Tag: coronavirus

After Coronavirus: Intervening in an Explosion of Potentiality

Coronavirus has accentuated the isolation and alienation that so many of us already felt. The short- and medium-term outlook is bleak. But once the crisis is over, I anticipate an incredible flowering of blocked potentiality and I am eager to see and experience the possibilities of what may come. New forms of life, new ways of relating to one another, new commitments to a joyful and meaningful daily existence, will proliferate across the country and the world.

The exhilaration of coming back together, of non-distanced life, will explode into thousands of new encounters. For a crucial moment, going back to our previous way of life—the drudgery and anxiety of life under late capitalism—will be unthinkable. This will be an incredible opportunity for those of us with alternative visions of life to intervene and propose—nay, demonstrate!—the possibilities for living, organizing, and relating differently.

I have been reading Tom Wolfe’s invigorating book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicling the acid-fueled bus trip that Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took across the United States in 1964 spreading new forms of life and consciousness across the country and helping kick-start the ‘60s counterculture. Last night, I got pretty stoned for the first time in a while (I’m getting old, give me a break) and watched Across the Universe, which features the Merry Pranksters in a great scene. And I suddenly thought: this is it. This is the intervention—or better, one of many interventions!—to be made in the post-coronavirus moment.

I have so many dear friends scattered across the country. Five years ago, I took a mostly-solo road trip around the US in which I reconnected with old friends and saw their amazing experiments in life and politics, from the “Avant-Gardeners” in Eugene to the rollicking fun of a Halloween weekend in New Orleans. It seems that this should be repeated, but this time in a bus with a collection of friends, comrades, and fellow travelers spreading anarchy and living communism: distributing literature, propaganda, art, music, puppet shows, perhaps even a talk or two based on my research. An autonomous zone in every park, a block party on every street!

Crucially, we would see firsthand and participate in what is happening across the country. Everywhere we go, we would ask the same questions to folks involved in infoshops, communes, alternatives to policing… what are you doing? How is it going? What is working well, what is not? What do you think others could learn from your experience? And then we would spread their answers in other cities through zines and talks and fireside conversations. After so many months communicating digitally, we need to come into contact again.

As the Invisible Committee put it in their ever-relevant book Now: “the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.”

The Merry Pranksters’ bus named “Further”

The Quarantine Commune

We call ourselves the Moth Mother Collective to honor our kitchen’s many winged inhabitants. Even before coronavirus, we strove to live our lives in common. Six days of communal meals each week, a rotating chore wheel, a garden and workspace, and collective care for the needs and desires of five beings: three humans, our cat Reno, and our wise old hamster Toby. Social distancing measures have forced us to band even closer together to face the crisis. We are becoming the quarantine commune.

Social distancing has paradoxically compelled every household and living group to orient towards the commune form. In their book To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee argue that “what constitutes the commune is the mutual oath sworn […] to stand together as a body […] So a commune was a pact to face the world together. It meant relying on one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What was aimed for in this case was not an entity; it was a qualitative bond, and a way of being in the world.” Today, a home must be a commune or it will fracture and die. Each decision must become a collective decision: how much risk to take, how to relate to others outside the living group, but most importantly the collective decision of how to live together, of how to be together in the world. The quarantine commune-orientation is a silver lining of the crisis which we should embrace and deepen.

We cannot go back to normal when this crisis ends, for returning to life as atomized individuals would be a significant defeat. Instead, the commune may become the new foundation for our social relationships. Before, during, and after social restrictions are lifted, each commune should make prudent contact (physical or otherwise) with other communes. Links should be forged, networks formed (mutual aid and beyond), the territory of communal relations deepened and enlarged. We have taken the first step—whether by choice or necessity—in the fragments of our own immediate living situations. The next step, when we can take it, is to link the fragments, to form circulation between them and collectively elaborate a new form of life-in-common.

Lifting social distancing restrictions will release a torrent of energy, mobility, and circulation. In our fragmented, socially distanced world, bringing people and places back into contact and re-articulating our social relationships in new forms becomes even more crucial. There is an opportunity to build from our communal foundation towards an entirely new community. As The Invisible Committee put it years ago but seemingly speaking to our moment, our goal “is the great health of forms of life. This great health is obtained through a patient re-articulation of the disjoined members of our being, in touch with life.”

For the Moth Mother Collective and each other quarantine commune, it is time to begin.

Disaster, Coronavirus, and Mutual Aid: A Reader

The coronavirus mutual aid response networks that have been created to care for each other through this crisis are inspiring examples of anarchism in action. I’m reworking the syllabus of my current undergraduate course on anarchism to add a unit on disaster and mutual aid which will use the coronavirus mutual aid networks as a case study. Here is a modified version of the readings and videos for the unit (almost all of which are available for free online through these links, with the exception of a few of the books).

Week 1: Introduction to Mutual Aid

Week 2: Disaster and Its Uses

Week 3: Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Week 4: Coronavirus and Mutual Aid

Stay safe, stay healthy, and take care of each other.

Ten Theses on Coronavirus

1. The coronavirus pandemic will cause widespread death and suffering that will strain social bonds and the system of production itself. Economists predict a massive economic crisis and unemployment rates unseen since the Great Depression. This opens the door to a radical restructuring of society, but the outcome is not guaranteed.

2. The fascist right will respond with blood and soil nativism. They will rally to defend the supposed purity of the white social body against the “foreign” elements of the virus and other perceived threats. The old, the immunocompromised, the poor, the “non-productive,” and the non-white will be allowed to die to preserve the health of the social body and economy. This is the path towards eco-fascism.

3. Neoliberalism will use this crisis as shock therapy to deepen economic restructuring that enriches the few and immiserates the many. Privatization and commodification will thrive off of the crisis.

4. Profiteers will exploit this moment to make untold sums of money. Petty hoarders and resellers are only the tip of the iceberg; the rich will take advantage of the plunging stock market and the widespread destruction of small businesses to cheaply buy up large swathes of the economy and reshape it in their image.

5. Capitalists will attempt to further commodify our social relations in the guise of tools to overcome the isolation of social distancing. They are already developing new apps that will monetize connections between homebound people. Commodified social connections will deepen our sense of alienation and despair.

6. Technological innovations also have the potential to transform our social relations in a decommodified fashion. Online mutual aid groups, free apps that facilitate neighborhood organizing, and free online live concerts are the first signs of an emergent paradigm. An online-coordinated rent strike will lead to a national rent freeze; this will be a major step towards the decommodification of housing.

7. In the face of callous state inaction, a new wave of mutual aid is emerging across the world. Online mutual aid groups will organically develop into systems of care and survival from below that have the potential to replace the functions of the state and market economy.

8. Against the alienation and atomization of social distancing, we will regain social cohesion through sustained individual and collective effort. Liberatory art, music, and poetry will be shared for free, producing a new culture of hope and possibility. Coronavirus will help us regain a sense of the social bonds that make us human.

9. The necessary decoupling of work from survival paves the way for a Universal Basic Income. We should embrace this moment as the beginning of the transition into a UBI-supported radical Green New Deal that points the way beyond capitalism towards an ecological society.

10. This crisis will force society to change. We may go further down the path of authoritarianism, ruthless competition, and ecological catastrophe. But we may instead embrace our inclinations towards joyful collaboration, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship. Strengthening these latter tendencies will guide us through the crisis and provide the basis for new forms of life.