What does capital consume? Racial capitalism and the social reproduction of surplus people

Introduction

This intervention emerged from our mutual curiosity about social reproduction within racial capitalism – in particular, the role of the state in capturing reproductive activities to make life itself available for advancing accumulation, while foreclosing potentialities for other ways of living. Here, we work towards a conjunctural countertopography (Katz, 2001a; The Revolutionary Picnic Collective, 2013) across our ethnographic fieldwork on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation we ask, how is the capture of time by racial capital accomplished through transformations of the state? This is not a new question, but one that is central to research on uneven development and social reproduction (cf Bakker and Gill, 2019; Mullings, 2021; Peck et al., 2022; Werner, 2016; Wright, 2006; Wright, 2020). We bring this work into conversation with scholarship on ‘carceral geographies’ (Gilmore, 2017) and post-colonial capitalism to contend with persistent and widespread conditions of surplus life in which people’s lives remain entangled in capitalist social relations regardless of the role of their labour in moving and making capital.

Social reproduction, life-time and life-work

Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of spheres, including institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce capitalism (Katz, 2001b; Mullings, 2009; Trotz, 2010). With the advent of post-industrial neoliberalism in the Global North – defined by increasing labour precarity and the withdrawal of state social services, feminist scholarship on the Global North began to interrogate the daily and generational maintenance of life. Specifically, scholars have examined how reproduction is accomplished across multiple spheres when capitalism renders people ‘permanently mobilized’, meaning that their time – whether as labour-time (waged or unwaged), or time not-labouring – is constantly made available to capital (Mitchell et al., 2003: 3).

Perhaps it is because of the uneven and contradictory ways in which permanent mobilization is embodied – continuously working, continuously precarious, continuously surviving abandonment – that social reproduction has received renewed attention in recent years (Bakker and Gill, 2019; Bhattacharya, 2017; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Mezzadri, 2021; Peake et al., 2021; Winders and Smith, 2019). Yet, as Andrucki et al. (2017; see also Mullings, 2021) observe, social reproduction as a knowledge project has tended to reify capital’s categories even as it has worked to evince what is eclipsed by dominant narratives about ‘productive labour’. As Andrucki et al (2017) write, ‘this dominant approach to life’s work risks reifying the very separation of productive and reproductive labor it calls into question’. Contrary to this tendency, concepts from the postcolonial world attend to simultaneous modes of life within, and yet in excess of, capital. ‘Life-time’ (Tadiar, 2022) and ‘life-work’ (Mullings, 2021) both point to biological and social life-making capacities that can be drawn into the reach of capital and subsidize accumulation, even as they sustain alternative lifeways. Tadiar (2022: 70) defines ‘life-time’ as ‘a concept for reckoning with the diverse, unrecognized life-making capacities that people exercise in the creation of value’, though Gilmore (2017) shows that extracting time from disposable people is significant whether to create or merely circulate value, both of which are critical functions to capital. The concept ‘plot’, emerging from the Caribbean context, situates these energies in relationship to epistemologies of land: if ‘life-work’, even though vulnerable to appropriation by capital, also provides the ‘conditions of possibility for social transformation [that] collective efforts generate’ (Mullings, 2021: 152), these activities unfold through the figurative plot. Time on the plot simultaneously provides sustenance for those made vulnerable to premature death, and for reproduction that is imbued with restoration and potentiality for imagined futures (Mullings, 2021: 153). ¹

Challenging the novelty presumed by analyses of neoliberalism situated in the Global North (that workers, newly underutilized, are made disposable by capital and state), Mullings (2021) points to the analytical clarity to be gained by theorizing capital from the Caribbean. There, but not only, lived continuity puts pressure on teleology as the modernization dream – that ‘the proper job’ (Li, 2017) would become a generalized means of reproduction – is revealed as mirage. Instead of the imagined, progressive march of capitalist industrial development, uneven regimes of dispossession and exclusion have long circulated and accumulated capital through those who are formally, intermittently or permanently without a wage. Indeed, disposable life has long defined some places and people in racial capitalism’s global hierarchies. The present conjuncture is an intensification and shifting geography of existing tendencies.

