We have received a second translations with some corrections, so the content is quite different from the previous english version

Plagues, indeed, are a common thing, but it is hard to believe in
plagues that crash down on your head. There have been as many plagues in
the world as there have been wars. And yet, plagues and wars always find
people unprepared.

(Albert Camus, The Pest)

Chaos…or not?

The arrival of the epidemic in Italy is the starting point of a
unprecedented upheaval. The economy collapses. Hundreds of billions of
euros have disappeared. Shops are being closed. Public offices, schools,
gymnasiums… everything is blocked. Only supermarkets and shops for
basic needs remain open and are emptied daily. People often leave their
homes only to go shopping. They don’t talk to each other out of fear,
everyone tries to get everything done as soon as possible. It seems to
be a pre-apocalyptic scenario, some might think that this is the sign of
a period of chaos. But today’s situation seems to be quite different
from chaotic: millions of people have given up leaving their homes in
the name of a collective responsibility filled with patriotism. The
state commands and citizens obey; some out of fear, others to avoid
retaliation. Relationships are mostly mediated by digital media, and
human contact has become a violation of public health. The economy is
based on web-based platforms, large multinational companies manage all
the movement of goods, and supermarket chains become the main point of
reference for satisfying needs. Classes are taught remotely; surely the
classrooms will be quiet now… How is this chaotic?

Of course the situation in the hospitals by no means under control, but
why should that be so surprising? Has the state ever cared about
people’s health? Illness is not just  a threat, it is an opportunity for
profit or control.

***

But we also know that in their order, disorder, rebellion, the feeling
of denied life lies just below the surface, more or less accessible and
understandable for the individual. There is an unexpressed potential in
terms of desire. The more this potential is banished and denied, the
more dangerous it becomes, because it could catch fire at any moment. Or
maybe not, maybe everything is already lost, and perhaps only we (who is
we?) still feel passions and desires?

But if neither of these two possibilities changes the individual
decision to continue the attack on power, it changes the way we can
reject the idea of the inevitable eternal reproduction of the present
state of things. Let us empower ourselves by trying to perceive the
stifled tension, the idea that another world is possible, or that this
is not the best, the only possible world.

***

Alternative or co-administration?

However, as happens in many historical moments when the authority of the
ruling social system is not undermined at the root, the alternatives
take only a few steps along a different path before they are caught in
the misery of co-administration.

What does it mean today to help with the distribution of masks? It would
mean either making arrangements and coordinating with civil defence and
the city administration, or it would mean that military and police
repression is just around the corner, because laws and decrees
prohibiting leaving the house are being violated.

This social system has created a world in which 7-8-9 billion people
live. As Huxley said in his prophetic novel “Brave New World”

“Stability. No civilization without social stability. No social
stability without individual stability.” His voice was a trumpet.
Listening they felt larger, warmer.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning–for ever. It is
death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the
earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were
two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks
there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand
thousand men and women have starved to death.

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be
men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane
men, obedient men, stable in contentment.

Crying: My baby, my mother, my only, only love groaning: My sin, my
terrible God; screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old
age and poverty–how can they tend the wheels? And if they cannot tend
the wheels … The corpses of a thousand thousand thousand men and women
would be hard to bury or burn.”

***

Which problems are ours, and which are Empire’s problems?

Do we have to solve the pollution problem? We didn’t study biology.
We’re tearing down a transmission tower to shut down a factory.

Must we solve the problem of poverty? We are not financing an ethical
bank, we are robbing it and we are trying to destroy the world of trade
and also that of the fraud called “fair trade”.

Must we solve the problem of disease? We are not studying medicine, we
are trying to break up this social system. Because revolutionary actions
do not restructure the prison, nor do they seek to improve it. They tear
it down to clear space, to give life a chance to flourish.

In fact, otherness can only arise where the power of the state does not
exist, and it suffocates when these spaces in which it tries to
germinate do not expand, but remain confined to small controlled
pockets.

Unfortunately, the casualties are caused by this world, by our
collective way of life – even of survival.  And not as a result of where
we choose to struggle. And a revolution is paved with blood and death,
because that is where this social system has placed humanity: without
it, existence is denied. How could humanity exist without the science of
nuclear energy, from the moment the first power station was switched on
and nuclear waste started to be produced? The price of the choices of
those who lived before us will continue to follow us for many years to
come, but if we do not start paying the debt of suffering now, in the
long-term, our suffering will only increase.

***

The emergency brake is a dangerous device.

However, if we do do not take action, paternalism will continue to
deepen and change our lives and dominate us materially. For this reason
it is not possible to accept co-administration or to postpone conflict,
which should actually be permanent: after all, the disaster belongs to
them and they must pay for it. And it has to stop.

Those who want a world of freedom are not responsible for the massacres
of the ruling class, not even for those that will take place tomorrow or
after the collapse of rule. Of course we must not lose sight of the
consistency between means and ends, but we must also be able to look at
the world from a certain distance.

