Ddi 12 ss disabilities Neg Dartmouth 2012 Andrew 1 ddi 12 ss disabilities Neg Strategy Sheet
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- , in materialist theory individuals must transform themselves through collective action, not be transformed by others who know whats best for them or whats best for society.
- . It will only be achieved through struggle, and that struggles will be by oppressed groups themselves against the forces that oppress them
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Link Debate – Multiple links to the affirmative: 1.) Normalization – the affirmative is an attempt to further integrate people with disabilities into modern society, not by means of accepting their condition, but by attempting to make them more “able” to engage in the globalized society we live in. This normalization of the disabled body is the root cause of their impacts because they still assume that there are unique functions that everybody should be able to do, such as being engaged in transportation infrastructure. 2.) Neoliberal Inclusion – The only thing “Universal Design” will do is further entrench the idea that you have to be engaged in neoliberal society to be included. Their own 1AC Drimmer evidence says, QUOTE “Congress has issued a message that people with disabilities do not deserve full citizenship … and are merely tolerated when they [*1345] can become economic participants”. The only thing the affirmative does is allow for people with disabilities to become “economic participants” in our economy. They do not change the psychological disposition people have against people with disabilities, rather they just allow for them to be “tolerated” because they are part of our capitalist economy. 3. State Control – Working within the system to help people with disabilities fails at empowering the individuals and turns them into agents of capitalist control – collective action against capitalisms material structures solves best Michael Oliver, Professor of Disability Studies @ University of Greenwich that has a disability, 1999, “Capitalism, Disability and Ideology: A Materialist Critique of the Normalization Principle”, http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/archiveuk/Oliver-cap-dis-ideol.pdf; AB Social and individual transformations are inextricably linked. However, in materialist theory individuals must transform themselves through collective action, not be transformed by others who know what's best for them or what's best for society. Empowerment is a collective process of transformation on which the powerless embark as part of the struggle to resist the oppression of others, as part of their demands to be included, and/or to articulate their own views of the world. Central to this struggle is the recognition by the powerless that they are oppressed; first articulated in respect of disability by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation in the 1970s and more recently been given a theoretical re-formulation within 'oppression theory' more generally (Abberley 1987). Normalization theory sees improving human services as a major platform for improving the quality of life for disabled people and indeed much time and energy is devoted to precisely this. Wolfensberger's position on this is unequivocal; he is vehemently opposed to services provided by institutions but has spent much of his working life developing and improving community based services. As I suggested earlier, this is because he views community based services as radically different from institutional ones in that they are not part of the social control apparatus of the state. While his position on community based human services may be unequivocal, it is certainly contradictory. In the paper he gave at the international disability conference in Bristol in 1987, he came very close to taking a materialist position on all human services, not simply institutional ones, when he argued that their real purpose (latent function) was to provide employment for the middle classes and in order to continue to do that "...merely enlarging the human service empire is not sufficient to meet all the requirements that a postprimary production economy poses. In addition, one has to make all the services that do exist as unproductive as possible - indeed one has to make them counterproductive if at all possible, so that they create dependency, and so that they create impaired people rather than habilitate them". (Wolfensberger 1988.34) The problem with this formulation is that it mistakes the symptom for the problem. If human services under capitalism are part of the state apparatus of social control as materialist theory would argue, the reason they employ the middle classes is simple; they are not the groups who pose a threat to capitalism and therefore, they do not need to be controlled, but instead can become agents for the control of others. It is precisely for this reason that the demands of disabled people allover the world are not, any longer, for improvements in existing services but control over them. And further, their struggles around welfare issues are about producing and controlling their own services through centres for independent living, direct payments to enable