A Party of Our Own

The marginalization and removal of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primary has once again proven that the party is inherently hostile to its working-class “base.” Thousands across the country are rightly concluding that we need our own independent socialist working class party. But how should we go about furthering this break? There are those who preach imprudent patience. There are comrades who argue that we have to wait for objective conditions to ripen further. There are those who argue against a “premature break” with the Democratic Party. And there are many more who are simply uncertain about how to proceed. Reaching this point during a devastating pandemic and economic crisis further complicates but underlines the urgency of this discussion. The following is in no way conclusive but is meant as a contribution against bleak passivity. 

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Under an Alien Sky

We are beset on all sides by disturbances of what the ancient poet-philosopher Lucretius called “an alien sky.” The Covid-19 pandemic is felt by all of us as a presence, a presence of that which should not, which cannot be—inasmuch as our ordinary perceptions define what can and cannot be. It sticks out like a sore, a wound, sudden and without warning causing even the bravest and strongest to groan. Our lives were moving right along, certainly already beset by intrusions into a billion little homeostases, when suddenly it all came crashing down. Before horror, we have felt a fascination with the very strangeness of it all, this thing which should not be that has arrived on our doorstep.

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Virus as Crisis/Crisis as Virus

When is a virus more than a virus? There is one virus, the novel coronavirus that is leaving thousands of dead in its wake. This is the physical virus at the base of the bigger crisis now emerging across the globe. The other virus is more abstract. It is the effect of this pandemic on human populations, on bodies, on selves, dissolved into the abyss of mortality. It is the social virus, the virus disrupting the social and economic system in which we live and move and have our being. It is virus-as-crisis, the limits of the system of social relations now being tested to their breaking point. It is manifested in the chaotic events of each day, when hospitals are overwhelmed, normal life is disrupted by social distancing, and the stock market crashes in a drama dwarfing 1929. This is the broader crisis, the Crisis. The one which defines the entirety of our lives and the future of our species. It is a crisis of capitalism as a set of social property relations, as a means of governing populations, as a means of determining what is and is not meaningful.

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