I found this answer on a reddit thread pertaining to the question and I thought it would be worth sharing.
“ Becoming disabled in my late 20s greatly accelerated my move towards radical leftism. As such I can speak to why ideologies like this appeal to disabled people, even if I can’t go into the nitty-gritty details.
Disability is explicitly incompatible with the capitalist system. The way it’s supposed to work is that you work for the means of survival, and then the meritocracy rewards those who work harder or in a more innovative way with luxuries and wealth. Those who refuse to work are left by the wayside; people who only do the bare minimum only recieve the bare minimum in return.
(This is bullshit, but that’s how it’s supposed to work)
The existence of disabled people is a massive problem for this system. What is society to do with people who are unable to work through no fault of their own? Leaving them (that is to say, us) to starve would clearly be barbaric, which is why only conservatives will countenance it, and even then they usually have enough shame not to say so directly.
The enlightened, progressive solution to this problem–the one that even those supposedly socialist European countries deploy–is to give disabled people the bare minimum they need to survive. Obviously we won’t leave them out on the streets, but giving them enough money to go on holidays or buy nice things, or even to live independantly on their own, well that would be unfair! People are supposed to earn those things. From the meritocracy. The reality is that once you become disabled, the things that are supposed to make life under a capitalist system worth living are placed beyond your reach.
To a mind not warped by neoliberal capitalism, this is clearly absurd and cruel. The only reason why this attitude would ever be seen as reasonable is because we live in a system that enshrines ruthless competition between people as a positive good, and in which all things are provided to others for profit.
I currently live in a country that has a generous and accessible benefits system compared to the US and UK, and even then my disability payments would not be enough for me to live on by themselves. The only reason I can live comfortably in my current situation is because of other factors, which are mostly down to luck and privilege. Had I been born in a different situation or if random events outside my control had played out differently, I would be far worse off than I am now, with no way to improve my circumstances.
Again: this is the humane, progressive solution to the “problem” of disability.
Anarchism isn’t the only ideology that pushes back against this–any anticapitalist worldview is addressing the root cause of oppression of the disabled–but I find the anarchist focus on grassroots mutual aid to be very positive. I am skeptical of the willingness of a communist state to treat disabled people better than capitalist governments currently do. Even if they did, I inherently dislike the idea that my quality of life and humanity are in the hands of a centralized authority with the power to discard them if it’s deemed to be necessary. “
i am disabled just enough to be in a dilemma.
interpersonal trauma, audhd burnout and immunodefficiency don’t mean i can’t do anything or that i can’t even be as ‘productive’ *over time* as other people. what it means is that:
- i can’t give them ass-in-chair for 8 hours every day;
- my shortterm ‘performance’ cannot be consistent or predictable enough for the boss;
- i can never succeed at the day-to-day drudgework; and
- i can never be a ‘culture fit’ in any workplace.
it’s not that i can’t do anything; it’s that i lack the appearances of profitability.
despite huge past professional successes in complex projects: i am unemployable.
so instead i work a fulltime job with overtime researching my condition, my rights and the local law — filling out paperwork and attending a dozen appointments every month where i answer the same 20 humiliating and condescending questions over and over again, too exhausted to care for myself inbetween — just to keep the disability compensation flowing in. and in every meeting, my ‘giftedness’ and all those times where i was successful are used to clobber me and argue that i’m just being ‘lazy’. i’m never given any treatment, because the healthcare system has been balkanized into poverty by privatisation and New Public Management, and they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.
i find time once or twice a month to study, on my own, with pirated courses and books. and the opensource projects i contribute to, and the organising work i scrape up spoons for, and the mutual aid and legal help i give to my disabled comrades, are things i still do. but i have to do them under aliases, and i can’t ever discuss them with anyone who knows me, because if the welfare office finds out: i can end up imprisoned, indebted and permanently marked for ‘welfare fraud’. because part of the deal of being disabled is that i can only be disabled.
no studies; no parttime; no volunteering; no activism. all because of the way i was born, and because i had the audacity to barely survive two separate attempts by politicians to sacrifice my demographics to Moloch. i know several other people in this same Kafkaësque hellworld.
how am i not supposed to end up radicalised?