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Title: Surviving the Virus Author: CrimethInc. Date: March 18, 2020 Language: en Topics: CrimethInc., COVID-19, affinity groups, mutual aid, tenant organizing Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-26 from https://crimethinc.com/2020/03/18/surviving-the-virus-an-anarchist-guide-capitalism-in-crisis-rising-totalitarianism-strategies-of-resistance
The pandemic is not going to pass in the next few weeks. Even if strict
confinement measures succeed in cutting the number of infections down to
what it was a month ago, the virus could resume spreading exponentially
again as soon as the measures are suspended. The current situation is
likely to continue for months—sudden curfews, inconsistent quarantines,
increasingly desperate conditions—though it will almost certainly shift
form at some point when the tensions within it boil over. To prepare for
that moment, let’s protect ourselves and each other from the threat
posed by the virus, think through the questions about risk and safety
that the pandemic poses, and confront the disastrous consequences of a
social order that was never designed to preserve our well-being in the
first place.
Longstanding anarchist forms of organization and security have a lot to
offer when it comes to surviving the pandemic and the panic it is
causing.
The prospect of quarantine tells us a lot about how we were already
living. Those who live in close-knit families or joyous collective
houses are in a much better situation than those in broken marriages and
those who have big empty houses all to themselves. This is a good
reminder of what really matters in life. Despite the models of safety
that are represented by the bourgeois dream of nuclear family home
ownership and the US foreign policy that reflects it, togetherness and
care are much more important than the kind of security that depends on
fencing out the whole world.
“Social distancing” must not mean total isolation. We won’t be safer if
our society is reduced to a bunch of atomized individuals. That would
neither protect us from the virus nor from the stress of this situation
nor from the power grabs that capitalists and state authorities are
preparing to carry out. As much as the elderly are at risk from the
virus, for example, older people are already dangerously isolated in
this society; cutting them off from all contact with others will not
preserve their physical or mental health. All of us need to be embedded
in tight-knit groups in a way that maximizes both our medical safety and
our collective capacity to enjoy life and take action.
Choose a group of people you trust—ideally people you share day to day
life with, all of whom share similar risk factors and levels of risk
tolerance. For the purposes of surviving the virus, this is your
affinity group, the basic building block of decentralized anarchist
organization. You don’t necessarily need to live in the same building
with them; the important thing is that you can cut down your risk
factors to those you all share and feel comfortable with. If your group
is too small, you’ll be isolated—and that will especially be a problem
if you get sick. If your group is too big, you’ll face needless risk of
infection.
Talk with each other until you arrive at a set of shared expectations as
to how you will engage with the risk of contagion. This could be
anything from total individual physical isolation to remembering to use
hand sanitizer after touching surfaces in public. If you are able to
minimize your risk factors for exposure to the virus outside your group,
within it you can still hug, kiss, make food together, touch the same
surfaces. The important thing is to agree about the level of risk you
are collectively ready to tolerate, adhere to a set security protocol,
and communicate clearly when a new risk factor arises.
This is what anarchists call security culture—the practice of
establishing a set of shared expectations to minimize risk. When we’re
dealing with police repression and the surveillance of the state, we
protect ourselves by sharing information on a need-to-know basis. When
we’re dealing with a virus, we protect ourselves by controlling the
vectors along which contagions can spread.
It’s never possible to avoid risk altogether. The point is to determine
how much risk you are comfortable with and conduct yourself in such a
way that if something goes wrong, you won’t have any regrets, knowing
you have taken all the precautions you deemed necessary. Sharing your
life with an affinity group, you get the best parts of both caution and
conviviality.
Of course, your affinity group alone won’t suffice to meet all your
needs. What if you need resources that none of you can safely access?
What if you all get sick? You need to be connected to other affinity
groups in a network of mutual aid, so that if any group in the network
gets overwhelmed, the others can come to their aid. Participating in a
network like this, you can circulate resources and support without all
needing to expose yourselves to the same level of risk. The idea is that
when people from different groups within the network interact, they
employ much stricter safety measures, so as to minimize additional risk.
The phrase “mutual aid” has been thrown around a lot lately, even by
politicians. In its proper sense, mutual aid does not describe a program
that provides unidirectional assistance for others the way a charity
organization does. Rather, it is the decentralized practice of
reciprocal care via which participants in a network make sure that
everyone gets what they need, so that everyone has reason to be invested
in everyone else’s well-being. This is not a matter of tit-for-tat
exchange, but rather an interchange of care and resources that creates
the sort of redundancy and resilience that can sustain a community
through difficult times. Mutual aid networks thrive best when it is
possible to build up reciprocal trust with others over a long period of
time. You don’t have to know or even like everyone else in the network,
but everyone has to give enough to the network that together, your
efforts create a sense of abundance.
