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Data from the Missing Migrants Project: "As collecting information is challenging, all figures remain undercounts."

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Industrial ecologists hold that global extraction and use of materials should not exceed 50 billion tons per year (Bringezu, 2015). In 2015, the global economy was using 87 billion tons per year, overshooting the boundary by 74% and driving ecological breakdown. This overshoot is due almost entirely to excess resource consumption in global North countries. The North consumed 26.71 tons of materials per capita in 2015, which is roughly four times over the sustainable threshold (6.80 tons per capita in 2015). Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.

Something similar can be said about energy. The vast majority of embodied energy appropriated from the South is supplied by fossil fuels and therefore entails greenhouse gas emissions. In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO₂) (Hickel, 2020), while the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change (DARA, 2012) (note these texts rely on slightly different country groupings to the ones we use here). The North’s net appropriation of energy from the South (as in Fig. 1 and Table 1) means that the benefits accrue in the former while emissions-related damages fall mostly on the latter. The same is true of the North’s appropriation of embodied land, which is another major driver of emissions (IPCC, 2018).

There are several other impacts worth mentioning. Net appropriation of land means soil depletion, water depletion, and chemical runoff are offshored; net appropriation of energy means that the health impacts of particulate pollution are offshored; net appropriation of labour means that the negative social impacts of exploitation are offshored, etc (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). In the case of non-renewable resources there is also a problem of depletion: resources appropriated from the South are no longer available for future generations to use (Costanza and Daly, 1992, World Bank, 2018), which is particularly problematic given that under conditions of net appropriation economic losses are not offset by investments in capital stock (cf. Hartwick, 1977). Finally, the extractivism that underpins resource appropriation generates social dislocations and conflicts at resource frontiers (Martinez-Alier, 2021).

In sum, our results indicate that high and unsustainable levels of resource consumption in the global North rely on patterns of net appropriation from the South. The benefits accrue to the former while the damage is borne by the latter, generating a significant ecological debt. People in the South also disproportionately suffer the social impacts of Northern growth and consumption, and are deprived of resources necessary for development and provisioning for human needs.

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Western Europe, with ~5% of the global population, has approximately ~25% of the richest ~1%. The leading U.S. client states around the Pacific Rim (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) account for ~16% of the richest ~1% with only ~4% of the global population.  

By contrast, China, with ~18% of the global population, has only ~10% of the richest ~1%; India, with another ~18%, has only ~1% of the richest ~1%; and while another ~18% of the global population is on the African continent not even a thousandth of a percent of the richest ~1% are in Africa.

Ironically, Germany and Japan, the very same countries that the Settler States defeated in World War II in order to achieve hegemony, are the most prominent clients of the Settler States. Of course, there is nothing mysterious about this ironic turn of events. It is no secret that, following World War II, Germany and Japan were effectively rebuilt, reconfigured, and enriched as client states sponsored by the U.S. Indeed, the Settler States presently has more than 100 bases in Germany and Japan each, and more than 30,000 troops stationed in each country — significantly more bases and troops than in all of the many countries where the Settler States keeps bases and troops. 

Even though the rise of China constitutes a crisis for global apartheid as we know it today, it seems unlikely to spell the end of global apartheid tout court. At present, China’s rise only threatens the specific international racial hierarchy that emerged under Amerikaner hegemony. Otherwise, all indications are that a rising China will maintain a global order built on the presumption of scarcity, for it maintains just such an order at home, and, to quote Ivan Illich, “without apartheid based on sex or pigmentation, on certification or race, or party membership, a society built on the assumption of scarcity cannot exist.”

Consider that China has constructed scores of massive prison and internment camps in recent years to house Muslim ethnic minorities. The construction of these purpose-built, high-security camps — some capable of housing tens of thousands of people — signals a radical shift away from the country’s previous makeshift use of public buildings, like schools and retirement homes, to a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention.

Alternatively, consider that 1 million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and forcibly placed into Chinese state-run boarding schools, as part of efforts to absorb them “culturally, religiously and linguistically” into the dominant Han Chinese culture.

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For much of human history, most people lived in rural areas, surrounded by nature and farmland. That all changed with the Industrial Revolution. By the end of the 19th century, European forests were vanishing, cities were growing, and Europeans felt increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

“With industrialization, the link with the natural cycle of things got lost — and that also led to a certain type of romanticization of nature, and a longing for a particular type of nature,” said Bram Büscher, a sociologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. 

In Africa, Europeans could experience that pure, untouched nature, even if it meant expelling the people living on it. 

[...]

Scientists, politicians, and conservationists are championing the protected-areas model, developed in the U.S. and perfected in Africa. In late 2022, at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, nearly 200 countries signed an international pledge to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and waters by 2030, an effort known as 30×30 that would amount to the greatest expansion of protected areas in history.

So how did protected parks move from an imperial tool to an international solution for accelerating climate and biodiversity crises? 

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This new scourge: imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Turbo-charged by racist and capitalist techniques and technologies of power, this modern scourge has proven itself more virulently ethnocidal, more virulently ecocidal, and more virulently expansionary than all previous scourges.

The "War on Terra" names the series of expansionary, ethnocidal, and ecocidal projects that have advanced (and been advanced) by imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy since 1452.

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From "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought":

Many historians of colonial Latin America insist that racism was not present in Iberia before 1492. They argue instead that racial stratification was a product of [uniquely] American economic conditions.

[Racism preceded capitalism] and the racism that came to characterize American slavery was well established in cultural and religious attitudes in Spain and Portugal by the fifteenth century. Such attitudes were reinforced by European political turbulence and the decline of the Mediterranean slave trade. The racist beliefs that Iberians and others would later refine to a "science" were firmly entrenched before Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas. This racial idiom became more rigid as capitalist imperatives gained strength.

The racist ideologies of fifteenth-century Iberia grew out of the development of African slavery in the Islamic world as far back as the eighth century.

Iberian Christians internalized the racist attitudes of the Muslims, but the crucial difference between Muslim and Portuguese variants of racial ideology was that Muslim racism was constantly subject to scrutiny by jurists and scholars. In addition, Islamic law prohibited the enslavement of other Muslims, including blacks. Despite recurrent enslavement of black adherents to the Islamic faith, there were numerous examples of black Islamic kingdoms in West Africa. The Muslims created a plethora of racist ideas, but it was the Iberians who, in conjunction with a rising demand for slave labor, turned these ideas into a coherent ideology.

