Socialists don't give a fuck about disabled people 99.9% of the time. They are rarely considered, and if they are they're an afterthought. Why? Because we aren't useful to the proleitariet. And really, nobody else cares about us because we can't fight back. They only say so much as to appear to support us, but not meaningfully plan out a sustainable way we can live.
I was still chronically ill, mostly housebound when I made this post. Going for a thirty minute walk would leave me bedbound for weeks. Many others are like this. I have a provisionary diagnosis of ME/CFS, an incredibly underfunded and poorly researched disease relative to other ones. Medical abuse, sexism, pseudoscience by opportunistic scientists, and suicide are common. Why? Because the institutions can do horrible things to us without consequence. We can't burn down their houses and businesses, we can't protest for weeks on end, we have no economic leverage. We are completely dependent on able-bodied people. And so, they control our entire existence.
Crippled people need George Floyd levels of imposed societal discomfort, but we will never get it. And really, the fact people even had to disrupt people's comfortable life to get anything done speaks volumes about how brain-oriented people are.
Neoliberalism has a very simple exchange. The government makes more than fifty percent of people comfortable, and in exchange they get to exploit them. If you're disabled, you aren't able to be exploited. It's designed to do the minimum to keep humans feeling sustained. You work a 9-5, come home, eat food in a reliable fashion, drink a beer, have your partner satisfy your sexual needs (lest they lose 50% of what they own), sleep, have a large military to keep this life around, and are given miniscule free time to exercise certain rights if you play well with the system.
The first level of these structures are comfortable people. Happy humans getting their needs met. To challenge this system and think with their heart is to risk what sustains them. If you never have to see, interact, or directly feel responsibility, there is no means for you to have a heart anyways. It's pointless, and society collectively characterises doing so as unneeded worrying. You never see sweatshop labour, or pollution, or the disabled killing themselves, or anything. So who cares what the consequences of not paying $15 extra in taxes are when you only are a comfort-seeker?
Of course, the foundation is the oppressed and disposed.
When people burn houses and businesses, it forces them to do something, but only to maintain that comfort. And so society does the bare minimum to keep themselves comfortable. Whether that be having overall little progress for eliminating racist societal constructs to appear to work on the problem more than they really are, or macing peaceful protestors to stop empathy from spreading.
Think of Occupy Wall Street, and the general strikes that might happen in Quebec. These are rare examples of their comfort being challenged not artifically but naturally. The system was not fufilling its end of the deal. And so, as usual, it did the bare minimum to fix the issue.
A good example of this is ODSP and CERB. The government paid the working class $2000 a month when COVID threatened them, which demonstrated what they felt Canadians needed to survive on. ODSP completely deducted these payments from people on disability, and it was only given to working people. This was in spite of ODSP being roughly $1000 for years, with a payment barely larger than before the 2008 recession.
The reality is that it's easier to just not think about us cripples. People aren't using their hearts. They're using their brains. They see dead weight, and act accordingly. Even if they feel bad on some level, they built that tinted box to survive in a world that's much more cruel than it seems.
For many socialists, they're okay with discomfort. But most aren't deprogrammed from using their brains for everything. That makes them in many senses more dangerous. They can't be manipulated via comfort in the same way a neoliberal can.
They are blindly and unknowingly ableist, selfish and focused on sustaining themselves. They focus mostly on class solidarity as it pays the most dividends to collaborate. It presents an alternative means of reliable comfort: spreading the wealth evenly.
"Mutual aid" means nothing if they have no value in the disabled as comfort-seekers. It's a band-aid not on the wellbeing of the crippled, but a band-aid on their image and psyche. Just as ODSP is a band-aid on the government's image of neglect and social murder of the crippled.
If people used their hearts, they would realise how fucked we are if they went through with their plan. They would feel the pain we would. They would feel the worry we do. They would know how helpless we are. They would understand, in a sense, that they're a perpetrator and approaching genocidal, and try to make it stop. But they don't.
But really, we silence our hearts because we're traumatised. For the comfortable, it's because they were beaten and programmed by a system to fear losing the reliable comfort they have, and fear having to face the consequences of how they are able to feel comfortable. They have no clue what life outside of their bubble is like. For the oppressed, it's because they have to do heartless things to keep themselves alive, and emotionally disconnect from abuse and exploitation.
I was programmed to silence my heart as well. Not only towards others, but myself. While a neoliberal seeks comfort in terms of reliable sustanence (as all humans do, which is why neoliberalism is so effective in exploiting people) I seeked a basic human need I didn't have: socialisation. While on an intellectual level I agreed with socialism, I wasn't willing to criticise the ableist structures that propped it up, because that would disrupt feeling neighbourly and connected. It would ruin the warm and fuzzy feeling of solidarity and unity my brain wanted. My brain muted my heart's conviction. It muted its fighting spirit. It seeked rewards that pleasures the brain, even if it was hurting me. I feared what it would be like without it.
Remember that post about trauma? See some reoccuring themes? This screenshot might seem benign or silly, but it's a testament to how damaged and traumatised myself and others are.
Really, socialism and anarchism isn't a complete answer to the world's ills. It's only a part of the solution. Mutual aid means nothing if people are programmed to be unwilling to help anyone but themselves. Socialism means nothing if we turn against each other whenever things get rough as we learned works in a neoliberal society. Communism means nothing if we're programmed to see it as a reward for those who were productive rather than a common good that the crippled are worthy of experiencing too. Abolishing landlords means nothing if we keep our "fuck you, have mine" attitude and refuse to help others get shelter. Fighting for socialism as a means to reach equality means nothing if the working class collectively decides to pay women less.
It's amazing how deeply ingrained neoliberalism and associated brainworms are and how at odds it is with human nature. How it makes us shut down our hard-wired human nature.
