STAY AT HOME - intro

I started this book on 29th of March when everyone of us coughed with a jittery desperation in United Kingdom, foreseeing quietly the arrival of the epidemic. The gloss came off the national dream in spite of the smokescreen of mainstream media. What brought me to write this book was to identify the flagrant refusal to compromise in the last decades and how easily soppy people puts flags on their windows. Ignoring from decades the mutilation of public services and human rights becoming lame ducks. I started this book which I hand in you here the introduction, untangling my thoughts, in a language that I started to learn seriously this year. So I accept suggestions in any way. You are welcome.

Stay at Home

Introduction

I write these lines while I listen to the president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele enact a long quarantine and abolish the quotas in the next three coming months in addition to give helps to those families that accomplish the isolation. I write these lines from one of the most “developed” countries of the world. I think in that man that feel fever since yesterday just at the moment he was forced to left his jobs with the hands endured by overwork and the smiley goofy by the employer.

         We all are living under the contradiction where the production set new standards to the world trade and the –states, nationalized— endeavour to slow down. Paradox introduced under the convenient pretext of prevention —social welfare and the health services helped us as a tool for serving the general interest. For this continued existence of the States which by is necessary to backfire and weaken the common goods and introduce a common enemy, a foreigner, a virus etc. State doesn’t ignore that virus kills whom will haven’t such a good condition for medicate by itself. At first they want to eliminate the pathology from the population, not raise it as a common matter. And then bolstering national policies and closing borders, providing accurate mechanisms of control. With a superlative quality China cabinets had the best control of the masses, zero moves out of the staring look of control and Big Data, even their diabolical system of "social credit" that grants and removes points and numbers according to the correct behaviour of its citizens, as well as the stigmatization and discrimination of LGBTI people. This surveillance isn’t a Chinese exclusivity.

It has been proven that surveillance on “social networks” are the thread running for fattening the pockets of the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the World Bank. Moreover, agri-food consumption habits start in the slums of the capitalist agri-industry. It’s easy to point out the origin of the Cov.19 in one unhealthy market in Wuhan. Why not the pork farm of Guangdong? But now the epicentre of the pandemic is called Europe. Numerous paperback intellectuals blame on the accommodatingly of the occidental countries and blame on our characteristic positivity and attitude in life. Someone dies. S/he is a number.

 

The truth abides in the collateral effects, the depoliticising, as a capital fact to impose a state of exception naturalised. It’s live.

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Blimey! I watch on the news that in Spain people are cheering and clapping at open windows and balconies. This reverence is for the doctors, nurses and other workers who put themselves at risk. This gleeful pandering always happens during catastrophe situations. It’s the soil exploited by the news media. The same media that have such a lack of decency. Hiding facts like in the Community of Madrid per example, the last built 12 hospitals were built by private companies and big part of public hospitals are managed by private firms in hands of vulture funds. Today the head-worker of the  Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Álvaro Cunqueiro, Vigo(Spain) hospital, was dismissal from his job. She reported about the technical deficiencies and lack of supplies. Cruel fact meanwhile she used the mask since a week ago… "I have been accused of being irresponsible for generating alarmism in the population!!"

Under the rhetoric; “we are linked, and we are all in this together”, millions of Spaniards forget 65,000 million euros delivered to banks in the last crisis since the start of the “2008 Spanish economic crisis” with the previous “socialist party”. People forget or are in retrospect apathy —budgets slashed in the third country in the EU with the highest degree of inequality, behind Bulgaria and Lithuania, if we reconsider the distribution of wealth, salaries and inequality of opportunities at birth. “We are all in this together!!” We chant in all European countries like a charmed spiritual healing. From south to north we share partner-ship agendas in troubled times but we forgot about the troubled times are lurking in another kind of agenda. This upsetting agenda is under unilateral government decrees imposing total travel bans, confinements and 24-hour curfews, true martial law and other dictatorial measures. In fact, on the web we can watch dozens of videos of police in Spain beating upon old people or innocent people that goes to job or to pharmacy.

I’m in the UK since two months, Cambridge, and people here use to bump into each other. The windows are like walls. So now with the lockdown I can’t see much difference. Education, culture, parks or beans are tacked like consumption items and today at eight o’clock also people is clapping from balconies and cheering to doctors, to volunteers and all active workers coping this pandemic. Of course the prime minister did it too. Tomorrow possible he’ll had Cov.19.

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This morning I woke up as usual time, eight o’clock. The sun’s rays among the venetian blind were awarding me the hour to get up. Although today I haven’t to go to job because England yet is on the seventh day of the lockdown. For how long this state of emergency is revoked? Experts and common people shuffle the end. My evading endeavour for don’t know any news is broken by my friendly mate who informs me about the dark developments of the virus. I have one more mate but this other one only informs me with broadening snores. I avoid contact with people so I go early to the shop. I usually spend almost all the morning time and long part of the afternoon cycling around the city and making photographs. I have some moments for instant messengers with some friends. However, I think henceforward to restrict this kind of communication because I feel an excessive attachment like honey obsess Winnie. Is akin to an interactional instinct that precedes language but in this times of isolation, I guess people should think hard about this pitch control, instant messengers. I’m sure that I will reflect on this "confusional anxiety" which is affecting our immunity because it hinders our own psychological defence mechanisms.  It increases anxieties, depressions, hyper-stimulations and blinkered forebodings.