The framework of reciprocity might seem to lend itself to social
stratification, in which people from similar social classes with similar
access to resources gravitate to each other in order to get the best
return on the investment of their own resources. But groups from
different backgrounds can have access to a wide range of different kinds
of resources. In these times, financial wealth may prove much less
valuable than experience with plumbing, the ability to speak a
particular dialect, or social ties in a community you never thought
you’d find yourself depending on. Everyone has good cause to extend
their networks of mutual aid as far and wide as possible.
The fundamental idea here is that it is our bonds with others that keep
us safe, not our protection from them or our power over them. Preppers
who have focused on building up a private stockpile of food, gear, and
weapons are putting the pieces in place for an each-against-all
apocalypse. If you put all your energy into individual solutions,
leaving everyone around you to fight for survival on their own, your
only hope is to outgun the competition. And even if you do—when there’s
no one else to turn those guns on, you’ll be the last one left, and that
gun will be the last tool at your disposal.
The appearance of a new potentially lethal contagion compels all of us
to think about how we relate to risk. What’s worth risking our lives
for?
On reflection, most of us will conclude that—all other things being
equal—risking our lives just to keep playing our role in capitalism is
not worth it. On the other hand, it might be worth it to risk our lives
to protect each other, to care for each other, to defend our freedom and
the possibility of living in an egalitarian society.
Just as being completely isolated is not safer for the elderly, trying
to avoid risk entirely won’t keep us safe. If we keep strictly to
ourselves while our loved ones get sick, our neighbors die, and the
police state takes away every last vestige of our autonomy, we will not
be safer. There are many different kinds of risk. The time is probably
coming when we will have to rethink what risks we are prepared to take
in order to live with dignity.
This brings us to the question of how to survive all the needless
tragedies that governments and the global economy are heaping upon us in
the context of the pandemic—not to mention all the needless tragedies
they were already creating. Fortunately, the same structures that can
enable us to survive the virus together can also equip us to stand up to
them.
Let’s be clear: totalitarianism is no longer a threat situated in the
future. The measures being implemented around the world are totalitarian
in every sense of the word. We are seeing unilateral government decrees
imposing total travel bans, 24-hour-a-day curfews, veritable martial
law, and other dictatorial measures.
This is not to say that we should not be implementing measures to
protect each other from the spread of the virus. It is simply to
acknowledge that the measures that various governments are implementing
are based in authoritarian means and an authoritarian logic. Think about
how much more resources are being poured into the military, the police,
the banks, and the stock market than into public health care and
resources to help people survive this crisis. It’s still easier to get
arrested for loitering than to get a test for the virus.
Just as the virus shows us the truth about how we were already
living—about our relationships and our homes—it also shows us that we
were already living in an authoritarian society. The arrival of the
pandemic just makes it formal. France is putting 100,000 police on the
streets, 20,000 more than were deployed at the high point of the gilets
jaunes protests. Refugees in need of asylum are being turned away along
the borders between the US and Mexico and between Greece and Turkey. In
Italy and Spain, gangs of police attack joggers in empty streets.
In Germany, the police in Hamburg have taken advantage of the situation
to evict a self-organized refugee tent that had been standing for
several years. Despite the quarantine, the police in Berlin are still
threatening to evict an anarchist collective bar. Elsewhere, police
dressed in full pandemic stormtrooper regalia raided a refugee center.
Worst of all, all this is occurring with the tacit consent of the
general population. The authorities can do virtually anything in the
name of protecting our health—right up to killing us.
As the situation intensifies, we will likely see the police and the
military employing increasingly lethal force. In many parts of the
world, they are the only ones who are able to gather freely in large
numbers. When police comprise the only social body that is able to
gather en masse, there is no word other than “police state” to describe
the form of society we live in.
There have been signs that things were heading in this direction for
decades. Capitalism used to depend on keeping a massive number of
workers available to perform industrial labor—consequently, it was not
possible to treat life as cheaply as it is treated today. As capitalist
globalization and automation have diminished dependence on workers, the
global workforce has shifted steadily into the service sector, doing
work that is not essential to the functioning of the economy and
therefore less secure and well-paid, while governments have become
increasingly dependent on militarized police violence to control unrest
and anger.
If the pandemic goes on long enough, we will probably see more
automation—self-driving cars pose less threat of infection to the
bourgeoisie than Uber drivers—and the displaced workers will be divided
up between the repression industries (police, military, private
security, private military contractors) and precarious workers who are
forced to take on great risk to make a few pennies. We’re accelerating
into a future in which a digitally connected privileged class performs
virtual labor in isolation while a massive police state protects them
from an expendable underclass that takes most of the risks.
