The Productive Citizen: Marx, Cultural Time, and Disability

This paper argues for analyzing the systematic invisibility of persons living with disabilities by temporalizing their oppression within a framework of “productive time,” which I posit as a normative sense of time by which cultural products and practices appear within capitalist economies. I argue that productive time is employed in cultural evaluations of actions that render persons with disabilities as “non-productive agents” who cannot partake in historical processes. My hope is that a theory of productive time will assist social justice efforts in analyzing the oppression of particular minority groups by identifying and combating harmful social values. When political philosophy considers historical progress, it tends to make central to its theories a conception of a historical subject with a particular kind of agency. Regardless of whether an agent’s autonomy is thought of as liberated or constrained within historical contexts, these theories usually posit a universalized subject that possesses traits constitutive of all historical agents. These accounts of personal subjectivity within history are positive ones; seldom is historical progress considered in relation to the absence of particular subjects—the ones history leaves behind. In this paper, I want to explore one such negative account of historical development. Underlying my approach is the assumption that, if historical progress is driven by the activities of politically enfranchised agents, then historical progress is likewise coupled with the oppression and invisibility of disenfranchised agents. This relationship points to the exclusion of particular identities and reveals expectations for corresponding modes of behavior that distinguish some kinds of social identities as not politically viable. While Marx’s political economy is not explicitly a negative account of historical processes, it provides a theoretical starting point for this type of investigation when we consider what it means The Productive Citizen: Marx, Cultural Time, and Disability