Even as life-times across place are subsumed into ever more generalized surplus life, they are shaped or re-directed by capital and state to serve capital in countless ways. A range of ‘state capacities’ (Gilmore, 2007) make, and extend, as well as shorten, and discipline life across various regulatory, financial and coercive apparatuses as well as those that shape the making of meaning. But the state is neither monolithic, nor internally coherent: under conditions of widespread surplus life, state capacities variously combine, resist or ally with capital to mobilize labour, social reproduction and everyday and generational time. In the present conjuncture, the state management of surplus populations opens new opportunity for moving and making capital. As Gilmore (2017: 227) examines in the context of incarceration: ‘people extracted from communities, and people returned to communities but not entitled to be of them, enable the circulation of money on rapid cycles. What’s extracted from the extracted is the resource of life—time’. If prisons are an extreme case of the extraction of time, across other ‘forgotten’, ‘stagnant’, ‘deviant’ or ‘deficient’ places that are unevenly subjected to ‘organized abandonment’ (Gilmore, 2008; Hall et al., 2013; Rodney, 2018; Rodriguez, 2021; Tadiar, 2022; Wright, 2020), the life-times of retirees, disabled people, children, the wageless, the intermittently unwaged and others are still integral to capital’s reproduction. Here, we investigate service territories of electric utilities, and spaces of extralegal land tenure as sites constituted by the hierarchical and uneven geographical organization of life-time. In what follows we show how the state mediates the extraction of time, juxtaposing the unfolding of this relation in two locales.

Life-time that powers the electric utility

Electricity, tethered to land and the built environment, organizes social and economic life and expanded social reproduction (Angel, 2019; Valdivia, 2018), powering everything from cooking, lighting and cooling, to running assembly lines, banks and computers. Globally, most people access electricity through connection to a centralized grid that requires capital-intensive, upfront investment. Nikki’s work has focused on electricity in the U.S. South, which is dominated by vertically-integrated, regulated monopolies. In the early 20th century, state governments authorized private electric companies’ exclusive franchise to provide electricity as a ‘public’ utility on the condition that they would serve all the customers in geographically-delimited territories and submit to regulation to prevent monopoly profits. The regulated, monopoly made financial investments for stock and bondholders safer and the provision of electricity profitable as the state effectively guaranteed a revenue stream from captive customers in the service territory. While some U.S. states have opened electricity to competition, across the South, monopoly utilities continue to dominate electricity transmission, distribution, and generation (Harrison, 2013; Harrison and Welton, 2023). Under this system, a utility debt-finances infrastructure that it builds to meet anticipated future demand for electricity in its service territory. State regulators review these investments and permit the company to recover allowable costs through rates charged to customers. Utilities also receive a return on equity intended to ensure that they can garner continued investment from shareholders. In practice, utilities are incentivized to overbuild ‘gold-plated’ facilities as their profit is indexed to capital costs. Customers’ need for electricity, which they must buy from the monopoly, and obligation to pay for commodified service to receive it, puts people’s time as anticipated, aggregate future demand in service to the utility. Life-time, even that outside the wage relation that is seemingly disposable or surplus to capital, comes to ‘serve as risk-absorbing collateral’ for the utility’s debts (Tadiar, 2022: 118). State regulation allows the investor-owned utility to profit from everyday and future demands of captive customers as the utility’s rate of return is inextricable from the life-times in which electricity is used.

In Georgia, the investor-owned utility, Georgia Power, serves 2.7 million customers, more than 70% of the state. The elected Georgia Public Service Commission that regulates the utility operates under the mission to ensure safe and reliable service from ‘financially viable and technically competent companies’ (Georgia Public Service Commission, 2023), and functions as part of a state apparatus invested in keeping labour, taxes and energy costs low for industry as the ingredients of economic growth (see Cobb, 1993). In practice, the state assists capital in suppressing wages and externalizing the costs of social reproduction, including for household energy provision. Electricity bills are disproportionately burdensome for poor and Black customers who pay a larger share of their income for energy given historical and on-going housing and employment discrimination (see Lewis et al., 2020; Luke, 2022). Georgia Power does not offer – and the state government does not require – discounts for low-income households, which are seen as an unfair, cross-subsidy between customer classes. In practice, the utility’s reliance on charging fixed fees to give the appearance of keeping rates low gives preference to large users such that ‘the more electricity that is bought, the cheaper it becomes’ (Marable, 1981: 12). As a result, small residential users pay the highest effective rates per kilowatt hour of electricity they use.

