I got on Reddit today because I was bored, boo, I have no idea why I ever visit that site.I know there are people dunking in the comments, but this thread being entertained whatsoever is mind boggling to me. Would my life with schizophrenia get better under Communism? Sure. But "solving neurodivergence" is some of the most absurd shit I've heard from leftists in a while
The autism leaving my body the second the last landlord is thrown into the Sun
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One could argue that
From Each According To Their Ability. To Each According to Their Need
"Solves" neurodivergence by valuing it. You're no longer a round peg getting forced into to the most profitably shaped square hole. You're an active participant in a system that's designed to help you find where you fit in best for yourself and your community.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, its all still people being people. And it's not like the USSR or Soviet China have been above ableism during their runs.
This is true, but neurodivergent people such as myself will still struggle to remember to brush our teeth even in an ideal world. The idea of diagnosis being dissolved under communism because "people will just get better" is kinda ridiculous.
People won't just "get better", but society can be structured to become more accommodating towards different groups. In that sense, the barriers between people come down and they can collaborate and collectivize more easily. For the same reason you'll see cities with amenities for the blind or wheelchair bound, you can imagine communities that are geared to accommodate folks with neurodivergent diagnoses.
What I see - which becomes frustrating in its defeatism - is people who can't imagine a better world or are hostile to any kind of change from the standard. Folks who spit and howl over a sign language interpreter at public events or bemoan the burdensome cost of inserts into sidewalks to aid the blind (like you can find all over Japan or Belgium) make even incremental progress this endless bureaucratic burden. The idea that maybe you don't need to bombard everyone with a kaleodascope of glittery advertisements in order to hijack their attention shouldn't be as radical as it is.
But I like to think a country that's friendlier to autistic people is friendlier to everyone, for the same reason guide walks and warning sounds for the blind and visual queues for the deaf can be a boon to the sighted and hearing as well.
personally had enough reddit for today so i'll just say this: i do know is that my ADHD and other assorted neurodiversities would really love the stability and predictability of life under socialism.
The specific labels are now becoming obsolete (schizophrenia already lost its loosely defined subtypes, and getting a new set of categories or even getting fully replaced as a diagnosis are more likely than most would think), but the actual bad stuff going on in our heads is the same as ever, we're just learning more about it. Pretty exciting times!
Let me guess, they’ll detect autism and try to groom us from birth to make menial labor our special interest, and then we do all the undesirable jobs that have been chosen for us? After all, we’re too stupid to make our own decisions.
That’s it, isn’t it?
I mean, the capitalist approach is to identify people with autism and groom them into being sports gamblers and Funko pop horders.
Then you tell them they need soul crushing careers in finance, sales, and logistics in order to cover the cost of their habit.
Getting folks engaged in more socially productive careers (autistic or otherwise) sounds more attractive than getting them addicted to consumerism and threatening their high to squeeze them for their labor.
Shit like this post and your comment is part of why I have no fucking faith that communism will actually make things any better for people like me. God forbid autistic people express that we would like to have basic self-determination, god forbid we be annoyed by the endless cavalcade of ableist NT idiots and assimilationist fucking ingrates who are incapable of getting their collective head out of their collective ass and realizing that not all autists, perhaps even most even under the pressures of nuerotypical society that shoves assimilation into our faces at every fucking turn no matter where one goes, WANT to be like a fucking nuerotypical. Why can't autistic people simply be raised like anyone else? Why the fuck do we have to be targeted and funneled into 'socially productive careers', go fuck yourself.
"From each according to his ability" implies a socially productive career doesn't it?
The goal for any socialist state is full employment, doing work that benefits society in some way. Of course allowing for different definitions of employment and work, outside of the capitalist definition of "that which earns profit". Recognizing that all jobs deserve respect, that a man sweeping the floor of a factory deserves the same rights and privileges, access to the same resources, and is just as important to the overall organization, as management.
I don't understand your objections to the comment that you're replying to. Capitalism forces maladaptive social constructs that greatly impact some people, presumably including yourself. People with trouble managing time getting fired for being 5 minutes late, companies targeting people with addictive traits in order to extract profit, people who have trouble with social anxiety or social interaction being forced to "sell themselves" in interviews to get the job that they need to survive, most "menial" jobs being in customer service which requires quite a bit of emotional labor even from the most gregarious and outgoing people, these are all a result of the capitalist mode of production.
