(Image from the 1977 504 sit-in.)

Welcome to the first weekly disabled community discussion thread for the week of 10/28/2024 — 11/3/2024.

This community is brand new! Everyone is welcome to post new topics and comments. However, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:

“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.

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Disabled people in the U.S. today experience a poverty rate of approximately 30 percent; comprise 40 percent of the total homeless population; have an active labor market participation rate of less than 20 percent, despite self-reporting a preference to do so at a rate well over 60 percent. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people remain today living in institutional or carceral environments, such as nursing homes or prisons, where conditions tend towards the cruel or barbaric.

Thus, when we ask the question, what is disability, we are not really providing a full answer if we only talk about physiology, biology, or even identity reduced to a cataloging of manifest limitations or functional deficits. In fact, disability – or, to put it perhaps more accurately, disablement – is a dialectical phenomenon arising from existing political, economic, and social relations in society.

While variations in human bodies, minds, and behaviors – up to and including those traits which might be termed ‘impairments’ – have always been an indelible and essential aspect of the human species, disability as we have come to understand it in the modern era is neither eternal nor transhistorical.

The notion that a group of people – with a vast array of completely different traits, capacities, morphologies, and phenotypes – could be lumped together and labeled according to their relative lack of generalized “ability,” in the abstract, is in fact endemic to the particular period of more recent human history signaled by the emergence and dominance of the capitalist mode.

Specifically, what is the relationship between disabled people and the working class, as such?

… we should hold an expansive conception of disability, which understands it both in terms of class location, but also more generally as a phenomenon less immediately relevant to the positions of the classes than to the processes intrinsic to the relations of the classes. In other words, centering the analysis of disability on the processes of labor commodification, exploitation of labor, market competition, and class division.

Put differently, the conditions that reproduce the division of society into separate classes, and in particular, reproduce that class of people whose lives are wholly determined by the commodified value that their labor power can purchase on the capitalist market, are the same conditions that reproduce a subclass of people whose very existence is diminished and devalued according to the relatively diminished and devalued worth of their labor power as measured by the logic of commodified market competition.

Insofar as the value of commodity labor power under capitalism is both a creation and a measure of the rate of exploitation obtaining in the market – that is, the rate at which capitalists can competitively extract surplus value from the productive labors of the working class – then the simple realities of human physiology, let alone the complex realities of biopolitics, mean that there will always be and must necessarily be a constant proportion of the working class whose commodified labor power manifests as a “disability,” with the attendant forms of oppression concomitant thereto.

The struggle against disability oppression should be seen as innately allied with all other struggles born of – and against – capitalist oppression. Specifically, disablement is a form of oppression arising from the system of exploitation of labor, and therefore the historical struggle of the working class against exploitation.

from Keith Rosenthal of Tempest Collective

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Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.