Neurodiversity, capitalism and class

Issue: 185

Roddy Slorach

A review of Empire of Normality by Robert Chapman (Pluto Press, 2023), £14.99

Over recent years, neurodiversity has become a major social phenomenon in the societies of the Global North.1 A rapid growth in the number of those seeking or obtaining diagnoses for autism and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD, often shortened to ADD because many affected individuals are not hyperactive) is accompanied by a huge rise in research and literature on autism in particular. This has fuelled existing controversies, including discussions about what these conditions are, what causes them and whether they should be seen as medical conditions at all.

Partly in response to the associated stigma, some people identifying as neurodivergent reject the idea that they have an impairment and some, on the contrary, argue that they have special abilities or even “superpowers”. As a political issue, neurodiversity highlights questions of oppression and class as well as notions of normality and “the other”, closely related to disability discrimination. As Ben Goldacre puts it, “the flaws in social reasoning” associated with autism “give us an excuse to talk and think about our social norms and conventions”.2

Robert Chapman had an impoverished working-class background that hindered their chances of obtaining an autism diagnosis until later in life. Their widely praised book Empire of Normality sets out to provide a “history of capitalism that places neurodiversity, rather than class, at its centre”.3 This article discusses Chapman’s book and the issues it raises in relation to capitalism and neurodiversity.

The rise of neurodiversity

Empire of Normality starts with the steep and widely reported rise in autism and ADHD diagnoses across the Global North. One widely quoted study shows an almost 800 percent increase in the recorded incidence of autism diagnoses in England between 1998 and 2018.4 In 2023, one out of every 36 children in the United States were diagnosed as autistic, compared to one in 110 in 2006.5 Before discussing the likely reasons for this rise, it is necessary to briefly summarise the conditions that are considered neurodivergent.

Autism was first characterised as a rare form of childhood psychosis in the early 1940s. It was not until the late 1980s that new diagnostic standards and criteria began to be applied to children and adults with less severe impairments.6 Successive editions of the “psychiatrist’s bible”, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM), have revised and widened these criteria, leading to claims that the diagnostic process is flawed or even that the autism category is too broad to be meaningful or useful.7 The latest edition, DSM-5, defines Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as “persistent difficulties with social communication and social interaction” and “restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviours, activities or interests” (including sensory behaviour), present since early childhood, to the extent that these “limit and impair everyday functioning”.8 ASD covers “the group of complex neurodevelopmental disorders that make up autism”.9

However, there is a great deal of divergence within these characteristics. Some autistic people are entirely non-verbal, while the active social lives of others provide no obvious indication of autism. The notion of a spectrum, although an advance on earlier rigid definitions, suggests a sliding scale of severity that fails to capture the diversity and complexity of autism. Co-occurring conditions often lead to greater stress and anxiety than living with autism itself. Almost one in ten autistic people, for example, experience mental health difficulties, and about one in three have a learning disability. Most also have “atypical eating behaviours”—usually strong preferences and dislikes around food.10 Other traits include sleeping problems and an unusual sensitivity to sounds, smells and/or feelings.

The other main conditions included under the neurodiversity umbrella are dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD. Dyslexia and dyspraxia are most often associated with difficulties in reading and writing. However, the profile for all three of these diagnoses usually includes both a weak working memory and a slow cognitive processing speed. Working memory is used for the short-term recall of verbal information, for example to follow directions. Weakness in this area tends to cause problems with personal organisation, such as forgetting appointments and misplacing and losing things. People with a slow processing speed take longer to write, to understand what they read, and may struggle with everyday activities “such as crossing a busy road on foot, driving in traffic, or walking along a crowded pavement”.11 In similar vein, Pete Wharmby believes autistic people have a “deficit in ‘executive function’…the set of skills that’s responsible for planning, prioritisation, organisation…every other part of our brain is trying to do that work on top of its usual job, like a computer trying to run a new video game without the necessary graphics card”.12

It was only in 2008 that ADHD was accepted in Britain as a valid diagnosis for adults as well as children. Contrary to myth, ADHD is not about a lack of attention. As David Grant explains, “one of the key characteristics of ADHD is a difficulty with maintaining ongoing control of conscious thought…intrusive ideas and thoughts are distracting for they are not inhibited”.13 ADHD differs from dyslexia or dyspraxia in that, for many individuals, some of these difficulties can be alleviated with medication.

