THERE ARE NO CRAZY SOLDIERS ON THE FRONT

madness that is for the other, the psychological bare minimum

Rejecting armed resistance declares a kind of life-in-death. How could freedom, any iota of it, come with anything less? We begin with this declaration, evoking Fanon, whose work on anti-colonial violence elucidates resistance as the colonized subject's psychological bare minimum. This violence, Eric A. Stanley reminds us, “remains both a practice of aimed liquidation and at times the only modality through which life can and must unfold.”¹ The risks of our actions are not experienced equally and those of us who benefit most from the system as it currently exists are often most reticent to take those risks.

We organize in small disparate collectives trying to harness what we believe is a latent but popular desire within our communities to form assemblages of care. In our organizing meetings, we fixate obsessively on circulations and chokepoints.² What are the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that we might exploit to blockade, slow, disrupt the machineries of capitalist/colonialist/imperialist violence? By care we mean, simply, the act of giving oneself in service of another. By violence we mean, simply, the act of purposefully causing pain.

How, then, do we map the bounds of what we mean when we talk about political violence in the West? Is purchasing a sticker that says “Arm the Left” violence? Is it violent to protest a Zionist synagogue’s real estate sale for land in the occupied West Bank?³ Is using naloxone to restore breath to a cyanotic neighbour violence? Is quoting Yahya Sinwar at a poetry reading violence? Is practicing de-arrest formations on the University of Toronto Front Campus green, day something-th of the Palestine solidarity student encampment, violence? Is taking out the trash? Is punching a fascist at the Christie Pits Canada First rally violence? Do any of the answers change if we replace “violence” with “a gesture of care”? Or are both binary taxonomies a Schrödinger's cat, violence/not-violence, care/not-care, contingent on the state’s punishment of the action in question, its always already greater violence? Inside atmospheres of colonial violence, “there is no escape, no outside or place to hide, yet through techniques of struggle collective life might still come to be.”⁴

On June 12, 2026, four of the Filton 25 were sentenced to prison terms of four to seven years, under terrorist provisions, for destroying “over 40 Israeli weapons, including killer drones.” Two weeks later, nine Texas anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism charges were sentenced to prison terms of over 50 years for tactics undertaken on a scale from shooting a police officer to printing leftist zines; “antifa” becoming a scapegoat category for targeting dissidence, evacuated of specific meaning. Between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2024, sixteen of the ninety-two Toronto arrests made in relation to actions against Israel’s genocide had taken place in the literary sector—specifically the Giller Prize and Indigo Books.

Those who pursue criminalizable tactics surrender their bodies and futures to care networks that may or may not exist among the movements that may or may not retroactively receive them as comrades. When a community defence fund covering legal fees continuously exhausts its reserves; when we blame organizers’ decisions for concussions, bruised ribs, and overnight jail support, rather than recognizing policing as a function of the state’s collective will, colonization as its original cause, and care as an otherwise practice rather than a burden, we treat each other as dictators and resistance as an institution aside from ourselves. How do we release the rules, rigidly internalized, that prevent us from exceeding our bounds? The social cannot be left intact. Tosquelles, a mentor to Fanon at Saint-Alban from 1952-53: “You can discover your being only in madness, and in the madness that is for the other.”

In 1969, the Weather Underground coined “bring the war home” as a rallying cry, insisting that Americans feel the impacts of America's imperialist war as much as the Vietnamese. Said David Gilbert, participant in the 1981 Brinks truck robbery: “We petitioned, we demonstrated, we sat in. I was willing to get hit over the head, I did; I was willing to go to prison, I did.”

This is not the kind of sentence a sane person would say. But as the circle of technofascist surveillance draws ever tighter around those of us involved in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements—Weather Underground militants made bombs in brownstone basements and smuggled them into the U.S. Capitol building women’s bathroom; now, even an orderly sit-in at the Israeli consulate would seem to require a dose of craziness to attempt— the flag of madness becomes critical to orient to, to assemble under.

