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When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.

This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.

Based on these interpretations, the advocates argue that the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a revolutionary socialist program is the only solution to the global capitalism’s failures on the pandemic. Further, they assert that the pandemic gives the impetus to the ongoing deeply rooted class struggle between the ruling class and the working class while it necessitates a fundamental social change toward a Marxist government (IMT 2020; SEPA 2020).

Henceforth, based on a rather brief review of this movement, the present author would like to outline several critiques on their proposals. The first is that they look over the fact that the most advanced capitalist economy has succeeded in producing highly effective pandemic virus vaccines in record time, in only nine months, because of the entrepreneurial successes of the leading pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca which are one of the hallmarks of capitalism (USFDA 2020a, b).

Critics such as Mazzucato maintain that, while economic growth and social welfare is driven by innovation, the state must intervene to prevent private actors from extracting too much value from their own innovations. This argument relies on four important assumptions. First, Mazzucato sees value extracted by private innovators as a rent, not a premium for their efforts and investments. In this perspective, entrepreneurs are myopic and must be prodded by the benevolent Leviathan to take a “patient,” long-term perspective. Even using the Ricardian role of rentiers as responsible of economic stagnation, the modern state is itself a rentier, a much larger one than entrepreneurs or large firms and one that bears little risk (unlike private capital, taxpayers’ money is always available). Moreover, the claim that innovators appropriate too much value from innovations with high social benefits is hard to square with the conventional notion that, in the face of positive spillovers, there is too little innovation in R&D (Arrow, 1962)!.

Second, these criticisms view the state is a priori entitled to appropriate a part (which? Half? 90%? 100%?) of the innovation’s value because of its “dirty job.” An example highlights the inconsistency of this argument. Suppose a firm that produces mobile phones uses a natural resource to create a specific component. The firm can buy the natural resource and make the component in-house or buy from an outside supplier. Either way, this process is facilitated by market transactions, either in the market for the resource or the market for the finished component. Assume the state owns the natural resource or the supplier producing the component is a state-owned firm. In both cases, the firm has paid a price to the state for its contribution to innovation (i.e., owning the natural resource or contracting with the supplier). An entrepreneur or group of entrepreneurs perform the central role of combining resources and bearing the uncertainty associated with value creation (production takes place before the product is offered and promoted to consumers, who may or may not buy the product). Why should the state be entitled to a share of the created value? A typical answer is that the entrepreneur is leveraging prior investments, infrastructure, institutions, education, etc. provided by the state. And yet, the entrepreneur, the investors, and other stakeholders have already paid for these, in the form of taxes, credit expansion, or however else the state funds its expenditures. Why should the innovator pay an additional “tax” on innovation?

Going through these arguments, we get a sense of a paradoxical situation. Large parts of the degrowth critique come from a progressive or “Millennial socialist” angle, and are accompanied by calls for tougher stands against inequalities, more support for the poor, and a stronger role for the welfare state more broadly. We have just seen, however, that an economy without growth would leave governments with less financial firepower to fight such challenges, even as it expanded their scale—leaving the much-hated alternatives of austerity or iniquitous inflation to pay for them. It comes as no surprise, then, that degrowth advocates have gravitated to the pipe dream of Modern Monetary Theory as an escape route from this policy conundrum. This theory purports to bust the “deficit myth” (to invoke the title of Stephanie Kelton’s book) by promoting money-printing as a sustainable and unlimited way of financing government, magically without creating inflation.21

Recall that the welfare system was first created back in the nineteenth century precisely to shore up capitalism against some of its most perverse wealth-concentration dynamics, and therefore to contain the insurgence of social unrest. Wouldn’t diminishing the welfare state’s firepower at a time of pressing need do the opposite? We can credibly suppose that it would further destabilize the whole economic system and that, as Heather Boushey argues, the increase in inequality would also stifle competition and innovation.22

But what is the true relationship between capitalism, environmental destruction and climate change? If we compare the ranking of the countries with the highest environmental standards with the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, we see a different connection than the one purported by Klein.

