>We need to include disability as critical theoretical category too.
>I recently discovered Nirvala Erevelles, a woman who like myself analyzes
>disability as a construct of the political economy. Erevelles discusses the
>politics of gendered "caring work" and its implications for the continued
>production of marginalized difference. She shows how disability can be
>re-understood as an ideological condition which is also structured by the same
>exploitative material conditions of capitalism as is gender.
>
>"The ideological category of disability is essential to the continued
>existence of the capitalist enterprise because it is able to regulate and
>control the unequal distribution of surplus through invoking biological
>difference as the "natural" cause of all inequality, thereby successfully
>justifying the social and economic inequality that maintains social
>hierarchies."
>Disability and the Dialectics of Difference, Disability & Society, Vol. 11,
>No. 4, 1996, pp 519-537
>
>So that rather than viewing disability as a burden solely placed upon women
>who are segregated into care giving "professions" she shows how both women and
>disabled people (constructed as unemployables) are devalued and oppressed
>under the same prevailing labor relationships of production.
>
>She shows how rehabilitation is "a division of labor that produces subjects
>who are bound to live within boundaries that mark them as separate from those
>who are considered productive in the mainstream society." This is highly
>important because disabled people are not objects, they are equally oppressed
>by a system which isolates and confines them to inferior stagnant positions
>while the capitalists are exploiting bodies for their profits.
I agree. Disability as we know it should be rethought of as an effect of political economy that is based on the ideology of equal right. As Marx writes in "Critique of the Gotha Programme," this "equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour." As such, equality in equal right can only "consist in the fact that measurement is _by the same standard_." The standard in question is set by the fantasmatic body of Man as abstract individual: the body which never becomes pregnant; the body which springs out of nowhere, full-grown, never knowing its dependence upon the care of others; the body which never ages; the body which never becomes sick or injured; the body which does not impose on employers the expenses of accommodating wheel-chair access, etc. Seen in this fashion, feminists and advocates for disability rights are struggling for the same radical transformation of political economy: "from each according to his abilities, to each according to her needs." Pace misrepresentations by anticommunists, Marxism is in fact *not* an ideology of "collectivism," which posits an individual as a "particular" member of an "organic whole" called society; and unlike liberalism, Marxism does not demand that each concrete individual fit the mold of an abstract individual (= rights-baring fictive person) in order to participate creatively in the reproduction of social relations and the production for needs and in freedom. Especially in the thoughts of the mature Marx (_The Grundrisse_, _Capital_, etc.), the main point of criticism of ideology is to show the problem of naturalization, to argue against the Robinsonades:
***** The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau's _contrat social_, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism....It is...the anticipation of "civil society"....In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc.,# which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual -- the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century -- appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history's point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. (Marx, _The Grundrisse_) *****
# On "nature": Keep in mind that in Marx's later works, the word "natural" is best understood to mean "spontaneously grown, not consciously determined, etc," in contradiction to the usual valorization of nature as eternal, unchanging "essence" beneath the artificial "appearance." According to Marx of _The Grundrisse_, etc., human beings have historically evolved, creating (pace the young-Hegelian Marx) _unanticipated_ new needs and desires, and there is no room for nostalgic yearning for the Eden of natural rights & natural relations between the sexes -- the fantastic origin that can only exist in the Robinsonades.
***** Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because of a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. (Marx, _The Grundrisse_) *****
In Marxism, there is a political project that allows us to reject the mode of production which makes "biological difference" "the 'natural' cause of all inequality." Those of us who stand on the margins of "humanity" (as it has been hitherto defined in ideology and practice) can gain, in communism, the material foundations for enjoyment of concrete differences, developed in the all-around freedom _of_ social relations, emancipated from the cage of the "natural individual" who is the protagonist of all forms of old humanist narratives (including immature Marx's).
towards a post-humanist communism,
Yoshie