When Trump took office and named anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. his Secretary of Health, he and his administration went on a rampage against health institutions. They fired thousands of federal healthcare workers at places like the CDC and FDA and dismissed heads of those same agencies. The Trump administration has cut millions in public health funding, HIV prevention, and chronic disease surveys. They’ve defunded vaccine efforts, including research into mRNA vaccines which have been essential in the ongoing fight against COVID and long COVID. They’ve called autism an “epidemic” caused by vaccines to justify cuts to research, social services, and treatment funding. All of this has devastating effects on ordinary people, and in particular, the disabled community.
A little over one in four US adults have a disability, and that number has grown faster than the general population, according to the Center for American Progress. COVID disabled a huge number of people and will continue to do so, especially if the availability of the COVID vaccine—and healthcare access in general—is further rolled back. Yet, as part of Trump’s war on DEI and “wokeism,” including fear-mongering around autism, he has slashed funding and programs for disabled people. The logical conclusion of dismantling healthcare and social services will be the deaths of countless of the most marginalized people.
We can’t take these attacks lying down; we must build a movement that fights for all working and oppressed people, including the disabled. This means setting our sights on a world free from capitalist exploitation and oppression.
Disability Under Capitalism
Ultimately, capitalism created the category of disability by refusing to accommodate workers with impairments. With the advent of industrialization and a system based on profit-seeking, the bosses looked to extract the most labor they could from their employees. Anyone who couldn’t perform like a machine was tossed into the “surplus population,” i.e. the ranks of the unemployed. The bosses continue this practice today—disabled people are much less likely to be employed than abled people, even though the means to accommodate our impairments exist. The capitalist class will always prioritize greater profits over employing someone who needs disability accommodations.
Social Darwinism emerged during the rise of industrial capitalism to justify the deep inequality baked into class society, underpinned by racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that are used to divide the working class and hyper-exploit certain sections of it. The idea behind social Darwinism was that, like in nature, modern society undergoes a battle for survival of the fittest, which determines each person’s place in it. This justified the oppression of people in need of accommodations by deeming them “unfit” and inferior to the abled population. Later, the rise of eugenics turned the dial up to eleven and proposed that society should be curated, composed of the “best” people. These ideas combined ableist rhetoric with racism, sexism, and queerphobia to justify oppression, exploitation, and eventually torture and genocide.
Even before neoliberal figures like Bill Clinton eradicated welfare programs in the ‘90s, disabled people were not afforded a good quality of life, being forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops to receive a pittance. Disabled Americans are twice as likely to live in poverty as their abled counterparts according to US Census data. This is intentional—it makes workers afraid of becoming disabled and shoved into the ranks of the unemployed. This also places countless disabled people among capitalism’s permanent pool of unemployed, the “reserve army of labor” who can be used as scabs during peaks in labor action, such as strikes.
How The ADA Was Won
In order to fight back against attacks on disabled people today, we must look to past movements that won protections for disabled people. The struggle for disability rights in the US heated up in the late 1960s, which also saw massive movements for Black liberation, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights. This was a time of major social upheaval, with one struggle inspiring another and compounding their momentum. Student activists at Berkeley started the Independent Living (IL) movement, seeking to dismantle barriers in society that prevented the participation of disabled people. For example, it was not required that public buildings have accessible ramps until 1968. Unfortunately, the IL movement stopped short of calling out capitalism as the underlying culprit and failed to engage in mass, disruptive tactics.
Later, other organizations such as Disabled in Action engaged in direct protest, like mass rallies and occupations of public buildings. One particularly noteworthy moment for the disability rights movement was the occupation of the San Francisco Department of Health, Education and Welfare building for nearly a month. Their aim was to put pressure on the government to issue regulations in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which would define what discrimination meant in the context of disability and make it illegal for federally-funded agencies to discriminate against disabled people. This audacious act saw the solidarity of unions and Civil Rights organizations, as well as the Black Panthers, who donated food to the demonstrators. The battle ended in victory.
Decades of disability rights action culminated in the winning of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (the ADA), which has been described as a “bill of rights” for disabled people. This wasn’t easy—it took an all-out battle of working people to win the most comprehensive disability rights laws in history. In 1988, as part of an initiative to raise awareness about the proposed legislation, a “discrimination diaries” campaign was launched where disabled people detailed the daily barriers they face. People gave testimonies before governmental committees in packed rooms overflowing with disabled people and disability advocates. A coalition was launched that included disability organizations, labor, religious, and civic organizations to fight for the legislation. Activists had to contend with attempts by Congress to narrow the bill in order to leave out individuals with AIDS or mental illnesses, as well as countless other amendments meant to drag out the process.
The movement needed to escalate to fight Congress’ aim to stall and weaken the bill—hence the famous “Capitol Crawl.” On March 12, 1990, ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, the same group that would later fight against Trumpcare in 2017) led a march of over 1,000 to the west side of the US Capitol. Demonstrators abandoned their wheelchairs and mobility devices and began the trek up 83 steps. After the grueling climb they hand-delivered scrolls of the Declaration of Independence to members of Congress. It was this mass, in-your-face action that disrupted business as usual that broke the stalemate and forced the “bill of rights” for disabled people through Congress.
The Struggle Today
Today, Trump and Co. use eugenics-based rhetoric to justify their attacks on disabled people. This is part of the counter-revolutionary project Trump has launched against the gains of social movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as the tactics that were used to win those gains. Without a powerful fightback, this will pave the way for more rollbacks of democratic rights for all working people, including disabled people. Losing these protections also exacerbates ableist attitudes towards autistic and other disabled individuals in need of support and care.
We need to revive the working-class tactics that won the ADA, including mass, disruptive action. We cannot rely on the Democrats and courts to carry out this battle, who seek to stall, block, or co-opt our movements. We need to link the fight for disability rights to the fight against all oppression, including attacks on immigrants and trans people. The fight to abolish ICE is inextricably linked to the fight for disability rights—a system that funds armed thugs over providing healthcare for all is not a system we can tolerate any longer. Fighting against all oppression means taking on capitalism itself, because as history shows, any gains won under capitalism are under threat of being rolled back. Capitalism relies on oppression and divides the working class in order to weaken our power, but our power is in our shared class interests and our ability to shut down business as usual. To truly provide for disabled people and the oppressed, we need to win a different type of society that prioritizes human need over profits— a socialist society.
We Demand:
- Research funding should be decided democratically by ordinary working people, not billionaire CEOs! Research related to disabilities should be in the hands of ordinary working people, including disabled individuals. Nothing about us without us!
- Healthcare is a human right! We need universal healthcare, free at the point of use. All branches of the for-profit healthcare system, including the pharmaceutical industry, need to be brought into public ownership, to be run democratically in the interests of workers, not for profit.
- Socialists must fight all attacks on democratic rights and the rights of oppressed people, and we need a new party of the working class to fight for these things!
- The whole system is guilty: disabled people will never be treated fairly as long as profit is the name of the game. Only a democratically planned, socialist society can truly accommodate the millions of disabled workers and ensure a decent standard of living for all working and oppressed people.