Already, billionaire Jeff Bezos has added 100,000 jobs to Amazon,
anticipating that his company will drive local stores everywhere out of
business. Likewise, Bezos won’t give his Whole Foods employees paid
leave despite the constant risk they face in the service sector—though
he is giving them a $2 raise through April. In short, he still considers
their lives worthless, but he admits that their deaths should be better
paid.
In this context, there is bound to be revolt. It is likely that we will
see some social reforms aimed at placating the population—at least
temporary ones to mitigate the impact of the pandemic—but that they will
arrive alongside the ever-increasing violence of a state that no one can
imagine doing without, insofar as it is misunderstood as the protector
of our health.
In fact, the state itself is the most dangerous thing to us, as it
enforces the drastically uneven distribution of resources that compels
us to face such imbalanced distributions of risk. If we want to survive,
we can’t just demand more equitable policies—we also have to
delegitimize and undermine the power of the state.
Towards that end, we’ll conclude with a few strategies for resistance
that are already getting off the ground.
In San Francisco, the housing collective Station 40 has led the way by
unilaterally declaring a rent strike in response to the crisis:
“The urgency of the moment demands decisive and collective action. We
are doing this to protect and care for ourselves and our community. Now
more than ever, we refuse debt and we refuse to be exploited. We will
not shoulder this burden for the capitalists. Five years ago, we
defeated our landlord’s attempt to evict us. We won because of the the
solidarity of our neighbors and our friends around the world. We are
once again calling on that network. Our collective feels prepared for
the shelter-in-place that begins at midnight throughout the bay area.
The most meaningful act of solidarity for us in this moment is for
everyone to go on strike together. We will have your back, as we know
you will have ours. Rest, pray, take care of each other.”
For millions of people who will not be able to pay their bills, this
makes a virtue of necessity. Countless millions who live from one
paycheck to the next have lost their jobs and income already and have no
way to pay April’s rent. The best way to support them is for all of us
to go on strike, rendering it impossible for the authorities to target
everyone who does not pay. Banks and landlords should not be able to
continue profiting on renters and mortgages when there is no way to earn
money. That’s just common sense.
This idea has already been circulating in many different forms. In
Melbourne, Australia, the local branch of the Industrial Workers of the
World is promoting a COVID-19 Rent Strike Pledge. Rose Caucus is calling
for people to suspend rent, mortgage, and utility payments during the
outbreak. In Washington state, Seattle Rent Strike is calling for the
same. Chicago tenants are threatening a rent strike alongside people in
Austin, St. Louis, and Texas. In Canada, there is organizing in Toronto,
Kingston, and Montreal. Others have circulated documents calling for a
rent and mortgage strike.
For a rent strike to succeed on a countrywide level, at least one of
these initiatives will have to gain enough momentum that large numbers
of people will be certain they will not be left high and dry if they
commit to participating. Yet rather than waiting for a single mass
organization to coordinate a massive strike from above, it is best for
these efforts to begin at the grassroots level. Centralized
organizations often compromise early in the process of a struggle,
undercutting the autonomous efforts that give such movements power. The
best thing we could do to come out of this experience stronger would be
to build networks that can defend themselves regardless of decisions
from on high.
Hundreds of workers at the Atlantic shipyards in Saint-Nazaire went on
strike yesterday. In Finland, bus drivers refused to take payments from
riders in order to increase their safety from contagion and protest
against the risks they are being exposed to, showing in the process that
public transit could be free.
If ever there was a good time for the embattled and precarious working
class to show strength through strikes and work stoppages, this is it.
For once, much of the general population will be sympathetic, as the
interruption of business as usual can also diminish the risk of the
virus spreading. Rather than seeking to improve the individual
circumstances of particular employees through wage increases, we believe
the most important thing is to build networks that can interrupt
business as usual, disrupt the system as whole, and point towards the
revolutionary introduction of alternative ways of living and relating.
At this point, it is easier to imagine the abolition of capitalism than
to imagine that even under these circumstances, it could be reformed to
serve all of our needs in a just and equitable manner.
Revolts in Brazilian and Italian prisons have already resulted in
several escapes, including mass escapes. The courage of these prisoners
should remind us of all the targeted populations that are kept out of
public view, who will suffer the most during catastrophes like this.
It can also inspire us: rather than obeying orders and remaining in
hiding as the entire world is converted into a matrix of prison cells,
we can act collectively to break out.