Writing for the 7th Circuit in 1995, Judge Richard Posner, a self-appointed

protector of the interests of business, applied cost/benefit analysis to the ADA:

If the nation’s employers have potentially unlimited financial obligations to

43 million disabled persons, the Americans with Disabilities Act will have

imposed an indirect tax potentially greater than the national debt. We do

not find an intention to bring about such a radical result in either the

language of the Act or its history. The preamble actually ‘markets’ the Act

as a cost saver, pointing to ‘billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses

resulting from dependency and nonproductivity’. The savings will be illusory if 

employers are required to expend many more billions in

accommodation than will be saved by enabling disabled people to work.72

The cost-benefit view (whether real or perceived) of the business class at large

runs up against their political representatives’ expectations in sponsoring the

ADA. Those who believe that liberal civil rights are the solution to the unemployment

 predicament of disabled people confront the problem that within

capitalism equal treatment is in contradiction with macro-economic realities.

Unemployment is a permanent feature of any capitalist economy. Civil rights,

though still necessary to counter individual acts of prejudice and discrimination,

have only the power (if enforced) to randomly distribute the maladies of unemployment,

 income and wage inequality throughout the population,73 not to meet

everyone’s material needs. Is there social justice in promoting bourgeois liberal

remedies that may liberate some but not all disabled persons from oppression?

Liberal anti-discrimination laws cannot end systemic unemployment and individual 

rights cannot override the economic structure. Neither the market nor

civil rights laws can end the exclusion of disabled people from the labour force.

Business has obtained both the legal and political legitimacy necessary to

discriminate and exclude millions from the workforce in the name of work-place

and market efficiency.74 Transforming this reality, not the (unachievable) accommodation

 of disabilities under a liberal ‘rights’ model, must clearly be a goal of

any socialist praxis worthy of its name.

So how, then, can disability politics help to end capitalist exploitation? While

to address this question fully is beyond the scope of this paper we will offer some

food for thought. Oliver, for instance, suggests ‘if the game is possessive individualism 

in a competitive and inegalitarian society, impaired people will

inevitably be disadvantaged, no matter how the rules are changed’.75 Finkelstein

recognizes that a society may be willing to absorb a portion of its impaired population

 into the workforce, yet this can have the effect of maintaining and perhaps

intensifying the exclusion of the remainder.76 Indeed, former US President

Clinton suggested that bringing disabled persons into the workforce could be a

tool to fight inflation in a tight labour market.77 Abberley suggests that we

abandon the notion that production be at the centre of any new conceptualization 

of Utopia: ‘even in a society which did make profound and genuine attempts

to integrate impaired people into the world of work, some would still be

excluded by their impairment’.78

But need the ability to labour in some socially recognized sense be a requirement for full 

membership in society? In a work-based society, productivism is the

‘normal’ activity. A radical disability perspective could offer great liberatory

potential by proposing to abolish this notion and to offer counter-values to those

of productivism. Is work the defining quality of our worth? Employability, aptitude 

for earning money and even work chosen during one’s free time are not, a

priori, the measure of what it means to live, to be part of the human race.

Moreover, a counter-hegemonic praxis of disability politics, challenging productivism,

 opens the door to alliances with many other groups who are also

marginalized by the imprisoning dictates of a market economy. These include

single mothers, welfare recipients, part-time workers, parts of the incarcerated

population, and all those unable for various reasons to earn a living wage. Indeed,

the fostering of grassroots solidarity amongst those oppressed by productionism

can only serve to enrich the disability rights movements themselves and enhance

the chances of achieving reformist goals of physical and structural access while

pursuing a longer term agenda of economic transformation. After all, what is the

alternative? Eugenics, sterilization, euthanasia and the institutionalization of the

impaired and others have all been productivist societies’ answers to what to do

with the ‘unproductive’. If the goal of social justice is to ensure the dignity of each

and every person, then buying into the largely capitalist-induced belief that work

equates with self esteem or is a condition for membership of the human race —

that people are labourers first and human beings second — only serves to oppress

us all.

MARTA RUSSELL AND RAVI MALHOTRA