Down South Africa way, white power certainly engaged in lots of displacement of surplus people, but as I've pointed out before they weren't really surplus because their 'functionality' to capital accumulation was in their gendered contribution to the reproduction of labour power, which occurred by sending working-age males to the cities and caring for them when sick, old or young. The Chamber of Mines once commented that these surplus people played such a vital role in gold mining that the system literally wouldn't find a way to operate without them (that was the view from 1944, I think, though things changed subsequently).
The quaint phrase 'surplus people' got revitalised on the left, however, when a quite good NGO -- Surplus People's Project -- in Cape Town sent folks around to document the horrors of forced removals during the 1980s. The group hasn't found a reason to change its name, since 1994, now that neoliberalism is giving them a greater constituency with which to work.
Patrick Bond HOME: WORK: 51 Somerset Road University of the Witwatersrand Kensington 2094 Graduate School of Public and Johannesburg, South Africa Development Management Phone: (2711) 614-8088 2 St.David's Road, Parktown E-mails: pbond at wn.apc.org bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za Work phone: (2711) 488-5917 Fax: (2711) 484-2729