This is probably going to ruffle some feathers so I’m going to preface this by a series of points that I’m not making before I get to the argument itself to pre-empt kneejerk reactions (skip the bullet points if you just want to read what my argument is):
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I’m not addressing a statement like “You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism”
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I’m not arguing that capitalism doesn’t aggravate serious mental illness
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I’m not arguing that capitalism doesn’t cause or, at the very least, exacerbate minor mental health struggles to develop into full-blown chronic mental illness
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I’m not saying that capitalism doesn’t profit from mental illness
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I’m not saying that capitalism doesn’t intentionally exploit neurodivergence
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I am taking the position that chronic mental illness is a part of disability. Disabilities vary and some can be intermittent but they still pose a significant impact on the ability of an individual to participate in society in the way that they would like to.
On to the argument…
Oftentimes you hear people saying variations on the phrase “It’s not you, it’s capitalism!” in response to discussions of mental illness.
While the sentiment is well-intentioned, I do not believe that it’s a statement which is truly radical but rather one which is aesthetically radical by invoking (superficial) critique of capitalism but at the same time which masks crypto-individualism and which fails to grasp the nature of material conditions while unintentionally dismissing and minimising the impacts of chronic and disabling mental illness.
Since we are discussing disabling mental illness, let’s use physical disability as an analogy to help illuminate my position.
Imagine a person who is a permanent wheelchair user who cannot access a building because it only has steps and no access ramp:
“I can’t get into the building because I can’t get up the stairs”
“It’s not you, it’s capitalism!”
Well, no. It is in fact you.
Ignoring this fact is not empowering and it distracts from the very real and present material conditions that a disabled person faces by shifting a discussion about present conditions and personal limitations to an abstract discussion about structural issues is not an act of allyship but ultimately it serves to diffuse and even silence the frustration that a disadvantaged person experiences.
This is why it’s pseudo-radicalism.
If that person lost function in their legs because of an industrial accident, would it be radical to respond with “It’s not you, it’s the lack of workplace safety regulations”?
Of course not.
Regardless of how that permanent wheelchair user came to be a permanent wheelchair user, the fact is that they experience disability as a personal limitation.
That person would still be disabled if they lived in the wilderness, outside of capitalism. That person would still be disabled in a socialist society. Denying this reality is denying the nature of disability and in doing so it’s false equality because, while many of the struggles that a temporarily-able person experiences would no longer exist outside of capitalism this fact does not necessarily carry over to disabled people.
Just like colour-blindness serves to deny, diffuse, and whitewash the present-day struggles of people of colour and the ongoing history of racial oppression, so too does this attitude of what I’m going to call “able-blindness” achieve the same thing for people with disability and chronic mental illness.
A person of colour who faces poverty due to intergenerational poverty and systemic factors like exclusion from education and employment is not going to be comforted by a person saying “You’re not poor, it’s because of capitalism”; two things can be true at once and identifying one of the major causes or aggravating factors does not change the nature of poverty.
Accurately identifying the etiology of a problem is not an inherently liberatory act.
To return to the point, a seriously depressed person is going to struggle to get out of bed regardless of the political economy they experience their depression under.
I would urge people to consider what their intentions are when they say “It’s not you, it’s capitalism”; is it to raise class consciousness? Is it an act of solidarity? Is it something else?
If you intend to raise class consciousness then I would urge you to consider whether you are approaching the discussion with a person with disability from a place of expertise in their own lives and their circumstances.
If you intend to act in solidarity then I would urge you to consider whether you are approaching the discussion with a person with disability from a place where your own subjugation is given preference over those who are more marginalised than you, and in effect perpetuating this marginalisation.
We should expect better of our comrades and of ourselves.
It’s more a pigheaded interpretation of the social theory of disability than anything else. My nearsightedness is so extreme it would absolutely be a disability if I didn’t have glasses, but luckily, we invented glasses hundreds of years ago, and myopia is a widespread enough problem that there’s a social impetus to fulfill the need for glasses without considering special treatment. The fact that wheelchair users are a much smaller minority means they’re less likely to be considered, and thus they get dehumanized and shut out of spaces that don’t accommodate their equipment. If literally every human space meant for social gathering included those accommodations, their disability becomes significantly more manageable.
This does not mean it’s good idea to go around telling disabled people that they shouldn’t feel bad because they’re deficient (shitty thing to assume someone thinks of themselves tbh) but because the material antecedents of their misery are easily explained by Marxist social theory. They’re still not allowed to get a fucking job if they want to keep their benefits and they still suffer from discrimination and you’re more or less just rubbing salt into the wound.
100%. If we implemented fully automated luxury gay space communism that wouldn’t cure my anxiety. And I know that’s true because I was having panic attacks at 7 years old when I didn’t understand what capitalism or panic attacks were.
