Sick of the System by James T. Brophy

Author:James T. Brophy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2020-05-07T15:00:00+00:00

Social Solidarity

When governments and doctors early on left people in the communities most affected by AIDS to die, community activists formed groups coming out of gay and lesbian, feminist, and health-care movements who provided support, education, and opposition to stigmatization. They argued for the value of the lives of those most affected. When early AIDS activists (before HIV was identified) began to figure out that whatever was causing the disease was transmitted through specific sexual acts and blood-to-blood contact, this led to the development of safe sex and, later, safe drug use guidelines. These practices, which avoided transfer of bodily fluids or blood-to-blood contact, were effective in lowering HIV transmission.

This initiative did not come from public health experts or rely on police enforcement; it came from grassroots organizing. It was not an individualist response, but one based on a sense of social responsibility. It allowed people, with support, to alter their social practices for their communities’ benefit. The education and support was based on the assumption that everyone was infected, so it also broke down barriers between those who were or were not infected. It became part of a community ethics. It was also based on the eroticization of safe sex: safe sex was promoted as the fun and social way to do it for everyone.5

The COVID-19 pandemic has thus far been addressed through top-down responses, which reinforce capitalist, racist, and patriarchal relations. Advice has first come from public health officials; it must also become collective in character. Physical distancing – combined with hand washing, use of gloves and masks, and isolation when required – is necessary to lower infection and death rates. But rather than social support and popular education, officials are using policing to enforce these measures against homeless people, harm reduction workers, and sex workers. For Black people, it has allowed new forms of state-sanctioned racist carding and profiling6 (see Alexander McClelland’s chapter, “We Can’t Police Our Way out of a Pandemic”). This approach does little to get people to engage in sustained safe practices.

To survive the pandemic, all of us must continue to engage in the vital work of social reproduction (including increasing our caring labour), even in more distanced and isolated ways. Much of this labour is unwaged and often performed by women, both cis and trans. A turn is required from capitalist normality to recognize the essential character of such usually low-waged positions as cleaners and grocery store workers. And we need to remember these lessons after the pandemic is over.

A collective response requires education and support to give people a social basis to engage in physical distancing. While officials can encourage distancing, much of the impetus for it must come from below. We can draw inspiration from the early support groups for people living with AIDS, the buddy systems, and the grassroots responses to the AIDS crisis. Networks of mutual aid and social solidarity are being formed in the current pandemic; these must be facilitated and given resources.

Mass involvement in distancing practices will determine whether we can slow the infection and death rates.

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