An Exchange between Daniel Loick and Rosaura Martínez-Ruiz

“Estorbo” [Nuisance], Teresa Margolles                

Dear Rosaura,

Our conversation explores the relation between authoritarianism and what we might call, with Marx, “surplus populations:” people rendered superfluous or redundant by global capitalism. This relation can be described from different perspectives: either we can focus on the function of social processes of exclusion for authoritarian projects and on the desires for exclusion, punishment, and abjection that they ignite in the authoritarian personality. Or we can look at the subjectivity of people rendered surplus themselves—their own grievances and resentments, but also their potentially emancipatory agency. As we will see, these perspectives depend not only on one’s theoretical background but also on one’s local situation.

From my point of view, surplus populations appear first of all as targets of global fascism. Attacking migrants and refugees, feminist women, trans and gender-nonconforming people, unemployed people, and other people construed as non-productive as well as leftists and other political opponents is a main characteristic of authoritarianism. The promise to do away with those who are considered “too many,” be it by way of deportation, criminalization, organized abandonment, or outright annihilation, is consistently one of the main driving forces behind fascist mobilizations.

With her concept of “phantom possession,” critical theorist Eva von Redecker has helped to explain how capitalist societies have historically always relied on forms of propertized oppression, in which hierarchical social relations—such as racism and sexism—function similarly to property ownership.¹ This framework allowed certain groups to claim control not only over things and resources, but also over other human beings, with enslavement and patriarchal marriage serving as paradigmatic cases. When these entitlements become precarious due to both economic decline and the political emancipation of marginalized groups, neo-authoritarianism emerges as an aggressive defense of this “phantom possession,” an attempt to reinstate “proper” racial and gender hierarchies by asserting material and symbolic sovereignty over groups that were once considered property. By paying closer attention to the hatred of surplus populations in contemporary global fascisms, we can see another dimension of authoritarian domination: not just objectification—disposing the other—but also abjection, disposing of the other.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva uses Lacan’s notion of the abject to describe a psychological and social process in which certain things, people, or ideas are expelled or rejected to maintain a sense of identity and order. Abjection occurs when something threatens the boundaries of the self, evoking anxiety, disgust, or fear. It is neither fully inside nor fully outside the subject but remains a disturbing reminder of what must be excluded to sustain a coherent identity: waste, filth, shit. Fascism, according to Kristeva, can be interpreted as the most extreme attempt at exterminating the threatening abject, at eliminating what reminds us of our own finitude, fragility, and dependency. It is easy to see how neo-authoritarianism works similarly to construe certain groups—immigrants and refugees, feminists and transgender people, the poor and unemployed—as abject, i.e., as dangerous, parasitic, or degenerate, and therefore in need of expulsion. The threat that surplus populations represent, I want to argue, is precisely the traumatic insight that everybody is virtually superfluous. Their very existence points to the objective fact that the relation between one’s place of birth and one’s passport, one’s genitals and one’s gender, or one’s achievements and one’s salary, is arbitrary and thus can change. No one “deserves” their title, their status, their wealth, which means that anyone can become a refugee or a pauper in a heartbeat.

This is, admittedly, a perspective mostly informed by observations from the US and Europe, analyzed using a very particular set of theoretical concepts. I wonder what your take is on this analysis, and how you see the relation between surplus populations and fascism from a Latin American perspective.

In comradely solidarity,

Daniel

*

Dear Daniel,

Historically, Latin America has been home to one of the quintessential surplus populations of the world. When discussing migrants, for instance, since the 1960s an overwhelming number of Latin American people have left their countries to settle in the United States and, more recently, Spain. We, Latin Americans and other inhabitants of the so-called Global South, are the abject, that which threatens the identity and purity of the white peoples of the US and Europe. This is not to say that white privilege does not play a significant role in Latin America, but rather that the concept of “whiteness” is also contextual. A person considered white in the Global South is not always perceived in the same way in the Global North. As a people, Latin Americans are part of what is globally identified as surplus.

This does not imply that certain fascist logics are not replicated in some Latin American countries. I am thinking, for example, of Argentina, governed today by Javier Milei, or El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. However, it is difficult for me to think of fascism as a category of authoritarianism easily imported today into Latin America. There are isolated phenomena that I would have no objection to identifying as fascistic, but fascism as genocidal murder—or neo-fascism, as Judith Butler qualifies it, as the stripping away of rights—underwritten by a restoration fantasy and a moralized justification for harming minority groups, is inadequate for thinking about the region in its recent history.

