The Material Anatomy of Dis/Ability

Julie Torrant

Dis/Ability has become a desire-al line of flight in social theory as not a lack but the singularity of difference, the being of the other as heterogeneous assemblage, a multiplicity of differences (Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus). Marxist theory of dis/ability is exactly the opposite in that it does not merely interpret dis/ability differently but surfaces the conditions of praxis in which from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs becomes the rule (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

Marxist disability theory is necessarily an intervention into canonical disability studies which has become entrenched as a reformism that at most advocates for accommodations within capitalism and its resulting debilitating conditions of life, rather than critique and social change to end capitalism and bring about a new social being in which existence is not contingent upon one's ability to sell their labor power for wages to live. Central to the reformism of canonic disability studies is its "anti-theory" frame of intelligibility that focuses on (thick) description of "what is" and how to "cope" with it, rather than explanatory critique of why "what is," "is" and, moreover, why and how it could be otherwise.

In its more activist and cultural forms the main tendencies in disability studies are focused on "exposure" and description of the "everyday" or "concrete" experiences and contradictions of dis/ability (e.g., the Disability Justice movement; the Disability Visibility Project; the work of writer-activist-artists including Sins Invalid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Alice Wong and Sami Schalk). For instance, in the wake of the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic a vast outpouring of activist writings were published, particularly in the US and other advanced capitalist economies, recording the experiences of individuals with disabilities.¹ As well as describing the daily experiences and contradictions of the disabled in the pandemic, these writings celebrate "disabled wisdom" as necessary "survival skills" for dis/abled individuals and communities in the pandemic and beyond. Invoking "disabled wisdom," from this perspective, is also an enactment of "disability justice" because it is an overturning of the hierarchical (cultural) value system that constructs "the disabled" as both unworthy of "care" and incapable of producing knowledge. "Disabled wisdom" is reconfigured, within this perspective, as central not only to survival in the increasingly apocalyptic future, but also to social change/justice: "Crip genius is what will keep us all alive and bring us home to the just and survivable future we all need. If we have a chance in hell of getting there" (Piepzna-Samarasinha 18). But justice, from this perspective, is surviving in the ruins of capital as its fundamental class contradiction deepens or, as Piepzna-Samarasinha writes: "surviving by making up stories about how shit could be different, i.e., how disabled people could survive and make something less gross than what we [are] in" (34).

Reformism limits change to the "less gross" because, for the reformist, it is not the "truth value" of theory—its ability to explain why dis/ability is produced and in specific ways within capitalism as a specific historical mode of production and why ending class relations is the material basis of ending disability. Instead, what matters for reformism is what theory "does" to ideologically crisis manage the disabling effects of capitalism: deconstruct hierarchies of (cultural) value within capitalism and its specific social formations and conjunctural moments. Moreover, reformist theory works by changing the hierarchies of cultural value it deconstructs as capitalism changes the ways that surplus value is extracted from wage labor. Piepzna-Samarasinha's writing, for instance, is aimed at intervening in "ableism" through what she calls "flipping the world" (28) and the way it assigns cultural value to people along the lines of dis/ability, wellness (versus sickness), the autism spectrum ("allistic" versus "autistic"), fitness and age as well as such differences race, sexuality, gender and nationality. From this perspective, fat, queer, autistic, disabled, sick, Mad pride—as a cultural intervention severed from the economic labor relations—is the central intervention in "what is."²

As Piepzna-Samarasinha's The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs marks, justice separated from the transformation of economic relations means, on the one hand, advocating harm reduction (the "less gross") for the most vulnerable humans and animals as social crises deepen and proliferate and, on the other, "dreaming" of "a deeply disabled future" where the ("vulnerable," or "at risk") dis/abled and their knowledges are at the center of the cultural value system, not its margins (22). She writes, for instance that "[t]he climate crisis, pandemics, and the ongoing ecocide of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism are already creating the conditions for more people to get sick and disabled from viruses, heat waves and wildfire smoke" (22) and argues that disabled people are "geniuses at staying alive despite everything" which means their survival skills and "survival work"—from how to make and wear masks to forming "mutual aid" and "care webs" to "crip research" and information sharing has become essential and central knowledge under such disabling conditions. And yet, having (only) gestured to the historical and social relations that produce disabling "conditions," Piepzna-Samarasinha "dreams" of "a deeply disabled future: a future where disabled, Deaf, Mad neurodivergent bodyminds are … accepted without question as part of a vast spectrum of human and animal ways of existing" and "where our cultures, knowledges, and communities shape the world" (22), implying that dis/ability is—under the cultural weight of ableism—a matter of a "natural" "spectrum" of "differences." At stake in this highly contradictory representation of dis/ability is, again, the separation of in/justice from the economic—capitalism as a fundamentally contradictory mode of production within which the basis for a qualitative leap in human freedom (freedom from need) in the development of social forces of production exists while the social relations of production (the wage-labor/capital relations) render that leap impossible.

