#disability a class war

Been thinking about ableist criticism of landlords, capitalists, etc., as “lazy”, “parasites”, and so on.

Thinking about how so much of vampire lore follows from their Byronic/Dracula characterization as predatory aristocrats (e.g. Marx: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”)

The problem being that the conception of “workers” versus “parasites” places many disabled people in the category of “parasite” for the sin of “existing without being able to produce material benefit to others”, irrespective of their ability to coercively exploit others.

If you’re interested in making time for a video essay on this, John The Duncandid

Really, what makes a typical vampire frightening and landlords and capitalists so horrid is the tremendous coercive power they have, thru supernatural means for vampires and thru state violence for the latter.

An interesting corrective of this would be (or is, if someone has an example) the disabled vampire — crippled or even just broke-toothed, kept alive by the generosity of others who merely enjoy the vampire’s company.

Not the vampire as aristocrat, preying on the weak, but vampire as valued community member, storyteller, granary of knowledge and traditions.

You can imagine the horror of someone from the outside seeing a community give up their blood to keep an undead creature alive — assuming all who did so were in its thrall.

Or someone from within the community wanting to profit off of the knowledge of something so old rather than be kind to that “creature” for no material benefit.

But if so, that person would be the villain rather than vampire who is just staying alive.