The pandemic we are mired in precarize everyone and highlights serious injustices. The stimulus wished by the leaders is an economic stimulus which is not addressed to us. It is not addressed to the artists and other people who don’t make enough profit to merit the right to exist. It does not concern sex workers, whose existence itself is still criminalized. This stimulus ignores handicapped people, the marginalized, those with mental health issues. The stimulus they talk about, it is for the oil companies, the Bombardier corporations, the party friends like Guzzo, but it is not for us. To let the governments save us from the crisis they created themselves through the constant cuts to healthcare and through their “snowbird” lives, would be to accept death. What we need to stimulate is not the economy, but the struggles for our rights and the end of capitalist exploitation.
The economic rebuilding project bets on a technological world stained with inequalities and based on dirty capitalist exploitation. The strenghtening of national borders and the abuses of immigration instances, which are illegitimate in this so-called Canada, aim to preserve these inequalities. And while in the North we vaccinate, we forget those who clothes us in the Gildan factories of Haïti. We forget that each zoom conference depends on the work in African and South American mines. Those same countries who might not see the vaccine before the next pandemic. Words of thanks and empty promises won’t bring back to life the Haitian “petrochallengers” killed by police forces trained by Canada, nor give back the eyes lost by Chilean protesters blinded by Canadian weapons. It will take much more to give back life to Raphaël « Napa » André, to Joyce Echaquan, and to all the native people killed here and elsewhere.
We saw worldwide injustices explodes in this last dreadful year. Migrants people who had the “chance” to come here now die in our hospitals and our warehouses. The streets of our poorest neighborhood are empty, the police being constantly on the hunt for their next prey. The First Nations are humiliated, attacked and killed by government instances, guided by extractivist companies. And in all this chaos we are imposed obedience, silence and self-deception in front of all that goes on around us.
We cannot let this be! Let’s refuse to police ourselves and our actions, because we recognize that to live in a world constrained by racist, colonialist and LGBTQIA2S+phobic laws is a challenge in itself. It is those same laws which feed genre inequalities which gives more reason to the most fortunate and to the rich heir·esse·s: do not legitimate them by accepting those laws for ourselves! We are angry when we see the disappearance of monetary assistance, of our jobs, and the precarization of those left, or from the imposition of a curfew with no scientific basis. We see it only as an excuse to legitimate State repression. The sanitary discourse makes no sense when we see that it is not applied equitably. The Legault government again shows its true face when it tries to safeguard the economy while throwing our lives away. We refuse this future dreamed of by billionaires, which drags our attention away through fear while they profit from the exploitation of the most vulnerable.
These billionaires, it is them who are the first polluters but the last to feel its consequences. It is those largest corporations who continue to exploit the work of migrant workers and to practice extractivism in First Nations’ territories, under the guise of economic growth and of the hypocrisy of the “green” or “sustainable” economy. While the whole world knows that the climate crisis is a major issue and will affect first marginalized people. For them, it’s business as usual as long as possible, until death do us part.
To make matters worse, the waiting lists in healthcare are even worse than what they were before the pandemic. Media took the opportunity to sell more anxiety-inducing news about the virus, casting a shadow on current struggles, especially those for the defense of the land. These struggles are alive, and we will remind them of that fact.
We are perceived as nothing but a mass of workers, empty and replaceable, but not is all lost. Together, we are ready to fight, and we are much stronger and numerous. Let’s refuse this “uberized” future and oppose to it a world of sharing and equality. And to get there, we will fight through all our might, which will take place by taking back the streets.
We will see you this May 1st, at 4PM, at Jarry park (corner of Gary-Carter and St-Laurent)!
Comments Off on You Can’t be Anti-State & Pro-Lock-down – A response to “Anarchy, Lock-downs, and Crypto-Eugenics”
Mar212021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
It has now been more than one year since the world that we have known all of our lives came screeching to a halt. And what a year’s it’s been. The collective unconscious roils in the throes of a bad acid trip, the realization seeps slow in the mind that the crisis is here to stay, and we are all along for the ride, tossed about by uncontrollable forces like a ship in a storm, trying to maintain some grace amidst all the fear and the confusion and the doubt.
Amidst it all, we have struggled to find solid ground. How are we to organize in the midst of a global pandemic? What is even going on? What threats should we be preparing for? How can we make sure that our loved ones are safe? What do other people think is going on?
This piece is a response to a critique entitled “Anarchy, Lock-down, and Crypto-Eugenics”, which is a critique of “On the Anarchist Response to the Global Pandemic”, published on Montreal Counter-Info, as well as It’s Going Down, North Shore Counter-Info, and quite a few other anarchist websites. I am not the author of that piece, however the author is a comrade with whom I have been working closely, and they encouraged me to respond, as they are currently too busy.
“On the Anarchist Response to the Global Pandemic was certainly not the first anarchist critique of lock-downs, or to suggest that the ruling class is manipulating the public for its own gain under the guise of Public Health. In fact, there are numerous anarchist voices coming out of the U.K. that have informed our critique. Some of the most notable would include Architects for Social Housing, the South Essex Heckler, Estuary Stirrings, Winter Oak, and the Acorn. We would encourage people to check out these websites if they are interested in developing their analysis in regards to the current crisis.
In any case, we are flattered that our piece is attracting international attention! Not only has it been translated into French, it has also been re-posted on anarchist websites from around the world, including Germany and the U.K., and it has a generated quite a bit of positive feedback.
It was our intention to kickstart discussion and debate around the subject of COVID-19, lock-downs, and related subjects, so we welcome the criticism of the British writer, though in all honesty we question whether it is made in good faith.
It has gotten increasingly difficult to have respectful debate these days, a phenomenon for which social media echo chambers are partly to blame, as well as the general deterioration of political discourse across the political spectrum. Often, debates about controversial subjects devolve into name-calling, guilt by association and whataboutism.
Whataboutism, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. This tactic, which was common in Soviet propaganda, was popularized by Donald Trump, and it is unfortunate to see it rear its ugly head in anarchist discourse.
The critic attempts to portray our piece as an example of “crypto-eugenics”. This is frankly absurd. Eugenics is an ideology which promotes coercive intervention in human reproduction, and nothing that we say in the piece has anything to do with reproduction whatsoever. If the response to a critique is to accuse the critic of secretly harbouring heretical views, we are in a time period analogous to the Inquisition. Furthermore, eugenics is an ideology promoting coercive intervention in natural human behaviour. We are advocating for the exact opposite.
Nevertheless, we will address some of the issues raised. In all honesty, the criticisms of the piece are mostly addressed within the original piece, and so we encourage folks to read (or re-read it), because it is fairly self-evident that the British critic misconstrues the arguments contained therein.
Firstly, the piece is primarily an appeal to anarchist values. It is clearly illogical to desire the abolition of the state and also uncritically support the expansion of state powers. The critic does not really address the question of values, and it is unclear which anarchist tendency they represent. In fact, when the critic says “As anarchists we affirm the violence of liberation” one is reminded more of Italian futurism (a proto-fascist ideology that flirted with anarchism) than contemporary anarchist discourse. But perhaps this is due to regional differences as to which theories are fashionable. All this to say: I can’t really identify any genuine anarchist sentiment in the critique.
Secondly, on the question of lock-downs: we maintain that it is an untenable position for an anarchist to support either lock-downs or curfews. Both of these interventions require the use of coercive force; that is to say, policing. We are not at all opposed to any public health recommendations, so long as they are voluntary.
We would do well to remember that the term lock-down comes from the prison system, and lock-downs are usually put into place in that context when authorities perceive there to be an increased risk of revolt.
All this to say that we believe that anarchism and any ideology promoting the implementation of draconian measures such as lock-downs and curfews are mutually exclusive, and that this should be self-evident. How can one both be against the state and in favour of state control? Ideology aside, studies have shown that lock-downs are not effective in reducing mortality. According to a recently published study in the journal Nature, “using this methodology and current data, in ~ 98% of the comparisons using 87 different regions of the world we found no evidence that the number of deaths/million is reduced by staying at home”.[1]
Third, there is the very important question of the lethality of COVID-19. The critic clearly takes issue with us for “minimizing” the severity of the pandemic, but they do not refute a central claim, which is that COVID-19 has proven to be far less deadly than was originally believed. On this, the scientific consensus is overwhelming. The disease was originally believed to have a fatality rate of 1% or more. A year later, we know that this is not even close to being true. There are many studies done on this subject, and we encourage people to do their own research, but we will quote one study authored by Stanford’s John P. Ioannidis.[2]
“Infection fatality rate in different locations can be inferred from seroprevalence studies. While these studies have caveats, they show IFR ranging from 0.00% to 1.54% across 82 study estimates. Median IFR across 51 locations is 0.23% for the overall population and 0.05% for people <70 years old. IFR is larger in locations with higher overall fatalities. Given that these 82 studies are predominantly from hard‐hit epicenters, IFR on a global level may be modestly lower. Average values of 0.15%‐0.20% for the whole global population and 0.03%‐0.04% for people <70 years old as of October 2020 are plausible. These values agree also with the WHO estimate of 10% global infection rate (hence, IFR ~ 0.15%) as of early October 2020.”
Some of the confusion regarding the lethality of COVID-19 results from people confusing IFR with CFR (Case Fatality Rate). Dr Richard Schabas, Ontario’s former Chief Medical Officer, has critiqued the Ontario government’s emphasis on using the CFR statistic, saying “Every knowledgeable observer of COVID understands that CFR is in itself an irrelevant number… CFR’s only ‘virtue’ is its ability to frighten by overstating the real risk of dying from a COVID infection.”[3]
Despite this, many people are under the impression that COVID-19 is much more lethal than it really is. This is clearly because of media fear-mongering, and yes, there are clearly financial interests at play, not those of Big Pharma, but also companies such as Amazon, Walmart, and many others who benefited from rampant stimulus spending. For some reason, Leftists have been shy to criticize the blatant greed of major corporations who are making a killing in the context of the current crisis. The Left readily decries the profiteering of both the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex, however, criticism of the medical-industrial complex has become increasingly rare in anti-capitalist circles. Because trusting that pharmaceutical companies have the best interests of the public at heart, one would do well to remember the particularly blatant example of how drug manufacturers fuelled the opiate crisis by heavily promoting drugs such as OxyContin. In developing our analysis of the current moment, it behooves us to take matters into consideration such as whether or not given politicians and other public officials have conflicts of interests. Until recently, this would not have been an even remotely controversial statement. It is a sad state of affairs when supposed anti-capitalists rush to the defence of Big Pharma!
So, thank you to British critic for giving us the opportunity to clarify our position. Again, our intention was to kickstart discussion and debate about how to organize in the current political climate, and so we welcome the criticism and encourage others to join the conversation. We would simply make two requests, in the spirit of having the most constructive debate possible. First, we would ask that critics engage with the actual content of what we have said, rather that resorting to whataboutism, and secondly, that if refuting any of our claims, reference is made to the best available data, that is, peer-reviewed studies from respected medical or scientific journals.
We can be reached at vertetnoire@riseup.net. We encourage people to reach out for any reason, either to send us supportive messages or to accuse us of blasphemy, conspiring with the Devil, and/or crypto-eugenics.
Comments Off on Fear and Loathing in the Age of COVID
Mar212021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
There’s a lot of weird and crazy things in the media these days, but one of the weirder and crazier things that I’ve seen lately appeared in the Ottawa Citizen back in October. The headline was “Forged letter warning about wolves on the loose part of Canadian Forces propaganda campaign that went awry”. Apparently, “a letter from the Nova Scotia government sent out to residents to warn about a pack of wolves on the loose in the province was forged by Canadian military personnel as part of a propaganda training mission”.
That training mission also apparently involved using a loudspeaker to generate wolf sounds. I don’t know what’s weirder, that the Canadian Forces would do such a thing, or that they’d get caught. Are the Trailer Park Boys now running psy ops? (Sunnyvale is in Nova Scotia. Just saying).
Thea article quotes a U.S. professor who calls this a major violation of ethics. “This is way over the top,” Briant said. “It’s a very dangerous path when you start targeting your own public with false information and trying to manipulate them.”
“Briant said the deception has nothing to do with wolves; it was likely an exercise in the testing the military’s skills in trying to manipulate the population with false information…”
This is where it gets really interesting, though:
“The Nova Scotia propaganda training comes as the Canadian Forces spools up its capabilities to conduct information warfare, influence operations and other deception missions aimed at populations overseas and, if necessary, the Canadian public.