So if we say theory, we mean any attempt to “build out a vocabulary for a war of position that might collectively overwhelm the world in which it persists.” Care as the Lacanian limit situation forcing us to face what’s Real: an affective tactic.

The Filton Four’s loved ones organize letter-writing days, listing out hobbies for solicitous strangers. “Write to X about pop music, queer culture, paleontology.” Mere days from the time of this writing, they will no longer be able to receive cards or letters from the public. Orisanmi Burton argues that liberalism itself is counterinsurgent warfare; our prisoners the tip of the spear behind enemy lines, letter-writing a form of interpersonal propaganda. Supporters raised placards of the Filton four outside the Woolwich Crown Court where their cases were violently resolved. “to slay a drone,” the placards read, next to faded reproductions of their faces, smiling. Similarly, the Prisoner Correspondence Project presents Instagram carousels of prospective queer/trans pen pals, organized by common interest.

Stanley describes the state's antagonism against queer and trans people as wholly extensive, an atmosphere with no event horizon. Can our living, against the state, be as principled? In our organizing context, antagonism as an instructive orientation may be more meaningful than armament as an immediate strategy. Not as a despairing statement, but an assessment of our collective readiness, or lack thereof.

In the meeting room of a community health centre, street medics present slides on treating tear gas, practicing “tactical neutrality”; surrendering their own strategic tendencies, passenger to the group's imminent movements. Autonomous networks of therapists, social workers, acupuncturists, osteopaths, RMTs, and chiropractors offer their time free to organizers and arrestees. Care workers who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with them on the streets, who will not try to coach them out of their militancy. That the practices of care and violence share a set of formal properties—organized, improvised, libidinal—is a phenomenological observation. “Not knowing how to live through wars deprives us of our humanity,” wrote Tosquelles. Through their clinical practices, Tosquelles and Fanon co-authored an approach to madness: healing requires being treated well and remaking the world.

professional establishments, healing institutions

If resistance as institution cracks open the horizons of political possibility, what are its characteristics? What must we be willing to surrender to the destabilizing effects of solidarity, collective organizing, and political repression in our encounters with liberatory struggles? Thinking alongside La Paperson, what we tend to think of as institutional spaces—artistic and cultural centres, universities, workplaces, social service agencies—are assemblages created in service of imperialist and settler colonial structures of power. This is why forms of “care” that emerge out of these places tend to be carceral, colonial, and ineffective in fostering political transformation. Yet La Paperson urges us to take assemblage seriously as both an analytic of power and a medium for it, because we exist in entanglements with these institutions and it is in these spaces that our “agential capacity extends beyond [our] being, into the system’s capacity.”⁵ Tosquelles understands institutions differently, suggesting that in times of war and political conflict, the institution—not institutionalization—functions through mediation, circulation, and madness as a form of creation, not passivity.⁶ In Tosquelles’ teachings and practice, the healing institution strives to distance itself from the inertia of bureaucratic establishment, it is instead an apparatus of exchange where madness is not to be overcome but to spark connections and relations that heal the institution itself.

If resistance as institution cracks open the horizons of political possibility, what are its characteristics? What must we be willing to surrender to the destabilizing effects of solidarity, collective organizing, and political repression in our encounters with liberatory struggles?

Tosquelles takes great pains to articulate a notion of the institution as an apparatus meant to create dialectical exchanges at all levels, as interstitial spaces of possibility, differentiating these formations from “establishments within the system of institutionalization,” spaces that stabilize a state of emergency through exerting control.⁷ Edward Said warned that professionalization establishes the authority to dictate acceptable practices, a warning as true regarding institutions of resistance as it is regarding institutions of care.⁸ Those of us trained to “help” people in crisis are often driven by an empathy that, through procedures, risk assessments, and managerialism, hardens into the “positions and structural dichotomies” that Tosquelles argues reproduce violence and aggravate crisis.⁹

“In a crisis, it may be in fact that one doesn’t always see what’s involved … Further, the crisis protagonist is not necessarily in a state to share, in a critical and lucid way, the production of the way out of it.”¹⁰ Tosquelles cautions against the professionalization of caregiving: no one knows how to respond well in a crisis, let alone a professional who has been trained to distance themselves from the one suffering. Inverted, however, the argument ironically shares a vocabulary and syntax with what has, more recently, been used to justify therapy’s mainstreaming: in crisis, the therapist owns the-way-out-of-it’s means of production; the client illucidly pays for access. The therapist, in this neoliberal formulation, becomes an establishment whose only goal is containing the crisis, rather than healing the relationship between the individual and the structures in which they live.