***

However, it is also true that the pace of these days is obsessive and
the awareness of the disaster is becoming increasingly clear to most
people. What will happen when fear abandons the field of desire for hope
or the hope of desire?

An unexpected world

And then what? A situation like this comes at you unprepared.

As lovers of freedom, we strive for the plots of this emergency regime
to be broken by an uncontrollable hotbed of passions. We also wonder,
however, how the possibilities for intervention change when a whole
range of guarantees, especially material ones, are denied or simply no
longer guaranteed by the social system. How can we continue to have
relationships and organise ourselves when we remain separated? How is it
possible to disseminate ideas without dispersing them in the virtual
space of opinion when it is difficult to communicate off screen?

Moreover, if communication and memory are entrusted exclusively to
social networks, which have the power to suddenly eliminate and censor
everything, how can we preserve the memory of the events which have been
bombarded by the messages of the eternal present? By which means can we
do this autonomously, when printing houses and printing presses are
closed by decree? And what are the risks involved in trying to break
this macabre silence?

Looking back

A look into the past could be a good starting point at this time to try
to orientate oneself according to the decisions to be made. Yet it must
be done without distracting the mind from the present, which offers us a
new and unique perspective.

The experiences of individuals and anarchist groups in the past could
enlighten us about the importance of having various skills, knowledge
and means at our disposal which have made it possible to make life
difficult for the state and its means of repression.

Even in times of war or military dictatorship, when the conditions of
precariousness were much more extreme than they are today, there were
those who managed to continue fighting, to spread ideas of revolt and to
put them into practice. But what are these nebulous “means and
capabilities” that we spoke of earlier? An example, which may seem as
trivial as it is obvious, is the ability to independently print paper
material in large quantities and in a short time, so that it can be
distributed quickly.

In the twentieth century it was common for those who wrote a newspaper
to have the knowledge and material means to print the copies to be
distributed. In many cities there were secret printing houses where
comrades could print their leaflets, posters, brochures, books, and so
on. It was, for example, in many cities in Russia during the tsarist and
Bolshevik rule or in Argentina under the Uriburu dictatorship, where one
Severino di Giovanni – as a person in hiding – was able to go from
robbing banks to printing books and leaflets in a short time.

Other possibilities are linked to a thorough knowledge of the territory
in which one lives and the knowledge of how to move about in it
unnoticed. One thinks of the case of Caracremada, who for decades
succeeded in carrying out acts of sabotage, either in company or alone,
on French territory, crossing the Pyrenees each time, only to return to
France a few weeks later. While forms of control in history certainly
assume different, reflecting on the conditions of those who have eluded
them in the past could be a preparation for the development of forms of
escape in the present. How does one combine knowledge of the territory
with the contemporary tendency towards nomadic life and constant
movement in space? What if the restrictions currently imposed were an
incentive to learn to move wisely through a territory, somehow avoiding
being stopped?

But this is only possible over time and not immediately. And what
scenarios do we now see before us?

A look at tomorrow

To simplify things, perhaps to an excessive degree, there are only two
alternatives. Of course we can intervene with our actions, we are not
overtaken by events nor we do not wait for history to take its course.
Our will carries weight and plays a role in what happens, both near and
far. The first possibility is that Empire will succeed in finding its
own new stability, normalizing the situation and continuing to reproduce
its world and the relationships it has produced. The other is that this
Empire begins to desintegrate, to spiral into ever greater instability,
to collapse inexorably.

The times could rapidly and unexpectedly unfold into one scenario or
another.

***

In the first case it would be necessary to understand what it means to
live in such a state of emergency and to find a way to avoid being
blocked by such external restrictions in the future. There is always a
next time.

Let us consider what would happen if certain websites were blocked and
filtered out in the future. Or if our mobile phone SIM cards were
deactivated. We would become mute. Today more than ever, since we don’t
even have a way to print, because we depend on printers and copy shops
and may not even have the addresses of the people we want to communicate
with. We also think about all those elements of knowledge and skills
that we need to develop over time and not in an emergency. Today we have
what we have, our limitations and our ignorance. Or maybe other people
feel ready instead? And how do we want to feel tomorrow? And what do we
want to know?

***

In the second case, we should be able to survive, firstly, and secondly,
to ensure that Empire does not reappear in another form. The city is
easily isolated and is not capable of self-sufficiency: it needs
supplies brought in from outside to continue to exist.

The city is a place that could suddenly prove inhospitable, because it
was built in the image and likeness of the powers that shaped it and is
thus only designed to function for them. Networks of relationships could
quickly be destroyed if you flee to places where you can still make a
living, where there is more than concrete. When gasoline is impossible
to get, and when it is not possible to phone or email each other, living
together becomes necessary to be able to live well and conspire
together. You choose the people you want to be with, because the future
is uncertain. If we hope that antennas will be burnt down and that
infrastructure will be destroyed, we have to find out how and where we
can reinvent our lives. And maybe we should start asking ourselves these
questions, even though we have always thought that the problem of
destruction is so overwhelming that we never thought that we would have
to ask ourselves other questions. And we should start sowing seeds,
because it’s not necessarily the case that with just-in-time production
there will still be noodle warehouses to attack or warehouses to loot
near where we live(1). Food could run out before the flowers are in
bloom.

