The World Transformed (but what about the sick?)
Preface: This is written from the perspective of solidarity in conflict. I want better for my disabled comrades and I want organisations of the British left to take the struggle for disability justice seriously. That disability is not exceptional — but the ‘quotidian racialized biopolitics of “working and warring”’, as Harsha Walia argues, borrowing from Jasbir K Puar. We have been excluded for too long and many movements are too disconnected from the everyday struggles of disabled people and that needs to change. TWT is an important event and this isn’t aimed at the individuals themselves involved in its organising, but at the collective organisation itself, and is a demand to do better. To take into account the needs of the disabled. If I had come across their disability and COVID policy sooner, I’d have engaged sooner and privately with TWT first, but given that the event is now on, and that this is not an isolated example, I think it is reasonable to make this a public critique/demand/discussion. I put it out there with trepidation but I feel somewhat compelled to say it.
TW: one mention of suicidal thoughts halfway down
Quick update: TWT have reached out in response and I’ll be having a chat with one of their organisers
This weekend The World Transformed festival takes place in Liverpool. Despite the proclamations of the media and liberal-capitalist governments the pandemic is not over. Far from it. Sick people are often one of the reminders that the pandemic still persists, which might partly explain why we’re marginalised. Who wants to be reminded of COVID-19 anymore?
Despite a stated aim to be guided by the social model of disability there are minimal safety measures put in place to protect those who are more vulnerable to COVID. The COVID policy boils down to opening some windows if possible and encouraging people to take a test before attending, and isolating if positive. Two and a half years into a deadly and disabling pandemic I don’t think it’s too much to demand better for all, particularly disabled people. A policy of masking indoors should’ve been considered the minimum benchmark for increasing accessibility to the event. In other words, enacting the social model of disability.
Juxtaposed next to the recent Socialism 2022 conference in the US, it’s quite jarring. There they had a robust COVID policy1 that included the requirement of wearing masks indoors. If Socialism 2022 can do it why not The World Transformed? It’s clear with Socialism 2022 that the demands and concerns of the vulnerable were taken into account. Utopian socialism is one of the principles underlying TWT, however it appears this utopia would seem to exclude many of those who are are sick, immunocompromised or medically vulnerable. Are we too difficult to accommodate? Left spaces are opportunities to challenge oppressive norms and to prefigure and imagine emancipatory futures.
This can only occur, I assume, because the organisers of the event are disconnected from the struggles of the sick and disabled. If you or your loved ones are chronically sick you cannot ignore the necessity of COVID safety measures. You live your life weighing up risk on a daily basis. It’s exhausting but it’s a necessary survival strategy. One of the issues with TWT, it would seem, is that they are working from a definition of disability that excludes the sick. Ignoring the wide gamut of disability inflicted upon individuals in capitalist society. We are “surplus” to capitalism and taken on face value we are surplus to TWT?
As TWT states in their Accessibility Pack, disabled people are disabled by society not by their impairment.2 In the case of this year’s event millions of disabled people in Britain are being disabled by TWT itself. The decisions made around the lacklustre COVID policy are disabling to so many. An effective policy would require, on top of testing, masking3 for all those who can whilst ensuring good ventilation checked with CO2 monitors and supported by air filtration. This is not too much to ask this deep into the pandemic. We ask to be valued.
There are millions of people in this country who are either shielding or having to make very difficult daily decisions relating to their exposure to SARS-CoV-2. As one shielder remarked in an excellent article by Sophie K Rosa:
Now that everything is open for the healthy, but not for clinically vulnerable people, I have to constantly push down suicidal thoughts, and keep breaking down in tears. There’s no end in sight.
We might ask people to test before seeing us, to wear a mask indoors, to meet outdoors only and so on. We often have to skip large events, or take a chance at occasional ones that we can’t or would hate to miss such as weddings. Many have had to give up so much. We deserve to have safer spaces. You cannot eliminate all risk, but risk can be significantly reduced. We shouldn’t have to rely on online streaming. And for those who still couldn’t attend, despite better COVID policy, due to extreme medical vulnerability, they still require solidarity in organising to end the pandemic.
This lack of safety has intensified since Boris Johnson’s so-called “freedom day”. In other words, since society abandoned most COVID safety measures. It’s pointless moralising every individual who doesn’t mask indoors anymore when possible, but it needs to be stated that the abandonment of safety measures has severely restricted the freedom of sick people. We’re often the lone ones wearing a mask, if we’re out at all. So when TWT says you are ‘welcome to wear masks in sessions and around the festival’ — they are explicitly shifting the responsibility for COVID mitigation onto the sick and vulnerable. By definition that is the medicalised, individualised model of disability based on personal responsibility. It is expressly anti-solidaristic. It is not rooted in an ethic of care and shared struggle. It is prioritising the desires of the majority over the needs of the minority. It is toeing the government line. As a recent infamous New York City subway ad said, with regards to masking, ‘you do you.’ There is nothing ‘social’ about that. No solidarity. No understanding of interconnectedness. Just naked exclusion and abandonment of collective responsibility for one another.
