Note: People with disabilities have various reasons for their self-identification. Here, we use the phrases "The person is disabled/person with a disability"/"disabled people" to emphasize that disability arises from societal structures. --- Currently, many disability rights activists are protesting against the reform of the Disability Equality Act. This reform is completely inadequate and shows us what inclusion in this society truly means: It must not cost anything.
Disability is a reflection of society: People with disabilities have a significantly higher risk of poverty and are more frequently unemployed. They are not disadvantaged because they are "different," but because performance, competition, and economic benefit define the standard of social participation. In capitalism, this affects them doubly: Higher living costs for assistance, assistive devices, or accessible housing-and simultaneously, disadvantages in the labor market. Those who cannot work or can only work to a limited extent are dependent on state support.Social welfare support has primarily... The following goals are pursued: social security and the preservation of social peace, the lowest possible long-term care costs, and the (re)establishment of employability. The state finds itself caught in key areas of tension: between providing assistance and controlling, because those receiving benefits are also evaluated, categorized, and monitored; between human rights and budgetary constraints, since the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD; 2006) formally strengthens the rights of people with disabilities, but its implementation repeatedly fails due to funding issues; and finally, between the ideal of "inclusion" formulated therein and the principle of utility in capitalism.
The result: The welfare state adapts people to society - not society to different needs.
This is evident in the activation paradigm: Those who cannot live up to the ideal of the self-reliant, self-optimizing individual are devalued. The Federal Participation Act (2016) contains explicit cost-cutting measures and demands self-responsibility to such an extent that it can lead to benefit reductions. The economization of disability services is evident in cuts to staff and services: clients are categorized into needs groups and receive standardized support instead of being supported according to their individual needs. The result is a two-tier system: those deemed "able" receive empowerment and opportunities for self-determination, while those deemed "unempowerable" are subjected to confinement, external control, and invisibility.
Even the idea of treating people with disabilities as "customers" who are "allowed" to pay for their own support sounds like autonomy-but it's problematic, because those without money are not attractive customers.
Around 300,000 people work in sheltered workshops without employee status and therefore without workers' rights-for an average of EUR225 per month. They produce genuine goods and services for the regular market. These workshops receive government funding, and companies can partially fulfill their legal employment obligations by outsourcing to them, thus avoiding having to directly employ people with disabilities-in effect, they serve as subsidized, low-wage workers.
Workshop operators emphasize that their focus is on support, not production. However, the proclaimed goal - placement in the primary labor market - is not working: only about 80 people manage this transition each year. Workshops and special education schools simulate normality - they enforce the societal value of work (daily activity, work as a positive individual contribution, etc.) without enabling independence from social welfare and family support or social integration. These measures create a parallel sphere that exists outside the general labor market and the rest of society - not as a bridge to it, but as a permanent substitute. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has done little to change this: the number of workshop employees has even increased at times.
People with disabilities are often devalued because their disability is interpreted as an individual deficit. This discrimination is not an individual prejudice: the devaluation of people deemed "useless" has a structural basis. Mere anti-discrimination policies cannot eliminate the material causes of inequality.
Integration means that people with disabilities or migrants should be adapted to and integrated into the existing system. In contrast, the term "inclusion" is sometimes used, even by anti-capitalists, to describe how structures should be adapted to different needs and society should be designed to be diverse from the outset. In this view, diversity would be the norm, and people wouldn't even need to integrate because the structures would be adaptable. However, in reality, both terms are often used synonymously: inclusion or participation usually just means integration into the market.
As long as people's lives and participation depend on their access to money-that is, for most people, on their ability to work-no fundamental improvements in the situation of people with disabilities can occur.
Social welfare measures and reforms will not change societal standards. A truly inclusive society requires a revolutionary break with this system.
For the social revolution!
https://www.dieplattform.org/2026/07/06/behinderung-im-kapitalismus/#more-3649
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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