tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49506305836709861742024-03-12T18:36:35.901-04:00Joan of MarkThis blog is no longer maintained. For recent & updated writings from Keith Rosenthal visit <a href="https://keithrosenthal.wordpress.com">https://keithrosenthal.wordpress.com</a>.Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-68045899880474529912023-10-13T11:10:00.006-04:002023-10-15T19:49:56.890-04:00Opposing Israel's crimes against humanity and the monolithic, callous hypocrisy of the US political class<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">As Jewish Voice for Peace -- the largest organization of Jews in the U.S. opposed to the systematic, settler-colonial oppression of Palestinians by Israel -- has warned, Israeli government officials have now openly declared their intention to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity in its ongoing, escalating assault on Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular (see links below). </span></div><p></p><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">The announcement this morning, communicated by the Israeli government to the United Nations, demanding that the entire population of northern Gaza (1.1 million people) evacuate immediately as Israel prepares for a full-scale military invasion of Gaza, not only promises unavoidably "devastating humanitarian consequences," as the U.N. replied, it also plainly constitutes an act of premeditated mass murder and maiming of children, elderly, disabled and less-mobile, families, and civilians. Rarely are such crimes against humanity so openly declared in advance of their prosecution. Israel is plainly preparing a Nakba for Gaza, which as the U.N. describes, means “catastrophe” in Arabic, and in its historical usage "refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine."</span><div><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoz6jzjVyZ5S6ff1ofoiTapg5uNvsJRqvFaXZ9Auj_e4tcGYvlNxfSRb3ICF05YWJGvPgO1SqNBznB8NpOz5_avb6AUrlN_d7GmRLvmlmPTMu5a3GzvcWk9aCwO26iOMGC7EZwKsMKHIHJ0pw38uB6stwPtJbDD3vA4w-YiMExxYsYyLvJOasfxFmB403I/s691/Screenshot%202023-10-13%20112158.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="691" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoz6jzjVyZ5S6ff1ofoiTapg5uNvsJRqvFaXZ9Auj_e4tcGYvlNxfSRb3ICF05YWJGvPgO1SqNBznB8NpOz5_avb6AUrlN_d7GmRLvmlmPTMu5a3GzvcWk9aCwO26iOMGC7EZwKsMKHIHJ0pw38uB6stwPtJbDD3vA4w-YiMExxYsYyLvJOasfxFmB403I/w527-h300/Screenshot%202023-10-13%20112158.png" width="527" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: left;">[Photo credit</span> from <i><a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/israelhamas-war-45-killed-in-residential-building-bombing-423-000-displaced-in-gaza-top-updates-101697155787372.html" target="_blank">Hindustan Times</a></i>: "A Palestinian woman comforts her children as they wait at the hospital to be checked, as battles between Israel Hamas continue for the sixth consecutive day, in the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday, (AFP)."]</span></td></tr></tbody></table></span><br /><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">As a Jew, with ancestors who fled pogroms, and with present ties to those living in Israel, I am tired, scared, and exhausted. Mostly I am tired of the willful ignorance and delusion on the part of too many unthinking supporters of Israel as to what it is that Israeli society has been doing, continues to do, and promises to do to the human beings -- not the "animals" as the Israeli Defense Minister referred to them mere days ago -- living permanently-displaced, occupied, impoverished, humiliated, and traumatized lives throughout historic Palestine. I struggle to remain above histrionics in discussing all of this, but it truly is sickening, and depressing.</span><br /><br /><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">We have clearly seen virtually the entire U.S. political class, as well as our university "leaders," declare that they stand firmly with Israel, that they mourn Israeli lives lost, and that they support what Israel is preparing to do next, without even having the perfunctory conscientiousness to spare a word of sympathy for the Palestinians. This despite the fact that, as reported by Reuters, as of yesterday morning, Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have killed over 400 children since Monday. Or, as Human Rights Watch has reported: </span><br /><br /><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">"Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) have recently faced perhaps unprecedented repression. During the first nine months of 2023, Israeli authorities killed more Palestinians in the West Bank in 2023 than in any year since the United Nations began systematically recording fatalities in 2005. As of October, the number of Palestinians being held in administrative detention without charges or trial based on secret information reached a 30-year-high.... The Israeli government’s systematic oppression in the OPT, coupled with inhumane acts committed against Palestinians as part of a policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, as Human Rights Watch previously found."</span><br /><br /><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">We have seen almost the entire US political class, the leading media outlets, and university chancellors be so monolithically and fatally wrong before; in the lead-up to the devastating and now-clearly unjustified U.S. war on Iraq, which was initiated almost exactly 20 years ago. They are wrong, as those ensconced in power so often are. We must speak out, protest, and make change now, before catastrophe, and not wait until 20 years later to regret that which never should have happened.</span><br /><br /><a class="x1fey0fg xmper1u x1edh9d7" href="https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/urgent-tell-congress-to-stop-fueling-violence/"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/urgent-tell-congress-to-stop-fueling-violence/</span></a><br /><br /><a class="x1fey0fg xmper1u x1edh9d7" href="https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/</span></a><br /><br /><a class="x1fey0fg xmper1u x1edh9d7" href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/28/west-bank-spike-israeli-killings-palestinian-children"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/28/west-bank-spike-israeli-killings-palestinian-children</span></a><br /><br /><a class="x1fey0fg xmper1u x1edh9d7" href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/09/israel/palestine-devastating-civilian-toll-parties-flout-legal-obligations"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/09/israel/palestine-devastating-civilian-toll-parties-flout-legal-obligations</span></a><br /><br /><a class="x1fey0fg xmper1u x1edh9d7" href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/447-children-248-women-among-1417-killed-israeli-strikes-gaza-2023-10-12/"><span style="white-space-collapse: preserve;">https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/447-children-248-women-among-1417-killed-israeli-strikes-gaza-2023-10-12/</span></a></div>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-91983518320688437422023-09-21T21:49:00.000-04:002023-09-21T21:49:11.691-04:00Once again on the Democratic Party, the lesser evil, and the working-class Left<i>(Originally published at </i><a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2023/09/once-again-on-the-democratic-party-the-lesser-evil-and-the-working-class-left/">Tempest</a><i>)</i><div><p class="MsoNormal">Could another four years of Democratic Party rule be as
disastrous for the Left, oppressed social groups, and the working class
generally as a fresh four-year hell of Republican Party rule? I think it is
quite possible—for the simple reason that, as a ruling-class political party
that lacks the capacity or desire to radically alter the <i>status quo</i> in
favor of the less powerful and privileged, the party in power will invariably
become the target of mass resentment with the <i>status quo</i>. This
resentment may be of a left-wing or right-wing variety; a bourgeois,
middle-class, or working-class variety; or a convoluted mix thereof, but it is
inevitable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Perhaps it may have been otherwise during previous moments
in the history of U.S. capitalism, when it could be argued that a relatively
broad consensus of satisfaction with the <i>status quo</i> existed
among a critical mass of the population. But the era of such a cross-class
consensus is over, and with it the golden years of an (always ephemeral) <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/12/a-populism-of-the-left-can-realign-american-politics">alignment</a> of
the liberal bourgeoisie and the working class in the Democratic Party. Now, the
ship of state of U.S. capitalism is a tottering behemoth, badly in need of
repairs and lurching toward global economic imperial decay. The growing
inequality between rich and poor (and the super-rich and everyone else),
persistent inflation, retrenchment in virtually all state services except
repressive apparatuses, the multiplication of social crises from ubiquitous
homelessness to civil strife— are all signs of capitalism’s inability to meet
our collective needs.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Since neither the Democratic nor Republican Parties have any
cure for the ills plaguing the <i>status quo</i>, the rule by either one
or the other party means simply the switching of hands upon the clipboard of
leadership over a terminal case. Under Democratic Party rule, the Republican
Party and the right-wing take the initiative in leading the resistance to the
insufferable <i>status quo</i>, not only making gains in terms of partisan
support but also benefiting from momentum on a local level to enact a slew of
utterly bigoted oppress-and-conquer measures. Under Republican Party rule, the
Democratic Party and liberal organizations take up the mantle of the
resistance, grow their ranks, and perhaps even stymie the worst excesses of the
ruling party’s administration. However, in either case the effect remains the
same. It is less the swinging of a pendulum–the switch from the rule of one party
to the other is <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f43f0e63-0fa4-4771-8eb4-b5d61f87ada4">less
diametric than is supposed</a>–than it is an alternating current, a form of
energy transmission that is both stable and continuous despite undergoing
constant reversal.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The point is that the Democratic and Republican parties are
not the same, but neither are they wholly separate species. They are
respectively <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/10/21/926051668/wall-street-is-a-big-source-of-campaign-cash-for-democrats">funded
by different</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/08/17/902626429/wall-streets-big-money-is-betting-on-biden-and-democrats-in-2020">though
overlapping</a>, <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/industries?cycle=2020">sectors
of capital</a>, after all. Put more accurately, the rule by the Democratic and
Republican parties, as distinct from their respective propaganda and social
bases, is noteworthy above all else for the exceptional flexibility and
constancy with which it has alternated over roughly 150 years of U.S.
capitalist history.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span></span></p></div><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2023/09/once-again-on-democratic-party-lesser.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-3073438529656040262023-04-12T11:32:00.003-04:002023-04-12T11:32:29.160-04:00"Learning From Comrade Helen Keller"<p> <i style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">(Originally published at </i><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/04/helen-keller-socialism-disability-socialist-party">Jacobin</a> as "</span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Helen Keller Was One of the Great American Socialists"</span><i style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">)</i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">In March 1915, the <i>Workers’
Chronicle</i> ran an article syndicated by <i>Appeal to Reason</i>,
the most popular socialist newspaper in the United States, titled “Learning
From Comrade Helen Keller.” The <i>Chronicle </i>was a weekly
newspaper representing “the center of Socialism” in Kansas, a state in which
Eugene Debs had won 7 percent of the vote in the previous presidential election
on the Socialist Party of America (SPA) ticket.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">Occasioned by a recent lecture
Keller gave to the Central Teachers’ Association in Oklahoma City, the article
praised the message being spread by “Comrade Keller” as both orator and
example. In the lecture, Keller reiterated the stock tale of her journey from
an uneducated blind and deaf seven-year-old to a world-famous college graduate,
scholar, and author thanks to the innovative pedagogy employed by Anne Sullivan
(of latter-day <i><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056241/">Miracle
Worker</a></i> fame).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">She then proceeded to a brief
discourse on the subject of happiness: “Not the pleasant things alone that one
can get out of life, but the things that can be done for others are the ones
worth striving for.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">“Her whole story,” reflected
the <i>Chronicle</i>, “speaks eloquently of what can be done for all
children everywhere, when sane economic conditions give them a chance to
develop.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">This point was more than
intimated by Keller herself during the lecture. When an audience member asked
if it was true that she was a socialist, Keller — who had publicly accepted an
offer of honorary membership in the Pittsburg, Kansas, local chapter of the SPA
the previous year — quickly replied: “Oh, yes, because it is the only way out
of the muddle humanity is in at the present time.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">Keller’s accomplishments,
the <i>Chronicle</i> argued by way of conclusion, ought to both
reproach and inspire<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">those of us who are sometimes
discouraged by the seeming great odds against the Socialist movement. When but
a fraction of the same willpower and determination that has characterized Helen
Keller’s life is infused into the Socialist movement, the Co-operative
Commonwealth will not be far distant.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><b>Contradictions at Noontide<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">Aside from providing a glimpse
into the breadth of popularity enjoyed by the socialist movement in the early
twentieth-century United States, this vignette captures many of the
contradictions that characterized the lives of both Helen Keller and the
socialist movement during this period.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">These contradictions orbit
around questions of disability and the role of disabled people within social
movements and society at large; ideology and theoretical conceptualizations of
how social transformation occurs; political organization and the role of party
formations in bringing about the socialist “commonwealth”; and, finally,
intersectional tension and disjuncture in the person of Keller herself along
lines of class, gender, disability, politics, and economics.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">For many in the SPA during this
era, the path to socialism in the United States was a simple, almost
ineluctable, matter. They assumed that socialism was a perfectly rational
conceptual model of society in contrast to that of capitalism, and that most
people would ultimately accede to rational solutions when they were
convincingly articulated (hence the title <i>Appeal to Reason</i>).
Victory was thus merely a matter of spreading the gospel through an
ever-expanding base of members, voters, newspapers, electoral candidacies, and
government officeholders.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">In this schema, the timetable
of socialism mainly depended upon the degree of willpower exerted by its
adherents. To this end, one could effectively deploy the archetype of Helen
Keller as an impelling challenge to socialist activists. Of course, the unspoken
premise behind such inspirational (or reproachful) appeals was that the
readership of the <i>Workers’ Chronicle</i>, for instance, did not share
Keller’s “endowed” deficits and therefore had little excuse for inactivity.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">In a way, this
inspiration-laden use of the persona of Helen Keller — as “she who overcame”
disability — represents a mere conversion of the disability trope so often
instrumentalized in a bourgeois framework: “If this unfortunate handicapped
person can succeed in life, then you have no excuse!”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">In the context of the socialist
movement, such canards are even more jarring, as it is precisely among the
lower and working classes of society that rates of disablement are
disproportionately high. Moreover, working-class disabled people are far more likely
to be impoverished, lacking advanced education and the kind of material
resources that made such “miracles” as Helen Keller’s success possible.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">While Keller explicitly and
conscientiously recognized the difference between her own social circumstances
and those of most disabled people, she nonetheless tended to lean into her
“branding” as a sort of Wonder of the World. This in turn readily lent itself
to such awe-inspired sentiments as were expressed by the <i>Workers’
Chronicle</i>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">It is important to note, however,
that Keller had been virtually trained from childhood to play such a role — if
not on behalf of the socialist movement, then at least on behalf of the
progressive-reformist variant of bourgeois liberalism, which swelled between
the 1880s and 1910s.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><b><span></span></b></p><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2023/04/learning-from-comrade-helen-keller.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-72299769500149923782022-07-12T10:02:00.006-04:002022-07-12T10:04:12.084-04:00Review of "Class War: The Jacobin board game"<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The Continuation of Politics by Other Means</b></span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>(Originally published at </i><a href="#">Tempest</a><i>)</i></span></p><br><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEigmuEDlsGhy03Jv4ETr84DaNba4L2wY_lEhvwHi7-V-N41jlyb3TVwP9PzIWy95D7OY29cvPHqCKcIAyk52cFUpYHeNP42zdTLT-1fBk_WBSH1W9MYKYjNPOFFZTCNXKz9enGw3pkHU_zGEzzoIh9mMZ6JJRwzwwhhUrsmLWDZbJZoiGvxvxzIKdEWSg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="375" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEigmuEDlsGhy03Jv4ETr84DaNba4L2wY_lEhvwHi7-V-N41jlyb3TVwP9PzIWy95D7OY29cvPHqCKcIAyk52cFUpYHeNP42zdTLT-1fBk_WBSH1W9MYKYjNPOFFZTCNXKz9enGw3pkHU_zGEzzoIh9mMZ6JJRwzwwhhUrsmLWDZbJZoiGvxvxzIKdEWSg" width="300"></a></div><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">“Why,” you may be wondering, “is a socialist magazine doing a review of a board game?” Perhaps it is for the same reason that a socialist magazine would create and merchandise a board game. Announced on social media by Jacobin magazine in November 2021 as a crowd-funded Kickstarter project, Class War: The Jacobin Board Game was officially released for individual and retail distribution in May 2022.</span></span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Class War </i></span></span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not only boasts the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jacobin </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">imprimatur, but its design team comprises some of the primary names behind the magazine itself, including </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jacobin</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> editor Bhaskar Sunkara,. As stated in relevant materials and publicity, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jacobin</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> views the game as both an entertainment and a “</span><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jacobin/class-war-the-jacobin-board-game/posts/3512675" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pedagogical</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” medium. “The gameplay is so addictive,” </span><a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/11/jacobin-board-game-class-war-socialism" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">J</span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">acobin </span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">asserts</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, “that even your libertarian uncle won’t be able to resist the world-historic struggle unfolding in the deck of cards before him.” At the same time, unwitting players “just might see, for the very first time, what a socialist perspective on our society’s class antagonisms really looks like.” </span></span><p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Moreover, the act of buying and playing the game is intended to “</span><a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/11/jacobin-board-game-class-war-socialism" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">support</span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Jacobin</span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s important socialist journalism and analysis</span></a><span style="color: #0563c1; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” an effort aided by the penultimate page of the included Rule Book, which contains more information “About</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Jacobin</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” and on “Further Reading” (comprising a short list of mainly </span><a href="https://jacobin.com/store/products/books" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #0563c1; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jacobin</span><span style="color: #0563c1; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-published texts</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> such as </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The ABCs of Capitalism</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The ABCs of Socialism</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Socialist Manifesto</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">).</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Given the game’s explicitly dual character—as play and as propaganda—this review will examine </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Class War</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in detail on both counts, perhaps leaning in a bit harder on the political analysis. As it turns out, both the strengths and weaknesses of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Class War</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as play and propaganda are immanently related to the strengths and weaknesses of</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Jacobin</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s ideological approach to questions of socialist theory and strategy, reform and revolution, state power, and workers’ power.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The game mechanics and rules of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Class War</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> are relatively straight forward and make for a gradual learning curve, with a relatively moderate complexity level (closer to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Exploding Kittens</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> than </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Magic: The Gathering</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). As the game box states, </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“In Class War, you are a collective entity: a social class—either the Capitalists or the Workers. You’ll fight for social dominance in an unstable constitutional democracy… Classes will use money generated by workplaces to build their social power in society, using cards drawn from their deck. Then they will confront their opponent with a dice roll—in the economy, to win a greater slice of the economic pie, or in the state, to build political power. Ultimately, both classes aim to make their demands into law, permanently changing the rules of the game in their favor.”</span></span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I was initially very excited when the Kickstarter project for this game was announced. As a game enthusiast and socialist, I have long thought about how great it would be to have a game that coherently and effectively combined enthralling gameplay with the satisfaction of a simulated conquest of workers’ power over the forces of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Gaming, after all, is a medium that lends itself by design to the freest flight of imagination—to either escape from the misery of the real world in an excursion to another time, place, and even personality, or to embrace the hopes, dreams, and struggles of the real world in a fanciful glimpse of what it might entail to entirely change present society in the construction of a brighter future.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps my expectations were too high, but </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Class War</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> sadly falls short of such lofty imaginings and even its own potential. However, let us start with what is good about the game, and why I would nonetheless recommend it for play with friends and comrades.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span></span></span></span></p><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2022/07/review-of-class-war-jacobin-board-game.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-81303020485559101872022-05-16T13:16:00.000-04:002022-05-16T13:16:19.830-04:00Review of "Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life" | Disability Studies Quarterly<p><a href="https://dsqblog.com/2022/05/09/woody-guthrie-an-intimate-life/" target="_blank"><i>Originally published at </i>Disability Studies Community Blog</a></p><p><i>Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life</i><br />Gustavus Stadler<br />Beacon Press, 2020</p><p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;"><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjSo_6WRsWA0Z6mGcz0kCfS-etRXqi1ZXzdw4iEihujfQ0F2Ke6-1Q2R1rDwQShz5TqjOezNsfjvr8DTh9LVbC6tPXUzZKJhnAeNNLK6IqI6t09itvYqpDkt1nLXIJkpDJHxcxGzDnVIwsJHlJVXn1co_QzQbUFKLtedrjRVu2Bnrb1uEH1KZeb0pRu9g" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Image of book cover featuring title and profile of Woody Guthrie" data-original-height="1151" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjSo_6WRsWA0Z6mGcz0kCfS-etRXqi1ZXzdw4iEihujfQ0F2Ke6-1Q2R1rDwQShz5TqjOezNsfjvr8DTh9LVbC6tPXUzZKJhnAeNNLK6IqI6t09itvYqpDkt1nLXIJkpDJHxcxGzDnVIwsJHlJVXn1co_QzQbUFKLtedrjRVu2Bnrb1uEH1KZeb0pRu9g=w266-h400" width="266" /></a><i></i></div><i>Woody
Guthrie: An Intimate Life</i> is an eponymous man-behind-the-myth look at
an abiding figure of folk-music and left-wing Americana. Against the popular
(and populist) conception of Guthrie as a rugged, rambling, and hardheaded
archetype of freewheeling Old Left communist politics and salt-of-the-earth
masculinity, author Gustavus Stadler presents a man whose life’s labors were
informed by a profound awareness of vulnerability, fragility, and
debilitation. <i>An Intimate Life</i> is also more than pure biography
as it is an opportunity to explore the broader concepts of love, sexuality,
disability, and communism in the context of the early-to-mid-twentieth century
United States, as refracted by the personage of Guthrie. Though not a work of
the Disability Studies genre, <i>per se</i>, the issues of normativity
(and deviance), madness, impairment, and physiological stigma and shame are
featured prominently throughout the book.<div><span style="text-indent: 0in;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;">Indeed,
this book is an intimate biography and a biography of the intimate. More than
Guthrie’s strident politics or ideological journey, Stadler focuses on the
private correspondences, diary writings, and personal friendships that reveal
Guthrie as a deeply sensual human being. Rather than conjuring the image of a
man violently strumming a guitar amidst the throes of revolutionary
fervor, </span><i style="text-indent: 0in;">An Intimate Life</i><span style="text-indent: 0in;"> elicits the sensation of a man
delicately rolling a pencil between his fingers as he prepares to put innermost
thoughts to paper. It is more Walt Whitman than Karl Marx, who is put into
communion with Guthrie in this book. In describing the import of Guthrie’s
semi-autobiographical novel, </span><i style="text-indent: 0in;">Bound for Glory</i><span style="text-indent: 0in;">, published in 1943,
Stadler writes that it tells “the story of his [Guthrie’s] interest in troubled
people and damaged bodies that needed intimate attention.” This includes scenes
of “men improvising relations of care, of quasi-domesticity” while riding in
train boxcars across the Midwest. It also significantly includes Guthrie’s
“haunted” relationship with his mother, Nora, “through his deeply traumatized
depiction of [her] decline,” due to Huntington’s disease.</span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;">Nora
Guthrie began expressing increasingly acute symptoms of Huntington’s, viz.
