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Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As seafaring colonizers divvied up the world and justified their actions using the Doctrine of Discovery, the era of land-grabbing imperialism led to outrageous exploitation of Indigenous peoples and ecosystems.
The Dawn of Everything, published in October 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow is 700 amazing pages breaking down self-fulfilling myths about humanity since the Ice Age.
As we work together to re-discover and build new empowering political systems of collective decision making, and life-giving economic systems that can meet our real needs, how do we ensure that they stay true to the intentions we’re setting out with? How do we surface, heal and create alternatives to our internalized and cultural habits of domination?
What changes to ourselves, our groups and wider society would help us to build new systems? Systems that can deliver fundamentally different outcomes to the one that has given us climate change and the many other environmental and social issues that we are struggling with globally.
In the midst of growing hunger from colonial academia we reflect on the need to right our relationships with the Indigenous and other racialized peoples with whom we work in Nicaragua.
With conversations about decolonising our institutions becoming more prominent, it’s important to remember that Thatcherism simply wouldn’t have triumphed in the UK without the defeat of another political vision then emerging from what was once among Britain’s most lucrative colonies: Jamaica.
So how, indeed, can those of us of colonialist heritage and good will do the serious work of deconstructing, then reconstructing and healing our ancestral heritage in our own minds and lives, while sorting out and holding fast to the beliefs, attitudes, practical knowledge and skills that might be useful and beneficial?
While an end to the Moroccan occupation and full decolonization are integral to a Saharawi just transition, the SADR government’s ability to ensure popular sovereignty over Western Sahara’s energy resources will also be of fundamental importance.
Going local is remembering the old ways, the ways in which all our ancestors used to live. Going local is about reconnecting to place, people and self. It is the ultimate reconnection our planet is calling for. A slower pace and more gentle way of being on this planet.
We can only ally and build stronger coalitions for change with the world around us (and not just with humans). Postactivism is the opening to this.
Southern governments are captive to the demands of international capital, which prevents them from meeting their people’s real needs. MMT offers a way out.
The documents of victimisation and exploitation are also the documents of agency and resistance – even if, of course, so much has been lost to history.
