Dr Laura Basu || A couple of weeks ago, I published the first instalment of a longer piece about ableism’s integral role within capitalism. In that post, I wrote about capitalism’s deep ableist historical roots and analysed its structure and inner logic.
This week, I want to write about how ableism functions within capitalism today.
The circular economy of waste
In the previous instalment, I wrote about how, under capitalism, we are valued according to how much profit we can generate for capitalists. If we are not sufficiently ‘productive’, we are worthless. We are surplus.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, in their book Health Communism,, explain how a worker/surplus binary is at the heart of capitalism. This binary is central to the entire system. It is only the fear that we will become ‘surplus’ that drives us into spending our days drudging away at work, creating the profits that get sucked up the chain to those at the top.
As Adler-Bolton and Vierkant observe, when we are surplus, we are disposable. We become capitalism’s waste product.
What happens to us when we are waste? How do those governing and administrating our capitalist institutions see fit to do dispose of us?
I can assure you, we’re not just taken to the dump and left to form a gigantic waste mountain, like non-metaphorical waste is. Our disabled bodies aren’t left to pollute the Earth, like forever chemicals and microplastics.
No, while capitalism can’t for the life of it seem to figure out how to create circular economies and stop poisoning the world, when it comes to disabled people, it knows very well how to process its waste efficiently.
Those leading and administrating capitalism put us through a rigorous — and highly fruitful — process of dehumanisation. Let me elaborate.
First, they smear us.
Our media and politicians tell the world that we’re welfare fraudsters. They tell us that we’re ‘overdiagnosing’*, that we’re lazy, dangerous, or that it’s all in our head.
These public smear campaigns apparently get a good return on investment. In the UK, over the past few years, there have been around 11,000 recorded disability hate crimes each year, spiking at times when anti-disability rhetoric from our politicians and media is high.
Globally, children with disabilities are almost four times more likely to experience violence than non-disabled children. Disabled people are some of the most likely to experience violence and discrimination in the world.
This outlay on anti-disabled sentiment might at first seem frivolous — what’s the pay off? But as we’ll see, the yields on hate and division are strong.
Then, they deny us what we need.
They cut off our social security while making it impossible for us to work without getting even sicker or dying. They deny us safe housing and accessible transportation. They ration our care and medication.
In her important book, Ramping Up Rights, Rachel Charlton-Dailey carefully documents the struggles that disability justice activists in the UK have always been fighting. She also collates a litany of heartbreaking statistics. Here’s one: The Trussell Trust estimated in 2023 that 69% of people accessing their food banks were disabled. 75% have at least one disabled person in their household.
These are the people who the government apparently thinks need to have their benefits cut. Well, we have to make savings, and what’s more fiscally responsible than cutting waste?
Then, they exploit us.
Always remember: a dehumanised person is an exploitable person. In the UK, 70% of disabled women get paid less than £15 an hour, versus 44% of non-disabled men. According to the International Labour Organisation, in lower income countries (ie countries on the wrong end of neocolonialism), the disability wage gap is 26%.
In the US, it is legal for businesses to pay disabled workers ‘subminimum wage’, on average $3.34 an hour.
Not only are our wages lower; our costs are higher. In the UK, Scope estimates that life is £1,067 more expensive per month for households with a disabled person. This is because of things like higher medical, energy and transportation costs.
This double whammy — lower pay plus higher costs — means that disabled people offer double the bang for our buck in profits for capitalists. Because one person’s low pay means someone else’s profit. Someone’s unaffordable cost means someone’s chi-ching. Maximal efficiency achieved.
Then, they extract from us.
Why leave it at exploitation? If we’re smart, lean and nimble, we can innovate further profitable uses for waste.
Worldwide, millions of disabled people are still institutionalised without their consent, including in the US, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, Nigeria and Russia.
In her 2017 book Beasts of Burden, Sunaura Taylor wrote that, in the US, nursing homes had become a $116 billion dollar industry. A room in a nursing home cost on average $87,000 per year.
Adler-Bolton and Vierkant explain that these nursing home setups are often dodgy public-private deals, with for-profit providers receiving billions in public funding. In almost every case, it would be far cheaper for the government to assist disabled people to stay in their own homes, including with home care workers paid a living wage.
Disabled people in these homes face notorious conditions, including physical and sexual violence as well as neglect of hygiene and psychological needs. Oh well, caring properly for people isn’t cheap, and we’ve got to cut costs.
Then, they kill us (or breed us out).
Ok, I guess this is where things start getting less circular. Once we have been entirely stripped for parts, once every penny of profit has been squeezed from us, it’s time for us waste to be eliminated.
Did you think eugenics was a thing of the past? Wrong. Many countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Belgium, still have rules to prevent disabled people from crossing their borders.
In both the US and UK, up to half of all those who die in police custody have a disability (disproportionately Black and brown disabled people).
In at least 12 European countries, including Denmark, Portugal and Latvia, the forced sterilisation of disabled women is legal. In Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic, it is legal to forcibly sterilise minors.
In the UK, austerity cuts have killed tens of thousands of disabled human beings. The UN has found that the UK has committed ‘grave and systematic’ violations of disabled people’s rights.
Covid has shown exactly what those running our institutions think of disabled people. The UK imposed Do Not Resuscitate orders on disabled patients during the pandemic without their knowledge or consent.
In 2022, it was found that three quarters of the people who had died of the Omicron variant in the US were disabled. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control, described this fact as ‘really encouraging news’.
After all, what could be a more effective way of eradicating waste?
The hyper-productivity of waste
Together, these steps make up disabled people’s comprehensive process of dehumanisation. While I’ve presented them as taking place in a certain order, actually all these stages are happening together, all the time. They all feed into each other, like a beautiful arrangement of virtuous circles.
For example, we’re easier to exploit when the world thinks we’re welfare cheats, but its also easier to convince people that we’re welfare cheats when we’re immiserated and suitably abject.
(A similar process springs to mind when I think about the dehumanisation of asylum seekers and the fact that, at least in my town, you can always spot an asylum facility by how inhumane and unlivable the building looks.)
The ultimate irony is that, even though they tell us that disabled people are worthless, we’re actually supremely productive for capitalists. They can make valuable savings by denying us the things we need; they can slash our wages, charge us through the roof for basic necessities, and then make bank from warehousing us.
Under capitalism, subjugation is never for its own sake. Some politician always ends up with more power and some rich fella always ends up with more profit out of it, every time. That’s how the entire system works.
Ultimately, under capitalism, both sides of the worker/surplus binary are rubbish and we all end up as waste. Time for a magnificent new system that values us all.
To be continued…
In the next instalment, we’ll see how disability justice can lead us out of this disaster into a world where care is abundant, community is nourished, and we all get what we need to be able to thrive.
*Shout out to Miffsky. who noted the cries of ‘overdiagnosis’ coming from politicians and the media in a comment on my previous instalment.
Some look like: Physical ability because the barriers are on the inside
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