Dec 27, 2020
Karl Marx View of Disability and Connections to Autism.
Jose Santiago, Co-chair Buffalo CPUSA
In Karl Marx’s 2018 International Publishers printing of The Communist Manifesto he writes:
The bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help but letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
This is interesting because it describes that the bourgeoisie is exploiting the health of the proletariat by furthering horrible conditions upon him further creating disability. In addition, when a disabled person says that their disability is there culture like an autistic saying that being diagnosed with autism it is there culture; what they are really meaning is that being a proletariat is who they are because they are fighting those who have harmed there personality. Jim Sinclair describes this harm of personality in his 1993 Our voice journal essay titled Don’t Mourn for Us writing “Therefore, when parents say, I wish my child did not have autism, what they’re really saying is, I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.” This is the idea that the parent is looked as a petty bourgeoisie wishing but sinking as Marx wrote the manifesto “The lower strata of the middle class — the small trades people, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat…” this is why you see a hike in autism.
Moreover, Marx demonstrates that when the proletariat is proud of his wounds he is at battle with the capitalist. As he wrote “the bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle…In all these battles the bourgeoisie drags it into the political arena… the bourgeoisie therefore supplies the proletariat with weapons for fighting themselves.” This shows that when Marx talks about disability Marx really states that capitalism creates this disability but then creates social political abilities so that capitalism can save the bourgeoisie. Yet when the bourgeoisie gives this “enlightenment” as Marx entitled, the proletariat goes against them and the proletariat in fact stabs the “hand that must feed him” as Marx wrote in his Manifesto. Helen Keller Disabled socialist describes this action in great detail in her 1913 work entitled Justice a vision for the deaf “this is not a time of gentleness, of timid beginnings that steal life with soft apologies and dainty grace. It is time for loud voiced , open speech and fearless thinking; a time of striving and conscious manhood, a time of all that is robust and vehement and bold; a time of radiant with new ideals, new hopes of a true democracy” this is also a fact for the Autistic population as Jim Sinclair writes in his 1993 our voice journal essay Don’t mourn for us stating:
“This is not my child that I expected and planned for. This is an alien child who landed in my life by accident. I don’t know who this child is or what it will become. But I know it’s a child, stranded in an alien world, without parents of its own kind to care for it. It needs someone to care for it, to teach it, to interpret and to advocate for it. And because this alien child happened to drop into my life, that job is mine if I want it.”
This ideology that Jim Sinclair and Helen Keller share is the ideology that democracy is there if you want it that you have the vote in accepting your child or other children and adults with disability. In addition, there acceptance means full nondiscriminatory and fascist biases that these individuals must be in full acceptance and freedom. Moreover, there ideology states that the proletariat can overthrow the bourgeoisie stating, “that job is mine if I want it” as Jim Sinclair wrote. This is powerful because Marx in his manifesto wrote at the ending of his thesis “ The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chain. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
In her 2013 book, The Autistic brain Temple Grandin writes
“I have talked to numerous young people with Asperger's syndrome who have been fired from there jobs. Yet there condition was no more or less severe than the kids I knew in school, or the Aspies who I ate lunch together, or the fish-farming research director, or any of the other on-the-spectrum people I have met who have managed to keep their jobs for decades. It’s a generational thing, I suspect.”
I suspect it is a generation of capitalists who want to exploit autism this political philosophy of autism in the camp of neuro-tribes and neurodiversity the proletariat is gaining political power. education on how the system of capitalism is against them, and their identity as a proletariat. The 2007 printing of the Reader in Marxist Philosophy by Howard Selsam and Harry Martel demonstrates how capitalism is going against the disabled by writing:
The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. In the words of Hegel, the class of the proletariat is in abasement indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between it human nature and its and it condition of life, which is the outright, decisive, and comprehensive negation of that nature.
“The disabled” themselves feel disabled from life itself. the reason why is they have be in an “abasement of indignation” they have been in that place where they have so fired up to change their own outcome in life then bourgeoisie plots against the proletariats way to enter their own freedom so that they are a slave to the work the bourgeoisie gives them. For example, an autistic who knows that they can do standard schooling without medication and they prove that they are a genius in a particular subject and the special education teachers meet with the child and the parents and the meeting denies the child’s request the child then loses his urge to become great at his subject and furthermore stops learning his favorite subject and does what the teachers tell him or her what to do rather than their own will. Carol Kanar in her 2014 book The confident student she writes “The relationship between student and mentor serves several purposes. It gives the student a contact person on campus to turn to for advice, for help in solving a problem…to help students to be successful.” In the case of my example a student is becoming unsuccessful to there own species being which is a problem for all students all autistics because they have been oppressed by the capitalist bourgeoisie.
