A-Radio Berlin, activism, Anarchist, Austria, Author, Azerbaijan, Črna Luknja, Disability, fascism, History, Labor, Transcribed

Anarchism and Disability, plus A-Radio Segments

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This week, we spoke with Richard Amm, a member of the Disability Action Research Kollective, or DARK, which they describe as a disabled-led group working to make disability perspectives, history, and research more accessible to a general audience. Amar and Richard speak about disability, eugenics, radical history the Corona virus and other topics. You can learn more about the project at linktr.ee/disabilityark

DARK Links

Then we’ll feature two segments from the May 2025 episode of BAD News: Angry Voices From Around The World, the English-language podcast of the A-Radio Network.

First up, A-Radio Berlin shared a conversation about the political motivated arrests and harassment of members of the Labor Desk Confederation of Trade Unions in Azerbaijan, which is calling for international solidarity.

The Labor Desk Confederation of Trade Unions in Azerbaijan is calling for international solidarity following the politically motivated arrests of its chairman Afiaddin Mammadov and fellow unionists Aykhan Israfilov, Elvin Mustafayev, and Mohyaddin Orujov. These arrests are part of a systematic crackdown on independent labor organizing in Azerbaijan..

https://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=5634

Next, Črna Luknja from Ljubljana conducted an interview with OLTA (Open Leftist Assembly of Antifascist, Carinthia) from south-west of austria.They are mobilizing against the so-called “Burschentag” of the Austrian Pennaler Ring ,which is the association of the conservative fraternities.The austrian Pennaler Ring is connected with the ruling, fascist party FPÖ and extra-parliamentary extreme right.

Finally, Sean Swain’s segment

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Featured Track:

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Transcription

TFSR: Thank you so much for agreeing to come on to The Final Straw. I’ve been really interested in talking to you for some time. Would you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns if you like, and a little bit about you and your work?

Richard Amm: Certainly. My name is Richard Amm, pronouns he/him. I’m a psychologist who did a master’s in engineering, and I run the Disability Action Research Kollective, who make cognitively accessible zines on various topics around disability justice, anarchism, and disability history, that sort of thing.

TFSR: That’s amazing. Before we get into speaking about the Disability Action Research Kollective, for any listeners who aren’t familiar with this, would you speak generally on what disability justice is and some of the history around this term?

Richard Amm: Certainly. This has mostly been a development within America reflecting on how previous attempts at achieving rights within state frameworks haven’t really been successful and have been very white, without looking at things through an intersectional lens and how things are related to power relations. At least in the UK a lot of the disability rights movement has been heavily influenced by Marxist theory, but we’re only now looking at more anarchist approaches to organizing.

TFSR: Would you speak about Disability Action Research Kollective or DARK and how you initially got the idea to form it?

Richard Amm: Yeah. Initially, I was doing some work around disability and anarchism, sort of histories, looking at the many, many disabled anarchists and communists, and making a zine that was based on miniature biographies. In parallel to my more academic work, I extracted things into zines, because I knew that in academia no one really reads your things. You know, if you publish something, it’ll be six months of work and five people will ever read it. Whereas a zine I could get out very easily and have it be accessible language, and many, many people would read it and hopefully enjoy it.

I knew that in a lot of leftist spaces, people understand, at least in theory, that disability is a political category, much like race or gender or any of these other experiences, but they don’t really know much beyond that, or really how to do accessibility, or even think in ways that a lot of disabled people think in terms of the models. Essentially, eugenics has framed how disabled people are thought of in the media, and that hasn’t really changed in terms of how we make movies or how we think of disabled people. And that’s how most people learn about disability, through the media, which has been heavily influenced by eugenics.

Almost all the stories you see about disability end in cure, death, or institutionalization as happy endings. And there’s a lot of psychological baggage in terms of how that’s shaped people’s perceptions of disability, where they’re just very uncomfortable even with the idea of discussing it. I think because disability is a fluid category that people can find themselves in, and so people really don’t want to reflect on aging, death, and sickness. But it also means that you dehumanize the other person’s experience, and so there’s a lot of infantilization and that sort of thing.