Diagnostic categories for these conditions imply uniformity and clear-cut boundaries, but the cognitive profiles of individuals vary widely in reality. Gabor Maté’s comment on ADHD could be applied to neurodivergence in general: “At a certain point on the human continuum, the characteristics associated…become intrusive enough to impair a person’s functioning to one degree or another.” It may therefore be more accurate to refer to “a diagnosis not of category but of dimension”.14

Wired for discrimination

Government figures for 2021 show that “53.5 percent of disabled people…were employed compared with 81.6 percent of non-disabled people”. The employment rate for autistic people (29 percent) is one of the lowest of all disability groups, and the pay gap the largest—on average, a third less than for non-disabled people.15 The Buckland Review of Autism Employment explains: “Autistic graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed after 15 months than their non-disabled peers, most likely to be overqualified for their job, to be on zero-hours contracts, and least likely to be in a permanent role”.16 Autistic people who excel academically may lack the skills needed to find or keep a good job, for example in negotiating the unpredictable challenges of interviews or interacting with workmates. Many mask their traits and only around a third of autistic employees are open about being autistic.17 

Even before the multiple stresses accrued during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, it was estimated that 50 percent of children with autism have at least one anxiety “disorder”, compared with 2.4 percent of the general population.18 The main factors include “academic underachievement, isolation, peer victimisation and bullying…many children with ASD drop out of education due to the severity of anxiety and lack of support or face school exclusion because schools are unable to meet their needs”.19 Some may even join the over 2,000 autistic people and others with a learning disability currently locked up in British psychiatric units. They face an “increased risk of abuse and neglect” because the support needed is not available elsewhere.20

Charlotte Moore, parent to two autistic sons with high support needs, objects to a popular stereotype: “some autistic people do have extreme abilities—but the popular belief that all autistic people are really geniuses isn’t helpful to parents or carers struggling with autistic people with no speech and self-harming behaviours, meltdowns or sensory overload”.21 Many of these co-occurring difficulties, however, are likely to be due to the mental strain and distress of coping with discrimination. As one practitioner put it, “Pure autism doesn’t come to the clinic”.22

Of the less than one third of autistic adults who are in employment, a small layer—principally from middle-class backgrounds—occupy skilled jobs in industries such as banking, accountancy and computing. IT giant SAP promotes itself as one of the top employers of autistic people. In 2013, this company made a public pledge to recruit 650 employees with autism by 2020 as part of a wider Autism at Work programme.23 By the end of 2022, SAP reported that, of a global workforce of over 109,000, just 215 autistic people were employed under the programme.24

Another example of such reforms is a recruitment programme promoted by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), which includes 400 autistic youngsters (a group until recently excluded from military service). Those excelling in perception tasks such as satellite and drone spotting are placed in secret intelligence units.25 The 400 recruits (all reported as having “high functioning” autism) comprise 0.06 percent of an estimated total of 635,000 IDF personnel. The evidence suggests, therefore, that a primary aim of “autism-friendly” employers is effective public relations.

A new movement

The rise of the Internet and social media enabled autistic people to communicate more easily and to build networks. Those who found in-person interaction challenging could now discuss and exchange written messages at their own pace. These new networks in turn helped to facilitate the development of an autistic rights movement. Judy Singer, one of the first to popularise the term, called for neurodiversity to be recognised as “an addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race”.26 Singer based her approach on the social model of disability, which states that it is not people’s mental, physical and sensory impairments that disable, but rather a society that excludes and marginalises people who are perceived to have impairments.27

Chapman found that, whereas the dominant “medicalised narrative” suggested “that being autistic made me somehow tragic, broken, and in need of fixing”, the new movement opposed “the very idea of a ‘normal’ brain and of the ‘neurotypical’ as an ideal”.28 Empire of Normality endorses Singer’s appeal for society to see neurodiversity “in the way conservationists view biodiversity”, with minds “having different cognitive specialisations within a broader cognitive ecosystem.” The book continues:

neurodiversity is an axis of human diversity, like ethnic diversity or diversity of gender and sexual orientation and is subject to the same sorts of social dynamics as those other forms of diversity—including the dynamics of social power inequalities, privilege, and oppression. From this perspective, the pathologisation of neurominorities can be recognised as simply another form of systemic oppression, which functions similarly to the oppression of other types of minority groups.29

“Neurodiversity” therefore encompasses both the typical and the atypical. The term neurodivergent, referring only to the latter, was initially applied to people on the autistic spectrum. As outlined by Daniel Aherne, it has more recently become an umbrella concept incorporating several different “identities”:

A person is considered neurodivergent if their brain works differently from the majority of people’s brains. These differences may be apparent in neurodivergent people’s learning styles, they are misunderstood and misjudged by others, and in their communication and processing. Common neurodivergent identities include autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia (DCD), ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. There are lots of diagnostic overlaps between different neurotypes, and it is becoming increasingly common for people to identify with two or more of the neurotypes.30

Katherine Ellis believes that the neurodivergence umbrella excludes people with more generalised learning difficulties “because of an idea that severe difficulties with learning and communication reflect ‘disorder’ rather than ‘neurodiversity’”. Ellis suggests that more people would be included if the social model of disability was applied more widely, as this “highlights how variation in someone’s environment can support or restrict those with non-neurotypical communication styles”.31

The disability rights movement emerged from the decades of capitalist expansion and full employment that followed the Second World War. Developments such as the closure of mental hospitals, the rise of white-collar office work and the creation of the welfare state saw many disabled people enter the workforce for the first time. Social and economic change also facilitated the subsequent rise of the neurodiversity movement. The expansion of health and education systems provided the first access to diagnostic assessments and individualised support for many school pupils and university students; the more recent rise of computers and the internet has provided employment opportunities for a small but significant layer of autistic people.

