The centrality of disablement subjectivation to the reproduction of capitalist social relations: considerations for Critical and Global Political Economy

In the face of a global, mass impairment- and chronic illness-producing event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of how to consider and integrate the politics of disablement within Global Political Economy scholarship and anti-capitalist activism has become ever-more pressing. In this article, I provide a proposal for how to conceptualise the capitalism-specific commonality between people who identify as having impairments, being chronically ill, neurodivergent, D/deaf, experiencing mental distress and who may or may not also identify as disabled people. To this end, in this article I adopt the ‘social model of disability’ and engage with both Moran’s cultural-materialist approach to identity and Autonomist Marxism’s ‘class composition’ thesis. Then, I make the case for the analytic usefulness of the non-identity, relational concept ‘subjects of disablement’ as the technical composition of disability on the basis of which the socio-political identity ‘disabled people’ as the political composition of disability emerges. Acknowledging disablement oppression and exploitation as central and fundamental to the reproduction of capitalist social relations would equip the GPE scholarship embedded within the praxis of dissent and resistance (see Bonfert et al, 2022) to generatively support activist groups’ already-existing efforts and mobilisations against and beyond – what I call – disabling capitalism. The Global Political Economy journal offers the opportunity for the ‘sluice gates’ (Clua-Losada and Moore, 2022: 6) of this interdisciplinary field to be widely opened for, and welcoming of, further explorations of how capitalism cannot be fully understood and ruptured without an analysis of structural disablement.