Campaign Presentation
The context of the global pandemic has amplified all the inequalities that feed the capital accumulation system: gender inequalities (more violence in closed-door households, more care workload for women without schools or senior centers, more harassment on online channels…); the inequalities of border regimes; inequalities in the international division of labor, among many others. At the same time, all public goods have been eroded, as shown by the state of health systems around the world. That was and it is our normality.
Faced with this situation, governments in different parts of the world promote in a variety of ways a kind of return to normality based on the coercion of bodies, on restrictions, on the continuity of impoverishment processes and on necropolitical logics.
That is why we make an internationalist call to give body, words, breath to #NormalityWastheProblem proposing, from the specific perspectives we inhabit, reflections, questions and answers, in the form of words, audiovisual clips, photos, collages,sounds …
The campaign begins on June 3 on social networks and runs throughout the month of June. Until June 30, contributions can be sent to: normalitywastheproblem@gmail.com
Or upload them directly here:https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1C8HyScMdxBkIByu-5hkQmA4ZUgiOhsYl?usp=sharing
And they will be published here https://www.instagram.com/normalitywastheproblem/
NORMALITY WAS THE PROBLEM
Virologists have spent these last few months bent over their microscopes as they labour to identify the origin, vectors of contagion and ways to combat Covid-19. They are not there yet. But they can at least claim to have resolved many of the urgent questions and most pressing needs.
Meanwhile, activists and militants, the impoverished working classes and other unquiet critics of the status quo have been scrutinising the implacable effects of a better known but equally vaccine-less virus: capitalism.
As the pandemic has tightened its grip, it has thrown into stark relief the simmering inequalities that feed the accumulation of capital. Indeed, it has intensified them to an intolerable degree: inequalities of gender (a surge in violence behind closed doors, a ramped-up burden of care for women as schools and old people’s centres shut down, more online harassment, etc.); inequalities of frontier regimes (illegal migrants are shut out from emergency support measures); inequalities in the international division of labour (countries confront the same virus with vastly differing resources in terms of healthcare systems, material conditions of their population, etc.). And many more.
This situation, which we used to call normality, has revealed itself in its dystopian reality.
So, while governments talk about a return to normality or a new normality, we – those of us who seek an emancipatory change to this monstrous normalised reality – are throwing our thoughts, bodies and energy into forging new paradigms, alliances and practices that map the way to new horizons.
But how to translate this urgent desire into specific, down-to-earth, locally relevant measures? How can we vaccinate ourselves against capitalism on the eve of an economic crisis deeper than 2008? At a time when the forces of the far right are eager to seize on the discontent stoked by the pandemic’s material cost?
How can we avoid a return to the dangerous promises that the nation state will save us and instead forge new alliances and new forms of international cooperation?
How can we short-circuit the spaces where capital accumulation squeezes out the resources we have to live on? How can we rescue from rampant marketisationour homes, neighbourhoods, cities, towns, water, air, public spaces and natural and urban environments?
How can we protect social assets (educational systems, cultural institutions, social security systems, healthcare) and create other new goods, under common management, which can overcome the dangers afflicting “public” sectors that are increasingly falling into the claws of financial elites.
How can we break away from a financialised economy centred on accumulation and instead develop a social organisation based on the needs and desires of a decent, independent and free life?
This campaign invites everyone to put forward (in words, video, photographs, collage, sound, etc.), each from our own corners of the world and from the reality we live and see, more questions and more answers to meet the colossal challenge of our collective global demand:
#NormalityWasTheProblem
#LaNormalidadEraElProblema
#ANormalidadeEraOProblema
