Japanese Imperialism and the Colonial Precariat: Imperialist Distortions of Marx’s “Absolute, General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”

My paper illuminates upon historical distortions of commodification of labor power in the case of Japanese imperialism, taking the example of colonized Korean day workers in interwar Japan as my object of study. The theoretical concept of "surplus populations," first theorized by Marx, is reexamined by analyzing the history of colonial, migrant labor within the context of  Japanese "colonial governmentality" in both Korea and Japan between the years of 1917 and 1937. In illuminating key, historical characteristics of how colonial Korean peasants were organized as a "colonial precariat" in the Japanese metropole, I seek to illuminate how Japanese imperialism sheds light on--but also distorts-- what Marx once called "the law of populations peculiar to capitalist society" and the historical stratifications of the "industrial reserve army." How does the historical case of colonial Korean day labor shape our analysis of fundamental principles of capitalist commodity economy, especially in the stage of imperialism? Moreover, how might this inform a theory of capitalist crisis in relation to questions of poverty and what Marx called the "absolute, general law of capitalist accumulation"?