A note from the editors: The following short essay, by Locust Review editor Alexander Billet, is part of our ongoing project “Locust Dispatches.”
“Hand-o-Fate (After Emory Douglas),” digital collage and drawing, from the Born Again Labor Museum (Adam Turl + Tish Markley)
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht
We are out of whack temporally. Looking out the window, venturing outside briefly, everything is slowing down as more businesses shutter, gatherings are discouraged, traffic evaporates and people retreat indoors. But scrolling through the news or social media, the world is moving at a dizzying pace. A country’s death toll is spiking. The amount of aid or relief we might expect changes dramatically day-to-day. New wars and skirmishes percolate. Plague time renders trenchant commentary useless.
All we really know for sure is that a lot of people are about to die. How many isn’t clear. In 1918 around 50 million died during the influenza pandemic. Are we headed to something similar? How overwhelmed will hospitals be? Which nations will be most effective in flattening the curve? Which ones will resort to mass graves?
These questions are all part of the cruel necropolitical calculus being shaped right now. Whole populations are expendable to capital and empire. It is always true but obscured to all but the most immediate victims. Now it’s horrifyingly apparent. It’s apparent when a mayor refuses to shut down the casinos and when sitting Senators sell off their stocks just before the crisis hits. When a president dithers and shifts blame. When sanctions on a foreign country in the grip of the pandemic are tightened. It’s apparent when the rich run for their bunkers and when a treasury secretary touts the “investment opportunities” that will come with a public health crisis. When ICE agents gear up to raid homes people are sheltering in. The lacunae between disaster capitalism and eco-fascism isn’t just becoming visible; it is being bridged.
Calling any of this “weird” feels woefully insufficient. In a hospital in Indiana, nurses are reporting that because of shortages in protective equipment, they can only get a mask when a patient tests positive. There is only one problem: the hospital has no tests on hand. The logic of capitalist realism is being stretched to its limit right now, its more Kafkaesque characteristics taking center-stage. “Be reasonable” is not a refrain that can withstand a plague. Survival will require solidarity and exercising the atrophied muscles of a collective imagination.
Emancipatory politics have always relied on the crowd. From the picket line that keeps out scabs to the throngs of demonstrators outside government buildings that could at any moment be inside, turning it all upside down. But it has already been turned upside down, albeit in a perverse and unexpected way.
Neoliberalism has spent the past four decades outsourcing its reproduction downwards, turning exploitation and atomization into common sense. It has made deadly ideas seem popular as it fragmented the institutions that provided us with cohesion – the trade union, the neighborhood, the community organization. The current Anglo-American approach to this pandemic is no different, pushing a “personal responsibility” solution that is likely going to lengthen it. Now that every crowd is filled with potential Typhoid Marys, and with little faith in governments’ abilities to keep us alive, we are forced to repair person-to-person bonds with a trust and comradeship that feels new and strange. Yes, we are learning how vicious the world can get. We are also learning how to stockpile hope.
In the Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno, homeless families have seized a dozen vacant homes. Community members have supported them. Small strikes are popping off and winning quick victories for safety of workers and their communities: bus-drivers in Detroit, teachers in New York. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has transformed into one big relief effort. Mutual aid networks are springing up, some spanning whole cities, others as small as a single apartment building. Even as we socially distance, we get to know our neighbors and coworkers in a way we haven’t for decades.
These actions allow us to picture a life beyond the plague, reminding us that the demand just to stay alive can be revolutionary. Think of ACT-UP, queer people refusing to quietly languish away while AIDS wiped them out. Or of the Palestinians, the grip of occupation and apartheid daily tightening around their lives, somehow unbowed, living in a state of what John Berger described as “undefeated despair.”
We will all be stunned over the next few weeks by how still the air has become. When we go for groceries or to deliver supplies to those in need, we will see people walking by on the street or a plaza, clutching their coats to them, faces pinned straight ahead as if even making eye contact might make you a carrier. It will feel dismal, particularly as death tolls climb. We will also be shocked, even a bit disconcerted, when our minds dare to picture these streets being used for something other than simply transporting us between work and home.
Think of Italy. In Venice, the canals are clear for the first time in decades. No, the pictures of swans and dolphins retaking them were not real, but they do speak to an urge to reimagine our cities and other surroundings, for the space between us to be, in a sense, reenchanted.
We do not have to make things up to picture this. We can think of the singing that comes from balconies in Siena, Rome, Bologna. Bono would have us believe that he is the one pointing out the beauty in this; he is a charlatan. So is any celebrity who thinks sanctimony can be so easily peddled in times like these. The real significance of the singing in Italy is found in relation to the uprisings that a few short months ago were rippling through Hong Kong, Beirut, Santiago.
In Chile, as police forces tried to quell mass marches with mandatory curfew, residents also sang through neighborhoods. They sang Victor Jara’s “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz.” They declared their right to live in peace, but above all the right to live. Within a week, it was being sung by tens of thousands on the streets as a government was brought to its knees. As we sing through dark times, keeping ourselves safe, we must picture ourselves a future much like this.
“Worker’s Argus Panoptes,” digital collage and drawing, from the Born Again Labor Museum (Adam Turl + Tish Markley)
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