In 2022, Georgia Power proposed a $2.8 billion rate increase that would increase monthly bills to finance shifting the grid to lower-carbon energy sources and clean up coal waste, which came on top of costs for an over-budget new nuclear plant. Stakeholders ranging from the U.S. Army to the environmental group, the Sierra Club, and the grocery chain Kroger petitioned to intervene in the formal rate case to present testimony and cross-examine utility witnesses. These public proceedings are a way for customers to seek favourable rates or environmental and consumer protection objectives. Alongside established industry and advocacy groups, 25 Black customers requested to intervene to protest the rate hike that could deepen the crisis of unaffordable electricity in their communities. Their intervention sought to make visible the life-times that subsidize the company.

The Commission called a special hearing to review the 25 customers’ petitions and asked each person to demonstrate why they should be permitted to intervene. The wife of a retired veteran on a fixed-income argued that she could speak for retirees, and protested how elderly customers are collateralized as a known revenue stream for the utility, saying: ‘we don’t need more money taken from us, as a matter of fact y’all should give us some money for being so reliable on paying our bills’. A community organizer who works with parents described that the cost of electricity ‘is a stress’, especially when she was on a prepay meter, which charges a higher, daily rate for the utilities’ in which all kilowatt-hours used are deducted from the balance in her account. Every social reproductive action incurred a fee because ‘my unit is Total Electric; we rely on total electric everything – air, heat, cooking, machine, appliances’. She explained that her power cannot legally be disconnected given the medical condition of her asthmatic daughter dependent on an electrically-powered C-PAP machine, but she still worries about conserving and changing spending habits to ensure her bills remain within an affordable range (PSC Committee Hearings, 2022). The company’s licence to sell and price kilowatt-hours of current asserts a quotidian control over time – with the threat of shut-off often present – that relies on and yet disregards the life-times of poor customers. Ultimately, the Public Service Commission deemed the petitioners’ testimony redundant, consolidated their claims under one stakeholder organization, and urged the customers to come back for public testimony. In foreclosing their individual participation in the rate case, the Commission refused to consider further the myriad ways in which the utility exerts pressure in the everyday lives of poor, working-class, disabled and retired Black people, and their recommendations based in personal, familial and community experience of energy insecurity as to how the utility could improve its service in everyday life. Instead, 4 months later, the commissioners would approve a $1.8 billion rate increase for the utility (Kann, 2022), permitting the continuation of its business model that captures time from ratepayers working two jobs, borrowing from friends and family, or seeking limited public or charitable assistance to pay unaffordable bills.

The system of regulation designed to make electricity capital profitable relies on the social reproductive energies captured through the state-enforced monopoly. The energy futures structured through the state in Georgia tether capital accumulation to the social reproduction of ratepayers, even as the utility threatens the survivability of households. How might we think about the relationship between the state, the utility and the life-times of its customers when their survivance paradoxically appears to be necessary collateral even as this time of social reproduction is disregarded to uphold shareholder value? While corporations are recognized as agents of uneven development (Fuller, 2022), it is also critical to understand how the state allows racialized and gendered social reproduction to cushion the risks that the utility takes as households work, and rework their lives, to survive the burden of extractive utility rates.

Capital accumulation that wagers whether its demands will be survivable at the scale of the population is all too familiar across ‘underdeveloped’ places (Rodney, 2018). But although in present-day relations of empire, the ‘aggregate. . .life-times of disposable people serve, like nature, as a free and seemingly infinite resource or fund that underwrites the profits of speculative financial capital’ (Tadiar, 2022: 350), what might thinking between Jamaica and Georgia reveal about the spatiotemporality of this relation?

