Neurodiversity as Status Group, and as a Class-within-a-Class: Critical Realism and Dyslexia *

Dyslexia is seen as one of a number of often overlapping neurodiversities which define a disadvantaged sector of the general population in developed countries. Neurodiversity is redefined in terms of the positive advantages of being a member of this “status group”. The role and status of this group in society are considered in the light of stratification theorists such as Marx and Bhaskar—with advocacy for group consciousness as a “class within a class” (Marx) in seeking and asserting change, using Bhaskar’s critical realist model. The paper draws on the work of recent scholars and political activists in advocating a model of “humanist class struggle” by the neurodiverse community, adopting Janine Booth’s model of trade union enterprise on behalf of the neurodiverse class of workers.

(like the gay/dyslexic/Asperger's Alan Turing) are particularly likely to explore complexities in the visual and symbolic environment which are crucial in code-breaking and other tasks. Janine Booth (Booth, 2016(Booth, , 2018(Booth, , 2021 begins her writing as a gay person with Asperger's, giving a socialist account (based on trade union activity) of a social structure which seeks to establish and ethical social contract, grounded in the Marxist dictum "from each according to their ability, to each according to their means", between all of the diverse social, cultural, value-based and ability-oriented groups which will co-operate in post-capitalist cultures.
Booth observes that: "Since autistic activist Judy Singer coined the term 'neurodiversity' some twenty years ago, it has facilitated great enlightenment and a progressive new approach to the experiences and rights of autistic and other neurologically atypical people. It is now facing a backlash, much of which is reactionary but some of which has been helped by flaws in some presentations of neurodiversity… an effective neurodiversity approach is one that locates neurodiversity in social structures. (At first)… the neurodiversity approach enabled us to supersede a highly pathological and disabling view of autistic and other neurodivergent people into a far more empowering one." In particular, according to Booth, the pioneering work of Silberman (2017) and others on neurodiversity enables us to identify that humanity is naturally neurologically diverse and that differently-structured brains are not "faulty" and deviant. There are good reasons why these conditions have remained in the human gene pool. We can now, with good conscience and with vigour "…progress from 'awareness' to 'acceptance', and thus from pity to demands for rights and equality" focussing on how social structures and environments disable people who are neurologically atypical, in the fight for social change in preference to "cures", in which apparently pathological brains can be changed through (for example) the "chemical castration" of Alan Turing, the recent resurgence in "conversion therapies", and the many pseudo-medical approaches which demean neurodiverse people, including those who process informational cues, en- She uses a Marxist analysis to arrive at the view that: "…When we look at how employers exclude neurodivergent workers, we are considering a specific social relationship in which 'employers' and 'workers' are different categories of people with different relationships to production. When we look at parenting of neurodivergent kids, we are considering the way in which parenting is structured as a private activity… And when we look at so-called disability, we are considering how our physical, sensory and social environment, and features of our own selves in conjunction with that environment, might create difficulties for us.
Understanding our experience in these terms is known as a materialist ap-proach… A materialist understanding of neurodiversity, rather than one based on pathology or identity, will enable us to better understand the oppression of neurodivergent people. It will also enable us to imagine and fight for the reorganisation of society that will embrace and support neurodivergent and neurotypical people."