physiological and psychological loss of control, when Woody was still young.
The people of the small Oklahoma town in which the Guthrie family lived began
to comment derisively upon and shun Nora for being “crazy.” In 1927, Woody’s
father had Nora committed to a state institution for the “insane,” where she
died shortly thereafter. The young Woody, ignorant at the time of both the
diagnosis and the heritability of Huntington’s disease, would have been shocked
to know that a similar fate awaited him in his elder years. In fact, the adult
Woody Guthrie of the 1950s was resistant to the Huntington’s diagnosis given to
him by doctors; he instead attributed his advancing physiological and
psychological impairments – and his increasingly frequent and extended stays in
various state institutions and psychiatric hospitals around New York City – to
alcoholism.</span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;">There
are other often-overlooked elements of Guthrie’s story that Stadler gives
extensive treatment to, such as the importance of his relationship with his
long-time partner and wife, Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia; Guthrie’s fascination
and complicated relationship with sex, sexuality, and homosexuality; and the
abstract artistic expressionism of his later years, after he began exhibiting
symptoms of Huntington’s, which focused on questions of racism, whiteness, and
white supremacy in the U.S. Additionally, Stadler presents an even-handed, if
not sympathetic, interpretation of Guthrie’s lifelong commitment to
working-class revolutionary politics and the American communist movement, which
enjoyed something of a surge in popularity in the New Deal 1930s.</span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;">From
a disability and madness studies vantage the most interesting sections of </span><i style="text-indent: 0in;">An
Intimate Life</i><span style="text-indent: 0in;"> are to be found in the latter chapters of the book,
which examine Guthrie’s experience with and reflections upon being
institutionalized. Between 1956 and 1967, when he died at the age of
fifty-five, Guthrie cycled between a number of state institutions, sometimes
voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily. The conversations and observations he
obtained from others in these institutions profoundly impacted him.
‘Shell-shocked’ war veterans, old leftists, ‘deviant’ victims of the 1950s
persecution of homosexuality – such people furthered Guthrie’s awareness of the
social effects of stigma, marginalization, and shame. Mediated by a callous and
cruel capitalist social system and an imperious medical establishment, Guthrie
saw in his fellow ‘patients’ not people who were primarily victims of their
various diagnosed pathologies – many of whom Guthrie maintained were “sick in
[their] own </span><i style="text-indent: 0in;">healthy</i><span style="text-indent: 0in;"> [emphasis added] way” – but victims of a
“crazy mixed up” society.</span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-indent: 0in;">In
a fascinating stroke of comparative insight, Stadler contextualizes Guthrie’s
experience by making recourse to the apt poetry of Allen Ginsberg. In 1956, the
same year that Guthrie entered the Greystone Psychiatric Hospital near New York
City, Ginsberg published the famous poem, “Howl,” which references Greystone
and other New York institutions, inhabited by “twenty-five thousand mad
comrades.” When Ginsberg writes in the opening line of the poem, “I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he may well have had
numerous specific names in mind, as Ginsberg witnessed many friends,
contemporaries, and family members committed to institutions over the years,
many of whom identified as communist, queer, or otherwise non-normative.</span></div><div><i style="text-indent: 0in;"><br /></i></div><div><i style="text-indent: 0in;">An
Intimate Life</i><span style="text-indent: 0in;"> has a lot to offer those interested in a diverse array
of subjects. It is a story of the shifting ideological climate of the United
States between the 1900s and 1950s, as working-class politics went from milieux
of itinerant syndicalist organizing, to New Deal and Popular Front socialism,
to revanchist and repressive Cold War anti-communism. It is a story of sexual
politics, gender variance, and the socially-constructed deviance corresponding
thereto. It is a story of American racism, lynch mobs, white supremacy, and
critical self-reflective whiteness. It is a story of disability, illness,
normativity, stigma, and institutionalization. And it is a story of love,
romanticism, the beauty and bane of family intimacy, poetry, music, the sublime,
and the sublimated.</span></div>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-31009165844297138302022-02-09T09:06:00.000-05:002022-02-09T09:06:03.984-05:00Pandemic Accommodations Proved We Can Vastly Expand Disability Access If We Try | TRUTHOUT Interview<p><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/pandemic-accommodations-proved-we-can-vastly-expand-disability-access-if-we-try/" target="_blank"><b><i>Originally published at </i>TRUTHOUT<i>, 23 January 2022</i></b></a></p><p><b>Keith Rosenthal interviewed by Danny Katch</b></p><p></p><p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">The
COVID pandemic has been a traumatic and revelatory historic experience for
everyone, but especially so for disabled communities. On one hand, the virus
appears to have had a disproportionately deadly impact on disabled people, and
the government’s relentless push to restore “normal” business activities —
already oppressive for disabled people — is cruelly discriminatory for those
with immunocompromising conditions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">At
the same time, governments and businesses have responded to the pandemic with
flexible schedules and remote meetings that offer a glimpse into how readily
society could provide accommodations to meet the needs of disabled workers and
students. And as millions of previously nondisabled people find themselves
applying for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) remote work accommodations
or disability benefits due to “long COVID” symptoms, there is potential for
building unprecedented levels of support for disability rights and justice.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">Keith
Rosenthal, editor of <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1289-capitalism-and-disability"><i>Capitalism
and Disability: Selected Writings of Marta Russell</i></a>, argues that the
pandemic has forced all of society to suddenly confront the questions of
accessibility and access that disabled people had previously struggled with on
their own. In this interview, he talks about how the condition of disability is
created less by people’s bodily limitations than capitalism’s cruel
unwillingness to accommodate them — and why disability politics are relevant to
anyone engaged in fighting for a more humane response to COVID and future
public health crises.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;"><b>Danny
Katch: Government leaders across the country have pushed to get employees back
in offices and keep students in school buildings even as COVID cases have
spiked because of the highly contagious Omicron variant. What does this push to
“return to normal” mean for immunocompromised people and others who remain
especially vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID even if they are
vaccinated?</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;"><b>Keith
Rosenthal:</b> The director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has been <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cdc-disability-rochelle-walensky-encouraging-death-1282179/">widely
criticized by disabled people</a> for recently saying that she was “really
encouraged” that most deaths from Omicron seem to have occurred in “people who
were unwell to begin with.” This statement may be written off as an individual
gaffe. But the logic behind it is something that <a href="https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2022/01/09/high-risk-pandemic-stories-a-syllabus/">disabled
people have been documenting</a> and <a href="https://wakelet.com/wake/1633ef52-2ade-43a9-b118-50d19f821cb7">criticizing</a> throughout
the pandemic — ever since CEOs, financiers and politicians first floated the
idea that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/richard-kovacevich-former-wells-fargo-ceo-work-die-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-3">some
people might have to die</a> in order for the economy to get back to a
profitable place.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">Whether
stated openly or not, the implicit reality of what has been called <a href="https://converge.colorado.edu/working-groups/disaster-capitalism-and-covid-19/">“disaster
capitalism”</a> or <a href="https://spectrejournal.com/covid-capitalism/">“COVID capitalism”</a> is
that marginalized, vulnerable and so-called superfluous populations are being
callously sacrificed by those who ruled over the pre-pandemic status quo to
which they seek a return.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">It
is worth recalling that as of last June, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html">over
a third of all COVID deaths</a> occurred in the nation’s nursing homes —
over 180,000 elderly and younger disabled individuals. What’s worse, snap
legislation was passed in New York and many other states that <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/andrew-cuomo-nursing-homes-covid-19">granted
immunity to nursing home executives</a> from any liability.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">As
for the return to school, firstly, it is <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-warning-symptoms-children-kids-hospitalized-record-numbers-rcna10741">simply
not true</a> that children cannot get sick from COVID. Second, the logic
that COVID is not severe for most children ignores the significant number of
immunocompromised or disabled children for whom COVID does remain a serious
threat. If these children are not offered a remote learning option, they will
also soon be counted among the numbers sacrificed in the name of a return to
the “normal.” Or they will have to remain home, in a regressive turn to the
educational conditions that prevailed over 50 years ago in which disabled
children were segregated from the rest of their nondisabled peers and excluded
from the public school system.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;"><b>You
recently wrote that one impact of the pandemic has been that </b><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2021/10/01/covid-disablement-and-the-return-to-normal/"><b>society
itself has become disabled</b></a><b>. Can you elaborate on this point?</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">The
implicit reality of what has been called “disaster capitalism” or “COVID
capitalism” is that marginalized, vulnerable and so-called superfluous
populations are being callously sacrificed.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">The
widespread character of COVID merely generalized what many disabled people
experience as a regular feature of life under American capitalism. To put it in
ADA terms, most people’s “major life activities” have been “substantially
limited” by the pandemic — earning an income, taking care of family, eating,
hygiene, leisure and recreation, etc.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">In
a physical or deficit-oriented sense, the ability of people to do all sorts of
things has become substantially impaired. In another sense, however, disability
is a social phenomenon, arising from conditions obtaining in the external
world. We experience disablement as a function of not only the biology of the
virus itself but also prevailing political and workplace policies, health care
and social service infrastructures, community networks of solidarity, as well
as racism, sexism, class inequality, poverty, homelessness, etc.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;">The
United States is constituted in a way that makes it particularly disabling to
those who become affected by such crises. With COVID, that crisis and
consequent disablement was experienced by broad swathes of the population. Most
of the people so affected would probably not think of themselves as
experiencing a form of disability oppression. But that is in fact essentially
what disablement is.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="APA" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; text-indent: 0in;"><b><span></span></b></p><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2022/02/pandemic-accommodations-proved-we-can.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-22903665565616434152021-10-13T10:00:00.001-04:002021-10-13T10:05:30.654-04:00COVID, Disablement, and the “Return to Normal”<p><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2021/10/01/covid-disablement-and-the-return-to-normal/"><i>Originally published at </i>Monthly Review <i>(October 2021, vol. 73, no. 5)</i></a></p><p></p><div>==</div><div><br></div><div>by Keith Rosenthal and Ari Parra</div><div><br></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MR-073-05-2021-09-300x450.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="300" height="400" src="https://monthlyreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MR-073-05-2021-09-300x450.png" width="268"></a></div>It has been one and a half years since the COVID pandemic
first took on a widespread national character within the United States. During
this span of time, we have witnessed the punctuated cessation of public,
social, and economic activity; conflicts and controversies over mask mandates
and stay-at-home recommendations; panic over the rationing of everything from
the mundane to the serious, toilet paper to hospital beds and ventilators. The
virus itself was talked about as a universalizing pathogen that did not
discriminate; a threat to each and all of us. Meanwhile, anecdotal and
quantitative data began to depict the vastly <i>unequal</i> impact
that the pandemic was having on certain demographics of the population—people
of color and Black people in particular, Indigenous communities, poor and
working-class populations, and especially elderly and disabled people living in
nursing homes and congregate long-term care facilities (along with the perhaps
less-documented populations of homeless people and disabled people on the verge
of entering nursing homes).<a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2021/10/01/covid-disablement-and-the-return-to-normal/#en1"><sup>1</sup></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Suddenly, the nation and the world seemed to find itself
living in a protracted emergency variant of reality. From “normal” existence,
society metamorphosed into a prolonged state of “abnormality.” Virtually all
aspects of social and economic life, previously taken for granted, became
inaccessible by degrees to vast numbers of the populace. Physical movement,
gathering with friends and family, the desire to meet new people and possible
intimates, travel, shopping, even going to a bar or restaurant, all became
eminently restricted tasks. Daily activities of personal care and hygiene
occupied more and more of people’s functional time and mental concern. The
basic process of leaving the house required a great deal of pre-planning and
preparation. Anxieties escalated around people’s ability to continue engaging
in, or go about finding, paid work that would accommodate their restrictions
and needs, and whether their employer would offer paid sick leave if they or a
dependent became infected. Access to adequate, affordable, and safe health care
likewise became a more generalized and potentially fatal concern. In a word,
society itself had become disabled—disabled by the coronavirus; disabled by the
actions or inactions of various ruling and hegemonic institutions; disabled by
the preexisting social, political, and economic conditions of an unequal and
individualistic capitalist society.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Through it all, the watchword of virtually all politicians
occupying positions of power within the ruling circles of government—regardless
of party affiliation or political persuasion—has been the aim of a “return to
normal.” This sentiment resonated broadly across a public chafing under the
disabling conditions of pandemic existence. The development and widespread
distribution of a vaccine seemed to be the single beacon of hope—even as the
novel strain of the coronavirus mutated into more robust and resilient
variants, potentially requiring booster shots and additional vaccinations.<a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2021/10/01/covid-disablement-and-the-return-to-normal/#en2"><sup>2</sup></a> It
is as if the pandemic purgatory we have been stuck in was a detour off the main
road, one wending laterally from the “normal,” desired route. Generalized
immunity, then, stands in prospect as an on-ramp back to society’s proper
timeline, back to the pre-pandemic vector, back to a “normal” future.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Abnormality Is a Preexisting Condition<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For many disabled people in the United States and around the
world, however, the abnormal state of things over the last year and a half is
not such an estranged discontinuity from the previous state of things.
