Hey Doyle,
Forget that stuff about me being a 'hero'! A hero is someone
who overcomes significant barriers and obstacles to achieve great
things. I've just survived long enough to be able to add my grain of
sand. Disabled activists and advocates are real heroes--- not the
least of their obstacles being the mindsets of those of us who don't
have the same questions regularly before us.
ML writes,
...there was a missing side
in Capital and that the book on wage-labour needed to be written.
Doyle,
Here I would pose the great divide that disabled people must raise,
suppose you can't 'labor'? How does a Marxist think about this?
The point I make in the book is that as soon as you proceed to think
of the wage-labourer as subject in her own right rather than as
object of capital (or both as mere tragers of a structure without
subjects), you are driven logically to consider, rather, the human
being as wage-labourer--- ie. to the human being in an inhuman
existence. Further, everyone engages in labour-- rather, engages in
'activity'/praxis of some kind; we produce ourselves through our
activity (including our activity in the reproduction of everyday
life... which is hardly transformative).
And
certainly also that Marx did not see himself as a 'Marxist'. Rather
that labor and a working class are the basis for a different sort of
society than capitalism. The value to me so far in ML's interview in
my view is the emphasis on the wholeness of a movement. That then
means to me where does disability fit in? Or how do the problems in
capitalism, like sexism, racism, etc relate to each other in the whole
not as 'identity politics' but as some grand view of labor that unites
all workers.
No time to go into this-- much of it not thought out; I do take up
briefly questions of the place of patriarchy and racism and the
struggle against these--- inadequately but sufficiently, I hope, to
demonstrate there is a logical place for their incorporation within a
Marxist perspective (as opposed to an eclectic external addition).
Now some self identified 'liberals' like Martha Nussbaum have taken on
'justice' in terms of disabled rights and she influenced by Amartya Sen
applies some sort of 'capabilities' view upon this aspect of class
struggle (or so it seems to me anyway though not to a liberal) which
extends the Locke/Hume nation state to include disabled people.
That 'capabilities' perspective is important but it stresses only
some necessary conditions for the development of human capacities and
definitely not sufficient ones. (But this is a subject I will write
on later this year.)
While this focuses upon individual rights like liberals do, the concept
of wholeness in the working class is often an abstraction so that a
Marxist does not know what to do with a blind deaf person. They being
so super isolated from able bodied labor they appear as living
abstractions.
And, it follows, our conceptions are thereby impoverished to this extent.
in solidarity,
michael
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Currently based in Venezuela. Can be reached at
Residencias Anauco Suites
Departamento 601
Parque Central, Zona Postal 1010, Oficina 1
Caracas, Venezuela
(58-212) 573-4111
fax: (58-212) 573-7724
