João Enxuto + Erica Love

A health care worker stands in the street Sunday to counter-protest hundreds of others that are demanding the end to stay-at-home orders in Denver. Alyson McClaran / Reuters

America was bitterly divided by the time Covid-19 struck in early 2020. The rupture had been triggered by political indifference, the wealth gap, crackpot conspiracies, the 9/11 attacks, Bush v. Gore, the Civil War, chattle slavery, and so on... Over the first two decades of the 21st century the breaches to civil society had become particularly acute and persistent. Volatility, which fueled the finance and media industries, simply became too intense and debilitating. The endless churn of viral proxy wars battered whatever was left to prop up the Union. Once the pandemic blew through, the house of cards collapsed decisively.

At this point you have been staying in place for over a month, in some cases longer. If you are among those fortunate enough to be at home with a reliable internet connection the view of the United States through your computer terminal has, at times, been terrifying. We can assure you, however, that the quarantines will end and that something good and meaningful is waiting on the other side.

The “Liberate” media events that you recently witnessed launched open conflicts between the states and federal government which became irreconcilable. Demonstrators delivered demands for the right to work at the door of state houses occupied by Democratic governors. These events, to a large degree, were cases of astroturfing boosted by the President on Twitter. “Operation Gridlock” was designed for maximum exposure. Handmade signs read: “Trust in Jesus not the New World Order,” "Don't Tread on Me,” and “I need a haircut.” Photographs of brave hospital workers blocking the paths of menacing Dodge and Ford trucks have become iconic: an American knock-off of the Tiananmen Square standoff.

With distance, reckless demands and deplorable tactics by protestors could be boiled down to a struggle for human rights. In America basic provisions were tied to a job. A business lockdown, in effect, cut access to social safety. Work continued nonetheless. As high-earning cognitive labor struggled with screen fatigue, essential workers (who were disproportionately people of color) continued to risk their lives on the front-lines. As Jordan Flowers, an Amazon warehouse worker put it, “How can we be ‘essential’ and ‘disposable’ at the same time?” [1] On March 30 of 2020 Flowers, with 50 of his co-workers, staged a walkout at their Staten Island facility. America had promised jobs as a cure; they became the disease instead.

Record unemployment led millions to lose their healthcare in the middle of the pandemic. Strikes, walkouts, and sickouts intensified as the summer wore on. Covid-19 cases surged and remained persistently high as gridlock in the federal government prevented a financial stimulus from reaching businesses and individuals. Outrage, dulled by prolonged isolation, turned into existential rage once it was given space in the streets. Social justice struggles took center stage and “Black Lives Matter” became the largest movement in the nation’s history.

As public health and other essential professionals worked tirelessly to limit the scope of the disaster, others tempered anxieties by mapping possibilities beyond what was imminently knowable. This tendency was certainly evident in the art field, where cooped up imaginations fluctuated wildly from the most dire endgame scenarios to vital expressions of solidarity that extended well beyond the arts.

In the early weeks, speculation about the future of Contemporary Art in the U.S. was generally grim. Countless, deeply-felt reflections circulated across publishing platforms. There was time to read. The takes were wide-raging but even among those who shared cultural affinities differences could be plotted mostly along generational lines. Some of the older commentariat who came of age in the 1970’s, during New York City’s bad old days, imagined that by having borne witness to one period of bust and boom, prosperity would gradually return to those who could wait it out with “Passion. Obsession. Desire.”[2] A devotion to cyclical history helped in no small way to confirm fools in their faith. The economic unraveling of the 1970s was not a reboot event but the conjuncture of a new regime known as neoliberalism.

Difference and density were impediments to the recasting of New York City in the aseptic modernist mold that was favored after the World Wars. The city proved not to be a pliable enough medium for the “master builders” and after decades of neglect by white elites the city was left for dead. And, so, it was with passion, obsession, and desire that a small community of artists in the 1970s resettled the wasted metropolis and delivered great American art from out of the deprivation. The scrappy bunch which occupied abandoned lofts in Lower Manhattan were the germ for an expansion that by 2020 had mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar global industry. In its final years the old art market became so bloated with ancillary prestige events (galas, fairs, etc…) staged in fealty to oligarch patrons that these satellite affairs ended up swallowing the planet which they orbited. In those days much vibrancy, critical energy, and transformative potential was squandered in beating back influencers, sorting through outrage, and paying the rent. Even now, 18 years on, we can’t help but indulge in a bump of recollections drawn from your lurid milieu.