Perhaps the Paris Commune would have lasted longer if groups of
revolutionaries rose up from the land and attacked the back of the
Republican army in scattered form and broke through the enclosure.

***

Which of these two scenarios do we consider more plausible? Depending on
location and sensitivity, the answers could be different.

No solutions, just clear ideas

Let us leave behind the illusion that the collapse of Empire can be a
unified process.  Everywhere in the world the dynamics and timing will
be different, like the spots of a leopard, which can make the situation
even more chaotic and confusing in a short time.

Perhaps we would never have thought to actually write it out, since we
had resigned ourselves to the inevitable reality of our world.  But
maybe we can actually see the birth of other forms of life. It will be
difficult to judge the different situations from a distance, as we used
to do. Thirty kilometers could separate different experiences and ways
of life, separated by a cordon sanitaire of military and police.

There is no blueprint today, any more than there was yesterday. It takes
intelligence, generosity, shamelessness and intuition to understand what
to do, where, how and at what time. Which are the times for destruction,
and which for construction? There is no single answer that applies to
every case. However, one thing is needed to make experiences
translatable and intuitions communicable: clarity of purpose. And that
in this time of change, the will to eradicate all forms of power from
the world that we inhabit, inside and outside of us, remains strong.

For the attack, here and now.
For life, here and now.

Amici di penna

(1) We mention this early contribution by A.M. Bonanno about
insurrectionary
perspectives and about some of his reflections on the organizational,
mental and
physical abilities that should be developed (see for example p. 21):
https://collafenice.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/trascizione-incontro-23-giugno.pdf

We’re all living quite a situation here. Before the virus had got near most of us, we were thrown into this necessary mode of life called social-distancing. Our lack of knowledge and the speed it has covered the globe and is transmitting within the locations we live has produced feelings of shock, confusion and fear. While these feelings make sense, we should also recognise and counter the tendency that they produce towards individualism and isolation.

Fear. Individualism. Isolation. Currently the circulation of these sentiments is exponentially bolstering the power of the state. As Crimethinc have said, “social distancing must not mean total isolation. We won’t be safer if our society is reduced to a bunch atomised of individuals”. Such an atomised society is the path to least resistance. Even as the virus spreads we must not become too isolated and disconnected from each other to be able to resist state control and the implementation of measures that fuck most of us over in a desperate attempt to save the economy.

We’ve never organised in a situation like this before. We’ve never organised where the idea that to be responsible to each other requires us to stay away from each other is common sense. And yet, we’re still finding ways to set up networks of mutual aid and support, to get supplies to people who need them. As things progress – as what is a medical- scientific issue expands further and further into the terrain of the social – we’ll find ourselves returning to the things we always knew, that we’d learnt in all our experiences of struggle and resistance.

Consider this a simple reminder of some of those things, to keep them in mind now, before fear and isolation means we’ve ceded too much ground to an increasingly authoritarian state.

Disclaimer: These suggestions are not meant to cover the entirety of things to consider in these times. Additionally, this was written from within the territory of so-called Australia with some specific references to the context here. Hopefully it might also have broad relevance for anarchists in other places.

Stick with your crew, look to your neighbours, connect with broader networks of mutual aid and solidarity.

As our concerns move between those closest to us to all of the most marginalised people trying to survive, we can begin to enact mutual aid by building from the relationships of affinity, care and support we already have in our lives. Even if there are people more in need – who we hope to be able to extend support to – skipping steps without being able to look after and organise with your closest crew will result in grand intentions with little capacity to follow through.

So stay in touch with the people around you. Check in on what mental, emotional and physical needs they have. Find ways to support them. And then find ways to organise. But also know that some of the best spontaneous examples of mutual aid arise from relationships you hadn’t considered to be your closest. Reach out to your neighbours and keep an eye on what broader networks of solidarity are starting to form and how you can participate. Or, if you (and your crew) feel good enough and have your shit together, start building towards those networks. If we allow the power we have and our connections to be decimated, when the virus is finally contained the transformed world we step back into will be a terrifying place. Have each others’ backs.

Fuck borders and racist paranoia.

The state-enforced response to the spread of the contagion has resulted in ever more borders proliferating throughout our lives, cordoning off homes, neighbourhoods, cities, regions and countries. These are considered necessary measures for containment – even by ‘radicals’ – so that a sentiment that has white nationalists nodding along in agreement is treated as common sense. But every wall that goes up, no matter how necessary, involves a fear of the dangerous other who lurks outside. In colonial, racist countries such as this, that fear of the unknowable, not-white outsider bringing disease and crime has upheld white nationalism for centuries. The beginnings of the coronavirus outbreak saw the latest wave of anti-Chinese hysteria – an Aussie tradition that goes back to at least the 1850’s.

