Content warning – reference to colonial violence
One thing to say is that this is a more gentle time of myself – in the span of my whole life – less thrusting, more stepped back, observant. It’s a period more characterised by uncertainty, speculation and creativity than other times where my energies have poured into community organising. Sometimes in the past I have addressed a public crowd at some political demonstration or gathering in a fiery and seemingly certain way. At this particular juncture, although I am energised and content to witness others doing something similar, if I think about doing it myself I notice some core of exhaustion (of which I am otherwise mercifully largely oblivious) start to rise. So I feel some kind of spiritual softness as an underlying tendency in my life just now; however it still demands a revisiting of self-awareness to protect it and allow it to flourish.
I would happily stand (if relevant) to deliver a speculative, exploratory talk and I remain very definite about certain matters that others would consider controversial. For example I would continue to recommend the consideration of how matters interact with the simultaneous realities of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism as an invaluable analytic approach. I continue to experience life itself as a precious, beautiful mystery. And I continue to believe that these two forms of awareness cannot be abstract but come to fruition when they are employed in the service of our collective wellbeing.
So I wanted to offer that personal context for my noticing of how this time seems to have given people an especial license to publicly judge others in new, intimate and particular ways. These expressions of condemnation are sometimes qualified by the slightly provoking statement that they aren’t given to judging others.
Another context is what a number of us are pointing out – there has been a dramatic escalation of the police state. In the UK we have moved further into the kind of totalitarian capitalism that prevails in China. All this occurs as directly fascistic modes of understanding and societal organisation have been incrementally on the rise. 1,500 fascists marched in London in 2018. A study by the IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) states 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 could have been prevented if improvements in public healthpolicy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts. Many within the UK disabled people’s liberation movement compare the effects of austerity with the Nazi holocaust. The 2018 UN report on extreme poverty condemned the UK’s austerity policies as “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous.” About 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty and 1.5 million are destitute. Brexit was approved by votes of people who accepted a racist analysis of how the UK’s and the world’s resources are distributed.
Licences are generally issued by an office of the state.
I want to clarify that I agree with the need to socially distance from one another, to close most places of public gathering and to do what we can to #flattenthecurve. I wish we had begun sooner. It’s akin to having speeding laws. If we’re going to have an environmentally disastrous road network, toxic combustible engines, inadequate public transport all existing in a societal context where people are unaccustomed to having much agency over their lives then by all means – let’s having speeding laws! It saves lives and slightly reduces pollution. Similar to hate speech legislation – as long as the state is the central agency through which human morality and the application/restriction of violence is mitigated then to have its organs check the promotion of racism/ableism/sexism etc. is definitely preferable to having carte blanche.
What those immediacies don’t remove is the concern of either (depending upon your politics) the very existence of the state or at least the kind of role it plays in society. Detailing the current escalation of state powers is occurring here:
https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk
https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/fundamental/coronavirus/
I want to concentrate upon questioning the implications of our own approaches within this specific crisis within a crisis. Whether your view of the role of the state in society stems from a broadly anarchist/marxist/liberal/left-wing/anti-authoritarian/trade unionist/decent human being I think we can all agree that it holds the capacity to greatly expand its already existing power and control over our lives in very negative ways. Honestly part of me – in the most loving way possible – doesn’t really care about the specifics of your analysis of the role of the state in these end times!
To return to the personal I feel in the course of my life I was maybe unduly slow to see the endless pressures and complexities that fall upon and emerge in people’s lives even as they continued to unfold in my own. In the process of becoming politicised and gaining various invaluable forms of awareness (a mixture of both good fortune and emotional and practical graft) I also sometimes strayed into becoming overly critical and addicted to being right. These kind of behavioural tendencies run deep so I can’t imagine these patterns to be fully behind me. There can be pagan virtue in some forms of humility.
Equally I struggled with the reality that the implications of gaining a fuller understanding of prevalent power structures is quite seismic for people, myself included. As none know more bitterly than women of colour people do like to degrade and sometimes shoot the messenger. People will shun logic and starkly accurate information rather than accept a disruption of their worldview, even if often that view does not serve them well. Sometimes simply in the process of offering information or raising a contending perspective I have been called judgmental because of the challenging implications. The very concept of judgment can be damned, yet we necessarily apply judgment throughout the course of our lives. The false speak of the new age movement, a soft pink glow wrapped around a cold white crystalline heart of the banking sector, has been a toxic addition to the voices of powerful agents (such as corporations, multinationals, the military industrial complex etc.) inviting us to disengage our faculties. We need critical engagement from each other. In her book Conflict Is Not Abuse Sarah Schulman usefully explores how being a good friend entails not feebly echoing all of someone’s words or endorsing their mistakes with empty ‘support’.
It would be untrue for myself or the left as a whole (as with the entirety of human society) to say that we don’t both wrestle with and neglect the question of judgment. We all have unresolved questions of how to best exercise questions of judgment – how to meaningfully and constructively assess our own behaviour of those and others. Writ large I would prefer us not to restrict our judgment to a narrow sphere whilst either removing spiritual questions from or depoliticising our thoughts.