Therapy becomes at once a form of exhibitionism and a form of privatization, drawing more and more life into the purview of the personal rather than the public, reifying particular pains into corresponding identities. “As a trans person with a disability…” The client proffers a predicament, the therapist smothers the problem with validation, the client leaves the couch feeling better about themselves, with no pathways to collective action—a perverted mirror image of unity / struggle / unity, more like stasis / stabilization / stasis. The unconscious drive toward security makes us resistant to political change. Neoliberal care-speak instrumentalizes our relationships with each other, while the cultural impact of “capacity” as a concept strengthens our tendency to do nothing useful together. “Emotional labour” safeguards our abdication of mutual responsibility. On their attempts to import a Western social therapy from Saint-Alban’s French pavilions to Blida’s Muslim ward without a cultural translation, Fanon and Jacques Azoulay reflect, “The psychiatrist, reflexively, adopts the policy of assimilation.”¹¹

In Abolish Social Work (As We Know It), Chanelle Gallant provokes that “the only good social worker is a criminal social worker,” arguing precisely that our ability to identify and divest from our orientation to the state and towards community is critical in re-directing ourselves towards abolitionist formations—healing institutions.¹² What we are calling abolitionist social work speaks directly to the lineage of institutional therapy as Tosquelles practiced it, which he also understood required re-direction and divestment. “What is necessary first of all,” he wrote, “is to create action: the activities that break the rigidity of classical establishments.”¹³ Healing institutions understand that perpetual crises still require reflective analysis and strategic formations so that we may structure our resistance in methodical and conscious ways. They are spaces where the practices Harney and Moten call “disruption and consent to disruption” are welcomed, where we are “sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosures whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area.”¹⁴

If resistance is an institution, then policing, hospitals, most families, courts, schools as we know them are anti-institutional establishments. In Tosquelles-influenced Deleuzian terms, an institution is “a system of possible means that could satisfy a tendency or a need,” in opposition to the law; “a positive model of possible action.”¹⁵ The lineage we teach in street medic training reaches back to the Black Panthers and Young Lords, twice occupying the South Bronx’s Lincoln Hospital in 1970 to reject the death-in-waiting of utter state abandonment, forming “The People’s Program,” a healing institution: community acupuncture detox, Marxist political education classes, grassroots organizing support, free childcare.¹⁶ “A hospital worthy of the name is a freedom school,” said Tosquelles.¹⁷ The Lincoln Hospital—a hospital in form, if not always in function—slowly disempowered People’s Program workers from their roles, until Ed Koch and over 200 NYPD officers shut down the clinic in 1978, reaching for but not always fulfilling its institutional promise. “An institution,” Masó writes, “had to be able to touch its own forms of hunger, sustenance, and protection.”¹⁸

a .20 calibre rifle, a walking stick

The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) have maintained autonomous zones of governance in Chiapas since 1994—territory gained by an original uprising of 3,000 armed guerillas, and a declaration of war against the neoliberal Mexican state; then solidified via the formation of autonomous schools, women’s centres, and institutions of care and healing. Twenty years later, comrades organize a reading group of Subcomandante Marcos’ writings at a Kensington café/bar/artist hot spot that has also played recent host to Palestine solidarity open mics, queer Arab karaoke nights, fundraiser parties for the No Arms in the Arts campaign. From the Declaration of Principles of the EZLN, we recite: “A certain dose of tenderness is necessary in order to get rid of all the sons of bitches that exist. But sometimes a certain dose of tenderness is not enough and it’s necessary to add … a certain dose of bullets.”¹⁹

