That was a shitty thing to do. Seriously, guys, we can disagree with women without calling them crazy out of the gate.
And let me say this again so EVERYONE can hear: disability is essential to your movements. You will never raise a movement for the people if you exclude disability. Period. Period. Disability is one of the magic rings, bros, we gotta have all of 'em, not just the ones we like.
There is a core and fundamental principle here which I try and keep in mind whenever the topic of disability and intersectionality is brought up, and it goes like this:
Sooner or later, everyone will be disabled, barring a sudden cessation of existence. This is what life does. Whether it be accident, illness, or simply old age, sooner or later we'll be hit by that stick in one way or another.
Ignoring that isn't just morally and ethically bankrupt, it's logically insane. If you don't include disability in your calculations, you are actively sabotaging your future self, not to mention everyone else.
I get so many weird objections to this one, usually going something like "but getting old isn't a disability".
That in particular annoys me, and I'm not even 40!
Is an older person, by default, as able as an 'average' (read: hale and in their prime) person to be able to navigate the obstacles of our world? Will their eyesight or hearing, for example, be as good? (Glasses and hearing aids are assistive devices, however you might swing it.)
Pride aside, the rigors of age are absolutely a disability and we need to stop treating it as a slur.
It's not only standard aging. Your chances of getting at least one "everyone recognizes this as a disability at any age" go way up as you get older.
I think that some people want to theorize old age as not involving disability because this way they think that they can have a life where they don't have to deal with it.
"ADL difficulty was present in 71% in 90–94 year olds, 89% in 95–99 year
olds and 97% in centenarians."
Per my recent posts, this is a problem of prefiguration.
Namely, the configuration of our movements, the configuration of our advocacy, is so stuck in the rut of 19th century theory that it prefigures ignorance of disability at its core.
Without 21st century theory, to meet 21st century lived experiences, prefiguring disability among other issues as core to doctrine and praxis, we'll continue to watch so called "human-centered" movements fail. Such anachronisms cannot win out.
I guess this is because in 19th century European society, like 21st century society in much of the world, people with disabilities were so integrated that there was no need to talk about us as a separate group
Before modern medicine, pretty much everybody was disabled, one way or another
Counterpoint, the way Marx defined the lumpenproletariat in many respects expresses a disdain for disabled folk (such as disabled veterans of the French wars), who Marx deemed to only show up in politics as tools of reactionary forces, so to "be used to combat the true proletariat in its efforts to bring about the end of bourgeois society".
Modern medicine aside, the workerism of 19th century theory glorifies one's exploitation as wage labor, this being the marker of revolutionary virtue, leaving everyone else as a "parasitic group" that "could not normally play a progressive role in history", thus "could not play a positive role in society".
Every time a Leftist complains that concern for disability or some other marginalized category is "splitting the movement", they are echoing sentiments of Marx (and likely many of his contemporaries who we might presume held similar opinion of those not abled enough to be targets of union organizing, which is to say targets of "class-consciousness").
Everyone may have been disabled, but not everyone was disabled in a way that marked them as lumpen. Marx invented a separate group for the express purpose of talking shit about them.
Side note: Your reply isn't turning up in my mentions, and am finding no discernible reason why that would be.
I have no idea!
That said, even without Marx talking shit (which, let's be honest, was how he made a name for himself among his contemporaries, let alone now), your point regarding a shift in the sociotechnical realities (this to be distinguished from sociotechnical imaginaries, in accordance with what follows below) of the past two centuries still stands.
We do not live in 19th century Europe. The material realities of our present history are markedly different. Heck, the material realities of 19th century Usia were markedly different than those of 19th century Europe. Yet our social theory wants to be ahistorical and to transcend social geography, to be a univocal commentary on naturalized power relations.
This being a monological commitment that even Marx couldn't sustain. Hence his having stuck Grundrisse in a drawer rather than publish. Having identified communal ownership and communal management of resources in medieval societies, he decided to just not talk about those exceptions to his grand theory of history.
Best not confuse the cause with facts.
Yet it is facts that define the territory our Korzybskian maps would help us navigate. When facts on the ground change, such as transformations of how we enact and are enacted by medicine (cf. Mol), this reterritorializes our lived experiences. We can't keep navigating with a Rand-McNally road atlas from the other side of two centuries.
Marc "ACAB" Godin
trying bear 🕊😺🕊🐼
Jennifer Kayla | Theogrin 🦊
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Cheryl G Kasson
Jane
DonCC
sport of sacred spherical cows
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