Several papal bulls issued between 1452 and 1456 confirmed the justice of enslaving black Africans. Nicholas V's Dum diversas (1452) granted to King Don Alfonso V the authority to subjugate Saracens, pagans, and all other enemies of Christianity. Don Alfonso was permitted to claim all lands and property for Portugal in the name of God, and the inhabitants of the pagan lands were subject to perpetual servitude. Pope Nicholas V extended Portugal's sphere of influence to include all territory from Morocco to "the Indies" with Romanus pontifex (1455). Calixtus III's bull, Inter caetera (1456), expanded Portugal's role to include spiritual jurisdiction over its conquered lands. Papal endorsement represented, in effect, divine approval for the conquest and enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans as a mission for Christ.

The conquest of the Americas and the classification of the indigenous peoples according to race may be understood as part of a process that began with the expulsion of the Muslims from Granada and continued with the Iberian invasions of the Atlantic islands and Africa. Almost immediately on his arrival in the Caribbean, Columbus commented on the color of the peoples he encountered-"the color of Canarians, neither black nor white." This reference to the Guanches of the Canary Islands establishes a striking parallel between the experiences of Atlantic African peoples and the expectations that would be imposed on those newly encountered "indios." By the time of the Columbian encounter, race had already evolved into an independent and deeply etched element of the Iberian consciousness, not simply a manifestation of more fundamental social and cultural relationships. Race, and especially skin color, defined the contours of power relationships. As a result of centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inscription in the social order, racial stratification attained its own independent logic, deeply woven into the social and cultural fabric of fifteenth-century Iberia. The legacy of Iberian racism would endure in the Americas.

The African slave trade was only in its infancy when the first blacks were brought to Hispaniola in 1502, but the racial attitudes of the Spanish were already firmly fixed. Aversion to black Africans permitted their exploitation in ways the colonists never considered for white slaves or servants. The virulence of racism increased as economic imperatives fueled Africans' debasement, but the origins of racism preceded the emergence of capitalism by centuries. Biological assumptions that were familiar to a nineteenth-century Cuban slaveowner would have been recognizable to his fifteenth-century Spanish counterpart. The rhetoric of debasement knew no national or chronological boundaries. The racist attitudes that existed in tenth-century Andalusia are in many respects prominent in the American mind today, a stark expression of their longevity, a continuing reminder of the civilized West's failures, and a stain on its conscience.

Ethnocide is the extermination of one or more determinate cultures effected by and through the inhibition of the pre-individual processes and the destruction of the supra-individual structures that together constitute the given cultures. Ethnocide and genocide do not necessarily imply one another insofar as a given ancestry can survive the extermination of its culture and a given culture can survive the extermination of some of its ancestries. This is the case because a person of a given ancestry may not be initiated into the culture of their ancestors, and because a person may be initiated into a given culture without having any ancestral ties to the culture. Regard, for instance, how the ethnocide of Indigenous American peoples occasionally involved genocide but was also effected by other many other means including displacement, re-education, and criminalization. Alternatively, regard how the enslavement of Black peoples in the Americas was ethnocidal without always being genocidal: ancestry needed to be maintained as part and parcel of being Black and being a slave, but being Black and being a slave meant being continually deprived of ties to an ancestral culture. And as final example, regard how White Amerikaner and European eugenicists conducted a genocide without ethnocide when they endeavored to eradicate the “degenerate” ancestries of the mentally and physically "disabled" from White Amerikaner and European cultures.

Ecocide is the extermination of one or more determinate habitats effected by the inhibition of the pre-individual processes and the destruction of the supra-individual structures that together constitute the habitats. Ecocide does not necessarily mean genocide for all ancestries with ties to threatened habitats: individuals of a given ancestry may very well survive the extermination of the habitat that nurtured their ancestors. Neither does ecocide necessarily mean ethnocide for cultures with ties to threatened habitats: a pastoral nomadic culture, for instance, may very well survive the extermination of one of the different habitats that they pass through.

Genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide are all too often impossible to disentangle from one another: the beautiful and differentiated cultures of the earth’s people are vital to the health of the planet's habitats, and all cultures are transmitted to some degree via ancestry. The ethnocide that destroys cultures, the ecocide that destroys habitats, and the the genocide that destroys ancestries are often accomplished in one and the same operation.

“The American lifestyle is non-negotiable”

The gernocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal meaning of this infamous assertion becomes very clear when we consider the fact that the industrial staples integral to the white Euro-American lifestyle require the world-wide exploitation of natural resources and the "pacification" of peoples who would refuse and resist such exploitation.

The map shows the number of deaths from malnutrition in excess of Cuban levels, in all countries from 1990 to 2019. Countries shaded in light yellow had a mortality rate from malnutrition equal to or lower than Cuba’s.

Even though Cuba has a [relatively] low per capita income, it has performed much better at ensuring access to essential goods required for survival. [...] Remarkably, Cuba has been able to accomplish low rates of malnourishment while subject to a brutal economic blockade imposed by the US.

In total, 15.63 million excess deaths have occurred due to malnutrition that could have been prevented with Cuba-style policies. This includes 35,000 in the US; 409,000 in Mexico; 729,000 in China; 1.2 million in Indonesia; and a staggering 3.65 million in India. The only large populous region left unscathed was Eastern Europe and Russia, perhaps reflecting its history of socialist policy. In the rest of the world, almost 16 million people have died needlessly.

These deaths are not incidental to the [racial] capitalist world-system; they are intrinsic to it. From the perspective of capital, the global poor’s claims to food represent a claim on resources (land, labour, energy) that could be appropriated instead to service elite consumption and the growth of the commodity sector. Capital therefore seeks to constrain the consumption of these communities in order to make resources available for accumulation. It is only by squeezing the incomes of the poor, often to the point of causing millions of needless deaths, that capital can ensure the steady flow of resources required for profit maximization and perpetual corporate growth.

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Neither of these cold and calculating notions of reparations are what I have in mind here. When I use the term reparations, I am referring to an art of making amends rather than a science of finding equivalents. Indeed, I am referring to a very specific art of making amends that eschews the finding of equivalents: the sublime art of making reparations, as I imagine it, is the art of kintsugi writ large as a metaphor for radical cultural transformation.

To make reparations is to make repairs, and repairs can be either made artfully or artlessly. The fascists and the liberals would only ever conceive of artless reparations, of artless repairs. Radicals who call for abolition and decolonization, by contrast, would conceive of artful reparations, artful repairs.

