From “It’s all just beginning”, Justin E.H. Smith. 2020.
[...] So I’m going have to rethink that particular book project. But that follows from the much more general point that we are all going to have to rethink everything. One thing that is certain is that you are now free to put down whatever cool theorist your peers once convinced you you had to read. None of that discourse is any more germane to thinking about the present situation than, say, Robert Burton, or Galen, or St. Theresa of Ávila. Read whatever you want to read now, and don’t be distracted by those writers who are so set in their ways that they know no other strategy than to recover formulae devised back in the old world, and to retry them in the new one, like stubborn Norsemen struggling to graze cattle in Greenland, when the world they find themselves in demands they learn to hunt seals. Thus Slavoj Žižek is now blogging for RT, the Russian state propaganda network, about how the virus puts him in mind of Tarantino films, while Giorgio Agamben is pushing a species of Trumpian doubt-mongering by claiming that the “disproportionate reaction” to the pandemic is nothing more than an assertion of authoritarian biopolitics. Honestly, at this point whoever’s left of the vanguard of continental philosophy should probably just start hawking men’s vitamin supplements on late-nite TV. These are not the end times, I mean, but nor are they business as usual, and we would do well to understand that not only is there room for a middle path between these, but indeed there is an absolute necessity that we begin our voyage down that path. To the squealing chiliasts and self-absorbed presentists, indulging themselves with phrases like “the end of the world,” I say: “Did it never dawn on you that all of human history has just been one partial apocalypse after another?” And to the business-as-usual mandarins I say: “Thank you for your service in the glorious battles of the past.” From "April 2 Rising Majority Teach-In: Movement Building in the time of Coronavirus", Angela Davis. 2020. I think that we should seize upon this as an opportunity to do the kind of organizing that enhances the sense of a need for international solidarity. This has the capacity to perhaps bring us out of our US-centric slumber, and to recognize that that we can take leadership from people who are organizing in other parts of the world, domestic workers all over the world who are now losing their job, of course, because of the stay at home orders, those who care for people in the for-profit nursing industry, the nursing home industry such as the outbreak that happened in Washington. And and I just want to say one thing about gender violence and and child abuse. Because it seems, it seems that the whole notion of staying at home is assumed to imply that we can retreat to this kind of nurturing environment of this refuge. But for many, they're being forced to spend 24 hours a day with their abusers, unable to connect with those who have been their lifelines. Children and women who are abused. I think that this isn't something we should seize upon as an opportunity to do the kind of organizing that is going to have our sense of belongingness to the world and enhance our sense of the possibility of moving Beyond capitalism. From "The Pandemic is a Portal", Arundhati Roy. 2020. The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered. At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party. The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament. The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time. Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”. It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed. Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser. March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”. Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers. He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals. Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers. On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed. He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted. Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve. The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles. As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way. Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love. As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray. A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave. Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view. When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties. Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border. “Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. “Us” means approximately 460m people. — — — Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. From "Irreversible Shift", Robert Omar Hamilton. 2019. On the plane I thought I would be touching down in a country primed for a revolution. Or, at least, a city with a little excitement. But London has always been a dark, quiet, private city. That never changes. What greeted me at the airport was BP, its generous, green advertising vista reassuring us that the fossil fuel giant has renewables in the pipeline. Journeying into London the constant advertising sings a happy chorus of a green city of upcycled art, biodegradable plastic, low-emissions cycling, sustainable fashion, recycled Coca-Cola, and renewable energies. In Cairo, the drive to the airport had been an altogether lazier advertorial experience. An overpass cuts through the city under billboard after billboard. Billboards squatting on top of crumbling buildings, billboards craning up from destroyed neighborhoods, new billboards erected on top of old billboards: all with the same offer of verdant gated housing compounds for the elite to flee the multiplying masses of the collapsing city. In both cities, the advertisers are selling salvation. [...] LONDON, WHICH BUILT ITSELF by prying open protectionist territories to its products, is now being hollowed out by an internationalized world market of its own creation. Londoners, today, are the ones being forced from their homes as a new city grows of buildings built not for living in, but, in Boris Johnson’s words, as “safety deposit boxes in the sky.” What happens to a city when it is not built for living in? Growing up in London, the discovery of new slang was a weekly thrill. As I ventured farther from home and later out into the night I would absorb the new language of the city at parties, bus stops, and nightclubs. Prang, cotch, safe, blud, dark. We would pass weekend nights on train platforms, learning to inhale in dark parks and looking for house parties. Bare, fit, tonk, peng, chirps. Words from hip-hop, from Jamaica, from UK garage music, words that became central to the style of the city, to being young in public in the strange drift of the early Blair years. Jack, chat, step, fine. It felt, then, that were we to remain teenagers, we would soon have our own distinct language, entirely incomprehensible to the adults. I thought, too, that when I grew older I would no longer understand the city’s language. That the beats of the future would be as incomprehensible to me as drum ‘n’ bass to my mother, that the city would wear a new lexical snakeskin—shiny, fresh, full of charm and warning. But, the strange thing is, nothing really changed. Garage became grime, dubstep went