Introduction

In Britain and many other countries across the developed world, there have been changes to social security systems in recent decades that have attempted to commodify the labour power of disabled people. In Britain, a tripartite approach has been taken. This includes:

• • the development of active labour market policies that are enforced through increasingly strict conditionality regimes;

• • the replacing in 2008 of Incapacity Benefit (IB) with Employment and Support (ESA), the structural features of which are supposed to engender a closer relationship between disabled people and labour markets;

• • an attempt through legislation, such as the Equality Act 2010 and its predecessor (the Disability Discrimination Act 1995), and policies (such as Access to Work), to reduce the discrimination faced by disabled people in accessing paid work.

In this chapter, we are not particularly concerned with the detail of these policies, but with the general thrust of policy that has focused primarily on placing greater pressure on disabled people to sell their labour power in open markets. The central issue considered is whether, given the material (the impoverishment of disabled people) and psychosocial (for instance, the creation of fear, anxiety and distress) effects that this process has caused, there might be an alternative to forcing disabled people to compete for wage labour alongside their disabled and non-disabled peers.

Disability and capitalism: some tensions for the social model of disability

Central to the social model of disability is the idea that disability is a form of social oppression, rather than being the consequence of an individual having a particular impairment or combination of impairments. In particular, the social model of disability suggests the material disadvantage that disabled people face is the consequence of the ways in which societies, and particularly their economies, are structured. In this context, it is argued, following Marxian ideas on the chronology of economic organisation, that the rise of industrial capitalism from the late 18th century resulted in the exclusion of disabled people from the one activity – wage labour – through which the basis of capitalism is expressed.

Finkelstein (1980) and others (for example, Gleeson, 1999; see also Chapter Fourteen, this volume) have argued that the way in which pre-industrial Feudal societies were organised allowed for the social use of the skills and capacities of disabled people.