For more than 20 years, researchers at Yale University have been publishing the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which ranks countries according to their environmental health and ecosystem vitality. The EPI uses a total of 32 performance indicators in eleven categories:147

Another dynamic element that receives too little attention in the degrowth literature is the international dimension of the policy agenda.42 What happens if one country decides to walk down the ecosocialism path, but others do not? In that case, commitment to degrowth leads, in an act of selfpreservation and contrary to the idyllic narrative, to an insular worldview and closure from the outside world.43

This is true, first, because the economic scale-down envisioned by ecosocialism reins in international trade. Production needs to be carried out on a smaller scale and as locally as possible to avoid environment-damaging global supply chains, so exchanges between countries will shrink. Along the same logic, international travel will need to be reduced, given the inevitable environmental repercussions of airplanes. As society moves full-throttle toward eco-autarky, we can expect less exposure to outside cultures, and possibly more xenophobia. So argues Benjamin Friedman in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, based on patterns of nationalism across US history. Indeed, this realization dates back to Enlightenment thinkers, who saw commerce as breaking through religious groups, political affiliations, and prejudices in its pursuit of economic gains. It inspired the well-known observation by 1800s economist Frédéric Bastiat that “when goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” 44

As climate activist Greta Thunberg likes to remind her audiences, when the house is on fire, you stop whatever you are doing and focus on extinguishing. The message is that in our climate emergency all other, petty concerns must be set aside. Applied to international relations, this aspirational thinking has some believing that climate change will imply the end of conflictual geopolitics.44 There are practical reasons why this type of thinking might have gathered momentum. After all, much of the world’s recent conflict history, including war after war in the Middle East in the 1990s and early 2000s, was driven in large part by issues related to petroleum. It might seem logical that once economies, as part of their climate mitigation efforts, switch to renewables like solar and wind, conflictual international relations will become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, that change is very unlikely to represent the end of geopolitics.45

First, the overall premise is wrong, as oil and gas will not disappear any time soon. Rather, we will observe a gradual shift in the energy mix from traditional energy sources toward renewables.46 An effort to fast-track the demise of highly polluting coal, while renewable capacity is still building up, might initially lead to a counterintuitive increase in the use of methane— which is, at least for Europe, another source of conflictual geopolitical relations, in its case with Russia.

If, as we imagine alternative institutions, we choose to ignore basic human cultural traits (perhaps blinded by false dichotomies such as whether people are inherently good or bad), then the mechanics of our society will rapidly turn perverse, as people find ways to go around those institutions. With this understanding, we can see why people would not suddenly embrace a narrative of sufficiency or a steady-state economy. We can appreciate that they would not simply ignore the fact that neighboring countries would begin to have more, thanks to their sustained economic growth and technological progress. We can recognize that impulses to emigrate would begin under ecosocialism. And we can see why redistribution alone, without growth, would lead to an unsustainable equilibrium. In sum, we can understand why capitalism has proved a successful way to organize society hitherto. It channels some basic human impulses.

Rather than fantasizing about changing human nature altogether, it is more promising to acknowledge these traits and try to align them with the environmental imperatives laid out by scientists.70 The odds of achieving this should be stacked up against the odds of accelerating technological change—which, as we saw, is the chief mechanism humanity has used to solve problems throughout its history. It is to this topic that we turn in Chapter 6.

The main topic of this book is the relationship between capitalism and the growth imperative, and this is an essential relationship to understand as we consider a societal rethink to address the challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. The point that must be accepted is that economic growth is a result of human desires, rather than a top-down imposition by capitalism on otherwise indifferent individuals. The quest for more will endure as long as humans populate the planet, whether we tear down capitalism or not. It is best to acknowledge this and craft our sustainability strategies accordingly.

While we have looked at the origins of the growth imperative from a more individual, or microeconomic, perspective, it is also possible to do so at the country level. Skeptics will surely point to historical estimates of GDP, such as the ones displayed in Figure 5.2, to claim that capitalism and industrialization brought a growth-obsession phase to an economic history previously characterized by simple stability. Such an interpretation of the data is understandable, but fallacious. Aggregate economic growth has accompanied humankind throughout its history, but it accelerated enormously from the Industrial Revolution onward thanks to certain conditions: the Scientific Revolution, better protection of property rights, presence of capital, an extensive banking system, high wages in England, and more.

