Very Capitalist Condition

A History and Politics of Disability

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• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781910885031
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Slorach shows how capitalism created disability by turning our minds and bodies into commodities to be priced and traded. Those who don't fit are excluded and identified as a problem. This book examines the origins and development of disability, looking at disability movements in different parts of the world and the hidden history of groups such as disabled war veterans, deaf people and those in mental distress. It argues that Marxism helps provide an understanding of the politics and nature of disability and offers a vision of a better world for all.

1.

Introduction

Disability in contemporary society is a complex and widely misunderstood issue. Two contradictory trends in recent years illustrate this well.

The first global report on disability, published by the World Health Organisation in 2011, identified 1 billion disabled people— 15 percent of the global population. As a proportion of the total, this figure is expected to continue rising for the foreseeable future. Since its adoption in December 2006, over 150 countries have ratified the United Nations (UN) Convention on Rights for People with Disabilities. Thanks largely to pressure from the world’s most influential disability movements, Britain and the US adopted antidiscrimination laws championed by the UN as models of best practice. Many other states have adopted similar legislation, with others likely to follow in the near future. As an international political issue, the profile of disability rights has in many respects never been higher.

Another side to disability, however, is better known to many more people. Today, the media and governments in Britain and the US routinely allege fraud by benefit “scroungers” or “fakers” to justify drastic cuts in disability-related benefits and services. In a climate of escalating austerity and protracted economic crisis, this pattern is increasingly being emulated elsewhere. In Britain, definitions have been altered to reduce the number of those deemed to be “genuinely disabled”, and therefore (supposedly) deserving of support. The drastic nature of these “welfare reforms” is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, in the summer of 2015, disabled activists succeeded in persuading the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to investigate alleged violations of disabled people’s human rights in the UK; the findings of the confidential investigation are due to be published in 2017. Another aspect of this more negative side to disability is the remarkable fact that the vast majority of those still officially classified as disabled neither disclose this to employers nor identify as such to anyone else.

What explains these contradictory trends? What, indeed, is disability in the first place? This book sets out to answer these questions by examining the social and historical roots of the nature of disability discrimination.

Disability was first identified as a particular form of discrimination at the end of the 19th century. The modern disability movement, however, only emerged in the decades after the Second World War. Referred to by one author as “the last civil rights movement”,¹ disability activism only began to peak after others, such as those of women, black people and gays and lesbians had already passed into decline. In Britain the disability movement has recently revived after an absence of almost 20 years in response to government cuts in disability-related benefits and services.

Most writing about disability falls into one of three categories. First, there are personal stories, mainly of “overcoming adversity” or the “tragedy” of living with impairment. Although tending to reinforce stereotypical notions of heroic “superhumans”, these may often provide important insights into the lives of individual disabled people. Second, there are accounts by and for health care or social service professionals. Finally, most discussion in the academic discipline of Disability Studies takes place in expensive specialist journals, the language of which is often impenetrable and the content of questionable relevance. The aim of this book is to build on the scattered handful of historical accounts of disability and disabled people, to provide a wider history that is also accessible to a broader audience.

The book locates the emergence of disability in the wider history of class society in general and capitalist society in particular. It takes the view that understanding its development, roots and nature as a particular form of oppression is key to the wider project of human emancipation.

Asking the question “what is disability?” prompts a range of different answers. For most people the term refers to a range of limitations in the mental or physical functioning of individuals—an approach reflected in most of the current disability-related legislation in Britain and elsewhere. The first chapter of this book therefore traces the development of the term and its associated meanings, addressing in addition the related and often thorny question of terminology.

One set of ideas has had more influence among disability activists and those working in the disability field than any other. With its origins in a tiny and obscure group of socialist wheelchair users, and with an avowedly materialist perspective, the social model of disability has been a political and ideological battleground since its development in the 1980s. What does this conception of disability have to say about impairment, or other forms of oppression? Chapter 2 makes a critical defence of the social model, finding the alternatives offered by its many critics deficient in several important respects, most crucially in terms of their relative utility as a vehicle for change. Unlike the social model, however, this account is unequivocal in seeing impairment and disability alike as for the most part social in origin.

