What Do Bosnia, Bulgaria, And Brazil Have In Common?

Once again, it’s kicking off everywhere: from Turkey to Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil, the endless struggle for real democracy resonates around the globe.

What do a park in Istanbul, a baby in Sarajevo, a security chief in Sofia, a TV station in Athens and bus tickets in Sao Paulo have in common? However random the sequence may seem at first, a common theme runs through and connects all of them. Each reveals, in its own particular way, the deepening crisis of representative democracy at the heart of the modern nation state. And each has, as a result, given rise to popular protests that have in turn sparked nationwide demonstrations, occupations and confrontations between the people and the state.

In Turkey, protesters have been taking to the streets and clashing with riot police for over two weeks in response to government attempts to tear down the trees and resurrect an old Ottoman-era barracks at the location of Istanbul’s beloved Gezi Park. But, as I indicated in a lengthy analysis of the protests, the violent police crackdown on#OccupyGezi was just the spark that lit the prairie, allowing a wide range of grievances to tumble in, ultimately exposing the crisis of representation at the heart of Erdogan’s authoritarian neoliberal government.

Now, protests over similar seemingly “trivial” local grievances are sparking mass demonstrations elsewhere. In Brazil, small-scale protests against a hike in transportation fees in Sao Paulo revealed the extreme brutality of the police force, which violently assaulted protesters — even pepper spraying a camera man, shooting a photographer in the eye with a rubber bullet, and arresting those carrying vinegar to protect themselves from the tear gas. After four nights of violent repression this week, the protests now appear to be gaining momentum.

Fed up with increasing inflation, crumbling infrastructure and stubbornly high inequality and crime rates, many Brazilians are simply outraged that the government is willing to invest billions into pharaonic projects that do not only ignore the people’s plight but actively undermine it. The militarization and bulldozing of the poor favelas and indigenous villages ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics are a case in point. As usual, the ruling Workers’ Party seems more concerned about pleasing capital than helping workers.

[OccupyWallSt.org Editor's note: Here in Chicago, USA, we feel a particular affinity for those tens of thousands who fight to #ChangeBrazil and have courageously taken to the streets in cities across their country because we, too, are being hit with similar austerity measures. Here, our authoritarian "Mayor 1%" Rahm Emmanuel is forcing through imminent closures of 50 public schools in spite of spirited community resistance (including mass demonstrations, strikes, occupations, lawsuits, and more) from unions, public school teachers, students, and families, Occupiers, and community members. These school closures are almost entirely located in people of color-majority neighborhoods that are already dealing with disinvestment, widespread poverty, lack of opportunity, and violence. We are told the schools must be closed because we supposedly "cannot afford" to keep them open. At the very same time, the city has pledged $100 million to build a new, and unnecessary, basketball stadium for a private university. Here, as in Brazil and across the world, these struggles reveal the true nature of austerity: It is not a question of lack of funding, but of priorities. The 1% is more interested in expensive entertainment for the ruling classes than education for poor and working peoples. Our struggles are connected, and our movements are united!]

Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, the inability of a family to obtain travel ID for their sick baby — who needs urgent medical attention that she cannot receive in Bosnia-Herzegovina — exposed the fundamental flaws at the heart of the nominally democratic post-Yugoslavian state. On June 5, while the government was busy negotiating with foreign bankers to attract new investment, thousands of people occupied parliament square, temporarily locking the nation’s politicians up inside and forcing the prime minister to escape through a window.

While competing ethnic fractions vie for political power, the Bosnian people continue to suffer. By playing the race and religion cards, Bosnian politicians hope to keep the people divided while retaining the financial spoils of foreign investment and World Bank and EU development loans for themselves. But in a sign that most ethnic divisions are politicallyrather than socially constructed, the Occupy Sarajevo protesters now have a simple message for their politicians: “you are all disgusting, no matter what ethnicity you belong to.”

