The Antisocial Socialist

I was just relating to some people on Discord that my problem with Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing, a book that had an embarrassingly large influence on me as a young person relative to its actual quality, is that no one in her anarchist communes ever fight over who does the dishes, and this is not realistic. By coincidence, someone on Facebook just linked to this amazing thread that had me cracking up in—well, whatever the opposite of nostalgia is.

Favourite tweet:

there are going to be people replying to these tweets with "WELL I LIVED IN ONE AND IT WAS FINE" and i would like to point out that the commune i lived in had lots of people in it who also thought ants and mold and loud music were fine or just weren't aware of them

Anyway if you've ever lived in this sort of housing arrangement or live in one now, go check it out.

@dewline mentioned the Shock Doctrine. That, for anyone who hasn't read it, is Naomi Klein's excellent book about how right-wing governments and corporations use disasters to enforce their ideology on the rest of us. He suggested two can play that game.

This is why I'm only panicky some of the time. Because shit-scared as I am, I'm seeing it happen.

Let us review some ways to mitigate pandemics:

• Universal health care. The US is in a uniquely vulnerable position for a number of reasons, but chief among them is a refusal to test and treat COVID-19 patients for free. Their patchwork healthcare system is already becoming overwhelmed. 
• Universal Pharmacare, a.k.a. why we should have voted NDP in the last election. The fact that we don't have this is likely going to be a problem for us.
• Rethinking how we do education. The Ford government is going to attempt mandatory eLearning, and it's going to fail because they can't even design a license plate. But you know what's even worse? Cramming 40 kids in a classroom built for 25. A huge push in my board has been to shutter underutilized school buildings and move towards closing any school with less than 1000 students. In a small school with extra space, you can do social distancing. In a school at 90% capacity, you can't.
• Building redundancy into staffing. The problem isn't that the virus is going to kill us all. The problem is that the virus is going to overwhelm hospitals. But longer term, it's also going to overwhelm other key institutions when critical people fall ill and have to be quarantined. Just-in-time staffing, which is what most companies and now schools, hospitals, nursing homes, etc., do, makes us more vulnerable in a pandemic. We need to have extra nurses, extra caretakers, extra childcare workers, extra cooks, even if they're sitting around doing nothing some of the time, because redundancy allows the company or institution to maintain continuity of operations through a crisis.
• Housing for all. You can't quarantine if you don't have a home, and unhoused/transient populations spread a pandemic faster.
• Loan, debt, and rent forgiveness. Bailouts aren't just for banks. If we allow people to fall into poverty as a result of either getting sick or having their place of work shut down, we worsen the epidemic by having people unhoused or in transient situations.
• Paid sick leave. This goes without saying.
• Robust internet access. So we can work from home when we need to.
• Greater support for disabled, ill, and elderly people. They are the primary people who are at risk and we need to work together to ensure that resources are maximized to help them survive.
• Ending arbitrary detention. Prisons and concentration camps are disease vectors. We have to avoid imprisoning people to the greatest extent possible, especially vulnerable populations.
• Strong communities. More on that in a bit.

What do these things have in common? Oh, only the kind of stuff that the moderate left has been demanding, when it summons the courage.

And at the risk of silver linings, observe these maps of China and extrapolate to a worldwide pandemic. I'm not one of those silver lining types but we have learned that we can probably get away with producing less, driving less, and flying less, and maybe continuous exponential growth that primarily benefits a rich minority at the expense of growing inequality isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Here is the awesome thing, though. People are starting to get it, I think. A pandemic is a collective problem with collective solutions, and the super-rich hiding in their bunkers won't last forever if there's no one to clean their floors. Let's look at a few good news stories.

• Trudeau, who rarely does anything I agree with, is suggesting income supports, basically amounting to a temporary UBI scheme.
• OH LOOK it turns out that Toronto can house the homeless after all! Note that we could have done this any time.
• In Louisiana, a proposal to empty the jails of non-violent offenders.
• San Francisco is putting a moratorium on evictions during the crisis, as is New York.
• I'm not even going to watch this video of Italians singing out of their windows because I've cried enough for one day, thank you very much.

Here in Toronto, within hours of the closures beginning, a Facebook group started up to provide community support. People are making sure that elderly, sick, and disabled folks get the supplies they need, arranging food and childcare, posting where there's toilet paper and where there are shorter lineups, suggesting things to do to maintain sanity, and generally assessing people's needs and capacity to help. Friends have started Slack groups. I've felt moved to tears several times as I've had to reassure friends, students, and co-workers, and other friends have stepped up to try to reassure me.

When I went grocery shopping for some basic supplies, everyone was nice to each other. There weren't huge lineups or hoarding. Everyone is scared but everyone was also really friendly and putting on brave faces. My internet company, TekSavvy, just removed all data caps on everyone's account because they knew people would be relying on the internet more. I've seen a few folks in crisis but I haven't seen a solitary person being an asshole.

Now, this situation may change as we haven't really been hit with a crisis yet. But if we can maintain this level of social solidarity, we have a fighting chance against the crisis hitting.

It is true that there's a strong attempt to use the Shock Doctrine the way it's always been used. Thing is, it...isn't working so well this time. If China hadn't started out covering up the severity of the outbreak, it would have fared better. The US crisis will almost certainly be exacerbated by its tendencies towards secrecy and authoritarianism. If people realize it, this might lead to better political outcomes (I hope without widespread death.)

Thing is, people tend towards the cooperative in emergencies, contrary to every disaster movie and most post-apocalyptic literature. I want to leave you with the article that made me cry today, from the New York Times. It's about the Great Alaska Earthquake in 1964 and I think it says a lot about the resiliency of solidarity and community and how cooperation is the key to surviving horrible events. 