Great Reset proponents see “capitalism” as an outdated, inefficient, and unjust system and want its current “neoliberal” manifestation supplanted with a much more regulated system. However, as we have argued capitalism simply means that most means of production are privately owned, that unhampered markets are used to allocate resources, and that there are high levels of economic freedom because state intervention is relatively limited. Economies organized on these principles also tend to be associated with high levels of social and political liberty. In such a system, firms concentrate on learning how to better serve customers. If customers want firms to produce more “socially responsible” products and services (and we certainly don’t deny that huge segments among modern customers and consumers hold such preferences), that is what firms will do. Not so in a cronyist system where the attention of managers is focused instead on winning favors with bureaucrats (lucrative contracts, network connections that may be of value in the future, harm done to competitors, privileges and even monopolies). Consumers lose directly because their interests and preferences may be overridden in favor of the preferences of bureaucrats and politicians. The wrong goods and services are produced and resources are spent on influencing public decision makers. Again, what is criticized by the critics of “capitalism” is in actuality “cronyism” (see also Klein et al., 2021).

Research on cronyism suggests that economies with high levels of government engagement with the economy are likely to exhibit particularly high levels of cronyism. There are reasons to expect a Great Reset to result in more cronyism. A recent WEF (2017) proclamation says that.

In this article, we offer a critical view of the Great Reset thesis, defined as the insistence on more government intervention in the innovation process through subsidy schemes or direct involvement, more emphasis on stakeholder capitalism brought about by a combination of legislation and pressure on business, and new metrics used to monitor private as well as public actors’ performance with respect to sustainability, innovation, and stakeholder performance. The Great Reset thesis is a set of normative propositions, calls for a better world that supposedly should be championed by management scholars as well as political and business leaders and the public. While Great Reset proponents do not a call for eliminating markets or capitalism, they call for new, normative management theory that in many ways is inconsistent with the market economy in its current form. The Great Reset is not only about changing managers’ objectives, beliefs, and actions, but also changing how organizations interact. In essence, calls for stakeholder management, new metrics for assessing social and environmental impact, and greater government intervention in markets to achieve social and environmental goals are closely related; they represent complementary arguments for restructuring the conventional capitalist model in which the means of production are privately owned and these owners—for large companies, shareholders—are responsible for managing their assets.

We argue that the Great Reset thesis is based on a fundamental lack of appreciation of the power of markets to bring about desirable social outcomes. In calling for a break with the traditional capitalist model, it leads to a world in which pressing social, environmental, and political challenges are exacerbated rather than alleviated. Moreover, the Great Reset thesis rests on a naïve conception of how governments work that neglects well-known problems concerning what governments (can) know, their incentives to take the right actions, and their vulnerability to rent-seeking on the part of organized special interests. It also mistakenly believes that the current system is a mostly unfettered market-based economy (e.g., Schwab, 2020) when, in reality, there is already massive government intervention—and, as a result, crony capitalism (Klein, Holmes, Foss, Terjesen, & Pepe, 2021)—in every major sector of the economy (Stiglitz, 1989, Majone, 1994).

While the Great Reset is fundamentally a set of normative propositions—a call for large-scale political and corporate action in the service of broad, societal goals such as sustainability—it is based on underlying descriptive assumptions. The basic, and mostly unanalyzed, premise of the Great Reset is that the existing social organization of economic activities (imprecisely described as “neo-liberalism”) has proven unable to deal with “grand challenges.” These challenges include the Covid-19 pandemic (as well as future, as yet unknown pandemics), the alleged increase in worldwide inequality, the various climate challenges, and the supposed declining innovativeness of private business which translates into reduced ability to deal with the other challenges. In other words, the Great Reset thesis rests on a strong claim of what economists call “market failure” (mainly “externalities”; Bator, 1958; Zerbe & McCurdy, 1999).

Those who call for the Great Reset may not use this terminology. Instead, they criticize “capitalism” for causing inequality, making natural resources being too heavily exploited, failing to direct innovation in the best possible ways, ignoring sustainability concerns, and so on (World Economic Forum, 2020). Much of this critique lacks concreteness and is entirely “boilerplate.” In particular, it is rarely explained how exactly “capitalism” does all these things; all are common to all known forms of social organization. Economic activity is driven by human wants and needs and the ability of people to satisfy those wants and needs, given the constraints of scarcity, production, and knowledge. Capitalism is merely a way of dealing with these basic facts (although some may of course argue that capitalism creates “unnecessary” needs and wants). Many proponents of Great Reset thinking claim they are not against capitalism per se, just the forms of capitalism that are most common today.

Degrowth, by definition, will reduce available resources and create some scarcity, albeit, according to its advocates, only for goods or ser vices that are unnecessary or superfluous. The implicit assumption, or hazardous bet, is that this would be voluntary scarcity—that everyone, once free from the iron cage of consumerism, would gladly embrace it as part of a superior mode of simple living.68 In this chapter we saw that, if this were not to happen, and the “infinite desire for more” (as Daniel Cohen calls it) were to remain prevalent, degrowth would likely turn into the proverbial road to hell, paved with good intentions.

