In its social sense, “ability” describes a person’s capacity for labor, relative to the social average. This social average makes up the general labor-power of society. Disability describes the individual’s deviation below that general labor-power. The degree of disability is the degree to which a disabled person will be excluded from the social process of production. Disability is not a natural category, but a social one, determined by the relations of production which exclude disabled persons from social reproduction and, thereby, from social life. That is to say: disability will be defined by any given mode of production only in contradistinction to the manner in which production functions. In a given social order, different attributes or conditions will be disabilities (or not) depending on whether they cause the person who exhibits them to fall below the general labor-power.
The ideological reflection of disability is found especially in medicine, but also throughout the ideological state machinery, and is ubiquitous in culture, where it finds its expression in ableism. Under capitalism, disability excludes the propertyless and poor from selling their labor-power, which leaves them destitute, beneath the proletariat, forming a “surplus” population that capitalists can subject to conditions of hyper-exploitation. Disabled persons are at a much higher risk to fall into debt bondage or otherwise be trafficked than the general population, and suffer ableist abuse both in the home and in public institutions. This is how disability structures class, particularly the laboring classes. However, there are also ideological ramifications for “disabled” persons of the dominant class, who might also suffer ableist abuse and even fall to the exploited classes as a result.
A person who suffers disability is therefore, under most circumstances, disabled against selling her labor-power, and is semi-proletarian. More precisely, a person who suffers such a degree of disability is a proletarian worker when she is able to work and is excluded from the proletariat when she is unable. Likewise, persons who suffer injury or illness and who are, for that reason, temporarily unable to work are, correctly speaking, also temporarily excluded from the proletariat, because their real productive relations have, however temporarily, changed to those of a non-proletarian class. A person, lastly, who is, under all circumstances, disabled from selling her labor-power is, therefore, excluded entirely from the proletariat.
But what about “disabled” capitalists, landlords, politicians, judges, military leaders, and so on? In the most precise sense (this may come as a shock) such persons are not and cannot be disabled. They are entirely free to participate in social life; indeed, some belong to those classes that dominate, structure, and order social life. And yet we cannot help but see a capitalist with mobility issues, a missing limb, chronic pain, a psychiatric illness, and so forth, as disabled. Why?
Because class-structure (real economic relations) is reflected in ideology. Disability has a real, structural existence, but it also has a real ideological existence. Therefore, in culture and institutions, persons of the dominant classes whose bodies fit what is, ideologically, the image of disability, will invariably be viewed and medically classified as disabled. We will see this process of reification, the disjoinder of the ideological products of labor-economic relationships into free-standing and inaccurately mapped categories, again. It is a recurring aspect of human class society.
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