This becomes a vicious cycle, with exclusion begetting further exclusion. Lack of accessibility perpetuates the mainstream British left’s disconnection from the everyday struggles of disabled comrades. Don’t get me wrong, this was an issue long before the pandemic, but it has now been intensified and made even more apparent. Ableism is rife on the left, as it is across society. Lip service, and tick box exercises are not limited to liberal organisations — it’s a factor on the left too.
Disabled comrades are not feeling solidarity from the rest of the left. The left’s response to COVID has been lacklustre. This is a major crisis and in the last 12 months in particular, most of the left acts as if the pandemic is over. Publications and media outlets have stopped covering it, events ignore its existence, and organisations ignore their members who are exposed to the dangers of the virus. I’ll admit I’m a bit jealous of that. I’m sick of this virus. I want nothing more than to never have to think about it ever again. And I do not blame people for wanting to get on with their lives. We are not asking for the return of lockdowns, we are asking for some accommodations to make our lives a bit safer.
There are tens of thousands of newly disabled healthcare workers, many who have now lost their jobs and are now experiencing the brute, bureaucratic violence of the DWP, that bulldog of British austerity, and they are receiving no political support. Their trade unions have mostly abandoned them. That’s the thanks they get for sacrificing their life and health for the pandemic response. So many workers were abandoned to this virus and have paid through their life or their health. A virus which exposes the extreme health inequality of this world, with racialised communities bearing the worst brunt of it. I think it’s fair to say the British left needs to do be doing more. This isn’t just a British phenomenon, as this recent essay highlights the struggle in the US too:
When we and our organizations fail to make these connections, understanding disability instead as exceptional and apolitical, we limit the horizons of what we can demand, during a pandemic where disabled people are rendered acceptable casualties so capitalism can continue undisturbed.
The left has seemingly caved into the right’s insistence that the pandemic is over. Pandemic fatigue is real and those most acutely impacted by the virus feel that more than most.
Yet here we are at the beginnings of yet another wave, the BA 4.6 subvariant, many of us getting reinfected just months after our last infection. Meanwhile the NHS continues to disintegrate under the pressure of the virus, dozens of people die every day, and vaccine apartheid continues with the Global South locked out of vaccines and treatments by the Global North. In other words, there are many opportunities for organising and many fronts to fight.
My motivation for writing this is to try and open up a space for discussion and debate that will lead to action. It is not just about the points raised above, it’s about sparking a bigger discussion that centres the many perspectives of the many disabled people, with the myriad complexities of disability. I hope that TWT will engage with this criticism and that TWT 2023 (and its smaller regional festivals) will be a genuinely accessible event that will include a more updated interpretation of the social model of disability. I hope that other events will consider this going forward. I hope to see trade unions better represent their disabled members. I hope to see publications take on the challenge of confronting the enormity of the COVID crisis. It’s not about TWT per se, it’s more emblematic of the British left’s position on COVID-19. This pandemic is not over and it will not be the last pandemic we see in our lifetimes. The virus has already taken more than 15 million lives and maimed more than 100 million worldwide. It will continue to do so as it evolves. We’re all tired of the pandemic, we all hoped it would have disappeared by now. But it hasn’t and it won’t unless we organise to eliminate the virus.
I’ll close with sharing some favoured words from Simone de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity:
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.
I doubt everyone will agree with their policy for proof of full vaccination, as it brings up wider debates around biopolitics to a greater extent than masking mandates. I don’t wish to get into that here but this is one of the reasons why we need to be having these conversations so that we can work out positions.
Whilst this was certainly a radical and necessary intervention in the 70s, today this needs expanding as chronically sick people are disabled by their impairments, as well as society itself. There are more radical iterations that have been developed that more adequately include the wide gamut of disability.
So that I don’t keep repeating it, I want to make it clear here that masking really should be appropriate masking. An airborne virus requires FFP2/3 masks. A cloth mask, a surgical mask etc. are better than nothing but still insufficient and the public health messaging around masks has been abysmal and has cost lives, particularly those of healthcare workers. This is not news to disabled communities who have had to try to stay one step ahead the whole way through this pandemic but it’s still not understood widely enough. A packed conference room with poor ventilation, means that an individual wearing a FFP3 mask is still not protected. They work best when most people are wearing them.