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8:23am July 19, 2014

sanityscraps:

I have some exciting activism news: I’ve just joined the International Socialist Organization, and I’ve been working with them on disability politics.  And they’ve agreed to help me out in March and April to speak out against Autism Speaks and their ableism! I’m going to give a public teaching talk and try to record it for the internet.

However, I also have a lot of self-education to do on the topic. Can anyone recommend any books about the history of disability politics, especially in socialist/communist contexts? I’ve read that even in countries where socialist revolutions were relatively successful, the disabled were forced to live in conditions just as bad as, if not worse than, those in capitalist nations, and I really want to know more about that. ADAPT’s history of sit-ins especially interests me. I want to talk about all disability, too, not just autism (which I just happen to know the most about, being autistic).

Thank you!

I think you’ll find that they mostly care about self-promotion and selling their newspapers, as well as rivalries with other socialist organizations (which are little better, sometimes worse).  Around here, they tend to turn up at anything remotely political, prominently waving around copies of the Socialist Worker (aimed directly at the camera), while reciting as much memorized babble as they can about the issue in order to keep the camera’s attention.  Which has not changed even slightly since my brief involvement with them half a lifetime ago when I thought they might actually be usefully socialist.  When I quit, they told me “That’s okay, you never sold enough newspapers anyway.”  But good luck, maybe your chapter is different.