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\nIn 1884, cholera tore through Italy, claiming thousands of lives. Despite a three-year prison sentence hanging over his head, Errico Malatesta joined other revolutionary anarchists on a daring mission to Naples—the heart of the epidemic—to treat those suffering from the disease. In so doing, he and his comrades demonstrated an alternative to coercive state policies that remains relevant today in the age of COVID-19.
\n\nThe following text recounts the story of the outbreak and Malatesta’s intervention, including all the available primary materials about the Italian anarchists’ participation, some of which have not previously appeared in English. Much of the historical background is drawn from Frank M. Snowden’s excellent Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884-1911. Thanks to Davide Turcato, the editor of Malatesta’s complete works; the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme in Lausanne; and radical archivists and librarians everywhere who preserve anarchist history, enabling us to learn from the past.
\n\n“In 1884, cholera blighted several parts of Italy, being especially virulent in Naples. According to the prefect’s statistics, cholera affected upwards of 14,000 people in the province, killing 8000 of them, of whom 7000 perished in the city of Naples alone. The state reacted by imposing a crackdown: the city was placed under martial law, restrictions on movements were imposed, using methods similar to those employed on the occasion of the Messina earthquake or the more recent quake in L’Aquila. The volunteers from the White Cross, Red Cross, social democrats, republicans, and socialists adopted quite a different approach. Felice Cavallotti, Giovanni Bovio, Andrea Costa, and Errico Malatesta, no less, were active on the streets of Naples. And not without some risk to their own health: the socialist volunteers Massimiliano Boschi, Francesco Valdrè, and Rocco Lombardo caught cholera and perished.”
\n\n-Alessia Bruni Cavallazzi’s elegy for Florentine Lombard, an English anarchist who served in the Red Cross during the epidemic
\n\nMalatesta and other comrades from various parts of Italy went to Naples as medical volunteers to care for those stricken by a cholera epidemic. Two anarchists, Rocco Lombardo and Antonio Valdrè, died there, taken by the illness. The well-known anarchist Galileo Palla especially distinguished himself by his selflessness, energy, and spirit of sacrifice. As a former medical student, Malatesta was entrusted with a section of sick people; they had a particularly high recovery rate because he knew how to force the city of Naples to turn over food and medicine in abundance, which he distributed liberally. He was offered an official decoration, the order of good merit, which he refused. When the epidemic ended, the anarchists left Naples and published a manifesto explaining that “the true cause of cholera is poverty, and the true medicine to prevent its return can be nothing less than social revolution.”
\n\n-Luigi Fabbri’s “Life of Malatesta”1
\n\nCholera is an infectious bacterial disease, typically contracted from infected water supplies, that can cause vomiting and diarrhea to the point of death. Was “the true cause of cholera” indeed poverty, or was that just ideological rhetoric? Read on and decide for yourself.
\n\n\nItaly was still a new country when the cholera epidemic struck in 1884. To understand why Naples was hit so hard and what it meant that anarchists traveled there from all around the country in solidarity, we have to back up two decades.
\n\nUntil 1861, there was no such thing as Italy. The peninsula was divided up into various kingdoms and duchies under many different local rulers. The original proponents of Italian unification were nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini, who called on revolutionary republicans around Europe to overthrow the old monarchs and establish new nations on the basis of shared language, geography, and “unity of purpose.” The idea was that rich and poor should work together in solidarity beneath the banner of the nation.
\n\nIn fact, people on the Italian peninsula did not possess a common language or culture. Many of the dialects spoken on different parts of the peninsula were mutually unintelligible; there were massive cultural and economic differences between different regions. Mazzini was seeking to invent a common language and culture where none existed, in order to create the foundation for a competitive modern state.
\n\nContrary to their intentions, those who sought to carry out Mazzini’s program of national liberation ultimately brought about the unification of Italy under a monarchy. Revolutionaries like Giuseppe Garibaldi risked their lives in guerrilla warfare to unify the peninsula as a republic, but whenever they succeeded in toppling one king, another simply assumed control of the area, until King Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia ruled all of Italy. Once he came to power, King Victor Emmanuel did not work beneath the banner of the nation for the betterment of all Italians; rather, he immediately set about looting the southern part of the peninsula to enrich his own coffers. In imagining that all Italians could share a common interest, Mazzini had failed to apprehend the class conflict at the basis of capitalist society.
\n\nIn exile in London in 1864, Mazzini participated in the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association, a worldwide federation of labor unions. Karl Marx forced Mazzini out early on, only to lose control of the International as workers gravitated to the ideas of anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin was himself a former participant in national liberation struggles who had become disillusioned with the shortfalls and betrayals of nationalism.
\n\nBorn outside Naples in 1853, Errico Malatesta grew up participating in one of Mazzini’s secret societies; studying medicine at the University of Naples, he was expelled and imprisoned for participating in a Mazzinist protest. Yet under the reign of King Victor Emmanuel, he saw firsthand that being ruled by an Italian king was no better than being ruled by a monarch of any other nationality. By the time of the Paris Commune in spring 1871, Malatesta and his comrades were seeking a new approach to social change.
\n\nIn Italy, it was Bakunin, not Marx, who represented the chief alternative to Mazzini’s nationalism. Malatesta and his comrades joined the International in association with Bakunin and other anti-authoritarians throughout Europe. Arguably, the radicalization of the Italian section of the International marked the emergence of anarchism as a full-fledged social movement. It also had a significant impact on working-class organizing in Italy, where anarchism remained the most powerful current in the labor movement for many years afterwards, shaping the anti-authoritarian ethos of grassroots organizations in Naples and elsewhere around the peninsula.
\n\nMalatesta committed himself to a life of revolutionary struggle, helping to establish mutual aid associations for workers throughout Italy and participating in open insurrections in 1874 and 1877. All this attracted the attention of the authorities, leading to a series of court cases and prison terms. In 1883, after years in exile, Malatesta returned to Italy to publish a newspaper and resume organizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/6.jpg\")
Errico Malatesta.
\nIn 1884, over half a million people lived in Naples, making it Italy’s most populous city. Much of the population consisted of former peasants uprooted from the countryside working as craftsmen or venders or else simply unemployed. Wages in Italy were among the lowest in Europe, and in Naples they were lower than in any other Italian city. Rent accounted for at least half of the total expenditures of each family. Illegal capitalist organizations set the price of food and worked with the municipal authorities to control what kind of criminal activity was possible.
\n\nFollowing Italian unification, Naples had lost its status as the seat of a monarchy. Consequently, power and wealth remained concentrated in the hands of an elite class, without the economic dynamism that could cause them to trickle down to the rest of the population. Scant resources were invested in public health structures of any kind. Hospitals were unhygienic, overcrowded, and ill-equipped, possessing a well-deserved bad reputation. The right-wing party controlled the government; the left-wing party represented a loyal opposition that simply asked for petty reforms, while the Catholic Church was powerful enough to constitute a third pole in society.
\n\nAnarchists saw no possibility for meaningful reform within this system. Instead, they focused on building up grassroots networks via which workers, peasants, and poor people could circulate resources to ensure their collective survival, defend each other against injustices, and spread a vision of a world in which power, resources, and freedom would be shared among all.
\n\nSome elements of this setting are analogous to our situation today, when a post-industrial economy has left a large part of the population without stable employment or savings. Austerity measures have gutted public health services to enrich a wealthy few, while the political system has repeatedly failed those who seek to bring about social change.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/13.jpg\")
\nCholera and imperial war have always been interlinked. In 1883, Indian soldiers serving in the British troops that were occupying Egypt brought cholera to the northern coast of Africa, where it killed 60,000 people. In 1884, French troops were engaged in a colonial campaign for control of Indo-China, during which an epidemic swept through the war-torn region. Cholera rode the military supply chain back to the Mediterranean, arriving at the French port of Toulon and spreading to Marseilles by June 25.
\n\nThe public and the press recognized that French military intervention was the source of the epidemic. Demonstrations and widespread graffiti denounced the French government’s policy of colonial expansion. In France as well as Italy, anarchists understood that the colonial domination of other peoples benefitted the ruling class of the colonizers while endangering ordinary people on both sides.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/10.jpg\")
Cholera arrives at Toulon.
\nIn 1884, well over 200,000 Italians lived in France. The majority were former small landowners or renters who had been engaged in agriculture until the expansion of the world market drove them out of business and across the border to seek employment—exactly the same way that the North American Free Trade Agreement uprooted countless Mexican campesinos and pushed them across the US border 110 years later. The highest concentrations were in Toulon and Marseilles, with Italian populations of 10,000 and 60,000, respectively. These were also the French cities hit hardest by cholera—and the epidemic hit the poor immigrant communities worst.
\n\n“A very large proportion of the victims at Toulon and Marseilles were Italians,” the New York Times reported. The death rate for Italian immigrants may have approached 1 in 10. In Naples in the Time of Cholera, Frank M. Snowden describes an apocalyptic atmosphere:
\n\n\n\n\nThe streets were sprinkled with carbolic acid in an attempt to “drown” the choleraic germs; tar and sulphur bonfires were lit at every corner to purify the air; public gatherings of every kind were forbidden; railroad passengers and their baggage were fumigated; and the sewers were flushed. The urban landscape was suddenly transformed beyond recognition by fire, pungent smoke, the unfamiliar smell of acid and the near-desertion of the streets. In this threatening environment, all economic activity halted as factories and shops closed. Provisions became nearly impossible to find, and those who remained anxiously watched for the first premonitory symptoms, convinced that they were inhaling poison with every breath.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/14.jpg\")
Cholera at Toulon.
\nIn July 1884, while state-sponsored experts from the French Academy of Medicine were still attempting to deny that an outbreak of bona fide cholera was taking place, many Italians were interned in the Pharo hospital in Marseilles. Here, the middle-class French doctors smoked cigars constantly in order to create what they imagined to be a protective smokescreen between themselves and their underclass patients; the doctors experimented with a variety of speculative treatments, including electrical shock. In the first weeks of the epidemic, the fatality rate at Pharo hospital was a terrifying 95%.
\n\nTo make matters worse, the crisis also intensified bigotry against Italian immigrants. For the French government and ruling class, this was an opportunity to get rid of what some of them regarded as an unruly part of the surplus population. Driven by the threat of death from the epidemic as well as xenophobic attacks and aggressive government policies, tens of thousands of Italians fled back across the border—bringing the epidemic with them.
\n\nFor all of these reasons, Italian anarchists immediately concerned themselves with the epidemic as it spread along the French coast in July 1884.
\n\nAt this time, Malatesta was in Florence, Italy, editing the anarchist periodical La Questione Sociale. Driven from Italy by police pressure after the failed insurrection of 1877, he had lived in France, England, and Egypt—where, according to Luigi Fabbri, he attempted to join the anti-colonial insurrection led by Ahmed ʻUrabi, the same insurrection that British troops had been brought from India to repress.
\n\nUpon his return to Italy in 1883, Malatesta was jailed for six months on fabricated charges of “subversive association,” a form of nebulous conspiracy charge that the Italian state has employed to hamstring anarchist organizing for a century and a half now. In January 1884, without ever coming before a jury, Malatesta was sentenced to three years in prison, but released pending his appeal. These are the conditions in which he and his comrades were organizing and publishing.
\n\nThe following article from the July 1884 issue of La Questione Sociale, quite possibly written by Malatesta himself, sets forth how Malatesta and his comrades understood the causes of the epidemic. Their theory that cholera originated in polluted river deltas was shared by most educated Italian doctors at the time, though it has since been surpassed by modern research. On the other hand, their argument that capitalism fails to provide an impetus for addressing collective problems remains as timely now as the day it was written. The appendix, a translation of a letter from a Parisian carpenter, is especially chilling to read in a time when capitalists are urging us to go back to work even at risk of death by COVID-19 and a part of the working class is eager to comply.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/7.jpg\")
“A rising sun, a quill, a gun, and sol-i-dar-i-ty!”
\nCholera is in France: perhaps it will invade much of Europe.
\n\nSatisfied people usually accuse us of bias and exaggeration when we attribute the greatest part of the evils that afflict humanity to the prevailing social order. They willingly talk about chance or fate (natural laws) and try to separate the question of responsibility from them and from the social system that produces or supports them, blaming unconscious nature, and often intemperance, or the unexpected, or a thousand other popular vices.
\n\nWe will see that these people, who always consider other people’s pain and misery necessary and inevitable, also have recourse to natural law when it comes to cholera, which makes its periodic appearance among humans inescapable or even useful. We argue that the existence of cholera, and its appearance in Europe and the environment conducive to its development that it finds among us, are the fault of the current social system.
\n\nCholera (at least the Asian variety, which is the only truly fearsome one) comes from the Ganges Delta, as the plague once came from the Nile Delta, and as yellow fever still comes from the Mississippi Delta, desolating parts of America and West Africa and continually threatening Europe.
