Collective Care Is Our Best Weapon against COVID-19

From Outside the Circle

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps around the world, statist and capitalist structures predictably continue to fail us in many ways. Underlying that failure is the stress on individual responses: stockpile, isolate, and care for yourself.

While “social distancing” is a necessary tool to help stop the spread of this virus, it will only be effective if it’s grounded in an ethics and practice of social solidarity and collective care. COVID-19 clearly demonstrates that only by deeply looking out for each other — acting as if everyone’s life has inherent worth and is at risk; as if the health of one is the health of all — will we actually be able to lessen the amount of sickness and death, not to mention the emotional weight on us all. Unless everyone cooperates, the virus exponentially spreads.

Such cooperation has to be about building on — rather than fearing — the fact that we’re all interconnected and impacted by COVID-19; that we’re all in this together. Our cooperation is about making sure everyone can take time off work, have a home and enough food, stay hydrated and wash their hands, not feel alone or abandoned, receive health and other care, and the list goes on. It’s what geographer Peter Kropotkin long called “mutual aid” in his book by the same title — a phenomenon that he saw repeated time and time again in his studies of various species, ecosystems, and societies: mutual aid allowed them to not only survive but also thrive! Or as Kropotkin put it, “Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence.”

Thanks to your local radical healers, queers, feminists, anarchists, and like-minded others — who know that only we can love and protect each other — social solidarity and mutual aid pandemic care is blossoming in communities large and small around Turtle Island!

In hopes of helping folks find and join in a mutual aid effort where they live, offering inspiration to start your own, and/or simply lifting your spirits, below is a growing list of mutual aid pandemic disaster care, in alphabetical order (with the acknowledgment that place-names are a colonial imposition). Please note: these links are all public resources, so be wary of putting info out on them that you don’t want to be public. And thanks to Anarchist Agency for setting up the list on Google Drive At:

http://tiny.cc/coronavirusmutualaid

To add to this list, email anarchistagency@gmail.com.

As of this afternoon, you’ll find:

Table of Contents/Quick Links

General

Mutual Aid and Survival

Half-Assed Disabled Prepper Tips for Preparing for a Coronavirus Quarantine

Form Letter: A Neighborly Invitation Regarding Coronavirus

Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Skill-Share — Covid-19/Coronavirus Resources

United States

Community Response to Covid-19: An Online Summit

State/Local

California / Bay Area: Covid-19 Financial Solidarity

California / San Francisco: SF Bay Mutual Aid Form

Illinois / Chicago: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Volunteer Sign-up

Illinois / Chicago: 73.5 Neighborhood Resource Pool

Indiana / Bloomington: No Space for Hate COVID 19 Mutual Aid

Kentucky / Lexington: Mutual Aid Lexington Kentucky

Kentucky / Louisville: Mutual Aid Louisville

Maryland / Baltimore: Mutual Aid and Emergency Relief Fund

Massachusetts / Medford, Somerville: Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville (MAMAS)

Michigan / Ann Arbor: University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

Michigan / Grand Rapids Area: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Form

Michigan / Grand Rapids Area: Mutual Aid Spreadshee

Minnesota / Minneapolis–Saint Paul: Twin Cities Queer and Trans Mutual Aid

New Mexico / Albuquerque: What Do You Need?

New York / Ithaca: Cornell University COVID Shutdown Housing Resources

North Carolina / CHP/Carrboro: Covid19 Support

Ohio / Cleveland: Provide Aid in Cleveland

Oregon / Portland: Portland-Area COVID-19 “Offer Support” Volunteer Form

Oregon / Portland: Covid-19 Portland-Area Community Support

Pennsylvania / Philadelphia: Philly Performance Artist Fund

Washington / Seattle: Seattle-Area COVID-19 “Offer Support” Volunteer Form

Washington / Seattle: Seattle-Area COVID-19 “Request Support” Form

Washington / Seattle: Seattle Artists Relief Fund amid COVID-19

Washington / Seattle: #covid19mutualaid links

Washington / Seattle: GLP SANI: Sex Worker Aid Network Initiative

Washington / Tacoma: Tacoma Mutual Aid Network

Worldwide

Germany / Berlin: Queer Relief Covid-19 Berlin — Help Form

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There are 9 Comments

"The aim of terror, and of its implementation, is to extort from human beings a total adaptation to its very principle, so that they recognize at the very end only one goal: self-preservation. The more, and unscrupulously, humans have in mind their survival, the more they become psychological puppets of a system whose sole objective is to stay in power.”
- Leo Löwenthal, 1945

