We Have to Change Everything
We must explore new Ways of Being. We owe it to the planet and all present and future life on it. Capitalism and electoral politics aren't and can't be our answer – by design.
This article is too long for email, so kindly read it in your browser or app. In today's newsletter I’m talking politics without mincing my words and sharing some thoughts on the state of the world. This is an (anarchist and anti-capitalist) invitation to reimagine everything we thought we knew. Living in this fractured time and land, can we open our souls and minds to the idea that wholeness is possible?
If you've been reading my writings for a while, the ideas in today's essay won't be new to you. I more or less based several previous pieces on similar premises, especially “A Keening for Our Sterilised Lives,” in which I covered some ways in which compartmentalisation, compliance and powerlessness have been instilled in us since birth, and “A Natural History of Anthropocentrism and Its Antidotes” in which I contemplated human exceptionalism and separation from nature and where anarchy and rejection of election politics fit into it. That essay was my single biggest drive for unsubscriptions to date (hooray!) and funny enough, one of the biggest sources of new subscriptions. I suspect this piece might be the same, and so be it. I’m not here for the numbers, instead, what I want to achieve is encouraging discussion and exploration of hard topics we've been conditioned to avoid. I see ideas and resources shared here as a stepping stone, a tiny fraction of lifelong unlearning and relearning we should collectively commit to if we want to have a livable planet.
I'm finishing these lines a week after the Winter Solstice, Grianstad an Ghreimhridh, and the cold, stormy winter in Ireland makes it hard to imagine that brighter days are ahead. With darkness aided by a cover of dense grey clouds that brings rain and hailstones most of the days, it still feels as if the night turns black as early as 4.30 pm. The Wheel might have turned at Winter Solstice, but it will be some time before our minds register that the daylight is starting to lengthen. The darkness glooming over humankind and more-than-human world alike makes the idea of Light even harder to grasp; what will truly change with longer daylight? None of us is going through a natural fallowing the winter season should bring; nothing about our existence is natural anymore. We're birthed into this world as fertile soil that needs to rest to nurture renewal, yet we're forcibly shaped into dry, crumbling lumps of clay until it's devoid of the urge to live. We've surrendered ourselves to the notion that rest is a luxury rather than necessity written in our genes, that natural rhythms ought to be replaced by busyness and so-called productivity that determines our worth. Our innate biological and emotional needs are suppressed and exchanged for artificial constructs that exist for no reason other than cementing hierarchical powers that control our lives under capitalism.
So here's a question I pose as someone who’s trying to build a holistic approach to life: can we ever truly reinvent our lives into something that doesn't spell destruction for the planet and all its lifeforms while we desperately cling onto existing power structures, finding false solace in the familiarity of the systems we've been born into and known our entire lives? Being an anarchist, it’s probably no surprise that my answer is no. It has been a complete no for quite some time now and many events of recent weeks and months have only reaffirmed it. Or more precisely, how the tools that prop and uphold the powers that be responded to these events was what reaffirmed my position.
covered this well in his piece “Deny, deflect, distract: Capitalist media working for the ruling class.”We're still watching unbridled, live-streamed annihilation of Palestine that revealed new peaks of contemporary colonialism and its apologia in popular media and culture. Past few weeks brought us the assasination of a UnitedHealthcare CEO and widespread support for the shooter, Luigi Mangione – a blow to the established order our untouchable capitalist overlords didn’t anticipate while blinded by their supremacy and visions of their very own Thousand-year Reich. The desperate levels of their response as they scramble speak for themselves: Luigi Mangione was charged for terrorism, and so was Briana Boston, an everyday woman and mother of three who, inspired by Mangione, said “delay, deny, depose” on the phone when her insurance company denied her claim. The Atlantic published a piece by Graeme Wood called Luigi Mangione’s Commonplace, Deplorable Politics with the subheading that read: “From his actions, and the glee that they have elicited, one learns not that the health-care system is broken but that many people are.” In case someone needs a reminder, Graeme Wood is the author of the notorious article defending Israel's genocidal rampage and arguing that “it is possible to kill children legally.” In the NYT, Bret Stephens, a well-known supremacist, climate change denier, racist and eugenicist, wrote that the real working class hero isn’t Luigi Mangione, but Brian Thompson who took $10.2 million USD home in 2023 and ran a company that denied 32% of all health insurance claims, likely resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and even more cases of disabilities and poverty. In a world that is becoming overrun by generative AI that is turning our natural abilities into mush, UHC used an AI system to sort their incoming claims – and that system had a 90% failure rate. No, you didn't read the number wrong. Just a quick browse on the Internet reveals countless horror stories about UHC, many shared years ago, and some that stayed carved into my mind include a child who was denied coverage for an overnight stay in the hospital following a cancer surgery and a young woman in her 20s who wasn't informed that the UHC denied her coverage for cancer treatment and only discovered it when she showed up for her chemotherapy. This is the system we small people vehemently defend and rehabilitate over and over again through voting – a tool of the oppressor that was thrown to us like a bone to an obedient dog. Why are we bowing before a system that is literally killing us while convincing us that there is no better system possible? The capitalist ouroboros isn't just perpetually eating his tail and spinning anymore, it finally managed to devour itself alive, yet it's still refusing to acknowledge its death.
