Capitalism & Disability – LPE Project

A Conversation about Marta Russell with Liat Ben-Moshe and Dean Spade

James Brandt — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

For the final contribution to our symposium on Marta Russell, Beatrice Adler-Bolton interviews Liat Ben-Moshe and Dean Spade about the connections between their work and Russell’s political economic analysis of disability and law. They outline how Russell’s work fits within Critical Disability and Legal Studies and explore what her critiques have to offer current movements for liberation and...

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Disability and the Cisgender State

James Brandt — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

In the escalating wave of anti-trans legislation and administrative violence sweeping the United States over the past several years, the credo on the left has often been that political violence against trans people is mere pretense: a right wing culture war meant to distract from issues more properly political-economic, or a cynical ploy to motivate a conservative voting base. This superficial reading is as naïve as it is dismissive of trans people’s material circumstances. What we need, instead, is a materialist critique that identifies state transphobia as dedicated to the broader neoliberal goal of dismantling public goods and modes of care in the name of cost reduction.

The Reactive Model of Reasonable Accommodation

James Brandt — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 11:03:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Marta Russell and the Political Economy of Disability. Read the rest of the posts here. *** As the disability justice movement gains greater acceptance in the United States, it is helpful to read or re-read the work of Marta Russell, one of the most influential disability justice activists in the 1990s and 2000s in the United States. Among the many insights...

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Moral Equality, Marxism, and Outraged Empathy

James Brandt — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

In her earlier work, Marta Russell called readers attention to the economy as a factor producing disablement and argued that we needed to re-embed the market in society, to tame businesses’ need to profit via the social policies of an interventionist state. By the end of her career, however, Russell had gone further, focusing on capitalism itself. Her solution expressed not a Polanyian ideal of a somewhat more egalitarian capitalism, but a Marxist aspiration to a vastly better and more egalitarian society, achievable only by ending capitalism through collective action.

Capitalism & Disability as Research Agenda

James Brandt — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Marta Russell and the Political Economy of Disability. Read the rest of the posts here. *** The late Marta Russell is not a well-known figure among legal scholars and practitioners. She should be. Her writings on capitalism and disability are filled with striking insights about law, as well as important research questions to pursue. This post begins to catalogue...

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Capitalism & Disability: A Symposium on the Work of Marta Russell

James Brandt — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 11:03:00 +0000

This post introduces a symposium on Marta Russell and the Political Economy of Disability. Read the rest of the posts here. *** One in four Americans are disabled. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—both the disabling effects of Long COVID and delayed or disrupted routine care—this figure is expected to increase in the coming decade. Disability is an important boundary category of the labor...

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