re: I literally do not trust 99% of revolutionaries because NONE of yall give a fuck about disabled people
OP:
So theres this guy I know who sees himself as a revolutionary political thinker, who wants to get involved in at least local politics. We would talk a bit about creating somewhat of a small commune, and I said something like "you know. It's all nice as a fantasy. But I cant just move out to the countryside into an abandoned village with some leftist people without someone to take care of me. I need someone to help me. No home care service would drive an hour just to help me get changed, brush my teeth and cook a meal" and he did not have a reply to that that could account for me being well cared for.
I'm literally in the lucky position that I wont easily die without care, my quality of life would just majorly suck, and this so called revolutionary doesnt even have space for me in his commune dreams. I literally do not trust 99% of revolutionaries because NONE of yall give a fuck about disabled people. We are here. We deserve to be here. And we fucking deserve to survive your revolution and thrive in the society you want to create.
my response:
Yup! And because many people who profess to have revolutionary politics fail to address ableism, a good number of disabled people are turned away revolutionary politics. I recall a time I saw a disabled person on here argue that we needed to have a state because otherwise they couldn't receive care.
I can speak to the common anarchist response to this problem: most anarchists at this point would advocate for some sort of mutual aid or affinity group dedicated to disabled care. I don't think it was explicitly an anarchist project but I once knew of something that was like an affinity group of disabled people who did mutual aid-style care for each other. Those who were more abled with regards to some aspects helped those who had less ability in those aspects, and they switched off roles of carer and cared based on their access needs.
Still, there are problems on relying on affinity and mutual aid for care, and one of my favorite critiques of it is by @/queeranarchism here:
If safety in your ideal society is entirely based on care by networks of affinity, and does not provide care for people who are not liked by anybody, then your society is actually even worse than the situation we are in now.
Pissing off people close to you or over-exhausting your social network or isolating yourself is often an inherent part of many mental health problems, addictions, etc. By the time people need care the most, they have often lost all their networks of affinity, and with some bad luck, any of us could find ourselves in that situation.
There has to be unconditional care available for the more unlikable of us, or there isn't really a safety net for any of us.
Too many people on this post going 'yeah mutual aid collectives are terrible'. Nah man, stop projecting your one shitty experience onto all of anarchism. Most mutual aid collectives are kind and forgiving and committed to transformative justice.
Sometimes the person who needs care pushes carers away, which is also a really common thing when you're struggling with your mental health. Sometimes the group that provides care just can't do it all, or they try their very best and burn out. Or sometimes things work out and the group succeeds in providing the care that is needed but it's so hard to do that they fail to take care of themselves.
Mutual aid networks fail sometimes, but state/institutional networks of care fail too, a LOT, and often they fail so much harder. When one door towards institutional care closes, often all the other doors close too, because you've been 'non cooperative' or some bullshit like that.
The point here isn't to shit on mutual aid. The point is to recognize that dependency on a single source of care doesn't work and creates a dangerous power relationship. The point is to recognize that tying care to close bonds of affinity has its downsides. The point is that we need more mutual aid, more overlapping ways of getting care, and recognition of how fucking rad it is to help complete strangers.
Separate but for me related to why so many anarchists fail to consider disabled care as part of their projects of liberation is because many anarchists are liberal anarchists. As Hostis says in this footnote: "Though they would bristle at the label, most anarchists today owe their theory of power to the liberal tradition. Such anarchism is concerned with the legitimacy of power, which begins with a possessive individualism that expands through the principle of non-coercion (‘your freedom ends where mine begins’) and contractual exchange (voluntary agreement)."
Not an anarchist but a physically disabled disability studies theorist, Fiona Kumari Campbell has elaborated on how ableism has been inherent to the liberal conceptions of freedom that anarchists have inherited. In Contours of Ableism, she writes: "Within the contemporary Western, freedom is held to be an inalienable and inherent right of the atomistic individual citizen. Freedom is represented as autonomy, invokes the performance of a choosing, desiring and consuming subject. The ‘free’ citizen is one who can take charge of herself – to act as her own command centre." But because being disabled means you may lack the ability to "take charge," "[a] drive towards self-mastery may mean that it is not possible for some disabled people to be truly ‘free’ within the confines of liberalism. These people may lose person status because they fail to meet certain criterion."
Liberal and/or anarchist ideas of the free person as a master of the self, and also my own ultraleft (Situationist) tendency's idea of the free person as a master without slaves (from Vaneigem) theoretically fail to account for disabled limits of self-mastery. At the same time--and this perspective probably wasn't started by anarchists, but I suspect many anarchists may be tempted to go along with it--I've also seen people think that integrating disabled limits of competency into this concept of self-mastery is the answer, that we should treat disabled people as fully independent agents on the same level of independence as abled people.
However, awhile ago--and unfortunately I've lost the link to the post--but I heard another disabled person on here criticize the practice of treating all disabled people as their own independent advocates, when some disabled people, by nature of their disability, cannot be their own independent advocates and depend on their carers to advocate for them. It prompted me to do some reflection on anarchist conceptions of autonomy, and I wrote: "power (individual) ≠ hierarchy (systemic). power only becomes a reflection of hierarchy if power is used to create, used to reinforce, or exercised within an established system where that kind of power is a mode of domination over others. #bcz we live in an ableist society abled caretakers do hold hierarchical power over disabled folks they're caring for #but it does not follow that caretaking itself is inherently hierarchical because the caretaker holds power over the cared one."
Sidenote, not related to disability, but bringing it up cuz it was part of the anecdote in the original post: some criticism on the settler colonialism of communes / autonomous zones