Essentially we found that zines are already widely used in a lot of subcultures, and they’re offline. A lot of digital platforms will suppress the spread of anything related to disability. Even the words are more actively suppressed by the algorithm on basically everything: TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, X, all of it. And so having a physical approach was needed. We’re returning to physical spaces and injecting easy-to-understand stuff about disability. I thought there was a real desire for it and people would be interested in it. And so far, people have been. It’s been a really amazing response.

TFSR: That’s incredible. Yes, speaking of algorithmic suppression of concepts and words, we have been struggling with that here in the so-called US quite a lot recently. Would you reflect on the misuse of terms such as “disabled” and “diversity,” such as in the current wave of gutting DEI initiatives here in the US? I’m sure there are many examples of such misuse in the UK also.

Richard Amm: I’ve got a controversial opinion about language, which I feel that its importance is often magnified in the discourse and the media because it’s a very safe discussion to have that doesn’t critique any existing power structures or make people uncomfortable or lead to any kind of meaningful call for action. At most, it leads to a symbolic victory. So there are endless debates. The difference between the US and the UK in terms of the language of, “Oh, is it person first? Is it person with a disability, or a disabled person?” There are fundamental theoretical structures underneath that, which I recommend looking at the Social Model by Inclusion London. They have a good page on that. But essentially, the person with a disability is person first, so it’s hoping that you remind people that they’re a human being. But then with disabilities, it’s a person with a medical condition essentially. Whereas the UK uses more Social Model language, which is a disabled person, like you’re disabled by the society that you live in, through prejudice, through infrastructure, through all of the structures around you that exclude and prevent.

I think often the importance of language gets magnified. You see this with all sorts of groups. And if you’re on the outside looking in and all you see is people bickering over word usage, you’re going to assume that’s not the worst thing they experience. Whereas disabled people pay taxes and yet we don’t have access to public transport, so we subsidize everyone else’s transport. We don’t get housing built for us in the UK, even though that, again, is subsidized by taxpayers. So we are subsidizing everyone else. But looking from the outside, you think, “Oh, well, the only thing they have to worry about is minor word usage.”

You see that with other groups. There’s more to being anti-racist than just not saying the N-word. There’s more to trans struggles than just making sure that pronouns are respected. It’s important, but there are huge amounts of medical discrimination, assault, and just terrible things happening. And to pretend that we live in a world where we’re just arguing about whether people are polite to us in the appropriate manner is so disconnected from the actual lived experience of most people and the power structures that underline the experiences of marginalized and oppressed people. I think it’s a controversial opinion. I do also think that symbolic language is important. It’s all important, but it’s not more important than talking about things like medical discrimination.

TFSR: I totally agree. I think that when one focuses on language, and it becomes a topic that eclipses sort of every other lived experience, people tend to stop there. We’re seeing this with pronoun usage. I work for sort of a corporation, and we had a diversity pronoun workshop and stuff. And the assumption or conceit behind that is that, as you said, that’s the only thing that trans people have to focus on. So I think that’s very well said and not at all controversial, in my opinion.

Richard Amm: Yeah, well I feel that the focus on language is a very neoliberal approach to liberation. I feel people want to be respectful towards disabled people and not say the wrong thing, but that initial anxiety that you feel around them, that’s the thing that maybe you should be exploring, as to why you feel uncomfortable around these people and why that is. You just treat them like they’re people. It shouldn’t be hard.

I’m a wheelchair user, I’ll have a random stranger come up to me to ask me, “Hey, why are you in a wheelchair?” You know, you’re asking someone either about the worst thing that’s ever happened to them in their lives, that was probably traumatic, or you’re asking them for private medical information. A very weird thing to do. I mean, you kind of get used to it. People on the bus who tell you that, “Hey, have you considered assisted suicide” is a little bit weird. It’s just wild. Again, with the focus on language, I find like there are a lot of other much more important conversations to have.