Chapman’s approach

Empire of Normality explains in detail how the development of capitalism led to the separation and sorting of people by neurotype. Chapman begins with Marx’s explanation of how “capitalism brought not just new machines, but also an ‘artificially produced’ transformation of human beings into mere machines for the production of surplus-value’”.32

The industrial revolution led to greater efforts to monitor, regulate and intensify work, along with new notions of fitness to work and attempts to classify populations statistically. A new concept of a measurable normality determined whether people’s bodies and minds were working or broken, assisted by the expansion of asylums and the rise of mental health professionals. Chapman emphasises the influence on these developments of figures such as Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet and Victorian scientist Francis Galton, pioneer of the pseudo-science of eugenics.33 As the demand grew for a more literate and specialised workforce, psychology and psychiatry became more established as specialist disciplines.

The empire of normality was a “new apparatus, made up of a complex nexus of different carceral systems, legal precedents, institutions, concepts and practices” that “systematically ranked populations in terms of mental and neurological ability, while positing this as part of a timeless natural order”.34 This apparatus “creates and harms both neurotypicals and neurodivergents, albeit in slightly different ways depending on any given individual’s proximity to the norm”.35

Chapman contrasts Fordism, an era of full and stable employment, in which workers could leave daily work behind to relax and pursue their own interests, with that of post-Fordism. Here, new technologies and “a tightening of neuronormativity” led to many more people being considered as abnormal, “far more than could be housed in state-funded asylums”.36

The rise of post-Fordism and “cognitive capitalism” eroded distinctions “between home and work, public and private, employed and unemployed…as work became casualised and precarious while workers became always reachable through phones and emails”.37 Chapman describes a modern world “where economic relations require a constant bombardment of lights, advertising, screens, and so forth” as linked to higher levels of sensory sensitivity among autistic people.38

“Cognitive capitalism”

A central argument in Empire of Normality is that the nature of exploitation has changed:

many workers today perform cognitive, attentive, and emotional labour more than the manual labour of Marx’s time, while our requirements as consumers and citizens, to have the correct desires, have also been restricted. All this…contributes both to tightening neuronormativity, and thus increased disablement, but also to much more widespread mental health problems… [I]ncreasingly, new forms of domination often have less to do with social class, which now, to an extent, is more fluid than in the 19th century, and much more to do with where each of us falls on the new cognitive hierarchies of capitalism.39

This new era of cognitive capitalism has supposedly replaced physical labour, with accumulation now centred on “immaterial assets”. In support of this thesis, Chapman cites Moulier Boutang’s argument that “since around 1975, ‘the object of accumulation consists mainly of knowledge, which becomes the basic source of value, as well as the principal location of the source of valorisation’”.40

Chapman also cites Berardi’s contention that post-Fordism brought a new form of alienation “marked by the submission of the soul, in which animated, creative, linguistic, emotional corporeality is subsumed and incorporated by the production of value”.41 On this basis, they argue that we need to “update Marx’s notion of alienation to fit the modern era”.42

This characterisation of late capitalist development has major implications for resistance, as discussed below. Firstly, however, I want to argue that Chapman’s conceptual framework confuses and over-simplifies complex changes in the composition of industry, the nature of the labour process and that of the working class.

Chapman is undoubtedly right that modern capitalism often draws more heavily on mental than manual forms of labour. Yet, any manual labour involves some exercise of mental capacities, for example even the most basic design or engineering. In practice, the two are not neatly separable, and the balance between them varies across different settings. For Marx, the root cause of alienation was not the separation of mental and manual labour, but the separation of control over the labour process from its execution. Because capital seeks to monopolise overall knowledge of the process as a whole, embedding this in managerial hierarchies that control and discipline workers, the worker loses sight of the labour process, which becomes subject to alien control. This is equally possible in mental and manual labour processes.

