Category: Human Interest

My original article entitled The Invalidation of the Worker – A Study of Disability in Capitalist Society was published in October, 2013. It is logical to assume that as ‘Austerity’ has continued unabated, thousands of disabled who were alive to read it then, are nolonger with us now. The proliferation of articles that over-simplify and misrepresent ‘disability’ are common place within bourgeois society. Most miss the vital point of economic exclusion, and focus instead upon misguided notions of bourgeois individuality – making such puerile statements as ‘if only disabled people were viewed as individuals and not their disabilities’, or ‘disabled people should not be viewed as dysfunctional able-bodied’, and so on and so forth. It is not that there is no truth to statements such as these, but that this kind of narrative is entirely bourgeois in nature, and as such, does not address the central reality of economic exclusion. Why should a person with a disability be categorised as ‘disabled’, when ‘able-bodied’ people are only referred to in that manner, within a temporary discourse which distinguishes the non-disabled from the disabled (privileging the former and disempowering the latter). In reality this situation is a matter of Marxist-Leninist critique, and involves the exclusion of the disabled community not only from bourgeois society, but also from proletariat society.