Impossible Working Lives and Disabled Bodies during Racialized Capitalism: Perspectives from Germany and the United Kingdom

Employment has always been theorised in terms of what it makes possible in a narrow sense of capitalist productivity, delimiting analysis of working lives that incorporate other forms of labour and broader ideas of kinship. In this chapter, we reveal how both employment and work become impossible due to racialised capitalism in Germany and the United Kingdom in differing ways as race still has salience. Both in Germany and the United Kingdom, we note how ableism becomes foundational to understand sexism, racism and ableism in employment and lack of possibility of disability lives. However, ableism also reveals tensions in intersectional categories and analyses that are still predicated on racialised capitalist structuring principles that hold embodied differences as central. Ableism and racism have devastating impacts on labour market participation of disabled Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPoC) within racialised capitalism. Therefore, this chapter critically examines the continuum of structural violence of ableism and economic precarity within the mainstream labour market in Germany and the United Kingdom as they are embedded in the dominant postcolonial exploitive system of racialised capitalism.