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.

@Loukas great thread, but I disagree that Marxists don't/didn't see women's domestic labor as having value and didn't see the importance of feminism and antiracism. Racism has always been seen as a way for capitalists to pit the working class against itself, which like you said wastes the energy we should be using to fight capitalism. As for domestic labor, it makes it possible for the men to be more efficiently exploited at work while women are isolated at home--this is an old critique

@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.