Relative surplus population, transnational labour regimes and the eclipse of the frontier: Guatemalan farmworkers in the Ontario greenhouse industry

Amidst the totalizing suffusion of capitalist social relations globally, all the world’s population is in some substantive sense co-constituted with the market and its imperatives. The concepts of the ‘frontier’ and ‘commodity frontiers’ have been used to describe capitalism’s historical expansion, with the spread of accumulation across geographies based on the extraction of commodities necessary for its further development. Some scholars contend that such frontiers continue to operate in the world economy. This article contends that the frontier concept is no longer adequate to describe the intricate and varied interactions between social relations of production, relative surplus populations and capitalism’s uneven and combined development in the world economy. These forces combine to form spatial and social complexes of transformation and reorganization – transnational labour regimes. To make this argument and begin to demonstrate these processes, it draws from interviews with Guatemalan campesinos who migrate to work in greenhouses in Ontario, Canada.