\n\nThese diseases derive from the swamps that form in the deltas of rivers that are abandoned to themselves, due to the rotting corpses and other organic materials that those immense currents bring to deposit there. Part of the Nile river delta has been remediated; the plague has almost completely disappeared in Egypt and been completely forgotten in Europe. Why not remediate the delta of the Ganges as well?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/12.jpg\")
\nIt might take a lot of work, immense expenditures, but what would that be compared to what governments spend on unproductive or harmful things? What would be the inconvenience or expense of a campaign by European peoples against cholera, compared with the moral and material damage inflicted by one of those wars between peoples that are so often repeated?
\n\nThe delta of the Ganges has not been remediated, because that work has not hitherto lent itself to private speculation, via which a few capitalists could have enriched themselves on the sweat and death of the impoverished people of India, and because in the absence of solidarity in which we live, rivalry, selfishness, and patriotism prevent all peoples from contributing freely to improving the soil on which one of these peoples lives, instead fueling hatreds and wars.
\n\nPerhaps that delta and all the great unhealthy plagues that corrupt the world will not be healed until the economic and political conditions of humanity are completely transformed—that is, until the world belongs to everyone and everyone has the right and the means to work towards improving it, until nobody can claim an exclusive right over a part of the soil and erect obstacles to prevent people from remediating it, until all the forces that are employed in rebellion and repression today, in wars and preparations for wars, or that are left latent and inactive, can be applied in useful ways and, increased a hundredfold by collective association, return to humanity all the power that we can achieve vis-à-vis the natural environment.
\n\nBut isn’t it ridiculous to speak of the remediation of the Ganges—and here, in Italy, when the marshes that are close to us are not remediated, when on the contrary, they increasingly enlarge their deadly zone!
\n\nAnd this cholera that we could eliminate but do not because of our form of social organization, this cholera from which we do not free India and that India sends us from time to time, as if to remind us that man never sins with impunity against human solidarity—did this cholera come to Europe by itself, carried by the winds, without it being anyone’s fault?
\n\nNo, not even. On the contrary, it seems that the government of the French republic gave it to us. Civilized France goes to conquer barbarian Asia and its ships, more or less victorious, carry the terrible scourge back within them. We, civilized peoples, inflict massacre and desolation upon the barbarians with bayonets and cannons, and the barbarians send back massacre and desolation through cholera. Oh human family! Except that the massacre that we carry out is voluntary, inflicted for the purpose of robbery, whereas the revenge of the barbarians is involuntary and unconscious. So who is more barbaric?
\n\nAnd aren’t there unsanitary homes here in Europe, bad and insufficient food, exhausting work, isn’t it poverty (the daughter of individualized property) that makes it possible for the Asiatic disease to spread? When the danger is upon us, the hygienic commissions busy themselves promulgating measures that would be laughable for their impotence if they did not make one cry, or suggestions that succeed only in expressing a bloody irony. You hear these big shots from universities or health councils preach Eat healthy food and avoid overwork. And when the farmers who earn an average of 27 cents a day and live on spoiled polenta and water that is not always clean ask for better living conditions, the government that pays university students and health advisers (with the people’s money, of course) imprisons the peasants and puts its soldiers at the disposal of the owners. And the doctors who should renounce their office, which has been rendered useless, and place the responsibility on the government and owners for their murderous activities, continue to report and dictate advice!
\n\nMeanwhile, cholera continues to spread slowly, and perhaps soon it will erupt with fearsome energy. And it will inflict more deaths and more pain than ten revolutions, just one of which would be enough to eliminate cholera and a thousand other ailments forever. Yet for a while, tender hearts will continue to fear revolutionary excesses!
\n\nWe present below a faithful translation of a letter that a Parisian carpenter addressed days ago to the daily socialist newspaper Le Cri du Peuple (“The Cry of the People”). It is an authentic letter, to which only a few corrections of form have been made: it is grim, wild, but it vividly describes the conditions of struggle that the bourgeoisie have imposed on the workers, it truly expresses the mood of the most energetic, most dangerous members of the proletariat.
\n\nBourgeois men, if selfishness has not reduced you completely to foolishness, meditate on this letter; think what would happen to you if on a day of revolution you met these workers who, thanks to your deeds, have retained only one hope, to have to manufacture many coffins, and… but it is useless; you will remain as you are and what is fated will come to pass.
\n\n« Some who hear that cholera is among us feel their stomachs turn in fear. On the contrary, rather than being afraid, I call out to cholera: Hail! And come early.
\n\n« Life is hard. It’s bad. I am a good worker and I love my job. The smell of wood widens my chest. How beautiful are the long shavings which curl, carried away with great strokes of a plane! What a beautiful sound the axes make under hammer blows! I am never as happy as when great drops of sweat fall on my bench from my wet forehead.
\n\n« I have no more work! I haven’t had a job for two months. The bosses all have—as far as they say—too many workers and not enough commissions. Two months without working! A little longer and my hands will become soft and white like a gentleman’s. But meanwhile, everything is in the pawnshop, even the receipts are expired. In the cupboard there is nothing but hunger. All I have in my room is a nail and a piece of rope. I keep them, they can always be useful.
\n\n« I went from door to door offering my skills for cheap. Nothing. I’ve traveled throughout the region. I walked for miles along the white roads, beside which sad elm trees die of thirst. Every time I heard the striking of a hammer in the distance, the screeching of a saw, my heart beat faster. Wretched hope! Yes, hope rises once again! But no, nothing. Everywhere the same thing, and I returned in the evening, when I could not take any more, heartbroken, starved, with a dry throat and the soles of my shoes a little more worn than the day before.
\n\n« How do you want me and all who are like me not to shout: Hail cholera? Leaning forward, full of hope, we stretch out our arms and shake our hats, as we do when we see the face of a long awaited friend appear at the turn of a road. So let him come and be quick! In his bony green hands, in the folds of his poisoned cloak, he carries the disease of work; work for us. If he comes, the Asiatic, there will be a need for coffins. I can make coffins, I can!
\n\n« Big ones and small ones. Some beautiful, some ordinary. For rich and for poor. In oak and in fir. Here it is. Be served. There will be one for everyone. Just ask. Who’s next? Come on, go on with the plan! What? Is it my fault that to live, I need others to die? And hundreds, thousands. Then we, the workers, will have work and we will be able to ask for whatever compensation we want; and we will make merry! Long live cholera.
\n\n« You are not afraid of us, scourge. If you have to break our barely living bodies, thank you. It is already no fun to lead the life we lead. But as we wait for you to take us to hell, you will certainly drop some coins in our pockets, and we will laugh at you. Be as bad as you like, you’re not as murderous as the lack of work, nor as selfish as the bourgeois, nor as cruel as the exploiter.
\n\n« Come. My arms are strong enough to make coffins for all Paris, if you want. Fear? Away then! Hail cholera!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/2.jpg\")
\nThe Florentine police repeatedly targeted La Questione Sociale, using minor infractions to justify confiscating all copies of the newspaper. Malatesta and his comrades were forced to cease publishing early in August 1884, just as cholera was spreading around the Mediterranean.
\n\nIn Italy, representatives of the Catholic Church took advantage of the situation to describe the epidemic as the judgment of God on a secular society—specifically as a punishment for the spread of socialism and atheism. They urged people to prostrate themselves in repentance rather than adhering to safety measures.
\n\nThe state resurrected quarantine procedures from the previous century’s protocol for dealing with bubonic plague, mobilizing the military to form a cordon across the French border. Their policies seemed vacillating and arbitrary; at first, they detained travelers for three days, then for five days, then for seven. Upon release from quarantine, all passengers and their belongings were fumigated with sulphur and chlorine or disinfected with carbolic acid, corrosive sublimate, or bichloride of mercury. This had no medical effect other than to irritate the lungs. Its chief purpose was to create a dramatic spectacle, so that the state would be seen taking action against the epidemic.
\n\nFor a modern equivalent, we need look no further than governments pouring resources into fumigating entire cities in response to COVID-19, when the vast majority of cases are spread by person to person contact.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/9.jpg\")
\nTwice displaced, refugees returning to Italy were not eager to be trapped in camps; many of them eluded the military cordon, traveling illegally through the hills. As cases of cholera nonetheless appeared in one region of Italy after another, further military cordons were deployed all around the country. (This is reminiscent of the aforementioned “subversive association” charges with which the Italian state has attempted to control anarchists by imposing regional limits on travel right up to the present day.) The internal cordons interrupted the economy, imposed famine, generated fear, and spread xenophobia and paranoia around Italy. Some superstitious people came to regard traveling strangers as malefactors intent on spreading disease, just as today ignorant conservatives attribute COVID-19 to some sort of Chinese plot—when they aren’t calling it a Democratic hoax.
\n\nBy any measure, the attempt to stop cholera via military blockade was a dismal failure. The state was always two steps behind the epidemic—and its heavy-handed interventions only induced people to conceal news of new outbreaks. As Snowden argues,
\n\n\n\n\n“In the dawning age of scientific medicine, sound public health policies depended on accurate and prompt information. The threat of military force was instead the best way to sever the lines of communication between the populace and the authorities. Worse still, to move large numbers of soldiers, largely drawn from high-risk social groups, from locality to locality in unsanitary conditions was itself an excellent means of spreading an epidemic. A large part of the history of cholera was the story of the movement of young men in uniform.”
\n
This phenomenon is familiar today, when the police of New York City and Detroit have played a major role in spreading COVID-19, bringing it from one neighborhood to the next and turning jails and prisons into death camps.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/4.jpg\")
\nThe first Italian city to experience a major outbreak of cholera was la Spezia, a port city like Toulon. The first deaths were concealed from medical officials, but after cholera contaminated the water supply and fatalities skyrocketed, the military sealed off the city completely, imposing famine and panic. In mid-September, there were two days of desperate fighting as the inhabitants attempted to break through the military cordon by force.
\n\nIn order to deal with the vast numbers of refugees in quarantine, the Italian authorities established lazarretos—quarantine camps—including one on an island immediately outside Naples. In these confinement centers, guards forced refugees to trade the last of their belongings for food; the contagion made its way back to Naples via these ill-gotten goods. These quarantine camps remind us of concentration camps like the one on the isle of Lesvos, in which European governments intern refugees today; in some cases, it remains official government policy to seize refugees’ belongings in return for confining them. These modern-day camps, too, see periodic rioting as refugees struggle to assert their humanity.
\n\nBy the end of August 1884, people in Naples were dying in such great numbers that it was no longer possible to conceal the arrival of cholera. The military quarantine had not contained the outbreak—it had spread it to Italy’s largest city.
\n\nThe military had failed. Now it was up to health officials to treat the epidemic.
\n\nWhenever officials learned of a person who was suspected of having cholera, they dispatched a team of guards accompanied by a doctor to seize the sick person and convey him or her to the hospital; then a disinfection squad would show up to destroy or disinfect the sick person’s belongings. At first, the hospital did not even have beds to accommodate the people who were conveyed to it.
\n\nIn addition, officials initiated a campaign to “cleanse” the city by building great bonfires of sulfur every night at every street corner and in every square. These made the already polluted air nearly unbreathable. The city also posted notices everywhere—in the north Italian idiom, rather than the local Neapolitan dialect—explaining that people could protect themselves from the disease by living in clean and airy rooms, adhering to a healthy diet of high-quality food, drinking purified water, and avoiding both public restrooms and emotional stress… in short, by being part of the ruling class.
\n\nThe officials also did some useful things, such as establishing housing and meals for the very poor, and some harmless things, like whitewashing the walls. But cholera had entered the city’s drinking water, and the death rate soon rose to well over one out of every 100 people. At the pace that bodies were piling up, it became impossible to bury all of the dead. Some were heaped into mass graves, others left to rot where they lay.
\n\nThe middle class and the aristocracy fled the city. This time, the class-conscious military made no effort to stop them. The government banned public assemblies, but desperate people crowded together at churches to beg for mercy or roved the streets in religious processions, demanding donations and attacking those who could not pay.
\n\nIn 1884, scientists knew of no effective treatment for cholera. The doctors in Naples experimented with a wide range of approaches, from irrigating the intestines with acid to administering electrical shocks, strychnine, and subcutaneous injections of saline solution. Many of these treatments only hastened patients’ deaths. Those who survived the hospitals told horror stories about the experiments that doctors were conducting upon those in their care.
\n\nAs a result, and owing to the association of these doctors with the guards who accompanied them and the invasive measures of the state, popular opinion turned against the doctors. Many people also considered it suspicious that these wealthy gentlemen (who could afford clean water and sanitary living conditions) were so rarely afflicted by the disease. People regularly assaulted doctors when they entered poor neighborhoods, repeatedly triggering riotous confrontations with the military.
\n\nWith the wealthy having fled, municipal efforts to clean out the sewers and whitewash the walls were read metaphorically as part of an effort to erase and exterminate the poor. As Snowden recounts,
\n\n\n\n\nDuring September 1884, a great phobia of poisoning gripped the city of Naples. Fearing that the municipal officials were engaged in a diabolical plot to eliminate surplus population, the people reasoned that cholera was literal class warfare. The health officials, doctors, and municipal guards who suddenly appeared in the back lanes of Old Naples were [regarded as] the agents of a deadly conspiracy. Their mission was to kill off the poor, and their weapon was poison.
