Facing a global health crisis: state and capitalism do not work, but solidarity does
The Relations Commission of the International of Anarchist Federations (IAF-IFA) is
continuing to carry out its activities during the current global pandemic. Across all
territories, the delegates of our Federations have virtually met to make a point on the
commitment of social and organisational anarchism in this worldwide crisis.
The plunder and destruction of nature, the exploitation and impoverishment of whole
societies, the war operations, the death of millions of people from hunger and
deprivation, the exclusion and confinement of people in concentration camps and
prisons reveal the criminal nature of the state-capitalist system. The brutality of this
authoritarian model of social organization becomes today, within the global
pandemic, even more blatant.
While our activists are trying to maintain their social and political work alive in
different forms, and mainly thanks to technology despite generalised confinement
rules, some common concerns have been shared, as follows.
· While acknowledging the need for social responsibility in taking all the necessary
health precautions that all individuals should adopt to protect themselves and the
others, we denounce the authoritarianism and militarism of all those governments
which are addressing health issues through military and police repression, and
through the suppression of civil liberties and the enhancement of totalitarian
forms of social control. This is especially the case with those governments that
have taken advantage of the situation to impose authoritarian changes.
· We denounce the search for profit of capitalists and ruling classes, who are
pushing for restarting production independently, regardless of workers’ safety,
and we support those strikes and spontaneous workers’ mobilisations that took
place worldwide to refuse the logics of profit and to foster direct action.
· We denounce the rising of domestic and sexist violence fostered by home
confinement measures and stand as usual against patriarchy, sexism and
homo/transphobia.
· We denounce the nationalistic rhetoric deployed in most states and stand in
solidarity with migrants, who often suffer and risk more than others due to the
inhuman and shameful conditions of the detention camps.
· We stand in solidarity with prisoners and against all prisons, camps and
totalitarian institutions, whose murderous nature is specially revealed by this
pandemic.
· We denounce the conditions of people in poverty and of all the unemployed and
precarious workers who are carrying the burden of social injustice all over the
world, and risk death from hunger in some countries, while they seem to be the
least concern of their governments and ruling classes.
· We stand in solidarity with healthcare workers and all the workers who are
performing duties essential for everyone’s life, operating often without the
necessary protections and guarantees, paying often with their lives for the
inefficiencies and mistakes of state and administrative apparatuses.
· We stand in solidarity with all those peoples and communities which are resisting
state warfare and repression, from Chiapas to Rojava, and whose burden is
currently worsened by Covid-19.
· For all this, we call for increasing the bottom-up experiences of mutual aid,
solidarity and sharing that are taking place worldwide, in order to perform the
only practices which can be effective in tackling the current global challenges.
These forms of reciprocal help amongst the weakest in society, the poor, the
elderly, all the ill-treated, exploited and discriminated groups and individuals
must expand. More strongly than ever, we need to support all such concrete
experiences which aim to transform our daily lives, including solidarity
cooperatives, alternative and libertarian schools, occupied spaces, spaces of
solidarity and alternative exchange, as well as all the initiatives informed by
mutual aid and libertarian social transformation worldwide.
· While it would be impossible to summarize all the concrete experiences which
are being supported by our comrades and federations in different countries and
realities, some partial examples of ongoing experiences in mutual aid can include:
Creating groups of mutual aid that help one’s community/house/neighbourhood
to cope with the virus, for instance with distribution of food, protection
equipment and medicine; Opening up new spaces for living and for making
cultural activities, including occupations of spaces by homeless peoples;
Circulation of books, journals and other supports and explanations to deal with
the crisis; Promoting and practically implementing anticapitalistic alternatives to
the existing economic system such as solidarity shared funds; promoting activism
to support abused and vulnerable groups such as indigenous people. And much
other that cannot be listed here.
The state-capitalist system that condemns millions of people to death by hunger,
disease and war, is not fighting against the evolving pandemic but for the preservation
of the privileges and power of the political and economic elites.
Suffering the current situation like everybody else, we anarchists of the IFA confirm
and continue our worldwide fight for justice and freedom, to go ahead building day by
day the new world that we bring in our hearts.
