Harry Braverman’s Hauntology of the Capitalist Mode of Production

An Autonomist Disability Perspective

Abstract

This article will explore the relevance of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital for studying the formation of the socioeconomic and political phenomenon of disability under contemporary capitalism on the one hand, and the contribution to anti-capitalist politics that a standpoint of struggle internal to disability can afford on the other. Putting into conversation Braverman’s discussion of the universalization of the capitalist mode of exploitation and the habituation this depends upon with disability studies, I will suggest, illuminates how in Braverman’s analysis the ontology of capitalism fundamentally implicates a hauntological dimension. Braverman foregrounds both the ways in which capitalism comes to envelop every social relation, and the difficulty with which it reproduces its domination. Such difficulty derives from the resistance of individuals to becoming habituated into the capitalist mode of exploitation. I will develop an autonomist disability perspective on Braverman’s hauntology of the capitalist mode of production by examining the resonance between Braverman’s work and Ioana Cherasella Chis’ ‘Autonomist-adapted’ analysis of ‘disability composition’ (2023). The first part of my analysis will probe the ways in which a political standpoint internal to disability reveals how the othering of disabled people based on the intractability that bodyminded non-normativity presents to capitalist exploitation. The second part of my investigation attends to the logics that rivet this marginal situatedness to the space of a wider tendency within the working class to resist habituation into the capitalist mode of production, which Braverman theorises. In my conclusion I will speculate as to modes and purposes of symbolically universalizing disability to deepen the logics of resistance to the universalization of, and habituation to, the capitalist mode of production delineated by Braverman.