The Political Economy of Disability

Disabled people have organized against state and economic power in every system that has tried to manage them, and often built the analysis that explains it. Disabled scholars named the mechanisms described on this page: Michael Oliver argued that industrial capitalism created disability as an administrative category, and Marta Russell traced how disabled people are made profitable to institutions that exclude them from work. Disabled activists in the UK triggered the first inquiry of its kind at the United Nations. Disabled dissidents in the Soviet Union documented a system that officially denied they existed.

This page surveys the recurring mechanisms. Its central finding is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly: these mechanisms cut across ideology rather than tracking it.

Why This Matters

It is tempting to file eugenics under fascism, institutions under state socialism, and market cruelty under capitalism. The record does not cooperate. Social-democratic Sweden ran a eugenic sterilization program until 1976. State-socialist governments warehoused disabled people in residential institutions. The liberal-market United Kingdom became the first state a UN treaty body found responsible for “grave or systematic” violations of disabled people’s rights.

Knowing which mechanism is operating matters more than knowing which flag flies over it.

Quick Overview

Six mechanisms recur across systems:

Productivity norms — sorting people administratively by capacity to labor
Institutionalization — warehousing disabled people away from community life
Eugenics and forced sterilization — preventing disabled people from existing
Welfare design — the rules determining what support exists and on what terms
Segregated and sub-waged labor — work separated from the mainstream economy, often below minimum wage
Classification and erasure — counting, naming, or denying disabled populations

A Note on Figures

Population figures in this area are contested, and several widely repeated numbers rest on thin or misattributed sourcing. Where a number is a range, this page gives the range. Where a claim rests on a single source, it says so. Where a commonly cited figure could not be verified, it has been left out rather than repeated.

That last category is not small. Readers encountering confident round numbers on this subject elsewhere should treat them with suspicion, including numbers that appear in many places at once, since a single unreliable figure propagates easily.

Mechanism 1: Productivity Norms

Michael Oliver, a disabled sociologist, argued in The Politics of Disablement (1990) that the rise of capitalism and the factory system created disability as a category by excluding people who could not meet industrial production standards. He distinguished this materialist theory of disablement from the social model, which he described as a practical tool rather than a theory. Not all disability scholars accept the strong version of this claim; Tom Shakespeare, among others, disputes that industrialization created disability.

Marta Russell, a disabled writer, developed what she called the “money model” in Beyond Ramps (1998) and later work with Ravi Malhotra. Her argument: people whose bodies do not enhance profitmaking as laborers are instead made profitable as objects of services, institutions, and nursing homes, from which others extract revenue. Her framing is one interpretive lens among several, and an avowedly Marxist one.

The administrative machinery long predates both analyses. England’s Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 restructured relief around the workhouse and the principle of “less eligibility.” It sharpened an inherited classification, originating in the 1601 Poor Relief Act, that sorted paupers into the “impotent poor” who would work but could not, and the able-bodied who could work but would not. Very few able-bodied people entered workhouses. Most inmates were aged, infirm, or disabled, and were treated harshly. Returns from 1776 recorded roughly 1,800 to 2,000 workhouses with about 90,000 places.

Mechanism 2: Institutionalization

United States. Willowbrook State School on Staten Island operated from 1947 to 1987. Built for about 3,000 people, it held roughly twice that by the late 1960s, peaking around 6,200 in 1969. Conditions included severe overcrowding, filth, and physical and sexual abuse. Researchers deliberately infected children with hepatitis in studies beginning in 1956 and running until about 1971, though sources vary on the end date. Geraldo Rivera’s television reporting in January and February 1972 brought national attention, though disabled people and families had been organizing before the broadcast. The resulting class action produced a consent judgment in 1975 (NYSARC v. Carey, 393 F. Supp. 715). The Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act followed in 1980.

Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. The USSR addressed disability substantially through institutionalization in internaty, residential institutions. Mothers of disabled children were pressured to give them up. Laws against “social parasitism” were used to move disabled veterans out of cities. This was standard practice across the Eastern Bloc. Reliable population figures for the Soviet era are not available, a consequence of state secrecy rather than an absence of the practice.

A caution on numbers that circulate here: a figure of 400,000 to 600,000 institutionalized Russian children is widely repeated in relation to disability. It is not a disability figure. It derives from a count of children without parental care (611,034 in 1997). Estimates for disabled children specifically are far smaller, around 30,000 in the late 1990s. The confusion overstates the disability-specific figure by roughly twentyfold.