What Alexander calls “patching, conservative, static” repair is the making of artless reparations. What Alexander calls “creative, dynamic, open,” repair is the making of artful reparations.

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The African and Trans-Atlantic slave trade represented the great, hideous introduction of mass logistics for commercial rather than military or state purposes. It became the ghoulish lab of experiment in access for singular means of work and sex, worldmaking and subjectivization. Much would follow, including infrastructure projects for the circulation of people, goods, and information and, of course, more mass displacements, indentures and migrations in the brutal enforcement against indigenous peoples and the very idea and practice of indigeneity of the law of genocide and geocide. All of this logistics would not only bear this trademark of ‘continent of origin’ in the slave trade, but with usufruct the improvement of flow would become indistinguishable from racialization.

In a world where agency extends well beyond the realm of the human, plants and animals participate alongside Marind’s struggles for justice in different ways. One setting involves native insects, reptiles, rodents, and fungi who act as parasites of the oil palm tree by repurposing the cash crop into a biotic host and source of food. These organisms include the mushroom Ganoderma, which infiltrates the root systems of oil palm trees and can cause fungal epidemics of dramatic proportions. Another is the common rat, that feeds off the palm’s fruit, trunk, and fronds and that can bring down thousands of trees in a matter of weeks. Yet another example is the Rhinoceros beetle, which bores and incubates in the base of young palms, causing vegetal stunting and eventual death. The actions of these parasitic entities, whom some Marind call “oil palm’s enemies” (lawannya sawit), sabotage the productivist agenda of plantation operators by undermining oil palm’s growth and yield. In doing so, parasites of oil palm have come to represent symbols of resistance and refusal to the plantation system among many Marind, who read in the lives and labors of these organisms a form of multispecies solidarity with their own, human struggles for justice.

Another more-than-human struggle pertains to tree-planting. This is an activity that Marind are undertaking to revitalize the environment and to demarcate the boundaries of lands wrongly appropriated by oil palm corporations, including Indonesian, Malaysian, and Korean operators. Land reclaiming activities often involve the harvesting of coconut and bamboo shoots that are then planted at plantation boundaries in freshly dug holes. Songs, incantations, and stories accompany these acts, which Marind describe as “returning life to the forest.” Over time, organisms including the birds of paradise, goannas, cassowaries, and boars, develop symbiotic relations with bamboos and coconut trees, producing ecosystems that flourish and spread. The kinds of plants matter to this story of multispecies struggle. Bamboo, for instance, tends to erupt in dense proliferation, forming thick clusters that are immune to herbicides and almost impossible to eradicate. If even the tiniest, stray root fragment remains in the ground, new growths will occur, and the bamboo will multiply all over again. Eventually, bamboo clusters create physical barriers that impeded the movements of plantation workers and of vehicles transporting oil palm fruit to the mill.

Other struggles for justice among the Marind, meanwhile, transcend the realm of the living and extend into the world of the dead. Since oil palm’s arrival, many villagers in Merauke have begun to enact rituals of mourning for plants and animals whose lives have been violently and suddenly taken as a result of habitat transformation and degradation. These include, for instance, organisms who have been crushed by passing vehicles along plantations dirt roads, starved in the plantation, or been poisoned by pesticides and herbicides in contaminated streams and rivers. They also include the trees, plants, bushes, and groves razed to make way for monocrops: the sago palms, nypa palms, gaharu trees, banyans, and more. Marind refuse to cast a blind eye to the sudden deaths of these sentient beings. Rather, they take the time to sit behind the remains of the deceased, to weep, to story their origins and lifeways, to celebrate their relations to each other, to mourn their untimely passing, and then to respectfully bury them in the forest. In doing so, Marind resist the reduction of non-human life to ungrievable matter. Instead, they insist on carving moments of silence and grieving in everyday life that offer to the dead something akin to a dignified and meaningful afterlife.

[The] ominous or trivialized remains [of the forced labor camps known as plantations] are preserved behind high levees that now protect, not sugarcane or cotton, but oil and chemical plants, in a place that everyone in America knows as Cancer Alley. The water itself flows differently there. The pulse, not only of the flood, and not only of our own bodies, but of the entire planetary metabolism, has been influenced by power relations that took both social and ecological form just upriver from New Orleans. These are race relations. You can see them in yourself, you can see them in the land. The point is to work through them and change their unjust consequences.

[...]

It’s as though river engineering itself [became] a form of Jim Crow: the tacit maintenance in fact of a set of violent relations that have supposedly been abolished by law.

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But as we unpacked these terms — witness, testify, and repair — we realized that these terms, in their conventional senses, proved untenable and that we either had to make new sense of these terms or discover better ones. 

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When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement. That is, when the social reflects The Entangled World, sociality becomes neither the cause nor the effect of relations involving separate existants, but the uncertain condition under which everything that exists is a singular expression of each and every actual-virtual other existant.

The African and Trans-Atlantic slave trade represented the great, hideous introduction of mass logistics for commercial rather than military or state purposes. It became the ghoulish lab of experiment in access for singular means of work and sex, worldmaking and subjectivization. Much would follow, including infrastructure projects for the circulation of people, goods, and information and, of course, more mass displacements, indentures and migrations in the brutal enforcement against indigenous peoples and the very idea and practice of indigeneity of the law of genocide and geocide. All of this logistics would not only bear this trademark of ‘continent of origin’ in the slave trade, but with usufruct the improvement of flow would become indistinguishable from racialization.

The challenge of climate mitigation is made more difficult by high rates of energy use in wealthy countries, mostly in the Global North, which far exceed what is required to meet human needs. In contrast, more than 3 billion people in poorer countries live in energy poverty. A just transition requires energy convergence—reducing energy use in wealthy countries to achieve rapid emissions reductions, and ensuring sufficient energy for development in the rest of the world. However, existing climate mitigation scenarios reviewed by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change do not explore such a transition. On average, existing scenarios maintain the Global North’s energy privilege at a per capita level 2·3 times higher than in the Global South. Even the more equitable scenarios perpetuate large energy inequalities for the rest of the century. To reconcile the Global North’s high energy use with the Paris Agreement targets, most scenarios rely heavily on bioenergy-based negative emissions technologies. This approach is risky, but it is also unjust. These scenarios tend to appropriate land in the Global South to maintain, and further increase, the Global North’s energy privilege. There is an urgent need to develop scenarios that represent convergence to levels of energy that are sufficient for human wellbeing and compatible with rapid decarbonisation.

