(Doyle) Of course the point of view being expressed corporately is someone occupying a bed, a specific type of disability, when most lived disabilities aren't about being in bed all the time in a warehouse. Class systems hold people in categories which provide levels of profit. That creates a role for someone to occupy. They also create an image of someone because that is how we might happen upon someone in that case. So someone in that situation would not have any right to independent living, because the house rules don't allow that, and the staff enforce that. The staff in many cases doesn't even grasp that anything else is possible.
(Marta) "In-home PAS will give us the power to both hire our attendants and fire abusive ones. If we are successful in making PAS mandatory national policy, it is my view that the additional challenge will be to prevent domination of PAS services by corporations or by the medical profession and to obtain a level of funding that will both pay a living wage and provide benefits.
Marta Russell"
(Doyle) I regard the employee/employer view you expressed as not really coming to terms with class issues involved. Certainly the logic of costs of PAS and of independent living are superior to the Corporate warehousing system which predominates. For instance, which is better, corporate, or small employers or neither? Your point is that independence is the primary goal to fight for, but are you talking about the concept of individual liberty as people are supposed to have in the U.S., or what?
(Doyle) Independence for a disabled person, aside from mobility access, strikes deeply into the heart of the Capitalist system concept of individual liberty. For example aside from needing attendent care, what about the independence of schizophrenics! I mean where is the autonomous line to be drawn for true independence? Or language related problems? Or Kervorkian, who "assists" the disabled to suicide without making sure they had independence of harsh social realities from the U.S. economy?
(Doyle) Socialist regimes use terror, meaning emotions to control anti-social elements. Is there anything like an understanding of the disability issues that someone who is anxiety ridden might require? Why do we readily inflict disabilities upon our enemies when the socialist injustice of that attitude is on the surface. I mean if we use disabling methods to deal with our enemies we are practicing bigotry against the disabled.
(Doyle) 70% of the disabled are unemployed. They are consistently the bottom of the heap in the system. Class systems are designed to wear out people physically for the greater profit. Look at the ever growing heap of people in workers compensation due to computers with the propensity to cause repetitive stress injuries. Disability rights clashes directly with the idea we are disposable commodities. But more deeply when one tries to really make independent living possible then most of the main barriers that the system makes to keep people in their place are made clear enough. Teaching the dyslexic to read, employing the bi-polar in a job that doesn't make their life a hell, on and on.
(Marta) "Disability, for purposes of explaining oppression, is a social construct. I use ablism or physicalism to describe the functional hierarchy imposed on disabled people. When people don't run, jump, see, hear, or mentally perform to the medical model "norm" they are considered less than those who do. Ablism or physicalism is viewing difference as a superior(nondisabled)/inferior(disabled) paradigm and this is strongly reinforced by the medical model (which views these differences as "defects")."
(Doyle) The problem with the idea of difference is where is the universal in a social system? For instance one might say that sign language is not universal in this English culture. If you say "English Only" that is oppressive, but we still need to communicate with a deaf person whether or not it is English only. We need a language of exchange that all can use not just experts, not just specialists. We still need a universal communication system even if the example of the current system isolates us in narrow segments and gives us little to understand what could replace it. If one sees a system has social justice and equality, that is deals with class in the system, then there has to be universal rules. Does that mean one language for all, or does that mean that different language systems have a right to exist within a larger universal framework? That arises again from the predominate problems of access for cognitive disabilities such autism, which are the knotty problems at the center of social justice and equality.
(Doyle) It seems to me, that this is the time to introduce into Marxism the debate at the center of true equality, the mind debate. How can anyone understand such terms as reification, or alienation without reference to the brain? How can we really resolve inequality without really including into the center of this debate those who most in the heart of oppression? What does it mean that the Soviet Union used mental hospitals to hold political prisoners? When do we stop identifying workers as a specific corporate activity, and start seeing the whole of their lives? We can at least begin to see that women's work is work whether or not they are "employed" by the economy. Doyle Saylor