Disability Politics in a Global Economy

Essays in Honour of Marta Russell

Ravi Malhotra, Ravi Malhotra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317499725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Discrimination Law
• Index: Law

While the visibility of disability studies has increased in recent years, few have thoroughly examined the marginalization of people with disabilities through the lens of political economy. This was the great contribution of Marta Russell (1951-2013), an activist and prominent scholar in the United States and best known for her analyses of the issues faced by people with disabilities.

This book examines the legacy of Marta Russell, bringing together distinguished scholars and activists such as Anne Finger, Nirmala Erevelles and Mark Weber, to explicate current issues relevant to the empowerment of people with disabilities. Drawing from various fields including Law, Political Economy, Education and History, the book takes a truly interdisciplinary approach, offering a body of work that develops a dextrous understanding of the marginalization of people with disabilities.

The book will be of great use and interest to specialists and students in the fields of Political Economy, Law and Society, Labour Studies, Disability Studies, Women's Studies, and Political Science.

Part I
Legal implications

1 The legal politics of Marta Russell: a Castoriadan reading

Ravi Malhotra

In this chapter, I explore the main intellectual ideas of the long neglected disability rights activist and scholar, Marta Russell (1951–2013), the subject of this anthology. I argue that Russell’s identification of neo-liberal capitalism as the central problematic facing people with disabilities, exemplified in her landmark book, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract, is an original insight and major contribution to modern disability politics. By bringing the beginnings of a materialist analysis into the world of disability rights, Russell opened the door for the possibility of a fully-fledged counter-hegemonic theory of disablement that is so badly needed today. For too many legal scholars, amending the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or transforming its case law is seen as the complete answer to the dilemmas faced by people with disabilities. For them, the social model, the idea that structural barriers are the main problem faced by disabled people today, is articulated exclusively through law. For many in American disability studies, an original interest in the symbolic interactionism of Erving Goffman (Shuttleworth and Meekosha, 2013: 351; Goffman, 1963) has degenerated into a focus primarily on culture and identity. Russell cogently argues in defense of a political economy approach. I suggest, however, that Russell’s genuine insights can be fruitfully deepened by a critical engagement with the political thought of radical Greek-French philosopher, Cornelius Castoriadis. In Part I, I provide a short overview of Russell’s life and introduce her to those new to her work. In Part II, I highlight the central ideas of her legacy, focusing particularly on the arguments contained in Beyond Ramps. In Part III, I provide a selective overview of some of the key ideas of Castoriadis. In Part IV, I argue that a Castoriadan reading of Russell’s work provides the basis for a liberatory disability politics. Elsewhere, I have considered how other radical theorists, such as those associated with the Sojourner Truth Organization, might provide new insight into disability politics (Malhotra, 2014b) and others have examined the politics of disablement in the context of the autonomist Marxist tradition (Richter, this volume). However, in the interests of space, I confine myself here solely to Castoriadis. In Part V, I offer some potential law reforms that would undergird a Castoriadan reading of Russell’s legacy. In Part VI, I provide an overview of the chapters that follow in this volume.

Part I: Marta Russell: a life of struggle and ideas

Marta Russell was born in 1951 near the town of Clarksdale, Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta (Clay, 2015). Disabled since birth and raised on a cotton farm, Russell was always integrated in regular classrooms despite the fact that she required leg braces and underwent periodic surgeries to attempt to improve her mobility. In an interview with noted disability advocate Laura Hershey, Russell comments on how she was given a tricycle to get between buses in an era when integration of students with physical disabilities was by no means the norm. Russell speculates that this may well have been in part because Mississippi was so poor that they did not have the institutional funding for a segregated school system for children born with disabilities (Hershey, 2000). As a child, Russell did not particularly self-identify as a disabled person. However, her impairments did preclude her participation in certain activities such as cheerleading, which all her friends did as children (Hershey, 2000). One might argue that, like many young girls with disabilities, her physical impairments freed her from certain ascribed gender roles that were dominant in the 1950s and 1960s to focus on more intellectual pursuits.