Knowledge is no more a neutral concept than science or technology. As Chris Thompson and Paul Smith explain, the arguments of the theorists of cognitive capitalism rely on a series of passages in the Grundrisse, later labelled “The Fragment on Machines”. Here, Marx speculates that the development of science, technology and automation would come to express the deepening contradictions at the heart of the capitalist mode of production and foreshadow the potential for a socialist economy. However, it is clear from Marx’s wider writings on economics that he saw the shift between these modes of production as one taking place through deepening crises and class struggle. Moreover, Moulier Boutang’s contention that we are living in a new era of the “rule of science” contradicts Marx’s “critique of the social character of science and technology and the consequences for the division of labour”. Boutang attributes to information technology “transformative powers that it does not and cannot independently possess”.43

Chapman also believes that the rise of the Internet and new technology represent a new “paradigm” of disaggregated work. Thompson and Smith argue that this overstates the extent to which capitalism is defined and dominated by internet-based companies:

If we look at data about which industries and firms dominate the global economy, we find that though Apple is currently the most profitable company in the world, it is far from the largest either by revenue or capitalisation and many of the other “exemplary” internet firms are marginal. Global capitalism is dominated by energy, finance and telecoms/utilities and sometimes retail or tobacco. If anyone examines how Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart or Toyota makes its money, it does offer a major corrective to the…narrative of immaterial production and zero cost reproduction at the heart of economic value.44

Against Chapman’s claim that accumulation is “now centred on immaterial assets”, Ursula Huws points out that digitalisation brought “new technology commodities and the commodification of previously un-commodified areas of life” and “the strategy of the major digital players (Amazon, Apple) has been to produce and sell new material goods (Kindles, iPhones)”.45 Marx explained at length that capitalists invest in new technology to increase their profitability, but this contributes to the tendency for profits to fall overall. Therefore, these investments become a means of “intensifying work and increasing the rate of exploitation, not only because of the costs involved, but also because of the necessity for capital to create countervailing tendencies in the workplace to stagnation in productivity growth”.46

In sum, what Chapman, like many others, regards as a break with traditional forms of capitalism is better seen as the development of a capitalist logic into new areas of production, following the same “old” laws of motion, whatever changes have accompanied it. Although Chapman makes a legitimate point about the importance of mental labour processes in many contexts, and the consequent implications for neurodiversity, tying this to a wider theory of cognitive capitalism is unhelpful and misleading.

What of the contention that we live in an era characterised by precarious work and casualisation? Neoliberalism has certainly impacted work in previously secure sectors, for example higher education. A 2019 survey by the University and College Union estimated that most British universities “rely on hourly paid staff to deliver around 25 percent of their undergraduate teaching, with some pre-92 universities likely to use hourly paid staff for up to 50 percent”.47

However, the extent of precarity is often exaggerated. As Joseph Choonara points out, “permanent forms of employment remained the norm for about 90 percent of the employed labour force in the United Kingdom in 2015, comparable with the situation in the late 1970s.” Second, the incidence of forms of non-permanent employment tend to fluctuate with the state of the economy. Following the recession of 2008-9, for example, the use of zero hours contracts increased, then “peaked in mid-2015 as the labour market tightened”.48 Naturally, the degree of precarious work is wildly different in different economies, and stable, formalised work has never been the norm across large swathes of the Global South or in the early history of capitalism in the Global North. Yet, we should be careful in making sweeping arguments about the transformation of capitalism based on rather slender evidence.

The consequences of doing so are quite serious for those trying to challenge capitalism and its attendant forms of oppression. The arguments Chapman cites are similar to those used by many thinkers from the autonomist tradition, a version of which was developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in a series of books they wrote in the early 2000s. These authors argued that capitalist restructuring had led to wage labour becoming submerged in a formless “multitude” comprising all those who exercise any creative capacity. As Choonara explains, this approach effectively abandons “the Marxist notion of a specific structural capacity obtained by workers by virtue of their position in the process of production”.49

Similarly, regarding the arguments about precarity, few capitalists wish to or can simply hire and fire workers at will; they need a trained and stable workforce which can reproduce itself. In Choonara’s words, “The capital–labour relation is…one of mutual interdependence; it is not a relation in which capital is all-powerful and labour abject”.50

Identities and change

Chapman explains that the steep rise in autism diagnoses is due to the expansion and refinement of diagnostic criteria, which have “gradually widened as an ever-rising percentage of the population fall short of the social, communicative and sensory processing capabilities required by the new economy”.51

Post-Fordism has certainly had an impact. Economic pressures have led to more families choosing to having children later in life.52 These children, as well as those born prematurely (now more likely to survive than in previous decades) are statistically more likely to be autistic.53 Greater public awareness about autism has also eroded some of the stigma and ignorance that discourage people from seeking a diagnosis.

More recent developments have contributed to these trends. Government austerity policies over the past decade and a half have led to the loss of vital support networks and services, with the impact of cuts exacerbated by the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Long periods of lockdown led to huge stress, anxiety and insecurity, further undermining the coping mechanisms on which people had previously relied, leading many of them to seek diagnoses for autism and ADHD.

