not so much on the self-care is shit part. i think anyone who has been involved in any kind of revolutionary organization has figured out that self-care is an important element of it if you expect to have any longevity. self-care and solidarity (or mutual aid if you wish to use that terminology) strenghten each other. anyway based on the other comments here it seems you have changed your tone so i won't harp on that but if you have had experience with people who have a deep "learned helplessness" due to decades of poverty and the system failing them and have tried to help them you will know that the rhetoric you were using is both ineffective and heartless but i'll stop at that.
i mean self care in the sense used in the article, and in the many liberal discourses it criticizes; that is, ascribing a deep political significance to the individual pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. i'm not advocating for a bootstraps mentality, and i'm not denying the real fact of our collective and individual disempowerment, but if we wish to pull our fellow workers up out of the muck, we need to begin from a place that assumes some degree of agency.
yeah, that particular definition is shit too imo. that said, when it comes to these types of things the amount of agency varies extensively, depending on the conditions you are facing. when i say self care i mean doing what is necessary to secure the bottom rungs of the maslow hierarchy more or less. if you are not able to get food, clothes, shelter, meds, sleep etc your agency even over your own mental state become severely reduced and because most people attempt to acquire those things through selling labor or getting SSI/SSDI checks that may not pay enough for that to happen. capitalism literally robs many people of most of their agency and its a downward spiral from there on and can lead to maladaptive behaviors like drug abuse etc.
liberal outlets that promote hedonism as self care only make this worse. solidarity and mutual aid can help us break through some of that but mostly we are left to fend for ourselves, which is why i am not against a better definition of self care that can be more useful if still very limited in its ability to meaningfully increase agency for many people. much of psychiatry and self-help coaching is similar to be honest, it only works for a small subset of people and is much more likely to work if socioeconomic factors have been guaranteed to begin with, which is not a safe assumption in our system of capitalism
not so much on the self-care is shit part. i think anyone who has been involved in any kind of revolutionary organization has figured out that self-care is an important element of it if you expect to have any longevity. self-care and solidarity (or mutual aid if you wish to use that terminology) strenghten each other. anyway based on the other comments here it seems you have changed your tone so i won't harp on that but if you have had experience with people who have a deep "learned helplessness" due to decades of poverty and the system failing them and have tried to help them you will know that the rhetoric you were using is both ineffective and heartless but i'll stop at that.
i mean self care in the sense used in the article, and in the many liberal discourses it criticizes; that is, ascribing a deep political significance to the individual pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. i'm not advocating for a bootstraps mentality, and i'm not denying the real fact of our collective and individual disempowerment, but if we wish to pull our fellow workers up out of the muck, we need to begin from a place that assumes some degree of agency.
yeah, that particular definition is shit too imo. that said, when it comes to these types of things the amount of agency varies extensively, depending on the conditions you are facing. when i say self care i mean doing what is necessary to secure the bottom rungs of the maslow hierarchy more or less. if you are not able to get food, clothes, shelter, meds, sleep etc your agency even over your own mental state become severely reduced and because most people attempt to acquire those things through selling labor or getting SSI/SSDI checks that may not pay enough for that to happen. capitalism literally robs many people of most of their agency and its a downward spiral from there on and can lead to maladaptive behaviors like drug abuse etc.
liberal outlets that promote hedonism as self care only make this worse. solidarity and mutual aid can help us break through some of that but mostly we are left to fend for ourselves, which is why i am not against a better definition of self care that can be more useful if still very limited in its ability to meaningfully increase agency for many people. much of psychiatry and self-help coaching is similar to be honest, it only works for a small subset of people and is much more likely to work if socioeconomic factors have been guaranteed to begin with, which is not a safe assumption in our system of capitalism