,” even as these modalities paradoxically sacrifice that life in the name of that very same vitality. For instance, biopower (Foucault uses the term “sovereign,” but we could easily if not always accurately substitute government, ruling elite, knowledge class, authority, etc.) acts upon life by producing “truth” (science/fact) as the first step toward a process in which increasingly penetrative and determining strategies of intervention and control (quarantines, genetic counseling, sterilization, family planning) are eventually internalized through ubiquitous modes of subjectification that frequently result in the death or sacrifice of populations in the name of security and optimization. Biopower, then, at its most general level of characterization, is a mode or field that attempts to rationally categorize, influence, control, and direct the somatic (physical/biological) character of human existence in the name of nurturing that somatic realm, but in so doing, generates fields of death as secondary, or almost tertiary effects. In a biopolitical epoch, wars are no longer waged in the name of kings and country or for the express purpose of destroying or killing a hated enemy. Rather, wars are waged in the name of life so that, as Foucault writes, biopower

…now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (Foucault 1990, 137)

Two leading understandings of biopower attempt to account for the disturbing brutality of the modern age and to explain how the subject is transformed, worked upon, dehumanized, and somatized. Arguing that the contemporary conditions are fundamentally different then the pre-modern, each takes the German philosopher Theodore Adorno’s dictum—“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”—as a guiding light in their extension of Foucault’s observation that the modern is about a politic that acts on, disciplines, regulates, and subjectivizes in the name of life. Giorgio Agamben (1998) and the post-autonomous Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) describe the politics of the present as one constituted by a biopolitical logic that results in the reduction of humanity to the coldly objective and distanced status of “populations” and the reinscription of the individual as a body or “the body.” This shift from human to population results in two different but related outcomes for each thinker.

Both situate biopower at the center of a moment in which the domination, exploitation, appropriation, control and disallowal, as well as the outright obliteration of subjects, populations and/or groups, is enacted. This is a political distinction for Agamben that harkens back to the establishment and formalization of a legal political order, while the exclusion and inclusion of some subjects from a political order for Negri is always also the shifting relation to the economic order. For Negri, being situated outside a legal political system is also being exposed to an exploitative economic condition, so that not being fully human is effectively the degradation of the humanist subject (who again is always and everywhere equal to one another) to a new order that produces some people as bodies alone or what Marx called “labor power.” The analogy is much like a beast of burden in that the energy it produces is recognized only as its potential energy, its value as labor. We even have a phrase for such a concept that is used frequently without reference or thought to the existential shift that the animal is forced to undergo from living creature to labor power. The phrase “horse power” is the distillation and everyday familiarized use of a much more sinister concept, the body as instrument and energy for production.

Agamben, more than Negri, sees barbarity (rational violence) as a condition of the political reality of sovereignty that separates and demarcates populations into two types of individuals: those who are “bare life” and those who are “qualified life.” In order to illustrate his point, Agamben excavates and presents an obscure figure of ancient Roman law, homo sacer (1998, 12), as the embodiment of this principle establishing both the antiquity of the idea that some people are not within the legal and social order, and therefore not protected by that order, and that this practice is as ancient as the legal order itself. Homo sacer is an individual who can be killed but not sacrificed; a living person outside of the social and legal frameworks of society and has thus become pure, naked bare life, which is expendable (zoe), as opposed to the socially situated and attenuated living self of a person (bios). The zoe-bios distinction demarcates the realm of the natural and the social, the world of unrestrained violence and the world of order. Just as animals could be killed, so could homo sacer, and what they shared in common was the category of being merely alive: zoe. The dichotomy between zoe and bios holds a relevance beyond formal definitions. The significance of this legalistic and historical genealogy for Agamben and those who see his work as essential for understanding contemporary politics, is conditional, because whether one is seen as bios or zoe, Agamben argues, puts one either on the side of being a protected and privileged person, socially alive, or exposes one to the power and forces of the State to be killed as something that is merely a living organism (here I use the term “merely” to emphasize the political distinction), like a virus, bacteria, or animal. It is this power of the state to kill those who are only zoe, bare life, that marks the modern political moment as different from the ancient.

