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Title: Immunity for All Author: CrimethInc. Date: March 27, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, tenant organizing Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-29 from https://crimethinc.com/2020/03/27/immunity-for-all-invitation-to-a-strike-a-poster-and-a-call-for-collective-self-defense
As the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic kicks in, grassroots
momentum is building around the United States, Canada, and worldwide for
a mass refusal to pay rent, mortgage, and loans. This April, millions of
people wonât be able to afford their bills regardless of whether they
want to pay. Like the pandemic, this is the inevitable consequence of a
system that wasnât designed to keep us safe in the first place. The
virus threatens our livesâbut it also threatens the social order that
was already making our lives impossible.
From our perspective, the most pressing thing is to defend those who do
not pay against eviction and other negative consequences. If we fail to
come together to defend each other, those who hold power will isolate,
betray, and destroy us one after another. Reach out to your neighbors.
Build defense groups. Identify local pressure points. Talk tactics. Be
creative. Prepare to stop the evictions by any means necessary. The more
people who participate, the safer all of us will be. Together, we can
overwhelm the courts and sheriffs that enforce the special privileges of
the rich.
The beneficiaries of the prevailing order are mobilizing to impose the
consequences of this crisis on usâone law for them, another for us.
Corporations like Subway, the Cheesecake Factory, Adidas, and others
have already declared that they wonât pay rent in April. There are
provisions to protect middle-class people who canât afford their
mortgages, but none for the poorest people who must pay rent.
Here, we present a poster and two texts about the rent strike: the first
from participants in a group offering countrywide coordination for the
strike, the second from anarchists involved in rent strike organizing on
the West Coast.
In the 21^(st) century, the feeling of home has become an increasingly
precarious and temporary experience.
Some sleep on trains or on the streets; for those who dwell within walls
of cardboard, even that narrow layer of comfort may be snatched away by
the police at any moment. Others rent boxes of wood and drywall, in
which the feeling of home is interrupted by monthly reminders that we
are only paying to linger on someone elseâs property; the following
monthâs rent starts looming as soon as the impact of this monthâs
payment wears off. In a grander sense, all the living things on this
planet share the feeling of losing our home as industrial capitalism
progressively renders it uninhabitable. A billion dead animals strewn
across Australia as smoke blots out the sky overheadâpools of black oil
floating on waterâan island of plastic in the ocean: these catastrophic
scenes of increasing frequency and magnitude imply that soon the earth
may not be able to offer us a home anywhere.
The COVID-19 pandemic is one of these catastrophes. Yet it has driven
home to us the importance of home. Repeatedly washing our hands and
continuously suppressing the impulse to touch our faces returns our
attention to our bodies. Wiping down surfaces and doorhandles reminds us
of all the ways our physical presence inescapably overlaps with the
presence of others. Our failure to contain the proliferation of an
infinitesimal piece of informationâ30 kilobases of RNA within a viral
envelopeâunderscores the fact that genetic matter has always been a kind
of commons. Our bodies are echoes of a shared ancestry; they ground us
on the earth.
This is the foundation on which we must build a new sense of home.
Ideally, the home should be a structure that supports life, a place of
comfort and privacy, a place where we donât have to work. Our homes
should offer us immunity from the countless forces acting upon us. In
the face of a pandemic, when we âshelter in placeâ so as not to spread
the virus, the greatest threats to our immunity are the forces that seek
to rob us of our homes. With unemployment anticipated at a staggering
20% due to the pandemic, we must confront the property relations that
subject our homes to the pressures of leases and mortgages.
Our first line of defense is immunity from the landlords and developers
who expect a full return on their investment even as the economy
collapses. We need immunity from the bill collectors, from the courts
issuing eviction orders, from the police carrying them out. We need
immunity for the patients issued $40,000 bills for emergency medical
care to treat COVID-19. We need immunity for prisoners, immigrants, and
asylum seekers all over the world who are condemned to sickness and
likely death while they are trapped in cages that will never be homes.
We need immunity for all.
This April, countless people will refuse to pay rent and, with this
single gesture, give new meaning to âherd immunity.â Viruses have always
played an evolutionary role as vectors of information transfer across
species and kingdoms; they are masters at synchronizing ecologies. What
is possible if we synchronize our actions into a collective refusal? Let
us commit together to defend this place we call home.