\n\nSuch a response, of course, is unintelligible except in the context of the long-term and deeply rooted suspicion of the people towards authority.
\n
In such an unequal society, the authorities had long ago earned this suspicion. The residents of Naples felt betrayed by the power structure that ruled them from northern Italy, just as the poor of Naples felt betrayed by the Neapolitan ruling class. As September progressed, massive clashes unfolded between soldiers and townspeople, escalating to gun battles. There were riots in two of the city’s prisons. As Naples descended into chaos, public health policies were rendered moot. Like the army, state health officials had failed to address the situation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/5.jpg\")
\nFortunately, state institutions were not the only ones to respond to the epidemic.
\n\nThe first grassroots response was organized by ordinary workers in Naples like the ones Malatesta had organized with in the 1870s. On August 29, the Società Operaia (“Workers’ Society”), a radical mutual aid organization founded in 1861, announced a new initiative intended to provide assistance to anyone whose family had been struck by cholera. This “sanitary company” involved a handful of trusted doctors accompanied by ordinary laborers serving as nurses. Drawing on the Società Operaia’s scant funds, they offered medication, clean blankets, food, and financial assistance to the ill and the bereaved alike. Wanting nothing to do with the hospitals or the city government, they treated cholera patients in their own homes, only going where they were explicitly invited. Being connected to workers throughout the poor neighborhoods of Naples, they were able to spread the news about their services through word of mouth.
\n\nA week later, on September 4, a middle-class newspaper editor named Rocco de Zerbi convened a meeting involving the Società Operaia, the medical faculty of the University of Naples, representatives of the press, and various local notables. The idea was to establish a citywide organization that scaled up the workers’ “sanitary company.” As often happens, the initial efforts by radical grassroots organizers had drawn middle-class activists with more resources who were convinced that they could do a better job at what ordinary people had started themselves. The organization that emerged from this meeting, officially named the Committee for the Assistance of the Victims of Cholera, came to be known colloquially as the White Cross.
\n\nWorkers’ associations continued to coordinate grassroots efforts throughout the city—but owing to the resources and credentials of its sponsors, the White Cross received the credit for everything in the international media and subsequent historiography. This is not surprising, considering that the budget of the White Cross ended up being 200 times greater than initial funds that the Società Operaia had raised. All the same, the White Cross depended on the workers’ contacts and the trust that radical labor organizations had earned among the poor and angry.
\n\nThe influence of the workers’ associations and the wariness of the workers compelled the White Cross to adhere to a fundamentally anti-authoritarian approach. In order to ensure that no one would doubt their good intentions, the White Cross was comprised entirely of unpaid volunteers. Rather than trying out experimental treatments on patients, White Cross volunteers stuck to providing palliative care and distributing fresh blankets, sheets, mattresses, disinfectants, and food. They never carried weapons with them, and they did not insist on compulsory fumigation or on destroying the property of cholera patients. Learning from the initiative of the Società Operaia, they distanced themselves from the state, only offering assistance when asked and refusing to have anything to do with the guards who attended the state-directed doctors.
\n\nAs de Zerbi wrote afterwards,
\n\n\n\n\nI never allowed a merger between our medical service and that of the city. Any such merger would have made us official and would thereby have destroyed our work… because the public would have feared and shunned us.
\n
While middle-class activists were adopting the model demonstrated by grassroots organizers, other less savory characters were vying to present themselves as the saviors of Naples.
\n\nKing Umberto, the son of Victor Emmanuel under whom Italy had been unified, arrived in Naples on September 9. Umberto was a reactionary conservative, loathed by workers and radicals throughout Italy for his policies. The year he had come to power, in 1878, the anarchist Giovanni Passannante had attempted to assassinate him; years after the epidemic, in 1900, the anarchist Gaetano Bresci succeeded in killing Umberto to take revenge for the king’s decision to reward a general who had over 300 demonstrators massacred in cold blood in 1898. (Incidentally, shortly before this, Bresci also risked his life to disarm a would-be assassin who was shooting at Malatesta.) Umberto was no friend to the poor.
\n\nUmberto’s regime had been feuding with the Catholic Church; his visit to Naples was calculated to repair this relationship, consolidating conservatism in Italy. Other ruling class institutions, such as the Bank of Naples, were looking for ways to re-stabilize the economy through philanthropy. If the monarchy, the Church, and the top tier of financial capitalists succeeded in presenting themselves as the ones looking out for the people of Naples, they would legitimize their power, making it more difficult for organizers to mobilize people to resist the various forms of oppression that preserved their privileges.
\n\nAnd all the while, thousands were dying in Naples.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/11.jpg\")
Cholera in Naples.
\nThese were the stakes as Malatesta and other anarchists from around Italy sought to depart for Naples. They had been organizing solidarity efforts for those affected by the cholera outbreak since early August. They were eager to join in the grassroots relief efforts on the ground; Malatesta himself had grown up in Naples and studied medicine there. The prison sentence hanging over his head did not deter him. Yet until early September, Malatesta and his comrades in Florence had not been able to raise enough money to pay for the trip.
\n\nIn “Galileo Palla and the events of Rome (May 1, 1891),” published in the May 23, 1891 issue of the weekly newspaper La Rivendicazione (“The Demand”) in Forlí,2 Malatesta recalls how he met Galileo Palla, an anarchist who helped fund their trip, and praises Palla’s tireless efforts once they arrived in Naples.
\n\nI met Palla in Florence in 1884. Cholera raged in Naples, and there were many of us among the Socialists who yearned to hurry to the rescue of those who suffered from cholera. While we were trying to collect the money for the trip, Palla arrived, who was also going to Naples, and as he had more money than he needed for the railway ticket, he stopped in Florence to see if he could provide assistance to anyone who was willing to go but could not leave for lack of money.
\n\nHe came to my house shouting and gesturing. “How,” he addressed me, “How is it that you are not going to Naples!”
\n\n—“Who are you?” I asked.
\n\n— “What do you care?” was his answer. “Those suffering from cholera do not need to know the name of who is at their bedside.”
\n\n“That’s right,” I said—“Several of us here want to go, but we have not yet been able to put together the money for the trip.” Then Palla emptied his pockets on the table, and so between his money and what we could find in Florence, we were able to leave—Gigia Pezzi, Arturo Feroci, Vinci, Delvecchio, myself, and other companions.
\n\nPalla’s conduct in Naples was splendid. Brave, indefatigable, night and day he was always at work. We were all without money, sometimes we went hungry and almost envied the soup that we served to the convalescents. Palla received some money from his home, which was largely based on his needs; but, as each of us would have done, he put it in common so we could all survive until the end of the epidemic.
\n\nAsk the anarchists nothing, Rocco De Zerbi—you cannot have forgotten the services of the anarchists of Florence if you remember a tall, thin, rather grumpy-looking young man who, in the moments when he expected responsibilities to be distributed, hung out at the back of the White Cross Committee room, silent, behind everyone, but who, at the first request for a volunteer, would leap up, before anyone else, and come forward shouting: “Me! I will!”
\n\n“But you,” they would point out, sometimes, “you are off shift now.”
\n\n“It doesn’t matter,” he would reply, “I can go back in.” And he went back in and amazed everyone with his truly extraordinary physical endurance, winning admiration for the heart, the devotion, the delicacy that he put into caring for the sick. That young man was Palla.3
\n\nThis memoir indicates how closely Malatesta, Palla, and others worked with the White Cross in Naples—and provides a hint at the character of that relationship.
\n\nBy September 13, over 1000 volunteers had joined the relief effort from all over Italy as well as Switzerland, France, England, and Sweden. Relative to the efforts of the state, the mobilization was a tremendous success. Roughly two thirds of the patients in the care of the White Cross volunteers survived; this stands in marked contrast to the death rates in hospitals in Naples, in which the majority of cholera patients died.
\n\nAnarchists were at the forefront of these efforts. According to Nunzio Dell’Erba (see appendix), Malatesta and Palla were joined in Naples by other comrades from Florence including Luigia Minguzzi, Francesco Pezzi, Arturo Feroci, Giuseppe Cioci, and Pietro Vinci, not to mention many other anarchists from all around the peninsula. We don’t know how many of them contracted cholera in the course of their work, but we know that two anarchists died of it—Antonio Valdrè and Rocco Lombardo—as well as the socialist Massimiliano Boschi.
\n\nThe White Cross had divided Naples into twelve sections; according to Luigi Fabbri, Malatesta and his comrades took on responsibility for organizing one of these sections. Fabbri asserts that the cholera patients in this section had the highest recovery rate in all Naples, because Malatesta—having grown up in Naples and being on intimate terms with the most militant elements of the local workers’ movement—was particularly well-equipped to strong-arm the city government into turning over food and medicine, which the anarchists distributed to those in need.
\n\nFabbri’s account is based on stories that he must have heard from Malatesta himself. Some material has reached us from Malatesta corroborating it. According the court record in “Verbale d’Udienza,” April 21-28, while standing trial in Ancona in 1898, Malatesta testified:
\n\n\n\n\n“In 1884, after putting together a group of anarchists, I went to Naples to assist the cholera victims; my professors there put me in charge of the medical service and I stayed in Naples up until the outbreak passed and was lauded for it.”
\n
A slightly different transcription of these remarks appears in the periodical L’Agitazione, in which Malatesta is said to have added
\n\n\n\n\n“I too was in Naples during the epidemic and the committee lavished praise on me.”4
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/8.jpg\")
\nWe can catch glimpses of the anarchists’ experience in Naples in the reports from Italy that appeared in the Swiss anarchist periodical Le Révolté between September and December 1884:
\n\n\n\n\n“Cholera has also made its fatal appearance in Italy and, at this hour, it harvests many victims, naturally among proletarian families who cannot afford the luxury of hygiene, for the simple reason that it is a privilege that only the bourgeoisie possesses, like all the others.”
\n
-Le Révolté, September 14, 1884
\n\n\n\n\n“In writing these few lines, I want to offer a fitting tribute of solidarity to our comrade Rocco Lombardo from Genoa.
\n\n“A charming young man, barely 27 years old, bold and generous, he was one of the most devoted and intelligent among the revolutionary anarchists of Genoa. He dedicated all his strength and all his thoughts to our cause—that a revolutionary movement took place, wherever it might be, to be sure that it was arranged in the proper way, as his aspirations and his tireless devotion called for.
\n\nAn opportunity presented itself; cholera was in Naples and reaped many victims from among his proletarian brothers, he joined with other companions and left from Milan, where he was, to go into the heart of the danger.
\n\nAs soon as he arrived in Naples, he was one of those most noted for his courage and selflessness in helping the victims of the terrible plague. Struck by illness himself, this modest hero of sacrifice died on September 18.
\n\nLombardo was a staunch propagandist. Last year, in Turin, he had founded the newspaper Proximus Tuus, which he supported with his companions until the last moment by means of all the sacrifices of which he was capable. This newspaper sustained fire until its last cartridge, remaining on the breach for several months.
\n\nPoor Rocco, you died without having a friend near you to pay you a just tribute of solidarity. We are sending it to you today on your grave, we are making the commitment to defend these ideas that were so dear to you and to sacrifice ourselves as you did for the Social Revolution.
\n
-Le Révolté, Septembre 28, 1884
\n\n\n\n\n“We receive from our friends in Milan a protest against the slanders that the clerical and bourgeois press heaps upon the anarchists, and in particular companion Rocco Lombardo, whose death we announced in our last issue. Comrades, it’s useless to waste time refuting the calumnies of these puppets. Just give them a kick somewhere when you meet them…”
\n
-Le Révolté, October 25, 1884
\n\n\n\n\n“In Naples, as you know, cholera has wreaked havoc among the workers. There could be no clearer proof of the inequity of today’s society. Our friends who went during the epidemic to treat the sick have just published a manifesto in which they have exposed the real cause of cholera—poverty; and indicated the only remedy—the Social Revolution.
\n\n“The newspapers here were scandalized, naturally, and a clerical newspaper did not fail to invoke the wrath of the police against these implacable anarchists, who refuse to permit the people to die in peace.”
\n
-Le Révolté, December 7, 1884
\n\nUnfortunately, to our knowledge, no one has been able to turn up the manifesto referenced in the December 7 issue.
\n\nThe White Cross officially disbanded on September 26, announcing that the crisis had passed to such an extent that the municipal authorities were once again able to handle the epidemic on their own. Presumably the workers’ associations continued to maintain their own mutual aid efforts, just as they had before the appearance of the White Cross. Thanks in part to their efforts, deaths dropped significantly in October, and the epidemic was officially over by early November. The grassroots mobilization had not defeated cholera singlehandedly—but it had accomplished something that the state could not, helping thousands of poor people to survive the catastrophe. Above all, it had demonstrated that the best aid programs are the ones initiated by those in need, enabling them to define for themselves what their needs and priorities are.
\n\nMalatesta was offered an official award in recognition of his efforts. He refused it. The same state that was trying to reward him for what he had done in Naples was also waiting to imprison him for things he had not done in Florence. Besides, he did not wish to be a leader—just a comrade among comrades.
