Doyle, thanks for bringing disability issues to our attention! a very _silenced_ topic indeed, just like race and women's isues.. Mine ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 22:16:08 -0700 From: Doyle Saylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:19401] Disability Issues, An arrow in the new economy Greetings Comrades, In the local press I noticed two different kinds of disability influenced analyses. I wanted to bring out some of the implications. I am looking at class structure in relation to disabled people and how disability is portrayed in the press. The first article is in a local free weekly, The East Bay Express, May 12th vol. ,# 31, "Working Without A Net--Could It Be That Welfare Reform Is Actually a Success?" By Timothy Beneke, interviewing Jill Duerr Berrick at UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. To summarize the article and then give a few quotes, since the U.S. economy has produced more low paying jobs, those people forced off welfare now participate directly in the workforce. The question posed by the author of this article is 'the end of welfare' working as social policy. This phrasing refers to a shift going on in the lives of seven million people where there are jobs affected by these work for welfare rules. The point of the researcher Berrick is that the destruction of the welfare system hasn't been tested yet, since people can find low paying jobs. But here are parts that has disability contribution to working class structure which Berrick does not seem to consider, page 14, Berrick speaking, .."The evidence is fairly clear that the U.S. has the worst record among the industrialized democracies in its treatment of children. The terrible irony is that no one doing research on children denies that poverty has a pernicious effect. We know that the deeper and longer the poverty, the more severe the effect. And the earlier the child experiences poverty, the more severe the effect. "The negative effects include a myriad of things. First, there are negative implications for children's cognitive functioning--poverty affects children's brain development. The actual number of synapses that develop inside your head is affected by how much cash your mother brings home! It's remarkable how the experience of poverty negatively affects the brain. "We have known for a long time that there is a strong correlation between poverty and negative social outcomes, such as children landing in the juvenile justice system, young women getting pregnant early, dropping out of high school, and so on. But the new evidence on poverty and its relationship with brain development is especially sobering. When you think of relegating whole classes of humanity to having fewer opportunities in life because of that deprivation in the early years, the implications are remarkably painful." page 15... Doyle It is not clear from the above statement this researcher grasps that they are talking about disabilities and what that implies about a capitalist social system. Aside from the fact that the children being depicted don't deserve to be thrown into a living hell, suppose we instead became aware of what could happen to class structure if disability became a part of the perspective on organizing workers. On the one hand, the researcher above ignoring that disability (as a means of creating class structure) has something to do with welfare rolls possibly because disabled people conceptually are always outside the system of work processes. Where people who grow up in a mal-nourished environment develop problems with various kinds of "able bodied" activity due to ingesting for example lead paint this seems to mean to most people that that person is an outcast from work itself, rather than question the structure of work itself that creates such issues. (It is a different issue that some disabled people can't work.) For which then others who are not at risk and can meet the multiple demands upon their ability to work under schedules, lists of things to do, etc function as part of the system and define an able bodiedness that impedes how we might go in other directions. But if people are to work anyway, then being disabled has to become central to how work itself is organized, or the end result is that disabled people will end up homeless and begging on the streets as the easiest elements to discard in a work life that is strictly defined by "able bodied" standards. Furthermore since being disabled usually considered invisible and outside the work force as in a natural part of welfare life, and by ending welfare as we know it, this forces the issue of what to do with millions of people affected by a lack of safety net. However suppose we didn't take it as a given that the only way to do things is according to able bodied standards. What Marxism has always focused upon was an understanding of the working class as a whole, as opposed to historical divisions of working people based upon kinds of work, racism, sexism. An effort by business to employ people outside the able bodied norms does happen in this economy, because of economic pressures to find more workers in a given profitable market place. We see some disabled people all the time in small roles (tokens) while the bulk of people with disabilities remain locked out (aggregate of major disabled categories is 70% unemployment rate). In order to structure a workers movement to disabled elements we have to look more closely at the many different ways the social systems denies disabled people being part of the whole. Welfare concepts of who is a worker and isn't makes it convenient for business to not pay for a system