For example, in the US it’s legal to sterilize disabled people without their consent in I think 40 different states, and these aren’t old laws that are just slow on the books. Some of them were brought in 2023, I think, so there are some really huge gaps in terms of the rights the disabled people have as a particular category. But yeah, I could go on and on and on. I probably want to stay on questions, if that’s helpful.

TFSR: No, of course. I think that marginalized people advocating for their humanity is sadly a thing that we still have to do.

Richard Amm: Yeah, I think that the reason people should care about disability isn’t just because of disabled people. It’s because if you’re a woman, you’re more likely to be disabled. If you’re trans, you’re more likely to be disabled. If you’re poor, if you’re from a minority ethnic group, we are the most diverse group on the planet. And if you nail disability rights, you’re actually helping a lot of the people experiencing the worst outcomes in every other group. And we also have a lot of highly developed theory.

A lot of people understand the Social Model as a personal identity, but what it fundamentally is is a framework for solidarity and understanding power relations, not just within disability, but within other groups. It was designed to codify… Like someone who’s a wheelchair user, someone who’s blind, and someone who is neurodivergent, they have almost nothing in common. But there’s this framework that takes all of their experiences and links them to power experiences so that they have a unified identity. That same framework works with every other marginalized group as well. There are a lot of really interesting theory frameworks within the disability community that haven’t really made it out very much. But yeah, that’s the hope of this project, to make things a lot more accessible and understandable for the general person on the street.

TFSR: Indeed.

Richard Amm: But for that, I would direct people to the work of Mike Oliver on the Social Model. It’s been largely watered down in academia and by corporations, but the original inception of it was actually incredibly radical, and its goal was the complete transformation of society.

TFSR: That’s amazing. We will link that in the show notes for anyone who’s interested in exploring that.

You’ve spoken a lot about disability in general and how it’s viewed and navigated, often poorly, in society at large, but would you speak on the intersections of disability, disability justice, and anarchism?

Richard Amm: Yep, certainly. There’s been a lot of organic anarchism between disability justice movement, disability rights, and anarchism itself in that they’ve been doing a lot of things that are largely comparable. But also the anarchism movement, in terms of what it’s usually defined as, a sort of cooperative movement that used direct action and violence, emerged at the same time as eugenics, and so they were heavily influencing each other. There were leading figures who, while they were heralded as amazing figures in the anarchist movement, still held very strong eugenic views on sterilizing certain groups of people. And of course, all these sterilization laws aren’t just disabled people, they’re also from ethnic minority groups, the poor, and often women. Things are always very intersectional when it comes to disability.

But I think it isn’t something inherent to the theory of anarchism that eugenics naturally follows. I think it’s more down to a historical accident. Except for, I guess, anarcho-primitivists, who seem to be the only people in the anarchist movement to even acknowledge that disabled people exist, only ever to defend themselves against accusations of ableism and being eugenicists. But yeah, they’re the only ones that even acknowledge this often.

So it’s deeply frustrating, because there have been these parallel movements that haven’t really talked to each other very much, and they’ve got a lot of overlap in terms of their ideas or their practices, like mutual aid and care groups. The way the disabled people organize is very interesting. We build redundancy into our systems so that if one person dies, gets sick, gets arrested, or anything happens to them, the information isn’t lost. Things are always spread out, so people don’t burn out as well. We actually have care practices built into our organizing, which would really benefit broader groups if they adopted them, as well as approaches to accessibility, but also just making sure that everything is doubled, so there is no single person who’s burning out who knows how everything works. You kind of have to organize that way, because we just keep dying all the time.

TFSR: Indeed. I loved the zine that y’all put out on DARK about disabled anarchists. And initially, I was like, “Oh, this is a list of bios,” and then I kept reading the bios, and the bios kept going on and on, and on. There were people such as Bakunin, Malatesta, and Voltairine de Cleyre. I was very moved to see Aaron Bushnell on there also. It really brought home to me that disabled people and anarchism have always had a deep relationship that seems to have gotten lost in recent years. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind talking about that a little bit?

