Tillbaka

Really, the fact that I'm too autistic to write an article about autism touches on the key point I wanted to make: that the problem we are facing is of a system that nullifies our creativity and steals our labour.

How ablism is a system of stealing our energy, and how that means things about how we should respond.

In general, I think it's most useful to look at the central 'isms' as systems of expropriation. They aren't just bad little thoughts inside people which can be educated away like a priestly exorcism.

Ablism, sexism, racism, classism, exist as systems that keep going because they keep on stealing our energy like vampires.

Now sometimes this seems hard to understand, even for leftists. Maybe Marxism has made us believe that (capitalism) takes our labour and makes it into **value**. So for a long time Marxists and other traditional socialists ignored areas of society where they thought value wasn't being created. They thought that women's struggle and antiracism were distractions from the factory where labour is stolen and value created.

But I think we need to look at labour-theft in a different way.

Consider the Toni Morrison quote:

"The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being".

In other words, often the system of exploitation will take your labour only to destroy it, to burn your own energy before your eyes. No value created, but domination is reproduced.

It's here I think we need to look for inspiration in fighting ablism, in the theories of labour and exploitation that women and Black thinkers have articulated.

So I see ablism, not as some wrinkle in the system, but as *Ablist Supremacy*.

Just like White Supremacy and patriarchy, it is s system that lives off others' labour, but is centrally about control rather than capital reproduction per se, although economic production is part of it as well.

Just like how white supremacy exists to discipline the entire society and patriarchy exists to discipline all genders, so ablism exists to control everyone, because none of us are ever able enough. We all get ill, we all get old, we're all born young.

So ablism is an economic-authoritarian system of supremacy that looms like a big stick in the sky that can be used to beat anyone over the head. No sick days for you, no maternity leave for you. You're not able to handle the stress of this job? Sucks to be you.

Disability is the knife against everyone's throat, which can be used at any time.

And this has implications for how it can be rolled back.

I think it has to be all about us taking back our energy and labour.

The ablist supremacy will now say - what are you talking about? Disabled people don't have energy or labour power, that's the entire point.

But humans have creative power and energy. Even very basic disability support measures can unlock life for people who are disabled. And above all, we need to stop allowing the Supremacy to take and waste our energy.

My conclusion is we need to work on ways of pooling and ploughing back our disabled energy. Not gaining energy to try to fit in or be productive according to ablist norms, but creating a virtuous spiral of energy which makes us less and less dependent on pretending to be 'abled'.

And my point here is that no body at all should have to pretend to be abled, because none of us are. Just like no one is really white.

The struggle against ablist supremacy is just another part of human liberation.

@alexhaist Thank you! I hope that the covid era has shown this needs to be taken seriously.

@Loukas To some of us, certainly.

@sofiav ok, I think this debate between and within Marxism is documented and I didn't see any need to disagree with you over its existence since we already agree on the key issue at hand.

@Loukas fair enough. I know you're just getting your thoughts together for your article, but it always makes me sad to see anarchists seeming to imply that communists are just a bunch of sexist white dudebros who don't believe in intersectionality, or something like that

@sofiav I absolutely understand that there are a lot of nuances within Marxism currently. A lot of the ideas I'm articulating now emerged from Marxist thinking. I was talking about a kind of dudebro economist Marxism that used to be very common and how it has left a general hangover within the general left. I didn't mean to imply that it characterises all Marxists currently. Many important Black and feminist thinkers are/were thinking within a Marxist framework.