NHS figures for December 2023 show 172,022 patients with an open referral for suspected autism, the highest number ever reported and over five times more than in 2019. The median wait for these patients was over nine months for a first appointment following a referral, compared to four months in 2019. Although there is no equivalent national data for ADHD, a survey for parliament in 2021-2 found that 34 percent of those waiting for an NHS ADHD assessment had been waiting between one and three years, and that the number of patients prescribed medication for ADHD increased by 51 percent between 2019-20 and 2022-3.54

Recent estimates in the US and Britain indicate that more black people and more females are obtaining an autism diagnosis.55 Nevertheless, having been treated for many decades as a male phenomenon, autism is still less likely to be recognised in girls and women. As Emily Katy writes in Girl Unmasked, diagnostic methods are mostly based on research into white cisgender males: “Autistic girls may be told they are being ‘hysterical’ and ‘melodramatic’, or ‘emotional’ and ‘hormonal’…[with] more of an intense desire to fit in because of how we are socialised and the expectations put on us from a young age”.56 All this means more pressure to mask autistic traits. Girls are diagnosed “on average six years later than boys, with 80 percent remaining undiagnosed at the age of 18.” At the same time, “More adult women are referred for assessment than men too, which highlights the numbers that have been missed”.57

This narrowing of the diagnostic gap is also at least partly due to increased social awareness. Many people who would previously have been misdiagnosed, particularly with psychiatric conditions, are now more likely to obtain an autism diagnosis. These changes suggest that autism diagnoses are no longer the preserve of white and wealthy or middle-class males.

So, how much has discrimination against autistic people changed? In a seminal article for the New Yorker magazine in 1993, neurologist Oliver Sacks described his own first experience with autistic people “in a grim ward in a [US] state hospital in the mid-sixties”:

Many of these patients, born in the nineteen-forties or early fifties, had not even been diagnosed as autistic when young, but had been lumped together indiscriminately with the retarded and psychotic, and warehoused in huge institutions since early childhood. This is probably how the severely autistic have been treated for centuries. It has only been in the last two decades or so that the picture for such youngsters has decisively changed, with increasing medical and educational awareness of their special strengths and problems, and the widespread introduction of special schools and camps for autistic children.58

Notwithstanding the relentless government attacks of more recent years, it is indisputable that millions more disabled people across the Global North are in mainstream education or living independent lives in the community. As Fern Brady puts it,

I’m also an autistic person now and not in another time where I’d have been institutionalised or trialled as a witch. I’m an autistic person in the UK and not in China, where they wouldn’t even acknowledge either my autism or my subsequent mental illness.59

The neurodivergent identity remains more strongly associated with autism than other groups covered by the term. Many who identify as neurodivergent do not necessarily have or want a specific diagnosis. Not everyone with an autism (or an ADHD) diagnosis identifies as neurodivergent, and (so far at any rate) many people with a dyslexia or dyspraxia diagnosis do not. In addition, many considered by themselves or others as likely to be neurodivergent do not seek a diagnosis or are unaware that they would meet the criteria.

Katy adds another important point:

[A] diagnosis does not automatically lead to understanding and support… Those diagnosed younger may have been forced into harmful therapies or institutions, learned to view autism as something inherently “bad” or wrong with them, and grown up experiencing just as many challenges. Likewise, someone diagnosed later may have been well supported in their home and school environment, and had their needs catered for, just without a diagnosis.60

Neurodiversity activist Nick Walker comments that, “there is no ‘normal’ state of human brain or human mind, any more than there is one ‘normal’ race, ethnicity gender or culture”.61 This, however, raises a problem. If the norm is neurodiversity, what does it mean to be neurodivergent? Many of those who identify as such refer to the majority as “neurotypical”. Nick Chown notes that “typical” here is often held to mean “normal”. His preferred term “predominant neurotype” distinguishes “between autistic people and non-autistic people on the basis of numbers only” without judging as to “whether one cognitive experience is better than another”.62 Chapman uses the term neurotypical frequently throughout their book, but at no stage questions it. As Temple Grandin aptly comments, “defining what is neurotypical is as unhelpful as asking the average size of a dog. What’s typical; a Chihuahua or a Great Dane? When does a little geeky or nerdy become autistic?”.63

Which way forward?

Chapman’s analysis of capitalism—when stripped of its exaggerated claims about a radical break from earlier forms of capitalism—shows how the contemporary workplace disables people who do not think in a typical way and how it distorts and damages human attributes and capacities. This part is helpful. Nevertheless, the point of any Marxist analysis must be its utility in the fight for a better world. Here, Chapman’s book is deeply flawed.