Russell had the good fortune to come of age at a time of enormous change in American society in general and in Mississippi in particular (Hamlin, 2012). The turbulent 1960s saw the destruction of the racist Jim Crow system that had dominated the South for nearly a century. The unpopular draft for the Vietnam War created massive unrest on college campuses throughout the United States. A participant in the emerging civil rights and anti-war movements, Russell grew up in a well-to-do family that included a Governor of Mississippi amongst her ancestors and attended the prestigious Lausanne boarding school for girls in Memphis, Tennessee during the late 1960s. Although Russell had physical impairments since birth, she had sufficient mobility in her youth to be included in this elite institution, notwithstanding the physically inaccessible environment that was common in private schools at the time (Clay, 2015). As a young woman, she was active as a volunteer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the enforcement of desegregation in Jackson, Mississippi and was friendly with activists who started an underground newspaper that drew the ire of the authorities (Hershey, 2000). In the early 1970s, she earned a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the Memphis College of Art (Malhotra, 2014a).

A major turning point in Russell’s life came when she permanently moved to California in 1974 (Clay, 2015). In Los Angeles, she built a successful career as a photographer and graphic designer, and moved into the film industry, building her own company for title design and acting as a Supervisor for Disney’s 1982 film Tron. During this busy time period, her daughter Georgia Scheele was born. Russell later created notable documentaries on visual effects and the disability community (Scheele, 2015). In the late 1980s, Russell gradually developed more mobility issues, necessitating the use of a wheelchair. Always the black sheep of the family and now divorced, she also found herself radicalized toward disability politics as her impairments made it increasingly difficult for her to work in the film industry, forcing her to eventually apply for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits (Weiss, 2015; Russell, 2005). From 1990 to 2005, Russell devoted her time to publishing both academic scholarship and activist articles about the socio-economic oppression of people with disabilities as neo-liberalism grew increasingly powerful after 1990. In 1994, she made the award winning video, “Disabled and the Cost of Saying I Do” on marriage disincentives for disabled people receiving social assistance (Russell, 1994a) that continue to plague American society more than 20 years later. She was also active in two organizations with occasionally conflicting belief systems. She played a role in the disability advocacy group, Not Dead Yet, which has been a stalwart voice in opposing physician assisted suicide because of concerns that vulnerable people with disabilities will be convinced to end their lives. They have been vocal in raising concerns about the activities of discredited physician Jack Kevorkian, among others (Russell, 1998: 29–30). She also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Southern California chapter of the ACLU, an organization that has supported, inter alia, the right of individuals to end their own lives (“Marta Russell LinkedIn Profile”; “The Successes of the American Civil Liberties Union”).

Russell also organized protests against telethons in Los Angeles that featured demeaning portrayals of people with disabilities. Many in the disability community have challenged the degrading way that telethons such as the Jerry Lewis Telethon have painted a picture of people with disabilities as helpless objects of pity (Shapiro, 1993; Longmore, 1997). She was also a participant in the activities of ADAPT, a militant direct action organization that in recent years has mobilized to demand appropriate funding to allow people with disabilities to live with appropriate attendant services in the community, rather than nursing homes (Hershey, 2000). Attendant services typically offer assistance with activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, and toileting. I was privileged to co-author a piece with Marta on capitalism and disability that appeared in the journal, Socialist Register (Russell and Malhotra, 2001) and have the opportunity to present it at what was then known as the Socialist Studies Conference in 2002 in Manhattan on a panel that included noted public intellectual, Naomi Klein. Unfortunately, due to health issues, Russell ceased her writing career after 2005 until her untimely death in 2013. In all of her myriad political activities, Russell was one of a very small number of American disability rights advocates to focus again and again on disability discrimination through the lens of a political economy perspective. Where so many disability studies scholars have been distracted by issues of identity and culture, for Marta, class was central.

