Surplus Humanity & Futural Communism
Surplus Humanity & Futural Communism
 By holopoiesis on August 6, 2025The slogan “We are the 99%” emerged during the Occupy movement, thanks in large part by David Graeber, to point to the extreme disparity in wealth between the elite and everybody else. Increasingly though I think the notion of the 1% v.s. the 99% should be imbued with a sense that the issue is not just one of wealth disparity but of an existential disparity: a disparity between those who are near-absolutely immunized from the social, political and ecological consequences of their actions and the rest of humanity who is constantly and increasingly being subjected to carceral logics of control and surveillance before they are even guilty of anything. It is a disparity in which the 99% are subject to constant dehumanization and self-effacement while the 1% relentlessly pursue their fantasy of trans-human self-deification. The 1% are effectively nihilists who are desperately trying to transcend their existential predicament of being enmeshed in a finite reality governed by cause and effect, conditioned by embodiment, and constrained by natural limits — whether through Silicon Valley tech-gnosticism or Christofascist eschatological evangelicism. They hate Life itself and are obsessed with overcoming death. The 99% is the rest of humanity and life on this planet who are increasingly becoming superfluous to financial capitalization and forced to directly contend with a more painful version of the same existential predicament on a day to day, moment to moment basis. We are extremely diverse in place, identity, culture and history, but we are united by our common situation as being entirely superfluous to the accumulation of capital and power for the 1%. In contrast to the communism of the past, which based itself in the temporary and fractured unity of the working class, the communism of the future (which is at once the communism of today; a “futural communism”) will have to be based on the dis-unity between this surplus humanity and capital. Because surplus humanity is extremely diverse with no real common basis other than their superfluity. This “futural communism” is an inclusive-transcendence of the modern communist universalism which assumed there was a real common basis of unity and the post-modern turn to relativism which denied any real common basis of unity. In fact we are unified: on the basis of our dis-unity with capital. If capital is tending towards ejecting the whole mass of us, then we should accelerate this process by exiting from the system. But what about the proletariat? Aren’t they supposed to be the vanguards of communist revolution? A proletarian is a member of a class of working people who have nothing but their labor-power to sell to a capitalist in exchange for a wage to survive. The proletariat or formal working class is not superfluous to capital but is structurally entangled with it. This is why working class movements of the past, as noble as they were, have so far contributed to the reproduction of capitalist relations by assisting in the centralization of power and the fusion of differential capitalization with the bureaucratic state. When labor fights for its rights as labor, it simultaneously affirms the rights of capital because capital-labor is a dialectical couple (as shown by Marx’s critique of political economy). This logic is really demonstrated by the fact that classical labor movements have always been delimited to the horizon of reform or restructuring, but never radical breaks from the circuits of capitalization. For the last few decades there has been rapid post-industrial deproletarianization. Even those who are still technically proletarian are now significantly more fragmented, precarious and virtual than their classical industrial counterparts working in actual factory floors. Homelessness, legal enslavement under incarceration, illegal enslavement via human trafficking and forced migration are at an all time high and interdependent crises in themselves. As capital accumulation becomes ever more increasingly finance-based, as automation and AI decreases the need for human labor input, as climate change and geopolitical conflict continues to ravage the landscape and infrustructure there will be less and less proletarians in the world and more people ejected from the system or hanging onto it by a precarious thread. National and global proletarians are neither quantitatively great enough nor qualitatively powerful enough at this stage of world-history to be the “vanguards” of communist revolution. I think proletarians will play a key role in futural communism — particularly in facilitating connection and organization between different parts of surplus humanity — but the hubris that a centralized party of proletarians who are supposed to represent the masses of proletarians and surplus humanity will somehow lead “the revolution” today is actually a direct obstruction to the free flourishing of futural communism. Futural communism will require the participation of everyone in equal measure skillfully utilizing an ecology of tactics and strategies, all deployed along a differential continuum of aims, desires and conditions, all united in their shared interest in total exit from Capital and the State (the State of Capital). The State of Capital is like an abusive boyfriend: he treats you as if he don’t actually want you and make you feel disposable, yet for some reason he won’t let you go, and each time you try to leave you find yourself coming back because you depend upon him for your life, only for things to get even worse than before. Leaving the relationship entirely and completely abandoning any hope for reconciliation is absolutely necessary at this point, lest it ultimately end in a femicide-suicide like they often do. Yet we all know pragmatically that it’s only when you have established alternative networks of care and support that you’re able to safely exit from the toxic relationship. Similarly, although we should accelerate the process of becoming superfluous by exiting the State of Capital entirely (and not gradually at some indefinite point in the future but immediately right here right now), this is not possible without establishing alternative forms of life that are capable of sustaining life on a global scale. Exiting is easy; it’s establishing this alternative planetary topology of care that is the primary challenge and goal for today’s futural communism. But like an abusive boyfriend, the State of Capital is extremely clingy in spite of acting like it wants nothing to do with you as a living breathing human being, so there will be deep resistance and great struggle. But there is no alternative route available to us, other than the one that benefits nobody: the extinction of us all. In the deepest sense, the State of Capital is not just a networked system of material and ideological relations but a kind of lived metaphysics and mode of awareness, because this is how deeply the State of Capital has subsumed life into its own way of being in the world. To exit from the State of Capital is to also exit from the mode of awareness which renders other beings as a means to one’s own self-satisfaction. We instead step back into that more primordial mode of awareness that allows us to be present with the other and see them for who they really are, in the fullness of their potentiality and actuality; this is futural communism as a first-person experience of reality, and it is the origin of the process of establishing futural communism as a collective praxis in reality. |
2 comments on “Surplus Humanity & Futural Communism”
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Engage! 
In naming the 99% as not just dispossessed, but existentially surplus, you reveal the dissonance at capital’s heart: humanity rendered redundant. This “futural communism” doesn’t ask us to unify under an old banner—it summons us to rise from our shared ejection. We are not the proletarian vanguard, still tethered to capital’s machinery; we are the abandoned, the fragmented, refusing reparenting from a State of Capital that claims to both hate and own us. The exit you propose is no mere escape—it is a descent into presence, into a mode of awareness that sees the Other fully, that refuses self-effacement. Thank you for mapping this fracture as a seam of potential—and naming our dis-unity as the ground of emergence for something sacred and communing.
The only statement I have an issue with is “Exiting is easy”; I think they mean “easier than setting up an alternative communal network to support us”. However, I don’t think “exiting is easy” in any sense. The truth is, we are being forced out of the system; exiting is extremely risky and an existential crisis. There are many alternatives that we could create, but we have to start doing that work, and quickly.