The socialist mode of production will still have some requirements, factory work does rely on punctuality, some jobs will require interacting with the public, there will always be individuals who take advantage of others. But in a socialist society everyone would be directed to socially productive careers, because the unproductive careers would be phased out and unnecessary. You don't need marketing executives to sell artisan crafted triple-ply toilet paper if the state has a monopoly on toilet paper production. And in this kind of environment, even if you're not a good fit for a job that requires extraordinary time management skills, you would be free to pursue whatever career best matches your abilities and desires without the threat of starving in the street.
I don't think I am understanding your objection to that comment above, and would appreciate if you could explain it to me.
Wow, cowardly too, deleted your reply before I could even see it, what a shocker. Great job.
The neurotypical brain is hardwired to detect, detest and shun people with autism. They can literally tell within seconds of looking at us and they treat us accordingly. Socialism will not change that
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5286449/
I hadn't seen this study, thank you for posting it. It figures. I honestly have no faith that any revolution of any kind will make things much better for us - frankly, a society with tighter social bonds, as communism might require, may even be worse in some ways. Not having the pressures of capital would admittedly be nice, it might end up evening out to being roughly equivalently awful.
The only idea I have at this point is just. Separation from NT society. But since nuerodivergent people are evenly distributed throughout the population with no particular geographical groupings, that's never going to happen.
Top comment is good, the thread must have been a lot worse when you posted this because it doesn't look too bad to me at this point
I think the top comment was pretty misguided and it's an unintentional whitewash of history. It's a bad take. A well-meaning one but a bad take all the same.
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It should have stopped there.
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It really should have stopped there.
Isn't this also the kind of conclusions being drawn in Capitalist Realism? It's almost two chapters worth of the book, talking about schizophrenia and ADHD as some kind of manifestation of capitalism's demands on individuals.
oh this is a HUGE thing on tic tok. they just say the social model of disability like its a magic spell if you try to argue with them. they also argue that they wouldn't be disabled pre industrial revolution.
Yah I’ve noticed tiktok is ableist as fuck and it’s so normalized. People there use autistic as an insult or way to self deprecate over completely allistic behaviors of theirs. Or rather ‘neuro spicy’ or ‘tism’ since they self censor there
Nah, if I was in a field and my job was to chase rabbits and raid cattle my adhd would cause me zero problems.
That top comment was
n'ttoobad, and then I scrolled down and just sat there
Edit: ReadFanon dropped another banger.
I'm hot off coming out of that thread so maybe this response is a product of exposure to the cognitohazard more than anything but Grunya Sukhareva was first to describe autism in medicine/academia. This happened in the Soviet Union. So the idea of a historical materialist attributing the impetus to describe and pathologise autism as being inherently due to capitalism is ignorant of history and it denies that this first happened under socialism.
The intention of the top comment was good but imo it's still really misguided.
Mother fuckers trying to tell me my ADHD isn't hereditary, that capitalism is why I have time blindness, cool story. Sounds like some fucking NT shit. I wish I could inflict these people with my divergence. Fuck casting Fire Ball, I cast infinite wave of divergence on their whole bloodline.
We don't have time blindness. I can tell when the sun is up and it is time to hunt. Everything else is fake. If capitlaism didn't enforce pointless and rasist systems of time measurement we would have no issues there.
As a Marxist, I must inform you that our goals are to abolish the oppressive bourgeois concept of linear time. As Marx once said, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." What is History, but an expression of Linear Time, and through the abolition of Linear Time, we will free ourselves from both the chains of the past, and the future!
Linear time is when the sun goes down and it is time to sleep.
Being at the desk by 0700 to do no actual work till 0730 is bullshit. That you get yelled at for being there at 0710 even though there is no work to is also bullshit. That is all a made up system that is completely arbitrary and only serves to reinforce all the worst instincts in society. Patriarchy? Sure. It's hard to do that when you have kids. Rascism? Sure, it's hard to be there at 0700 sharp when the world has been made dangerous to you. Name a bad thing about society. Enforcing punctuality is part of that system. Let people be 10 -15 late. It's fine
I hate to break it to you, but people are going to want you to be on time for the Socialist Revolution. They'll want you to be on time after it, too. I highly doubt after the fall of capitalism that the next form of production won't contain a bunch of pedantic neurotypical dweebs who want to "hit the deadlines". When you want to meet people for socialist lunch, and you're 10 min late, there will be people who are annoyed by that. I highly doubt it's going to be much better under socialism. The system we live under doesn't manifest time blindness and to deny that it exists outside the context of the conditions we live under is not, in my opinion, a materialist perspective. If I can sit at a task that my brain fixates on, and not realize how much time it took me to do the task, or not be able to estimate now much time it takes to do a given task, that's going to be true, no matter how things are arranged. This entire framing that what I experience every day, is somehow not real and instead only a manifestation of the social relations of capital is frankly insulting. I'm not saying you're saying that, I'm just saying people in that thread are saying that.