A week before this writing, a news article declares “the RCMP Can Apply Israel’s Gaza Tactics to Canadian Policing” and we learn that Toronto police can now investigate every political action as a hate crime. A new crisis for organizing, another sinking feeling of being surrounded. And yet we see the flourishing of healing institutions: organizers travel to Grassy Narrows to participate in the wild rice harvest, a radical softball league holds a public library talk on anti-fascist resistance, a group of comrades blockade a weapons manufacturer’s parking lot in the wee hours of the morning, a community art space hosts drop-in sessions on anti-gentrification, a clandestine group trains in de-arrest tactics at an underground music venue, a care network mediates interpersonal conflict and harm within activist organizations, a row of organizers pushes the wheelchairs of Grassy Narrows movement leaders during their annual River Run, itself an escalation of the longest running blockade against resource extraction in Canadian history, and—following the thread even further—the creation of the American Indian Movement-influenced Warrior Society in 1974. “Water = Life / Mercury = Death,” declares a sign held amidst a sea of cut-out fish and long blue cloth that emulate the flowing English and Wabigoon rivers.

We collect fragments of our movement histories shared in books, pamphlets, poems, art—in dialogue in community centres, shisha lounges, someone’s auntie’s basement. How the migrant justice movements of the early 2000s in Canada are directly tied to refugees fleeing the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, itself directly tied to the anti-colonial armed resistance against French colonialism that Fanon documented in The Wretched of the Earth.²⁰ How forms and practices of encounter and solidarity within those same movement spaces emerged in direct connection and relation to the Zapatistas. In “To Open a Crack in History,” Subcomandante Marcos quotes Ernesto Sabato: “I propose to you, with the gravity of life’s final words, that we embrace in a commitment: let’s go out into open spaces, let’s take risks for another, and with him wait with outstretched arms for a new swell in history to lift us.”²¹ Marcos pairs this quote with a reflection on armed resistance and care. Recalling his early days as a guerilla marching through the mountains of Chiapas, he describes repurposing his .20 calibre rifle to act as a walking stick, helping him continue forward despite wanting to give up and go home. At a point of exhaustion, he looks up into the stars and remarks, “That’s what we are ... fallen stars that barely scratch the sky of history with a scrawl.”²² His comrades, fearing he has become delusional, trudge forward and hurry to make camp, but Marcos begins to envision this “new swell in history,” the cracks and possibilities created through openly organizing with one another, the need to surrender to madness as an act of care.

In conversation with Françoise Picard, Tosquelles suggests that war poses an ethical problematic against which all combatants must define themselves and their roles.²³ We are keenly aware that we are not doing enough, and yet the dialogue between our ethics and ideologies is more split than we think, their radii subtended by our capacity for risk. It is not magical thinking, nor sporadic and spontaneous action, that builds institutions attuned to the collective needs of the people within them. Only creative struggle changes the terrain. Only consistent effort elaborates strategy. Only failures and conflict solidify solidarities. Institutions as the practice of movement, not the rigidification of process. As the Zapatistas say: Asking, we walk. Walking, we ask.

It is not magical thinking, nor sporadic and spontaneous action, that builds institutions attuned to the collective needs of the people within them. Only creative struggle changes the terrain. Only consistent effort elaborates strategy. Only failures and conflict solidify solidarities.

The Zapatistas can speak about tenderness because of the institutions they’ve built: schools, health clinics, ecological farm systems, local governments. Speculative pragmatism as political storytelling. For decades, they have supported Palestinian resistance, via repertoires of contention that include speeches, murals, teach-ins, .20 calibre rifles, walking sticks, the international Gathering of Resistances and Rebellions.²⁴ The Mexican state, in turn, has used Israeli-supplied technologies to arm the U.S.-Mexico border²⁵ and surveil journalists and activists.²⁶ Pegasus spyware, Elbit towers and drones.