Let's get to the point: totalitarianism is no longer a threat in the distant future. The measures implemented around the world are totalitarian in every way, not only in the palpable bans to population. Actual governments like a century before income economic levels comparable to those of the 1930s due to the absence of substantial state interventions that would go against the neoliberal nature and the production of wealth and wealth-sharing. Nowadays the forms of production require less labour works (with enormous repercussions on employment) and generate a greater dependence on production systems with artificial intelligence. Governments, in fact, they impose a drastically unequal distribution of resources that forces us to face unbalanced risks. If we want to survive, not only can we demand more equitable policies, we also have to delegitimize and undermine the power of the State and how the State estimate the value of people. This is the success of modernity, a State which a civilization no can imagine living without, because it is still being confused with something that protects our health. Docile bodies? The genealogy of evil and the political-military victory of current totalitarian fascism cannot/should not be forgotten.

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Before coming to England a good friend lent me a book by Harold Barclay which I devoted myself to translate in a practical exercise. Alas before traveling I formatted my computer as well as I packed all my books into sad boxes but here is an extract from the preface by Alex Comfort…

… with the growth of a technologically sophisticated public it has become plainer and plainer that today teleonomic, or purposive, planning has become almost wholly divorced from government. It is conducted by experts, while authority devotes itself to play-therapy. Some scientists, who find warnings ignored and resources squandered on pyramids, Maginot Lines and Five Year Plans unrelated to reality, talk about the day when computers will do the planning. Unfortunately, if they did, the play-therapy group would programme them. Faced with this, the "serious man" withdraws into anti-politicism, or, in America, populism (which substitutes free enterprise and the Devil take the hindmost for the anarchist recipes of mutual aid and direct action).

One of the potential side-effects of capitalism's victory is that by itself creates our lives unsafe, clearly intended precisely when we try to make lives more secure and comfortable. The “better” technology, the “better” production of markets increases risks exponentially. At the same time, under the sovereignty of nations civil rights are banished in order to protect their populations from terrorism or virus - a free society may be abolished, but the terrorist or the virus threat is by no means averted. It amazes me to read people who hesitate between the ineffectiveness of sovereignty- or their intention to face the disaster in the worst way. Hooray for those “thinkers” who depict problems in only two ways. At left, for example, those who think about a priori knowledge prompting human being and nature to be in one or another form, “determinism biotechnologist?”. Somehow or other, thinkers also embrace a culturalistic insight, or a predominance of a biological approach, social framework, psychologic, etc. At the right, for example, are the other thinkers that embrace insight posteriori with different nuances in each case.

Even so, the governmental institution gets to this point; to a disposability of human life. I can explain these blinkered insights by referring to a myth. Erisicton the anthropophagic. I don’t know when it happened but in some moment of the human history our minds decided stop the harmonic and natural evolution coppicing the roots and branches, concurrently occupying the vacuum in their trail with neocapitalism. Meanwhile the internalization of the controls created by it are the receptacle of a lethal combination between narcissism and fetishism of the merchandise.  Achille Mbembe (2008), proposes what we define by sovereignty could be the power available of the modern State to control the life or death (necropolitics) of people. But it happens since population is confined in cities and therefore fed like chicks. Always the biopolitics had been unmistakably visible. The medicine is a political practice as our way of live, threatening to wrest control of our freedom. Obviously the imposition of the industrial model of intensive livestock farming is promoting the growth of new diseases. The model of industrial logging prompt the eviction of tribes in Brazil and also in these same days its PM edict suspensions of employment contracts for four months. During this period, companies are exempt from paying the wages of their workers, in exchange for offering on line courses.

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In the future life will be easier for those submissive people forced to make their lives online. Developed countries will slog Cov.19 out and they all will get their nests nicely feathered. Working on this police subjectivation over our bodies who once transformed into "legitimate bodies" will continue to organize this social fabric that soon will have nothing to do with the previous ones. Our social relationships are mediated by corporate platforms in the same way that there is a network of links and agencies that links the police organization with government structures. This all focus us in blocks of identities. It’s time to shed some light over.

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What do you reckon? Can you set new standards by which be at home redistributing your weakened economy? For as long as put two and two together is three? For how long news reports need been gambling population? For how long the state of uncertainty is being articulated in “mass-media” providing public an unreal cover? Could be the apathy be so quite to become increasingly sceptic the people power? What consequences will be settled down with apocalyptic tales?  At who benefits from the beginning of time, since our expulsion from what paradise?

Are we so troubled to reject this gathering gloom? Do you think I must be engaged into an auto-ethnographic research and don’t kick your sanctuary? Are we talented to admit and get the drift and daft detour adjusting our lives? Are we so egocentric and so blind to don’t see our insignificance? How much could the reality be adjusted to your ordinary life? It’s so hard to get people to see the customary laws and rights such seldom questioned? Why they call this; “global systemic crisis”?

Why now the raising of capital has been pushed to back burner, to becomes secondary while the State pops up to protect a country exhausted in an old mind-set? Who declares “bank holidays” to the market economy without disrupting its validity or the privatization of healthcare, labour deregulation, increasing pollution (…) metropolitan overcrowding and industrial food, particularly that derived from macro-farms?

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Utagawa Toyohiro (1773-1828),

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Next chapters

- Intelligence

- Speed Dating