Solidarity is relationship (& Detroit’s RAD UnConference is now online)

from northshore counter info

Now more than ever, this is the time to question what our relationships would look like if we really lived our values.

This is a time when many people can no longer ignore the alienation they live, from their communities, from each other, and even from themselves.

In the COVID-19 climate, people are increasingly participating in building networks of care and mutual aid. These networks are a circulatory system throughout the body of society, interconnecting us for our individual and collective survival. Survival in the context of a new disease.

But the capitalist and colonial devastations, which empowered this new virus and which are central to its destructiveness, have long been disintegrating our social body and the planet, isolating us in nuclear families and small consumer units, and relegating care-work to the context of violent institutions. So much so in fact that the circulatory system of interconnectedness some people are building these days, for the most part, doesn’t already exist. Even though the need isn’t new. There is no community for people defined outside of it, whether from exclusions related to disability, prisons, legal status, age or anything else. Not everyone gets to be part of the social body— not everyone has access to the blood.

This active community cooperation among people of various political stripes, limited as it may be (and scaffolded by corporate and data-mining digital “social networks”) is sometimes beyond what so many of us have actually been living in our humble humdrum quests of getting from one day to the next. But even this is still only a shadow of a truly radical possibility.

So many of us forget, both under “normal” circumstances and in times of “crisis”, the power we do have to structure our lives the way we want, despite the costs of this resistance. And we forget the costs of doing what we’re supposed to do when amatonormative institutions of monogamy and homonormativity offer us promises of legitimacy. Even when the cost is our collective survival.

We need to share the blood.

We forget that solidarity is ongoing and relational: showing up for each other day by day, and not just in scattered moments of crowded streets. Solidarity is relationship. It begins with caring whether and how we all live and die, but possibilities for relationship are vast. Who is part of this “all”? And what do these relationships look like? Why? What do we want them to be? And how can we make that happen, together?

Times of upheaval and uncertainty always carry the hope of new possibilities. As we struggle through these days, together and alone, I hope we heed the call to reassess and imagine radical potential for collaborative community: are we living our values in how we relate to each other? What would our lives and communities look like if we did?

What would our relationships look like if we lived our anarchistic values in our mundane, daily interactions?

Solidarity is relationship. Relationship is political.

**

For all the limitations and failings of online communications, the digitisation of certain community spaces has opened possibilities (if only temporary) for connecting with communities in new ways. Possibilities for discovering what other people are doing and how.

Detroit is easily visible from Windsor’s waterfront. But connecting with the beating heart of Detroit’s relationship anarchist community would normally require physically crossing nation states’ violently policed borders. It doesn’t right now.

The RAD UnConference on May 21st-24th 2020 is going online (with some participation from this side of the river). It’s a space to consider the question of anarchist praxis through relationship. Press Release: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11b9gihCsBae8bakh5zPuD8vb33N499qJh_G4....

(https://communitiesnotcouples.com/unconference)

There are 4 Comments

“We need to share the blood.”

Big yikes is this what social anarchist really believe. Y’all are a Christian cult.

Why is this vapid comment sacred, but saying that this comment has no value is punished with censorship? I don't understand. Did the anews controllers post this comment? Or do they only permit negativity towards content on the site, not negativity towards the negativity?

I think if the commenters get to be negative, I should get to be negative about them. I think it's fucking stupid to post zero calorie, meaningless, vapid nonsense taken out of context, like this dumbass fucking comment, and then to censor anyone who identifies it as such. That's the kind of shithole authoritarianism we're seeing here.

Explain to me why I should think otherwise. If you just delete this comment, it will show that you are shutting down coherent criticism, while preserving pure empty shit talk for its own sake. Pretty fucking dumb.

the post i removed said, "that's not what it said, you're a moron." that is fewer words than you use here to complain, but both comments are empty. i'm responding, however, because people don't learn to think, and i would like anarchists to be able to reason their way out of a paper bag, so i'll put in my two cents.
a. calling someone stupid isn't an argument
b. relying on the paucity (lack, inadequacy) of someone else's argument is not an argument
c. just saying "you're wrong" isn't an argument
d. accusing other people of being fucked up (whether OP or site admins) isn't an argument--whether the "fucked up" is authoritarian, fascist, moronic, or whatever--unless you back it up with actual information, which you have not done so far. moderating a site is only contradictory to the most shallow definition of anarchist, right?

the first comment quickly and without fuss makes a weak and vague point, but it is still a point. your responses have not added anything to the conversation except a lot of assumptions and accusations. if it's so obvious that the point is wrong, then rebut it. if the point isn't worth rebutting, but it pisses you off, then make a joke about it. if you can't be smart or informative, then be entertaining. if you can't be either, then come back when you can.
this is advice that can be helpful to all of us in these fraught times.
good luck out there

thecollective .4

"Y’all are a Christian cult."

That's not an argument, either, it's an insult. If they spew insults on the basis of intentionally misrepresented quotations, why can't I insult them back? Arguably, my comment is of greater value, in that it doesn't include an intentional misrepresentation, but simply identifies what is happening in theirs.

You want me to be "funny" about this—in short, to *create value* for your website—but there's nothing funny about the original comment, nor your deletion of my answer, it's just fucking dumb, and it reduces all of us to stupidity.

I think that stupid comments should be punished with stupid answers, if they are to be published at all. Leaving the stupid comments but erasing those who decry them is de facto support for stupidity.

The bottom line is that you like what you like, empowered collective member, and you like their stupid misrepresenting comment and don't like my stupid but honest response, and you took a side in favor of theirs and against mine. Now you purport to teach me how to think! Why not simply say—how to please you? Isn't that what most teachers mean when they offer to teach us how to think?

Dishonest, unintelligent hostility towards anarchist projects at random—this pleases you. Honest, simple hostility towards those who are hostile to anarchist projects—this, you seek to erase. So be it.

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