Chapman criticises “existing neurodiversity theory and activism” for focussing more on “changing our thinking and attitudes than on changing material conditions”.64 So, how to achieve the latter?

The key question here is that of agency. Empire of Normality sees neurodivergent people as part of a reserve army of labour, either a subset of or separate to the working class, due to “extractive abandonment”. This term refers to the way in which capitalism “both creates and extracts from the surplus class while simultaneously abandoning them”.65 Chapman extends their argument further:

[C]apitalism, especially once it reaches a period where labour requires high-level cognitive or emotional processing, is increasingly disposed towards making us all, at the very least, either mentally ill or disabled…harms those in the out-group through positioning them as surplus, but it is also harmful to the in-group, as it positions them as workers to be exploited until they finally become neurodivergent through burnout, illness, or cognitive decline.66

Chapman argues that a neurodivergent “collective cognitive power…could be harnessed no less than the collective power of the working class”.67 If we read for “in-group” the wider working class, neurodivergent people are conceived of as forming the core of a distinctive “surplus class” with the potential power that Marx saw in the proletariat. The question Chapman neither poses nor answers is what makes this group a separate “class” and what provides the basis of its power. How are classes defined if not by a common place within the relations of production?

This concept of a “surplus class” also calls to mind previous attempts to argue that the unemployed or “lumpenproletariat” are the most oppressed group in society and so should be the focus of liberation struggles. Chapman’s book refers to the US Black Panther Party several times but omits to mention their orientation on organising the “brothers on the block”—a strategy that made the Panthers particularly vulnerable to state surveillance and infiltration.68

Empire of Normality proposes a “transitional politics that…finds ways to empower the surplus as surplus.” This “will need to take different forms to traditional union organising, which is based on the threat of withholding regular waged labour”.69 Chapman’s argument recalls Hardt and Negri’s vision of reclaiming the productive potential inherent in human labour to create liberated spaces as an alternative to capitalism. As with much post-Marxist theorising, this evades the question of confronting centres of capitalist power in favour of acts of subversion and escape, leaving capital and the state largely untouched. The examples Chapman provides of an alternative power are far from convincing: “neuroqueering”, which “focuses on embracing weird potentials…turning everyday comportment and behaviour into forms of resistance” and building “neurodivergent-led cooperatives [to] help build new ways and modes of working and relating”.70 It is unclear how alternative forms of behaviour and networks of cooperatives can become a force for change for the vast majority who remain trapped within the structures of capitalist oppression and exploitation.

A recent edition of the online US journal Boston Review includes an interesting debate that in part concerns Chapman’s claims that “the [neurodiversity] movement has won many of its demands”, including a minimum wage for US federal contractors.71 Ari Ne’eman, who played a key role in this campaign, objects to Chapman attributing this success “to neurodiversity activism rather than to plain old disability rights work” and also for ignoring the role played by trade unions. Ne’eman goes on to caution that “thirty years after neurodiversity’s founding, applied behavioral analysis (ABA)—with its focus on rendering autistic people ‘indistinguishable from peers’—dominates autism service-provision more than ever”.72

Empire of Normality’s brief discussion of the 1917 Russian Revolution also reflects the weaknesses of Chapman’s conception of strategy. They condemn the left’s flirtation with eugenics and argue that, after 1917, its “attempt to move beyond capitalism never got past state capitalism”.73 Here, Chapman conflates the Bolsheviks’ attempts to deepen and spread the revolution with the brutal programme of industrialisation during Stalin’s counter-revolution from 1928 onwards. Stalinism did indeed lead to state capitalism. For Chapman, the earlier effort to liberate humanity and its later reversal were both characterised by the same alienation and emphasis on production.

Missing entirely from this account are the soviets: the democratically elected councils of workers and peasants that were so central to the October Revolution and its global appeal. The subsequent civil war decimated what had been a tiny but hugely powerful working class and destroyed its ability to wield power. The immediate priority of the Bolshevik government was to increase the production of a devastated economy, but with the working class no longer in control, the revolution was deprived of its key social and economic core.

