In the previous four articles, I’ve shown how self-diagnosis is important for autistic liberation, how that personal liberation is always part of a bigger autistic community, and how the autistic community, like other disabled communities, is best seen as a class struggle against a system of ableist supremacy.
Now, I’m going to say why anarchism is important for all of this. You might say – what’s the need to label things or relate them to anarchism? Can’t we just work for personal and collective liberation with everyone and not label things?
Well, I’m not a big fan of political labels, but I do think anarchism is essential for the work I’ve been talking about. Partly, this is for general reasons. All political theories and movements that claim to be about liberation eventually turn on the people they supposedly want to liberate because they want to create stable power structures, whether as their own separate states or as some kind of structure within an existing state. People’s constant personal need for liberation is messy and causes power structures to dissolve. That’s why liberal, socialist, and other movements have often seen major conflicts between leadership and grassroots. Thank you for getting us here, the leaders say to the movement members, but now we want to build something solid, and we can’t have you ruin it.
Anarchism, for me, is just the name for a kind of politics that never stops being messy and never stops listening to personal and collective desires, no matter how unreasonable they seem. The reason I respect anarchism more than other ideologies is because it doesn’t pretend to be a scientific insight that others should follow. Rather, it is about bringing the existing urges and dynamics that lead to liberation and making them the core of the politics instead of just using them until it’s time to pave over them when building that new concrete structure.
What does all this have to do with autism?