Ecosocialism does not have an allocation mechanism, or a way to assuage tensions within society. The problems this chapter has described would rapidly cause the entire degrowth utopian vision to unravel, leaving citizens with some combination of perceived misery, social tension, autarky, emigration, and welfare reductions. An intricate web of rules would be spun up to regulate most aspects of life—all presided over by a strong central government at high risk of turning illiberal in its efforts to shore up its ideological raison d’être. The distance between ecosocialism and ecoauthoritarianism is shorter than one might imagine.

The scenario sketched above highlights that ecosocialist degrowth transitions would most likely occur in a context of deepening political-economic crisis, intensifying climate shocks, and worsening insecurity for the majority of populations. A key danger, then, is that even in the best-case scenario in which powerful red-green movements decisively shift the balance of power vis-à-vis capital and elect leftist parties following ecosocialist platforms, this could lead to “authoritarian” forms of ecosocialism, understood as ecosocialist regimes that institutionalize “state of emergency” provisions such as unchecked executive power, the suspension of democratic rights and procedures, restrictions on free speech, and military-police repression of dissent (Petras and Fitzgerald Citation1988). This has of course been one of the primary challenges confronting all socialist transitions historically, which have had to fight off external military intervention, resistance from capitalist elites, and reactionary currents from below in order to protect revolutionary gains. Things would be no different for future ecosocialisms-in-transition, particularly given the likely contradiction between the speed at which consumption cuts may need to be made in the global north and the slowness with which post-materialist cultural change would occur, yet such problems have not been systematically explored by ecosocialists and degrowth scholars. The risks are twofold: first, that authoritarian measures would be needed to enforce lifestyle changes upon recalcitrant populations and “deal with the exceptional circumstances of direct and serious threat” to the survival of ecosocialist regimes in their early phases; and second, that such measures, rather than being temporally limited and abolished once the “exceptional circumstances” are dealt with, become the new normal (94).

Quincy Saul and Andreas Malm are among the few ecosocialists who don’t shy away from this problem. Saul, for one, writes that “a period of ‘emergency rule,’ when the expropriators are expropriated, must be revised for the twenty-first century, it cannot be dismissed or glossed over” (Saul Citation2011, 58–59). Similarly, Malm suggests that carrying out the transition in the needed time frame would require.

Fuchs (2020b) talks about ‘class struggle social democracy’. This aims to move to democratic socialism and involves: a pluralist convergence of radical reforms and the gradual transformation of institutions; trade union industrial action with working-class struggle (trade unions are another topic that could get more attention when discussing alternative societies and routes to them); new social combinations across classes and other divisions and identities; electoral parliamentary politics, social movements and movement parties; organization spontaneity and new prefigurative forms of social co-operation; the building of democratically controlled commons within as well as beyond capitalism; leadership and mass action; both conflict antagonistic politics and taking power. This includes different but complementary political strategies and rejects seeing these as contradictory or mutually exclusive. There are parallels here with what I am advocating in this book. I may not use the term ‘social democracy’ for this approach as that implies staying within capitalism, although in this context it refers to building from political reformism within capitalism to something beyond. Fuchs discusses thinkers as diverse as Rosa Luxemburg (2008), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2017), and Bhaskar Sunkara (2019) as advocating change along these lines. Likewise, Eagleton (2022: 191), discussing a post-Corbyn Left in the UK, argues that the ‘the priority must be to grow this movement through every available channel’, numerous existing and thriving examples of which he gives.