Having established a framework within which to discuss disability, the following three chapters discuss its historical development. Recent research has provided further evidence that people with impairments have not always been marginalised or discriminated against. It is clear that social attitudes varied depending on the nature of a given society. Despite the many difficulties inherent in looking back at ancient societies, it is evident that the development of class distinctions had a negative impact on the fortunes of people with impairments. If preclass societies did not exclude or marginalise such people, then this must be possible for an alternative future society.

Although early origins can be found in the late feudal period, the evidence demonstrates it was the rise of industrial capitalism that created disability as a distinct form of oppression. Successive innovations in medicine, science and technology led on the one hand to more disabled people surviving and living more independent lives, while at the same time marginalising them on the grounds that their labour was less productive. The Marxist concepts of alienation and exploitation have been either too crudely applied or completely neglected in existing accounts. They are, however, vital to understanding the nature of disability in contemporary capitalist society.

The drive for profit and the cyclical but chaotic disruption of economic booms and slumps have led to the marginalisation or exclusion of disabled people from the workforce. The most advanced economies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—particularly Germany, Britain and the US—were home to eugenicist movements that saw different physical and mental impairments as evidence of degeneracy and/or imperial decline. Rooted in concepts of racial and genetic superiority, these ideas were taken to their extreme and logical conclusion in Nazi Germany with the mass murder of certain groups of disabled people demonised as an economic burden. Until the evidence of Nazi genocide began to emerge, versions of eugenic ideas were more widely shared, even among some socialists of the period, and have since then reappeared in different forms. Chapter 7 looks at the main principles involved in this issue.

As capitalist production assumes a bigger and more global scale, so the wars it generates have led to ever greater and more widespread destruction. Ironically, such wars have often proved to be drivers of social and economic change. As the First World War ended in revolutions and mass unrest, injured soldiers, particularly in Germany, played a direct role in winning social gains. Chapter 8 looks at the history of disabled war veterans and their relationship to wider social movements.

Chapter 9 looks at the history of disability movements and highlights some lesser-known events involving groups of disabled people, which predate the modern disability movement, and considers other countries where such movements have not developed. Finally, it discusses the disability charities and their constant and contradictory role in the lives of many people.

Disability movements have sometimes excluded certain groups, either because they disagree that they were indeed disabled or for more complex reasons. People experiencing mental health difficulties comprise the largest group of disabled people and also perhaps the most misunderstood. On a global scale, depression alone is projected to become the single biggest cause of impairment by 2030.² Of all areas of disability, mental health arouses the greatest fear, ignorance and discrimination—including among other disabled people. Chapter 10 argues that mental distress is best understood as a form of disability and therefore also as a social problem demanding a social solution.

Another social group has historically remained separate from the disability movement, in large part because their representatives have not considered themselves to be disabled. Many deaf people see themselves instead as a linguistic minority with a distinct history and culture. Chapter 11 discusses this disputed area along with the varying fortunes of sign language. Part of the following chapter develops this debate on the nature and perceptions of impairment and disability, this time in relation to learning difficulties and neurodiversity. This chapter also goes on to tackle perhaps the most controversial issues in the book—disability hate crime and assisted suicide. The latter in particular raises further and more complex issues of disability rights in contemporary society.

This brings us to the nature and place of disability discrimination in contemporary capitalist society. Far from the 21st century signalling new progress for humanity, global austerity, wars and environmental and climate chaos threaten to thrust us dramatically backwards. Chapter 13 brings together the previous strands discussed to analyse the particularities of disability as a form of oppression, examining in addition the reasons for the greater prominence of disability as a political issue in recent years.

