Some good posts on anarchism/libertarianism that i have found recently:
Polycentric Order: Resolving Anarchist Conflict
Conflict between the socialist oriented and market oriented camps within anarchism can get very tedious. Many anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists appear to emphatically claim that market anarchism isn't truly anarchism, that opposition to private property and capitalism is a requirement for one to be an anarchist, conflate currently existing political and economic systems with a free market and sometimes even defend welfare states as if take the edges off of the alleged evils of capitalism. Some anarcho-capitalists appear to get baited into functioning as vulgar libertarians or they generally associate themselves too closely with contemporary conservatism and therefore end up defending currently existing corporatism as if it is the result of a free market, claim that all forms of socialism are statist political systems, defend paleoconservative positions on issues such as immigration and romantisize feudalism and colonial America...
I am really pleased (coming more from the anarcho-communist side myself) that someone coming from the "market anarchist" side of things has said "it is of course true that non-state institutions may sometimes qualify as examples of rulership."
Ze also makes a good distinction regarding "private property":
Market anarchists tend to define private property in terms that should actually appeal to a socialist, which is that legitimate private property is the product of labor - a labor theory of property aquisition. How can a socialist oppose labor when that is supposed to be their forte? If consistant to their principles, the market anarchist does not support all legal private property titles, for they have an independant standard of justice in property aquisition that would delegitimize currently existing conditions. In short, they oppose the currently existing legal construct. The vulgar libertarian, however, does fall into the trap of defending all or some illegitimate portion of currently existing private property titles and buisiness arrangements.
I think there would be a lot less shitty argument going on between "market" and "socialist" anarchists if this was more widely understood. (Of course, part of the problem is people who are really more accurately described as "vulgar libertarians" calling themselves "market anarchists".)
Perpetual use is an absurd criteria for ownership, for it would imply that as soon as one parks their car somewhere then it is no longer theirs and therefore someone else may expropriate the car for themselves. In short, it would justify theft.
I have to disagree somewhat with this bit, as i don't think any anarcho-communist believes in a standard of perpetual use. (This is similar to Mike's comment on my last post, where he says "Carried to its extreme conclusion, it seems we would have to admit that the hotel guest gains indefinite title to his room immediately upon check-in, and should never be evicted even if he doesn't pay the lodging fee.") I think nearly everyone would recognise that a hotel is something different from a home that one permanently lives in, and that "perpetual use" is unrealistic - but i think that a condition of general use, as brought up a couple of paragraphs down, is realistic as a criterion for rightful ownership: a house that someone lives in for 10 months out of a year is, IMO, rightfully owned by a person, but a house that someone lives in 4 months of the year isn't. (I'm reminded of the ridiculous argument often used against squatters that "they could move into your house while you are on holiday".) Similarly, if someone "owns" a whole fleet of cars that they never use, but just keep in their front garden as a symbol of how ostentatiously rich they are, then i think "stealing" one would be fully justified, if you really needed a car to get somewhere, and couldn't afford one - but stealing a car that was just parked outside someone's house, but that was their only car and they used it every day to take the kids to school definitely wouldn't be justified...
An interesting cunundrum to present a social anarchist with is, "I want to be a wage slave, I want to work for a boss, so what do you do if I truly do choose to enter into a contractual relationship with someone for wages in exchange for my labor? Why can't I rent out the products of my labor if I sincerely want to? What if I want to opt out of the worker's collective and look for an employer?". If an individual is truly autonamous, then noone may legitimately force them out of this personal association or force them to remain in a particular association, whether it is a single individual or "the majority" or "community".
I think i still have to think a bit more about this, but i think i have to agree with it - largely, in fact, because of how much it reminds me of the radfem-versus-sex-pos arguments about BDSM relationships - which, while some of which are (arguably) IMO problematic in terms of power relations, i would unhesitatingly defend the right of people to engage in (as long as, it should go without saying, everyone is consenting). I have to take the same stance on non-sexual interpersonal relationships as i do on sexual ones...
Anarcho at Anarchist Writers: Quoting Marxo-capitalists out of context?
I haven't read Rothbard, but this is still a nice deconstruction of the "anarcho-capitalist" position.
"Even worse, the possibility that private property can result in worse violations of individual freedom (at least of workers) than the state of its citizens was implicitly acknowledged by Rothbard. He uses as a hypothetical example a country whose King is threatened by a rising “libertarian” movement. The King responses by “employ[ing] a cunning stratagem,” namely he “proclaims his government to be dissolved, but just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of his kingdom to the ‘ownership’ of himself and his relatives.” Rather than taxes, his subjects now pay rent and he can “regulate to regulate the lives of all the people who presume to live on” his property as he sees fit."
Shagya Blog: More On Those Pesky Social Services
This post pretty much sums up my ambiguous feelings on the "welfare state":
The reason why social anarchists assert the need for positive freedoms is that in the real world we can't wait around until the perfect stateless – and therefore classless - society comes into being. In the real world people have needs and these must be met, if they cannot be not through mutual aid due through state-enforced economic inequality, then through government. To destroy social welfare – as well as protective legislation like the 8 hour day, or vacation time – and leave the rest of the state – and therefore class society with all its vast inequalities intact is to condemn the vast majority of the people to Third World misery.
(although i would query the bit about "protective legislation"... but i think that's for another post...)
It also needs to be pointed out that even in an anarchist society a significant minority of the population will have to be subsidized or supported in some manner think of the aged, sick, those with mental health problems etc. In a free society – and therefore one without the present vast inequality of wealth, and the resulting culture of narcissism and sociopathology – this could be done by mutual aid. In the meantime, and I have been discussing this for years, we can work to democratize, mutualize (de-state) existing social welfare measures. For example, Unemployment insurance should be run not by the state but be set up as a cooperative along the lines of a credit union. All workers become members of this coop and elect a board of directors for their city or region. Hospitals should be taken back by the community and run by elected boards representing the user population and the work force etc.
This is really heartening to read as well - and reminds me that i really, really need to fully write up my thoughts on the employer/employee relationship inherent in the current independent living movement model of personal assistance (which i am now actually living on the PA side... more on that in future posts), and how that can be squared with an anarchist philosophy... not so sure about the "unemployment insurance" bit, but the idea of democratising hospitals... wow. That would certainly stop shit like this (or this, or this, etc, etc, etc) happening...
And Werner in the comments saying that "vulgar libertarians" "mirror certain Marxist delusions"... hell yes - how many times does it need to be reiterated that the whole equating "socialism" with state authority and equating "liberty" with capitalism thing that both groups do almost as a matter of pseudo-religious dogma is complete bollocks...
Ok, this one is from 2 years ago, and from a blogger who seemingly hasn't posted since December 2006, but it's still very much worth reading, on the same subject:
Lady Aster: libertarianism: the music of a people who will not be slaves again?
(I'm not sure if this is the same Aster who used to comment, but recently stopped due to an argument about abortion rights, on Charles Johnson's Rad Geek blog... if Aster sees this, i'd like to say to her that i always liked and admired what she had to say there...)
I know plenty of people dependent in one way or another on the state. None of them like the system, and most resent its control over and its indifference to their lives. They support the system, tepidly, because they know of no other practical alternative- and because they know the Republicans who represent the 'free market' in their eyes would gladly leave them to die. Some of them take benefits from the system more or less for granted, true. But this is because because they've given up hope functioning as individuals, and this is turn is usually only because various systems of oppression (statism included) have painted them into a psychic and economic corner.
...
Protest first not wealth transfers but the controls the welfare state enforces on people. Libertarians should rise in anger when government largesse is used to control peoples' lives or serf-farm them out to corporations as 'workfare'. Don't tell the poor that they are lazy if they don't want to work in humiliating jobs at starvation wages- show how our crony capitalist system is at fault for offering them nothing but humiliation and starvation wages. Show how the spirit of liberty is the same spirit which could empower them against everyone who wants to run their lives- whether that be the state, corporate bosses, welfare bureaucrats, criminal gangs, or abusive parents and husbands.
Don't act like the poor are your natural enemies and the rich are your natural friends. Don't act like corporatism, rife with privilege and racism, in equivalent to your ideal. Don't act like the middle class or 'productive citizens' are better than the poor, are your first priority, or retain their positions because of merit or special virtue in a state capitalist world where the real mechanism of a free market has marginal play. Talk to people. Invite them your meetings. Reach out and understand their concerns and show that libertarianism will help them, not how morality shows that they should help you.
...
Extend your notion of liberty to something more than formal noncoercion. When someone speaks of the tyranny of their boss or workplace, don't tell them the relationship is 'voluntary' and thus the tyranny isn't real- tell them instead how statism makes possible social and economic relations that always feel like heirarchy and tyranny. If you don't feel this, maybe you need to learn to rebel against the boss yourslef. And it just might be the reason you don't feel this, and they do, is because you are bribed well for your corporate serfdom and they are bribed poorly. In which case it is your love of freedom for its own sake that has been dampened, and theirs which still flares. In a certain sense a poor person who reaches for the state to fight corporate tyranny deeply resented is more libertarian than the libertarian with perfect theory who meekly submits to the 'just' control of bosses micromanaging their lives.
(I'm not sure that i agree with some of the more market-oriented bits in between those 3 quotes, like the bit about "how life would be if they could start their own businesses", which i think is a bit ambiguous - does it mean start non-hierarchical co-ops, which i would thoroughly approve of, or become entrepreneurs within the capitalist framework, which i wouldn't? - but, if market-oriented libertarians generally followed this post's advice, i certainly wouldn't be anywhere near so frustrated and pissed off with them... and they might have something meaningful to offer the disability rights movement...)
Lady Aster also has a really good post on the same site about sex-positive feminism and libertarianism...
OK, that got to be a bit more than just link-and-quote. Never mind...
Edit to add: apparently, this is my 100th post. Woot. I hadn't thought that it would take me over a year to reach 100 posts, but so it goes... i was interrupted by a lot of stuff. (And it's fucking weird that i've had this blog for over a year... i somehow missed the anniversary of it, too...) Maybe my goal should be to reach 200 by the end of 2008...
Showing posts with label anarchism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anarchism. Show all posts
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
My Libertarian Ethics
I am writing this because I realised it would be relevant to several of the posts I am currently planning to write, and it would make it somewhat easier to write them if, instead of explaining basically the same ethical position in each one, I could just link back to this...
Libertarianism is my most basic and fundamental ethical and political principle - it is what underlies pretty much all my other principles. I am an anti-capitalist, a feminist, a believer in the social model of disability (there needs to be a snappy word for that - social-modellist?), etc., because I am a libertarian, and not vice versa.
Unfortunately, the word “libertarianism”, particularly in English-speaking countries, has been grossly distorted in meaning in its commonest usages - hence my need to explain here what it means to me...
