Occupation and Disability: Alienation and Affirmation

Paul Lafargue (1883/2023, p 3), Karl Marx’s son-in-law, named the love of work ‘a strange madness’. He identified the kind of work that caring professionals would increasingly become engaged in as work created by capitalism to give the middle classes something to do with their time. I would suggest that we can similarly characterize caring professionals’ obsessions with ‘training’ disabled people to be less like themselves and more like alienated normal people ‘a strange madness’. Professionals are well paid for this work, but it needs to be asked: In whose interests?

I will begin by considering the definition of ‘disability’...