MIM Notes 191 August 1 1999

Supreme Court guts Americans with Disabilities Act:
Maoism is most effective at guaranteeing rights of the 
disabled

by MC45

In three much-publicized decisions on 22 June, the U.S. 
Supreme Court gutted many of the employment protections 
from the Americans with Disabilities Act. 7-2 majorities 
declared in all three cases that the 1990 law was 
intended to apply only to the small minority of "truly 
disabled" people who were barred from employment and 
other resources as a matter of discrimination.(1)

By the rules of Amerika's legal system, this Supreme 
Court decision bars potential lawsuits by many people 
who may be denied jobs because of physical ability. The 
decisions have left disability rights activists 
scrambling for a new way to frame their legal battles. 
The ADA deals with access to employment, public services 
and public accommodations for people with disabilities. 
The June decisions dealt only with employment.(2)

MIM sees this set of court decisions as a sad reminder 
that capitalism does not see any value inherent in humyn 
life. Enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act 
(ADA) was considered a huge victory by disabilities 
rights activists. But this law -- as written by 
advocates for the disabled -- rests on the idea of 
defining people in relation to some imagined ideal. This 
is not surprising: capitalism assumes that humyn 
achievement can reach its apex by skimming only the 
supposed best among employees, raw materials and 
production processes.

As an Amerikan law intended to better life for some 
people under capitalism, the ADA did not take seriously 
the idea of challenging private property holders' 
assumptions or regulations for living. MIM sees this 
narrowing of the ADA's interpretation by the Amerikan 
courts as a call for advocates for humyn rights and 
recognition of humyn worth to take up the struggle for 
socialism -- a political and economic system that 
recognizes people's value beyond divisions of labor 
developed to serve profit.

The decision: defining "substantially limited"

To the chagrin of disability rights activist Robert 
Burgdorf who drafted the Americans with Disabilities 
Act, the language of the law ended up making a big issue 
out of defining the term "disability" rather than 
focusing attention on the function of disabilities in 
day to day life and work. The law defines as disabled 
people who are "substantially limited" in one or more of 
the basic life activities (walking, eating, dressing, 
cleaning oneself, etc.).(3) The Supreme Court seized on 
this ADA provision, splitting enough hairs to opine that 
if a persyn can use aids (medication, glasses, etc.) to 
mitigate or control their condition then the condition 
is not a disability.(1)

(A columnist remarked in the New York Times on June 29 
that since he has a family and a job and it is not 
immediately obvious to someone who sees him sitting in a 
chair that he is disabled, the court might conclude that 
his paraplegia and dependence on a wheelchair do not 
constitute a disability. The Supreme Court decision 
stated explicitly that someone who depends on prosthetic 
limbs to walk is substantially limited in major life 
activities, but the decision as a whole does not make 
clear why.)

The case of the ADA is rare for the obvious clash 
between rights and captialism. By capitalism's most 
basic definition -- private ownership of the means of 
production, private production for public consumption -- 
it is clear that hiring in all workers under the same 
stingy conditions is best for the capitalist. It is the 
cheapest way to suck labor from the workers and this is 
the only logic a capitalist needs in understanding use 
of labor power.

Zeroing in on the Americans with Disabilities Act's 
provision that disabled people cannot be barred from 
employment as long as they can perform the "essential 
elements" of a job, Burgdorf argues: "The focus of the 
Act was -- and should be -- on eliminating employers' 
practices that make people unnecessarily different. ... 
employers routinely plan for and accommodate the 
expected needs of employees in general -- but [not the 
needs of] employees (and potential employees) who have 
disabilities."(3)

But the Act allows for Justice O'Connor's 
interpretation, which focused instead on what a 
disability is ("substantially limiting major life 
activities"), and on the idea that a minority of 
Amerikans (just upwards of 40 million) have 
disabilities.(1) So the Supreme Court's logic winds up 
homing in on the irrelevant idea that it cannot expand 
this law to apply to too many people, or it will be 
violating the sanctity of the legislative branch 
(congress) and "legislating from the bench." To MIM this 
is not a surprising outcome. Marx termed the governments 
of capitalist countries to be the "executive committees" 
of the bourgeoisies. The Supreme Court decision to 
narrow the ADA is closely in line with the interests of 
capital.

Maoist laws: realizing human beings' infinite potential

A writer for the Ragged Edge magazine on disability 
rights issues wrote of the difference between taking a 
medical approach to people with disabilities, and a 
rehab approach.(4) From the perspective of employment in 
a socialist society, MIM would call this the difference 
between attempting to make all people fit into a mold of 
doing the same jobs in the same way, and recognizing 
that different people bring different things to a 
society and economy. In a "Talk on Questions of 
Philosophy":

"Engels spoke about moving from the realm of necessity 
to the realm of freedom, and that freedom is the 
understanding of necessity. This sentence is not 
complete, it only says one half and leaves the rest 
unsaid. Does merely the understanding make you free? 
Freedom is the understanding of necessity ITAL and END 
the transformation of necessity -- one has some work to 
do."(5)

In the language of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 
freedom from discrimination in the work place will come 
from understanding the necessities of a given job and 
transforming the job to fit those necessities. MIM 
argues that this goal will never be achieved under 
capitalism, which is far too inflexible and lacks the 
motivation for true creativity in structuring the way 
people work. Bourgeois social (so-called) scientists 
abandon science when they insist on individualism -- 
glorification of the individual to the exclusion of 
understanding or reckoning with social interaction.

