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Title: The Quarantine Commune Author: Spencer Beswick Date: September 11 2022 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, communes, collectives, the invisible committee Source: Retrieved on 9/12/2022 from https://anarchiststudies.org/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, workspace, and collective care for the needs and desires of
five beings (three humans and two cats). Social distancing measures
forced us to come even closer together to face the crisis. We are
becoming the quarantine commune, an anarcha-feminist form of
caring-life-in-common.
Social distancing paradoxically compelled every household and living
group to orient towards the commune form. In To Our Friends, The
Invisible Committee argue that “what constitutes the commune is the
mutual oath sworn… to stand together as a body… 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.”[1]
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 and
care for each other in an ailing world. The quarantine
commune-orientation is a silver lining of the crisis that 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
caring 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 caring-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 in 2017, 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.”[2]
For the Moth Mother Collective and every other quarantine commune, it is
time to begin.
[1] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, (South Pasadena:
Semiotext(e), 2014), 199–200, emphasis in original.
[2] The Invisible Committee, Now, (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017),
143.