Marxism and Disability
Any movement for social equality, or freedom from oppression, has something in common with Marxism. In liberal capitalist economies, such social movements often consist of reform efforts to enact civil and human rights legislation. The very perception that there is a need for legal rights to protect marginal classes of persons suggests that oppression exists, for if members of a particular group were not oppressed, they would not have barriers to remove nor rights to be gained. Marxists identify structural injustices that need rectifying and seek to change society through action.
From here, however, Marxism parts ways with traditional liberalism. Liberal solutions, Marx would argue, must fall short of remedying oppression because liberalism fails to acknowledge the central role of productive activities and labor relations in history. Specifically, liberalism fails to expose either the way society is organized for the production of the material conditions of its existence or that the mode of production plays the chief causal role in determining oppressive social outcomes. Marxism posits the principal motive for historical change is the struggle among social classes over their corresponding shares in the harvest of production. With respect to the social condition of disablement, the focus is on the struggle of the class of disabled persons for the right to enter the labor force and on the place the disabled body occupies within the political economy of capitalism. The term disabled is used to designate the socioeconomic disadvantages imposed on top of a physical or mental impairment.1 Bypassing biological or physical anthropological definitions that make it appear that impaired persons are naturally and, therefore, justifiably excluded from the labor force or that one is handicapped by ableist biases reflected in the physical environment, this article takes the view that disability is a socially created category derived from labor relations. For this reason, disabled persons is the nomenclature of choice rather than people with disabilities. Disabled is used to classify persons deemed less exploitable or not exploitable by the owning class who control the means of production in a capitalist economy.
This article presents an overview of Marxism, from the theory of labor power relations to capitalism’s role in defining disability, to show that our economic system produces the state of disablement and that the prevailing rate of exploitation of labor determines who is considered disabled and who is not. The article then explains how class interests perpetuate the exclusion of disabled persons (and others) from the workforce through systemic compulsory unemployment. Disability is conceptualized as a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society; one that creates the so-called “disabled body” to permit a small capitalist class to create the economic conditions necessary to accumulate vast wealth.
The Primacy of Production: Profits and the Nonconforming Body
The man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
—Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme2
Marx’s most significant contribution to history was to pinpoint the primary cause of oppression as economic: The capitalist class exploits the working masses (wage earners) for profit to the detriment (alienation) of the working class. Private property relations entail an exploiting owning class that lives off the surpluses produced by an exploited non-owning, and thus, oppressed class. Feudal and slave-based modes of production also had exploitative relations of production, though different than those of capitalism. The surpluses are extracted by different methods in capitalism, feudalism, and slavery.3 Exploitation, in strict Marxist terms, refers to the appropriation of surplus value through the wage relationship.
A primary basis of oppression of disabled persons (those who could work with accommodations) is their exclusion from exploitation as wage laborers. […]
A class analysis makes apparent that it is neither accident nor a result of “the natural order of things” that disabled persons rank at the bottom of the economic ladder. Capitalism has certain disadvantages, such as persistent vast inequalities.4 A chief disadvantage is that many people are unemployed, underemployed, and impoverished against their will. Although capitalism has sometimes held the promise of expanding the base of people benefitting from it, for disabled persons it largely has been an exclusionary system.
Economic historians, such as Karl Polanyi and E. P. Thompson, have pointed out that capitalist beginnings required a major change in the concept of human labor. The effects on the disabled population can be explained by tracing how work evolved under capitalism. In precapitalist societies, economic exploitation, made possible by the feudal concentration of land ownership, was direct and political. Although a few owners reaped the surplus, the many living on an estate worked for subsistence. With the advent of capitalism, the discipline of labor was now economic, not political. The worker was “‘free’ in the double sense that he or she was no longer tied to a given manor and had the right to choose between work and death.”5
Under Marx’s labor theory of value, the basis of capitalist accumulation is the concept of surplus labor value.6 The worker’s ability to work—Marx calls this labor power—is sold to the capitalist in return for a wage. If the worker produced an amount of value equivalent only to her wage, there would be nothing left over for the capitalist and no reason to hire the worker. But because labor power has the capacity to produce more value than its own wages, the worker can be made to work longer than the labor-time equivalent of the wage received.7 The amount of labor-time that the worker works to produce value equivalent to her wage, Marx calls necessary labor. The additional labor-time that the worker works beyond this, Marx calls surplus labor, and the value it produces, he calls surplus value. The capitalist appropriates the surplus value as a source of profits.8 So writes Marx, “the secret of the self-expansion of capital [of profit] resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labor.”9
To Descartes, the body was a machine; to the industrialist, individuals’ bodies were valued for their ability to function like machines. As human beings were gathered into the “satanic mills” (William Blake) to accomplish the task of capital accumulation, impediments were erected to disabled people’s survival. New enforced factory discipline, time-keeping, and production norms worked against a slower, more self-determined and flexible work pattern into which many disabled people had been integrated.10 […]
Reproducing Disablement
Despite the availability of advanced assistive technology and an information-age economy that has expanded the realm of jobs disabled persons could readily perform, body politics under standard business practice are still a part of the employment struggle of disabled persons. Economic discrimination—the structural mechanisms that permit and even encourage a systemic discrimination against disabled workers—has not been fully confronted.
