Welcome to the Apocalypse

By Lisa Duggan for the Bunker Bloggers

As we shelter in place, socially distance and join Zoom University, the Bully Bloggers have decided to Bunker Blog.  Treading water as the flood of multiple catastrophes rises around us, we are speechless, but also have much too much to say.

Photo by Guillaume Behaegel on Pexels.com

The human disaster produced by the virus itself is now spectacularly magnified by the austerity regime of disaster capitalism past, and the reigning supremacy of clown car capitalist thugocracy present.  Legions of workers in the precarious sectors of the gig economy are already on the edge of destitution as they lose income, with no benefits or structural social support.  The most vulnerable among us—the homeless, the detained, the incarcerated—are trapped under nightmarish conditions.  Those who provide the most essential services—home care workers, food delivery teams, hospital workers, first responders—do not have the protective option of working from home.  The for-profit health care system is fully exposed as criminally inadequate.  The racial and class inequality baked into our economic and political system is visible in its deadly brutality.

What will come of these conditions?  As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1916, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.”  We’ve been standing at that crossroads for a long time now, watching the wind blow in both directions.  What can happen now, and how?

At Bunker Bloggers, we want to try to outline and analyze the current apocalypse in all its hideous manifestations.  We also want to follow the everyday life of containment, including not only its miseries and deprivations—the sources of all our rage and sorrow—but its forms of pleasure and intimacy, its ephemeral and whimsical moments, its ridiculous and sublime experiences. Our posts will be short and frequent.  Welcome to our bunker.