Communism: The Real Movement to Abolish Disability

[Niccolò Rossi]

This is a brilliant, albeit very brief, article that I just finished reading over at Libcom by the user 'RedEd'. Check it out. What do you think?

Communism: The Real Movement to Abolish Disability (http://libcom.org/library/communism-real-movement-abolish-disability)


Communism: The real movement to abolish disability
The dominant ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of the age. As revolutionaries we know this and must constantly be alert to the ways in which they influence and limit our own conception of how things are and where they might go. We are alert to the fact that in our popular culture it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. In the revolutionary milieu we reject -with varying degrees of success- the universality of wage labour, the state, the nuclear family and so on. In the piece I want to focus on an area most revolutionaries never bring into their analysis of political economy: disability. Disability, I will argue, is a feature of present day social relations, that it is specific to capitalism, that it will not go away as long as capitalism persists and finally that communism presents the answer to the problem of disability. In doing so I locate disability firmly in ‘the present state of things’ that Marx argued communists must seek to abolish

Nic.

[Savage]

I like the main point of the article, but I am unsure as to how correct it is to say that disability is a concept specific to only the modern social relation, I would think that the concept of disability (and the enforcement of this concept upon society) is something that has existed since ancient times, without the concept changing that fundamentally over time, but please correct me If I am incorrect on this point.

[agnixie]

I like the main point of the article, but I am unsure as to how correct it is to say that disability is a concept specific to only the modern social relation, I would think that the concept of disability (and the enforcement of this concept upon society) is something that has existed since ancient times, without the concept changing that fundamentally over time, but please correct me If I am incorrect on this point.

What the article means is that definitions of disability are often largely cultural - I'm not entirely sure it's true in all cases, but I'd say it's true in a lot more than we assume. Deafness is a more or less obvious case where the cultural aspect is dominant, as it has no other real "disabling" aspect than communication within the bounds of hearing environments. Sight is also largely cultural, and many blind people will happily point out that in the realm of the blind, the one-eyed is not king, but insane. A lot of mental disabilities are influenced by the cultural environment in how they act.

Even with mobility issues, if modern culture integrated accessibility organically within its architecture, it would be much less of a visible than tacked on ramps (there's a park in the US midwest that tried just that with a stairway it built not too long ago: it looks pretty good too).