In opposition to these writings and their reification of "experience" and experiential knowledge, I argue that to take the everyday experiences of dis/ability seriously requires not exposure and recognition of "disabled" "experience" or deconstructing hierarchies of value implicit in these cultural experiences, but explanatory theoretical critique and social transformation of the historical, material relations that produce disability. This is because "experience" is always a historical product and thus not the ground of transformative knowledge. The deepening contradictions of the "everyday" (experience) in capitalism are products of its laws of motion, laws of motion determined by capitalism's fundamental contradictions as a mode of production: the development of the social forces of production as they (increasingly) come into conflict with the social relations of production and the binary class opposition in the exploitation of wage-labor by capital that is the essence of the social relations of production in capitalism. Thus, dis/ability today is no longer a "lack" of ability but a utopian figure of justice-to-come because the increasing productivity of labor in cybercapitalism has equalized the conditions of exploitation to include people with disabilities while the generally debilitating effects of wage-labor over all has delegitimated the traditional liberal humanist concept of personhood. Dis/ability studies are thus part of the (post)human turn in philosophy, which recognizes the "agency" of those once thought to be other than human because they have been included as productive members of the global factory.

Recognizing the agency of the other severs the relation between the contradictions of the "everyday" and the mode of production that produces them. As such, canonical disability theory is not "anti-essentialist" despite its claims; its economic, class essence—the interest it serves by severing "experience" from class as exploitation—is that of capital. It is an ideological obstacle to producing transformative knowledge.

Like its more activist forms, the more philosophically sophisticated forms of contemporary dis/ability theory also reject the possibility and necessity of theory as explanation of the underlying historical, material relations and laws of motion that produce the contradictions of "daily life" under capitalism, including along the lines of dis/ability; such explanatory theory is the core of historical materialism. These theories reject historical materialism for its universalism, which they argue, like all universals, subsumes the singular and experiential to the abstract and general to reveal the underlying class interest shaping the daily life of wage-labor/capital relations. And yet, while they reject the historical materialist theory of dis/ability for its generalization of class analysis, they use theory to imply society can be changed by changing the "language" of dis/ability. Such a move of rejecting materialist abstractions for their lack of attentiveness to difference while embracing idealist abstractions that reify the phenomenal as the singularly concrete, exemplifies, of course, the "enlightened false consciousness" (Sloterdijk) wherein "one knows the falsehood very well...but does not renounce it" (Žižek 26). But, as Teresa Ebert has explained, this is a "hypercynicism," rather than a personal/-izing one—i.e., an institutionalized "response to the more complex processes in the material base of an increasingly more global capitalism" (160).

In fact, some of the pervasive strains of disability theory today, such as new materialism and other tendencies within the "ontological turn," serve as most effective allies of capital for their (post)critique-al concept of the material. By claiming that transformative theory, which focuses on critique and explanation of the systemic material relations of capitalism behind the immediate "lived experience" of disability, is "unethical" they embrace "small" theory—the experiential narratives and micropolitics—as what is most effective for improving non/human lives."³ The ethical or rule-less-ness, in this frame, wherein one cannot speak or act on knowledge or principles "prior" to the contingency that, it argues, constitutes the quotidian, is not ethical even on its own terms because it rules out "in advance" knowledge of the systemic material relations shaping "what is." In doing so, it essentializes the existing social relations of production as untransformable for the benefit of the few that profit from the labor of others.

An exemplary instance of this "anti-theory" frame of intelligibility can be found in the writings of the influential new materialist, feminist disability theorist Rosi Braidotti. In her essay in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, "'We' Are In This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same," Braidotti writes: "It would be obscene and unethical to theorize about the epidemiological catastrophe that is unfolding under our very eyes. This is not a time for grandiose theorizing but for collective mourning, affective resistance, and regeneration." But Braidotti does posit a theory of the pandemic and its "cause," one which is no less "grand" than the materialist theory she rejects. Braidotti writes: "The COVID-19 pandemic is a man-made disaster, caused by undue interference in the ecological balance and lives of multiple species" and that it is the "high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems" of this undue interference "in the first place." Here Braidotti de-conceptualizes capitalism as a mode of production that is a contradictory unity of not only the social forces of production (which she reduces to "tech")—but the social relations of production. In other words, she erases the capitalist labor process—which is a process of not only creating use-values, but of the valorization of capital; she erases, in short, the profit motive. From this perspective, the alienated labor relations of capitalism—wherein wage-laborers, the producers of social wealth (in the form of surplus value), are compelled to sell their labor-power to live to the owners of the means of production, capitalists, and thus do not own and control that wealth and the uses to which it is put—are rendered a transhistorical "force of nature." Naturalizing the social relations of production of capitalism in which the profit motive determines the uses to which the accumulated social wealth (the social forces of production, including not only the means of production but labor) are put is what is at stake in Braidotti's argument that the nature of the relation of "man" (as in "man-made disaster") and "technology" is "paradoxical" and as such not subject to transformation. Put another way, Braidotti's "posthumanism" is not a new, ground-breaking materialism, but yet another reiteration of the "selfish misconception" of "every ruling class" to "transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from [their] present mode of production and form of property" (Marx and Engels 501).

