A Pedagogy of Solidarity: Resisting Capitalism's Disabling Processes in a Primary Grade Classroom

Primary and secondary education under capitalism serves as an ideological apparatus to construct productive workers who will participate in the extractive economy and consent to their own exploitation. However, some school children are marked as deficient--impaired, disabled, and mad--incapable of being good workers who facilitate capitalist accumulation. Just as capital banishes incapacitated workers to the reserve army of labor, so too do school children learn to "surplus" and "disable" their peers who do not meet school norms. In this paper, I use a revolutionary Marxist perspective to analyze empirical data from a grade 1 United States classroom where students were teasing a neurodivergent classmate and excluding her from participation. I explore how the teacher intervened by using critical literacy to design a curricular unit on hidden disabilities that would engage her students in transformative, disability justice, and how students built a community around their disabled peers. Along the way, I explore how disability is a relation under capitalism rather than an identity; how nature gives us diverse bodyminds but it is capitalism that disables us; how the education system in capitalist societies is a vehicle for the dissemination of ruling class ideologies of productivity; how some school children are surplused and labeled as incapable of being good workers who facilitate capitalist accumulation; and possible solutions--what educators, parents, caregivers, and others can do about it.