ON September 5, Beatrice Adler-Bolton hosted a panel alongside Da’Shaun L. Harrison at the Socialism Conference, 2026 in Chicago, which was met with backlash. The session was titled “Health Fascism, Body Politics and the Anti-State State.” The discussion was focused on the state organizing health around productivity, capacity and national strength.” The central theme was that the state, instead of providing care, engages in the disciplining of bodies.
The controversy surrounding it opens the possibility of confronting ableist assumptions within socialism. It provides us an entry point to ask an uncomfortable question: who gets to occupy the subject position in the socialist emancipatory script? Socialism must challenge those material conditions that disable, injure, and exhaust people.
Adler-Bolton, the co-author of Health Communism, describes “health fascism” as a political logic that “health, fitness, productivity, and bodily normalcy are measures of moral worth and political belonging.” This is rooted in an ableist, eugenicist, racist, and productivist understanding that some groups are disposable and that they can be weeded out of society. She argues that precarity under capitalism is reframed as a problem attributable to individual possession of health. This is directly fostered by the state machinery. Adler-Bolton cites the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) initiative as the most recent example. MAHA, a progeny of the second Trump administration, has been promoted as a public health movement, dubbing the care of one’s health a “patriotic duty.” Below this nationalist surface lies policing of bodies, eugenics, and austerity measures. Further, the ability to work is being tied to national strength, seeking to ensure the availability of a future workforce.
In the same discussion, Harrison illustrates a cultural fixation on optimizing the body. Some bodies are accorded the status of being the standard, leading to “body fascism.” Desirability affects how disposable one is, when conformity to the standard becomes a marker of public health. Bodies that do not meet the standard (disabled, fat, non-white, transgender) are seen as undeserving of care. The rise of GLP-1s, bodily enhancement, and diet culture is promoted as moral achievement, as well as social responsibility. States have routinely adopted policies that discipline bodies for the sake of national image. This subjects “unhealthy” bodies to surveillance and subjugation.
It is not just public health policies and medical interventions that aid in the subjugation of deviant bodies. Our entire ecosystem is based around health and survival. Martha Russell, in her book “Capitalism and Disability,’ points out that the driving force behind such policies is the rejection of bodies deemed “unfit” for the market economy. Whether it’s living conditions, data centres, detention facilities, or war and genocide, debility and disability are constantly produced under capitalism.
Adler-Bolton argues that health fascism remoulds “genuine experiences of abandonment” into “politics of purification and differentiation.” Instead of health being a collective experience, it becomes an individual asset that needs to be nurtured.
‘Reactionary’ Socialist Reaction
Adler-Bolton and Harrison’s discussion irked not only the right, but also reactionaries on the left. Concerns of disabled people are seen as excessive and a distraction from legitimate causes. This echoes the same exclusionary logic that designates misogyny, racism, casteism, and transphobia as identitarian and secondary problems. Disabled people’s fight for survival and their rejection of eugenicist ideas is all the more irksome because disablement is perceived as a fixed state that finite people go through, instead of a pervasive phenomenon that is socially constructed.
The perception is that sickness, diseases, and disability could be kept at bay if one follows the best health practices at a personal level. Our concerns come from the fact that the entire controversy viewed this question as an identitarian concern and a distraction from material struggle. Class struggle does not exist in a historical vacuum. Capitalism works on the exploitation of subaltern embodiments, and disabled and other marginalized bodies experience that exploitation as well.
In our Indian experience, we have seen that caste, gender, and ableism shape our understanding of who are forced to dangerous work such as manual scavenging, whose exhaustion is normalized and whose injury is ignored.
Different Context, same problem: The Global South Experience
For half a century, disabled people have been asserting that health, disability and debility are socially determined. While this is accepted in disability advocacy, the actual workings of the State in policing and regulating bodies are viewed separately from disability justice. This includes incarceration, punishment, institutionalisation and surveillance. Global capitalist relations and the socio-cultural context determine which groups are more susceptible to being disabled. The state control of bodies is dependent on disposing off these vulnerable groups through legal and political processes. The dilution of trans rights and their access to medical care around the world is one such instance.
Imperialism, colonisation and occupation are also political processes that govern the boundaries of health. In fact, they are the producer of ableism. Talila A. Lewis defines ‘ableism’ in the following terms:
“A system of assigning value to people's bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.”
Imperial wars, infectious diseases, pollution, and climate disasters affect populations more severely in the periphery. When the risks of industry and capital on public health become apparent, and consequently, stricter laws are made in the developed nations, corporations move to developing countries where labour standards and environmental policies are less stringent, putting the populations of these countries at risk of sickness, diseases and disablement. Thus, health and national image in developed countries is reconstructed by way of imperialism, instead of any change in social relations.
We would like to draw attention to Jasbir Puar’s distinction between disability, debility, and capacity to complicate the image of a monolithic, uniform ‘working class’. Working people may be worn down by exploitative labour and deprivation without gaining recognition and support as disabled. Their debility remains unrecognized due to capitalism’s refusal to recognize it. At the same time, disabled people- recognized and visible- face extreme precarity under global capitalism. Only a few disabled bodies are accommodated and tolerated who do not challenge the hegemony of global capital, subservient state instrumentalities, and their logic. Jasbir Puar underscores the point: “Disability empowerment and pride are part of rights discourses even as an expression of maiming, debilitation and disabling are central to economies and vocabulary of violence and exploitation.” Socialism of any hue must answer therefore two very important questions: firstly, what would be the socialist program to challenge the relationship of exploitation and imperial domination? While engaging this question, socialist policies and programs must unmask the nefarious relation of capitalist exploitation and imperial domination in producing debility and disability. Secondly, socialism must also undertake critical self-examination of its own ableist assumptions.
