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8:13pm January 23, 2014

This is deliberately disconnected from its original post, because I didn’t want to distract people from the original topic.

This quote from the last quote I reblogged:

“White radicals must realize that the circumstances and realities of indigenous people are different. What appeal does a working-class movement have to a population that faces devastating unemployment?”

Also applies extremely well to many approaches I’ve seen in socialist movements, to unemployed disabled people, who are basically (if we’re noticed at all) e’ve seen as “anti-revolutionary” by many people because, if we get benefits, we “want the state to continue’ and… all this other stuff.  There isn’t any real understanding of our actual views and how they contribute to ideas about where capitalism goes wrong, that are often completely different from purely working-class ideas and theories about where capitalism goes wrong.

(Even though working-class people should be thinking about this, given that they’re more likely to be injured and become disabled in industrial accidents.)

One of the biggest and most important viewpoints disabled people have to offer is the understanding that human beings are interdependent (not independent), and that our value doesn’t lie in the jobs we do, or even the other obvious contributions we make, but just in the reality that we exist and all people are valuable.

Which flies in the face of everything capitalism values about human beings, and capitalism is a big part of how modern disabled people are seen as useless and worthless.  Unemployed disabled people have as big a stake, if not a bigger stake, in changing this, as working-class nondisabled people do.  

But anyway, wanted to make a side-note about this somewhere where it wouldn’t detract from the main message about indigenous people.  Because this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.  There are so many different points of view among different sorts of people that contain such large groups of unemployed people, who are never talked about in these discussions at all.  (Or, if talked about, seen as no real consequence or even as an obstruction rather than as actual people who might have something important to contribute.)

Original post I got this quote from, the last one I reblogged:

http://youneedacat.tumblr.com/post/74332018819/proposed-solution-make-no-excuses-for-not-recruiting