Crip Compositionisms: Proliferating Hauntologies of the Capitalist Mode of Production

Harry Cleaver associates with Autonomist Marxist theory an ‘emphasis on the ability of workers to take autonomous initiative in the class struggle’ (2002, p.xvii). Through the concept of ‘crip compositionisms’ Arianna Introna will lay out how different strands of Autonomist Marxist theory offer distinctive tools for locating disability as a socio-economic phenomenon in relation to autonomous modes and subjects of class struggle.

Crip compositionisms, Arianna will propose, insert a disability logic and presence within working-class auto-critique to excavate the ways in which this logic and presence may inflect the political recomposition of the working class and reconfigure both its horizons and its modes of struggle. On the one hand, crip compositionisms focalize the specificities of the insights derived from different traditions of Autonomist Marxist theory. On the other, they draw attention to how Autonomist Marxist theory as a whole generates fertile ground on which to produce multiple ‘hauntologies’, rather than a single ontology, of the capitalist mode of production.

The autonomist disability perspective that underpins crip compositionisms situates working-class auto-critique in a hauntological rather than ontological register by delineating how the capitalist mode of production is haunted by the pitfalls it encounters as it strives to insert disabled people into capitalist relations of production as workers. In making visible the logics whereby, for the capitalist mode of production, the hauntological ‘opposition between “to be” and “not to be”’ operates in both a teleological and eschatological sense (Derrida 1994, 10), crip compositionisms proliferate the hauntological frames for working-class auto-critique, its insights into the vulnerability of the capitalist mode of production to working-class resistance, and possible connections between disability and anti-capitalist politics.