This crucial omission is very likely linked to Chapman’s bizarre claim that today’s left continually embraces the ideology of eugenics, with “imagined utopian futures” based on an ideal “that reinforces rather than challenges the equation between productivity and health”.74

Marx and Engels wrote very little about a post-revolutionary society, but the tradition identified with this journal is based on workers’ self-emancipation and their principle of “from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs”. The working class appears in Chapman’s Empire of Normality, but never as an agent of change, which may explain the absence of any vision of a post-capitalist future, utopian or otherwise. Chapman has argued more recently for “[r]econstructing the project” of the revolutionary party, but given the above we can only guess as to what kind of party this would be.75

A further question arises in relation to the question of impairment. Like many neurodiversity advocates, Chapman supports the social model of disability, because it “acknowledged that the impairment was real and part of the body” and sees “the problem of disability [as] primarily one of marginalisation and oppression”.76 Empire of Normality does not, however, acknowledge neurodivergence as involving any impairment. This may in part reflect longstanding disputes over whether particular behaviours should be seen as “deficits” or impairments at all.77 Nevertheless, discrimination against disabled people is based on impairment, real or perceived, and many people seek psychiatric or psychological diagnoses because these provide formal recognition of impairment and therefore a gateway to individual support.78

Chapman dismisses “liberal reforms” as these, according to them, have benefited the middle class and helped capitalists make more profits, while leaving “multiply marginalised neurodivergents stuck in a variety of carceral systems, homeless, or in other unbearable situations”.79 Unfortunately, Chapman’s book says nothing about reforms that can be won in education and at work, such as securing access to regular rest breaks, quiet spaces, working times which avoid rush hours, support from job coaches or mentors, training in assistive software, permission to attend meetings online and/or to have instructions in writing, to name but a few. These are all “reasonable adjustments” under the 2010 Equality Act, which benefits not just workers with neurodivergent conditions but also their workmates.80 Promoting and winning such reforms raises awareness about neurodiversity or disability as well as improving people’s lives. Campaigning for more inclusive and accessible schools, universities, workplaces and communities can help unify workers around an understanding of common class interests and therefore to build a stronger and more diverse resistance to capitalism. The widespread economic troubles in recent years combined with a mental health crisis fuelled by a rise in insecurity have made this task all the more urgent.

Empire of Normality contains a detailed analysis of the ways in which our society damages and distorts our minds by imposing bogus norms of behaviour and identity. It shows convincingly how capitalism, with its imposition of norms and its frenetic pace, disables people in multiple ways. Many neurodiverse people, particularly those identifying as autistic, will find it liberating to read that it is not autistic people who are a problem but rather a society rejecting and stigmatising those perceived to be different or impaired. The book will also resonate with other people, disabled or not, who feel marginalised or isolated by an increasingly hostile, unstable and insecure world.

However, Chapman’s account of modern capitalism and their strategy to fight for a better world are both badly flawed and lack any real sense of struggle. Their book lacks any sense of the system’s inherent fractures and contradictions. Marx’s central contention about capitalism was that, amid its numerous horrors, it constantly generates both the potential for abundance and its own gravedigger. Capitalists have always used technology to reinforce their power over us, but equally workers can take control of it to create a society based on assessing and meeting the needs of every individual.

In marking out all autistic and neurodivergent people as a separate social and economic group, with interests separate from broader layers of workers, Chapman confines resistance to a minority and in doing so deprives neurodivergent people of any meaningful agency. As far as Empire of Normality demolishes capitalist notions of normality, many will find its insights illuminating. Yet, it falters when it comes to outlining a way out. The work lacks both a coherent vision for change and a clear strategy to move forward.


Roddy Slorach is senior disability advisor at Imperial College London, a member of the University and College Union, and the author of A Very Capitalist Condition: A History and Politics of Disability (Bookmarks, 2024, 2nd edition).


Notes

1 Thanks to Joseph Choonara, Iain Ferguson, Sheila McGregor and Camilla Royle for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. The responsibility for all the views expressed lies with me.

2 Goldacre, 2009, p301. An obsessive focus on their interests and an intolerance for “small talk” are also traits often associated (not always unfairly) with revolutionary socialists.

3 Chapman, 2023, p15.

4 Russell and others, 2022.

5 Robinson and Gasner, 2023.

6 Silberman, 2015, provides an excellent social history of autism.

7 The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the manual more commonly used outside the US, and covers all health “disorders” (but DSM-5 is likely to influence the definition used in the next edition of the ICD). See also https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/diagnosis/diagnostic-criteria/all-audiences

8 As stated on the website of the National Autistic Society, “This is useful as many autistic people have sensory differences which affect them on a day-to-day basis.”

9 Rowden, 2024. Prior to DSM-5’s publication in 2013, ASD was one of four different types of autism, along with Asperger’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified.

10 Autistica, 2024.

11 Grant, 2010, p26.

12 Wharmby, 2022, p91.

13 Grant, 2010, p95.

14 Maté, 1999, p24.

15 Office of National Statistics, 2021. The employment rate for those with “severe or specific learning difficulties” is 26.2 percent. The figure for autism should be treated with some caution, as it cannot take account of the significant number of those in work who do not disclose or identify as autistic.

16 Buckland and others, 2024.

17 Buckland and others, 2024.

18 Anderson, 2018.

19 Marianna Murin, principal clinical psychologist at the National Centre for Autism Spectrum Disorders, Great Ormond Street hospital, quoted in Anderson, 2018.

