Marxism

Published in Solidairty 434, 29 March 2017:

Can Marxism can help us to understand autistic experience in modern capitalism? How might Marxism inform our struggles for equality and liberation?

There are different approaches to understanding autism. Perhaps the dominant approach is a medical one: seeing autism as a disease or tragedy, and autistic people as being broken and needing fixing. Over recent years, a more progressive approach has developed. It stresses acceptance of autistic people rather than simply “awareness”, and demands rights, equality and support rather than abusive “treatments”.

This approach is based on the concept of neurodiversity: the recognition that the human species is neurologically diverse; that different people have different brain wiring. But this more progressive approach, while welcome, does not necessarily locate autism and neurodiversity within the social, economic and political structures of society. It is important to do this — firstly, because all disability exists in a social context; and secondly, because autism is largely an issue of how people interact socially. We are all expected to follow social rules, but who makes those social rules, and how?

A 20-minute PowerPoint presentation discussing whether Marxism can help us to understand autistic experience in modern capitalism, and how it might inform our struggles for liberation.

Janine read through the notes from the previous meeting, and reported on the process to draw up a Labour Party autism/neurodiversity manifesto. Discussion followed, and included:

Preamble
As public understanding of autism grows, there are different approaches to understanding it.
* A medical approach, which sees autism as a disease or a tragedy, that we are broken and need fixing

This article was published in Solidarity 365, 20 May 2015

As we wage the fight of our lives against Tory government attacks on disabled people, it may seem that discussing “models” of disability is an irrelevance, a distraction, a waste of time.

The fourth in a series of articles about the German socialist women's movement 1890-1914, written in 2005, originally published here:

Laws against women’s organisation