âMy imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the
world and exiles me from it.â
â Ursula K. LeGuin
âIâd prefer not to.â
â Bartleby
âThe tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the âemergency
situationâ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of
history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the
task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our
position in the struggle against fascism will thereby improve.â
â Walter Benjamin
We are not paying rent on April 1. We cannot afford to. We already
barely could. Rent: our monthly contribution to the fallacy that the
homes we inhabit on stolen land are owned by our landlords, to whom we
are indebted simply for being alive. Now, when our very existence as a
species is in question, we cannot endure the nightmare of that
relationship.
Over the past decade, insurrections that toppled regimes have been
defeated by the global gentrification of the cities. Rebels in cities
around the world have bowed to the increasing cost of living and the
soul-draining attrition of work. Our lives have become unending hustles.
Theyâre pumping a trillion dollars a day into the banks to keep them
afloat. Daily applications for unemployment throughout the so-called
United States are already surpassing those at the peak of the financial
crisis that preceded the occupation movements. In California, the
association of apartment owners sent a letter to its constituents
advising landlords to freeze rents, work with tenants to establish
payment plans, and suspend evictions. Yet city governments are offering
only paltry protections for renters. Capitalists have announced their
willingness to sacrifice us en masse on the altar of the economy. They
want us back to work already.
Our enemies are afraid. They know a storm is coming. Something has to
give.
On April 1, an unprecedented wave of us will simply not pay our rent.
Some will do this in solidarity. Some will do this as their only option.
Some will do this as an entire building or as an entire block. Some will
go it alone. This strike does not belong to activists, organizers, or
militants. It belongs to all of us, to everyone who simply cannot or
will not bear the burden of this crisis. It belongs to everyone who
wonât pay, who wonât take on more debt, to all who will affirm each
other in saying âno.â To all who love and protect each other.
We have already been on strike.
Some of us have gone on strike in prisons, in lecture halls, in the
streets and at the ports. Now we are striking from our homes. The same
way we went on strike after the pandemic of 1918, just as we went on
strike after the bubonic plague. After those disasters, they couldnât
keep us at work, they couldnât stop our free movement, and we discovered
the formulas which allowed us to expropriate from the rich the wealth
they hoarded even in deathâthat equalizing force. Infinite new
possibilities for life have suddenly become thinkable for countless
people who are only just now imagining a life outside the economy. There
has never been so pressing a need for our imagination, our energetic
attention.
The same progressive politicians who defanged the word abolition are
already trying to appropriate the language of mutual aid. They know the
state cannot save us. If mutual aid is in fact a factor in evolution,
then the ways that it has spread far and wide are already transforming
us. When this is over, the authorities will tell us that we only
survived because of their control; liberals are already applauding the
new authoritarianism in the name of the common good. Yet we know that
what really keeps us alive is our care for each other.
The virus threatens our lives, but it also threatens the social order
that was making them impossible. Rent, work, fares, debt, insuranceâall
the scams we were born into as marksâlet the virus freeze them. Weâll
drink fire and tend our hearths to wait out the cold.
And spring is upon us. With April Foolâs Day, spring arrives in earnest:
a renewal, a jubilee, a suspension, a reversal, a cosmic jokeâbut not on
us. The foolâs journey opens the way to the world. The inevitable
non-payment of countless debts will be our first blow against the world
of measure and control. This is the easiest thing we can do. In the face
of disease, begin with ease, grace, rest.
If work itself is killing us, the strike cannot be more work. April 1 is
not a day of action. On that day, sleep in, call your friends, kiss your
love, read, meditate, drink water, and get ready. That day is a small
key which opens a large door. The managers of the coastal cities are
already beta-testing the new normal, but the cards are still being
dealt. The crisis isnât over until we decide it is. Now, when everything
is at stake, our collective refusal to play their game is our greatest
weapon.
The old world will not give us all we require. How could it? Health,
rest, a world without debt or prisons, homeâwe who step through this
door will have to find these things for ourselves. We must understand
the strike in the broadest possible terms.
We are not afraid of ruins. Today, when our futures have been cancelled,
this time together may be all we have. We wonât be returning to normal.
We will be the ones to shape what comes next. Set down your burden. You
need not face this alone. We are striking out. With so much distance
between us, itâs time to activate everything that connects.
Donât pay. We wonât either. They canât evict us all. Weâll give them
hell if they try.
We know how to survive a plague.
La salute è in voi! â Health is in you!