Niklas Altermark
Niklas Altermark
Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden
Niklas Altermark is a researcher at the Department of political science at Lund University. His research interests revolve around disability politics, broadly conceived of, focusing on themes such as the politics of austerity, resistance, vulnerability, and the era of post-institutionalisation. His work has for example appeared in Disability & Society, International Political Sociology, Pedagogy, Culture & Society and Review of Disability Studies – An International Journal. His first book, entitled Citizenship Inclusion and Intellectual Disability: Biopolitics Post-institutionalisation, is published in 2018 by Routledge.
Crip Solidarity: Vulnerability and Political Struggle
In this keynote, I will argue that the insight that vulnerability is a defining characteristic of all human lives can revitalise our understanding of what solidarity is. The purpose is to revive this concept from its zombie like existence at the margins of political discourse by infusing it with disability theory.
To start with: Why should we engage with the suffering of others? Why should we act politically to better their situation? What is the grounds of political alliances between oppressed groups and those not directly affected? Mounting problems such as austerity politics, discrimination of groups perceived as deviant, and xenophobia being the standard response to what is called ‘the migration crisis’, all underscore the need for critical analysis and political struggle. Within critical theory and activism, there seems to be a broad consensus that these political battles need to be fought by alliances – of directly affected groups and their allies as well as by coalitions of groups that are oppressed by interlinked structures of power. However, in a time that is commonly characterised as ‘hyper-individualistic’, it is hard to see what the basis of such alliances might be. Political engagement today often appear to stem from sentiments of empathy or even pity, leading to a form of activism that resembles charity. As has been noted by disability activists and scholars, as well as critical thinkers concerned with other issues, this tends to reproduce inequalities between the oppressed and their benevolent helpers. At the same time, such political responses to oppression and suffering are often individualistic in nature; the solution to the ‘migration crisis’ becomes sending worn out clothes to charity organisations and the answer to the social exclusion of disabled people might for example be programs tailored to help members of the group enter the labour market. Meanwhile, the structures that create the problems in the first place are left intact.
Historically, another way of responding to oppression and inequality has been through solidarity – not for the oppressed but with them. However, as I will argue, our present notion of solidarity is utterly unprepared to spark political alliances as well as critical analysis. Tracing how the meanings of solidarity shifted throughout the 20th century, primarily within the labour movement, I show how this concept has transformed from being a way to talk about social struggles and power to become a notion of national unity and a legitimation of the welfare state. Solidarity was tamed and depoliticised. Furthermore, the transformation of ‘solidarity’, which was intimately associated with the formation of the welfare state, also resulted in a strengthened emphasis on the obligation to work, in turn justifying disciplinary measures against those perceived as unable to. In our present time, the very same moral of ‘work as duty’ is used to legitimise the destruction of welfare systems targeting groups that for some reason cannot. And at present, we do not have a conception of solidarity that help us muster resistance.
Now, I argue that the necessary theoretical resources for a revitalisation of ‘solidarity’ are to be found within critical disability studies, disability activism, and feminist political theory, in the idea that all human lives are characterised by precariousness. Within disability theory, this has served as a powerful tool to deconstruct the idea that disability politics is of interest only to a separated group of unfortunate individuals and to question the boundaries separating ‘normalcy’ from ‘deviance’. My argument is that it can also be a foundation of political alliances and a motor of political struggle. Indeed, the insight that we are all fragile runs as an underlying ethos in much of the disability movement’s resistance against austerity, at least in the Scandinavian context. By this view, the reason why people that are perceiving themselves as non-disabled should care about disability cutbacks is that they share with those directly affected the predicament of being vulnerable. Every single one of us can at any time find ourselves in a situation where we are dependent on the welfare systems that are being slashed. Therefore, the disability movement is not merely fighting for their own rights, but for the rights of all of us.
In other words, vulnerability ties us together and can serve as a platform to build political alliances from. Nevertheless, it is almost completely absent in academic as well as activist discussions explicitly addressing the meanings of solidarity. Rather than understanding progressive politics as a project of transforming members of oppressed groups to become self-determined, independent, and autonomous rational beings, we need to start by asking how we are to make politics of the fact that none of us can take our bodily or cognitive functioning for granted. We need to understand the question of how we should respond to precariousness as the most fundamental problem of politics. I contend that the answer of solidarity is that we should embrace vulnerability by building alliances that are committed to fight for a society where we carry our shared precariousness together, equally and as equals.