In our globalized economy, the consumption of goods and services induces economic benefits but also environmental pressures and impacts around the world. Consumption levels are especially high in the current 27 member countries of the European Union (EU), which are some of the wealthiest economies in the world. Here, we determine the global distribution of ten selected environmental pressures and impacts, as well as value added induced by EU consumption from 1995 to 2019. We show that large shares of all analysed environmental pressures and impacts are outsourced to countries and regions outside the EU, while more than 85% of the economic benefits stay within the member countries.

As towering as they are, walls are not impenetrable. Every day they are jumped, subverted, crossed. And despite our emphasis on the spectacle of walls, there are multiple dimensions to border governance. This chapter describes and explores four border governance strategies: exclusion, territorial diffusion, commodified inclusion, and discursive control. These border governance strategies solidify racism, a power structure constructing racial differences and hierarchies, and described by Ruth Wilson Gilmore as ‘the state- sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.’ Borders are not fixed lines or passive objects simply demarcating territory; borders are productive regimes both generated by and reproducing racialized social relations, further imbued by gender, sexuality, class, ability, and nationality.

Consider, for instance, the Grand Canyon, whose natural, yielding banks have given way to the flow of the Colorado River over the course of millennia, and contrast that with the engineered banks formed by the Old River Control Structures along the Mississippi River that would violently keep that great river in check, at least until the great river finally rages against with enough force to violently wrecks its engineering.

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1. A brittle matchstick of processed wood

2. A yielding plant tendril

Xin Wei offered these images to help us recognize how it is that the forces of Empire (defined by pathologies of command and control over all that flows and overflows) create brittle lifelessness, while the forces of nature (always ready receive flows and overflows) create yielding life forms.

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.”

On the other had, our task is also to (re-)construct convivial statements, implements, environments, and elements in order to relay and amplify decolonial movements.

While other scholars of biopolitics have noted the centrality of disability to the deployment of biopolitical population management, these efforts generally remain wedded to the poles of living and dying within which life is toggled. That is to say, while the distinctions between living and dying are often recognized through the “cuts” of race and the “folds” of overlapping population construction and management, maiming, debilitation, and stunting are relatively undertheorized components of these cuts and folds; centering these processes may potentially alter presumed relations to living and dying altogether. Maiming is a practice that escapes definition within both legal and biopolitical or necropolitical frameworks because it does not proceed through making live, making die, letting live, or letting die. My reframing adds a critical axis to the four quadrants, insisting that debilitation—indeed, deliberate maiming—is not merely another version of slow death or of death-in-life or of a modulation on the spectrum of life to death. Rather, it is a status unto itself, a status that triangulates the hierarchies of living and dying that are standardly deployed in theorizations of biopolitics.

Transposing this essay from its US-centric POV can yield some useful approaches to the challenges of redesigning "legitimate" "equitable" governance rather than merely governing by resistance, resilience, retreat.

From their abstract (deleting the US-specific reference):

"Conventional climate change wisdom tells governments to plan for a 2°C increase in global average temperature. However, increasingly robust science indicates that the planet is well on its way to at least 4°C of warming, possibly by the end of the 21st century or shortly thereafter. That much warming is a governance game changer, taking the multiple and interconnected complex systems that define … society across thresholds and tipping points into cascades of transformational change…"

"[C]limate models can stupefy us with their abstraction. Thus, one often hears that, according to their calculations, in 2050, it will be too late to attempt to avoid the worst. … We forget that other peoples have already, at our hands, lived through untold devastation, without any truth other than that of the destruction of their world. And we also forget that, even if we proved capable of escaping the worst, our descendants will go on living on a poisoned and exhausted earth in a profoundly and very persistently disrupted climate, an earth from which a great part of living beings will have disappeared. Thus “2050” does not mark the closing of the curtain, the end of the play. What is coming will indeed demand learning to “live in the ruins,” to quote Anna Tsing.

… A deliberate effort is needed for the mind to hold onto a thought to permit it to evoke “conveners and associates” who can give it consistency. … We have to think and imagine before those who are already living in the ruins or will tomorrow live in the ruins, before the innumerable living beings, humans and non-human, who, in one manner or another, will continue to live and die on this earth, regardless of our conclusions. And this creates what James called a “genuine option,” an option not possible to avoid on the pretext that the game is over."

The framing of “loss and damage” as a principal feature of the CARICOM wishlist, though, indicates a different objective for the schemes brokered between elite actors in Dubai. Community empowerment, by their calculus, must wait until a sufficient sum of cheques arrive. Climate justice is doled out after the fact of disaster, with the inevitability of “loss and damage” accepted (or even endorsed) as a basic condition of claims-making for Caribbean communities on the front lines of climate change.

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After decades of scholarly inquiry, recent intellectual discourse has reconverged on the topic of the plantation. As work continues to emerge out of different geographic contingencies, historical contexts, and political commitments, several questions are newly pertinent: What methods ought to undergird the study of the plantation and its divergent afterlives? How does thinking about industrial monoculture as affective infrastructures invite, enable, or require us to question the plantation form in new ways? What work does theorizing plantations across spatiotemporal divisions do for radical and coalitional knowledge production?

Birthed in the sugar, hemp, cotton, and tobacco estates of the 18th century Caribbean and US Southeast, and since metastasized across the Global South, plantations have long been crucibles for the formation of social inequalities, global divisions of labor, and attendant registers of resistance (Beckford 1972; Gilmore 2017; Mintz 1985; Woods 1998). Renewed interdisciplinary interest in recent years has underscored how industrial plantations undermine conditions of life at a planetary scale through the radical simplification of environments, the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples, the production of surplus populations, and the naturalized exploitation of human and non-human vitalities (Casid 2005; Davis et al. 2019; Haraway 2015; Li 2010; Tsing et al. 2019).

Boaz Hagin, Roy Wagner, “The Occupation Image, A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation of Palestine” (2014) — https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/121488

b’tselem (hebrew for “in the image of”),

the Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, is one of Israel’s most prominent human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Founded in 1989, its goal is to document and educate about human rights violations in the occupied territories, to combat denial among the Israeli public about what goes on in the territories, and to ensure that Israel’s government “protects the human rights of resi- dents there and complies with its obligations under international law”

…

Launched at the beginning of 2007, [B’Tselem’s Camera Project provided] Palestinians with video cameras in order to document their lives under the occupation themselves… B’Tselem’s videos have been posted on its website… and YouTube channel …, and some of them have garnered considerable public interest, although they have received almost no attention within film studies. Some of the videos have been circulated by the Israeli and international media.3

B’Tselem and the media frequently see these moving images as representations of facts that lie behind the images, coded in terms of human rights and national conflict. This is indeed the chief interest of NGOs such as B’Tselem as well as the police, the courts, and the media. In this article, we would like to put these issues in parentheses and argue that what the images show is not reducible to such an account.