“Civilisation demands obedience,” writes
. “It calls violence justice when delivered downward, but god forbid anyone snap back — even with words. The absurdity here isn’t just systemic; it’s cultural. We’ve been trained to accept this grotesque arrangement, where human life is cheap, property is sacred, and words are the gravest crime of all, so long as they punch up the hierarchy. In modern industrial society there can be no doubt: the property of those at the top is worth more than the lives of those at the bottom.”Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet who also doubles as the most deranged, and Donald Trump are currently touted by many as men of the people, and across the pond many are giving the same treatment to Reform UK, a party of conservative rich people who somehow want to be more conservative than the colonial apologists from the Conservative party. Regardless of the country, in parties of all (allegedly different) flavours that call themselves opposition, even the least well-off elected members of parliament and government who present themselves as working class are insanely rich from my position as a neurodivergent, disabled working class woman. When the poorest sections of the society genuinely start celebrating billionaires and trillionaires as a solution and perceiving wealth as worth, you know said billionaires and trillionaires have succeeded at obliterating class consciousness, fortifying their power and hierarchy (and hoping they've fortified it enough to make it untouchable and eternal).
The re-election of Trump triggered a wave of self-proclaimed liberals crying over their mad cop candidate losing and revealing themselves for what they truly are. While they scream how they're going back to Starbucks and don't care about Gaza “anymore,” they're revealing themselves to be the same fascists as those who they're allegedly against. The difference is one side is quite open about it, while the other hides behind labels such as democratic, liberal, progressive. There are no good sides within a colonial supremacist system, no matter how much some try to hide behind “progressive” or “green” policies and BIPOC candidates; a colonial system is inherently inhumane. Why are we fervently insisting on making excuses for it and rehabilitating it? As the late indigenous anarchist Klee Benally said and I wrote about previously, it all comes down to one simple truth — you can’t decolonise the ballot.
Every step we make is political. Everything, from our education to how we relate to other living beings (human and more-than-human) to what we eat, is a thread woven deeply into a rapidly changing world shaped and dominated by extractive ideologies. As I argued many times in the past, politics can't be simply reduced to electoral politics if we want to approach the topic with honesty and integrity. The infamous quote by Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters”1 has never been more relevant, and quite possibly, we've never been more equipped to deal with the monsters, even if we repeatedly have trouble identifying them and understanding their nature. It's time we stop denying and dismantling our own power by chewing the bones our masters have thrown at us. It's time to be uncivilised in the world where civilisation has become synonymous with exploitation.
Another world is possible
I want to propose a thought exercise: imagine a world that feels respectful and healthy for all forms of life; for you and your neighbour as much as a whale, a bee and a tree. A world without extractivist capitalism, in which humans only take the bare minimum of resources needed for sustenance and do it through sustainable practices, feeling a deep gratefulness and connection to the planet. What do you think would take to achieve this kind of existence that is currently alien to most people? What would humankind have to change and get rid of to achieve such a radically different Way of Being? Can you imagine it at all, or are you maybe stumbling upon an inner voice screaming or laughing that it’s a pointless utopia and you should move on? I don't think it would take long before you’d come to a conclusion that there's one key obstacle our species has to remove – our governments. And then you might shrug that thought off, swiftly reassuring yourself with “gosh, surely I need someone to govern me, I can't just live like some lawless barbarian, life would be impossibly hard without someone to provide structure and services!”