Briant revealed on Monday the Canadian Forces spent more than $1 million in training its public affairs officers in skills to influence targeted populations.
In July, this newspaper reported a team assigned to a Canadian military intelligence unit monitored and collected information from people’s social media accounts in Ontario, claiming such data-mining was needed to help troops working in long-term care homes during the coronavirus pandemic. The collection involved comments made by the public about the provincial government’s failure in taking care of the elderly in the province. That data was turned over to the Ontario government, with a warning from the team it represented a “negative” reaction from the public.
This newspaper reported at the same time that the Canadian Forces planned a propaganda campaign aimed at heading off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic. The plan used similar propaganda tactics to those employed against the Afghan population during the war in Afghanistan, including loudspeaker trucks to transmit government messages. The propaganda operation was never put into action.
In addition, some Canadian military officers have suggested creating fake Facebook and other social media accounts for carrying out deception operations as well as harnessing social media accounts of Canadian Forces members, military-friendly academics and retired senior military staff to challenge opposition politicians and journalists who raise controversial issues regarding the Canadian Forces.”
So, I suppose we can at least be secure in the knowledge that the Canadian Forces seems pretty inept when it comes to “information warfare”. It took a “military intelligence unit” to figure out that the public had a “negative” reaction to old people dying of COVID? And their plan was to cruise around in trucks blasting propaganda from loudspeakers? What the fuck? Damn, I guess “military intelligence” really is an oxymoron.
However, there’s good reason to be concerned as well. For one thing, isn’t it unsettling that the Canadian Forces are gearing up for “information warfare”? Who exactly are they going to war with? If the army is preparing for “influence operations and other deception missions”, for what ends are people to be influenced and deceived?
We can make guesses. On February 15th of this year, the Globe and Mail published a piece by Lisa Kramer, which advocated for using an “evidence-based approach” to COVID propaganda. Of course, she didn’t call it propaganda. She called it: “messaging urging Canadians to abide by COVID-19 lockdown measures”.
Kramer writes: “Evidence suggests people will be more likely to follow the rules when information is framed both to make it easy to grasp and to emphasize that the majority of others are behaving themselves, too… “[b]ecause lockdowns go against humans’ innate social nature, it can… be helpful to use psychology-based methods to help promote lockdown-abiding behaviour. One such approach is to curate the way we present information, building on extensive evidence that people care what others think and engage in activities that others deem socially acceptable.”
What she is referring to is the concept of social proof, popularized by behavioural scientist Robert Cialdini in his classic work “Influence”. In this book, which I would highly recommend to anyone wishing to understand political persuasion, social proof is identified as one of six “weapons of influence”. The idea, put simply, is: “monkey see, monkey do”. A person who isn’t sure what constitutes appropriate action in a given situation will look to other people and imitate their behaviour. We all know this intuitively; as we all discern what is correct through reference to what other people think is correct. This becomes all the more true in unfamiliar situations, such as during times of crisis.
Back in March 2020, a group of behavioural scientists penned an open letter urging the U.K. government to use evidence-based techniques to influence the public with comply with its commands. Their letter states: “those essential behaviour changes that are presently required… will receive far greater uptake the more urgent the situation is perceived to be.”
It seems so benign when they put it that way, but it would seem to me that what is being proposed is the state uses psychological manipulation to frighten the populace so that they are more compliant.
Other examples make a pattern clear. According to an article in Die Welt, headlined “The German Government Ordered Scientists to Produce Data to Scare Citizenry”: “a group of German lawyers has been pushing for the Koch Institute to disclose correspondence with the German Home Office in which the latter demanded that “scientists” create “scientific” documentation to scare the populace… The document, published just weeks later, finally identified a worst-case scenario in which more than a million people could die from the coronavirus.”
The same article goes on to not that fear-conditioning seems to be widely accepted. It notes that “on the website of one of the largest and best known institutions of higher learning in the US, Cornell University, the following study was found: “Modelling the role of media induced fear conditioning in mitigating post-lockdown COVID-19 pandemic: perspectives on India”.
This study (which has not been peer-reviewed) finds that “fear conditioning via mass media (like television, community radio, internet and print media),” along with positive reinforcement, resulted in “significant decrease in the growth of infected population.”
Basically, this study advocates for the use of fear-mongering propaganda in the name of Public Health, specifically through the formation of conditioned reflexes. Remember Pavlov’s dogs? They were conditioned to drool when a bell was rung. Are we being conditioned to have automatic, unconscious reactions to certain stimuli as part of a propaganda campaign?
According to the study, the answer to this question is yes. It states: “Modelling studies have shown that fear has a major influence in reducing the impact of a pandemic. Fear was shown to be directly associated with increased social distancing, as well as increased security measures… Thus, reflex fear production through incoming information, combined with other techniques, can increase social distancing and cautious behaviour. Fear conditioned reflex production, a subspecies of classical conditioned reflex production, is the making of a connection between unpleasant events and a stimulus from the environment.”
The question then arises: If we are conditioned through fear, which stimuli are triggering which responses?
The study provides one example: “in the case of COVID-19, a person can be considered to have an attached reflex if he forms a connection between being uncomfortable and touching surfaces. In this way, he begins to perceive touching surfaces as touching the virus itself.”
This is deeply troubling. People are being conditioned to be afraid of touching surfaces. How insane is that? Are we really to believe that this in the name of the greater good? What about the psychological suffering of individuals who are highly susceptible to fear-conditioning? How many children will become life-long germophobes as a result of the current obsession with viruses? How many people will develop serious phobias and mental disorders as a result of this? What will the effects on society be if there is a class of people who are afraid of everything? Will a certain percentage of people become psychological casualties of this era?
As someone with a boundless curiosity regarding the human mind, it saddens me that psychology is not being used not to uplift and inspire people, but to keep them down. I personally feel that if the goal really was to save lives, that it wouldn’t be necessary to use fear to gain compliance. It would be possible to appeal to people’s better instincts, towards caring and conscientiousness. I believe that a positive message could have been equally (or more) effective, if the goal really was to protect the vulnerable from real and imminent danger.
One should remember that propaganda is morally neutral. Anti-smoking campaigns are a form of propaganda which, if you think being addicted a carcinogenic drug is bad, you might be inclined to think was beneficial for society. Nor is reference to the principle of social proof either good or bad. However, I don’t think that the motivation of any of this fear-conditioning is to “save lives” or protect the vulnerable. I believe it is to condition the population to be compliant, so that they won’t put up too much of a fuss during a time in which society is being radically transformed into a form that none of us would have chosen.
The good news is that social movements also have the ability to employ weapons of influence. Courage is as contagious as fear, and people will, once a certain threshold is crossed, emulate acts of defiance as well as acts of conformity. That means that social proof is a principle which can we as a movement can make use of as well. By everyday acts of disobedience, we can normalize resistance. Right now, the expectation is that people will comply with any rule, no matter how absurd. We must break the spell. And how do we do that?
It will acquire just enough resistance to reach a critical mass at which the illusion cracks and defiance becomes generalized. Remember, people look to others for cues from others as to how to behave. If breaking the rules becomes more common, following suit will be perceived as less risky by others. Through small, incremental actions, disobedience becomes more possible within the popular imagination. People then will be more willing to experiment with what they can get away with, and their examples make rupture with groupthink easier for people whose personalities are on the more conformist side of the spectrum.
The point isn’t to stubbornly insist upon an alternate interpretation of reality. The point is to show that alternatives exist, and that it is possible to create them, and that in order to be free in an unfree world one must both break the rules and get away with it.
Beautification of the city under cover of night is one way to take arms against the sea of lies that is drowning the world. Make no mistake: the souls of the pacified masses cry out in despair, desperately desiring that which gives life meaning, purpose and direction. If you can express what you are feeling through any form of self-expression, you are making it easier for others to find their voices. Political graffiti and wheat pasting provocative art sends a message to those who desire to remember themselves, whispering to their truant hearts: “there are others who are like you”. A spontaneous dance party in the streets sends a message to the city: “Dance before the day is lost!”
The task right now is to remind people of what there is to live for, to call people’s spirits back into their bodies, to energize their spirits with the desire to live and to fulfil the purpose of their existence on Earth. And how can one accomplish that?
By doing it yourself. By having fun. By laughing, dancing, playing, singing, gathering together. By having a good time. By refusing to take life so seriously. By affirming the bonds of friendship and community that bring true collectivity, that which emerges through love and organic social organization, and never from the false collectivity imposed by the state.
For A Joyous Rupture with the Reality of the Fear-crazed, for the Contagion of Revolt!
There are currently at least sixty people still facing serious criminal charges from the 2019 and 2020 raids on Wet’suwet’en territory and the solidarity movement known as Shut Down Canada. Dealing with criminal charges is often an isolating and scary experience, especially when the legal system intentionally tries to make people feel alone and powerless. We think a support campaign is the best way we can fight back against these forces and show the state that we will not allow our friends and comrades to be criminalized. If we can support one another now, then we can support one another in all the struggles to come.
More than avoiding repression, what matters is how we deal with it. We need to always be finding ways to show those targeted they are not alone — this makes it easier for them to get through it with strength and integrity. As people move through the justice system, displays of solidarity and practical support make a real difference in the outcome. We need to show that those who are brave and take risks will be supported if we want to be brave together again in the future and see our movements grow.
We want to provide a space where defendants can write about their experiences with repression and criminalization, statements of solidarity, and updates about the charges, which will be posted on our Updates section.
We want to help defendants to fund raise for their legal battles, where we provide links to different defendants and communities’ GoFundMe pages.
We want to help defendants feel more supported in the incredibly isolating process of state criminalization, and are offering a PO box where letters of support, postcards, and zines can be sent, which we we then forward to defendants.
And, finally, we want to create an email campaign to pressure for charges to be dropped or for prominent figures to publicly support charges being dropped. We have created a basic sample template for a (polite) email, and a list of talking points that defendants have given us, and compiled a list of emails for it to be sent to.
Please share this campaign on your various data-mining surveilance platforms and use the hashtag #BlockadeDefense
Comments Off on Anarchy, Lockdown and Crypto-Eugenics: A critical response from some anarchists in Wales & England
Mar152021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
“The Covid19 crisis has presented a challenge to anarchists and others who believe in a fully autonomous and liberated life” – so a recent submission to Montreal Counter-information declares. These words certainly resonate with our experiences. Anarchy in the UK is not just presented with a challenge; it is itself in crisis. Spycops, squatting ban, abusers, Corbynism, TERFs – the list is long, and the virus already found “the scene” in a sorry state. But Covid-19 represents something different, and on this we can agree with the analysis from Montreal. This is also where our agreement ends. In the following text we critique the analysis – we do so as its arguments are similar to those we have heard among friends and even comrades over the past months. Though the epidemic in the UK appears to be waning, its associated tendencies remain. The text calls for serious critiques, and so we offer the following in the spirit of antagonism against the present. We close with some suggested points of unity for anarchists in these times.
“Politicians”, their text begins, “lie”, and big pharma has exploited the pandemic. Maybe we can agree on a little more! In the UK, we were told that the virus was only a flu and to keep working as usual. (At the time of writing, the death count numbers over 125,000.) And we were told of Oxford’s vaccine, a people’s vaccine with no patent or borders (a mask that quickly slipped as the state reverted to vaccine nationalism). But these aren’t the lies they have in mind. Rather, they argue that politicians and the media have craftily overstated the virus’ threat, in a cunning plan to impose lockdowns and reap pharmaceutical profits. (Surely the hand-sanitiser corporations are behind this too..?) Anarchists, we are then told, have believed this powerful lie. Out of an “admirable [!] want to do well by the elderly and infirm”, the state has succeeded in “hacking our hearts and minds”.