…

Specifically, as other scholars have noted, the events on the ground and other moving images produced in the region are not easily reducible to accounts in which clear-cut sub- jects and collectives that maintain a coherent identity over time perform easily discernable actions. Such discursive categories can indeed shed light on violations of human rights and national struggle, and providing clear and reliable evidence about what happened is no doubt crucial for legal proceedings. But this kind of analysis can also miss the sometimes chaotic, unofficial, and looming forms of violence and suffering, as well as the forms of political action they call for. As Ariella Azoulay writes, the “ruling power seeks to homogenize the heterogeneous scopic regime through the active reduction of objects seen within it to the logic of a national struggle” (201). In response to this danger, we will attempt a reading that might escape the point of view offered to us by traditional liberal categories."

Following on the idea that the border is more than a line on the map, an abolitionist vision is rooted in a vision of the abolition of all bordering and ordering regimes. It’s not enough to open the borders, we have to call for no borders and radically alter social relationships of power at and beyond the border. In order to dismantle borders, we have to abolish the divides that they entrench between the so-called core and periphery, between sites of extraction and sites of consumption, between the wealthy and the impoverished. This reality of global apartheid of who lives where and under what conditions can only be eliminated through a radical transformation of our entire world.

Spanish immigrants arrived in the archipelago in the late 1700s, and a booming agricultural business brought Latinos to the islands to harvest pineapple and sugarcane. In the 1800s, King Kamehameha III invited Mexican vaqueros, or cowboys, to teach locals how to manage cattle as Hawaii’s beef industry grew. As Hawaiian and Mexican cultures blended, paniolo — a derivative of “español” — ranching culture was born and remains today. 

Lahaina’s story of immigration is almost as old as the town itself, dating back to missionaries in the 18th century and then waves of people from China, Japan and Portugal who came to work in the sugar cane and pineapple fields.

Today, they come from Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras, as well as the Pacific Islands and the Philippines. In Lahaina, they find jobs in the tourist economy, in hotels, on golf courses and in shops and restaurants.

Immigration policies in South Africa are really quite neoliberal and meant to selectively manage and govern migration. What is maintained then in the current immigration regime that is similar to apartheid is what some scholars have called this two gates system, which allows people to come in who have the required or desired skills such as high skills. These are people working perhaps in universities, law firms, accounting firms, and at the same time this regime still needs domestic workers, right, because local workers are not all necessarily keen on taking up some of that work if it’s too manual. Or one of the things you find is that these low wages are exploitative, so undocumented workers are likely to accept them.

So what the current regime then thrives on is creating policies that ensure that people can move on the high end, formally and well documented, while it leaves a gap for precarity where people have to move through smugglers, undocumented and work in border farms in the Limpopo, picking oranges even if it seasonally and returning, for example.

Looking at matters from another side, the task is to (re-)construct an “Entangled World” — a convivial world characterized by demographic indeterminacies, geographic non-localities, and historigraphic non-eventualities.

READ THE PRIMER

"[Colonial science imagines] The World as an ordered whole composed of separate parts relating through the mediation of constant units of measurement and/or a limiting violent force."

[...]

"What if, instead of The Ordered World, we could image The World as a Plenum, an infnite composition in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time."

[...]

"When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement. That is, when the social reflects The Entangled World, sociality becomes neither the cause nor the effect of relations involving separate existants, but the uncertain condition under which everything that exists is a singular expression of each and every actual-virtual other existant."

The Times of Israel 20 January 2024:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-confirms-flooding-hamas-tunnels-in-gaza-with-seawater/

IDF confirms flooding Hamas tunnels in Gaza with seawater

The Guardian 24 December 2023:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/23/israel-flooding-hamas-tunnels-seawater-risks-ruining-basic-life-gaza-expert

Flooding Hamas tunnels with seawater risks ‘ruining basic life in Gaza’, says expert: Senior hydrologist warns Israeli plan would constitute one element of the crime of genocide.

Old Testament Judges 9.45:

"All that day Abimelek pressed his attack against the city [of Shechem] until he had captured it and killed its people. Then he destroyed the city and scattered salt over it."

https://biblehub.com/niv/judges/9.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abimelech_(Judges)

"In effect, smuggling produces subjects and objects and practices that exist in the realm of the ‘untaxable’. And by this I mean a great deal more than that which escapes the regimes of levied tax. The ‘untaxable’ is a mode of eluding existing categories and being unable to operate with them and as such it is not a resistance but an embodied criticality. In its array of partial splits and internal incoherences, the ‘untaxable’ of smuggling provides the inhabitation of a category of refusal."

side of trees, and the rising and setting sun brought the heavens into the realm of the geography of resistance; a cloudy night could spell as much disaster as a coursing river."

"The average length of time in solitary confinement over the last five years was 27 days, almost twice the number that the U.N. believes constitutes torture. More than 680 cases of isolation lasted at least three months, the records show; 42 of them lasted more than one year."

If freedom is a place, doesn't that mean that some of us need to find our way to it? Ay, and if there are those who would obstruct pathways to freedom, won't we have to figure out how to smuggle ourselves and resources past their obstructions?

The Gulag no longer exists. Millions work, however, under conditions that are not very different. What has changed is the forensic logic applied to workers and criminals.

During the Gulag, political prisoners, categorized as criminals, were reduced to slave laborers. Today millions of brutally exploited workers are being reduced to the status of criminals.

The Gulag equation “criminal = slave laborer” has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become “worker = hidden criminal.” The whole drama of global migration is expressed in this new formula; those who work are latent criminals. When accused, they are found guilty of trying at all costs to survive.

Over six million Mexican women and men work in the US without papers and are consequently illegal. A concrete wall of over one thousand kilometers and a “virtual” wall of eighteen hundred watchtowers were planned along the frontier between the US and Mexico, although the projects have recently been scrapped. Ways around them—though all of them dangerous—will of course be found.