Time on the land

Racial capitalism, entangled with empire, has always required death and the frontier, even if to degrees that vary across space and time. As such, ‘underutilized labour’ is conceptually inadequate to a full reckoning with the usefulness of disposability to capital. In addition to labour-time, capital consumes living time (reproduction), and steals time (premature death), sometimes in order to consume territories of various scales. Historically and currently, it is inherent to this unevenness of space, time and subjectivity that daily and generational reproduction of people rendered disposable makes and moves capital, as does speculation on their reproduction, murder or replacement. Trans-Atlantic markets in commodities – everything from saltfish to coal – that have sustained life speculate on the aggregate life-times of disposable populations (Tadiar, 2022: 350), whether reproduced elsewhere on other shores (i.e. migrants, stolen or otherwise compelled), or on the plot. But speculative financial capital is not a wholly novel partner to disposability. Consider that the lives of enslaved people (rendered property) were securitized through insurance, which spurred speculation that their death might sometimes be more profitable than their capacity for work, as the mass murder of those thrown overboard the Zong slave ship reveals (Philip and Boateng, 2008). The murderous circulation of value relied on collaboration of the imperial state and finance capital’s annual extension of credit.

In the historical lineage of colonial violence, this conjuncture wagers – anew, not new – on how much life-time can be extinguished, immobilized, freed from the land, dispossessed of access to energy (and so on) without stalling capital’s motion. To aid, life itself is rendered the proper subject of regimes of security that, while uneven globally (Noxolo, 2017), increasingly generalize the subjection of surplus people to surveillance, debt and other non-labour regimes of control by the carceral state, modulating everyday patterns of consumption in utility access and disconnection, land access and dispossession. Rachel’s work traces how extra-legal tenure and its periodic delegitimization figures into the reproduction of disposability across generations in Jamaica. Illuminating this relation does not assert particularity from other manifestations of the capture of life-time, but rather aims to prompt curiosity about similarities, tensions, models, transnational coercion and entanglements of social reproduction across time and space.

From Jamaica, we see that accumulation and circulation through disposable people hinges on configuring and reconfiguring state and capital to both capture and enable life-making activities. This relation has been reproduced in part by regulating the conditions of self-sustenance across land and wage. There is an always unfolding tension between land seizure, or the refusal of property-in-land, and exclusion from forms of sustenance that fall outside of what is called, at any given moment, the formal economy. This relation, configured and reconfigured through time, now results in as much as 30% of Jamaica’s population being ‘ownershipless’, meaning people who exercise tenure that is durable yet vulnerable to dispossession. In other words, people engage in life-making activities in spaces where their presence is not (formally) legitimated by the state. Excluded from legal relationships to land, the ownershipless also make use of land seizure to facilitate (a measure of) withdrawal from harmful and insulting work arrangements and to pursue imagined futures (Goffe, 2023).

One form that social abandonment takes is the non-enforcement of limited social protections. Twelve years after flag independence, the 1974 Employment Act belatedly replaced the 1842 Master and Servant Act, passed shortly after legal emancipation in 1834. The 1974 act established labour protections including requiring employers to pay redundancy, a defined percentage of annual wages that would be paid to employees at the time of termination or retirement. A former sugarworker named Mr. M, living in an ‘informal settlement’ on the land where he had worked, said that when the business closed, workers were supposed to receive these deferred wages. However,

I get to find out say a headman tell them [the landowner-employers], ‘Nuh give them no redundancy—they have plenty a banana, coconut, and whatsoever on the property ² fi go pick and eat and whatsoever, so there is no redundancy’ (Author Interviews, 2014)

The insinuation of the headman’s reported words is that, the estate’s ownershipless workers like Mr. M, ‘have always appropriated food from the property, are thus known to be thieving, and will continue to thieve; therefore, let them live off of that’. The violent calculus of the labour-time deemed ‘socially necessary’ to reproduce life asserts that the fruit taken from the land is beyond the value capital assigns to life. The unacknowledged mathematics of those who, by working to reproduce their labour, end up accused of owing their future means of sustenance as a debt to the employer is that their lives are worth less than their labour power. Marx (1976: 274) fails to grasp this, though he writes, ‘In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element’. In fact, the ‘historical and moral element’ includes premature death–resulting from the estate’s refusal to pay redundancy, despite the past suppression of agricultural workers’ wages. To use other terms, the rate of exploitation absent ‘banana, coconut, and whatsoever’ lies beyond a death that does not appear on the balance sheet – it is socially unseen, necessary. For the ownershipless, time on the land, time necessary to extend the life-times of the disposable, was never legal. Instead, time on the land is the restless outcome of the conflict between capital and the ownershipless over the meaning of life and land, a conflict mediated by the wavering commitment of state capacity between privileging property or sustaining life.

