LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
>
> This is too quick and facile an explanation, in my view. Disabled folks may
> be more unproductive, but how does it follow that the most efficacious way
> of handling unproductiveness, from a capitalist point of view, is
> confinement. What's wrong with having individual family units bear the cost
> of sustaining the unproductive? In some ways it is even more of a cost
> effective approach, since it places the economic burden on the individual
> family, thus avoiding the inevitable socialization of cost in mass confinement.
>
First not all disabled people are unproductive. Being productive is relative to the economic system. In large measure the "disabled" body has been created to allow a small class of capitalists to accummulate vast wealth by excluding the least exploitable.
This is an excerpt from a paper I have written for the Journal of Disability Policy Studies (forthcoming Fall 2001) "Disablement, Oppression, and the Political Economy":
Class Interests Regulating the Labor Supply in Disability Policy
It is often claimed that disabled persons are disregarded by mainstream society, invisible, and not relevant to the workings of society. This analysis has attempted to explain that the “unemployables” have been deliberately shut out of the labor force due to a capitalist economy that so far has dictated their exclusion by measure of economic calculations that favor the business class. It further poses that disabled persons are further oppressed in capitalist societies by having been purposely shifted onto social welfare or segregated into institutions for similar reasons -- to keep workers who could not be profitably employed out of the mainstream workforce but also to exert social control over the entire labor supply.
Marx explains that capitalism is a system of “forced labour--no matter how much it may seem to result from free contractual agreement” (Marx, 1967, 819). It is coercion because capitalists own the means of production and laborers do not. Without ownership of factories and other means of production, workers lack their own access to the means of making a livelihood. By this very fact, workers are compelled to sell their labor to capitalists for a wage because the alternative is homelessness and/or starvation. Deborah Stone in The Disabled State convincingly argues that in order to restructure the workforce for the demands of early capitalist production it was first necessary to eradicate all viable alternatives to wage labor for the mass of the population:
The disability concept was essential to the development of an exploitable workforce in early capitalism and remains indispensable as an instrument of the state in controlling labor supply. (Stone, 1984, 179).
Regulating the composition of the labor force through social policy became key to assuring an ongoing exploitable labor supply. Disability became an important boundary category through which persons were allocated to either the work-based or needs-based system of distribution. In the US, disability came to be defined explicitly in relation to the labor market. For instance, in some workers' compensation statutes, a laborer's body is rated by impairment according to its functioning parts (Berkowitz, 49). In Social Security law, disabled means medically unable to engage in work activity (Berkowitz, 77).
Our institutions (particularly medical and social welfare institutions) have historically held disablement to be an individual problem not the result of economic or social forces (Oliver, 1990; 27; Barnes, Mercer & Shakespeare, 1999, 20-31). They have equated disability with physiological, anatomical, or mental “defects” and hegemonically held these conditions responsible for the disabled person's lack of full participation in the economic life of our society. This approach presumed a biological inferiority of disabled persons (Hahn, 1989). By pathologizing characteristics such as blindness, deafness, physical and mental physical impairments that have naturally appeared in the human race throughout history medicalization became a means of social control that has relegated disabled persons to isolation and exclusion from society (Oliver, 1990). By placing the focus on curing the so-called abnormality, and segregating the incurables into the administrative category of disabled, medicine bolstered the capitalist business interest - to shove less exploitable workers with impairments out of the workforce.
This exclusion was rationalized by Social Darwinists, who used biology to argue that heredity -- race and disability status -- prevailed over the class and economic issues raised by Marx and others. Just as the inferior weren't meant to survive in nature, they weren't meant to survive in a competitive society. For 19th century tycoons, Social Darwinism proved a marvelous rationale for leaving the surplus population to die in poverty. Capitalism set up production dynamics that devalued less exploitable or nonexploitable bodies, and Social Darwinism theorized their disposability. If it was natural that disabled persons were not to survive, then the capitalist class was off the hook to design a more equitable economic system - one that would accommodate the body that did not conform to the standard worker body driven to labor for owning class profit.
Social analysts describe the disability needs-based system as a privilege because, “as an administrative category, it carries with it permission to be exempt from the work-based system” (Stone, 1984, 28). In conservative terms, disability can be described “an essential part of the moral economy” (Stone, 1984, 143). In the public debate over redistribution of societial resources, public assistance is viewed as legitimate for those deemed unable to work but the disabled individuals on public benefits under US capitalism do not have any objective right to a decent standard of living, even with “privileged” status nor is the definition of disability etched in stone. As Stone points out, the definition of disability is flexible, the state (which evaluates disability status) controls the labor supply by expanding or contracting the numbers of persons who qualify as disabled, often for political and economic reasons (Stone 1984, 9-10, 182).