Gandhi’s Enduring Vision
We propose something Gandhian here, as we feel Mahatma Gandhi’s vision and work offer pedagogical lessons for conservative socialists. Writing in Young India on May 1, 1930, he provided very expansive meaning of Swaraj and wrote, “But the swaraj of my—our—dream recognizes no race or religious distinctions. Nor is it to be the monopoly of lettered persons nor yet of moneyed men.” “Swaraj” he boldly asserted, “is to be for all, including the former, but emphatically including the maimed, the blind, the starving toiling millions”. Such all embracing meaning of Swaraj discards ableism.
The Constructive Programme of Gandhi authored by him is yet another shining example of a manifesto anchored in inclusion. While writing on Gandhi’s Constructive Program, Dhananjay Rai argues that Gandhi’s constructive program provided a ‘de-definite space of politics’ in which every space is political. It allowed a de-constrained space of politics in which everyone is a participant. More importantly, Rai sees the constructive program as ‘evolutionary episteme’ in which movement can learn constantly and keep adding up issues. In this Gandhian learning, socialism can have ‘plural’, non-normative bodies in its fold. However, even if socialism distances itself from Gandhism, we believe it can be inclusive enough to accept Adler Bolton's provocation: “the more dysgenic, the better,” which is a radical challenge to the right-wing obsession with “fit bodies”. One can read it as an epistemic provocation to resist the eugenic authority to decide which body is ‘desirable’ and worthy of a future. Those deemed ‘dysgenic’ must belong to socialism.
Da’Shaun L. Harrison, in “Belly of the Beast,” while unpacking the definition of ‘health’ as provided by the World Health Organization, makes a profound point. WHO defines health as “the state of complete physical, mental, social well-being and not just the absence of disease and infirmity.” Harrison argues that reading it from the vantage of black person also means it is not enough that one must be “non-disabled but also should be in the environment to feel mentally secure, physically safe and socially well.” The total subjugation of black bodies, their multiple marginalizations and slavery, Da’Shaun L. Harrison argues, had already kept black bodies outside the definition of health and stigmatized these bodies as ‘corruption’ and ‘degeneration’. An inclusive vision of socialism cannot ignore these material conditions of dominations such as racism, ableism, casteism etc. These material conditions must be at the center of socialist class struggle. Socialist methods such as political meetings, unions, and protests must include different bodies, modes of communication, and differential capacities for participation. Socialism can learn from the feminist ethic of care, in which care becomes a part of collective imagination and participation.
Indian Experience
We would like to bring the Indian experience here, as this debate happened mostly in the context of the Global North. The question of ableism, disability and debility in developing countries is intensified by the struggle for basic survival. In India, for example, we have witnessed that casteism and hyper-ethnic and religious nationalism are embedded in political processes that seek the removal of ‘undesirable bodies’ from the secure nationalist imagination.
In May 2018 BJP leader Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, Union minister of state for youth affairs and sports and Information and Broadcasting started a #HumFitTohIndiaFit Campaign.” He reached out to his supporters on Twitter and asked them to capture their physical exercise activities in pictures and videos to keep their bodies fit, and to post those pictures and videos on social media. He challenged cine actor Hrithik Roshan, cricketer Virat Kohli and badminton ace Saina Nehwal to join his campaign. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, in his article “Elitist #HumFitTohIndiaFit Campaign Divorces Fitness From Health” published in The Wire on May 25, 2018, wrote, “Rathore’s #HumFitTohIndiaFit campaign is selfish for placing self before society and obfuscates the real health challenges in the country.” “By promoting this campaign,” he critically remarked, “the ruling party and its supporters are legitimising the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of society.” “It exposes the lack of sensitivity of ministers towards real issues confronting people, the basic challenge the invisible majority faces every minute of their lives. Survival is more important for them than fitness. This is possibly Rathore’s Marie Antoinette moment,” he emphatically claimed.
Nilanjan flagged the point that “Fitness movements internationally have perpetuated myths about masculinity and added pressure on women to become super-slim.” He persuasively argues that those joining paid programmes under a trainer for keeping themselves fit uncritically accept hierarchical relationship with the trainer. Such legitimacy to hierarchy in fitness centres, he says, possibly “provide legitimacy to autocracy, and one ‘hands over’ one’s body to another in hope of fitness.” “At a political level,” he stated, “such reasoning has manifold implications”.
Processes like the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) disproportionately affect disabled, religious minority, and women's bodies, as they get erased from the curated voter list which SIR generates. These processes are also disabling themselves, as welfare and access to healthcare are directly dependent on who is included in SIR.
First, the state deliberately pushes bodies that do not conform to the hyper-masculine, militarised, Hindu, upper caste, able-bodied standard to the margins by subjecting them to purity and moralization. Vegetarianism and alternative medicines are advanced as state policy even though malnutrition and lack of healthcare facilities continue debilitating marginalised groups. Second, these groups are termed dangerous to the national well-being, and their bodies are regulated and disciplined.
Such exercises create a homogeneous society in which only “fit bodies”- ethnically, religiously, physically and mentally” are allowed to form the national polis. To oppose such homogeneity, an inclusive socialism must include plurality of embodiment and their lived experiences. Those deemed ‘dysgenic’ by eugenics must get equal space in imagining socialism. An inclusive socialism can learn some lessons from Gandhi and feminist “ethic of care.”