That foosball was invented by a disabled anarchist who survived the Spanish Civil War to bring some joy into the lives of children injured in the war.

Yes really.

So next time you play foosball, imagine that the ball being kicked is a fascist's head. Do it for Alejandro.

 How does one become a "professional anarchist"?

Asking for a friend.

Oh man. I went to a friend's birthday party last night and we played Bloc by Bloc. I've been hearing about it for ages (full disclosure; it was created by a friend-of-an-acquaintance) but never actually played it. I can in no way justify it for my games course, but I think I maybe need it for me.

The object of the game is to create an insurrection in a city. You have a faction and you work cooperatively (or semi-cooperatively, if you give everyone a sectarian agenda that may run counter to every factions) against the cops to loot stores, build barricades, fight cops, and create guerrilla gardens and assembly halls. It's a very complicated, involved set-up, but the game play is completely hilarious and wonderful. And it's beautifully designed; when someone I know designs a game, I tend to assume it's going to be well-written but look kind of crap, but this had quality art. It's a bit like Pandemic, mechanically, but naturally the theme is much more up my alley.

Anyone else played it? Anyone else want to play it?

I could not resist doing this again.

1. Comment to this post with "I surrender!" and I'll assign you the basis of some tv show idea. (Science fiction show, medical drama, criminal procedure, etc...)
2. Create a cast of characters, including the actors who'd play them
3. Add in any actor photos, character bios and show synopsis that you want.
4. Post to your own journal.

smhwpf gave me period drama and initially specified pre-1815, but my burning period drama idea takes place in 1907, which is nearly 100 years ago so ought to qualify in terms of lavish costumes and set design.

Apologies in advance for the profusion of British white dudes playing Russian white dudes. This is a Beeb production. It's 90% dialogue and largely an excuse to get really talented actors to shout at each other. Russian and French dialogue is in English with the actors' actual accents; dialogue in German and Polish is subtitled.

The show is called Common Cause (Общее дело).

It's 1907. The first attempt at revolution in Russia two years ago was a miserable bloody failure; the movement's surviving leaders are scattered in exile throughout Europe or rotting in Tsarist prisons. Lenin's just declared that it'll be twenty years before they have another shot at overthrowing the Tsar. Some elements are trying to reunite the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as well as the Social Revolutionaries and anarchist groups in a common struggle; other forces work behind the scenes to undermine any cohesion or unity.

The one group that does take the revolutionaries seriously is the Okhrana. In an attempt to prevent a repeat of 1905, the Tsarist secret police has dispatched agents and infiltrators to destroy the various revolutionary movements from within; in fact, as in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, the Parisian emigré community has more informants than actual activists, and they've been entirely successful in hobbling the movement.

Until now.

( based on a true story )

I expect it would run for two or three seasons (with six episodes each) and then get abruptly cancelled. There is also a made-for-TV movie, set during the Berne Trial, that reunites the surviving characters and ends the series.

Leigh Phillips joins authors Gwyneth Jones, Marge Piercy, Ken MacLeod and Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss the role of science fiction in extending the radical horizons of our imaginations.

I don't agree with everything in this article, especially in regards to Zizek (Ken MacLeod, you know that's not what he meant) but it's a pretty fascinating read on the radical potential of science fiction and a good starting point for discussion. I particularly liked the last question, about technology and its place in cultural narratives. All of the authors really hit the nail on the head in terms of describing exactly why I feel uncomfortable with the emphasis on anti-GMO/anti-Monsanto/pro-woo stuff on the left:

Gwyneth Jones: Progressives have a right to be cynical about nanotechnology, likewise GM foods and crops, as long as these developments are controlled by ruthless corporate interests. It isn’t about the science; it’s about the tragedy of the commons.

---

On a more mundane (but still futuristic!) note, this article on organizing workers in a service economy (from Macleans, no less!) is also an interesting read. The premise is that traditionally middle class jobs aren't coming back (likely true) and thus minimum wage service sector jobs should be transformed so that one can actually earn a living at them.

Proponents of the idea that service jobs can become the new ticket to the middle class point to sweeping changes in the manufacturing sector in the early 20th century that helped transform factory work from dangerous low-pay jobs into secure careers that could support a family. From 1914, when Henry Ford declared he would pay his employees what was then an exorbitant sum of $5 a day in order to reduce turnover and boost demand for his cars, governments saw higher wages and greater workplace regulation as the start of a virtuous economic cycle. But whether the service industry can follow the same model is far from certain.

Read and discuss.

Wish I could join the marches for migrant rights and justice for the workers murdered by capitalism in Bangladesh that are going on today, but alas, my crip status and physio appointment today rule that out. So, you know. Celebrate for me.

I just got back from seeing Ragtime at Shaw with the wonderful bcholmes. It was very exciting. I used to think that I wasn't a fan of musicals* but this seems to have changed. Anyway, if someone had told me that there were musicals with Emma Goldman in them I probably would have been into musicals sooner.

Niagara-on-the-Lake is really pretty. I know it's touristy, but I do tend to fall for an entire town of Victoriana. I mean, they have a museum of pharmacy! How cool is that? One of these days, I need to tool around Southern Ontario and just be a silly steampunk tourist.

* Other than Cabaret and Threepenny Opera.

Zizek on the Avengers, Occupy, and oh really, do you need an excuse to listen to Zizek rant about things? It's Zizek being himself. Also, he's not dating Lady Gaga. If you were wondering.

I accidentally a whole anti-protest guide to anarchists. Is this bad?

In his court motion warning that Karn is an “anarchist,” Richmond’s Deputy Assistant Attorney Brian Telfair doesn’t allege the possibility of any violence or property destruction. Instead, he cites a blog post by Karn about acquiring government information through legal requests. The title? “FOIA Rocks!”