On Friday, Bulgaria joined the budding wave of struggles that began in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and that was recently revived through the Turkish uprising. After the appointment of media (and mafia) mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the State Agency for National Security, tens of thousands took to the streets of Sofia and other cities throughout the country to protest his appointment, which was approved by parliament without any debate and with a mere 15 minutes between his nomination and his (pre-guaranteed) election.

Chanting “Mafia” and calling upon Peevski to resign, the Bulgarians are warning their politicians that a limit has been reached. Ever since the transition from state communism to democratic capitalism empowered a tiny minority of oligarchs to enrich themselves by feeding off the state’s public possessions, Bulgaria has been effectively ruled by a Mafia kleptocracy. As in any capitalist state, political and business elites have become one, undermining the promise of democracy the Bulgarians were made at the so-called End of History.

Greece, in the meantime, finally appears to have been waken up from its austerity-induced slumber. Following the decision of the Troika’s neoliberal handmaiden, Antonis Samaras, to shut down the state’s public broadcaster ERT overnight and to fire its 2,700 workers without any warning whatsoever, the workers of ERT simply occupied the TV and radio stations and continued to emit their programs through livestreaming, making ERT the first worker-run public broadcaster in Europe. ERT workers have since been joined by tens of thousands of protesters and workers, who on Thursday held a nationwide general strike to protest the ERT’s closure.

At first sight, it may seem like these protests are all simply responses to local grievances and should be read as such. But while each context has its own specificities that must be taken into account, it would be naive to discard the common themes uniting them. As my friend, colleague and fellow ROAR contributor Leonidas Oikonomakis just pointed out in a new opinion piece, the Turkish uprising may have started over a couple of trees, but we shouldn’t let that blind us to the forest: the obvious structural dimension at play in this new wave of struggles.

If we take a closer look at each of the protests, we find that they are not so local after all. In fact, each of them in one way or another deals with the increasing encroachment of financial interests and business power on traditional democratic processes, and the profound crisis of representation that this has wrought. Furthermore, the protests show a dawning awareness that the divide-and-rule practices of the ruling class everywhere — pitching the religious against the secular, Bosnians against Serbs, blacks against indigenous against whites, poor against slightly-less-poor, and ‘natives’ against immigrants — are just part of a strategy to keep us from realizing our own power.

In a word, what we are witnessing is what Leonidas Oikonomakis and I have called theresonance of resistance: social struggles in one place in the world transcending their local boundaries and inspiring protesters elsewhere to take matters into their own hands and defy their governments in order to bring about genuine freedom, social justice and real democracy. The resonance of these struggles across national, ethnic and religious boundaries tells us that three decades of neoliberal peace since the End of History were not really “peace” at all; they were merely the temporary victory of other side in a hidden global class war.

Now that has come to an end. A new Left has risen, inspired by a fresh autonomous spirit that has long since cleansed itself of the stale ideological legacies and collective self-delusions that animated the political conflicts of the Cold War and beyond. One chant of the protesters in Sao Paulo revealed it all: “Peace is over, Turkey is here!” And so are Bulgaria, Bosnia and Greece — as well as Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Québec and every other place in the world where the people have risen up in the global struggle for real democracy.

The ominous bottom-line for those in power is simple: we are everywhere. And this global occupation thing? It’s only just getting started.

Prism: Democracy means Surveillance

Perhaps you’ve read about the recently revealed Prism program, through which the US National Security Agency has been harvesting data from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, and other major internet corporations.

Remember, this is the tip of the iceberg. We can’t know how many similar projects are buried deeper in the apparatus of the surveillance state, unrevealed by daringwhistleblowers. We do know that the NSA intercepts billions of emails, phone calls, and other forms of communication every day. What they can monitor they can also censor, à la China or Mubarak.

Many have championed the internet as an opportunity to create new commons, resources that can be shared rather than privately owned. But faced with the increasing state and corporate power over the structures through which we interact online, we have to consider the dystopian possibility that the internet represents a new enclosure of the commons: the channeling of communication into formats that can be mapped, patrolled, and controlled.