Between industrial capitalism, dependent on manufacture and factories, and financial capitalism, dependent on free-market speculation and front office traders, the incarceration area has changed. Speculative financial transactions add up to, each day, $1,300 billion, fifty times more than the sum of the commercial exchanges. The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.

[...]

Today the purpose of most prison walls (concrete, electronic, patrolled, or interrogatory) is not to keep prisoners in and correct them, but to keep prisoners out and exclude them.

Most of the excluded are anonymous—hence the obsession of all security forces with identity. They are also numberless, for two reasons. First because their numbers fluctuate; every famine, natural disaster and military intervention (now called policing) either diminishes or increases their multitude. And second, because to assess their number is to confront the fact that they constitute most of those living on the surface of the earth—and to acknowledge this is to plummet into absolute absurdity.

Read the Article

and

“What is so rich about the notion of ‘smuggling’ is that the entire relation to an origin is eroded and the notion of journey does not follow the logic of crossing barriers, borders, bodies of water but rather of sidling along with them seeking the opportune moment, the opportune breach in which to move to the other side"

Can we look at the Coloniality and Conviviality maps that Muindi showed us, and ask, whether and how we can "sidle" along some of the colonial flows with pirate or smuggler's intention?

On a tangential note, a marvelously lucid, spirited radical historian, Kavita Philip, is working on a book on what she names The Pirate Function. It's coming out in MIT, but she's given talks, for example

https://bcnm.berkeley.edu/events/22/history-theory/936/the-pirate-function

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/urban-institute/news/pirate-function-developmental-lag-and-illegitimate-generation

The Therapeutic imagination stays with the trouble of continuously varying forms, faulting and repairing them in order to better convey and care for their ever changing contents.

The Late Davosian Holocausts are poised to do by way of neocolonialism what the Late Victorian Holocausts did by way of colonialism, marking a new inflection point in the history of the havoc wreaked by imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

In a recent commentary for Nature Medicine, the Georgetown University biologist Colin Carlson used a decades-old formula to calculate that warming had already killed four million people globally since 2000 just from malnutrition, floods, diarrhea, malaria and cardiovascular disease. As Carlson notes, this means that, since the turn of the millennium, deaths from climate change have already exceeded those from all World Health Organization global-health emergencies other than Covid-19 combined. “Vanishingly few of these deaths will have been recognized by the victims’ families, or acknowledged by national governments, as the consequence of climate change,” he says.

Going forward, most estimates suggest the impact should grow along with global temperature. According to one 2014 projection by the W.H.O., climate change is most likely to cause 250,000 deaths annually from 2030 to 2050. According to research by the Climate Impact Lab, a moderate emissions trajectory, most likely leading to about two degrees of warming by the end of the century, would produce by that time about 40 million additional deaths.

[...] One thing that is almost always left out is air pollution. This is the research area for which Shindell is best known, and his most notorious finding on the subject is that simply burning the additional fossil fuel necessary to bring the planet from 1.5 degrees of warming up to two degrees would produce air pollution that would prematurely kill an estimated 153 million people.

[...] Now, air pollution is probably not what you have in mind when you picture significant climate change; probably diarrhea and malnutrition aren’t either, or the elevated risk of stroke or respiratory disease that comes, empirically, with higher temperatures. Instead, you’re likely to imagine mass heat death or a world-historical storm. But that is a major lesson of the research on mortality and warming: that our climate fantasies can lead us astray, pulling us toward apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster rather than the simple but tragic accumulation of what today look like ordinary, if unfortunate, events — heat waves like those we’ve already lived through, infectious-disease outbreaks like those we’ve already read about, air-pollution problems like those we’ve mostly left behind in places like the United States. Climate scientists worry a lot about what they often call “discontinuities” or “nonlinearities.” But the world is a very large place, and you don’t need a major phase-shift in our experience of climate to produce a harrowing death toll. You just need things that kill people now to be made worse by warming.

The top 20 career hubs, pictured above, are the primary shapers of the values and norms global capitalist elite. The US government, perhaps unsurprisingly, happens to be ranked amongst them. Individuals passing through the top 20 career hubs are present in executive suites in leading corporations all over the globe, showing how traits learned in these organizations have gained global recognition and form part of a common ideology.

Read More

Read more

The plutocracy is not an abstraction, but a social class in the flesh. They are the owners of capital and the directors of great banks and enterprises. They sit on the boards of universities and museums, they run corporations and government organizations, they gather in clubs and committees where everyone’s future is planned by a shameless few. The reality is that they are the state. They don’t just take over and distort our formerly public institutions. 

The circles that loom so large here are called “coordinating committees”: official or informal bodies whose sole purpose is to bring the elites together and allow them to draft their plans behind closed doors. After the coordinating committees you will find the cultural and scholarly institutions through which symbolic power is expressed as a façade. These are the places [...] where the ruling class shows its cultivated image. The real action is in the dense tangle of industrial corporations and financial entities that construct and mismanage the world we live in.

Read more

Read the Article

In both factories and plantations, surveillant measurements informed methods of valuation that shaped people’s lives and structured the labor process. In the context of slavery, trafficked and enslaved Black people were ranked, rated, and priced for sale or loan based on classifications that had as their central criteria the value of a person’s perceived productive capacity. Enslaved people were rated by traffickers, plantation managers, and others profiting from enslavement based on their estimated productivity, their physical appearance, their fertility, and other attributes, with "the primary criterion for assessment being the amount of labor they could perform."

[...]

The specter of the plantation that hangs over computation and industrial labor regimes also speaks to the need to revisit the terms of “free” industrial labor, and to recognize the contested process through which this particular category of “freedom” was created and guaranteed. To do so, we must directly confront the unmarked presence of Black unfreedom that haunts “free” labor and reweave links that have been strategically severed between race, labor, and computational technologies. My hope is that such analysis can help identify leverage points for change, and shift attention from tinkering at the edges of technologies of control to articulating futures that claim the right to redefine categories of freedom.

Do “homeland,” “Heimat” “jiaxiang” carry attachments to the earth that are quite different from attachments to “home“? And how could some of those attachments be exploited to unhome people in favor of others?

How can we engage in “place-based” discovery and (to borrow from theater) devising co-articulating our surround

while attending to those immediate and multi-generational risks?

The Gulag equation “criminal = slave laborer” has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become “worker = hidden criminal.” The whole drama of global migration is expressed in this new formula; those who work are latent criminals. When accused, they are found guilty of trying at all costs to survive.