Let’s continue with the fallout: Museums, theaters, and galleries that closed in mid-March remained shut for months. In all, the infrastructure that furnished live public spectatorship went dark for longer than most could have anticipated. Contemporary art galleries attenuated by market strain for too long, staged mergers or simply folded. Hopes for a sustainable market rebound sparked by an ascendant patron class of conscious-capitalists that would source locally-grown artists from emerging galleries never materialized.[3] The human compulsion to possess singular commodities is a difficult force to regulate.

The dominos continued to fall when it became clear that there would not be a federal bailout of the nonprofit arts sector. In the years leading up to Covid-19 there was very little public provision to shore things up to begin with; the National Endowment of the Arts had been threatened with elimination four years running. What had been starved for decades would be the first to perish. For their part arts foundations joined together to provide relief, but the economic impact of the virus was too widespread and too sustained. Payments were furnished for immediate support—a bridge, it was hoped, to somewhere.

Young Americans subsisting on a precarious creative economy before the pandemic were quickly forced to redirect their energies to the fundamentals of survival. These abrupt introductions to urban immiseration prompted a hunt for alternatives. The Great Depression was the obvious historical precedent and texts covering the New Deal’s Federal Arts Project (FAP) began appearing on Zoom reading group lists. In sustained examinations of bygone post office mural paintings advocated by federal administrators named Holger Cahill and Rexford Tugwell, the fog of 85 years became all the more dense. Artists of the Great Depression had made concessions to decorate and propagandize for a wage – to bear the yoke of social realism and the remit of FAP administrators to update the conventions of Americana. In those years – for the sake of self-preservation – American artists were forced to redefine their output as craft. As your contemporary Dave Beech notes, the Euro-American artist since the Renaissance had couched their exceptionalism within the “aristocratic project of the eradication of labour within labour itself.” He explains further, “This is how it was possible for art to pass itself off from the outset as unteachable, immeasurable, spontaneous, and free from rules.”[4] It would follow that a demand for a subsidy in times of economic crisis would require that the artist again shed their claim to exceptionalism.

With a measure of historical perspective some in the art field recalibrated their approach to movement politics. Allegiances between art workers and broader labor movements were cultivated like never before, but the internet had forever muddied the waters of what constituted creative labor. To this day unruly armies of humans and bots push out countless disintermediation schemes, deep fakes, and shit posts: All of which became tactically valuable when the time came for the secession. However, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s messianic return never came.

What we now call the Soft Secession was not a single revolutionary event but rather an escalation brought on by the collapse of the U.S. and global economies after Covid-19 and the 2020 election which was plagued with irregularities, lawsuits, protests, and bloodshed. As the Joe Biden campaign engaged in reclaiming a disputed election, a New State confederation was seeded as an informal alliance between East and West coast states. A definitive plan for secession was rolled out shortly thereafter by governors and other elected officials from so-called donor states – those contributing more tax money to the federal government than they receive. These states tended to be Democratically-led and were initially hit the hardest by Covid-19. For their part, Republican senators continually blocked federal financial bailouts for states and municipalities. Meanwhile multinational corporations were profiting from billions of stimulus tax dollars. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes charted all-time highs. For many states a secession simply made economic sense.

With the help of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General, Trump declared his re-election at the close of 2020. In a concession speech Joe Biden echoed Al Gore from 2000, "for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession." Decades of incompetence finally broke the Democratic National Committee and progressives grabbed control from the moderates. A party coup would prime the secession.

While most of the secessionist planning took place via back-channel negotiations, a brazen media war was waged in support of the cause. After Trump’s illegitimate claim to victory, secessionist leaders made no effort to conceal their intentions. They reasoned that the President and his circle would interpret the strategy as an appropriation of their own tactics – all hot air and bluster. In the first few months of 2021 the word “TREASON!!!” was included in Presidential tweets more than two dozen times, but no significant response was taken other than the threat of lawsuits.

New State independence was declared on April 15, 2021, following a coordinated effort by millions of residents and businesses based in the original 20 secessionist states to suspend payments to the U.S. federal government. The original states were: Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Shortly thereafter South Florida liberated itself to join the New State. The District of Columbia followed after sorting out a series of complications related to its status as a former national capital. In the end, the New State map closely followed boundaries established when states decided to expand Medicaid in the 2010s.

