Disparate Care Strategies

We are holding on to life in an abject dearth of robust care and self-defense strategies that characterizes today’s fascism. We intended targets of genocide are fighting to survive this period of violent decay and compulsory reinfection. Five years of this ongoing pandemic and we have very little to show for supposedly collectively banding together while the world as we knew it was upended and made more lethal. And yet, we’re now overly familiar with endless excuses and compromises with fascism at both the interpersonal and systemic level. All of these acts of capitulation were done in the name of the “rev” or because “we won’t cancel us” or that “covid-telpro” is the real threat.

Liberals and radicals alike mistakenly believe we’ve only just arrived at the onset of an especially fascist historical period. The state apparatus that hunts marginalized people at home and abroad did not appear from thin air. The final tally of votes within a so-called “democracy” did not materialize techno-fascist surveillance and drone warfare on inauguration day. There is an uninterrupted continuity of a growing state arsenal that runs throughout capitalism’s history.

The decay we face today brings with it more unapologetic violence, life-threatening scarcity, near-mandatory ignorance, and a wealth of insidious reasons to compromise with fascism. In this cultural climate, it is no coincidence that the vast majority of people have already made their peace with any and all deaths that further the project of eugenics. This absence of care and practical safety is a product of these reactionary cultural attitudes that have become so emblematic of this historical period we are struggling to survive and put an end to.

So what does it mean to accept that the stage has been set such that many of those who claim to be fighting to get us free are neither our comrades nor our community? We are effectively fending for ourselves in a fight when we’d greatly benefit from the theoretical “unity” many anarchists, communists, and radicals claim to stand for. Still, the “unity” we marginalized folks are usually silenced with only ever leaves violence unchallenged wherever it is directed at someone besides those that white supremacy is built to favor.

We have not found care and safety within the promise of a mass movement that, apparently definitionally, requires our silence and capitulation to fascism. We have not found a means of survival and self-defense within spaces and organizations that both need us yet refuse to accommodate our growing needs during genocide and mass disablement. Many of the networks of care we have formed or found ourselves drawn to have proven themselves very susceptible to the kinds of violence our values are, at least theoretically, opposed to. We have been socially exiled with little to no offline alternatives of finding each other that don’t risk succumbing to viruses the state is all but too happy to weaponize against us. Yet, the visibility of our online networks are used to ridicule or exploit us or both.

There are no leaders who will save us. Life-saving care work has been invisibilized and made largely inaccessible. It is rare to find people masking and protecting themselves. It is rarer still to find marginalized folks struggling with precarity who are able to safely access care, resources, and/or the defense necessary to ward off violent actors and hostile systems. We who have been exiled may or may not find a single individual willing and able to stand with us in meaningful solidarity against a violence that imperils billions. Where we are able to find those who genuinely wish for us to live even though the world wants us dead, we may not manage to cultivate meaningful care and compassion between us. We may not have the resources, the capacity, the space to discover what is actionable and accessible in equal parts.

The notion of solidarity rings hollow when there is this ubiquitous hostility for the primary targets of fascism. Those of us who have given up on the possibility of finding something we might recognize as real solidarity are not wrong to seek it. To disparage all of us who are the primary targets of today’s fascism and may succumb to despair is to blame us for receiving so much lethal violence.

We are without desperately needed care systems despite how long we’ve been demonstrating how they’re the only reliable way to protect us from these formidable threats to our lives. In the very organizations and networks the most vulnerable of us are so often directed to seek out for connections and some means of surviving scarcity, we often find these spaces unequipped to stop those who wish to harm, abuse, and exploit us from getting their way.

Fascism leverages the coercive nature of scarcity to bring about our submission to capitalism and it culturally reinforces that submission in the ways it structures everyday life. This structure has made our care strategies disparate and more susceptible to collapse. We are often both unable to reinforce each of our networks with the strengths of what we get right and we are more likely than ever to crumble should any conflict or crisis develop. We often lack the ability to care for each other as autonomous people with loved ones and trusted comrades, so it follows that we also lack care strategies that can scale.

These crises of care are the backdrop of people’s pursuits of the power that fascism aims to grant anyone willing to do its bidding. Just as there are many consequences to compromising with abusers, so too are there consequences for compromising with eugenicist logics during an especially fascist period. Failure to recognize the coercive nature of scarcity is one such consequence that invariably results from both of these compromises.

The erasure of scarcity and its role in how we make decisions about our survival brings with it a devaluation of consent and accessibility. Each of these social consequences function as key pillars that make the continuation of fascism and genocide all but inevitable. These are pillars that severely decrease the possibility of self-determination and access to life-saving resources for marginalized folks who are also the primary targets of fascism.

Despite the vital role these reactionary dynamics play in the maintenance of fascism, they remain tolerated to the point of near exaltation in many formal organizations, non-profits, and less structured formations alike. The presence of any degree of organization is frequently mistaken for adequate reason to absolve groups, orgs, and formations of any responsibility to provide effective defense and the care necessary to keep we primary targets of fascism alive.

In the face of such demoralizing stakes, unwillingness to identify and address culpability in aiding fascistic power dynamics continues to defang and deflate would-be formidable sites of resistance in this historical period. The duty to make care accessible is never recognized as the order of the day. Instead, our uninvolvement with organizations is perceived as a moral failing rather than an intended function of our social exile from everyday life.

These tasks of care and survival before us cannot be actualized without our creativity and critical thinking. Just as tradespeople and artists may hone their respective crafts in unique ways, there is a vast range of ways to express and provide care. Fascism pushes for the death of creativity, aiming to replace it with its sanctioned cultural expressions. This animosity towards creativity influences how we do or do not aim to bring about more accessibility in how we both struggle against oppression and aim to ensure our survival. The result is us thinking accessible care would be too difficult to make real and too great a difference from how we’ve previously conceptualized organizing and movement work.

As individuals, we are not entitled to care from any one person. Nor are we entitled to some elusive notion of collective care. And yet, that inaccessibility has become a tool of social exile during fascism means collective efforts at accessibility are worth building and protecting. Both the care we each are capable of giving and the care we each are capable of receiving are made more abundant by accessibility. Learning to understand why some of us are able to show up while others aren’t is to understand our collective needs on a deeply grounded and fundamental level. Our struggles and acts of resistance prove capable of eroding fascist power wherever collective care has been made tangible, accessible, and inarguably present.