This idea, appealing as it might be, is only a pale shadow of the reality. Covid-19’s threat is not a conspiracy, any more than Covid-19 itself. It is not the result of media hype any more than it is the product of Bill Gates’ brain or transmitted from 5G towers. It is the direct consequence of severe ecological destruction and capitalism’s toxic living conditions. Having brought it into existence, it is of course “exploited” by capital and state. As the critic notes, it is unlikely that capitalism will eradicate it, even if certain states claim this as their goal. Instead it is managed, incorporated, capitalised upon. This is at a far more fundamental level than creating profits for some pharmaceutical companies – we are seeing in the colonial core an historic restructure of work and class-composition. Our critic begins to scratch at this surface (they describe lockdowns as “classist”, as if a lack of lockdown would be classless!). Scratch a little deeper, and we see that capitalism faces a familiar contradiction: exploit workers, but ensure there are workers to be exploited tomorrow. Manage the virus, manage production. Like inflation, the death-graph must be regulated – kept just right. Everywhere this paradox is obvious: “stay at home” but “go to work”! Technocrats and managers debate the 2 metre rule just as the 19th century Factory Acts debated the relation of profits, health and cubic-feet per worker.[1]
We can call this capital’s “positive” side. Though each worker is cheap and replaceable, capital needs a body of workers. It can’t have everyone ill at once, and it can’t afford killing off too much of its working population. But it also finds and creates bodies superfluous to capitalist production: disposable bodies, bodies in the colonial margins, old bodies, less or unproductive bodies, bodies that cannot “work”. It’s here that we see capitalism’s eugenic and Malthusian tendency. This tendency, always present, has for the disabled been intensified in recent years, as the numerous lives lost due to benefit cuts demonstrate. Since the beginnings of “public health” in the 19th century, triage systems (a military invention) have ranked bodies in a hierarchy of value, rationing resources under conditions of artificial scarcity. In recent times, do-not-resuscitate notices imposed on Covid-19 patients with learning disabilities were the result of a care algorithm – tech meets “accidental” eugenics.[2] Capitalism itself could accurately be described as an algorithm of crypto-eugenics, always at risk of fascism outright. Like fascism, Covid-19 presents an existential threat to the lives of certain minorities – the proletarian disabled and the elderly in particular – and a slower death to others.[3] And like fascism, liberal democracies allow it to exist, manage it, keep their monster on the leash. At times this management fails: health-care systems collapse, production plummets. At other times, the far-right call for the monster to be set free.
Recognising the pandemic as an existential threat is where “our conversation should begin”. The critic talks of anarchists on the one hand, and the elderly and “infirm” on the other. It’s the anarchist that is agent-subject here, their freedom to act with or without them (the “vulnerable”) in mind. It erases from the beginning elderly anarchists, disability anarchism. Where are they and their freedoms in this imagined revolt? Our critic continues: as free anarchists, we also care for others, we co-operate with “consent” and without “force”. But who’s force, what consent? It’s a simple truth that your right to drink in the pub (that is, the right of the business to re-open) shits on the freedom of those at serious risk, those a few links down the chain of transmission. These chains of transmission are our chains. As anarchists we affirm the violence of liberation. Let us be clear: those that threaten the disabled cannot be consented with. We will find no freedom in frozen morgues.
The critic goes on to downplay the threat of Covid-19, a familiar refrain. Montreal Analysis come Barrington Deceleration – talk about technocrats! They cite statistics on average risks, masking the deadly risks to specific minorities (it won’t be bad for you!). They pit Covid-risks against cancer treatment (we can only afford one or the other!), despite the virus being far more deadly for those fighting cancer. Even were Covid-19 somewhat less risky (look, only 60,000 deaths!), the crypto-eugenic logic remains. In the UK, we must critically analyse recent events – particularly that certain assemblages of the state openly plotted course for “herd immunity” without a vaccine. It’s safe to assume that this Malthusian wet-dream would have led to health-system collapse and perhaps half a million deaths (“acceptable losses”).[4]
Where the critic calls on anarchists to question and critique the Covid-19 threat, we call on anarchists to reflect critically on eugenics as a logic of capital and state. We must also grapple seriously with its nasty history in the anarchist tradition, from Emma Goldman’s writings to sections of primitivist and anti-civ thought. As pandemics become more prevalent and eco-fascisms enter the mainstream, anarchists must fight to ensure nobody is “left behind”.
Finally, our friend attacks the tyranny of lockdown, claiming that as anarchists this should be our aim, and that in failing to do so we have cowardly ceded ground to the far-right. But their target is both abstract and confused. They use the terms curfew, lockdown and closures interchangeably (one of their cited articles even describes mandated mask wearing as “draconian”!) and argue that these measures must be attacked “in principle” as they are imposed without “consent”. We argue that as anarchists there is no state which can be consented to, and that the very notion of a social contract has nothing to do with anarchy. Rather than make vague statements for #freedom in the style of the Tea party right, we must locate and attack the instruments of power and control. “Lockdown” has come to mean a myriad of very contrasting measures – from asking people to stay at home to policed curfews, from enforcing meager workplace health and safety to the breaking of strikes, from closing businesses and schools to violent prison lockdowns (the term’s original meaning), from fining tourists and quarantine hotels to detaining migrants in military camps. It should be obvious which of these as anarchists we must attack, and which we can leave alone – or even fight for.
We must define our targets and recognise our enemies. Free business has nothing to do with our freedom. Simply opposing lockdown “edicts from on high” is as empty as supporting all protest. In the UK we have seen large, rowdy Covid-conspiracy demos led by celebrity anti-Semites, but we have also seen unpolitical gatherings fighting the police – as well as organised demonstrations for black lives. The US presents an even simpler dichotomy. Nothing could be clearer than the difference between the late-Spring business protests against Democratic governors and the Summer’s black uprising against the police. The first stood for the rights of small businesses and merged into the right-wing militia movement. The second exploded anger at the cops, expropriated goods and created temporary autonomous spaces. As anarchists we know where we stand.
Speculative points of unity:
Smash crypto-eugenics, of the right and of the left Obstruct Covid-conspiracy demos, recognising them as far-right mobs Resist the criminalisation of the pandemic, policing powers, curfews and intensified surveillance Target the reinforced border regime and “lifeboat fascism” Organise against the return to unsafe workplaces Fight the evictions of anarchist spaces and the mass-eviction wave Further networks of mutual aid and act with dangerous care Sabotage ecological destruction and animal exploitation, the cause of present and future pandemics Analyse the changing terrain, refuse the postponement of anarchy
Notes:
“It has been stated over and over again that the English doctors are unanimous in declaring that where the work is continuous, 500 cubic feet is the very least space that should be allowed for each person. … [but were this to happen] [t]he very root of the capitalist mode of production, i.e., the self-expansion of all capital, large or small, by means of the “free” purchase and consumption of labour-power, would be attacked. Factory legislation is therefore brought to a deadlock before these 500 cubic feet of breathing space. The sanitary officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all harp, over and over again, upon the necessity for those 500 cubic feet, and upon the impossibility of wringing them out of capital. They thus, in fact, declare that consumption [tuberculosis] and other lung diseases among the workpeople are necessary conditions to the existence of capital.” Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry, Section 9). If we assume a work-room height of 10 feet, 500 cubic feet would give a base of approximately 7 x 7 feet, 7 feet being a little more than 2 metres.
On the 26 June 2020, England revised its guidance from 2 meters to 1. Whilst “the evidence shows that relative risk may be 2-10 times higher”, “there are severe economic costs to maintaining 2 metre distancing. With a 2 metre rule in place, it is not financially viable for many businesses to operate.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-two-metre-social-distancing-guidance/review-of-two-metre-social-distancing-guidance
The linked Guardian article is from February 2021, but concerns regarding do-not-resuscitate forms were raised by medical establishment bodies at the beginning of the UK epidemic. https://www.cqc.org.uk/news/stories/joint-statement-advance-care-planning
“I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” Fred Moten on racism (interview, 2013). Vaccine nationalism is increasingly shifting this to the “postcolonial” elderly and disabled. Other groups of course include certain sections of the workforce (mostly low-paid) and people of colour, the urban poor, the incarcerated, migrants. (We would argue that the existential threat directly applies here to the elderly and disabled, whereas the Covid-regime intensifies existing threats against the latter groups.) A lot could also be said about the privatisation of Covid-risk to the household and the domestic abuse this has further enabled.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics estimates disabled people as making up 60% of all Covid-19 deaths (November 2020). Similar to “BAME” deaths, “raised risk is because disabled people are disproportionately exposed to a range of generally disadvantageous circumstances compared with non-disabled people.” https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/coronaviruscovid19relateddeathsbydisabilitystatusenglandandwales/24januaryto20november2020#main-points
The ONS estimated that approximately 15% of the population had antibodies to Covid-19 on the 18th of January 2021 (the rate was lower for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland). On this date the total UK deaths of people who had received a positive test result (a relatively low measure) was approximately 95,000. “Herd immunity” is estimated to require a threshold of at least 60% (the percentage Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance gave in his interview with Sky News on March the 13th, 2020) possibly more. That is, to reach herd immunity without a vaccine, more than four times as many people in the UK would need to have been infected than had in January 2021, making it reasonable to assume four times as many deaths (giving 380,000 as a conservative estimate). This is before considering reinfection, the lack of treatments at the beginning of the pandemic, likely health-system collapse, the higher chance of new variants etc. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveyantibodydatafortheuk/3february2021
More evidence has emerged of herd immunity without a vaccine being a pushed for strategy prior to March 23rd, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54252272
By the Sex Work Autonomous Committee, an autonomous political organization of sex workers based in Montreal with the aim of demanding the decriminalization of sex work, and better working conditions in the sex industry more broadly.
Cari Mitchell is a former sex worker and a member of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), a network of sex workers in the United Kingdom working both outdoors and indoors campaigning for decriminalisation and safety.1
In 2000, the ECP organized a sex workers’ strike that was part of the Global Women’s Strike on International Women’s Day. The Global Women’s Strike is an international network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work. A sex/work strike was organized again at that date in 2014 and 2019, on these occasions, with other sex workers’ organizations. We asked Cari Mitchell to share her experience as one of the organizers of the strike.
CATS: Your collective has existed for many years and used many political strategies to obtain rights for sex workers. How did the strike come up as a tactic to obtain decriminilization of sex work?
C.M.: Our collective which started in 1975 was founded by immigrant sex workers. From the beginning we demanded the abolition of the prostitution laws and for money in women’s hands from governments so we can get out of sex work if and when we want. It was and still is mostly women that are doing sex work, mostly mothers, mostly single mothers, doing our best to support our families. In the ECP we also fight legal cases against criminal charges such as loitering and soliciting and brothel keeping. Whatever people come to us with, we help them. We are an organisation of different nationalities, races, ages, sexualities and all genders.
We work closely with other organizations. We are part of the Global Women’s Strike and the campaign for a Care Income Now2. Like other women we want our work of giving birth and raising the next generation to be counted, valued and paid for. And as sex workers we know that if we had that money for the work we are already doing, most of us wouldn’t have gone into prostitution in the first place. We wish that those people who complain about the number of women who have to go into sex work because of poverty and lack of economic alternatives, would instead press the goverment for that money.
We are based at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London and work closely with Women Against Rape, which is an anti racist, anti-violence against women organization. We also work with disability organizations – we have a number of women in our own network who have disabilities or who have children with disabilities, which is why they are working to get the money to cover the extra costs of dealing with a disability. Queer Strike which is part of the LGBTQ movement in the UK are also allies as is Support Not Separation which fights against children being taken from their mothers – which is happening here at frightening rates, the excuse being given that mothers are not protecting children against poverty or domestic violence. This is so outrageous. We know of sex workers who only started working to support their children and then have had them taken away by social services saying they are unfit mothers!
We have an international network so we learn from everyone’s experiences. Our sister organization in San Francisco is USPROS (The US PROStitutes Collective) and EMPOWER is our sister organisation in Thailand – who are involved at the moment in the massive struggle for justice in that country.
We campaign for decriminalisation along the lines of the law that was introduced in New Zealand in 2003 which has been shown to improve sex workers health and safety. The law removed consenting sex from the criminal law which means that the police now have to prioritise our safety rather than prosecute.
Women going on strike to demand recognition for their unwaged and low waged work has quite a long history. In 1975, all the women in Iceland went on strike and the whole country ground to a halt. It was fantastic! There are photos of thousands of women out in the streets. Newscasters had to have their children with them in the studio while they were reading the news about the women being out on strike!
People have always known that withdrawing our labour is a way of bringing attention to the issues we want to raise. On International Women’s Day in 2000, the Global Women’s Strike was organizing a women’s strike in many countries calling on governments to recognise and value all the unwaged work women are doing in the world. UN figures at the time showed that women are doing two thirds of the world’s work for just 5% of the income and 1% of the assets. We were already working with sex workers in Soho, London – one of the most well known red light areas in the country. Sex workers there had been part of our network for decades and we had fought a number of campaigns with them against the local Westminster Council trying to close down flats – trying to gentrify the area. Many of the women working in Soho are migrant women and the police targeted them in particular for raids, arrest and deportation but used as an excuse the claim that women were trafficked and needed saving. When we spoke with them, sex workers from Soho said they wanted to join the International Women’s Day strike. Women there work in walk-up flats – the clients come and knock on the door and wait. On the Strike day those doors were closed and Soho sex workers came together with others who worked in different places and ways. We all joined the Global Women’s Strike.
