I can clearly remember the moment when I realized what I was doing, the moment when I was able to let go, to stop trying to fight Death.

Civilized societies are not less violent than non-civilized societies–-though they may appear to be the more privileged citizens. One of the defining characteristics of civilization is the depersonalization of violence.

We are rediscovering that we have always been wild, we are remembering the power we have. We are reforming and building bonds with those like us, who no longer wish to be tame, who no longer wish to accept the injustices of this world that favours money over all else. We are ‘agents against history’. We are ’unbinding a supposedly bound totality’. We are becoming iconoclastic.

Though they’re often used synonymously, civilization is not the same thing as culture. Many of the things that are attributed to civilization, such as art and healing, existed before civilization and outside of states. And many of the lauded “improvements” brought by civilization were not really improvements, or else they were improvements which came at a terrible cost.

There will be no final victory, nor defeat. There is only the endless repetitive revolutions of the gyre, which are destined to grow, contract, and begin again in moments of discord and strife.

According to many biologists, there is as much cooperation in nature as there was competition. The story we have been taught about our innate selfishness is only part of the truth. As such, it is capitalist propaganda, and something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Rather than running off as the police intended, the protesters stood their ground. When they were forced back by tear gas, they advanced again as soon as it cleared. They reclaimed ground repeatedly, and it took the police more than an hour to drive them back. This was only the beginning...”

A poem by Missy Malverde.

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Wine making is pure magic, the kind akin to cooking. I make several types of wine each year, indeed it is one of the easiest things I make and yet perhaps the one that people think is the hardest, perhaps they too think it’s a kind of magic, one that’s out of their grasp, but I’m here to tell you everyone should try the art of fermentation at least once in their lives.

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