Neurodiversity: A Social Class Analysis
Any analysis of social stratification must begin with a consideration of the work of Karl Marx, and how his original ideas have been interpreted, practised and modified over the years, into ideas and analyses which are still relevant today.
Marx argued that human values and consciousness were rooted in how individuals were linked to systems of property owning, production, trade, and labour. Those who benefited economically from a capitalist system engineered a social order which controlled the mass of the workers, though a system of "false Marx's writing on class, and status groups within class strata are complex and challenging, and are still being interpreted and reformulated today (Hurst, 2007;Bannerji, 2005;Banfield, 2015;Zizek et al., 2018;Christophers, 2018Christophers, , 2019aChristophers, , 2019bChristophers, , 2020Christophers, , 2021Hamsa, 2018;Harvey, 2017;Zizek et al., 2018;Milner, 2019;Adler, 2019). It is clear that, despite the failures of Marxist-Leninist applications, the class analyses of Marx are still highly relevant for understanding and changing how a capitalist-dominated social system dominates and disadvantages class groups, in particular those whom we call the neurodiverse strata (Silberman, 2017). We include amongst the neurodiverse those individuals who process social and cognitive information in "mainstream" ways, but nevertheless are categorised because of their social origins, to become members of the precariat (to use Standing (2010Standing ( , 2012Standing ( , 2014Standing ( , 2021 adaptation of Marx's term the proletariat).
The precariat is a mass of workers with fewer educational achievements and little vocational training, who occupy minimum-wage jobs on precarious contracts. In times of economic stress they are easily laid off, to become "the reserve army of labour" who can be called upon to work as and when a capitalist system needs them (see Table 2 appended). And beneath them are the class whom both Marx and Standing call "the lumpenproletariat", the strata whom we, the general masses, can ritually abuse as a neurodiverse class who fail in school, and who are destined for marginal lives of petty crime and imprisonment. Hamsa (2018) includes Karl Marx among the distinguished company of those with dyslexia (a term he uses metaphorically, rather than clinically). Capitalism, now in its "neoliberal phase" is changing shape, with fresh structures and ideologies to deceive the world's community of workers, in its movement towards being a hidden economy, with its wealth housed offshore in its new "rentier" phase, described by Standing (2021)  argue, in about 1980), with the consolidation of the rentier class, who own but do not manage the business of industry (that is the work of a managerial class of lackeys, who administer a precariat system- Standing (2010Standing ( , 2012Standing ( , 2014Standing ( , 2021.
This managerial class is like the overseers of slave plantations, who create wealth for offshore elite. Christophers (2019aChristophers ( , 2019b details the nature of rentierism in the UK, identifying eight-core asset types which are detailed in Table 1 appended. Much of Standing's seminal work has been generated in Third World economies, and is elaborated in his influential analyses of the delivery and benefits of a  (Dünhaupt, 2012;Drucker & Hakins, 2021;Ford, 2020). The ways in which rentiers, the manipulators of neoliberalism's international income move profits between countries and banks in ways which avoid tax and accrue vast fortunes, is detailed by Shaxson (2018). Rentiers hardly form a secret cabal: rather, capitalistic economies acquiesce in this tax avoidance for a relatively small share of the trillions amassed by rentiers. The price that ordinary citizens pay is the increased underfunding of education, social services, and health care (Sawyerr & Adam-Bagley, 2017b). The decline in the proportions of national wealth assigned to education and learning services since 2010 is paralleled by the rise in wealth of the richest two percent of the nation, those who exploit British workers for their own wealth creation-between 2014 and 2018 their residual wealth increased by more than £400 billion, on which they paid tax at the rate of about 3%. Even this payment of tax was little more than a publicity gesture, given the numerous ways in which the movement of profits offshore, avoids tax (Holpuch, 2021). re-identified as a group with special abilities in science and entrepreneurship (Schneps, 2015;Van Viersen et al., 2015;Hall, 2021).

