According to Julie E. Maybee in her book Making and Unmaking Disability, the Middle Ages could be highly accommodating to disabled persons. Citing Metlzer, she quotes “[Labour was often tailored] according to individual (dis)abilities”, and all people were actively included in social and economic life. In stark contrast to our late stage capitalist world, the rise of oligarchic and far right movements in the USA and around the world marginalise people on the explicit basis of perceived productive capacity and the rejection of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA), with the disabled as clear first targets. So what changed from feudalism to capitalism to change these standards?
The social model
Despite its relevance, disability justice is often an afterthought within broader social justice movements. However, no one is immune to disability. It can happen to anyone suddenly, at any point in life, yet is siloed to the realm of policy lobbying and liberal identity politics. Underneath this is the belief that disability is independent of social construction; located ontologically as a medical essence of the individual.
This could not be further from the truth. The social model explains disability as not an individual deficit, but rather a result of the systemic ways our society privileges particular kinds of accessibility and being, while marginalising others through inaccessible environments and discriminatory norms. But this leaves the question, why does society privilege certain kinds of being?
Why is it that those whose bodies and minds are capable of the highest economic productivity with minimal accessibility requirements are located as the norm, and others as deviant? At its worst, we can see these logics, weaponised in biopolitical moralisations, reproduced in the structural violence of ableist healthcare policies or horrific events such as the Holocaust , dictating who lives and who dies.
The Marxist model adds to this framework an additional dimension of analysis — ‘The Economic’. It reframes these social structures and barriers as particular to capitalist economic structures and the exploitation it necessitates.
Capitalism is to blame.
Capitalism is a system of mass-disablement. The exploitative conditions needed to perpetuate its cycle require able bodies, best suited to material needs of capital accumulation, with low social reproductive and welfare needs. It privileges certain forms of being based on how well they reflect this. Barriers of exclusion then become embedded within requirements stipulated for labour, and further within the disabling nature of the labour carried out. Its mode of production favours the kind of social organisation that incentivises disablement and ableism.
Viewing disability within the social model as merely representing those who fall outside structural normativity and accessibility can, therefore, be fairly misleading in a vacuum. This exclusion is not the result of neutral, random misfortune, but rather deliberate social and institutional choices. It is, in many cases, the clear byproduct of our broken system.
We need Revolution!
Marx himself identified the need for ever-increasing profit as inherent to capitalism. Without reinvesting profit into capital, the market economy inevitably withers. The tendency towards downward pressure on wages and employment to increase profits, ultimately reduces them. There is less money to be spent from wages earned, therefore less profit. Capitalism is functioning exactly as intended when it maximises profits in contrast to deteriorating conditions — as it squeezes blood from the stone at the expense of all other concerns, including disabled people, or anyone else’s wellbeing for that matter.
Alienation from the labour process, produced by this cycle, “destroys the integrity of the labouring body” according to David Harvey in his 2000 book Spaces of Hope. As workers are required to work harder, faster, and under worse conditions, they grind themselves down against the unforgiving and mechanistic system, extracting every last mote of productive capacity. No longer able to perform to normative standards, the system discards them. Disability then becomes a convenient excuse to fulfil the pressure towards unemployment required for the system function, naturalised as a normal rate of unemployment.
The material and living conditions afforded to those in the productive classes of Marx’s time were abysmal, and these would frequently cause sickness and injury — even when such harms hadn’t already occurred on the factory floor. Whilst the average conditions in the Western world have improved significantly, do not be fooled. The disparity between the access to care services and healthy conditions between the top and bottom economic statuses in our society remains abysmal, not to mention the unimaginable suffering that the Global North imposes upon the Global South through expropriation.
Imperialism is of particular note to this, especially where colonial projects themselves function as mechanisms of genocide and mass disablement, as exemplified by Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians. Capitalism necessitates racism, sexism, queerphobia, and environmental destruction as they intersect with disability, in order to justify and excuse the conditions needed for its perpetuation and the escalation of its exploitation.
Capitalism cannot exist without exploitation. Its existence requires ‘othering’, and the sickening calculus of human capital. Policy and welfare can certainly ameliorate ableist conditions, but it will always inevitably manifest more when the profit motive demands.
Disability justice needs more than lobbying, it needs a revolution.