From her posthumanist, intersectional perspective, Braidotti—in the tradition of "post" theory from Derridean deconstruction to Lyotard's "small narratives" (Postmodern Condition) and Foucauldian genealogy ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"), to Latour's actor-network theory (Reassembling the Social)—rejects what she calls "grandiose" theory because it is "anthropocentric" thinking that depends on the "normative category" of "the human." The posthumanist rejection of the human/nonhuman binary is an ideological justification for purging theory of historical materialist concepts (labor, mode of production, class contradiction). And yet, symptomatic of its actual essence (class interest), Braidotti, when faced with the crisis of the pandemic, takes up the argument that the pandemic is "man-made," invoking the binary human/nonhuman she claims to reject, showing that the issue is not human-centered theory but class theory.

Braidotti's theory, as I have hinted, is a most effective—and cynical—ally of capital by actively discouraging and vilifying the development of public and social critique of the englobing material relations of production for profit underpinning the widespread proliferation of disabilities in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. But her theory would not be useful (to capital-in-crisis) if she did not address the daily contradictions of capitalism, such as its (gross) inequalities. The effects of being marked as disabled and/or Black, woman, queer, indigenous … are due, according to Braidotti, to "[a]ppeals to the 'human'" which are "always discriminatory: they create structural distinctions and inequalities among different categories of humans" including the category of "able-bodied" versus disabled (n.p.). And, again exemplary of post-theory, Braidotti's posthumanism is contradictory, even on its own terms; it is not, despite its claims, opposed to binaries. It is underpinned, at the level of ideas, by the very binaries Braidotti argues against, positing as most fundamental the human/nonhuman binary with abled/disabled as among the many epiphenomena of that fundamental binary. These binaries are, perpetually, as in Derridean deconstruction, put under erasure and as such the contradictions they represent and (re)produce cannot be resolved. Nor can this (anti-)theory theory explain why the ideology of humanism and its epiphenomena. In other words, in an updating of the idealist "post-theories" and constructivism that she ostensibly rejects as a "new materialist," Braidotti does not reject all binaries. However, as in all bourgeois theory, intersectional posthumanism purges from theory any explanation of the material binary of class relations—the binary of exploiter (capital) and exploited (wage-labor) that is the basis of production for private profit—and, in doing so, teaches a mode of ideological adjustment to the social relations of exploitation.

"Class," in these theories, if it is addressed at all, is a matter of Weberian "status," which is central to the flattening of social and cultural theory and its inability to provide historical explanations of the systemic material relations of production that give rise to the outpouring and proliferation of experiences of disability from the "everyday" contradictions of capitalism. This is what is at stake when Braidotti argues that "[h]umanity is a quality that is distributed according to a hierarchical scale" because the social as "hierarchical scale" depends on a Weberian, market notion of class as "life chances on the market" (Weber 91). The implication of which of course is that the role of dis/ability theory is to create better, more horizontal ("flat") scales. Such market (anti-)theories are "accommodationist" theories; they limit themselves to enabling reformist attempts to mitigate the effects of production for profit while re-affirming the capitalist class relations that are the cause of these effects. In particular, these discourses and their politico-conceptual scaffolding limit change to, at most, the redistribution of value that has already been produced through exploitation. But giving "disabled" people more access to the surplus value of workers, is predicated on their being more accessible to capital as an exploitable labor force to produce higher rates of profit, usually by being over-represented in low-wage job ghettos.⁴ Market theories of disability, in other words, are "ableist"—not in the sense of privileging the normative view of ability, but as in naturalizing the class logic that produces dis/ability within exploitation as labor that is "more or less expensive to use" (Marx and Engels 491). Braidotti severs the cultural (market) construct of "the human" from the historical labor relations of capitalism that underpin the contemporary, contested deployment of it and posits the distinction between "human" and "nonhuman"—not the difference between exploiter and exploited—as the root cause of inequalities not only within the exploited along the lines of gender, race, and dis/ability, but between exploiter and exploited.

Dis/ability and the Question of the Social

Despite its claims that it has superseded such earlier forms of disability theory, canonical disability theory is modeled on the "social" theory of disability, which distinguishes between the (natural) impairment of the body and the social condition of oppression that produces "disability." This "social" theory which is exemplified by, and often equated with, the (British) "social model" of disability developed in the 1970s by members of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), has set the conceptual and political parameters of (contemporary) disability studies, as has been acknowledged by disability theorists from Roddy Slorach (A Very Capitalist Condition) to Lennard Davis (see the essays in the section on "Theorizing Disability" in his The Disability Studies Reader) to Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler in Astra Taylor’s documentary film Examined Life.