This leads to the second conjoined tendency, which is to neglect difficult strategic questions, trade-offs, and dangers that would likely emerge during the transition process and beyond. The majority of ecosocialists ignore these sorts of questions altogether, while others address them more tepidly. Michael Löwy, for example, who has done some of the finest work on elaborating the ecosocialist alternative, does not consider whether there might be a trade-off between calls for “democratic planning” and the simultaneous emphasis on biospheric limits within which we must constrain consumption. Indeed, he affirms that “nobody has the right to tell people what their needs are” (Löwy Citation2015, 34), but then the question of whether this may require allowing energy-intensive modes of consumption that transgress planetary boundaries to persist is left unaddressed. Instead, Löwy expresses faith that “the rationality of democratic decisions will prevail once the power of commodity fetishism is broken” (28). This is perhaps plausible, but as Löwy himself recognizes, there will be a long period of transition in which the “old habits of consumption would persist” (34), and he doesn’t grapple with the question of how they would be transformed within the requisite timeframe to avoid runaway climate change (i.e. by 2050 or shortly thereafter). Joel Kovel and Michael Lebowitz also recognize that ecosocialism(s)-in-transition would remain marked by the defects of capitalism for some time; thus they emphasize the importance of democratic praxis in forging the new subjectivities and social relations that would be needed to sustain a long-term revolutionary transformation, which otherwise risks lapsing into the same authoritarian statism that has plagued socialism throughout its history (Kovel Citation2007, 272; Lebowitz Citation2006, 66). This is an important insight, though it still begs the question of how a society-wide transformation towards ecosocialist/degrowth principles might occur in the needed time-frame. Given the possible intransigence of energy and emissions-intensive consumption practices, particularly in a context of rising rightwing populism and “fossil fascism” (Malm and Collective Citation2021), we should grapple squarely with the risk that state coercion would be needed enforce ecosocialist degrowth in rich countries. On the other hand, if we choose to follow the democratic will wherever it leads us, even if this entails the perpetuation or even expansion of material-energy intensive modes of living, then we must deal with the biospheric consequences. Might there be a trade-off, then, between degrowth and non-degrowth paths to ecosocialism, each with its own set of challenges and dangers? Ecosocialists have not systematically investigated these sorts of questions.

In sum, we can see that the ecosocialist and degrowth movements have so far devoted limited attention to important strategic questions and trade-offs regarding ecosocialist transitions. Thus they are vulnerable to critiques like those of Matt Huber, who claims that degrowth variants of ecosocialism fail to articulate how their utopian aspirations could be “realistically built out of the present” (Huber Citation2019). Instead, Huber advocates what he calls a “scientific ecosocialism” that eschews the emphasis on degrowth and instead endorses a “traditional socialist politics not of limits and less, but of more” (Huber Citation2019). Unfortunately, Huber’s proposal is itself “utopian” in that it disregards the biospheric devastation that would be entailed by more consumption in the already over-developed global north (which I will expand on below). However, he indicates a crucial problem that must be addressed by the degrowth ecosocialist left: how might an ecosocialist vision based on degrowth (in rich countries) win popular majorities? As Hubert Buch-Hansen bluntly states: “the degrowth project is nowhere near enjoying the degree and type of support it needs if its policies are to be implemented through democratic processes” (Buch-Hansen Citation2018, 160). This is undoubtedly true, at present, and thus more strategic thinking about the how of transition is needed. Following Sam Gindin, we need “an honest presentation of the risks, costs, and dilemmas the [eco]socialist project will face, alongside credible examples and promising indications of how the problems might be creatively addressed” (Gindin Citation2018, 14). Furthermore, as Erik Olin Wright says, we need to understand “not simply the obstacles and openings for strategies in the present, but how those obstacles and opportunities are likely to develop over time” (Wright Citation2010, 18).

Privilege expresses itself as ableism, the same privilege that finds those in positions of power fearing and denigrating folks who live on the margins; the people who society would rather forget.

What this does mean, or at least one thing it may mean, is that what is wrong here is not something that is inherently wrong with me or up to me alone to fix. I live with illness and impairments regardless of what society does, but that does not preclude us from asking: How might we design a world that addresses those impairments and educates nondisabled people about how meaningful a life with a disability can be, particularly if one is supported in the best ways to maximize their potential as fellow folks with dreams, goals, interests, senses of humor, favorite foods, relationships and desires for self-determination? The problem that I am diagnosing here is that attitudes couched in dominant norms about my life do not meet me where I am. A failure to bring attitudes about a population into closer alignment with the attitudes shared by that population is a stubborn privilege that would rather pity the “other” than learn from them.

Ableism, broadly defined, is any expression of discrimination that favors nondisabled people, but it is not a prejudice that harms only those with disabilities. Ableism is a systemic oppression that finds common ancestry with white supremacy.

Disabled people are often asked to give an account of themselves to quell nondisabled people’s discomfort, while striving toward conformity. It is understood that our lives do not matter enough to fund robust public transportation infrastructure, rethink city planning, improve workflows for benefits administration, or to codify universal health care access. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve learned that some people do not think our disabled lives are worth saving; disabled bodies are disposable.

