Arts of the Working Class #18: World Hell Organisation

The world has changed. We feel it in the water. We breathe it in the air. We feel it on the earth. Much that once was is now lost, for none now live who remember it: the world hell organization. With the first planetary event in which the whole world has been thrust into pandemic, lockdowns, and quarantine simultaneously, every person, country, and class has been affected in their own way. In lockstep with the pandemic, the 21st century is experiencing a major shift from unipolar hegemony to multipolar forms of power.

How are our ways of living, of experiencing our bodies, of being healthy inflected by the way geopolitics, white supremacy and class warfare from above colonises our bloodstreams as we are finally thrust into the age of the pharmapornographical? We plan to investigate these entanglements by pondering the system that stands behind the World Health Organization: The liberal world order of the UN, the World Trade Organization, unipolar American dominance and Western supremacy. As the pandemic keeps on mutating, HIV enters its 40th year in the eyes of science, and the protests against reason rage in the global north, we want to ask: What is health? And how does it turn public? Political and financial scandals erupt as the struggling masses drown in debt and, in response to the demobilization of the working class and the breakdown of supply lines, the global economy is restructured yet again, only to bring the exploitation of working people into a new era. On the streets, the situation is even more dire, as houseless people, substance users, and sex workers are thrust into even more precarity through seemingly endless cycles of lockdowns and the breakdown of public space.

In response, we explore how new organizational methods communities are implementing from scratch can be used as tools to confront these problems. Thus the main question of this issue provides a critical reassessment of how to deal with traps of pharmaceutical profit and the pursuit of physical, emotional and social wellness. In this issue, artistic reinterpretations of technical reports and statistics undermine the currently dominant representation of our present through data visualization, while essays and interviews redistribute attention away from centralized care structures and towards self-organized attempts at healing.