We share an essay by Vaneigem(1) that was shared generously with us by notbored.org, to which we owe the translation.
Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But, on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the habitual course of illnesses has become the object of such intense emotional exploitation and mobilizes the same arrogant incompetence that years ago kicked the cloud from Chernobyl out of France?(2) Certainly, we know the facility with which the specter of the apocalypse comes out of its box to seize upon the latest catastrophe, patch together the imagery of a universal deluge and plunge the plowshare of guilt into the sterile soil of Sodom and Gomorrah.
My friend Jun Fujita, passing through Madrid on his return to Japan from Argentina, has been trapped by the quarantine at my house. For me, a blessing: we cook, chat and at night we put together a cinema-forum.
Yesterday, it was The Thing, by John Carpenter (1982), a science-fiction and horror movie that has not lost one bit of its impact capacity. The entire post-movie conversation revolves around the question, so present today with the coronavirus, of the enemy.
In all the representations disseminated by catastrophism, in the way they are elaborated as well as in the conclusions they inspire, we see above all an astonishing accumulation of denials of reality. The most obvious is the one that refers to the ongoing, and already consummated, disaster, which is hidden behind the image of the hypothetical catastrophe, when it is not calculated or extrapolated. In order to be able to understand the extent to which the real disaster differs from the worst scenarios announced by catastrophism, we shall attempt to define it in a few words, or at least specify one of its principle features: by utterly ruining all the material foundations, and not just the material ones, on which it is based, industrial society creates such conditions of insecurity and generalized instability, that only an increase of organization, that is, of submission to the social machinery, can still cause this collection of terrorizing uncertainties to pass for a habitable world. This will give you a good enough idea of the role actually played by catastrophism.
The Chuang journal-blog dedicates itself to studying and analyzing chinese capitalism, or in the groups own words:
Chuang will publish a journal analyzing the ongoing development of capitalism in China, its historical roots, and the revolts of those crushed beneath it. Chuang is also a blog chronicling these developments in shorter and more immediate form, and will publish translations, reports, and comments on Chinese news of interest to those who want to break beyond the bounds of the slaughterhouse called capitalism.
From the collective comes what must be one of the best critical reflections that we have found on the COVID-19 pandemic, both situating its roots or causes in chinese as well as global capitalism, and drawing out the implications of the crisis for the understanding and elaboration of a “communist” politics. We share the text below.
(At the request of the lundi matin collective, we have replaced our original translation with that now posted on the collective’s site.)
What the virus said
You’d do well, dear humans, to stop your ridiculous calls for war. Lower the vengeful looks you’re aiming at me. Extinguish the halo of terror in which you’ve enveloped my name. Since the bacterial genesis of the world, we viruses are the true continuum of life on Earth. Without us, you would never have seen the light of day, any more than the first cell would have come to exist.
Viruses and Separation: Frédéric Neyrat on political virality and competing separatisms
(15/03/2020)
Originally published in Terrestreson March 5, 2020
Translated from the French by an anonymous friend
“Our enemy is separatism,” President Macron recently declared. Hearing him define separatism as “the will to leave the Republic, to no longer respect its rules,” to “leave the republican field” in the name of certain “beliefs,” many of us thought that he was talking about himself and not about Muslims, according to the well-known mechanism of projection – a primitive psychological defense system that makes it possible to attribute to another what one seeks to deny in oneself. This is because La République en Marche clearly appears to be the party of those who have separated themselves from others: from the people, from refugees, from the reality of the climate, and who are more interested in the future privatization of the pension system than in the laws of the Republic. It should be added that putting demonstrators’ eyes out with Flash-Ball guns (LBDs), making highschoolers kneel with their hands on their heads in Mantes-la-Jolie, or arresting those who worry about their future and invade the headquarters of the multinational BlackRock, does not seem to be a matter of respect for the rules of the Republic, unless one understands it as being in the business of psychic and physical mutilation.
Crisis and Control: Resisting the end of the world by proliferating new worlds
COVID-19 is the culmination of a decade of contagion movies, the beginning of the worst. Every little anxiety baked into the liberal order is now being expressed with PSAs reminding us we are all vectors responsible for the spread of the economy’s epochal pandemic. Governments the world over scramble to impose restrictive measures, some ham-fisted, some half-baked, others just horrifying.