Central to the "social model" of disability and the way it has set the parameters of contemporary disability studies, as I mark above, is the analytical distinction between "impairment" (the "natural") and "disability" (the social). The social, it is argued, is what disables physically impaired people. In its influential The Fundamental Principles of Disability (1975), the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) theorizes the distinction between "disability" and "impairment." They write:

we define impairment as lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body; and disability as the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities. (14, emphasis added)

UPIAS's distinction between impairment and disability is central to its intervention in the "individual" or "medical" model of disability as a frame of intelligibility for understanding disability. The canonic medical model posits that it is the physical difference or "impairment" of the disabled individual that is the cause of their marginalization in society. From this view, which constitutes the commonsense view in capitalism, "disability" is a natural effect of the physical difference or impairment. The importance of the distinction between disability and impairment from the UPIAS/social model framework, in contrast to the commonsense, is that it works to de-naturalize disability, arguing "it is society which disables physically impaired people" and that "[d]isabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society" (14). The intervention of the social model, as has been widely recognized, even by its critics, was an important intervention.

However, this framework is not, in the end, a "social" model or social critique, but a political, rights-based critique of disability that equates the social with the market, or relations of reproduction/distribution and equates class with the Weberian theory of status and "life chances on the market" (Weber 91). By rights-based critique, I mean that the "social model" at most argues for accommodations—i.e., rights, recognition, and a higher level of social distribution for the impaired—within capitalist production and exploitation, rather than freedom from capitalism and exploitation.⁵ This is what is at stake in understanding disability as a "disadvantage" that blocks full participation in the existing society. But it is production that determines distribution—the market relations and their relative "advantages" and "disadvantages." UPIAS's rights-based argument is apparent when they write:

In the final analysis the particular form of poverty principally associated with physical impairment is caused by our exclusion from the ability to earn an income on par with our able-bodied peers, due to the way employment is organised. This exclusion is linked to our exclusion from participating in the social activities and provisions that make general employment possible. For example, physically impaired school children are characteristically excluded from normal education preparatory work, we are unable to achieve the same flexibility in using transport and finding suitable housing so as to live conveniently to our possible employment, and so on. (14)

UPIAS raises the historically significant question of "the way employment is organised," by which they mean how the social distribution of jobs, income, and other resources (housing, education, transportation, etc.) are organized to exclude, marginalize, and devalue the life and labor of the physically impaired.

My critique of this "social model" is not that the question of distribution for the needs of the impaired is not historically significant; rather, it is that it does not grasp the root of the social in the production relations of capitalism. At root, "employment" in capitalism is organized on the basis of the principle of profits for the owners, not on the principle of needs for workers. It is the class organization of production and not distribution that determines disability, and thus the distribution of such resources as schooling, housing, and transportation. In other words, in capitalism, as Marx argues, even at times in which workers are given a higher level of distribution (whether in the form of higher wages or other forms of public support), production for profit requires that workers labor under conditions of exploitation in which they must be "producers above their needs, in order to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs" (Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II 520). Those who are "able" to do so are considered subjects deserving of dignity and recognition, while those who cannot are marked as undeserving and are silently marginalized in the culture. It is not that physically impaired individuals are culturally marked as disabled that produces disability, but that the conditions for the production of surplus-value from unpaid surplus-labor cannot provide for the needs of everyone equally and thus require the economically excluded be demonized to protect the sanctity of private property.

UPIAS's argument for access to resources for the impaired is, in effect, an argument for the redistribution of surplus value produced through exploitation in the capitalist working day that refuses to implicate capital in the production of disability. They are arguing, in other words, for the equal right to compete in the capitalist labor market—an equal right, in essence, to be exploited as the limit-text of "ability."⁶ This "social model" is reformist because it takes the market and exchange relations in capitalism as a "self-evident" given and limits social struggle and change to changes in distribution and "life chances on the market" so as to stabilize the system of wage-labor at a time of increasing precarity. That this analytics posits "impairment" as a (natural/ized) substrate "on top of which" social barriers are placed is symptomatic of its constriction of "the social" to the cultural and political relations of reproduction and marks, at the level of theory, why, in a stalled dialectic, it re-naturalizes that which it attempts to de-naturalize.

