In a period of capitalist crisis and austerity, social, health and educational provisions for disabled people are among the first things to be cut – disabled people are seen by governments as an easy target. Marginalised and denied a voice in mainstream politics and media, governments across the world have masked the cruelty of cuts to disability services by provoking media witch-hunts against those too sick to work.
In an era of capitalist crisis, the health and struggles of disabled people are a very distant concern for governments. Stirring up popular anger at those on state incapacity benefits serves to divide those who can least help themselves from the rest of the working class which has the most interest in defending them.
Disabled people are typically forced to accept lower wages and worse positions within companies. Private companies refuse to fund support for workers facing mental health problems or physical restrictions, and even use it as an excuse to sack them. Public transport and spaces are often closed off to people in wheelchairs because of a refusal to invest in disabled access infrastructure.
Capitalism super-exploits the disabled, denying them the means to live as full and active life as possible, and ditching vital services as soon as it becomes politically convenient.
In old age, when physical restrictions are a fact of life, pensions are plundered by private firms, state pensions are maintained at poverty rates, transferring the burden of care onto the mostly female shoulders of working families.
Disabled people also suffer from social exclusion, prejudice, bullying and a process of dehumanisation. Media portrayals of benefits claimants as ´scroungers´ are a prop for government policies which outsource assessments of ‘fitness to work’ to private, profit-driven firms. School students with mental health problems suffer higher rates of punishment and exclusion. Recent years have seen a rise in physical attacks on visibly handicapped people. The widespread discrimination against disabled people in society is reproduced in the very places designed to care for them – austerity and cuts will do nothing to reverse the rampant bullying and neglect in private care homes.
Disability drives people and families towards poverty as people are either unable to work or denied work by discriminating employment practices. Welfare provision, already inadequate, is cut, sacrificed in the higher interest of funding bank bailouts. It also burdens the relatives of the disabled, as the capitalist austerity agenda aims to shift the burden of care from the state (or society as a whole) to the family unit. As most families lack the means to pay for private care, this will increase the tendency for women to drop out of the workforce as they fulfill social obligations to act as unpaid, 24/7 carers.
These problems exist on a global scale. Leper colonies still remain open sores of deprivation and misery. Caste systems in India ensure that physically handicapped people are forced to live on the fringes of society, often relying on begging for any sort of income.
Disability is a fact of life, to deny the fullest possible support and care is anti-human, and yet under capitalism the drive for profitability marginalises disabled people and their carers. Moreover, it is a system which delivers increased illness resulting from poor diets and pollution- and disabilities arising from stress, alienation and depression.
REVOLUTION demands:
• Equal pay and opportunity for disabled workers, to be monitored by workers’ councils.
• Reverse every cut to health, social and education provisions for disabled people.
• A huge increase in social spending, to be paid for by taxing the rich, to ensure equal access to education, healthcare and public spaces.
• Full state provision of support for people with physical and mental handicaps. Nobody should be a prisoner in their home or their body due to poverty.
• Better conditions for care workers to prevent the alienation which leads to abuse.
• Monitoring of care conditions by committees of the workers, residents and families.
• The right of disabled people to caucus within trade unions, working-class organisations and progressive movements
• An end to the religious idea of disability as a form of punishment or ´test´ of moral worth.
• Investment in adequate support for disabled students.
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