So that no-one could be identified, all the people on the march wore masks. No-one could tell who was a sex worker and who wasn’t, it was a fantastic success and there was a lot of publicity.
In the ECP we try to bring out the truth about sex work- about who we are and why we are doing it so people can have more of an understanding. We talk about the effects of criminalization on our safety and how we are workers just like any other workers, that most of us are supporting families both in the UK and in other countries as well. There are so many migrant sex workers sending money home to countries all over the world. These messages came across in our demands in the Strike in 2000 which was a great leap forward.
We continued to work with sex workers in Soho as Westminster Council continued to pursue them. Some flats were closed and women were driven out onto the streets. Tragically, one woman was murdered in 2000, shortly after the Strike. She was very well known within our network, we knew all about her. Her name was Lizzie and she was murdered while working on the street shortly after being forced out of a Soho flat. No sex worker has ever been murdered while working in a Soho flat. It is 10 times more dangerous to work outside than it is to work indoors with others.
The prostitution laws make it unlawful for sex workers to work together for safety, they drive the industry underground and so make us all vulnerable to violence. Under loitering and soliciting laws – just standing on the street and talking to a client, sex workers can be taken to court and convicted on the word of a single police offier. Once you have a conviction you have a criminal record under sexual offences and it’s pretty much impossible to get out and get another job. So you’re stuck. The police now often use civil orders which also force women to move out of areas they are familiar with and into darker side streets. If you work in a group for company and safety your colleagues can take your client’s car registration number when you get in the car and you can make sure he knows this. But that’s not possible if you have to work by yourself in a dark area to avoid coming to the attention of the police. Where police continue to crackdown, violence and murder of sex workers rises.
Indoors, it’s not illegal to exchange money for sexual services, but everything you have to do to work with others is against the law. More than one woman working from a premises is a brothel and arranging for people to work together, advertising, paying the rent is all unlawful under brothel keeping legislation. It is basically illegal to work safely in this country. Working together means people can look out for each other and learn from each other not only how to work more safely but also for instance to get the money first, how to deal with clients, how to do the job in the quickest time. One of the problems with continued police crackdowns is that most sex workers in this country are now having to work on their own.
Things have changed though – years ago sex workers used to be described in the press as vice girls, but that doesn’t happen anymore. The press is much more respectful and the public is much more aware of who sex workers are. They know that a lot of us are mothers, migrants, trans, women of color; they know that we are vulnerable women who have few alternatives to sex work. The strikes have been a really effective contribution towards this change. The more recent International Women’s Day strikes were organized by other sex workers organizations but we were very prominent in them, especially in the 2014 and 2019. We did a lot of organizing to get people out and we were very much out there and they were both a great success. It doesn’t always feel like it but things are moving along.
CATS: Your movement is in favor of decriminalisation and not legalisation. Can you explain why you think this model is the best option for sex workers?
C.M.: Decriminalisation which was won in New Zealand in 2003 has been a verifiable success. It was introduced under health and safety legislation and sex workers there say that they now have more legal and other rights and more protection from violence – they know they will not be prosecuted if they come forward and report violence to the police and under these circumstance violent men are more aware they will not get away with it. This makes an enormous difference to sex workers safety and is a standard we think should be everywhere.
Legalisation is completely different. It’s state-run prostitution. People have to register with the authorities to work legally and most people are unable to do that. Legalisation creates a two tier system where if you can afford to be known to be working you’re ok and you can work in the legalised areas or premises – but most of us can’t come out as sex workers. Who knows what might happen if your child’s school or a social worker or health authorities find out. It’s simply not something most people can do. In those countries where there is legalisation the prostitution stigma remains, most sex workers don’t register with the authorities and continue to work unlawfully. In the well known areas where people work outdoors, someone just walking into the area can be identified as a sex worker. Who can afford that? Internationally, sex workers are not campaigning for legalisation, we’re campaigning for decriminalisation. We want all consenting sex to be removed from the criminal law
CATS: Your strike was part of a broader women strike in the UK and internationally on International Women’s Day to bring attention to labor exploitation in all aspects of women’s lives. How do you think being a sex worker can compare to other feminised labour or unpaid work such as caregiving and cleaning?
C.M.: In lots of ways it’s similar work. Clients come to us not only because they want sex, but also because they want someone who is sympathetic to them, who will listen to them. Maybe it’s for fifteen minutes, maybe it’s for half an hour, maybe it’s an hour, maybe it’s for longer but they want the personal contact, that they are at the center of someone’s attention for that time.
In fact, one of the women in our network did sex work with a client but was also working with him as a care worker. She did both jobs with the same person and said it was much more work doing the caring work then it was doing the sex work.
In 2017, we did a survey which found there were many other jobs that women describe as exploitative and dangerous3. Sex work is one of the most dangerous jobs women do purely because violent man know that they can get away with being violent to us – they know we’re not going to report anything to the authorities because we don’t want to get prosecuted. That’s how it is.
That survey was really illuminating. We launched it in the House of Commons and it’s been very useful to show there are many other jobs that are described by women as being particularly exploitative and dangerous – that sex work is not uniquely exploitative.
In sex work, you can earn a bit more money in a bit less time and that’s very important especially if you’re a mother or you’re doing another job, maybe you’re working in a bank or working another way and you’re doing it to top up your low wages. A lot of people are doing that. Also, if you are a migrant, you don’t have access to jobs in this country in the same way at all. For instance if you’re an asylum seeker you don’t have the right to look for jobs. A lot of people are living in poverty and suffering discrimination – for instance trans people and women of color face racism and other disrimination all the time in the job market – that’s why so many people are driven into the sex industry.
CATS: How is a sex work strike organized concretely? How can you make sure everyone can participate, even the more precarious ones? The whorearchy (the hierarchisation of different types of sex work as some being more respectable such as stripping or camming then full-service sex work, particularly those who work outside) is one of the factors that affects the amount of criminalization someone will experience. Was this an issue while organizing the strike and how can you address this?
C.M.: We’ve been going for a long time and have a really big network around the country – as well as internationally. We’re in touch with people who work outdoors and indoors in many different places and we invited everyone to come to join the 2000 Strike. The organizing meetings were with people who were not only working in Soho but in other places as well. We sat down and made sure that everybody was able to put forward their suggestions. We were very careful to make sure everybody knew that they would not be public on the day, they would not be recognisable and would be able to take part without compromising their security in any way. That they were not going to be identified because everyone would be wearing masks.
People who worked in many different ways including strippers and people working online took part. We were really determined not to be divided. We are all affected by the laws in some way, however we work, but it was very important to us to make sure that people knew we start with the situation of people who work on the street who are most up against the law, are most stigmatised and therefore most vulnerable to the police and to other violence. So people knew we were not going to have any slagging off of anyone about the way they worked, that’s just not on the agenda. We are all doing it for the money because we need that money and we choose to work in different ways, whichever way fits our lives the best. I think that’s one of the reasons why we were successful in organizing the 2000 strike and the subsequent ones. Because people knew that we’re not going to be divided against each other.
CATS: Here in Montreal and Canada, most unions and mainstream feminist organizations are still in favor of the Nordic model. How was it organizing a sex work strike within a bigger feminist movement? How did you find alliance in the left and the feminist movement?
C.M.: Feminists who take a moral stand against prostitution have always been around, but back in 2000, they were not really interested in coming out against us and neither were the unions. Since then Nordic model has been more of an issue and we take every opportunity we can to address it – like going to trade union conferences, speaking out when we’re interviewed with feminists in the press. When you point out that criminalizing clients is going to increase the stigma and drive everybody underground so undermining safety, it’s obvious why we’re against it. Every country where the Nordic model has come in has shown an increase in violence against sex workers. Those women who call themselves feminists and are pressing for the Nordic model are in fact the biggest obstacle to getting decriminalization. If they would go to the government and say ‘Well, we don’t think women should be in prostitution, but we think that women should have money in their hands so they don’t have to do it’, that would be great ! But they don’t – they take a moral standpoint against prostitution and often make a career out of opposing it as politicians or journalists or academics. At the 2000 International Women’s Strike, there were thousands and thousands of women marching. There was the odd group of feminists standing on the edges with some odd placards, but they were never in a position to counter what sex workers were saying publicly.
Women’s safety is something that the government shouldn’t be able to argue about. We have here a prestigious government committee which spent a year doing an enormous piece of research into prostitution and in 2016 recommended that it be decriminalized, both outdoors and indoors. Also, crucially that prostitution records be wiped clean so that sex workers can get other jobs. It also recomended prostitution not be conflated with trafficking. But their recommendations were not taken up – the government saying it needed more research which just meant more money in academic’s hands. But even those academics who did do further research were not able to come up with the kind of counter report they had so wanted to produce.
The laws have to change and they will change. A divorcee used to be called a “scarlet woman” but not nowadays- things are changed, there has been a women’s movement and decriminalization will happen because sex workers are a key part of that international women’s movement.
CATS: The criticism of borders and the way they are almost always excluded in the trafficking discourse seems to be a big part of your campaign. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
C.M.: We have a lot of immigrant women in our network and a lot of them are seeking asylum, running from other countries and trying to survive. Under UK legislation, people making claims for asylum have to live off of 37 pounds a week4, a pittance! So in order to survive and maybe to send some money home, sex work is one of the options people have.
We also know from our experience not only in Soho but also in cities around the country that the police target migrant sex workers under the guise of saving women from traffickers. We have made it a priority to counter that. For instance, in Soho, women say ‘look we are not being forced, we are working here because we need to survive and to send money home to our family. Every penny we earn, we send it home to our family’. The only force sex workers are under is the force is not having enough money to survive without doing it.
The best research has shown that less than 6% of migrant sex workers are trafficked. So when we speak publicly we make sure that we counter the publicity that police get when they raid. And it’s clear that these raids don’t have anything to do with saving any women from trafficking but to aid the immigration agenda of the government – which is to deport as many migrant people as possible. Women who are picked up are often sent to immigration centers and deported against their will. Terrible.
CATS: Now what do you think are the next steps for the sex workers movement in the UK? How does COVID impact the way you mobilize?
C.M.: I’m sure it is the same in your country, but COVID has exacerbated everything. At first, everybody did try to stop working. People were and still are in this horrendous dilemma of either stopping working so you’re not making your family vulnerable to the virus – but then you’ve got no money to feed them. And you can’t pay your landlord if you work indoors. Or you can decide to continue working and have a bit of money but then you have to be very very careful with clients – and the police may come after you.
People who have continued working have taken very careful precautions with clients. During the lockdown, most people have basically stopped because they feared their neighbors or the police or other authorities are going to catch up with them in some way, they will get in trouble with the law and then you have another whole story to deal with.
Some sex worker organizations were doing a great job of raising money for sex workers who were unable to continue working, and we helped distribute that money around to people in our network who needed it. But we decided that as that good work was going on, we would focus on pressing the government to recognize sex workers as workers, to demand an amnesty from arrests, and to demand that sex workers are able to easily access emergency payments. But the government hasn’t done one single thing to enable sex workers to get that money. We made sure with our public campaigning that this point was very prominent and it did bring together some members of parliament. We asked everyone on our mailing list to write to their local MP and press them to raise these matters in parliament, and some MPs did do that. The government got back saying ‘Well people can access a benefit called Universal Credit’ which is a benefit that is very hard to access, takes ages to get to you, and isn’t enough to live on. People in general are much more aware about these very low benefits – so many people in this country are having to rely on them one way or another in order to survive right now.
The pandemic has clarified a lot of issues, starting with how much caring work women are doing, making sure people in communities have enough food, that they are okay. It also clarified the brutality of the government. For example in care homes, elderly people were not protected from the virus at all. They sent people who were positive with the virus from hospitals and into care homes so then of course, hundreds and thousands of elderly people died. But the government was happy – they haven’t got to pay their pension! The government recently announced that billions of pounds are going to the military, so we know that they have the money. They have had to organize a furlough system whereby people get 80% of their salaries if they are temporarily laid off. So we know that the money is there and we know that they have been lying to us when they say there is no money. It is very clear now they didn’t organize to make sure hospital and care home workers had all the protection they needed. It’s the same with sex workers, they don’t really care if we live or die. I think people have even more scepticism about the government than before.