Neither privilege nor morality theories adequately describe the function of the needs-based system. A political economy analyst would ask what role do public disability benefits play to further the machinations of production and wealth accumulation?
The vast majority of those on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), the deserving workers involuntarily severed from their wages, are not privileged. They are financially oppressed by less-than-adequate aid. Public disability benefits hover at what is determined an official poverty level. The Federal poverty guideline for one is $8,350 (FY2000). Since $759 is the average per month benefit that a disabled worker receives from SSDI and $373 is the average federal income for the needs-based Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the annual income of over 10 million disabled persons on these programs is between $4,000 and $10,000. The extremely low SSI benefit was set up for those with no work history or not enough quarters of work to qualify for SSDI; the least valued disabled members of society.
It would not accurately describe the depth of poverty those on disability benefits face, however, without explaining that the current system of measuring poverty dates back to the 1960s. Government has never adjusted the equation to take into account the sharp rise in housing, medical care, and child care costs of the following four decades which have altered the average household's economic picture. The Urban Institute concluded that, in order to be comparable to the original threshold, the poverty level would have to be at least 50% higher than the current official standard. If basic needs were re-figured to the modern market, almost a quarter of the American people would be deemed to be living in poverty (Ruggles, 1990).
Most importantly, public policy which equates disablement with poverty means that becoming disabled (nonworker) translates into a life of financial hardship, whether one has public insurance or not, and generates a very realistic fear in workers of becoming disabled. At base, the inadequate safety net is a product of the owning class’ fear of losing control of the means of production. The all-encompassing value placed on work is necessary to produce wealth. The American work ethic is a mechanism of social control that ensures capitalists a reliable work force for making profits. If workers were provided with a federal social safety net that adequately protected them through unemployment, sickness, disability, and old age, then business would have less control over the workforce because labor would gain a stronger position from which to negotiate their conditions of employment, such as fair wages and safe working conditions. American business retains its power over the working-class through a fear of destitution that would be weakened if the safety net were to actually become safe. This, in turn, causes oppression for the less-valued nonworking disabled members of our society; those who do not provide a body to support profit-making (for whatever reason) are relegated to economic hardship or institutionalized to shore up the capitalist system (Russell 1998, 81-83). Nursing homes, for instance, have commodified disabled bodies so that the least productive can be made of use to the economic order.
Disabled persons contribute to the Gross Domestic Product when occupying a bed in an institution where they generate $30,000 - $82,000 in annual revenues and contribute to companies' net worth -- commodification is a root of institutional oppression (Russell 1998, 96-108).
A materialist analysis suggests that capitalism has created a powerful class of persons dependent upon the productive labor of some and the exclusion of others. Business owners and Wall Street investors rely on the preservation of the status quo labor system (not having to absorb nonstandard costs disabled workers represent in the current mode of production or the reserve army of unemployed). Judge Posner’s quote, supra, explains the calculus. The US work-based/needs-based system is a socially legitimized means by which business and investors can econonomically discriminate and “morally” shift the cost of disabled workers onto poverty-based government benefit programs rather than be required to hire or retain the unemployables as members of the mainstream workforce.
Consequently, disabled individuals currently not in the workforce collecting SSDI or SSI who could work with an accommodation are not tallied into employers’ cost of doing business. Employers do not pay direct premiums for Social Security disability programs. (The cost of direct government and private payments to support disabled persons of employable age who do not have jobs is estimated to be $232 billion annually). Instead disabled persons have no right to a job. Civil rights laws do not intervene in the labor market to mandate employment of disabled persons (not even to adhere to affirmative action, much less to a quota system like Germany’s), rather, these costs are shifted onto the shoulders of the working class and the low middle class who pay the majority of Social Security taxes while business and our economic system is absolved of responsibility. This analysis is not suggesting that benefits be dissolved: employment discrimination is related to reliance on public aid as those who experience labor market discrimination are also more likely to need public assistance (Boushey, 2000, 108). It does suggest that capitalism is a system that forces nondisabled persons into the labor market, but also just as forcefully coerces many disabled persons out. Oppression occurs in either case. copyright by Marta Russell 2001 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED