Why are disabled people oppressed?

Disabled people protest for access to benefits to enable them additional costs (Pic: Wikimedia commons)

The dominant idea of disability is negative. For most people, disability refers to a limitation, in either choices, decisions, freedoms or ability.

Under capitalism, disability is seen as an ­individualised and ­medicalised issue and one in which it is the disabled person’s responsibility to resolve. This is known as the ­medical model.

This view of disabled people has a significant impact. In Britain, disabled people are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as non-disabled people.

And the Labour government plans to cut back essential benefits for disabled people. Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall recently said that some people on benefits are “taking the mickey”.

Disabled activists often make a distinction between impairment—the ­perceived absence or limitation of ­function in the way the body, mind or senses work—and ­disability. Disability is the oppression faced by people with impairments in an inaccessible society.

This is the social model of disability. It says that is not the absence of legs or eyes or minds that don’t work well, that mean you are unemployed or treated badly—it’s the way society is ­organised. Capitalist society marginalises or excludes people with impairments.

Impairment is the individual and private, whereas disability is the social and public ­experience of those with ­impairments. These two concepts are often conflated but they should be seen as distinct.

There is nothing natural about disability oppression. But where does the oppression of disabled people arise?

For thousands of years the lives of most of the world’s population were dictated by the ­seasons.

Families lived and worked on the land as large extended groups, enabling networks of ­support for child-rearing and care for the elderly. For most people, there was no concept of ­literacy or ­intellectual ability.

Every family member helped in various roles. While ­someone with an impairment might work differently to others, they would still be able to contribute.

But the growth of markets and towns led to new patterns and systems of work. Work had been task-oriented—people kept working until the job was done and took regular breaks. But work became increasingly regulated, with people expected to keep time.

However, most peasants, and workers in handicraft ­industries based in their own homes, retained a large degree of ­control over their work.

Along with the extended nature of the family, this allowed people with ­impairments to continue ­participating in daily economic life.

The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century transformed people’s lives and was fundamental to the ­emergence of disability. Factory towns destroyed old extended family structures. The factory brought a regimented, complex and timed division of labour, measured in minutes instead of seasons, weeks or days.

Ability to work was ­determined by the ­requirements of machinery—those with ­various impairments, without community or family support, now found themselves “unfit” for factory work.

The 18th and 19th ­centuries brought new institutions—workhouses and special schools. Now people with ­impairments were increasingly separated from society, living isolated at home with their families or warehoused in new asylums. They would have been a permanent part of the system if it weren’t for a series of struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries.

A wave of social ­movements emerged in the 1960s. They included the Civil Rights ­movement in the United States, the ­Women’s Liberation movement, ­movements for LGBT+ rights and the anti-war ­movement in relation to Vietnam.

At this time, radical ideas started to ­challenge the ­dominant view of disabled people. In 1976 there was a ­meeting between the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (Upias), a radical socialist group and the Disability Alliance—a reformist organisation ­working as a coalition of ­disability groups.

The meeting aimed at forming an understanding on the meaning and causes of disability.

Upias’s ­perspective on ­disability was that the ­material conditions disabled people face, such as poverty and isolation, were symptoms rather than the cause of their oppression.

In a 1976 pamphlet it said, “Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are ­unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society”.

Mike Oliver built on this by developing the social model of disability. Oliver’s social model outlined the way that the transition from feudal societies to industrial c­apitalism led to the ­emergence of disability in society.

Oliver and others would argue that the change in the way that work was ­organised disadvantaged people with impairments and caused disability to arise.

It follows that the sol­ution is to argue for rights and ­adjustments for ­disabled people in the w­orkplace to remove the oppression disabled people face.

There was real value in this approach to reform of the world of work. It’s right that ­socialists and Marxists argue for the rights for disabled people, alongside other oppressed groups.

But the ­oppression of ­disabled ­people is more deeply rooted in ­capitalism and the ways in which production changed ­following the Industrial Revolution. It cannot simply be reformed out of existence.

Author and activist Roddy Slorach outlines a Marxist ­understanding of the ­oppression of disabled people. His ­analysis considers how capitalism and the Industrial Revolution robbed people of their ability to control the way they work. Rather than work ­happening in the home, workers have to sell their labour power to a ­capitalist—and so their labour power itself becomes a commodity.

Competition arises between workers in order to sell their labour. It wasn’t just ­factories or institutions, or even the Industrial Revolution itself, that systematically ­marginalised disabled people—it was the ­capitalist mode of production.

To prospective employers, the labour power of ­someone with an ­impairment is more expensive than those without one. It requires the bosses to make adjustments to the workplace and even the work itself.

The pressure is on the ­disabled worker to prove that they will be able to complete work as quickly and efficiently as someone ­without an impairment.

These changes to working practices and adjustments are more expensive, so the labour power of a worker with an impairment becomes more expensive for the bosses.

The labour power of a worker with an impairment also becomes more expensive to reproduce. It costs more money to live as a disabled person due to the additional expenses of medications and treatments, personal support, equipment and travel.

And governments ­increasingly expect individual disabled people to carry those additional financial burdens­.

With the advent of industrial capitalism also came the concept of “normality”. Human beings were ­categorised and divided. Included in this was a ­concept of “intelligence”.

The term “normal” only entered use in the 19th c­entury, alongside the rise in theories of eugenics. Eugenicists believed that “social ills”—such as c­riminality, alcoholism, poverty and mental illness—stemmed from hereditary factors. Society could be improved by ­encouraging some or preventing others from reproducing.

Eugenics provided the basis for the compulsory ­sterilisation programme the Nazis ­implemented. It was also behind the murder of over 70,000 disabled people in the Aktion T4 state-sponsored euthanasia ­programme in the early 1940s.

Important steps forward for disabled people have been won, for example ­protections in the 2010 Equality Act. Changes in working lives including the growth in service sector jobs mean that some disabled people can find accessible work and they are more visible in society.

But the reality for most ­disabled people is still o­ppression, marginalisation, and stigma. So while we can argue for rights we also need to locate disability ­oppression at the heart of capitalist production.

Revolutionary socialists argue that nobody’s life is worth less because capitalism sees them as less profitable. We should resist all forms of oppression and support every fightback that emerges.

But liberation is located in working class unity and r­esistance. It is the working class that can dismantle the very structures that cause the oppression of disabled people.

Karl Marx wrote “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. This is a vision for how our value in society can be viewed in terms of socially meaningful labour, planned and controlled by workers themselves.

It is one where people can develop true individuality, where the genuine diversity that is part of human existence is seen as a true asset to us all.