At the outset of Foucault’s important 1982 interview/text “The Subject and Power,” he provides a sweeping overview of the motivation for his work to that point, making the somewhat astonishing claim that the impetus for his endeavours over 20 years was not (as widely believed) “to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis,” but rather to “create a history of the different modes by which…humans are made subjects.”

Although in other contexts, Foucault does allow that analysis of power was an objective of his work, in the context of this interview, he explains how concern to understand the constitution of the subject as a product of the human sciences, of “dividing practices,” and of self-subjectification had really been the engine behind his investigations. Indeed, Foucault (not unlike other 20th-century “Continental” thinkers) pushed back against the very idea of the solitary Cartesian cogito of the dominant tradition of philosophy.

Foucault’s animosity toward Marxism is well known, if not overblown. We might keep this animosity in mind, however, in order to ask this question, “Who Is the Subject of the Left?” Are disabled people subjects in current Marxist discourse? My co-blogger Mich Ciurria has written several posts on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY that articulate ways in which disabled people’s current situation and the social mechanisms that produce it can be informed by, and can inform, contemporary Marxist analyses, as well as contributed a chapter to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability that elaborates such an account. In part, Mich’s efforts in this regard involve a “crip feminist” critique of the notion of work itself (e.g., what counts as work, who gets to define it as such, who does it, and so on), advocating for a universal basic income (UBI) that would improve the material conditions of the lives of disabled people, most of whom are unemployed under the current capitalist system.

The idea of UBI is contested in Left circles, which generally fail to address the conditions of growing material deprivation that disabled people endure. As readers/listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY know, I (and Mich, among others) have given considerable attention to identifying the ways in which the institutional, political, and discursive practices of philosophers and other academics reproduce the forms of economic, social, and political exclusion that disabled people confront. Furthermore, I, for one, am not reluctant to criticize potential allies on the Left (whether in philosophy or beyond) who marginalize and exclude disabled people in their public assertions and pronouncements, regardless of whether these assertions and pronouncements concern intersectionality, identity politics, MAiD, diversity initiatives, or any other aspect or situation of the world at present.

Hence, I want to implore Olúfẹ́mi Taiwo, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Mike McCarthy, and Daniel Denvir to reconsider their repeated invocation of the term worker in their understandings of current sociopolitical arrangements and hierarchies, as evidenced in a recent podcast for The Dig, which Denvir hosts. Other Leftists, too, should reflect upon the exclusionary assumptions that motivate and sustain the continued currency of this honorific moniker, insofar as it relies upon ableist assumptions about (among other things) the value of time, how it is distributed, and who gives it; whose efforts are political; and who is “meaningfully” productive.

Indeed, I want to argue that even the currency afforded to the term working class should be reconsidered, for this term, too, relies upon these (and other) ableist assumptions. In short, we need a new term (or terms) behind which to organize, a term (or terms) that is more expansive than the terms worker and working class, a term (or terms) that encompasses a range of social groups–including elders, disabled people, the working poor, institutionalized people, prisoners, and addicts–that heretofore Leftist (including Marxist) analyses continue to systematically preclude.