“Libertarianism” has seemingly come to mean a sort of amoral, social-Darwinist style of extreme free-market capitalism, based around a belief that “free trade” (something which I actually believe is an oxymoron, at least when using the word “trade” as it is generally used in an economic context) is the only ethically acceptable way to run an economy. However, this isn't the word's original meaning - according to Wikipedia, the term was coined by the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, although other sources say it was first used by Proudhon himself. At any rate, the original (and still mostly current in Europe) usage of the term as a self-description was by anti-capitalists, and the “default” libertarian position was and is the one which needs a qualifier as “left-libertarian” or “libertarian communist/socialist” in the UK and US.
Libertarianism, as far as I am concerned, means a political philosophy which holds freedom from coercion as its primary value, the value which all other values derive from. Thus, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be a feminist, because all of the key feminist issues, as far as I can tell, revolve around women lacking and deserving the freedom to control their own lives and their own bodies, and fighting for liberation from a restrictive system of patriarchal family and relationship structures and gender roles. Similarly, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be an anti-capitalist, because capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberty - as exchange-value, the most fundamental component of capitalist economics, needs some form of authority to define and regulate it, and the capitalist wage-labour system could not exist without coercion (at least in its negative form of threats, e.g. of poverty for not working). (I will expand on this particular topic in a future post, because it's hugely controversial to say the least, and I think it deserves a post to itself.)
As Wikipedia notes, “Libertarian is an antonym of authoritarian” - i.e., it is not, despite the popular understanding in the English-speaking world, an antonym of “socialist”. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only true socialist is a libertarian, and the only true libertarian is a socialist (which is a pretty good working definition of an anarchist).
(As an aside here, I have become convinced that the disabled people's liberation movement is quite possibly the one movement which holds the key to unifying libertarianism and socialism in such a way as to resolve some of the apparent contradictions in present left-libertarian thought, because it is quite possibly the only movement which is necessarily both libertarian and socialist. This, however, I also intend to expand on in a future post...)
My libertarian ethic basically boils down to this: no person has the right to forcibly prevent any other person from carrying out any action which harms no person other than the person doing it - or, to use a slightly more elegant phrase, “Do as thou wilt, an it harm none”. (OK, I'm not so into the mysticism... well, OK, sometimes...)
One corollary of this is that, as far as I am concerned, no moral judgement is possible of self-regarding actions - what X does to X is no one's business but X's. Of course, it can be convincingly argued that there is no such thing, in reality, as a wholly “self-regarding” action - but, still, I think that, in most everyday situations, the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions is fairly robust and fairly obvious.
Going a bit further, when it comes to other-regarding actions, as far as I am concerned, if all parties in any interaction are fully and freely consenting to that interaction, then no ethical wrong has been done. (Sure, there are plenty of things that 2 or more people can do to each other that I find deeply repellent, but squick does not morality make.) Thus, even one person killing another person might not be morally wrong, because there are situations in which people consent to their own deaths - and I support an inalienable right to suicide, despite the fact that I agree that “we shouldn't be offering assistance with suicide until people can get the assistance they need to get up in the morning”. (if anyone can find me the source of that quote, I'd be very grateful...)
It follows that my definition of “harming someone” isn't necessarily the same as the one generally accepted in mainstream society (and certainly not the same as that held by most medical professional types). As far as I am concerned, “harm” is not defined by material damage to a person, but by antithesis to that person's will – a person is harmed by having something happen to them that they don't want to happen. Thus, while performing bottom surgery on a trans person could certainly be considered “harm” by a purely material definition (a lot of pain, a lot of tissue damage, the loss of organs, a lot of energy needed to recover) – and if the person is transitioning from male to female in a patriarchal society, it will probably do social and economic “harm” as well – it's not harming that person, because it's what that person wants – whereas denying them that surgery emphatically is harming them.
Similarly, while I consider myself to be fundamentally anti-violence, my definition of “violence” isn't necessarily the same as the standard one. I define “violence” as the violation of a person's will, the imposition of something unwanted on a person (whether that something is material harm or anything else), or the prevention of that person from having choice or agency in what happens to hir. This means that consensual BDSM, even if it involves typically “violent” acts such as beatings, isn't violent, whereas, for example, forcing someone to live in a “nursing home”, where they are denied agency over things as basic as what and when they eat, if and when they can leave the house, and even when they can go to the toilet most definitely is.
(I have seen libertarians use different definitions of violence - for instance, while this is an awesome article, its use of the phrase “consensual sexual violence” is, IMO, unfortunate, because according to my definition of “violence” it's an oxymoron... however, I think my use of the word is the only consistent libertarian one which can keep the sense of “violence” being an inherently bad thing...)
(I can't consider myself a pacifist, in the strict sense of that word, because I do believe that, sometimes, a particular act of violence is necessary to prevent greater violence, and I also believe in the legitimacy of self-defence. Strangely enough, it was actually the abortion issue which led me to stop defining myself as a pacifist - when I did consider myself a pacifist (while I was still a Christian, but on my way into anarchism), I had to take an anti-abortion viewpoint, because I believed that - at least after a certain stage - a foetus was a person, and killing it was therefore violence against a person. The argument that it only becomes a person at birth didn't really work for me, because I fail to see a meaningful difference between a baby outside the womb and that same baby a few minutes earlier inside the womb. Realising that violence against a person can be necessary to prevent a greater violence (in this case, forcing the mother to go through pregnancy and labour against her will) resolved my feminism versus anti-violence problem for me...)
One question I have to ask myself is whether, and if so how, my libertarian morality has any connection to my autistic neurology. I believe that, in at least an indirect way, it does. The single defining experience of my undiagnosed autistic childhood, if I have to choose one, would be being treated as if my own beliefs and judgements about myself were false, and that others knew my needs and desires better than I did, meaning that it was appropriate to deny me those desires “for my own good”. Of course, I believe that all, or nearly all, children in Western society experience this – but I experienced it with a particular intensity that is very difficult to verbally describe, particularly to non-autistic people, yet, I have noticed, even with my difficulty in describing it easy for those who have similar experiences to understand.
One of the things that is most noticeable about autistic people is that, due to our differences from the norm in sensory perception, we tend to regard relatively small things (e.g. temperature, light levels, texture of food or of clothing) as crucially important, whereas most neurotypical people would regard them as trivial, as “not worth complaining about”, and certainly not as serious rights violations if (for example in the workplace) we don't get them. This, I think, actually extends more widely, to other areas of life. I have lost count of the number of times I have been outraged to the point of utter horror by instances of denial of autonomy that the vast majority of people would regard as either justifiable or trivial enough to be “not worth worrying about”.
One good example is restrictions placed on people in the name of “health and safety”, which the vast majority of people just seem to accept, without questioning, and even to regard as important examples of human rights being defended (usually in the context of a “right to be safe”). (The concept of a “right to be unsafe” seemingly either never occurs, or seems absurd, to them.) Yet, if one of those restrictions or impositions (e.g., having to wear ear plugs or plastic glasses to work in a factory) is something that is completely intolerable to someone because of autistic sensory issues, although that person would be perfectly capable of doing the job if ze didn't have to wear them, then the ridiculousness of such paternalism (an employer being forced, against both hir own interest and that of the worker, to force a worker to wear something that ze not only doesn't want to, but that would also probably vastly increase hir likelihood of having a dangerous accident due to putting hir in a state of sensory overload) becomes all too obvious to that person. (Yes, I have lost jobs over that exact issue.)
(An equivalent for people with physical impairments would probably be not being allowed to use lifts in an emergency such as a fire – something ostensibly for “safety”, but which leaves people unable to use stairs completely unable to get out of the building unaided in such an emergency...)
A very uncomfortable thing about being against such things is that, usually, it puts me in complete opposition to the vast majority of socialists, and even many anarchists, and the only people who are likely to agree with me are Daily Mail-style conservatives who like to rail against “political correctness gone mad” and extreme “right-libertarians”, whose pro-capitalist positions I find as vile as paternalism...
I think autistic people very often feel the desire to be “left alone”, to be allowed to live our lives as we see fit rather than constantly harassed and questioned in “concerned” terms about why we are doing things that seem counter-intuitive to neurotypical people, far more keenly than the desire to be “supported” (in the sense of active intervention). I think this “naturally” does lead to a libertarian mindset, simply from universalising what we want for ourselves into what we want for all people.
However, I'm nervous of such a viewpoint being attributed totally to “the autistic experience”, both because I've also known autistic people with highly authoritarian or paternalistic views on some aspects of life, and because it reduces belief to an inevitable result of neurology, rather than something arrived at by individual choice or reasoning, which in turn could lead to such beliefs being dismissed as “pathological”, which is IMO one of the worst kinds of illibertarianism of all (personally, I don't think that, even if a belief was an inevitable consequence of neurology, that that would make it “pathological” - but that doesn't mean I don't think the danger of such attribution is real)...
Anyway, the main purpose of this post was to set out the basic ethical “framework” that underlies most of my more specific positions on issues. It probably isn't complete, and I'll probably return to the subject at some point in the future. Debate welcome...
Libertarianism is my most basic and fundamental ethical and political principle - it is what underlies pretty much all my other principles. I am an anti-capitalist, a feminist, a believer in the social model of disability (there needs to be a snappy word for that - social-modellist?), etc., because I am a libertarian, and not vice versa.
Unfortunately, the word “libertarianism”, particularly in English-speaking countries, has been grossly distorted in meaning in its commonest usages - hence my need to explain here what it means to me...
“Libertarianism” has seemingly come to mean a sort of amoral, social-Darwinist style of extreme free-market capitalism, based around a belief that “free trade” (something which I actually believe is an oxymoron, at least when using the word “trade” as it is generally used in an economic context) is the only ethically acceptable way to run an economy. However, this isn't the word's original meaning - according to Wikipedia, the term was coined by the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, although other sources say it was first used by Proudhon himself. At any rate, the original (and still mostly current in Europe) usage of the term as a self-description was by anti-capitalists, and the “default” libertarian position was and is the one which needs a qualifier as “left-libertarian” or “libertarian communist/socialist” in the UK and US.
Libertarianism, as far as I am concerned, means a political philosophy which holds freedom from coercion as its primary value, the value which all other values derive from. Thus, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be a feminist, because all of the key feminist issues, as far as I can tell, revolve around women lacking and deserving the freedom to control their own lives and their own bodies, and fighting for liberation from a restrictive system of patriarchal family and relationship structures and gender roles. Similarly, as far as I am concerned, a libertarian must be an anti-capitalist, because capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with liberty - as exchange-value, the most fundamental component of capitalist economics, needs some form of authority to define and regulate it, and the capitalist wage-labour system could not exist without coercion (at least in its negative form of threats, e.g. of poverty for not working). (I will expand on this particular topic in a future post, because it's hugely controversial to say the least, and I think it deserves a post to itself.)
