[book, 1961] The wretched of the Earth
[video, 1993] Ancient futures
[declaration, 2005] Fourth declaration of the Lacandon jungle
[book, 2010] Staying alive
[map, 2013] Mesoamérica resiste
[book, 2017] These wilds beyond our fences
[book, 2019] Phone and spear
[book, 2019] Ideas to postpone the end of the world
[book, 2021] Hospicing Modernity
[article, 2022] Decolonizing money
[declaration, 2022] The Milpamérica declaration
[article, 2022] Buen vivir as a territorial practice
“A holistic diagnostic of climate fever would show the obvious: we cannot cure a 500 year old disease with Carbon Credits, hydroelectric companies that dry out the rivers, with electric cars that require mining. Any viable solution must question the economic growth model and its accumulation scheme. Any viable solution must confront the systems of inequality and must heal the colonial wound.”
“What good is money to “mitigate”, “finance” and “adapt” if we don’t stop the war against our peoples and Mother Earth?”
[In Spanish]
Episodio 4. El evangelio (del bitcoin) según Bukele
Bukele convirtió a El Salvador en el primer país en adoptar Bitcoin como moneda de curso legal de manera rápida y opaca, sin el apoyo de la población y con una ley que dejaba muchas preguntas. Le funcionó como publicidad… fuera del país. En este episodio llegamos hasta El Zonte, la zona cero del experimento salvadoreño con las criptomonedas, donde un periodista que ha cubierto esta historia desde el principio nos ayuda a entender el impacto de esta medida en la economía local. Escuchamos también las voces de la comunidad que no puede comprar una propiedad porque los precios se han disparado, o que es desalojada para construir proyectos turísticos; mientras tanto, los seguidores de esta propuesta, que busca romper con el sistema financiero tradicional, insisten en las ventajas de su aplicación. El ‘plan piloto’ de la criptoeconomía salvadoreña ha dejado claro que una ilusión libre de impuestos puede costarle caro a la población local.
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/RAS6105448499.mp3?updated=1706050204
«Transform money from its current universalist commodity form, based in colonialism, to different ones based on autonomy, community, and care.»
«To counter both state and capital, the enactment of the three territories of defense [territory-body, territory-land, territory-money] would mean the creation of a democratic money commons, powered by people as an unconditional share, an income derived from the socially produced wealth in the planet, administered by communities locally, sharing their labor and their land.»
Here are my highlights: https://keybase.pub/elopio/papers/2022-decolonising_money.pdf
Power is often stabilized in modernizing practices as invested in specific institutions, individuals and informational arrangements. As a property only a few have access to. However, in a changing world, where new technologies challenge human claims to cognitive exclusivity, where geographical conveniences afford some nationstates significant resource advantages in the rupturing infrastructure of the rules-based international order, and where the role of gut bacteria in shaping social decisions and power is now increasingly recognized, the shape of power is also changing. Beyond the questions of who has power and who doesn’t, our sense is that power is irreducibly relational, indebted to shifting accommodations, never fully realised, provisional, contested, speculative, and inseparable from ecologies and movements beyond the human. Our invitation: touch the shape of your overwhelm. For the moment, we are reconstituting overwhelm not as pathology but as those infra-thin moments when the more than human world presses itself against the skin of human sociality. When a business meeting gets interrupted by the scurrying rudeness of a passing cockroach. When a blueprint or book grows moss. When the road arched its back and resisted full passage beneath the taming machinery of your vehicular privileges. Gather with two others in this cohort. And tell stories of your “overwhelm”, inspired by the examples above. When the world crossed you out. Keep telling these stories as you recount them. Whenever your shared storytelling session is saturated, create an altar of some kind - digital, diffracted, distant, crooked, whatever - that honours this crossing-out, this situated overwhelm. Your feral improvisations may open up possibilities for noticing that power is strange and not as domesticated as the modern thinks.