This is a simple reminder: fuck borders and racist paranoia. We can accept the responsibility of social-distancing without mobilising the sort of sentiments upon which detention centres and the violent militarisation of borders are built. The state’s capacity to shutdown the borders so easily now is a precedent that will be used to ensure an even greater control of people’s movement in future. This containment will prioritise balancing capital’s demands for cheap labour and the paranoia of a racist population. The economy of this country has been built on the labour of precarious migrant labour and international students, yet it always measures them as outsiders against the interests of white society and makes them expendable and scapegoats in times of crisis. Should the state’s stimulus packages exclude these people, our struggles must fight to extend support to them. We must ensure that our solidarity is anti-racist, anti-nationalist and directed to those who have no status or without full (resident/ citizen) status.

Dismantle all capitalist relations.

Every measure that the state proposes in this time is as concerned with the maintenance of the economy as it is with public health. Even now, as governments implement packages that might bring a bit of relief to some of us, the main purpose is to keep the economy ticking over and the property market viable – that is, to ensure that we can keep paying rent. Capitalism has enshrined social relations built on the extraction of maximum value from all and any possible terrain, leading to: the extortion that is the rental market; the degradation of the environment while dispossessing First Nations people of their land; the inequities of access to medical care (even in this country that retains more public health services than many); and of course, the exploitation of our very bodies as a source of labour.

While a return to ‘normality’ will at times seem preferable to the existence we face now, we need to be prepared to resist a return that prioritises the reinstatement of these modes of social relations. We’ve seen how crucial casual and precarious labour is to all sectors of society and how the mass of us who work under these conditions are the first ones to wear the fallout of economic decline. When the peak of virus transmission passes and recovery becomes the objective, government and business will apply all social, moral and material pressure for us to ‘pitch-in’ as workers in their efforts to restore profit-making capacity. There will be sweeteners given to entice us, and these may be hard to turn down in our material circumstances. But we must reject a return to conditions that thrive on alienation and exploitation. Instead, we can build on the collective structures of mutual aid and support – the ones currently getting resources to people in need or pushing towards a rent strike – to assert different forms of social relations in defiance of capital.

Learn about boundaries, ask questions.

This is a time where we need to be able to talk about our needs and boundaries clearly. In our usual day-to-day lives, we’re all implicated in crossing each others boundaries: the negotiations of life and survival within conflicting oppressive systems mean we’re infringed upon and we infringe. We do our best to respect each other, acknowledge and learn from mistakes and build our resilience. But this virus is a stark reminder that how we respect boundaries can have major consequences. Recognise the boundaries people are setting and try to understand the conditions – material, physical health, psychological – that result in the necessity of certain boundaries.

The nature of the contagion has disrupted norms about how affectionate we can be with each other. There’s awkwardness and discomfort as friendships incubated in warm hugs become stand-offish, or as doling out daps all over town becomes frowned upon. Ask questions instead of assuming is common advice in terms of consent around sex and intimacy. Do it now. Here’s a chance to extend our understanding of consent. But also take stock how the boundaries that you set aren’t simply related to what you feel are your individual capacities, but reflect a responsibility to keep those around you healthy and safe. There is no pure individual cocoon, everything is interconnected.

No snitching, ftp forever.

The fear is compelling and true, but we must resist everywhere that it produces reactionary responses. As sentiments of paranoia, self-isolation, righteousness and shaming culture spread, they are opening the door for snitching. In the face of this, we need to build social solidarity and resist authoritarianism, not partake in leaders’ calls to ‘dob in a mate’. Snitching is never ok. Some people are not in the material, social or psychological situation to cordon themselves off in a comfortable home with a fully-stocked pantry. Instead of being boot-lickers, create the structures of support and care that provide an alternative example.

The threat of the virus has become a fear that seeks out the comfortable embrace of the state. Wherever people are demanding more of it, the state responds by doing what it knows best – rolling police out onto the streets and increasing surveillance. As always, it will be marginalised people and communities who have the most to fear, as well as anyone attempting to enact mutual aid and solidarity outside of state control. We should understand well the advice of Plan C that “if we demand security from the state, we disempower ourselves and our communities”. We should realise that if we cede too much ground now, we are allowing the state to set the terms of the post- virus recovery.

So FtP forever and cough on every cop you encounter (not really, there’s better things to do than getting nicked for nothing).

Do your illegal shit as a way to extend resources and support.

What is legal or illegal is most directly about protecting wealth and property from being taken by those who need it most. These divisions of legality and illegality are inextricable from the circulation of capitalist social relations that promote individualism and a profit-driven mindset over forms of collectivity and communalism. Owning multiple houses and charging rent on them is not illegal. Buying every last roll of toilet paper in a supermarket is not illegal. We know that what is legal or not has little relation to our capacity to live with, and provide for, each other.