For Agamben, as for Aristotle, humans are thus part animal and only human by virtue of their participation inclusion in a social sphere, a condition that is itself dependent on and ultimately a manifestation of a political decision. The undocumented migrant, the citizen or non-citizen, enemy combatants or soldier are examples of the political determination of life and its right to be killed or sacrificed. The focus on politics as the space in which our humanity appears or becomes possible, depends upon certain practices and distributions of power, which are different depending upon the regime. For instance, within the liberal condition it is through processes of discourse and consensus that attempt at least on the surface to include all persons as bios. For the ancient regime it was slavery, war and freedom. And more recently, under the modern specter of totalitarianism, genocide and the camp in which a “state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system” (2005, 2).

Negri, on the other hand, sees biopower not as the political solely or even primarily, but rather as an economic relationship, one oriented toward extracting “surplus value” from human life and doing so in new, unprecedented ways—further, unlike Agamben’s political analysis, or even Foucault’s historical archaeology that locates the regulative practices in the 18th and 19th centuries—in practices that are generally and gradually ensconced across the social landscape through various institutions, a carceral archipelago of institutions that cover, map and in every way determine our paths through society. Negri, on the other hand, decentralizes and deterritorializes the idea of power from the moment we are born in the hospital and even before our birth in the medical and social services that chart and protect us while in the temporary care of the womb, to the schools that “educate” and train us, and the various institutions that await the fully formed adult. Negri sees this process as always oriented towards a subjectivizing tendency; one that is developing and forming ways, means and technologies that exercise control over the minds and bodies of a population in order to extract surplus labor. He writes,

biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it — every individual embraces and reactivates this power of his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24)

Further, unlike Foucault, who situated power and its penetrative regulatory effect upon the individual as dispersed across a social field of institutional apparati that was deeply invested in “disciplining” the social body one individual at a time, Negri draws upon the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who saw a dramatic shift from the “society of discipline” to a “society of control” (2010). Deleuze specifically marks the transition from the former to the latter by remarking that “the disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” (2010, 6).

Citing the theorist of speed and technology, Paul Virilio, and the chief hero of the beat generation, William S. Burroughs, who wrote of “viruses” and “control systems” (1971), Deleuze invokes a post-institutionalist understanding of biopower that resituates power and the exercise of such not through the old, solid stable spaces of the family, the factory or the prison, but the ever-fluid, flexible and striated space of the information age in which the doctor is on your smartphone, the job is always temporary, flexible, contingent (the precarious proletariat or precariat) (Bodnar 2006) and the state is a mythical apparition that only appears in the form of technological surveillance and hunter drones. This is the “society of control” in which man is “no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (Deleuze 2010, 6). In the society of control, we don’t need prisons because an economy based upon the endless and crushing assumption of debt is the prison and capitalism our church. This is what Hardt and Negri following Deleuze see as the decentralization and deterritorialization of power even as it remains invested in life, which they term “Empire.” But life as surplus value, for they do not abandon the loci of accumulated capital, the “multinational and transnational industrial and financial corporation” even if these loci have become increasingly immaterial and dislocated highly mobile deterritorialized pots and flows of capital seeking markets and profits and ignoring the former constraints of the Nation-State. Criss-crossing striated space at hyper speeds, increasingly mobile and amorphous, yet still the accumulated capital of Marx. Yet, even if the new global order seems different because it is more difficult to “see” and locate, it has not strayed far from where the old imperial, colonial and national regimes left off, continuing “to structure global territories bio-politically” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 31).

Whether we see the biopolitical as primarily a political act of the sovereign (Agamben) or economic decentralization and dematerialization (Hardt and Negri), both articulations of the concept have their limitations and can cause us to pose some serious questions. For instance, what is the relationship between the political and the biological? And to what degree is the biological already a social concept, one that only appears political when we begin to disagree over the definitions, management and deployment of life? How do these concepts help us address the violence identified by the Frankfurt School as imbedded within the rationality and instrumentality of the 20th century, and embodied by that icon of industrialized death, the concentration camp? And what of the subject, where and how is it worked upon, reconfigured and posited in a sphere where the human becomes raw life?