Governments want to keep criminalisation of sex work because they want to keep us all divided, they want to divide us into good girls and bad girls. But we refuse that in the same way that we refuse to be divided as sex workers depending on the different ways we work. In New Zealand, decriminalization hasn’t resulted in an enormous increase of people doing sex work because that depends on the financial situation in the country. It’s just that you are not criminalized for earning money in that way. Governments have to contend with the international sex worker movement and based on safety and rights, we will win.
1 You can learn more about the ECP at https://prostitutescollective.net/
2 Care Income now is an international campaign led by the Global Women Strike that advocates for a care income for all those, of every gender, who care for people, the urban and rural environment, and the natural world. For more info: https://globalwomenstrike.net/open-letter-to-governments-a-care-income-now/
3 The report of the survey – What’s A Nice Girl Doing In A Job Like This: a comparison between sex work and other jobs commonly done by women, can be found on ECP’s website: https://prostitutescollective.net/
Stella, l’amie de Maimie: Fighting to end the criminalization of sex workers’ bodies since 1995
Sex working bodies are criminalized, surveilled, stigmatized, and discriminated against daily. Some people respect and revere our bodies, while others vilify and reduce us to the parts of bodies. Anti-sex work prohibitionists and law enforcement attempt to control us for using our bodies for pleasure, economic empowerment, and our advancement in society. Even though our bodies are only one of the many working tools we use in the context of our sex work, the stigma around sex work leads to social control and criminalization of our work and our lives. It results in discriminatory health, public, legal, and social services for sex workers, compromising our health and safety.
The criminalization – and ultimate prohibition of sex workers, clients, third parties, and advertising – introduced through The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (née Bill C-36) implemented in December 2014 impacts sex workers first and foremost – it displaces sex workers from habitual workplaces forcing sex workers to work in unknown areas and without safety mechanisms, it criminalizes communication necessary for consent in sex work, and fosters fear of arrest in clients whereby they do not share important information to sex workers. These “end demand” models are often described as “decriminalizing sex workers and criminalizing clients” – this is a lie. Limited understanding of “end demand” models means that their proponents are unaware of the ways in which this regime still criminalizes sex workers and put sex workers at risk.
Since 1995, sex workers in Montreal have been fighting for sex work law reform – the removal of criminal and immigration laws against sex work, as a first step to respecting sex workers’ rights. Decriminalizing sex workers, clients, and the people we live and work with is primordial to respecting sex workers Charter rights to safety and security. This echoes not only the Supreme Court decision in Bedford, but major international human rights research conducted by Amnesty International, UNAIDS, Human Rights Watch, and the World Health Organization, who all call for the total decriminalization of sex work. Decriminalization is only a first step: members of our community who occupy public space – particularly those who are Indigenous, Black, trans, who use drugs, who are living in homelessness — will continue to be harassed, surveilled, and policed. Ending unwanted and unsolicited visits from police in our lives is long overdue.
We continue our struggle to end the policing of our lives and our work, and we stand in solidarity with communities to defund police towards a police free society.
We invite sex workers working to contact us for non-judgemental advice and support, and ways to protect yourself during a time of increased surveillance, police repression, and general sentiments of prohibition.
The original French version of this text can be found here.
In early 2020, a truly awful text entitled “Re-attachments: Toward an ecology of presence” (or Rattachments: Pour une écologie de la présence, in the original French version) was published out of Quebec, signed by a collective called “Dispositions.” Anchored in appelist thought, this text combines out-of-context linguistic mysticism with certain thinly disguised conservative ideas and also defends tendentious neocolonial and capitalist positions – all with an altogether astonishing narcissism. Up until this point, we’ve kept our critiques of this text to the private sphere, as it did not seem worth the effort of critique on our part. Unfortunately, the fact that the text is circulating once again a year after its publication, and been translated into English, compels us to react. Though we developed our critique specifically in response to Rattachements, it could easily also apply to an American text that inspired it, Inhabit (itself now also translated into French and distributed in Quebec). Citations follow the order of the text, but are not precisely referenced, as the printed version of the text is not paginated.
After hurriedly presenting the current crisis, both human and ecological, Rattachements proposes that we transcend the paralyzing binary permeating the environmental movement: “activist environmentalism” and “individualist environmentalism.” One might expect a strategic proposal to replace this binary: to the contrary, the authors claim that to operate within the terrain of values, to determine the “orientation of [an] action,” falls within “activism” and that it is therefore of no interest. From the get-go, it seems that an esoteric immanence sprinkled with belief in the future (a hope counterbalanced later in the text) stands in for political strategy: for the authors, it would be sufficient, according to the authors, to “[know] that all the components for a magical life are already there waiting for us — understanding that we are acting in the long term.”
Who exactly the authors are addressing in this text is not specified, although it is indicated in the negative at the beginning of Section II. An assertion – reeking of class condescension – that poses the question of how one might “speak about ‘nature’ to the subjects formed by the metropolis.” The tone seems to connote genuine sorrow for the dispossessed urban poor, but nothing is said about how their dispossession should be overcome or how people so deprived might reconnect with nature, other than by buying land in the country. In effect, the authors insist on a reconnection to nature that is nothing but the privilege of the wealthy. So, to the poor dispossessed: so sad, but there is no ‘redemption through presence’ for you in Rattachements.
Elsewhere in the text, the authors correctly observe that the state seeks to capture the totality of struggles in defense of the earth and will pass off just about any green policy as progress towards our collective well-being, but they refrain from mentioning any of the myriad anticapitalist, radical ecological, and decolonial groups and collectives that struggle against the state without being captured by it. The authors render invisible the totality of existing radical movements in order to underscore the supposedly exceptional nature of their thinking and the inspired brilliance of their practices. In expressing regret at this supposed absence, this text intentionally obscures the practices of millions of people struggling around the world. As the real and existing radical movement is ignored by the authors, they propose the following in order to bring about change: “It is a question of defending forms of life from that which denies their possibility. It is about fighting and defeating the enemy (whose many forms lurk both within, and outside of us).” We do not know which forms of existence must be saved nor which enemies must be fought. An ellipsis would suffice, according to the authors. Capitalism? Colonialism? These terms are virtually absent from the text. A particular mention of settler colonialism (a few pages before the middle) is certainly relevant here, affirming that settler colonialism continues its policy of the extermination of Indigenous communities in Quebec and Canada, although the authoritative tone employed to express this (rare) interesting idea contrasts strangely with the subjectivism of the rest of the text.
While Rattachements claimed from the outset to break with traditional politics (indicated by their disdain for “activist environmentalism” as well as for strategy), a new perspective is put forward near the middle of the text that stands in direct contradiction with its presentist politics. Indeed, after having advocated a sort of mystical return to the self, encouraged a search for “the components for a magical life”, after having ignored social and collective problems, the authors contradict themselves in stressing that politics is the art of conflict, and that acting (politically) against “the economy” (why not capitalism?) implies “a real territoriality — a presence, a reattachment” … and thus “the possibility of concrete conflictuality.” Let’s be generous and assume ‘being present’ is a necessary prerequisite to ‘being in conflict.’ But beyond that, nowhere is it explained how a mystical presence in the world would become, by force of words, a real conflictual presence. Is it even possible to theorize political conflict without collective organizing (in the social and class sense), without strategy, without naming the (capitalist) enemy, etc? The presence that is advocated here is totally individualistic and devoid of political content. Note once again that only this signifier “presence” (in oneself, in nature) serves as political content from the beginning of the text to the place where we find ourselves. It is thus unfortunate to see that the authors, in attempting to integrate some bad Carl Schmitt as regurgitated by French appelistes, don’t even manage to pose a real political contradiction.
For sure, beyond mystical presence in and of itself, the whole notion of re-attachment ignores the question of the settler colonialism that founded the Americas. It seems a single mention of this colonization passes for serious reflection on the subject and, especially, suffices for drawing political consequences from it. Indeed, in the second part of the text, the authors incessantly speak of inhabiting, territories to inhabit, areas to (re)take, and so on: themes that are just new deployments of colonization, under a different name. Let’s say it plainly: if the authors of the text are claiming that territories are ‘rightfully due to them,’ it is because they have totally internalized the values of the white colonial bourgeoisie, the only social class that speaks of its right to vast open spaces and various territories, and for whom a simple affirmation of their existence constitutes politics.
The authors insolently take advantage of this to reject the collective responsibility that descendants of settlers bear. Recognizing this collective responsibility is necessary if we want to think through a real decolonial politics, but this is of no importance to the authors: they fear that such a recognition leads only to a “sacrificial politics.” The chain from cause to effect – from the acceptance of our collective responsibility in the genocidal colonial process to the issue of sacrifice – is not made explicit in the text. Rather, it seems that by refusing to carry this shared responsibility, they are trying to make their desires in unceded territories more palatable: to reappropriate territories, to build houses there, to cultivate the land, to be able to own property, to celebrate freely with friends, to be “present” and to place themselves beyond reproach. And to prevent others from discovering their secret: that such practices are nothing other than a new coloniality and a vague hedonism. This neo-colonial mentality at work was showcased at length in the excellent text Another Word for Settle: A Response to Rattachements and Inhabit. This text shows clearly the profound flaws of these two appelist texts.
For the Dispositions collective, not wanting to talk about collective crimes Western societies and individuals have perpetuated right up until the present day is just another way of absolving themselves of their political responsibilities. After having (very poorly) discussed political conflict near the middle of the text, the authors quickly circled back to their personalist leitmotif. Under the pretext of not wanting to guilt individuals (because guilt paralyzes political action), they refuse to name systemic problems. The simple solution would be to take aim at capitalism, the state, and its structures – this would also designate a clear enemy and create political conflict. In refusing to do so, the authors are instead unilaterally wagering that their self-absolution leads to inaction, or even to compulsory inaction. As a result, the authors fall into a wilfully naive relativism about responsibility, according to which there are neither ‘guilty nor victims.’ Starting from immanentism and personalism as politics, the text struggled with the issue of politics before reaching a conclusion that is liberal, apolitical, individualistic and contrary to any social revolutionary spirit.
Is pessimism the fundamental affect of the times? For the authors, perhaps. Although one wonders if this affirmation is not simply serving to justify anew the duty of inaction, the right to avoid struggle, the refusal of strategy. Another way of justifying that in these difficult times, it is better to be in love with oneself, which is truly in step with the times. But now the situation is reversed: never short of contradictions, the authors affirm now that we must “[become] responsible.” Nice words from those who are not ‘guilty’ but rather ‘pessimists.’ Is this really a contradiction? Not totally, since the responsibility posited by the authors is individual (towards oneself and one’s friends) and concerns the relations the individual maintains with others and with nature. Historical, political, and economic responsibility are cast aside. What is needed is to be responsible towards yourself and your neighbours. Doesn’t that just remind you of the “individualist environmentalism” decried at the beginning of the text! Or simply liberal individualism. Of course, for those who are not crushed by social and economic structures, it is easy to take on responsibility ‘towards’ oneself, with an aura of stoic saintliness. It is different for peoples and individuals who organize themselves and fight against colonialism, imperialism and capitalism; but it has long since been understood that Rattachements was not going to speak of the wretched of the earth, obsessed as it is with the spiritual reconnection of the white colonial petty-bourgeoisie to the world that surrounds them.
How do the authors propose getting past the initial dichotomy of the text? How should we conceptualize political conflict? “To make ecology truly political, we must ask the following question: what makes it possible for this or that community to live a fulfilling life, to increase its happiness?” Fairly weak as a grand political statement for the current era. Fighting capitalism? Organizing a new, self-managed world? Absolutely not: it seems that developing happiness and well-being in one’s own little corner of the world is enough to change the world and make revolution. This promise of happiness ‘in one’s own surroundings’ is the same as that of liberalism and capitalism, and is in no way in contradiction with social structures. Most members of the middle and upper classes can aspire to such happiness, without ever challenging the system of production and consumption that destroys millions of lives.
What is really at work here is the willingness to tend to your own garden and come to believe there is something inherently revolutionary about that. If you need more proof that the so-called politics invoked by the author are nothing more than the most banal ideas of our time: we should care for our relations, our collective apartments, our shared houses and our political meetings. Apart from the distasteful touch of ‘ownership,’ there is only a desire to get along well with your friends. No politics. Just: ‘I want things to go well with my housemates and with my crew.’ As in the whole text, no political, social or collective problems are raised. The authors admit that it is because they feel “so dreadfully inert” that they wish to reconnect with presence. Their condition seems to stem from simple depression, not a political call.