As Wikipedia notes, “Libertarian is an antonym of authoritarian” - i.e., it is not, despite the popular understanding in the English-speaking world, an antonym of “socialist”. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only true socialist is a libertarian, and the only true libertarian is a socialist (which is a pretty good working definition of an anarchist).
(As an aside here, I have become convinced that the disabled people's liberation movement is quite possibly the one movement which holds the key to unifying libertarianism and socialism in such a way as to resolve some of the apparent contradictions in present left-libertarian thought, because it is quite possibly the only movement which is necessarily both libertarian and socialist. This, however, I also intend to expand on in a future post...)
My libertarian ethic basically boils down to this: no person has the right to forcibly prevent any other person from carrying out any action which harms no person other than the person doing it - or, to use a slightly more elegant phrase, “Do as thou wilt, an it harm none”. (OK, I'm not so into the mysticism... well, OK, sometimes...)
One corollary of this is that, as far as I am concerned, no moral judgement is possible of self-regarding actions - what X does to X is no one's business but X's. Of course, it can be convincingly argued that there is no such thing, in reality, as a wholly “self-regarding” action - but, still, I think that, in most everyday situations, the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions is fairly robust and fairly obvious.
Going a bit further, when it comes to other-regarding actions, as far as I am concerned, if all parties in any interaction are fully and freely consenting to that interaction, then no ethical wrong has been done. (Sure, there are plenty of things that 2 or more people can do to each other that I find deeply repellent, but squick does not morality make.) Thus, even one person killing another person might not be morally wrong, because there are situations in which people consent to their own deaths - and I support an inalienable right to suicide, despite the fact that I agree that “we shouldn't be offering assistance with suicide until people can get the assistance they need to get up in the morning”. (if anyone can find me the source of that quote, I'd be very grateful...)
It follows that my definition of “harming someone” isn't necessarily the same as the one generally accepted in mainstream society (and certainly not the same as that held by most medical professional types). As far as I am concerned, “harm” is not defined by material damage to a person, but by antithesis to that person's will – a person is harmed by having something happen to them that they don't want to happen. Thus, while performing bottom surgery on a trans person could certainly be considered “harm” by a purely material definition (a lot of pain, a lot of tissue damage, the loss of organs, a lot of energy needed to recover) – and if the person is transitioning from male to female in a patriarchal society, it will probably do social and economic “harm” as well – it's not harming that person, because it's what that person wants – whereas denying them that surgery emphatically is harming them.
Similarly, while I consider myself to be fundamentally anti-violence, my definition of “violence” isn't necessarily the same as the standard one. I define “violence” as the violation of a person's will, the imposition of something unwanted on a person (whether that something is material harm or anything else), or the prevention of that person from having choice or agency in what happens to hir. This means that consensual BDSM, even if it involves typically “violent” acts such as beatings, isn't violent, whereas, for example, forcing someone to live in a “nursing home”, where they are denied agency over things as basic as what and when they eat, if and when they can leave the house, and even when they can go to the toilet most definitely is.
(I have seen libertarians use different definitions of violence - for instance, while this is an awesome article, its use of the phrase “consensual sexual violence” is, IMO, unfortunate, because according to my definition of “violence” it's an oxymoron... however, I think my use of the word is the only consistent libertarian one which can keep the sense of “violence” being an inherently bad thing...)
(I can't consider myself a pacifist, in the strict sense of that word, because I do believe that, sometimes, a particular act of violence is necessary to prevent greater violence, and I also believe in the legitimacy of self-defence. Strangely enough, it was actually the abortion issue which led me to stop defining myself as a pacifist - when I did consider myself a pacifist (while I was still a Christian, but on my way into anarchism), I had to take an anti-abortion viewpoint, because I believed that - at least after a certain stage - a foetus was a person, and killing it was therefore violence against a person. The argument that it only becomes a person at birth didn't really work for me, because I fail to see a meaningful difference between a baby outside the womb and that same baby a few minutes earlier inside the womb. Realising that violence against a person can be necessary to prevent a greater violence (in this case, forcing the mother to go through pregnancy and labour against her will) resolved my feminism versus anti-violence problem for me...)
One question I have to ask myself is whether, and if so how, my libertarian morality has any connection to my autistic neurology. I believe that, in at least an indirect way, it does. The single defining experience of my undiagnosed autistic childhood, if I have to choose one, would be being treated as if my own beliefs and judgements about myself were false, and that others knew my needs and desires better than I did, meaning that it was appropriate to deny me those desires “for my own good”. Of course, I believe that all, or nearly all, children in Western society experience this – but I experienced it with a particular intensity that is very difficult to verbally describe, particularly to non-autistic people, yet, I have noticed, even with my difficulty in describing it easy for those who have similar experiences to understand.
One of the things that is most noticeable about autistic people is that, due to our differences from the norm in sensory perception, we tend to regard relatively small things (e.g. temperature, light levels, texture of food or of clothing) as crucially important, whereas most neurotypical people would regard them as trivial, as “not worth complaining about”, and certainly not as serious rights violations if (for example in the workplace) we don't get them. This, I think, actually extends more widely, to other areas of life. I have lost count of the number of times I have been outraged to the point of utter horror by instances of denial of autonomy that the vast majority of people would regard as either justifiable or trivial enough to be “not worth worrying about”.
One good example is restrictions placed on people in the name of “health and safety”, which the vast majority of people just seem to accept, without questioning, and even to regard as important examples of human rights being defended (usually in the context of a “right to be safe”). (The concept of a “right to be unsafe” seemingly either never occurs, or seems absurd, to them.) Yet, if one of those restrictions or impositions (e.g., having to wear ear plugs or plastic glasses to work in a factory) is something that is completely intolerable to someone because of autistic sensory issues, although that person would be perfectly capable of doing the job if ze didn't have to wear them, then the ridiculousness of such paternalism (an employer being forced, against both hir own interest and that of the worker, to force a worker to wear something that ze not only doesn't want to, but that would also probably vastly increase hir likelihood of having a dangerous accident due to putting hir in a state of sensory overload) becomes all too obvious to that person. (Yes, I have lost jobs over that exact issue.)
(An equivalent for people with physical impairments would probably be not being allowed to use lifts in an emergency such as a fire – something ostensibly for “safety”, but which leaves people unable to use stairs completely unable to get out of the building unaided in such an emergency...)
A very uncomfortable thing about being against such things is that, usually, it puts me in complete opposition to the vast majority of socialists, and even many anarchists, and the only people who are likely to agree with me are Daily Mail-style conservatives who like to rail against “political correctness gone mad” and extreme “right-libertarians”, whose pro-capitalist positions I find as vile as paternalism...
I think autistic people very often feel the desire to be “left alone”, to be allowed to live our lives as we see fit rather than constantly harassed and questioned in “concerned” terms about why we are doing things that seem counter-intuitive to neurotypical people, far more keenly than the desire to be “supported” (in the sense of active intervention). I think this “naturally” does lead to a libertarian mindset, simply from universalising what we want for ourselves into what we want for all people.
However, I'm nervous of such a viewpoint being attributed totally to “the autistic experience”, both because I've also known autistic people with highly authoritarian or paternalistic views on some aspects of life, and because it reduces belief to an inevitable result of neurology, rather than something arrived at by individual choice or reasoning, which in turn could lead to such beliefs being dismissed as “pathological”, which is IMO one of the worst kinds of illibertarianism of all (personally, I don't think that, even if a belief was an inevitable consequence of neurology, that that would make it “pathological” - but that doesn't mean I don't think the danger of such attribution is real)...
Anyway, the main purpose of this post was to set out the basic ethical “framework” that underlies most of my more specific positions on issues. It probably isn't complete, and I'll probably return to the subject at some point in the future. Debate welcome...
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Stuff I have found recently
Haven't been feeling up to writing again recently. I have a huge list of posts i'm meaning to write (or maybe topics i'm meaning to write posts on), quite a few of which are ones i've said i would write to other people, which i really do intend to write soon (for a given value of "soon"), but it's going to have to be when i've got a more coherent head on.
I recently created a Livejournal account, for the intended purpose of being able to comment on Livejournal blogs (my actual blog posts are going to stay here), but it's also led me to browse LJ using some of its fairly nice networking functionality. I'm really not a "social networking site" kind of person, and not really inclined to do things like friends-locked posts, but i kind of like the thing LJ shares with Wikipedia of links leading all over the place to random stuff.
One awesome post i found which definitely deserves linking is Pro-Choice, But by thauts, which basically sums up my views and feelings on abortion and being (truly) "pro-choice" pretty exactly.
Also this report from the queer/trans demo in Manchester, and a link to the responses to it on Indymedia, the transphobic so-called-radical so-called feminist ones of which are just fucking depressing, altho i'm gratified to see that there are several people ably countering them...
edit: just seen this bullshit counter-attack from the radfems, claiming that the trans/queer bloc was a "protest against women only spaces"... ffs, i don't know if i can even be bothered to step into this...
further edit: Caz (in the comments) speaks TRUTH:
This paranoid ranting about "the queer lobby" is straight out of the conspiratorial pages of the hetero-supremacist Daily Mail, who use a similar strategy: play minority groups against each other - feminists vs Muslims, African-Caribbean Christians vs LGBT people, working class householders against travellers and so on. They can't stand any of these groups of course, but it suits their purposes to stir. Beware of the deliberate wrecking policies persued by the straight male left also: to some factions, feminism and queer politics have been a source of hostility for nigh-on 40 years now. Trying to pit female and gay activists against each other is an old CP style tactic which can only weaken the feminist and queer movements.
On a more theoretical tip, i came across this really awesome quote, which deconstructs corporate heirarchies while showing up the fundamental contradictions of both statist "socialism" and pro-capitalist "libertarianism" very nicely, here:
"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.
When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12
The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."
-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )
I really don't agree with the rest of the post it's quoted in, but don't really feel knowledgeable enough to jump into the comment thread (although it's really interesting).
Searching for Kevin Carson on Libcom found me this thread, which also... contains pretty fucking interesting ideas, but once again leaves me feeling like i would be flamed or laughed out of the thread if i tried to respond. When it comes to the subcategories of anarchism, i always seem to find myself stuck somewhere between the anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist consensus at Libcom and the individualist, pro-market anarchism of people like Johnny Red or Rad Geek, with each "side" generally regarding me as the other.
I do really need to overcome my fear/inability of stepping into discussions without getting flamed and/or ridiculed by all sides, although every time i think i have, there seems to be another setback (this, for example). Or maybe i just need to stop letting it affect me so much... but then, maybe that line of thinking is internalised oppression from a lifetime of neurotypical people trivialising and ridiculing my serious emotional reactions to... just about everything. I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully some proper posts soon...
I recently created a Livejournal account, for the intended purpose of being able to comment on Livejournal blogs (my actual blog posts are going to stay here), but it's also led me to browse LJ using some of its fairly nice networking functionality. I'm really not a "social networking site" kind of person, and not really inclined to do things like friends-locked posts, but i kind of like the thing LJ shares with Wikipedia of links leading all over the place to random stuff.
