Surplus Populations, Contingency, and Economic Recession: Histories from Korean Day Workers in Interwar Japan

This paper delineates three concepts of surplus populations, contingency, and economic recession, tracing their historical interrelations through the example of colonial Korean day workers in interwar Japan. At stake in a thinking of these concepts is a reconceptualization of the category of the proletariat, exploitation, and racism as a process of segmentation endemic to the process of the commodification of labor power. I especially highlight the myriad ways in which institutions constituting nodal points within labor markets introduce various recording machines that seek to diffuse class antagonisms through micro-techniques of individuation, racialization, and generally the production of difference. This process of producing difference, in the case of interwar Japan, is fundamentally a problem of how the Japanese empire designed its critique of European colonialism, as well as the ideological space of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. At the same time, the production of difference must be understood as an effect of state and para-state sites of power to maintain surplus populations in a chronic state of precariousness as a precondition of work discipline. The “origins” of this problem are shared in both the phenomenon of ongoing rural expropriation as well as of sudden unemployment or chronic semi-employment in cities. Consequently, the terrain and milieu of struggle of surplus populations becomes hydra-headed, involving more than direct struggles against bosses and employers during periods of work, and including struggles found in everyday life that must confront organized institutional forces supplanting specific modes of representing workers according to axiomatics of nation, ethnicity, and race. What we can learn from this series of problems is a mode of questioning less the fact of working, and more the vast world of power that constitutes the search for work itself.