Marta Russell

"disabled peoples' movements seek to overturn the assertion that disability is pathological in health terms and a social problem in welfare terms. Disabled persons want to be citizens with human rights."

"The ADA and equal opportunity is a non-solution for a capitalist society wherein the disabled workers and would-be workers, by definition, do not have the social or political power to realize their economic wants. Power lies at production, with the owners of capital, and the Supreme Court is one manifestation of that power."

"There can be no democracy without economic democracy"

"Discounting the value of rights, the handicapitalists hold that in order for disabled people to be tolerated by our capitalist society, rights must be subsumed to the profit motive. Under this philosophy, social success will be ours when disabled persons gain status as consumers with enough buying power to command it. But where does the buying power reside; who really controls it and who benefits?"

"Rights, contrary to the handicapitalist opinion, are not "altruistic." Civil rights laws, though certainly not a complete remedy for the inequality described here, are an important element in the struggle in building oppressed groups' economic parity under capitalism."

"Disabled people (an eighth of the world population) remain the most impoverished, the least likely to rise above subsistence in every nation in the world. The wee middle class of disabled persons in the US does not exist in many countries. In the underdeveloped nations disabled people have no rights, no ADA. They can be found sleeping on sidewalks without wheelchairs, crutches, or other goods they need to live a life with dignity (not that we don't have this in the US, too). There are no curb cuts in Africa or Asia and very few in Western Europe. There are no accessible buses to provide transport to a job. Disabled people in the US only have what little we have now because we have struggled for our rights. Holding up yuppie lifestyle consumerism-handicapitalism-as a solution to disabled people" problems in the face of such reality is a terrible hoax."

"Let the market rule? Unless disabled people see ourselves as active creators of equality (which means undoing capitalism, which can never be made equitable) we will be doomed to be tools of the owning class, and our people, like other oppressed groups, will remain impoverished."