2021-09-18, COVID Broke America

Before I begin, let me start by saying thank you to everyone who maintained their paid subscription here or through my Ko-Fi. That money has been covering my groceries these past few months, which has been a tremendous burden off my back.

In my last letter, I announced that spring was coming, and encouraged everyone to reckon with their own relationships with our contemporary kyriarchy, colonial white dominionism. That letter was sent out February 26th. Back then, lots of folk who read it probably felt that with a new president, things were going to get back on track. The pandemic already seemed to be waning, and with control of the executive and legislative branches of our federal government, the Democrats seemed likely to move toward economic reforms that would reduce the growing gray-zones between middle class and working class, and working class and the underclass. (Petite bourgeousise, proletariat, and lumpenproletariat, precisely, if perhaps misspelled.)

Well, it is now the fall. In that time, my family, and hundreds of thousands (and soon millions of families) got kicked out of our homes. Luckily an accomplice stepped forward, and so while the displacment and dispossession was a substational disruption, I actually feel closer to the future I imagined than I expected to be this time of year, had things not gone badly. I have very good bad luck, I've often said.

In addition to the evictions occurring across the country, the pandemic continues to move through our communities in waves. Only recently have I seen local folk acknowledge the Delta variant, but I hear comrades on the horizon crying out "Lambda!" and "Mu!" And through it all, environmental destruction continues to accelerate, despite the most authoritative experts in our world saying we are in a state of 'red alert' and absolutely must stop behaving as we are, immediately.

But I'll stop there. Most people are aware that there are abnormal situations developing in our reality; and this letter is not the place, right now, to raise that awareness. Instead I want to take a brief moment and share my conclusion from this summer:

COVID broke America. I don't mean America as in the material infrastructure, but as in the concept of what America is. The disruptions to the infrastructure are, so far, very minor, yet they have solidified a real shift toward an extreme commitment toward manifesting various American ideologies. Against the backdrop of the egotistic isolation built to require consumerism, this has the effect of being an acceleration into late liberalism where this commitment is acted out only through aesthetic, further developing the marketization of the recuperation of the radical into the state's ontology.

That was a lot of jargon to say: Even though inflation, supply shortages, etc., have been pretty small, various groups have used those things to justify more firmly believing in an American ideology (be it American capitalism, American communism, American syndicalism, etc.), to the point where people are willing to take actions to try and move America toward that ideology. But because everyone is very isolated by and for consumerism, those actions will largely be aesthetic, existing within the infrastructure of America that already exists. Such aesthetic actions create a "discourse" that then can be commercialized and then you see Marx slogans for sale on tee-shirts at publicly-owned corporate retailers.

There is a popular story about how when the Roman empire was collapsing, they made sure to provide their population with food and entertainment, so that they would be too complacent to revolt. This was not actually that effective, for many reasons, but for the sake of narrative I'm looking at one: the spaces where entertainment happens can be spaces for radicalization.

If all your neighbors are gathered together to watch a show, all it takes is one neighbor saying "Hey so the way our mayor treats us is crap, right?" to start a conversation about the mayor. Sure, the mayor can hire guards to keep the conversation to a minimum, but, those guards are probably neighbors too.

The social world served as a whispernet and sneakernet for information, that in the hands of the proletariat became class consciousness and fuel for radicalization and insurrection.

Look at our contemporary circuses. They are electric screens. We each have our own, though some might share a large one for a couple hours. They flatten geographic boundaries, but at the same time, flatten everything else. The channels they carry are constructed with the capital interests of commercial agents as a primary concern, not their ability to facilitate community or communication. We know they closely monitor us, and everything we say through them, or possibly even around them, can be heard. We don't know who all exactly can hear it, but we know they have more systemic power than us.

The nature of these spaces makes it very difficult for them to be spaces for liberation, and perhaps impossible for them to be spaces for liberation outside of the capitalist gaze and a part of the market's source for fresh cultural materials. (I do not want to diminish or erase the great amount of work that has been done despite this difficulty. There are many who have cultivated truly liberatory spaces through the Internet, and I respect and learn from them.)

In effect, it is not really possible for a neighbor to say to their neighbors, "Hey, our mayor sucks," without it being carried through a network controlled by the mayor's boss, and in sight of many many people who are not neighbors and yet might involve themselves anyway. While isolated as individuals, simultaneously, community has been removed as a buffer between the individual and their society: now the way to change your community is not through community effort, but changing the whole society. And the material reality enforces this: our municipalities do not have the means to implement a local Green New Deal, for example, without the funding of the federal government.

And so you have individuals asking of their imagination, "How is this profitable in our society?" of... every thought they have, just about, because that is the only question that matters, when it comes to realizing that imagination in the world. It isn't enough to grow a fig tree because you say, "I want to," you need to say, "Well, the fig tree will give me figs, I otherwise would've had to buy them," and you need to say, "Look, by the fifth year, I'll have saved over one-hundred dollars on figs!" and you need to say, "Look, it is profitable to have a fig tree even if I pay myself for the time it takes me to cultivate it."

You have to say, "I have to pay myself a wage to do the things I want to do, and if I cannot do that, I will try to change my desires. If I cannot do that, then my desire to have profitable desires is my desire, and I can buy books and many other things to fulfill this desire." You have to train your imagination to follow the logic of neoliberal market economics, rather than let it follow the opportunities presented to it by the world immediately around it.

A space for a neighbor to ask their neighbors about the mayor is a requirement for liberatory insurrection, as it is needed to develop the prerequisite class consciousness.

A space for a neighbor to grow a fig tree because they want to, is also a requirement for liberatory insurrection, as it is needed to development the material consciousness to see the world from outside a colonial perspective.

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of establishment of the Occupy Wall Street camp at Zuccoti Park. There have been a number of pieces reflecting on that; I bring it up to say, as someone who was there, and at many other Occupy camps across the United States during that time: what made Occupy a threat was that it provided a space for both of these things. It was a space where people could discuss things directly with their neighbors - and much like the Internet, there were established protocols for helping the conversation flow; I saw the rules of the General Assembly then and now as a kind of "analog TELNET". But it was also a space where people could experiment with different ways of meeting their material needs, so that their life had room to imagine things differently. They brought these ideas to the discourse being conducted in that same space, and suddenly the conversations were massively expanding in scope, from questioning the legitimacy of student loan interest rates to questioning the institutions that make up the American Empire, in just a few months.

All of the above to say: I think the creation of these liberated spaces is critical to enacting liberation. But it is critical to center Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty when moving this way, otherwise settlers, colonials, and colonized all will be engaging in a form of neopioneerism. By creating, disconnected from what I'll refer to as LandBack, liberatory spaces, folk coming from colonialism are almost certain to create liminal spaces which form the frontier of cultural commodifiation.

So this is not a call for you white readers to go strike ground on an unapproved garden in your bougie subdevelopment, so that you can all sit around and plan some NIMBY nonsense. This is a call for you to look for the BIPOC spaces that already exist around you, and figure out if and how they want your support. We need accomplices, not imitators.

For those of yall already working on creating these spaces: thank you. For those of yall who are scared to get started: reach out and I'll be your cheerleader and/or coach.

"We have all we need to be free."