The Money Model of Disability: Marta Russell’s Contribution

Marta Russell, a disability activist and writer, developed what she called the “money model of disability.” Unlike traditional models focusing on culture or identity, Russell's model argues that capitalism itself is the primary driver of how disability is legally and economically managed. Central to this theory is the idea that disabled people are not simply a societal burden but are used within capitalist systems as a resource around which various economic sectors generate profit, particularly through public financing and social policies.

Russell emphasized that capitalism commodifies disabled bodies and life maintenance, turning them into assets that produce economic value due to the revenue they generate. For example, each resident is financially valued as a source of revenue, incentivizing profit-driven care that often undermines quality and worker conditions. This model exposes how disabled people, deemed non-productive in traditional labor terms, are nonetheless integral to the capitalist economy through their care and survival needs, which fuel entire industries. She further critiqued the charity industrial complex and underfunded social safety nets, illustrating how policy and institutions perpetuate exploitation and economic exclusion of disabled individuals. Ultimately, the money model reveals disability oppression as a mechanism rooted in capitalism’s cost-benefit logic rather than merely prejudice or cultural attitudes, suggesting that true liberation of disabled people cannot be achieved within the existing capitalist framework.

Her intention was to move beyond the dominant frameworks through which disability is understood — the medical model and the social model — and to foreground the political-economic structures that define the lives of disabled people under capitalism. Russell’s model is not a minor adjustment to existing approaches but a fundamental reframing: it argues that disability is inseparable from the dictates of money, profit, and labor markets.

The medical model views disability as an individual pathology, something located in the body or mind of a person that requires cure, rehabilitation, or management. By contrast, the social model, which emerged from the disability rights movement, shifted attention to the environment. From that perspective, disability arises not from impairment itself but from inaccessible institutions, discriminatory practices, and built environments that exclude those with atypical bodies and minds. Russell acknowledged the importance of the social model’s intervention but argued that it did not go far enough. For her, it failed to account for why environments were designed in exclusionary ways in the first place, and why efforts at inclusion so often remained partial or tokenistic. The answer, she contended, lies in the way capitalism organizes society around wage labor and profit.

 

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At the heart of Russell’s “money model” is the claim that disability, under capitalism, is defined in relation to labor markets. A person becomes “disabled” when they are unable to sell their labor power at a rate considered profitable or competitive. Disability is therefore not merely a biological condition nor simply a matter of social access; it is an economic designation, a judgment that certain lives cannot generate surplus value for capital. The “able-bodied” worker is not just a physical ideal but a social construct shaped by the requirements of productivity, efficiency, and flexibility demanded by employers. Those who fall outside this construct are cast as dependent, burdensome, or economically redundant.

Because survival in capitalist societies is mediated through money, those unable to participate in wage labor must rely on alternative supports: welfare systems, disability benefits, family care, or charity. These forms of support are consistently rationed, stigmatized, and subject to surveillance. In Russell’s account, the welfare state functions less as a vehicle of justice than as a mechanism of social control, sustaining disabled people at the margins while minimizing costs to the state and capital. Disability policy, then, is not designed to maximize inclusion but to manage populations deemed economically unproductive.

Russell’s money model carries significant implications. It insists that disability is not a neutral or timeless category but a political-economic one, produced and maintained by capitalism’s valuation of human beings according to profitability. Ableism is not simply a matter of prejudice or oversight but is embedded in the very logic of accumulation. In this sense, the money model radicalizes the social model: it explains that environments are disabling because they are designed around the imperatives of profit, not because of accidental neglect of human diversity.

This perspective also reframes solutions. If disability under capitalism is produced by economic exclusion, then genuine liberation for disabled people requires more than accessibility or inclusive hiring practices. It demands a transformation of the economic system itself. Russell’s model points implicitly toward socialism, or at least toward a society where survival is not mediated solely by the ability to generate profit.

There are, however, limits to the money model. Its emphasis on labor and profit risks reducing the complexity of disability experience to a single axis, leaving less space to analyze cultural, affective, or interpersonal dimensions of ableism. Moreover, while Russell powerfully critiques capitalism, she leaves less developed the question of what concrete alternative arrangements could sustain disabled lives without reproducing new forms of exclusion.

Still, the money model remains one of the most forceful and illuminating accounts of disability as a structural condition. By insisting that disability is an economic and political category, Marta Russell cut through both the medicalized pathologization of disabled people and the liberal optimism of inclusion narratives. For her, to be disabled under capitalism is to be rendered economically nonviable in a society where survival is purchased with wages. Until that fundamental mediation by money is transformed, disability will remain bound to exclusion and devaluation.

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