The Specter of Eugenics on the Left

For over a century, not an insignificant number of prominent socialists held a eugenicist ideology—and it still haunts our movements

On the left, even—or actually particularly among self-identified socialists—there has been, minus some notable exceptions, little, if any, resistance to the State abandonment of sick and disabled people during the ongoing pandemic—which has led to a situation of coerced infection and/or our virtually complete exclusion from society.

As much of a betrayal as this has felt like, an even greater betrayal is that many of my comrades have not just been silent, but embraced exclusionary practices—most on display when it comes to pushing back against universal masking—making protection of the most medically vulnerable an individual rather than collective matter.

These material circumstances have caused me to reckon with a new understanding: what is happening is not aberrant to socialism. The material conditions of the pandemic have revealed the specter of eugenic thought in socialist ideology. For over a century, not an insignificant number of prominent socialists held a eugenicist ideology—and it still haunts our movements.

Before I go further, I want to be clear that am not writing an anti-socialist tract here. I still consider myself a socialist—I still believe it is the only hope forward for civilization—which is all the more reason why the ubiquity of ableism and eugenic thinking on the left, and in socialism, in particular, needs to be addressed.

Much has been written on the romanticizing and idealizing of the working class, and so I will just mention the image is a fantasy. Much of the working class are unwell—and are a couple of Covid infections away from being kicked out of the workforce (becoming the surplus class) and so will become of little use to capitalism, and even less, it would seem, to socialism.

Part of the debate happening in socialist circles and other left activist circles around masking at protest and organizing is, in some degree, about what we owe one another, particularly the most vulnerable among us. Many disabled and sick leftist today find themselves, with some exceptions in a similar situation:: advocating for our health and safety, in order to participate in the project of social justice, is not just ignored, but disdained. But not because disabled people threaten the emancipatory project—by, essentially, slowing it down. Rather we are scorned because in insisting on our inclusion, we are insisting that the socialist project, in rejecting mutual care as a matter of solidarity, does not go far enough.

Part of what is at stake is temporal: the emancipatory future Marxism promises against the immediate needs of the present. To put it another way, able-bodied comrades have the privilege (even if, in reality, it’s often a fantasy—for the sake of not feeling their own vulnerability) to look far past the inconveniences of what is directly before them: the materiality of sick bodies especially. And this is their preference: to always be looking far from the immediate and into the future where the world they wish to live exists.

The impetus for these observations was a twitter dust-up—which in twitter time, I realize, is ancient—though it was at least a month ago. But some variation of the sentiment has appeared before and certainly will again. In this particular case, a self-proclaimed leftist’s viral tweet basically stated they were constantly working-out, so they would be fit for the revolutionary battle that lay ahead, and the sick and disabled “complaining” about lack of access—due to lack of universal masking in left organizing spaces and actions—ought to either do the same or be quiet. The outrage it caused was less, I believe, because of the content itself, but how explicit it was: stating (however absurdly) the quiet part of abled-bodied socialism (we could call it) out-loud: we, the sick and disabled, because we cannot participate in the able-bodied conception of how to bring about revolution, ought to be excluded from preparing for it, which also means we are excluded from envisioning our disabled-selves in a socialist future.

If I am not of use in the fight for revolution, I very much doubt I will be considered after it is completed.

One way of deflecting matters of inclusion and accessibility is to offer socialist futures where much of the conditions (under capitalism) that disable people will cease to exist and, also, that medical care will be justly distributed. Perhaps (in terms of medical care). But what is also being imagined here is a world without sick and disabled people or very few—which will, regardless of the social-economic structure of society, always be a fantasy and a dangerous one.

I am not so sure the post-capitalist future, envisioned by many socialists, will be any more hospitable than the present for folks like me. In fact, it pains me to say so, but it may well be worse

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