Disability and the Relative Surplus Population: Towards a Crip Critique of Political Economy

Disability and disabled people present a theoretical, empirical and, ultimately, political problem for Marxian political economists. As a group frequently distinguished by its marginal attachment to labor markets, the condition of disabled people challenges Marxists in identifying where exactly the disabled fall within the dialectic between the proletariat and the capitalist class. Equally unclear to Marxists, therefore, is what function the disabled serve in cycles of capitalist accumulation and crisis, and what role they may play in the class struggle. Complicating this problem are two issues: (1) disabled people are a large, heterogeneous group that may hold multiple class positions (including that of the capitalist class), and (2) that Marx’s concepts of the relative surplus population, the industrial reserve army of labor, etc. are themselves ambiguous within his work. Beginning with a discussion of the social theory of disability, I follow with a genealogical discussion of the relative surplus population, an overview of current debates within Marxian disability theory, and a subsequent examination of where the various disabled people fit within this schema. Finally, a discussion of how to operationalize Marxian class categories in relation to national unemployment statistics in the United States paves the way for future empirical research. While most disabled people occupy the stagnant and pauper layers of the relative surplus population, the disabled’s role within cycles of capitalist accumulation cannot be discovered using the existing macroeconomic data alone, and must be supplemented with qualitative work on disabled people’s class positions.