What a discovery is society!

Faced with the risk of dying of contagion, millions of human beings are discovering that their own and others’ actions have a real effect on society, i.e. on themselves and their fellow beings. After decades of liberal ideology according to which “society” was a sort of dark hole into which anything could be thrown, now the principle of responsibility is being rediscovered all of a sudden. It’s been discovered that workers are cannon fodder; that profit comes before health; that behind the famous “public interest”, it is the State that makes the decisions along with its police. Given that viruses have effects even if they can’t be seen, we are discovering a “materiality of the invisible”. Digital technologies – to which scientists and governments are entrusting our fate – are anything but immaterial. In order for millions of people to be connected while they are shut at home, you need servers, energy, cables, antennas and above all rare metal and soils, whose looting means wars, plunder of the Earth’s crust, nuclear radiations, semi-slaves (often children) forced to work in mines, entire areas of the world transformed into landfills, i.e. conditions for new epidemics. Can a principle of responsibility exist by command, in the empire of fear?

What does “you can’t go out” mean?

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this period is precisely the State’s attempt to make responsibility coincide with obedience. If we think of the tragedies that obedience caused in the Twentieth century (not by chance, «I was just obeying orders» was the phrase most repeated by the Nazis in Nuremberg), such an imposition should make us tremble. Why, then, do we stay at home? Out of a sense of responsibility? Because the government says so? For fear of being fined? Millions of people would certainly answer in very different ways. What is ethically and socially unacceptable is to confuse obedience with responsibility. Let’s give an example. If we were to read the government’s regulations carefully – without letting ourselves be terrorized by the announcements from loudspeakers – and follow them to the letter, what would happen? If thousands of people were to go out at the same time to “exercise near their homes”, what would happen? If instead the same people went for a walk in isolated areas, indeed breaching the regulations, would they be putting anyone’s health at risk? The sanction was never an issue.

Obligation and prohibition

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Posted on 2020/05/14 by Sans_Attendre

Translated by Act for freedom now!

Right now

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them.

You can only crush them by ignoring them.

By refusing to think, refusing to change.  

Ursula K. Le Guin

Right now, while humans are staying inside, animals are taking back space, leaving traces and opening up unexplored paths that accomplice spirits can travel to out of the blue, reach interesting places and sensitive points far from prying metal eyes.

Right now, an inspired and inspiring wave is spreading across Europe, from France to the Netherlands, via Germany.

Right now this irrepressible, elusive wave is leaving behind it punctured wheels, burnt antennas, severed cables.

This wave is called: Sabotage. And it continues to surge despite the Fear.

They have dystopia. We have the weapon of utopia.

Accomplices and in solidarity with  Duccio, Ele, Stefi, Nicole, Guido, Martino, Otta, Leo, Zip, Tommi, Angelo and Emma!

wild hearts

 In Italian Poster in solidarity:

OLTRE LA PANDEMIA, LO STATO DI POLIZIA!

News from the state of emergency (Issue 4) 13nt of April 2020

“Their viruses, our dead”

Every day we are submerged by data on the number of infected, the dead and those who pulled through. Even if the structural causes of the epidemic – the industrial looting of the natural environment and the imbalance in relations with other animal species – never emerge, some things are coming to the surface, for those who can fish them out of the sea of information. Over 70% of the dead had high blood pressure. In 95% of the cases there are risk factors that can lead to its advance, in particular, sedentariness and stress. Prohibition to leave home – with the due precautions – creates the conditions for more multitudes of sick people. Not to mention the devastating psychological consequences for all those who are going through housing and family situations as unbearable as they are being dismissed by the State’s optimism (“Everything will be fine. I’m staying at home”). Moreover, if the importance of sun exposure for vitamin D absorption is “fake news”, why do the protocols handed out to carabinieri and police recommend at least half an hour in the sun a day, and where this isn’t possible, taking vitamin D supplements?

They can be sacrificed

Two coronavirus cases were reported among the warehouse workers of BRT [a logistics company] in Rovereto (one of them is in intensive care). The logistics company, after having hurriedly “sanitised” the offices (not the warehouse), wanted workers to carry on working tranquilly, without even having swab tests. The workers refused and went off sick.  Meanwhile the Confindustria [Italian employers’ federation] is pushing for factories to be reopened as soon as possible (they were shut after the wave of strikes that forced the government to block “non-essential production”). Someone is talking about “imbalanced subdivision of risk”. Others, looking at the entire planet and its gigantic injustices, are talking about “differentiated apocalypse”.

We’ll talk about it, and for a long time to come

According to official data, from 2009 to today 37 billion euros have been taken from the Health System. Perhaps it’s because of the eloquence of this figure that local newspapers reported a writing that appeared outside the hospital in Rovereto (“Thank you to health workers, but we’re not forgetting those who cut the Health System”) without the usual string of criminalizing comments? Besides the quantitative fact, there is a qualitative one. If we widen the time span, we’ll see that the Health System was not only cut but also transformed. In fact, up until 1978 there was a relation of exchange between preventive medicine and “Citizens’ committees” (a definition with which they tried to institutionalize the numerous people’s health committees in local areas and workplaces that sprang up everywhere during the struggles in the Seventies). A few years earlier, the most serious and in-depth inquiry into the Icmea environmental disaster in Seveso resulted from the encounter between doctors and popular committees. Given that what we are living is a mass experience which won’t go away fast – the greatest limitation of freedom in the history of Italy – it will be of paramount importance for the future to create spaces of discussion between people and critical health workers so as to analyse, as a whole and in detail, what caused the epidemic and how governments and the State’s scientists tackled it.

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News from the state of emergency (Issue 3) 6th of April 2020

Nothing will be as it was before

That is what they are telling us. As industrial society can’t be put in question – an industrial society whose constant headlong rush will produce increasingly lethal and frequent epidemics –, we will have to push the accelerator of technological solutions even more. As deforestation, the frenetic extraction of raw materials, the poisoning of the air and water, intensive agriculture and breeding, artificial food production and the devitalization of human beings can’t be stopped, we will have to get used to cohabiting with pandemics. 75% of the new infectious diseases are transmitted to humans by wild animals whose natural habitat has been destroyed, then the role of “contagion carriers” is performed by the fine dust produced by pollution (as recently written by a member of the Società italiana di medicina dell’ambiente [Italian society of environmental medicine]). So? Shall we give back their space to what’s left of the wild fauna and stop this demented race? No. Full speed ahead, under digital command!

Nothing must be as it was before

That’s what we say. Let’s open up places for discussion and organization from below. In cities, neighbourhoods, towns. And let’s face everything that concerns our lives together, from basic material needs to medicine, from the economic reorganization that will be fierce, to the direction we want to give to society. Don’t let them tell us that we will have to pay for it, yet again. Don’t let them talk to us about Great works to relaunch their economy, about automatization of production, 5G and other rubbish. The virus is not the cause but the consequence of the industrial disease. And that is where we have to start off from, finally.

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