\n\nIf it is true, as Fabbri says, that the poor Neapolitians in the section of Naples that Malatesta helped to organize had the highest survival rate—not because of Malatesta’s medical prowess, but because of the leverage the anarchists were able to bring to bear on the government to force it to turn over hoarded resources—this bears out the claim that “the true cause of cholera was poverty.” In Naples in the Time of Cholera, historian Frank Snowden argues that poverty was a major cause of the 1884 epidemic in Naples: “Cholera thrives on poverty because the poor, through malnutrition and intestinal disorders, are predisposed to contracting the disease.”
\n\nThe chief solution for cholera, as we now know, is to put a clean water supply at everyone’s disposal. Plumbers, not doctors, are the heroes of that story. But—as repeated cholera outbreaks in Naples and elsewhere throughout the 20th and even 21st centuries demonstrated—kings, capitalists, and presidents alike will all keep some portion of the population languishing in perilous conditions unless collective solidarity and uncompromising rebellion force them to share the resources they try to hoard.
\n\nTo quote the missing manifesto, the true medicine to prevent the return of cholera can be nothing less than social revolution.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/16.jpg\")
\nThat fall, after returning to Florence, Malatesta managed to dodge the prison sentence hanging over his head by escaping from Italy concealed in a box of sewing machines. For the next half century, he continued organizing and writing, leaving his mark on the anarchist movement on three continents.
\n\nIn his writing, he repeatedly drew on his experience with cholera, using it to illustrate how the fates of human beings on opposite sides of the globe are inextricably linked—a point that the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated to us once again today—and emphasizing that the state itself cannot foster health, only hinder doctors from preserving it.
\n\nWe conclude with a few selections from his work.
\n\n“The inhabitant of Naples is as concerned in the improvement to the living conditions of the people inhabiting the banks of the Ganges from whence cholera comes to him, as he is in the drainage of the port warehouses of his own city. The wellbeing, the freedom, and the future of a highlander lost among the gorges of the Apennines are dependent not only on the conditions of prosperity or of poverty of the inhabitants of his village and on the general condition of the Italian people, but also on workers’ conditions in America or Australia, on the discovery made by a Swedish scientist [Malatesta likely had in mind Alfred Nobel, who had invented dynamite in 1866—an important event in the development of anarchism], on the state of mind and material conditions of the Chinese, on there being war or peace in Africa; in other words, on all the circumstances large and small which anywhere in the world are acting on a human being.”
\n\n-Errico Malatesta, “Anarchy”
\n\n“Those in government office, taken out of their former social position, primarily concerned in retaining power, lose all power to act spontaneously, and become only an obstacle to the free action of others…
\n\n“With the abolition of this negative potency constituting government, society will become that which it can be, with the given forces and capabilities of the moment…
\n\n“If there are doctors and teachers of hygiene, they will organize themselves for the service of health. And if there are none, a government cannot create them; all that it can do is to discredit them in the eyes of the people—who are inclined to entertain suspicions, sometimes only too well founded, with regard to every thing which is imposed upon them—and cause them to be massacred as poisoners when they visit people struck by cholera.”
\n\n-Errico Malatesta, “Anarchy”
\n\n“Do not ask, a comrade said, what we should substitute for cholera. It is an evil, and evil has to be eliminated, not replaced. This is true. But the trouble is that cholera persists and returns unless conditions of improved hygiene have replaced those that first allowed the disease to gain a foothold and spread.”
\n\n-Errico Malatesta, “Demoliamo. E poi?” Pensiero e Volontà (Rome) 3, no. 10 (June 16, 1926).
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/3.jpg\")
\nThe Origins of Socialism in Napoli by Nunzio Dell’Erba and Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892 by Nunzio Pernicone both offer short accounts of the anarchist mobilization in response to the epidemic in Naples. Pernicone’s book is available in English, published by AK Press. Here is the relevant material from Nunzio Dell’Erba’s book in rough English:
\n\n\n\n\nIn the months of August and September [1884], there was an intense participation of the anarchists from all over Italy in efforts of generosity and assistance to the Neapolitan populations affected by cholera.
\n\nOn September 13, Luigia Minguzzi, Pezzi, Malatesta, Arturo Feroci, Galileo Palla, Giuseppe Cioci and Pietro Vinci left for Naples; in the same period, Cavallotti, Musini, [ex-anarchist politician Andrea] Costa, and others went there. The socialists of Ravenna sent their wishes that the proletarians of the Mezzogiorno [the south of Italy] would “soon, immediately free themselves from choleric contagion, as one day (they will free themselves) from bourgeois contagion, which kills like any disease.”5 At the solidarity demonstration of the socialists of Ravenna, the lively and powerful voices of the socialists of Parma, Bologna, Lugo, Turin, Alessandria, Genoa, and Milan joined together in protest against the “sorcerer” [Prime Minister Agostino] Depretis and to assist their fellows of the Mezzogiorno.
\n\nTowards the end of September 1884, three of these, the lithographer Rocco Lombardo of the Milanese anarchist group, Massimiliano Boschi of the Association ‘The Rights of Humanity” of Parma, and Antonio Valdrè of Castelbolognese, became victims of the epidemic.
\n\nCholera exacerbated the already sad conditions of the proletariat by forcing bosses to fire their workers or shopkeepers to close their shops, as occurred in the case of the “union of shoemakers” which involved about 400 members. But, as Carlo Gardelli, a socialist from Romagna who moved to Naples, recalled, cholera “has not only caused serious material damage, but has caused other forms of harm, immensely greater, in the moral field.”6
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/25/15.jpg\")
\nBrigate volontarie d’altri tempi—I sovversivi e il colera di Napoli, 1884 [Voluntary Brigades of Yesteryear: The Subversives and the Cholera Epidemic of Naples, 1884]
\nCholera Revolts: A Class Struggle We May Not Like, Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr.
\nThe Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, edited by Davide Turcato
\nItalian Anarchism, 1864-1892, Nunzio Pernicone
\nEpidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, Frank M. Snowden
\nNaples in the Time of Cholera, 1884-1911, Frank M. Snowden
\nFrom the Cholera Riots to the Coronavirus Revolts, Jesse Walker
\nFabbri’s account largely echoes Max Nettlau’s version, published a few years earlier in Errico Malatesta: The Biography of an Anarchist: “In the autumn of 1884, Malatesta and other comrades went to Naples, where the cholera had taken alarming proportions, and worked in the hospitals. Costa and other Socialists did the same. Two Anarchists, Rocco Lombardo, the former editor of the Turin ‘Proximus Tuus,’ and Antonio Valdre succumbed to the epidemic. Those who returned stated in a manifesto that the real cause of cholera was misery and the real remedy the social revolution (c. “Révolté,” September 28, Dec. 7, 1884; Nov. 8, 1885).” ↩
\nThis article was later reproduced in the October 1, 1933 issue of Studi Sociali in Montevideo, which was where we read it, thanks to the assistance of Davide Turcato. ↩
\nMalatesta continues: “After the cholera epidemic in Naples, I have always been in contact or in intimate relationship with Palla; I have seen him in very difficult circumstances and I have always found him to be good, always ready to put himself and his money at the service of the cause, friends, or needs, always courageous and first to stand up to danger, always intent on everything his soul, with all his strength dedicated to the triumph of goodness. I have penetrated, by force of intimacy, into the depths of his somewhat wild character, and I have seen an immense love for men, a strong faith in goodness, a firm decision to consecrate his life to the triumph of his idea, and I saw with emotion how these apostolic qualities were harmoniously united with the deep affection he felt for his mother, whom he often remembered, and whose memory filled his blue eyes with tears.” ↩
\n“Il Processo,” parts 1-10, L’Agitazione, Supplemento Quotidiano, nos. 1-10 (April 21-30, 1898). Both of these transcripts appear in English in Davide Turcato’s collection of Malatesta’s writing, A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897-1898. ↩
\nPartenza di socialini per Napoli, in “Il Comune” (Organo del Partito Socialista Rivoluzionario italiano), Ravenna, 20-21 dicembre 1884, a. 11, n. 50 ↩
\nSee the letter by Carlo Lardelli, Naples, December 1, 1884, in “Il Commune”, a. II, December 7-8, 1884, n. 59. “The priest knew how to seize the sad occasion and exploit it to his advantage; he knew, in his misfortune, the weakness of the populace and profited from it. Today he is the master of the field. The doors of the houses are covered with writings still entreating God and the Virgin Mary for liberation from the scourge, the walls are once again smeared with images, as they were under the Bourbon domination. There is no more faith in science and the labor of humanity. More hope is invested in a sprinkle of holy water than in any medicine.” ↩
\nA selection of exercises, rituals, and ways of preparing you can use to reconnect with your agency and ground yourself as we face the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
\n\nThe following text draws from our lived experiences of struggle, of growth and of loss. It is informed by the things we have learned from the practice of Somatic Experiencing as well as through doing end-of-life care as death doulas, as nurses, and as human beings loving people in a hard world. This writing also springs from seeing the need for us to acknowledge and face our fears on an individual level in order to ensure that we can build the capacity to trust each other in this new uncertain context. No one knows how to contain this pandemic—and it is more evident than ever that we cannot trust the state. Tending to our mental health can increase our capability to act together.
\n\nWe find ourselves in a new era in which we must figure out together how to navigate life in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. All of us are experiencing collective trauma as the wave of COVID-19 moves across the world, tearing apart the basic fabric of society. Other living things sigh a deep breath as capitalism falters in this country. This historical moment has opened up the opportunity for new pathways towards connection and mutual aid in both social and economic aspects of our daily lives as we continue to experience the weirdness of physical distancing and the ambiguous loss of what we have known as day-to-day life.
\n\nIt is a worldwide collective human experience to be moving in and out of moments of stress and uncertainty as we try to navigate life with this virus. At the same time, this pandemic is not a unique event; it is part of the new normal in this global economy. Viruses will continue to spread as long as we go on upsetting the ecological balance of the planet. Yet what we have been through so far could help us to figure out how to build more of the society we want together as we move into the future. While this may feel difficult, it’s important to remember that we do have agency—together, we can build a meaningful life in the rubble of the parts that we must leave behind.
\n\nThis text is a small effort to help hold each other up in the process of this collective readjustment as we continue to fight in pursuit of the dreams we have for the world. We offer a look at the importance of moving through the many aspects of grief with some suggestions as to how we can prepare for the unknown ahead. We provide several somatic exercises aimed at facilitating our ability to ground ourselves in uncertain futures while also finding creative ways to get connection and expand the imagination in spite of the need for increased physical distancing.
\n\nSome of us are in shock. Some of us are anxious. Whatever feelings and mental states you are moving through right now, you make sense. Each of us, in our own way, is undergoing what is known as ambiguous loss. The collective experience of COVID-19 began without any sort of closure for our pre-pandemic lives. None of us have a clear understanding of what this means for our day-to-day life. We don’t know how we will make money in the future. Unplanned loss can overwhelm our coping abilities, making normal functioning extremely difficult. We have to figure out new ways to structure our lives. This can leave us anxious and complicate or delay our process of moving through the loss in order to adapt to the changes. In addition, many of us are also experiencing the anticipatory grief of the impending loss of loved ones because of the pandemic. None of us are alone in this.
\n\nBecause of the way our threat response cycle works as humans, we are having a hard time orienting to what the threat is because the future is so unknown to us right now. We are hyper-focused on our phones and screens, seeking both information and connection to help settle us—to help us obtain a sense of control and imagine a path forward. Yet this does not calm our nervous systems. Our brainstem is designed to locate a threat, usually scanning far out into the distance before moving up close to our present surroundings. In this situation, our nervous systems tend to remain in a heightened state because our present environment is giving us the potential of dangerous information and swiftly changing news.
\n\nOur immune systems are deeply interconnected with our nervous systems, and our stress levels impact both of these. In particular, extended periods of shutdown strain our immune function. We hope that some of these tools can help move you towards settling your nervous system, as well as towards the mobilization many of us seek.
\n\nSocial isolation is a risk factor, compromising our mental and physical health. In this new context, it is very important that we direct intention towards connecting with other people. Using screens and video chats can cause an extreme strain on our attachment system. We must make an effort to nudge ourselves towards facial expression, making eye contact and modulating our tones of voice with others. We must imagine windows where there are walls. It is important that each of us resist the tendency to normalize the fear of others, which we already experience so much in this individualized society. Implementing these practices can help us avoid fear-based interactions with friends and strangers alike.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/07/1.jpg\")
\nOne way that we can reduce stress and harm to ourselves and each other is to practice good consent when interacting with others. For example, take the time to figure out what you want your personal boundaries to be when you interact with others. Do you need to be six feet or more away from people? Do you need them to be wearing masks if they want to talk to you? Do you feel comfortable sitting next to someone? Is touching toes acceptable? If so, under what conditions?
\n\nAsk yourself questions like these and make your feelings known to others. This will help to prevent people from accidentally crossing a boundary that they weren’t aware that you had. It can also help to reduce the kind of self-policing that can happen when people feel scared and uncertain, enabling everyone involved to be able to trust that everyone around them is being thoughtful about their boundaries and needs.