(David – professor of sociology @ University of Toronto, Michelle Maroto - professor of sociology @ University of Alberta, and Jennifer Brooks – research associate in the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability @ Cornell, “The Sociology of Disability-Based Economic Inequality,” Contemporary Sociology 54.1, 2022)

A Disability Rights Backlash In what scholars, legislators, and activists have called perverse understandings of the ADA, federal courts managed to make it especially difficult for victims of employment discrimination to mobilize the law by denying standing to disabled people on the grounds that they are not actually disabled (O’Brien 2001). Similarly, legislative silence on the issue of collective agreements2 carved out a space for courts to interpret reasonable accommodations in unionized workplaces. Historically, the courts ruled that any accommodation seen as violating a collective agreement is an ‘‘undue hardship’’ (Lee 2003; see also Daly-Rooney 1993 on the 1984 Daubert v. USPS case). Even after the landmark ADA, the court’s position was that the ADA did not require an employer to break a collective bargaining agreement to accommodate a disabled worker (see Schoen 1997 on the Eckles v. Consolidated Rail case). Until the 1997 Aka case, courts generally granted summary judgments against plaintiffs with disabilities if they deemed that an accommodation contradicted a collective bargaining agreement or seniority system. However, courts were still reluctant to appear as interfering in collective bargaining agreements (see Lee 2003 on the 2002 U.S. Airways v. Barnett case). Courts effectively framed the debate not as a matter of employer rights versus employee rights, as is often the case in disability antidiscrimination cases, but as one about the collective seniority rights of other employees versus the individual rights of the employee with disabilities.3 This had the unfortunate consequence of pitting the interests of disabled workers against the interests of workers without disabilities (O’Melveny 1993). As Stahlhut (1993:74) argued, ‘‘unions are worried about whether the obligation of reasonable accommodation will allow an employer to circumvent the seniority provisions of a collective bargaining agreement. Management, on the other hand, is perplexed because it needs to know its obligations under the ADA so it can avoid legal liability.’’ The courts have effectively used collective bargaining agreements to limit the options regarding accommodations (Daly-Rooney 1993). The courts have largely decided who qualifies for rights (O’Brien 2001), and those who do are relatively few. Based on twenty years of Supreme Court discrimination cases, Maroto and Pettinicchio (2014b) show that lower courts were actually more inclined to rule in favor of a disabled person, while the Supreme Court was more likely to hear cases in which it overturned those decisions. This was especially the case for disability-based cases compared to race and gender-based discrimination cases. Although conservatives and other detractors of the ADA continued to argue that the law caused unintended harm by disincentivizing hiring people with disabilities through raising the costs of litigation, many in Congress pointed to this judicial resistance in weakening the ADA (Maroto and Pettinicchio 2014b). In response, the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), also referred to as the ADA Restoration Act of 2008, directly addressed the Court’s narrow interpretations of the ADA. Yet, the same opposing forces sought to kill or curtail the legislation. For example, at one congressional hearing, a representative from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce testified that the Restoration Act would replace ‘‘the long experience under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the ADA’’ with a ‘‘‘litigation regime’ not focused on the universally lauded goal of full inclusion of qualified individuals with disabilities into the mainstream of American life’’ (Pettinicchio 2019:149). To supporters, though, the ADAAA reified Congress’s intent when it came to the law enacted years prior. In the wake of the ADAAA, there has been a decrease in the number of cases rejected in the pretrial phase based on standing. However, this decrease appears to have coincided with a rise in the number of cases that determined individuals to be ‘‘unqualified’’ for a job (Befort 2010, 2013; Henry 2014). With these continued legal challenges, efforts in Congress to undermine this now thirty-yearold ‘‘emancipation proclamation’’ for disabled Americans persist (e.g., the 2017 ADA Education and Reform Act), coupled with a laxity and unwillingness by administrations to implement the ADA’s provisions.

Social workers aim to integrate anti-oppressive strategies into their front-line practice. Students are taught to be critical of how systems and institutions control the lives of marginalized people and how to be aware of their own biases and power. Having a critical or structural understanding of social problems is essential if social workers wish to have a positive effect on people’s lives and make lasting social change. Mullaly (1997) describes what oppression looks like and how social workers are to respond. 125 Everyone suffers frustrations, restrictions, and hurt. What determines oppression is when these happen to a person not because of individual talent, merit or failure, but because of his or her membership in a particular group or category of people… Oppression protects a kind of citizenship that is superior to that of the oppressed. It protects the oppressor’s access to a range of better paying and higher status work. It protects the oppressors’ preferential access to and preferential treatment from our social institutions. (Mullaly, 1997, pp. 138-139) Mullay (1997) explains that “structural” social workers must critically examine their own actions and determine if they are contributing to oppression (pp. 202). Carniol (2000) directs social workers to challenge the current treatment of people who are oppressed by supporting individual empowerment and social change. The social model of disability is an essential theory in anti-oppressive practice. It was developed by Oliver as a way to help his social work students understand the hegemonic oppression of disabled people within society. As a professor of social work and a disabled person, Oliver (1990b) understood that social workers have power in their relationships to clients and that they needed to rethink disability in a critical way. I originally conceptualised models of disability as the binary distinction between what I chose to call the individual and social models of disability (Oliver. 1983). This was no amazing new insight on my part dreamed up in some ivory tower but was really an attempt to enable me to make sense of the world for my social work students and other professionals whom I taught [emphasis added]….I wanted to put this distinction into a framework that could be understood by professionals with a limited though expanding knowledge of disability issues. (p. 2) 126 Unfortunately, Oliver expressed that in twenty years social work had failed to embrace the social model, failed to meet disabled people’s needs and was dead in the lives of disabled people (Morgan & Roulstone, 2012; Oliver, 2004). He explains: “There is little doubt that the hegemony of the individual model still endures within social work, as in other professions” (Oliver, 2004, p. 11). Still, Oliver continued to work towards the goal of using the social model to inform anti-oppressive social work practice. In Social Work with Disabled People, Oliver and Sapey (2006) critique the “disability industry” and that social workers have been complicit in ignoring disability issues (p. ix). Social workers have relied on individual pathology assumptions in their practice, and ignored the social context that people face when they acquire a disability. They quote Paul Wilding (1982) in his comment that the emphasis on “…a medical, psychotherapeutic and individualized model of work” was for social workers a way to gain professional status (Oliver & Sapey, 2006, p. 22). They argue, however, that social work is the occupational group which is in the best position to challenge the injustices and barriers that people with disabilities face and change their practice to support and reflect the social model of disability. Morgan (2012), Oliver and Sapey (2006) and Reeve (2012) describe how the social model should inform social work practice, both in the critical analysis of social policies (macro level) and the one-on-one, front-line relationship with disabled people (micro level). Morgan (2012) frames the social model of disability as a paradigm shift or “threshold concept,” and explains that this is why it is so difficult for social work students to integrate (p. 215). Most students enter social work programmes with the professed aim of ‘helping’ and so to be confronted by an approach (the social model of disability) and a body 127 of research and theorising (disability studies) that challenges their taken-forgranted assumption that social work practice is ‘helpful’ is unsettling and can lead to resistance. (p. 215) The result is that students mimic what they believe the social model to mean, a problem that Morgan calls “ritualized performance” (p. 220). A threshold concept has five main characteristics, it is transformative; irreversible; integrative; bounded; and troublesome (Morgan, 2012). Morgan explains that the social model is often personally transformative, challenging personal beliefs and once explained often denotes irreversible knowledge. It is integrative and bounded in that it exposes underlying ideas and it creates conflict between disciplines, in this case between disability studies and social work. Lastly, it can be troubling for the learner: [A threshold concept can be] “alien”, counterintuitive or even intellectually absurd at face value’ (2003, p. 2). Clearly a social model perspective can be all three to some learners. Many students are distant from the lived experience of disability and take their cues from wider social and cultural depictions of and scripts for understanding disability. The idea of disability as an individual’s personal tragedy is so hegemonic that it is extremely difficult for some students to grasp an alternative despite the modelling of similar approaches to issues like gender and ethnicity and the pervasiveness of claims to non-judgementality and antidiscriminatory practice within social work. Threshold concepts like the social model can be ‘subversive’ and undermine deeply-held beliefs and attitudes and, in the context of social work, they trigger fundamental questions about the nature, practice and future existence of social work itself. (Morgan, 2012, p. 221) 128 As a social work student doing a practicum at a disability organization, I was tasked with representing