As a historical materialist critique, by contrast, Marxist disability theory connects both the impairment of the body (and/or mind) and the social condition of disability to their root cause in the capitalist social relations of production and argues that it is both possible and necessary to end the exploitative labor relations of capitalism and enable the emergence of production based on meeting needs that can transform the working and living conditions that produce impairment and render the impaired disabled. As I have argued elsewhere,⁷ "impairment" is not simply physical or mental difference between or among "individuals." There are no "individuals" as such in capitalism. There are working-class individuals—those who must sell their labor-power on the market in order to access means of subsistence for themselves—and, if they have dependents like children under working age—their family, and there are ruling/capitalist class individuals who purchase labor-power as "variable capital" in order to exploit it. The aim of production for the capitalist is not to meet the needs of workers but to valorize their capital (reap profits at as high a rate of profit, the ratio of profit to investment, as possible). And the source of profits is the surplus value extracted from workers at the point of production. This means that "impairment" in capitalism has a relation to how much profit the worker produces and is able to produce compared to the average worker under the current level of historical development of productive forces. "Socially necessary labor time" is the time required for the average worker to produce a given amount of value, under the current level of historical development of the productive forces of the time (that is, using up-to-date instruments of labor, etc.), including the value equivalent to their means of subsistence (wages) and surplus-value that is the basis of profit. The "impaired" member of the working class in capitalism is a person who has a non-standard body and/or mind, meaning that they cannot produce at the rate of the "average" worker, or at least without "accommodations." As materialist theorists such as Marta Russell and Roddy Slorach argue, it is in the interests of capitalists to reject "impaired" workers (to render them "disabled")—at least those who claim their "rights" to accommodations—because they limit the capitalist "bottom line," which is to say the rate of profit. They do so either by lowering the rate of exploitation (the ratio of surplus to necessary labor) and thus put an unnecessary limit—from the perspective of capital—on the extraction of surplus value or, in effect, through the requirement of accommodations such as specialized equipment, increasing the cost of "constant capital" and thus lowering the rate of profit (Russell 15; Slorach 92).

However, to stop one's theorization with the question of "impairment" here, that is, addressing only the question of why and how those workers who are "impaired" are excluded from capitalist production, as Marta Russell, in particular, tends to do, is, in the end, to once again (as in the social theory or "model" of disability) take as a self-evident "given" the existence or "is-ness" of "impaired" workers (Russell 2-6). From a Marxist perspective, as I have begun to argue, the appearance of impairment as well as dis/ability on the capitalist (labor) market are historical products of capitalism as a dynamic, and increasingly contradictory, mode of production. All modes of production are, as I indicated above, a unity of forces of production and relations of production, or labor relations.

By productive forces I mean, in contrast to some of the "new" theories of productive forces,⁸ productive forces in the Marxist-Leninist sense. For Lenin, the productive forces are

a category of historical materialism, characterizing the main, determining factor of the historical process […] The content of the P.F. is the organic unity of the accumulated and living labor, i.e., the totality of material and personal elements of production necessary for the production of things to satisfy human requirements from the objects of nature. (Frolov 338)

The productive forces include, then, not only the instruments of production (machinery, tools, etc.) and the raw materials of production that are themselves products of prior production processes but also the "living labor" that, in capitalism, is purchased "piecemeal" on the market. Freedom, in the materialist sense, is freedom from economic need, not political "rights." Moreover, the development of the forces of production is the basis of and sets the parameters of possibility for human freedom.

Capitalism, as Marx and Engels argue in, for instance, The Manifesto of the Communist Party is historically a progressive mode of production and key to the progressive historical nature of capitalism is the extremely rapid development of the social forces of production within capitalism, which is driven by competition between and among capitalists. However, the progressive potential in the development of the social forces of production within capitalism—by which I mean the potential to free humans from necessity—has always been limited, and class contradictory because of the capitalist social relations of production of capitalism, the labor relations of wage-labor and capital wherein living labor (the class of producers) serves dead labor (in the form of capital). Thus, as Marx argues in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, within the alienated (or commodified) labor of capitalism, the (increasing) potential for human freedom that is developed as the social forces of production develop is, in manifold ways, unrealized and unrealizable for the vast majority (the class of workers). This is because, as Marx writes, the alienated labor of the wage-laborer means that "the object that labor produces—labour's product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer" (272). The basis of capital (and thus its power) is, in other words, the surplus-value extracted from wage-laborers who are compelled to sell their labor-power in order to access the means to live. Thus the alienation of labor means the worker "becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities [they] create" and, as Marx writes: "It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich—but for the worker, hovels; It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labour by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to the barbarous type of labor" (272). And, to be clear, Marx is not equating here nor does Marxist dis/ability theory equate "deformity" with "disability"; physical, mental and intellectual "deformity"—as the (growing) gap between what has historically been made possible within capitalism and what is, is the norm within capitalism.

As capitalism develops, the social relations of production become, increasingly, a fetter (or block) to the further development of the social forces of production themselves. There is, in other words, as I have indicated, a fundamental contradiction between the development of the social forces of production within capitalism and the capitalist relations of production (its wage-labor/capital relations). This contradiction is manifested in the law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall. There is downward pressure on the rate of profit as the forces of production are developed within capitalism because the basis of profits is surplus value extracted from workers (variable capital) but, as new technologies are developed and deployed—under the pressure of competition—by capitalists, the organic composition of capital (the ratio of constant to variable capital) rises. But, because the source of surplus value (profits) is surplus labor extracted from workers (as "variable capital") at the point of production, as the organic composition of capital increases with the development of new technologies (forces of production) and thus the productivity of labor increases, there is downward pressure on the rate of profit.