There’s less neurosis in a time of war, Tosquelles argues, casting total conflict in a romantic hue. Speaking to Miquel Bassols and Rosa Maria Calvet in 1982, Tosquelles describes the Spanish Communist Party’s resistance to setting up psychiatric units during the 1936 Civil War. To do so would have meant accepting the craziness present in anyone, even people living through the mundane conditions of war. The anxieties of peacetime—that “euphoria of high economic indicators, political stability”²⁷ which Marcos disparages in reference to Mexico, December 1993, on the eve of the EZLN insurrection—require a particular healing. “There are no crazy soldiers on the front.”²⁸ How can each of us get willing to get hit over the head, or go to prison? State repression targets what’s working. Avoiding consequence is not the same as being free. We undermine revolution through hesitation, indecision, the lack of an honest calculus about what we are willing to give up; sometimes not even a literary prize or an hour or two of leisure per month. The sane may be more afraid of the stories they use to carry on, less willing to confront them, than the mad are. The psyche is a contested space; our unwillingness to assume responsibility, a controlling defense against fear and anguish.

Can our living, against the state, enact the types of healing institutions that Tosquelles and Fanon manifest in their practice? Are these the care networks we must create to allow for the possibility of new and more effective repertoires of contention? How do we create future care networks that allow more of us to surrender our bodies not to the despair of overlapping ecological, economic, authoritarian and geopolitical crises, but to the notion that “total liberation involves every facet of our personality”?²⁹

In our professional training, we became a problem by pointing out problems. Identifying the white woman’s fragility, her tears halting every conversation about class or race, made us into angry students, rebel recipients of countertransferences. A situation the facilitators couldn’t control, despite ample practice. Our curriculum confused unconditional positive regard for tenderness, a dynamic borne out in the classroom every Tuesday evening. There’s a reason Fanon’s psychiatric writings are less studied than his reflections on revolutionary violence. The final chapter of Wretched of the Earth, consisting of case notes from his work with both French soldiers and Algerian militants, argues that there is a price paid in each militant’s person for national independence.³⁰ The shame and migraines of an FLN driver whose wife was raped; an orphaned ALN fighter’s nightmares, haunted by the settler’s wife he didn’t kill. Practicing care teaches us about the psychological capacities we need to cultivate in order to relate to armed resistance as agential subjects. Relinquishing ease, surrendering control. The goal of organizing is not to feel good or get along, necessarily, though both can help the collective project.

This is also an argument against specialization, one’s basic capacity for presence deformed by prestige or professional training in any discipline. Throughout 2024, writers refusing to boycott the Giller Prize asked: why is there a campaign against the Giller’s sponsors and not the Amazon First Novel Award, eponymously evil, or the Carol Shields Prize, presented by BMO? To which organizers said, “You could lead those campaigns.” “Oh no,” they said, “I could never,” without saying so directly; they were “always searching to see if there wasn’t someone else, someone more responsible.”³¹ It’s “cartoonish,” another comrade suggests, to imagine “actually doing armed resistance.” But why? George Jackson’s prescient instructions for revolution—to organize on one hand for the production of our own needs, growing food, settling quarrels, operating rent strikes, on the other for the enforcement of a military strategy, via guns and grenades, damaging the state’s essential logistics—feel impossible only if we don’t understand that revolution builds in stages. “Red freedom has a door, struck by every bloodied hand,” recited Yahya Sinwar, quoting Shawqi’s poem “Nakbat Dimashq.”³² “Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved,” wrote Jackson.³³ Freedom requires the work of transformation. Violence breaks the continuity in our everyday lives, “so we can make the necessary leap correctly, all together and each of us on our own.”³⁴ When we fear work, we fear freedom as well, taking the measure of the break.

not to change the institution, but to change life

Militarized violence makes up only part of the deathscape of colonialism. Structural power coalesces through a weaving of crisis and control, dysregulation and abandonment, domination and coercion. James and Grace Lee Boggs write, “There is a dangerous and terrifying gap between the emotions with which most people respond to [crises] and their understanding of how our struggles relate to the continuing struggle of humankind down through history.”³⁵

