Disability, Ableism, and Devaluation

How capitalism contributes to the marginalization of Deaf and disabled people

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Brief disclaimer

This is the fifth of a multi-part article series based on a paper I originally wrote for a University rhetoric course. If you missed parts one through four I recommend reading those first.

I broke my very long paper into sections and made edits to make it easier to read, so I hope you enjoy.

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The surplus class

Under capitalism, Deaf and disabled people are considered part of the surplus class. Not only are we valued based on our productivity (our ability to contribute to capital), our value is subject to change based on society’s economic requirements at any given time. 

As people who may be limited in our ability to contribute to the workforce — or the workforce being limited in its willingness to accommodate us so we may fully participate — we are relegated to a lower class of citizenship in a capitalist hierarchy, yet must remain available for exploitation for profit by the higher classes. 

There are multiple dynamics at play in these situations, and I will explore two main themes here: audism and power. Audism, a sub-type of ableism, is “the notion that one is superior based on one’s ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who hears”. Applying the concepts of ableism and linguicism to the power imbalance between the hearing and Deaf populations, the skill of multilingualism is valued differently depending on who possesses it. 

Hearing people have greater social power to begin with, by virtue of not being viewed as disabled. When hearing people learn sign language, they are seen as some type of “hero” or saviour to the Deaf community, and are lauded for learning a new language in order to “help” Deaf people.

While Petrovic’s 2022 article, Linguistic appropriation and/or dispossession: Two sides of the Marxist coin, makes the case that culture and language cannot be appropriated because they are not commodities, this is besides the point when it comes to the attention economy on TikTok and other social media platforms. 

Petrovic argues that language itself isn’t commodified, it’s the labour power of those who create cultural and educational materials, and therefore the exploitation is of labour and not language. The article explains that, in order to create the supply and demand, a commodity must be restricted or its production controlled. Because the possession of language cannot be managed and limited by outside sources, Petrovic concludes it cannot be truly commodified in Marxist terms. 

I would (and do) suggest the finite resource of attention on social media is used to manage the ability of content creators to profit from language as a product in and of itself. Marx and Engels did not develop a theory of language specifically, however, they did insist that ideas are part of the totality of human life. 

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness [are] directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse” which takes place between people and is “the language of real life. The same applies to mental production as expressed in language,” argued Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, because people are “the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.” and that “consciousness [is] taken as the living individual”