How do you feel about these questions in the context of authoritarian political streams rising all over the world? The most prominent of them, of course, coming from America. Let's make it clear: Donald Trump is a disaster for the US and the entire world. The cabinet of raving lunatics he has chosen to work with is nothing short of horrifying Right now there's grief, there's rage; tensions galore left, right and centre – and there should be. From where I stand, the problem is that these strong feelings don't seem to translate into a call to action and accountability and rethinking the root causes of society's toxic and hopeless predicament. It’s easy to scream “fascism!” like fascism abruptly materialised out of thin air one Sunday morning and took us all by surprise. Unfortunately, that's not how fascism has ever come to life, be it in Germany a hundred years ago or in present day US and Europe. Fascism crystallises out of a society that carefully fosters perfect conditions for its formation, a society that sweeps its dehumanising practices under the rug and makes people drunk on a false sense of safety, justice and democracy. Why are we still breeding these conditions and refusing to acknowledge it? As
writes:This civilisation is built upon the practice of continuously hiding inconvenient truths out of sight and out of mind. An entire empire held together by compartmentalisation and avoidance.
In the US, a state built upon genocide, the perfect conditions that breed fascism aren't something magically reserved for the Republican party and Republican administrations, no matter how much the self-proclaimed “liberals” and “progressives” (the words that grew into becoming two of the most meaningless labels of our time) want it to be true when they advertise themselves as the good guys. The Democrats were midwifed by a colonial supremacist state as much as the Republicans. Supremacy by its very nature can't midwife anything but acts of destruction. No matter how much one wing of a bird wants to cosplay as liberalism or democracy and present itself as an opposition, it still belongs to the same bird as the fascist wing. If for some reason this isn't sinking in upon looking at the US elections, it might be useful to look at the results of the UK elections this summer to see how the hurray-we-voted-the-Tories-out victory of the “opposition” resulted in absolutely nothing. Voting for the “lesser evil” led to disastrous Blue Tories being replaced by Red Tories who, led by a man whose charming nickname became Kid Starver, instantly intensified their cheerleading for genocide in a manner that would put Joseph Goebbels to shame, in addition to pursuing horrible austerity policies. In short, nothing changed. It was never meant to. They tell us to use our vote because our grandmothers fought hard for the right to vote – only no one told our grandmothers that they were duped and lured into a trap that enabled normalisation of oppression.
I'm sitting here shaking my head watching how only the re-election of Trump pushed many people to worry about the future, and everything that has been happening in this world until now wasn't quite enough to truly wake them up and scream for a different world. For more than a year now, excuses were repeatedly found for Biden's so-called democratic administration and their unbridled support for colonial conquest. The soil we all walk on is soaked with blood. The Earth is screaming. Yet we're still upholding the state that caused all this chaos. Right now we’re witnessing more than a year of live-streamed, US/UK/EU backed genocide and ecocide that generated staggering, unprecedented emissions into Earth's atmosphere; we’re witnessing unbridled land theft all over the globe, the green lungs of our plants obliterated, animal and plant life hurling into extinction, waterways turned into toxic slurry, our food poisoned. We're witnessing raging poverty that makes it common to have children in the “developed” Western world depend on a single free school meal in order not to starve, elders in “Western democracies” who spent their entire lives being obedient, productive workers choosing between heating and eating. The scale of the mental health crisis in this very moment is incomparable to anything the human kind has experienced before, sexual violence is rampant and you hardly know a woman who hasn't experienced it (whether you want to admit it or not!), cancers and immune system diseases and all sorts of addictions are at an all-time high. Do I have to go on, or is it obvious that we can't keep living the way we live, that the way we persistently keep organising our lives brings nothing but destruction?
So, what gives? What does it take for us to abandon our mentality of lonesome individualism, come together as a collective and muster the courage to say no, no more, another world is possible and we're starting to build it right now, right here? What does it take for us to divest from existing systems of power, embrace accountability and acknowledge our own complicity in enabling and perpetuating harmful systems? What does it take for us to stop cloaking deep structural issues that keep cementing the system in place in illusory “choices” (such as electoral politics) and “progressive politics” (such as various “green growth” ideas that refuse to let go of destructive capitalism and embrace degrowth while brandishing themselves as good for the environment)?
