This episode was recorded live at the 2025 Socialism Conference in Chicago, where we collaborated with conference organizers to host four discussions over the first weekend in July. All four recordings are now available for Death Panel patrons at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod

feat. Beatrice, Tracy Rosenthal, Marques Vestal

Session description: 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.

For a longer discussion of some of the themes addressed in this session, see our episode What We Burn w/ Marques Vestal (06/16/25):

https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-we-burn-w-131635837

Find our Socialism Conference 2025 sessions that have yet to be unlocked here:

Gender, Sexuality, Reproduction and the State: Fighting Back Against the So-Called Law (DP x S25)

— Bea, Melissa Gira Grant, Sophie Lewis

www.patreon.com/posts/134643775

Dean Spade on Community Care in the Face of Collapse (DP x S25)

— Bea, Dean Spade

www.patreon.com/posts/134644217

Thanks to Han Olliver for our Death Panel x Socialism Conference 2024 poster image, which is being used as the cover image for this episode on platforms that support it. Find and support Han's work at www.hanolliver.com

Find our book Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism

Find Tracy's book, Abolish Rent, here: www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2443-abolish-rent

Find Phil's new book, Counting Like a State, here: kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700639687/

Death Panel merch here (patrons get a discount code): www.deathpanel.net/merch

As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod