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"Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged," Horkheimer and Adorno observe, "not in so far as it is something in itself." This assumption has only stuck with us, morphing over the years into the idea that everything can be distilled down to some numerical unit like biometrics, engagement statistics, or dollar values. (It's visible, too, in how online platforms stopped referring to creative entities as "art," and migrated to calling them "content.") As a result, Horkheimer and Adorno write, "[b]ourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities." Such is the problem of thinking in terms of units. Metrics exist to quantify, calculate, and above all, convert. For Horkheimer and Adorno, sameness is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

— Legend of the River King by Alexander B. Joy (19%)

The resulting shape of the worker/surplus binary can be found today in eligibility requirements for welfare pro-grams, pensions, health insurance benefits, poor relief, and others. Many of the laws and policies that sort and shape the worker/surplus binary function as a means of investigating and certifying deservingness based on these criteria, ones that mark labor capacity as the foremost value of life. As such, those on the bottom of the spectrum of economic productivity have been medicalized and pathologized to justify the lack of universally available social supports. Capitalism has defined "health" itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor.

— Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant (19%)

Under the money model of disability "the disabled human being is a commodity around which social policies are created or rejected based on their market value." Russell argued that this constituted much more than simply profiting from the provision of medical care to the disabled. For Russell, the money model is presented as a corporate "solution" to the problem of disablement, predicated on the primary assumption that "Disabled people are 'worth' more to the Gross Domestic Product when we occupy a 'bed' instead of a home... The 'final solution'-corporate dominion over disability policy-measures a person's 'worth' by its dollar value to the economy." The money model of disability identifies what is in essence a "cure" for the existence of unproductive bodies under capitalism.

— Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant (9%)