Mechanism 3: Eugenics and Forced Sterilization

Eugenic sterilization was a transnational policy diffusion, not a national aberration. See Eugenics and Disability for fuller treatment; this section covers what the political-economy lens adds.

The United States exported the model. Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act (1924) was upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), decided 8 to 1, with Justice Holmes writing “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The ruling has never been expressly overturned, though Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) is generally described as having weakened it to the point of irrelevance. Roughly 7,300 to 8,300 Virginians were sterilized, with 8,300 the most-cited figure. Nationally the standard total is more than 60,000, understood to be an undercount.

Nazi Germany’s Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (14 July 1933) was modeled on American eugenics legislation, in particular Harry Laughlin’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, on which Virginia’s act was also based. Virginia was a sibling of the German statute rather than straightforwardly its parent. Unlike the US laws, which applied to the institutionalized, the German law applied to the general population. Approximately 400,000 people were sterilized.

Social democracies ran parallel programs. Sweden’s program ran from 1934 to 1976, expanded on “social” grounds in 1941, largely under Social Democratic governments. About 63,000 people, mostly women, were sterilized. A government report gives the breakdown: roughly 21,000 by force, roughly 6,000 coerced into ostensibly voluntary procedures, and roughly 4,000 indeterminate. The program was exposed by Dagens Nyheter in 1997, and a 1999 act provided compensation of SEK 175,000 per victim, though only about 3,000 people were ever compensated. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway ran parallel programs, the last ending in 1977.

Coercive sterilization did not end with the eugenics statutes. Under Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s National Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program (1996 to 2000) sterilized overwhelmingly poor, rural, Quechua-speaking Indigenous women, many without informed consent. The Health Ministry’s own figure is 272,028 tubal ligations for 1996 to 2001. Peru’s state victims’ registry has registered roughly 7,000 to 8,000 women, which is a registration count rather than a ceiling: research by Giulia Tamayo found that only about ten percent of the women sterilized gave free, prior, informed consent. This was primarily a program targeting race, class, and gender rather than disability, and it is included because coercive sterilization on grounds of “social inadequacy” overlaps historically with disability eugenics. The UN CEDAW Committee found Peru violated victims’ rights in October 2024, and in March 2026 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled against Peru in Celia Ramos v. Peru, ordering reparations.

Mechanism 4: Welfare State Design

The normalization principle originated in Denmark’s Mental Retardation Act of 5 June 1959, drafted under Niels Erik Bank-Mikkelsen, who had himself been interned in a Nazi camp as a resistance member. Bengt Nirje formalized it in 1969, and Wolf Wolfensberger reworked it in North America as Social Role Valorization in 1983. It underpinned deinstitutionalization and community services and influenced UN declarations in 1971 and 1975.

It is worth noting who authored it. Normalization came from professionals and administrators, not from disabled people. Michael Oliver critiqued it on exactly this ground: still professional-led, and compatible with the ideology it claimed to reform.

Austerity as retrogression. Following post-2010 austerity in the United Kingdom, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities conducted the first inquiry in its history under Article 6 of the Optional Protocol. Its report, published 7 November 2016, found “grave or systematic” violations, citing changes to Housing Benefit, Personal Independence Payment eligibility, social care, and the closure of the Independent Living Fund. The inquiry was triggered by disabled people’s organizations, notably Disabled People Against Cuts.

The UK government rejected all eleven recommendations, responding in writing that the report “focuses on too narrow a scope and, in doing so, presents an inaccurate picture of life for disabled people in the UK.” At the Committee’s examination in August 2017, its chair Theresia Degener was quoted in advocacy reporting as telling UK representatives that “social cut policies have led to a human catastrophe in your country.” A follow-up review in March 2024 found no significant progress and explicit signs of regression.

This is a treaty-body determination, not a court judgment, and the distinction matters for what it can compel.

Mechanism 5: Segregated and Sub-Waged Labor

United States. Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) authorizes certificate-holding employers to pay disabled workers below the federal minimum wage, historically in segregated “sheltered workshops.” A wage floor added in 1966 was repealed in 1986, and there has been no statutory floor since. A 2020 report by the US Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the program operates discriminatorily and recommended repeal with a phase-out.

The number of workers paid under 14(c) has fallen substantially, from over 120,000 in 2019 to roughly 40,000 by late 2024, driven largely by states eliminating subminimum wage authority. Sixteen states had done so by January 2025.