Part II: The disability politics of Marta Russell

Marta’s political writings are extensive. They range in tone from scholarly to populist and activist. Unfortunately, they are scattered across a number of small circulation theoretical journals such as Monthly Review (Stewart and Russell, 2001; Russell, 2005), Socialist Register (Russell and Malhotra, 2001), and Counterpunch (Russell, 2003) as well as magazines devoted to the disability community such as The Disability Rag (Russell, 1994b; Russell, 1994c). No central depository of her work exists as of this writing nor does there seem to be even a comprehensive listing of her publications. This poses serious challenges for researchers trying to study and appraise her work. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on her hard-hitting and pioneering if populist monograph, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract, published by Common Courage Press in 1998 (Russell, 1998). In primarily focusing on political economy and the role of people with disabilities in a free market economy, this text is emblematic of Russell’s overall oeuvre.

In Beyond Ramps, Russell presciently anticipates the massive downsizing of the welfare state that has unfolded in the 15 years since its publication. In fact, one of her core messages is that people with disabilities essentially function as canaries in the coal mine. The marginalization that people with disabilities experience in (or more often outside) the labor market merely anticipates the dismal economic future of large sections of the working class if free market capitalism continues unchallenged. Sadly, with Donald Trump a serious Presidential candidate at this time of writing, anti-capitalist ideas remain almost as marginal today as they were in 1998. Divided into three parts, the book opens with an explanation of disability oppression and the use of the concept of normalcy to structure hierarchies predicated on ableism (Russell, 1998: Ch 1). Russell does this effectively through an exposition of the Nazi legacy of eugenics and its linkages to social Darwinism. She documents how eugenic ideas had influence in the United States as well (Russell, 1998: Ch 2). This leads to a discussion of the right to die movement and its ableist implications (Russell, 1998: Ch 3) and the Human Genome Project (Russell, 1998: Ch 4).

In the second part, Russell outlines the mechanics of poverty and how people with disabilities are marginalized in a system that is based first and foremost on profitability. She analyzes how the rise of the market required conformity to bodily standards to ensure efficient production in the factory system. This inevitably excluded disabled people who could not conform to those standards (Russell, 1998: Ch 5). Russell then details the hierarchies that are endemic to the social assistance system for people with disabilities in the United States. Not only are there a bewildering array of rules and regulations that can easily lead to a denial of benefits, there is a very clear class system that places injured veterans at the very top, disabled workers who are entitled to SSDI based on their past earnings and contributions in the middle, and those people with disabilities with no work history at the bottom who must survive on the most meagre social program known as Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The American social benefit system, which keeps disabled people with no work history in deep poverty, compares badly to the more generous welfare system on offer in Scandinavian countries such as Sweden. Russell also importantly draws attention to the layers of bureaucracy, including medical doctors, social workers and policy makers, which benefit through well-remunerated professional careers from the byzantine framework which people with disabilities must navigate daily (Russell, 1998: Ch 6).

She then devotes a chapter to the debilitating role that charity has played in the lives of disabled people. A particularly appropriate time for reflection as the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon, as of this writing, has finally come to a close, Russell documents how the Telethon portrayed disabled people as pitiful and helpless. At the same time, they maintained a vast bureaucracy staffed with many lavishly paid executives who were paid, in some cases, up to $300,000 a year in 1992, while spending relatively little on assistive devices that would benefit disabled patients. She also identifies the tax deductions associated with charitable giving, which benefit the wealthy (Russell, 1998: Ch 7).

Building on this theme of the commodification of disability, Russell turns her attention to the failings of the nursing home industry. She illustrates how the American nursing home industry generates huge profits from the institutionalization of people with disabilities who typically are not able to perform wage labor. At the same time, they are significant donors to politicians and have stymied the developments of more dignified (and ironically cheaper) alternatives, such as the development of personal attendant services that would enable people with disabilities to remain in their homes. She documents the tragic physical and emotional abuse that has been rampant in many institutions, often compromising the health of the residents, and the shocking number of citations that nursing homes have received for violating patients’ rights (Russell, 1998: Ch 8). As she poignantly remarks, “[t]hose who have done time in nursing homes have exposed the rat-infested rooms, witnessed maggots crawling in open wounds, and counted the days inmates have lain neglected in feces” (Russell, 1998: 99). The deliberate choice of language referencing incarceration in penal institutions is unmistakable. As Russell notes, disability rights advocates have established organizations such as ADAPT which have used direct action tactics to co...