One awesome post i found which definitely deserves linking is Pro-Choice, But by thauts, which basically sums up my views and feelings on abortion and being (truly) "pro-choice" pretty exactly.
Also this report from the queer/trans demo in Manchester, and a link to the responses to it on Indymedia, the transphobic so-called-radical so-called feminist ones of which are just fucking depressing, altho i'm gratified to see that there are several people ably countering them...
edit: just seen this bullshit counter-attack from the radfems, claiming that the trans/queer bloc was a "protest against women only spaces"... ffs, i don't know if i can even be bothered to step into this...
further edit: Caz (in the comments) speaks TRUTH:
This paranoid ranting about "the queer lobby" is straight out of the conspiratorial pages of the hetero-supremacist Daily Mail, who use a similar strategy: play minority groups against each other - feminists vs Muslims, African-Caribbean Christians vs LGBT people, working class householders against travellers and so on. They can't stand any of these groups of course, but it suits their purposes to stir. Beware of the deliberate wrecking policies persued by the straight male left also: to some factions, feminism and queer politics have been a source of hostility for nigh-on 40 years now. Trying to pit female and gay activists against each other is an old CP style tactic which can only weaken the feminist and queer movements.
On a more theoretical tip, i came across this really awesome quote, which deconstructs corporate heirarchies while showing up the fundamental contradictions of both statist "socialism" and pro-capitalist "libertarianism" very nicely, here:
"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.
When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12
The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."
-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )
I really don't agree with the rest of the post it's quoted in, but don't really feel knowledgeable enough to jump into the comment thread (although it's really interesting).
Searching for Kevin Carson on Libcom found me this thread, which also... contains pretty fucking interesting ideas, but once again leaves me feeling like i would be flamed or laughed out of the thread if i tried to respond. When it comes to the subcategories of anarchism, i always seem to find myself stuck somewhere between the anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist consensus at Libcom and the individualist, pro-market anarchism of people like Johnny Red or Rad Geek, with each "side" generally regarding me as the other.
I do really need to overcome my fear/inability of stepping into discussions without getting flamed and/or ridiculed by all sides, although every time i think i have, there seems to be another setback (this, for example). Or maybe i just need to stop letting it affect me so much... but then, maybe that line of thinking is internalised oppression from a lifetime of neurotypical people trivialising and ridiculing my serious emotional reactions to... just about everything. I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully some proper posts soon...
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Master's House
Everyone needs to read this, because it is MADE OF AWESOME.
To be honest there isn't really anything else i can say about it that it doesn't say itself, except that it's absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the vaguest interest in feminism, anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism and the intersections between them.
There's an incredibly long and high-quality comment thread as well, which is the equal of any discussion thread on communities such as Barbelith.
The Ring cannot be used against the Dark Lord, because it is from him and of him, and anyone who uses it will end up either serving him or becoming him. The Master's tools cannot be used to demolish the Master's house. Lots of stuff i could spin off that, including a critique of campaigns for the "right to marriage", the relationship between the disability rights movement and certain charities who claim to be "campaigning for equality", government- and corporation-funded "technofixes" for global ecological crises, etc etc, but those will in all probability be the subject of future posts.
I think i need to start a "favourite quotes" and "favourite pieces of writing" page or link list...
Lack of activity recently has been due to a strange form of writer's block, which has been allowing me to start writing lots of posts, but not to finish them. Hopefully i'll manage to turn some of those drafts into publishably comprehensible posts soon-ish...
To be honest there isn't really anything else i can say about it that it doesn't say itself, except that it's absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the vaguest interest in feminism, anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism and the intersections between them.
There's an incredibly long and high-quality comment thread as well, which is the equal of any discussion thread on communities such as Barbelith.
The Ring cannot be used against the Dark Lord, because it is from him and of him, and anyone who uses it will end up either serving him or becoming him. The Master's tools cannot be used to demolish the Master's house. Lots of stuff i could spin off that, including a critique of campaigns for the "right to marriage", the relationship between the disability rights movement and certain charities who claim to be "campaigning for equality", government- and corporation-funded "technofixes" for global ecological crises, etc etc, but those will in all probability be the subject of future posts.
I think i need to start a "favourite quotes" and "favourite pieces of writing" page or link list...
Lack of activity recently has been due to a strange form of writer's block, which has been allowing me to start writing lots of posts, but not to finish them. Hopefully i'll manage to turn some of those drafts into publishably comprehensible posts soon-ish...
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Thing Itself Is The Abuse
The headline of this recent BBC story is "Stroke victim was misdiagnosed as mad". While reading it was pretty scary (especially as temporary aphasia can also occur in autism, and in fact i experienced it (albeit only for a few very brief periods) in my teens), it follows a certain pattern that annoys me: in describing the horrible treatment that Steve Hall experienced when "misdiagnosed", it implicitly suggests that the same treatment would be appropriate and acceptable if he actually was "mad".
It reminded me of this case of a woman who was put in a men's prison because she was percieved to be a transsexual woman (and, therefore, in the eyes of the police who arrested her, "really a man") - and of similar cases i've heard of where gender-ambiguous-looking women have been refused entry to women's toilets or other single-sex spaces where they were thought to be MTF transsexuals. As nodesignation says:
The police don’t question the practice of regularly placing trans women in situations where they will be raped. They only lament that they accidentally subjected a non-trans woman to the violence that they regularly subject trans women to. I would assume that as this story gains traction the emphasis will be about how horrible that a woman who was not trans received such mistreatment. That much is clear already from the fact that there are so few stories on trans women receiving this mistreatment despite being its being a regular occurance.
It's not the inherent wrongness of the treatment that is discussed, it is the supposed "horrible mistake" of subjecting someone to that treatment when that person actually turned out to be not a member of the category of people that it's considered acceptable to do this sort of thing to. No thought is given to why it's supposedly "acceptable" to do it to people who are in that category, despite the fact that, in both cases, the reporting of the incident blatantly begs the question: if it was horrible and inhuman and inacceptable to do this to one person "by mistake", what is it to do it to a whole "Othered" class of people deliberately?
It was, and in some places still is, common for autistic people (particularly those who don't fit certain aspects of the commoner autism stereotypes) to be "misdiagnosed" as "schizophrenic", leading to institutionalisation, forced drugging, etc. Similarly, many non-verbal autistic people (who are/were nonetheless capable of communication through other means) are or were "misdiagnosed" as "mentally retarded", again leading to institutionalisation and other abuses "justified" by the "fact" of their supposed incapacity for rational thought or communication. On autism message boards and other communities, these cases tend to be talked about primarily in terms of the horribleness of the "misdiagnosis", often with comments to the effect that "I/you/ze should never have been treated like that, because I'm/you're/ze's autistic, not schizophrenic/mentally retarded/whatever", or seeing the case similarly to someone who was acquitted of a crime after new evidence proved them not guilty, as if to be found to be autistic rather than some other diagnostic category "after all" is what makes all the difference. Even if the people making these sort of comments don't realise it, they're implying that it would be OK to do all those things to someone who actually is "schizophrenic" or "mentally retarded".
(Let's not, here, get into the fact that i actually don't think anyone is "schizophrenic" or "mentally retarded", as i don't think either of those terms is a useful diagnostic category at all... regardless of the label used, if something is unacceptable to do to anyone, it's unacceptable to do to anyone...)
Similar stuff goes on when people who are cognitively "normal", but who have physical impairments (particularly ones such as CP which affect speech) are harassed or discriminated against because they are "mistakenly" assumed to be mentally impaired, and express outrage at having been categorised as such, often asserting their intelligence or educational qualifications in response - implying that harassment or discrimination would be justified if they really were mentally as well as physically impaired (see, for example, Cal Montgomery's fantastic article "Critic of the Dawn", particularly the beginning of the first and the 8th part of the second section).
In the BBC news report, a "spokesman for the Aphasia Alliance" said: "People with aphasia are often wrongly pigeon-holed as stupid... However aphasia does not affect intelligence..." - clearly motivated by a desire to render the particular category of cognitively disabled people he is employed to "speak for" a "respectable" category, because they're not really mentally impaired - again, as if it would be acceptable to mistreat people if they did have the "beyond-the-pale" category of impairment.
I recently found this quote at Rad Geek People's Daily (it's one of the rotating "frontispiece" quotes). While i was surprised to see it coming from who it comes from (he was one of the political philosophers i had to study in the first year of my Politics with International Studies degree, and i remember him as an arch-conservative and one of the least pleasant writers, both in opinions and in style, i ever had to study), it makes it pretty clear (well, apart from the fact that i actually can't identify 3 things that make up the "all three" in the second paragraph) where these kinds of critiques fall far short of logical or ethical consistency.
To prove, that these Sort of policed Societies are a Violation offered to Nature, and a Constraint upon the human Mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary Measures, and Instruments of Violence which are every where used to support them. Let us take a Review of the Dungeons, Whips, Chains, Racks, Gibbets, with which every Society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of Victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in Pride and Madness, and Millions in an abject Servitude, and Dependence. There was a Time, when I looked with a reverential Awe on these Mysteries of Policy; but Age, Experience, and Philosophy have rent the Veil; and I view this Sanctum Sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastick Admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the Necessity of such a Proceeding in such Institutions; but I must have a very mean Opinion of Institutions where such Proceedings are necessary.
I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper than it is at present to hear Truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its Temper; my Thoughts may become more publick. In the mean time, let them repose in my own Bosom, and in the Bosoms of such Men as are fit to be initiated in the sober Mysteries of Truth and Reason. My Antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in Religion and Politics make sufficient Discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober Man a proper Caution against them all. The Monarchic, Aristocratical, and Popular Partizans have been jointly laying their Axes to the Root of all Government, and have in their Turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse!
—Edmund Burke (1757), A Vindication of Natural Society
Ballastexistenz has many, many incredibly powerful posts that are essential reading on the subject of institutionalisation, and why it's never acceptable, but one of the best is this one, in which Amanda Baggs contrasts the well-known horrors of the Judge Rotenberg Center with the subtler horrors of "nicer" institutions. Just as, in the case of the recent scandal over the prank-calling incident at the JRC, it was not this "abuse" of the electric schock treatment, but the entire treatment regime itself, that was the abuse, it is not just the particular forms of torture practiced at the JRC that is an "abuse" of an institutional system, but the whole institutional system, the whole concept of institutions in which to incarcerate people categorised as "Other", which is abusive at its core.