Grace Lee Boggs recognized that the map to transformation must be not only pragmatic, but also spiritual, requiring both an ethics and a poetics: a desire path, stamped by repetition. She made distinctions between the conditions of postrevolutionary China and potentially revolutionary United States; between the transformative and self-destructive capacities of violence; between a hunger for action and a readiness for sacrifice.³⁶ “In order to transform the world, we must transform ourselves,” Boggs famously wrote in her autobiography, Living for Change. It would be a misreading, though one that happens often, to take this as an individualistic assertion, blurring the Detroit Summer project into a panorama of community gardens and street festivals for their own sake, rather than a movement-building enterprise changing young people’s relationships to work and to their city, or to think Boggs moved away from militant means of resistance over the course of her life, rather than understanding that she was constantly assessing and re-framing the context—ecological, economic, geopolitical—of Left struggle in Detroit, from the soil up. As Salmaan Khan reminds us, Boggs “insisted on fighting on two fronts: the mobilization of the masses against an external enemy, and the creation of structures and institutions for the transformation of the masses into new beings.”³⁷ Boggs and Tosquelles might have had something to say to each other. In The Next American Revolution, Boggs addresses the issue of labour directly, how their organizing retrieved young people from the “factory model” of education and restored them to their own human capacity for change: “In Detroit Summer we combined physical forms of work with workshops and intergenerational dialogues on how to rebuild Detroit, thus further expanding the minds and imaginations of the young, old, and in-between.”³⁸ Tosquelles, too, took work as essential to healing, under the treatment method of ergotherapy. Work, as long as the work is not geared towards capitalist productivity but towards non-alienated purpose and dignity. Reflecting on Tosquelles’ interdisciplinary orientation at Saint-Alban, creating anchors for the hospital’s collective life through artistic practice, Masó writes, “is a form of transmission that reveals the always-unfinished project of becoming an institution. Not in order to change the institution, but to change life.”³⁹

In 1970, the psychiatrist Wolfgang Huber founded the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) out of the University of Heidelberg’s psychiatric hospital. For the SPK, the hospital was a site of class antagonisms between doctors and patients, the organs a map of imperialism’s intrusions into the body.⁴⁰ They ran radical therapy sessions and bomb-making tutorials, secured medications and housing for runaways, hosted cop watch programs on pirate radio stations, all under the framework of “Working Circles”—echoes of ergotherapy, though possibly the SPK would have disparaged Tosquelles’ institutional psychotherapy methods as a continuation of state-sanctioned psychiatric violence. The German medical establishment could not abide this association of care with violence. By mid-1971, despite little actual evidence linking the SPK to the armed revolutionary group Red Army Faction, an onslaught of press and policing pathologized the SPK’s activities as crazy and terroristic, leading to the imprisonment of key organizers.⁴¹ As SPK members themselves knew all too well, “If the protest as resistance starts to become a material force (materielle Gewalt) it soon will be criminalized and eliminated by the State…”⁴²

A line from Shawqi’s poem, not quoted by Sinwar, reads, “When those who seek justice arrive, They say, ‘A group has gone out and caused a rift.’”⁴³ Demonstrators are arrested after blocking the entrance to the “Best Defence Conference” in London, Ontario, whose sponsors and exhibitors included Elbit Systems, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Hensoldt—companies producing Israel’s F-35s, drones, missiles, and surveillance systems used to bomb schools, hospitals, and refugee camps in Gaza. Police later announce that they have seized “protest placards, two-way radios, smoke bombs, and handwritten documents describing police Public Order Unit tactics.”⁴⁴

