Beyond Empire

Candlelight. Dinner for four, with (boxed) wine in plastic goblets, drying herbs hanging from the rafters, a full moon out the window. Fade from black amidst an awkward pause.

Velvet: So there's no hope, then?

Nonkululeko: Well, the very means of production themselves colonize us, so even if they're seized by a popular movement the only way to operate them is either to pay or to become functionaries of the white man's world. The logic of conquest and alienation is intrinsic. All the experiments of harnessing them to a utopian potential failed -- sometimes quite horrifyingly.

Jax: You're saying the means themselves, not just the mode of production?

base: Yes, all of it, don't you see? Mechanized life, you're made into cogs. Not just your hands in factories, but now even your souls: cell phones, 24-hours hooked in, your feelings turned into raw materials for a kind of vast monoculture of living death, food for a demonic spirit that's eating everything bare, leaving nothing for the rest of us, the systems of relations we should be a part of, rather than dominating.

Nonkie: This is where socialism has failed us, Jax, we people your white men stripped from the earth. There's no way back for us. We have the choice of trying to become like white people ourselves -- or nothing. Slavery by another name, whether we "own" the means of enslavement or not.

Jax: But if you've given up on dialectical materialism, on the forward dynamic engine of history, where does that leave us? Hopeless, suicidal, futile? That's no way to organize for change. And people need things, here and now. We can't give up on them. There must be a way to engage the very nihilism of despair as a negation that can drive us forward into a new vista of human potential.

base: Holy mother of all, aren't you listening? Humans don't need more potency, especially not within the "engine" of this fucking empire. We need to remember the pwoer of the earth, to move through us.

Velvet: I fell a spirit of hope in those words, base. What do you foresee?

base: (fiercely) "When we are gone, they will remain. Wind and rock, soil and rain. When they remain, we will return; the winds will blow; the fire will burn." Earth people will return; the empire will burn. That's hope, that's what we have.

Jax: Yes, environmentalism is important. We must conserve our resources, learn to do more with less. But surely the only plausible way to do this is by setting up structures through which wise collective decisions can be made about allocation and consumption. Regardless of what means of production you have in mind!

base: I'm not talking about some wishy-washy, "Oh let's care for the earth on weekends" environmentalism, Jax. I'm not talking about sharing the dwindling fruits of the soil we have left as we strip the whole thing to the bone. Listen to me: the empire will die and the sooner the better. Some of us are leaving, now, tending to the wild places so that we and they will be ancestors to new peoples following old paths of living as part of the earth, listening to her rhythms, dancing her prayers. To be earth people is to inhabit stories and senses fully woven with the rest of life. To make our own tools, so that we can be free to use them wisely. To craft our own homes, so that their lifecycle follows the tracks of stars and birds. To wander the actual living, breathing body of this planet in ways that contribute to the fullness of life's beauty, its complexity, its richness. No fossil fuels to give us unholy power so that we forget our place. No fossil fuels to give us unholy power so that we forget our place. No screens to isolate us from the elements that give us life. No vast specialization of labor that masks the patterns of the whole, depriving us of even the possibility of being responsible, of being dignified, of being whole.

(Silence. The candles flicker in a sudden breath of wind. Silence. An owl calls.)

Velvet: Thank-you, base, for sharing such a powerful vision. I'm filled with memory, memory only half my own, of ways of being my body yearns to connect with. But how many people can really live the way you describe? Aren't most of us so softened an changed that even a weeklong camping trip without showers and a bed feels like a stretch.

Nonkululeko: Yah, I mean people are still fleeing the villages where something like what you describe is practiced. My granny, you know, she was a sangoma, trained to learn the plants and spirits, but she gave it up to go to the city so her children could do more than break their backs scrabbling away in a backwater. Village life is hard, and there's all the old patriarchal shit still strong, delimiting what we can and can't do, can and can't become. That's why people come to the cities, to make something new of themselves, to live and easier and more meaningful life.

base: Shit, and does it work?

Jax: Don't underestimate the power