I agree with you that there is an authoritarian emergency in the world, and that there is also an urgent need for political action to subvert these trends. For my part, I am hopeful about the left-wing government of Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, but at the same time I am concerned that international far-right discourse could, at some point in the near future, gain momentum in Mexico. But beyond having to be attentive to the echoes of these emergencies, my current concern is with the social and security crisis in Mexico caused by the violence that Sayak Valencia has aptly called “gore” and that is directly related to socioeconomic inequality caused by capitalism/neoliberalism and the competition for the illegal drug market among different gangs in Mexico.² The growth of this business and the number of people working for the cartels are directly related to the international distribution of labor, to the unemployment rate, and to the precarization, irregularization, and flexibilization of employment. In short, they are the disastrous effects of the neoliberal economy.

Responding directly to your note, drawing on Eva von Redecker’s vocabulary, I would argue that the Latin American population is treated as a phantom possession by the colonizing countries or the Global North. Or, following Kristeva, the abject. However, I think it is important to clarify, when you argue that “the threat that surplus populations represent is precisely the traumatic insight that everybody is virtually superfluous,” that this is not a conscious thought. From my perspective, this is an unconscious calculation insofar as what I read and hear from the hegemonic populations of the Global North is rather a discourse of earned and unquestionable entitlement. This is an unconscious/foreclosed psycho-cognitive formation. As von Redecker explains, the hegemonic subject feels dispossessed of something that belongs to it “naturally” or essentially, not just historically.

Beyond certain hegemonic subject formations in Mexico, I would like to think about what happens to the populations that I would call “waste” and that I diagnose differently from the surplus insofar as they do not live with a risk of being replaced since they have never occupied any place in society other than being considered and treated as disposable, as garbage. Marx conceptualizes surplus populations as a “reserve army of labor,” suggesting that they possess certain skills and the potential to be integrated into capital production at some point. In contrast, there is a population that has been radically abandoned, with no prospect of integration. These waste populations are unable to establish productive connections with any legally recognized sector of the globalized economy, remaining trapped in marginalized areas of cities. These populations are also the product of a globalized neoliberal economy with an international division of labor that, in this region, intensifies the rates of unemployment and low incomes. In Mexico, for example, the income that is considered middle class, a population that represents 47%, is around 35 US dollars a day; and the unemployment rate of 2.9% is the lowest in the region where the average is around 6.4% (Colombia 10%, Brazil 7.1%, and Bolivia 5.1%, to give other examples).³ Although the unemployment rate in Mexico is considered low and that of the region is only a few tenths higher than the European Union’s, which is at 5.9%, the unemployed population does not receive state unemployment subsidies. From 2023 to 2025, the number of people estimated to work in drug trafficking increased by 289%, from 175,000 people to 500,000.⁴ It is also estimated that organized crime is the fifth largest employer in Mexico.⁵

The situation in Mexico is quite clear in this regard: many impoverished men from abandoned populations who don’t migrate to the United States in search of a better economic future join criminal organizations. Men who have participated in and survived working with organized crime report choosing that path because it made them feel “like somebody,” “respected,” “admired,” “like they had a place.” These men also share that they wanted “to have things” like “luxury objects” and “women,” knowing that the work was dangerous, and meant that they would very likely die soon. (By 2022, the cartels totaled 160-185,000 members and recruited around 350 people per week to compensate for high rates of attrition due to conflict, detentions, and, we can assume, deaths.)⁶

What I mean to say is that neoliberalism has other effects in regions where, in addition to surplus populations, there are those which I would call “waste,” and this produces effects other than resurgent fascist tendencies. Waste populations in Mexico have taken other paths than fascism: informal commerce, organized crime, migration, but also revolution, as in the admirable struggle of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), fought since 1994.

In solidarity,

Rosaura

*

Dear Rosaura,

Thank you for your response. If I read you correctly, you want to caution mainly against two Eurocentric confusions: authoritarianism in Latin America is not fascism, and waste populations (as you understand them) are not surplus populations (in the Marxist sense). Your objections raise broader methodological and political questions for any attempt to analyze what various authoritarianisms around the globe have in common, and where they differ.