I had a friend as a teenager who lived in a local authority-run "children's home" (actually for 14-18 year olds) type institution (she wasn't classified as "disabled", although i'm fairly sure she wasn't neurotypical), in which many of the same techniques of oppression and dehumanisation used in disability institutions were commonly used. However, she failed to recognise the inherent wrongness of that type of institution, insisting during the many heated arguments we had about the subject that the staff who had physically abused or pettily taken rights and possessions away from her were just "bad staff", and that others there were "good staff", and that the "home" itself was fundamentally a "good" place. Possibly it was clearer to me, on the outside, than it was to her, on the inside, that it was not "corruption" within Social Services that was the problem, but the entire set of premises on which the concept of "Social Services" was based.
Of course, this argument applies to a whole host of other things: "anti-war" activists and commentators who stop short of being full-blown anti-militarists, for example - those who argue that the Iraq war is wrong, but would have been right if there actually had been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; a certain category of "gay rights activists" who argue that gay people are not promiscuous as they are stereotyped as, but just as likely to have stable, monogamous relationships as straight people (thus implying that it's acceptable to shame or discriminate against people who are promiscuous); apologists for the oil or nuclear industries who accept that certain particularly blatant examples of environmental destruction were wrong, but insist they were "anomalies" rather than part and parcel of inherently polluting industries; the examples could, in all probability, go on for ever. It's the fundamental basis of the anarchist argument against all government, not just "bad government", and one of the main reasons i identify as an anarchist.
Whether or not we want to adopt an overarching political/philosophical label like "anarchist", however, all of us who fight, with actions or words, for any oppressed groups and against oppression need to actively oppose the hypocrisy of outrage at people being "mistakenly" treated like they are members of a "supposedly OK to exclude, abuse or oppress" category, when the real outrage should be that such a category even exists. The thing itself is the abuse...
It reminded me of this case of a woman who was put in a men's prison because she was percieved to be a transsexual woman (and, therefore, in the eyes of the police who arrested her, "really a man") - and of similar cases i've heard of where gender-ambiguous-looking women have been refused entry to women's toilets or other single-sex spaces where they were thought to be MTF transsexuals. As nodesignation says:
The police don’t question the practice of regularly placing trans women in situations where they will be raped. They only lament that they accidentally subjected a non-trans woman to the violence that they regularly subject trans women to. I would assume that as this story gains traction the emphasis will be about how horrible that a woman who was not trans received such mistreatment. That much is clear already from the fact that there are so few stories on trans women receiving this mistreatment despite being its being a regular occurance.
It's not the inherent wrongness of the treatment that is discussed, it is the supposed "horrible mistake" of subjecting someone to that treatment when that person actually turned out to be not a member of the category of people that it's considered acceptable to do this sort of thing to. No thought is given to why it's supposedly "acceptable" to do it to people who are in that category, despite the fact that, in both cases, the reporting of the incident blatantly begs the question: if it was horrible and inhuman and inacceptable to do this to one person "by mistake", what is it to do it to a whole "Othered" class of people deliberately?
It was, and in some places still is, common for autistic people (particularly those who don't fit certain aspects of the commoner autism stereotypes) to be "misdiagnosed" as "schizophrenic", leading to institutionalisation, forced drugging, etc. Similarly, many non-verbal autistic people (who are/were nonetheless capable of communication through other means) are or were "misdiagnosed" as "mentally retarded", again leading to institutionalisation and other abuses "justified" by the "fact" of their supposed incapacity for rational thought or communication. On autism message boards and other communities, these cases tend to be talked about primarily in terms of the horribleness of the "misdiagnosis", often with comments to the effect that "I/you/ze should never have been treated like that, because I'm/you're/ze's autistic, not schizophrenic/mentally retarded/whatever", or seeing the case similarly to someone who was acquitted of a crime after new evidence proved them not guilty, as if to be found to be autistic rather than some other diagnostic category "after all" is what makes all the difference. Even if the people making these sort of comments don't realise it, they're implying that it would be OK to do all those things to someone who actually is "schizophrenic" or "mentally retarded".
(Let's not, here, get into the fact that i actually don't think anyone is "schizophrenic" or "mentally retarded", as i don't think either of those terms is a useful diagnostic category at all... regardless of the label used, if something is unacceptable to do to anyone, it's unacceptable to do to anyone...)
Similar stuff goes on when people who are cognitively "normal", but who have physical impairments (particularly ones such as CP which affect speech) are harassed or discriminated against because they are "mistakenly" assumed to be mentally impaired, and express outrage at having been categorised as such, often asserting their intelligence or educational qualifications in response - implying that harassment or discrimination would be justified if they really were mentally as well as physically impaired (see, for example, Cal Montgomery's fantastic article "Critic of the Dawn", particularly the beginning of the first and the 8th part of the second section).
In the BBC news report, a "spokesman for the Aphasia Alliance" said: "People with aphasia are often wrongly pigeon-holed as stupid... However aphasia does not affect intelligence..." - clearly motivated by a desire to render the particular category of cognitively disabled people he is employed to "speak for" a "respectable" category, because they're not really mentally impaired - again, as if it would be acceptable to mistreat people if they did have the "beyond-the-pale" category of impairment.
I recently found this quote at Rad Geek People's Daily (it's one of the rotating "frontispiece" quotes). While i was surprised to see it coming from who it comes from (he was one of the political philosophers i had to study in the first year of my Politics with International Studies degree, and i remember him as an arch-conservative and one of the least pleasant writers, both in opinions and in style, i ever had to study), it makes it pretty clear (well, apart from the fact that i actually can't identify 3 things that make up the "all three" in the second paragraph) where these kinds of critiques fall far short of logical or ethical consistency.
To prove, that these Sort of policed Societies are a Violation offered to Nature, and a Constraint upon the human Mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary Measures, and Instruments of Violence which are every where used to support them. Let us take a Review of the Dungeons, Whips, Chains, Racks, Gibbets, with which every Society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of Victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in Pride and Madness, and Millions in an abject Servitude, and Dependence. There was a Time, when I looked with a reverential Awe on these Mysteries of Policy; but Age, Experience, and Philosophy have rent the Veil; and I view this Sanctum Sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastick Admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the Necessity of such a Proceeding in such Institutions; but I must have a very mean Opinion of Institutions where such Proceedings are necessary.
I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper than it is at present to hear Truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its Temper; my Thoughts may become more publick. In the mean time, let them repose in my own Bosom, and in the Bosoms of such Men as are fit to be initiated in the sober Mysteries of Truth and Reason. My Antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in Religion and Politics make sufficient Discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober Man a proper Caution against them all. The Monarchic, Aristocratical, and Popular Partizans have been jointly laying their Axes to the Root of all Government, and have in their Turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse!
—Edmund Burke (1757), A Vindication of Natural Society
Ballastexistenz has many, many incredibly powerful posts that are essential reading on the subject of institutionalisation, and why it's never acceptable, but one of the best is this one, in which Amanda Baggs contrasts the well-known horrors of the Judge Rotenberg Center with the subtler horrors of "nicer" institutions. Just as, in the case of the recent scandal over the prank-calling incident at the JRC, it was not this "abuse" of the electric schock treatment, but the entire treatment regime itself, that was the abuse, it is not just the particular forms of torture practiced at the JRC that is an "abuse" of an institutional system, but the whole institutional system, the whole concept of institutions in which to incarcerate people categorised as "Other", which is abusive at its core.
I had a friend as a teenager who lived in a local authority-run "children's home" (actually for 14-18 year olds) type institution (she wasn't classified as "disabled", although i'm fairly sure she wasn't neurotypical), in which many of the same techniques of oppression and dehumanisation used in disability institutions were commonly used. However, she failed to recognise the inherent wrongness of that type of institution, insisting during the many heated arguments we had about the subject that the staff who had physically abused or pettily taken rights and possessions away from her were just "bad staff", and that others there were "good staff", and that the "home" itself was fundamentally a "good" place. Possibly it was clearer to me, on the outside, than it was to her, on the inside, that it was not "corruption" within Social Services that was the problem, but the entire set of premises on which the concept of "Social Services" was based.
Of course, this argument applies to a whole host of other things: "anti-war" activists and commentators who stop short of being full-blown anti-militarists, for example - those who argue that the Iraq war is wrong, but would have been right if there actually had been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; a certain category of "gay rights activists" who argue that gay people are not promiscuous as they are stereotyped as, but just as likely to have stable, monogamous relationships as straight people (thus implying that it's acceptable to shame or discriminate against people who are promiscuous); apologists for the oil or nuclear industries who accept that certain particularly blatant examples of environmental destruction were wrong, but insist they were "anomalies" rather than part and parcel of inherently polluting industries; the examples could, in all probability, go on for ever. It's the fundamental basis of the anarchist argument against all government, not just "bad government", and one of the main reasons i identify as an anarchist.
Whether or not we want to adopt an overarching political/philosophical label like "anarchist", however, all of us who fight, with actions or words, for any oppressed groups and against oppression need to actively oppose the hypocrisy of outrage at people being "mistakenly" treated like they are members of a "supposedly OK to exclude, abuse or oppress" category, when the real outrage should be that such a category even exists. The thing itself is the abuse...
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Er... in 18 years?
So... today i went to the Equality 2025 conference at the ICC in Birmingham. (I was actually blagged in as a fellow disability rights activist's "PA", but nobody seemed to care once we were in there... at least one other activist i know did the same.) "Equality 2025" is the Office for Disability Issues's big new "brand" for disability rights and equalities, basically consisting of attempting to consult disability activists and (supposedly) using the results of that consultation to influence government policy. Just how real (or, conversely, how tokenistic) that consultation is remains to be seen...
The conference format involved presentations from speakers (some followed by question-and-answer sessions), alternating with splitting into small groups (arranged around numbered tables), each with a "facilitator", to discuss different aspects of the key issues and then choose one person to feed back to the whole conference. It was interesting to observe the similarities and differences to (supposedly) non-hierarchical activist gatherings such as the Camp for Climate action gathering i went to last week, and some of the terms and concepts which seem to have been co-opted by government from new social movements (creating a kind of pseudo-non-hierarchical conference style?)...
One of the 4 "Hot Topics" of the conference was the government's (supposed) aim to set up "User Led Organisations", modelled on the existing Centres for Independent Living, in every area of Britain, and using money from a Department of Health "development fund". Of course, from a cynic's point of view, this is questionable considering that existing CILs are being closed down, struggling to survive funding cuts, or being seriously compromised (arguably even corrupted) by conditional funding from "charitable" sources... A word mentioned several times, but not really clarified, was "businesslike" - seemingly implying that one intent was that the new ULOs should in some way act more like corporations.
The lack of consensus about what the phrase "Independent Living" really means (both in the eyes of the government and in reality), and about what a "User Led Organisation" should look like, was also discussed - some activists challenging even the use of the word "user", and some criticising the implicit medical-model thinking of the funding coming from the DoH. The urban/rural divide also came up, with an interesting (but possibly difficult to implement) idea of a "mobile CIL" that could visit isolated disabled people in rural areas.