\n\nSelf-touch is a useful tool, especially right now when we are getting less physical contact. Stress and shutdown responses can affect our digestion. Making a low “vu” sound encourages our nervous system to downshift towards a more balanced state, bringing a sense of cohesion to our organs and body. This particular sound comes from the lower trunk part of our body. When we focus our attention on feeling the sound as it comes from below our diaphragm, it helps us to reset.
\n\nThere is a great deal of difference between a forced breath and one that arises spontaneously. Instead of taking an intentional deep breath, allow yourself to make a full exhale, and as you do so, notice the quality of settling as your body comes into balance.
\n\nTry to pay attention throughout your day to notice when you let out a deep breath, a sigh. This slow, audible exhalation is an everyday experience of resetting the body and mind. We spontaneously sigh many times an hour as our nervous system resets and regulates.
\n\nPlace your right hand under your left armpit, close to your heart. Then place your left hand on your right shoulder. Notice the warmth of your body. Invoke a sense of containment. Pay attention to see if you feel any sort of ease settle in your chest, or if you get a spontaneous deeper breath or a natural breath that comes back in. Then, when you’re ready, slowly inhale and, when you exhale, let all your air out slowly with a “vu” sound, like that of a low foghorn. Repeat this three times slowly. Imagine your brain moving down into your pelvis, like an ice cube melting, flowing down to help regulate your nervous system. And finally, just be curious about what you notice. Has anything shifted? Is your attention more available?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/07/4.jpg\")
\nIn our modern situation, and especially with the sudden need to care for each other with physical distancing, we spend a lot of time in focal vision, in which we move focused attention from one object to the next. It is helpful to extend our peripheral awareness and gain a greater sense of physical perspective as we adjust to the context we each find ourselves in. Staring at screens, or even at printed material, is a fairly recent human invention. Before industrialization, the vast majority of people did not spend so much time looking at things so close up. We evolved in the savannah. Human evolution brought us out of the trees to stand upright. It’s good for our system to be able to see over long distances, even in the cityscape. Focusing on the point of furthest contact gives us a more softened and expansive consciousness, while still maintaining a sense of awareness. The goal is to enter a state of relaxed alertness in which you are able to access a wide range of responsiveness in any given moment.
\n\nTo begin, let your eyes go where they want to go. Allow your eyes to wander slowly. Take a moment or two to do this; be curious about what you notice. Then, begin to look for the thing you can see that is the furthest away. It might take a little effort to adjust to looking in the distance, but take a moment to play with that. What’s the furthest thing that you can see right now? As you find that object, notice how your eyes soften, how the muscles in your face relax. You may notice that you naturally inhale or exhale more deeply.
\n\nNext, slowly extend your arms out in front of you and move them outward to the edges of what is just within your peripheral view. Once you have found that spot, turn your palms in and slowly wiggle your fingers. As you again find that object at the point farthest away from you, notice your eyes soften. Allow your eyes to rest and tap into a deeper sense of centering. Notice how you can hold relaxed vision and pay attention to the movement of your fingers at the same time. In this place, you are in balance with a relaxed alertness, ready to respond to threat from an underlying state of calm.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/07/3.jpg\")
\nIt’s important to make space to express feelings of agitation, rage, and grief. The goal of this exercise is to legitimize and tend to these feelings, giving them permission and expressive release. When we engage our facial muscles, it helps to downshift and regulate our nervous systems. This enables us to communicate better and read others’ faces better too.
\n\nBegin by directing your attention to your face. Slowly scrunch up the muscles in your face until they are as tight as possible. Hold this for a moment, then release the muscles. After a few natural breath cycles, move to widen and extend your face outward. Open your mouth and stretch your cheeks. Hold this for a moment and then rest. Move back and forth between these states several times.
\n\nThen, when you are ready, focus on any feelings that want attention and movement. Begin again to scrunch up your face, bringing awareness to your eyes and nose; scrunch harder, letting the anger know that it’s OK for it to be there. You may experience a spontaneous settling breath. Next, use your eyes to direct a piercing glare. Grit your teeth slightly. Allow any sort of rumble or sound you feel within you to make its way out of your mouth. When you are ready, let your face to return to a neutral state, allowing your eyes to soften. Repeat a couple times, if needed.
\n\nOur bodies can get stuck in habitual patterns in which some areas are extra tight or tense, while other areas can become absent from our awareness altogether. In order to shift these states, we have to become aware of them. An excellent way to do this is to create and release tension intentionally. This exercise brings attention to what your nerves are usually doing unconsciously, enabling you to begin to shift those patterns.
\n\nFrom a standing position, with your eyes closed if that’s comfortable for you, begin to tense up one area of your body, then another, allowing yourself to breathe. For each part of your body, count slowly to eight while you hold the tension forcefully. Then slowly release the tension as you exhale, imagining that that part of your body is expanding or taking up more space, as if all of the cells that comprise it are growing. After the next breath in, exhale for a count of eight, imagining that that part of your body is relaxing—melting like butter. Go through the process of tensing and relaxing each area twice. Be sure to allow for a few natural breath cycles between the two states.
\n\nStart by tensing your neck and throat. Many of us hold tension in our necks, sometimes keeping rigid as a consequence of trying to control situations. The neck is a great place to gain back some ease. After doing this twice, rest a moment. Second, tense your shoulders, arms, and hands, as if you are getting ready to fight. Notice your muscles and any sensations of strength in your body now. Feeling your arms can give you a sense of how much space you can take up. \nThird, tense your stomach muscles. Many people feel a tense knot in their upper bellies connected to anxiety, while others feel an emptiness or lack there. Focusing on sensing your belly can be a step towards restoring a depth of experience and a sense of quiet at just being. Finally, tense your legs and feet. Lots of us feel separated from our legs; restoring your awareness of them can be a step towards feeling your strength, standing your ground, and rediscovering your power to charge or flee if need be.
\n\nAfter all this tensing and relaxing, do an extra swinging movement to discharge any excess tension. Stand and turn your upper body from one side to the other, as if you’re looking first over your right shoulder, then over your left, gently rotating your whole upper body in the process. Let your arms hang loosely, following the movement, so they swing out in front of you, then knock gently at your sides at the end of each twist. You can relax your knees a little, letting your hips join the turning movement. Feel the gentle twist of your spine as you move. Do this for a minute or two.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/07/7.jpg\")
\nThis pandemic reminds us that we are never quite sure what is going to happen. As we confront uncertainty, it can help to give us a sense of our agency to address all the things that we can control. Even if these preparations do not become necessary for years or decades, you may feel more grounded having made them.
\n\nThe ways that the pandemic and social distancing have destabilized our lives have already given rise to a painful sense of loss for many of us. Whether you are dealing with the changes in your life or mourning the passing of a loved one, it can help to use ritual to structure your relationship to these feelings.
\n\nHere are some ideas for creating ritual around loss:
\n\nYou can also practice ritual on an individual level. This can help give you a feeling of control over your environment at times when that is otherwise hard to maintain. It can help you feel more grounded to focus on controlling things that only affect you, such as the structure of your day, the order in which you do certain things, or the arrangement of your things in a personal space, for example.
\n\nMany of us are experiencing a dramatic increase in the amount of time we spend at home with our loved ones. This makes it especially important not to take out our difficult feelings on them. Giving ourselves creative and intentional ways to deal with our need for control, such as focusing on ritual, can help keep us from hurting or conflicting with those around us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/07/2.jpg\")
\nOne of the best gifts we can give to each other is to prioritize having the difficult conversations necessary to prepare for the unknown. We encourage you to talk with your friends and family about what you would want in case of serious illness. This is a way to increase your self-determination and autonomy even in a worst-case scenario. Write down what you will want your companions to do if you are sick or dying and what you want them to do after your death. Here, we offer some of the logistical aspects of how to do so. Be as specific as you feel you can. It can be an immense relief for friends and family not to have to make such significant decisions for you in a situation in which you cannot make them for yourself. Preparing in this way forestalls the sort of second-guessing that can occur even among those who know your desires best. You are never too young or too old to take these steps.
\n\nGiving thought to this can be an important way to prepare for the unknown and to care for ourselves, as well as those we love.
\n\nAn advance directive, also known as a living will, is a state-specific legal document that declares your healthcare wishes should you become unable to make those decisions for yourself. It can describe what kinds of medical intervention you do or do not want—for example, CPR, artificial nutrition and hydration, intubation, or surgery. While the forms vary state to state, you can obtain them online or from your doctor, if you have one. This document can be revoked at any time as long as you are cognitively able to do so; it must be notarized to be considered applicable. The form requires you to name someone as your health care agent/health care power of attorney.
\n\nA HealthCare Power of Attorney is a person you select to make all your healthcare decisions when you cannot do so for yourself. You should share as many details with this person as you can about what you want for your care. You can set up secondary and tertiary agents in addition to a primary person. If you want them to make decisions collectively and horizontally, make this clear; legally speaking, your primary will have all of the decision-making power unless you specify otherwise. Make sure that you get consent before selecting someone for this role, as it can be a significant responsibility to give someone who may not feel comfortable making such high-stakes decisions.
\n\nCan this person do the job that I am asking them to do? Are they the type of person who can or would advocate for me? How comfortable are they making emotional decisions under stress? How likely are they to answer the phone in an emergency situation? Do they live close by? Are they able to travel to reach me? How well does this person know me? Have I asked them if they’d be willing to do this for me?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/05/07/5.jpg\")
\nIn the uncertainty of this moment, please know that you are not alone. You are part of a larger fabric of human collectivity that spans time and space, stretching beyond the confines of capital and state control, even beyond the reach of viruses. Whatever you may be facing, remember that those of us that dream of a wholly new world are in this together. Take care of yourselves. There is still so much possibility we can enact.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/04/10/and-after-the-virus-the-perils-ahead-resistance-in-the-year-of-the-plague-and-beyond", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/04/10/and-after-the-virus-the-perils-ahead-resistance-in-the-year-of-the-plague-and-beyond", "title": "And After the Virus? The Perils Ahead : Resistance in the Year of the Plague", "summary": "Confronting the pandemic and the totalitarian power grabs accompanying it, we must ask not only how we will survive, but also how we want to live.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-04-10T20:53:18Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:42Z", "tags": [ "solidarity", "pandemic", "Coronovirus", "rent strike" ], "content_html": "How will our society emerge from the COVID-19 crisis? Does the pandemic show that we need more centralized state power, more surveillance and control? What are the threats ranged against us—and how can we prepare to confront them?
\n\nSeveral days ago, the number of coronavirus deaths in New York City surpassed the death toll of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Whenever pundits and politicians invoke 9/11, you know they’re trying to set the stage for some shock and awe.
\n\nThe September 11 attacks served to justify the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition and torture, the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; these paved the way for a host of other catastrophes, including the rise of the Islamic State. While 2977 civilians were killed on September 11, the ensuing “War on Terror” killed at least one hundred times that many civilians.
\n\nIf the September 11 comparison shows anything, it is that the state response to the pandemic will be far more destructive than the virus itself. Let’s review what the dangers are and the logic of those who aim to drive the state response in order to prepare for the next stage of the crisis before it hits. It is not inevitable that what comes out of this will be tyranny; on the contrary, it might be upheaval.
\n\nAs we asserted long ago, in another century, there is a difference between life and survival. Confronting the pandemic and the totalitarian power grabs accompanying it, let’s concern ourselves not only with the question of how we will survive, but also of how we wish to live.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/2.jpg\")
Just as the September 11 attacks resulted in policies that killed hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with them, opportunistic states are responding to the pandemic by attempting to launch a new era of tyranny.
\n\n\n\n“Plague regulations also cast a long shadow over political history. They marked a vast extension of state power into spheres of human life that had never before been subject to political authority… They justified control over the economy and the movement of people; they authorized surveillance and forcible detention; and they sanctioned the invasion of homes and the extinction of civil liberties. With the unanswerable argument of a public health emergency, this extension of power was welcomed by the church and by powerful political and medical voices. The campaign against plague marked a moment in the emergence of absolutism, and more generally, it promoted an accretion of the power and legitimation of the modern state.”
\n\n-Epidemics and Society from the Black Death to the Present, Frank M. Snowden
\n
Owing to neoliberal globalization and automation, an increasing proportion of the global population is simply inessential to industrial production and distribution. Consequently, workers have flooded the service sector, working longer and longer hours to survive. Rather than renegotiating the peace treaties between capitalists and workers that sustained capitalism through the 20th century,1 governments have come to rely on ever more repressive policing, depending on technological innovations to keep restless populations under control. Nonetheless—or else for this very reason—unrest came to a boil in 2019 with uprisings in Hong Kong, Chile, Catalunya, Lebanon, Sudan, Haiti, and dozens of other countries, with more anticipated in 2020… until the virus reshuffled the cards.