Some dubious references are brought up at the beginning of Part III: a mythical peasant life is invoked in a gesture that is both backward-looking and confused, experiences of the Zapatista struggling for self-determination are referenced (even though these experiences stand in direct contradiction to the reoccupation of territories by the descendants of colonizers, at the heart of the authors’ project), and finally they emphasize the autonomy of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka, as if indigenous peoples were not specifically subjected to a colonial regime of non-autonomy in so-called Canada. It’s clear that these figures serve only to give the text a decolonial veneer, although the veneer is cracking due to the ‘back to the land and good rural life’ aspects of the text – an approach that is quite simply conservative and colonial. The authors again feel the need to insult those who engage in activism: they are making a “lazy self-sacrifice.” Why? Because they do not adhere to the bourgeois presentism and individualism of the authors? Coming from those who prefer to drop out and party on stolen territories with their clique, the insult is a particularly low blow.
In critiquing the pacifist strategies and tactics employed by certain environmental groups, the authors don’t hesitate to lump all activists together in the same boat. They counterpose to activism “the need for ecstatic forms of life,” the only form of “real organization” according to the authors. This is absurd nonsense: the text asks its readers to not only spit on activists, but also to favour the murky (and once again, mystical) idea of ecstasy over collective struggle, organization, and, yes, even sometimes sacrifice. On one hand, it should be noted that throughout the text the authors conflate activism, reformism, sacrifice and “absence from the world,” concealing various radical and social practices of struggle and proposing no solution other than their presentism and their retreat in “the commune” (a term that is out of place in this text). On the other hand, the authors seem unperturbed by the idea that “ecstasy” can be reserved for those whose class conditions – notably, economic – allow them to treat themselves to such a good “ecstatic” time. Would the authors dare to demand that night-shift warehouse workers in the Saint-Laurent industrial park not struggle against their employer, but ‘choose’ ecstatic life instead? Would they dare to submit their ‘ideas about ecstasy’ to those incarcerated in Leclerc? The narcissism and classism of the text peak right around here. How could you think for one second that for the truly oppressed, a choice exists between struggle (a bad sacrificial choice according to Dispositions) and the life of ecstasy (which one can choose deliberately if we wish to). This is how 200 years of revolutionary materialist reflections and practices go up in smoke.
And this ecstatic life, what does it look like? One must fight, steal, travel. And most importantly, “[find] money, [acquire] buildings and land to put in common. [Watch] life flourish.” In sum, fun pursuits for having a good time in the present, and capitalist pursuits for real life, for the future. We can’t help but observe that this ‘strategic’ paragraph of the text (the authors are clearly ignorant of the meaning of this word) only deals with festive and individual activities, as well as investments and classically economic activities (liberal and capitalist). If buying land and forming a cooperative on it is deemed to be revolutionary (or a strategy!), the authors will need to learn that it is not: buying a parcel of land and forming a cooperative on it is an economic action belonging to the capitalist regime and made possible by it, accessible only to the global middle and upper classes due to the costs of investment. It is also, in the context of North America’s foundational settler colonialism, an action that generally serves to perpetuate colonialism. Obviously, it can be useful for revolutionary movements to possess infrastructures, spaces, etc. But this possession, legal and capitalistic, is never revolutionary in itself, and even less so when it is used personally or for one’s small group.
The only concrete proposal in the text is therefore to abandon political struggles in favour of the self (family or nucleus of friends), and then to adopt capitalist life practices that allow individual enjoyment for those who can afford it. We find here the melting-pot that we named at the beginning of the text: the conservatism of bourgeois values, neocolonialism, capitalism, individualism and hedonism; we are entitled to assume that this is what is meant by finding “all the components of a magical life.”
Neocolonialism and conservatism are taken yet a little further, in the very fashionable vein of ‘back to the land.’ It thus becomes important to gather “what our aunt taught us about plum trees, how to sharpen our wood carving knives, how to can ten bushels of tomatoes.” We must find ourselves in “the commune” (again, a term out of place in this text), meaning in the country house bought with our friends, to perform these highly symbolic actions. The authors teach us that such actions are even capable of “definitively suspending the progress of the catastrophe.” It’s heavy with retrograde values as well as totally apolitical actions that are simply a matter of daily life. In short, nothing very ecstatic. Finally, we don’t need to judge the ecstasy of others: rather, we can judge that living with a few people in the countryside, while unburdening ourselves of our political responsibilities, does not in any way augur well for a revolutionary organization or political triumph. It is hard to see how such a project would distinguish itself from the myriad individual and apolitical initiatives trying to establish rural settlements (increasingly popular due to anxieties provoked by the ecological crisis) or worse, from green entrepreneurship (the famous organic permaculture farm). If these “autonomous” initiatives were really able to bring about the overthrow of current capitalist and colonial structures, Val-David would long since be a commune liberated from the market and from all oppression.
The last two pages condense various hallmarks of Rattachements: no structural analysis, no material analysis, the domination of our times considered primarily subjectively, a call to mystical presentism (return to oneself, to real life, to the world), a so-called politics that ignores all actual living conditions, etc. The climax of this colonial, capitalist, narcissistic and mystical text: “To make oneself both perceptible and open to perceiving. Affect and power, orientation and magnitude. It is not a question of fighting on ‘two fronts’, but of the practical elaboration of the double meaning of “presence” and “sensible.” The text thus closes its long litany of contradictions with a sentence that means absolutely nothing.
***
This long critique may seem repetitive and sometimes confusing. It nevertheless simply follows the thread of a long text called Rattachements, itself confused, full of contradictions, not fulfilling its promises. The text is meant to be a reflection on the present time and a proposal for revolutionary action, but in our opinion it is nothing more than a long display of neo-colonial, bourgeois, capitalist and narcissistic values. There are many absurdities, many contradictions, a vulgar personalism and nothing useful for current revolutionaries. Those who don’t think the text is so terrible should take the trouble to reread it carefully: it is terrible, it is an enemy. We know that the people behind this text are not enemies, but we cannot be complacent in the face of what they have written and distributed.
In the end, their text proposes yet another enviro-capitalist and individualist ‘alternative’: the very type of practice that diverts the vital force of political action and that contributes to the catastrophe under the pretext of ‘personal action.’ The lines of argument of Rattachements are contrary to the social and political understanding we need, contrary to the collective organization necessary to fight against the capitalist system. We believe that a different analysis and politics are needed: a politics made by and for activists and the oppressed which must lead us towards a self-managed world; not a politics of little narcissists living their best life in the countryside. Individualistic desertion will not save us and cannot guide our actions in the times to come. As long as Rattachements circulates, it is our duty to criticize it harshly.
Comments Off on Don’t Kill Yourself – A Letter to an Anarchist Friend
Mar012021
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
(This piece, by U.K. anarchist Paul Cudenec, is posted here in memory of those we have lost to suicide, and to encourage people who are suicidal to find within themselves the desire to keep living and fighting for a better word. May we mourn Hugo, Dave, Jean, Charles, and all the others, but may we also honour their memories by continuing the struggles that gave their lives meaning. We are in midst of a suicide epidemic, and, since the age of COVID began, many amongst us contemplate suicide on a daily basis. If you would like to contribute to a zine which deals with the subject of suicide, please write nevermorezine@riseup.net)
I was deeply shocked by what you told me last night in the café.
I know I didn’t say much at the time, almost brushed it aside with a few empathetic mumblings.
But this morning I’ve been struck by the immense sadness behind your words and feel the need for a somewhat delayed reaction. You said, as I am sure you recall, that the world we live in is so bad, so far beyond redemption, that you feel like killing yourself to escape from it.
I never would have imagined that you could feel like that – feel like I do, in fact, though I’ll come back to that later.
You are, after all, young (from my point of view at least), perfectly healthy, in a stable and loving relationship, financially secure thanks to a job you don’t seem to mind too much, actively involved in trying to make the world a better place…
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that this is not enough. Why should it be? But you’ve always seemed to me like someone blessed with an inner force of positivity, propelling you forward with such momentum as to leave doubt and despair trailing helplessly along behind.
Maybe if your life had stopped in some way, then I would have accepted that all this debris had caught you up and entangled you in its confusion.
But then it’s not really about you at all, is it? Any more than my own unease and anxiety are about me and my little life.
You’ve had your eyes open long enough to see the whole picture, the picture that most people around us have to blank out of their consciousnesses in order to remain ‘sane’ – which means to carry on living out their phoney existences in a phoney manner without being troubled by the inconvenience of thought.
You’ve seen all that. You’ve seen the layers upon layers of lies that smother us and stop us from growing tall and strong inside as nature intended.
You’ve clambered up on the shoulders of the people you’ve met, the writers you’ve read, the dreams you’ve dreamt, and you’ve seen that beyond the wall that surrounds our everyday lives is another wall, and then another, in concentric circles marking out the limits of our identity, our freedom, our imagination, our potential.
We are all prisoners of a society, a civilization, so life-destroying, so corrupt, so ruthless, so brutal, so all encompassing, that all who see its hideous face revealed are in danger of being turned to stone – immobilized by the sickening dread of complete powerlessness.
How can we destroy this monstrous machine that is pulping into mincemeat so many tender, hopeful, human beings like you?
How can we even start the task of destroying it? Or think about starting to do so?
Whose life is long enough, whose energy and courage sufficient, whose patience and perseverence so divine that they could embark upon such a mission with any kind of confidence?
How can you free someone who doesn’t even know they are a slave?
How can you inspire people to win back something they don’t even realise they’ve lost?
How can you urge them on to fight an enemy that they can’t see, that they can’t distinguish from the wobbly stage scenery and cardboard props of what they have been taught to think of as reality?
After generation upon generation in cages, do birds lose the urge to fly? Or do they just accept that a feeble fluttering from perch to perch is the nearest they are ever going to get?
No, it’s not enough, this half-life we are condemned to lead, with chains and blinkers on our souls as we trudge on and on, turning the treadmill of profit for the greedy, loathsome few, sometimes holding hands or singing together to make us feel less worthless.
It’s not enough even to have tried to escape, to have smashed your head against the wall time and time again, the blood mixing with your tears as you scream that you WILL be free.
And it’s not enough to find some quiet corner of the global prison where you can pretend you are at liberty, to crouch in some sheltered spot, behind a bush maybe, and hum sweet songs to yourself with fingers firmly planted in both ears to stop the sound of humanity’s wailing from disturbing your reverie.
It’s not enough, I know, and I have also often thought that suicide was the only way out – a comforting emergency exit in case it all does finally become unbearable.
My own contemplation of self-murder does not shock or thrill me any more, though. It bores me. It’s been aired so often over the years, the decades in fact, that it’s become stale and indigestible. But when you come out with same idea, it makes we want to weep.
Don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself!
I don’t know how serious you were, but don’t even talk about it, let alone think about it!
I wouldn’t say this if you were already dead, if you had sunk into a way of being so superficial that there really was no point in you staying alive, if you were compromised, polluted or stymied to such an extent that the earthly form we know as ‘you’ had nothing left to offer.
I have nothing against suicide in some, nay many, circumstances.
But to kill ourselves because of our despair at finding ourselves born and trapped in this prison-world is to miss out on an amazing opportunity.
When I was much younger, I had a vision of myself on the top floor of a multi-storey car park in the suburban town where I grew up.
I could no longer bear living in the realm of the plastic undead and I stood on the edge of the wall, the sun in my hair and the breeze making me squint, ready to step into the void.
At the very moment that I stepped out, an old man appeared from nowhere and pulled me back. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I suspect now that he was maybe the concept of my older self.
He told me that, instead of jumping from the car park, I should simply close my eyes and imagine I was doing so, imagine the fast falling, the impact, the end.
I should think about everything that was now gone. My memories, my connections, my fears, my hopes, my perceived obligations.
And then, he said in this vision of mine, I should open my eyes again and find, to my astonishment, that I was still alive, still there, still real.
But all the rest of me had really gone. All those things I should or would have done would now never be accomplished. All that life I should or would have led would now never unfold. Nothing was expected of me. Nothing was demanded of me. I simply was.
Think now, he said, how and who you want to be, all freed from the burdens you have been persuaded to take upon yourself.
Think now of what potential you possess as a raw human being with the power of moving, talking, interacting with the world around you.