The intellectuals who service the bourgeoisie are so 
terrified of the concept of greater good (and what that 
means for privileged individual status) that they fail 
to see how individuality benefits under socialism. In 
MIM Theory 9 we wrote "we focus on how abilities are put 
into use: is the person working on the side of the 
people or against them? The focus is always on political 
line, and differences outside that are minimized through 
an attitude of collective creativity and cooperation 
instead of individual competition. The goal is not to 
abolish all differences between individuals, but rather 
to abolish all differences between what an individual is 
capable of and what that individual accomplishes through 
assistance of a party built on criticism-self-criticism-
unity."(6)

In the Chinese Maoist practice (following the revolution 
of 1949, until 1976) this focus on political line took 
the form of community involvement in public health work. 
In their book ITAL Serve the People END, Ruth and Victor 
Sidel wrote of Chinese practices: "there are no passive 
bystanders.  One is expected to participate 
'wholeheartedly' ... in the conduct of all aspects of 
one's personal life, including one's health. It is a 
country of mass and individual participation, of mass 
and individual responsibility."(7) This type of mass 
involvement in both the difficulties and achievements of 
daily life is the Communist answer to the stigmatizing 
of people with disabilities that goes on in Amerika.

The Sidels refer to medical workers in language that 
could well represent an argument for defining (and 
limiting workers' responsibility to) the "essential 
elements" of a job. "An emphasis on 'credentialism' not 
only leads to mismatches between personnel and tasks, 
but helps to prevent a large group of able people from 
playing the helping roles they want to play."(8) Maoists 
extend this logic to all areas of work. Within our own 
party, MIM places a heavy emphasis on being "red" and we 
say that "expert" credentials can come later. We would 
rather see comrades take the correct attitude toward 
their work than be technically perfect from the start. 
From a social perspective, we care about involving 
people in work that meets the political and basic needs 
of the masses. We are bound to a correct program for the 
rights of people of all abilities -- this is the only 
way we can claim to be truly concerned with meeting the 
needs of all people.

MIM view on the disability rights movement

MIM has addressed issues of mental illness in the past, 
devoting a full issue o MIM Theory to the question of 
Psychology as it relates to ideas about people's mental 
status and revolutionary struggle. Outside of MT9, we 
have not dealt with the question of disabilities. There 
is much that we do not know about the political movement 
around disability rights -- its origins, history and 
central focuses. We hope that this article will inspire 
some contributors who have more knowledge than we do.

We have seen in brief readings some things we agree 
with: a general move to stop thinking of people with 
disabilities as "patients," overall recognition that 
many different types of people can contribute to society 
in varied and creative (but often unrecognized) ways. 
MIM's answer to these criticisms of the society we live 
in is that Maoism recognizes no bounds of human 
potential. Our next answer is that as the overwhelming 
majority of the world's population is impoverished and 
living in the Third World, so the majority of disabled 
people is in the Third World and poor. Third World 
peoples, tethered by the yoke of imperialism, the 
disabled and "able" among them alike, are the 
overwhelming majority of humyns whose potential is being 
stifled.

The value of stifling humyn potential for the 
imperialists is in sustaining what Marx called a 
"reserve army of labor." Such an "army" keeps wages low 
for the proletariat by existing as a silent threat that 
someone else will always be available to assume the jobs 
the proletariat will not do. In the terms of the 
Americans with Disabilities Act, capital also sees a 
tremendous value in refusing to define the "essential 
elements" of any job.

The ADA was supposed to force employers to define these 
elements so that a persyn in a wheelchair could not be 
required to climb steps to use a bathroom at work 
because that's just how her or his job is set up. ADA 
drafter Burgdorf calls this the law's recognition that 
"equal treatment is not synonymous with identical 
treatment."(3) An example less obvious to some is that 
it can hardly be necessary to drive a truck for 14 hours 
without rest instead of seven. Whatever the examples you 
choose, the only movement that truly cherishes the 
rights of disabled people is the movement that places 
social good above all else. Activists for disability 
rights owe it to themselves to investigate the Maoist 
line on human worth, work and contributions to society.

Notes:

1. New York Times 23 June, 1999.

2. The Americans with Disabilities Act: A Brief 
Overview, 
http://janweb.icdi.wvu.edu/kinder/overview.htm.

3. http://www.ragged-edge-
mag.com/extra/edgextraburgdorf.htm.

4. http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0599/a599ft1.htm.

5. Quoted in MIM Theory 9: Psychology & Imperialism, p. 
48.

6. MT9, p. 49.

7. Victor W. Sidel and Ruth Sidel, Serve the People: 
Observations on Medicine in the People's Republic of 
China. (New York: Beacon Press, 1974), p.109 .

8. Ibid., p. 204.