One of the foundational events in the transition to capitalism was the original enclosure of the commons, in which land that had once been used freely by all was seized and turned into private property. Indeed, this process has repeated again and againthroughout the development of capitalism.

It seems likely that we can’t recognize “commons” until they are threatened with enclosure. Nobody thinks of the song “Happy Birthday to You” as a commons, because Time Warner (which claims to own the copyright) has not succeeded at profiting off its performance at birthday parties. Peasants and indigenous peoples did not originally regard land as property held in common, either—rather, they considered the idea that land could be property absurd.

It would have been similarly difficult, only a couple generations ago, to imagine that one day it would become possible to show people advertisements whenever they chatted together, or to map their tastes and social relations at a glance, or to follow their thought processes in real time by monitoring their Google searches.

We’ve always had social networks, but no one could use them to sell advertisements—nor were they so easily mapped. Now they reappear as something offered to us by corporations, something external that we have to consult. Aspects of our lives that could never have been privatized before are now practically inaccessible without the latest products from Apple. Cloud computing and pervasive government surveillance only emphasize our dependence and vulnerability.

Rather than the forefront of the inevitable progress of freedom, the internet is the latest battleground in a centuries-running contest with those who would privatize and dominate not just the land, but every facet of our selfhood as well. The burden of proof that it still offers a frontier for freedom rests on those who hope to defend it. In the course of this struggle, it may become clear that digital freedom, like all meaningful forms of freedom, is not compatible with capitalism and the state.

Democracy means surveillance. Democracy presumes transparency: a marketplace of ideas, in which decisions are made in the open. Of course, in an unequal society, transparency puts some people at risk—the employee who could be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, the immigrant who fears deportation—while the powerful can feign transparency as they make back-room deals. In practice, political transparency simply equips intelligence agencies to monitor the populace, preparing reprisals for when dissidents get out of hand—and what government could maintain its authority without intelligence agencies?

Without surveillance, there would be anarchy: people would say and do what they really believe in. Those who defend centralized power fear nothing more than privacy—the keeping of secrets—which they call conspiracy.

The Internet as New Enclosure

Digitized Capitalism, the Attention Economy, and the Surveillance State

Media transforms experience, memory, and communication into something synthetic and external. In a media-driven society, we depend on technology for access to these externalized aspects of ourselves. Books, recordings, movies, radio, television, internet, mobile phones: each of these successive innovations has penetrated deeper into daily life, mediating an ever greater proportion of our experience.

Until the end of the 20th century, mass media was essentially unidirectional, with information flowing one way and attention flowing the other. Critics generally focused on this aspect of its structure, charging that it gave a small cabal tremendous influence over society while immobilizing everyone else as spectators. In contrast, underground media championed more participatory and decentralized forms.

Participation and decentralization suddenly became mainstream with the arrival of widely accessible digital media. In many ways, the internet offered a liberating and empowering terrain for new modes of communication. Since the basic model was developed by researchers funded by the military rather than the private sector, it was designed to be useful rather than profitable. To this day, much of the internet remains a sort of Wild West in which it’s difficult to enforce traditional property laws. The ability to share content freely and directly among users has had a tremendous impact on several industries, while collaborative formats such as Wikipedia and open-source software show how easily people can meet their needs without private property. Corporations are still scrambling to figure out how to make money on the internet beyond online stores and advertising.

Yet as more and more of our lives become digitized, it’s important not to take it for granted that this is always for the best. Capitalism thrives by absorbing aspects of the world that were once free and then offering access to them at a price, and this price is not always exacted in dollars.

We should be especially attentive to the ways new media are convenient:convenience can be a sign that the infinite possibilities of human life are being forcibly narrowed down. Indeed, these innovations are barely even optional: nowadays it’s difficult to maintain friendships or get hired without a cell phone and an online profile. More and more of our mental processes and social lives must pass through the mediation of technologies that map our activities and relationships for corporations and government intelligence. These formats also shape the content of those activities and relationships.

