Based on a talk given at the Feb. 5 webinar “Global Class War: Lessons from Sam Marcy for workers struggles today.” Go to youtu.be/5Arb33Q8SN0 to view the webinar.

Brian Shea. PHOTO: Howard Rotman

In “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels characterize the working class as being the revolutionary gravediggers of capitalism. 

The vast, overwhelming majority of disabled people all over the world are proletarians. We’re not bourgeois. We either sell our labor to a bourgeois/boss for a private wage (the boss will try to pay us less because we’re disabled), or we may be able to live on a social wage* won through struggle by workers organizing into mass movements and unions, wrestling concessions from the whole bourgeoisie or from a few bosses to start with.

One of the foundational tenets of disability justice is that disability justice and capitalism are mutually exclusive. We disabled people are, like the rest of our class siblings, capitalism’s gravediggers, because if our movement is going to succeed at all, we need to consign capitalism and capitalists to museums of human prehistoric stuff that we don’t ever want to do again.

* “Europeans calculate real wages as direct wages paid by employers plus the ‘social wage’ paid by the government. The social wage is the equivalent of the wages that workers save by having free or low cost public health care, higher education, affordable housing, child care, public transportation, and many other public goods.”  (tinyurl.com/4rktrza3)

Brian Shea

Share
Published by
Brian Shea
Tags: Sam Marcy

Recent Posts

Finding and keeping our balance: Elders at the crossroads

By Jeri Hilderley I long for peace and ease as stress and anxiety overtake me.…

April 18, 2025

Nicaragua en la Cumbre de la CELAC: No hubo ni hay consenso

Los siguientes son extractos de la declaración del Gobierno de Nicaragua del 9 de abril…

April 18, 2025

Nicaragua in CELAC: There neither was nor is consensus

The following are excerpts from the statement of the Nicaraguan government on April 9, 2025,…

April 17, 2025

Do not threaten Iran! Lift the sanctions immediately!

The following is a statement from the organization Solidarity with Iran (SI) regarding the current…

April 17, 2025

Donald Trump and Panama: Back to 1903?

By Olmedo Beluche Beluche is a Panamanian Marxist, author and political leader. This article was…

April 17, 2025