Richard Amm: There’s a general historical trend which is what we’re directly confronting with our zines, which is that when people are remembered, disabilities seem as something shameful that is tarnishing their memory, and so those are excised whenever their stories are retold. And it’s kind of understandable to see why, because even with Aaron Bushnell, people knowing that he was autistic were then trying to use that as the reason that he did what he did, instead of him having a genuine, radical political statement that he wanted to make. It was all just, “Oh, it’s all just down to poor mental health.” And so his autism was used, or people tried to use it, to directly undermine his political messaging, which we’ve actually seen before, and happens all the time.

Even with people who don’t even have any kind of diagnosis or aren’t autistic, often they’ll have mental illness applied to their actions as a way to de-politicize what they’re trying to do. And even with the story of Helen Keller, as well as being a eugenicist, awkwardly, she also was a socialist and had very, very strong political views, and those were essentially whitewashed from her memory, from her stories. People like disabled people as sort of placid little angels or pets. You don’t really like to see them as people who have strong convictions that they’ve thought through and reasoned or are sort of developed organically out of their oppressed position in society, that, hey, maybe things aren’t great, and we could build a system that works better for everyone.

I do think—and this is my personal opinion, I can’t evidence this—that anarchism is a natural progression for disability rights, because within capitalism we’re told to view ourselves in terms of our productivity, in terms of our jobs, and how much money we can make for the business owners and the corporations. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re sort of a failure who doesn’t deserve belonging. As capitalism and disability rights are intrinsically opposed to each other, the goal of disability rights has to be the deconstruction of capitalism.

The state exists fundamentally as asset protection for the rich. There’s the essay “The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand” which is a direct answer to right-libertarians or anarcho-capitalists, as I believe they enjoy calling themselves incorrectly. Essentially, the state is there in order to preserve capitalism and to centralize power and wealth. And you can’t get rid of capitalism on its own, you have to do both, in my personal opinion. Again, I can’t evidence that. I prefer historical examples to theory.

We now have a second volume of our zine on disabled communists and anarchists, which adds even more. And I specifically put communists and anarchists together, mostly to get people to read more of both, because I think that they’re both just interesting stories. And I thought it would annoy people, and that seemed fun.

TFSR: [Laughs] I love that. Yeah, it’s a really, really good read, and I really recommend people to read it.

Richard Amm: We also have one on disabled radicals, which is primarily civil rights leaders and anti-slavery activists, and one on the disabled feminists as well.

TFSR: Cool, cool. In an article, which I think is on The Commoner, you write that, “Disability is a minority group that anyone can join at any time, the definition of which is neither binary nor permanent.” And I think that is maybe being brought home to a lot of people now with the realities of COVID and long-COVID specifically. What are your thoughts on the porous and transient nature of the concepts of ability, “health” and disability?

Richard Amm: There are a lot of different ways of defining what disability is, and I think it comes down to who often has the power to define what it is because, even within the state, the definitions are extremely variable. For example, you can be too disabled to the point where you’ll get kicked out of the Army, but you won’t qualify for disability benefits for not being able to work. It’s all about who has the power to define. A lot of neurodivergent people prefer to just figure stuff out on their own and identify without needing to go through the entire medical system to get a diagnosis, which in the States is obviously a class issue because it’s not free. I think it’s gone off the question a little bit, could you repeat that?

TFSR: No, no, not at all. The porous and transient nature, and then you were talking about who has the power to define what disability means.

Richard Amm: If I could touch on COVID just very briefly. COVID causes cumulative damage, not all of it, but each time you get COVID, you’re increasing your chances of long-COVID. By the time you’ve had it five times, it’s about a 50% chance. It causes damage to the frontal cortex, which regulates emotions and does logic and risk analysis and some very important things, as well as damage to the somatosensory cortex, which is why you lose your sense of smell. That is brain damage that’s happening, and it’s cumulative. It doesn’t fully repair. Your brain just sometimes finds ways of rewiring around it, but that can only happen a certain number of times.

