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# Revolt of the surplus
- URL: https://futuri.city/revolt-of-the-surplus/
- Published: 2025-07-13T09:45:38.000Z
- Updated: 2025-07-13T09:45:38.000Z
- Author: Sophia McAllister
- Tags: Newsletter, #sophiefrommars, #Migrated-1792438291474, #Import 2026-10-19 20:32

*Messy tumblr post that became way too long - there’s some stuff here that will come back up in more formal writing I’m working on that will be out soon. I’ve been reading Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton’s* Health Communism *and so I’ve been thinking a lot about what a revolution starting in the so-called “surplus population” would look like*

The American state is cutting off countless people from healthcare right now while ramping up its anti-immigrant policies and its already heavily militarised police forces. The overlap between these is a naked attempt to reduce surplus population.

Capitalism designates a certain amount of the population to be "surplus" because they don't fit inside the parameters that make someone a productive worker. This is why racist stereotypes constantly paint immigrants as lazy and parasitic - they can't be allowed in OUR country if all they're here to do is LIVE. The maintenance of the surplus population is one way that capitalism manufactures our consent - this is why the French had a massive riot when Macron raised the retirement age by two years - you are working until you can't and then the system will take care of you. That's the rationale anyway. The material incentive is what people have recently been calling "extractive abandonment" where a state is able to squeeze value out of the processes of classifying, diagnosing, treating, housing, and "caring for" the surplus population to the minimum viable level.

Fascism has no interest in maintaining a surplus population. Yes those are concentration camps. Yes a tonne of rural hospitals kept afloat by medicaid are going to shut down. Yes they would prefer trans people kill themselves than live happy lives. Why does your analysis end there?

We have to center the surplus in our organising against what the state is doing. I'm saying this as a British trans woman but you barely have to squint to see that the UK is playing the part of 51st state right now, moving in lock step with America. We have to center the surplus population and that means both the people whose lives are considered completely "luxury" or "unnecessary" by the state (queers, elderly, disabled) and those whose lives are going to have the "unnecessary" parts, the parts where they get to live, legislated out until it becomes clear that they have been turned into a new class of slaves (migrant labourers, prisoners, "unskilled" labourers, communities of colour). Centering the surplus means organising a parallel structure for these populations to exist within at some distance from the state in as self-sufficient a manner as possible.

To make this possible, we need democratic structures so that the social organisms of these populations can understand themselves and have something close to a decision making faculty. The model I've been proposing for a long time now is assemblies. I think that getting people together for a structured discussion can achieve a lot very fast, and as I've written before, it escapes the invisibles traps of the "activist class" thinking. That is to say there are lots of issues and solutions that occur to non-activist members of communities that aren't apparent in the frameworks of thinking that we, as activists, think have made us superior and therefore in a position to dictate strategy to others. Getting together the community to talk about what their issues are and how to solve them is an incredibly powerful engine for change. Also, some people will find it too slow and frustrating, and that's great too! Those people will find each other in that meeting and get together to organise the more rapid and radical things that they feel frustrated the assembly isn't doing already. If done correctly, an assembly model could have frequent local or smaller assemblies tackling immediate community specifics while feeding back to larger regional assemblies and maybe even into something national. It is possible for us to create a structure that gives us a truer freer democracy than bourgeois electoralism ever could.

As an aside here, I am sick of seeing neoliberal propaganda and attitudes infect the thought processes of well-meaning leftists in the imperial core. Your mutual aid structure isn't a startup, your affinity group isn't a podcast, you don't need to find your USP and your niche and compete to be the best at communism. When I see people saying that big structures inherently corrupt and oppress, and therefore we must **never** have any centralisation, any large scale organising, it feels less like an anarchist perspective and more like McCarthyism wearing a red and black pin. Please stop being scared of Big Organising, we are going to need to do some Big Organising in order to win. Decentralised horizontal structures, federations and coalitions and so on can get really big, but we have to have the impulse to actually work together, to coalition build, to distinguish between minor ideological or interpersonal differences in order to actually make something happen.

