Weaving Paths from Colonial Apocalypse to Ecological Revolution
from Brazil to the world, this is how we'll survive the ecological crisis
Yesterday, 533 years ago, the Invasion began. It started in the Caribbean, and quickly spread to North and South America, what many of the peoples resisting the Invasion referred to as Turtle Island, Abya Yala, or a similar name in their own languages.
It was the largest, most extensive process of genocide in human history. Tens of millions of people were killed. Hundreds of languages, extinguished. Countless unique cultures and ways of relating with unique territories, criminalized. Most of those peoples are still here, resisting or surviving as best they can, but the opportunity for the military, religious, and economic elite of a dozen nascent nation-states in Europe to enslave millions, to cut down forests and dig mines and start plantations to plunder and despoil two continents, the opportunity to start a transatlantic cycle of intense profit and accumulation by also enslaving millions of people from Africa, the opportunity to practice and perfect a science of social control through the conquest and rule of one society after another – all of those things together allowed these European nations and the settler states they established to dominate the whole planet and to spread capitalism and the modern State globally.
At the time of the Invasion, four of the six human-inhabited continents were mostly stateless: Australia and Oceania, South America, North America, and Africa. They weren’t stateless through ignorance. Many of them, from the Mississippi to the Amazon to the Bío Bío to the Upper Niger, had already seen states arise in their midst, and overthrew them. Afterwards they organized themselves to prevent new states and better defend themselves against neighboring states. They were post-state. Anti-state. And even in Europe and Asia, where states had been developing for four thousand years, there were still many anti-state areas and pockets of resistance that thwarted the pretensions of state control. The Invasion and the globalization of the State erased so much of this knowledge, this history.
The first few invasions were led by a Genovese slaver and merchant named Colombo. His supporters called him an explorer but there is no historical record of him doing any exploring before he took three ships west. What we know is that he made his money selling enslaved human beings and, if he could find a source, precious metals or rare spices. And his sponsors in the Invasion were two monarchies that had joined together to build more powerful states by carrying out a war of genocide across the whole of the Iberian peninsula. When they won their final battle at Granada, the place where Colombo found them and offered them a new war, they killed or enslaved all the Muslims, Arabs, and North Africans, and they killed or exiled all the Jews. Their ancestors had already killed or enslaved or converted the native Iberians who knew how to share the land, care for the forests, and worship the local spirits.
These invaders referred to themselves as Christendom, the white race, Western civilization, but they have created a life-devouring Machine that will utilize and promote anyone who agrees to serve it. The Machine can give immense power, but it is a kind of power that can only be used to dominate, to enslave, to extract, to murder, to torture, to rule.
All major states that we know of in human history caused regional ecocides, whether they worshiped a sun god, were led by warrior kings, allowed all their citizens to make decisions in assembly, or declared themselves states of the working class.
For the first time, we are facing ecocide at a global scale.
Learning from those who have been resisting for 500 years, for 1000 years, we know it is possible to survive the apocalypse. It is already too late for some of us, but even if we have to wait another two hundred years to destroy this Machine, it will not be too late for life.
But why wait? Why continue to use strategies or to trust institutions we know will betray us?
This ongoing ecocide—climate change and all the other ecological and social catastrophes that overlap with it—is already increasing misery, poverty, totalitarianism, sickness, death, and extinction around the world. It could get much much worse. Or, it could be the way the State finally commits suicide, once and for all.
Whether it goes one way or the other largely depends on us. We need to act with awareness. We need to move forward from our history. We need to listen and to speak. We need to strengthen our connections and return our bodies to the world. We need to learn the skills for struggle and for freedom. We need to know what to destroy and what to cultivate.
This November, some compas in Brazil, in a few other places, and me: we’re starting a project that we hope will push things in the other direction. Weaving paths from colonial apocalypse to ecological revolution.
We could use your support. Here’s the fundraiser:
Firefund: Paths to Ecological Revolution
As we release the articles, interviews, podcasts, and teaching materials arising from this project, I’ll be sure to post about them here and on my bluesky account!
The fundraiser is live!
https://www.firefund.net/pathstoecorevolution
I'm so happy that now, as you can understand from my writing, I write in Greek and then translate it with a Greek-English software for translators. This helps me write more complex thoughts—I don't write immediately in English, and this way I can expand my thinking without the constraint of a second language limiting what I can express. I hope the translation makes sense.
What you do here my friend is to refuse the narcotic of historical amnesia. You place the knife exactly where it belongs: the so-called "discovery" was invasion, the "explorers" were slavers, and what we call "civilization" is a Machine that devours life and calls it progress.
The most radical proposition in this text—the one that should make us reconsider everything—is that the stateless societies encountered during the Invasion weren't "primitive" or "pre-political." They were post-state. Anti-state. They had watched states arise in their territories and overthrew them. They organized themselves specifically to prevent new ones from forming. This isn't romantic primitivism. This is sophisticated political knowledge that was systematically erased because it represented an existential threat to the project of domination.