Communication Styles
A crucial part of neurodiverse identity relates to communication style-the ways in which information from the environment is experienced, processed and communicated in the roles which a capitalist society prescribes for its citizens.
This theme is taken up by Christian Fuchs (2020)  In capitalist societies, language is shaped by capital and power and does not stand outside of the processes of commodification, exploitation, and domination. In capitalism, essence and existence of communication diverge: The essence of language and communication is that they are common goods. Their reality in capitalism is that besides communication commons there are cultural and communicational commodities and the communication of ideology. The essence of language and communication as common goods of humanity can only become a full reality in a commons-based society… in such a society, power inequalities can be better addressed, overcome, challenged, and communicated, but do not all automatically vanish. An equal distribution of power is an important goal that can only be achieved politically. (Fuchs, 2020: p. 21) "Control of the means of communication" has replaced the Marxist dictum of the emancipation of the people through "control of the means of production". This is why Fuchs' analysis is so important since it points to a way in which "we the people" can wrest the flows of mind-numbing "information" from the ruling classes spewed by the electronic media. The "class struggle" is now "the information struggle" which we, the neurodiverse people, must engage in, with a variety I turn now to examine briefly dialectical critical realism (DCR) as a model for analysing the social world, and advocating change, which DCR theorists described as morphogenesis (Adam-Bagley et al., 2016).
Critical Realism has been attractive to social researchers, and theorists who are committed to a firm ideological basis for viewing human action (e.g. Marx- ists, Muslims, Catholics) in asserting that structures within society are real and although their nature and influence may be debated, their being or ontology (e.g.
class exploitation, alienation, the nature of spiritual being) is not in doubt. We have followed Alderson (2013Alderson ( , 2015

The important application of DCR in unmasking alienation is through what
Margaret Archer (1995Archer ( , 2000Archer ( , 2003Archer ( , 2021 describes as morphogesis, a dialogue aimed at deconstructing the nature of alienation (e.g. as neurodiverse persons), through a process described as dialectical critical realist dialogue in which we, the stigmatised and oppressed, create communication streams which struggle to unmask our alienation. Archer's student, Sally Tomlinson (2012aTomlinson ( , 2012bTomlinson ( , 2014Tomlinson ( , 2015Tomlinson ( , 2017 chronicles the struggles surrounding the SEND SEND (Special Educational Needs) industry in British education, and exposes how some 15 percent of children are shunted into a permanent underclass through "the manufacture of inability", a group for whom there are relatively few advocates (Sawyerr & Adam-Bagley, 2017b).
My own neurodiverse condition is epilepsy, the subject of earlier research (Adam-Bagley, 1972a, 1972b. Epilepsy is a curiously neglected condition in the literature on the stigmatisation of "the neurologically odd" (de Boer, 2010), perhaps because of a latent horror on the part of many people at the sudden outburst of "motor violence" which the person with epilepsy seeks so desperately to conceal. All of this is a far cry from the chronic challenges of "dyslexia" unless one conceives of neurodiversity as a progressive and inclusive social class, in which we join with our brothers and sisters in communication and dialogue, in order to unmask our shared alienation (Porpora, 2013).

Conclusion
Dyslexia is a condition which often intersects with other disadvantaged statuses, in defining a group who are part of a community who are labelled the neurodiverse, a disadvantaged but emerging group whose "class consciousness" defines From the point of view of Marxist humanism (Banfield, 2015) each individual member of this neurodiverse strata is a unique individual, whom society at large should reward with the basic income due to all members of society, with each neurodiverse citizen offering support with dialogue to every other member of society in the morphogenetic dialogue, "according to their ability".
We champion the work of Janine Booth (Booth, 2016(Booth, , 2018(Booth, , 2021 and others such as James Richards (Richards, 2020;Richards & Sang, 2016), on trade union support for the neurodiverse; and Nick Walker's Marxist programme of support for this class within a class, (Walker, 2014(Walker, -2021 who are well described and advocated for by Silberman (2017). We frame these conceptualisations of "disability" within a Marxian analysis of capitalist exploitation and social class. Marx's models of how capital acquires and uses power through "surplus value" remain highly relevant today, in a new era of neoliberalism capitalist enterprise whose rentier class operates internationally, increasing profit through the exploited efforts of managers, technicians, skilled workers, and an unskilled reserve army of labour. It is into this underclass that many neurodiverse people are relegated, to be used for profit whenever capital requires their casual labour.
We offer the insights of the dialectical critical realist model as one way of "unmasking" this alienation through the consciousness-raising dialogue of oppressed people. Electronic modes of knowledge generation and communication are expertly used by capital in order to stultify the consciousness of the masses: yet these communication media (following Christian Fuchs) may also be the modes by which the neurodiverse underclass communicate and expose the nature of their exploitation.

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.