In opposition to all that, many of us have developed skills and abilities that allow us to survive at the edges of the system. From simply being able to gather food for free or to opening abandoned buildings, to whatever else you feel capable of and have experience in. Use these skills now and build upon them to extend our capacity to provide resources and support to the people around us and to help sustain the larger networks of solidarity that are forming. But be extra careful and prepared. Understand that the conditions of surveillance and policing are changing, amping up as the state has seized this moment to assert its authority. Be brave, be clever, stay strong.

Fuck landlords and hoarders, scam and loot for your people.

Other Readings:

‘Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide’ from Crimethinc.com

‘No Security in Times of Crisis’ from weareplanc.org

https://325.nostate.net/2020/03/27/some-old-things-to-live-by-some-new-things-to-live-by-anti-authoritarian-ideas-to-hold-onto-in-these-times-of-virus-and-crisis-autralia/#more-26654

On a particularly chaotic Friday afternoon, Piñera inaugurated the nationwide chain reaction to the pandemic. Since the beginning of March, fear of the virus has slowly entered the conversation: between the agitated return to classes that seeks to be a replica (like an earthquake) of the October Revolt, the massive feminist demonstrations, the radicalization of the reactionary sectors and the imminence of the plebiscite, it is taking on more and more importance.

The international situation is no less complex. Last year saw the beginning of a new worldwide wave of revolts against capitalist normality, and the much manipulated “institutionality” seems to be collapsing from all sides, leaving room not only for insurgent creativity but also (and never so easily differentiated) for populism and fascism of all kinds.

The economy has been losing speed for some time, but the trade war between two declining powers, the manufactured rise in the price of oil, and the paralysis caused by the coronavirus, built the perfect storm to leave the stock market and its tangle of speculative fictions in free fall.

It is in this context that the disease arrives in our territory, with the state of exception still fresh in our memories. It starts in the upper classes, and we almost rejoice before remembering that they will not be the only ones to suffer its consequences. The government, always late, announces its measures. Clearly they are not enough, and their only objective is to ensure the free movement of capital. Some (the ones who see conspiracies at every corner) whisper that it is a strategy to cancel the plebiscite, that is apparently so dangerous. But we are clear that the intelligent fascist votes to approve, and that the government’s incompetence requires no more justification than its own class interests.

However, we have also seen how the situation has developed in other countries with a more advanced stage of infection. Simulations of insurrection, urban warfare and absolute states of emergency have been deployed on the streets of China, Italy and other parts of the world, with varying degrees of success. The Chinese state, famous for its repressive capacity, concentrated all its efforts on the containment of ground zero but, juggling to keep its economy afloat, left its regional governments free both to resume production and to sustain the quarantine. Beyond this it has been by far the country whose quarantine has been most efficient and effective (we won’t mention the United States, whose public policy is reduced to covering its ears and shouting loudly).

The Italian case is notable, more than anything else, for its resistance to quarantine measures and “social distancing”, a nefarious euphemism that refers to self-isolation, forced precarization disguised as “tele-working”, hoarding of essential goods, and the denial of any form of community. When the prisoners (who have always been overcrowded and immuno-compromised) were banned from receiving visits, the biggest prison revolt of this century began: 27 prisons were taken over, many people were killed, police and prison officers were kidnapped and hundreds of prisoners escaped.

In Chilean territory, the situation is uncertain. Pharmacies and supermarkets that were recently looted will soon be out of stock due to widespread panic. Public transport, a permanent battleground since the beginning of the revolt, will soon be avoided like the plague. The government has already banned gatherings of more than 500 people, but by now anyone who is listening to the government is listening. The military, who we assume have refused to leave again to keep what little legitimacy they have left and to be able to preserve their privileges in a new constitution, will not have so much shame if they can disguise their actions as public health. Real public health, on the other hand, weighs less than a packet of cabritas (translation note: a popular popcorn snack). And we have no idea what will happen with the plebiscite.

If elsewhere the pandemic was a trial of insurrection, here the insurrection seems to have been a trial of pandemic and economic crisis. Let’s keep the flame of revolt alive, and organize to survive.

We will now outline some measures that we consider worthy of generalization, more of an inspiration than a programme:

• Looting and organized redistribution of basic goods
• The use of student occupations as collection centres, shelters for homeless people and, of course, street fighters.
• The boycott of any form of distance work or study, so that the quarantine becomes a general strike.
• The immediate release of all prisoners as a central demand.
• Mass evasion in private clinics, free medical care for all.
• Rent strike, taking over empty houses.
• The hood is the best mask!

Evade the isolation of capital!

Deny immunity as a police device!

The crisis is an opportunity, raise your fist and attack!

(via Contra Info, translated into English by Anarchists Worldwide)

About the mutinies in Italian prisons against the state’s measures against Coronavirus

For several weeks now the Italian government has been testing increasingly radical measures to restrict freedom in order to manage the Coronavirus pandemic.
While isolation and control are becoming increasingly harsh on the outside, the situation is becoming unbearable on the inside. For two weeks now, the visits, work and recreational activities have been restricted. In recent days, people who were on day-release are no longer allowed to go out and special permissions are no longer allowed. This also means the deprivation of access to basic necessities and goods (food, clean clothing, money…).

