Food For Thought.

 

     We can look at this pandemic as something that is happening to us, or we can see it as something that is showing up the glaring inadequacies in the present structure of society, forcing us to think again about how we function as a society. It is obvious that the existing structure of the way we live is incapable of dealing with this sort of event, due in some great measure to the value given to profit rather than worth to humanity. Wealth accumulation for the individual is seen as success, rather than improving the quality of life for all, thus producing a society of inequality and insecurity. In the aftermath of this pandemic, is that what we want to rebuild? I recently heard a comment that made perfect sense to me, "If you live in a shanty town and a hurricane comes along and completely destroys your shanty town, when it has past and you realise that you will have to rebuild, do you rebuild another shanty town, or do you try to build something better?"

Some food for thought from Anarchist News:

 1. A pandemic isn’t a collection of viruses, but is a social relation among people, mediated by viruses.

Nothing is inevitable, inescapable, or immutable about the coronavirus pandemic unfolding everywhere around us, simply because the pandemic is social. The endless posts and announcements marshalling us to help “flatten the curve” are at least enough to make clear that the historical consequences and human costs of the pandemic entirely depend on the ways we collectively choose to live in relation to it. Because the pandemic doesn’t simply happen to us but is instead something we partake in, a first step forward in these times is to refuse to curtail our thinking to how each of our individual lives may be particularly impacted by the virus and to begin to contemplate the potential we collectively share to change the course of the pandemic as well as to shape the new society that emerges from it.

2. At the very least, the expanding suspension of social, economic, and political norms and laws provides each of us with a unique opportunity to question the pre-pandemic world we had all grown accustomed to living within.

What is the value of work? How might we allocate resources differently if we didn’t have to consider price? Is privatized healthcare defensible? Are prisons truly necessary? As we witness the cancellation of utility, mortgage, and rent payments, the public takeover of private healthcare systems, the cessation of arrests for low-level offenses, and the calls for the cancellation of all debt, what else might we call into question and, perhaps more importantly, imagine taking hold in their place? If those in power are so willing to upend social, economic, and political norms and laws in the interest of defending the world they upheld, then we must be equally willing to upend them and spread the imagination of something otherwise. In this short time, we can already see that the only truly certain thing in the pandemic is that nothing will ever be the same again.

3. As nation states prove unwilling and/or incapable of supporting life, our immediate and urgent priority must be to organize mutual aid, solidarity, and care using whatever means necessary.

It truly didn’t take long for the specters of pandemic darwinism and viral malthusianism to surface, finding support in politicians around the world who tell their citizens that they are on their own. If the state and the market economy prove to be unable to provide the diverse forms of care upon which all life depends, we must find ways of providing that care without concern for who owns what or whether it is legal. In this sense, the struggle to defend life in the pandemic will at times necessarily take shape as a direct struggle against the logic of capital, the violence of law, and the abstraction of price. We must learn about our own needs and the needs of those we are capable of caring for, find ways of producing, expropriating, and distributing goods that satisfy the needs of interconnected and interdependent communities, and be willing to simply take what is needed whenever it is denied to us.

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