In James C. Scott’s telling of the rise of early Neolithic states, sedentism, farming, the domus, irrigation and urbanisation precede the creation of state power. “All of these human achievements of the Neolithic were in place well before we encounter anything like a state” in Mesopotamia or elsewhere. (Against the Grain, 116) Rather than embryonic states preceding the emergence of these institutions and practices, they arose by harnessing the new agricultural grains and concentrations of manpower as a basis of control and appropriation. There was no other possible foundation for the design of a state previously or at that time.
What might “collapse” mean, anyway—as in the phrases “the collapse of Ur III,” around 2,000 BCE; “the collapse of the Old Kingdom Egypt,” around 2,100 BCE; “the collapse of the Minoan Palatial Regime” on Crete, around 1,450 BCE? At the very least it means the abandonment and/or destruction of the monumental court center. This is usually interpreted not merely as a redistribution of population but as a substantial, not to say catastrophic, loss of social complexity. If the population remains, it is likely to have dispersed to smaller settlements and villages. Higher-order elites disappear; monumental building activity ceases; use of literacy for administrative and religious purposes is likely to evaporate; larger-scale trade and redistribution is sharply reduced; and specialist craft production for elite consumption and trade is diminished or absent. Taken together, such changes are often understood to be a deplorable regression away from a more civilized culture. In this respect, it is just as essential to emphasize what such events do not necessarily mean. They do not necessarily mean a decline in regional population. They do not necessarily mean a decline in human health, well-being, or nutrition, and, as we shall see, may represent an improvement. Finally, a “collapse” at the center is less likely to mean a dissolution of a culture than its reformulation and decentralization.
…
What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order. In the case of more centralized command-and-rationing economies such as Ur III, Crete, and Qin China, the problems were further compounded, and cycles of centralization, decentralization, and reaggregation seem to have been common.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain
For something positive to emerge from moments of crisis, it is not enough to prophecise the end of the world and to simply witness the sunset from our ivory tower. From now on, the necessary scaffolding, networks and organisation must be created, in order to respond to the wreckage, so as not to start from scratch when society breaks down and the human species loses its compass. If we do nothing in that direction, in creating today the cooperative and solidarity structures that already serve to test economic self-management and political autonomy in our neighborhoods (and not in isolated communities for the convinced), the future will look much more like what culture Pop has taught us for decades on the big screen.
Collapse is an opportunity, but not necessarily an opportunity for improvement. That depends on us.
Beyond the quarantines, the expansion and intensification of State control, the states of emergency, justified in the name of “public health”, we share further sources for reflections on the politics of the coronavirus (COVID-19) …
Headline for an article from the NASA earth observatory (March 2, 2020): “Airborne Nitrogen Dioxide Plummets Over China“.
A commentary following on the headline …
Whoever believes that pollution, once produced and out of human control, is apolitical (being political only the options and decisions that increase or decrease the quantity and content of the pollution), is mistaken: pollution can also be an ideologically and politically constructed object. It is thanks to this construction that pollution does not officially produce deaths or sickness (except when there is an accident or a catastrophe like Chernobyl), while the victims of a virus are counted one by one and country by country. And what if the appearance of the virus, in China, was a conspiracy engendered in a laboratory by “green” terrorists to combat pollution? What if this viral remedy was relatively innocuous, from the perspective of public health, when compared with the tons of gases and polluting materials produced daily when a threatening virus does not circulate? Where in the end is the illness and where is the cure? We will never know. But the idea that the virus – this one or another to come – is not a catastrophe but a salvation is a source of great enthusiasm.
(“Livro de recitações”, in the portuguese newspaper Público – 06/03/2020)
Raoul Vaneigem: Coronavirus
We share an essay by Vaneigem(1) that was shared generously with us by notbored.org, to which we owe the translation.
Challenging the danger posed by the coronavirus is surely absurd. But, on the other hand, isn’t it just as absurd that a disturbance in the habitual course of illnesses has become the object of such intense emotional exploitation and mobilizes the same arrogant incompetence that years ago kicked the cloud from Chernobyl out of France?(2) Certainly, we know the facility with which the specter of the apocalypse comes out of its box to seize upon the latest catastrophe, patch together the imagery of a universal deluge and plunge the plowshare of guilt into the sterile soil of Sodom and Gomorrah.
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