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.
Sissy, please turn this into an essay. This is too good to just be a comment!
(As for the project starting in Brazil, over the next months I hope you'll be reading and hearing and seeing the things we're discussing, sharing, learning, and proposing)
Superb Sissy - I agree with Peter - this is a Substack essay in itself - very prescient and overdue, to educate us all who need to learn fast just what is going on and the way to move through this mess.
In the UK, people are hoping the Green Party and Your Party will combine and overcome all comers but if they do, it’s still within the constraints of the Imperial Colonial abstractive State (the machine).
As you say peoples must become interconnected laterally. As an organic farmer I get to work with Cattle and their evolved knowledge of how to maintain themselves within their herd is always a lesson for me as there are no lies in their world they just work together matrilocally…
Thats how I felt too but really its just the other side of the climate change coin 😔 Searing droughts punctuated by torrential downpours instead of a healthy consistent rainy season. Im so grateful for this rain but its also going to mean a huge explosion in invasive plants probably followed by the pattern of drought which means: lots of fire 🤧 But no matter where we are in the globe this will be the case in its many different forms. So Im just trying to listen and see which relationships present themselves
Yeah, it's really rough how in so many places we might really need rain, but when it finally comes it's a torrent, which causes even more erosion on dry earth, in addition to the problem you named of the type of plants that come up afterwards and increased fire risks. It's heartbreaking!
Here in India, alternating unseasonal rains and severe heat have wreaked havoc on farmlands, flattened crops, erased the sustenance of many many farmers, and hiked up food prices for the working class folks. :(
I live in the city, and there is not much beyond discussions over this here. I'm sure some people in the villages would have come up with coping techniques though they're not represented in the media. But it has been a very tiring and testing journey for them, and having to show resilience and grace through it all would be extremely courageous.
I would love to connect with more people in India grappling with these issues. If this project I'm writing about here seems interesting and potentially relevant to you, please let me know! (translations, sharing articles and critical analysis, etc.)
This is extremely relevant to India. Sharing some stories from India about climate change and state involvement below.
I'd love to help -- what can I do? I can contribute 10 hours every week in support (I am unable to support financially at this point). I can translate articles into a few Indian languages (Hindi, Marathi). Happy to connect to understand what else I can do!
“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.”
Mind sharing some examples? I’m familiar with Cahokia but always like to find more.
My view is that those of us in the imperial core would do best to hunker down and survive collapse. Working to create low-input regenerative food systems and other low-tech offgrid technologies that can be scaled up when needed. There is no one collective ‘us’, that’s an illusion of state conditioning and the internet. Part of mental rewilding is returning to an embodied pov, and realizing its limits. There will be places the state persists for another hundred years, there will be (and already are) places it recedes and does not return, and the transition from one to the other will play out all over as collapse intensifies over the next decade. All we can do is work to prepare our local areas and communities, in my view.
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.
Sissy, please turn this into an essay. This is too good to just be a comment!
(As for the project starting in Brazil, over the next months I hope you'll be reading and hearing and seeing the things we're discussing, sharing, learning, and proposing)
I love you. You know…you taught me how to write precisely and consistently.
You give me too much credit!
Superb Sissy - I agree with Peter - this is a Substack essay in itself - very prescient and overdue, to educate us all who need to learn fast just what is going on and the way to move through this mess.
In the UK, people are hoping the Green Party and Your Party will combine and overcome all comers but if they do, it’s still within the constraints of the Imperial Colonial abstractive State (the machine).
As you say peoples must become interconnected laterally. As an organic farmer I get to work with Cattle and their evolved knowledge of how to maintain themselves within their herd is always a lesson for me as there are no lies in their world they just work together matrilocally…
Currently reading this as a massive abnormal storm rips through my drought stricken desert. Much love
It's been a wet year for my desert too, but because of the drought I'm trying not to jinx it by saying bad things eheh
Thats how I felt too but really its just the other side of the climate change coin 😔 Searing droughts punctuated by torrential downpours instead of a healthy consistent rainy season. Im so grateful for this rain but its also going to mean a huge explosion in invasive plants probably followed by the pattern of drought which means: lots of fire 🤧 But no matter where we are in the globe this will be the case in its many different forms. So Im just trying to listen and see which relationships present themselves
Yeah, it's really rough how in so many places we might really need rain, but when it finally comes it's a torrent, which causes even more erosion on dry earth, in addition to the problem you named of the type of plants that come up afterwards and increased fire risks. It's heartbreaking!
Here in India, alternating unseasonal rains and severe heat have wreaked havoc on farmlands, flattened crops, erased the sustenance of many many farmers, and hiked up food prices for the working class folks. :(
Love and support
That's really difficult! Do you know any techniques people have been using to adapt to the increasing heat or unpredictable rains?
Sending wishes of health and solidarity
I live in the city, and there is not much beyond discussions over this here. I'm sure some people in the villages would have come up with coping techniques though they're not represented in the media. But it has been a very tiring and testing journey for them, and having to show resilience and grace through it all would be extremely courageous.
I would love to connect with more people in India grappling with these issues. If this project I'm writing about here seems interesting and potentially relevant to you, please let me know! (translations, sharing articles and critical analysis, etc.)
https://www.firefund.net/pathstoecorevolution
This is extremely relevant to India. Sharing some stories from India about climate change and state involvement below.
I'd love to help -- what can I do? I can contribute 10 hours every week in support (I am unable to support financially at this point). I can translate articles into a few Indian languages (Hindi, Marathi). Happy to connect to understand what else I can do!
Articles:
https://www.outlookindia.com/elections/char-dham-project-in-uttarakhand-connecting-shrines-but-at-what-cost (this is from 2024, scores of floods and related loss of lives have happened as recently as Aug-Sept 2025 too)
https://scroll.in/article/1074221/1-crore-trees-not-8-5-lakh-could-be-cut-for-great-nicobar-project-one-ecologist-estimates
https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/the-river-warns-us-the-government-ignores-us
https://ruralindiaonline.org/article/in-amritsar-district-a-flood-of-challenges
“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.”
Mind sharing some examples? I’m familiar with Cahokia but always like to find more.
My view is that those of us in the imperial core would do best to hunker down and survive collapse. Working to create low-input regenerative food systems and other low-tech offgrid technologies that can be scaled up when needed. There is no one collective ‘us’, that’s an illusion of state conditioning and the internet. Part of mental rewilding is returning to an embodied pov, and realizing its limits. There will be places the state persists for another hundred years, there will be (and already are) places it recedes and does not return, and the transition from one to the other will play out all over as collapse intensifies over the next decade. All we can do is work to prepare our local areas and communities, in my view.