Following these decisions, the first mutinies broke out on Saturday the 7th of March, spreading to around thirty prisons in the space of two days throughout Italy.
The methods of revolt are simple and effective. From the north to the south of Italy, fire spread from one prison to another, prisoners climbed to the rooftops shouting “freedom and amnesty!”, prison guards were taken hostage, bars were twisted, official documents were reduced to ashes. There are no more traces of law enforcement officers in some wings of the buildings. In Modena, the entire prison closed down because the revolts made it unusable.
The figures that are beginning to circulate speak of more than a hundred escaped prisoners. We wish them good luck!

As the smoke rises high in the sky, relatives and people in solidarity gather at the bottom of the prisons, either to shout their support or to organize street blockades, thus blocking the arrival of the police, the GOM (prison police) and the military.

The revolt is intense, the repression is ferocious: water and electricity cuts, helicopters flying over the prison walls, police violence…There are at least 12 dead in several prisons. The bourgeois press and the prison administration speak of overdoses following the looting of infirmaries, however relatives of the prisoners [gathered in solidarity outside the prisons] have heard gunshots. And several prisoners are hospitalized in intensive care.
At the same time, politicians of all kinds are trying to pacify by offering access to telephones or Skype, while asking families to calm their loved ones…but it hasn’t been enough to break their determination.
We send them all our solidarity!

We don’t need to make analyses of the current revolts, they speak for themselves of the attack on a system that locks up and controls through fear and threats.
By relying on an urgency and a generalized fear that they have helped to create, the different states place themselves as saviours in the face of the catastrophe and impose their logic and their measures on us. They compete in inventiveness to deepen control and surveillance and experiment with different tools for population management.
Moreover, France is talking about setting up a specific system for prisons in the coming days.
Apart from these situations, the reality of prisons is always disgusting.
Faced with imprisonment, there are always good reasons to revolt!

Coronavirus or not, in Italy or elsewhere, fire to all prisons!

March 11th, 2020.

[Originally published on Nantes Indymedia on 12.03.2020]

(via Sans Attendre Demain, translated into English by Anarchists Worldwide)

Received by mail anonymous..

We’re in Lockdown. Stay at home, we’re commanded. Only that which is most necessary for economic survival is permitted, but it is never stated of whose survival they speak. Even then we’re greeted by processions of police riot vans – lights flashing, show of force – informing us that we have to go home. Going about the minimum of daily activities is a danger to public health. It’s already been said in Italy that it’s amazing how quickly we forget: what it’s like to speak to a stranger, to touch someone, to encounter an unexpected moment amid the concrete drizzle of capital. The workhouses and temples of consumption are open but the shelves are almost bare. We have a social responsibility, they say. The healthcare system cannot cope and it is us that has to save it. Did someone say something about funding?

An invisible enemy. The stuff of apocalyptic films. The cause is not important, it’s just the flu after all, but the response is crucial. We are not measuring the number of deaths but the capacities of power. Swine flu and SARS failed to take the world by storm but they’ve nailed
it this time. Everything that came before was a mere prototype for the finished product: a perfectly intangible terror that demands our complete subservience. It’s as though The Handmaid’s Tale, in all its controversial success, was a warm-up before the main act.

The supposed reach and severity of the Corona Virus is almost a mute subject. What’s important is who is going to take benefit, how, and who pays the price. The capitalist economic system is built on investment, but this time it’s starving itself ready for a rampage. When this is allover, when our glorious benefactors have saved us from near ruin and we
welcome back with open arms a depleted economy that was fucking us before ‘the pandemic’, we have to think where we will be.

Waves of migrants washing upon even more hostile European shores. Solitary confinement becoming the prisoners’ permanent state. G4S quietly clean up after the morning matinee as we’re distracted by the charade in the main hall. Physical human interaction reduced to an
Orwellian suspicion whilst the spectrum of human emotion is expressed through Whatsapp’s preset sticker selection. Facebook’s laughing as Instantgram’s rewriting history with all our rebellious quotes.

https://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=36822

COVID-19 – known as the coronavirus – emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. It’s flu-like symptoms enabled the quick spread of the virus within the city. It also allowed the spread of the disease beyond Wuhan despite the attempts of the Chinese government to curb it by resorting to drastic measures of arresting and detaining suspected carriers.

Now it has spread globally. As of March 5th, 2020, 97,893 people have been infected worldwide with 7100 cases being regarded as serious. 3353 people have died of whom approximately 3013 were in China and 340 in other countries. The most serious outbreaks outside China have been in northern Italy, Iran and South Korea. The rates in many countries may be under-reported because of health officials refusing to test people reporting flu symptoms, especially Japan. The virus has impacted an estimated 87 countries and territories. 53,786 people have recovered from the virus. (Statistics from various government health agencies as charted in this webpage) According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), it takes about five days from exposure before people manifest the symptoms of the coronavirus. Not surprisingly the elderly, very young children and those with respiratory problems are most at risk.

