To build something better, we need the people this world tried to break
~ Pablo ~
There’s a strange silence across much of radical politics when it comes to neurodiversity—not hostility, just absence. You’ll hear passionate talk about Palestine, climate breakdown, strikes, prisons… But the everyday lives of autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent people? That barely registers.
And yet we’re everywhere. Behind tills, in hospital corridors, in the back rooms of council offices, driving forklifts, fixing broken beds, answering angry calls. Neurodivergent people aren’t a minority within the working class—we a large, misunderstood, and largely unorganised part of it.
We’re the kids who got labelled lazy, weird, bad at maths, or ‘bright but unfocused’. We grew up into adults who were never quite at ease. Some burn out. Some shut down. Most of us mask, adapt, and survive in systems never built for us.
And still we turn up.
Still we work.
Still we try.
But if you struggle with eye contact, or can’t keep up with rapid changes, or need instructions in plain steps you’ll often be dismissed. You’re not being “difficult”. You’re trying to survive in a world that demands conformity as a condition of worth.
Too many movements reflect the same hierarchy of voices that exists outside. Loudest wins. Fastest wins. Charismatic wins. If you stim, go blank under pressure, or freeze in meetings, you’re seen as a problem, not a comrade. That has to change.
This isn’t about identity. It’s about power. Neurodivergent people know what it means to be punished for being different, to be gaslit into doubting our own minds, to be left out of decisions that affect us.
It’s not enough to open the door. You have to change the room.
Movements must learn what executive dysfunction looks like, what sensory overload feels like, what rejection sensitivity does to someone who’s been isolated their whole life. Emotional and cognitive access matter just as much as physical access.
Neurodivergent people are not fragile. We’re not a burden. We’re not a distraction from “real” struggle. We are the struggle. And if a better world is going to be built one without bosses, prisons, or power hoarded in the hands of the few it must include the awkward ones, the quiet ones, the ones who’ve been written off, misdiagnosed, or mocked.
We are not some niche concern. We are not an afterthought. We are the workers who don’t fit. And that’s exactly why we matter.
Movements that don’t include us will fail us. If you want to dismantle coercive systems, you’ll need the ones who’ve been crushed by them and are still standing.
Images: The Punk Rock Autistic