Exiles in the Twenty-First Century: The New “Population Law” of Absolute Capitalism

Abstract

Addressing the dramatic situation of migrants and refugees in the Euro-Mediterranean and Euro-British space, Étienne Balibar mobilizes and questions the Marxist theoretical legacy, in particular the “law of population” and the “general law of capitalist accumulation”. Introducing the notion of “absolute capitalism” – the idea that there is no longer any existing alternative economic system to capitalism –, Balibar focuses on the violence inherent to new regimes of mobility and immobility in migration and migratory politics, focusing on borders, exploitation and the segmentation of the labour-force. Contrary to traditional Marxist analysis, absolute capitalism, according to Balibar, is not characterized by stability and self-regulation, but by financial and political instability which, due to a severely limited capacity for control and restraint of violence, opens up for extreme violence.

This lecture was presented first at SOAS, University of London, on February 19, 2019. It was repeated with minor changes at Cornell University, Warwick University, and the University of Kent in 2019 and 2020.