Second was the United Nations Convention on Disability Rights. Interestingly, the description of rights given by the presenters in describing the UN Convention was a fundamentally moral conception of rights - i.e., rights as "things" which exist independently of laws and governments (or which "every human has and which cannot be taken away", as one speaker put it), but which can be either upheld or not upheld by laws - a liberal conception which, IMO, somewhat fails to recognise the reality of the lives of people living in the many, many situations (such as disability institutions) where they don't "have" human rights in any meaningful way, regardless of whether they morally or theoretically have those rights. Possibly this is the philosophical question of the difference between an "is" and an "ought"?
The UNCDR is very clearly rooted in the social model of disability - containing such rights as inclusive education, family life, the right to choose where to live, to participate on an equal level in public and political organisations, and to have organisation of disabled people. As such it stands in clear contrast to the DDA 1995 and the current Single Equality Bill, which are both essentially based around a medical model definition of "disability". The UK has signed but not ratified the UNCDR - despite the fact that countries such as Cuba, Jamaica and India have ratified the convention...
The remaining "Hot Topics" were young disabled people's transition to adulthood and disability-related hate crime. Annoyingly, each table was only given the opportunity to discuss one of those issues (ours was given hate crime), and then the tables' responses were read out in indiscriminate order, mixing up the responses to both topics. The person chosen to feed back from our table was a non-disabled spokesperson for Scope and RNIB (note that these charities are now trying to portray themselves as campaigning for equality, while still being controlled by non-disabled people and practicing segregation) - my points about institutional disablism being a root of anti-disabled hate crime, and things being done to disabled people (such as locking them up and denying them rights as basic as the right to choose what to eat, when to go to bed or when to go to the toilet, cutting out their organs without their consent, or killing them) which would be universally considered hate crimes if they were done to any other minority group, being considered to be acts of "care" and done in our best interests because of the deeply fucked up medical model images of disabled people (as "burdens", as "helpless", as objects of pity, etc) that are so prevalent in media and culture, completely failed to be fed back...
The statistics quoted on hate crime (which were shocking enough - for example, that 1/3 of people with learning impairments experience harassment every week, and that 47% of physically impaired people had either been physically abused or seen fellow disabled people get physically abused) were also ones which came from charities (Mencap and Scope, in the above examples), rather than from organisations of disabled people...
Some good points were, however, allowed to filter through to the conference, including the way that the mental health system pathologises "service users" for reporting hate crime, the fact that some disabled people may perpetrate hate crime against others (often due to "divide and rule" hierarchies of impairment), and the prevalence of perceptions of disabled people as either "socially deviant" or "vulnerable and childlike" - although some truly idiotic ideas were also not only expressed, but seemingly approved of by large numbers of delegates - such as "punishing" perpetrators of hate crimes against disabled people by forcing them to "work with" disabled people... Yeah, and punish rapists by employing them as rape crisis counsellors while you're at it (that was sarcasm, for anyone who isn't good with that)...
Similarly, some good points were allowed to come through about young disabled people and their rights to full citizenship, such as the taboo subject of relationships and the assumption of asexuality, the need for young disabled people to meet older disabled role models, and that non-disabled parents of young disabled people are often potential opposers of their children's rights, and thus it is crucial that they be educated to be allies, arguably from as early as antenatal classes if a diagnosis of impairment exists at that stage (something obviously very strongly felt in the shadow of the Katie Thorpe case).
However, if my experience was in any way typical, the more radical ideas raised in the small groups (i.e., the ones which directly threatened the government's spin of itself as safeguarding and upholding disability rights) were all probably discreetly not given a platform. The notes made by the "official" notetakers at each table were collected, supposedly to be used in consultation, but the cynic in me finds that extremely doubtful...
It was however heartening that there was a general recognition (at least among those present who i had the opportunity to hear the views of) that "Equality 2025" is a bad joke - the DDA was supposed to give disabled people equal rights in 1995, 12 years later in 2007 it clearly hasn't, and now we are being promised "Equality 2025" - a wait of another 18 years!? (Apart from the fact that "Equality 2025" sounds like some strange socialist space opera - a Cold War Russian equivalent to Star Trek, perhaps?) We need equality now.
(Hmmm... possible disability movement counter-ODI logo/slogan - the Equality 2025 logo, with the pink and blue changed to red and black, and "2025" changed to "NOW"... anyone got photoshop skillz? Not quite sure what "Working with government for disability equality" should be changed to tho...)
(edit: i can't find the Equality 2025 logo online, although you can see a hand-drawn version of it in one of the pics below... will scan it if i get a chance...)
Non-content-related stuff: the free food was pretty good (one decent veggie option, although there was nothing vegan... tho what the so-called "potatoes" actually were, i don't know... but very, very nice coffee cake), and we (the Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People/Housing4All posse) stocked up very well on discarded notepads and pencils afterwards... there was some positive networking for Housing4All as well, despite us running out of leaflets :)
Accessibility wise things were as good as could be reasonably expected, with sign language interpreters (and a spoken English interpreter for the speaker who was a BSL user), palantype, an audio loop and good physical access, although there was one amusing moment when the palantypist mis-typed "neurodiverse" as "neuroadverse people"... ;)
There was also a rather amazing woman (not really sure if her role was part of the accessibility, or just to provide something visual) whose job was apparently to create a cartoon representation of all the discussions on huge pieces of paper pinned to the wall, in a brilliant Tony Hart stylee using huge paint pens:
There were points at which i found myself experiencing a strange cognitive dissonance, thinking "what am i, as a notorious anarchist who thinks government is the problem, doing here at a government consultation event?". I think this is one of those examples of intersectionalities of movements creating strange bedfellows - one particularly strange position i found myself in was that of demanding stronger anti-discrimination legislation, including criminal punishments for businesses such as losing their licences for breaking equal access laws - when normally i would be totally against the whole concepts of a criminal law system and of licensing... this is definitely a whole area which i need to explore more ideologically and try to put together a more "joined-up" perspective on...
One thing that kind of pissed me off (although i don't know what people with learning disabilities which affect verbal comprehension would think of it) was the IMO quite patronising tone of the "easy-to-understand" documents in the free pack accompanying the presentations. Much worse than patronising tone (which is, of course, subjective), however, is the blatant distortion of the first sentence of the document accompanying "Hot Topic presentation 1 - Independent Living and User-led Organisations" - "The government has a big plan for disabled people's lives to be equal to other people's lives" - referring to the Improving Life Chances of Disabled People" document - basically portraying the government as the author of the disability rights movement, instead of the primary institution that we have had to fight against to achieve rights, and which still ensures through all kinds of institutional disablism (in housing provision, in the benefits system, in employment legislation, in the "justice" system, in NHS hospitals, in segregated education, in its failure to ratify the UN Convention, etc, etc) that disabled people's lives are not "equal to other people's lives"...
Despite the obvious bullshit government spin and unlikeliness of anything coming out of this (except further flashy-but-meaningless "consultations"), this still felt to me like a positive event - although it might be that, because of my desperate desire to be involved in anything at all disability-related, i have somewhat lower standards for a government convention on disability than i do for, say, one on climate change - networking was good, there were plenty of radical people scattered among the delegates (and even the speakers/Equality 2025 committee members), and i got the same buzz i always get just from seeing and being around a large group of disabled people in one place at the same time (the variety of represented impairments was, IMO, to be commended, although there was probably an (extremely common) under-representation of people with learning disabilities, and the self-fulfilling perception of disability organisations as only for, or dominated by, wheelchair users to the exclusion of other impairment groups was at least mentioned).
It is still an absolute necessity for the disabled people's movement to fight for disability rights now, and not fall for government promises to sort it out over the next X number of years, however...
You can write to Equality 2025 c/o The Secretariat, 6th Floor, The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HT, or telephone them on 0845 460 2025 (UK)...
The conference format involved presentations from speakers (some followed by question-and-answer sessions), alternating with splitting into small groups (arranged around numbered tables), each with a "facilitator", to discuss different aspects of the key issues and then choose one person to feed back to the whole conference. It was interesting to observe the similarities and differences to (supposedly) non-hierarchical activist gatherings such as the Camp for Climate action gathering i went to last week, and some of the terms and concepts which seem to have been co-opted by government from new social movements (creating a kind of pseudo-non-hierarchical conference style?)...
One of the 4 "Hot Topics" of the conference was the government's (supposed) aim to set up "User Led Organisations", modelled on the existing Centres for Independent Living, in every area of Britain, and using money from a Department of Health "development fund". Of course, from a cynic's point of view, this is questionable considering that existing CILs are being closed down, struggling to survive funding cuts, or being seriously compromised (arguably even corrupted) by conditional funding from "charitable" sources... A word mentioned several times, but not really clarified, was "businesslike" - seemingly implying that one intent was that the new ULOs should in some way act more like corporations.
The lack of consensus about what the phrase "Independent Living" really means (both in the eyes of the government and in reality), and about what a "User Led Organisation" should look like, was also discussed - some activists challenging even the use of the word "user", and some criticising the implicit medical-model thinking of the funding coming from the DoH. The urban/rural divide also came up, with an interesting (but possibly difficult to implement) idea of a "mobile CIL" that could visit isolated disabled people in rural areas.
Second was the United Nations Convention on Disability Rights. Interestingly, the description of rights given by the presenters in describing the UN Convention was a fundamentally moral conception of rights - i.e., rights as "things" which exist independently of laws and governments (or which "every human has and which cannot be taken away", as one speaker put it), but which can be either upheld or not upheld by laws - a liberal conception which, IMO, somewhat fails to recognise the reality of the lives of people living in the many, many situations (such as disability institutions) where they don't "have" human rights in any meaningful way, regardless of whether they morally or theoretically have those rights. Possibly this is the philosophical question of the difference between an "is" and an "ought"?
The UNCDR is very clearly rooted in the social model of disability - containing such rights as inclusive education, family life, the right to choose where to live, to participate on an equal level in public and political organisations, and to have organisation of disabled people. As such it stands in clear contrast to the DDA 1995 and the current Single Equality Bill, which are both essentially based around a medical model definition of "disability". The UK has signed but not ratified the UNCDR - despite the fact that countries such as Cuba, Jamaica and India have ratified the convention...
The remaining "Hot Topics" were young disabled people's transition to adulthood and disability-related hate crime. Annoyingly, each table was only given the opportunity to discuss one of those issues (ours was given hate crime), and then the tables' responses were read out in indiscriminate order, mixing up the responses to both topics. The person chosen to feed back from our table was a non-disabled spokesperson for Scope and RNIB (note that these charities are now trying to portray themselves as campaigning for equality, while still being controlled by non-disabled people and practicing segregation) - my points about institutional disablism being a root of anti-disabled hate crime, and things being done to disabled people (such as locking them up and denying them rights as basic as the right to choose what to eat, when to go to bed or when to go to the toilet, cutting out their organs without their consent, or killing them) which would be universally considered hate crimes if they were done to any other minority group, being considered to be acts of "care" and done in our best interests because of the deeply fucked up medical model images of disabled people (as "burdens", as "helpless", as objects of pity, etc) that are so prevalent in media and culture, completely failed to be fed back...
