'...not only are poor children exposed to lead and other toxins, resulting in high rates of developmental and learning disabilities; they also drink poisoned water and breathe poisoned air, leading to extreme prevalence of asthma and other respiratory illnesses and cancers. Poor people often live in neighborhoods plagued by drug and alcohol abuse, leading to physical and psychological damage, including fetal alcohol syndrome, and marked by violent crime, leading to spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and other disabilities'.

'Factory discipline, time-keeping and production norms broke with the slower, more self-determined and flexible work pattern into which many disabled people had been integrated.15 As work became more rationalized, requiring precise mechanical movements of the body, repeated in quicker succession, impaired persons — the deaf or blind, and those with mobility difficulties — were seen as — and, without job accommodations to meet their impairments, were — less ‘fit’ to do the tasks required of factory workers, and were increasingly excluded from paid employment.16 And so ‘the operation of the labour market in the nineteenth century effectively depressed handicapped people of all kinds to the bottom of the market’.17

Industrial capitalism thus created not only a class of proletarians but also a new class of ‘disabled’ who did not conform to the standard worker’s body and whose labour-power was effectively erased, excluded from paid work.18 As a result, disabled persons came to be regarded as a social problem and a justification emerged for segregating them out of mainstream life and into a variety of institutions, including workhouses, asylums, prisons, colonies and special schools.19 Exclusion was further rationalized by Social Darwinists, who used biology to argue that heredity — race and genes — prevailed over the class and economic issues raised by Marx and others. Just as the ‘inferior’ weren’t meant to survive in nature, they were not meant to survive in a competitive society'.

MARTA RUSSELL AND RAVI MALHOTRA