Over six million Mexican women and men work in the US without papers and are consequently illegal. A concrete wall of over one thousand kilometers and a “virtual” wall of eighteen hundred watchtowers were planned along the frontier between the US and Mexico, although the projects have recently been scrapped. Ways around them—though all of them dangerous—will of course be found.

Between industrial capitalism, dependent on manufacture and factories, and financial capitalism, dependent on free-market speculation and front office traders, the incarceration area has changed. Speculative financial transactions add up to, each day, $1,300 billion, fifty times more than the sum of the commercial exchanges. The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.

[...]

Today the purpose of most prison walls (concrete, electronic, patrolled, or interrogatory) is not to keep prisoners in and correct them, but to keep prisoners out and exclude them.

Most of the excluded are anonymous—hence the obsession of all security forces with identity. They are also numberless, for two reasons. First because their numbers fluctuate; every famine, natural disaster and military intervention (now called policing) either diminishes or increases their multitude. And second, because to assess their number is to confront the fact that they constitute most of those living on the surface of the earth—and to acknowledge this is to plummet into absolute absurdity.

[...]

The authorities do their systematic best to keep fellow prisoners misinformed about what is happening elsewhere in the world prison. They do not, in the aggressive sense of the term, indoctrinate. Indoctrination is reserved for the training of the small élite of traders and managerial and market experts. For the mass prison population the aim is not to activate them, but to keep them in a state of passive uncertainty, to remind them remorselessly that there is nothing in life but risk, and that the earth is an unsafe place.

This is done with carefully selected information, with misinformation, commentaries, rumors, fictions. Insofar as the operation succeeds, it proposes and maintains a hallucinating paradox, for it tricks a prison population into believing that the priority for each one of them is to make arrangements for their own personal protection and to acquire somehow, even though incarcerated, their own particular exemption from the common fate. This image of mankind as transmitted through a view of the world is truly without precedent. Mankind is presented as a coward; only winners are brave. In addition, there are no gifts; there are only prizes.

Prisoners have always found ways of communicating with one another. In today’s global prison, cyberspace can be used against the interests of those who first installed it. Like this, prisoners inform themselves about what the world does each day, and they follow suppressed stories from the past and so stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead.

In doing so, they rediscover little gifts, examples of courage, a single rose in a kitchen where there’s not enough to eat, indelible pains, the indefatigability of mothers, laughter, mutual aid, silence, ever-widening resistance, willing sacrifice, more laughter…

Read the entire essay

In the contemporary consumer public…all sorts of narratives are read as autobiographies of collective experience…[There is] is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience. A certain circularity structures an intimate public, therefore: its consumer participants are perceived to be marked by a commonly lived history; its narratives and things are deemed expressive of that history while also shaping its conventions of belonging; and, expressing the sensational, embodied experience of living as a certain kind of being in the world, it promises also to provide a better experience of social belonging—partly through participation in the relevant commodity culture, and partly because of its revelations about how people can live.

Whether linked to women or other nondominant people, it flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x. One may have chosen freely to identify as an x; one may be marked by traditional taxonomies—those details matter, but not to the general operation of the public sense that some qualities or experience are held in common. The intimate public provides anchors for realistic, critical assessment of the way things are and provides material that foments enduring, resisting, overcoming, and enjoying being an x.

This fracture delineates a global hierarchy of inferior and superior races, with anti-Blackness at its foundation. The dispatch examines how race, space, and time are mobilized to sustain this division, focusing on Blackness as the universal marker of abjection within the global racial order.

Building on The Desertion of Empire, which theorized the refusal of imperial domination, and The Racial Fracture, which examined racialized hierarchies in demography, geography, and history, Decomposing the Technosphere confronts the planetary ecocide wrought by Empire’s techno-political machinery.

From an infrastructural point of view, a splintering form of colonial occupation is characterized by a network of fast bypass roads, bridges, and tunnels that weave over and under one another in an attempt at maintaining the Fanonian “principle of reciprocal exclusivity.” According to Weizman, “the bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever to cross. They therefore emphasize the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. At points where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug out to allow Palestinians to cross under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between settlements.”

Under conditions of vertical sovereignty and splintering colonial occupation, communities are separated across a y-axis. This leads to a proliferation of the sites of violence. The battlegrounds are not located solely at the surface of the earth. The underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict zones. There is no continuity between the ground and the sky. Even the boundaries in airspace are divided between lower and upper layers. Everywhere, the symbolics of the top (who is on top) is reiterated. Occupation of the skies therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is done from the air. Various other technologies are mobilized to this effect: sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an Earth-observation satellite, techniques of “hologrammatization.” Killing becomes precisely targeted.

What I want to suggest is that those at the top of this Iceberg model—those who hold capital and those who command contract labor—occupy the high roads and the airspace of contemporary narrative infrastructures. Meanwhile, those at the bottom of the iceberg experience narrative infrastructure as a form of detainment.

"i ain’t got much left to give

these poems, black folks of every kind

of body are dying, & yes at our own

hands too & before you start

pointing fingers wash yo bloody

bloody hands. if you still say

things like we need all the info,

there must be a reason

then i can’t waste

anymore time on you. the world

is burning for real for real – some

some us burning, some staying warm.

i turn to the cards, the stars,

G-d, the gods, my sweet dead, all them

say it’s an age of smoke. i pray to everything

i’ve been taught to pray towards."

Excerpt:

"Everything sad exists and isn't forgotten

Tudo de triste existe e não se esquece

Someone insists and wounds the heart

Alguém insiste e fere o coração

Nothing new exists on this planet

Nada de novo existe nesse planeta

That isn't talked about here at the bar

Que não se fale aqui na mesa de bar"

Text/Article: Clube da Esquina & What Came After

A few excerpts (my emphasis):

"Clube da Esquina’s narratives called to “those who want to break free,” and then offered multiple ideas about what that freedom might feel like. Its lyrics expressed the idealism of Woody Guthrie through the melancholy imagery of Pablo Neruda, and its lavish orchestrations and intricate arrays of vocal harmony, stirring by themselves, braided the ancient and modern together into a sound that was also a provocation. Clube da Esquina arrived at a moment in Brazilian cultural life that was defined by fear; in response, it radiated possibility. It challenged its listeners and it challenged other musicians to go big. To dream. To stand for something."

"After Clube da Esquina had been out and its related projects began to circulate, the sounds of the loosely connected collective — Nascimento maintained that Clube was not a “club” because it didn’t have an official meeting place — spread rapidly throughout the community of Brazilian recording artists."