The networks offered by Facebook aren’t new; what’s new is that they seem external to us. We’ve always had social networks, but no one could use them to sell advertisements—nor were they so easy to map. Now they reappear as something we have to consult. People corresponded with old friends, taught themselves skills, and heard about public events long before email, Google, and Twitter. Of course, these technologies are extremely helpful in a world in which few of us are close with our neighbors or spend more than a few years in any location. The forms assumed by technology and daily life influence each other, making it increasingly unthinkable to uncouple them.

As our need for and access to information increase beyond the scope of anything we could internalize, information seems to become separate from us. This is suspiciously similar to the forcible separation from the products of their labor that transformed workers into consumers. The information on the internet is not entirely free—computers and internet access cost money, not to mention the electrical and environmental costs of producing these and running servers all around the world. And what if corporations figure out how to charge us more for access to all these technologies once we’ve become totally dependent on them? If they can, not only power and knowledge but even the ability to maintain social ties will be directly contingent on wealth.

But this could be the wrong thing to watch out for. Old-money conglomerates may not be able to consolidate power in this new terrain after all. The ways capitalism colonizes our lives via digital technologies may not resemble the old forms of colonization.

Like any pyramid scheme, capitalism has to expand constantly, absorbing new resources and subjects. It already extends across the entire planet; the final war of colonization is being fought at the foot of the Himalayas, the very edge of the world. In theory, it should be about to collapse now that it has run out of horizons. But what if it could go on expanding into us, and these new technologies are like the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María landing on the continent of our own mental processes and social ties?

In this account, the internet functions as another successive layer of alienation built on the material economy. If a great deal of what is available on the internet is free of charge, this is not just because the process of colonization is not yet complete, but also because the determinant currency in the media is not dollars but attention.Attention functions in the information economy the same way control of material resources functions in the industrial economy. Even if attention doesn’t instantly translate into income online, it can help secure it offline. As currencies, attention and capital behave differently, but they both serve to create power imbalances.

What is capital, really? Once you strip away the superstitions that make it seem like a force of nature, it’s essentially a social construct that enables some people to amass power over others. Without the notion of private property, which is only “real” insofar as everyone abides by it, material resources couldn’t function as capital. In this regard, property rights serve the same purpose that the notion of divine right of kings used to: both form the foundation of systems assigning sovereignty. Some people believe passionately in property rights even as those rights are used to strip them of any influence in society. It could be said that these people are under the spell of property.

Similarly, when an advertising agent sets out to make a meme go viral, you could say she is trying to cast a spell. If attention is the currency of the media, gaining it is a way to cause people to buy literally and figuratively into a power structure. The determinant factor is not whether people agree with or approve of what they see, but to what extent it shapes their behavior.

Digital media appear to have decentralized attention, but they are also standardizing the venues through which it circulates. Beware entities that amass attention even if they never convert it into financial assets. The real power of Google and Facebook isn’t in their financial holdings but in the ways they structure the flow of information. In imposing a unitary logic on communication, relationships, and inquiry, they position themselves as the power brokers of the new era.

Behind these corporations stands the NSA, which now has unprecedented ability to map relationships and thought processes. Monitoring Google searches, it is possible to trace an internet user’s train of thought in real time. The NSA has even less need to convert internet use directly into financial gain; the currency it seeks is information itself, with which to direct the brute force of government. The role of the surveillance state is to maintain the conditions for corporations like Facebook to do business; the more power those corporations accumulate, financial or otherwise, the more power flows back into the hands of the government.

Until the Prism scandal, many people thought that surveillance and censorship were chiefly employed in places like Syria and Tunisia. In fact, most of the censorship technology those governments use comes from Silicon Valley—and was first appliedright here in the US. Since even the slightest internet censorship presupposes effective and exhaustive surveillance, it is a small step from regulation to lockdown. The more we depend on digital technology, the more vulnerable we are to massive institutions against which we have very little leverage.

