Inhumanist Marxism

Materialist philosophy confronts a persistent dichotomy: humanism versus anti-humanism. Marx embodies this split. The young Marx theorized alienation and proclaimed human-centricity in his theses on Feuerbach^[1], a humanist gesture. The mature Marx analyzed capital’s cold mechanics, mapping the flows beneath production relations^[2], an apparent turn from humanism. Yet throughout, Marx remained committed to one project: overcoming capital through mass action. From this ambiguous foundation, two traditions emerged. Humanist Marxism maintains fidelity to the transformative power of the masses, the negative force of collective agency. Anti-humanism inverts this and examines how masses are produced by structural relations, rejecting any emancipatory horizon. One camp clings to the subject; the other dissolves it into impersonal forces.

Reza Negarestani’s “inhumanism” attempts to escape this polarity.^[3] Rather than defending a pre-given human essence or reducing humans to structural effects, Negarestani proposes actively constructing what it means to be human. This construction proceeds through sustained revision of norms under the guidance of autonomous reason. Instead of the one-evental-rupture that kitsch Marxism fetishizes, a cumulative normative development. Negarestani grounds this in “new rationalism,” a pragmatic functionalism that treats reason as self-legislating and capable of revising its own commitments. However! Negarestani’s rationalism remains tied to Enlightenment teleology. By situating reason as autonomous and self-actualizing, he smuggles in the transcendental commitments of classical rationalism which is precisely what materialism should reject. This essay proposes a different inhumanism: one grounded not in autonomous reason but in constitutive alien-ness and technico-material transduction^[4].

The human began from the feet.

Leroi-Gourhan’s paleoanthropology^[5], what Stiegler calls “anti-cerebral”^[6], demonstrates that the strengthening of feet and straightening of posture freed the hands and face. Only then could manipulation of nature begin. The hand that shaped the flint was itself shaped by the flint. The mind that drew the cave painting was drawn by it. This co-constitutive relation between interior (human) and exterior (technics) grounds contemporary materialism. Yet a problem remains. It is as idealist to collapse the human into the animal as to posit a transcendent human essence. Negarestani locates human distinctiveness in sapience^[7]: the capacity to enter “the space of reason,” to engage in discursive practices of giving and asking for reasons. But if we take paleoanthropology seriously, we must ask: How does the sentient become sapient? The answer returns us to the reciprocal relation between interior and exterior or “Anthropogenesis as technogenesis”. Sapience is nothing but the transductive capacity of the technical being. What Negarestani identifies as human uniqueness, rational autonomy, is actually an effect of a more fundamental uniqueness: the power of transduction between the interior and exterior (precisely the process that leads to the creation of the interior and exterior). The human individual becomes rational by participating in the exteriority of technico-linguistic matrices^[8] into which it is born. Language is not internal; tools are not constituted of something entirely external. Both are transductive media. The core of the human is alien. This unfolds in three moments:

1. Originary technicity^[9]. The human originates with technics. Not as compensation for lack, but as affirmative relation to alien exteriority. The flint stone exists as differential materiality (grain, hardness, fracture patterns). Encountering this alien existence transduces both stone and hand.
   
2. Matrices as externalized interiority. Technical and linguistic practices accumulate into what Hegel called Geist^[10]: collective, externalized structures that organize possibility. Capital, language, colonial grids, gender norms: these are technico-linguistic matrices. They are spirit materialized in technical-symbolic systems. Human interiority returns to exteriority, crystallizing into matrices.
   
3. Matrices as alien individuators. These matrices, now external and impersonal, individuate^[11] the very subjects who constitute them. The mother fluid. You are born into language, not as its author but as its effect. Matrices possess alien status—they are affirmative differential existences that harbor and shape interiority. The exterior that humans create becomes the alien that creates humans.
   

Negarestani’s error is treating sapience as autonomous and self-legislating. Reason does not actualize itself independently of technical-material conditions. Rather, sapience is a crystallization. A metastable^[12] individuation sustained by ongoing transduction between alien exteriority (technico-linguistic matrices) and individuated interiority (subjects). There is no autonomous reason, only reason as a bio-linguistically transducted crystallization. No self-legislating sapience, only matrix-mediated individuation.

This formulation rescues the inhuman from Negarestani’s transcendental conception and places it in immanence logic. The interior-exterior movement gives it relational ontology. True commitment to the project of humanism is now immanently possible. Due to the alien nature of the constitutive outside, construction of new norms is not the telos of Reason or an AGI, but the intensive becoming of the inhuman. While conserving the same call for commitment, now, inhumanism is politically potent. New norms must be created. But instead of this creation being the labor of reason against humanity, it is the enigmatic dance of the alien seducing humanity into becoming. Instead of slaving under the telos of this transcendent category of sapience, the joyful inhuman revaluates matrices. Indeed this is a pre-figurative praxis^[13] of interference with creation. Affirmative creation constitutes destabilizing the milieu. We are not liberated from slavery. We are unlearning slavery by practicing anti-slavery positively. This is not the apathetic reactionism of kitsch Marxism. This is the real communized alternative. This is not the one-sided assumption of agency, but the new creation of it outside the cogito^[14]. This positive interference-theory, I will talk about at a later time.