On that tax independence day residents of the New State were told that they would be protected from the non-payment of federal tributes to the United States; a decree which went a long way towards quieting dissent in the countryside. Days of celebratory street manifestations were to follow. In the Soft Secession the scales of Federalism were tipped toward regionalism.

Hard boundaries were not raised immediately to mark New State territory. Migration was permitted and new citizens registered their affiliation with the New State through an online portal which was an early component in a vast network architecture that would be designed to provide access to basic government services. Claiming a New State identification number would immediately trigger the revocation of U.S. citizenship and furnish guaranteed monthly income payments.

The New State is not a country in the manner of a typical modern nation state. Governance is decentralized, local, and participatory. There is a President who is elected by ranked choice vote but she can only serve one four-year term with strictly limited executive powers. It was also decided through a plebiscite that the New State would retain its generic name, have no national flag, no anthem, and no police force, but it did need its own currency. An injection of new money would quantitatively ease the difficult challenge of coordinating and building out a social infrastructure. Inflation was a worry to be left for another time. Executing plans for a new government apparatus was a massive undertaking, particularly during an economic depression. But let’s not get tangled in policy details, these are just sketches from a secession.

It is worth noting that the New State benefited from serendipity. A vaccine to stop Covid-19 was discovered and approved by a group of researchers at Oxford University in May 2021. By June it was widely available. Having California in the New State was an immense benefit because of its advanced research and technology sectors. We can characterize the secession as “soft” because a vast majority of the military-industrial complex was absorbed in the break up. The revolution was bloodless and bureaucratic.

For some years the Pacific States, and California in particular, had been facing off against the federal government to maintain an adherence to stricter emissions and climate regulations. Reducing and capturing atmospheric carbon became a top priority for the New State under the direction of Californian policy makers. Parallels were frequently drawn between the Pacific secessionist block and the breakaway nation described in Ernest Callenbach’s 1974 novel Ecotopia. In the book, the Pacific Northwest states (Washington and Oregon) join California in a bioregional movement that separates from the United States in 1980. Ecotopia contains various proposals that are unworkable in the New State, but it does offer useful sketches for a large-scale plan which is oriented towards an ecological horizon – the only horizon that really matters in the end. It remains a popular title in the New State to this day. From an ecological standpoint, the most significant plan adopted by the New State was the Green New Deal.

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and cover art by Mark Harrison. Color image can be found here — Ernest Callenbach’s *Ecotopia* and cover art by Mark Harrison. Color image can be found here

The political foundations for the New State assembled from unfulfilled promises gathered from the ill-fated campaigns of Bernie Sanders. His Democratic Socialists party helped to transform the New State from a version of Keynesianism to a multi-party socialist system. A guaranteed income, climate action, universal healthcare, and free college were adopted over time. Legislative priorities hewed closely to Sanders' 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights. His portrait is now on our digital currency.

In the first years of the New State there was massive economic and personal suffering. There was social unrest and real doubts about whether our statecraft would succeed. But as difficult as that period was, it created the conditions for artists to act politically alongside other workers towards a common cause. There were no means to build an individual practice; no market. The guaranteed income was just enough to get by. But what’s slowly emerging is the framework to support creative work under the terms that we've long wished for.

A recounting of the fate of the United States will be left for another time.

Sam Adler-Bell, “Coronavirus Has Given the Left a Historic Opportunity. Can They Seize It?,” The Intercept, April 14, 2020, accessed April 26, 2020,
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/14/coronavirus-mutual-aid-worker-organizing-left-movement/
Jerry Saltz, “The Last Days of the Art World … and Perhaps the First Days of a New One Life after the coronavirus will be very different.” New York Magazine, April 2, 2020, accessed April 25, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/how-the-coronavirus-will-transform-the-art-world.html
Magda Sawon, “This Is the Toughest Challenge My Business Has Ever Faced. But Here’s Why Small Galleries Like Mine Will Come Out Alive,” Artnet, April 27, 2020, accessed April 27, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/magda-sawon-postmasters-op-ed-1845471
Dave Beech, Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labor, Automation and Value Production. (London: Pluto Books, 2019), 41.