05/21/2026
Disabled people have always been present in the communist movement. Rosa Luxemburg had a lifetime disability affecting her bones and which caused her to have a limp all her life. Lenin, in his later years, had to use a wheelchair and suffered multiple strokes. Anuradha Ghandy, a prominent Indian communist and later Central Committee member of the CPI (Maoist), was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder systemic sclerosis. Antonio Gramsci had a form of tuberculosis which affects the spine, and this permanently affected his stature his entire life. During his time in prison, he lost his ability to walk completely. Yakov Batyuk, a Ukrainian communist and leader in the resistance against the N***s, was blind from early childhood.
Why bring this up? It’s not to tokenize disabled revolutionaries. It’s to show that the struggles of the disabled and of communists are historically and currently intertwined. We meet comrades all the time who were radicalized by their experiences navigating the healthcare system, especially when they’re a disabled person. Capitalism, like other class societies, requires oppression and preference of some groups over others. Under capitalism, this naturally targets those that are deemed less productive, such as the disabled. This is shown by ideas that were developed while capitalist society was well established, such as eugenics. Eugenics was/is also of course a racist idea, showing the inseparability of racism and ableism.
A Progressive Labor Party pamphlet made in 2020 about the COVID-19 pandemic further explains the relevance of racism: “Inequality and racism are instrumental in cultivating the conditions that allow the spread of disease. Poor access to and inferior for-profit healthcare, shoddy housing conditions, inferior wages and benefits, all conspire to put workers, especially Black and Latin families, at risk.” In short, racist inequality inherently puts large sections of the working class at greater risk for disability from things like disease, and with worse care if they are or become disabled.
Capitalism not only targets the disabled, but it also exacerbates disability, through addiction, unsafe drinking water, unsafe working conditions, war, genocide, and displacement. Not to mention the mental health crises caused by capitalism. Many of these things are of course worse in the countries of the Third World, since capitalism ensures that access to clean drinking water, proper medical care, adequate workplace regulations, etc, will not be evenly dispersed across countries. This further entrenches racist inequality.
Oftentimes in capitalism, companies will open that only or mostly hire disabled people. Companies choose to do this so that they can legally pay their workers less, while acting as though they are doing a “good deed” by even hiring them in the first place. Furthermore, disabled people in this society are often relegated to menial jobs just to make a living, if they can find a job at all. This directly ties into the communist idea of super-exploitation, which says that the bosses (ruling class) must pay some workers less and/or make them work under worse conditions than others in order to extract maximum profits. We can safely say that disabled workers are super-exploited under our current system.
It’s also important to talk about the history of disability in the communist movement, as many prominent communists had disabilities that impacted their daily life and work, and yet these aspects of their life are not often talked about. Today, on the one hand, we have people saying that revolution/communism would not be beneficial to the disabled because it would leave them behind. And on the other hand, we have people saying that the most important thing for communists is to be physically fit and that we can’t be taken seriously if we’re too “different.” Both of these perspectives are wrong. Revolution is the only way to break free from capitalism, which today is the system that maintains ableism and the super-exploitation of disabled people. At the same time, communists must make an effort to include disabled people in our work and make it clear that anyone can be a principled revolutionary, not just the able-bodied. In a society dominated by capitalist ideas, communists will always be viewed as “different” and as outliers.
This is exactly why many disabled people have already gained class consciousness. The system of capitalism inherently dehumanizes all workers, but especially the disabled, and many disabled people are already aware of this whether they say it in these exact words or not. The step we have left is to show that communism is the answer and the only way to get there is through revolution!
