coerced treatment

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

This is too quick and facile an explanation, in my view. Disabled folks may 
be more unproductive, but how does it follow that the most efficacious way 
of handling unproductiveness, from a capitalist point of view, is 
confinement. What's wrong with having individual family units bear the cost 
of sustaining the unproductive? In some ways it is even more of a cost 
effective approach, since it places the economic burden on the individual 
family, thus avoiding the inevitable socialization of cost in mass confinement.

In her rush to reduce all social oppression to the logic and power of 
capital, Yoshie elides the possibility that there may be other logics and 
other powers at work.

Yoshie:
>Modern discrimination against & oppression of the disabled -- especially 
>the Great Confinement of the disabled & other groups that Foucault 
>discusses -- arose in response to capitalism that demanded the confinement 
>of the unproductive & the
>disruptive (unproductive & disruptive from capital's point of view). 
>Medicine is but a vehicle through which capital's class power has been 
>exercised. Capital's power over experts (medical or otherwise), however, 
>is contestable. The best example may be the removal of homosexuality from 
>DSM in 1973, in response to the demand by the
>rising gay liberation movement.

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272
212-98-6869

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

.