The example I'm most familiar with is trans people, being a trans woman myself, so I'll outline my idea for trans assemblies that I've talked about in a few places now:

Meet regularly with a venue open for a couple of hours before the start of the assembly for a volunteer group to cook food for everyone. With the venue open, people can come in and socialise, get ready for the meeting, help with the food if they want, or use the space for anything else (perhaps they have legal or medical admin they've been putting off). Then, when the assembly begins, start with a rundown of the agenda by the facilitators (the agenda should have been available to everyone before the meeting and the facilitators should have volunteered at the end of the last assembly). After this, floor speeches. Allocate a number of slots for fixed length speeches for any attendees to give their perspectives on whatever they'd like. If they want to use this time to talk about community mess, that's just fine, if they want to use their time to talk about the assembly itself, great, if they wanna just let their feelings out, that's vital, if they wanna promote their surgery fundraiser, literally why not. After this move into the agenda items. Create working groups to achieve goals - you want to phone blockade the office of a transphobic politician so you're creating a working group to plan it while taking hands in the room for potential participants; you want to start a regular letter writing program to trans prisoners so you create a working group who will find a venue and regular time to convene to write together; you want to make a community HRT production process, start a working group with volunteers to make it based on the estimated size of the need for supply, discuss in the assembly what people's concerns are and how best to satisfy them; you have a lot of trans people with precarious housing, so you have a housing working group who are working closely with renters unions while putting together queer houseshares who need a flatmate with trannies about to be evicted. (All these working group examples are based on organising I have seen, to be clear, but through an assembly they could be plugged into each other more effectively and benefit from each other's and the community's resources better) Consider having a fund for working groups that anyone can donate into - there are a lot of tech trannies and cis allies with comfy salaries who would love to contribute money rather than time. After the main discussion consider having something like a "member solidarity" section like renters union branches will do where people with specific issues bring them to the group and the room splits into volunteer bunches to help those people. After this, do your AOBs, get people to volunteer for next time to facilitate, take hands, take minutes & keep time, and make sure everyone knows who to speak to concerning the operations of each working group.

This local assembly could have representatives feed back to a city or regional assembly, ideally with representatives changing each time - this is sometimes called using "spokes" - but the regional or city assembly should still be open to everyone. The same on a level above to a national assembly. A regional assembly can make projects like housing bigger, or put more funds towards HRT production that enables higher level safety & sterilisation than any small group could afford for their startup costs. It could also coordinate large marches or actions very effectively. A national assembly could mobilise enormous mass demonstrations, deliver political demands to the government and work in concert with trade unions to make sure that trans issues are taken seriously by organised labour.

The organised structure that makes the assmblies happen can be very small and isn't the same as the assembly itself. It isn't even the same as the facilitators, except maybe in the first meeting of each assembly. People aren't joining an org by coming to any assembly, and the volunteer facilitators come from the community by design. This is similar to how some orgs will have paid staff organisers who aren't the same as their chair, treasurer, secretary, comms officer and so on. The people who get together to organise the assembly are in an obvious position where they could hold power over the community, so getting the assembly out of their hands and into the hands of the community asap is an important part of this. It's also worth saying that no trans person should be excluded from these - community conflicts aren't the job of the assembly to resolve and the situation is too critical to be locking people out of the room. For these reasons I suggest that the people getting together to organise an assembly make consitutional and protocol documents right away to figure out how they get from organising the logistics of the first assembly to sitting back and letting it carry itself on its own momentum.

This all is a rough outline of my idea for trans assemblies, but the same model could be applied to various populations considered surplus to create a democratic voice that can turn your population from a political football into a political bloc. If there were trans assemblies at every level and disabled people's assemblies and migrant community assemblies, the surplus population could start to intentionally build in a direction away from these states that are currently transitioning into fascism. Their whole plan revolves around cutting off the surplus population, killing us outright or letting us die, while trapping the productive workers into a perfect machine that will get the maximum value out of their labour with no possiblity for revolt. If the surplus population can constitute a movement that is self sustaining, then the "productive workers" can simply start jumping ship, joining on to our parallel structure and leaving their fascist world behind.

A friend of mine has been getting super into potlucks and community food sovereignty, and she sent me this amazing stoner text at 3am the other day - the gist was that every meal you eat that was provided by your community instead of capitalism is a meal you're eating in the future, and if you have one potluck a week then once a week you're eating in the future, and if you can keep increasing the number of community meals around you pretty soon you can be eating in the future all the time. The steps from where we are to interdependent self-sufficiency without the state are smaller and less scary than they want us to think. The state is saying "if you walk out that door you'll die! you'll never survive without me!" to the people it considers valuable units of labour. To us, it has already made it clear we should die either way. So let's leave, and take them with us