of work that counts disabled people as human beings. In a system where welfare safety nets don't exists, the choice for disabled people is complete loss of all resources of support or having the work system restructured to meet access needs. There is no way for disabled workers to fight effectively for those needs without social organization linked to wider movements. Social organization of workers cannot address working class needs without making disability a serious part of the whole structure of the working class. Here is a typical specific one sees in disabled lives, a second example from the capitalist press to give us a sense why we might understand wholeness about class structure and class organizing of working class people has an important disability component. San Francisco Chronicle, page A10, Thursday May 11, 2000, Stroke Victims Found to Be Good Lie Detectors, With Speech Skills Damaged, They Learn to Read Facial Expressions, by Richard A. Knox, Boston Globe, "Boston, How do you tell when someone's lying? Don't listen to the words. Watch the face. "Researchers are reporting that people who have suffered brain damage that wipes out their ability to decipher speech are much sharper than almost everybody else at spotting lies. "Not that most people are very good lie detectors. In fact, study after study has shown that the vast majority are no better than a coin-toss at discriminating truth from falsehood--and that includes police officers, psychiatrists, judges and customs inspectors. "In sharp contrast, stroke victims who suffer from a disorder called receptive aphasia - the inability to comprehend speech - can detect nearly three lies out of every four. "The reason is that, at least for some kinds of lies, words apparently get in the way of other telling clues to perception. When the brain's left hemisphere speech comprehension area is damaged, that removes the distraction of words. The researchers believe that other parts of the brain gradually sharpen, especially right-hemisphere areas attuned to tiny, fleeting facial expressions that betray true feeling...." Doyle First we ought to keep in mind the caveat of Carrol Cox's recent remarks about the popular presses frequent reprints of research claims. Research results often fluctuate from study to study, and we ourselves must keep a critical eye upon the meaning of such things, being honest amongst ourselves about the subject matter. Through the lens of a disability we see how difficult it is to know how other people feel from directly talking to them since these individuals who had a stroke were now better equipped to understand how another person felt. Thinking strikes us as so apart from feelings because words (in the form of writing systems) do not directly transmit what feelings really produce in human consciousness, which is a sensation of our part in social structure. As Marx says of alienation of labor power in a broader context of the whole class, this particular disability shows us that in a labor process of producing words we encounter in normal communication, an emphasis upon words impedes the tools of face to face human communication accomplishes. The whole human being is acknowledged by looking at the disability component to the whole. It gives us a sense of what we might construct toward in a great new social movement. Similar processes of a need for understanding happen to people having to learn any of the core languages in developed economies of Capitalism as a second language in a new immigrant community, so we could understand many connections outside of disabilities to a larger community of social forces in the whole system which structure working class people. Pre-literate societies depend upon face to face social organization (therefore see/understand feelings more clearly than someone used to dismissing feelings as meaningless through the influence of writing systems). The material form of producing information in a pre-literate society through speech acts can't compare with the versatility and precision of writing thoughts down, but the question is to understand how important it is to feeling the right thing about what we do, compared to making sound "rational" judgement as we assume writing produces as a labor process. There is a tie to the process of production of knowledge here (I am referring to a labor process), of writing words that distorts human reality in the sense that oppression that makes itself known through emotions cannot be adequately expressed through writing systems. Necessary as writing is to our level of culture and production, writing also reflects a vast repression of the disabled through cognitive barriers to participation in global culture. Where we might demand that the work process be disabled accessible, we see that we have to have a whole to the class structure. This is an extension of the original movement in labor organization to bind together different industries into combinations that reflected the whole class of workers in industries. To summarize, the wide range of disabled experience, which is an out growth of the unifying efforts of the activists who start the disabled movement thirty years ago, we see many new ways of understanding what class does to the system. If we let go that someone disabled is invisible, and instead make them central to the base of the movement we are given a unexplored terrain of organizing. As the above example shows with insights about what stroke sometimes does, we have the materialist sources to understand much deeper what is going on in the system that oppresses workers, we need to bring that in to our movement. thanks, Doyle Saylor
