wealth is the closest one can feel to secure in a society that runs on precarity.
John Green, Mr. Gaiman, what’s the best thing being famous? – @sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog on Tumblr
The chief problem is not safetyism, but scarcity coupled with precarity.
A Million Thoughts on ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’
we must first address the problems of scarcity and precarity
A Million Thoughts on ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’
Material poverty limits the leisure lives of the young precariat, with neither the money nor the occupational community nor the sense of stability to generate the control over time that is needed. This feeds into an anomic attitude to all activity, including work and labour. This is a precarity trap. Merely to survive requires an adequate set of public spaces, and even those are being eroded by austerity measures. After all, the neo-liberal mentality sees them as a ‘luxury’, in that they do not contribute directly to output or economic growth. Only if the precariat becomes a threat to stability will that arithmetic be reassessed.
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
Part of the precarity trap is that the jobs some may be forced to take will generate hostility to jobs in general. It is a middle-class prejudice to think the jobs the unemployed are driven to take are conducive to good working habits and labour commitment.
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
This recalls one of the worst precarity traps. The precariat is faced with a time squeeze from declining returns to labour and from pressure to do more work-for-labour and work-for-reproduction, partly because they cannot afford to pay for substitutes. Anxious and insecure, to the point of being ‘spent’, they have to do an excessive amount of work-for-labour and are unable to digest and use information that comes their way. A basic income would give them greater control of their time and thus help them to make more rational decisions.
The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
I’ve written how these attitudes are rooted in a culture of “scarcity and precarity”where lower-class students experience actual scarcity of opportunity and resources, while upper-class students internalize a sense of “precarity” that their advantages could be lost in an instant if a single wrong move is made.
We All Want – by John Warner – The Biblioracle Recommends
Disabled people know precarity intimately.
Climate Crisis Makes Us Recognize Our Limits; Disability Culture Can Show Us How | Truthout
Eugenics lives because on personal and communal levels, to “save ourselves” we have always found “superior” categories that we fit into or can strive toward, and “inferior” categories that we do not belong to and can strive to never become part of. On structural and systemic levels, ableism ensures that dispossessed, oppressed and abused people who are facing precarity because of capitalism, white supremacy and other oppressions are labeled “ill,” “criminal,” “vagrant,” etc., to justify and perpetuate everyday eugenics/necropolitical practices. These practices include all forms of surveillance, control, incarceration, deprivation, and fast and slow genocides (e.g., food, medical, water and vaccine apartheid). Systems of domination even leverage ableism to create subcategories of unworthiness within categories of purported unworthiness (e.g., deserving vs. undeserving poor, illegal vs. legal migrants, violent vs. nonviolent felons, acceptable vs. unacceptable disabled people, talented tenth, etc.).
Ableism Enables All Forms of Inequity and Hampers All Liberation Efforts | Truthout
Section V Beyond Ramps addresses the breaking of the social contract across several areas of life. The first two essays describe a destructive trifecta of anti-disability policies: tax cuts for the rich, the fiscal prioritization of militarism, and the gutting of America’s safety net. These policies, justified by neoliberal ideology, lead to vast wealth for a small segment of the population and devastating precarity for disabled Americans (and for most Americans). Basic needs like affordable and accessible housing are not met. Those in crisis are abandoned. On the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Russell argues, “the tremendous loss of life and ongoing devastation was not at root caused by Hurricane Katrina. It was caused by a corrupt government run by people who saw more profit for themselves and their friends in diverting taxpayer dollars to multibillion-dollar corporate contracts in a senseless and lawless war, and doling tax cuts out to the richest people in this nation, rather than in buttressing the faulty levee system protecting New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain” (p. 135-136).
Review of Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell edited by Keith Rosenthal | Disability Studies Quarterly