The statistics quoted on hate crime (which were shocking enough - for example, that 1/3 of people with learning impairments experience harassment every week, and that 47% of physically impaired people had either been physically abused or seen fellow disabled people get physically abused) were also ones which came from charities (Mencap and Scope, in the above examples), rather than from organisations of disabled people...
Some good points were, however, allowed to filter through to the conference, including the way that the mental health system pathologises "service users" for reporting hate crime, the fact that some disabled people may perpetrate hate crime against others (often due to "divide and rule" hierarchies of impairment), and the prevalence of perceptions of disabled people as either "socially deviant" or "vulnerable and childlike" - although some truly idiotic ideas were also not only expressed, but seemingly approved of by large numbers of delegates - such as "punishing" perpetrators of hate crimes against disabled people by forcing them to "work with" disabled people... Yeah, and punish rapists by employing them as rape crisis counsellors while you're at it (that was sarcasm, for anyone who isn't good with that)...
Similarly, some good points were allowed to come through about young disabled people and their rights to full citizenship, such as the taboo subject of relationships and the assumption of asexuality, the need for young disabled people to meet older disabled role models, and that non-disabled parents of young disabled people are often potential opposers of their children's rights, and thus it is crucial that they be educated to be allies, arguably from as early as antenatal classes if a diagnosis of impairment exists at that stage (something obviously very strongly felt in the shadow of the Katie Thorpe case).
However, if my experience was in any way typical, the more radical ideas raised in the small groups (i.e., the ones which directly threatened the government's spin of itself as safeguarding and upholding disability rights) were all probably discreetly not given a platform. The notes made by the "official" notetakers at each table were collected, supposedly to be used in consultation, but the cynic in me finds that extremely doubtful...
It was however heartening that there was a general recognition (at least among those present who i had the opportunity to hear the views of) that "Equality 2025" is a bad joke - the DDA was supposed to give disabled people equal rights in 1995, 12 years later in 2007 it clearly hasn't, and now we are being promised "Equality 2025" - a wait of another 18 years!? (Apart from the fact that "Equality 2025" sounds like some strange socialist space opera - a Cold War Russian equivalent to Star Trek, perhaps?) We need equality now.
(Hmmm... possible disability movement counter-ODI logo/slogan - the Equality 2025 logo, with the pink and blue changed to red and black, and "2025" changed to "NOW"... anyone got photoshop skillz? Not quite sure what "Working with government for disability equality" should be changed to tho...)
(edit: i can't find the Equality 2025 logo online, although you can see a hand-drawn version of it in one of the pics below... will scan it if i get a chance...)
Non-content-related stuff: the free food was pretty good (one decent veggie option, although there was nothing vegan... tho what the so-called "potatoes" actually were, i don't know... but very, very nice coffee cake), and we (the Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People/Housing4All posse) stocked up very well on discarded notepads and pencils afterwards... there was some positive networking for Housing4All as well, despite us running out of leaflets :)
Accessibility wise things were as good as could be reasonably expected, with sign language interpreters (and a spoken English interpreter for the speaker who was a BSL user), palantype, an audio loop and good physical access, although there was one amusing moment when the palantypist mis-typed "neurodiverse" as "neuroadverse people"... ;)
There was also a rather amazing woman (not really sure if her role was part of the accessibility, or just to provide something visual) whose job was apparently to create a cartoon representation of all the discussions on huge pieces of paper pinned to the wall, in a brilliant Tony Hart stylee using huge paint pens:
There were points at which i found myself experiencing a strange cognitive dissonance, thinking "what am i, as a notorious anarchist who thinks government is the problem, doing here at a government consultation event?". I think this is one of those examples of intersectionalities of movements creating strange bedfellows - one particularly strange position i found myself in was that of demanding stronger anti-discrimination legislation, including criminal punishments for businesses such as losing their licences for breaking equal access laws - when normally i would be totally against the whole concepts of a criminal law system and of licensing... this is definitely a whole area which i need to explore more ideologically and try to put together a more "joined-up" perspective on...
One thing that kind of pissed me off (although i don't know what people with learning disabilities which affect verbal comprehension would think of it) was the IMO quite patronising tone of the "easy-to-understand" documents in the free pack accompanying the presentations. Much worse than patronising tone (which is, of course, subjective), however, is the blatant distortion of the first sentence of the document accompanying "Hot Topic presentation 1 - Independent Living and User-led Organisations" - "The government has a big plan for disabled people's lives to be equal to other people's lives" - referring to the Improving Life Chances of Disabled People" document - basically portraying the government as the author of the disability rights movement, instead of the primary institution that we have had to fight against to achieve rights, and which still ensures through all kinds of institutional disablism (in housing provision, in the benefits system, in employment legislation, in the "justice" system, in NHS hospitals, in segregated education, in its failure to ratify the UN Convention, etc, etc) that disabled people's lives are not "equal to other people's lives"...
Despite the obvious bullshit government spin and unlikeliness of anything coming out of this (except further flashy-but-meaningless "consultations"), this still felt to me like a positive event - although it might be that, because of my desperate desire to be involved in anything at all disability-related, i have somewhat lower standards for a government convention on disability than i do for, say, one on climate change - networking was good, there were plenty of radical people scattered among the delegates (and even the speakers/Equality 2025 committee members), and i got the same buzz i always get just from seeing and being around a large group of disabled people in one place at the same time (the variety of represented impairments was, IMO, to be commended, although there was probably an (extremely common) under-representation of people with learning disabilities, and the self-fulfilling perception of disability organisations as only for, or dominated by, wheelchair users to the exclusion of other impairment groups was at least mentioned).
It is still an absolute necessity for the disabled people's movement to fight for disability rights now, and not fall for government promises to sort it out over the next X number of years, however...
You can write to Equality 2025 c/o The Secretariat, 6th Floor, The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HT, or telephone them on 0845 460 2025 (UK)...
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Money money money, it's the root of all evil
Right now i'm feeling despairing because i seem to be trapped in a situation of poverty that i can't find any way out of...
I am living on Jobseeker's Allowance (a total of £59 per week, paid every 2 weeks) and about £33 a week housing benefit. That £33 is supposed to cover my rent, but in fact it only covers approximately 2/3 of it - my rent is £208.33 (a third of the rent for the house, £650) per month, which comes out to approximately £50 per week - which is very cheap for the area i'm living in, and is the same amount of money i was paying for the (roughly equivalent quality) accommodation i was living in in 1999. The reason the council assessed the amount of HB i was to get as £33 is because they assessed the "market rent value" of the house (without actually sending a rent officer to visit the house) as £450. There is absolutely no way that anyone would be able to find a privately rented house of comparable size to this one in this area for £450 - in 4 months of looking, the cheapest house we found was £625 (which had a lot of disadvantages compared to this one at £650). I had to blag a fake job reference from a friend of a friend's company to get past the estate agent's credit checks, because of the absolute unwillingness of any estate agent in the area to take clients on housing benefit.
Total income of £92 per week minus approx £50 per week rent leaves me with round about £40 per week for all of my living costs. I can and have lived on that amount relatively easily before, but i seem to be having trouble now. I think at least in part it's because over the spring and summer of this year i went to quite a few demonstrations, activist gatherings and events such as Climate Camp, all of which cost money for travel, plus fairly regular (maybe every 2 weeks) visits to a friend who lives a £6.50 train journey away (I have managed to jump the train a few times, but after the cumulative psychological effects of threats of arrest and violence from ticket inspectors i don't really feel willing to do that any more, except on the particular trains which i know don't have inspectors, which is only the last train at night, which as the single train fare is almost as much as the return doesn't help me much). Last month i was stupid enough to buy a couple of books from Amazon, which i think, together with the cumulative impact of the travel costs, was probably what tipped me over from having just enough to pay my rent to not having enough, meaning i had to owe my housemate until next benefit day...
I thought that, as my benefits happen to get paid at roughly the same time fortnightly, and there were 3 "giro" days in October, that this month i would be OK - but somehow i'm not, and i'm either going to have to borrow money from somewhere (and i don't know where, because i have pretty much exhausted all the friends i could possibly borrow money off - i already owe about £800 to various friends, £400 of which is to one person who i've owed since 2004, and probably something in the region of a couple of grand to my parents, although i haven't really kept track of that, and don't know whether they'll ever really ask for it back) or do the same again - but if i do the same again, i'll never be able to get back on track with the monthly money cycle, because there's just no possibility at all of me saving the £80 or so necessary in a month.
I don't exactly want to be unemployed - i guess i've just pretty much despaired of finding a job. In smaller towns i've lived in, i was able to get... not quite continuous, but regular-enough-to-pay-the-bills temp work, and while it was mind-numbingly alienating, exhausting and generally horrible work (sweeping the floors of factories or stacking rusty metal on pallets, for example), i could at least afford my living costs. Since moving to Birmingham just over a year ago (a move partly motivated by thinking work might be easier to find in a big city), i've attempted to register with temp agencies, but had no work offers whatsoever.
I've applied for "permanent" jobs which i felt myself to be amply qualified for, but had no replies whatsoever, even when the employer advertised the "Two Ticks" scheme (under which any applicant with a disability who meets the qualifications for the job is supposed to be guaranteed an interview). Other jobs, which i am reasonably confident i would be able to actually do, have "person specifications" worded in such a way (usually referring to neurotypical social skills, which would not actually be regarded as essential for the job in any open-minded approach to logic) that it would be impossible for me to truthfully answer the questions on the application forms in such a way as to meet the specification.
I won't even go into details on the scheme "for getting disabled people into employment" which the council led me to believe was an alternative route into a job to application/interview, by doing a short unpaid work placement, but actually turned out to be an unpaid work placement doing the boring bits of someone else's work, just for the sake of it (suffice to say i didn't take up the offer)...
And, of course, there are all my anarchist, feminist and ecological critiques of the nature of "work" under capitalism, which i could probably write a dissertation on if i had the concentration and access to all the books i would need to reference...
There's nothing additional i can get under the benefit system either. Unlike a friend who has just been put on it, i seem to have managed to avoid the Employment Zones programme (possibly by virtue of having a Disability Employment Advisor), but the nature of my disability is such that i have pretty much no chance of getting Disability Living Allowance (DLA), because that gets awarded depending on how much assistance you "need" (or, more accurately, are assessed as "needing" by someone with often no real understanding of your actual needs), and, well, with my impairment there isn't really anything that anyone could be paid to "assist" me with. There would be no point in me going on Incapacity Benefit because for me, as someone who hasn't worked enough to build up National Insurance contributions, it would be on exactly the same rate as JSA. After attempting to appeal against not getting my full rent awarded in Housing Benefit, i was given a "discretionary" payment to make it up for 3 months, but only for 3 months because that would apparently give me time to "bargain with my landlord or find a cheaper place" - the first of which bears no relationship to anything resembling reality whatsoever, and as for the second, the likelihood of finding anywhere cheaper is slim to none, and moving would be an upheaval that, right now, i just wouldn't be able to face again...
