Time to Social Dis-tanz!

A combination of the pandemic and policing efforts have left Alexanderplatz looking like a still from the 1960's: empty, windswept. Aimless people, seemingly fresh-awakened to the endless possibilities of city life, are moving with uncertain freedom to the Reclaim Club Culture sound system.

I had to bypass what looked to be a "hygiene demo" to get to this antiracist action by RCC, in support of freedom of movement. The hygiene demo was a messy scene, full of aggressive, drunk people trying way too hard to look like they were having fun. 

One can see the different intentions behind the two actions in the way that each group uses its allocated demo space. The hygiene crew use it to scream at passers by to take off their masks and invade their personal space, walking or dancing uncomfortably close. As if they blame you for whatever is going wrong with society. Under the auspices of freedom, they move into the power vacuum of an empty city street, and attempt to fill it with a new set of laws that suit their tiny sect.

The Reclaim Club Culture demo, on the other hand, has opened up a space for itself and for others to use their own way, for however long as they want, as long as they're respecting the safety of others. Everybody here's calm and chatting, bumping around to the tunes. Being themselves and leaving place for you to do the same. 

I think this plaza today looks like a little microcosm of society. At the centre is an idyllic open space that liberal thought has managed to hold onto for all comers; on all sides of it, draconians are closing in. Right wingers are bouncing off would be shoppers in one section of the plaza, making it impossible to chill out over there.

Police are roping off any other empty spaces they can find, near to the RCC van, hassling anybody who stands around too long to preserve "order" and "for our protection". The space where you can actually be free, for free, is under severe pressure... and it is this pressure, plus the autocracy that fuels it, that is causing most of the problems in this square. Everywhere you turn, though, you see angry frustrated people like yourself, and your impulse is to lash out at them - not at the barriers that are holding everyone in place. Stopping a more humane arrangement from taking shape.

Primark, Galleria, Promod, Saturn: by far, the largest amount of people in the plaza is squeezed into the narrow margins of the square that is reserved for people going shopping in these corporate occupied spaces. Like as if shopping is any safer than being at a demo. The "I'm just here to buy something" queue is the only simple option, here, though. You don't have to fight to occupy it. You just have to pay. 

After leaving the demo, I cycle through Friedrichshain, passing by a few of the skateboarders who basically own Frankfruter Tor now that there's no tourism left. A bunch of posters for the May 1st demonstrations fly past, calling out in sing-songy cartoon letters, The Kids Hate Capitalism. The Kids Love Feminism. 'Hey, I guess that makes me a kid!' I think, and smile.

On Mayday, I wanted to go out and protest but was frankly baffled by all of the last-minute callouts telling demonstrators to urgently go to this or that changed meeting point. I'm ashamed to say I gave up and stayed home. Probably, I should have just followed the choppers hovering over Rigaer Strasse might have been faster. 

It seems like slowly, the initial 'WTF is happening' scatty chaos of pandemic activism is merging into the shape of a movement that still defends every kind of freedom. Not just the 'freedom' to return to wage slavery as quickly as the declining death rates will allow, as the "hygiene demo" crowd seems to want. 

Meanwhile, Reddit tells me that on the other side of the Atlantic, conservative trolls are now claiming that the pandemic is all an elaborate leftist conspiracy to halt capitalism in its tracks. I guess that's going to the right wing's default argument against anything that stands a chance of reforming the system that favours its leaders, going forward: "It's all a conspiracy!!"

On both sides of the Atlantic, the right thrives on insinuating that there isn't any real democratic support for stuff like free medical care or better working conditions. In reality (and again, I'm paraphrasing) it is all an illusion cooked up by some Jewish, Marxist, feminist cabal of Satanists which is pulling the strings behind the scenes of every mass upheaval... and COVID-19 is no exception. They engineered that, too. If you really know where to look, you'll learn that a bunch of alien Greys are secretly in charge of Them. But don't tell anyone! It's a secret.

Basically, it's the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion reloaded, with added Star Wars music.

Funny how none of these faceless accusers - who are drastically underrepresented in every area of physical life, apart from YouTube and Facebook comments (almost as if they, themselves, are the invention of a shadowy cabal) never get around to addressing the underlying question of WHY so many millions of people might be so keen to conspire against capitalism, in the first place.

Maybe it's because, even in a pandemic, humans and the planet are faring a lot better than they were under this "ideal" economic system?

And it seems like the masses don't even need that much money, just as long as they have their friends, some ace tunes and a park to chill in. Relationships, culture and nature: three things that the pre-COVID-19 economic order had 'no time' for. Even if there was a shadowy cabal that was willing to fake a pandemic to halt that in its tracks, I'd understand where it was coming from.

Revised on 22.06.2020