This isn’t a criticism of technology per se. The point is that it’s not neutral: technology is always shaped by the structures of the society in which it is developed and applied. Most of the technologies familiar to us were shaped by the imperatives of profit and rule, but a society based on other values would surely produce other technologies. As digital technology becomes increasingly enmeshed in the fabric of our society, the important question is not whether to use it, but how to undermine the structures that produced it.

For All We Care

In the 1980s, as she struggled with cancer, Audre Lorde asserted that caring for herself was “an act of political warfare.” Since then, self-care has become a popular buzzword in activist circles. The rhetoric of self-care has moved from specific to universal, from defiant to prescriptive. When we talk about self-care today, are we talking about the same thing Lorde was? It’s time to reexamine this concept.

But what could be wrong with care? And why, of all things, pick on self-care?

For one thing, because it has become a sacred cow. It’s painful to hear people speak sanctimoniously about anything, but especially about the most important things. Pious unanimity implies a dark side: in the shadow of every church, a den of iniquity. It creates an other, drawing a line through as well as between us.

Self and care—in that order—are universally acknowledged values in this society. Anyone who endorses self-care is on the side of the angels, as the saying goes—which is to say, against all the parts of us that don’t fit into the prevailing value system. If we wish to resist the dominant order, we have to play devils’ advocate, searching out what is excluded and denigrated.

Wherever a value is considered universal, we find the pressures of normativity: for example, the pressure to perform self-care for others’ sake, keeping up appearances. So much of what we do in this society is about maintaining the image that we’re successful, autonomous individuals, regardless of the reality. In this context, rhetoric about self-care can mask silencing and policing: Deal with your problems yourself, please, so no one else has to.

Assuming that self-care is always good means taking for granted that self and carealways have the same meaning. Here, we want to challenge monolithic and static understandings of selfhood and caring. Instead, we propose that different kinds of care produce different kinds of self, and that care is one of the battlefields on which social struggles play out.

Don’t Tell Me to Calm Down

Though advocates of self-care emphasize that it can look different for each person, the suggestions usually sound suspiciously similar. When you think of stereotypical “self-care” activities, what do you picture? Drinking herbal tea, watching a movie, taking a bubble bath, meditating, yoga? This selection suggests a very narrow idea of what self-care is: essentially, calming yourself down.

All of these activities are designed to engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which governs rest and recovery. But some forms of care require strenuous activity and adrenaline, the domain of the sympathetic nervous system. One way to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, is to allow the sympathetic nervous system enough freedom to release trauma from the body. When a person is having a panic attack, it rarely helps to try to make them calm down. The best way to handle a panic attack is to run.

So let’s start by discarding any normative understanding of what it means to care for ourselves. It might mean lighting candles, putting on a Nina Simone album, and rereading Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family. It could also mean BDSM, intense performance art, mixed martial arts fighting, smashing bank windows, or calling out a person who abused you. It might even look like really hard work to other people—or ceasing to function altogether. This is not just a postmodern platitude (“different strokes for different folks”), but a question of what relationship we establish to our challenges and our anguish.

Caring for ourselves doesn’t mean pacifying ourselves. We should be suspicious of any understanding of self-care that identifies wellbeing with placidity or asks us to perform “health” for others. Can we imagine instead a form of care that would equip each of us to establish an intentional relationship to her dark side, enabling us to draw strength from the swirling chaos within? Treating ourselves gently might be an essential part of this, but we must not assume a dichotomy between healing and engaging with the challenges around and inside us. If care is only what happens when we step away from those struggles, we will be forever torn between an unsatisfactory withdrawal from conflict and its flipside, a workaholism that is never enough. Ideally, care would encompass and transcend both struggle and recovery, tearing down the boundaries that partition them.

