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.
4. As capitalism’s
market economies fail us in every way, we must dare to imagine ways of
organizing social life beyond the logic of price, competition, and
profit.
Organizing a society based upon
satisfying the needs of all rather than defending the wealth of the few
isn’t simply an ideal in the pandemic, but is a practical and popular
necessity. As this new common sense continues to proliferate and take
hold, we must begin to materially reorganize society on that basis by
making sure people get what they need first and worrying about profit
never. Any new practices of care that arise will be immediately
challenged by the infrastructural and logistical power of digital
capitalism, which is already seizing upon the pandemic as a means of
wholly conquering and networking what remains of a collapsing global
economy. If Amazon, already hiring thousands of new workers to keep up
with skyrocketing demand, becomes the means people rely upon to survive
the pandemic, then our post-pandemic world will become increasingly
indistinguishable from the exploitation, inequality, and precarity that
define Amazon’s organizational model. Quite simply, if we fail to break
the logic of market-driven supply and demand, of price and profit, it
may in the end simply break us.
5. Our
networks of care and solidarity necessarily must begin from the
specificites and immediacies of the situations we live within, but
rapidly must multiply their bonds with diffuse and diverse communities.
No
life ever lives truly alone, and no act of individuation or privation
can ever alter the fact that every life constitutively depends upon
innumerable other lives. As such, truly caring for ourselves and for
those with whom we share intimate ties effectively necessitates
implementing care for everyone. Over the next months, we should
inventively and imaginatively practice social distancing in ways that
cultivate and proliferate, not diminish, social solidarity. If we must
practically begin by organizing care for those who are already proximate
and intimate—for ourselves, our families, friends, neighbors, and loved
ones—then part of that effort necessarily implies continuously
expanding the organization and coordination of care to whatever scales
are required. These inclusive and open modes of care must escape the
logic of the state and the market by constituting themselves on the
basis of diverse yet common precarities and interdependencies.
6.
Caring and acting in solidarity with one another within and beyond the
pandemic will necessitate the constitution and defense of new forms of
commons.
As we struggle to organize
care, capitalism may very well rely upon all of our compassion and
solidarity to survive the pandemic before returning at full force and
plunging us all into only more intense states of precarity, into more
uncaring forms of work, and into deeper and deeper debt. While a great
deal depends upon the ways we are able to act in solidarity with one
another, practicing kindness and generosity and compassion and courage
in equal parts, if those solidarities are not constituted in new kinds
of commons that render capitalism and the state effectively obsolete,
they will not be able to endure the exigencies of the pandemic nor
withstand inevitable measures meant to conquer and capture whatever
follows the pandemic. In other words, if our capacity to care for one
another fails to be instantiated in qualitatively different forms, they
may very well simply be reintegrated into novel expressions of
privation, dispossession, and precaritization in whatever new legal and
economic systems that may attempt to establish themselves.
7.
Caring for one another will equally involve militantly opposing those
who intend to further instantiate already-existing forms of domination
in the turbulences and uncertainties of the pandemic.
While
hospital workers still struggle to get enough protective gear, new
footage already circulates of immigration agents outfitted with new
breathing masks arresting undocumented migrants. Xenophobias are
magnified, welfare programs are marked for cuts, and Palantir signs new
contracts with the state to implement facial recognition and cell-phone
tracking technologies. We must not underestimate the new cruelties that
may arise in these times, preying upon communities that can no longer
substantively defend themselves or protest on the streets, much less
congregate together. What new kinds of solidarity and struggle might we
invent in order to counteract the new intensities, practices, and forms
of violence that will surely arise? How might we maintain social
distances but nonetheless find ways of acting decisively and concertedly
together?
8. The pandemic, as a
phenomenon that differentially affects all of the planet at once, must
push us all to live our lives definitively beyond the logic of borders
and nations.
Health officials have long
noted that viruses don’t respect borders. Neither should we. So much of
what presently threatens our lives—climate change, financial capital,
the coronavirus pandemic—is now expressed at a planetary scale. We have
little hope of defending life anywhere if we are unable to act in
concert with life everywhere, acknowledging the dignity that is common
to all life, on the one hand, and the material inequalities which
continue to differently impact the way life is lived, on the other. The
violence of the pandemic will be expressed differentially, at different
intensities, and in different forms across historically differentiated
bodies, and our ways of living and organizing will not only have to
account for that but will have to organize on that very basis. Defending
life in New York City will mean something different than defending it
in Mexico City, or in Ramallah, or in Hong Kong, but these struggles
must find ways of resonating and reverberating with one another across
borders, continents, and oceans, just as capital and pandemics are able
to.
9. Because life in the pandemic is the way it is, life in the pandemic will not stay the way it is.
The
pandemic is a world-historical process, leaving nothing on Earth
unchanged and acting as a temporal fold between a planetary before and
after. While we cannot change what happened before the pandemic, we must
nonetheless learn from the past as a means of bringing to life,
sustaining, and defending the possibility of different futures. Diverse
histories of struggle against various forms of oppression and domination
must inform the ways we ourselves continue to struggle, even if new
struggles that arise in the pandemic present cannot formally resemble
the ways of struggling we’re accustomed to. The past is never settled,
and all past events can always come to mean something new in the ways we
learn from and draw upon them. In this sense, how might past struggles
against sexism, racism, fascism, ableism, and capitalism inform
struggles in the pandemic? Resistance is to some degree always a
fundamentally speculative endeavor, a collective wager that something
may be possible before that possibility has been realized. Now is a time
for imagination, invention, and experimentation, leveraging each as a
means of producing new kinds of knowledge about our situation and new
modes of struggle within it.
10. We
must collectively, courageously, and compassionately decide what new
ways of living we desire to live in the pandemic and the times that
follow, or it will be decided for us.
The ways in which human life is presently threatened on a planetary scale should push us all to consider not only the generic value of life, but also the value of distinct forms of life and ways of living. The worth of life in the abstract does little to help inform the ways we might choose to live our own particular lives, while imagining and dreaming of what kinds of lives may be worth living can clarify everything. The pandemic offers us all an opportunity to engage in a kind of critical aesthetic experience, allowing us to not only see lives as they are, but also to see how lives came to be lived in a particular way, and thus how lives could live otherwise. Taking this opportunity seriously requires nothing less than a total abandonment of everything that governed and organized our lives up to this point. Only then will we be capable of beginning the interminable process of learning to live, think, care, act, love, struggle, and build new lives and ways of living together definitively beyond the logic of the pandemic and the world that preceded it.
taken from here