If life taught me anything, it's that we humans have a poor capability of learning and genuinely understanding things that we haven't felt on our own skin. I'm painfully aware that you can't lead anyone by the hand and present them with a ready solution; people have to undergo their own inner process and come to terms with their own solutions. So, what’s the breaking point for most people, the one needed to reimagine things radically and completely abandon the attachment to familiar societal structures? Trump presidency? A live-streamed genocide apparently isn’t a breaking point for an awful lot of people when it's not their own family being bombed in their own backyard. My personal breaking point that eventually led me onto the path to anarchism happened a couple of years ago — experiencing obstetric violence during my first childbirth. Once I started understanding what was done to me not as a one-off or an unfortunate string of events in an understaffed hospital, but a very common and normalised product of systemic violence against women, our bodily autonomy and worth as living beings, there was no going back. It's a tragedy that I had no political awareness and ability to recognise the violence of the system around me before I was personally harmed by obstetric violence, but it couldn't be any other way. It was so by design, fostered from the day I was born into a society and family moulded to have no political awareness. Education (or lack thereof) and exposure to media and social narratives that create manufactured consent are all designed to keep us within our walls and ultimately, turn us into small, silent building blocks that uphold imperialism and capitalism. The key is not to stop at your personal experience — fighting against and removing only the violence that you've experienced yourself is not revolutionary unless you extend it to building class consiousness and connect the dots to recognise different, interconnected flavours of violence that oppress us as a part of a wider system. And specifically on the topic of how the system mistreats and fails our bodies and the wellbeing of the collective, there’s one book that’s not to be missed, and that's Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice written by physician
and political economist Raj Patel. This uneasy read is a journey through both our biology and political systems built upon extractivism, opening questions and perspectives you never thought of before, especially if you're a part of a marginalised group and/or have experienced medical trauma. Read it.I don't believe in rehabilitating the existing socioeconomic world order. You can't revive a plant that has a fully dead, rotting root, you have to discard it. The roots of our civilisation are as unhealthy and rotten as they can be. All we have are systems of power that are repeatedly failing us, yet we're repeatedly electing them in a game of illusory choice. And by electing them, we're legitimising them, sending them signals that their behaviour is what we embrace, need and want; rehabilitating them over and over again in futile attempts to make them work in a humane way that won't equal Death. Whether we're talking about American, British, Irish or other elections, the result is always the same - a population caught between a rock and a hard place, swallowing stories of alleged lesser evils, corralled by polluted rivers, glyphosate-soaked soil, piles of used drug needles on the ground and energy-devouring data centres to maintain our addiction to useless, distracting information. The result is Death, because the system has been designed to herald Death.
Quo Vadis, Hibernia?
Let's apply all of this locally too. At the beginning of December, Ireland had a snap general election. There seems to be a trend of the turnout getting lower and lower that is true for both Ireland and most of the West, and it's very obvious that working class people are least likely to vote (gosh, I really, really wonder why the working class might not identify itself with the state that keeps it underpaid and unhealthy). The blame for “bad” electoral outcomes of course always goes to nonvoters and never to the state, with the state employing all resources into cementing the idea that “the turnout is an indicator of democratic health”2 into our minds. In Ireland, this led to some hilarious whining from the statist media,3 but what caught me off guard was seeing the amount of statist apologia from the “left,” to the point where alleged socialists and even anarchists moaned about people ruining everything by not being bothered to vote. I even saw propositions to have people fined and legally punished for not voting. You couldn't make it up.
The outcome of the election showed that once again absolutely nothing has changed. Massive surprise! The ballot was littered with “choices” where Irish citizens were graciously given the gift of choosing between puppets beholden to the US and the puppets beholden to the UK. Some of them are open about it, while others cosplay as an opposition, yet they're all wings of the same bird. The long arm of American imperialism strikes close to home too – not long ago, The Ditch, one of the rare leftover examples of investigative journalism done right, revealed how Claire Cronin, the US ambassador to Ireland, threatened the spineless Irish government with “consequences” should they dare pass the Occupied Territories Bill (which aims to ban sales and imports from Israel). Only 90 minutes later (no, I'm not joking!), Tánaiste Micheál Martin announced a “review” rather than enactment, while ten days later the ambassador took to X to express her delight over 550 new Microsoft jobs and “the ever-strengthening US-Ireland trade relationship.” Apparently, according to the US, a trade relationship with them automatically includes a trade relationship with Israel. Or else! Personally, I'd describe this relationship as Ireland being America's sad little client state, completely dependent on American companies and investment. The government that allowed that is the same government that has been playing a game of normalising colonialism and abandoning its own occupied people in the north for over a century. The story of Ireland isn't a story of a nation becoming independent and overcoming colonialism, it's a story of normalisation and ongoing colonialism; a masterclass in lying to oneself to fit into the “West.” Ireland has never decolonised.
