I’m autistic, and I have ADHD. You’ll often see me refer to myself as AuDHD, which just means I’m both and I kind of like that terminology because it’s very clean and simple, very straightforward.
So sometimes I like to just list the things I believe in, and the things I don’t believe in, because as someone who is AuDHD, I have struggled for years to be clear to neurotypical people who always seem to be confused despite my being very straightforward about what I think and how I feel about what I see and what I believe.
So I hope this might help clarify it without getting embroiled in any kind of back and forth, which is a nice bonus of having your own personal blog where you can do these things!
WHAT I AM
I am a socialist.
More specifically, I am a communist. This means that I believe in a worker controlled system of government, where wealth flows from “the bottom up” in a sense. Workers will actually get to enjoy the fruits of their labor, rather than that wealth be transferred up to an ownership class that does not have any investment in seeing to the needs of those workers. It is an intersectional system. When I say “workers,” I mean the people whose labors create something (whatever value it might be). Everyone, regardless of disability, ethnicity, economic status, orientation, gender, doesn’t matter, is considered a “worker” in that sense.
I believe everyone has the right to food, water, shelter, and medical care.
Some people might say “you don’t have a right to other people’s labor,” but that only looks at things from a purely capitalistic point of view. Society exists, or at least the purpose of a society is, to pool our resources and talents together in order to survive as a group, to grow, develop, to thrive in a community where everyone prospers, and no one is left out.
I am against the death penalty.
This one’s pretty simple and straightforward. I am against the state having the power of life and death over individuals. No firing squads, folks. I am staunchly against it. After all, if it turns out you’re wrong and you’ve executed someone later found to be innocent, well what happens now? You’ve committed murder. What should be done in your pro-death government?
I believe in justice, not just order, because you can have order and have massive injustices. I seek to end those injustices, but it’s something we have to do together as a whole. Individualism will not win this one.
I am in favor of abolishing prisons and creating a strong social safety network that is designed to mitigate the need for prisons in the first place, but to also ameliorate the damage incarceration does.
Does that mean people won’t be locked up? No. There are going to be people who cannot be reasoned with, who cannot be helped for a myriad number of reasons. That doesn’t mean confinement in a cage, but it does mean they will be secured from the public in other ways, ways that will give them a good quality of life even though they can’t rejoin the population because they would be an overwhelming danger to themselves or to others.
The idea that communists want “gulags” to the point where a large portion of the population is imprisoned or has been imprisoned at some point to create a carceral state from despotism and corruption is absurd. You’re thinking of capitalism, where countries like the US have the largest prison populations in the world.
I believe in the power of art.
If you’ve got the idea that as a socialist I want some kind of empty gray miserable existence for everyone, you couldn’t be further from the truth. I love art in all of its forms, including the visual arts, music, craftwork, political and social commentary and so on. Art is the expression of the human soul, and it must be encouraged.
I believe in the human heart.
That means I believe in your gender, your orientation, your identity, as a part of who you are. I am staunchly pro-LGBTQ+. There is an old expression, by Fannie Lou Hamer, who once said, “none of us are free until all of us are free,” and I take that to heart. Until we start to lift the least of these up off the ground and put them back in control of their lives, their free agency, we are all irrevocably chained.
Does any of this surprise you? Probably not, but I like to put this out there so people know who I am and not just who they think I am.
There’s so much more to me, and I hope you’ll read this and understand that I am not someone to fear, my beliefs are not unrealistic, humans and human governments have engaged in positions like these going back to when we were just becoming agrarian and able to till the soil.
This isn’t utopian, it’s realistic, and it’s how humans survived for so long before more modern systems came along and started to break it down in order to benefit the few at the cost of the many.
Until next time.
.Red
