(Image from the 1977 504 sit-in.)
Welcome to the first weekly disabled community discussion thread for the week of 10/28/2024 — 11/3/2024.
This community is brand new! Everyone is welcome to post new topics and comments. However, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
“Disability” is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
Disabled people in the U.S. today experience a poverty rate of approximately 30 percent; comprise 40 percent of the total homeless population; have an active labor market participation rate of less than 20 percent, despite self-reporting a preference to do so at a rate well over 60 percent. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people remain today living in institutional or carceral environments, such as nursing homes or prisons, where conditions tend towards the cruel or barbaric.
Thus, when we ask the question, what is disability, we are not really providing a full answer if we only talk about physiology, biology, or even identity reduced to a cataloging of manifest limitations or functional deficits. In fact, disability – or, to put it perhaps more accurately, disablement – is a dialectical phenomenon arising from existing political, economic, and social relations in society.
While variations in human bodies, minds, and behaviors – up to and including those traits which might be termed ‘impairments’ – have always been an indelible and essential aspect of the human species, disability as we have come to understand it in the modern era is neither eternal nor transhistorical.
The notion that a group of people – with a vast array of completely different traits, capacities, morphologies, and phenotypes – could be lumped together and labeled according to their relative lack of generalized “ability,” in the abstract, is in fact endemic to the particular period of more recent human history signaled by the emergence and dominance of the capitalist mode.
Specifically, what is the relationship between disabled people and the working class, as such?
… we should hold an expansive conception of disability, which understands it both in terms of class location, but also more generally as a phenomenon less immediately relevant to the positions of the classes than to the processes intrinsic to the relations of the classes. In other words, centering the analysis of disability on the processes of labor commodification, exploitation of labor, market competition, and class division.
Put differently, the conditions that reproduce the division of society into separate classes, and in particular, reproduce that class of people whose lives are wholly determined by the commodified value that their labor power can purchase on the capitalist market, are the same conditions that reproduce a subclass of people whose very existence is diminished and devalued according to the relatively diminished and devalued worth of their labor power as measured by the logic of commodified market competition.
Insofar as the value of commodity labor power under capitalism is both a creation and a measure of the rate of exploitation obtaining in the market – that is, the rate at which capitalists can competitively extract surplus value from the productive labors of the working class – then the simple realities of human physiology, let alone the complex realities of biopolitics, mean that there will always be and must necessarily be a constant proportion of the working class whose commodified labor power manifests as a “disability,” with the attendant forms of oppression concomitant thereto.
The struggle against disability oppression should be seen as innately allied with all other struggles born of – and against – capitalist oppression. Specifically, disablement is a form of oppression arising from the system of exploitation of labor, and therefore the historical struggle of the working class against exploitation.
from Keith Rosenthal of Tempest Collective
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
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You know one of the most disabling aspects of my AuDHD to me? The hyperfixations. The “ahaha quirky interests” part of it all. When I’m in hyperfixation mode I literally cannot think of anything but what I’m hyperfixating on no matter how much I need to. I literally feel like I completely lose myself and I’m living in a dream and completely disconnected from reality. It’s almost physically painful to try to make myself focus on anything else. I actually hate getting hyperfixated on shit because it’s a horrible feeling.
Does it ever happen to you with people? Absolutely sucks
yes, I married him, best/worst decision of my life 😅
Sometimes when I meet someone ‘unique’ (someone with a trait set I hadn’t seen before in someone else) I get kind of obsessed and want to know everything about them
I think you just perfectly described something I’ve felt for the longest time but haven’t been able to express
It’s cool to know I’m not alone in that! I don’t really mind it too much to be honest, the obsession is annoying as I sometimes confuse it with love, it takes up a lot of my energy and I can’t just walk up to a person and ask them personal questions about their life, but it’s very rewarding to slowly become friends and learn new things about them.
Also I’ve never related this trait of mine with hyper fixation but the relation explains a lot actually
Oof, kind of? I mean I’ll get hyperfixated on bands or youtubers. Not people who I actually know irl, though.
Most recent hyperfixation had me skipping meals.
ableism discussion
Just feeling. Very frustrated with ableism today, specifically ableism in communist spaces. The way so many communists are happy to ignore the ongoing pandemic and leave people like me for dead? The way no org even brings up masking? If communists can’t get on the same page about A Deadly Pandemic, how the fuck are we supposed to have a revolution lollll
fr, I think a lot of it comes from the culture of professional unions. People at work are almost by definition not interacting with disabled people and work under capitalism is by definition ableist. That culture then seeps deeply into other orgs where lots of radicalised labour union members get involved and replicate the ableist structures and practices of their labour union. obv it’s not inherently bad to do labour organising, but I’ve noticed this trend a lot.
ableism, misanthropy?
Yes this is basically what is making me take my long mountain sabbatical into the Offline to really soak in the gravy and I don’t know that I will find satisfactory answers. We are all monsters, and now is the time of monsters.
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I hope you enjoy your mountain sabbatical and find it relaxing!