"This group settled in a house in Rio while the rehearsal and recording of Clube da Esquina progressed. There was downtime, and during it, other projects sprouted. Each of them blossomed as a direct result of the atmosphere the musicians had cultivated on the street corner."

my grievances sneak up on me
beckon to be heard
unable to fly
stuck in time’s nest
impatient and desperate to live.

my grievance is not with you
drowned my god a long time ago
before I had the clarity to list
unuttered desire,
silenced cry,
ignored need,
other things worth the weight and wait, the bending and breaking and forming into

my grievance is not with time,
But with what was taken.
in conversations with
a grave, a memory.
a seance,
stuck. in time’s nest,
impatient and desperate to live.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/worth-weight-124193243?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

• What is the space between watching institutions bend and break their own procedures and asking, “How can they do it?” How does this gap—between observing institutional violence and questioning its legitimacy—shape our perception of governance and compliance?

• Compare this to the space between following procedure dutifully in a meeting and stepping out to the bar afterward to laugh with colleagues about its absurdity. What happens in these moments where belief in procedure and recognition of its absurdity coexist?

• Consider police procedurals on television, where bending or breaking the rules is framed as necessary to catch the “bad guy.” How does this narrative reflect and reinforce the dissonance between procedural promises and institutional behavior?

The Aesthetic of Neutrality

• Gray walls, uniform furniture, and impersonal language—how do institutions use aesthetics to convey objectivity and suppress dissent?

• Are policy and procedure a style guide masquerading as rationality? How does deviation from this style create friction and reveal cracks in the system?

Institutionalized Promises and Their Failures

• Policies promise safety, prosperity, and fairness, yet their failures often leave harm unaccounted for. How do these failures manifest physically and psychologically in those navigating institutional spaces?

• What does survival look like for those who need these promises to be kept if they are to have a life and livelihood?

Friction as a Clue

• Friction often arises when individuals fail to conform to the style guide and behave in an “off-brand” manner. How can we read these moments of friction as clues to systemic contradictions?

• How do people navigate and resist institutional violence in these moments of rupture?

Who Gets to Break the Rules?

• Let’s talk about who has to comply with procedure as a matter of survival, who can break it when it suits them, and who couldn’t care less about the rules in the first place.

• What does it mean to live in a world where some people’s improvisations and deviations from procedure are excused (or even celebrated), while others are punished harshly for the smallest infractions? How does this disparity shape experiences of power and resistance?

Over five sessions, we will share our answers to the questions these factors pose:

• April — Ways You know the Way when you can tell a compelling story about your undertaking, one that keeps you committed and draws others in. For the self-defense of the surround, the Way cannot be a hero's journey. It must be a story of entanglement: how you came to be bound up in others' survival, how you remain so, how you will continue to be so regardless of what you as an individual choose. We will share the stories that orient us.

• June — Weather The Weather is favorable when there are no feelings you deny because they stand in your Way. Fear, grief, rage, despair: these are weather. Suppressing them does not make them disappear; it makes them operate underground, sabotaging from within. Favorable Weather is not the absence of difficult feelings but their acknowledgment. We will share the feelings we are actually contending with.

• August — Terrains The Terrain is favorable when there are no facts you deny because they stand in your Way. Empire excels at producing false maps, but counter-maps that show what we wish were true are equally fatal. Favorable Terrain means knowing the actual landscape: where networks of care run, where surveillance sees, where policy contradicts itself, where the gaps are. We will share something of the actual terrains we are navigating.

• October — Guides You have trustworthy Guides when the theories informing your undertaking can account for the facts on the ground, the feelings in the air, and the turns of events you imagine possible along the Way. Trustworthy Guides have been tested against reality and not found wanting—not because reality is kind but because the framework is honest. We will share the frameworks actually orienting our practice.

• December — Maneuvers You have practiced your Maneuvers when you have developed skills to handle the turns of events your Guides indicate are possible along the Way. The Maneuvers are not a single skill but a repertoire. They develop through repetition, not inspiration. When the moment comes, you do not rise to the occasion; you fall to the level of your training. We will share what we have rehearsed, are rehearsing, and have yet to rehearse.

By the end of this iteration, we will know each other's actual situations: the specific conditions under which each person's practices of recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair can or cannot be sustained. This is about learning the surround by learning each other.

"Natural Life is a project I began working on in the winter of 2011, a few months after I arrived to Chicago. The piece focuses on the stories of five individuals who were sentenced to life without parole (natural life) for crimes they committed as youth. The degree of responsibility for the crimes they were charged with varies from merely being in a room with an adult who committed a murder, to being accused of partaking in a premeditated act of killing. None of them, however, will ever be evaluated for change, difference, or growth. They will remain in prison till they die.

…

In 2009 I was collaborating with a young inmate who was serving life in a Michigan prison for a crime he committed as a juvenile. Together we conceived and generated a short 3-D animation that told the story of his crime and sentence by weaving actual facts and images with fabricated and constructed ones. When I left Michigan to move to Chicago, I decided to tackle the severity of his and other youth’s natural life sentencing in a more straightforward way, and to develop a documentary project that would allow these kids’ voices to be heard by a broad and diverse audience."

The extreme legal and police response to climate resistance is a tacit acknowledgment of the incredible potential opened by those attempting to enact a livable future.

Each interviewee was paid $1000 for their participation out of an NYU grant. There's an invitation to others with access to academic funding to consider how university resources might best be allocated in this era of crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

A Project by Mariah Tso, a Diné Cartographer and GIS Specialist with the Million Dollar Hoods (MDH) Project at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA

Learned about this through this Red Nation podcast episode:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mapping-deportations-w-mariah-tso-and-kelly-lytle/id1482834485?i=1000730358410

Our next session is now scheduled for Sunday, December 7, 11AM – 1PM (Chicago / GMT -5).

Stay tuned for more information.

What follows is a review of what we learned over the last year and a preview for the next year.

"I've found the concept rhymes with the concept of 'badmind' we have in Trinidad, which is kind of like doing something 'for spite', determination brought on by anger at perceived injustice. We say, for eg, it's badmind that propelled the West Indies cricket team to give the English team licks in the 1970s after their captain said 'we will make them grovel'. There's a book/film called Fire in Babylon (2010) that refers to this story. I feel like there may be some rhyming with Gramsci's 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will' as well."