Note 2: To students from R. Prince: This is an unusual article in a number of respects - first, from where I am sitting, it is an unusually good article. It attempts to connect the development of eugenic thinking and models at the end of the 19th century in the USA with the development of industrial capitalism. When I first read it, in the Left Business Observer, I considered it one of the more interesting and original articles on the eugenics movement I had seen in some time and asked both the author and LBO if I might use it. The specific idea I found intriguing is Russell's notion that as industrial capitalism became more specialized, requiring more highly specialized technical and mechanical skills that unskilled workers and those outside the work force became, in the eyes of `the system' even more irrelevant than they had been previously. It was this social contempt for physically and mentally handicapped people, that helped fuel the unusual virulence of the eugenics movement towards they wrote off as `feebleminded' or physically handicapped. Her book which deals with the present moment, looks especially interesting. rp.

Capitalism has certain disadvantages, among them that many people are unemployed and impoverished against their will. And while capitalism has sometimes held the promise of expanding the base of people benefiting from it, for people with disabilities (PWDs) it's largely been an exclusionary system.

The effects on PWDs of a market-driven society can be explained by tracing how work evolved under capitalism. In precapitalist societies, economic exploitation was direct and political, made possible by the feudal concentration of land ownership . While a few owners reaped the surplus, the many living on an estate worked for subsistence. With the advent of capitalism, as Michael Harrington put it, the "discipline was now economic, not political.... The worker was 'free' in the double sense that he or she was no longer tied to a given manor and had the right to choose between work and death." People were no longer tied to the land but were forced to find work that would pay a wage -- or starve.

With the means of production in the hands of capitalists, those who were capital-less were at the mercy of being hired by others. While one may have previously worked to produce for the landowner's use and those PWDs who could work did work at their own pace (not that their lot, or any feudal worker's, was enviable), capitalism meant that one was expected to produce for another's profit. This sea change presented nonwealthy disabled people with less than an equal chance to be a productive member of a community, for industrial capitalism set up production dynamics that devalued our bodies.

To Descartes, the body was a machine; to the industrialist, people's bodies were valued for their ability to function like machines. As human beings were gathered into the "satanic mills" to accomplish the sacred task of capital accumulation, impediments were erected to disabled people's survival. Nondisabled workers had value because bosses could push them to produce at ever increasing rates of speed. But as work became more rationalized, requiring precise mechanical movements of the body repeated in quicker succession, PWDs were seen as less "fit" to do the tasks required of workers.

Then. A society run by markets meant that PWDs perceived to be of no use to the competitive profit cycle were excluded from work. Modifying work schedules or providing job accommodations to fit the needs of PWDs -- a goal of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) -- would lower profits. So the labor market -- and society at large -- devalued PWDs for not having an arm or for using crutches Many were forced to beg on the street to survive, and generally all PWDs came to be labeled as "unfit."

"Disability" came to be defined explicitly in relation to the labor market. For instance, in workers' compensation statutes a laborer's body is rated according to its functioning parts. One is rated a "10" if one has all one's fingers, arms, legs, but ones value is significantly altered to a 7, 4, or less depending on how many parts do not "work" according to standard productivity models. In Social Security law, "disabled" means unable to "engage in substantial work activity." Being irrelevant to the economic system, PWDs were defined as part of the surplus population.

This exclusion was rationalized by Social Darwinists, who used biology to argue that heredity -- race and genes -- prevailed over the class and economic issues raised by the likes of Marx. Just as the "inferior" weren't meant to survive in nature they weren't meant to survive in a competitive society. At the extreme, Nazi Germany viewed PWDs as a burden and exterminated over 280,000 of them. But even in "democratic" America, bean-counting logic prevailed: over 50,000 inferiors were sterilized in a pseudo-scientific effort to prevent the births of disabled offspring and save on social costs.

For 19th century tycoons, Social Darwinism proved a marvellous rationale for leaving the surplus population to die in poverty. But lots of "progressives" also saw in eugenics a secular, rational means to control what it perceived as meandering nature that impeded the march of progress. It missed the link to a capitalism that devalued disabled people's less- or nonexploitable bodies and to the Social Darwinism that theorized their disposability.

Now. We like to think that things have changed. But have they? Body politics under standard business practice are still a part of the employment struggle of PWDs today. While the ADA provides redress for discrimination based on prejudice, it has not addressed economic discrimination -- the structural mechanisms that permit and even encourage a systemic discrimination against workers with disabilities.

Just how have employment civil rights fared over the nine years the ADA was enacted? A 1997 comparative study between the pre-ADA state and federal disability anti-discrimination laws shows that civil rights laws have not produced the gains in employment rates or employment opportunities for people with disabilities that advocates expected. National employment surveys show no real statistical gain in employment. One study suggests that proportion of working-age adults with disabilities who are employed has declined since 1986, when one in three were working. The overall combined (severe and nonsevere) disabled unemployment rate is 70%. Though PWDs remain chronically unemployed, of those who are, 79% say they'd prefer to work.

Positive employment outcomes from disability civil rights are compromised by the lack of mandatory affirmative action and work disincentives built into Social Security regulations, but business resistance to employing PWDs also figures directly in the high unemployment rate. The National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Banking Association, and the National Federation of Businesses all opposed the ADA from the start.

