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

    I recognize the importance of the supply line, the factories, and agitprop. I am not prepared for combat. What worries me is that the same sense of exhaustion, demoralization, and chronic burnout I face now is going to continue to make me unproductive in civilian sectors during a revolution.

    • Doc14 [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I think the important thing is that the revolution should be able to accommodate you no matter how bad things get for you. That's one of the big differences we have with the capitalists, if someone is struggling with their issues at some points than we should help them and provide as much support as possible. A comrade is not capital and no-one is expected to perform like the robots the corporations so desperately want us to be.