By exploring a third extension of biopolitical thought, following the nomos (logic) of death internal to the nomos of life, we can perhaps begin to unravel the questions raised by the biopolitical. Following Agamben, Robert Esposito attempts to situate the logic of biopolitics firmly in the bare life of zoe, the purely biological non-social form of life that is permeated by techne, or the modern technological condition tied to scientific racism. His thanatopolitics (Esposito 2008) is a form of social-technical immunology in which the social body is continually undergoing a selective self-excision so that parts of the population are killed by other parts to ensure survival. This destructive tendency, in which the social body attacks itself, is the result of the collapse of genos and ethnos, or the genetic and ethnic, into one discursive technical regime. These two very different concepts that become conflated and synonymous in the 20th century, genos and ethnos, blood and nation, reveal the dark underbelly of biopolitics when intertwined and conflated.

Historically, racism (and its biological, and therefore technological claims) differentiates between the various elements in a social body that need to be killed and those that must be nurtured or protected. Esposito uses the example of Nazi scientific racism, eugenics, and race purification as examples of this logic. The absolute normativization of life in which the law is based in biology and biology is based in the law (formal racism), as well as the enclosure of the social and physical body so that an absolute identity between the body and identity (race/ethnicity), and even the suppression of potential life through sterilization (eugenics) is this logic. But what is both novel and disturbing about biopolitics in the mid-20th century as reframed by Esposito is “the fact that everyone, directly or indirectly, can legitimately kill everyone else” (2008, 110). This, he argues, is thanatopolitics, in which the cure for the ills of society is selective death, or the “therapeutic attitude with the thanatological frame” (2008, 115).

Contrary to the usual claims that genocidal regimes are always also totalitarian or authoritarian, killing is a generalized social condition, a normative homeostatic (self-regulating and self-preserving) condition. Here Esposito posits the idea that the medical paradigm of immunization becomes the orientation of the imagined community (Anderson 2006) of the nation. This immunological moment transposes the abstract, specialized bureaucratic scientific state apparatuses dispersed across the disciplinary archipelagos of Foucault’s biopolitical regime, to the social body. In a thanatopolitics every individual is tasked with acting like a white blood cell in the body, seeking out “foreign” threatening others and eliminating them. The subject under a thanatopolitics is the immunological-oriented subject of the community who kills in the name of life. The contagion of impurity is deflected and diverted on the level of subjective action and thought, on the level of sexual reproduction as individuals see some people as racially inferior and unacceptable sexual partners, to the anticipatory murder of sterilization, to the combatant ready to kill and be killed in the name of “purity.” A thanatopolitical subject is not the object of biopower as in Foucault or Negri’s versions, but rather the agent of a biopolitics.

Esposito’s politics of death, thanatopolitics, places the danger of a totalizing system at the moment in which the “biologization of the political that makes the preservation of life through reproduction the only universal legitimacy” (2008, 147). He proposes deconstructing and inverting this logic, subverting the paradigm with its antithesis, inclusion and preservation. Simply put, the move from thanatopolitics to a positive biopolitics involves an embrace of difference, one which makes the other an integral component of the self. To tolerate, bear, allow or ignore is not the affirmative biopolitics Esposito envisions. Since

tolerance is not a non-immunity, a kind of virtuous immunodeficiency, if anything it is a reverse immunity: that which reverses the effects within the same lexicon. But if so, if tolerance is a product of the immune system itself, it means that, far from having a single-response repertoire, that of rejecting other-than-self, it includes the other within itself, not only as its driving force, but also as one of its effects. (Esposito 2011, 167)

In other words, preserving what is foreign and different rather than obliterating it, heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, hybridity rather than purity, difference rather than defense—all of which would involve the deconstruction of a particular reading of biology and politics, one which would delink the two and cease to conflate Communitas and Immunitas, community and immunity, and stop reading difference as an existential threat.