The same staged forms of moral panic dogged organizers charged with tossing washable red paint and wheat-pasted posters on a downtown Toronto Indigo storefront, denouncing Indigo CEO Heather Reisman’s ties to the HESEG Foundation, which provides scholarships for “lone soldiers” to serve in the IOF. Meanwhile, those who profit and perpetuate mass violence are seen as the victims of people’s uncontained rage or anger. Tactics spanning from public support for Palestinian resistance, to orderly demonstrations, to acts of property damage or sabotage, to boycott campaigns, to scholarly and artistic work have all been deemed more egregious and worthy of punishment than the bombing of hospitals, the merciless slaughter of children, the targeted assassination of journalists, the purposeful denial of food deliveries in order to starve Palestinians, the escalation of settler violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Zionists demand denunciations of Hamas as a precondition for dialogue, but to what end? On the other side of respectable dialogue there are no cancelled weapons deals, no Israeli officials arrested as per ICC warrants, no organizations, like Honest Reporting, denied charitable status, no withdrawals from genocidal settler colonial campaigns against Indigenous communities here in North America.

Many on the liberal left have indeed denounced Hamas, as they have historically denounced the Black Panther Party, the African National Congress, the Marxist guerillas in the Philippines, the Zapatistas, the Earth Liberation Front, and all other struggles that have chosen armed resistance as a repertoire of contention—as an act of care. The power of the state today, more than ever, “operates through automated and self-regulating circuits,” meaning that our fear of soft power (algorithmic policing) immobilizes us to make claims or assert solidarity that is complex, nuanced, and tinged with contradictions, while hard power (militarized policing) becomes more repressive, violent, and deadly for communities who have been marked for elimination within the nation states in which solidarity organizing is taking place.⁴⁵ Anti-institutional establishments that purport to “care”—schools, hospitals, social service agencies, universities, community organizations, oversight boards, media outlets—begin to exact paternalistic forms of control out of self-preservation and risk aversion.

Tosquelles pointed out the dangers of having a depoliticized relationship to these kinds of anti-institutional establishments: normalizing contemporary forms of authoritarianism and making them impossible to transform.⁴⁶ Establishments of neoliberal power are rendered as primary sites of carcerality in an effort to shift the burden of risk from managers, directors, and even frontline workers to community members themselves. Shira Hassan affirms this reality, noting, “Keeping the lights on and thousands of people employed, keeping the institutions lawsuit free and the system intact, is the primary purpose of hospital administrators and the vast majority of mainstream nonprofits.”⁴⁷ In an era of growing state abandonment, individual responsibilization, and increased targeting of vulnerable populations by state authorities, the need for social support and deep connection is greater than ever. But the function and administration of these establishments orients us organizationally and personally towards self-preservation and surveillance, determining who is and is not worthy of care.

To reject this form of carceral care means to redefine our relationship to care work, as an antagonism against state violence. The SPK sought to do this through the socialization of knowledge, skills, and methods of care—shunning the false scarcity of capitalist education. The Black Panthers’ concept of “self health,” an extension of the party’s theory of self-defense, involved “training lay people to defend their communities against structural health injustices, including malnutrition, sickle cell anemia, and involuntary sterilization.” A growing movement of frontline care workers “bend, break, or overlook rules to benefit users and mitigate the harm” of eliminatory social policies.⁴⁸ Rather than seizing the means of production, they are operating in ways that George Jackson defined as “the destruction of the protective and productive forces” of racial, colonial, and imperial capitalism.⁴⁹

In an era of growing state abandonment, individual responsibilization, and increased targeting of vulnerable populations by state authorities, the need for social support and deep connection is greater than ever. But the function and administration of these establishments orients us organizationally and personally towards self-preservation and surveillance, determining who is and is not worthy of care.