Certainly, just like everyone, pandemic life for disabled people has been
exceedingly difficult, painful, oppressive, and deadly. But the “normal” of
pre-pandemic life was also exceedingly difficult, painful, oppressive, and
deadly. To be disabled in contemporary capitalist society is to live in a
permanent state of socially constructed “abnormality.” Illustrator Sam Schäfer,
for example, has aptly depicted this phenomenon in a series of graphics on
disabled people and the pandemic, published online in early 2021.<a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2021/10/01/covid-disablement-and-the-return-to-normal/#en3"><sup>3</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In one of the panels in the comic titled “And Now Here We
Are,” Schäfer writes: “We died the same way many of us lived: in hospital,
isolated, stuck indoors, financially struggling, isolated.” As the caption
explains: “Each point is illustrated with an empty hospital bed, a silhouette
sat in a jar, a closed door, a broken sad and very adorable piggy bank with
little coins in it, and nothing.” A subsequent panel features the words: “Every
day I see people wishing for things to go back to normal. Back to the way
things were. Where we were still suffering and dying.” The inscription
accompanies a drawing of crutches lying abandoned on a patch of grass beneath a
rainbow and sunshine.<a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2021/10/01/covid-disablement-and-the-return-to-normal/#en4"><sup>4</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span></span></p><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2021/10/covid-disablement-and-return-to-normal.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-89388506879498920792021-09-01T16:27:00.006-04:002021-09-01T16:30:18.812-04:00Jailbreak of Disability<a href="https://rampantmag.com/2021/08/jailbreak-of-disability/"><i>Originally published at </i>Rampant <i>magazine</i><br></a><br><b>The abolitionist movement stands to gain key lessons from mass deinstitutionalization, argues Liat Ben-Moshe's latest book.</b><div><b><br></b><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Decarcerating Disability book cover" height="200" src="https://i2.wp.com/rampantmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/unknown.jpg?resize=640%2C989&ssl=1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="129"></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Decarcerating Disability </i>book cover</td></tr></tbody></table><br><div><br></div><div><i><b>Decarcerating Disability<br></b><br>Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition</i><br><br>By Liat Ben-Moshe<br><br>Published by <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/decarcerating-disability">The University of Minnesota Press</a></div><br><br><br><div><br></div><div>A growing number activists have become familiar with the vast and interlocking histories of oppression that are constitutive of present US society—indigenous dispossession, racialized slavery, exploitative capitalism, imperialist plunder. Less often understood or theorized is the phenomenon of mass disablement as an artifice of social oppression.</div><div><br>In fact, a critical analysis thereof is pivotal to making sense of myriad other oppressive American histories, including: eugenics and the enforcement of biosocial hierarchies; the pseudoscience of race inferiorities and intelligence quotients; segregationist and eliminationist regimes of carcerality and sterilization; hyper-exploitative cults of productivity, wealth accumulation, and universal competition; and the constant reproduction of variable layers of the human species rendered into a permanent underclass of paupers, peripherals, and euphemistic “surplus” or “superfluous” populations.1<div><br>Theorizing the Disability-Carceral Relationship<br><br>One important area that has recently seen inroads in theorizing across various forms of oppression, including that of disability, is the prison abolition movement. Having as their goal the complete elimination, or transcendence, of all existing structures of carceral violence, coercion, and subjugation, prison abolitionists have made recourse to a number of emancipatory frames of analysis—from settler colonialism to racial capitalism to hetero-patriarchy. Paying homage to the ancestral liberation movement against American slavery, from which it draws both literal and figurative analogies, modern abolitionism focuses primarily on the state apparatuses of the prisons and the police: how these latter institutions dialectically emerge from and reproduce existing systems of oppression. Among the names associated with this movement we might include Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, Dean Spade, and Mariame Kaba. Many of these figures adhere to a feminist of color or queer feminist of color critical framework, which is also often anticapitalist or socialist.<br><br>Of those explicitly theorizing the disability-carceral relationship, Marta Russell and Jean Stewart were among the first. Their article “Disablement, Prison, and Historical Segregation,” originally published in Monthly Review magazine in 2001 (and reproduced in the book I edited, <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1289-capitalism-and-disability">Capitalism and Disability</a>, published by Haymarket Books in 2019), is seminal as an historical materialist analysis. The authors trace the emergence of the “disabled” classification in line with the development of industrial capitalism, how those whose bodies and minds were deemed less profitably productive from the standpoint of competitive wage-labor were effectively marginalized. “American capitalism,” write Russell and Stewart, “in its failure to incorporate disabled people into its social fabric, instead shunts them into prisons and other institutions.”2<br><br>Others have engaged in illuminating analyses focused on the connection between Special Education and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline or “school-prison nexus,” such as Subini Annamma along with Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear.3 Presently, however, the scholar doing the most expansive work on the relationship between disability and incarceration is Liat Ben-Moshe. Ben-Moshe has produced two books on the subject within the past ten years: Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014), and Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020).4<br><br>Disability Incarcerated is an edited collection that surveys the various iterations and sites of historical carcerality vis-à-vis disabled people: asylums, mental hospitals, state institutions, migrant detention centers, prisons, nursing homes, segregated schools and workshops. It is an accessible overview and exploration of the pertinent topics, histories, and theories. Decarcerating Disability, in contrast, is singularly authored by Ben-Moshe; it is an interesting attempt at utilizing the experience of disability incarceration and decarceration—in the form of the lesser-known deinstitutionalization movement of the later twentieth century—in order to impart lessons and considerations of relevance to the present-day abolition movement. <br><br>Others have written extensively on the history and political economy of deinstitutionalization as such.5 Ben-Moshe’s Decarcerating Disability is unique in its explicit positioning within the framework of prison studies and the abolitionist movement; it is, in fact, a polemical intervention into living debates. As Ben-Moshe writes in the introduction:<br><blockquote>To those who claim that prison abolition and massive decarceration are utopian and could never happen, this book shows that they’ve happened already, although in a different arena, in the form of mass closures of residential institutions and psychiatric hospitals and the deinstitutionalization of those who resided in them.<br><br>Understanding how to activate this knowledge can lead to more nuanced actions toward and understandings about reducing reliance on prisons and other carceral enclosures as holders for people who are deemed by society to be dangerous, abnormal, or disturbed.6</blockquote></div><div><span></span></div></div></div><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2021/09/jailbreak-of-disability.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-72667410414170155382021-09-01T16:16:00.006-04:002021-09-01T16:30:41.438-04:00Carceral Histories of Disability: AN ABOLITIONIST ANALYSIS<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/"><i>Originally published at </i>Spectre Journal<br></a><br>In 2013, investigative reporting revealed that nearly 150 women incarcerated in the California prison system had been sterilized between 2006 to 2010. The gynecological prison official who oversaw the procedures – and was paid nearly $150,000 by the state per sterilization – defended the payments and the procedures, stating, “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money, compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children – as they procreated more.” It is certainly outrageous that interned women were coerced into undergoing sterilization – oftentimes at the precise moment when they were “under sedation and strapped to an operating table.” But such practices are neither rare within the long scope of U.S. history, nor are they even technically prohibited by law in all circumstances.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">1</a> <br><br>THE INSTITUTION AND THE PRISON<br><br>Given the disproportionate rates at which people of color and disabled people are over-represented within the U.S. prison population, the above abuses were essentially a case of modern eugenics being carried out against precisely those populations that have been historically targeted – disabled people, people of color, and women in poverty. What this demonstrates is the insidious ways in which the matrix of institutional confinement, disability oppression, and eliminationist social policy has remained a persistent feature of modern capitalist society, even as it has undergone mutations, adaptations, and reconfigurations over past decades and centuries.<br><br>Insofar as the ruthlessly competitive accumulation of capital via exploited labor has been the constant guiding imperative of historical capitalism, disabled people have ever represented a troublesome source of non- (or even counter-) profitability to the ruling class. The labor power that disabled people possess – the basic unit of commodity value under capitalism – is deemed an invalid, defective, or otherwise undesirable resource vis-à-vis the productive economy.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">2</a>As the U.S. federal government defines it, to be disabled is to be “unable to engage in substantial gainful activity”;<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/#_edn3"></a><a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">3</a> in other words, to be unable to competitively acquire a paying job within the prevailing conditions of capitalist wage-labor<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/#_edn4"></a>.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/#_edn4"></a><a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">3</a><a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/#_edn4"></a><br><br>In this way, disabled people have historically been cast into that sub-class of people under capitalism who rely on state welfare payments, are marginal to the formal process of capital accumulation, and are considered ‘disposable’ from the standpoint of political economy. In truth, and conceptualized broadly, disabled people occupy a class position that spans the proletariat: the active working class, the reserve army of labor, and the so-called lumpenproletariat.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">4</a> Under any conception, however, disabled people under capitalism are, by definition, so many ‘damaged goods’; commodities systematically devalued as a result of inherited or acquired ‘deficits’ in their functioning as components of capital accumulation. Thus, to the capitalist ruling class, disabled people represent an economic ‘problem’ necessitating a political ‘solution.’<br><br>Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and reaching its peak maturation in the early-to-mid twentieth century, the prevailing ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of disability was the erection of a system of mass institutionalization, sterilization, and social elimination, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of disabled and other marginalized and oppressed peoples in the U.S. This system was codified and executed at the state level, and rendered licit at the federal level.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">5</a> Then, as now, a central pillar of the overarching regime of control, separation, and social exclusion of the disabled and other marginalized populations was the carceral institution. This is a complex of controlling and controlled spaces ranging from asylums, hospital wards, state facilities, nursing homes, penal colonies, poorhouses, halfway homes, jails, and prisons. The form has changed over the years, but the function – control, separation, and social exclusion – has remained. At its peak, in the mid-1950s, there were an estimated 550,000 people confined to the nation’s mental asylums and hospitals.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">6</a> Today, the number of people with mental illnesses and disabilities confined to the nation’s prisons and jails is estimated to be close to 1.25 million.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">7</a><br><br>The red thread connecting the erstwhile system of incarceration in institutional asylums and that of the prison system today, is more than abstractly analogous. Both represent forms of segregation, subjugation, and constraint as coercive mechanisms of social policy. Behind the paper-thin pretense of being ‘rehabilitative’, both structures eschew the latter in favor of the social removal and warehousing of putatively deviant, degenerate, or maladjusted populations. Involuntary confinement and loss of autonomy are equally characteristic of the institution and the prison. Through the mid-twentieth century, the majority of people in state mental hospitals were forcibly committed by lunacy commissions, medical professionals, state welfare agencies, or the judiciary.<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">8</a><br><br>Moreover, whether committed on a voluntary or involuntary basis, institutionalized residents had no control over when they would be discharged, what treatments they would receive, or the nature of their living conditions (this remains the case for those committed to psychiatric wards and institutions to this day). In similar fashion to the way that durations of prison sentences are determined by Parole Board bureaucracies, release from the institution was contingent upon the subjective determination of bureaucrats (which determination was likewise influenced by a resident-inmate’s exhibit of “good institutional behavior”).<a href="https://spectrejournal.com/carceral-histories-of-disability-an-abolitionist-analysis/void(0)">9</a> In sum, the high degree of continuity between these various carceral systems suggests a shared function across wide-ranging forms.<br><br><span></span><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2021/09/carceral-histories-of-disability.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-28603526489264272272021-07-14T09:06:00.002-04:002021-07-14T09:08:11.011-04:00BDS the Police<p><a href="https://rampantmag.com/2021/07/bds-the-police/"><span style="font-family: arial;"> <i>Originally published at </i>Rampant<i> magazine.</i></span></a></p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">A central strategy of the Palestinian struggle for liberation is rich with potential for abolitionist movements. It’s time to boycott, divest, and sanction the police.</span></b><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-FuHzWUohJ5A/YO7fuqqrmHI/AAAAAAAAOro/ZeXvaTX3uSY7FPtOSbg8f1j21mx2YC15ACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1280" height="300" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-FuHzWUohJ5A/YO7fuqqrmHI/AAAAAAAAOro/ZeXvaTX3uSY7FPtOSbg8f1j21mx2YC15ACLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h300/image.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><a href="https://rampantmag.com/author/keith-rosenthal/">Keith Rosenthal</a> · July 14, 2021<div><p class="MsoNormal">This past spring saw the explosion of protests,
demonstrations, and even workers’ strikes in Palestine, the United States, and
around the world in response to the latest Israeli assault on the people of
Gaza. Three insights emerged from this uprising: 1) the depth and scale of the
popular outpouring of solidarity with Palestine demonstrates the extent to
which the hegemony of the pro-Israel Zionist discourse was being <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/israeli-apartheid-turning-tide-global-protests-general-strike-palestine-liberation">substantially
eroded</a>; 2) the international Palestinian struggle has gained a new degree
of political <a href="https://spectrejournal.com/reflections-on-the-third-intifada/">potency</a>,
as the uprising arguably played a role in bringing the Israeli assault to an
early cessation; and 3) significant ideological <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/palestine-israel-conflict-occupation-ceasefire-democratic-party-tlaib-ocasio-cortez-omar-squad">headway</a> has
been won in terms of popular acceptance of the related notions that Israel is
an oppressive apartheid state and that boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS)
is an efficacious movement strategy.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Over the past year or so, the connections between the
struggles for Palestinian liberation in the Middle East and Black liberation in
the US have been <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2021/06/black-and-palestinian-solidarities">expansively
drawn and highlighted</a> by markedly increased numbers of people. The
massive, historic uprising for Black lives that erupted in the wake of the
high-profile police lynching of George Floyd in May of 2020 saw protests,
rebellions, and riots break out in a sustained fashion across the country. This
social struggle not only <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2020/06/rebellions-get-results-a-list-so-far">led
directly</a> to significant local reforms in policing across numerous
communities, schools, and cities but also played a major role in changing the
public discourse around the police and advancing radical demands long touted by
social movements. In particular, the slogan “Defund the Police,” raised by
certain sectors of the movement as an end in and of itself and by others as a
transitional element of an abolitionist program, was elevated to a place within
the mainstream lexicon.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Despite, or perhaps because of, the growth and maturation of
the struggles for Palestinian and Black liberation, the socialist and broader
political left has found itself in a position to reevaluate the prevailing
demands and tactics of these struggles, to take stock of the fact that the
slogans of the movements have gained increased popular circulation, support,
and criticism. For some, the inevitable pushback and revanchism exhibited by the
political center of the US ruling class (expressed in both ruling political
parties, the Democrats and Republicans), has <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2021/02/defund-the-police/">occasioned</a> a
degree of caution, retreat, and conservatism. Kay Gabriel, <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5096-defund-is-a-strategy">writing for
the Verso Books blog</a>, notes:<o:p></o:p></p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Maybe because it is actually a radical demand—that is to
say, targets some of the real causes of racial dispossession in the present—the
center- and far-right have propagandized against Defund [the police] in
increasingly shrill tones. These relentless attacks have caused some queasiness
on the left. In April, <i>Jacobin</i> staff writer Meagan Day
appeared as a guest on Doug Henwood’s podcast to suggest that Defund’s weak
favorability in poll numbers suggests a strategic miscalculation. “I worry
about the present standing of [Defund] a little bit,” she said, “because it
seems that ‘defund the police’ has come to be conflated with ‘abolish the police’
in the minds of the majority . . . its popularity seems to have tanked. . . .
The number one demand coming out of the largest protest movement in American
history should be more popular than that.”</p></div></blockquote><div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Whereas almost exactly one year ago, Day was <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/bernie-sanders-defund-police-uprising">arguing</a> that
“Bernie Sanders should embrace the demand to defund the police,” it now seems
that Day is rather embracing Sanders’s <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/sanders-police-reforms-include-a-wage-increase-for-cops/">conservatism</a> on
this score.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">
</p><p class="MsoNormal">It is perhaps not coincidental that certain radical and
abolitionist demands that imply a direct assault on the (bourgeois) state, and
threaten a diminution thereof, elicit consistent hesitancy from certain
left-wing currents and forces. Notwithstanding the inarguably eminent role
played by Sanders’s recent electoral campaigns in, at the very least,
translating the latent anticapitalist sentiment brewing in the United States
into the political mainstream, Sanders opposes the Defund demand and has long <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/democratic-socialism-government-bernie-sanders-primary-president">included</a> the
institution of the police in his list of already existing “socialist
institutions” in America. He has likewise publicly <a href="https://bdsmovement.net/news/congress-tries-criminalize-bds-democratic-socialists-america-endorse-it-0">distanced</a> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/where-bernie-sanders-stands-on-issues-that-matter-to-jewish-voters-in-2020/">himself</a> from
the BDS movement and the movement to abolish the state of Israel as a <i>de
facto</i> apartheid system.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In contrast, a thoroughly anti-oppression, emancipatory,
revolutionary, and, indeed, more effective strategy, would embrace the
advantageous paradigm embedded within the Defund and BDS struggles, and,
moreover, seek to further develop the manifest connections between the two
struggles. In the <a href="https://rampantmag.com/2021/06/black-and-palestinian-solidarities/">words</a> of
Khury Petersen-Smith, cofounder of <a href="http://www.blackforpalestine.com/">Black for Palestine</a>:<o:p></o:p></p></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><p class="MsoNormal">The US, which is a colonial-settler state and an imperial
power, looks at Israel, which is a colonial-settler state, and, from the start,
says, “Okay, well, we’ve got something in common, and we should compare notes.
We should help each other out.” And that relationship is extensive. On the one
hand, it involves the billions of dollars in terms of military aid that the US
gives to Israel. The bombs they’re dropping on Gaza are American bombs. . . .</p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal">But it’s not a one-sided relationship. American police
departments in the United States train with Israel. . . . It’s not an
exaggeration to say that every major police department in this country and a
lot of police departments in small cities have relations with the Israeli
military . . . and there are Israeli weapons that get deployed on the streets
here against Black people rising up against racism. . . .</p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal">In so many ways, our oppressions are linked. But our
resistances are <i>also</i> linked.</p></div></blockquote><div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Petersen-Smith goes on to point out that the BDS movement
“takes inspiration from other boycott movements throughout history, including
the movement to boycott South African apartheid, as well as the boycott
movements that were key parts of the Civil Rights Movement here and the Black
freedom struggle in this place called the United States.” The struggles for
Palestinian liberation and Black liberation have been mutually inspiring and
edifying. For the present, regarding the question of the struggle to
defund the police, we should allow ourselves to be guided by the trajectory and
radical perseverance of the BDS movement.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In fact, BDS is an entirely apt slogan and strategy to
scaffolded the defund the police movement:<o:p></o:p></p><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal">The
police should be boycotted. Police should not be relied upon, solicited,
or collaborated with. For instance, they should not be invited to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/pride-marchers-pepper-sprayed-nypd-witnesses-say-rcna1284">participate</a> in
LGBT Pride or other events that will <a href="https://reclaimpridenyc.org/reclaim-pride-is">serve</a> to
whitewash, pink-wash, or otherwise woke-wash them.<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal">The
police should be divested from. State and private institutions should be
called upon to withdraw financial and budgetary support from the police,
and to redistribute that wealth to non-police, non-carceral social programs
and services that benefit BIPOC and working-class communities.<o:p></o:p></li>
<li class="MsoNormal">The
police should be sanctioned. Governments should be pressured to hold
police accountable for the violence, injustice, and oppressions they
wreak. Progressive and nonprofit organizations and institutions, such as
labor unions and universities, should suspend membership and collaborative
agreements with the police where they exist, and codify nonparticipatory
censure of the police where they do not.<o:p></o:p></li>
</ul><p class="MsoNormal">To be sure, a BDS movement aimed at the police would be just
as protracted and difficult as the BDS movement against Israeli apartheid has
been; public support and backlash can be expected to ebb and flow. But the
wending nature of the struggle does not make it any less desirable or effective.
