Necroeconomics: dispossession, extraction, and indispensable/expendable laborers in contemporary Myanmar

Through ethnography of de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar, the article shows how threshold subjects - poor laborers uncertain whether they are relatively or absolutely unnecessary to the social system of profits and distribution - become vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction constituted by combining extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; willing laborers driven by debt, dispossession, and existential desperation; and biopolitical abandonment (by states or corporations) of subjects to the carnage of extraction. The article considers what politics may be inhabited by the threshold subject, given s/he is both simultaneously surplus and essential to social reproduction.

Automated summary

The article explores how poor laborers in Myanmar are vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction that combines spatial, mechanical, and political elements through debt, dispossession, and existential desperation. These laborers are abandoned by states or corporations, leading them to suffer during the extraction process.