Violence, too, offers a Lacanian limit situation that forces us to face what’s Real; an affective disruption. Settler colonial structures and acts of violence, the primary function of the colonialist state, are legitimized through the valiance of virtues.⁵⁰ Who does the head of state believe he will outlast? What are the sovereignties that are respected? Who decides whether we call it the Oka Crisis or the siege of Kanehsatà:ke? Coulthard contends that “settler-colonialism should not be seen as deriving from its strictly repressive or violent features, but rather from its ability to produce forms of life that make settler-colonialism’s constitutive hierarchies seem natural.”⁵¹

Times of crisis, then, are also struggles over the terms of transition for social existence; what forms of life are possible, natural.⁵² For Berlant, in times of crisis, “politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life.”⁵³ Such glitches open our society up to being filled by a need for control, where the social landscape is “organized according to a spatial politics of safety.” Tosquelles warns that “there are people who become like states…they do their little state song and dance, they live in the analytic state.”⁵⁴ Alternately, these glitches might push us to create new projects of mutual aid as we come to see public services as “exclusive, insufficient, punitive, and criminalizing.”⁵⁵ Antagonisms as an orientation towards institution-building may more meaningfully orient us to creating deeper relations of solidarity with resistance struggles globally by creating networks of interdependence, material support, and relationality that we need to organize through and against state abandonment. To create institutions of care is not synonymous with institutionalization or professionalization. Creating institutions outside of the state is not magical thinking, nor can it be sporadic and spontaneous acts of mutual aid alone. Both things are true.

trying hard, feeling bad

“Everyone dies and everyone is crazy, thanks to God,”⁵⁶ wrote Tosquelles. In which case, we should at least try to improve our psychic capacities for struggle. This might mean killing some of our acquired needs for self-actualization, or at the very least killing a few bad ideas. A dependency on feeling good, or feeling smart. Instead, surrendering to feeling bad, cultivating a more copacetic relationship with difficulty.

All of this is happening right now: a coalition forms to “fight back against the Carney agenda,” hosting panels, workshops, and demonstrations as a counter to Carney’s “Canada Investment Summit” in September.⁵⁷ Carney pushes forward his War Bank proposal despite almost certain humiliation, enlisting fewer and less geopolitically significant financiers than he had originally promised.⁵⁸ National arms embargo organizers launch a new campaign against Elbit Systems, identifying dozens of Elbit suppliers across the country, eleven and counting in just the GTA.⁵⁹ Wildfires—their mismanagement abetted by systemic abandonment—displace Indigenous communities to a scattered array of urban centres, completely destroying Namaygoosisagagun First Nation.⁶⁰ Political struggles proliferate in which the scale of our response to the palimpsest of crises seems utterly incommensurate to the severity of their consequences.

A comrade says the conditions of our lives here—our comforts and little luxuries—prevent us outright from growing inside ourselves the humility and openness to loss that billions of people around the world are forced to inhabit, due to the way colonialism and imperialism have already truncated their relationships to futurity. The psyche is a tool, usable for both revolutionary or counter-revolutionary purposes, which does not assess the relative moral value of assimilation versus insurgency.

To legally obtain a firearm license in Canada is a minor gauntlet of screening, controlled by the RCMP. Simply taking the firearms safety certification course requires eight hours of classroom time, a theoretical and practical exam, and approximately $400. A challenge that far right extremists seem more capable and willing to meet as they form and train militias at an increasing rate throughout the country.⁶¹ If we worked through our pathologies around violence and agreed tomorrow that armed resistance is necessary, good even, would we take up said arms the day after that, topple the government in time for the weekend?

For Freud, a dream is an expression of an unbearable wish.⁶² For Sheehi, Zionist smear campaigns exploit “the psychic state of siege” and provide a close reading of the mechanics of our own targeting.⁶³ To what question is armed resistance the only possible answer? We are still trying to ask it.

Neither violent nor non-violent resistance negates the original atmosphere of violence, which pervades and pervades. Violence is not a moral question, but a strategic one. “The first contact with the patient has to lead us to search for how one can live while making the most of madness.”⁶⁴ Psychoanalysis on its own, with its liberal European roots, its “aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis,” will not set us free.⁶⁵ What matters, in the end, is not our affective response to struggle, but struggle itself. If so, we have a lot of safe houses to establish, medical supplies to stockpile, and go-bags to assemble, in short order.

Endnotes

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4. Stanley, 16.
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