As we’re allowing COVID to just spread through populations, the disability theory is going to be a lot more important in the future. There was a recent study with 5 million participants. They found that getting COVID once increases your chances of developing dementia by 17%, if you get COVID mildly. If you get COVID seriously, to the point you go to hospital, you’re increasing your chances of developing dementia 17 times. People are going around who’ve had COVID four or five times, you’re going to see aspects of personality change as people lose the ability to regulate their emotions. They could be a lot more angry, a lot harder to reason with. And a lot of this is comparable to the early onset dementia, where you see people becoming highly, highly emotional over things that otherwise would be just slightly annoying. COVID doesn’t just damage the brain, it also damages the heart, the kidneys, the liver, and the immune system for up to a year.

I could give an entire interview just about COVID. I’ve been writing a literature review, which might eventually end up as a zine on long-COVID and personality change. My original training was as a research psychologist, and COVID has certainly been an interesting development. It has shaped society recently and continues to. What is the world going to be like where people keep getting infected, and there’s only a certain number of times until you have permanent, long-term conditions? That’s going to be everyone, especially people in public-facing jobs, school teachers, nurses, police, and armies. What is society going to be like when people can’t get stuff done as effectively as they previously did? I think we haven’t really reckoned with that, and no one’s been looking into it, but I think it’s going to be hugely impactful. But I guess we’ll have to see.

Currently, people think that COVID is over and that everything’s back to normal now, but that’s not going to last. We’re already seeing all of the consequences sort of stacking up, and they will only be ignorable for so long. But I think it’s like climate change. It’s going to be slightly annoying to fix, and it’s going to be an enormous long-term problem, and so existing power systems are just not gonna bother. They need reliable workers showing up at work and not worrying about the long-term health consequences of their actions.

TFSR: Yeah, I think that the siren song of normalcy is both one that it seems people really long for, and also the state and capitalism really relies on to push forward status quo capitalism, or late capitalism advancement. And we saw that in this part of the world. We’ve just gone through a very impactful and devastating hurricane back in late September, early October, that just changed this region, probably permanently, so far as we’re able to understand it. And we even saw that siren song of normalcy being touted as, “Oh no, you need to go back to work. You need to go back to work.”

Richard Amm: I should also point out that long-COVID is more likely to impact you if you’re female. And if you’re transgender, you might also have underlying health conditions like EDS or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which makes you far more likely to develop long-COVID. So if you are in spaces with comrades, please wear a mask. Please construct Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes to filter the air, and please just be careful out there. Do what you can to protect yourself and other people.

We know it’s airborne. Washing hands never did anything. There was a study that came out of China very early on, which showed that people wearing glasses got infected seven times less if everyone was masking. Because it’s in the air, people are walking into the air with their eyes exposed, wearing masks, thinking that they’re protected when they’re not. I could talk about COVID forever, but I would like to touch on a few other points while we have time.

TFSR: Yeah, it stands to reason, the eyes are a mucous membrane.

You’ve given some sort of recommendations, and I think that placing the burden of change on people who are the most impacted is not an entirely fair thing to do. But in your opinion, what are some ways forward psychologically, materially, or both, into making the anarchist milieu or anarchist spaces more accessible and more open to more and more people?

Richard Amm: Hard to say. I’ve seen some wonderful developments with the Anarchist Book Fair, where they’ve been offering people fidget toys, or ear sound-blocking things as they’re coming into managed sensory overload and that sort of thing. I think masking is great, not just in terms of protecting your identity, but also keeping others safe or reducing risk in general. At societal levels, we should still be doing testing and tracking, but there are ways of doing it which are decentralized and anonymous, which weirdly, none of the governments were particularly interested in doing. I think it’s important to make sure that everyone is welcome in your organizing and thinking about who isn’t at the table and why that is. I think physical accessibility might be less of an issue in the states where you have, or used to have, the ADA.