In many ways, in the last few weeks I felt like I was watching a copy/paste of the US and UK elections and the “lesser evil” and “harm reduction” narrative. There’s an apparent drive to vote out the two parties that have ruled Ireland for a century and brought nothing but moral collapse – but who is there to replace them in a system where effective opposition can't possibly exist? The system was designed to stay the same, it won't change until it’s decolonised. Sinn Féin, a party that has long abandoned its socialist and revolutionary roots and curiously became a part of the establishment even before they fully rose to power, is now seen as a “change” that offers good housing policies. This is despite SF betraying their traditional Palestinian solidarity, being riddled with scandals, and being completely useless and pandering to the colonial occupation in the north where they are in power. Apparently, just like we've just witnessed in the US, in Ireland you need to do very little to be seen as the lesser evil and a viable solution; do some performative photo-ops with a keffiyeh around your neck and throw some empty promises and people will actually believe that they're voting for something new and different.
American warplanes fly over Ireland every single day, and yet nothing happens. We talk and talk, organise protests and marches weeks in advance with the blessing of the police like good citizens do, and whoever dares suggesting that the time to be nice and polite in our “protesting” has long passed gets shut down. I'm sure you could find parallels in any country. I know someone has to win now, be it Irish, American, British or any other elections. I know we won't dismantle the electoral system today or within the next few years. What bothers me is the apparent lack of appetite to dismantle it at all, as we're forever clinging onto the idea that we need the state and can't do anything without the state as our supreme pontiff. All the while, the state is enacting brutal violence on us every single day, just as it was designed to do.
The state is fiend, not friend
The state (and especially colonial states) is not democratic by its very nature and by default, it depend on violence to keep itself going, coaxing us into believing in an abstract concept of non-violence to ensure violent resistance against the state and revolution don't happen. There will never be a sustainable, life-affirming change unless the state is abolished. Having said that, I highly recommend reading
’ books on this topic, How Nonviolence Protects the State, The Failure of Nonviolence: From the Arab Spring to Occupy, and his latest, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements. Pair them with his other books that tackle some of the principles of anarchist approach to this world's destructive predicament, Anarchy Works, Worshipping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, and The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies of Ecological Revolution From Below.I think the biggest issue and task is making larger masses of people understand this and acknowledge the systemic violence done to them in their everyday life. Aren't terrorist charges against Briana Boston violence? Isn't poverty violence? Aren't food deserts violence? Isn't racism violence? Isn't bankruptcy because of inaccessible healthcare violence? Isn’t making education financially inacessible violence? We're still at a stage where many of us talk about what needs to be done, only to be shut down by the majority of people around us and called extremists, dissidents, brushed off as pursuing "utopia" and wasting time, and so on.
The real work is organising beyond individual actions after living in systems that disenfranchised and separated us for centuries, while selling us a manufactured idea of "post-colonial era" and "peace time” to placate us. We have the power and means to stop this farce, if only we could let go of our infatuation with being ruled.
In Ireland and worldwide, we keep appealing to the moral sense of our masters, doing nothing but enabling their rule while they look down at us from their marble houses and high thrones. We keep treading the narrow perimeter provided and allowed by the state structures and seek alleged solutions and changes within our cage, instead of breaking free out of the cage altogether. Even when the bars of the cage are weakened and rusting away, we still stay inside the cage because the cage is all we know, and familiarity can trick us to think it's safety. I don't naively expect a swift, magical mass awakening after centuries, and particularly the last few decades, of being governed in ways that seek to disenfranchise us and reduce us to bare, hyper individual shells that exist in ways that are completely alien to human nature and Life in general. However, I do expect we can do better, and you can see me as naive if you so wish, but I firmly believe that we have the capacity to burst open the doors of our cages. A capacity and a duty to all living beings and the planet they inhabit; to ourselves, our neighbours, our descendants, people who live thousands of miles away who we’ve never personally met. A collective duty for a collective wellbeing.