the philosophy and values of the organization in writing a handbook on education. The enormity of the task meant that I had to understand the radical, anti-oppressive side of the movement. When confronted with disability pride, or parents who were angry at selective abortion or segregated services, I was shocked. At first I had trouble getting past the ingrained tragedy perspective and found the alternative viewpoint upsetting and completely absurd. I experienced this new knowledge as a radical, threshold concept in my own social work practice and began rethinking how I viewed people with disabilities and how they were treated by society. I started from an individual pathology framework, but I rapidly understood that this belief system was oppressive. I had also assumed that people with disabilities had access to the supports they needed, which was challenged by the reality of residual, micro-managed services that limit personal choice. The most difficult problem to be confronted with was how interpersonal exclusion and the devaluing of their lives affected the quality of life of many disabled people. They live a life that most people do not inherently see as valuable and are systematically excluded from typical work, recreation, education, living and social situations. This is the real tragedy, not their impairment. Forming relationships and being valued in any social role is difficult unless they fit into a stereotype or learn to manage and thrive within ‘normal,’ ableist society. For me, incorporating the social model affected both my microlevel practice, but also my macro-level analysis of the problem. In front-line practice, there are practical ways that social workers can implement the social model at the micro-level. Reeve (2012) uses Honneth’s work on social justice, suggesting that for justice to be realized, people need to experience recognition in three 129 areas: love; rights; and solidarity. A lack of recognition leads to exclusion, shame and degradation (Reeve, 2012). She points out how holding individual pathology model beliefs about disabled people has a cumulative emotional, personal effect in their lives. [It] is particularly important that professionals such as social workers understand how their behaviour and attitudes might (inadvertently or not) disable the person they are working with. Significantly, psycho-emotional disablism is cumulative like any form of emotional abuse (see Reeve, 2006). Consequently past experiences of being ridiculed or patronised may play out in current relationships with professionals. (Reeve, 2012, pp. 229-230) This presents a challenge to social workers, showing how a progressive, social model perspective changes their practice with disabled people: Put simply, a student on placement may not be able to do anything concrete about a voluntary sector service which is housed in an inaccessible building (structural disablism); however, the student does have control over the manner in which they interact and support a disabled person, the attitudes and assumptions that they make (psycho-emotional disablism), which in turn influence the services provided…..[In] contrast the elimination of psycho-emotional disablism relies on the social work student to be reflexive and self-aware of their own prejudices about disabled people so that these are not acted out and so is commensurate with the politics of recognition advocated by Honneth. (Reeve, 2012, pp. 230-231) Oliver and Sapey (2006) suggest that social workers evaluate the usefulness of their interventions in removing disabling barriers, and implement a position of “determined advocacy,” allowing disabled people the right to define their own needs (p. 186). 130 At a macro level, social workers need to embrace the social model in order to be relevant in the lives of people with disabilities, as social work from and individual pathology perspective is no longer viable (Oliver & Sapey, 2006; Morgan, 2012). There are fundamental questions about the future role of social work in the lives of disabled people in the personalisation era and about whether statutory social work can meet the wider needs and entitlements of disabled people….social work and social work education need to provide an articulate and convincing argument about what social work can offer disabled people in the twenty-first century. (Morgan, 2012, p. 224) In 1983, the original challenge that Oliver and Sapey gave social workers was to “...review the individualising and pathologising knowledge and methods that had dominated their practice, and to join disabled people in challenging the political, cultural and professional barriers they faced in their everyday lives” (Oliver & Sapey, 2006, p. ix). In relation to using the social model as a lens to analyze specific welfare policies, Oliver and Sapey (2006) suggest becoming a profession that is allied with the disability community, understanding their needs and goals: What is also required is that social workers have a knowledge of the social model of disability that will inform their actions as practitioners and managers within a welfare system that has itself been seen to be oppressive….If social work is to be an effective ally to the struggle and to use its influence within the welfare state to alter and modify disability policies, it must do so from a position that is informed by its work with collective organisations of disabled people. It may, in Finkelstein’s terms, need to become a profession allied to the community. ( pp. 184-188) 131 6. While this thesis analyzes policy from a theoretical or ideological standpoint, the implications are real for people with disabilities. Many people with disabilities experience life-long poverty with no opportunity to escape. The charity mindset that pervades income replacement programs, the low benefits and the policing of personal details does not create a feeling of equity and accommodation, but further segregates and disables people. People with disabilities should not be celebrating a benefit increase on AISH that keeps them well below the poverty line, but that is the reality. They are the “deserving poor,” but not deserving of equity and accommodation as a result of that label.