Thread by @PeterGelderloos

Brief (late) suggestion for an anarchist positionality in the pandemic.

*The line of conflict runs through the lives of people who are being hurt by the capitalist and statist response.*
That seems obvious, but we often don't stop to trace that line before acting.

A THREAD

Our battlefield is in the workplaces where workers don't have healthcare or sick days or safe conditions; in the hospitals neglected by the state; in the streets when people are punished for organizing on the job.

We should defend the survival of an expansive "we" through strike actions and mutual aid initiatives. The strike actions may temporarily rely on union structures, but they should point to a path of worker self-organization leading to a world without bosses or alienated consumers

(thus feeding back into the mutual aid).

Mutual aid may initially look a little like charity. Rather than becoming paralyzed or insular, we should continue distributing massive resources while building real invitations to open participation and honestly critiquing any activist professionalization that crops up.

Anarchists should point out the failures of the State without ever demanding the State do better. We are the ones who can do better, building relationships with hospital workers, teachers, and others to ask, how would we do this if we controlled these resources?

Rather than supporting vaccine passports or opposing vaccines, we need to boost the voices of undocumented people endangered by both passports and lack of access. If our feminist comrades have organized pirate abortion services, can we organize pirate vaccination services?

We should never oppose anti-vaxxers in a way that corners us into supporting state measures. Distributing useful info and myth-busting in neighborhoods with less healthcare access is more useful than counterprotesting a demo that is against state policies.

The imperative to deplatform can be better fulfilled pressuring anti-vaxxers to keep open white supremacists out of their rallies and attacking them if they don't. This keeps the Right divided against itself. Ignore them like wingnuts if they're just talking about vaccines

and mask mandates. Attack them for fascists if they let themselves be a trojan horse for white supremacist groups. As they attempt to gain mainstream cred, they will police and fight with themselves.

We need a nuanced critique of Western medicine, based on an awareness of what they do well and what they do poorly. For example, a blanket distrust of vaccines only plays into poorer demographics' lack of access to healthcare. We should be increasing access,

while also opening space for people who are the least protected by the medical establishment's research into side effects (those with non-normative bodies). (People who can have babies, to name one example, are often just left out of medical studies).

It's important to talk about the misogyny, transphobia, and white supremacy of the medical establishment, and spread alternatives to interventionist/symptom-focused medicine, but in a way that increases rather than decreases choices and resources for the dispossessed.

Final fun fact: different from most pharmaceuticals that stifle symptoms or massacre proximate causes, vaccines actually help your immune system to heal itself. The method was stolen from the old peasant practice of innoculations!

And in case it's not clear, this positionality isn't like *my idea*. It's my imperfect attempt to analyze what is actually being tried out on the ground.
All knowledge comes from the streets.
(Okay, and the woods and ancestors and deep trips to scary beautiful places)