Add new comment

Standard left-anarchist approach... "we'd do what the state does only via federations".

What I think's really important in attacking states here is three things. 1) states responded in a securitised way, using laws and pigs and armies and closures, instead of in a medical way or a social way. 2) states ignored or neglected the knock-on effects of their own repression, e.g. "mental health" collapse, people dying from other diseases, hunger, domestic violence, etc, and didn't consider vulnerable groups like homeless people or prisoners. 3) states used Northern-centric and middle-class-centric distancing models which are impractical or impossible in the global South and working-class communities.

The writer's obviously a collectivist who doesn't like individual concrete freedoms very much and wants everything decided on a social scale, so would probably be fine with the doctors' collective ordering a lockdown and the people's militia enforcing it. Which really puts me off their vision of "anarchism". If I can't live by my own desires and perceptions then it's not my anarchism, it's just another version of dictatorship by the ingroup. It's all very well pulling all this "we're all connected blahblahblah" crap... yeah we're connected, you're stamping on my neck. Strange how this kind of connectedness is always an excuse for the ingroup dominating the outgroup and never the other way round. We don't understand other people well enough to be able to dictate whether they can go outside or not; end of story.

To be fair, leftist responses to Covid-19 in places like Venezuela, Cuba and Kerala have been far more successful than neoliberal or hyper-securitised responses. This is because they rely a lot more on coordinating with the affected communities and making sure their needs are met to some degree.

From an eco-anarchist perspective, an important point is that cities are unhealthy. Always have been. The only thing that raises urban health above rural health is massive urban-centred spending on health services and health-related social provision (water, sewage etc). We know very well that pandemics don't spread as fast in areas with lower population density, especially if they're also self-sufficient. Just look where the Covid-19 deaths are concentrated - even in America, it's the megalopolises.

How would a non-leftist anarchist world deal with pandemics - firstly each person has a right to respond in their own way - second, people live in small-scale communities or affinity groups, normally the groups will decide to shut down or not, some will and some won't - thirdly knowledge will be quickly horizontally diffused and different perspectives available - fourthly people will quickly respond on a grassroots level by making masks, testing kits, drugs etc IF they want to and think it's useful. I think there would be volunteer mobilisations to help particularly vulnerable people to isolate if they wanted to, and everyone would choose how much risk to take. Of course capitalism interferes with this, not only because of the state responses but because work monopolises people's time and because people are clustered based on work and class, not projects or desires. If one person is in punk-commune with 30 other people who have a fuck-it attitude, and we carry on as usual, and someone else is in hippy-commune who are more health-concerned and want to reduce activity, and someone who disagrees with the strategy can move to the other commune, then we can have collective responses and also individual freedom. Whereas if someone's living in a neighbourhood because it's the cheapest or the most fashionable or closest to the factory where they work, or their whole family live in the same village all their lives, there's going to be a lot more disagreement how to handle things and majorities will tend to dominate minorities. I don't see why left-anarchists have such a problem with voluntary reorganisation.

The writer should also know very well that in a British context (which I assume is where they are), "anti-social behaviour" is a reactionary concept referring to petty nuisance and harmless eccentricity. So it's an authoritarian gesture to use this concept. Serious so-called crimes are usually either effects of poverty and job shortages in capitalism, effects of intergroup resource conflicts in conditions of scarcity, or effects of psychological breakdown in an overly stressful society. It's very much demonstrable that these kinds of problems don't arise in other kinds of societies, though of course people occasionally fight or hurt each other etc. Still, the way one resolves conflicts outside a statist society is by removing the hierarchical assumption that one side will have its way and instead trying to create a modus vivendi of coexistence. In other words, treat it is two individuals or groups who want different things, not as a privileged Law and its excluded other. The division between conformists and "criminals" (deviants), social or anti-social is a big part of the problem. An absolutism of one side. In any case on a Marxist model there is no such thing as "social" and "anti-social" because "society" is by definition class-divided and antagonistic. There are no interests of "society" because "society" is inherently divided between classes with different interests. Strange how many leftists forget this, even though it's basic leftist doctrine.