\n\nThis is not an auspicious situation in which to face a pandemic. When the authorities regard an increasing proportion of the population as an expendable nuisance contained by ever-escalating violence, they have little incentive to keep us alive. Some, like Trump, want to establish gated communities of class, nationality, and ethnicity and leave everyone outside them at the mercy of these newly heightened risks. Others hope to broker a new deal between rulers and ruled by providing a modicum of safety to all in return for unprecedented forms of surveillance and control. Below, we’ll address both of these proposals for how to stabilize state power for the 21st century.
\n\nIf many radicals seem strangely sanguine about the prospects for social change, it is only because our current conditions have become so obviously untenable—not because there is anything particularly promising about them.
\n\nIn many ways, the worst-case scenario is already here. Police robots are already patrolling the streets of North Africa as drones target villagers in Italy. Viktor Orbán has become the de facto dictator of Hungary in the heart of supposedly democratic Europe. The Islamophobic government of India has locked down 1.3 billion people with a single order. In East Java, stay-at-home orders were used to disperse residents who had been defending their region against a destructive gold mine—but not to stop mining operations. From China to Peru, the pandemic has offered a pretext for governments to repress journalists reporting on their poor handling of it. Trump has taken advantage of the situation to intensify military operations throughout the Western Hemisphere—not to distract from his handling of the virus, as some foolishly assume, but because the virus affords him an irresistible opportunity to advance his agenda.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/7.jpg\")
Tunisia: “If you want an image of the future, picture a police robot stopping you to check your papers—forever.”
\nIn the US, risk of exposure is explicitly distributed according to class. Delivery drivers dispatch groceries to computer programmers who never leave their houses; nurses assigned to treat patients with COVID-19 symptoms bring iPhones with them so that doctors can FaceTime the patients without being exposed to danger themselves.
\n\nConfined to our houses, we are a captive consumer base in a company town run by Amazon, dependent on telecommunications companies that could cut us off from each other with the flip of a switch. The authorities are mulling the possibility of tracking and controlling all our movements with passports based on health data. If such a program gets off the ground, they could expand it to control freedom of movement according to legal status as well, transforming our entire society into a prison.
\n\nEven in nations that have “flattened the curve,” emergency measures including social distancing and prohibitions on large gatherings might well last another year while a vaccine is in development.
\n\n\n\n\n“Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.”
\n\n-“I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary.,” Ezra Klein
\n
We need to talk frankly about what all this means for social movements. Alongside the virus, we are experiencing the most brutal assault on our freedom in at least a generation. Many of our tools for collective self-defense depend on concentrating in large numbers, which the virus renders extremely dangerous. Even if a new revolt on the model of the uprising in Chile breaks out later this year, public health officials will deem it an epidemiological risk and call for the imposition of a new lockdown, provoking a split within our ranks between those invested in resistance at any price and those who consider it so irresponsible to risk spreading the virus that they would prefer total capitulation.
\n\nThis presents serious conundrums. Some are experimenting with automobile-based demonstrations, but we need to develop a much wider range of options.
\n\nWhile they take advantage of the pandemic to consolidate power and advance their agendas, authoritarians of all stripes are also using this opportunity to legitimize invasive state intervention as the only effective means of dealing with a crisis like COVID-19. We have to debunk their arguments, presenting more convincing and inspiring models for how to respond to this crisis. Even with all the technology and subservience at its disposal, the state cannot reign without a certain amount of perceived legitimacy, without a certain amount of public consent. In shifting definitively from the carrot to the stick, our rulers are making a dangerous gamble.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/1.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nThen the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness will spread over Egypt—darkness that can be felt.”
\n
The pandemic pushes several tensions that were already destabilizing our society to the breaking point. Let’s look at them alongside each other:
\n\nMany have been anticipating a financial crisis for years. Debt has served to keep the economy running—and to indenture people to it—for decades now. If the obligations of debt can be suspended or canceled by legislative fiat, if capitalism only functions because governments keep bailing out banks and corporations at everyone else’s expense, then in theory, this should call the entire system into question. The ways that the capitalist economy does not meet most people’s needs—for safety, for material necessities, for joy and togetherness and meaning—are cast in stark relief today. But if social distancing requirements and authoritarian clampdowns prevent anyone from demonstrating a feasible alternative, many people may respond by pining for an imagined past of normalcy.
\n\nIn the United States, access to health care has long been an expensive privilege; in many states, Obamacare made no difference whatsoever in the lives of the poorest. Now it’s clear how the health of the poor can impact the entire population.
\n\nThere are two possible responses to this. One is for our society to direct resources to meeting the health care needs of the entire population—on our terms, according to our priorities. The other is for the elite class to treat the health risks posed by the general population as a danger to be managed for the protection of the privileged.
\n\nWorldwide, property speculation and gentrification had already displaced countless millions and made housing nearly unaffordable for the majority; no wonder nearly a third of apartment renters in the US didn’t pay rent for April. Those who could only afford to live in urban shoeboxes are now confined to them like cells; others are homeless in the face of “stay at home” orders. Domestic violence and mental health issues have reached epidemic proportions alongside the virus.
\n\nAll this forces the issue: what is a home? Is it real estate to be speculated upon, a space of isolation, a tiny holdover of patriarchal feudalism (“a man’s home is his castle”)? Or is it something else—the feeling of security created by collective solidarity, something that could bind individuals and communities together rather than separating us?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/we-defend-each-other/we-defend-each-other_front_color.jpg\")
“Home is not a private enclosure that separates us into tiny fiefdoms that can be divided and conquered one by one; it the collective solidarity that we build in the process of standing up for each other and intervening whenever we see harm being done.”
\nThe pandemic has confined literally billions of people to their homes—those who have homes at all—but in many cases this has had an unexpected effect, opening up the home as a space of sociality, creating new forms of intimacy and strengthening networks. Yet this sociality is almost entirely virtual—and it depends on a very small number of telecommunications companies and platforms.
\n\nRight now, social distancing is exerting so much pressure on people that many of us feel a desperate urgency to gather in large numbers, to hug our friends and rub elbows with strangers. The value of public spaces and sociality has never been clearer. If this pressure continues building, it could have disruptive or liberating effects.
\n\nBut if social distancing continues in varied forms for a year or more, will people get used to it, coming to regard crowds fearfully, developing agoraphobia and new social anxieties? Will we have become so habituated to conducting our relationships in virtual mediums that afterwards we continue doing so even when we could be together in person? Will the power that the algorithms of corporations like Facebook have to shape online dialogue influence what it is possible to imagine even more than it has already?
\n\nThe reduction in ecological damage during the confinement period in China has been news around the world. Until now, everyone regarded the ongoing environmental catastrophe as something beyond our control. Now it is clear that—if we choose to—we could put a stop to it. Neither democracy nor authoritarian governments have been able to prioritize this. But if a virus could halt ecological destruction, so could an ungovernable social movement.
\n\nBorder clampdowns, state surveillance, authoritarianism, and the violence of the police state were already intensifying rapidly before this. The authorities are playing a risky game of double or nothing. Right now, they have a powerful justification for grabbing power—but if they overreach, all the pressure that has built up could explode.
\n\nThe release of prisoners from jails and prisons underscores that they didn’t have to be in there in the first place. Police have been presenting themselves as stopping the virus from spreading, but according to that logic, it would be safer to get them off the street, as well. It is the height of foolishness to imagine that the virus is an adversary that can be fought by military means in a “war,” to use Trump’s rhetoric; like the hydra, every blow that the armed forces aim at it will only make it stronger.
\n\nThe question remains whether that will be true of our resistance as well.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/3.jpg\")
Stay home—if you have a home. A warning in Cape Town, South Africa.
\nIn analyzing the available frameworks for how to respond to the pandemic, we can simplify the options on offer into three competing camps: the adherents of death, the apostles of survival, and the partisans of life.
\n\nIt has never been more obvious that “life” for the market represents death for us. Donald Trump and the other murder barons who would hasten us back to work for the sake of their precious bar graphs have made this clear enough. Capitalism has always been a cult of death. We sell away the unrepeatable moments of our lives for wages—we reduce forests to sawdust, clean air to smog, water to poison—as profit-driven market competition makes the rich richer and immiserates the rest of us. At this rate, we will soon join the countless species we have already driven into extinction.
\n\nThis is not just a question of whether Trump will call for us to return to work before the scientists give him permission; right now, everywhere that workers are being compelled to risk exposure to COVID-19 in order to pay rent, the market is already being prioritized over human life, just as it was before the pandemic.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/4.jpg\")
“Please God, kill us all if you have to, but just make the line rise again.”
\nWhile downplaying the risks of returning to work, nationalists like Trump and Matteo Salvini have used the pandemic to advance their program of shutting borders, insinuating that Chinese, African, and Latin American migrants are responsible for its spread. In fact, it appears that the virus arrived in New York from Europe; the chief vectors likely include the global business class, politicians, and police officers, one of the only groups permitted to congregate in groups and circulate freely without proper protective gear.
\n\nWhether or not this is how the coronavirus spread, these are the vectors of the virus of control—which is what makes the coronavirus so dangerous. If not for all the police, cameras, courts, and prisons, we would long ago have abolished the political and economic system that creates such great disparities in wealth and power. If not for those disparities, we would not be forced to keep showing up to work even when doing so means exposing ourselves to a statistically significant risk of getting killed in addition to all the usual humiliations of wage labor. The uneven distribution of resources and power increases the risks that the poor face, but it also increases the likelihood that poor people, homeless people, and workers will be compelled to do things that continue to spread the virus.
\n\nWhile it was ironic that the “libertarian” Rand Paul was the first Senator to test positive for coronavirus—and many hoped that the virus would punish him for his hubris once and for all—his infection, like the infection of so many New York City Police officers, is a perfect metaphor for the risk they pose us. There was never any danger that Rand Paul or Boris Johnson would be forced to go without a ventilator. Their carelessness, violence, and profiteering are the vectors through which the virus exposes the rest of us to mortal peril. COVID-19 is not an avenging angel that will carry out the vengeance of the people.
\n\nIt’s easy to be critical when bourgeois taxpayers who thoughtlessly paid for guided missiles to slaughter people in Iraq and Afghanistan are panicking about the coronavirus. But let’s not be cavalier about death. Any dismissiveness we express about the pandemic will ultimately serve employers who aim to play down the risks for workers and politicians who would prefer to let us die.2
\n\nYes, heart disease and cancer will kill more people than coronavirus this year; so may complications from AIDS. Few have spared a thought lately for the millions killed or displaced by global conflicts, though refugees will be among those hit hardest by the virus. Most people have grown inured to the costs of our way of life, including the ongoing murder-suicide of the entire biosphere by industrially-produced climate change; in this context, the widespread focus on the coronavirus comes across as myopic. But rather than habituating ourselves to yet another threat, we should extend the concern with which many regard the coronavirus outbreak to all the other tragedies to which everyone has become so accustomed.
\n\nEvery single death caused by our society’s unequal distribution of resources is an immeasurable tragedy. We should respond to each the way that the residents of Ferguson, Missouri responded to the murder of Michael Brown. While capitalists will surely attempt to exploit the distinctions between “essential workers,” the newly unemployed, and those who were already precarious or excluded to play us all against each other, we have to create ties of meaningful solidarity between those endangered by their jobs and those endangered by joblessness, between those who can’t pay rent and those who are struggling to pay their mortgages and those who were homeless long before this. Every one of us is essential.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/6.jpg\")
A demonstration in Berlin, March 2020.
\n\n\n\n“While America may be slow to act at first, once it is up to speed, it can probably match the capabilities of most authoritarian governments, including China’s.”
\n\n-The Thing That Determines a Country’s Resistance to the Coronavirus, Francis Fukuyama
\n
Demagogues like Trump have to compete with centrists like the Democratic Party who aim to preserve the same hierarchical structures, but propose to operate them more wisely and efficiently. From the New York Times to Western admirers of the Chinese Communist Party, many pundits have sought to distinguish themselves from Trump’s ignorant and careless response to the virus by calling for more stringent measures. They are the most passionate advocates of the invasive surveillance measures described above. In return, they offer those Trump would consign to death a better chance of survival.
\n\nIndeed, doesn’t this pandemic underscore that we need more centralization, more surveillance, “stronger” government?
\n\nIn fact, every form of government—from China and Iran to the United States—has concealed information about the pandemic and delayed responding to it in ways that intensified the risk for everyone. In Iran, the justification was to keep the population calm ahead of an election; in the United States, it was to keep the stock market going as long as possible. The problem is not that the authorities did not have enough control; the problem is the centralization of power itself. Whenever power is concentrated in the hands of a few, whether they be a military junta, party functionaries, or elected officials, they will inevitably prioritize their own interests over those of others. Every aspiring ruling party tells us that their governance would be better than the others, or that they could do more good with more power, but we should know better than to trust such promises.
\n\nFrancis Fukuyama has argued that whether people trust their rulers is the most decisive factor determining the effectiveness of government responses to the pandemic:
\n\n\n\n\n“What matters in the end is not regime type, but whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state.”
\n
This misses the mark in an obvious and disingenuous way: what happens when there is widespread trust in a “competent and effective” government that doesn’t do what is in the best interests of its population?