Within "cognitive capitalism," contrary to the notion that it is a new age of "immaterial labor" in which "the law of value is blown apart" (Hardt and Negri 172) and that surplus value is no longer the result of exploitation but domination, the extraction of surplus value, the basis of profits, remains at the core of capitalism. The working of the law of value and the law of the tendency of the profit rate to fall, as Smith et al. argue in Twilight Capitalism: Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit System, is at root of the economic malaise of productive capital in the advanced capitalist economies of the North. It is this malaise that has prompted capital's attack on the working class in the form of "neo-liberal" economic policies aimed at buoying the falling rate of profit.

The historical materialist understanding of the source of surplus value continues to be necessary to understand not only capitalism and its contemporary crisis but changes in disability and its borders. The essence of capitalism remains rooted in exploitation at the point of production. What has changed is the way surplus value is extracted. With the changes in forms of extraction—which are necessary in capitalism and its "constant revolutionising [of] the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society" (Marx and Engels 487)—the boundaries of "impairment" and "disability" change, and these shifts are sensitive to shifts in the political economy of capitalism and its formations. To be sensitive and thus shifting in relation to shifts in political economy is not, however, a matter of pure "contingency." In the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, the turn of many segments of workers to "remote work" enabled a shift in the border of dis/ability and some new possibilities for many historically "disabled" workers.

Such "progress," however, is not only subject to reversal, but is limited by the imperative of production for profit and its "working day" which means that "socially necessary labor" (wages) is only posited insofar as capital(ists) can make the average rate of profit in doing so, and with the development of labor-saving means of production, which raises the rate of exploitation and suppresses the value of labor-power, this potential becomes increasingly difficult and crisis-ridden. This is why, as Marx explains, capitalism, "more than any other mode of production […] squanders human lives, or living labour, and not only blood and flesh, but also nerve and brain" and that, "[i]ndeed, it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that the development of the human race is at all safeguarded and maintained in the [capitalist] epoch" (Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, 92). The production and proliferation of impairment and disability within contemporary, "twilight" capitalism is symptomatic of capitalism's "extravagant waste."

This Marxist theory of disability and impairment is fundamentally opposed to the way the "social model" is criticized in "new" (post)humanist bourgeois theories—such as new materialism, actor-network-theory, assemblage theory, biopolitics, vitalism and other theories that are part of the "ontological turn" in cultural theory—in which impairment and disability are undone as a binary opposition and the two become one instance of what Bruno Latour calls the "proliferation of hybrids" (We Have Never Been Modern). These theories argue that the "social model" is outdated because it posits a binary of impairment/disability that is linked to a constellation of binaries, including nature/culture, body/mind, ability/disability. Such hybrids "naturalize" both disability and impairment by abstracting them from the social relations that produce them. The "new" and "newer" forms of disability theory, in other words, do not, as they claim, supersede "the social model." Rather, they update its reformism and do so in ways that both reflect the shifting political economy of capitalism and work, more or less consciously, to manage its deepening crises and contradictions. Severed from the social relations of exploitation, "oppression" in dominant discourses becomes a floating cultural construct—a trope. Put another way, "normal" or "abled" is a cultural construction, but it is not an arbitrary, contingent construction, "event" or "moment" as it is represented in posthumanist theories.

Shelley Lynn Tremain's writings on disability are exemplary of the way "new" (post)humanist theories hybridize impairment and disability through a discursive critique of the British Social Model of disability (BSM). In her “Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual Engineering, and the Nursing Home-Industrial Complex,” Tremain argues that for the British social model "impairments are prediscursive and hence politically neutral human characteristics" while "disability is a pervasive form of social disadvantage imposed upon 'people with impairments.'" As such, Tremain states, "the BSM is structurally and theoretically analogous to both the feminist sex–gender distinction and its predecessor, Claude Lévi-Strauss's 'nature-culture distinction'" and aligns herself with those, like Judith Butler, who have critiqued this distinction (12). She writes:

contra the BSM … both impairment and disability are socially constructed, invented rather [than] discovered, made rather than found, emerging as new kinds of conceptual objects from a historically specific style of reasoning – namely, the 'diagnostic style of reasoning' […] disability is a historical construction all the way down, [it] is a dispositif (to use Foucault's term), a complex apparatus of force relations that produces impairment as its naturally (i.e., prediscursive) disadvantageous foundation to camouflage its own thoroughly contingent political motivation. (12)

