The United States government doesn’t have to take the position of sending people to work and school to their deaths and absolutely ensuring an explosion of breakthrough infections while saying “well it’s your fault if the conditions for mass infection we’ve laid out through our laissez-faire public health policies designed to extract the maximum amount of profit during a crisis kills you”.
This is the issue with taking a totally individualist perspective on the pandemic that blames conspiratorial individuals for not taking the right health measures. It completely ignores the whole role of the state which has deliberately prevented any kind of strict measures that would’ve saved lives because it would disrupt business too much and would empower workers and poor through aid. By placing all the focus and blame on anti-vaxxers we miss that we wouldn’t be in this position if the United States government cared more about global public health than its ability to profit while people en mass die. The anti-vaxxers play a role but it would’ve been a far more minor one if we didn’t have exclusionary patent laws that are allowing the virus to mutate in the regions of the world with the least access to vaccines (despite wanting them!) and if the state was unafraid of angering business by putting into place robust stay at home policies where we pay and deliver food to people to keep them at home.
The United States government is going out of its way to choose the most cruel policy positions during this crisis and have successfully gotten many people to shift blame from the most powerful agent in the situation to a bunch of idiots who are coughing to death because they think microchips can fit into a needle. Congratulations on swallowing that propaganda whole heartedly.
[Image Description: Tweet by @MadinaAgenor reading, “It bears repeating (still), even after epidemiologists have been saying this for years (!!), but individual-level strategies will not solve population-level health problems. Only equitable population-level strategies (policies, structural change, resource allocation) can do that.”]
“Do you know how to correctly leaf through a book? Leaf through the book carefully, do not slob your fingers so as not to wrinkle or stain the pages” Soviet poster, 1929 https://t.co/FN2tfp5r1X
This is so great because if anyone is caught impeding or messing with these deliveries, it’s MAIL, that makes it a FEDERAL crime, whoever fucks with these packages gets charged FEDERALLY, they face up to five years in prison.
On this day, 8 January 1896, the world’s first explicitly anarchist-feminist newspaper, La Voz de la Mujer (Woman’s Voice), was published in Buenos Aires, advocating class struggle, women’s liberation and sexual freedom.
Its first editorial was a fierce condemnation of the situation of women in society:
“fed up as we are with so many tears and so much misery; fed up with the never ending drudgery of children (dear though they are); fed up with asking and begging; of being a plaything for our infamous exploiters or vile husbands, we have decided to raise our voices in the concert of society and demand, yes, demand our bit of pleasure in the banquet of life.”
While the newspaper was welcomed by some of the anarchist movement, some anarchist men were clearly hostile to it. In its second issue, the editors characterised the responses of their critics: “The first number of La Voz de la Mujer appeared and of course, all hell broke loose: ‘Emancipate women? For what?’ ‘Emancipate women? Not on your nelly!’… ‘Let our emancipation come first, and then, when we men are emancipated and free, we shall see about yours.’”
1000-2000 copies of each issue were sold, mostly to women workers in the cities of Buenos Aires, La Plata, and Rosario.
*
If you enjoy our content, make sure to follow our new TikTok account, where we post short video histories of positive and inspiring people’s history: https://www.tiktok.com/@workingclasshistoryhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1894680290717112/?type=3