I think one of the most impactful things—and this isn’t just for including disabled people, and this is one of my critiques of anarchism in general—is just all of the reading or the complex reading. People don’t have time. People are losing their ability to do high-level cognitive functions. We need to make things as simple as possible for people to understand and to reach people where they are. If I’m trying to sell you political philosophy, and you have to go read five very long books by five very dead old white guys who write in language that you need an entire degree to understand and a dictionary with you, that is not going to spread. That is going to be an abject failure in every respect. So I do believe in the accessibility of language and explaining things in as simple a way as possible, which is increasingly important as COVID is going to be eating people’s frontal cortexes.

TFSR: Indeed. I think that’s really well said and maybe a very good provocation to any anarchists who may be listening to this.

Are there ways that listeners can plug into the work that you’re doing? Do you need help? And how can also people learn more?

Richard Amm: We do have a linktree that will provide access to all of the zines that we’re making. Everything that we make is free, including the subscriptions. And that is llinktr.ee/disabilityark.

If there are disabled people out there who are interested in being contributors, we would love to have you. Please do reach out and get in touch. We do things on all sorts of topics, primarily history, but we’ve started doing a lot more media analysis. We’re about to put one out on disability in horror movies, looking at the historical connections between the eugenics movement and how that shaped how disability is portrayed even in films today. It’s absolutely fascinating.

We’ve previously done things on disability and Star Trek, which might be of interest. One of the things that was particularly interesting was that even as the representation of other groups improved over time since the 1970s, representations of disability have gotten worse in Star Trek over time, instead of better. In the original, I think 16% of the episodes had sort of disabled characters. And in modern things, it’s about 2%, and the representations are much worse. So we’re still kind of trying to unpack exactly why that is.

There are a lot of theories about it, but mostly financial crashes. Financial crashes get worse, and you need to start cutting money. Disabled people are the most expensive, and they’re the smallest number of them. So in terms of hurting your voting base, they’re always the first place to go and find money. And so you have to have media so people don’t care about their suffering. You have to dehumanize them as much as possible in the minds of the general public. These aren’t instructions. These are just what has currently been happening, to be clear.

TFSR: No, I think that that’s very poignant and also very real, that the media representation and financial patterns have this very intimate and intertwined relationship with each other.

Richard Amm: I think particularly, not just because of the various financial collapses, but also because of COVID, we’re seeing a push for assisted suicide legislation in a lot of countries in ways where it’s not really consensual, in that it’s far easier to access assisted suicide than get accessible housing, social care, or even medication or therapy. I mean, there have been people who’ve gone seeking treatment for PTSD who’ve been offered assisted suicide instead, or even people looking for housing. So it really is an important thing to keep in mind, and that’s the direction that things are going to be going in.

We may see some treatments for long-COVID in the future, but probably what we’ll see is an expansion of assisted suicide legislation by the State, which, to be clear, most disabled people are very much against. All media will paint us as all wanting to die or just thinking about being cured all the time, but actually, most of us enjoy being alive to a degree. Assisted suicide is often something that non-disabled people assume that we want, but that’s because that lines up with the goals of capital, and certainly isn’t something that’s endorsed by almost any disability group.

TFSR: And as at least we here in the States are experiencing… I don’t really even know how to describe it. You could describe it as a collapse of empire. You could describe it as an oligarchical takeover. You could describe it as fascism, though I think that that word needs to be troubled somewhat. Typically, those societal structures are not friendly to disabled people and are not friendly to people in general, so keeping an eye on what’s going on and what patterns are emerging is going to be very crucial. And has been extremely crucial too.

Richard Amm: Absolutely. And I think with long-COVID becoming increasingly prevalent, there’s never been a more important time for cognitively accessible disability politics, and that’s a need that we hope to fill with our project.

TFSR: That’s wonderful. Richard, that is all the questions that I had scripted out. Would you like to touch on anything that we didn’t get to in closing?