For centuries, we've been told that the state is inevitable, that hierarchy is natural, that centralized power is the only way to organize complex societies. But what if the opposite is true? What if statelessness isn't the absence of organization but its most advanced form—one that requires more collective intelligence, more mutual responsibility, more actual freedom than any state could tolerate?
The Invasion didn't just genocide people. It genocided political possibilities. It erased the memory that we once knew how to live without masters.
Your analysis of the Machine is crucial: it doesn't matter whether the state worships a sun god, practices Athenian democracy, or declares itself socialist. All major states have caused regional ecocides. The problem isn't which ideology animates the state. The problem is the state itself—the concentration of power, the extraction of resources, the reduction of living relations to administered categories, the transformation of land into property and humans into resources.
And now, for the first time, we're facing global ecocide. Not regional collapse that other societies could survive and learn from. Total planetary catastrophe produced by the same logic that drove the Invasion: the insatiable need to extract, accumulate, expand, dominate.
But here's where you refuse despair: "It is possible to survive the apocalypse.". Oh my God, yes we need this!!! Not because you are optimistic, but because Indigenous peoples and communities of resistance have been surviving apocalypse for 500 years. They've watched their worlds end and continued existing anyway. They've maintained other ways of relating to land, to each other, to life itself—even under conditions of maximum violence.
The question you are posing is stark: Will the ecological crisis destroy the Machine, or will the Machine use the crisis to intensify control?
Because it could go either way. States are already using climate catastrophe to expand surveillance, militarize borders, justify authoritarian measures, and continue extraction under the guise of "green capitalism." The crisis could be weaponized to make the Machine more totalitarian than ever.
Or—and this is what the project you are describing seems oriented toward—the crisis could create conditions where the Machine finally collapses under its own contradictions, and those of us who survive have the knowledge and skills to build something else.
Not reform. Not better policies. Not "green" versions of the same structures. But the cultivation of capacities that the Machine has tried to destroy: "the skills for struggle and for freedom. To know what to destroy and what to cultivate."
This is where I want to push the analysis further, because you leave something unspoken that needs saying: Most of us don't have these skills anymore. We don't know how to organize horizontally at scale. We don't know how to grow food, defend territory, make collective decisions without deferring to experts or representatives. We don't know how to survive without the infrastructure the Machine provides—even as that infrastructure is killing us.
The Indigenous and anti-state communities who've been resisting for centuries have this knowledge. But the rest of us? We're the descendants of those who were absorbed into the Machine, who forgot how to live otherwise, who accepted the bargain of wage labor and consumer goods in exchange for our autonomy.
So the project you describe—"weaving paths from colonial apocalypse to ecological revolution"—isn't metaphorical. It's literal. It's about rebuilding the connections, the knowledge, the practices that were severed during the Invasion. It's about listening to those who never stopped resisting, learning from those who maintained other ways of being, and creating new-old forms of life that can survive what's coming.
You are not promising salvation. You are not saying this will be easy or that everyone will make it. "It is already too late for some of us." That's not nihilism. That's reality. People are already dying from climate collapse, from state violence, from the compounding catastrophes of capitalist ecocide.
But if we act with awareness, if we stop trusting institutions we know will betray us, if we move from history rather than repeat it—there's a possibility. Not of preventing catastrophe (that ship has sailed), but of ensuring that what grows from the ruins isn't just more sophisticated versions of the Machine.
My question: How do we actually do this in the metropolis, in the heart of the Machine, where most of us are trapped? The communities that have survived 500 years of resistance often have land, have maintained some connection to territory, have lineages of knowledge. But those of us in Athens, in Berlin, in New York—we're deeply embedded in the Machine's infrastructure. Our survival depends on systems we want to destroy.
May be the path from apocalypse to revolution looks different depending on where you're standing. For some, it's defending land that was never fully colonized. For others, it's desertion—leaving the metropolis, finding or creating spaces where other logics can operate. For others still, it's sabotage from within.
If i have understand right, you are proposing—and i agree - that all of these paths need to be woven together. Not unified under one strategy or one organization, but connected, learning from each other, creating a multiplicity of refusals and alternatives that the Machine can't absorb or destroy.
The fundraiser you mention, the project starting in Brazil—I want to know more. Because this is the work: not writing manifestos, not building new leftist organizations that will replicate the same hierarchies, but actually creating the material infrastructure and the social relations that can survive the Machine's collapse.
The apocalypse isn't coming. It already happened. It's been happening for centuries. And people have been surviving it, resisting it, maintaining other possibilities within it.
That's the knowledge we need now. Not how to prevent catastrophe, but how to live through it and ensure that what comes after isn't just another version of the Machine.
This is urgent work. And it requires more than analysis. It requires our bodies, our time, our willingness to learn from those who know what we've forgotten.