Quick (?) note on social murder as stigma-generating
I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned this on here before or not, I have an article where I very briefly lay out my understanding of disability as social/as historically produced, my understanding of capitalism as subordinating human well-being to accumulation, combine those to say ‘thus capitalism is inherently disabling which is to say, it will never stop producing disabled people as an oppressed group.’ (To be clear, none of that’s especially original on my part though I think the type of connections I draw between the two lines of thinking are relatively uncommon.) Then I pivot to material mostly drawn from my book, to serve as an extended case study. If that’s of interest to you, check it out here - https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9795&context=penn_law_review If nothing else, it’s another set of reasons to read Tony Smith’s wonderful book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, which is all over the footnotes.
I happened to look at this article again because of a conversation with a student. The ‘capitalism will always disable’ argument is closely related to how social murder operates (I feel like I say this all the time at this point - you ever get bored by your own thoughts? - the most fleshed out version being this: https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/social-murder-capitalism-s-systematic-and-state-organized-killin/26241382) but with an important difference, one that I probably could have drawn out more explicitly. I’ll come back to that in a moment. First, I want to mention the thought that occurred to me that prompted to write this. It’s this: insofar as capitalism involves denying people access to good lives, capitalist societies face ongoing tensions, in part because they’re class societies.
At a little more length: societies produce a) ideas of what counts as good lives, dignified treatment, etc, b) different ways of accessing such conditions, c) insofar as they’re class societies, exclusion of many people from access or at best differences in degree of such access (to put it so mildly that it borders on offensive...!), and d) justifications for c). That is to say, there’s an ongoing need for rulers to go ‘hmm, some of you not getting access to good lives might have views on that, that could be a problem!’ That involves at least four basic elements: shaping people’s sense of what’s a good life, shaping people’s awareness of who does and doesn’t have such a life, shaping how people respond when they are aware that they or others they care about are denied a good life, and dealing with people’s actions when their responses take potentially troublesome collective forms.
Schematically, the first three of those are matters of ideology, the last is a matter of repressive force of various kinds, though I wouldn’t want to put that too starkly - there’s a fair bit of repression in the first three and a fair bit of ideology involved in justifying the repression. I should as well, this isn’t a static affair so much as it’s a general pattern of tension playing out dynamically in a host of different concrete forms. Another way to make the point about tension is that there’s always a low grade kind of simmering happening, at the least, tied to the unfolding historical develop of i) new needs, ii) new means of meeting needs, iii) changed awareness, consciousness, culture, related to those, and iv) various political actions taken (and reactions in response) due to all of the above.
Yet another way to say this - trying again because unsatisfied with these formulations - is that capitalism is intrinsically hierarchical, involving the ongoing reproduction of pre-existing hierarchies and the creation of new ones - which can sometimes need new justifications, and it’s also beset by periodic ideological and occasionally material attacks (some of which are genuinely and important ways successful to some degree) on various hierarchies (from there sources: conscious political movements, cultural changes, and ‘the market’ undermining some of the sources of some specific hierarchies). This means capitalism is in one sense stable as set of hierarchies and in another sense unstable in that many of specific hierarchies are subject to giving way for various reasons, such that the personnel at the tops of and in the middles of those hierarchies can’t be entirely sure of their position, so to speak. All of that, I think, tends to foster various forms of cultural and ideological ferment as people enduring all that shit seek justify and/or criticize various parts of the world they live in and their positions and attendant social fate in that world.
Okay so now this is getting into why the disability analysis in that article is a little different from the social murder analysis as I’ve tended to late it out. Disability is a condition of real deprivation of needs - so far, so social murder - and also a condition of having both constrained capacity for social participation as well as being of lower social status or enduring relative lack of respect. The latter stuff isn’t in the social murder analysis as I’ve tended to think about it, though it’s closely related. Here’s what I mean: as part of it being a society that periodically wrecks people massively in stochastic fashion (I mean to say, it’s predictable in general that some people will get shat upon but who exactly, when and how, is unpredictable), capitalism tends to generate justifications for why that wrecking of those people then and there wasn’t actually a problem, you plebs, so shut the fuck up and go back to work, kinda thing. To return to the terms I used just a second ago: the lower social status and lack of respect for disabled people is at least in part a result of the deprivations disabled people endure, meaning, it’s part of justifying the denial of needs. The constrained capacity for social participation is itself partly a result of denied needs (living in deprivation makes it harder to be an efficacious social and political actor, all things being equal) and is partly an ideological matter closely intertwined with - or, maybe, the exact same thing as, just put in different words - disabled people’s status as a discounted population.
What I’m fumbling for here (and again a point I’m pretty sure I’ve said before but not in this exact way, I hope) is that it’s easy to think ‘the stigmatized are more likely to get wrecked’, which does have an important element of truth to it, but the reality seems in some ways even worse, which is that ‘those who get wrecked by the stochastic death machine that is the system will find they then get stigmatized as well’ with those stigmas having some sticking power and taking on lives of their own to some extent too. Yet another way to put it: the system dehumanizes in practice and ideologically; if the latter happens to a person or group, the former may happen (ie, to get rhetorically dehumanized seems to increase risk of the sorts of violent oppression that we mean when we say ‘dehumanization’); if the former happens, the latter will then happen (ie, those who endure dehumanizing violent oppression can count on being rhetorically dehumanized as well). I should say, this is all a bit more lockstep gears turning mechanistically than I mean to say, think instead, tension-laden tendencies, shit people will have to fight over - rough patterns of political-cultural conflict over time kinda thing, which are subject to empirical investigation and to contestation to some degree by people in concrete circumstances.
Going to end with this quote by Barbara Fields that a friend pointed out to me recently:
“A commonplace that few stop to examine holds that people are more readily oppressed when they are already perceived as inferior by nature. The reverse is more to the point. People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed.” (“Slavery, Race and Ideology in theUnited States of America,” p106. https://files.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/13230/files/2020/08/Fields_Slavery-Race-and-Ideology.pdf)