\n\nTo anarchists, the answer to this problem is clear enough. The only thing that can keep us safe is to establish widespread horizontal means for transmitting information whether the authorities wish for us to or not—so as to get around the state censorship that delayed public awareness of the COVID-19 epidemic in China, for example—and to be capable of implementing our own autonomous, participatory measures for survival, mutual aid, and collective self-defense. If we depend on existing governments to solve all our problems, we will be limited to endorsing their dangerous and self-serving policies while pinning our hopes on unsatisfactory efforts to achieve change via electoral means, like the Bernie Sanders campaign.
\n\nThe alternative to embracing technocratic top-down solutions is not to celebrate individual freedom on an isolated basis. Rather, it is to invest our energy in becoming more capable of sharing information and coordinating activity internationally, as anarchists have always advocated. Coordination and centralization are two different things.
\n\nAs others have argued, the vast majority of the credit for the measures that have delayed the spread of COVID-19 should go to ordinary people who have voluntarily engaged in social distancing and other responsible practices, not to governments. Voluntary, self-organized activity driven by ethics rather than coercion is always going to deliver the best results. If resources and knowledge are distributed widely and evenly enough, people are much more capable of assessing, prioritizing, and addressing the risks they face and pose to others than any centralized decision-making body could be.
\n\nIn short, the only way to ensure that the political systems in place will actually meet our needs is to be capable of easily overhauling or toppling them when they fail us. More centralized control will only make this more difficult.
\n\nThis brings us to a related question that will be especially important in the years following the end of the pandemic. Wouldn’t it be worth giving up our individual freedoms if we could obtain a little more security and safety in return? We will likely see demagogues from the center offering us this devil’s bargain.
\n\nWithout the freedom to organize and defend ourselves on our own terms, outside and against the ruling order, we won’t be able to defend any gains we make within it. Even if our only concern were to secure our survival in the barest material terms, giving up even an inch of freedom would never help us to achieve that goal.
\n\nThe open secret about centrists and technocrats is that they do not offer us a real alternative to the autocrats. Their programs always serve to strengthen the state apparatus that the autocrats then employ against us. Trump inherited all the power that Obama concentrated in the executive office. In the end, brutal autocracy or efficient technocracy is a false choice.
\n\nLet’s conclude with a word about expertise in the sciences. Thus far, medical scientists are perhaps the one group of authorities that has come through this disaster untarnished. But the medical industry itself has never functioned in the best interests of all humanity. Ideally, the development of scientific knowledge should be a collective endeavor involving the entire human race, not a domain in which accredited experts dictate Truth to everyone else. Capitalism and institutionalized systems of authority have long interfered with the participatory development of knowledge, gatekeeping access to the process by means of intellectual property rights, institutional monopolies on information, and determining who gains access to funding. The profit motive that the market imposes on researchers corrupts their priorities and interferes in the process itself—for example, medical study employees who are renting themselves as lab rats to pay their rent have no more incentive to answer questions honestly than medical testing corporations seeking to make a profit.
\n\nThis pandemic has illustrated the value of collaborative international approaches over market-driven models; practically everyone is hoping that scientists will cooperate across institutional and national borders to produce a vaccine. As in every aspect of our lives, we need more autonomy, more communication and horizontal coordination, not more hierarchy. The existing medical establishment is no more fit to govern us than the prevailing political institutions.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/th1an1/status/1248355378091474944\n\n\n
\n\n\n“In a pandemic that has deprived life of its social uses, life appears to threaten society totally.”
\n\n-The Pandemic Community, Nil Mata Reyes
\n
Survival is essential to life, but it’s not all there is to it. It is necessary but not sufficient.
\n\nIt is simple enough to speak of survival; we can define it with medical terminology. To speak about life, on the other hand, is inherently partisan. When one says life, one is always speaking of a particular way of living, a particular set of relations and affects and values. Those who refer to “life” as if what they mean by the word is self-evident always have some sort of agenda up their sleeves.
\n\nWhen our rulers try to focus discussion on how to assure our survival, we should change the subject to what sort of lives we want to lead in the post-pandemic world. There may be some authoritarian models that can indeed assure our survival, but none that can deliver the sort of life we desire. If we only haggle with our rulers over the jobs, wages, and healthcare essential to our survival, at the very best, we will come out of this with guaranteed housing in identical quarantine units, digital identity bracelets coded with biological data, and lifetime Netflix subscriptions to dull our senses and distract us from lives that will make Brave New World look like On the Road by comparison. That’s the most the technocrats have to offer. We have to dream bigger.
\n\nTo speak of freedom is almost anathema in the year of the plague. Freedom is associated with the kind of reactionary buffoons that are still pretending that the virus itself is some sort of conspiracy. Yet, as argued above, without freedom, we won’t be able to win or defend any gains we might make in the quality of our lives. Those who hold power will never grant us self-determination on our own terms—and without it, we are at their mercy. We have to change the balance of power.
\n\nToday, having already been robbed of almost everything that gives life meaning, many people feel they have nothing left to hold on to but survival in the barest biological sense. This is why they are willing to consider giving up even more. But if this crisis really does call everything into question, let’s fight for what we really want.
\n\nFrom mutual aid projects and wildcat strikes to rent strikes and prison revolts, there are already bold stirrings of resistance all around the world. These efforts must give rise to networks that can confront the new totalitarianism and defeat it. The stakes have never been higher.
\n\nPursuing life rather than survival means doing without guarantees. Those who wish to live fully must sometimes risk their lives. It is meaning that is at stake here, even more than safety.
\n\nWhat do you want? Free testing and treatment for COVID-19 and every other medical concern? To be able to use the machines at your employer’s factory to produce ventilators rather than automobiles? To be free to utilize the medical facilities at your nursing job to care for your friends and neighbors who have never been able to afford proper medical treatment? To have opportunities to employ your skills and resources and creativity for everyone’s benefit, rather than according to the dictates of the market? To abolish the economic pressures that compel people to risk spreading the virus and contributing to global climate change? To be able to travel to other lands without gentrifying the neighborhoods of the cities you visit? To be able to gather freely in festive crowds without fear of pandemics or police? To hold and be held, to thrive?
\n\nAnswer these questions for yourself, dear reader, and let us find common cause on the basis of our wildest dreams. We’ll join you in the streets at the conclusion of this nightmare—determined to bring all nightmares to an end.
\n\n\n\n\n“We’ve known what we’ve wanted this whole time, we just thought it was impossible. It is not. Not only is it possible, it is our only safe passage to the future.”
\n\n-“How to Fall”
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Self-Organization in Times of Pandemic: How the Masses Are Reconstructing Society—On the grassroots response to the pandemic in China
\nThe Coronation, Charles Eisenstein
\nA Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis, Jean-Pierre Dupuy
\nUS Pandemicism: Forced-line Labor and the New Care-ceral Surreality
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/04/10/5.jpg\")
Graffiti in Chile: “They say to wash our hands… but capitalism stole all the water and hoarded all the hand sanitizer.”
\nThese “peace treaties” included authoritarian state socialism in the Eastern Bloc, a combination of the Fordist compromise and social-democratic safety nets in the United States and Europe, and the promise of economic development in the Global South. ↩
\nIn Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti suggests that one of the fundamental drives motivating human beings is the desire to outlive their peers. At first glance, this is a strange proposition; yet in the United States, where social relations have always been based in cutthroat competition, people often see others’ misfortune as a net gain for themselves. This is a way to understand some of the cheap bravado with which young people have regarded the prospect of a pandemic that especially impacts the old and infirm. ↩
\nTo support the unfolding rent strike and eviction defense measures against COVID-19 profiteers, we have designed a poster with artwork from Portland-based anarchist artist N.O. Bonzo to hang in neighborhoods promoting collective resistance. Please print these out and distribute them widely (and safely)! If you no longer have access to printing facilities where you are, you can obtain print copies through the mail from Phoenix Autonomy.
\n\n Click on the image to download the poster.
\nLandlords, property managers, real estate speculators, debt collectors, police and sheriffs, be warned—in this community, we defend each other. Home is not a private enclosure that separates us into tiny fiefdoms that can be divided and conquered one by one; it the collective solidarity that we build in the process of standing up for each other and intervening whenever we see harm being done.
\n\nThe more each of us resists, the safer all of us will be.
\n\nThe idea of a rent strike in response to the unemployment and economic crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic gained visibility in the United States when a longstanding anarchist housing collective in San Francisco, Station 40, announced that on March 16 that they would not be paying rent in April and later hung a vast banner reading “RENT STRIKE” across the front of their building. By March 20, there was a nationwide telegram channel and rent strike groups had emerged in Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, the Bay Area, and elsewhere.
\n\nBy the beginning of April, dozens of rent strike groups were actively organizing around the US. The New York Times reported that 40% or more tenants in New York City might not be able to pay April’s rent whether they wished to or not.
\n\nIn Canada, rent strike organizing has spread to Toronto, Montréal, and elsewhere, while housing activists in Vancouver have attempted to occupy buildings to establish self-organized residences for the homeless in response the pandemic. In the UK, students in Bristol have mobilized alongside other sectors of society. Rent strike organizing is underway in Italy with a website and Telegram channel of their own. In Catalunya, one rent strike initiative spearheaded by anarchists had drawn commitments from 10,000 households by April 3. There are stirrings in Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, and elsewhere around the world.
\n\nWell before the pandemic, gentrification had already rendered many cities almost uninhabitable for all but the very wealthy, destroying countless neighborhoods and communities. If we don’t mobilize quickly and forcefully, this pandemic is going to be a step in the emergence of an explicitly expendable class—a vast number of people who are forced to work in high-risk environments without any protection whatsoever. This reality has already arrived for Whole Foods employees, garbage collectors, and countless others.
\n\nThere is no need to set about trying to convince people to go on strike against rent, loan, or mortgage payments. Millions are already unable to pay whether they like it or not. The pressing thing is to prepare networks that can defend everyone who can’t pay. Over the coming months, we have to develop tactics of mutual support and solidarity and strategies with which to shame and attack every landlord that wants to penalize people for not being able to pay. To this end, we can revisit the tactics of the SHAC campaign and the victory of the poll tax non-payment movement in the UK.
\n\nOf course, the more people refuse to pay rent, the more pressure on the economy and our rulers to make provisions for those in need. In the long run, rather than making demands of our oppressors, who are at least as incapable of addressing the catastrophes they have brought about as we are, our organizing should equip us to make the changes we want to see directly. As the totalitarian police state becomes more and more invasive and destructive in the wake of this pandemic, it will be especially important that we continue building connections and gaining experience in networks like the ones that will emerge from proper eviction resistance organizing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/covid19-profiteers/covid19-profiteers_front_color.jpg\")
“During the COVID-19 crisis, this institution took advantage of the pandemic to profit on others’ misfortune.” A poster with which to identify landlords, corporations, and other institutions that took advantage of the pandemic to exploit others for their own benefit. Click on the image to download the poster.
\nToolkit for general action
\nThe Tenants Will Win—Pandemic Organizing Guide, Bay Area, California
\nCOVID-19 Tenant Organizing Toolkit, Chicago, Illinois
\nKnow Your Rights—Reference material for New York City
\nDisclaimer: No vultures were harmed in the designing or production of this poster. The metaphor of landlords being “vultures” is a non-ecological understanding of the important role that scavengers play in ecosystems. Vultures and other scavengers don’t terrorize and exploit other living animals the way landlords do. All other things being equal, we’d better off if every landlord were magically transformed into an actual vulture.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/03/18/surviving-the-virus-an-anarchist-guide-capitalism-in-crisis-rising-totalitarianism-strategies-of-resistance", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/03/18/surviving-the-virus-an-anarchist-guide-capitalism-in-crisis-rising-totalitarianism-strategies-of-resistance", "title": "Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide : Capitalism in Crisis—Rising Totalitarianism—Strategies of Resistance", "summary": "Let's protect ourselves and each other from the threat posed by the virus and a social order that never preserved our well-being in the first place.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-03-18T20:30:36Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:42Z", "tags": [ "Italy", "pandemic", "Coronovirus" ], "content_html": "The pandemic is not going to pass in the next few weeks. Even if strict confinement measures succeed in cutting the number of infections down to what it was a month ago, the virus could resume spreading exponentially again as soon as the measures are suspended. The current situation is likely to continue for months—sudden curfews, inconsistent quarantines, increasingly desperate conditions—though it will almost certainly shift form at some point when the tensions within it boil over. To prepare for that moment, let’s protect ourselves and each other from the threat posed by the virus, think through the questions about risk and safety that the pandemic poses, and confront the disastrous consequences of a social order that was never designed to preserve our well-being in the first place.
\n\nThis text offers medical advice for dealing with the virus; this one addresses the importance of mutual aid. You can find a list of mutual aid initiatives in the US here and in Germany here. Learn more about rent strike initiatives here and here. You can print out a zine version of this text here. For an introduction to anarchism, try this.
\n\nLongstanding anarchist forms of organization and security have a lot to offer when it comes to surviving the pandemic and the panic it is causing.
