'Those who do not move, do not notice their chains': Surplus populations and endless crisis

March 24, 2022 | 13:30 h - 14:30 h

Speaker: Prof. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (Associate Professor at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad)

Topic: 'Those who do not move, do not notice their chains': Surplus populations and endless crisis

Abstract:  Contrary to classical theories of rural-urban migration and promises of upward mobility, large segments of working people in postcolonial countries like Pakistan resemble what Marx termed ‘surplus populations’. Displaced from traditional livelihoods due to the rapacious financialisation of nature (land, forest, water) in geographical peripheries, these surplus populations move towards metropolitan centres where they face constant struggles to find means of labour to subsist. Additionally their perennial struggle to secure shelter in informal/illicit housing markets conforms to the almost exponential growth of what Mike Davis has poignantly called a ‘planet of slums’. Through a series of vignettes set in both peripheral and metropolitan Pakistan, the paper/presentation will elucidate the ‘endless crisis’ spawned by capital’s incessant drive to both conquer natural economies and expand into every nook and cranny of postcolonial society and attendant logics of colonial statecraft.

Prof. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is Associate Professor at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, where’re he is teaching political economy, colonial history and social theory. His research themes are state theory, social movements, geopolitics and informalisation.

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