Written by Hamilton Borges, from the REAJA OU SERÁ MORT@ (REACT OR BE KILLED) organization in Brazil.

While Caliban and the Witch told us the story of how bodies were subjugated and how we became separated from our bodies, her latest book, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin—Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism, addresses how our relations to the body play out now, especially in the digital age where the cyborg (half human, half machine) has replaced the earlier mechanistic model of the body-as-machine.

We tend to reject hierarchy instinctually in some parts of our lives, while accepting it uncritically in others. Anarchists strive to eliminate all hierarchy, in every aspect of life.

Solidarity is not the same as this insane movement of taking photos with the donation of a food aid basket and leaving the subject served by this charity for the flies.

While the master position presents debt as liberating — one can invest the money wisely, pay for education, strive to make a living — it is the ultimate mechanism of economic slavery.

“The murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, and the attack against Christian Cooper. Do these specific cases, whose punishments rely on the chance of someone recording at the right place and time, shake the foundations of our structurally racist society?”

The point of this essay, apart from pushing for everyone with a yard to degrass and plant useful things, is to demonstrate that I have made a start already in preparation for a projected New World that may come into being when the Pandemic is over.

We are currently seeing the limits inherent in the types of understanding gained through rationality and technics. While there may have been a moment when it could be reasonably argued that new developments in the intellectual products of humanity were oriented towards the improvement of human life, there can now be no doubt that these have facilitated greater levels of immiseration and despair than ever before imagined.

I do not belong to a specific Land, but to my mom, my family, my community, my Ancestors. I do not draw my powers from a specific Land, but from my body, my mind, my spirit and my relationships. However, I am accountable to all the Lands that sustain me and the people I share them with.

A decolonial approach for life beyond neoliberalism

And the liminal revolution in-between

“The country I live in is a strange one, a place where the poor express their frustration by stealing and destroying electronic devices, while the rich express theirs by threatening to shoot everyone.”

Grounding and centering are foundational practices of witchcraft.

I place the root ball in the carefully dug furrow and close the earth over it, firming it down and move on to the next until there’s a row of young tomato plants, ready to extend their roots into the earth, to grow. And when it’s done I sit down and have a drink. There’s dirt beneath my nails and I think once more, I could do this forever.

“The film is asking us to come to terms with some difficult realities which we have yet to face: namely, that sustaining our infinite growth, industrial civilization on renewables is neither desirable nor possible, yet that is exactly what green capitalists are intent on pursuing.”

Sustainability, as we conventionally call it, is not actually sustainable. Sustainability continues to use finite resources as if they were infinite. Sustainability leads to greater harm to all life, not greater friendship with all beings. The products of sustainability—solar panels and biofuels — require Empire.

As the ravages of Empire play out, cultural recovery may become our goal again in the future — and we may find ourselves by choice or necessity living in small localized kinship groups once again, looking to our own ancestral traditions for a template to survival.

Trees are such beautiful creatures, are they not? And wise too. If you listen with a wild ear, if you watch them with wild eyes, they will share their lessons with you.

Sounds awfully romantic, doesn’t it? But as lovely as it sounds, it is also true.

Oh you'll go outside again, work at a job, hate the president. But that old world is gone, let it go and prepare for the new.

May you take care of your essence like a lioness takes care of her young, and may your heart shine with the innocence of a child, seeing the world through the hopeful eyes of tomorrow full of sweets, toys and ice cream. We still have to fight, with hope and confidence in seeing what we are in each other's eyes, even if by videoconference.