Tracy Rosenthal, Marques Vestal, and Beatrice Adler-Bolton speak in this session recorded at Socialism 2025. This session was sponsored by Death Panel.

Discussions of “surplus populations” often fixate on labor markets; those cast out of work, left idle, or deemed unproductive. This session explores how the state organizes surplus not just through production, but through property and confinement. From land enclosures to the prison-industrial complex, the management of “surplus” has always been a question of containment, racialized abandonment, and carceral exile. Drawing on histories of displacement, abolitionist thought, and housed and unhoused tenant organizing, the discussion will examine surplus not as a demographic misfortune, but as a structural necessity of capital, and as a flashpoint of resistance. What emerges is not a question of productivity but of place—who is allowed to belong, and who must be removed to keep property regimes intact.

The next Socialism Conference will be held in Chicago, September 4-7, 2026. Learn more about the Socialism Conference at www.socialismconference.org.

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