them to purchase these services for themselves and peer counselling to enable them to develop the necessary skills and support to meet their own self-defined individual and collective needs. This is not an anti welfare or anti human services position but one which raises fundamental issues of who is in control and in whose interest? In looking at the issue of political change, within normalization theory it is difficult to find anything beyond descriptions of the kinds of things devalued people should be entitled to. How to achieve these entitlements at the political level is not really discussed although Wolfensberger confidently asserts that if we want to valorize someone's social roles "...we know from social science what the overarching strategies are through which this can be accomplished if that is what one wants to pursue". (Wolfensberger 1994.96) I don't know what social science he is referring to but I have to say that I know very few social scientists who are, any longer, convinced that the concept of social roles has very much value to the development of social theory let alone for the promotion of political action. Not only are Talcott Parsons and Erving Goffman dead in a material sense but so are their products; the macro and micro versions of role theory. One can only assume from normalization writings that political change will be a gift from the powerful to powerless once they have come to a true understanding of disability through exposure to the teachings of normalization and social role valorization. Nowhere does normalization acknowledge that "...the conviction that one's group is worth fighting for has to come at least partly from within. The alternative is to wait passively for the advantaged group to confer limited equality which does not essentially alter the status quo, and which it may be motivated to avoid". (Dalley 1992.128) Again, materialist theory is much more upfront about political change. It will only be achieved through struggle, and that struggles will be by oppressed groups themselves against the forces that oppress them. In order to do this it is necessary for oppressed groups to organise collectively to confront this oppression. That inevitably means confrontation and conflict with powerful groups, interests and structures for there are few examples in human history of people willingly giving up power to others. As far as disabled people are concerned, we have seen over the past fifteen years disabled people coming together to organise themselves as a movement at local, national and international levels. In Britain, for example, in order to harness this growing consciousness of disabled people, to provide a platform to articulate the re-definition of the problem of disability and to give a focus to the campaigns for independent living and against discrimination, the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People (BCODP) was formed in 1981 and its success in the subsequent decade is entirely an achievement of disabled people themselves (Hasler 1993). Its conception and subsequent development have been achieved without extensive financial support from Government or from traditional organisations for disabled people. On the contrary, the BCODP was criticised from the start as being elitist, isolationist, unrepresentative, and Marxist by a collection of unrepresentative people with abilities, right and left wing academics, isolated and elitist staff and management of traditional organisations and many professionals whose very careers were bound up with keeping disabled people dependent. Yet despite these attacks, BCODP has gone from strength to strength, now representing over 90 organisations of disabled people and 300,000 disabled individuals. These initiatives not only established BCODP as the only representative voice of disabled people in Britain but by its very success it stimulated an ever growing number of disabled people to adopt a disabled identity. Similar stories of the rise of the disability movement could be told from other parts of both the developing and the developed world. With this growing sense of a collective, political identity has developed the self-confidence not simply to ask for the necessary changes but to demand them and to use a whole range of tactics including direct action and civil disobedience. What's more, this movement is democratic arid accountable to disabled people themselves (Dreidger 1988 Oliver 1990 Davis 1993) and its collective voice is demanding that we be included in our societies everywhere by ending the oppression that confronts us, not by offering us and our oppressors normalization or social role valorization programmes. In this paper I have argued that normalization as a social theory is inadequate in that it does not describe experience satisfactorily, its explanation of why disabled have the kinds of experiences they do is wholly inadequate, and its potential for transforming those experiences to something better is limited. It is not only those unsympathetic to normalization who question its future, however. "What does normalization now have to do in order to be a positive force for change in the 1990's. The answer may lie in going back to its roots and realigning itself in relation to other sociological theories". (Brown and smith 1992.176) hether such a realignment, even with materialist theory, is likely to resuscitate normalization is itself doubtful, because what is at stake is a vision of the kind of society we would like to live in. Normalization theory offers disabled people the opportunity to be given valued social roles in an unequal society which values some roles more than others. Materialist social theory offers disabled people the opportunity to transform their own lives and in so doing to transform the society in which they live into one in which all roles are valued. As a disabled person I know which of those choices I prefer and I also know which most of the disabled people I meet prefer. 