``..The independent living movement has already answered many of your questions though unfortunately it has accepted the foundations of free market ideology...'' Marta
------------
I have to go to work, and I am already an hour and half late. Anyway, it is critical to explain how and why the community based services and independent living movements have failed and were doomed to fail from the start---despite the fact that they also answer the primary question of how to organize people into collective action.
The problem centers on the idea that their whole justification for existance in the first place was to get people out of the margins of life----but the justification was to make marginal people employable. While this escapes the institutional and medical models, and begins the process of re-patriation so to speak, it also centers this development around work and the free market.
So the critical juncture is working out of the margins, but into a mainstream of political action against the free market ideal of socialization.
I can summarize this in one quick story. Me and Ed Roberts (I was one of his attendants a very long time ago) were arguing over something related to this. He was writing a grant to RSA and giving me the justification as breaking down employment barriers. I said, `Shit, Ed, who wants a fucking job?' After a long moment of frog breathing, he said, `Yeah, yah, but we are not saying that in public, Chuck. This is going to Voc Rehab and we need them to sign off on it.'
Anyway gotta go. Marta, please help explain this for the list. Since I have to go now. Its an pivotal political transistion that has to be made...and isn't just restricted to movements around disability.
Chuck Grimes