But how are the intersections of biopolitics and neoliberalism to reveal a particular condition in which labor becomes the key element in preserving the social body? The answer may be found with a continuation of the logic of a biopolitical regime, in which it is “the deaths of the latter that enable and authorize the survival of the former” (Esposito 2008, 110). It is not to be found in the eugenicist’s race continuum, but rather in a neoliberal logic of competitive markets that we can finally see how Harvey, Agamben, Negri, Foucault, and Esposito all reveal dimensions and moments of a social tendency that produces labor as death and death as labor. While the analytical limits of biopolitics and its technicity as governmentality have been explored elsewhere (Dillon 2007; Rose and Rabinow 2003; Rose 2006), I would like to focus on the manner in which a biopolitical orientation reveals the operation of the market in a globally integrated political and economic system that has become invested in not only life (Foucault), its surplus (Hardt and Negri), or even its radiant destructiveness in the other Janus-faced half, thanatopolitics (Esposito). Instead, the manner in which that destructive tendency is itself profitable, a product not of the biologization of law, or the social, or the rendering of the carceral, but the manner in which these operations are determined under neoliberalism, into an economy of life, and its opposite, death. While Hardt and Negri and Esposito’s biopolitics focus upon the organization and management of life, each forgoes Foucault’s crucial gesture towards labor as the defining element of biopower and the role of death in a regime of life.

Neoliberalism + biopolitics = necroeconomics

It is telling that Foucault begins his analysis of the disciplinary society with a description of the measures taken to contain the plague in 17th-century France (Marx and Engels 1977). What strikes the reader in this crucial passage of a work that forms the kernel of his later lectures on biopolitics is the amount of work (labor) necessary to manage death. And while Foucault inverts the focus of the activity, arguing that it is life that becomes the focus—surveilling, compartmentalizing and managing it in order to save it—clearly, it is death that preoccupies the powers that be in 17th-century France. In fact, it is not only death, but the organization of individuals into a labor force or “disciplinary machine” that enacts the overall project. Death, its direction, control and management can be labor-intensive. In the case of biopower, in the affirmative it is the visualization, mapping, containment, and control over the anatomical and biological forces in a population in and through segments of that population; a mobilization of the “healthy” against the sickness. In Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, and Myanmar, we can see this very same mobilization but reconfigured as a mobilization of the healthy against the “sick.” Death-subjects are in direct contrast to the neoliberal consumer and it is this contrast that reifies the direct centrality of death-subjects to a neoliberal order. The dead and dying are both reminders of the privileges of the citizen of the global north, a compulsion to enjoy and consume as we are not the unfortunate ones, and concretely the beneficiaries of that death that is a refusal of global equity. In the same sense that differentiated geographies confuse the underlying uniformity of capitals movement, the killing fields of the forgotten or excluded zones of abandonment appear as merely “primitive” or “barbaric” pre-capitalist social relations when they are in fact central to capital overcoming its own barriers.

Following this particular line of thought forces us to rethink death not as a side effect of biopower, capitalism, or globalization, but integral to its formation, expansion, and maintenance, particularly when designed and intended death is delivered to large-scale populations as in the case of genocide. These are not the excess populations that Zygmunt Bauman describes as “wasted” (2004) simply because they have no apparent recognizable role in a global neoliberal order. To the contrary, rather these “excess” subjects are increasingly a type of necrotariat: death-subjects whose utility is their labor power as death and not their labor itself as life.

Paul Virno illustrates this point clearly when he writes

The non-mythological origin of the dispositif of knowledges and powers that Michel Foucault defined with the term biopolitics without a doubt finds its mode of being in labour power. Here, the practical importance assumed by potentiality [is] as potentiality in the capitalist relations of production; its inseparability from immediate corporeal existence is the exclusive foundation of the biopolitical point of view. (Virno 1999)

With this, Virno posits three suppositions: first, the importance of labor; second, the distinction between labor as an activity and the labor power that the worker has as a potentiality, that which has “value” and can be bought; and third, that this value is inseparable from the worker and hence the investment in the worker as “life.” He is thus situating the “wage as the true apex of biopolitics” since it is what ultimately interests capital. While in a stable relationship in which the capitalist and the worker are negotiating over her labor power, this does indeed constitute the relationship between the two. But in a post-industrial global neoliberal world order in which the former, relatively stable relations between capital and workers are upended, in which capital is no longer contained by national boundaries but labor still is, in which there is a surplus of laborers, or excess population, then this “negotiation” becomes a negotiation about life and death, not wages. For what and with whom can the semi-nomadic tribes of Darfur “negotiate”? And the peasant farmers known as the Rohingya? The slaughtered men and boys of Srebrenica or Račak? And what was the value procured in these past and present atrocities?