History is equated with the history of ideas and thus impairment as well as disability which, Tremain argues, is a "historical construction all the way down," are discursive constructions delinked from the social relations of production. This is the implication of her critique of the British social model as positing impairment as prediscursive rather than presocial. While the "British social model" naturalizes impairment, erasing the biological/natural (impairment in this instance) from one's analysis does not, of course, enable historicizing impairment but rather renders it an arbitrary, floating trope. The limit of this argument is not that it focuses on the discursive, or ideological construction of impairment, but that it de-links the ideological (as "discourse") from the economic base—the social relations of production—and in doing so severs "oppression" from exploitation. Such a reification of disability-as-oppression is what is at stake when Tremain writes that disability is an apparatus of power relations that produces impairment “to camouflage its own thoroughly contingent political motivation" (12; my emphasis). What Tremain means by "power relations" are market relations and competition on the market within the working class (i.e., those who do not own the means of production), which leads her to focus on difference/s within the working class, in isolation from exploitation of the working class as a whole (by those who own the means of production). It is not surprising, then, that when Tremain theorizes the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and its devastating effects on the elderly and disabled in nursing homes, she focuses on oppositional power relations between nursing home workers and residents at the same time she recognizes that both nursing home workers and residents are "vulnerabilized" in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (for "thoroughly contingent" reasons) (24-27; 12). Tremain's biopolitics is not an "improvement" from the anti-dialectical notion of impairment/disability put forward by the "British social model." It is an ideological updating of it at a time when the crises of capitalism have not only proliferated but deepened and thus produced a need for more "flexible" subjects in-of labor. The push and pull of ("dis/abled") workers in and out of the workplace during the first few years of the “COVID-19" pandemic is exemplary of this need for "flexible" (dis/abled) workers. Such "flexible" subjects, from the perspective of capitalist class interest, must understand themselves as market subjects of power relations who are in competition with one another, not class subjects of exploitation with a common interest in ending the exploitation that underpins and determines power relations.

In contrast to post-theories of disability, I argue that while dis/ability is subjected to ideological construction in the culture of capitalism, at root, it is an economic relation. "Ability" and "disability" have a dialectical and historical, material relation to the mode of production. As such, the meaning and significance of "disability" and, relatedly, "impairment"—concepts which are sometimes used interchangeably, especially outside of the context of the (British) social model—transforms with transformations of the mode of production. Thus, "disability" and "impairment" in capitalism have a specific historical meaning and significance; they are determined by the political economy of capitalism as a dynamic—and increasingly contradictory—mode of production that revolves around the extraction of surplus value (the basis of profits) at the point of production.

During the 19th century industrialization in Britain, for instance, workers with physical differences who could not work the new, mechanized instruments of labor in the growing textile factories at the rate and speed of the "average" worker at the time, and thus threatened to slow production and decrease the rate of exploitation (surplus to socially necessary labor) became the socially, economically "impaired" (or "disabled") and, increasingly, excluded or marginalized in production and subject to oppression within capitalist social institutions. An "impairment" in capitalism is thus not simply a physical or mental difference, but a difference that compromises the individual or group's ability to sell their labor-power at the "going rate" in a specific historical "moment" (place and time) within capitalism.⁹

Capitalism makes people's bodies dependent on their ability to labor in normative ways. This is because of the economic abstraction of labor which constantly reduces different forms of labor to the same (abstract) labor in the production of surplus value. What is called the "normative" body is a body produced by specific economic relations. Not only are different bodies valued differently (i.e., they receive different wages) but different bodies are produced as disabled bodies in and through the labor process. As the different means of extracting surplus labor change through technology, new norms replace old ones and what was once an impairment or disability ceases to be such, though the existence of the normal/abnormal division never disappears as long as exploitation—the essence of capitalism—exists.

For example, the emergence of cognitive capitalism, with its increasing reliance on more automated/computerized instruments of production, is a condition of possibility for the UPIAS and other activists' challenge to the boundary of dis/ability from the perspective of the "physically impaired" such as those who need wheelchairs for mobility. In the context of increasingly computerized capitalist production in the advanced capitalist economies such as that of the U.K., the disablement of the physically impaired can be contested—even within the limits of capitalism—as a matter of "barriers" put "on top of our impairments" (i.e, physical differences); that is, as a matter of "equal rights" and "inclusion" since a person in a wheelchair, for instance, would not necessarily be "impaired" in the sense it is important to capital—their ability to produce at the "normal" rate during the working day.

But "integration" of "others" into the same (profit system) does not resolve the underlying contradictions of capitalism as a mode of production that revolves around exploitation (the extraction of surplus value). Put another way, Marxism does not simply explain the shifting borders of "dis/ability" within capitalism or, as in canonical disability theory, advocate for (increased) distribution of surplus value to "the disabled" so that they can be equally exploited (or, if they are not able to participate in wage-labor, get a greater distribution of surplus value for their "care."). Marxism not only explains why, despite the development of the forces of production within capitalism and what this development could make possible—i.e., the end not only of the reproduction of "disability" but of all such "differences" (of gender, age, race. . .) as sites of oppression and exploitation—"disability" (and "race," and "gender,"….) still exist as instruments of exploitation owing to capitalist relations of production. Moreover, it explains why "disability-as-individual-difference," which is to say disability as a difference within the class of producers, needs to be re-understood as the effect of the fundamental class contradiction between exploiter (capital) and exploited (wage-labor) and why, through transformative class struggle to end capitalist social relations of production (its alienated labor relations), it is historically possible to not merely limit disability, but to end it. With the development of the productive forces in capitalism, what is possible, such as providing healthy food and housing for all, is blocked—and increasingly so—by the for-profit relations of production because, as the productivity of labor develops this is, at the same time, the deepening of exploitation and the class divide. Capitalism necessarily produces both absolute and relative poverty in the class of producers and this is damaging to dis/abled workers' physical and mental health in diverse and complexly mediated ways.