2 new pages on my site:

Cornonavirus in France:

http://dialectical-delinquents.com/coronavirus-in-france/

Contestavirus – a constantly updated chronology of global expressions of contestation against the new conditions of misery:

http://dialectical-delinquents.com/contestavirus/

Above you say "“social distancing” is a necessary tool to help stop the spread of this virus". I'd like to know the logic and rationality behind this. The only social distancing I can see which is necessary are gloves and masks - the rest only makes sense as an insanely authoritarian sledgehammer to crack a nut. The virus is hardly airborne - virtually all the evidence suggests that it's spread by droplets and touch. Keeping that metre or two away from others is not at all necessary if you wear gloves and a mask. How can being in the same place as someone else if you don't touch them with bare skin and are incapable of being effected by droplets or effecting the other person with droplets influence the spread of the virus? Droplets can't effect anybody if you've got a mask. Touching someone's sleeve with a glove is not going to harm them unless the glove itself is infected, but then you should never touch anything because it's impossible to disinfect your clothes, your keys, your front door, or whatever, every time you touch something that might possibly be infected and then, after disinfecting yourself you're still holding the bottle of sanitiser, which itself could be infected. You'd go insane (and many are going insane) if you thought about and acted against all the chances of being infected.
The virus doesn't survive in water nor is it carried in the air. Social distancing is mostly a state and media-imposed ideology to justify the massive intensification of alienation. And this ideology of "confinement" has invaded people's minds, fears and discourse so they can't even begin to think logically. Fear eats the soul, body, mind and all social life.

The only health that submission to fear improves is the health of the state.

Nonsense. The virus can survive on clothing, including coats, masks, gloves, etc. So you'd have to wash your hands after you touch your own clothes if you've been around other people. You'd also then have to wash your clothes. The virus also survives in water. After all, your body is made of 70% water.

You sound like a Trumpanzee who thinks the virus is some kind of deep state plot. Either that, or you are using the wrong tin foil.

Take a deep breath.

it has been accepted for a week now that the virus can be transmitted through the air. if someone sneezes and you come by minutes later, you can be exposed to aerosol particles containing the virus.

i'm not saying i know what's true in all this. fuck science, but when that's literally all you have to go on, i'm gonna at least pay attention.

But that's your opinion of it, and shouldn't be dismissed just because it doesn't fall into line with the scientific consensus about Covid-19, that's been saying for weeks that the virus is airborne and also can get into clothing.

Just like most other viruses it can be easily broken when washing drying clothes at high temp for at least 30 mins. It can stay for long in some fabrics, and wet clothes will make it last longer.

THO that is the scientific consensus expressed through the media and State institutions. Denying it, unless you got solid proof, amounts to be saying it's just a hoax. As if scientists are lying about it being airborne, then they may as well be lying about the whole thing.

I don't think it is, as several people no matter the social standings got it and a few died from it. If you're sure it's a hoax, then can you show at least evidence there are attempts to lie about it, or irregularities in the infos being spread?

there's a difference between a virus being transmitted in droplets and being airborne. please notice and alter your characterization of the disease accordingly. thanks.

"there's a difference between a virus being transmitted in droplets and being airborne."

yes, and this virus has been shown to transmit both ways. a month ago.

yesterday i saw and old lady walking down the street and i thought about following her home to see if i could help, but then i thought i would better maximize my efforts of care if it was collective but then i remembered about social distancing and how we're not supposed to be less than 6feet apart and mind you i was keeping a safe distance, i didn't want to scare her, so then i was so conflicted, and all of these corona virus death are taking a very heavy toll on me from all of the rebellious mourning i've been having to do. all these resources are going to help me so much, and yes it is true that Kropotkin once said "mutual aid" such a great quote, right on!

Krapotkin wrote about "mutual aid" in a time (100 years back... same old shit) and social context that was very different than today. Like a month ago, everyone including even so-called anarchists were living in some informal caste system.

And it didn't got negated or abandoned, now. It's getting reinforced to a whole fucking new level.

The social "cracks" or "striates" of yesterday have just got tightly sealed off (for the most part). In some countries like France and Italy you get huge fines just for walking outside without an authorization.

If you cover your mouth and nose, droplets can still come in contact with your eyes, thus infecting you. If droplets touch any part of your face, you can then contaminate your hands and the rest of your face (because we touch our faces hundreds of times a day).

And fuck all the anarchists Quakers. Go show the world how you're the best fucking NGO out there, agent of collaboration and progress.

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