Kill your idols (because they're already killing you)
At this point I hear you say, “but Ramona, what are we to do?” I can't tell you that in the form of a set of instructions to follow. What I can tell you is to kill your idols, and I can invite you to reimagine things alongside me and many others. To form a circle, to gather a community, to discuss ways of organising unlike anything you've seen before. To embrace that we shouldn't live in a choking fear of fresh starts, to shed the dread of chaos and realise that a societal tabula rasa wouldn't be a source of discomfort upon losing our familiar structures, but a source of opportunities and chances to rewrite the human story into something that spells Life instead of Death. To rewrite it into one that doesn't centre humans as superior beings, entitled to extract the very essence from the womb of our Mother. To rewrite it into a kinship between us, the two-legged animal known as human, and the bear, pine tree, salmon and lichen, in a place where the warplane doesn't even exist and our existence isn't intrinsically tied to subliminal messages that prompt us to consume and own. Can you reimagine? Living in this fractured time and land, can you open your soul and mind to the idea that wholeness is possible? Or have they broken us so much and so successfully that we can't even imagine existence without top-down power and someone's boot on our throat?
I can't tell you what to do and prepare a collapse manual for you because that would ultimately mean that I myself haven't killed my idols, that I'm imposing hierarchy and perpetuating the same top-down power I'm standing against. You don't need my instructions, you don't need my (or anyone’s) leadership, you don't need a saviour to steer you and save you. You need to start afresh, shoulder to shoulder with dozens, hundreds, thousands of us, birthing solutions together and beating Gramsci’s monsters at the same time. No gurus, no prophets to follow while they peddle their oh-so-wonderful solutions on their YouTube channels and podcasts. The world doesn't need yet another prophet song, the world needs more birdsong. More mycelial networks, more fingers touching the moss and feeling its sacredness. More degrowth, more surrendering to simplicity, more hands held together to keep each other safe and uplifted.
I think for me personally, the single most defining shift in consciousness that made me orientate myself towards collective liberation was reframing the world through a totalitarian lens. Fascism wasn’t ushered by Trump, it has already been here, brewing in perfect conditions, and all Trump did was bring it to the surface. In the past year, both online and offline I've met a large number of people who were shocked to their core and lamenting “what has the world turned into” and how “we're destroying all progress we've made.” I think the state of the world is easier to process, and it's easier to feel ready for action instead of paralysed by fear, if you acknowledge that we haven't lost anything. You can't lose what you don’t have. Democracy, free speech, justice, the rule of law, international humanitarian laws and other alleged foundational aspects of our society have never existed as anything but a propaganda program to condition us into thinking everything is fine and we’re safe. And what can make you roar louder and fight harder than realising that you've been deceived and taken advantage of? Processing the monstrous proportions of the lie we've been living in our entire lives is gut-wrenching. Maybe you are, like me, in your mid-30s. Maybe you're 20, 50 or 70 years old. No matter your age, you haven't had a single day of your life where you've lived in a just and free world. Not a single reader who opened this newsletter has known anything but totalitarianism in their life. That's a chilling thought, one that many would rather avoid, opting to keep upholding the lies that held our world together and taught us of its greatness and progress.
Dystopia is right here, right now
We desperately cling onto this inhumane system because that's all we know. Over and over again, we try to rehabilitate the existing system, convincing ourselves that we can rehaul some elements of it and see functioning and long lasting results, even though the system is showing us time and time again that it can't be changed. The system is virtually killing us and the planet we live on, yet we keep pushing for it to “change” within set parameters. Even flogging this dead horse feels more acceptable than opting for a total reset, a societal tabula rasa that would mean something so radically new and different than the exploitative neoliberal hell we were born into. From early childhood we're conditioned to fear new and unknown and taught the language of resignation and conformity. We're warned about utopias, something so ludicrous we better stop wasting our time on it right away, and dystopias, the dreadful threat of a dangerous future where there are no laws and safety. We're so concentrated on the evils of our past that we've allegedly gotten rid off and so afraid of the evils that await us in the dystopian future that we don't see the evil happening before our eyes. Dystopia is right here, right now. It's in the endless stream of weapon manufacturers making more money in one minute than you make in your entire life, in the widespread food deserts in the US, in the majority of people in Ireland and Britain living in damp houses covered in black mould, in the health and education systems that traumatise us. We tremble at the thought of a horrible future so much that we don't hear the cries of those bombed in this very moment, their crime being nothing but – existing. It's time to stop making excuses for the system. There's nothing to rehabilitate. There are no untouchable idols. We must completely destroy the system and cultivate the birth of a mindset that will forgo craving for power and vertical hierarchy.
