First, we recognize that not everyone with a disability considers themselves to have a disability, and not everyone with a disability considers themselves to be disabled. For example, many Deaf folks, autistic folks, elders, and people of color either do not or are less likely to identify as having a disability or consider themselves disabled. For brevity, we are using the term “disabled people” to include all people with cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, and other conditions of the mind/body who experience exclusion, limitation, or impairment related to those conditions, regardless of how they identify.
Anarchism and disability share much in common. To survive in our ableist world, disabled people have taken on traits of anarchism out of need: curiosity, innovation, nonconformity, and adaptability. Yet, most conversations about anarchism do not include disabled experiences. Our experiences are often left out because non-disabled people frequently don’t know what we need, let alone how to provide for it. Asking how disabled people will survive in an anarchist society is not a whataboutism when building anarchist futures – it is a genuine concern for roughly one-sixth of the world’s population.
Disabled people and our needs must be included in plans for a better world even as many of us require more care and other considerations that non-disabled people take for granted – yet there is little discussion or accommodation made in anarchist spaces for us. Theory is easier than practice.
As we enter not just the last stages of capitalism but also the first stages of global collapse (ecologic, economic, societal, and state) — an experience known as polycrisis — we are left to wonder: What next? What will become of disabled people, who are too often left out of planning or are left behind as seemingly acceptable collateral?
As Margaret Killjoy wrote in her Substack essay entitled “Anarchism and Its Misunderstanders,”
Anarchism is capable of presenting answers to questions about supply chains and manufacturing, but those answers are also not, quite, what anarchism is. Anarchism is not a set of answers. It’s a set of tools with which to find answers. The answer to “how would anarchist society handle the following,” is “we will organize in such a way that those who are most capable of answering that question will be able to get together and answer it.”
This project is an attempt to bring together those people “most capable of answering” questions about building the practice of disabled-anarchist futures, focusing on providing tools from disabled anarchists themselves. This project will include Plain Language to explain how disabled people will thrive in anarchist futures that include people with all forms of disabilities. Our collective vision of an anarchist future will exclude no form of disability because no disabled person is disposable.
We must embrace all disabled people as potential comrades. As such, we must consider how anarchism can meet the needs of all of us, including when experiencing access friction. We must receive and engage the most impacted and the most impaired. We must include those who rely on government benefits. We must embrace those who lack social support, as for many, the disabled experience feels individualized, isolated, and trapped – that there is nothing beyond our bodies and minds, that our worlds have shrunk.
This project is a call for those of us among our comrades who are disabled to:
- Address the misinformation surrounding disability and anarchism (that we need the state to live; that all anarchism is anarcho-primitivism, which will cause eugenics).
- Creatively but realistically address how disabled people can live lives of anarchism today as well as in a stateless future.
Eugenics, anarcho-primitivism, and ableist anarchists will not erase us from the movement. We will survive and thrive in a better world – in anarchist society. Figuring out how to do that is crucial to our survival. It’s up to us to come up with at least the start of some of the tools which will get us there.