The tenuousness of this relation becomes even more pronounced as capital shapeshifts to recategorize sustenance by ‘fruit-theft’ into ‘land-theft’, that is, when redundant workers become categorized as ‘squatters’. Their future precariously rests in the tension between their refusal of property (called ‘theft’) and the quixotic deferral of eviction. ‘Theft’ of fruit and land, regardless of its (elided) usefulness to capital as externalized reproduction, also supports life-making in excess of capital (Mullings, 2021; Tadiar, 2022: 71). This uneasy equilibrium has been threatened by the current state project to ‘free’ the ownershipless from the land amidst an unprecedented construction boom.

Mr. M and his fellow residents of the settlement were served with eviction notices but their removal was forestalled. His daughter, Tiffany, is one of the few residents who had a full-time job in the formal sector. However, she explained that the large hotel where she is employed severs her contract every quarter with a forced, unpaid leave. The hotel thereby avoids paying into programmes that fund subsidized housing and other social welfare programmes by illegally classifying her as casual labour, a tactic known to the state and yet widely used. Unwaged time in forced, unpaid leave thus serves to cancel debts that capital legally owes her as deferred wages, state pension and a pathway to homeownership – to say nothing of the value already appropriated as surplus labour-time. Because it reclassifies her in the eyes of the corrupted use of labour law – which the state enables through the non-enforcement of labour law – capital is able to speculate on Tiffany’s time on the plot – extracting value via her misclassification not only from her labour and reproduction, but also from the space between casual worker and formal employee in which time on the plot sustains her. While her life on the plot is deemed theft, that theft is recouped as the property of capital; the tactic of seasonal dismissal relies on, yet elides, Tiffany’s recourse to the plot, which she unreliably realizes via extralegal tenure.

The tactic also ensures her exclusion from subsidized homeownership under the National Housing Trust. This places her alongside those who pay in to the Trust but don’t get that value back out; the programme grants mortgages to its highest income contributors at twice the rate of its lowest (Klak, 1992, cf. CAPRI, 2016). With contributions compulsory and access to subsidies discretionary, the state acquiescence to the tourism industry’s violation of labour law contributes to a woeful result: the poor, and their life-making infrastructures of mutual aid and ‘theft’, collectively fund a ballooning Trust even as they are unable to leverage their contributions towards becoming propertied. ³

The cocktail: exclusion from housing assistance joins extra-legal tenure, and wages suppressed below survival in preventing entrance into land access that is legitimated. Mr. M and Tiffany’s stories illustrate how the aggregate life-time of disposable people is sustained by time on the plot. This relation is often sustained by the state facilitation of extra-legal tenure, given that about 72% of settlements are on land that is owned by the state (Government of Jamaica, 2008). Time on the plot makes the life-time on which capital speculates. And if speculation on life-time fails, the power to evict those in possession of land can free the land of the ownershipless, providing space for a new round of speculative investment.

Conclusion

Building on feminist, postcolonial and abolitionist scholarship on social reproduction, we observe that with the increasing support of state institutions that govern energy, land and labour, life-times are rendered legible and made available to capital in patterns that mark deeper grooves between those subsidized by and those who are subsidizing the quasi-public provision of commodified electricity and housing. Across these sites, speculation on time beyond the wage, facilitated by the state, comes into focus. Understanding the organization of ‘state capacities’ (Gilmore, 2007) to facilitate the production of capital through electric utilities, agriculture, tourism illuminates the contradictory and coercive requirement to labour at these and countless other sites to secure social reproduction and the capture of life-time from surplus people continually thrown out of the wage relation. Uneven development widens between rate-payers and shareholders, employers and redundant employees, mortgage holders and the ‘ownershipless’. And yet, the various mechanisms through which space is made and reproduced to extract time points forward to life-time beyond the grasp of racial capital. As the extraction of time becomes generalized as a resource that makes and moves capital, and in turn further drives uneven development, scholars of social reproduction ask how life-making practices also act as a resource for refusal and imagination to take time back.