Indeed, for those of us who view anti-oppression reform as a constitutive and
necessary element of revolutionary abolition, a BDS movement aimed at the
police is a strategy pregnant with material and ideological potential.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">===</p>Keith Rosenthal lives in New York City and is the editor of <i><a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1289-capitalism-and-disability">Capitalism
and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell</a></i> from
Haymarket Books.</div>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-51119355260826657742021-06-08T10:10:00.000-04:002021-06-08T10:10:41.076-04:00The Intersections & Divergences of Disability & Race: From the 504 Sit-In to the Present<p class="APA" style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://spectrejournal.com/the-intersections-and-divergences-of-disability-and-race/" target="_blank"><i>Originally published at </i>Spectre<i> </i>Journal <i>on 7 June 2021</i></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br></div><div style="text-align: left;">The twenty-six-day mass
sit-in of April 1977 at the San Francisco headquarters of the federal
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was a watershed moment in
U.S. history.<a href="https://spsmailcuny-my.sharepoint.com/personal/keith_rosenthal38_spsmail_cuny_edu/Documents/University/Fall%202020/DSAB%20601%20-%20PSYCH%20CULT%20POLIT%20ASP%20OF%20DISAB/Final%20Research%20Paper/Disability%20&amp;%20Race%20article.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[1]</span></span></span></a>
Not only did this struggle over Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 directly
lead to the promulgation of the first seminal piece of federal disability
anti-discrimination legislation – without which the Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) of 1990 would not have been possible – but it also marked the advent of
the modern disability justice movement. “Second to the signing of the [504]
regulations the way we wanted them to be signed,” stated sit-in leader Kitty
Cone on the occasion of the group’s declaration of victory on April 30, 1977, “the
most important thing that came out of this is the public birth of a disabled
movement.”</div><p></p><p class="APA"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="APA" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;">People all over the country, not just people shut in convalescence
homes, but everyone in this country has learned that disabled people have a
tremendous amount of strength, that we are capable of leading a struggle that
has won major gains from the government. There’s a great deal of
self-confidence, a great deal of pride, that we have given to ourselves and to
disabled people all over the country. But we’ve also shown that if you wage a
really effective struggle and you don’t give up, you can win a victory. (“Handicapped,”
1977, p. 6)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="APA">As one of the central organizers of the near-unprecedented feat of
political strategy and collaboration that went into the victory of the
struggle, Cone knew well the historic import of their achievement. With 120
disabled activists and supporters occupying the federal building inside,
hundreds more regularly rallying in support on the outside, and crucial extensions
of practical assistance forthcoming from sundry other social movements – including
that of labor unions, LGBT activists, feminist groups, and racial justice organizations
– the 504 victory was a paradigm of cross-movement, cross-cultural, and
collaborative solidarity in the fight against social oppression. Of particular
note in this vein, though reported and theorized to a lesser extent at the time,
was the intersectional positioning of Blackness and disability as mutually
reinforcing matrices of the struggle (Connelly, 2020; Erkulwater, 2018; Lukin,
2013; Schweik, 2011).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="Heading" style="text-align: center;"><b>The Pre-History of 504 and the Politics of Solidarity<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="APA">San Francisco in the 1970s was a seething ferment of radical, emancipatory
unrest. Activism against the U.S. war on Vietnam was widespread on the campuses
and amongst war veterans; disabled students at Berkeley College were agitating
against structural impediments to their equality; gender and sexual liberation
groups were challenging ingrained norms and roles; and the mass struggle for
Black freedom – personified by the movements associated with Martin Luther
King, Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and others – was upending virtually all
pre-existing relations of American society. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="APA">This was the crucible that shaped the personages, politics, and
characteristics of the 504 movement. Linkages made, lessons learned, and leaderships
forged amidst the general social upheaval preceding the 504 sit-in ultimately
proved indispensable to its success. Figures like Cone, who through her experience
as an organizer with the Socialist Workers Party, had spent many years involved
in campaigns against racial segregation and had developed a sense of the utmost
importance of building coalitions and networks of solidarity across social
struggles (Dash,
2009; Landes, 2000). <o:p></o:p></p><p class="APA">Another key figure was Donald Galloway, one of the first Black
people to occupy a leading position within the Berkeley Independent Living
Center (ILC) movement in the mid-1970s. Galloway had long been pressuring the
ILC to take a more active role in the politics of racism and the life of the
Black community. Galloway was keenly aware of the fact that disability activism
surrounding the ILC had been negligent toward the specific experience of Black
disabled people in San Francisco and nearby Oakland. This negligence, Galloway argued,
was to the detriment of both the ILC and the Black disabled population who
could benefit from the resources, politics, and activist opportunities <span color="windowtext">offered by the former (Erkulwater, 2018; Lukin, 2013;
Pelka, 2012, pp. 218-222).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="APA" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;">I didn’t see very many black
people. I was the first black person that I knew of at the Center, hired on the
staff full-time. I was the only black, and I started bringing black people into
the center as drivers and attendants, and bringing in professional types.... There
was just a handful of us that came in, but we came together and decided that we
needed some input into this system....</p><p class="APA" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span> </span>We were in a predominantly black
community.... The movement was predominantly white. We needed to reach out to
the black community in Oakland, get the Black Panthers involved, and any other
group that would like to be involved. (Pelka, 2012, p. 220)</p><p class="APA" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="APA">Although Galloway ultimately felt frustrated in his attempts to
establish overt connections between the disability movement and the local Black
population, his efforts were not without significant posterior effect. As
Galloway later recalled:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="APA" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;">There was a severely
disabled man in the Black Panther Party<a href="https://spsmailcuny-my.sharepoint.com/personal/keith_rosenthal38_spsmail_cuny_edu/Documents/University/Fall%202020/DSAB%20601%20-%20PSYCH%20CULT%20POLIT%20ASP%20OF%20DISAB/Final%20Research%20Paper/Disability%20&amp;%20Race%20article.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
named Brad [Lomax], and Brad was our link to the Black Panthers. We would go
and provide him with attendant care and transportation because we had a small
transportation system going, a fleet of vans going out to the community. Ed
[Roberts, the ILC director] made a decision that he wanted us to get more
involved with the Black Panthers and with Oakland. So we would go to some of
their meetings and explain our programs. Because Brad, one of their members, had
a severe disability, we were quite accepted. (Pelka, 2012, pp. 221-222)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="APA" style="text-indent: 0in;">This connection with Bradley Lomax and the
Black Panther Party (BPP) would prove to be eminently pivotal in the 504
struggle to come.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="Heading"><b><span></span></b></p><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-intersections-divergences-of.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-53798847563576593342021-04-10T12:28:00.004-04:002021-04-10T12:28:49.789-04:00Helen Keller's Socialism: Review of 'Her Socialist Smile' | New Politics<a href="https://newpol.org/review/helen-kellers-socialism/"><i>Originally published in </i>New Politics<i> Vol. XVIII No. 2, Whole Number 70 (Winter 2021)</i></a><div><br /></div><div><div><i>Her Socialist Smile</i></div><div>By: John Gianvito</div><div>Traveling Light, 2020.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>“The seeds of socialism are being scattered far and wide, and the power does not exist in the world which can prevent their germination.”</i></div><div><br /></div><div>—Helen Keller</div><div><br /></div><div><i>“There is a pertinence and connection between [Helen’s politics and] our current historical moment (even one hundred years later). She has a lot of things to say to us. … She had belief in the power of the young to move us a few steps closer to the kind of world we’d like to live in. So I hope this film speaks to new generations of activists and gives them some nutrition for the good fight.”</i></div><div><br /></div><div>—John Gianvito, Q & A with the director, <i>Her Socialist Smile</i> (2020)</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://newpol.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/800px-Helen_KellerA-241x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="241" src="https://newpol.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/800px-Helen_KellerA-241x300.jpg" /></a></div>A director would normally balk at the prospect of making a movie about an historical subject on whom there is an extreme dearth of extant audio or visual material. In fact, director John Gianvito did precisely that twenty years ago when he first began exploring the possibility of making a movie on the under-appreciated socialist politics of Helen Keller. Gianvito had originally discovered Keller’s radical political history within the writings of the influential “people’s historian,” Howard Zinn, about whom Gianvito would later make an award-winning documentary (<i>Profit Motive and the Whispering Mind</i>, 2007).</div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately for Gianvito, the primary medium by which Keller (who was blind and deaf) communicated her voluminous thoughts was, of course, that of the written rather than aural or visual word. Additionally, much of Keller’s personal archive of photographic and recorded content was destroyed over the years in a series of tragedies (a house fire in 1946 and the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001).</div><div><br /></div><div>Recently, however, Gianvito decided to revisit the project. The renewed popularity of socialist ideas following the 2008 global crisis of financial capitalism, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, the historic campaigns of Bernie Sanders within the Democratic Party primaries, and the meteoric growth of Democratic Socialists of America—all these signs pointed to a revivified relevance of socialism in the United States.</div><div><br /></div><div>In this light, Gianvito adopted a different conception of the Keller vehicle. The scarcity of primary audio and visual source material was inescapable, Gianvito recognized; but perhaps this was quite metaphorically fitting for a subject who made use of neither the sense of sight nor sound.</div><div><br /></div><div>The resultant, imaginative <i>oeuvre </i>is the documentary <i>Her Socialist Smile</i> (2020), which recently received a limited run through the 58th New York Film Festival (held entirely online this year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic). The 1 hour, 33 minute movie is an interesting bricolage of white text against a black background; an eclectic selection of thematic music; scenes of nature in states of change and at rest; topical clips from newsreel and other secondary historical sources; professional narration and voice acting performed by Carolyn Forché; and the rare gem offering firsthand recordings and photographs of Keller speaking, writing, working, and playing.</div><div><br /></div><div>All of this makes the documentary appear as an unlikely combination of worlds. With its text-on-screen format overlaid by musical and narrative accompaniment, one experiences the anachronistic universe of silent film; its interspersed shots of icicles melting in springtime or a slug making a herculean pilgrimage across the face of a boulder strike one as eminently modernist in form.</div><div><br /></div><div>This latter aspect of the movie may not be quite so eagerly met by those whose primary attraction to the title stems from a desire to learn more about Keller’s socialist thought. There are odd stretches of long minutes in which on-screen bees pollinate flowers and flies buzz around an animal carcass. There is also an odd exception to form when the viewer is presented with the lone instance of political analysis, not by an interviewee discussing Keller’s politics, the various U.S. social movements of which she was a part, or the complexities of disability political theory in Keller’s time and now. Rather, the movie is given over to a four-minute clip of Noam Chomsky speaking at an event in 1989 on the ideological repercussions of the Cold War and the differences between the “opportunistic … Leninism” of the 1917 Bolshevik “coup” in Russia (an event which Keller, incidentally, viewed as a revolutionary beacon of socialist hope to the world) and the “mainstream Marxist movement” represented by the German Social-Democratic Party and the likes of Anton Pannekoek.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, leaving aside questions of appropriate analyses of the social nature of Russia over the seventy-plus years between workers’ revolution and “the fall of Communism,” the central political content of <i>Her Socialist Smile</i> is both inspiring and edifying. Keller lived during the tumultuous years spanning 1880 to 1968; she identified as a socialist for sixty of those years, and was heavily involved in all of the major socialist and radical movements and organizations in the United States for roughly fifteen of those years, beginning in 1908 when she joined the Socialist Party.</div><div><br /></div><div>Throughout this period she participated in protests for women’s equality and Black freedom. She organized in solidarity with workers strikes and anti-imperialist initiatives. She toured and gave speeches on behalf of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World. She offered her prestige to movements affiliated with the American Communist Party. She supported the struggle against nuclear weapons and the anti-communism of Cold War McCarthyism. She wrote prolifically on the topic of social revolution, workers’ power, socialist strategy, the injuries of economic inequality, the violence and opposition to democracy of the capitalist class, the oppression of the disabled and the economically marginalized, and the hope of a society reimagined around the principle that “the welfare of each is bound up with the welfare of all.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Gianvito provides us with a taste of this all—a taste of Keller’s political genius. There are certainly elements of the documentary that are wanting. For instance, Gianvito inexplicably leaves out any discussion of Keller’s association with the anti-colonial movements of the 1940s and 1950s; the concomitant Non-Aligned Movement, whose leading figures, such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Josip Tito, drew the keen interest of Keller; or the affection with which Keller regarded Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign for U.S. president. Further, Gianvito’s documentary does not include any analysis of the politics of disability, which were of course integral to Keller’s lifework.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nonetheless, <i>Her Socialist Smile</i> is a welcome contribution to the contemporary proliferation of socialist-educational materials. If the movie does nothing more than whet the audience’s appetite for more of Keller’s politics, and socialism in general, then it can be considered a great success.</div></div>
Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-60110227821510446862021-04-10T12:21:00.006-04:002021-04-10T12:21:58.275-04:00Essential Workers: Class Struggle in the Time of Coronavirus | New Politics<div>by Keith Rosenthal and Brian Escobar</div><div><br /></div><div>==</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://newpol.org/essential-workers-class-struggle-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/">First published at <i>New Politics</i> on 01 Apr 2020.</a></div><div><br /></div><div>==</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://newpol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Grocery-checker-300x199.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="199" data-original-width="300" src="https://newpol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Grocery-checker-300x199.jpg" /></a></div>A newscast on SUR Peru Sunday showed residents of Lima at their windows clapping and thanking the masked sanitation workers loading bags of trash into a garbage truck. The screen read, “Coronavirus: Cleaning in Lima, Anonymous Heroes.” Residents knew whose labor they were counting on to stay safe from the pandemic and knew the risks the workers were taking.</div><div><br /></div><div>With the coronavirus pandemic now spreading across the United States — and local and national government officials belatedly cobbling together a response — naked truths about contemporary American capitalism have been laid bare.</div><div><br /></div><div>For one, the existing privatized, patchwork health care system in the United States relying on just-in-time supply chains is incompatible with the needs of a globally integrated, healthy society. It has also become painfully clear that we can no longer endure the lack of a comprehensive public welfare infrastructure in this country (e.g., universal paid sick leave, income assistance, etc.).</div><div><br /></div><div>Other components of American capitalism that are being exposed are the class divide and the social relations which inform production and distribution. Usually obscured by exaltation of the rich and powerful of society, the shutdown of all “non-essential” services has rendered obvious the essentiality of a particular subgroup of the American population.</div><div><br /></div><div>In just a short time, the stoppage of American business-as-usual is revealing that the nation fundamentally relies on this indispensable subgroup — or class — of people to carry out the work essential for society’s functioning. This class of people comprises those engaged in labor without which all other social, economic, and political activities would grind to a halt. Indeed, without the labor of these individuals, such emergency measures as social distancing, lockdowns, and widespread self-quarantining would be impossible to maintain.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Who is “Essential”?</b></div><div><br /></div><div>The question of who counts as “essential” is proving to be ad hoc, inconsistent and contested. Multiple governmental bodies and private employers are treating different sets of workers as essential. Companies like GameStop instructed employees to tell any official who came to shut them down that they were essential workers (GameStop finally closed stores on March 21). Meanwhile, some Starbucks employees are petitioning the company to stop considering them essential so they can go home with paid leave. The concept also tends to reinforce the devaluation of domestic work, disproportionately done by women, despite it being necessary for society’s continuation.</div><div><br /></div><div>From a working class standpoint, we can rightly observe that nurses, delivery drivers and grocery store workers are showing the world how essential their work is, whereas advertising execs and app developers can safely stay home without any real cost to ordinary people.</div><div><br /></div><div>While the ‘frontline’ essential workers who remain on the job do not encompass the entire working class, they nonetheless clearly compose a core part of it. Though disproportionately underrepresented in the political bodies of government, undercompensated in their share of national income and wealth, and underprivileged in their access to the nation’s education, health, and social security resources, these workers — along with the rest of the working class — bear upon their shoulders the entire edifice of American society.</div><div><br /></div><div>This section of the working class is made up of grocery store workers, food and delivery service workers, package and postal delivery workers, CVS and Walgreens workers, warehouse workers, sanitation workers, workers in the energy and telecom industries, farmworkers, childcare and personal care assistants, and of course emergency and medical service workers. This list is not exhaustive; but it starkly depicts the nature and scale of the labor which American capitalism rests upon, and even more so in times of crises.</div><div><br /></div><div>Strip away the parasitical class of financial speculators and idle owners of corporate capital, the quasi-aristocratic families with immense dynastic wealth and power, the leisure class who can simply choose not to work and still live comfortably; strip away the pomp, circumstance, and chauvinism of the elites who comprise the ruling class of America, and you have lost nothing that is essential to the basic functioning of society.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Class Matters</b></div><div><br /></div><div>What is the significance of pointing this out? First of all, it cuts through the veil of myth-making which has disguised the true nature of the world in which we live. Before the financial collapse of 2008 it was rare to hear a mainstream politician even mention the word “working class.” They spoke only of “saving the middle class” — a mantra which they repeated ad nauseam.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sundry intellectuals and television news talking heads reinforced this paradigm, opining that even the notion of a working class was a Marxist anachronism in today’s postmodern American society. It was purported that the United States was a post-class technocracy, fluid and flat, and the populace was just one giant middle class sandwiched between two tiny and mildly bothersome populations of the very rich and the very poor. America was the suburbs and young urban professionals; the dishwashers and delivery drivers were a mere imaginary number in the equation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Coronavirus is rattling the cage. As society “pauses” and relies on essential workers to get us through the crisis, we are forced to ask, for instance, why it is that those engaged in the basic, necessary work of our society are so often the most marginalized, maligned, underpaid, and disempowered?</div><div><br /></div><div>Now we are beginning to hear grumbles from Wall Street and its political servants in government that the price — and they mean literal monetary price — of the current preventative economic standstill is simply too high. These corporate villains declare that they want all workers – “essential” or not — to return to work, regardless of the danger posed by the virus. They readily admit that ending social distancing will lead to countless unnecessary deaths. To the financial barons of the American stock exchange, a billion dollars in profit lost on the S&amp;P 500 is far more important than a million human lives lost to an unflattened curve.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Essential Power</b></div><div><br /></div><div>For now, it is the “essential” working class which remains on the front lines. The upshot, from the standpoint of class struggle, is that these workers now find themselves in a potentially pivotal position. With all of society resting upon their labors, the question is whether they will feel empowered by their newly visible importance and flex their collective muscles.</div><div><br /></div><div>The alternative is that the humans who compose the ‘essential’ class will simply be ground down and sacrificed by the ruling class. This is being proven by the utter failure of bosses and governments to provide workers with adequate protective equipment, safety protocols, or hazard and sick pay</div><div><br /></div><div>While the class itself and the labor it performs are indispensable to the functioning of society and to the profits of capitalists, the discrete human laborers, which the working class comprises, are deemed individually dispensable by the ruling class. Provided other human laborers are on the market and willing to take their place, the loss of a single set of hands is of no concern to the corporate owners. The work must go on, they insist, regardless of the cost in human lives. Thus, the only solution is for workers to collectively usurp control over the work itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed, the mere threat of a strike or work slowdown on the part of essential workers at this moment could be sufficient to win major concessions from CEOs and governments. Across the country we’re already beginning to see ‘wildcat’ job actions and strikes planned by Amazon, city sanitation, and Instacart workers.</div><div><br /></div><div>In short, the vulnerabilities of capitalism — both its abject failure to prepare for and contain the coronavirus, and its utter dependence on the labors of a class which it treats as little more than an expendable resource — means that it will be more possible than ever for America’s essential workers to fundamentally change the landscape of American class relations.