I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.
— Ché Guevara
This quote is one I printed off at my office when I had a student union position back shortly into the new millennium. I printed off a number of great quotes and poems, etc, but this one I have moved with several times. I have felt a genuine attachment to the spirit of few quotes by any I admire more than this one. It has long been my belief that attention to these human factors — the “I can dance” factor — that has helped Cuba stay strong and committed despite their difficulties, and why the Soviet society was dismantled while their own working people stood by and watched.
Having moved from primarily being motivated in life by individual participation in social struggles to taking care of my elderly mother with dementia full-time, I have often stopped to try and think on how to mesh what I know, feel and believe from that part of my lived experience & apply whatever I can to my life helping Mom thrive as best possible despite her decline and dementia. For some reason, even though the Ché quote has been sitting on my fridge and looking at me for years, I had not registered it anew for a long time. A couple of months ago, I glanced at it and realized that this is precisely a paragraph that explains why I do what I do living with my mother, and what is wrong with how this society interprets dementia care — as well as what is NOT the answer even under a more progressive or even radical society.
“Dry economic socialism” — the idea of delivering goods, but not having a participatory, beating heart in the new society is one that cannot create the conditions for people to deliberately deepen and make that society their own. If you do not feel a stake in your job and your living quarters, no matter how well supplied the goods you get are, they are foreign, alien entities spoon fed to you, much like bad cafeteria food would be as well. Working class society cannot be built on the back of gifts from the Gods, but is always built on the labour and must also be controlled by it as such.
The truth for our struggling elders, is that we are arguing over how to best deliver “dry economic socialism”; Our nursing home units are sterilized, provide beds, proper nutrition, medication and even cookie-cutter entertainment events from time to time. But there is no role in the choosing of their own lives (beyond now legally enforced autonomy of person — they can’t be physically dragged to sit in a chair during a bad music performance), they are deliberately cut off from all of the rest of us and isolated; The needs met are only the most basic physical health needs.
The systems we have devised for the vast majority of those who suffer dementia or similar cerebral dysfunction are holding pens for the bodies still attached to minds that are treated as a hindrance. Yet we have more than a handful of studies that exemplify other means of creating value in life. From helping seniors live with plants to their cherished pets, even the perception of having these animals and fauna reliant upon them is a shot in the arm: “I’m needed and I can help” is something we ALL need to feel — all the more so when our intellect is challenged.
The society outside of the world of dementia is all people who have dementia know when dementia first takes over; As one develops limited cerebral capacity, the very world they have to hold onto is being stolen simultaneously. The heart will always want what it wants, but we steal the sense of place and provide only the opposite of what is needed most. Belonging. Value.
And here’s the true damage of the threat of “dry economic socialism” as practised by our societies most common nursing homes. They not only speed up decline, but the socialization of the whole society into the normality of being thrown away makes the borderline person live in a world of absolute utter terror. Trying to figure out where you put the keys suddenly becomes a test of whether or not you may retain your freedom. Hiding these issues and allowing them to become more acute and dangerous is the inevitable result of basically forcing everyone to live with the mantra “Mess this up too many times, and your life is going to be over,” and this stress causes all forms of decline — but also has deleterious effects, such as forcing people who are making mistakes to need to confabulate all the time. Part of the motivation behind this is trying to cover for the mistakes and confusion.
People who suffer dementia often create serious dilemmas, such as when they refuse to believe something that is actually true, and show no capacity for understanding the issue. Part of this, I have come to observe strongly in my own mother, is out of the misguided belief that accepting the problem that exists will mean “it’s real” and therefore everything is much worse for her. Why is this worse? The greatest fear of those with dementia is not the condition itself but what other people will do to them for having it.
The strongest evidence of this in my life is a negative; Now, through the passage of time and my semi-constant repetition of her safety here & my mother knows in her emotional makeup that I’m not measuring her mistakes against a chart that determines how safe she is in her own home with the tally inevitably meaning “You’re out!”; Over time, that constant fear that I will cut her out has dwindled. The connection between needing to get everything perfect all the time and keeping her home has been broken — until someone comes into her immediate presence that has been close to her from before she fell into needing daily help.
If a relative or former close friend comes into her space? At that point more independence that is counterproductive begins, such as confusing the plans of the group and demanding they be what she mistook them for, etc. “Taking control” by herself is only necessary because of the ingrained fear our individualistic society has programmed into us. Now that Donna lives where “we” is the operative phrase in the home, disagreements can be solved through asking for trust — not arguing and getting frustrated and panicky over insane narratives for me, and being utterly helpless to accomplish many basic tasks for her.
Perhaps it is best understood in saying: She knows that the help she receives is to help her maintain the life she values at home, and thus sees help as actually cooperative, rather than as prison guards hosing her down in solitary. The basic narrative — I need help, but this is where I want to be — makes everything more vibrant, cooperative and allows for MUCH higher cognition and value to life.
“One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations.” That line in the opening Ché quote is perhaps the biggest point; We are social beings, and we derive our best from others. In the famous Marx quote on a communist society that has “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” as a primary organizing principle is interpreted as a materialist demand, but people are actually a lot closer in spirit to this already.
It merges into a cyclical demand when the need to be needed is understood — for my mother, clearly being given actual space to allow herself to give to others according to her abilities is HOW she receives what she needs. Precisely because as we age, at whatever cognitive level, our need to maintain connection and value to the larger collectives only deepens.