This kind of care cannot be described in platitudes. It is not a convenient agenda item to add to the program of the average non-profit organization. It demands measures that will interrupt our current roles, bringing us into conflict with society at large and even some of the people who profess to be trying to change it.

By your response to danger it is
Easy to tell how you have lived
And what has been done to you.
You show whether you want to stay alive,
Whether you think you deserve to,
And whether you believe
It’s any good to act.

-Jenny Holzer

Love Is a Battlefield

If we want to identify what is worth preserving in self-care, we can start by scrutinizing care itself. To endorse care as a universal good is to miss the role care also plays in perpetuating the worst aspects of the status quo. There’s no such thing as care in its pure form—care abstracted from daily life in capitalism and the struggles against it. No, care is partisan—it is repressive or liberating. There are forms of care that reproduce the existing order and its logic, and other forms of care that enable us to fight it. We want our expressions of care to nurture liberation, not domination—to bring people together according to a different logic and values.

From homemaking to professional housekeeping—not to mention nursing, hospitality, and phone sex—women and people of color are disproportionately responsible for the care that keeps this society functioning, yet have disproportionately little say in what that care fosters. Likewise, a tremendous amount of care goes into oiling the machinery that maintains hierarchy: families help police relax after work, sex workers help businessmen let off steam, secretaries take on the invisible labor that preserves executives’ marriages.

So the problem with self-care is not just the individualistic prefix. For some of us, focusing on self-care rather than caring for others would be a revolutionary proposition, albeit almost unimaginable—while the privileged can congratulate each other on their excellent self-care practices without recognizing how much of their sustenance they derive from others. When we conceive of self-care as an individual responsibility, we are less likely to see the political dimensions of care.

Some have called for a caring strike: a collective, public resistance to the ways capitalism has commandeered care. In their text “A Very Careful Strike,” Spanish militants Precarias a la Deriva explore the ways care has been commodified or rendered invisible, from customer service in the marketplace to emotional care in families. They challenge us to imagine ways care could be wrested away from maintaining our stratified society and instead lavished on fostering togetherness and revolt.

But such a project depends on those who are already most vulnerable in our society. It would take a tremendous amount of support for family members, sex workers, and secretaries to go on care strike without suffering appalling consequences.

So rather than promoting self-care, we might seek to redirect and redefine care. For some of us, this means recognizing how we benefit from imbalances in the current distribution of care, and shifting from forms of care that focus on ourselves alone to support structures that benefit all participants. Who’s working so you can rest? For others, it could mean taking better care of ourselves than we’ve been taught we have a right to—though it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to undertake this individually as a sort of consumer politics of the self. Rather than creating gated communities of care, let’s pursue forms of care that are expansive, that interrupt our isolation and threaten our hierarchies.

Self-care rhetoric has been appropriated in ways that can reinforce the entitlement of the privileged, but a critique of self-care must not be used as yet another weapon against those who are already discouraged from seeking care. In short: step up, step back.

A struggle that doesn’t understand the importance of care is doomed to fail. The fiercest collective revolts are built on a foundation of nurture. But reclaiming care doesn’t just mean giving ourselves more care, as one more item after all the others on the to-do list. It means breaking the peace treaty with our rulers, withdrawing care from the processes that reproduce the society we live in and putting it to subversive and insurrectionary purposes.

Beyond Self-Preservation

“‘Health’ is a cultural fact in the broadest sense of the word, a fact that is political, economic, and social as well, a fact that is tied to a certain state of individual and collective consciousness. Every era outlines a ‘normal’ profile of health.” –Michel Foucault

The best way to sell people on a normative program is to frame it in terms of health. Who doesn’t want to be healthy?

But like “self” and “care,” health is not one thing. In itself, health is not intrinsically good—it’s simply the condition that enables a system to continue to function. You can speak about the health of an economy, or the health of an ecosystem: these often have an inverse relationship. This explains why some people describe capitalism as a cancer, while others accuse “black bloc anarchists” of being the cancer. The two systems are lethal to each other; nourishing one means compromising the health of the other.