You are an angel fallen from the sky, he said, still draped in the afterbirth of the celestial mother. You have been sent here to do what you can, do what you must, to help bring about the great insurrection of the enslaved and dispossessed, to help crack open the crust of earthly power and deceit and unleash the tide of cleansing fire that swells beneath.
Imagine if all the would-be suicides in the world did the same – pulled back from the brink and became what they knew deep down they needed to be! What an army that would make, taking on the life-deniers with nothing left to lose!
He saw that I had understood and he said: “Just think – if you had really stepped over that edge, you would have died. Instead, you’ve been born.”
I’ve always remembered this whenever I contemplate suicide, even though it only ever took place in my imagination. I like to think I have lived by it to some extent – but, I’m afraid, not as deeply as I would have liked.
It wasn’t a one-off, though, and from time to time I leap again in my imagination, eyes tightly closed, and open them to find myself wrapped in a fresh skin, pulsating with new determination to leave my constructed self behind and throw my earthly presence, all clean and unencumbered, up against the scaly flesh of the Beast.
So don’t kill yourself – just offer yourself up, time and time again to be used as they see fit by the forces of good, of life, of resistance to evil.
We are all lonely sparks of light, separated from the Whole and homesick for reunion.
That day will come soon enough, but while we still have our own separate form, we have work to do, a destiny to fulfil.
“Let’s set healing fires for our dead. Let’s light up authority and domination so it burns as brightly as our friends immense heart. Let’s never forgive the world that took him from us, and never forget the ways he touched us. Ai Ferri Corti.” – a card distributed at the funeral of our accomplice Vlad
Vlad would have turned 26 today if he was still with us. For those who weren’t fortunate enough to have met him, know that he was fucking solid.
In an effort to feed the flames of his contributions to our shared struggles, we’d like to refocus on a text that we know was deeply inspiring to him, initially published in Avalanche: a journal of anarchist correspondence.
I cut through time as if with a knife. We’re hanging out in a park, watching friends play basketball. Vlad is vividly recounting how impacted he was by this text from Sweden, between fiddling with his pants and drags on a cigarette. Only a complicit grin is needed to communicate its obvious relevance to our context.
As the years pass, we invite you to contribute to a tradition of combative memory – a gift of rebellion and refusal every February 22nd, for yourself and for Vlad. Without falling into the authoritarian trappings of martyrdom, we can bring the memory of our dead into the present through attack.
You are alongside us in every act against authority, my friend.
Let the fire spread, is a text written under significant circumstances, concerning the late summer and early fall unrest in Sweden and Denmark this year (2016). We, the authors, are comrades who grew up and lived most of our lives in different Scandinavian countries but who were not there as the events unfolded. As has already been shown in the text Social tension and anarchist intervention in Sweden in Avalanche issue 2, the social tensions in Scandinavia and most of all in Sweden are not something new. And sadly enough, the lack of initiative and even ability to analyse and imagine something else and new among many comrades in the Nordic countries, also is not something new. When the fires once again started to spread between cities and neighbourhoods and even countries, we all agreed that we just could not let this pass without a single anarchist attempt to intervene. This time, the most commonly used method of attack used by the rebelling individuals was to set cars ablaze, which in comparison with the rioting and group attacks of the past years, is something very easily reproducible for a small group and even for an individual, which in itself presented a good opportunity to reintroduce other perspectives and terms but most of all, an imagination of a different way of fighting than the ruling one. The ruling one being very society-friendly and humble; rude and uncompromising only when it is sanctioned by the state. In the end this text is, besides a deficient analysis and a proposal, an attempt to spread another imagination and ideas of what it means to fight authorities, to fight this society, which in its obvious absence left comrades to a defeatist retreat during recent years. We decided to translate the text from the originals in Swedish and Danish to English, on the one hand to let international comrades know that what UpprorsBladet wrote in 2014, still is an ongoing reality in Scandinavia, and on the other, to let our ideas and way of intervening be debated or criticized by comrades closer to our ideas. As this introduction text is written, beginning of November, the text has been widely spread – from hand to hand as well as online – but with the coming of colder winds and snow, this wave of unrest must be considered as over or at least cooled down. However, we hope that our text might provoke another mindset and other discussions for the next wave to come.
***
Let the fire spread – an analysis of the last months car burnings in Sweden and Denmark and a proposal for intervention
The last months, something which belongs to the everyday life of the Swedish suburbs, has sprawled like a weed in the garden of social peace and has come to take the shape of a nameless and apolitical revolt. The simple act of setting fire to a car has, precisely for the reason of its simpleness, let itself be reproduced in small towns as well as bigger cities, on both sides of the Öresund, in segregated areas as well as in central, rich and well-integrated ones. Everything from single incidents to (what seems to have been) co-ordinated actions throughout the city. From society the response came from police, fire departments, media, politicians and random experts, who made statements and promised or proposed a serious amount of actions; actions which do not only serve to stop the car burnings but more generally increase the repression against those who do not want to toe the line. With this text we aim to create a modest analysis, followed by a more determined proposal for an intervention in this conflict between anonymous individuals and society. An anarchist intervention without any place for politics or negotiation. The way we see it, all we have got to lose in this, is the comfort that kept us from burning the first car.
Chronology and the problem with media
It has been hard to keep up with these events as they have developed. As soon as one has tried to put together a chronology for a better overview, new events have unfolded – on the part of society as well as its antagonists. For us, it is also clear that the greatest source of information that we have and have had, has been official media reports, as other ways of communication have lacked. So with the words of some comrades in mind: “The millions of words and images that fill the screens and (toilet)papers are not an echo or reflection of reality, they form an integral part of the creation of that reality, of the imposition of the morals, rules and logics that permit the existence of the State,” (*1) it is not without self-critique that we use this information. This information has obviously already come in handy for politicians and good citizens, according to the quote above. So even if this information serves our enemies, we will use this information with the aim of overthrowing those who created it. We do not know what has been going on in the sphere of social media but take it for granted, that these so called tools have not been used to analyze and spread these actions, with the aim of expanding the situation to a social revolt. If it is only the case that the media would have hyped and sensationalized these events, which allegedly happen all the time, with the same intensity(*2), this does not change the fact that these actions – the car burnings as well as the numerous attacks on cops and other uniforms – in themselves carry with them revolt and the potential for social revolt. Therefore, it is hard to know where to draw the line between what belongs to this specific escalation and what belongs to a more broad and constant social tension. We do not want to hijack the actions of different individuals, just to confirm our ideas; to project our longing for an expanded revolt on individuals and actions, that carry their own reason, meaning and will. So even if it is hard not to involve events like the organized attacks on cops and other officials in Kronogården, Trollhättan, or the ones that unfolded in Södertälje or Örebro, we will stay with the car burnings. In part because of their intense sprawl during the last months and in part because they do entail a very simple and reproducible method for attacking normality. In the first two weeks of August, the news sites and magazines were filled with headlines like “16 cars were burned in 5 hours,” “Minister of Justice: ‘damned fed up’ with the hooligans,” “20 cars burned last night,” “The government calls for heavier punishment for the car burners,” followed by a daily repeated: “More car burnings last night.” In connection to this, experts in sociology, firefighters, cops and people who got their cars burned were interviewed. The cops desperately promised to and did engage with a more intensified presence in the affected neighbourhoods – without any greater success. In Ronneby, however, the cops were a bit more realistic as the chief inspector on duty made the following statement: “We are short on officers right now, it’s vacation times and all, so I cant promise any additional patrols in the area,” in connection to cars being burned three nights in a row in the small town. In reaction to this, the municipality decided to hire security guards to patrol the streets instead. Between the 1st of July and the 17th of August this year, the fire brigades in each city reported 134 car burnings in Stockholm, 108 in Malmö and 43 in Göteborg. Throughout 2016, up until the middle of August, 154 cases of car burnings were reported in Malmö alone, where in several cases it concerned more than one vehicle. In the first week of August it was estimated to have burned seven cars per night in the city area of Malmö. In the first weekend of August a cop car was set ablaze, as the patrol was responding to some reported disturbances in an apartment. With its epicentre in Malmö, according to media coverage, the car burnings spread to several other cities. In the night between the 16th and the 17th of August a car fire in Norrköping led to the complete destruction of twelve cars and additionally at least seven cars were damaged. Meanwhile there were continuous reports of car burnings in smaller cities like the aforementioned Ronneby but also in Skara, Varberg and Borås as well as in bigger cities like Stockholm, Linköping, Göteborg, Västerås and Södertälje. In the middle of August the car burnings spread to Denmark, where cars were burning several nights in a row. In the night of the 20th of August ten cars were set aflame. Since then it has continued with varying intensity, in different areas of the Danish capital like Christianshavn, Amager, Nørrebro, Valby and Vestegnen. According to media, there has been at least 50 cars burned in the area of Copenhagen, between the middle of August and the middle of September. The cops did not hide their suspicion, that the fires might have been inspired by the situation in Sweden and immediately started investigations to catch the agitators and calm down the situation. In the media they called out for witnesses and the cops went through an extensive amount of video material from CCTV in the affected areas. Pictures and description of a suspect was made public and after several anonymous tips, a person was arrested and locked up the 24th of August, suspected of having burned ten cars and of havingattempted to burn another 23. This, however, did not stop the fires, that continued in different places around the city. Also the stinking wannabe-cops, the SSP:s (a co-operation between school, social services and the cops, that has as its aim to keep an eye on and prevent kids from committing crimes), increased their activities because of the car burnings and reinforced their numbers in the streets in certain neighbourhoods, as to prevent the youth to be inspired by the fires. Every night in the first week of August, the Malmö cops engaged with a helicopter in the hunt for the car burners. The 11th of August, obviously not for the first time, this helicopter was being pointed at with a green laser and for this two youngsters were arrested later that night. The cops interrogated them, with the hope of a connection to the car burnings but the two detainees were released the next morning and apparently leaving the cops without any leads. The 15th of August, according to the press, a 21 year old person was arrested at a traffic control in Rosengård. The cops claimed the car to be full of gasoline canisters and a hammer for breaking windows. The person was released on the 18th of August, as there were no legal grounds for incarceration but the suspicions remained. The same day the cops presented a new action to be taken in their struggle against the car burnings. For the first time in Sweden, drones would now be used by cops, primarily to hunt down the car burners. The drones will, according to the cops, guide the reinforced MC-patrols and plain clothes officers on the ground. The proposal came from and will be carried out by the NOA, the cops National Operative Unit, and the equipment will be supplied by SAAB (a company whose production for the military market most likely will find additional “civil” uses, other than just drones for hunting car burners).
The response from society
To increase our understanding of the whole situation but also to see where one can find possibilities to extend these acts of revolt towards insurrection, we want to have a closer look at the circus that society kicked off as a reaction to the unrest. It is interesting at a first glance, to see how the burning of cars continues to spread in silence, while the media, politicians, cops, experts of all sorts and active citizens compete to be the loudest and most condemning one concerning these events. In the silence the actions speak for themselves and would they be left in their silence, all you hear is the fire crackling, no more explaining would be needed. But the silence is dangerous and brooding for the ruling order. The best remedy against silence is of course to make noise, talk and distract, to take over the power of definition. In Sweden they talked about failed integration and vandalism, while in Denmark they initially talked about pyromania, i.e. the burning of cars was declared as a disease. An assumption that was soon abandoned, as the “suspected pyromaniac” was detained and the car burnings still continued to spread. The discussion then went into a direction more similar to the Swedish one, with focus on juveniles. In the first case the act (of burning a car) is isolated and said to be an act limited to poor youth with a migrant background, which makes it harder for others not fitting into these categories to identify with the actions. In the other case the act is pathologized. I.e. if you identify with these actions, you ought to consider yourself sick, a pyromaniac, which, with the power of social shame, causes a distancing in most people. The same actions, the same silence, confronted with a lot of noise from society. In Sweden these discussions have had time to develop further than in Denmark and the ruling politicians have proposed harder punishments, not just for the car burners but to hit two birds with one stone, for the whole social category of juveniles. The proposal would, when carried out, mean that on-call courts are established, that the ankle monitor is allowed to be used in younger ages and that the surveillance measures in probation convictions against juveniles would be intensified. The political opposition calls for more cops and for a return to the former, recently changed, police organization. Sociologists are warning about the negative consequences of harder punishment and propose instead to increase the presence of the cops in the streets, as this allegedly was the reason for the de-escalation in the similar situation in Sweden some ten years ago. Circling around the rotting carcass of these discussions, we find the silent vultures. They who, with their businesses, profits from the car burning and foremost from the societal circus surrounding it. The drones of SAAB has already been mentioned but we also have the insurance and security companies. In several articles in for example the Swedish Radio, the public is informed about how the “traffic insurance” is not enough on its own, to cover the cost in case of a car fire but the car must be at least “half insured” to cover the damages. One does not have to have studied at a business school to understand the economic value for the insurance companies, in such a well-meant and informative article. Especially when it is followed up by articles where spokespersons from insurance companies are reassuring that the insurance for the people living in the affected neighbourhoods will not be raised or different than in less affected neighbourhoods. In places like Ronneby, where the cops left their uniforms in the closet and are chilling somewhere else, the municipality decided to hire a security company, to instead have security guards patrolling the streets.