The year the ADA was signed, the libertarian Cato Institute called on President George Bush "to ask Congress to reconsider" the ADA, since it represented a re-regulation of the economy that was harmful to business. Supply-side economist Paul Craig Roberts, warned on the day the Act was signed that it would "add enormous costs to businesses that will cut into their profits." The right-wing Washington Times made its objection clear from the onset in an editorial "Handicapping the Economy: the Downside of the New Disabilities Law."

Two years after the ADA was signed into law, Law and Economics movement economist Richard Epstein devoted an entire book chapter opposing the concept of civil rights for disabled people. Starting from the premise that the ADA is a redistributive interference with the market, he concludes that the ADA should be repealed. In 1995, Cato's director of regulatory studies wrote: "If Congress is serious about lifting the regulatory burden from the economy, it must consider major changes in, if not outright repeal of, the ADA.... Congress...should consider paying reparations to cover the costs that individuals, private establishments, and enterprises have suffered under the ADA's provisions."

ADA's record. Business' desire to retract hard won disability civil rights victories must stem from the perception that PWDs will be able to enforce civil rights under the ADA. Not so. In a report on the performance of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (which enforces employment antidiscrimination laws) the U.S. Civil Rights Commission concluded that enforcement of the ADA has fallen short. An American Bar Association study shows that workers with disabilities are having a difficult time winning disability discrimination suits. Their study of the more than 1,200 cases filed since 1992 under Title I of the ADA reveals that employers won in 92% of the cases that have been decided. Professor Ruth Colker of the Ohio State University College of Law found that employers prevail in more than 93% of reported ADA discrimination cases decided at the trial court level, and of those cases that are appealed, THEY prevail 84% of the time. She concludes that this outcome is "worse than results found in comparable areas of the law; only prisoner rights cases fare as poorly."

The Civil Rights Commission states that one of the most persistent criticisms of the ADA has been the issue of how much it costs employers to comply with the employment provisions. While employers' cost of compliance is not an appropriate argument against remedying the denial of civil rights to PWDs, business objections reveal the labor market mechanisms that generate obstacles to the employment of PWDs.

Any executive knows as well as any Marxist that business exists to make profits. Employers will resist any extraordinary cost of doing business. By that logic, an employee with a disability represents an impediment to the maximization of the bottom line. Epstein, for example, states that the employment provisions of the ADA are a "disguised subsidy" and that "successful enforcement under the guise of 'reasonable accommodation' necessarily impedes the operation and efficiency of firms."

Whether real or perceived in any given instance, employers continue to express concerns about increased costs in the form of providing reasonable accommodations and anticipate extra administration costs to hire an unknown quantity, the nonstandard worker. Employers, if they provide health care insurance at all, anticipate extra premium costs for health insurance for workers with a disabilities. Insurance companies and managed care networks often exempt "pre-existing" or chronic conditions from coverage, or charge extremely high premiums. Employers, in turn, tend to look for ways to avoid providing coverage to cut costs. In addition, employers characteristically assume that they will encounter increased liability and lowered productivity from a disabled worker either from decreased work capacity or absences from work.

Undoubtedly prejudice -- employers' distaste for hiring PWDs, much like their distaste for hiring people other than white men -- contributes significantly to the high unemployment rate of PWDs. But an accountant's cost/benefit calculations could also be labeled as a form of discrimination -- economic discrimination. An employee who is too costly -- significantly disabled -- is likely to be unemployed.

Statistics tend to support this position. John McNeil of the Census Bureau, for instance, finds that for workers ages 21 to 64 with no disability the likelihood of having a job is 82.1%. For those with a non-severe disability, the rate is 76.9%; the rate drops to 26.1% for those with a significant disability.

Civil rights traditionally demands equal treatment, requiring that PWDs be treated the same as nondisabled people. In the case of employment and disability, however, civil rights within a capitalist paradigm envisions equal treatment while failing to acknowledge economic discrimination. This fatal oversight ensures that laws such as the ADA will necessarily fall short of accomplishing employment goals. For truly equal opportunity, biases (including economic biases) must be eradicated.

Enforcement of any redistributive measure, including civil rights laws, involve a power struggle between the public interest and business interests, which resist such cost-shifting burdens. Law and Economics icon Judge Richard Posner, a self-appointed protector of the interests of business, writes:

If the nation's employers have potentially unlimited financial obligations to 43 million disabled persons, the Americans with Disabilities Act will have imposed an indirect tax potentially greater than the national debt. We do not find an intention to bring about such a radical result in either the language of the Act or its history. The preamble actually "markets" the Act as a cost saver, pointing to "billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity.The savings will be illusory if employers are required to expend many more billions in accommodation than will be saved by enabling disabled people to work.

While there are benefits to government to see that PWDs are employed (workers become taxpayers and get off public benefits, for instance), business and conservative antiregulatory factions appear to have the upper hand.

In our society humane concerns get subsumed by the market's tyranny, the inversion of what is needed to foster an inclusive, cooperative and healthy society. We should ask what is an economy for: to support market driven profits or to sustain social bonds and encourage human participation? Is it "progressive" or even defensible to hold bodies that do not produce the way the capitalist class demands in contempt, leaving PWDs to struggle on meager benefit checks? How can the realm of work be adjusted to provide reasonable accommodations for all, and how can all members of society be embraced and rewarded whether they work or not? Is the capacity to produce for profit an acceptable measure of human worth?