4.) Corporate Influence – The affirmative is the new American Disabilities Act – a sinister corporate ploy to “include” people with disabilities for the sake of capitalist accumulation and oppression Pamela Robert, PhD. Associate Professor of Sociology, Assistant Research Professor at the University at Albany, SUNY School of Public Health and a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Women and Government, Summer 2003, “Disability Oppression in the Contemporary U. S. Capitalist Workplace”, Science Society, Vol. 67, No. 2, 136-159; AB UNTIL RECENTLY, DISABILITY WAS VIEWED as a property - a physical, mental, even spiritual fault - of an individual human being. Historically, this notion has underpinned social policies that have aimed at everything from extermination to re- habilitation of people with disabilities. Even rehabilitation, however, commonly has amounted to little more than preparing people with disabilities to function in social milieux, such as workplaces, to which they often had been denied access (Albrecht, 1992). In the 1970s and 1980s, the property definition of disability came under decisive attack. Disability activists, who were then breaking through multiple barriers, and disability scholars, who were then remaking the field of disability studies, fought for a relational defini- tion of disability. They sometimes acknowledged impairment in in- dividuals, but they located disability, as such, in the limitations im- posed upon individuals as they interacted with the social, including the built, environment. For example, these activists and scholars viewed traditionally low rates of labor force participation among people with disabilities as the consequence not of any deficiency of skills or capabilities but of the prevalence of barriers and discriminatory practices. This definitional breakthrough formed the basis for what is some- times called the social model of disability oppression (e.g., Abberley, 1987, 1991a, 1991b, 1995; Albrecht, 1992, 1997; Albrecht and Bury, 2001; Charlton, 1998; Corker, 1993, 1998; Deegan, 1985; Finkelstein, 1980, 1993a, 1993b; Hahn, 1988, 1991, 1997; Hasler, 1993; Morris, 1991; Oliver, 1990, 1993, 1996; Russell, 1998; Shakespeare, 1992, 1994; Shakespeare and Watson, 1997, 2001; Stroman, 1982; Wendell, 1989, 1996), which, although questioned in part by some disability schol- ars (e.g., Crow, 1996; Dowse, 2001; French, 1993; Gleeson, 1997; Higgins, 1992; Hughes and Paterson, 1997; Humphrey, 2000; Scotch and Schriner, 1997; Williams, 2001), is now dominant in disability studies. Recently, the social model has given rise to political-economic studies of disability oppression (Albrecht, 1992; Albrecht and Bury, 2001; Albrecht and Verbrugge, 2000; Charlton, 1998; Finkelstein, 1980; Oliver, 1990, 1996; Russell, 1998; Stone, 1984; to situate these within the wider field of disability studies, see Williams, 2001), which have focused on the historical exclusion of people with disabilities from employment in capitalist societies. Capitalism, the general argument goes, created factory produc- tion, which separated home and workplace and segregated people with disabilities from family members who entered the waged labor force. Over time, the worth of individuals became tethered to new capitalist work roles. Although this historical change did not create pejorative attitudes toward people with disabilities - in Medieval Eu-rope, for example, disability was often equated with demonic posses- sion - it provided such attitudes with new impetus and rationales: people with disabilities were devalued as abnormal and unfit for work (see Livneh, 1982). Charlton (1998) has emphasized the uneven impact on people with disabilities of capitalist development around the world. At one pole, capitalist accumulation has engendered the wealth to allow some families the luxury of caring for people with disabilities and occa- sioned the rise of private and public charities to care for still others. At the other pole, capitalism has created a reserve army of labor (Marx, 1964, Chapter XXV), the lowest sector of which includes a disproportionate number of people with disabilities who are more often than not outside the mainstream of society and its production process. Most recently, as social contracts protecting the least-well- off collapse globally, people who are considered abnormal, includ- ing people with disabilities, find themselves increasingly excluded and oppressed (this position is argued in Russell, 