Claims that disability would vanish if capitalism ended confuse the social conditions around disability with disability itself. Capitalism can deepen exclusion through inaccessible workplaces, costly healthcare, rigid measures of productivity and inadequate public support. But removing those barriers would not make every disabled person non-disabled.
That distinction matters. A liberatory politics should change the conditions under which people live, not treat particular bodies or minds as temporary errors that a better society will correct.
Disability is more than a workplace category
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for example, can affect attention regulation, executive function, impulse control, emotional regulation, sleep and the perception of time. Experiences vary, and no single list describes everyone. Still, reducing ADHD to difficulty sitting still—or to a mismatch with paid employment—misses much of disabled people’s daily reality.
Schools, workplaces and public institutions often promise accommodations while making them difficult to request or inconsistently available. Benefits systems August also demand extensive proof while evaluating disability through narrow assumptions about employability. These are political and economic failures. Their removal would reduce harm, but it would not erase neurological difference.
Medication access offers another example. Cost, shortages, restrictive refill procedures and uneven healthcare coverage can turn routine treatment into a recurring administrative burden. A fairer system could remove those obstacles. It could provide stable access to medication, care and practical support without requiring people to prove their economic value. That would be meaningful liberation precisely because disability would be respected rather than denied.
Access is not a consolation prize. It is part of the structure of freedom.
When social critique becomes erasure
The social model of disability offers an essential insight: environments, institutions and attitudes create many disabling barriers. A staircase excludes a wheelchair user where a ramp or lift provides access; inflexible scheduling can exclude people whose health or attention varies. These barriers are designed, and they can be redesigned.
But acknowledging socially produced barriers does not require claiming that impairment, chronic illness, developmental disability or neurological difference will cease to exist after economic transformation. Treating disabled existence as a defect destined to disappear echoes eugenic thinking, even when presented in the language of progress.
That rhetoric also narrows who is considered welcome in an imagined future. If belonging depends upon becoming more productive, more independent or less visibly disabled, the standard has changed its vocabulary without changing its exclusionary logic.
Material change and self-determination
Disability justice can support far-reaching economic change while insisting that disabled people remain present in every vision of the future. That means universal and accessible healthcare, secure housing, income support, mobility, communication access, flexible education and work, community-based care, and the right to make decisions about one’s own body and life.
It also means recognizing interdependence. No one is entirely self-sufficient, although institutions often hide the networks of care, infrastructure and labor that make everyday life possible. Disabled people should not have to approximate an ideal of independence to receive dignity or support.
Economic systems influence who receives treatment, who can enter a building, whose time is valued and whose needs are dismissed. Changing those systems can transform disabled life. The goal, however, should be ending deprivation and coercion—not ending disabled people as a social group.
A liberation that includes disabled people
Any movement seeking collective freedom must confront ableism within its own theory and practice. Meetings need access planning. Organizing timelines need flexibility. Political education needs multiple formats. Leadership must include people with intellectual, developmental, psychiatric, sensory, mobility and chronic health disabilities.
Disability is not a metaphor for capitalism, and disabled people are not evidence of a society’s failure. A just society would not require people to overcome their bodies or minds before they could belong. It would make room for difference, distribute care without stigma and treat access as a shared responsibility.
That is a more demanding political vision than promising disability will disappear. It is also more honest: liberation is measured by whether disabled people can live with agency, support and dignity—not by whether society can imagine a future without them.