Writing about the colonization of the Americas, Marx and Engels (1977) recognized the disturbing relationship between capital and death and particularly the value of death. His analysis of the origin of the capitalist mode of production contains these two moments, labor and death. It begins with expropriation:

The discovery of gold in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. (Marx and Engels 1977, 915)

Here, Marx is debunking Adam Smith’s notion of “previous accumulation,” which attempts to obscure the use of force and expropriation in the founding moments of a capitalist world order. We have the two moments and two forces: work and accumulation, life and death. But what if we are to think of contemporary regimes of accumulation as being rooted within early forms of primitive accumulation, in labor that produces death? And what if we accept that we can see moments of a return to this form of primitive accumulation with the added condition of neoliberalism and homo economicus? How does resituating these old and already understood moments of colonial genocide and primitive accumulation within a global neoliberal order change our perception? How can we think of death as an economy? As a necroeconomy? And what does this do to the subject?

Being that primitive accumulation is that “which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure” (Marx and Engel 1977, 873), then we can also think of necroeconomies in which the deliberate targeting of populations is a productive activity. Unlike Hardt and Negri’s biopower that siphons off surplus value and does not account for the primitive accumulation of capital on the level of the body that is attacked and killed, and unlike even homo sacer or the thanatopolitical “Other,” this body is internal to biopower, it is labor power or potentiality that has a twofold existence as that which is a source of value and that which produces value in its consumption.

Virno was correct in emphasizing the difference between labor and labor power and in insisting that the wage is indeed the apex of biopolitics, but I argue that labor power is, in fact, separable from the living body in death and as death. This, in and of itself, constitutes a form of labor. In a necroeconomy, an economy of death, the accumulation of capital occurs from below, directly, not through surplus value (cheap labor) but rather through surplus populations that are (re)produced as death-subjects, as people whose role in the economy is to be victims.

In a necroeconomy it is not the physical body alone (organ trafficking), or the productive capacities of that body as labor power that are of value, but the humanity of the necrosubject. For example, in a necroeconomy, the target of expropriation is not gold, timber or rubber as in the European rush for overseas colonial domains in the 16th and 17th centuries, but the very body of the human as corpse, not material flesh, but the death of personhood. Again, a necroeconomy is unlike biopower since it is invested not in life but rather in death directly and it is this dying and death that becomes commodified much in the same manner that labor is converted to the commodity labor power by the market. Even the “silent compulsion” to work in a necroeconomy occurs on two levels: labor, or active work, and labor power, or potentiality—the former for the self (killer) and the latter for the regime of accumulation (victim).

Moreover, rather than a slow and gradual process of absorbing labor into a wage labor regime as either worker or standing reserve army of labor, necroeconomies compel labor into this relationship of production. Neoliberalism’s slow strangulation of the working class as articulated by Harvey in the beginning of this chapter has forced huge swaths of the global population into the status of surplus population, an excess that is not simply abandoned or excluded as in the old formulas of the disciplinary society (and biopower), but actually and actively consumed as death-subjects, the necrotariat, as victims within a global market as both that which is excluded, abandoned, and revalorized and that which is valorized as death itself. This surplus population is consumed as victims, as death-subjects within a necroeconomy, or an economy that takes the biopolitical order to politicize the biological to also mean economizing the biological as a social force.

The Rwandan genocide offers a concrete example in which we see the operation of an economy of death. The ostensible ethnic conflict between the majority Hutus and Tutsis could be (re)read as a struggle for resources. Yet, not just the expropriation of land, money, political power and jobs through violence by one group against another group as in the case of the Sudan (Macrae and Zwi 1994), but a mechanism within a larger global capitalist system, a world market, one that values death either in its direct embodiment as the “victims” of a liberal humanist interventionism (Chandler 2006; Hunt 2007), or the lack thereof (Dallaire and Dupuis 2007), paving the way for new markets, or the sacrificial lambs of profit (Cramer 2002; Klein 2007; Le Billon 2000; Mamdani 2014). Although this is a component of a necroeconomy, it is one identified and explored in the microcosm of specific conflicts (Macrae and Zwi 1994) but not as a generalized condition of neoliberalism. Further, war and profit are linked to the state, as Marx observed, and central to the nascent developmental stages of capitalism. War then is a tool of the state, and ultimately serves the interest of markets and capital:

