This article deploys a materialist theoretical and methodological framework to analyse and discuss capitalism's disabling phenomena. It is my intention to demonstrate how Marx's concept of a "relative surplus population" may be used to scrutinise capitalism's symbols, meanings, images, and practices which reproduce ableism as the norm.…

This article focuses on a particular group in capitalist society that is disabled, demeaned and denied by capitalism itself, through processes of economic exploitation, systematic and systemic class exclusion, and discrimination/ prejudice- that is- the working class. In doing so I recognise that the working class (defined as all those who sell…

This paper examines the inexorable rise of "health" as regulative discourse, highlighting its class and cultural dimensions. With reference to the policy content of recent obesity reports, analysis suggests that contemporary concerns around obesity are but a modern variant of earlier eighteenth and nineteenth century child saving crusades whose…