Capitalism aggravates my disabilities, but it didn’t create them all on its own. Implementing communism would certainly alleviate certain causes and lessen consequences, but wouldn’t cure me. Its a lot easier to deal with the days you can’t get out of bed if you’re not worried about becoming homeless, but it’s still not fun to spend a day feeling miserable in bed.
FALGSC doesn’t help someone who can’t walk if you forget to build wheelchair ramps
I think you are probably right, but a wheelchair is a pretty bad example. Whether to build stairs or ramps is a social choice that can be changed by policy. You might not be able to climb Mt Everest, but the barriers in normal city life are mostly artificial.
That’s a very narrow view of the challenges that people who are permanent wheelchair users face.
Policy alone isn’t going to stop discrimination in society and in the workplace, it isn’t going to flatten hills that are too steep to climb in a wheelchair, it’s not going to fix flat wheelchair tire, it’s not going to make everything low enough that a permanent wheelchair user can reach it, just as a few examples.
the barriers in normal city life are mostly artificial
I’d encourage you to spend a whole day with a permanent wheelchair user because it’s a whole lot more than just a lack of access ramps and reducing it down to that is to do exactly what I have described in my post except we’re trading “It’s not you, it’s capitalism” for “It’s not you, it’s policy”
Obviously there is discrimination, but your OP seemed to focus on the immediately physical aspect. There’s a lot I don’t know, eg I didn’t consider not being able to reach things, but imagine if every gas station, or heck, even every grocery store, was required by law to provide spare wheelchairs etc for free. There are already steep places that have elevators even for bikes. My point is that modern capitalist cities are built in very specific ways that can be changed. Hell, if HOAs can regulate the tidyness of someone’s lawn, what stops us from regulating that cupboards not exceed a certain height?
The reason why I chose to use physical disability as a reference point was because I suspected that talking about chronic and serious mental illness would run the risk of being too intangible for people to grasp when drawing a distinction between the ways that society causes or exacerbates disability and the ways that disability itself disables a person.
What you’re talking about is accommodations for disability which is fine but my point isn’t that there needs to be more accommodations in society but rather to highlight how we need to be careful about unintentionally erasing the struggles that individuals face by attributing everything to systemic and structural issues.
I think it’s worth reflecting upon how our exchange has mirrored the very issue that I’ve identified in my post; we have been completely focused on the structural issues and this is, in effect, erasing the individual struggles that people with disability face.
I’ll admit that my feathers were rustled, so I’ve re-read what you’ve written and really tried to understand what you want. If you just want to vent that’s perfectly valid. I guess the political context of hexbear made me read the post as some sort of liberatory goal, but please correct me if I’m wrong. Do not eg wheelchair bound or depressed or autistic or ADHD people share the same struggle?
I’d say that they generally share parallel struggles.
Let’s take ADHD or autism, for example. An autistic person is potentially going to experience sensory overload, which can be quite debilitating at times and it can limit what an autistic person can/cannot do, regardless of capitalism. So taking that personal limitation and attributing it to being a product of capitalism is to talk over that person’s personal experience and the limitations that comes with being autistic. For example, an autistic person who is very sensitive to sound is likely never going to be able to work in a loud factory or in a noisy classroom regardless of whether that’s under capitalism or under socialism.
Executive dysfunction is another one that is really common for ADHDers and autistic folks. Because of this it means that they can be unable to perform basic tasks like organising themselves and forward planning. Of course it’s going to be easier to manage executive dysfunction in a post-scarcity world but even so, that isn’t going to take away the problems when an autistic person or ADHDer is experiencing executive dysfunction and they can’t manage planning and decision-making tasks. It’s not uncommon for a person experiencing serious executive dysfunction to not be able to figure out what to do for dinner in a very literal sense. Even if it’s now free to order takeout and all the food in their fridge they got for no cost, it still isn’t going to change the situation where that person literally can’t marshal the mental resources necessary to organise something for dinner.
So my post is an invitation for people to consider how attributing everything to being capitalism’s fault can often paper over the real-world struggles that people with disability face.
Imagine if you told someone that you’re having a bad day, you are going through a breakup, or that your parent just died. The person that responds to you says “It would be better under socialism”. Like, yeah, it probably would be at least in some respects but it misses the point about the nature of the suffering that you’re experiencing and it diverts the focus away from the experience by centering the other person’s political agenda in the discussion rather than being an act of solidarity with that person. At best that person is going to be telling you what you already know and at worst it feels like they’re telling you to shut up about your grief and focus on the class struggle.
My post is really to get people to think carefully about how they use the phrase “It’s not you, it’s capitalism”, what is motivating them to say that, and whether it’s actually appropriate for the situation.
Ok I think I get you now, all good. Thanks for your patience!
