Crisis And Surplus Analysis

Crisis and Surplus In this chapter, I ask what we can learn by looking to migrant caregivers’ experiences of rebuilding daily life and reconstituting community in the aftermath of disaster. Specifically, I take interest in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2007) claim that, “the actual effects of crisis in a particular society are not necessarily paralyzing; rather, they invite remedies that take many forms, and therefore produce varying outcomes that are as likely further to shake up, as to settle, the original political-economic upheaval” (p.56). Thus, in turning to migrant caregivers’ intimate re/productive contributions to disaster recovery (as one such remedy), I believe we can better understand not only how crises are mediated but how they come …show more content…
Following Nicole Constable (2013), I argue that the informal, unpaid, or underpaid labour of migrant caregivers is “a contemporary permutation of David Ricardo’s labor theory of value in which ‘surplus labor’ creates the ‘surplus value’ upon which capitalist profits are based” (p.47). Drawing upon data from in-depth interviews with live-in caregivers, I trace how— in the wake of the Fort McMurray wildfire— families extracted surplus value from caregivers as a way of coping with the financial, social, and psychological effects of crisis. Ultimately, I make the case that in studying a community in its moment of reconstitution through the eyes of a largely invisible workforce, we are able to see how crises are woven into our everyday lives through existing patterns of social reproduction. It is through this extraction of surplus value that the social formation of capitalism is re-established amidst the rubble of crises and extensive restructuring. Furthermore, as the case of migrant caregivers makes clear, this process of extracting (reproductive) surplus value to re-settle capitalist relations is highly gendered, raced, and classed— unfolding unevenly, as well, through time and across space in a global political