Recent moments I have found troubling come to mind:
· At my allotments another plotholder passing tells two others that they shouldn’t be standing so close. One of them gently says, “That doesn’t apply here” because they are sweetly romantic companions (who maintain separate plots and don’t usually cohabit but have probably moved in with each other for the duration of this lockdown) but this is stonily ignored.
· People calling the police when their neighbours have visitors. We really have no idea what is going on in people’s lives. People could have received a terminal medical diagnosis or they could be being selfish. Let them be.
· Constant use of the slogan #staythefuckhome Some slogans invite thought such as the IWW All For One, One For All whilst others such as #stayathome do not. These specifics are not straightforwardly dichotomous but I do dislike mass orders replacing a demand for critical engagement. There has been crisis after crisis involving horrendous human suffering and loss of life and now we suddenly all use slogans? It reminds me of praying for Paris but not Kenya. I’m not even saying I feel especially critical of this I just feel troubled by it.
· An increased judging of peoples ‘chaotic’ lives – addictions, poverty, disassociation, interpersonal violence don’t just melt away in a time like this they escalate and can make maintaining social distancing and/or isolation the least of people’s concerns.
· Constant second guessing of people’s behaviour – for example if groups of three are not readily interpreted as a heteronormative unit then they may be assumed to be breaking the rules.
· A goodhearted woman saying online that if she were to walk to her allotment it would take 45 minutes to get there thus she wouldn’t be able to stay there as between getting there and back she would use up her one hour of permitted public exercise time. What possible difference can it make if she is within her allotment for 5 minutes or 5 hours once she is there? There is just no logic to that and it exasperates me when people abandon thinking for themselves. No one is telling people how long they can spend sitting outside in their private gardens. There is a purpose to what we are all trying and that’s what is important not mindless adherence to the very last . in the guidelines.
· People CAPSLOCK shouting at people irl and online
· Further intrusion of tory party hypocritical morality – hardly unfamiliar as I grew up in a one parent family in the 70’s when condemnation of the non-nuclear was pretty much endemic (which like violent enforcement of the British empire spanned all the political parties) – into our interpersonal lives. I find this a rather unbearable statement: “The alternative might be that, for quite a significant period going forwards, they should test the strength of their relationship and decide whether one wishes to be permanently resident in another household.” Followed by “There you go. Make your choice and stick with it.” Just fucking acknowledge that it is delicate personal terrain and that people of all sorts of configurations may choose to try living together or not for the duration of this unusual period. There are married couples who choose to stay in separate households, friends might temporarily choose to share etc. The strength of a connection is a separate matter entirely.
· A humanist celebrant writes in a somewhat sanctimonious tone describing the new funeral rules – “Another family, for example, asked if they could approach the coffin with flowers, messages and their grandad’s favourite cap. Usually I would encourage this; but now I have to refuse. “We promise not to actually touch the coffin,” they said. But the new rules are in place for a reason. I have to say no”. It seems unduly harsh that people should not even be allowed to place objects a 2m distance from a coffin. Maybe I might learn more and shift my perspective but again something about the very way in which the matter is discussed sits unwell with me.
· Within those funeral rules queer and/or alternative constructions of intimacy are seen as surplus. Only members of the deceased households or biological family members (who obviously will live in a variety of separate households) may attend a funeral. Simultaneously as queers are weaponised in the construction of homonationalism we are also seen as the frivolous excess to be shed in times of crisis. An exemplified representation of this in pop culture is the depiction of the overindulged residents of the metropolis in the Hunger Games film franchise using queer iconography and costuming.
These shifts don’t feel like an increased willingness to take social risks on behalf of our collective welfare. Some other kind of space has been prised open as helicopters pass overheard. I also find people ignoring social distancing troubling but in a somewhat different way. I myself have politely asked people if they could maintain the 2m distance. I think it is significant to note that people largely have been mindful. It is notable that civic society not our government led the call to close workplaces and end large social gatherings. Yet there has been some thunderously condemnatory reporting of people bulk buying when (apparently – market analysis firm Kantar Worldpanel looked at data from 100,000 UK shoppers in mid-March and found that only 3% of the population engaged in full-blown panic buying) the majority of people were in fact adding to their store cupboards in a moderate way. It is always useful to examine those moments when people choose to axis a portrayal of events around facts that are untrue on an elementary level. Does this echo a ruling class perspective on us as the repulsive and excessively multifarious many? Or to an interlinked existential repulsion and/or practical concern at our burgeoning numbers as a species? A sensation of ourselves a cancer within the earth, of it yet fatally separate. Cancer being the 21st century first world disease with which we are most romantically entwined, like consumption in the Victorian era. The emphasis upon empty shelves greedily hoarded into our cupboards certainly creates a picture of the population as a whole in need of external regulation.