In connection to riots or mass actions like the ones in Örebro and Södertälje
In two Södertälje suburbs, two nights in a row, youngsters were building burning barricades and attacking buses as to lure the cops to them. When the cops arrived, they attacked them with stones and fireworks. One of the nights, a stone broke the front window of a cop car, sending a cop with a damaged eye to the hospital. In the Örebro neighbourhood, a bigger amount of masked individuals gathered and moved around in the area. Setting a laundry-facility on fire, also to lure the cops to them, and then greeting the cops with molotov cocktails, rocks, fireworks and golf sticks. Extra guard patrols from different companies are called in as foot soldiers next to the cop cavalry. Security companies that, through the last years so called “refugee crisis”, has experienced a new Klondike-era for their businesses. Companies that, enriched with experiences of beating up people of colour, gladly continues with this – the Department of Migration now substituted with the cops, for the guards to step in for, and the refugees substituted with car burners, in their role as moving targets. These vultures remain vultures, only as long as they are allowed to work undisturbed, as long as they can keep a distance between themselves and the dramatic centre of these events. Just like in an ecosystem, they fulfil an important role in the maintenance of the societal system and contribute to choke the brooding revolt. In the social peace, every break means a possibility for revolt and insurrection; the break is in itself not seldom a conscious act of rebellion, however limited to one unique individual and one unique situation. The break uncovers the conflicts that the social peace otherwise covers. What we in our everyday lives choose to swallow, in terms of submission, is spit out and all the words about us living in “the best of bad worlds,” about “that’s just how it is,” etiolates in the face of the obvious discontent with the lives we are forced to live in this society. A burned out car might not feel like the starting signal for a social revolt but at the same time that is exactly what it can be. What it can become. It can at the same time be a single individuals attack on the social peace, on the social order, as it can be a sabotage of another individuals function in the maintenance of the same. This we see as factors, independent of the fact that it goes down with intention and with a wish for revolt or if it happens out of boredom, for some cash or for a personal vendetta. The social peace, where the state claims the exclusive right of mediation and population control, does nonetheless, with or without the intention of the assailant to overthrow the society, get attacked when a car is burned. In the normality that we are all expected to reproduce, there is (still…) no space for burning cars. Even less for burnings car without a clear and graspable reason, that almost freely spreads over great distances and regions. When this spreads as it has done during the past months, it is impossible, even for the people in power, to ignore the existence of a social conflict. What they instead try to do, is to isolate the conflict to belong only to a small discontent and untamed group – with whom the majority, as already mentioned, should not have something in common. It becomes a matter for the police, for the politicians and the sociologists. The state tries to make the matter intelligible and manageable in its role as mediator. It tries to make it into a matter and a conflict between the authorities, with its loyal specialists, and a group of “badly integrated youth”. Thus not what it actually is: individuals like you and me in conflict with the life we are forced to sustain under these circumstances.
From anonymous revolt to apolitical insurrection
“This crime is very hard to investigate. We don’t see any patterns and we don’t have any suspects. We need all the help we can get,” – Malmö cop Lars Forstell. We are not only interested in the car fires that are sweeping across Sweden and Denmark because they carry the spark of rebellion, but also because they offer us another way of understanding insurrection, because their apolitical character gives us a hint about a different tactic. The car fires are an uncontrollable attack on society, because they are spread all over the territory which the state controls and are not focused on specific symbolic targets. They are simple to reproduce anywhere and any time, and it is impossible for the police to be everywhere at the same time. Political movements are fixed on the idea of gathering a movement or a certain category of the exploited in front of a symbolic aim in the belief that if enough people are gathered, power will be forced to change. In reality, these methods are easy for the state to control, because it is not so difficult to gather the repressive forces in specific places with a predetermined date. Even anarchists who actually criticize this perception of struggle continue to reproduce this logic. Why all the demonstrations to symbolic targets surrounded by heavily equipped police? Why always be a step behind the state and the police? The car burners show the way to a different form of conflict with the state. Constant, uncontrollable, flexible and destructive. Here it is the police who are lagging behind. Sure, car fires will not be enough to overthrow the existent. But they do open up, in the Scandinavian context, a new way of understanding insurrection, and gives inspiration for different tactics for our struggles. They give us a springboard that we can use in our individual revolt in the leap towards a social insurrection, and that is, one must say, more than political movements have created in Scandinavia for a very long time. Speaking of political movements, the struggle around the partly occupied house Rigaer 94 during the past half a year showed how the car fires can be used as a method, but also showed their limits, which might be interesting to shortly consider. (*3) In the struggle around Rigaer 94 it was, in our opinion, the same factor which caused the rapid and intensive diffusion, that also became the reason why the conflict was not expanded beyond concerning only anarchists and autonomists. This factor was the limiting of the struggle to the house and local area. Compared to Scandinavia, Germany is full of autonomists and anarchists, of whom many joined in on the promise made by comrades to cause 10 million euro of damage – some because they identify with Rigaer and act in solidarity, others because they are constantly looking for new events to react to, and found one in this. Which leads us once again to have a conflict between a small group of easily categorized individuals (anarchists and autonomists) and the state, with the rest of society as spectators and commentators. The conflict thus came to circle around a symbolic target, which gave the state at least a hint about where to send its repressive forces, and made it easier to handle and predict. Most other people who could have an interest in burning cars or otherwise revolt against society, do not have an obvious point of reference in Rigaer, or in the subculture in which it is based. Presumably even less when people start saying that they are political, or that burning cars is a political act. As long as the point of departure is something which only a few can refer to, then it remains a duel between these few and the state.
This escalation which have taken place in Sweden and Denmark will probably die out as repression hardens and advances. It will probably reignite in a couple of months, or in a year? And then die out again. Provided that we do not attempt to expand and strengthen it with our own acts, ideas of and longing for freedom. It is neither guaranteed to succeed nor doomed to fail. Only one thing is certain, and that is that as long as we remain passive spectators or commentators, we are guaranteed the existence which we so intensely despise. If we have criticisms towards how some have acted during this escalation of car fires, then let us act in accordance with our ideas, and in that way show what we propose and what it means in practice. Especially if we wish something else from other rebels. A car belonging to a proletarian was burned and it disturbed you? What keeps you from going at a SAAB office, security cars or insurance company? If you think that one cop car was too little, see to it that more will go up in flames. It is not through passive nagging that our ideas can spread and their consequences be multiplied, but through action and consistent honesty towards ourselves. If we want to realize our ideas and dreams, then we have to take them and ourselves serious. By questioning traditions of struggle which have not moved us closer to our dreams, but rather to society. By searching for inspiration wherever we see revolt, and not just where we see people following political manuals. If we share ideas, it means a constant hostility towards this society. It means exposing oneself to uncomfortable social situations. It means risks. Such as the risk of losing the privileges granted to you by the order you claim to despise. It means embracing and being embraced by the unknown and all the fears that come with it. It means trusting yourself and your ability to meet that which awaits beyond the break with normality. What is it exactly that have kept you from burning a car or from building barricades in the streets and attacking the cops when they arrive? Whatever your answer may be, it is not a obstacle for you to find your own way to act in this conflict.
Into the Unknown
We want freedom, and the way we see it this is incompatible with this society, well, with every society that deprives the individual of its power and self-determination. Thus is the destruction of this society, with its inherent authoritarian mechanisms, essential for us to be able to usurp what we want. As our point of departure is the everlasting now – neither deadlocked in a Marxist determinism nor consumed by a capitalist future investment of our energy and our dreams – and we want to live in anarchy now, not tomorrow or in a year, but now, our ends are closely interwoven with our actions. In other words: in anarchy we do not want to negotiate with authorities of all kinds, but attack them and in the worst case defend ourselves against them. So why would we negotiate with them now? In anarchy we do not want to organize ourselves in masses and pursue politics. So why would we do this now? Especially since history taught us that this serves the survival of society rather than the struggling individuals… We want to see the revolt spread without leaders and stagnating aims. We want to spread our revolts and see them become an insurrection together with other individuals athirst for freedom. To, at all, be able to get there, an expansion of the conflict that lies before us is clearly needed. So, how can a conscious expansion of this conflict take shape? Our goal is not to be able to count as many members as possible, in some sort of organization or movement, neither is it to put forth some demands for change or to be “strong enough” to be able to negotiate with or about the power. Our goals are, as has already been stated, as easy as they are hard to realize – freedom through revolt against those who deprive us of it. Thus can neither success nor expansion be measured in the number of participants in an uprising or if “normal people” sympathize with us or not, but in the quality of our own experiences, how our lives changes and where they take us. If a million people takes to the streets but in essence are only seeking a new leadership, a new shepherd, this is in every way a defeat. But if I in the right moment attack the right object, publish the right text – where right is a relative term, which can be underpinned by clear analyses of situations – or I enter new comradeships or meet new accomplices, and thereby new possibilities open up for me and others to prolong, deepen, strengthen and enlarge the extent of the personal and the shared revolt, then I can talk about a success – with myself and my surroundings as a benchmark. So, in this case the most obvious way to enter into the conflict, is first and foremost to take to the streets ourselves. For who are we to talk about all this, without having our own practical complicity? But to broaden the space for us, for our ideas and revolts, we should also identify the most active counterinsurgents and profiteers of this situation, as well as transforming them into obvious targets. The cops are already obvious in their role but not SAAB who supply them with drones and other equipment, neither are the insurance companies, the security companies and the politicians, using the situation to strengthen their power. Depending on the area in which you live, you for sure have your local authoritarian structures to identify and fight, whether it be a group of salafists, a racist hunting team, a neighbourhood watch or democracy loving social workers. It can be worth keeping them in mind, before running into them in the heat of the moment. All of the mentioned companies have nationwide offices in every bigger urban area and do have, just like the politicians, “names and addresses”. To point these out, to attack and to, with our own words, explain why this happens, is also to point out the structures of society and their relation to our existence in submission. Which could contribute to a more libertarian character of the revolt. More or less every enemy you can imagine in this society has a car. Nazis, politicians, CEO’s, cops, judges, screws and so on. Not everyone but most have cars and as we already have said: if someone’s choice of a car to burn has disturbed you, it is not hard to reproduce this act of revolt, but with an outcome that enriches your life.
This is all just scratching the surface, a hint of the possibilities that obviously has been neglected by comrades. Nevertheless, it is here we see the possibility for ourselves and those we consider to share our ideas with, to act and to expand this conflict. We have written this text to call for, that the revolt and the own ability to act is taken seriously. The insurrection and the social landscape is filled with contradictions and there are no simple recipes to fight a successful struggle against the world of authorities; we just simply have to try. But the first step must be to realize that there are already rebels that have set the torch of revolt ablaze, that have created a social tension where we can find thousands of ways to act if we want to. Not as followers or leaders that are to show the way to the real anarchist insurrection, but as accomplices in the destruction of the existent, with our own ideas, aims and actions. In this leap into the unknown, we have no guarantees for defeat or success, but we do at least have the possibility of that, which today is impossible: a world without authorities and rulers… so let the fire spread.
“We will destroy laughing, we will set fires laughing…”
Some insurrectionaries
Notes: (*1): Text, A few notes on media and repression, published on solidariteit.noblogs.org, on the 23rd of August 2016
(*2):https://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/786141?programid=2795 (Media was in this specific radio show criticized for having created a false picture and that the sprawl of car burn-ings should have been exaggerated and even somehow fuelled by media reports. This critique is just like the actual media reports based on statistics and full of contradictions.)
(*3): In order to not lose focus, we leave a deeper analysis for another moment, but there is plenty of information on e.g. contrainfo.espiv.net for anyone on wants to dig in.