Economically speaking, I would insist that the social class you have in mind is aptly described as a “surplus population.” It has been produced by, as you write, “the unemployment rate and … the precarization, irregularization, and flexibilization of employment.” I understand that you want to focus not on the economic status but on the psycho-affective coping mechanisms that different groups have developed. Paying attention to these subjective differences, rather than emphasizing economic similarities, allows you to shift the perspective from the marginalized, unwanted, and disposable populations as targets of reactionary politics to their own agency. I think this is an important reminder not to romanticize the poor, and, even more urgently, to take seriously the potential appeal of reactionary politics for them. This is not only the case in Mexico, but also in other parts of the world as well, as seen, for example, in the racist riots in the United Kingdom. This might be the kernel of truth of Marx’s warning that the Lumpenproletariat, due to its unorganized and precarious status, is especially susceptible to corruption by the bourgeoisie. Not only did the lumpen support the authoritarian dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte already in the nineteenth century in France; they later formed the social basis for the fascist Sturmtruppen in Germany. To me, it makes sense to interpret the empowerment effects and the satisfaction from causing harm and suffering you observe in waste populations along these lines: as a psycho-affective reaction to the experience of being treated as waste, discarded. Using the vocabulary offered by W.E.B. Du Bois, von Redecker, and others, we could interpret this sadism as a form of compensation. Having no other source of status or recognition, these subjects turn to the spectacle of excessive misogynistic (and often racialized) violence to find a derivative form of social participation. So, I agree that reactionary politics is not only the expression of a hegemonic subject, but also the expression of a corruption of parts of the propertyless classes by gaining access to substitute forms of status and recognition—be it in the form of organized crime or hyper-consumerism.

There are, however, also examples of surplus groups finding different and contrary political articulations. The most prominent example is, of course, the Black Panthers, who based their revolutionary theory on the belief that precisely due to its social and economic exclusion the Lumpenproletariat was the vanguard of the people. Their organizing practices included not only the fending off of state repression, but also establishing infrastructures of care known as survival programs. The strategy behind this was explicitly to win over marginalized groups from gangs and organized crime. It is also in this tradition that a more dynamic, less Eurocentric notion of fascism was developed. Thinkers and activists in the Black Radical Tradition often used the term “fascism” to describe a reality of repression, deprivation, and organized abandonment that is absolutely compatible with liberal democratic regimes, even with progressive forces in power. This perspective—the view of history, as we can say with Walter Benjamin, from the standpoint of the oppressed, revealing that the fascist state of exception is not an exception but the rule—could still vitalize antifascist struggles today by offering possibilities of solidarity and alliance building beyond national borders.

This is why I prefer a theoretical framework that emphasizes the similarities across different contexts, as well as the agency of the most marginalized groups. In Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe updates Fanon’s notion of the “wretched of the earth” in a similar way: “the new ‘wretched of the earth’ are ­those to whom the right to have rights is refused, ­those who are told not to move, those who are condemned to live within structures of confinement—camps, transit centers, the thousands of sites of detention that dot our spaces of law and policing. They are those who are turned away, deported, expelled; the clandestine, the ‘undocumented’—­the intruders and castoffs from humanity that we want to get rid of because we think that, between them and us, there is nothing worth saving, and that they fundamentally pose a threat to our lives, our health, our well-­being.”⁷

To fight global fascisms today, a new popular front is needed. It is my conviction that such a front won’t be formed by hegemonic forces, even if they are liberal or humanistic, but can only emerge from those groups that have not traditionally been deemed part of “the people,” who have been rendered superfluous, redundant, or disposable. Whether these surplus populations turn to liberation or accept the poisoned offer of hyper-consumerism and excessive violence is a matter of political organizing.

Solidarity,

Daniel

*

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for your last response.

The question of whether the signifier “fascism” could allow for the articulation of an international struggle for social justice seems urgent to me. In this sense, I agree with you on the importance of finding a globally shared anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian, or anti-dispossession politics. However, we must ensure that the term, with its apparent social scientific rigor, does not obfuscate local social struggles. I agree that its use should not be historicist and that, for at least a century, it has been more of a norm than an exception. At the same time, we must be more ruminative and careful not try to impose it from within a Eurocentric academy. For now, suffice it to say that never in the history of any of the nations in this region has a mass emancipatory social and political movement been organized against fascism. Latin America has fought against colonialism, latifundismo, dictatorships, and patriarchy, and for sovereignty. Specifically, the gore violence we experience in Mexico could not be categorized as fascist. It is, of course, an effect of neoliberalism and its hyper-consumerist ideology. However, it does not unleash, for example, violence against a specific group that is perceived as the cause of misfortune. It does not activate nostalgia for a (non-existent, of course) bygone past that should be recovered. I think this could also be one more reason to insist on the difference between surplus and waste populations. The temporality of the affective reaction of the latter kinds of populations—waste populations—is not nostalgic, but desperate. These populations have not lost anything because they have never had anything. There is no experience of being displaced or “replaced” by other populations. They envy what the other has (the capacity for consumption and social recognition) and are willing to snatch it, but the violence does not stem from a sense of deserving it. I would go so far as to affirm that they even perceive themselves as impostors. As if that were not enough, their violence is not directed outward, at the bourgeois or at the white, but is unleashed within, in a competition for the illegal market.

