Marxism and Disability Network (MDN)

@marxdisability.bsky.social

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Study and engagement network with a particular focus on Disability Politics & Marxism(s). We hold monthly talks. To join the mailing list, check out our contact page: https://marxismdisability.wordpress.com/Contact

Poster with the list of all the events, written in white and yellow on a black background.

Abstract:

This paper investigates how the digitalisation of work reconfigures the understanding of workers, their labour, and their value. Drawing on technoableism theory, which foregrounds how technologies establish new normative, disabling standards of capability, we analyse the shifting ontology of the worker in digitally intensive workplaces. We base our study on extensive qualitative data collected with managers, workers, trade union representatives, technology providers, labour market intermediaries, and local authorities across 12 warehouses in three European logistic hubs. Our analysis shows how warehouse workers are problematized as fallible, defective productive resources through systematic comparison with digital technologies, and how these latter are conversely constructed as necessary to enhance, fix and “save” them. In this way, a negative ontology of the human as disabled, generic labour power, holding at best residual “soft” skills, is established, within which any claim to the value generated is pre-emptively undermined. Our study shows that technoableism offers a powerful theoretical lens to interrogate and demystify the worker empowerment trope at the core of Industry 5.0.

Poster for the event featuring a tarot card with pieate carers, the invitation to join the event and the logos of the collectivee supporting the event - bsa, mdn, cas, rival, alternatives to capitalism research network, and the vagabonds book series of pluto books

Printscreen of the video recording

Printscreen of the video recording

printscreen of the video recording

Poster for the event. On the left half, a tarot-like imagery is featured, in black and white, of pirate carers by the sea. On the right side, it reads 'please join us on March 3rd, 2026 at 7pm (UTC+0) online for a discussion of the book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalisation of Solidarity with the authors and with contributors to a new critical forum on the book that appears in the Postdigital Science and Education Journal. To register, visit vagabonds.xyz

February 2023 – Katharine Terrell: The fat* disabled Walmart shopper; or, how not to be a good consumer under capitalism

This paper considers an everyday occurrence: going grocery shopping. The normative expectation is that everybody will enter a shop, reach the shelf with the item they need, pick it up and put it in a basket. Du Gay (2004, 157) describes this “autonomous” shopper being encouraged to spend in “the proper exercise of individual shopping liberty” – they are not free, ut they are sold the idea that they are. For disabled people, this becomes more complex. Jennifer Knapp Wilkinson, a disabled American, discovered that strangers were mocking a photograph of her (which had been taken without her permission and published on the Internet) in which she falls from her mobility scooter as she reaches for groceries from a shelf.

Poster for the workshop that reads 'worker witing workshop online, 6pm January 21st 2026

Marxism and Disability Network // Notes From Below"

Taking markets to be specifically legal institutions, this paper explores the constitutive role of law in constructions of disability under capitalism. I draw on the works of Marx, Polanyi, Russell, and Malhotra to suggest that disability, as a key market rationality determining the state-market boundary, is constructed through processes of legal coding or commodification. The law not only sets the foundations for markets, but predistributes rights and interests that shape actor preferences, acting as a fulcrum for balancing the conflicting demands of capital and, for example, labour. In the process, disability emerges as a keystone concept that can shift the fulcrum one way or the other, revealing and concealing standard and non-standard employment relations respectively and creating inequalities and oppressions in the process.

I take insights from the “Great Homeworking Experiment” of the pandemic to explore what happens when background labour market assumptions are shifted and ask whether the legal duty to provide reasonable adjustments was impacted. By positing that mandatory homeworking during the pandemic might have shifted both employer and state preferences that feed into underlying efficiency calculations, alternative challenges to the ongoing disability employment and pay gaps are suggested that focus on decommodification rather than (legal) rights.

June 2025: Shu Wan – ‘Making the Deaf Useful: The Policies of Deafness in 1950s China’
Abstract: Based on rarely referenced historical newspapers and state archives, this essay examines the nascent socialist state’s human resources of making deaf people useful in the 1950s. The essay includes sections regarding the communist government’s agendas of furthering literacy and vocational education for deaf youth and adults, organizing the deaf population, and developing deaf medicine. In terms of the shortage of deaf education in China before 1949, the communist government nationalized existing private deaf schools and established many new ones for deaf youth in the early and mid- 1950s. In the name of “welfare,” deaf adults were also given vocational training and job opportunities in factories, which represents the state’s concern about making all people self-sufficient under the communist regime.

