Disability and Postsocialism

Teodor Mladenov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315306810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the decades following the collapse of state socialism at the end of 1980s, disabled people in Central and Eastern Europe endured economic marginalisation, cultural devaluation and political disempowerment. Some of the mechanisms producing these injustices were inherited from state socialism, while others emerged with postsocialist neoliberalisation.

State socialism promised social security guaranteed by the public, and postsocialist neoliberalisation promised independent living underpinned by the market. This book argues that both promises failed as far as disabled people were concerned, drawing on a wide range of scholarly reports and analyses, policy documents, legislation, and historical accounts, as well as on disability studies and social justice theory. Besides differences, the book also illuminates continuities between state socialism and postsocialist capitalism, providing on this basis a more general and historically grounded critique of contemporary neoliberalisation and its impact on individual and collective life.

The book will appeal to anyone interested in disability studies and postsocialism, as well as social policy, social movements and critical theory. It will also be of interest to professionals involved in disability-related service provision, as well as to disability activists and policy makers.

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1 Disability and maldistribution

The heyday of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century brought about systematic impoverishment and marginalisation of disabled people. Mechanised, factory-based production required standard workers, thus excluding people with physical or mental differences from wage labour (Oliver and Barnes, 2012: Ch. 3). The profit imperative was mediated by productive technology that did not tolerate deviations from a narrowly defined corporeal norm. Mechanisation called for a specific range of bodily shapes, functions and aptitudes. The rigid requirements it imposed on workers’ physicality, movement, speed of reaction and accuracy of execution informed the approach of ‘scientific management’ promoted in the early twentieth century by the American engineer Frederick Taylor (1967 [1911]). Scientific management sought to regulate worker’s bodies and minds in their minutest details in order to enhance the efficiency of production. Those who did not conform got materially and culturally marginalised:

as work became more rationalized, requiring precise mechanical movements of the body repeated in quicker succession, impaired persons – deaf, blind, mentally impaired, those with mobility difficulties – were seen as less ‘fit’ to do the tasks required of factory workers. (Russell, 2001: 89)

Industrialisation generated urbanisation, ‘a vast displacement of the population from rural to urban areas where they were forced to sell their labour in the textile factories, cotton mills and mines of the growing cities and towns’ (Soldatic and Meekosha, 2012: 199). The displacement of urbanisation dismantled old family- and community-based mechanisms of subsistence, social integration and support. This had a negative impact on many groups, but particularly on disabled people. Oliver and Barnes (2012: 61) have pointed out that ‘what might be ignored or tolerated in the slower and more flexible pattern of agricultural or domestic labour became a source of friction and lost income, if not a threat to survival, within the new industrial system’. The increasing pressure to engage in industrial production separated ‘work’ from ‘home’, making home-based care more difficult at a time when the demand for care was rising (Ignatieff, 1983). The typical response to such a demand in Europe since the early nineteenth century has been placement in residential institutions (Mansell et al., 2007: 1), although institutionalisation has a longer history. Foucault (2006) famously traced it to what he called the ‘Great Confinement’ of the ‘mad’ and other outcasts in the workhouses that started to emerge in Europe over the course of the seventeenth century. Another classical study of institutionalisation, Goffman’s (1974) Asylums, systematises the characteristics of what Goffman referred to as ‘total institutions’, including ubiquitous regulation of everyday life and depersonalisation of those confined to such establishments.

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Capitalist industrialisation enhanced productivity immensely, but at considerable social costs (Titmuss, 1974: 78). People with impairments were among the worst affected, while their number significantly increased due to industrial accidents (the study of the socioeconomic production of impairments as a function of the capitalist system has been pioneered by Abberley, 1987). The human misery brought about by industrialisation was mitigated and managed through the development of the welfare state. Foucault’s (2006) and Goffman’s (1974) classics could be read as critiques of the capitalist welfare state whose rise and expansion in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries modernised the workhouse without abolishing it:

Writing at the zenith of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, [Foucault] taught us to see the dark underside of even its most vaunted achievements. Viewed through his eyes, social services became disciplinary apparatuses, humanist reforms became panoptical surveillance regimes, public health measures became deployments of biopower, and therapeutic practices became vehicles of subjection. (Fraser, 2003: 160)

The Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) embarked on developing their own welfare systems in the 1920s and the 1940s respectively. Some scholars have highlighted the competition between the capitalist and the state socialist regimes during the Cold War as a key factor for the blossoming of the welfare state on both sides in the mid-twentieth century (Obinger and Schmitt, 2011). Another important factor was industrialisation – in both capitalist and state socialist countries, the welfare state was needed in order to address the adverse effects of industrialisation through enhanced public spending and social programmes. Such measures had a double function – to secure the social reproduction of labour power and to provide the regime with legitimacy (Grover and Soldatic, 2013: 224–225). In the capitalist West, the welfare state, while contradicting the laissez faire principles of classical liberalism, was nevertheless indispensable for alleviating the contradictions generated by the capitalist relations of production without abolishing these relations (Offe, 1984). Although the welfare systems in CEE were an integral part of the political rationality of the socialist regime, they served a similar system-maintaining function with regard to state socialist structures of power (Rueschemeyer, 1999: 5).

Notwithstanding that it was presented as a radical alternative to capitalism (a claim that has been strongly contested by Marxist scholars such as Tamás [2011], as well as by French Situationists such as Debord [2014]), twentieth-century state socialism did not alleviate the deprivation and marginalisation of disabled people. The accelerated industrialisation sought by the new regime replicated the negative effects of capitalist industrialisation. Both regimes were extremely productivist and the principles and practices of American Fordism transcended the political-economic and ideological divide (Hartblay, 2014). At the same time, the redistributive measures targeted at disabled people that could potentially offset the social costs of industrialisation and productivism were focused on creating an extensive infrastructure of publicly funded sheltered enterprises and residential institutions for social care. Again, rather than offering an alternative to capitalist disability policy of the time, such measures merely replicated its segregated solutions and paternalist provision.

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The system of segregated social support significantly augmented the power of professionals or welfare ‘experts’ to define disabled people’s problems and their solutions – in other words, to have control over disabled people’s lives. Roulstone and Prideaux’s (2012: 32) critique of the development of British disability policy in the aftermath of the Second World War is equally applicable to state socialist disability policy of that time:

The increase in state-sponsored welfare and the increased professionalisation of the services meant that the newly trained medical professionals and social workers, the so-called ‘experts’, were increasingly making decisions about what a disabled person’s needs were and what support was best for them. Furthermore, this discrimination and patronage contributed to the denial of citizenship rights for disabled people.

Instead of improving disabled people’s parity of participation, segregated provision actually prevented them from getting access to the economic resources needed for interacting with others as peers. Yet besides maldistribution, segregated provision in sheltered workshops and residential institutions has generated misrecognition as well. Ignatieff (1983: 169) has pointed out that the key impact of institutions has consisted in structuring meaning and value in the external realm: ‘“Total institutions” work their effects on society through the mythic and symbolic weight of their walls on the world outside, through the ways, in other words, in which people fantasize, dream and fear the archipelago of confinement.’ Oliver and Barnes (2012: 64) have also suggested that the main damage inflicted on disabled people by institutionalisation has been symbolic. Although the development of capitalism greatly enhanced institutionalisation, the majority of disabled people remained outside the material confines of institutional facilities, experiencing the negative effects of institutionalisation ‘at a distance’, through the stigmatisation of impairment.

Without denying the significance of misrecognition generated by segregated provision, in this chapter I approach it as primarily a matter of maldistribution for three reasons. First, in state socialist countries, both sheltered workshops and residential institutions were publicly funded and as such were an integral part of the state socialist system of redistribution. Indeed, the expenditure for building and maintaining such facilities was considerable (Holland, 2008). Second, segregated facilities were routinely built in remote areas, which provided a way of keeping their existence and the existence of their inhabitants ‘covered up’ (Phillips, 2012: 31). There, institutions became key sources of employment for local people, offering low-wage and low-qualification jobs (Angelova, 2008; Šiška and Beadle-Brown, 2011). The sheer materiality of institutional infrastructure and its embeddedness in local economy has continued to generate inertia and resistance to efforts at deinstitutionalisation decades after the fall of the regime. Third, sheltered workshops and residential institutions have enhanced the economic marginalisation and deprivation not only of their residents and employees but also of disabled people beyond their walls by diverting resources away from the development of alternative services in the community, such as supported employment or personal assistance, that could greatly enhance disabled people’s economic prospects (among other things). In brief, distributive issues plague the input, the workings and the output of segregated provision.