“There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.” - James Baldwin
I firmly believe humankind can overcome and remove the limitations of our own making that confined us to see the world and life on it in a very narrow and rigid sense, celebrating a linear development of how we live and organise. The other day I came across someone's thoughts on libraries as an ultimate expression of a “civilised culture,” postulating that only “truly civilised societies” are dedicated to building such storehouses of knowledge. It would be easy for me to say the same as an archaeologist amazed by ancient libraries such as Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, today's Iraq. The human and the anarchist in me nowadays see it very differently: I marvel at the dedication to Life many Indigenous societies had when they carefully nourished the preservation and transfer of oral knowledge without ever codifying it on paper, stone or clay tablet. In fact, I object to the very idea of obsessing with the notion of “civilisation” and defining human culture as “civilised” in order to add a vertical, hierarchical value to it. “Civilised” is an antiquated term that has lost all meaning as the colonial nature of our reality peels away. A society that concentrates on linearity and hierarchy can never offer respectful and healthy Ways of Being. I consider myself uncivilised.
All the hallmarks of a profoundly sick society I mentioned earlier weren't enough for the majority of people to turn towards reimagining our collective future and move beyond organising for the promise of passive saviourism through electoral politics. The way we live under our current, highly hierarchical systems of power are failing us miserably day after day, yet an overwhelming majority of our species is perpetually ensuring things are staying just the way they are. We have long surrendered our power to promises of representation, scratching our heads every few years when we need to come up with some sort of justification for how incredibly bad our representatives are. Forever waiting for that magic ballot that will finally set us free, that magic solution that someone else will serve us because they promised they would. They promised it this year, a decade ago, five decades ago; just you wait, this last government was bad, but change is possible in the next cycle! Don't give up hope! Yet the only thing the representatives ever delivered, draped in blue, red, some other colour or national flag, were more cogs and more oil for the death machine. “We vote for Harris and pressure her for changes after she wins,” “we can organise under Harris and won't be able to do it under Trump” and “we must save our democracy!” echoed the social media and the streets for months, conveniently omitting the fact that no one organised under Biden, Obama (remember the Occupy movement and all the bombs?), or any other of the allegedly good and democratic warmongers guys. No one did, as no one would have under Harris. Cycle after cycle, a new promise, a new excuse and a new prompt to wait for the right time is delivered, all under a democracy that never was.
We often hear that the system is broken, but is it really? I see a system that works perfectly, exactly as designed, running smoothly like the death machine it was made to be. Both Trump, an immoral billionaire who will be endlessly studied by psychiatrists in future, and Harris, a smug, power-hungry cop who adores fracking and is a co-signer of the genocide in Palestine, are a product of the same system incompatible with life. Harris looked elated when she declared that the objective was to ensure the US has the most lethal military in the world. Words so grim and supremacist, you'd think someone is reciting Mein Kampf. Kamala Harris’ top priority was Death because she exists within a death machine, just like Trump who now will ensure this invoked lethality. No difference, save for one: the level of compartmentalisation you're willing to employ to convince yourself and the world that you're talking about two different systems while you cling onto your illusion of choice and pick whose corpses you're willing to jump over.
The concept of a “single issue vote” got thrown around a lot in the last few months, mostly by those who vote blue no matter who and insist that a democratic US government funding a genocide should be seen as a single issue. I guess some people conveniently didn't get the memo when Audre Lorde said that “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives,” pointing at the intersectionality of liberatory struggles. And they keep forgetting still – the last few months felt like one big festival of denial, watching unrelenting defenders of the Demoncratic party accuse everything and everyone for their candidate’s failure. Third party voters were allegedly at fault even though the margins clearly showed that all third party votes combined wouldn't have ensured Harris’ victory in a single state (just in case you didn't know, a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for the Ayatollah). Some went so far as to harass grieving Palestinians, proclaiming they don't care about Gaza anymore and announcing their imminent return to Starbucks and McDonald's. The numbers clearly show it was America's immersion in imperialism and military industrial complex that won this time – same as it has won in all elections before this – yet the culture of finger pointing, avoiding and diffusing responsibility and clinging onto known structures strikes again. At the same time, missiles worth millions of dollars from AI-controlled drones strike refugee tents. You'll have to forgive me for feeling for innocent people in bombed tents and feeling nothing for the tears of “liberals” and “progressives.”