June 2025: Luke Beesley – “But for them it is not a question of rights. The political struggle is won”: Disability in socialist Cuba through British Marxists’ eyes

Abstract: The internationalisation of disability politics is, generally, treated as an elite affair; involving cosmopolitan policy wonks, large (somewhat distant) federations of national activist groups, or ‘rights tourists’ – whose experience in developed nations allowed them to become leaders of under-developed national movements. Less appreciated are bi-lateral relationships between activist groups; which provided movements’ grassroots with opportunities for comparative analysis of shared struggles, and critical reflection on liberation strategies.

Abstract: I’d like to explain why neurodivergent people need to be anticapitalists. I’ve alluded to this in previous articles (https://www.salon.com/2017/11/25/im-a-liberal-because-im-autistic/), but as right-wing autistic people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel try to associate neurodiversity with capitalism, it is essential to have a pushback from neurodivergent anticapitalists. I hope to deliver a speech to this effect.

Bio: Matthew Rozsa has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism – the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual – can be an important organizing principle for the left. He obtained his Bachelor’s in History from Bard College in 2006 (graduating in only three years) and a Master’s in History from Rutgers University-Newark in 2012 (graduating in only a year-and-a-half). He was ABD in Lehigh University’s PhD program in history until his adviser, John Pettegrew, passed away from cancer.

Abstract: In recent years, the growing presence and visibility of autistic people in the global workforce has driven the production of new cultural representations of autism. However, such representations do not homogeneously apply to all autistic workers. Along the lines of the social division of labour, two distinct and opposed depictions emerge.
On the one hand, the image of the neurodivergent as a “savage” and as a “child” – elaborated throughout modern Western philosophical thought and still informing many psychiatric representations – is reactivated and repurposed to represent autistic workers employed in unskilled and low-skilled jobs. This depiction casts them as “past in the present”, “atavistic” beings in need of tutelage to develop as “modern” subjects and workers, subjected to a sort of “civilising mission” (the “neurotypical man’s burden”, to paraphrase Kipling).
On the other hand, autistic workers employed in high-skilled jobs – especially in IT – are increasingly depicted as “future in the present”. The neoliberal capture of the neurodivergence paradigm frames it as just another difference within diversity management: stereotypes thus fuel the economic valorisation of the neurodivergent labour power. The autistic worker is said to enjoy repetitive tasks, focus for hours without breaks, remain instinctively loyal to their company, and so on. These stereotypes create a “machinic” depiction of autistic workers: quasi-cyborgian or robotic, closer to computers than humans (hence their perceived excellence in IT), a representation that enables hyper-exploitation.

The Marxism and Disability Network is a study and engagement network supported by Historical Materialism; with the aim of deepening Marxist analyses of disablement as a capitalist social relation, and informing disability liberation projects through the application of Marxist insights. Since January 2023, the MDN has held monthly online events in the form of presentations, discussions, and reading group sessions.
Alongside these, the network intends to facilitate other contributions to debates in Marxism and Disability. If you have proposals and ideas, please email us. MDN’s video recordings are available via HM’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@historical_materialism_journal/playlists

Twitter: @MarxDisability

Email: marxismdisability@gmail.com
Website: marxismdisability.wordpress.com

Join the MDN JISC mailing list via the Contact page on the website.
Supported by Historical Materialism

Marxism & Disability Network
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December 2024 – Ioana Cerasella Chis: The Politics of Disablement and Precarious Work in Contemporary UK
November 20, 2024by ICC, posted in Monthly talks, Uncategorized
Abstract:
This talk serves as an attempt at providing an overview of The Politics of Disablement and Precarious Work: Prefiguring a Non-Productivist Future [1] doctoral research project and its analysis/findings. Thus, I will discuss the contemporary context of waged and unwaged work in the UK, with a focus on the role of structural disablement and the total institution of work in the oppression and exploitation of people who identify as/are disabled, neurodivergent, chronically ill, having impairments, and/or experiencing mental distress. The talk is informed by a series of interviews and diary entries produced by twenty-seven research participants – all of whom were, at the time, precarious workers subjected to disablement [2].

Printscreen with 6 of the 15 video recordings of the MDN, on the youtube playlist