Marta Russell (1951-2013)

“In our society, humane concerns are subsumed by the market’s tyranny, the inversion of what is needed to foster an inclusive, cooperative, and healthy society. Questions that need to be brought to the forefront might include the following: What is the purpose of an economy: to support market-driven profits or to sustain social bonds and encourage human participation? Is it acceptable to reduce the productive activities of persons to commodity wage labor? Is it defensible to hold in contempt bodies that do not produce the way the capitalist class demands, leaving disabled persons to struggle on low wages or meager benefit checks or to be institutionalized? How can the realm of work be reorganized to provide accommodations for all, and how can all members of society be embraced and rewarded whether they work or not?” – Marta Russell

Biography: 

Marta Russell’s first involvement in politics was in Mississippi, where she was born, during the 1960s civil rights movement. Russell later moved to Los Angeles where she worked in the movie industry and parented a daughter. In the late 1980s, Russell, who had cerebral palsy, began using a wheelchair, which she soon found prohibitive to retaining employment in the industry. Subsequent to exiting the formal workforce, Russell committed herself to a deep study of disability and political economy. She wrote a seminal book, Beyond Ramps (1998), along with scores of articles, which established her as a pioneer in attempting to advance an analysis of disability oppression firmly rooted in a Marxist critique of capitalist relations of production. As an activist, she worked with the disability movement organizations ADAPT and Not Dead Yet, she protested both US wars on Iraq, and she demonstrated against the bipartisan austerity regimes of neoliberalism.

Celebrating Russell’s Activism and Scholarship: 

Marta Russell’s approach to disability politics and theory was in many ways far ahead of its time and place. Writing most prolifically in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Russell advanced a firmly anti-capitalist conception of disablement, rooted in Marxist economic theory and critical political discourse. While scholars and activists in Britain and elsewhere had for many years by then engaged in the development of a “social model” of disability, linking the nature of the modern industrial economy to the form of modern disability oppression, such ideological framing had been far less developed within the U.S. context. Of course, today, it is far more common to see U.S.-based scholars and activists explicitly connecting capitalism – and the liberal-bourgeois legal superstructure concomitant thereto – with the phenomenology of disability. However, Russell was truly in the nascent vanguard of this conceptual movement. 

Russell’s early attempts at a critical engagement with the prevailing regime of disability oppression in the era of neoliberalism took form in the 1998 publication of “Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract.” “Beyond Ramps” expresses utter frustration with the enduring conditions of oppression faced by disabled Americans in the decade following the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the start of the Democratic Party administration of Bill Clinton, the end of the Cold War (or the End of History, as some would have it), and the advent of neoliberal austerity and the generalized retrenchment of the welfare state. Russell’s unique insight, however, was to situate the endurance of disability oppression at the turn of the millennium within – rather than despite – the very policies and structures of the dominant liberal, rights-based, anti-discrimination regime. This put her at odds with other, more sanguine takes on the disability policy landscape at the time, such as those proffered in the popular book, No Pity, by Joseph Shapiro. For Russell, disability oppression was a function of an economic order that was inherently disablist, and which laws like the ADA (not to mention the byzantine rules associated with programs such as Social Security Disability Insurance) either failed to interrupt, at best, or actively reinforced, at worst. 

Over the roughly ten years following the publication of “Beyond Ramps,” Russell wrote a slew of essays in academic and activist journals, from the staid “Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law” to the socialist “Monthly Review.” In these essays, Russell went further than anyone of the time in specifically theorizing disability in terms of capitalism. Russell argued that the oppression of disabled people in the modern capitalist world was no mere historical accident or tangential “symptom” of the dominant social system. Rather, capitalism and disability were structurally, necessarily, and ontogenetically linked in a dialectical process of mutual reinforcement. Utilizing Marxian concepts regarding the nature of classes, wage labor, exploitation, the rate of profit, market competition, the reserve army of labor, and the bourgeois state, Russell identified the oppression of disabled people as an inextricable constituent component of the operation of the capitalist mode of production itself.

Russell’s Impacts: 

One aspect of Russell’s approach to politics and theory that I, and many others, have appreciated was her capacity to address a wide array of diverse issues and audiences. Her writings analyzed disability in connection with such injustices as those related to housing, policing and incarceration, ecology, imperialism and war, the welfare system, eugenics, and euthanasia. Moreover, Russell proffered equally incisive analyses whether writing for esoteric academic journals or anarchist web zines; whether engaging in “high” theory or “low” muckraking.

Russell’s Legacy: 

In recent years, as U.S. capitalism has faced increasing criticism amidst increasing crises, Russell’s arguments have been revisited by a growing number of disability scholars and activists. To be sure, Russell has also been critiqued by some of the same for various theoretical and political shortcomings. However, with the expansion of the field of those for whom critical analysis of disability is inextricable from that of capitalism, Russell has come to be seen as a valuable foundational theorist, if in no other capacity than as a starting point for the development of theorizations more capacious and nuanced than hitherto.

To Learn More About Rusell: 

1. Marta Russell, “About Marta Russell,” http://martarussell.org
2. Haymarket Books, “Author: Marta Russell,” https://www.haymarketbooks.org/authors/821-marta-russell
3. Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, “Capitalism & Disability: A Symposium on the Work of Marta Russell,” LPE Project (10/03/2022): https://lpeproject.org/blog/capitalism-disability-a-symposium-on-the-work-of-marta-russell
4. Ravi Malhotra, “Honoring Marta Russell,” Against the Current (March 2014): https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/4113.html

This celebration was authored by Keith Rosenthal

About the Author: 

Keith Rosenthal is the editor of “Capitalism & Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell” (Haymarket Books, 2019). He is a History PhD student at the City University of New York. He can be found online at https://keithrosenthal.wordpress.com/