What is the real cost of your protection?

There’s some things this month that seem positive, astrologically speaking. Venus forms a mutual reception with the Sun in Leo and Libra, which are also signs that sextile one another. Venus is what you protect and the Sun is power. The malefics are also dignified and retrograding. They move slowly. They’re stuck in their own signs and, doing so, expand.

Power may be protected but a power that protects itself is disturbing. Power that serves power is fascism.

As we live in the slow decline of capitalism, there’s talk about wanting to find ways to support each other while swerving around money. We want to avoid money because it seems as if money is the root of all problems.

Sylvia Wynter writes that racism actually preceded capitalism. Samuel Johnson writes that “banishing money is an old contrivance of those who did not consider that the quarrels and mischiefs which arise from money must, if money were to cease arise immediately from riches themselves; and could never be at an end till every man was contented with his own share of the goods of life.” Freud theorizes that money can’t buy happiness because happiness is infantile and infants don’t want money.

The problem isn’t capitalism—the problem is racial patriarchal capitalism. To deride capitalism without the whole picture is to pretend that money is something that can buy happiness.

The moons this month are subtle. Pisces and Virgo become visible through Venus. Venus is a story. Venus rescues because Venus prosecutes. Venus also desires the rescuer because Venus is a victim. In this drama triangle, Venus makes vulnerability visible in order to hide power. When Venus does this, it makes some bodies more vulnerable than others. Definitions of vulnerability work to confuse. In some NYC schools, a third of students have taken up full time jobs. We treat our essential workers callously and talk about protecting our children but it turns out that “our” children do not include the children who are also essential workers.

There are moments of every story that call you back to your body. Those are shameful moments. Entertained bodies are also embarrassed bodies. September is for listening carefully—when you listen carefully, you might hear the grief behind your shame.

Virgo

Idle hands are the devil’s tools. The devil is a powerful symbol through which Europeans imagined the colonized. If you want to do the devil’s work, you will have to be willing to be idle. The United States hates being idle because it tries to genocide the devil.

There’s no reason for you to be working right now. You’ll need your idle hands if you want to be the devil’s tool. Yeah, everything is opening back up. This sucks. Figure out a way to keep idle. Scam your workplace. Pretend to work without actually working. Call out sick when you’re not. Demand unemployment. Reclaim your time.

Libra

Not everyone who supports you can see you. This means that not everyone who supports you actually supports you. Identify precisely which institutions you want to abolish. Institutions don’t exist in a vacuum but alongside one another and in support of each other. For example, the institution of marriage exists alongside the institution of the prison because the nuclear family breaks kinship networks that protect people from prisons.

Abolition, too, is about sticking alongside one another and in support of each other. Abolition is not about coexistence but about revealing conflicts that already exist. Coexistence is not love and love is something that cuts into capitalism.

Scorpio

How many small motions make up a day? Big words, ideas, and people aren’t useful to you right now. Bigness is an enlargement that abstracts and preaches. Talking big reaffirms old biases. Try to find the small and you’ll find what you’ll really have at stake. The real costs of capitalism often show up in small ways while permeating everything.

Say something without talking at all. Silent people know how to speak with their actions. At the end of the day, whatever happens—there’s no sense talking about revolution that you haven’t committed to. Divest instead of dialoguing and disturb norms instead of holding book clubs.

Sagittarius

Love is a perpetual waiting and waiting is excruciating when you’re terrified of the end of the wait. Waiting is when you weigh your self worth and decide how much you’d like to personally sacrifice for love so that you can feel impressed by the extremity of your passions.

This is love under capitalism. It’s love under capitalist time. What would divesting from love that makes you weigh yourself look like? What do you need to do to get there? Can you get there together and who will push you there?

Capricorn

Crisis is like a slow burn love affair. So much happens but it takes its time. You have been living in a slow crisis since 2018. It’s brought some people closer to you and taken some people away. Like love affairs, crisis makes you wait. Like love affairs, crisis can make you feel left behind.

When you were waiting in line to enter the grocery store, when you were waiting to hear back from your boss about whether you still have your job, when you were waiting on your unemployment check, and when you were waiting to hear back from your lover about whether they love you anymore—what did you remember?

Aquarius

Erase the word victim from your politics. There are no victims. The word victim is a method through which neoliberals decide which lives are worth protecting. Your identity is not a wound and you are not a victim not because you don’t suffer but because your pain does not fit comfortably into a politics of innocence.

Once you remove the word victim from your politics, you will be able to see things more clearly. You will see that histories of pain that the word victim works to conceal. You will understand which of your reactions are reactions that anticipate the past based on traumas from the past and you will have a clearer idea of what you want to do about those anticipations.

Pisces

What happens if you make friendship the most enduring and more important type of relationship in your life? What do you gain? What do you lose? When friendship overrides romantic sexual relationships, you lose the right to hoard property and move it along inherited blood lines. You lose the presence of those who you would not want to be friends with.

The reason why we put up with more in our romantic sexual relationships than our friendships is because romantic sexual relationships are made to serve patriarchy. Never let anyone you’re sleeping with get away with anything that you wouldn’t let a friend get away with.

Aries

Abuse is not emotional and neither is it an identity. Abuse is a behavior that arises from a patriarchal, colonial mindset. Because abuse is a behavior that results from complicity with power, we all abuse when we conceal power. Your job as an Aries is not to avoid abuse but to reveal the normal conditions through which power works—to reveal the already existing conflicts under difference. Your job is to make abuse recognizable.

When you see power work, make sure you describe out loud in plain words the mechanisms by which it works. Power doesn’t look the same to everyone. To some, it hides and to others it confronts. Power is a mirror that tries to represent us back to ourselves distorted. Your job is to break mirrors.

Taurus

Being the strong and silent type only works when you are in power. Be a harpy instead. Be annoying, dig at the sensitive things, and complain, complain, and complain until you’ve irritated even yourself. Whatever happens, start talking about it. Be the inappropriately worded person that your authority figures warned you about.

It is okay to kill joy when you understand that joy is something that can be intentionally fostered again. Joy is not a sacred resource but an action. It is okay to refuse some forms of joy and to wreck joy that was built on violence. To do this, you have to be willing to be a whiny brat.

Gemini

Beware of impulses towards being a silent sufferer. Beware of hidden spaces created for the sole purpose of privacy. Just because you don’t want to let other people see your grief or depression or anger doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect them. Just because people might not see your accountability process doesn’t mean that it doesn’t inform your every relationship.

Western queers talk about how pronouns create dichotomies but have propagated the pronoun as a personal choice. In Henanese dialect, the same pronoun (an) is used interchangeably for “I” or “we.” Which are the places in your life where “I” and “we” are interchangeable?

Cancer

Stop having career goals, just for this month. Figure out what else exists in your life. Figure out what the real cost of your career goals might be whether they are seen, felt, and known by you or if they have been exported onto someone who you do not see, feel, or know.

You will never feel secure as long as you export death to someone else. You feel only as secure as the most vulnerable person in your community. If you feel insecure, recognize it. Insecurity is an emotion. You can’t change your emotions but you can change the environment that your emotions respond to.

Leo

What structures of power does your personal narrative support? Where do you project strength and who does that strength serve? Who do you recognize as a victim and, in doing so, what histories of pain do you know?

None of us recognize all vulnerabilities. Those in power are often perceived to be more vulnerable. Like any Leo, you might want to do good in the world and protect the most vulnerable. Doing so will require that you see both the professed precarity of those with power and the hardened exteriors of those without for what they are.