I had the very same reaction when reading Capitalist Realism.
If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict. Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting its users; William Gibson recognized that in Neuromancer when he had Case and the other cyberspace cowboys feeling insects-under-the-skin strung out when they unplugged from the matrix (Case’s amphetamine habit is plainly the substitute for an addiction to a far more abstract speed). If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture.
Fisher is making the argument that ADHD is an abnormal manifestation of late capitalism, that being bombarded by the "entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture," you will develop ADHD. In 2010 a London team found direct evidence that ADHD is a genetic disorder. This book was published in 2009. The people in that thread are essentially making the same arguments as Fisher. "There is no 'genetic' component to ADHD/Autism" is bullshit idealist nonsense.
At the intersection of the topology of my brain and the way society is structured lays friction. This is true under capitalism, and it will be true under socialism, especially if idealist brain worms like the ones in that thread make their way into the fabric of the new social order.
Not surprisingly, work discipline left much to be desired. There was the clerk who chatted endlessly with a friend on the telephone while a long line of people waited resentfully for service, the two workers who took three days to paint a hotel wall that should have taken a few hours, the many who would walk off their jobs to go shopping. Such poor performance itself contributed to low productivity and the cycle of scarcity. In 1979, Cuban leader Raul Castro offered this list of abuses:
[The] lack of work discipline, unjustified absences from work, deliberate go-slows so as not to surpass the norms—which are already low and poorly applied in practice—so that they won’t be changed. … In contrast to capitalism, when people in the country-side worked an exhausting 12-hour workday and more, there are a good many instances today especially in agriculture, of people … working no more than four or six hours, with the exception of cane-cutters and possibly a few other kinds of work. We know that in many cases heads of brigades and foremen make a deal with workers to meet the norm in half a day and then go off and work for the other half for some nearby small [private] farmer [for extra income]; or to go slow and meet the norm in seven or eight hours; or do two or three norms in a day and report them over other days on which they don’t go to work. …
All these “tricks of the trade” in agriculture are also to be found in industry, transportation services, repair shops and many other places where there’s rampant buddyism, cases of “you do me a favor and I’ll do you one” and pilfering on the side. (Cuba Update, 3/80)
If fired, an individual had a constitutional guarantee to another job and seldom had any difficulty finding one. The labor market was a seller’s market. Workers did not fear losing their jobs but managers feared losing their best workers and sometimes overpaid them to prevent them from leaving. Too often, however, neither monetary rewards nor employment itself were linked to performance. The dedicated employee usually earned no more than the irresponsible one. The slackers and pilferers had a demoralizing effect on those who wanted to work in earnest.
Michael Parenti, Black Shirts and Reds, Chapter 4: Communism In Wonderland, Section 2: Nobody Minding the Store, para 4-6.
Maybe Raul Castro would think I was one of those slackers "pilfering on the side."
Your post is well thought out and I don't have a well thought out responce to it.
In comunist China they tradionally have work days with shorter work periods and bigger breaks. That would help with Symptom managment. Further it would cut out alot of overhead. At least 30% of my job is make work stuff to make paperwork people happy someplace. Without banks and insurance companies working for investors to maximize profit a good deal of that would go away. So my work would be even easier and more intresting. Further 10 minutes late to comunist style 2 hour lunch is much less a deal than it is for a 30 min capitalist lunch. So despite not changing my neuroanatomy my situation would be less maladaptive. So while I would have ADHD no matter what it would just be ADH as it is not D for for the society
We generally agree, so don't stress needing to "respond" to my "points" comrade. It's all good! I'm not really trying to change your mind, just expressing my perspective. Don't get me wrong, my perspective includes life being better under socialism, I just also accept that the typical/divergent relationship and social interaction won't immediately improve.
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