</div><div><br /></div><div>Witness the fact that some employers have already strategically offered certain limited concessions to workers, from one-time $300 cash bonuses ($100 for part-timers) to $1 an hour wage increases. Such scant boons, however, amount to a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to the cost of COVID-19 treatment.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Looking Deeper</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Ultimately the crisis of the coronavirus, which is a crisis of capitalism from the virus’s origin to its spread, forces us to reflect upon the very way that work is organized throughout society.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many people have taken to offering moving and heartfelt public commendations for the labor of essential workers amidst the crisis. Such praise is well earned for those who are soldiering on for the benefit of others despite hazardous conditions, like those Peruvian trash collectors. However, we would be remiss to ignore the insidious forms of economic intercourse that belie purely anodyne gestures of gratitude.</div><div><br /></div><div>Labor in capitalist society is not a function of genuine free choice. Rather, the work people do is heavily determined by wealth, racial, gender, and other inequalities. Most Americans — perhaps apart from the middle and upper classes — don’t end up in the job they want in order to fulfill a dream, but the job they get in order to meet basic financial obligations; or, employers exploit their dreams to persuade them to work for little pay and grueling hours. That is, many workers in essential services industries enter or remain due to their financial vulnerability. It is not feasible for them to abruptly quit or stay home without pay; nor are they flush with access to a variety of different jobs.</div><div><br /></div><div>Capitalism relies upon a form of coercion in which some humans are sufficiently more desperate than others so as to accept employment in hazardous conditions, for less pay, and with less job security. Especially in the absence of the basic protections afforded by unions, workers in essential sectors are often compelled to work entirely according to the whim and discretion of their employer.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a reason why wealthier people tend to avoid taking such essential jobs as sanitation work and grocery delivery. There is a reason why nurses tend to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than hospital executives, and why those who clean the hospitals tend to be disproportionately of a darker complexion than either of the above.</div><div><br /></div><div>What would it mean to organize the work of society differently? Is it possible to have an equitable, democratically planned, and socially owned structure of work and consumption? The prevailing economic system is one in which the owners of capital hold despotic sway over the productive nodes of the economy. Consequently, they also hold ruling sway over all decisions about work and production: what gets produced, how the work is done, who the work is done by and for, and the manner in which the work is compensated.</div><div><br /></div><div>When socialists call for a society based on workers’ power, it is in subversion of the above regime. The majority who do the work for society to function should have a ruling share in the decision-making power over the vital political, economic, and social questions of that society. Further, the economic and living conditions of the working class should be secure, elevated, and liberated to a degree that is inversely proportional to how insecure, depressed, and circumscribed they are at present.</div><div><br /></div><div>Present conditions in the U.S. remain far removed from such a socialist vision. We have a long struggle ahead of us, not only to survive and navigate the immediate pandemic crisis, but also to fight to fundamentally remake society itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the moment, many workers in low-paying and vulnerable jobs are receiving the recognition and respect that they have long deserved. We must never allow that recognition to be lost again and we must fight to turn recognition into power, and power into transformation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let us use this opportunity to push for everything that essential workers and all people need to live dignified and healthy lives in the twenty-first century: A twenty-five dollar minimum wage with full benefits; grocery chains converted into co-ops with safety and health protections regulated by the workers; the mass expansion of occupant-run, affordable public housing; transforming the largest banks into a national utility so as to stabilize people’s finances and fund general human needs; nationalization of hospitals, and the implementation of universal social services such as Medicare for All, Public Power, and internet access.</div><div><br /></div><div>As the subheading of a recent New York Times op-ed asserted, “Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic.” We know humanity can do better than this and that the welfare of each is dependent upon the welfare of all. We should proudly project this vision and use the “essentiality” of our class to win the lasting and necessary changes we deserve.</div>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-59953391506368922602020-04-26T16:44:00.000-04:002020-04-26T21:36:28.369-04:00The ruling class may not rule -- but the state always rules in the interest of the ruling class<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Jacobin </i>recently posted a fascinating thought-piece on the Marxist theory of the state. It is actually a reprint of an article originally published in 1977 by the radical sociologist Fred Block, titled, "The Ruling Class Does Not Rule." (<a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/ruling-class-capitalist-state-reform-theory">https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/ruling-class-capitalist-state-reform-theory</a>).<br />
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The article posits an "unorthodox" Marxist analysis of the manner in which the state in capitalist society is always a product of the interaction between the existing economic classes and social forces of society. This is true regardless of the desired political content of the state managers -- be they of the right, the center, or the left.<br />
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In other words, as long as society is cleft into opposing classes, and as long as the means of production by and large remain in the hands of one of those classes (namely, the capitalist class), then the state will forever manifest as a bourgeois state -- the state of a capitalist society -- despite the conscious intentions of the major social actors. Or, as Marx puts it, the character of the state is determined by the nature of the existing struggle between the classes so that it appears to take on a form independent of the will of any of the major social actors; that is, the content of the state is formulated "behind their backs," as it were.<br />
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The conclusion? As long as there is a capital-owning class arrayed against a working class, the state of such a society will always be essentially capitalist in form and function. Only with the abolition of the classes themselves, through the total appropriation of the capitalist class by a universal working class (which in turn, as a matter of definition, loses the character of a "class" as such), will the state lose its class, i.e., capitalist, character, and become, first, a socialist workers' state, and ultimately, a universal state of simply "the people."<br />
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Consider, by way of comparison, a slave society. Any state which exists and abides alongside the existence of a slave-owning class arrayed against a class of slaves will always be essentially a state of slavery. It is only by pitting itself in open and total hostility to the master class, and then proceeding to abolish said master class by "appropriating" or liberating it of its ownership over the capital from which it derives its power and very existence (i.e., slaves, human beings), that the state can be said to completely lose its character as a state of slavery. This can be stated in tautological form thusly: The abolition of slavery is the absolute precondition for the abolition of a state of slavery (i.e., a state influenced by the existence of a slave-owning and enslaved class dialectic).<br />
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In sum, as regards the question of capitalism and the state, it means that any movement which seeks to use the state as an anti-capitalist instrument must simultaneously and minimally prepare to pit itself in direct and total belligerence against the capital-owning class (i.e., that class which privately owns the means of production). It must prepare its constituency and convince the working class of the imminent need to appropriate the capitalist class out of existence entirely. Anything less will inevitably end in naught but capitulation to the role of state manager of capitalism, i.e., managing the capitalist state; which is to say, managing the systemic exploitation and oppression of the working class by the capitalist class.<br />
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This is why the notion of a Socialist Party governing in a society which exists and abides alongside the existence of a capitalist class is simply a contradiction containing the seeds of its own undoing. Socialists cannot truly pursue a coherent and consistent socialist program while managing a capitalist state. To rephrase the above tautology, the precondition of a socialist state is the abolition of the contending classes of capitalist society. Any socialist party or movement which does not view its road to power as passing through this imminent conquest has, <i>a priori</i>, forfeited the pursuit of a socialist state.</div>
Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-38677634347847251002019-09-07T19:35:00.000-04:002019-09-07T19:35:13.364-04:00How a third party helped to abolish slavery in the U.S.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: PT Serif, Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><b>First published on August 10, 2016, at <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/08/10/how-a-third-party-helped-to-end-slavery">SocialistWorker.org</a>.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: PT Serif, Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><i>Are third parties irresponsible "spoilers"? Or a necessary part of challenging a spoiled system? Keith Rosenthal and Alan Maass look back at history for some answers.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">FOR MANY people, third-party politics in the contemporary U.S. is a nonstarter at best and downright irresponsible at worst.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">One need only observe the torrent of invective currently being leveled against supporters of the Green Party's Jill Stein, who is running a left-wing third-party challenge against both the "lesser evil" Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the "greater evil" Republican Donald Trump.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The overlooked truth, however, is that third-party election efforts historically played an important part in advancing progressive causes in the U.S. The most obvious example is the abolition of slavery. It was arguably the single-most significant social advance in U.S. history--and it was catalyzed in part by third-party initiatives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">IN THE decades preceding the Civil War, the two ruling-class political parties that dominated the U.S. system were the Democrats and the Whigs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Democrats were the party of slavery. They were dominated by the Southern slave-owning master class and consistently advocated the expansion of slavery into newly organized Western states--every issue was viewed through the lens of what would defend and extend the institution of slavery. The Northern wing of the Democrats were built around urban political machines that depended on votes from working people, but the Southern slaveocracy called the shots within the party.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Whigs were the second main party from 1833 onward, appealing primarily to the Northern ruling class that was becoming more powerful on the basis of industrial production. But while the Northern industrialists clashed with the Southern slave power over a range of political issues, from trade and tariffs to spending on infrastructure development, the Whigs stood for a "measured" policy of compromise and conciliation, prizing national unity above all else.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Probably the best-known national leader of the Whigs was Henry Clay--who was even known as the "Great Compromiser" for his role in brokering a series of legislative compromises that papered over the divisions between North and South.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">On the all-important question of whether slavery should be legal in new Western territories as they became states, the Democrats were unreservedly in favor of the expansion of slavery, while the Whigs at most argued that the question of whether a state should be slave or free should be decided by popular vote.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Still, if you apply the logic of the current liberal scolders that anyone who questions a vote for Hillary Clinton is helping the Republicans, the Whigs would still represent the "lesser evil" compared to the Democrats.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But the most determined opponents of slavery in this era viewed the Whigs as one wing of a political system that was completely committed to upholding the institution of slavery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In fact, abolitionist sentiment in the Northern states was sharpened most of all by the compromises negotiated by the Whigs to hold the North and South together. For example, the Compromise of 1850 curbed some of the South's ambitions for slavery's Western expansion, but the cost was a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act that essentially made the federal government responsible for capturing and transporting free Blacks to any Southerner who claimed to have owned them as slaves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Far from viewing the Whigs as the "lesser evil," the dominant attitude among abolitionists in this era was to reject <i style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">any</i> participation in the U.S. political system. They believed that the Constitution itself was "infected with the pestilence of slavery," as the abolitionist agitator William Lloyd Garrison put it, and any involvement in politics would corrupt the participants and turn them into compromisers, too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Gradually, though, some opponents of slavery--Frederick Douglass among them--started moving toward a different strategy. They wouldn't choose between the two evils, Democrats and Whigs, but would support independent parties committed to confronting the slave power more directly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">THE FIRST such challenge came in the 1840 presidential election, and the results were modest. Abolitionist James Birney, running as the candidate of the newly formed Liberty Party, won 0.3 percent of the popular vote.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Undeterred, Birney ran again for the Liberty Party ticket in 1844--this time with Douglass a vocal supporter. He won only 2.3 percent of the popular vote, but the contest between the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, and the Democratic candidate, James Polk, was very close. Polk won the popular vote by less than 40,000 votes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Birney and the Liberty Party were accused of winning enough support in New York that would have otherwise to Clay to swing that state to Polk--and its 36 electoral votes at the time were the margin of victory for Polk in the Electoral College.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Did that make the abolitionists election "spoilers"? There's no doubt that James Polk was one of the most rabidly pro-slavery Democratic presidents. He launched the U.S. into the Mexican-American War on the strength of the slaveocracy's fantasy of annexing an entire nation's worth of territory where slavery would be legal. The justices he nominated to the Supreme Court were reliably pro-slavery, responsible for such obscenities as the <i style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">Dred Scott</i> decision in 1857.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But the Whigs, with their compromises, were just as responsible for admitting new slave states into the union. And the pro-slavery laws that the Supreme Court was upholding had been passed by Congress with support from the Whigs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">So those who wanted to see an end to slavery continued to support third party efforts that would actually challenge slavery--first the Free Soil Party formed in the wake of the 1844 election, and finally the Republican Party, founded in 1854.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Republican Party, like the Free Soil Party before it, was firmly opposed to the expansion of slavery westward, but it didn't stand for abolition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Much of the party leadership was more moderate than the abolitionists on the question of slavery itself. Their opposition to expansion of slavery was about challenging the power of the Southern ruling class, which, through its control of the federal government, pursued policies that hampered the development of Northern industry and agriculture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The third party challenges over several decades contributed to a political crisis for the Whigs. By 1856, now running under the name American Party, they fell behind the Republicans in the presidential election, winning just 21 percent of the popular vote to the Republicans' 33 percent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">A more clearly anti-slavery third party had beaten the Whigs and taken its place in the two-party system. But many abolitionists were disappointed in what they saw as compromise and conciliation among Republicans, like their presidential nominee for the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As Frederick Douglass wrote:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Republican Party...is opposed to the political power of slavery, rather than to slavery itself. It would arrest the spread of the slave system...and defeat all plans for giving slavery any further guarantee of permanence. This is very desirable, but it leaves the great work of abolishing slavery...still to be accomplished. The triumph of the Republican Party will only open the way for this great work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Nevertheless, Douglass challenged abolitionists who called for boycotting the 1860 election to set aside their doubts. His argument was that a victory for Lincoln and the Republicans really would "open the way for this great work"--by putting the federal government in the hands of a party that would stop the expansion of slavery into new territories, and thereby fatally undermine the power of the South.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As Douglass wrote a few months before the election, "The slaveholders know that the day of their power is over when a Republican president is elected."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Douglass was exactly right. Lincoln won the 1860 election with a 39 percent plurality of the popular vote. The Democratic vote was split between two candidates, one representing the Southern wing of the party, and the other representing the Northern wing. Lincoln won easily in the Electoral College.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Before he had even taken the oath of office, the secession of Southern slave states from the union had begun. The slave power did indeed understand "that the day of their power is over when a Republican president is elected."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">LINCOLN, OF course, didn't "free the slaves" by himself. Primary credit goes to the resistance of slaves themselves in carrying out countless revolts, escape plots, confrontations with "fugitive slave" catchers and building up the Underground Railroad.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Blacks in the North were, in turn, leaders of an abolitionist movement that began small, but grew in influence and political strength because of the determination of its supporters to accept no compromise in the struggle to end slavery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And ultimately, the slave system was only demolished after a four-year-long Civil War--still the deadliest military conflict in U.S. history. Lincoln deserves credit as the commander-in-chief, but the North's victory depended on the sacrifice and commitment of the more than 2 million Union soldiers--10 percent of whom were Black by the war's end--and their families and communities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Still, Lincoln and the Republicans were a part of the struggle that ended slavery. Their victory in 1860 was both a signal of the strong influence of abolitionist ideas after decades of organizing and a ripening of the deeper conflict between North and South past the point of no return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Abolitionists were only one factor in the third-party challenges in the decade before the Civil War, but their understanding of what they were fighting for and how they should conduct the struggle holds lessons today. They understood that organizing a political challenge to slavery might mean temporarily tipping the balance in favor of the "greater evil" against the "lesser evil"--but that retreating in the face of this threat would only perpetuate the pro-slavery duopoly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As the late socialist and veteran Green Party candidate Peter Camejo wrote of the Liberty Party in the 1840s:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">[A]mazing as it may sound, the Liberty Party received some of its most hostile reception from people who claimed to oppose slavery, including some committed and active abolitionists. They attacked the new party because of what they perceived as a "spoiler" factor that could take votes from the Whigs, allowing the Democrats to win in close elections. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Liberty Party responded by saying it was a matter of principle not to vote for political parties that supported slavery. They dared to raise the idea that abolitionists should seek to win control of the U.S. government to abolish slavery.</span></div>
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Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-72522063687906720102019-07-04T10:42:00.000-04:002019-07-04T10:42:49.613-04:00E-Book Release | "CAPITALISM AND DISABILITY: Essays by Marta Russell," ed., Keith Rosenthal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>The electronic version of the new book I edited is now available for immediate download through the <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1303-capitalism-and-disability">Haymarket Books</a> website!</i><br />
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<a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1303-capitalism-and-disability"><i>https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1303-capitalism-and-disability</i></a><br />
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<a href="https://cdn-ed.haymarketbooks.org/images/000002/473/9781608467198-f_medium-48e08fb4bf999074cb34afb711eeee23.jpg20181019-38-pl77r5" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="250" src="https://cdn-ed.haymarketbooks.org/images/000002/473/9781608467198-f_medium-48e08fb4bf999074cb34afb711eeee23.jpg20181019-38-pl77r5" /></a></div>
<b><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Capitalism and Disability </span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Selected Writings by Marta Russell </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Edited by Keith Rosenthal</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This book comprises a collection of groundbreaking writings by Marta Russell on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1303-capitalism-and-disability"><i>https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1303-capitalism-and-disability</i></a><br />
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Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-41009063399658988852019-04-22T14:36:00.000-04:002019-04-22T14:36:02.781-04:00Archive of articles written for SocialistWorker.org<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://socialistworker.org/author/keith-rosenthal">http://socialistworker.org/author/keith-rosenthal</a><br>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>PSYCHIATRIC POLICING WON’T STOP GUN VIOLENCE</b></span><br>
<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">15 March 2018</span><br>
<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">PEOPLE ARE sharing around stories about how lax our gun laws are in regard to people with mental illness. In particular, they are criticizing Trump's decision in February 2017 to overturn one of Obama's last executive orders, which placed increased restrictions on the ability of people with mental illnesses to obtain guns.</span><br>