Richard Amm: So I previously touched on Star Trek and disability and sort of how it charts, how disabilities has gotten worse while representation of other elements has gotten better over time. The last one we have out is ancient Egypt and disability, and that’s a society that lasted for 5000 years and was incredibly disability inclusive. Disabled people existed at every level of society in ancient Egypt, and we sort of chart all of that.

A lot of people imagine that the past is a time when disabled people had it much worse, and because of modern technology, they’ve just never had it so good, but that is completely untrue. And actually, since capitalism, disabled people have existed at the bottom of society or warehoused institutions, whereas we used to exist among everyone else, often as equals, for thousands and thousands of years, which everyone’s forgotten about, very interestingly.

We’ve also got one on disabled gods, looking at how disability has been interpreted from world mythology, which is probably one of my favorites if I’m being honest. I also did disability film analysis tools. It was actually my master’s dissertation, which was a framework for analyzing film to show how likely it was to be reinforcing prejudice in the minds of the viewers. The framework works for or can be adapted for a variety of different marginalized groups. We also have one about wheelchair history, charting the development of the wheelchair from the year 500 to the modern era. Geared, hand-driven wheelchairs actually predate the bike by 200 years.

Disabled Radicals I touched on before. A lot of them are anti-slavery activists, anti-apartheid activists, and civil rights leaders. Disabled Feminists has the most people that we’ve done so far and has characters like Frida Kahlo and many others. And we have Disabled Communist and Anarchists Vol 1 and 2. But we do plan to be following that up with one which is less mini biography and more theory-based, sort of building on things that were initially more entertaining with slightly more rigorous and theoretical structures and more practical work as well. So we plan on doing a mix of educational and entertainment stuff.

TFSR: Excellent. Oh my gosh, it was so amazing to talk to you. I’m so happy that we got to connect, and thank you for being so understanding with scheduling and rescheduling and all of that good stuff. It was absolutely wonderful, and I hope we get to stay in touch and collaborate more.

Richard Amm: Yeah, sure thing. Thank you so much for having me on. It’s a real pleasure.

TFSR: Yeah, likewise. Do you feel complete with that interview?

Richard Amm: I think so. I’m not really sure what else I would add to it. It was all very surface-level, and I might have talked about COVID a little bit too much, but can anyone?

TFSR: No, I don’t think we can.

Richard Amm: I feel people immediately disengage when you bring it up because people want to return to the old world. And I get that because it’s scary, the one that we’re living in. And it must be so much more scary living in America right now. Things look real bad. It’s like you’re looking at a complete collapse of the States, except for the police and the army. Everything else is getting defunded.

TFSR: I have a very, very dear comrade who has a chronic health concern, and her partner also has chronic health concerns. We were talking a little bit earlier. She’s an anarchist, and she was like, “I feel very weirdly invested in things like Medicaid and things like health care that the state provides, and I feel really frightened that these things are being taken away.” And I was just like, “Yeah, we don’t have any kind of accessible health care for anybody who’s not very, very wealthy.” And we have very good health care for people who are pretty wealthy, ut as you discussed earlier, many disabled people, myself included, do not have that kind of access.

So, yeah, I don’t think we can talk about COVID enough. And we here have, even among anarchists sometimes, a resistance to masking, resistance to practicing safer practices. I know that the issue of disability is quite a bit bigger than just COVID can encapsulate, but it is also intimately intertwined. So thank you for talking about COVID. Thank you for talking about it, because it is a huge problem, you know. So I do really appreciate you, and I also really loved in that article that you sent to Bursts a little while ago, there is quite a long reading list at the end of it. I know reading is not the thing for a lot of folks, but I will link that so people can absorb that information in whatever way it works for them.

Richard Amm: A lot of our zines do have little mini-reading lists at the end. And the idea for them was that the book is the lecture, and the reading list at the back is the rest of the course materials. So doing little free educational modules was how I originally envisioned this.

TFSR: That’s amazing. I love that, you know, I love that so much. Really appreciate the work that you do, and know that it’s really been connecting with everybody that I’ve shown it to here, and it will continue to do so through this interview, I’m sure.