Yeah, on reflection I have some more thoughts on both the Gittlitz and Agamben Ill Will articles. First, on the Gittlitz:
While punks were largely opposed to the war on terror and the security state, refusing imperialism abroad and tyranny at home in the name of safety, the war on Covid and its biosecurity measures have been relatively popular in punk circles. Punks preach tirelessly against the government, but at the pivotal moment when the capitalist state’s inadequacies were laid bare, their response was largely to publicly demand full compliance with public health authorities and self-police against any illegal assemblies, no matter how cautious.
This bit is, I think, a classic bit of stupid-that-thinks-it's-clever. "How come when the US dropped white phosphorous on Fallujah and the cops shot de Menezes, you said that was bad, but when you got asked to work from home or get paid to not go to work, you didn't say that was bad? Doesn't that seem a bit hypocritical to you?"
This is not to say all the punks who took Covid seriously are safety punks. Without articulating an anti-lockdown politics, many punks, anarchists, and other traditionally danger-attracted political subcultures stared the virus in the face to test the vagaries of early COVID-restrictions. They set up mutual aid networks, organized rent strikes, and fought police in chaotic melees at the frontlines of the demonstrations. In those first months of lockdown it was assumed that everything from handing out bags of groceries to the public, engaging the police, going to jail, or assembling with one’s neighbors, however masked, were likely routes to a potentially deadly infection. It was at least late June before we figured out for sure that outdoor demonstrations did not constitute “super spreader events,” as many politicians and pundits were arguing to discredit the rebellion. We gathered nonetheless, deeming this risk worthwhile.
Despite their courage and effective rejection of the neoliberal lockdown in the US, this punk faction of mutual aid and anti-state rebellion never explicitly framed itself as rejecting Covid protocol. The result is that punks and the left in general have drifted in the popular imagination farther away from oppositional culture, often appearing more like eager hall monitors of the biosecurity state.
Similarly, I think it's worth examining what the mutual aid work that that they describes as "effective rejection of lockdown" looked like - in Portland,
anarchists and antifascists were manufacturing hand sanitizer for frontline workers and homeless people, and pretty much everywhere people did the shopping for their neighbours so that other people could self-isolate. To say that those actions are effectively the same thing as an anti-lockdown protest is... well, it's a bit "everything is exactly the same as everything else", innit? And that's not even getting into the situation in prisons, where
people agitated for early release in order to be able to self-isolate more effectively, and
inmates on Rikers Island organised a strike to demand proper PPE - I don't think you can call that "rejection of lockdown", but it hardly seems like being "hall monitors of the biosecurity state" either.
On the Il Rovescio/Agamben texts, I'm genuinely curious about what this bit is meant to mean:
tens of thousands of people took to the streets — and will do so again in the coming period — to assert that they do not accept a society divided in two (do you know where the first signs with the words "health pass = apartheid" appeared? It was in the streets of Israel).
Now, it seems to me to that the only possible way anyone who wasn't a complete clown could write that sentence would be to mean "if you live in Israel, and you don't recognise the normal functioning of your society as being apartheid and a society divided in two, including the genuine scandal of unequal access to the vaccine, but you think that the idea of a vaccine passport is an unacceptable step into apartheid, you must be one of the dimmest cunts alive". But that bit from the Agamben article I mentioned above, about "a discrimination against a category of human beings to which a Jewish person ought to be particularly sensitive", makes it sound like there could be another, much worse meaning, about "see, the vaccine passports must be apartheid, if an Israeli/Jew says so then it must be true".
More generally, I suppose I'd find the Gittlitz/Rovescio/Agamben line of argument more convincing if there was no other social contestation going on, if it really was that the state vs the antivaxxers was the only game in town. But that's not the case, there's loads of other people pushing back against the extension of social control one way or another. As we see, Gittlitz deals with this by just claiming that doing the shopping for your neighbours, setting cop cars on fire in anti-police riots, and anti-lockdown protests are actually all the same thing; Rovescio seems to just slag everything else off for being "typical decomposition into the arenas of environmental defense, support for the unemployed in struggle, opposition to racist apparatuses" whereas only anti-vax passport stuff is "a confrontation with the Emergency as a
total social fact". Like, they specifically diss "the "unitary statement" by rank and file unionists for the general strike of October 18" for not talking about vaccine passports, cos a general strike organised by rank and file unionists isn't proper rebellion unless it's about vaccine passports. As far as I can see they don't mention Natascia Savio's hunger strike, but presumably the same objection would apply there.
I'm curious as to what it was that
cloudyday thought was good about those texts?
. The house systems at my school seem to have been selected so that one or two houses had kids much better at sports than the others.
winteroak.org.uk
mtlcounterinfo.org
illwill.com