1998). While recent political-economic analyses of disability have illu- minated the historical sources and trajectory of disability oppression, such analyses have yet to offer systematic research on recent efforts to break down barriers to employment for people with disabilities in the richest capitalist societies. In the United States, for example, dis- ability advocates and activists helped push through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), which outlawed various barriers to employment for people with disabilities.1 The ADA, at least formally, outfitted people with disabilities with a range of important civil rights. In employment, the ADA prohibited workplace discrimination and mandated workplace alterations, called "reasonable accommoda- tions," to enable employees with disabilities to perform their work roles on a par with others. The role of capital in the passage of the ADA was complex. On the one hand, the ADA did not grow out of campaigns of corporate leaders, such as those that certain historians (Kolko, 1963; Sklar, 1988; Weinstein, 1968) have detected behind national legislation, begin ning with the Progressive Era. On the other hand, although particu- lar companies and economic sectors objected to segments of the ADA - Greyhound, for example, fought hard to avoid having to redesign its buses to accommodate passengers or drivers with disabilities, the insurance industry successfully blocked equal access to health insur- ance for people with disabilities, and national small business coali- tions opposed meaningful penalties for noncompliance and stringent enforcement of the law (Parke, 1995, Chapter VI) - corporate capi- tal did not mount any general opposition to the ADA. This reflects the particular political conjuncture and process that gave birth to the ADA. First, corporate capital easily viewed the ADA as consistent with its general interests. The law was first proposed and eventually drafted by the National Council on Disability (NCD) , a for- mally independent body charged with overseeing Federal disability policies, all of whose members at the time had been appointed by the corporate-friendly Reagan administration. The NCD suggested that the ADA, by promising to eliminate employment barriers, would lessen the need for social support programs for people with disabilities. The NCD thus couched its initiative in the anti-welfare, government-off-our- backs rhetoric of the day. Moreover, corporate capital, with produc- tion and marketing operations spanning the country and beyond, eas- ily viewed the ADA, which would set a single national standard for disability policy, as a potential advance over the farrago of local, state, and federal regulations that had grown up in recent decades in re- sponse to the demands of disability advocates and activists. Replacing this patchwork with a well-tailored coverall was another stated objec- tive of the NCD when it initially called for an ADA. Second, even if anyone had been inclined to try to mount one, the times were not propitious for a full-blown attack on the ADA. The disability rights movement, which had been gaining momentum for decades, was suddenly galvanized by the introduction into Congress of the ADA. For the first time ever, disability advocates and activists found their forces concentrated in a single national effort. While disability advocates were vigorously lobbying legislators and paraple- gic activists were crawling up the Capitol steps and chaining them- selves into the Rotunda, opposition to the ADA became increasingly difficult, even embarrassing. In the end, the ADA passed overwhelmingly (91 to 6 in the Sen- ate, 377 to 28 in the House) (Parke, 1995). This consensus was made possible by, among other things, papering over actual and potential points of social conflict with vague language that left them unresolved. This effectively delayed such conflicts to the implementation phase of the ADA, when the national coalition of forces that constituted the disability rights movement might recede, either from the exhaustion of the battle or the exhilaration of the victory, or might fragment into smaller coalitions pursuing narrower issues. Capital, both at the level of national politics and at the level of local workplaces, might then be better able to assert its power and mold the ADA to its interests. This article extends existing political-economic analyses of disabil- ity oppression through an examination of interviews with employees with disabilities in the implementation phase of the ADA. The voices of these ordinary working people seldom have been heard in the pub- lic discourse on disability rights. What these employees report here is a common experience of alienation and harassment at work. Since this study's sample was drawn from a large state civil service system with a long history of policies against discrimination against people with disabilities, and since employees with disabilities generally have fared much better in the public than in the private sector (Bruyère, 2000), this study provides a best-case view of the conditions faced by employees with disabilities in the contemporary U. S. capitalist workplace. 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