Blogger’s Note: I remember being taught about Helen Keller at school in the UK. I believe there was a film about her childhood we had to watch. The problem is that it is always the “abled” teaching everyone else what “disability” is. This further objectifies what it means to be different as it is fed through yet another distorting filter. This filtering is always toward the supposed “normal” and involves the sanitising of what it means to possess a body (or brain) that does not function as expected in an “ablest” world. When this is dialectically pointed-out – the disabled are then personified as being “ungrateful”. I once wrote an article published in a Communist newspaper entitled “The Invalidation of the Worker” – a Marxist-Leninist assessment of the bourgeois definition of disability – which sits quite comfortably just as easily on the left as it does on the right (a number of trade uniionists replied – attempting to justify why it was that disabled people “are not welcome” in the workforce – inadvertantly proving the central point of my thesis). Of course, the left hates it when its racist and discriminatory attitudes are exposed – as it deludes itself into thinking that only the right or far-right possesses these viewpoints. No. We see it all the time. It is an issue that has destroyed the far-left in the UK – as it becomes ever more like the far-right it claims to be in opposition to. The left needs to purge itself of its racist and ablest attitudes. I see now why it was that Lenin attending very few formal meetings of leftist groups before the Revolution – preferring to work behind the scenes in an educational capacity. He believed that attending was condoning the errors he saw – and he was right. There are times when we must be collectively be on our own as a form of protest against the erring group. But I digress. Imagine my surprise, when forty-years after hearing about Helen Keller, I was stood in the “Marxist” section of the huge London Foyles Bookshop, and there was a book about the Socialist beliefs of Helen Keller! Nobody had mentioned this to me as a child and I knew nothing about it. The ability of the bourgeoisie to be deceptive is demonstrated by the fact that Helen Keller can be eulogised on the one-hand (a disabled person decreed worthy of sympathised and respected) – whilst completely hiding the fact that she supported the ideology of “Socialism” which seeks to undermine and replace the very bourgeois ideology that misrepresents her! Of course, I know nothing about the individual remembered below – and have no idea what her politics were. Still, as we all act as “mirrors” to one another, comparisons and assessments, even if parallel to one another, will do no real harm. We are all dialectically in the same boat, so-to-speak, even if we occupy different and varying roles (if we do not pull together at the right time – the ship will sink). ACW (24.7.2026)
Norman Lebrecht – July 23, 2026
The Royal Philharmonic Society has announced the death of the composer Asteryth Sloane, who was blind from the of two.
Sloane, who was born in Suffolk in 2000, won the 2016 Cambridge Young Composer of the Year, followed by a Classic FM/RPS 25th Birthday Commission. In 2020, the composer announced a name change to Xia Leon Sloane.
Self-described:
I’m a person-centred therapist with particular interest and experience in working with survivors of abuse and complex trauma. I believe that therapeutic work is revolutionary in the ways it can go against the grain of the violence and brutality of past and present experiences in both personal and global contexts. As a queer, autistic, blind person, it’s especially important to me to hold curious, authentic, and anti-oppressive spaces for all who come to my practice.
As a composer, I believe that music and the arts more widely also have immense power to contribute to compassionate change-making, and much of my music responds to the beauty and fragility of the living Earth. I have worked with a range of soloists, chamber ensembles, orchestras and choirs, and having a creative practice with listening at its core means that attunement, resonance, and imagistic approaches are also fundamental to my therapeutic work.
No cause of death has been made known.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 