The Political Economy of Disability and the Nursing Home Industry in the United States

While the mass of Covid-19 related deaths in nursing homes has begun to draw attention to the corruption of the industry, the existing literature focuses primarily on the post-productive population (the elderly), or on the unpaid and underpaid care workers, while the discussion of the young and disabled, making up over 15% of residents in U. S. nursing homes, is largely absent. What can a Marxist analysis of disability tell us about both the nature of disability oppression and of the nursing home industry in the United States? Why are 16.9% of nursing home residents young disabled people? How are nursing homes in the U. S. funded? What political conclusions can we draw from this analysis? Building on the work of the late disabled socialist activist Marta Russell, I argue that the trapping of young disabled people in nursing homes is a result of their absorption by the nursing home industry due to capitalism's “compulsory unemployment” of the disabled and the segregation of those who cannot produce surplus value (Russell, 2019). Furthermore, private nursing homes do not “extract” from the disabled, as some have argued, as surplus value can only be extracted from the living labor of nursing-home and other workers. The incorporation of the non-working, institutionalized disabled into class struggle, then, is the only path to ending capitalist exploitation of the entire working class.