What i've been saying i really want to do with my life for about the past 2 years is to go to Leeds University to do the MA in Disability Studies, followed if possible with a PhD (probably focusing on disability, labour and employment - a radical deconstruction possibly involving what "work" would look like in my utopian post-capitalist society). I have the academic qualifications to get there (a first class degree, undeserved in my own opinion though that might have been, in Politics with International Studies from the University of Warwick), but no way that i know of to get the funding. (I have been procrastinating for nearly a year over actually contacting the Centre for Disability Studies and asking what funding possibilities might be available...)
Getting back to immediate stuff, I have already got into conflicts with my housemates (which can only get worse over the winter) over having the heating on when "we" (read: me) can't afford the gas bills, when my sensory sensitivities (which i've sort of told my housemates about, but not fully, because i'm not "out" to them about my impairment) mean that i find it utterly unbearable, to the point of feeling suicidal, if the temperature goes below my comfort level (and i would be perfectly willing to pay the whole heating bill by myself, if i could safford it)...
I really, really want to go to the Anarchist Bookfair in London this weekend (both because of the actual books and because several people who i've lost touch with but would really like to get back in touch with are very likely to be there), but can't afford even the train fare.
I got an email from a fellow crip activist a few days ago replying to my question as to whether she was going to the upcoming DAN gathering, saying that, because her DLA had been reduced (resulting in her losing housing benefit), she can't afford to leave her house for anything that doesn't pay travel expenses until February. (I'm trying to sort out a lift for her from the fellow activist i'm getting driven down by.) Why the fuck do we have to live like this?
The cruel irony is that the disability movement doesn't have the resources to organise to campaign against such enforced poverty, because most of us are living in poverty... and then there's the vexed question of how to integrate an anarchist desire for a world with neither states nor money, with having to be supported by the welfare state...
This post doesn't really have a conclusion, unfortunately. I might be able to sort my life out if it did...
I am living on Jobseeker's Allowance (a total of £59 per week, paid every 2 weeks) and about £33 a week housing benefit. That £33 is supposed to cover my rent, but in fact it only covers approximately 2/3 of it - my rent is £208.33 (a third of the rent for the house, £650) per month, which comes out to approximately £50 per week - which is very cheap for the area i'm living in, and is the same amount of money i was paying for the (roughly equivalent quality) accommodation i was living in in 1999. The reason the council assessed the amount of HB i was to get as £33 is because they assessed the "market rent value" of the house (without actually sending a rent officer to visit the house) as £450. There is absolutely no way that anyone would be able to find a privately rented house of comparable size to this one in this area for £450 - in 4 months of looking, the cheapest house we found was £625 (which had a lot of disadvantages compared to this one at £650). I had to blag a fake job reference from a friend of a friend's company to get past the estate agent's credit checks, because of the absolute unwillingness of any estate agent in the area to take clients on housing benefit.
Total income of £92 per week minus approx £50 per week rent leaves me with round about £40 per week for all of my living costs. I can and have lived on that amount relatively easily before, but i seem to be having trouble now. I think at least in part it's because over the spring and summer of this year i went to quite a few demonstrations, activist gatherings and events such as Climate Camp, all of which cost money for travel, plus fairly regular (maybe every 2 weeks) visits to a friend who lives a £6.50 train journey away (I have managed to jump the train a few times, but after the cumulative psychological effects of threats of arrest and violence from ticket inspectors i don't really feel willing to do that any more, except on the particular trains which i know don't have inspectors, which is only the last train at night, which as the single train fare is almost as much as the return doesn't help me much). Last month i was stupid enough to buy a couple of books from Amazon, which i think, together with the cumulative impact of the travel costs, was probably what tipped me over from having just enough to pay my rent to not having enough, meaning i had to owe my housemate until next benefit day...
I thought that, as my benefits happen to get paid at roughly the same time fortnightly, and there were 3 "giro" days in October, that this month i would be OK - but somehow i'm not, and i'm either going to have to borrow money from somewhere (and i don't know where, because i have pretty much exhausted all the friends i could possibly borrow money off - i already owe about £800 to various friends, £400 of which is to one person who i've owed since 2004, and probably something in the region of a couple of grand to my parents, although i haven't really kept track of that, and don't know whether they'll ever really ask for it back) or do the same again - but if i do the same again, i'll never be able to get back on track with the monthly money cycle, because there's just no possibility at all of me saving the £80 or so necessary in a month.
I don't exactly want to be unemployed - i guess i've just pretty much despaired of finding a job. In smaller towns i've lived in, i was able to get... not quite continuous, but regular-enough-to-pay-the-bills temp work, and while it was mind-numbingly alienating, exhausting and generally horrible work (sweeping the floors of factories or stacking rusty metal on pallets, for example), i could at least afford my living costs. Since moving to Birmingham just over a year ago (a move partly motivated by thinking work might be easier to find in a big city), i've attempted to register with temp agencies, but had no work offers whatsoever.
I've applied for "permanent" jobs which i felt myself to be amply qualified for, but had no replies whatsoever, even when the employer advertised the "Two Ticks" scheme (under which any applicant with a disability who meets the qualifications for the job is supposed to be guaranteed an interview). Other jobs, which i am reasonably confident i would be able to actually do, have "person specifications" worded in such a way (usually referring to neurotypical social skills, which would not actually be regarded as essential for the job in any open-minded approach to logic) that it would be impossible for me to truthfully answer the questions on the application forms in such a way as to meet the specification.
I won't even go into details on the scheme "for getting disabled people into employment" which the council led me to believe was an alternative route into a job to application/interview, by doing a short unpaid work placement, but actually turned out to be an unpaid work placement doing the boring bits of someone else's work, just for the sake of it (suffice to say i didn't take up the offer)...
And, of course, there are all my anarchist, feminist and ecological critiques of the nature of "work" under capitalism, which i could probably write a dissertation on if i had the concentration and access to all the books i would need to reference...
There's nothing additional i can get under the benefit system either. Unlike a friend who has just been put on it, i seem to have managed to avoid the Employment Zones programme (possibly by virtue of having a Disability Employment Advisor), but the nature of my disability is such that i have pretty much no chance of getting Disability Living Allowance (DLA), because that gets awarded depending on how much assistance you "need" (or, more accurately, are assessed as "needing" by someone with often no real understanding of your actual needs), and, well, with my impairment there isn't really anything that anyone could be paid to "assist" me with. There would be no point in me going on Incapacity Benefit because for me, as someone who hasn't worked enough to build up National Insurance contributions, it would be on exactly the same rate as JSA. After attempting to appeal against not getting my full rent awarded in Housing Benefit, i was given a "discretionary" payment to make it up for 3 months, but only for 3 months because that would apparently give me time to "bargain with my landlord or find a cheaper place" - the first of which bears no relationship to anything resembling reality whatsoever, and as for the second, the likelihood of finding anywhere cheaper is slim to none, and moving would be an upheaval that, right now, i just wouldn't be able to face again...
What i've been saying i really want to do with my life for about the past 2 years is to go to Leeds University to do the MA in Disability Studies, followed if possible with a PhD (probably focusing on disability, labour and employment - a radical deconstruction possibly involving what "work" would look like in my utopian post-capitalist society). I have the academic qualifications to get there (a first class degree, undeserved in my own opinion though that might have been, in Politics with International Studies from the University of Warwick), but no way that i know of to get the funding. (I have been procrastinating for nearly a year over actually contacting the Centre for Disability Studies and asking what funding possibilities might be available...)
Getting back to immediate stuff, I have already got into conflicts with my housemates (which can only get worse over the winter) over having the heating on when "we" (read: me) can't afford the gas bills, when my sensory sensitivities (which i've sort of told my housemates about, but not fully, because i'm not "out" to them about my impairment) mean that i find it utterly unbearable, to the point of feeling suicidal, if the temperature goes below my comfort level (and i would be perfectly willing to pay the whole heating bill by myself, if i could safford it)...
I really, really want to go to the Anarchist Bookfair in London this weekend (both because of the actual books and because several people who i've lost touch with but would really like to get back in touch with are very likely to be there), but can't afford even the train fare.
I got an email from a fellow crip activist a few days ago replying to my question as to whether she was going to the upcoming DAN gathering, saying that, because her DLA had been reduced (resulting in her losing housing benefit), she can't afford to leave her house for anything that doesn't pay travel expenses until February. (I'm trying to sort out a lift for her from the fellow activist i'm getting driven down by.) Why the fuck do we have to live like this?
The cruel irony is that the disability movement doesn't have the resources to organise to campaign against such enforced poverty, because most of us are living in poverty... and then there's the vexed question of how to integrate an anarchist desire for a world with neither states nor money, with having to be supported by the welfare state...
This post doesn't really have a conclusion, unfortunately. I might be able to sort my life out if it did...
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Alan Moore knows the score
Alan Moore, legendary comic book writer (author of, among many other masterworks of the form, V For Vendetta and Swamp Thing), links anarchism, biodiversity and (implicitly) the social model of disability in an Infoshop News interview here:
Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world. Nature, and the forces of evolution—if you happen to be living in a country where they still believe in the forces of evolution, of course —did not really see fit to follow that “in unity and in uniformity there is strength” idea. If you want to talk about successful species, then you’re talking about bats and beetles; there are thousands of different varieties of different bat and beetle. Certain sorts of tree and bush have diversified so splendidly that there are now thousands of different examples of this basic species. Now you contrast that to something like horses or humans, where there’s one basic type of human, and two maybe three basic types of horses. In terms of the evolutionary tree, we are very bare, denuded branches. The whole program of evolution seems to be to diversify, because in diversity there is strength.
And if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.
(Can Blogger do the quote tag where the quote is indented from the rest of the text as well as bolded?)
Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world. Nature, and the forces of evolution—if you happen to be living in a country where they still believe in the forces of evolution, of course —did not really see fit to follow that “in unity and in uniformity there is strength” idea. If you want to talk about successful species, then you’re talking about bats and beetles; there are thousands of different varieties of different bat and beetle. Certain sorts of tree and bush have diversified so splendidly that there are now thousands of different examples of this basic species. Now you contrast that to something like horses or humans, where there’s one basic type of human, and two maybe three basic types of horses. In terms of the evolutionary tree, we are very bare, denuded branches. The whole program of evolution seems to be to diversify, because in diversity there is strength.
And if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.
(Can Blogger do the quote tag where the quote is indented from the rest of the text as well as bolded?)
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