The repressive function of health norms is obvious enough in the professional field of mental health. Where drapetomania and anarchia were once invoked to stigmatize runaway slaves and rebels, today’s clinicians diagnose oppositional defiance disorder. But the same thing goes on far from psychiatric institutions.

In a capitalist society, it should not be surprising that we tend to measure health in terms of productivity. Self-care and workaholism are two sides of the same coin:preserve yourself so you can produce more. This would explain why self-care rhetoric is so prevalent in the non-profit sector, where the pressure to compete for funding often compels organizers to mimic corporate behavior, even if they use different terminology.

If self-care is just a way to ease the impact of an ever-increasing demand for productivity, rather than a transformative rejection of that demand, it’s part of the problem, not the solution. For self-care to be anti-capitalist, it has to express a different conception of health.

This is especially complicated as our survival becomes ever more interlinked with the functioning of capitalism—a condition some have designated with the term biopower.In this situation, the easiest way to preserve your health is to excel at capitalist competition, the same thing that is doing us so much harm. “There is no other pill to take, so swallow the one that made you ill.”

To escape this vicious circle, we have to shift from reproducing one “self” to producing another. This demands a notion of self-care that is transformative rather than conservative—that understands the self as dynamic rather than static. The point is not to stave off change, as in Western medicine, but to foster it; in the Tarot deck, Death represents metamorphosis.

From the standpoint of capitalism and reformism, anything that threatens our social roles is unhealthy. As long as we remain inside the former paradigm, it may be that only behaviors deemed unhealthy can point the way out. Breaking with the logic of the system that has kept us alive demands a certain reckless abandon.

This may illuminate the connection between apparently self-destructive behavior and rebellion, which goes back a long time before punk rock. The radical side of the Occupy Oakland assemblies, where all the smokers hung out, was known affectionately as the “black lung bloc”—the cancer of Occupy, indeed! The self-destructive energy that drives people to addiction and suicide can also enable them to take courageous risks to change the world. We can identify multiple currents within self-destructive behavior; some of them close down possibility, while others open it up. We need language with which to explore this, lest our language about self-care perpetuate a false binary between sickness and self-destructiveness on one hand and health and struggle on the other.

For when we speak of breaking with the logic of the system, we are not just talking about a courageous decision that presumably healthy subjects make in a vacuum. Even apart from “self-destructive” behavior, many of us already experience illness and disability that position us outside this society’s conception of health. This forces us to grapple with the question of the relationship between health and struggle.

When it comes to anti-capitalist struggle, do we associate health with productivity, too, implying that the ill cannot participate effectively? Instead, without asserting the ill as the revolutionary subject à la the Icarus Project, we could look for ways of engaging with illness that pull us out of our capitalist conditioning, interrupting a way of being in which self-worth and social ties are premised on a lack of care for ourselves and each other. Rather than pathologizing illness and self-destructiveness as disorders to be cured for efficiency’s sake, we could reimagine self-care as a way of listening into them for new values and possibilities.

Think of Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Voltairine de Cleyre, and all the other women who drew on their private struggles with sickness, injury, and depression to craft public expressions of insubordinate care. How about Friedrich Nietzsche: was his poor health a mere obstacle, which he manfully overcame? Or was it inextricable from his insights and his struggles, an essential step on the path that led him away from received wisdom so he could discover something else? To understand his writing in the context of his life, we have to picture Nietzsche in a wheelchair charging a line of riot police, not flying through the air with an S on his chest.

Your human frailty is not a regrettable fault to be treated by proper self-care so you can get your nose back to the grindstone. Sickness, disability, and unproductivity are not anomalies to be weeded out; they are moments that occur in every life, offering a common ground on which we might come together. If we take these challenges seriously and make space to focus on them, they could point the way beyond the logic of capitalism to a way of living in which there is no dichotomy between care and liberation.