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

'...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

GTDF

"Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is a collective of researchers, artists, educators, activists and Indigenous knowledge keepers from the Global North and South. Our collective focuses on how artistic and educational practices can gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures. We work at the interface of questions related to historical, systemic and on-going violence and questions related to the unsustainability of “modernity-coloniality”. We use the term modernity-coloniality to mark the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, destitution, genocides and ecocides.

In our current context of informational politics (and “infodemics”), many people seek the pleasures of dopamine fixes through selective and superficial reading of information that confirms pre-existing cognitive biases. In this context, knowledge consumption is self-serving and self-infantilizing; “sloganization” and mis-representations become the norm of information sharing; and echo-chambers charged with outrage and self-righteousness replace genuine, sober, accountable and multi-voiced inquiry. It is unlikely that we will ever arrive at a universal agreement about climate engagement and that is precisely the reason why conversations that can uphold respect and mutual learning in dissensus are extremely important.

In this respect, our collective has been in conversation with the Deep Adaptation movement in relation to Jem Bendell’s critique of what he calls ESCAPE ideology, an acronym that stands for entitlement, surety, control, autonomy, progress and exceptionalism. The critique of ESCAPE resonates strongly with our decolonial analyses of harmful ways of knowing and being within modernity-coloniality.

However, our analysis emphasizes that ESCAPE is not simply an ideology, but a habit of being with deeper affective, relational and neurobiological dimensions, including hopes, desires and unconscious attachments, compulsions and projections that cannot be interrupted by the intellect alone.

In this on-going conversation, our collective has offered our interpretation of ESCAPE as an illustration of a modern-colonial habit of being that is arguably prevalent in climate movements of low-intensity struggle, like those mentioned in the social cartography presented earlier:

• Entitlement: “Me having what I want is your responsibility” or “I demand that you/ the world give me what I want”.
  
  
• Surety: “I demand certainty, to feel safe and reassured about my future, my status, my self-image and my self-importance”.
  
  
• Control: “I demand to feel empowered to determine everything on my terms, including the scope and direction of change”.
  
  
• Autonomy: “I demand to have unlimited choice, including the choice of not having to be accountable for the implications of my choices or my complicity in harm.”
  
  
• Progress: “I demand to feel and be seen as part of the avant-garde of social change and to have my legacy recognized and celebrated.”
  
  
• Exceptionalism: “I demand to feel unique, special, admired, validated and justified in demanding all of the above.”

It is the hatred of those who...have never been allowed to give anything back...of a humiliation – of those who can give nothing in return. 

Jean Baudrillard

"It's to the direct benefit of oppressive power to make you think there are less like-minded people than there actually are.''

 

"Broader social attitudes and values can lead to prejudiced outcomes even if individuals are not acting with explicit malice. In other words, systems can be prejudiced''.

 

"People in charge have a tendency to be strong and oppressive against the weak, and submissive against the thuggish and corrupt. Our politicians are cowards, but they also belong to the latter group''.

Self-deception, and thus systematically distorted communication, is possible only when the lifeworld has been 'colonized' by instrumental rationality, so some social norm comes into existence and enjoys legitimate power even though it is not justifiable. This occurs when means of mediating instrumental ideas gains communicative power—as when someone pays a group of people to stay quiet during a public debate, or if financial or administrative resources are used to advertise some social viewpoint. When people take the resulting consensus as normatively relevant, the lifeworld has been colonized and communication has been systematically distorted. The 'colonization' metaphor is used because the use of steering media to arrive at social consensus is not native to the lifeworld—the decision-making processes of the systems world must encroach on the lifeworld in a way that is in a sense imperialistic:

When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it. The diffused perspectives of the local culture cannot be sufficiently coordinated to permit the play of the metropolis and the world market to be grasped from the periphery.^[7]

The fragmentation of consciousness associated with the two Marxist concepts of alienation and false consciousness illustrate why, in Habermas' perspective, they are merely special cases of the more general phenomenon of lifeworld colonization.

Social coordination and systemic regulation occur by means of shared practices, beliefs, values, and structures of communicative interaction, which may be institutionally based. We are inevitably lifeworldly, such that individuals and interactions draw from custom and cultural traditions to construct identities, define situations, coordinate action, and create social solidarity. Ideally this occurs by communicatively coming to understanding (German Verstehen), but it also occurs through pragmatic negotiations (compare: Seidman, 1997:197).

Wiki

 

For Baudrillard, in the simulation or in simulacrum everything can be reduced to an easily commodifiable and consumable form - an image form - and both Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard suggest that this extends well beyond entertainment, well beyond screens. In our lives we reduce the world to manageable understandable categories and we reduce people to various graspable qualities that can be used to oppress them, we reduce others to specific sets of ideas used to justify their subordination. This comes about, or at least one of the ways that this comes about for Jean Baudrillard, is through a process by which people are reduced to an image that becomes more real than their lived and real experiences.

So Jean Baudrillard is cautious, we can't just say that the spectacle or that the simulation or simulacrum is a falsification of reality as Guy Debord says, instead Jean Baudrillard says that there is no such thing as a real objective world, that it is in the realm of simulation that the real world is created. It is in this world (this real-abstract world) that certain dominant interests, values and views of the world become real. There is no actual real world.

David Guignion (paraphrased)