20 Mencap, 2024. See also www.mencap.org.uk/press-release/government-have-failed-halve-number-people-learning-disability-and-autistic-people

21 Quoted in Limburg, 2019.

22 Quoted in Happé, 2024. Thanks to Nicola Field for this reference.

23 Other signatories to the programme include Microsoft, Cintas, Ford, JP Morgan Chase and DXC Technology.

24 SAP, 2022. This figure, however, is likely to be too low, given that so many people mask their autistic traits at work.

25 Lovett, 2023. At the time of writing, the Israeli Defence Force had 169,500 active troops and 465,000 reservists. See Tegler, 2024.

26 Singer developed her ideas from a 1997 article written Harvey Blume and published in the New York Times, in which the term neurodiversity was used for the first time. See Silberman, 2015, pp450-454.

27 For a full account of the social model, see Slorach, 2024.

28 Chapman, 2023, p4.

29 Chapman, 2023, p135.

30 Aherne, 2023, p19.

31 Ellis, 2024.

32 Chapman, 2023, p33.

33 In their history, Chapman also allocates a prominent place to Thomas Szasz. I find their view of the debates around anti-psychiatry highly problematic, but I do not have the space to discuss this here.

34 Chapman, 2023, p44.

35 Chapman, 2023, p19.

36 Chapman, 2023, p84. Fordism refers to the large-scale assembly-line production methods pioneered by Henry Ford in the early 1900s and post-Fordism to the shift away from manufacturing towards service industries and flexible working methods across the Global North.

37 Chapman, 2023, p84, p113.

38 Chapman, 2023, p114.

39 Chapman, 2023, p114.

40 Chapman, 2023, p112.

41 Berardi cited in Chapman, 2023, p110.

42 Chapman, 2023, p110.

43 Thompson and Smith, 2017, p15.

44 Thompson and Smith, 2017, p11. More recent figures show Apple to have fallen back somewhat. In 2023, Saudi Aramco was the world’s most profitable company with profits of over $247 billion, followed by Apple with profits of $114.3 billion, see https://www.datarails.com/5-most-profitable-companies/. This, of course, only strengthens the argument Thompson and Smith make.

45 Quoted in Rose, 2017.

46 Upchurch, 2016, p152.

47 University and College Union, 2019, p8.

48 Choonara, 2020.

49 Choonara, 2020.

50 Choonara, 2020.

51 Chapman, 2023, p114.

52 Ivi.uk blog, 2022. Studies in the US show a similar trend.

53 Lyall and others, 2020, Griswold, 2016.

54 Morris, 2024.

55 According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cited in Stobbe, 2023; National Autistic Society website, 2024.

56 Katy 2024, p183.

57 Katy, 2024, p184.

58 Sacks, 1993. An Anthropologist on Mars is centred on a series of interviews with autistic scientist and author Temple Grandin, whose vivid shorthand description of her experience of “normal” society provided Sacks with the article’s title.

59 Brady, 2023, p270. Brady’s book Strong Female Character is a brilliant account, by turns hilarious and horrifying, of her own journey towards an autism diagnosis.

60 Katy, 2024, p3.

61 Cited in Graby, 2015, p235.

62 Chown, 2017, p25. For an analysis of autism identities, see Slorach, 2019

63 Grandin, 2022, p35.

64 Chapman, 2023, p137.

65 Chapman 2023, p150. This approach follows that of Marta Russell and other Marxist writers who also see disabled people as a reserve army of labour. For a critique of this view see Slorach, 2021.

66 Chapman, 2023, p153.

67 Chapman, 2023, p152.

68 Richardson (ed), pp273-274.

69 Chapman 2023, p162.

70 Chapman, 2023, p142; Chapman, 2023, p161.

71 Chapman, 2024.

72 Ne’eman, 2024.

73 Chapman, 2023, p157. For a discussion of eugenics and both the reformist and revolutionary left, see Slorach, 2020.

74 Chapman, 2023, p158. Given the context, I have assumed that this refers to the revolutionary left.

75 Chapman, 2024.

76 Chapman, 2023, p128.

77 See Chown, 2017, for a detailed and accessible academic survey of cognitive theories about autism. Chown defines autism as “a social learning disability involving certain cognitive differences” (using the term disability in what he calls the “lay sense”, meaning impairment).

78 The UK Equality Act 2010 fudges the impairment/disability distinction, defining disability as “an impairment that has a long-term and substantial negative impact on a person’s ability to perform normal daily activities.”

79 Chapman, 2023, p9.

80 Janine Booth’s short book Autism Equality in the Workplace (Jessica Kingsley, 2016) is a useful guide to the range of relevant workplace adjustments.


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