What is noteworthy about the coronavirus isn’t the virus itself. It has been the fear, misinformation and over the top reactions including panic buying that has occurred in many countries including here in New Zealand where there have been five confirmed cases of the coronavirus at the time of writing (1 News, 6th March 2020).

Conspiracy theories and misinformation have not only fuelled racism against East Asians, especially the Chinese and Koreans, but it has also hampered attempts to deal with the virus. Many of the claims being made by conspiracy theorists have included that it is a form of population control, a bio-weapon unleashed by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against various governments currently at odds with the United States (“China coronavirus: Misinformation spreads online”. BBC News Online . 30 January 2020). Alternatively, the coronavirus was created by the United States government to enable American businesses to make a profit on the vaccines being used to fight the virus. (Rubio, Marco: “Marco Rubio: Russia, China, and Iran are waging disinformation war over coronavirus”. New York Post. 3rd March 2020. Considering Marco Rubin is a Republican Senator and Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Committee on Foreign Relations his comments should be treated with discretion.)

The conspiracy theories surrounding the coronavirus are similar to those that claimed that the Ebola virus, AIDS/HIV and the SARS virus were all secretly created in labs by the CIA. These conspiracy theories have been peddled by various government agencies in the Middle East and Russia for many years as well as thoroughly discredited anti-vaccination campaigners, shock jock conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones (of InfoWars infamy) and various YouTube channels. (Ghaffary, Shirin (31 January 2020). “Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube struggle with coronavirus hoaxes”. Vox .)

Just as disturbing has been the accusations that health authorities have deliberately withheld or downplayed the true numbers of people who have been infected by the coronavirus. Such claims have surfaced on various social media sites and have even been repeated in many traditional media outlets in which it has been alleged that Chinese and Taiwanese officials have lied about the true numbers of people who’ve been infected by the coronavirus. (BBC online, January 30th, 2020)

Most governments have followed the recommendations of the WHO on their website page Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public. That is, for people who have been to northern Italy, Iran, South Korea, and China to be quarantined for about fourteen days and for people who think they may have been infected to get tested as soon as possible. To avoid the possible spread of the virus such people are being encouraged to call their local Health provider rather than turn up in person. People are also being told to be more vigilant about basic hygiene like washing hands with sanitizer after handling food, using the toilet or coming into contact with people who might have flu-like symptoms. If people cough or sneeze they should do so into the crook of their elbows rather than their hands. If they have flu-like symptoms they should wear a surgical mask. People are encouraged to practice social distancing, such as not shaking hands. The taking of such precautionary measures has helped to slow the rate of infections in some countries.

There has been one exception to this: the United States. Rather than addressing the virus Trump and other members of his administration have been spreading misinformation. In an interview with Sean Hannity on March 4th, he claimed the WHO had exaggerated the numbers of people infected by the virus and that the potential impact of the coronavirus is part of a Democrat plot against him. He has also misled or lied about the United State’s government’s ability to deal with the coronavirus by claiming their measures to contain it are airtight and that the virus is no more serious than the outbreak of the seasonal flu. (Walters, Joanna; Aratani, Lauren (5 March 2020). “Trump calls WHO’s global death rate from coronavirus ‘a false number’”. The Guardian .)

As a result, there has been no consistent response from federal agencies. Apart from Trump peddling misinformation about the coronavirus, it has largely been left up to the various states to decide how to address the problem. The result has been that many people with flu-like symptoms are getting contradictory information, not being able to undertake any tests unless they have medical insurance and not even getting told what self-imposed quarantine involves. This means that many people may be spreading the coronavirus without being aware of it and that the cases that have been reported may be an under-estimate. (The U.S. Response to Coronavirus Is Uneven: It Depends on Where You Live, Wall Street Journal, March 4th, 2020) .The response of the United States government shows what happens when a so-called democracy is in the hands of a narcissist who peddles conspiracy theories and is confronted by a crisis as serious as this.

The Chinese government’s response to the coronavirus went to the other extreme. The full power of the authoritarian regime was deployed to deal with the coronavirus epidemic. According to the livescience.com website article, China gets ‘mixed report card’ in its coronavirus response. How will the US do? (March 2nd, 2020) the initial response was to arrest the doctor who first brought the coronavirus to the attention of the world and to clamp down hard on the reporting of the number of cases and even fudging the criteria of diagnosing cases to make the figures look lower than was the case. They also dismissed Wuhan authorities who raised the alarm about the impact of the coronavirus in Wuhan. They also refused to accept assistance from the U.S Centre for Disease Control and the WHO at a point when the assistance could’ve made a major difference.

The Chinese government was responsible for “instituting the largest public health experiment in the history of humankind, which is the quarantine of Wuhan [city] in Hubei province,” using methods that included arresting and forcibly detaining people who were suspected of having the coronavirus in their homes and censoring any criticism of their methods such as its quarantine measures or the facilities that were rapidly built to isolate and treat people with the coronavirus. Live Science also pointed out that “It’s difficult, however, to see how effective the quarantine is because China hasn’t consistently studied the virus’ spread among subpopulations… According to a Feb. 28 opinion piece in the journal JAMA, “it appears that the strict measures China took may have ‘bought the world some time’ but did not prevent the global dissemination of SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes the disease COVID-19.” In other words, there’s no way of knowing if the methods used by the Chinese government in Wuhan have worked.