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The reforms of social policy initiated by neoliberals in the 1980s in the West and in the 1990s in CEE (and still unfolding today) came in part as a reaction to the expansion of the welfare state in the preceding several decades. Processes of neoliberalisation could appear emancipatory precisely because they promised to erode the power of welfare professionals that had greatly increased in the preceding period, largely at the expense of the power of welfare recipients. The rise of the postwar welfare state endowed those who provided instruction and care – educators, medical practitioners, social workers – with quasi-feudal authority that was hard to question: ‘the very powers that the technologies of welfare accorded to experts enabled them to establish enclosures within which their authority could not be challenged, effectively insulating experts from external political attempts to govern them and their decision and actions’ (Rose, 1996: 54). Marketisation was summoned by neoliberal reformers to open up these enclosures, to challenge the authority of state-sponsored carers and to promote the autonomy and self-determination of those on the receiving end of public support:

The almost feudal authority of the professions (the medical or the teaching professions for instance) is hardly compatible with the ongoing democratization of human relations [in postsocialist countries]. For the same reasons it is increasingly unacceptable that the professions should dictate needs, or solutions to need satisfaction, in an authoritarian way. The professional gatekeepers, the professional lobbies and such like may have bred distrust. Many professional arguments may have been self-serving, promoting the status and prestige of the professions rather than the interests of the client groups. (Ferge, 1997: 28)

Indeed, in some Western European countries disabled people’s struggle against welfarist paternalism and segregated provision converged with the neoliberal critique of the welfare state to produce emancipatory results. This is evidenced by the adoption of ‘direct payments’ or user-led personal assistance legislation in the United Kingdom and Sweden in the 1990s, sponsored in both cases by right-wing, market-promoting governments (Mladenov, 2016). However, neoliberalisation also brought about retrenchment of disability support, either through direct cuts or by way of workfare conditionality. Actually, this has been the main way in which neoliberalisation has influenced disability policy in the postsocialist countries of CEE.¹

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In this chapter, I explore the legacy of state socialist disability policy, as well as postsocialist processes of neoliberalisation, in terms of their maldistributive impact on disabled people in CEE. I provide examples of continuing socioeconomic marginalisation of disabled people generated by segregated service provision and/or retrenchment of public support. I review legislation, policy documents, reports and scholarly analyses that highlight the state socialist genealogy of the policies of placing disabled people in sheltered workshops and residential institutions in the postsocialist CEE. I conceptualise such policies of institutionalisation as major causes of contemporary socioeconomic marginalisation of disabled people in the CEE region, inherited from state socialism. In the second part of the chapter, this critique of the state socialist legacy is complemented by an analysis of the neoliberalisation of postsocialist disability policy. To this end, I look at cases of benefit cuts and the introduction of workfare conditionality in publicly provided disability support. It should be noted that both here and in the following two chapters, the analysis has been complicated by the lack of reliable data concerning disabled people, coupled with a dearth of in-depth studies of disability policies and discourses in CEE.

State socialist legacy

The main way to deal with distributive issues, such as economic marginalisation and deprivation, faced by disabled people during state socialism was through work placement. Some commentators of that time even referred to the latter as ‘[t]he basic form of social assistance in all socialist countries’ (Golemanov and Popov, 1976: 29, emphasis added). This generalisation is indicative of the common rationality underpinning social policy developments in state socialist countries, notwithstanding national variations in implementation. As a social policy measure, work placement in regular or segregated units was informed by the productivist logic that governed Soviet-style societies economically and culturally. In accord with the Industrial Achievement-Performance Model of social policy (Titmuss, 1974), state socialist countries restricted access to public services and social security to those adults who were in employment – social support was constituted as ‘a reward for work, not a right earned by citizenship’ (Szelényi, 2009: 614). Consider, for example, the stipulation that in the German Democratic Republic, ‘matters unimportant to growth either in production and employment or in the population – like the needs of the infirm or of people with disabilities – went...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Disability and Postsocialism
• Interdisciplinary Disability Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: Key Terms
• 1 Disability and Maldistribution
• 2 Disability and Misrecognition
• 3 Disability and Misrepresentation
• Conclusion: Postsocialist Disability Matrix
• Index