The final chapter asks whether science is an ally or enemy of progress. It then goes on to address the key question implicit throughout the book: is it possible to build a genuinely inclusive society for the many disabled people who work and the many others who do not? Could a future society completely abolish disability as a form of discrimination?

While considerable effort has been made to provide a more global analysis, the bulk of the literature, research and statistical material currently available is from US or UK sources. This reflects the fact that these are respectively the most powerful and oldest of the advanced capitalist nation states, where disability movements have also had the greatest influence or had the greatest influence on the introduction and development of relevant legislation and services. The UK is also, of course, where both the social model of disability and the academic discipline of Disability Studies first developed.

Finally, as the title implies, this book is written from a Marxist perspective. The scale and severity of the current economic crisis have helped prompt renewed interest in such ideas. The popular view remains, however, that such an approach offers little to an understanding of social oppression. I hope this account demonstrates that, on the contrary, only Marxism offers the necessary tools to explain the roots and nature of disability as a form of discrimination, as well as offering a vision as to how it can be overcome.

2.

What is disability? Definitions and terminology

For most people familiar with the term, disability refers in Western societies to limitations in an individual’s mental or physical functions. Disabled people themselves, however, disagree on what exactly disability refers to.

The first area of difficulty concerns impairment itself. The term “disability” applies to people with a diverse range of impairments, the majority of which are invisible to others. Second, many people who meet the legal definition of disability do not define themselves as disabled, although others with an identical impairment may well do so. A third complication is that some impairments fluctuate or become progressively more incapacitating while others which are more constant in their effects vary in their levels of severity.

There are nevertheless compelling political reasons for preferring particular terms—for instance, “disabled person” or “person with a disability” rather than older terms such as “handicapped” or (particularly in the US) “retarded”. It is largely due to campaigns by disabled people and their supporters that both of the latter came to be seen as offensive and associated with helplessness or inferior human status. This led UK charity The Spastics Society, for example, to change its name to Scope in 1995.

Any serious discussion of the history and politics of disability requires as a starting point a clear and consistent approach to definitions and terminology. The use of particular terms can advance or undermine understanding, depending on the specific historical context. Those who believe disability has always existed, for example, apply the term uncritically to societies and historical periods where the term or concept was unknown. This approach is fundamentally mistaken. Even today, the majority of the world’s population living in the Global South³ may refer to blind or “slow” people or those with walking difficulties, but have no general term equivalent to “disability” or “disabled people” in their language or culture.⁴

The most important issue concerning definitions is the way in which modern society constantly confuses or conflates the distinct concepts of impairment and disability, often treating them as interchangeable terms. In order to fully address this we need to begin by asking how disability is defined in the relevant existing legislation.

Official definitions of disability

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 states: “The term ‘disability’ means, with respect to an individual: (a) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of an individual; (b) a record of such an impairment; or (c) being regarded as having such an impairment”.⁵ The UK Equality Act (2010) takes a slightly different approach, defining disability as “a long-term impairment which has a significant adverse effect on his/her ability to carry out day-to-day functions.” Both legal definitions embody a contradiction; disability is defined in individual and medical terms—in other words as the property of the individual—but is simultaneously treated as equivalent to other forms of discrimination.

This confusion over terminology is not new. In 2006 an article in the medical journal The Lancet attempted to grapple with an earlier definition:

The current draft of the UN Convention does not define disability but rather people with disabilities. Unfortunately, this definition fails to acknowledge that disability is a central health issue that plays out in all area...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What Is disability? Definitions and terminology
• 3 The social model and its critics
• 4 It wasn’t always so
• 5 Late feudalism and the origins of disability
• 6 The rise of disability
• 7 From eugenics to Nazi genocide
• 8 War and disabled veterans
• 9 Politics and movements
• 10 Mental distress—not all in the mind
• 11 Deafness and sign language
• 12 Some controversies
• 13 Capitalism and disability today
• 14 From rights to revolution
• Endnotes
• Index