If we are fighting alienation every bit as much as misery, we must end this elderly torture chamber that casts people into emotional and psychological misery. And we must shake the notions of segregating our elders and our best. Segregation is physical alienation that rots cognitively and spiritually.
Elders who see a role for themselves in others safety or happiness, who can legitimately ascribe to themselves some role of protector or keeper over another, even plants, is to have meaning and internal value. Revolutionary understanding of workplace democracy correctly has argued that workers who feel attached to their work and value in what they do perform much better. So too for the lives of our elders.
Ultimately the society that has married the human being to the phone is going in exactly the wrong direction for this fundamental alteration of how we see — and ultimately ourselves experience — the irreversible effects of aging. There is no fix short of building a world much like the one demanded by Ché — and he said elsewhere, be realistic and demand the impossible. Right now, however, there are basic steps we can make to hold on to our humanity while the society around us is dying, and not our elders alone.
There is already the concept of maternal and even paternal leave for new parents, guaranteed the right to return to their positions after conclusion of the break. An elder leave, with obviously different implementation is a decent start for our “too busy” society; Instead of legally required general leaves of absence for a set period, a mandated reduction in hours per week wity the same exemption from management or professional retaliation, for one. A 40 hour week reduced to 32 for the duration of an in-need elders residency at a family or similar home.
While changing the priorities of the society itself overnight is not possible, getting a massive start in education for the value of seniors regardless of functionality was already necessary yesterday. This needs to begin with children, being involved in real places with elders, while they are young enough not to be as frightened of the implications as perhaps the majority of adults are.
There are major, new initiatives being taken up in elder care as we speak and write. Perhaps the most innovative of those is the ‘dementia village’ — a concept whereby elders with dementia live within an open, contained community (with many different buildings, streets to walk, shops to visit, theatres to attend, and more. The employees of the various places are, in fact, trained dementia caregivers as well as ticket sellers). The amount of agency, dignity and ability to live a free spirit life is a massive, tremendous benefit to the elders. And perhaps best of all, once these communities are built life in them costs roughly the same as the Canadian Health Act sets out to care for an elder who is isolated inside of a nursing home, with no ability to leave, no sun to feel on their face, etc.
Currently even this is not seen as a priority for the care of elders, but this must be changed in the interim to a more responsive, elder-inclusive society.
The roadblocks put up by our society are multi-faceted and start psychologically. People in every day conversations slowly desensitize themselves — but not to elders themselves, but to the idea of throwing them away and becoming so oneself, one day. I’ve seen newspaper articles written about sports, referencing that the Canucks may be a winner “by the time I’m in assisted living” (ha-ha?) just last week. This alienation of our elders for our own comforts and money making opportunities is a new concept; The move to have better care with more devices to protect, others to synthesize care or connection, etc is never going to catch up to the previous centuries. Because people in the end of their lives look back. They take stock, and they make lists.
The phase of our lives where it’s mostly behind us is where we seek some feeling that it was worth it, and or that we have done well by our principles and by others. For parents, the glance backwards starts and ends with their children. How their children are with them in their final years is not a thought, it is a feeling. It is for me as a child, to redeem and validate her contributions to my life. The simplest most important feeling given as a child to me was safety. If Mom or Dad were there, I would be okay.
Now, what does it say for each and every one of us to need, indulge and embrace that for ourselves, and then deny it to those who gave us that in our great needy moments? That’s why I am not interested in dry, economic socialist elder care. We are fighting against misery, sure! But we cannot alienate and claim opposition to alienation. We must care abut the psychological and human factors every bit as much as the body, a body that is now utterly led by emotions. We must not look for gadgets and monetarily-thrown out solutions. There may be a shortage like never before of ‘free’ time, but that’s just it. It’s not abut whether the time is free, but our elders must be. We must be realistic, and demand the impossible. Make elder care a society wide responsibility and, ultimately, pleasure. We have nothing to lose but the palliative chains — we have actual dignity for our elders in the world they built to gain.
While this may seem an impossible task, it really is just a part of the larger need for a more human-centred world. Today, we have automation that frees up human labour — that is, it frees up time — and with our current economic paradigm, this causes all people to retract their earnings, to lose work and to have more hardships for themselves and their families. But, in fact, the move towards automation should be leading towards a re-connection not with our phones and apps, but our kids and paps. Our elders and children are more disconnected from their immediate families due to the ever burgeoning demands of time. For each new app we garner, that is one less activity we do with people. This logic should be turned on it’s head.
Growing up in the 1980’s, it’s truly remarkable how blatant racism, homophobia, sexual assault, drunk driving and even cigarettes were once considered both normal and in many cases, good fodder for humour. It’s remarkable because of how we see it collectively today. Someday our society will look back in the same manner at this one — one preparing for a grey tsunami of elders from the Baby Boom Generation, and either shake it’s collective head at the cruelty of indifference, or at the moment when the idea of tossing elders away in closed facilities became anathema for a decent human being. That’s actually the totality of what we face in the coming years. My mother was born in 1940 — and she had her brain trauma younger than most will. This story has barely begun to be told.
Perhaps best put in a “too long, didn’t read” summation? Okay: Don’t look for silver bullet programs, drugs, facilities or legislation before you look in the mirror. Our whole society also needs this very same reflection. Your reflection likely bears a remarkable similarity to your parents already. Embrace it.
- *****
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