an aside about disability and capitalism that i can’t exactly put into its own post due to being too short, but too long for updates.
i have this working theory about disability. humor me. understand i’m not calling neurodiversity a disability, they’re both umbrella terms to me, just that these two terms have some parallel interactions with what i’m about to grace.
capitalism requires an underclass. we know this. queer people, people of colour, women, and disabled people. i find that last one particularly interesting (not that any class is inherently less oppressed or not in need of equal parts of advocacy). if you’re black, or gay, trans or femme - you are (and history has repeatedly shown you are) typically equally capable of contributing to the economy. you are not less ‘able’ to create value (i use ‘value’ in the most vacuous sense of the word). purely in the practical sense, you are physically and mentally capable of holding down a job.
being disabled however is different. you are more often than not unable to compete for resources the same way able bodied people could. if you look at other demographics and how they have taken a place in the bottom of the hierarchy of capitalism, it usually has some socially perceived inability to provide as much as a cishet white man attached to it.
“women are too physically weak to work at the same pace as men.”
“people of colour come from different cultures that are incompatible with western values”
“queer people are too outside the mould to conform to straight society”
“disabled people can’t work many of the jobs an able bodied person can”
one of those is true. undeniably.
you are valued when you are profitable, and of what lesser value could you ever be, if you’re never going to be profitable. not only that, but you require resources for your existence to be sustained. man, wouldn’t it just be better if disabled people themselves didn’t exist?
conservatives don’t lead with this. it’s hard to do so and not sound like a nazi (because boy howdy, there is a lot of overlap). it’s a byproduct that’s baked into the pie that is commodification. psychologically, it manifests like any other bigotry, without adequate reason or methodology. it would be, at best, very disingenuous to say that this isn’t somewhat within cognition.
to be very clear, i’m not claiming disability has supreme reign over oppression, just that its interaction with capitalism seems more direct and harder to untether. you can at least argue multiculturalism could increase globalism and international trade to a neo-liberal, or that you can market to the queer community. you cannot make an argument for disabled people within that same framework, because at its core, capitalism doesn’t give a single fuck about human rights or moral good, just a line going up. fuck bigotry. fuck capitalism. and fuck nazis.