Still in search of politics: Disability, productivism, and socialism in liquid modernity

This article returns to Zygmunt Bauman's lifelong search for politics through the lens of disability, arguing that disability is not marginal to his social theory but revelatory to its moral core. Bauman's essay ‘Society Enables and Disables’ is read alongside major contributions from Disability Studies to reconstruct the philosophical anthropology that underpins Bauman's liquid period: a humanism not grounded in labour or productivity, but in mutual enablement and interdependence. Disability exposes the mutual economy of worth that structured life across solid and liquid modernity alike, illustrating how productivism continues to invalidate us. It builds upon Beilharz's claim that socialism is a principle rather than a programme, it argues that a politics adequate to liquid modernity must be anti-productivist. In the context of automation and artificial intelligence, it proposes a liquid socialism grounded in interdependence committed to opening the social question beyond labour.