Brown

"Health Communism’s definition of surplus...“elides traditional left conceptions of the working class or the ‘worker.’... the idea that the worker is not a part of the surplus populations, yet faces constant threat of becoming certified as surplus, is one of the central constructions wielded in support of capitalist hegemony.” (4) Surplus is not so much a state to which a given population belongs a priori as it is a status bestowed upon populations by the state in the interest of capital, a fraught and ever-shifting designation mediated by a host of administrative processes of biocertification which seek to either recoup as productive those bodies it deems capable or to mark for extraction the bodies it does not. This brings us to the idea of “extractive abandonment,” an extension of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of “organized abandonment” and Marta Russell’s money model of disability, which describes the ways in which capitalist society maintains “those discarded as non-valuable life… as a source of extraction and profit for capital” via a host of “industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus.” (5)

Lewis Brown