Productive labor under capitalism refers to the production of surplus value near or above the prevailing rate of exploitation. Because the material basis of capitalist accumulation is the mining of surplus labor from the workforce, the owners and managers of the businesses necessarily have to discriminate against those workers whose impairments add to the cost of production. Expenses to accommodate disabled persons in the workplace will be resisted as an addition to the fixed capital portion of constant capital. In effect, the prevailing rate of exploitation determines who is disabled and who is not. […]
Any executive knows that employer-capitalists will resist any extraordinary cost of doing business. For example, a leading economist in the Law and Economics movement, Richard Epstein, states that the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are a “disguised subsidy” and that “successful enforcement under the guise of “reasonable accommodation” necessarily impedes the operation and efficiency of firms.”11 […]
Disabled workers face inherent economic discrimination within the capitalist system, stemming from employers’ expectations of encountering additional nonstandard production costs when hiring or retaining a nonstandard (disabled) worker as opposed to a standard (non-disabled) worker with no need for accommodation, interpreters, environmental modifications, liability insurance, maximum health care coverage (inclusive of attendant services), or even health care coverage at all.12
The category of “disabled” as applied to the labor market is a social creation; business practices determine who has a job and who does not. An employee who is too costly due to a significant impairment will not likely become (or remain) an employee.13 Census data tends to support this view. For working-age persons with no disability, the likelihood of having a job is 82.1 percent.14 For people with a non-severe disability, the rate is 76.9 percent; the rate drops to 26.1 percent for those with a significant disability.15 According to the 2001 National Organization on Disability/Harris Survey, employment rates are 19 percent for those with a severe disability, 51 percent for those moderately disabled, and 32 percent for those with any disability.
Data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) suggests a strong relationship between disability onset and employer firings. The most prevalent cause of complaints disabled workers file with the EEOC are over involuntary termination of employment upon disablement.16 Of the 171,669 employment discrimination charges filed with the EEOC for the period of July 26, 1992, through February 28, 1998, 53.7 percent involve the issue of discharge, and another 32.1 percent involve the failure to provide reasonable accommodation.17 The ADA itself explicitly states that employers are not required to provide an accommodation if it would impose an “undue hardship” on the business. The disabled person’s theoretical right to an accommodation is really no right at all; it is dependent upon the employer’s calculus.
Managers and owners, in general, have only tolerated the use of disabled workers when they could save on the variable portion of cost of production, resulting in lower wages for workers. The sheltered workshop is the prototype for justifying below-minimum wages for disabled people. […] According to the Washington Post, 6,300 such US workshops employ more than 391,000 disabled workers, some paying 20 percent to 30 percent of the minimum wage: as little as $3.26 an hour and $11 per week.18
Census Bureau findings substantiate that disabled workers’ pay in the regular labor market also falls to the low end of the wage scale. […] Over a lifetime, the disparity in earnings represents tens of thousands of dollars lost to disabled workers (and pocketed by business).
In liberal capitalist economies, redistributionist laws like the ADA are necessarily in tension with business class interests, which resist such cost-shifting burdens. Representatives of small and medium businesses, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Banking Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business, opposed the ADA. […]
Marxian political economy tells us that disability oppression has less to do with prejudicial attitudes than with an accountant’s calculation of the present cost of production versus the potential benefits to the future rate of exploitation. Discrimination can be ameliorated, but not eliminated, by changing attitudes. Only a system of material production that takes into account the human consequences of its development can eliminate discrimination against disabled persons. […]
Class Interests Regulating the Labor Supply in Disability Policy
It is often claimed that disabled persons are invisible, disregarded by mainstream society, and irrelevant to the workings of society. This analysis has attempted to explain that the “unemployables” have been deliberately shut out of the labor force due to a capitalist economy that so far has dictated their exclusion by measure of economic calculations that favor the business class. It further posits that disabled persons are further oppressed in capitalist societies by having been purposely shifted onto social welfare or segregated into institutions for similar reasons—to keep workers who could not be profitably employed out of the mainstream workforce but also to exert social control over the entire labor supply.
Marx explains that capitalism is a system of “forced labor—no matter how much it may seem to result from free contractual agreement.”19 It is coercion because capitalists own the means of production and laborers do not. Without ownership of factories and other means of production, workers lack their own access to the means of making a livelihood. By this very fact, workers are compelled to sell their labor to capitalists for a wage because the alternative is homelessness or starvation or both. Deborah Stone in The Disabled State convincingly argues that in order to restructure the workforce for the demands of early capitalist production, it was first necessary to eradicate all viable alternatives to wage labor for the mass population.
Labor is a resource to be manipulated like capital and land. Stone writes, “The disability concept was essential to the development of an exploitable workforce in early capitalism and remains indispensable as an instrument of the state in controlling labor supply.”20
Regulating the composition of the labor force through social policy became key to ensuring an ongoing exploitable labor supply. Disability became an important boundary category through which persons were allocated to either the work-based or needs-based system of distribution. In the United States, disability came to be defined explicitly in relation to the labor market. For instance, in some workers’ compensation statutes, a laborer’s body is rated by impairment according to its functioning parts.21 In Social Security law, disabled means medically unable to engage in work activity.22
Our institutions (particularly medical and social welfare institutions) have historically held disablement to be an individual problem, not the result of economic or social forces.23 They have equated disability with physiological, anatomical, or mental “defects” and hegemonically held these conditions responsible for the disabled person’s lack of full participation in the economic life of our society. This approach presumed a biological inferiority of disabled persons.24 Pathologizing characteristics such as blindness, deafness, and physical and mental impairments that have naturally appeared in the human race throughout history became a means of social control that has relegated disabled persons to isolation and exclusion from society.25 By placing the focus on curing the so-called abnormality and segregating the incurables into the administrative category of disabled, medicine bolstered the capitalist business interest to shove less exploitable workers with impairments out of the workforce.
This exclusion was rationalized by Social Darwinists, who used biology to argue that heredity (race and disability status) prevailed over the class and economic issues raised by Marx and others. Just as the inferior weren’t meant to survive in nature, they weren’t meant to survive in a competitive society. For nineteenth-century tycoons, Social Darwinism proved a marvelous rationale for leaving the surplus population to die in poverty. Capitalism set up production dynamics that devalued less exploitable or non-exploitable bodies, and Social Darwinism theorized their disposability. If it was natural that disabled persons were not to survive, then the capitalist class was off the hook to design a more equitable economic system—one that would accommodate the body that did not conform to the standard worker body driven to labor for owning-class profit.
Social analysts describe the disability needs-based system as a privilege because “as an administrative category, it carries with it permission to be exempt from the work-based system.”26 In conservative terms, disability can be described as “an essential part of the moral economy.”27 In the public debate over redistribution of societal resources, public assistance is viewed as legitimate for those deemed unable to work, but the disabled individuals on public benefits under US capitalism do not have any objective right to a decent standard of living, even with privileged status, nor is the definition of disability etched in stone. As Stone pointed out, the definition of disability is flexible; the state (which evaluates disability status) controls the labor supply by expanding or contracting the numbers of persons who qualify as disabled, often for political and economic reasons.28
Neither privilege nor morality theories adequately describe the function of the needs-based system. A political economy analyst would ask what role do public disability benefits play to further the machinations of production and wealth accumulation?
The vast majority of those on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), the deserving workers involuntarily severed from their wages, are not privileged. They are financially oppressed by less than adequate aid. Public disability benefits hover at what is determined an official poverty level. In 2000, the Department of Health and Human Services set the poverty threshold for one at $8,350. Because $759 was the average per month benefit that a disabled worker received from SSDI and $373 was the average federal income for the needs-based Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the annual income of more than 10 million disabled persons on these programs was between $4,000 and $10,000 that year. The extremely low SSI benefit was set up for those with no work history or not enough quarters of work to qualify for SSDI: the least valued disabled members of society.
It would not accurately describe the depth of poverty faced by those on disability benefits, however, without explaining that the current system of measuring poverty dates back to the 1960s. Government has never adjusted the equation to take into account the sharp rise in housing, medical care, and childcare costs of the following decades that have altered the average household’s economic picture. The Urban Institute concluded that in order to be comparable to the original threshold, the poverty level would have to be at least 50 percent higher than the current official standard. If basic needs were refigured to the modern market, almost a quarter of the American people would be deemed to be living in poverty.29
Most important, public policy that equates disablement with poverty means that becoming disabled (a nonworker) translates into a life of financial hardship, whether one has public insurance or not, and generates a very realistic fear in workers of becoming disabled. At base, the inadequate safety net is a product of the owning class’s fear of losing control of the means of production. The all-encompassing value placed on work is necessary to produce wealth. The American work ethic is a mechanism of social control that ensures capitalists of a reliable workforce for making profits. If workers were provided with a federal social safety net that adequately protected them through unemployment, sickness, disability, and old age, then business would have less control over the workforce because labor would gain a stronger position from which to negotiate their conditions of employment, such as fair wages and safe working conditions. American business retains its power over the working class through a fear of destitution that would be weakened if the safety net were to actually become safe. This, in turn, causes oppression for the less valued nonworking disabled members of our society; those who do not provide a body to support profit making (for whatever reason) are relegated to economic hardship or institutionalized to shore up the capitalist system.30 Nursing homes, for instance, have commodified disabled bodies so that the least productive can be made of use to the economic order.