Still, I find your concern about the agency of classes and social movements important. Following Marx, surplus populations have revolutionary power. However, it seems politically wrong-headed to expect an emancipatory struggle from populations that have always been abject, violated, and abandoned. Nevertheless, delinquency and criminality are not the only paths that abject populations have historically taken in Mexico. They have engaged in informal commerce, servitude, vagrancy, and, of course, also political resistance and revolution. The EZLN, for instance, is the greatest emancipatory movement in in contemporary Mexican history. Pointedly, the EZLN took up arms on January 1, 1994, the date on which NAFTA came into effect, the date on which Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then president of Mexico, enthusiastically announced that neoliberalism was arriving in the country.

After National Socialism, it is clear that we must alter the analysis of the political subject and the class struggle to account for more complex phenomena. We can think with Ernesto Laclau, for example, of the people not as an a priori political subject, but as the articulation of political demands. Waste populations thus do not have one political destiny but several. Why did the indigenous people of Chiapas take the path of armed resistance while other impoverished people of Mexico chose that of organized crime? This is a question that requires a broader analysis than an analysis in terms of class struggle. Colonization, racism, machismo, and the new consumer society are phenomena that are played out in Latin America.

Finally, I agree with you that the path to the disarticulation of these violences, whatever name we give them, is a matter of political organizing. I would conclude that I recognize the value of finding a name that articulates the global fight against social injustice, but I would say that “fascism” is not the answer for the moment. I would leave this discussion open, then, not without acknowledging that—although it was not articulated with demands from other movements and we cannot say that antifascism was or is the EZLN’s main political demand—on more than one occasion Zapatismo named fascism as an enemy: “We—and I’m talking not only about Zapatistas—are fighting to democratize this country. The advocates of the State’s party system and we will make history: those belonging to PRI [the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party] because they will have done everything they could to lead this country towards fascism; we [will make history] for pushing it towards democracy, freedom, and justice. I don’t know what the immediate outcome will be, but I do know what the end will be: democracy’s victory.”⁸ And: “Amid clear signs of fascism, all stemming from the state party system, the EZLN reiterates its call for an inclusive effort by democratizing forces, encompassing the entire political and social spectrum of Mexico, to achieve the deep changes that are necessary. An important part of the democratic change effort is dialogue among the different social and political forces.”⁹

In solidarity,

Rosaura

1. Eva von Redecker, “Ownership’s Shadow: Neoauthoritarianism as Defense of Phantom Posession,” Critical Times 3, no. 1 (2020): 33-67. [↩]
2. Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, translated by John Pluecker (Semiotext(e), 2018). [↩]
3. International Monetary Fund. Unemployment Rate. 2025. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/LUR@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WE [↩]
4. Jorge Cisneros and Diego Joaquín Hernández, “Reclutamiento de jóvenes para el narco se dispara 289%.” La Silla Rota, May 16, 2025. https://lasillarota.com/nacion/2025/5/16/reclutamiento-de-jovenes-para-el-narco-se-dispara-289-536495.html [↩]
5. Jorge Vaquero Simancas, “El narco es el quinto empleador de México.” El País, September 22, 2023. https://elpais.com/mexico/2023-09-22/el-narco-es-el-quinto-empleador-de-mexico.html [↩]
6. “Cárteles deben reclutar 350 personas a la semana, señala studio.” Diario de Tabasco, Septiembre 22, 2023. https://www.diariodetabasco.mx/nacion/2023/09/22/carteles-deben-reclutar-350-personas-a-la-semana-senala-estudio/ [↩]
7. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois (Duke University Press, 2017), 177. [↩]
8. Enlace Zapatista, “Un gran diálogo nacional donde se discuta y acuerde un nuevo pacto social y politico,” author’s translation, May 5, 1995. https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/1995/05/05/un-gran-dialogo-nacional-donde-se-discuta-y-acuerde-un-nuevo-pacto-social-y-politico/ [↩]
9. Enlace Zapatista, “Llamado a participar en la Consulta Nacional,” author’s translation, August 25, 1995. https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/1995/08/25/llamado-a-participar-en-la-consulta-nacional/ [↩]