The pretensions of capital in its embryonic state, in its state of becoming, when it cannot yet use the sheer force of economic relations to secure its right to absorb a sufficient quantity of surplus labour, but must be aided by the power of the state…. Centuries are required before the “free” worker, owing to the greater development of the capitalist mode of production, makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life. (Marx and Engels 1977, 382)

In the standard telos of capitalist development, the absorption of surplus-labor or at least its control as a standing reserve army of labor (the unemployed) is the primary drive behind the use of state power. The state is the force that compels the worker to work, or denies the worker the ability to control their own labor. This characterizes the traditional relationship of labor and the state in a liberal economy. Under neoliberalism, necroeconomies emerge as an extension of the market and the powers of the state to compel labor again, but not only as a force of direct living work, but also as non-living labor, as both killers and victims respectively.

At a glance this may seem as an utterly self-defeating and destructive act. Yet in the face of deterritorialized capital and a severely weakened or “failed” state, a necroeconomy is the last hope to extract a “quantum of value.” It is the crews of failing states deliberately drowning their passengers in the hopes of collecting that “quantum of value.” As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, the collapse of Yugoslavia was preceded not only by a massive ideological shift from socialism to ethnonational, but also a debt and legitimacy crisis in the wake of which the state lost the ability to reproduce or maintain sufficient levels of social, political and material reproduction—an all-too-frequent condition faced by developing countries under globalization and neoliberalism. One response to such a crisis is a reorientation from production (and social reproduction) to destruction. The effect is the erasing of pre-existing fixed capital in both economic and social forms. “Burning homes, decimating culture and dismembering kin, clan and family, the body and subjectivity, rapidly restructuring societies into fragmented dependents, and in its most radical form fragmented dehumanized objects as the refugee and the ‘victim’” (Haskaj 2008). E. C. James has already shown how Occult economies of suffering operate in a “humanitarian market” producing “trauma portfolios” that serve as a type of currency for individuals and states, procuring investment, interest and compassion (James 2004, 132). Necroeconomies also produce value in these global humanitarian markets by eliciting economic and emotional investments but only in the final stages when the economy is ready to be “rehabilitated” into a normative global commodity chain of production and consumption. The cannibalistic consumption of its own population that marks a necroeconomy is traded in for the humanitarian and development aid injected as a balm by the developing world. Yet, the early stages of a necroeconomy are marked by increased economic “activity” that is not registered on the standard metrics of World Bank economists. Portions of the population are mobilized and “employed” as assailants and frequently remunerated by the “state” either directly or indirectly through pillage, plunder and looting. Production and consumption both increase in a necroeconomy as war, death, destruction and displacement all require intense human activity and set the stage for humanitarian interventions and rebuilding. Death then forms a crucial component of this economy, which is a response to the hierarchical global economic system that places many countries in a “poverty trap.” The dead are commodified but are also quantified, and it is the latter that forms the crucial turn in a necroeconomy.

Conclusion

What I have argued in this paper is that the progressive subsumption of the natural world, labor, culture and finally life, has expanded a step further to incorporate death. In seeking ever-new markets, capital has, at moments of crisis under neoliberalism, converted what formerly could only be considered as a material loss into profit. As in the Rwandan, the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians also shed light on this dark phenomenon. Ethnic cleansing, genocide, environmental “disasters” and generalized poverty have become productive industries that release the accumulated stored value of life, as death, into circulation. Particularly if a society is not competitive in global markets and lacks fixed capital such as functioning competitive industrial and technological sectors, then the very body of the subject becomes a new market in which to extract value. In this way, necroeconomies are destructive industries that produce growth. By engaging in the rationalized destruction of life, populations are mobilized and employed. The body of citizen within the state represents the accumulated labor of the state, society, local community and the international community, a store of value. Murder and displacement releases this value, but, even more importantly for neoliberalism, brings in foreign investment in the form of NGOs, the United Nations, foreign personnel and their material belongings, services to support these institutions and belongings and finally grants and loans to stabilize the country and encourage its reincorporation into the mainstream flows of neoliberalism, all so that the subjects are no longer “wasted lives.”

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