\n\nThe prospect of quarantine tells us a lot about how we were already living. Those who live in close-knit families or joyous collective houses are in a much better situation than those in broken marriages and those who have big empty houses all to themselves. This is a good reminder of what really matters in life. Despite the models of safety that are represented by the bourgeois dream of nuclear family home ownership and the US foreign policy that reflects it, togetherness and care are much more important than the kind of security that depends on fencing out the whole world.
\n\n“Social distancing” must not mean total isolation. We won’t be safer if our society is reduced to a bunch of atomized individuals. That would neither protect us from the virus nor from the stress of this situation nor from the power grabs that capitalists and state authorities are preparing to carry out. As much as the elderly are at risk from the virus, for example, older people are already dangerously isolated in this society; cutting them off from all contact with others will not preserve their physical or mental health. All of us need to be embedded in tight-knit groups in a way that maximizes both our medical safety and our collective capacity to enjoy life and take action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/3.jpg\")
\nChoose a group of people you trust—ideally people you share day to day life with, all of whom share similar risk factors and levels of risk tolerance. For the purposes of surviving the virus, this is your affinity group, the basic building block of decentralized anarchist organization. You don’t necessarily need to live in the same building with them; the important thing is that you can cut down your risk factors to those you all share and feel comfortable with. If your group is too small, you’ll be isolated—and that will especially be a problem if you get sick. If your group is too big, you’ll face needless risk of infection.
\n\nTalk with each other until you arrive at a set of shared expectations as to how you will engage with the risk of contagion. This could be anything from total individual physical isolation to remembering to use hand sanitizer after touching surfaces in public. If you are able to minimize your risk factors for exposure to the virus outside your group, within it you can still hug, kiss, make food together, touch the same surfaces. The important thing is to agree about the level of risk you are collectively ready to tolerate, adhere to a set security protocol, and communicate clearly when a new risk factor arises.
\n\nThis is what anarchists call security culture—the practice of establishing a set of shared expectations to minimize risk. When we’re dealing with police repression and the surveillance of the state, we protect ourselves by sharing information on a need-to-know basis. When we’re dealing with a virus, we protect ourselves by controlling the vectors along which contagions can spread.
\n\nIt’s never possible to avoid risk altogether. The point is to determine how much risk you are comfortable with and conduct yourself in such a way that if something goes wrong, you won’t have any regrets, knowing you have taken all the precautions you deemed necessary. Sharing your life with an affinity group, you get the best parts of both caution and conviviality.
\n\nFor resources on how to continue organizing via secure digital platforms with other comrades despite “social distancing,” read this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/2.jpg\")
\nOf course, your affinity group alone won’t suffice to meet all your needs. What if you need resources that none of you can safely access? What if you all get sick? You need to be connected to other affinity groups in a network of mutual aid, so that if any group in the network gets overwhelmed, the others can come to their aid. Participating in a network like this, you can circulate resources and support without all needing to expose yourselves to the same level of risk. The idea is that when people from different groups within the network interact, they employ much stricter safety measures, so as to minimize additional risk.
\n\nThe phrase “mutual aid” has been thrown around a lot lately, even by politicians. In its proper sense, mutual aid does not describe a program that provides unidirectional assistance for others the way a charity organization does. Rather, it is the decentralized practice of reciprocal care via which participants in a network make sure that everyone gets what they need, so that everyone has reason to be invested in everyone else’s well-being. This is not a matter of tit-for-tat exchange, but rather an interchange of care and resources that creates the sort of redundancy and resilience that can sustain a community through difficult times. Mutual aid networks thrive best when it is possible to build up reciprocal trust with others over a long period of time. You don’t have to know or even like everyone else in the network, but everyone has to give enough to the network that together, your efforts create a sense of abundance.
\n\nThe framework of reciprocity might seem to lend itself to social stratification, in which people from similar social classes with similar access to resources gravitate to each other in order to get the best return on the investment of their own resources. But groups from different backgrounds can have access to a wide range of different kinds of resources. In these times, financial wealth may prove much less valuable than experience with plumbing, the ability to speak a particular dialect, or social ties in a community you never thought you’d find yourself depending on. Everyone has good cause to extend their networks of mutual aid as far and wide as possible.
\n\nThe fundamental idea here is that it is our bonds with others that keep us safe, not our protection from them or our power over them. Preppers who have focused on building up a private stockpile of food, gear, and weapons are putting the pieces in place for an each-against-all apocalypse. If you put all your energy into individual solutions, leaving everyone around you to fight for survival on their own, your only hope is to outgun the competition. And even if you do—when there’s no one else to turn those guns on, you’ll be the last one left, and that gun will be the last tool at your disposal.
\n\nThe appearance of a new potentially lethal contagion compels all of us to think about how we relate to risk. What’s worth risking our lives for?
\n\nOn reflection, most of us will conclude that—all other things being equal—risking our lives just to keep playing our role in capitalism is not worth it. On the other hand, it might be worth it to risk our lives to protect each other, to care for each other, to defend our freedom and the possibility of living in an egalitarian society.
\n\nJust as being completely isolated is not safer for the elderly, trying to avoid risk entirely won’t keep us safe. If we keep strictly to ourselves while our loved ones get sick, our neighbors die, and the police state takes away every last vestige of our autonomy, we will not be safer. There are many different kinds of risk. The time is probably coming when we will have to rethink what risks we are prepared to take in order to live with dignity.
\n\nThis brings us to the question of how to survive all the needless tragedies that governments and the global economy are heaping upon us in the context of the pandemic—not to mention all the needless tragedies they were already creating. Fortunately, the same structures that can enable us to survive the virus together can also equip us to stand up to them.
\n\nA clash in Milan between police and anarchists expressing solidarity during the prison riots in Italy.
\nLet’s be clear: totalitarianism is no longer a threat situated in the future. The measures being implemented around the world are totalitarian in every sense of the word. We are seeing unilateral government decrees imposing total travel bans, 24-hour-a-day curfews, veritable martial law, and other dictatorial measures.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/5.jpg\")
\nThis is not to say that we should not be implementing measures to protect each other from the spread of the virus. It is simply to acknowledge that the measures that various governments are implementing are based in authoritarian means and an authoritarian logic. Think about how much more resources are being poured into the military, the police, the banks, and the stock market than into public health care and resources to help people survive this crisis. It’s still easier to get arrested for loitering than to get a test for the virus.
\n\nJust as the virus shows us the truth about how we were already living—about our relationships and our homes—it also shows us that we were already living in an authoritarian society. The arrival of the pandemic just makes it formal. France is putting 100,000 police on the streets, 20,000 more than were deployed at the high point of the gilets jaunes protests. Refugees in need of asylum are being turned away along the borders between the US and Mexico and between Greece and Turkey. In Italy and Spain, gangs of police attack joggers in empty streets.
\n\nPolice attacking and beating a jogger in Sicily.
\nIn Germany, the police in Hamburg have taken advantage of the situation to evict a self-organized refugee tent that had been standing for several years. Despite the quarantine, the police in Berlin are still threatening to evict an anarchist collective bar. Elsewhere, police dressed in full pandemic stormtrooper regalia raided a refugee center.
\n\nWorst of all, all this is occurring with the tacit consent of the general population. The authorities can do virtually anything in the name of protecting our health—right up to killing us.
\n\nAs the situation intensifies, we will likely see the police and the military employing increasingly lethal force. In many parts of the world, they are the only ones who are able to gather freely in large numbers. When police comprise the only social body that is able to gather en masse, there is no word other than “police state” to describe the form of society we live in.
\n\nThere have been signs that things were heading in this direction for decades. Capitalism used to depend on keeping a massive number of workers available to perform industrial labor—consequently, it was not possible to treat life as cheaply as it is treated today. As capitalist globalization and automation have diminished dependence on workers, the global workforce has shifted steadily into the service sector, doing work that is not essential to the functioning of the economy and therefore less secure and well-paid, while governments have become increasingly dependent on militarized police violence to control unrest and anger.
\n\nIf the pandemic goes on long enough, we will probably see more automation—self-driving cars pose less threat of infection to the bourgeoisie than Uber drivers—and the displaced workers will be divided up between the repression industries (police, military, private security, private military contractors) and precarious workers who are forced to take on great risk to make a few pennies. We’re accelerating into a future in which a digitally connected privileged class performs virtual labor in isolation while a massive police state protects them from an expendable underclass that takes most of the risks.
\n\nAlready, billionaire Jeff Bezos has added 100,000 jobs to Amazon, anticipating that his company will drive local stores everywhere out of business. Likewise, Bezos won’t give his Whole Foods employees paid leave despite the constant risk they face in the service sector—though he is giving them a $2 raise through April. In short, he still considers their lives worthless, but he admits that their deaths should be better paid.
\n\nIn this context, there is bound to be revolt. It is likely that we will see some social reforms aimed at placating the population—at least temporary ones to mitigate the impact of the pandemic—but that they will arrive alongside the ever-increasing violence of a state that no one can imagine doing without, insofar as it is misunderstood as the protector of our health.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/6.jpg\")
\nIn fact, the state itself is the most dangerous thing to us, as it enforces the drastically uneven distribution of resources that compels us to face such imbalanced distributions of risk. If we want to survive, we can’t just demand more equitable policies—we also have to delegitimize and undermine the power of the state.
\n\nTowards that end, we’ll conclude with a few strategies for resistance that are already getting off the ground.
\n\nIn San Francisco, the housing collective Station 40 has led the way by unilaterally declaring a rent strike in response to the crisis:
\n\n\n\n\n“The urgency of the moment demands decisive and collective action. We are doing this to protect and care for ourselves and our community. Now more than ever, we refuse debt and we refuse to be exploited. We will not shoulder this burden for the capitalists. Five years ago, we defeated our landlord’s attempt to evict us. We won because of the the solidarity of our neighbors and our friends around the world. We are once again calling on that network. Our collective feels prepared for the shelter-in-place that begins at midnight throughout the bay area. The most meaningful act of solidarity for us in this moment is for everyone to go on strike together. We will have your back, as we know you will have ours. Rest, pray, take care of each other.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/7.jpg\")
\nFor millions of people who will not be able to pay their bills, this makes a virtue of necessity. Countless millions who live from one paycheck to the next have lost their jobs and income already and have no way to pay April’s rent. The best way to support them is for all of us to go on strike, rendering it impossible for the authorities to target everyone who does not pay. Banks and landlords should not be able to continue profiting on renters and mortgages when there is no way to earn money. That’s just common sense.
\n\nThis idea has already been circulating in many different forms. In Melbourne, Australia, the local branch of the Industrial Workers of the World is promoting a COVID-19 Rent Strike Pledge. Rose Caucus is calling for people to suspend rent, mortgage, and utility payments during the outbreak. In Washington state, Seattle Rent Strike is calling for the same. Chicago tenants are threatening a rent strike alongside people in Austin, St. Louis, and Texas. In Canada, there is organizing in Toronto, Kingston, and Montreal. Others have circulated documents calling for a rent and mortgage strike.
\n\nFor a rent strike to succeed on a countrywide level, at least one of these initiatives will have to gain enough momentum that large numbers of people will be certain they will not be left high and dry if they commit to participating. Yet rather than waiting for a single mass organization to coordinate a massive strike from above, it is best for these efforts to begin at the grassroots level. Centralized organizations often compromise early in the process of a struggle, undercutting the autonomous efforts that give such movements power. The best thing we could do to come out of this experience stronger would be to build networks that can defend themselves regardless of decisions from on high.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/03/18/4.jpg\")
\nHundreds of workers at the Atlantic shipyards in Saint-Nazaire went on strike yesterday. In Finland, bus drivers refused to take payments from riders in order to increase their safety from contagion and protest against the risks they are being exposed to, showing in the process that public transit could be free.
\n\nIf ever there was a good time for the embattled and precarious working class to show strength through strikes and work stoppages, this is it. For once, much of the general population will be sympathetic, as the interruption of business as usual can also diminish the risk of the virus spreading. Rather than seeking to improve the individual circumstances of particular employees through wage increases, we believe the most important thing is to build networks that can interrupt business as usual, disrupt the system as whole, and point towards the revolutionary introduction of alternative ways of living and relating. At this point, it is easier to imagine the abolition of capitalism than to imagine that even under these circumstances, it could be reformed to serve all of our needs in a just and equitable manner.
\n\nRevolts in Brazilian and Italian prisons have already resulted in several escapes, including mass escapes. The courage of these prisoners should remind us of all the targeted populations that are kept out of public view, who will suffer the most during catastrophes like this.
\n\nIt can also inspire us: rather than obeying orders and remaining in hiding as the entire world is converted into a matrix of prison cells, we can act collectively to break out.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/bnonews/status/1239708674626650115\n\n\n
Ten Premises for a Pandemic—”A pandemic isn’t a collection of viruses; it is a social relation among people, mediated by viruses.”
\n\nAsk a Different Question: Reclaiming Autonomy of Action during the Virus
\n\nMonologue of the Virus: “I came to stop the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find.”
\n\nFor a Solidarity-Based and Militant Approach to the Virus
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/five-actions/five-actions_front_color.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/posters/five-actions/five-actions_front_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the poster.
\n