From my perspective, the responses of both the American and Chinese governments have been pretty much the same: pretend that the problem isn’t so bad and that there are systems in place to deal with it, use the epidemic to stomp on basic human rights such as being detained without trial and freedom of movement and accuse anyone trying to highlight the seriousness of the epidemic of being part of a conspiracy or plotting to bring down the government. The difference between the Americans and the Chinese is that the Chinese don’t pretend to be a democracy that pays lip service to the notion of being a government “of the people, for the people and by the people”.

What people need is accurate, openly available and reliable information about what is going on so that we, as individuals and local communities, can take the necessary steps to protect each other. That means paying attention to the people who have expert knowledge about flu epidemics. It means not listening to some ignorant pissant sitting behind their computer peddling the latest piece of crap from the 8chan website, an anti-vaccination website or from a President who thinks the answer to dealing with an epidemic that has killed over 33,000 people worldwide is to hold a prayer meeting and to blame his opponents. It means using science and sense, not stupidity and authoritarianism.

https://awsm.nz/?p=4870

Much is said about the Covid-19 coronavirus, and yet very little. There are fundamental aspects that remain in the shadows. I want to name some of these, different but complementary.

The first refers to the perverse mechanisms of capitalism to hide the true causes of the problem so as not to do anything about them, because it affects their interests, but it does deal with the apparent cure for the symptoms. Meanwhile, the State spends enormous public resources on prevention, containment and treatment measures, which do not act on the causes either, so this way of facing problems becomes a captive business for transnational companies, for example, with vaccines and medicines.

The dominant reference to viruses and bacteria is as if they were exclusively harmful organisms that must be eliminated. A war-like approach prevails, as in so many other aspects of capitalism’s relationship with nature. However, due to the ability of viruses to jump between species, viruses and bacteria are a fundamental part of the coevolution and adaptation of living beings, as well as their balance with the environment and their health, including humans.

Covid-19, which now makes global headlines, is a strain of the coronavirus family, which causes generally mild respiratory diseases but can be serious for a very small percentage of those affected due to their vulnerability. Other coronavirus strains caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), considered an epidemic in Asia in 2003 but since disappeared in 2004, and Middle East Acute Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which has also virtually disappeared. Like Covid-19, they are viruses that can be present in animals and humans, and as with all viruses, affected organisms tend to develop resistance, which in turn causes the virus to mutate again.

There is a scientific consensus that the origin of this new virus – like all those that have been declared or threatened to be declared a pandemic in recent years, including avian influenza and the swine flu that originated in Mexico – is zoonotic. That is, it comes from animals and then mutates, affecting humans. In the case of Covid-19 and SARS it is presumed that it came from bats. Although the consumption of bats in Asian markets is blamed, in reality the consumption of wild animals in a traditional and local way is not the specific problem. The fundamental factor is the destruction of the habitats of wild species and the invasion of these by urban settlements and/or expansion of industrial agriculture, thereby creating specific situations for the accelerated mutation of viruses.

The true systematic factory of new viruses and bacteria that are transmitted to humans is the industrial breeding of animals, mainly birds, pigs and cows. More than 70 percent of antibiotics worldwide are used for fattening or preventing infections in non-sick animals, which has produced a very serious problem of resistance to antibiotics, also for humans. The WHO has called since 2017 for the agricultural, fish farming and food industries to stop using antibiotics systematically to stimulate the growth of healthy animals. Added to this mixture, large agricultural and food corporations add regular doses of antivirals and pesticides within the same facilities.

However, it is easier and more convenient to point the finger at a few bats or civets – whose natural habitats have certainly been destroyed – than to question these factories of human and animal diseases.

The pandemic threat is also selective. All the diseases that have been considered epidemics in the last two decades, including Covid-19, have produced far fewer deaths than common diseases, such as influenza – of which, according to the WHO, up to 650 thousand people die each year globally. However, these new epidemics motivate extreme surveillance and control measures.

As stated by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal paradigm of government is thus affirmed.

Referring to the cases of Covid-19 in Italy, Agamben points out that “the law decree approved immediately by the government, for reasons of health and public safety, gives rise to a real militarization of the municipalities and areas which are named as the sources of transmission, it is a formula so vague that it allows the state of exception to be extended to all regions.” Added to this, adds Agamben, “is the state of fear that has spread in recent years in the consciences of individuals and that translates into a need for states of collective panic, to which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext. Thus, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for security that has been induced by the same governments that now intervene to satisfy it.”

Silvia Ribeiro

https://325.nostate.net/2020/03/13/coronavirus-agribusiness-and-the-state-of-emergency-by-silvia-ribeiro/