Précis of “For Neurodivergent Marxism: Between Materialist Analysis and Escape from the Empire of Normality and Capitalism” by Arianna Introna
Summary:
Introna (2025) reviews Robert Chapman’s Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (2023), explaining and endorsing its account of how capitalism shapes neurological norms, disability, and mental health. This is a theoretical book review rather than an empirical study. Introna highlights Chapman’s “neurodivergent Marxism,” which places neurodivergent oppression and liberation at the center of an analysis of economic power. Within this framework, expectations about acceptable attention, communication, emotion, and productivity develop alongside changing economic demands. People whose capacities do not meet those expectations face exclusion, while people whose capacities are profitable face exploitation. Introna emphasizes that liberation requires collective power and changes to social and economic structures, with a central role for disabled people excluded from paid employment.
Key Arguments and Concepts:
1. The Empire of Normality:
This term describes the interconnected institutions, practices, scientific ideas, and economic pressures that establish and enforce standards of normal functioning.
In Chapman’s account, these standards develop historically alongside capitalism and intersect with racism, colonialism, gender, and other forms of oppression.
Introna highlights the argument that contemporary capitalism increasingly restricts the range of bodily, cognitive, and emotional differences it accommodates.
2. Neurodivergent Marxism:
This approach examines how economic conditions and power relations shape neurodivergent people’s lives, including their access to work, resources, and support.
It challenges both versions of neurodiversity politics focused on inclusion within capitalism and Marxist approaches that overlook disability and neurological difference.
Its account of collective struggle includes people outside paid employment as well as workers.
3. The Neuronormative Double-Bind:
Neuronormativity means expectations that privilege particular ways of thinking, feeling, communicating, and functioning.
Chapman’s double-bind describes two connected pressures: capacities that employers find useful can be exploited, while capacities they cannot profit from are devalued or excluded.
Neuro-Thatcherism names an approach that treats neurodivergent people as an economic resource, valuing inclusion according to the productivity or profit it generates.
4. The Pathology Paradigm:
This framework treats departures from preferred neurological norms as individual defects or disorders.
Introna explains Chapman’s argument that it reinforces capitalist institutions by presenting historically shaped standards as natural measures of human worth and ability.
Changing attitudes alone is therefore insufficient within this analysis; the institutions and economic pressures sustaining those standards must also change.
The review also conveys Chapman’s recognition that genuine illness and some disabling experiences would persist beyond capitalism.
5. Collective Power Includes People Excluded From Work:
The term surplus population refers here to people whom capitalism excludes from, or does not consistently need for, paid employment. It describes their position within the economic system, not their human value.
Introna emphasizes that these people must have political power without being required to become productive workers first.
Possibilities discussed include organizing among intermittently employed people, demands for Universal Basic Income, and collective action beyond workplace strikes.
6. Neurodivergent Communism:
Chapman’s proposed alternative is a society that provides for people’s needs and values them regardless of their ability to produce economic output.
Suggested steps include neurodivergent-led cooperatives and organizing to change workplace structures and expectations.
Introna stresses that ending capitalism would not automatically end neuronormative oppression; challenging that oppression must be an explicit part of building alternative societies.
Implications:
Introna presents Chapman’s work as a foundation for alliances among neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, and other people harmed by restrictive standards of normality and productivity. The review shifts attention toward who controls those standards, whose needs institutions accommodate, and whose lives are treated as valuable. Its political goal extends beyond employment inclusion to collective provision and participation regardless of work capacity. These are historical interpretations and political arguments endorsed by the reviewer; the article does not report new empirical tests of them.
Citation (APA):
Introna, A. (2025). For neurodivergent Marxism: Between materialist analysis and escape from the empire of normality and capitalism. Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis, 4(3), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.55533/2765-8414.1142
Topic tags: