When considering the politics of disability under capitalism, it is important to understand the economic aspects of the relationship between people’s disability and the means of production. Or, how people with disability interact with society, as producers and consumers, and are valued (or not).
The medical model of disability normalises the able-bodied, fit, healthy, white male heterosexual adult as the ideal. By definition, people with disability are not as able, do not contribute (as much) to the economic wealth of capital and, in many cases, need support to participate in society.
The social model of disability is person-centred and places responsibility for disability at the feet of capital and the state.
It says disability is caused by the way society is organised, rather than a person’s impairment or difference. When barriers are removed, people with disabilities can be independent and equal.
Pre-capitalist societies
Mutthi Mutthi woman Mary Pappin Junior discovered fossilised footprints in the Mungo National Park in 2003. The tracks, estimated to date back 20,000 years, are the oldest found in Australia.
They show footprints of three hunters running across the clayplan chasing a kangaroo. There is a fourth set of tracks left by a one-legged man running, possibly without the use of a stick or crutch.
This suggests that, at least in pre-class Aboriginal society, people with even significant impediments were integrated into community life and were expected, and permitted, to participate in and contribute to society.
The footprints appear to provide evidence that pre-class society did not necessarily discriminate against those with significant impediments.
From a Marxist point of view, this discovery helps our understanding that the goal of history (a communist society) is to return to the kind of social equality experienced during pre-class society, but at a higher level.
Rise of capitalism
With the rise of capitalism, the productive class (those who work and produce value) was “liberated” from the means of production. Enclosures and legislation separated peasants from their means of subsistence, physically and geographically, leading to mass migration to cities.
The new working class was forced to sell its labour power to live. However, the factory system — and later industrial capitalism — required intense concentration, dexterity and repetitive movement.
Long hours, fine detail and intense concentration are not necessarily skills possessed by all people with disability. So, they were largely excluded from the capitalist mode of production, including those injured by the system itself. If they did find work, it was generally transitory, poorly paid and very insecure.
The rise of capitalism led to a breakdown of social bonds and with it the privatisation of responsibility for disability within the family (women) or, at the extremes, institutionalisation and segregation.
Some social gains were eventually won. The Invalid Pension (later the Disability Support Pension, DSP) was introduced in Australia in 1908 to support critically injured workers unable to provide for their families. Its scope was later broadened to provide some level of guaranteed economic support to others with disability.
War, crisis and reaction
The early 20th century began a period of war, economic crisis and reaction. The settlement of World War I lay the foundations of a significant economic crisis (the Great Depression). In western Europe, this led to the rise of fascism.
The Nazi regime in Germany introduced systematic discrimination against people with disability, who were dehumanised and dismissed as “useless eaters” or “oxygen thieves”, in a way reminiscent of the dehumanisation of Jewish people as “rats”.
Soon after the Nazi’s ascension in 1933, “mercy” killings by doctors of children with disability began to take place. Twinned with segregation came confinement into institutions.
However, institutionalisation of people with disability came to be seen as a burden on the state.
Beginning in 1939, the “solution” identified by the Nazis was the systematic murder of institutionalised people with disability. This was known as Aktion 41 and included the development of techniques later used in the death camps against Jews and others.
Fascism is an extreme version of capitalism, which the bourgeoisie is very reluctant to utilise except in periods of extreme crisis.
Nonetheless, it is a capitalist response to crisis — one that caused the death of millions during the Holocaust. While not characteristic of “democratic” capitalism, it is a historical fact that those dedicated to making a better world must not forget.
Civil rights and disability
From the late 1960s, foment around the Vietnam War and social movements, including of people with disability, began to develop.
In Australia, Disabled People’s Action Forum members blockaded a Medibank claims office in 1978, with placards that read: “We don’t need a stairway to paradise; We want ramps to independence.”
Pressure for the extension of civil rights to people with disability continued to grow, with the United Nations declaring 1981 the International Year of Disabled Persons. On November 10, that year, 300 people with intellectual disabilities and their supporters rallied outside NSW Parliament to demand control over their housing and living conditions.
The Paul Keating Labor government passed the federal Disability Discrimination Act in 1992. However, more than 30 years after this formal acknowledgement of the rights of people with disability, the gains have been limited and remain tenuous.
People with disability are significantly underrepresented in the workforce. Just over 2 million people with disability are of workforce age (15-64), according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). But around 1 million of those are not in the workforce.
The DSP is an important provision for people with disability who are unable to work (or at least to work full-time). It is a guaranteed income (albeit at poverty level) that proves some level of financial independence.
But now that people with disability have the right to work, we also have the “right” to be excluded from income support. Despite there being more than 1 million working-age people with disability who are not in the workforce, only 649,000 are on the DSP.
The drive to remove people with disability from the DSP (in many cases forcing them to live on the much lower Job Search Payment) is a central part of the neoliberal drive to reduce social subsidies, privatise the cost of support and force responsibility onto the family.
In more ways than one, people with disability are the new “dole bludgers” — suspected of receiving social support without good reason and viewed as a drain on the public purse.
NDIS: Commodifying the disabled body
The Julia Gillard Labor government legislated the National Disability Insurance Scheme NDIS) in 2013.
From the beginning, NDIS was a privatisation exercise. It gives huge government subsidies to private businesses to provide support for (some) people with disability.
NDIS has led to large corporations dominating the provision of services in metropolitan centres, while people with disability struggle to find support in rural and regional areas.
Increasingly, people with disability are supported only where it is profitable to do so.
However, there are aspects of NDIS that socialists should defend, such as its lack of means testing.
Within NDIS, there are elements of self-determination for people with disability (including giving participants the limited right to decide who they want to support them and in what way).
We should defend the democratic aspects of NDIS, with its focus on social inclusion and independent aspiration (“goals”). People with disability have a wide range of wants, needs and desires. At its best, NDIS provides assistance to achieve at least some of these.
However, NDIS is under attack from the Anthony Albanese Labor government. We need to oppose “robo-planning”, which would reduce funded support to a number generated by a formula rather than individual needs, and any plan to introduce copayments.
We should also oppose cuts to NDIS funding and to the range of people considered disabled enough to receive it.
For the majority of us, only our labour power separates us from penury. For people with disability, many of whom are not able to work — at least not for a living wage — the situation can be worse.
Socialists understand that only a coalition of the oppressed has the social power to overturn the rule of the minority and establish a society based on social equality.
To bring about that change, such a coalition must represent the aspirations and needs of all oppressed people, including people with disability.
[Abridged from links.org.au. This article is based on Graham Matthew’s presentation to Ecosocialism 2024. Matthews is a disability rights activist, a founding member of Socialist Alliance and a regular contributor to Green Left.]