mainstream, and techno conquered the world while the words of the ’90s became fixtures in the language. Cinema became a looping carousel of fantasy and superheroes, fashion froze, television peaked then turned to classic reruns. The dominant cultural mode became one of kitsch and self-reference, while the commercially avant-garde was confined to technology. Between 1950 and 1999 the Oxford English Dictionary added 53,417 new words. Between the year 2000 and today, only 593 neologisms have been officially recorded—a notable deceleration. Oxford’s English is growing at about 20 percent of its previous speed, with wholly one third of the language’s expansion from the world of tech. Is it any wonder that in a century dominated by surveillance, paranoia, terrorism, rendition, financial collapse, and hard borders our language has retreated? Our reality, for years now, has been of individual survival under austerity; the erasure of the public in a city of stagnating wages that in eight years lost half its youth centers and half its nightclubs and saw them replaced with sterile glass towers. One by one London’s houses, monuments, newspapers, and artworks are being eaten up by the searching, liquid capital of Indian steel tycoons and Arab petrolords and Russian disaster capitalists. Of course the language has stopped growing: where are we even supposed to talk to each other now? Between 1950 and 1999, 148 new words officially arrived in the dictionary from the Caribbean (though, of course, many more actually took root). That’s an average of three a year. Between the years 2000 and 2019 only one new word was registered. [...] “We are not here to make life easy for you,” said an official in an immigration reporting center to a man facing deportation. “It’s a challenging environment we have got to make for people. It’s working because it’s pissing you off. Am I right? There you go. That’s my aim at the end of the day, to make it a challenging environment for you. It’s pissing you off. You’re telling me it’s pissed you off. There you go, I’ve done my job.” Capitalism, they used to say, is a tide that lifts us all. They don’t use that metaphor anymore, in our age of drowning. [...] Ten days before the election a new London bank vault announced itself to the public. “We won’t deal with millionaires” the director proudly declared. “Only billionaires.” International Bank Vaults, which is owned by South African multimillionaire Ashok Sewnarain, said it was opening the London vault owing to increased demand from the world’s wealthiest people fearing a possible reaction against rising inequality . . . The wealthy also fear the possible impact of the climate crisis, and are increasingly storing their wealth in gold bars. In 2004 there was one food bank in the UK. In 2019 there are 2,040. Sixty thousand children were given charity food supplies in London last year. Around them, international finance flows. The world capital pulls in dirty money looking for a safe home and pulses out exploratory capital hungry for risk and profit. Active money leaves the city and dormant money arrives. Investigation by Guy Shrubsole, map by Anna Powell-Smith. Beginning in the late 1950s, the British Overseas Territories of the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, and Montserrat were developed by London’s bankers as sites through which to run offshore trades. The Empire lives on in the capital, as dark money loops back into politics and property, often disguised in the language of nationalism. [...] THE IRAQ WAR BEGAN when I was 17, and as I emerged into adulthood in London I found myself circling questions of narrative and experience. I remember thinking that if people were as culturally familiar with Arab or Palestinian or Iraqi lives as they were with American suburban ones, then wars would be much harder to wage. Later I would learn the word for that idea is “representation.” In 2011 I settled in Cairo, where the revolution’s politics sidelined questions of identity and culture in favor of mass mobilization, macro-economics, and geopolitics. At the time, it felt obvious: first the regime would be defeated, then a new culture would be built. In hindsight, these absences created crucial weaknesses: questions of gender were deprioritized, so when sexual attacks began on protesters the Left was deeply divided as to both cause and response; nationalism and patriotism were never challenged, which maintained the emotional bridge for the military coup to come; minority concerns were bundled into a One Nation fervor and forgotten, mutating later into a full-scale insurgency in Sinai; meaningful international solidarity was sidestepped to avoid accusations of being unpatriotic, and our national struggles remain divided to this day. Two years after the military coup my partner and I were living in New York, where the issue of representation was in full force. We watched #OscarsSoWhite in a gentrifying bar in Bushwick and debated the position of class in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing and held our breath as the city fell silent on the night of Donald Trump’s election. The next night, sitting with two friends with tears in their eyes, I recognized their feeling exactly from post-coup Cairo: what is this place? Who are these people that we live among? So here we are, back at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, listening to the moving, personalized narrative of the brave imam of Finsbury Park Mosque. Generations of effort to elevate the experiences of migrants and minorities have built to this moment, to the possibility of these narratives taking over government, to a political manifesto that promises to “conduct an audit of the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy.” And, yet, it is a bitter pill because this one experience is either being held up—in the best case—to the exclusion of another or—in the worst—in competition with it. When I leave the event I feel at a loss. I wander around Tottenham for hours, working it over. Was the event just tone deaf? After four years of attacks? After years, as Muslims, as Black people, as the ones who watched Tony Blair and George Bush returned to power, who have watched our people drown in the Mediterranean, who have been so collectively vilified for so long that we sometimes struggle to recognize ourselves—are we now supposed to do the same thing to British Jews—to ignore their fears, to denarrativize them, to sideline them as political opposition? [...] The neoliberal consensus, Third Way capitalism, post-Thatcherism—however we define our economic chapter, it is clear that it is collapsing. We are in the interregnum—but what will rise in its place? Further concentration of wealth at the top, massive expansion of surveillance, police powers, and population-control technologies as the earth is strip-mined for its final generations of resources? Or something new? A future in which we harness our technological capacity, drive our political will, and expand our empathetic abilities to take on financial, racial, gender and energy inequality? Parliamentary politics is just one part of a change that will require all of our commitment. To build a world free of inequality will not come about through Acts of Parliament only, but through acts of collective will as we fundamentally re-shape the way we live together.
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