Thus the New Inhumanist Marxism is as follows:

1. The core of the human is alien. Human existence is constituted by relation to technico-material exteriority. Not lack (Stiegler), not ethical alterity (Levinas)^[15], but affirmative differential existence. The alien is positive exteriority with its own properties and resistances. All seemingly “distinct human traits” emerge from this relation.
2. Language and tools are transductive media. Neither purely internal nor purely external, technico-linguistic assemblages are the sites through which subjects individuate.
3. Inhumanism operates in immanence logic.
4. Construction of new norms — intensive becoming.
5. The alien seduces humanity into becoming. Instead of an Autonomy of Reason, there is the heteronomy of the Alien.
6. The joyful inhuman revaluates matrices. Not submission to matrix encoding nor romantic escape, but active experimental interference and revaluation.
7. Pre-figurative praxis = interference + affirmative creation. Noisal disruption^[16] (destabilizing matrices) combined with positive construction (building alternatives). Affirmative creation that destabilizes the milieu.
8. Creating agency outside the cogito. Not assuming pre-given agency from the sovereign subject position, but generating new forms of collective, distributed, transductive agency through experimental practice.
9. True commitment to humanism = recognizing its alien core = freedom to construct new norms.

Inhumanism is not anti-human nor posthuman but the radical extension of humanism without anthropocentrism nor logocentrism.

The work to be done is concrete. Analyzing specific matrix configurations. Identifying sites of transductive ruptures. Building alternative technico-organizational forms. Experimenting with noisal-affirmative practices. This theoretical foundation enables practical interference. The stakes are planetary. Capital’s algorithmic capture intensifies. Colonial matrices persist and mutate. The climate crisis accelerates. Against kitsch Marxism’s apathetic critique and liberal humanism’s impotent appeals, inhumanist Marxism offers tools for material intervention. Not waiting for the revolution. Not submitting to Reason’s dictatorship. But unlearning slavery through practiced anti-slavery, building the commons in capital’s ruins. The inhuman is already here. The question is whether we recognize it, affirm it, revaluate it, or remain captured by fantasies of autonomous reason and sovereign subjects. The alien seduces. The choice is whether to dance.

References

Negarestani, Reza. “The Labour of the Inhuman.” #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Urbanomic, 2014.

Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

— On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Univocal, 2017.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Foundations:

Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford University Press, 1977.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. MIT Press, 1993.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin, 1990.

— “Theses on Feuerbach.” The German Ideology, edited by C.J. Arthur. International Publishers, 1970.

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^[1] Marx’s early writings (1845). “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” The famous eleventh thesis—revolutionary practice over contemplation.

^[2] Capital (1867)—the systematic analysis of how capitalism actually works, moving from philosophical humanism to cold economic mechanics.

^[3] See Negarestani’s “The Labour of the Inhuman” (2014). His argument: committing to humanity means letting autonomous reason continuously revise what “human” means, culminating in AGI as reason’s full autonomy.

^[4] Transduction is Simondon’s term for how individuals emerge from pre-individual fields. Think of a crystal forming in a supersaturated solution—the crystal individuates but stays connected to the solution. It’s ongoing, never complete. Here: subjects continuously individuate at the interface between alien exteriority and matrices. Not a one-time conversion but an ongoing relation.

^[5] André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986), French archaeologist. Gesture and Speech (1964) flipped the script: human evolution started with walking upright (freeing the hands), not big brains.

^[6] Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020), Technics and Time uses “anti-cerebral” to describe how Leroi-Gourhan rejects brain-first evolution in favor of tool-use driving human development.

^[7] Sapience vs sentience: Animals feel (sentience), humans reason (sapience). Sapience = capacity for discursive reasoning, giving and asking for reasons. Negarestani makes this the core human trait.

^[8] Technico-linguistic matrices: The collective technical and symbolic systems that organize social life. Technical = tools, machines, platforms, infrastructure. Linguistic = language, categories, classifications, narratives. Examples: Capital (accounting systems + value categories), colonial grids (maps + racial taxonomies), gender (dress codes + pronouns). From Hegel’s Geist (spirit) but materialized—not idealist Spirit, just externalized collective structures.

^[9] Originary technicity: Stiegler’s claim that humans and technics emerge together. No “human” before tools. But he frames it through lack (technics compensate for biological deficiency). We reject the lack framework: technics as affirmative relation to alien exteriority instead.

^[10] Geist: German for “spirit” or “mind.” Hegel’s term for collective consciousness unfolding through history, culture, institutions. Here it’s not mystical Spirit but concrete externalized structures: matrices.

^[11] Individuation: Simondon’s term for how individuals emerge from pre-individual fields through ongoing processes. You don’t pre-exist your relations, you individuate through them.

^[12] Metastable: Between stable and unstable. A supersaturated solution is metastable: looks stable but can suddenly crystallize. Subjects are metastable individuations i.e. relatively stable but open to transformation.

^[13] Pre-figurative praxis: Building the future society in present practice. Not waiting for revolution to create new forms—building them now. Anarchist concept, but useful beyond anarchism.

^[14] Cogito: Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” The sovereign thinking subject as the foundation of everything. Inhumanism rejects this. Agency is distributed, collective, transductive, emerging through practice not given in advance.

^[15] Levinas’s alterity: Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), ethics and the Other. The other person’s face makes an infinite ethical demand. But his Other is always other to a subject. Our alien is different. Not ethical other requiring a subject but differential material existence in itself.

^[16] Noisal disruption: From cybernetics. Noise = interference that disrupts structured signals. Matrices encode flows into signals; noise exceeds encoding. “Noisal praxis” = producing interference that resists being encoded back into the system. Not just any disruption but low-encodability disruption that maintains transformative potential instead of getting recuperated as feedback.