Ciurria

"Marginalized groups are routinely scapegoated, gaslighted, and infantilized, while the privileged are exonerated, forgiven, and praised for no good reason.

To eliminate these asymmetries of power and respect, I propose that we use blame and praise—which I define as communicative acts—to identify oppressors and take a stand against them, as well as to recognize and stand in solidarity with resisters. Blame and praise shouldn’t, say, respond to a person’s quality of will, or seek an apology from a morally competent person, but should instead shed light on people’s investments in systems of oppression and resistance and oppose or support them in those roles.

This is an important task given that we live in a society full of gaslighting and colonialist propaganda that make it difficult for many people to understand oppression, much less take action against it. James Baldwin once famously said, “I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church that is white and a Christian church that is black.” We don’t always know what makes someone tick, but we can see how they choose to occupy space. I say that people are blameworthy for their contributions to systems of oppression irrespective of the attitudes that they “hold in their hearts.”




"...disabled students usually must—as you put it in your book, Shelley—“medicalize their circumstances and enter a bureaucratic morass in order to get the social goods that they require, that is, must make more effort (and usually considerably more effort) to get the services and resources that they require than nondisabled people make to get comparable services and resources.”

"As an episodically disabled woman and a migrant worker with limited earning potential, I am multiply oppressed under capitalism, and this isn’t due to my choices, or “bad luck,” or a glitch in the market system, but is rather an example of capitalism working as intended...people like me are supposed to be exploited, marginalized, and exhausted.

Within capitalism, the alternative to wage labour is welfare, and welfare is designed to be punitive and marginalizing".

"To end oppression, then, we need a coalitional, anti-capitalist movement. In other words, we need, not just justice, but transformational justice, a re-visioning of the social order. This revision of the social order will require what Garland-Thomson describes as “inclusive world building” in contrast to “eugenic world building,” i.e., the design plan made for the “ideal citizen.” Eugenic world-building constructs a society for the privileged and tries to “eliminate” everyone else through techniques of genocide, assimilation, medicalization, and so on. 

Michelle Ciurria

Unsurprisingly, capitalism is now driving us toward the ultimate eugenic state: the annihilation of the human species. Capitalism is producing more greenhouse gas than the planet can sustain, leading to global ecological collapse and mass extinction events. Capitalism emerged out of eugenics-based practices like genocide, slavery, and rape, and, if left unchecked, will progress to the logical conclusion of mass extinction and the end of life on Earth. Extinction isn’t a by-product of capitalism but, once again, a design feature. If we don’t question the logic of capitalism, we will continue down the path to the end of the world.

The end of the world is, of course, not a new frontier for Indigenous peoples, who have been forced to live through the end of their worlds due to genocide at the hands of the settler-colonial state and who continue to live under a genocidal regime today. Accordingly, Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard says that “in order for Indigenous peoples to live, capitalism must die,” as capitalism is a form of genocide. This understanding is quickly becoming a reality for all of us, as we face the extinction of the human species under capitalism. The decolonial collective “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures” (GTDF) describes capitalism as a central feature of “modernity coloniality,” the modern way of life which “cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, dispossession, destitution, genocides and ecocides”.

Michelle Ciurria