💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › spencer-beswick-the-quarantine-commune.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:51:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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/

Spencer Beswick

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, 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.