Disabled Rage & Western Communists
As the Covid-19 pandemic enters its 5th year the impact of this airborne disease continues to destroy and take the lives of thousands of Americans. While more citizens are coming to terms with the fact that the pandemic has not ended, many Americans are still choosing to live as if this pandemic is not a threat. At the beginning of this pandemic there was a very palpable sense of solidarity among most Americans. Many were unsure of what the future looked like. Most of the country was shut down and communities that were once in person became virtual overnight. That included communist organizations.
However, all of that has been reversed since 2019 despite Covid remaining with us. That sense of mutual care and genuinely wanting to protect other people vanished as states lifted mandates for the sake of capital and citizens decided that their lifestyles were more important than minimizing the spread of Covid. This includes American communists. There is a very clear separation of disabled people and our access needs in left leaning movements and that rift continues to increase as the pandemic continues. When communists talk about unionizing and the importance of worker protections nothing is said of improving air quality infrastructure outside of the disabled community, particularly the covid conscious community. When discussions of the gig economy come up these discussions are never really about unionizing these companies and securing livable wages for workers, but it is almost always about how these services are unnecessary and how disabled people who use them are being exploitative. When mass protests were planned for support of Palestine disabled people begged protesters to mask during an unmitigated wave not only to stop the spread of Covid but to also protect protesters from being surveilled by law enforcement.
The backlash was swift and immense. It was not mere dismissal of a need for masks during large scale protests but actual vitriol that disabled people would dare prioritize masks at such a time. Disabled protesters were told they were privileged or attempting to distract others from the genocide happening in Palestine. According to one protester in DC an organization explicitly said people should go unmasked to show that they weren’t cowards. When people in the covid conscious community along with those who previously protested with BLM raised alarm about this we were accused of attempting to demotivate people. The complaints leveled at disabled people from abled communists has in many ways become indistinguishable from that of the anti-mask and anti-vaxx community.
The Separation of Communists and the Disability Community
There is an individualistic mindset that permeates American culture and that is precisely how western communists approach disabled people and our human rights. The separation of disabled people and the current communist movement in America comes down to the simple fact that abled communists are not on the side of disabled people because they view us as separate from themselves. They do not believe they can ever be us.
They are not concerned with organizing with us or protecting us (or themselves for that matter) because we are viewed as a sub class of people whose priorities are either nonexistent or counter to their own when nothing could be further from the truth.
Much of this purposeful erasure of disabled people from communist's spaces stems from the idea that disabled people are not workers or at least do not make up a significant enough portion of the working class for abled communists to be responsible for addressing our needs. Disabled people are assumed to be largely homebound and to be homebound in the minds of abled communists means that you are exempt from work and therefore exempt from navigating capitalism. It is not only false but ableist to believe that being homebound means that disabled people are exempt from participating in and surviving in this capitalist system. It works to uphold the same capitalist system that forces many disabled people to live in perpetual poverty. The same system that prohibits us from marrying, owning assets, and limits how much we can earn if we are dependent on the SSI system. A SSI system that is purposely designed to limit how many people receive aid by making the requirements of eligibility so stringent that most of the people who need SSI will never get it.
Since we are not considered workers our day-to-day existence is never thought of.
By placing disabled people into a separate, subcategory away from the rest of the population, abled people give themselves permission to essentially push us out of existence.
They imagine a world for disabled people where our disabilities are accommodated (to an extent abled people deem reasonable). They imagine a world where we don't struggle with transportation because the state takes care of that for us. In this imaginary world abled people create for us none of us live in perpetual poverty. We all have aid workers or non abusive family members who can help us around the house or with chores and none of us struggle to do what are considered basic tasks such as cooking, grocery shopping, or even walking.
Many disabled people are in fact former workers or current workers who have sacrificed the last of our health and bodies to support ourselves under this capitalist system. It is incredibly cruel for those same workers to be discarded by both our government and the community that proclaims to champion for the underclass. Once someone is disabled or at least too disabled to perform the same physical, social, and political commitments that abled communists can perform they essentially stop being human in the eyes of many communists. The only time the needs of disabled people are brought up by abled communists is to use their image of the disabled worker as a cudgel against home bound disabled people. It is disingenuous to claim that you both care about the needs of disabled workers while railing against homebound disabled people. Which is what many disabled workers eventually become.
When disabled people tell the world about our existence being so hard to cling to we are told by communists to blame our government. Which serves as a clear indicator that abled communists are not at all concerned about the lived realities of disabled people because one would be hard pressed to find many disabled people who do not blame our government. Most disabled people are well acquainted with the fact that the role of our government is antithetical to the advancement of disabled, working class people. We want a government that actually works to improve the lives of citizens because that should be it’s primary function. If these ableist communists organized with disabled people they would find out our interests align with theirs.