</div><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2019/04/archive-of-articles-written-for.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-42493624056389588632019-04-01T15:19:00.005-04:002021-04-27T16:37:39.904-04:00Disability and the Soviet Union: Advances and retreats (Part 2 of 2)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This article originally appeared in <a href="https://isreview.org/issue/103/disability-and-soviet-union-advances-and-retreats">ISR #103</a>.</i><br>
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Part two of a two-part article (<a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2019/04/disability-and-russian-revolution.html">see part one here</a>).<br>
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By the end of October 1917, the Bolshevik Party had won a clear majority of workers and peasants within the nationwide network of soviets (revolutionary councils) to their program of the overthrow of the capitalist, or provisional, government which had replaced the deposed tsar. Almost immediately after carrying out the revolution, the Bolsheviks began reshaping all of Russia. To be sure, their ambitions in these first optimistic years far outstripped the limited means which Russia’s backward economy put at their disposal. Yet, hopeful as they were in the spread of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries of Europe—bringing with it the promise of direct international aid and an end to the economic siege organized by said capitalist countries—the Bolsheviks began reordering society in a truly revolutionary direction. There were three major areas in which the revolution effected significant change in the area of disability: law and policy; labor and the economy; and health and education. Changes in law and policy were discussed in <a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2019/04/disability-and-russian-revolution.html">part one of this article</a>. The present article will address the impact of the revolution on the latter two categories.<br>
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<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>Labor and the economy</i></span></div>
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The dramatic nature of many of the legal decrees notwithstanding, it is important to note that the Soviet government’s maximum agenda in the first years after the revolution remained largely aspirational. From its inception, the revolution had been fettered by the underdeveloped economic conditions inherited from tsarist feudalism and a disastrous world war; the inception of a counterrevolutionary civil war backed by the imperialist Allied countries of Europe and the United States; and a debilitating economic blockade placed upon Russia by an alliance of imperialist countries. As a result, it was estimated that by 1919 industrial production had declined to a mere one-fifth of its prewar high.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">1</sup></div>
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At best, the revolutionary government could set for itself the initial task of dividing up equally amongst the population the existent accumulated domestic wealth of the landowners and capitalists. Such a measure could provide immediate relief to the population, but could not stave off hunger and the generalization of want for more than a brief period. The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware that the eventual success of socialism in Russia hinged entirely upon the spreading of revolution to the wealthier capitalist nations of the world, from whom Russia could obtain substantial economic aid and favorable relations of trade. Failing that, the Russian people were doomed to either remain mired in relative poverty or else face a growing compulsion to proceed down the road championed by the Bolsheviks’ conservative detractors: namely, to act as a kind of surrogate bourgeoisie committed to wealth accumulation via the exploitation of labor. As Engels had long before noted in The Peasant War in Germany, </div>
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The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realization of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence. . . . Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practiced, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">2</sup> </div>
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For the time being, however, the working class of Russia was simply determined to enjoy the immediate fruits of its victory. The experience of the revolution itself had thoroughly imbued Russian society with seemingly unbounded feelings of hope, solidarity, and comradeship. The watchword of the day was that the welfare and well-being of all trumped all other concerns.</div>
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Naturally, the reorganization of the economy proceeded along lines informed by this prevailing mood. Initially, this was done largely spontaneously as workers and peasants took matters into their own hands. They were not waiting for Soviet decrees, but simply proceeding to reorganize their lives, knowing that the soviets—their soviets—would invariably codify their actions after the fact. To this end, a massive wave of factory and workplace takeovers directly succeeded the revolution. The lowest strata of the peasantry likewise engaged in mass seizures and occupations of the former estates and mansions of the landed aristocracy.</div>
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Having thus placed the means of production under their own cooperative control, the workers immediately began to freely adapt and accommodate the labor process to their abilities, needs, and desires. This took the following forms: slowing down the pace of work; decreasing the length of the workday; prioritizing the implementation of safety precautions and measures; creating substantially more flexible work schedules; exerting more direct control over the flow and process of the work; and allowing for greater flexibility in the division of labor within the production process. </div>
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The promise of such a socialist reorganization of the economy was, as Lenin wrote in December 1917, to draw “the majority of working people into a field of labor in which they can display their abilities, develop the capacities, and reveal those talents, so abundant among the people whom capitalism crushed, suppressed, and strangled in thousands and millions.” </div>
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Every factory from which the capitalist has been ejected, or in which he has at least been curbed by genuine workers’ control, every village from which the landowning exploiter has been smoked out and his land confiscated has only now become a field in which the working man can reveal his talents, unbend his back a little, rise to his full height, and feel that he is a human being.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">3</sup></div>
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Reminiscing decades later on the practical changes which the revolution in the factories had initially wreaked, the Bolshevik leader Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote, “The revolution had done away with the bullying, swearing and driving class of foremen and bosses, and the worker was glad to be rid of them, glad to be able to sit down and have a smoke when he was tired without anyone driving him. At the beginning the factory organizations readily released the workers to attend all kinds of meetings.” She continues by relating a particularly illustrative anecdote which occurred in early 1918: </div>
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I remember a woman worker coming to me once at the Commissariat of Education to receive some certificate or other. During our conversation I asked her what shift she was working in. I thought she was working in the night shift, otherwise she would not have been able to come to the Commissariat in the daytime. “None of us are working today,” [she said]. “We had a meeting yesterday evening, everyone was behindhand with her domestic work at home, so we voted to knock off today. We’re the bosses now, you know.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">4</sup></div>
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Another aspect of the revolution that immediately expressed itself throughout the economy was the desire for equality between all sectors of the working class. For instance, whereas in August 1917 the ratio between unskilled and skilled workers’ wages was 1:2.32, by 1920 it had become 1:1.04.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">5</sup> Historian Marcel Liebman notes that for Lenin and the Bolshevik party, the impossibility of achieving the complete equalization of wages was in fact seen as “one of the constraints imposed by the crisis and by the country’s economic backwardness, and [Lenin] regarded the necessity of giving specialists specially favored rates of pay as nothing less than a setback for the revolution. In the draft program he put before the Eighth Party Congress [March 1919] he repeated: ‘our ultimate aim is to achieve . . . equal remuneration for all kinds of work.’”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">6</sup></div>
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The spirit of equality that attended the democratization of the production process also applied to issues that existed at the intersection of workplace accommodation and gender. For instance, some workplaces established free on-site childcare spaces for the benefit of working mothers, while others implemented regulations allowing working mothers to take off up to two hours out of their normal workday for the purposes of feeding their children.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">7</sup> </div>
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Perhaps one of the most popular new accommodations that Russian workers now enjoyed was the ability to take a near-unlimited number of paid sick days and respites away from work. Because the new revolutionary healthcare system was controlled by the workers, patients, and local soviets—and because the health system was free, universal, and removed from the dictates of market profitability and finance capital—it became easy for a worker suffering from injury or ill health to obtain authorization from a nearby medical center excusing them from work for a given period of time or indicating the necessity of a change in their workload or workflow.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">8</sup> </div>
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In addition to paid sick leave, revolutionary Russia also became the first country in the world where all workers, without exception, had the right to an annual paid vacation of two to four weeks.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;"> 9</sup> Moreover, the Soviet government took the added measure of facilitating the widespread enjoyment of this right by seizing the beautiful seaside palaces and country estates of the former aristocracy and bourgeoisie and opening them up to peasants and workers to use for free as therapeutic resorts and communal vacation homes.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">10</sup></div>
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Outside of the immediate sphere of relations pertaining to the workplace, there were a number of broader noteworthy social changes that improved the accessibility of general economic and civic life to all. For instance, important services such as public transit, electrical power, and postal and parcel delivery were provided free of charge to the populace at government expense.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">11</sup> </div>
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Another significant development was the national campaign to establish free communal kitchens, laundries, childcare, and the like; the primary aim being to lift the many tasks of social reproduction off the shoulders of the individual family unit in general, and women workers in particular. Though the scale of these communal experiments was unfortunately limited by overall economic constraints, it is clear that those who especially stood to benefit from such measures were mothers with disabilities and mothers who had children with disabilities. Additionally, with the complete socialization and universalization of many tasks associated with individual daily living, all people with disabilities would be able to more easily obtain all manner of personal (i.e., communal) assistance necessary for meaningful self-development and realization.</div>
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Ultimately, a fully accurate depiction of the labor and economic situation in revolutionary Russia cannot be complete without recognition of the exigencies that stymied all but the most halting progress. By the end of 1918, sabotage, economic blockade, and open civil war on the part of the capitalist class and its international imperialist backers was well underway. From 1918 to 1921, the area under Soviet control was a society literally under a state of siege. Famine, unemployment, and the near-total breakdown of railroad transport plagued the cities and countryside alike. This was the period of so-called War Communism (a horribly inexact appellation), in which every nerve and fiber of Soviet society was marshaled toward the fortification and defense of the revolution. In many regards, it marked a significant retreat (or at the very least, an austere detour) from the path of democratic, cooperative, and post-coercive socialist development. As Trotsky put it in retrospect, “War Communism was the regime of a beleaguered fortress.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">12</sup></div>
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At the war’s conclusion, the peasant-worker alliance which had made the tsar’s overthrow possible began to break down under the weight of generalized scarcity, postwar exhaustion, and industrial collapse. The breakdown of transportation and the outbreak of the civil war crisis prompted the new government in August 1918 to begin sending detachments of workers and poor peasants into the countryside to forcibly requisition grain in order to sustain the Red Army and to forestall the depopulation of Russia’s cities. In 1921, with socialist revolution having failed (at least for the moment) to spread internationally, the Bolshevik government initiated a New Economic Policy (NEP) premised upon the limited introduction of capitalist forms of economy. If the policy of War Communism was one of retreat, then NEP marked a retreat from a retreat. Nonetheless, it was deemed a necessary concession to the demands of the peasantry and even elements of the working class, not to mention the very historical economic conditions obtaining in an isolated, dilapidated, and underdeveloped society.</div>
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As the decade of the 1920s wore on, the NEP saw the gradual reintroduction of privatized production, the commodities market, wage determination according to the labor market, social and economic inequality, and regularized unemployment. The Bolsheviks who ran the government during this period often felt that they were hostage to circumstances beyond their control in their implementation of NEP. Lenin, for example, remarked at the 1922 party congress: “It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">13</sup></div>
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In reflecting upon the limitations and characteristics of Soviet Russia during these years, it is worth returning to Karl Marx, who in one of his more expansive descriptions of communism, wrote of a society in which, </div>
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After the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">14</sup></div>
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And yet, how far Russia of the 1920s was from a society in which such conditions even remotely obtained. If, as Marx wrote, a political superstructure “can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby,”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">15</sup> then we are compelled to return to the original Bolshevik assertion that a workers’ state that remained isolated in an underdeveloped Russia would be simply unable to conjure into being a genuine communist, classless society. </div>
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Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that in certain key respects, the genuinely socialist aspirations of the Bolshevik government and the advanced sections of the working class remained evident even during these years of retreat and dissolution. For instance, the 1920s witnessed, inter alia, the emergence of three important labor-oriented disability advocacy organizations that enjoyed the support of both a large number of disabled Russians as well as the Bolshevik government. </div>
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The All-Russian Cooperative of Disabled People (VIKO), All-Russian Union of the Blind (VOS), and All-Russian Union of the Deaf (VOG) were established in 1921, 1923, and 1926, respectively. Insofar as these three organizations were controlled by their members and yet operated with the support and under the aegis of the national government, they were quite without precedent. In fact, it has been argued that VIKO represents the first national pan-disability advocacy organization in modern history.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">16</sup> VIKO was directly established in December 1921 by a vote of the Council of People’s Commissars.</div>
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The structure of VIKO was [that of] a national umbrella disability organization. All decisions were made democratically (in the early ’20s it was still allowed), and only people with disabilities had voting power at VIKO . . . VIKO focused its efforts on providing work opportunities for people with disabilities by creating special production lines, kindergartens, resorts, health retreats, vocational schools and sport centers.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">17</sup> </div>
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Along with VOS and VOG (which operated under the purview of the Commissariat of Social Services), these groups set for themselves the task of integrating disabled Russians into society by helping them find “socially useful work; helping them complete secondary and higher education and find suitable employment; and drawing them into the ranks of active builders of Communist society.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">18</sup> Describing the activities of VOS in the mid-1920s, historian Bernice Madison writes, “The effort to do away with illiteracy among the blind began . . . with a cultural revolution of sorts. Clubs, houses of culture, red corners, and libraries multiplied. Night schools were developed; records became available.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">19</sup> Of work amongst the deaf, disability studies scholar Sarah Phillips writes, “Thanks to the VOG, which enjoyed the approval of Party functionaries, deaf people were able to nurture a deaf culture and improve the social standing of people with disabilities.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">20</sup></div>
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</div><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2019/04/disability-and-soviet-union-advances.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-70970011379404474632019-04-01T15:14:00.002-04:002021-04-27T16:32:27.476-04:00Disability and the Russian Revolution (Part 1 of 2)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>This article originally appeared in <a href="https://isreview.org/issue/102/disability-and-russian-revolution">ISR #102</a>.</i></div>
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Part one of a <a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2019/04/disability-and-soviet-union-advances.html">two-part article</a>.</div>
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Although there is scant available literature specifically addressing the topic of disability in the context of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, disability issues, nonetheless, figured quite prominently in it. As evidenced by the demands raised and literature produced by the revolutionary masses and parties in the years leading up to the revolution, disability seems to have been a significant contributing factor to the upheaval. Disability was an explicit component of the Bolshevik party program and propaganda between 1903 and 1917; after 1917, it was an area subject to much social and legislative reform on the part of the revolutionary government, which was in turn a product of the disability politics raised explicitly by the revolutionary soldiers, workers, and peasant masses.</div>
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Owing to the distortions of both Stalinist and Western capitalist ideologues, this history has largely been hidden or ignored. To be sure, the fate of people with disabilities in Russia after the turn toward forced industrialization, capital accumulation, and exploitation of wage labor in the late 1920s, followed essentially the same oppressive historical trajectory as that of all newly industrialized and industrializing capitalist societies. Nevertheless, just as Stalinism represented the negation of the emancipatory and socialist character of the Russian Revolution in its first years, so too did the worsening conditions of people with disabilities under Stalinist Russia represent a negation of what had been obtained in revolutionary Russia. </div>
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The 1917 Russian Revolution marked a turning point in the history of the world socialist movement and, indeed, the history of humanity. It was the first time that a revolutionary party founded on the principles of Marxism—that is, the Bolshevik Party—was able to lead the majority of the working class in rising up, defeating the political rule of the capitalists and landowners, and instituting a form of government organized around the democratic self-rule of the exploited and oppressed.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">1</sup> </div>
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While the full scope of the changes that the Bolshevik revolution effected was necessarily limited by the overwhelmingly underdeveloped and internationally isolated nature of Russia’s economy and society, nonetheless what we find in revolutionary Russia is a society that proceeded as far, if not farther, down the road toward the overcoming of disability oppression than any other society before or since. Moreover, this history is arguably proof of the Marxist-derived principle that the liberation of people with disabilities is impossible without the liberation of the entire working class, and the liberation of the entire working class is impossible without the liberation of people with disabilities.<sup style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">2</sup></div>
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The Russian economy at the turn of the century was largely agrarian and impoverished, combined with small but growing advanced pockets of industrial capital. Roughly 80 percent of the population was rural and consisted of small farmers, or peasants, working for semi-feudal landowners, while urban wageworkers, or proletarians, comprised roughly 15 percent of the population. What existed was an incipient capitalism, overshadowed by pre-capitalist feudal relations, all under the autocratic hand of the tsarist monarchy. The peasants and workers had virtually no rights, either at work, at home, or in civil society, and there was no apparatus in place for the provision of such basic public services as health care, social security, or unemployment assistance.</div>
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It was in this context that mass struggle began to emerge between the years 1900 and 1905. This struggle ultimately set the revolutionary overthrow of the tsar as its central demand, but it also raised an entire range of social and economic demands in the process. Though the 1905 uprising was violently repressed by the tsarist state, it nonetheless had a profound and lasting impact on the whole of Russian society. The demands raised in 1905, as well as the revolutionary methods of organization and struggle—the soviet (council) and the mass strike—would be brought even more forcefully to bear in 1917. </div>
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In relation to the issue of disability, a number of these demands and struggles were of particular note. These include a demand for the development of a national system of social security, and in particular, for comprehensive disability insurance; a demand for the reform and extension of the wholly inadequate health care system; and a demand for the liberation of psychiatry from the tight grip of the tsarist police state, as well as the decriminalization of mental illness. </div>
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Finally, as an addendum of sorts, it is worth exploring briefly the issue of workplace democracy and control as it emerged in the lead up to 1917, and its relevance to certain vital questions pertaining to disability.</div>