Growing strong and rooted
The brutal truth is – the work that is in front of us now is the exact same work we had before the Trump re-election, the exact same work that was needed under Biden, the exact same work that would have been needed under Harris, the exact same work we'll have in six months, a year or two years. We carry each other and help each other survive. We ourselves, in a sacred communion with the soil and the owl, not in a death pact with the state and its violence. Don't want to live in fascism? Then for goodness sake, would you please stop enabling it and breeding it through persistent denial, avoidance, compartmentalisation, colonial comfort and niceness? We reap what we've sown. So for a change, let us finally sow some fertile seeds that will grow strong, collective roots. Let us shed this shivering, frightened skin and reimagine our existence, because the last time I checked, the roots of a tree are perfectly capable of growing without being steered, uncivilised, with no gods and no masters. Wholeness is possible if we reject the imposed fragmentation.
To change anything, start everywhere.4 To change everything, start anywhere.
Thank you for reading this at times unsettling piece that I'll finish with the words of Ursula K. Le Guin:5
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
🍉 I'd also kindly like to invite you to participate in mutual aid requested by many Gazan families who live under constant threat of bombs and hunger.
has shared this family's appeal with me: https://gofund.me/9fa09670 and for more ways to help, please visit Project Watermelon that lists verified mutual aid campaigns. 🍉
This is actually a liberal translation of Gramsci popularised by Slavoj Žižek (A Permanent Economic Emergency, New Left Review, no. 64, 2010), which renders “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” as “now is the time of monsters.”
This gem of the state propaganda comes from the UK Parliament website. The author says: “The number of people voting in elections is an indicator of democratic health. In UK general elections, this number has declined since 1997. Why is this? What could be done to increase turnout?” and then proceeds to deliver a gruesome classist shitshow. The ruling class doesn't even try to hide their disdain for the working class human fodder. Also see this interesting piece, The true class divide in British politics is not which party people choose, but whether they vote at all.
The Journal writes that “low turnout levels say a lot about the strength of democracy in a state, and very low turnout levels can weaken the sense of legitimacy and representativeness that is invested in governments.” Could it just be because there's no sense of legitimacy and representativeness? Crazy thought, I know! RTÉ asks “why some vote while others walk away?” and believes that “turnout is vital to democracy.” That surely explains why nothing ever changes, no matter how small or big the turnout. And then there's this gem the author proudly reshared and emphasised that he still stands by it: “Politicians may not deserve your vote but they deserve your respect. Parliamentary democracy won't work unless people take on the task of seeking election.” Don't read the rest unless you have an appetite for state bootlicking.
As postulated by CrimethInc., a decentralised anarchist collective, in the booklet (manifesto if you want) I highly recommend reading.
From her speech known as A Left-Handed Commencement Address, delievered at the Mills College, 1983.
My thoughts are similar; every feeling human knows it and feels it to the core of their being. The animals more than us. The same with the trees. So I follow their lead. They continue on with life, gathering their food, singing their songs, acting in harmony with themselves and their surroundings. I see it every day with the birds, squirrels and Henry the cat.m whom I help feed.
This approach seems counter-intuitive, but we humans need to step aside, get out of the way. It is our hubris that says we can solve the very problem we humans created. We can't. But Nature can and will. She has billions of years of experience. She has wisdom and beauty that we can only dream about.
So, yes, I take comfort in the realization that we are seeing the end of a system that is only about 500 years old. It will collapse soon under the weight of its brutality, its cruelty, its stupidity, and its total disharmony from Nature.
Then a new more harmonious system will form. I will not be around to see it, but I do see the cracks in the foundations of the current system. Change is already taking place.
As usual, Ramona, you left no drops spilt.
Everyday feels like a dance now between hope and feeling like it's too late.
But either one I feel at any moment I'm acting and planning the same. Even if I die a horrible death in the extinction of our species, I'll do it helping whoever i can while it happens, in any way I can.
I'll go down with the ship releasing the love that we hold, believing it goes on to feed whatever comes next.
If it's the end of us, or the beginning of a new us, it takes the same movements and intentions, because whatever follows is still a continuation of what we leave. That's been the affirmation keeping me from fear and despair anyway. Working so far!
Thank you for all the words and love you keep releasing, it helps strengthen our affirmations. ❤️