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Autism here (and probably ADHD too). I honestly feel like I have been denied adulthood. No matter how much I apply, no one even gets back to me and no one is hiring because of their absurdly high standards so I kind of admit it: I am an involuntary NEET.
I’ve considered just going back to college and doing one of the few avenues this stupid country cares about like some BS engineering I’m bad at, but since it’s the only thing porky wants. I have to. Oh, and on top of that I have to beat millions of people in getting an unpaid internship or else my degree won’t count in the eyes of employers, AND get perfect grades or else I’ll be seen as too stupid to work.
But in the situation I’m in I only get two actual pieces of advice both of which are total dogshit.
- “Use your network, bro.”
- I’m poor I’m a little lacking in the nepotism department. Besides I’m ‘early career’ so what little networking you can squint and say is ‘fair’ I don’t have. Besides, I’ve tried cold messaging people on linkedin and lo and behold none of them ever respond, probably because they’re too busy to waste time with an unemployable idiot who clearly just wants to use them to get a job. Oh, and I was born and raised in a rural shithole, you don’t make a lot of rich friends there even if people weren’t too judgmental to even give you the time of day.
- “Start your own business, bro.”
With what money? Last I checked I’m not some super-talented prodigy at any skill enough to sell it myself even if I had the time to go through years of paperwork just to finally have a .00000000001% chance of having an income at all, we can’t all be lucky bastards. Anyone who says this is a spoiled, privileged dipshit that never had to lift a finger in their lives.
Sometimes I think me being poor and the rich being such staunch perfectionists is “disabling” me more than my actual disabilities.
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any PMDD pals here?
fully in what should be the Bad Time, but I’m actually doing pretty well this week, and I’m trying to figure out why so I can try to repeat it! 😅
my best guess, unfortunately, is that my son’s illness and absence from school this past week has resulted in reduced outside pressures, which has given me the freedom to hyperfocus on a project I’ve been struggling to finish for a while.
obviously I don’t want my kid to be sick every month, but maybe the secret is to act like he is and just avoid everyone for a week or two every month?? 😂 that doesn’t seem tenable. but maybe 🤔 maybe if someone would be offended by “I’m unavailable this week due to health reasons,” (family) I can figure out a way to hem and haw about plans during those times and put them off long enough. idk, I’d need a good plan in place to not be stressed about it every time.
if you’ve read this rambling this far, feel free to chime in with whatever ❤️
“After 15 years I am assuming you’ve built up a network” yeah buddy, my home lab 🤓
oh, you meant trying to schmooze and brown nose your way through the worst PMC losers you could ever imagine? sorry no
me when somebody asks me for references and I suddenly start playing 5D chess trying to figure out who’d actually be willing to do that despite me making no effort to maintain post-working-together relationships (uh for the same reasons lol)Honestly I’ve had success faking them. Employee refs aren’t obliged to share anything other than this person knew you, worked with you, and vouches for you, afaik, so ask a friend who is really good at acting, lol.
my dad has a different last name to me lol (long story), he’s always my #1 reference. he is my #1 fan, after all…
I was diagnosed with Autism recently. It feels good knowing there’s a name to that “otherness” I’ve felt all my life, but now I can’t figure out if the way I’m feeling is Autistic Burnout or plain ol’ Depression
I feel this as someone who suffers from both. it can make caring for yourself difficult as “just make yourself go outside/do the thing” can be good advice for someone who is just depressed but can do more harm than good for people like us, just for one example. knowing your spoons/limits is important. my psych sent me this before it’s pretty generalised but i found it useful. hope you’re taking care of yourself comrade.
What does the chart mean with “behavioral activation”?
it’s a type of therapy that i’m not exactly familiar with so tbh i’m not really sure/can’t speak on it in detail anyway. i think it kind of is related to what i said in that it involves pushing yourself to e.g. do stuff you enjoy that has been difficult because of depression. this will be rewarding if you just suffer from depression but for autistic folks it risks contributing to burnout and just taking a break to restore energy could be better.
Thanks for the explanation
Am autistic, can confirm that pushing myself to do difficult stuff just leads to more exhaustion… One time had brain fog for two days afterwards (which made it impossible to engage in my special interest of computer programming, too…) Good to know there’s evidence that it doesn’t only happen to me.
Fuck. I’m pretty sure I’m just ADHD and not autistic but that chart hits pretty fucking hard.
I found the diagram so helpful, thank you for sharing
Loss of skills hits hard
happy I could share it!
Loss of skills hits hard
for me too comrade.
I’m trying! Working a campaign job right now is not helping lol 🙃
Just realized my months supply of meds was 90% cheaper this month for some reason? I only paid $3 something out of pocket instead of the usual ~$30.
Would still cost like $250 without insurance lmao fuck this place
Second “no masks inside” sign spotted in the wild in my city.
I hope it wasn’t a critical place.
Vile.
Crush reacted to a meme I sent her to set myself up to ask her out, but didn’t actually answer if she wanted to go out or not
Honestly the long wait and uncertainty probably would have broken me a lot worse a couple months ago, but I’m just going to try take this in stride. Just really want to hang out with her outside of work again since its been a while
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Happy Halloween disabled comrades!
Happy Halloween!