To put my critique of dominant disability studies another way, the discourses implicitly calling for redistribution of value already produced by exploited labor naturalize capital accumulation: by including the other within the same (the legacy of Derridean textualism in the ontological turn) they encourage access to the other's labor. By increasing the mass of abstract social labor available for exploitation within the existing property relations, which are already highly rationalized and capital intensive, its cost is lowered. The effect is to increase the ratio of surplus-labor over necessary labor within the workday (the source of profit) at a time when there is less need of labor overall within the advanced metropoles of capital. In this way capital is able to create a surplus-population within the core to compete with the low cost labor in the periphery. By reifying dis/ability from the organic composition of capital the dominant disability studies reproduces the capital logic that necessitates dis/ability as a way to regulate the labor market and block fundamental transformation of property relations for the good of all.

The historical materialist—i.e., Marxist—theory of impairment and disability is not an argument that "impairments" (not only physical but mental) are not "real" and do not shape the "lived experiences" of "the impaired"; it is an argument that the "real" is social and historical and that there is a determinative priority of social relations with those of class (as exploitation) as primary. The social, collective needs of the working class that are produced within capitalism develop as the forces of production are developed, but meeting those needs is blocked by capitalism's labor and property relations—its commodification of labor.

The aim of Marxist disability theory, contrary to the way it is misrepresented in bourgeois theory, is not to end individual differences and make all workers conform to a norm; it is, rather, to enable class-conscious struggles to transform the private property relations of capitalism so that individual differences—which will always exist—are no longer produced by and used as weapons to maintain social relations of exploitation that mean that profit for the few is prioritized over meeting the needs of all.

Notes

1. See NYU's Disability COVID Chronicles, the Disability Visibility Project, the website of the International Disability Alliance, etc.

2. See, for instance, Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future is Disabled, including “Introduction: Writing a Disabled Future, in Progress,” especially pp. 17-28 on re-valuing cultural hierarchies and Chapter 5: Cripping the Resistance: No Revolution without Us,” especially, p. 144 on “Pride” as resistance.

3. See Arseli Dokumaci, Activist Affordances; Schillmeier, Rethinking Disability; Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple; Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory; Linda Ware, ed., Critical Readings in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies; Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, & Lennard Davis, eds., Disability and Social Theory.)

4. See Day and Taylor, 2019.

5. I am aware that there is, among some contemporary disability theorists, an attempt to reclaim UPIAS and its founding members’ "radical,” anti-capitalist social theory from what they see as a devolution into a bourgeois reformism in the writings of second-generation "social model" theorists as represented, especially, by Mike Oliver. This argument is made, at least in part, on the basis of interpretations of unpublished (but now publicly archived) writings by members of UPIAS. Luke Beesley, for instance, argues that there are “competing variants of the social model” (n.p.). I cannot engage in this debate here, but as I argue in my forthcoming book Marxism and Disability (under consideration) this attempt at "reclaiming" an originary radicality confuses (rhetorical) claims within some of UPIAS and its members’ writings opposing capitalism, which they de-conceptualize as a mode of production, with the conceptual, class logic of UPIAS’s argument and, as such, risks blocking, once again, the development of a Marxist theory of disability.

6. Or, in the case of "service" workers, an equal right to "serve" the system of exploitation by limiting the socially necessary labor required to re-produce labor-power and thus enable exploitation.

7. See my “Pandemic, Disability and Capitalism” in Marxism and Pandemic: The Materialist Anatomy of a Social Crisis (forthcoming, Routledge).

8. See, for instance, Virno's argument that "General Intellect" is part of the productive forces.

9. To briefly address an important issue I discuss at much greater length in my book The Material Family, “care” for those who cannot or can no longer perform wage-labor—whether due to age and/or impairment is a site of class struggles over the surplus-value that is produced (and extracted) at the point of capitalist production; however, at most, such struggles in reproduction shift the proportion of surplus-value accessible to the wage-working class. So, for instance, struggles for and over public services for the care (including education) of “the disabled” and which class—capital or wage-labor—will pay for those services through “taxes” is a matter of the rate of exploitation of the wage-working class and thus does not resolve the underlying class contradiction. Such reforms are, as such, important insofar as they are part of a broader and increasingly class-conscious struggle to end the private property relations of capitalism.

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