</div></div><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2019/04/disability-and-russian-revolution.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-37152445450353905282019-04-01T15:08:00.000-04:002019-04-01T15:09:44.098-04:00Pioneers in the fight for disability rights: The League of the Physically Handicapped<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>This article was originally published in<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/90/pioneers-fight-disability-rights"> ISR #90</a>.</i></span><br>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">IT IS commonly held that the inception of the modern US disability rights movement occurred amidst the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, two major developments figure prominently in this narrative.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first is the rise of the Independent Living Movement in Berkeley, California. This movement was born of the efforts of a group of disabled University of California students. Politicized by the civil rights struggles of the period, they became active on their Berkeley campus and later established the first independent living center in the United States in 1971. The aim of the center, of which hundreds of others would soon spring up across the country, was to create a space where disabled people could exercise control over all aspects of their lives—professional, medical, social, civic—rather than remain marginalized by a paternalistic society constructed around their exclusion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The second major landmark of the new disability rights movement was the formation of the group, Disabled In Action (DIA) in New York City, in 1970. Like the independent living centers, DIA sought autonomy for disabled people, but was more explicitly political and organized confrontational protests against discriminatory laws, attitudes, and institutions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Out of and alongside these two organizations flowed countless springs of disability rights awareness, activism, and organization. This all played a fundamental role in changing the way that society—and most importantly, disabled people themselves—viewed the question of disability. This transformation is best expressed in the articulation of what has come to be known as the social model of disability. In sum, this model explains disability oppression as a phenomenon which limits the self-determination and life opportunities of people with impairments, and which arises primarily from social and political—rather than medical or personal—factors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In other words, it is not the existence of a physical or mental impairment itself which diminishes one’s life, but rather the systemic unemployment, poverty, discrimination, segregation, etc., imposed upon people with impairments by an inaccessible and unaccommodating society. As Judy Heumann, founder of DIA, put it, “Disability only becomes a tragedy for me when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives—job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example. It is not a tragedy to me that I’m living in a wheelchair.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">1</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The disability rights movement of today can trace its immediate lineage—directly or indirectly—to these 1960s-era progenitors. Yet, it is possible to look even further back in US history to the Depression era of the 1930s, to see the very first emergence of a self-conscious movement for disability rights, organized by disabled people themselves, and promoting a view which closely foreshadows that of the social model.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It goes without saying that the Great Depression that began in 1929 had a devastating impact on the lives of all American workers, with official unemployment rates skyrocketing to 25 percent. But for disabled people the economic crisis hit even harder. One study found that 44 percent of deaf workers who had been employed prior to the crash had lost their jobs by 1935. The overall unemployment rate for disabled people was probably upwards of 80 percent, translating into crushing levels of poverty.<sup style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">2</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Finding employment had been extremely difficult for disabled workers even in times of economic prosperity. Industrial capitalism had come to develop a tendency to discard all those whose labor was deemed insufficiently productive or too costly in relation to the amount of profit they could create for an employer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The years leading up to and during the Great Depression saw a veritable explosion in the popularity of eugenicist ideas among the political, medical, and economic elite of the United States. These ideas posited all disabled people as so much worthless refuse to be cast aside in the “survival of the fittest” struggle that was free-market capitalism. As a consequence, millions of disabled people were subjected to forced institutionalization, sterilization, and/or death at the hands of both private and public officials.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet for all its nightmarish features, the 1930s were also marked by a great upsurge in working-class radicalism and resistance against exploitation and oppression. Strikes, occupations, sitdowns, pickets, and demonstrations for jobs, welfare relief, and against evictions, and for many other reasons became commonplace. Millions of workers formed labor unions to protect and extend their rights. Notably, the American Communist Party (CP) also grew during this period into a substantial force on the US left. It ballooned to a membership of approximately eighty thousand, with hundreds of thousands more passing through its ranks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As a consequence of all this turmoil and struggle, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt had begun implementation of its New Deal program in the mid-1930s. A centerpiece of the New Deal was the creation of millions of federal jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), inaugurated in January of 1935.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #383838; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet even the WPA—as important a victory as it was for the working class—proved to be woefully limited in its scope. Among other flaws, state and federal WPA regulations barred disabled jobseekers from enjoying any of the program’s benefits, categorizing such individuals as “unemployable.” WPA advertisements underlined this point by explicitly stating that “only able-bodied American job-seekers” need apply.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #383838; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To make matters worse, two additional pieces of New Deal legislation, following on the heels of the WPA, further codified federal discrimination against disabled people. The Social Security Act of August 1935 specifically defined “disability” as “inability to engage in substantial gainful work,” thus precluding anyone receiving any disability insurance from obtaining employment. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a national minimum wage, exempted workers with disabilities from the law’s coverage, thus giving official sanction to the common practice of employing disabled people in “sheltered workshops” where they were paid a mere pittance for their labor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For one particular group of disabled workers living in New York City, such blatant discrimination on the part of the putatively progressive Roosevelt administration was simply too much to endure passively. On May 29, 1935, six of these individuals presented at the local office of the Emergency Relief Bureau (ERB) and demanded equal access to jobs under the new federal relief program. When told they did not qualify, being “unemployable,” they demanded to speak with the ERB director, Oswald Knauth. When Knauth refused, they began a sit-in right then and there, initiating an indefinite occupation of the ERB office.<sup style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">3</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This particular group of protesters was not yet part of any formal organization, but they had come to know each other through their previous involvement with radical politics and labor activism. Most had been at least peripherally involved in the activities of the CP.</span></div>
<div style="border: 0px; color: #383838; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin-bottom: 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Undoubtedly, this prior experience played a role in giving them the confidence to defy the prevailing bigotries regarding disabled people as social and medical “invalids.” Rather, they situated their struggle and their demands on an explicitly political terrain. They forthrightly referred to themselves as “handicapped” rather than “cripples,” “invalids,” or any of the other then-common derogatory euphemisms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As one participant recalled, “What started it was finding out that jobs were available, that the government was handing out jobs . . . everybody was getting jobs . . . those of us who were militant just refused to accept the fact that we were the only people who were looked upon as not worthy, not capable of work.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">4</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When the second day of the occupation began, the protesters decided to drastically expand the action. They sent one of their numbers over to a nearby rally being held by the CP in Madison Square Garden in order to appeal for help. Immediately, the emissary returned with several dozen reinforcements. Before long, hundreds of people were picketing outside the ERB office, with thousands more looking on. By the day’s end, the action had drawn the support of members of the local Writer’s Union, the Young Communists of America, and the Unemployment Council. It had also drawn the attention of various media outlets, which reported on the protest in a predictably sensationalized manner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Over the next several days, Knauth employed a number of tactics designed to break the occupiers’ resolve. Yet the sit-in persisted. A steady group of picketers—disabled and nondisabled—held constant vigil outside. Though the number of picketers slowly dwindled as the days wore on, newcomers continuously showed up to lend their efforts to the fight. This included visits from disabled people throughout the region who had read reports of the action and identified with it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">On the sixth day of the occupation, Knauth finally conceded to a meeting with the group at which point he was informed of their demands. First, they wanted fifty jobs to be immediately given to supporters of their as-of-yet unnamed organization, followed by ten more jobs every week following. Second, the jobs must be at or above minimum wage. Finally, the jobs must not be in segregated “sheltered workshops” or as part of a charity, but rather in an integrated setting with nondisabled workers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Knauth peremptorily stated that he could not acquiesce and that, furthermore, his policies were merely in compliance with those of the federal government. At this point, one of the occupiers, a man named Hyman Abramowitz, angrily retorted, “That’s not a good enough answer. We are all handicapped and are being discriminated against.” He then proceeded to indict the Roosevelt administration. He accused Roosevelt of “trying to fix things so that no physically handicapped person can get a job, so that all of us will have to go on home relief. . . . We don’t want charity. We want jobs.”<sup style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">5</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Though few would have been aware of it at the time, the irony was that Roosevelt himself was also disabled. In fact, he was impaired in much the same way as Abramowitz—paralyzed from the waist down due to a childhood bout of polio. The only difference between these two men, one from the working class and one from the ruling class, was that Roosevelt and his presidential entourage were able to develop an elaborate system that kept his impairment all but completely hidden from the public. Thus, while Abramowitz fought for the right of all disabled people to obtain jobs, Roosevelt used the power of his position to deny this right to millions of other disabled people less fortunate than himself.<sup style="border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">6</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nine days after the occupation had begun, the police were finally called in to quell the protest. After roughing up the defiant occupiers and their supporters outside, they dragged away eleven protesters in handcuffs.</span><br>
</div></div><a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2019/04/pioneers-in-fight-for-disability-rights.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-52701476448644574482017-03-09T13:40:00.000-05:002017-03-09T13:40:30.778-05:00Helen Keller on the fight for women's liberation and socialism (1912) If we women are to learn the fundamental things in life, we must
educate ourselves and one another. For instance, why in this land of
great wealth is there great poverty? Any intelligent young woman like
those who write to me, eager to help the sightless or any other
unfortunate class, can learn why such important work as supplying food,
clothing, and shelter is ill-rewarded, why children toil in the mills
while thousands of men cannot get work, why women who do nothing have
thousands of dollars a year to spend ... There is an economic cause for
these things.<br />
<br />
It is for the American woman to know why millions
are shut out from the full benefits of such education, art, and science
as the race has thus far achieved ... We must know why 150 of our
sisters were killed in New York in a shirt-waist factory fire the other
day, and nobody to blame ... why our fathers, brothers, and husbands are
killed in mines and railroads.<br />
<br />
I am surprised to find that many
champions of woman, upholders of 'advanced ideas,' exalt the
intelligence of the so-called cultivated woman. The woman who works for a
dollar a day has as much right as any other human being to say what the
conditions of her work should be. It is just this, I am sorry to find,
which educated women do not always understand.<br />
<br />
Throughout the
ages, man has drilled woman in morals, that she might not deceive him;
he taught her obedience, that she might be his slave. He made her laws,
constituted himself judge, jury, jailer, and executioner. He had entire
charge of her prisons and convents, or her house, her church, and her
person. He burnt her, tortured her, gave her to wild beasts and cast her
forth to be a pariah ... Through all times he granted her the privilege
-- of bearing his children.<br />
<br />
A woman opens a can of food which
is adulterated with worthless or dangerous stuff. In a distant city a
man is building himself a palace with the profits of many such cans. If a
petty thief should break into her pantry, and she should fight him
tooth and nail, she would be applauded for her spirit and bravery; but
when a millionaire manufacturer a thousand miles away robs her by the
peaceful methods of commerce, she has nothing to say, because she does
not understand business, and politics is not for her to meddle in.<br />
<br />
In the hospital wards where the nurse [works], there are men
unnecessarily laid low by the accidents of trade ... from the
battlefields of industry come the wounded, from the shambles of poverty
come the deformed. What enemy has stricken them? How much of all this
disease and misery is preventable? Shall the wise nurse stand by the bed
of pain and ask no questions about the social causes of ill health?<br />
<br />
It has been found that you must feed your child before you can teach
it, and that the poor home defeats the best schoolroom. Behind the free
school we must have a free people. What profits it to provide costly
school buildings for anemic, under-fed children, to pass compulsory
education laws and not secure a livelihood for the families whose
children must obey them? What is the common sense of free text-books
without wholesome food and proper clothing?<br />
<br />
Countless mothers of
men have no place fit to be born in, to bear others in, to die in.
Packed in tenements forgot of light, unheeded and slighted, starved of
eye and ear and heart, they wear out their dull existence in monotonous
toil -- all for a crust of bread! They strive and labor, sweat and
produce; they subject their bodies and soul to every risk, lest their
children die for want of food ... [all this] has but served to herd them
in masses under the control of a growing industrial despotism.<br />
<br />
Many young women full of devotion and good-will have been engaged in
superficial charities. They have tried to feed the hungry without
knowing the cause of poverty. They have tried to minister to the sick
wihout understanding the cause of disease. They have tried to raise up
fallen sisters without knowing the brutal arm of necessity that struck
them down. We attempt social reforms where we need social
transformations.<br />
<br />
The greatest change is coming that has ever
come in the history of the world. Order is evolving out of the chaos
that followed the breaking up of the old system in which each household
lived after its own manner. By using the physical forces of the universe
men have replaced the slow hand-processes with the swift power of
machines. If women demand it, a fair share of the machine-products will
go to them and their families ... They will no more give their best
years to keep bright and fair the homes of others while their own are
neglected. They will no more consume all their time, strength, and
mental capacity in bringing up the rosy, laughing children of others
while their own sweet children grow up pitiful and stunted.... We know
that there is plenty of room in the world and plenty of raw material in
it for us all to be born right, to be brought up right, to work right,
and to die right.<br />
<br />
We shall not see the end of capitalism and the
triumph of democracy until men and women work together in the solving
of their political, social, and economic problems. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">[The above is excerpted from two articles written by Helen Keller: "The Modern Woman," <i>Metropolitan Magazine</i>, 1912, and "Why Men Need Women Suffrage," <i>New York Call</i>, 1913.]</span></span><br />
Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-4666508069427293992016-08-11T14:31:00.001-04:002016-08-11T14:31:38.796-04:00"Equal pay for equal work" | Gender, race, and class<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
issue of gender-based inequality in pay was a prominent theme at this year’s
Democratic National Convention. Numerous speakers called for “equal pay for
equal work” (</span><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/07/25/elizabeth_warren_at_dnc_when_we_turn_on_each_other_we_cant_unite_to_fight_back_against_a_rigged_system.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/07/25/elizabeth_warren_at_dnc_when_we_turn_on_each_other_we_cant_unite_to_fight_back_against_a_rigged_system.html</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">),
and the final Democratic Party platform ratified by the Convention stated, “We
will fight to secure equal pay for women” (</span><a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=117717"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=117717</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Here
in Massachusetts, pay equality has even taken a big step forward at the
legislative level. On August 1, the Republican Governor, Charlie Baker, signed
into law a bill requiring that “men and women be paid equally for comparable
work” (</span><a href="http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/08/01/massachusetts-equal-pay-comparable-work-baker-bill/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/08/01/massachusetts-equal-pay-comparable-work-baker-bill/</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All
of this is of course an incredibly welcome development. Socialists have
historically been and should continue to be involved in the fight against
gender discrimination and inequality in wages in all sectors of the economy.
Sexist inequality is unjust and in fact damaging to the interests of all
working class people.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">However,
an anti-capitalist and intersectional approach to gender pay inequality
requires ultimately taking the question a few additional steps further.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For
instance, while the often-cited statistic -- that women in the US earn
approximately 78% of what men earn -- is certainly outrageous, it is also the
case that both Black men and women, and both Hispanic men and women, earn less
than both White men <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> women (</span><a href="http://www.aauw.org/2015/07/21/black-women-pay-gap/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://www.aauw.org/2015/07/21/black-women-pay-gap/</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Black
men earn 75%, and Black women earn 64%, of what White men earn; while Hispanic
men earn 86%, and Hispanic women earn 69%, of what White women earn (</span><a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882775.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882775.html</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Moreover,
it is ultimately necessary to talk about wage inequality as a function of class
inequality. While winning an equivalent $10/hr wage for both men and women
working full time at Wal-Mart is an important first step, it is simply
insufficient for the conversation to end there. We also have to talk about the
fact that the men and women working for $10/hr at Wal-Mart earn less than 1% of
what top Wal-Mart executives earn (</span><a href="http://www1.salary.com/Rosalind-G-Brewer-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-for-Wal-Mart-Stores-Inc.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://www1.salary.com/Rosalind-G-Brewer-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Options-for-Wal-Mart-Stores-Inc.html</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">As
socialists, our end goal is not simply to secure an equivalent rate by which
the labor of both the men and women in a given workplace or industry is
exploited by their employer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We
should therefore strive to bring to the fore the fact that the “work” of all
members of the working class is systematically undervalued against that of the
upper and ruling class within the context of capitalist society.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For instance, the current female President of
Harvard University, who makes close to $1 million a year, exerts the same (if
not less) magnitude of labor in a given year as the largely-female clerical
workforce at Harvard who earn an average of 5% of what the President makes (</span><a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/5/16/administrator-salaries-990-2012/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/5/16/administrator-salaries-990-2012/</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Or
take the single richest individual in Massachusetts (who happens to be a woman),
Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments, who has a net worth of $14
billion (</span><a href="http://www.masslive.com/business-news/index.ssf/2016/05/how_much_is_the_wealthiest_person_in_mas.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://www.masslive.com/business-news/index.ssf/2016/05/how_much_is_the_wealthiest_person_in_mas.html</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">).
Abigail inherited control of the financial corporate giant from her grandfather.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now,
if one wants to truly talk about “equal pay for comparable work,” there is no
way that Abigail has done a comparable magnitude of work as, say, a male <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or</i> female born into poverty who has had
to work their entire life in order to survive and today has a (median) net
worth of $45,000 (</span><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class-wealth/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class-wealth/</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">);
in other words, 0.000003% of Abigail’s net worth.</span></div>
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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-->Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-62626060708728965102015-05-06T09:24:00.002-04:002015-05-06T09:31:45.699-04:00Helen Keller on the injustice of high-stakes standardized testing in schoolsEducator, activist, and author Jesse Hagopian <a href="http://iamaneducator.com/2015/05/05/resistance-to-high-stakes-tests-serves-the-cause-of-equity-in-education-a-reply-to-we-oppose-anti-testing-efforts/">writes recently on his blog</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Twelve national civil rights organizations <a href="http://www.civilrights.org/press/2015/anti-testing-efforts.html">released a statement</a>
today in opposition to parents and students who opt out of high-stakes
standardized testing–what has now become a truly mass direct action
campaign against the multi-billion dollar testing industry. I believe
that their statement titled, “We Oppose Anti-Testing Efforts,” misses
the key role that standardized testing has played throughout American
history in reproducing institutional racism and inequality. I wrote the
below statement, with the aid of the board of the <a href="http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/2015/05/resistance-to-high-stakes-tests-serves-the-cause-of-equity-in-education/" target="_blank">Network for Public Education</a>,
to outline the racist history of standardized testing and to highlight
leadership from people of color in the movement against high-stakes
testing. I sincerely hope for a response from the civil rights
organizations who authored the statement and I hope that this dialogue
leads to deeper discussion about how to make Black Lives Matter in our
school system and how to remake American public education on foundation
of social justice. </blockquote>
I, too, think it is utterly despicable that these prominent civil rights groups --
including the NAACP, La Raza, National Disability Rights Network,
American Association of University Women -- would pen an open letter
condemning the growing movement of marginalized students, teachers, and
parents against high-stakes testing and corporate education deform.