What follows from judgment? Is it a matter of punishment, shaming, control, calling to account or some collective process of alteration? The process back and forth between cultural shifts and state/corporate legislation is ongoing. How that takes form has always been dramatically affected by working class consciousness. We are the majority. Despite the way history continues to be written and directed by a tiny elite en masse we hold the power – latently at any rate.
In any Christianised country I think we can feel the approaches of punishment, shaming, control almost as physical calls in our bodies. In the course of my life I have had odd moments where I met people so fixated on punishment that it held a quasi-sexual intensity within them. (Most people who have organised a large-scale public event will relate to this last!). Within BDSM it can hold a cathartic or playful quality but writ large in society it is a more grievous matter. Interestingly Algis Budrys – a science fiction writer – wrote the following of his time as a child during the Third Reich: “Adolf Hitler drove past our house a couple of times, and they went insane. Hordes of German housewives and househusbands, people that I knew, who were all living in the same apartment complex together, were tearing themselves psychically to pieces all over the sidewalk, just watching the man go by. They weren’t simply shouting or clapping their hands or going ‘hooray’, they were going through an animal frenzy to the point where some of them were having what I would call epileptic seizures. Others were defecating in our bushes, couldn’t control their bowels. I was four years old. I remember a guy hopping across our lawn with his pants around his knees, tugging desperately at his underpants, trying to get to a bush, and men and women rolling on the ground, writhing, clutching at each other.” Of course it is of significance that an early act of the Nazi regime was to delimit exploration of these interconnections by their destruction of the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology) whose archives were burned in the street by youth brigades. And the following tragic account from the book/zine Threads (Changes During the Menstrual Cycle +) mentions one part of the colonial exporting of European approaches to discipline and punishment: “When the Jesuits arrived in Canada in the mid 17thcentury they, like many colonisers of north America “were impressed by Montagnis –Naskapi generosity, their sense of cooperation and indifference to status, but they were scandalised by their “lack of morals”; they saw that the Naskapi had no conception of private property, of authority, of male superiority and they even refused to punish their children. Jesuits prohibited sexual freedom and gender equality among the Naskapi. “The Jesuit’s greatest victory, however was persuading the Naskapi to beat their children, believing that the “savages” excessive fondness of their offspring was the major obstacle to their Christianisation.” ”
The historical process of reaching our current state has been protracted and violent. In a society where we don’t get to exercise our decision making abilities over most important matters that pertain to our lives there can be a heady rush when we have access to new forms of power, albeit petty. At worst a kind of macabre glee can emerge; the potential to get it twisted when you are trying to channel frustrated vital bubbling life force through the narrow channel of condemnation is pretty massive. Lots of people are acknowledging the sensation of change occurring rapidly around us. A time of breaking apart and a reforming. This is thankfully not primarily what is happening (in fact people are often being movingly kind) but for me it has brought to mind scenes of horror during the Cultural Revolution in China where students abused their previously honoured teachers and killed sparrows. To clarify by twice citing examples of the type of control exercised by the state in contemporary China I don’t want to divert attention from the continual abusive power of the British state. I would recommend the book The Blood Never Dried – A People’s History of the British Empire by John Singer – whose work draws upon the insights of countless anti-colonial scholars and activists of colour – as a concise work that summarises some of this process. The main point I wish to make here is that the potential at this juncture for an increase in misdirected horizontal condemnation and structurally enacted violence (e.g. via policies) based on the dehumanisation of sections of society is enormous.
The time spent frustrated about people not maintaining the social distance, whilst understandable and largely valid as an occasional response, is time not directed in engaging with more critical matters. I don’t want to overstate this – I spend time being annoyed by decisions made in Rupaul’s Drag Race and the lack of a functional rubbish collection – and social media is always gonna be 46% complaining. But the fact that people will die needlessly of Covid-19 is largely due to chronic/deliberate mis/management by people who are empowered and very well paid to take key decisions, ostensibly for our collective wellbeing. It is also due to the majority of us swallowing a ton of bullshit propaganda that favours the rich and being inactive about matters that directly affect us. If successions of governments (of various hues) hadn’t run down the NHS from its post war inception, more fundamentally if society was orientated towards need not profit – then our ability to respond to Covid-19 would be markedly different. The fact that doctors will be called upon to make decisions about who receives critical care and who lives or dies is entirely avoidable and obscene. Indeed if our food production and distribution systems were not exploitative there is the strong possibility this virus would not have spread in the way that it has. As we know other ways of organising our society in more caring ways are entirely possible. Personally I still believe in the necessity of revolution but even a social wage would be a step in the right direction.
Please let’s focus on calling out abuses of power, caring for one another and building radical alternatives. All of us continue to go through a process of learning about and responding to this situation. I would like for us to be part of creating a healthy rather than a difficult learning environment – so that the most vulnerable amongst us can have the best possible outcome – because duress can call forth noble responses but is unsustainable in the longer term. I would like us not to become each other’s policemen – so that the police state can be ultimately ended, not expanded.