By buying into this idea that disabled people are separate from the working-class abled communists are cutting the legs from under the movement. Since they believe they are separate from us they don't have to be concerned with the fact that employers are legally allowed to pay disabled workers below minimum wage. They don't have to be concerned with air quality infrastructure because to them the pandemic is over. Despite Covid taking over a million workers out of commission. Abled communists don't have to think about medication shortages that will take even more people out of the workforce. They certainly don't think about capitalism excelerating disablement in workers because in the minds of these ableist communists disabled people don't have to work. Since abled communists don't see a future where they are disabled, they are incapable of seeing a future for those of us who are currently disabled.
Ableism & the Legacy of White Supremacy
The relationship between ableism and white supremacy in the U.S traces back centuries. Take for instance the eugenics movement of the mid to late 20th century. The goal of the American eugenics movement was to ‘purify’ the population and solidify the power of naturalized white people. This included forced institutionalization, ‘ugly laws’ that limited public visibility of disabled people, laws preventing disabled immigrants from entering the country, as well as forced sterilization of Black women, Indigenous women, disabled people, and poor people. By 1937 up to thirty-three states had implemented laws meant to quell the number of disabled people with cognitive and physical disabilities. Laws restricting the movement and freedom of disabled people stayed in place until the 1960’s when the disability rights movement began. Over the next three decades disabled people made gains securing more civil rights such as the rehabilitation act of 1978 that aimed to reintegrate institutionalized disabled people back into society and the 1990 ADA act. It should be noted that forced sterilization continued on with the last official sterilization taking place in 1981 in the state of Oreagan. However, the state of California continued sterilizing some prisoners without consent into the 2010’s. Black, Indigenous and other women of color are still today victims of forced sterilization at the hands of the state.
Disabled Rage
A large part of why there is so much ableism in the communist community is because most of the U.S population is comprised of white people therefore most communists in the U.S will also be white. There has not been a sufficient attempt by white, American communists to address and combat the white supremacist's nature of American culture. Most are not even aware of the history of eugenics in the U.S or how it interconnects with racism and many are unwilling to learn because they believe being communist is enough to make their worldview and actions ethical. They often buy into a class reductionist way of thinking that allows them to believe economic woe is what divides Americans. Often completely divorcing how the legacy of racism, eugenics and genocide shapes economic policy even to this day.
In a movement where people openly declare that human worth exists outside of what we produce disabled people have been ousted with the excuse being that we are not workers therefore our needs are not a priority. What is left as a result of that is disabled rage. Disabled anger in the eyes of abled communists is seen as unjustified. Like all other marginalized groups we are seen unreliable orators of our own stories. When disabled people tell communists we would die without certain services due to government neglect the response is not to find ways to organize with us but to essentially tell us that we’re lying. Despite that same government abandoning them. When disabled people tell communists that we can’t build community with those who refuse to mask or advocate for clean air infrastructure we are scoffed off. Abled communists make it very clear that the only way disabled people will be allowed in communists spaces is if it comes through subservience. Whatever needs we may have are considered secondary to their own.
This dynamic is by no means new. Long before the Covid-19 pandemic disabled people talked about how there wasn’t true marriage equality because disabled people on SSI weren’t allowed to get married without risking losing their benefits. Disabled people’s access needs were ignored pre-pandemic as they are now and many disabled people lived in poverty, isolated from offline communities as they are now. Disabled people were forced under conservatorships, lived in abusive familial dynamics, or had their workplace access needs ignored. That was the reality of disabled people pre-pandemic and it is the reality for many of us still. And that is where disability rage comes from. It comes from centuries of subjugation. Centuries of having the bare minimum. Even with the civil rights that disabled people have gained since the 60’s our existence remains largely on the margins and those margins are widening.
Our rage comes from knowing we could have so much more. Not just for disabled people who exist now but also for those who will inevitably exist in the future. We could have clean air that allows us all to live a better quality of life. We could have worker protections against infectious diseases. Stipends so that non essential workers could remain home and reduce the spread of Covid so that we can finally end this pandemic. We could have demanded higher wages and more comprehensive worker protections if communists had not gotten distracted by their own selfishness and actually put up a united front against our government during this pandemic by organizing with disabled people and demanding these things. What disabled people are left with instead is a depleted healthcare system, less worker protections than pre-pandemic, no community outside of the virtual world because most people refuse to mask, and we aren’t even capable of safely going into healthcare settings to seek help because not even medical professionals are masking during multiple, unmitigated pandemics. Disabled people are arguably more isolated and less protected than we were pre-Covid. That is where our rage comes from.
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