A materialist analysis suggests that capitalism has created a powerful class of persons dependent upon the productive labor of some and the exclusion of others. Business owners and Wall Street investors rely on the preservation of the status quo labor system (not having to absorb the nonstandard costs disabled workers represent in the current mode of production or the reserve army of unemployed). […] The US work-based/needs-based system is a socially legitimized means by which business and investors can economically discriminate and “morally” shift the cost of disabled workers onto poverty-based government benefit programs rather than be required to hire or retain the unemployables as members of the mainstream workforce.
Consequently, disabled individuals currently not in the workforce collecting SSDI or SSI who could work with an accommodation are not tallied into employers’ cost of doing business. Employers do not pay direct premiums for Social Security disability programs. (The cost of direct government and private payments to support disabled persons of employable age who do not have a job is estimated to be $232 billion annually). Instead, disabled persons have no right to a job. Civil rights laws do not intervene in the labor market to mandate employment of disabled persons (not even to adhere to affirmative action, much less to a quota system like Germany’s); rather, these costs are shifted onto the shoulders of the working class and the low middle class who pay the majority of Social Security taxes while business and our economic system is absolved of responsibility. This analysis is not suggesting that benefits be dissolved; employment discrimination is related to reliance on public aid because those who experience labor market discrimination are also more likely to need public assistance.31 It does suggest that capitalism is a system that forces non-disabled persons into the labor market but also just as forcefully coerces many disabled persons out. Oppression occurs in either case.
Lingering Questions
A Marxian analysis demonstrates that the employment predicament of disabled persons is produced by the economic and social forces of capitalism. The mode of production is key to explaining the organization of society, to preserving existing class relations of production. It is neither arbitrary nor irrational that disabled persons have been excluded from education, transportation, and other social spheres. Rather, it is logical that such a state of affairs would exist as long as disabled persons have little value as workers to the capitalist class.
The civil rights model holds that disabled persons need the protections afforded by the ADA to help shrink the pervasive gaps that still exist between them and non-disabled Americans. This equal opportunity approach, however, assumes that the employment needs of disabled people can be solved under our present economic system. […] The economy dictates that large numbers of the disabled population will be left jobless or working at subminimum wages regardless of disability civil rights laws. Is this acceptable? Is the disability rights movement’s goal only to see that some, not even all, disabled persons are “free” to be boldly exploited like everyone else?
Liberalism presumes a free, rational, autonomous human can exist under capitalism, but oppression is a permanent factor of any class-based economic system. Marx saw capitalism as a block to workers’ autonomy. Economic change, he deemed, was necessary for the full realization of each person’s human potential. Marx’s final goal, however, was not economic revolution, but human change.
Erich Fromm points out that “the goal of [Marx’s] atheistic radical humanism was the salvation of man, his self-actualization, the overcoming of the craving for having and consumption, his freedom and independence, and his love for others.”32 Marx believed that individual autonomy is interwoven with and dependent upon social relations. Labor power is something that must be created and controlled in a manner appropriate to the maintenance of the capitalist social relation. Exploitation is a common feature of all modes of production that are split into classes. Alienation is a consequence of the mercantilization of human life as a whole by the capitalist relations of production. Wage labor is the transformation of human energy into a commodity like any other piece of matter. So, if the masses were to have freedom and autonomy, Marx believed there must be a transformation of alienated, meaningless labor into productive, free labor, not simply employment or employment at higher wages by a private or state capitalism.
In our society, humane concerns are subsumed by the market’s tyranny, the inversion or camera obscura of what is needed to foster an inclusive, cooperative, and healthy society. Questions that need to be brought to the forefront might include the following: What is the purpose of an economy—to support market-driven profits or to sustain social bonds and encourage human participation? Is it acceptable to reduce the productive activities of persons to commodity wage labor? Is the capacity to produce for profit an acceptable measure of human worth? Is it defensible to hold in contempt bodies that do not produce the way the capitalist class demands, leaving disabled persons to struggle on low wages or meager benefit checks or to be institutionalized? How can the realm of work be reorganized to provide accommodations for all, and how can all members of society be embraced and rewarded whether they work or not?
The disability rights/independent living liberation struggle provides a strong motive for historical change. There is an opportunity to reconceptualize disability and to eliminate disabled peoples’ oppression. We must contest the biological rationale for the exclusion of disabled persons from the realm of work and replace it with a materialistic rationale calling for drastically and justly altering the political economy.
The fundamental questions of class power raised by Marx must be addressed politically if the long-term goal of a society of equals, where “from each according to their [dis]ability, to each according to their need”33 is to materialize.