These civil rights groups' ties to the Democratic party establishment
and corporate financial donors (who they depend upon to keep their<span class="text_exposed_show">
NGO machinery running), means that they side with billionaire
"limousine liberal" philanthropists intent on further privatizing and
stratifying the education system, rather than with those they purport to
represent who are fighting back precisely for genuine education justice
and equality. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">Ultimately, it is a question of class and social
position. Do these groups use the mantle of civil rights in order to
serve the elites who run this racist and oppressive system premised upon
capitalist-apartheid education, or do they stand with the truly oppressed and
defrauded in order to fight against a vision of education "reform"
premised upon the further erosion of the gains of the 1960s mass civil
rights movements?</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">In this vein, I offer the words of the famous Helen Keller on the subject, herself a life-long educator, civil rights activist, and author:<br /></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O4GYBxQ0pGw/VUoU6NNFdcI/AAAAAAAAMIo/jKUv0zvT45w/s1600/2015-05-05-1430797495-1246133-HelenKeller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O4GYBxQ0pGw/VUoU6NNFdcI/AAAAAAAAMIo/jKUv0zvT45w/s1600/2015-05-05-1430797495-1246133-HelenKeller.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">Regularly twice a year the children who come to visit me
are disturbed and upset by the Damocles sword of school examinations. These
horrid occasions hang over their heads, a threat and a terror, for weeks in
advance, and even though I cannot see the little faces of my visitors nor hear
their voices, I feel tenseness and perturbation in the very air.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">Whenever these times come, I cannot help but recall the
attitude of Miss Sullivan towards strictly conventional modes of education when
she came to teach the little groping, helpless creature that was the Helen Keller of long ago.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">She found me anything but amenable to discipline at first,
but she adapted herself to me in many ways, instead of forcing me to adapt
myself to her. Shortly after beginning a more lenient regime, she wrote to a
friend: </span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"Since I have abandoned the idea of regular lessons, I find that
Helen learns much faster. I am convinced that the time spent by the
teacher in digging out of the child what she has put into him, for the
sake of satisfying herself that it has taken root, is so much time thrown away.
It's much better, I think, to assume that the child is doing his part, and that
the seed you have sown will bear fruit in due time ... "</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">Of course, I realize that the methods which can be
successfully followed with one child offer obstacles when they are large groups
of children to be dealt with. I realize that public school education must be
standardized for the quantity production of graduates, just as any other
process of quantity production must be standardized for the most efficient results.
And yet -- it seems to me that the trend of modern education and thought should
be all away from the medieval inquisitorial methods of formal twice-a-year
examinations. On the nervous, high-strung, sensitive students they work cruelty
and injustice. A child may be a splendid student with a real enthusiasm and
devotion to learning and yet find himself so paralyzed with nervous
apprehension, as examination time draws near, that every thought flees and the
work of months comes to naught.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">I believe the time will come when teachers will be so
attuned to the responsiveness of every individual in class work that that
responsiveness, that eagerness to learn, will be made the basis for judgement
as to whether or not the child is fit to proceed to the assimilation of more or
less work. Informal tests, perhaps, there must be, but the looming, giant bear
of the twice-a-year examinations -- surely the youngsters could be spared of
that.</span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Many teachers, I believe, given the opportunity, would say
with Miss Sullivan, so wise even in her youthful days of teaching the
seven-year-old Helen: "The time spent by the teacher in digging
out of the child what she has put into him, for the sake of satisfying
herself that it has taken root, is so much time thrown away."
</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span class="text_exposed_show">(</span><span class="text_exposed_show"></span>Keller, Helen. “EXAMS.” <i>Boston Daily
Globe</i> 23 June 1926: A30).</b></span></blockquote>
</div>
<span class="text_exposed_show"></span>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-6769037045627441422015-03-30T16:30:00.000-04:002015-03-30T16:34:33.413-04:00Socialism & Disability: The politics of Helen KellerBy Keith Rosenthal<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><b>This article was originally published at <a href="http://isreview.org/issue/96/politics-helen-keller">International Socialist Review</a>. </b></i></span><br>
<br>
Helen Keller is one of the most widely recognized figures in US history that people actually know very little about. That she was a serious political thinker who made important contributions in the fields of socialist theory and practice, or that she was a pioneer in pointing the way toward a Marxist understanding of disability oppression and liberation—this reality has been overlooked and censored. The mythological Helen Keller that we are familiar with has aptly been described as a sort of “plaster saint;” a hollow, empty vessel who is little more than an apolitical symbol for perseverance and personal triumph.<sup>1</sup><br>
<br>
This is the story that most of us are familiar with: A young Helen Keller contracted an illness that left her blind and deaf; she immediately reverted to the state of a wild animal, as depicted in the popular movie <i>The Miracle Worker</i>; she remained in this state virtually unchanged until she was rescued by her teacher Anne Sullivan, who “miraculously” introduced her to the world of language. Then time passed, and Helen Keller died eighty years later: End of story.<br>
<br>
The image of Helen Keller as a gilded, eternal child is reinforced at the highest levels of US society. The statue of Helen Keller erected inside the US Capitol building in 2009, which replaced that of a Confederate Army officer, depicts Keller as a seven-year-old child kneeling at a water pump. Neither the statue itself nor its inscription provides any inkling that the sixty-plus years of Keller’s adult life were of any particular political import. <br>
<br>
When the story of Helen Keller is taught in schools today, it is frequently used to convey a number of anodyne “moral lessons” or messages: There is no personal obstacle that cannot be overcome through pluck and hard work; whatever problems one thinks they have pale in comparison to those of Helen Keller; and perhaps the most insidious of such messages, the one aimed primarily at people with disabilities themselves, is that the task of becoming a full member of society rests upon one’s individual efforts to overcome a given impairment and has nothing to do with structural oppression or inequality.<br>
<br>
Ironically, this construction of the iconic, or mythological, Helen Keller has resulted in numerous essays and books written by individuals with disabilities who recount growing up feeling deeply resentful of her. They saw Keller as an impossibly perfect individual who personally overcame all limitations in order to become a world-famous figure—someone who pulled herself up by her bootstraps, so to speak, and did so with a polite smile.<sup>2</sup> In reality, such a narrative starkly contradicts the experiences of the vast majority of people with disabilities, then and now, who endure incredibly high rates of poverty, homelessness, discrimination, police brutality, and ostracism.<br>
<br>
<b>Distortions of Helen Keller, then and now</b><br>
<br>
Keller fought her entire life against such bigoted notions and distortions of her life story. She constantly combated attempts to render her a hollow icon. Nonetheless, such images regarding Keller and disability continue to be reinforced everywhere. This can be found in primary school curricula, in the vast majority of children’s books on Helen Keller, and in most adult biographies of her. More often than not her radical politics are simply ignored. But even when they are acknowledged, it is usually to discount them.<br>
<br>
One of the most authoritative recent biographies on Keller—written by the noted author Joseph Lash, and commissioned by the prestigious Radcliffe College and the American Foundation for the Blind—includes the following explanation of Keller’s involvement with socialist politics: “She needed to see the world as a contest between Good and Evil. Her imagination—cut off by blindness and deafness from many of the signals that brute experience sends most of us counseling caution, compromise, grayness instead of black and white—lent itself to dichotomies. . . . If she kept some grip on reality, it was because of her Teacher [Anne Sullivan], a woman of practical common sense.”<sup>3</sup><br>
<br>
This assessment, while expressed in milder terms, isn’t far from the accusations Keller regularly faced in her lifetime. Newspaper editors would use her disability as a means to dismiss her politics and to dissuade people from taking her seriously. Her radicalism, conservative writers would aver, was a product of the political “mistakes [which] spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.”<sup>4</sup><br>
<br>
Here is what the <i>Detroit Free Press</i> wrote about her in 1914:<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
As long as Miss Keller appears before the public in the light of a member of society struggling nobly under great handicaps and furnishing by her example inspiration for others who are unfortunately placed, she does a valuable work. But the moment she undertakes to speak <i>ex cathedra</i>, as it were, of all the political and social problems of the day, she receives a consideration out of all proportion to her fund of knowledge and judgment.<br>
<br>
Helen Keller, struggling to point the way to the light for the deaf, dumb and blind is inspiring. Helen Keller preaching socialism; Helen Keller passing on the merits of the copper strike; Helen Keller sneering at the constitution of the United States; Helen Keller under these aspects is pitiful. She is beyond her depth. She speaks with the handicap of limitation which no amount of determination or science can overcome. Her knowledge is, and must be, almost purely theoretical, and unfortunately this world and its problems are both very practical.<sup>5</sup></blockquote>
<br>
What is remarkable, however, is the power and tenacity Keller brought to bear in answering these attacks. She courageously defied any and all attempts to render her a second-class citizen. She would have her say, and woe unto those who would try to silence her.<br>
<br>
<b>The radicalization of Helen Keller</b><br>
<br>
Helen Keller was born in 1880 in Alabama to an upper-class family. Her father had been a slave-owner before the Civil War in which he had served as a commanding Confederate officer. After the war, he became the editor of a major newspaper in Alabama. Keller’s mother hailed from a wealthy and connected New England family.<br>
<br>
When Helen Keller was two years old she became permanently deaf and blind as the result of an unknown illness. It was not until she was seven years old that she began her formal education under Anne Sullivan, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, who had been hired by the Kellers as a live-in tutor. <br>
<br>
Keller’s education proceeded rapidly under Sullivan’s guidance, and her development soon gained attention from increasingly far-flung quarters. When she enrolled in a college preparatory school with seeing and hearing girls in 1896, newspapers around the country—and even the world—ran articles detailing her course loads, semester grades, and attendance records. Her every move became the subject of intense scrutiny and gossip. By the time she had graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe College in 1904, Keller had become something of a global celebrity.<br>
<br>
Then, in 1908, Helen Keller took the seemingly unlikely step of joining the American Socialist Party (SP). She cites two major factors that led her to this: First, her widespread readings on society and philosophy, which had ultimately led her to the works of Karl Marx as well as those of contemporary socialists, such as H. G. Wells, William Morris, and Eugene Debs; and second, her growing interest in studying the specific conditions of people with disabilities in the United States, which led her to draw conclusions about society that dovetailed with the former.<br>
<br>
She noticed that the leading causes of disability in the United States were largely attributable to industrial and workplace accidents and diseases, frequently caused by an employer’s greed and reluctance to prioritize workers’ safety lest it diminish profits. She found that other social factors contributed, too, such as the prevalence of poverty, unequal access to medicine, overcrowded and unsanitary slums, and an officially imposed societal ignorance regarding matters of reproductive and sexual health.<br>
<br>
She discovered that, once disabled, such individuals constituted a class who “as a rule are poor,” cast aside and forgotten.<sup>6</sup> They were thrown into institutions; mired in poverty and unemployment; cut off from educational opportunities; and segregated and marginalized at every turn. There was not a single census in any state or city of the country that even kept track of the numbers and needs of the disabled population. They simply did not exist as far as the powers-that-be were concerned.<br>
<br>
“Step by step,” Keller recounted in 1912, “my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world.” <br>
<br>
<blockquote>
And what a world it is! How different from the world of my beliefs! I must face unflinchingly a world of facts—a world of misery, degradation, blindness, sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself. How to reconcile this world of fact with the bright world of my own imagining? My darkness had been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.<sup>7</sup><br>
<br>
“For a time I was depressed,” she told the <i>New York Times</i> in 1916, “but little by little my confidence came back and I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that humanity has advanced so far in spite of them. And now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts!”<sup>8</sup></blockquote>
<br>
In short, she had come to conclude that “our worst foes are ignorance, poverty, and the unconscious cruelty of our commercial society. These are the causes of blindness; these are the enemies which destroy the sight of children and workmen and undermine the health of mankind.”<sup>9</sup><br>
<br>
One final factor that attended her decision to publicly commit to the socialist movement is less explicitly political but nonetheless important. In 1908, she wrote a sort of existential treatise titled <i>The World I Live In</i>. Keller felt that if she were to be taken seriously by society at large in the assertion of her right as a human being to discuss the affairs of that society, she would have to mount a fundamental intellectual self-defense against her many detractors. <br>
<br>
<blockquote>
[Scientific men] think that I can know very little about objects even a few feet beyond the reach of my arms. Everything outside of myself, according to them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, cities, the ocean, even the house I live in are but fairy fabrications, misty unrealities.<br>
<br>
Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas. My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical color and sound; but without color and sound it throbs with life. Every object is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity.<br>
<br>
It is not for me to say whether we see best with the hand or the eye. I only know that the world I see with my fingers is alive, ruddy, and satisfying. . . . The colors that glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not correspond exactly with those you delight in; but they are none the less color to me. The sun does not shine for my physical eyes, nor does the lightning flash, nor do the trees turn green in the spring; but they have not therefore ceased to exist, any more than the landscape is annihilated when you turn your back on it.</blockquote>
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In sum, she asserted, “Between my experience and the experience of others there is no gulf of mute space which I may not bridge.”<sup>10</sup><br>
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<a href="https://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2015/03/socialism-disability-politics-of.html#more">CONTINUED »</a>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4950630583670986174.post-57828069728079167652015-03-16T19:14:00.000-04:002015-03-16T19:21:06.862-04:00Mental illness and violenceJust as an FYI - <br />
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It is inaccurate to draw a correlation between mental illness and violence, or to explain an act of violence by alluding to a perpetrator's mental, psychological, or emotional state:<br />
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<i>"Public opinion surveys suggest that many people think mental illness and violence go hand in hand. A 2006 national survey found, for example, that 60% of Americans thought that people with schizophrenia were likely to act violently toward someone else, while 32% thought that people with major depression were likely to do so." [http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/mental-illness-and-violence]</i><br />
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In actual fact: <br />
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<i>"The vast majority of people with mental health problems are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Most people with mental illness are not violent and only 3%-5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population. You probably know someone with a mental health problem and don't even realize it, because every year ... one in five American adults experience a mental health issue; one in 10 young people experience a period of major depression; and one in 20 Americans lived with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression" [http://www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/myths-facts/]</i><br />
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Moreover:<br />
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<i>"People with psychiatric disabilities are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crime (Appleby, et al., 2001). People with severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or psychosis, are 2 ½ times more likely to be attacked, raped or mugged than the general population (Hiday, et al.,1999)." [http://depts.washington.edu/mhreport/facts_violence.php]</i><br />
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All of this has a particular bearing on people of color, poor people, and those generally in the lower socio-economic class, all of whom tend to experience much higher rates of mental health problems than the rest of the population:<br />
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<i>"That a relationship exists between poverty and mental illness was first established in the landmark New Haven study conducted by Hollingshead and Redlich (10), whose findings were published in 1958. Their principal conclusion was that there is a significant relationship between social class (SES or socio-economic status) and mental illness as regards the type and severity of the illness suffered as well as the type and quality of the treatment provided. Specifically, persons who were members of the lowest social stratum were the poorest, had a higher incidence of presumed serious mental illness and received the least adequate forms of treatment if they received any treatment at all." [http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/03/poverty-mental-illness-you-cant-have-one-without-the-other/]</i><br />
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Several further unfortunate results of the marginalization and stigmatization of people with mental illnesses is that they face very high rates of:<br />
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a) homelessness <br />
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<i>"More than 124,000 – or one-fifth – of the 610,000 homeless people across the USA suffer from a severe mental illness, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They're gripped by schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression — all manageable with the right medication and counseling but debilitating if left untreated." [http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/27/mental-health-homeless-series/14255283/]</i><br />
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b) unemployment<br />
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<i>"Most adults with mental illness want to work, and six in 10 can succeed with the right supports, according to the report. Yet only 1.7 percent received supported employment services in 2012. Just 17.8 percent of people receiving public mental health services were employed in 2012 – down from 23 percent in 2003. That’s an unemployment rate of more than 80 percent. [http://portside.org/2014-07-13/adults-serious-mental-illnesses-face-80-unemployment#sthash.Ui9Y6lVH.dpuf]</i><br />
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c) incarceration<br />
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<i>" ... Kathryn Wooten of Los Angeles called 911 for help when her 23-year-old son Terrence suffered a mental breakdown in October 2011. ''The police came and I thought they were going to take him to the hospital but he wind up in county jail,'' said Wooten. Police say with few mental health beds available at state facilities, they have no choice but to leave the fate of people like Terrence Wooten to the criminal justice system.... The Department of Justice says up to 64 percent of inmates at local jails have some mental health problems. Using that statistic, the two largest jails in the United States, Cook County and LA County would become two of the largest mental institutions in the country - de facto." [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/patients-as-prisoners-jails-new-mental-health-institutions/]</i><br />
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<i>" ... In a 2006 Special Report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimated that 705,600 mentally ill adults were incarcerated in state prisons, 78,800 in federal prisons and 479,900 in local jails. In addition, research suggests that "people with mental illnesses are overrepresented in probation and parole populations at estimated rates ranging from two to four times the general population" (Prins and Draper, 2009)." [http://nicic.gov/mentalillness]</i>Keith Rosenthalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00409646652027144978noreply@blogger.com0