The federal picture as of July 2026 is worth stating carefully, because it changed recently and in the opposite direction from the trend. The Department of Labor proposed a rule to phase out 14(c) certificates in December 2024, but withdrew it on 7 July 2025, concluding that it lacked statutory authority to end unilaterally a program Congress made mandatory, since the statute says the Secretary “shall” issue certificates. There is no federal rulemaking pending, and certificates continue to be issued and renewed. Legislation to end the program has been introduced but not enacted. Whether 14(c) protects or exploits remains genuinely contested, with some parent groups and providers defending it as preserving a choice.

Soviet Union. The USSR organized production for disabled workers through cooperatives called artels and through disability societies: a cooperative of disabled people established by decree in December 1921, the All-Russian Society of the Blind (1923), and the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (1926). These were production and consumer cooperatives under the social-welfare commissariat rather than advocacy organizations, though they provided employment, education, and peer community alongside segregation from the mainstream workforce.

A claim circulates that the USSR forbade integrated employment generally from 1968. That broad version does not hold up, and it is worth separating from a narrower claim that does.

The narrow version is supported: residents of residential institutions appear to have lost the right to take work outside the institution in 1968. The scholarship rests on one historian’s reading of residents’ correspondence, who gives the rationale as social security agencies being unable to reconcile disabled people both working and drawing state support. A Ministry of Social Security regulation governing these institutions was issued on 31 December 1968, and its 1978 successor provides only for work performed inside the institution, which is consistent, though the 1968 text itself does not appear to be available online.

The broad version, that integrated employment as such was forbidden, is an over-generalization of that narrower point and is contradicted nearby in the same source, which records that about thirty percent of disabled people were employed by 1988. No Soviet legal instrument or archival scholarship supports a general prohibition.

The documented structural event is earlier and larger: the disabled cooperatives were liquidated between 1956 and 1960, nearly 220,000 people working in over 4,000 artels, with the blind and deaf societies allowed to continue. Exclusion from mainstream work was produced by work-capacity rulings, an employment quota that went unenforced, employer practice, and inaccessible environments rather than by prohibition.

Mechanism 6: Classification and Erasure

The Soviet Union built an administrative classification ranking disabled people by capacity to work, introduced in the 1920s and replaced by a three-group system in 1932. In public life disabled people were largely invisible.

The emblematic instance is a reported statement by a Soviet official, “There are no invalids in the USSR!”, given in response to a Western journalist’s question about the 1980 Paralympic Games. This quote deserves care. Every chain of citation ends at one source: V SSSR invalidov net!, published in London in 1986 by Valery Fefelov, a disabled dissident who was paralyzed in a 1966 fall, co-founded the Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Invalids in the USSR in 1978, and was forced to emigrate. There is no named official and no contemporaneous press or archival record. Retellings disagree even on whether the official was asked about hosting or attending. It is best treated as an emblematic anecdote from a disabled-authored dissident account, and it is meaningful as that, rather than as a documented on-record statement.

India. Disabled people have been among the most undercounted populations. Disability was omitted from the census between 1941 and 1971, reintroduced in 1981, dropped again in 1991, then included in 2001 and 2011. The 2011 census recorded 26,810,557 disabled people, or 2.21 percent of the population, against WHO global-prevalence estimates that would imply a far larger number. Narrow definitions and question framing systematically undercount, particularly women. The Persons with Disabilities Act 1995 used a threshold of “not less than 40 percent” disability, certified medically; the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 decoupled that figure, which now defines only “benchmark disability” for certain entitlements rather than who counts as a disabled person.

South Africa. Under apartheid, disability grants were racially tiered in both eligibility and amount, with benefit levels for Black, “coloured,” and Asian recipients sharply lower than for white recipients. Special schools were racially segregated. Racial disparities were removed through the Social Assistance Act 59 of 1992, with parity substantially achieved by 1993. One frequently repeated specific, that white applicants qualified after six months of expected disability while Black applicants needed twelve, rests on a single working paper citing a single clinical article and should be treated as unconfirmed.

What This Survey Does Not Do

This page does not rank systems or argue that one arrangement was better for disabled people than another. The mechanisms are presented so they can be recognized, not scored.

It also does not claim completeness. The strongest sourcing here is for the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Nordic countries. Coverage of the Global South relies more heavily on English-language academic and journalistic sources, with Peru the main exception where Spanish-language institutional sourcing is strong.

Contribute to This Page

This survey is strongest on Europe and North America and thinnest everywhere else. If you have knowledge of how disability policy worked in your country, particularly outside the regions above, that would materially improve this page. Corrections to specific figures are welcome, especially where you can point to a primary source. See How to Contribute.

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