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im not gonna hang around here for long because even ultra/anarchist twitter has pretty much succumbed to the most radical wing of activism repeating slogans without assessing their programatic content. the fact is, you just can't have an abolish police politics without
factoring disability and disablement. saying we need to look out for our disabled comrades or notions of consent are simply not good enough. you have to actually find concrete, material solutions to the fascist police state locking us up.
it's all very good chatting about how the community will care for us in an anarchist society but that just makes an auxiliary, we have to wait till the revolution happens as event and then finally we can say anarchy is everywhere at all times.
so yeah you can trendily criticise twitter dwellers or basement people as being insulated and having unitary experiences,
but until able bodied people don't realise that we are always reduced to the status of stinking corpses constantly requiring help, deprived of nearly all legalistic representation to speak for ourselves, unless via the mediator of an advocate, they have no right to talk
about an impending threat of fascism or intensifying white supremacy. We have been on the brunt of that for years, and we have received nothing from radicals of any shades, only heideggerian musings about authenticity
the thing is, I know a lot more than people think. I just don't except the claim that we here from radicals where it's like 'we're doing our bit for the disabled.'
well, your bit is jack shit.
well, your bit is jack shit.
People don't understand why certain people are reluctant to be called racists. You wait until you apply that to disability, and the amount of jennuflections are unreal. Noone has ever admitted to me that they have engaged in ableist behaviour, ever.
and here's the thing, disability is the concrete manifestation of the social production error under capitalism. this is why it is perfectly possible to be antiracist, antisexist, anti-white supremacy but still be ableist.
because ableism is a form of bigotry totally depersonalised from any community identifications. Ableism is class division and bigotry elevated to the most abstract level as a representation of exchange value. One struggles to sell the labour power of the disabled, if at all.
So it's not even that the disability movement has bourgeois politics. That is inevitable. It is that communists/anarchists would rather cling to the promises of theology rather than get down and dirty with how discrimination materially works under capitalism
I saw a tweet last night about how we could write down the billionaire class names and get rid of them. This is a patent absurdity. The centre of capitalism isn't private ownership but the use of living labour to destroy dead labour
private ownership also existed in pre-capitalist modes of production.
when we talk about the historical specificity of capitalism, we have to see it as a thread. It is not merely enough to say capitalist categories belong to a certain time period. Very good. but then what are the clashing social forces within this epoch?
I don't mind people calling me proximate to whiteness or race-blind or whatever. Go ahead. But why give a shit about oppression if you don't want to take arguments seriously?Why not say that you just want to defend your turf? Because oppression can't be untied frm exploitation
and i do get the feeling, that if people did decide to take disability and disablement seriously, it would make it harder for them to look for a common enemy. be that cis men, heterosexuals, or even white people as some kind of amorphous mass. And this is uncomfortable.
good, it should be uncomfortable. the petty-bourgeois nihilism of punk rock will not save you here.
yeah ok maybe as oppressed people it isn't our job to educate the able-bodied.
But if we don't do it, who will? Because it sure as hell isn't going to be you lot learning is it? After all many anticapitalists supported eugenics in the early 20thC.
But if we don't do it, who will? Because it sure as hell isn't going to be you lot learning is it? After all many anticapitalists supported eugenics in the early 20thC.
this critique applies as much to anarchists who say they are not leftists either. no, it don't work like that. You see as an anarchist you can still be invested in maintaining a distance of exceptionality which hinders actual change. This is the curse of activism.
the militant's fear of Khalil at the kebab shop or Robbie at the starbucks joint has to be looked at in this light. suddenly youre not so special when people who should not be reading this literature get hold of it. Because that's what most post-68 writing has been.
and of course, if said writings are made accessible to a much larger populous, then those permanently subhumanised - the disabled, can actually interface with them. rather than being confined to the wastebasket of the unseen and unheard.
the usual academic move is to criticise marxism as ableist or eurocentric. i think this is a lazy cop out. the fact is, whether a theory ignores certain aspects does not have any impact on how its adherents use it.
all this does is ontologise the consciousness of being before the stomach, a very heideggerian (and proto-fascist) move.
there was never any kind of lesserEvilism or fear of the alternative for us. If you are white disabled, you are fucked over. If like me you are racialised disabled, you are ignored as nonexistent by all of the so-called 'progressive' movement. Socdems have been loyal thatcherites
and this is the key issue. if any kind of revolt breaks out, multiracial or Black working class, in the UK and US and many other advanced capitalist countries we have a band of activists and intellectuals ready to succor the ruling class into domestication and containment
this is far before these revolts can even begin to make inroades into the disabled populous, who rather than living solely on the periphery of capitalism, live on the periphery of humanhood, as zombified quantative labour, trapped between dead surplus and living.
It is also important to note that the biggest acts of disablement intentionally carried out were done in the name of antifascism (yes, hold your nose) by the American government, namely the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That particular altar
can apparently never be satiated, no matter the extent of the blood sacrifices done in its name.
yes, I'm going to get a load of strident denials - that's not real antifascism. this is what happens when you only see fascism as an ideology rather than a necessary stage of the bourgeois capitalist state.
It's not that "postracialism" is real (such a thing is impossible under capitalism) but *politics* wants to make race *more* real and entrenched. this is why the covid deaths were never analysed from the vantage point of age-related disability, certainly in the UK it was nebulous
concept of Black and Ethnic Minority communities, with little rigorous grounding in how Black/ethnic minorities were being made surplus to capital's requirements. The essential vs inessential workers discourse contributed to this. The disabled are never essential workers
and then, to add insult to injury, we had people calling out the BBC for being racially immoral, despite also saying in the same sentence that one cannot separate good whites and bad whites.
Well, that's what you just did.
Well, that's what you just did.
You very well know that nursing homes, carceral institutions, psychiatric wards, etc etc are the fount of white supremacy, so why ask for bourgeois whites to be more compassionate? It's not that they can or can't, but how does compassion even remotely help here?
this was my main falling out with the bay area communisation milieu. eventually one has to realise that anti-political politics is still *politics.* It's why endnotes and co. were never all that hard on the democratic party
'Yes the democratic party is counter-revolutionary, yes it is bourgeois capitalist' (paraphrasing) but it will inherently drag people to further left positions. This is a mystical automatism that can only be dreamt up by graduate students who have no experience
