EDIT: I appreciate the responses to this question. I would encourage people to keep this discussion going if they feel as though they have something substantive to add.

Hello chapos! I've been lurking for like the past month (after lurking the original chapo subreddit for years before that) and feel the need to get this issue off my chest anonymously before asking my IRL comrades about it.

Y'all are hardened Marxists around here, so I feel like it might be useful to ask about this, hoping for a brutally honest answer. What does accessibility for people with invisible disabilities and neurodivergent people look like in the early stages of a socialist revolution? I've heard demands like "the revolution will be made accessible" before but as an aspie who's lived his entire life in the belly of the beast (i.e. Murrika) I find it extremely difficult to imagine a wartime socialist economy - i.e. one subject to constant siege in the form of sanctions, blockades, psyops, and other Cold War bullshit - making any such accommodations when literally everyone (except maybe party members, assuming revisionist leadership) is living close to subsistence already. I suspect people with physical disabilities and retirees who spent a lifetime busting their asses would and probably should get first priority.

Under these conditions, the able-bodied workers who keep our borderline-lumpen asses alive could easily democratically decide to throw us into mental hospitals or gulags unless or until we provide at least as much in labor value as we consume in order to survive (and our living costs tend to be greater than that of the average worker because of the extra labor necessary to provide healthcare, so all but the most productive among this group are deadweights). Obviously the communist ideal would be an automated post-scarcity form in which each gets what they need rather than just what they produce, but that's a very long-term goal almost certainly not reachable in our lifetimes. A successful revolution in the US and North America would, extrapolating from 2020's objective conditions, necessarily result from the subjective factor eventually catching up to accelerating and highly advanced imperial decay and the exponentially increasing challenges coming from global warming, with the American and Anglo capitalists likely going literally scorched-earth as a final fuck you once they lose (probably featuring nukes and other spiteful irreversible acts of ecocidal terrorism) and leaving little left for a socialist US to start developing itself with and too many mouths to feed.

I'm willing to suffer chronic burnout and exhaustion for the revolution if that's what it takes, even if it's worse than what I deal with now. However, dying for revolution under these probable hellish conditions seems like a more attractive option - I would be spared the suffering of living close to starvation in a dying world, and more resilient comrades eager to push forward and do the thankless tiresome work of rebuilding for the benefit of future generations would be relieved of the burden of one deadweight sad-sack slowing them down.

Have I reached rational conclusions here based on current objective conditions and the historical realities of attempted large-scale socialist experiments in the USSR, PRC, etc.?

  • TossedAccount [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    4 years ago

    What happens if the capitalists turn most of the US's agricultural land into wastelands (even if it's just a long-term result of global climate change)? Obviously we could give up beef and other meats to quickly improve agricultural efficiency almost tenfold but that can only be done once. Restoration of desertified lands would be a borderline-Sisyphean generations-long project (and would be much harder with 4 C+ warming than the PRC's current efforts to green their deserts with 2 C of warming). Would we have a contingency plan for Canada annexing all the territory surrounding the Great Lakes other than just invading and annexing a British-controlled Canada first like in Kaissereich? What if the enemy decides to nuke or poison the Great Lakes? My scenario assumes borderline Mad-Max like conditions, with most of the west coast looking like World 8 from Super Mario Bros. 3 12 months a year, because we live in the worst timeline and the international ruling class is full of petty nihilist fucks who've repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to permanently destroy the conditions necessary for the continued existence of humanity past the 21st century should they lose control.