Dr Laura Basu || I’ve written before about how capitalism is inherently racist and sexist. Today, I want to do the same for ableism. These systems of oppression aren’t incidental to our global economic system. On the contrary, they are hotwired into capitalism and form its basic logic and structure
This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person’s appearance and/or their ability to satisfactorily [re]produce, excel and “behave.”
You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.
I’m dividing this piece into two installments. This post will focus on the history and internal logic of capitalism. The next instalment will look at how ableism works today and how disability justice can get us out of this circus and into something fabulous.
The Roots: Capitalism Was Built on Ableism
We take for granted that we have to work to earn money to buy the things we need to stay alive. But wage labour only became pervasive during the era of capitalism, which began around 500 years ago.
Sure, there were artisans and other kinds of workers who worked for money, but wage labour wasn’t the dominant way of organising the economy. Under European Feudalism, for example, peasants worked the land for their lords and for themselves and their families. There were also communal tracts of land, so, even though Feudalism was a harsh and dehumanising class system, people were at least able to feed themselves directly from the land.
The transition to capitalism wasn’t exactly a peaceful process. On the contrary, it was a bloody onslaught and theft of global proportions. It was good old fashioned class war, perpetrated by a newly forming ruling alliance composed of the Church, the state, the old nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie. Its victims were everyone not part of the ruling alliance.
The world over, people were forced off their lands and deprived of the means of providing for themselves and their beloveds. Their land was stolen and so was their labour. They were forced onto plantations, into mines, factories, or the homes of the rich as domestic servants. They were forced to work for wages or to work for no wages at all, as in the case of the millions of enslaved people who built the new world of capitalism.
This process wasn’t, let’s say ‘respectful of people’s bodily integrity’. The global transition to capitalism itself created millions upon millions of disabled and chronically ill people.
Disfiguring the body through branding was what turned a person into a slave, a piece of property to be owned for their masters’ profit. Indigenous Americans were infected en masse with diseases such as smallpox. Enslaved workers on sugar plantations were regularly dismembered, burned, and maimed during the course of their hazardous work. In Europe, the new urban working classes worked and lived in conditions so unsanitary that in some cases they only had about a 50:50 chance of keeping their kids alive.
(Btw if you’re thinking that this is all nothing more than the barbarity of some bygone era, just wait till the next instalment.)
Did this new system that enriched its rulers by maiming and sickening people then reward those people’s sacrifice? Did it tenderly nurse them and make sure they had everything their transformed bodies needed? No, my friends. Quite the reverse. It labeled sick and disabled people as inferior, even deviant. The capitalist ruling class subjected them to a systematic campaign of dehumanisation.
As capitalism proceeded, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, disabled people were increasingly locked up in asylums, often subjected to cruel medical experiments. The fake race science of eugenics targeted disabled people for literal extinction. Countries including the US forbade disabled people from crossing their borders. Across Europe, Africa and the Americas, hundreds of thousands of disabled people were sterilised against their will.
If we look at the history, we see that ableism was baked into capitalism from the get go.
The structure: ableism is integral to the logic of capitalism
This is a devastating history that, on the surface, might defy comprehension. How can humans behave so inhumanely to one another? What evil compelled our ancestors to do this to each other?
But if we look at the inner structure and logic of capitalism as a system, it makes a gnarly kind of sense.
The history of capitalism is one of the new ruling alliance grabbing as much land and labour as they possibly could. Why? To make a profit out of it. What was the point of this profit? To use to make more profit for themselves. And what was the point of that new profit? To use to make even more profit for themselves. That’s it. That’s the whole point of capitalism.
Everyone else, deprived of the means of sustaining their own community, became the working class – having to work for the ruling class (who have now mutated into billionaires and almost-trillionaires) to get money to buy the things they need to stay alive.
Under this system, the worth of a human being is reduced to how much profit they can make for capitalists. We are valued by how productive we are for capital.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, in their book Health Communism, describe a binary logic of worker/surplus. If you are not a sufficiently functioning worker, you are ‘surplus’. Surplus to capitalism’s requirements. And if you are surplus, you become waste.
This worker/surplus binary is not incidental to capitalism; it is necessary. If we were whole, if we were treated as if we mattered no matter what our bodies were like, if we knew that our needs would be met come what may, do you think we would work in Amazon warehouses to get harassed all day by algorithms? Would we work in poultry farms where we have to wear diapers because we don’t have time for bathroom breaks? Would we let our children work in hazardous mines for $1.50 a day for minerals for other people’s kids’ smart watches?
Would we even choose to do the ‘good’ jobs, sucking out our prime hours, day in, day out, on pointless and mind numbing tasks instead of being with our loved ones and doing things that bring us energy, inspiration and joy? I think not.
No. Under capitalism, unless you are part of the ruling class, the only thing worse than being a worker is not being a worker. Is being waste.
To be continued…
In the next installment, we’ll look at how ableism functions within capitalism today, and how disability justice can set us free.
Discover more from Class Autonomy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
