[quotes] Serviceberry - Robin Wall Kimmerer 2024

 

"what is the 'sun' of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it's love" 

"you can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother." 

"Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them."

"Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for a life." 

"Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer."

"Never take the first one. Never take the last."

"Take only what you need."

"Take only that which is given."

"Never take more than half. Leave some for others."

"Harvest in a way that minimizes harm."

"Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken."

"Share."

"Give thanks for what you have been given."

"Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have taken."

"Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever." 

[quotes] A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things - Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore 2017

  

"Cheap is the opposite of a bargain - cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life. 'Things' become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print." 3

"Great historical transitions occur because 'business as usual' no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing." 12

"While much has been made of its gory and oppressive history, one fact is often overlooked: capitalism has thrived not because it is violent and destructive (it is) but because it is productive in a particular way. Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work - as cheaply as possible." 19 

"Everything that humans make is coproduced with the rest of nature: food, clothing, homes and workplaces, roads and railways and airports, even phone and apps... The 'human' relations of power and difference, production and reproduction, not only produce nature, they are products of nature." 20

 

"Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can count only dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible. For capitalism, this means that the whole system thrives when powerful states and capitalists can reorganize global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption as possible." 21

"In economics, an externality is a cost or a benefit, private or social, that doesn't appear in the calculus of production. We're arguing that the modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at the frontier, crises that resulted from human and extrahuman life inserting itself into that calculus. The modern world happened because externalities struck back." 21

"Frontiers are so important in these processes because they offer places where the new cheap things can be seized - and the cheap work of humans and other natures can be coerced. We come, then, to what we mean by cheapness: it's a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism's crises." 22

"Capital isn't the dead stock of uncut trees or unused skill. For Marx and for us, capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again. Money tucked under a mattress is as dead to capitalism as the mattress itself. It is through the live circulation of money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens." 26

"Capital is a process in which money flows through nature. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion within the finite web of live." 27 

"The story of cheap things and the crises that follow their cheapening is not one of inevitability. Humans can and do fight back. Capitalists then try to address that resistance with a range of cheap fixes. These too inevitably generate their own crises and, in turn, more and more sophisticated mechanisms of control and order." 29 

"... without the power to decide whose lives matter and whose do not, it would not have been possible to suppress Indigenous Peoples or members of rival religions and states and appropriate their knowledge, resources, and labor power." 37 

"So when we write and hyphenate world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of 'world-systems' to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation." 38

"The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear, and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history - one that includes the early modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples, and Africans from humanity - is testimony to modernity's extraordinary capacity to make us forget." 39

chapter 1: Cheap Nature

"Where European capitalism thrived was in its capacity to turn nature into something productive and to transform that productivity into wealth. This capacity depended on a peculiar blend of force, commerce, and technology, but also something else - an intellectual revolution underwritten by a new idea: Nature as opposite of Society." 46 

"Originally just a claim on land, the encomienda became a strategy to shift certain humans into the category of Nature so that they might more cheaply work the land." 50 

"This means that Descartes's philosophical abstractions were practical instruments of domination: they were real abstractions with tremendous material force... Society and Nature were not just existentially separate; Nature was something to be controlled and dominated by Society." 52

"This Cartesian revolution accomplished four major transformations, each shaping our view of Nature and Society to this day. First either-or binary thinking displaced both-and alternatives. Second, it privileged thinking about substances, things, before thinking about the relationships between those substances. Third, it installed the domination of nature through science as a social good. Finally, the Cartesian revolution made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination." 54

"So peasants were forced either to leave the land or to offer the only thing they had left to sell: their labor. In this sense their labor was 'free' - its sale was uncoerced by anything other than poverty and prison terms for vagrancy, the laws against poverty and vagabondage being motivationally harsh." 60 

"Knowledge was enclosed too. If anything was to be known about nature and the world, European men would author and authorize it."61

chapter 2: Cheap Money

"Two movements make financialization attractive and even useful to capitalism when the world's economic pie stops growing. One is the tendency of leading powers to go to war, or at a minimum to build up their war-making capacity... As we will see, modern states rarely self-finance their wars. They have to borrow money just like everyone else. The other thing that boosts financialization is that capital in the heartlands of the system begins to flow toward the frontiers." 69

"Financialization's bet on the future has worked historically so long as there were bountiful frontiers, where humans and other natures might be put to work - or otherwise extracted - for cheap." 69

"The silver boom didn't just make money - it also produced one of the first modern working classes, devastated landscapes, and provoked modernity's first great worker and peasant revolt" 73 

"One of his earliest inventions was the repurposing of an Indigenous labor regime: the mita. Every community in the sixteen provinces around Potosi had to send one in seven men to work in the silver mines. These men, called mitayos, were required to work from dawn until dusk. This stipulation, enforced by violence, was waived on Sundays and Christian holidays... He knew that Indigenous People were in the realm of nature but might redeem their souls through labor." 83 

"Hence the role of a credible 'lender of last resort' - a state bank or, more recently the IMF - an institution that, with hard currency and military connections, can guarantee a given hegemonic order." 87

"The extraordinary volatility of financial markets speaks not only to the dominance of finance capital but also to its weakness. At some point, bets on the future must pay off. And that's precisely what past centuries' frontiers of work, food, energy, and raw materials enabled. Today, those frontiers are smaller than ever before, and the volume of capital looking for new investments is greater than ever before." 88 

chapter 3: Cheap Work

"So the Portuguese crown requested and received permission from Rome for its subjects to capture and enslave any north or west Africans they encountered on their colonial adventures." 92 

"Since it was hard to argue that residents of the Americas harbored actual enmity toward Christianity, a new criterion emerged: ignorance. What people knew, and didn't know, became the proper subject of the state, for the purposes of acquiring and managing a labor force." 93 Requerimiento

"In his debate against Sepulveda before the panel, Las Casas conceded that there is a hierarchy of life, that some kinds of humans are superior to others. At issue was the position of Indigenous People in this hierarchy and the duties of Christian conquerors toward them. In the end, it was resolved that although Indigenous People aren't part of society, they might escape their place in nature through generations of labor." 94

"Note the toxic chemistry of greed and piety. If colonization was to proceed, God had to be okay with it. Ultimately, it was the duty of care for Indigenous souls that licensed the appropriation of their land and their labor to work it, in the service of civilization... Here lies capitalism's most sinister accounting tricks. Putting most humans into the category of Nature rather than Society enabled an audacious act of frontier bookkeeping." 94 

"The conquest of the Americas therefore involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the 'lazy' native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock. Policing time was central to capitalism's ecology." 98 

"Slavery was the cost of cheap cotton." 103

"And with every resistance to it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again." 107

"It's time now for us to explore the boundaries of what has counted as payable work and as the kind of work offered, by nature, as a 'free gift' to the economy." 110 

chapter 4: Cheap Care

"There's no necessary reason why the language of sex should also be the language with which silver mines were acquired. Yet as some humans moved across the surface of the planet, bringing it under the reign of property, they compassed it as they would a sexual conquest. The reign of cheap nature and cheap work was, from the beginning, a transformation not just in how and what humans could own but also in who could won and work, how they would be born, and how they would be cared for." 113

"For the order of cheap nature and cheap work to be created, other work needed to happen without being paid at all - most of all, the creation and management of bodies to do that work... Such work is overwhelmingly unpaid because it makes the whole system of wage work possible. Without unpaid work, especially care work, wage work would simply be too expensive. At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and mange the category of humans who would perform unpaid care work: women... we continue to think of 'real work' solely as wage work and forget the care work that makes it all possible" 116 

"For modern models of the household to stick, economics wasn't enough. Women and men needed to be schooled and disciplined in their new household responsibilities." 120 

"The hegemony of the modern household wasn't made purely through instruction manuals. It was also made by force. As with cheap work, the bodies of certain kinds of humans needed to be disciplined for the strategy of cheap care to work. Transforming women's bodies into compliant machines of reproduction took force and fear and social policing. The institutions of this policing included the prison, the school the clinic, the madhouse, and the management of public and private sex and sexuality through violence and shaming... The household's violent education was enforced through law, property law in particular." 121

"Kin networks that had supported women, men, and children beyond the nuclear family were destroyed no less than the commons. The extended family and relationships that could sustain families were transformed and professionalized... Women's economic activity, insofar as it was permitted, was confined to the domestic sphere, a domain from which politics was correspondingly banned." 128 

"To make this system work, the state developed a keen interest in enforcing the categories of man and woman." 128

"... to use the term workshop is to mischaracterize how housework was viewed. It was considered precisely beyond the domain of wage work, a favor that women did for men, akin to the free gifts that nature offered enterprise." 129 

"The global household has always done the work that makes possible the global factory and the global farm." 134

"To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for the end to capitalism." 135

"To imagine a world of justice in care work is to imagine a world after capitalism. But while capitalism persists, the cheapness of labor reproduction is based in turn on other cheap things." 137 

chapter 5: Cheap Food

"Without food surplus, there is no work outside agriculture." 140 

"While historians debate the precise timing of its agricultural revolution, it's clear that by 1700 England was doing the two big things that every great capitalist power must: increasing the agricultural surplus and expelling labor from the farm." 141

"Every global factory needs a global farm." 142

"Cheap food is 'cheap' in a specific sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system." 143

"Cheap food required the suppression of political dissent. The Green Revolution was, after all, a package of reforms designed to prevent the Red revolutionary political goal of many peasants' and landless workers' movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform. That's why, in its implementation, the Green Revolution was often an authoritarian program." 151

"Raw meat in the supermarkets is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism's ecology." 156

"The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to the profit calculus of the industrial food system. This is one of the reasons why meat is so cheap. Cheap labor is another." 156

chapter 6: cheap energy

"Here a new layer of cheapness emerges in our picture of the world: capitalism's global factory requires not just a global farm and a global family, but a global mine as well." 165

"Why is cheap oil so important? It's not that capitalism can't do without fossil fuels. After all, retailers and manufacturers don't care if their electricity comes from ancient fossils, windmills, or solar panels. Cheap oil is so important because today's capitalists don't wish to support the kinds of massive investment that would make a solar transition possible... If a solar transition is to happen under capitalism, it will only be because governments will pay for it." 178

"Yet we cannot end a discussion of energy without observing that the IEA in 2016 announced that the capacity of renewable energy exceeds that of coal. Does this render a discussion of cheap energy moot? Hardly. Look inside the batteries of the solar revolution, and you'll find blood minerals from the DRC and Bolivia." 179

"It requires violence meted by public and private sectors, licensed by a world-ecology that stretches back to cheap nature and is possible only because of a collective understanding that cheap energy is part of the national bounty." 179

chapter 7: cheap lives

"Yet while it certainly involved bloody murder, colonialism was never exclusively an act of brute force. Columbus and his descendants had weapons but also an organization and language that legitimated their use of that force. Capitalism may have claimed the New World with guns, germs, and steel, but the New World's order was kept through race, police, and profits. These technologies of hegemony and order are the subject of our final chapter." 181

"Women, wageworkers, Indigenous People, and even those members of the ruling class on whose fortunes the sun has set - all have fought, more or less successfully, against the requirement of their subservience. In response, capitalists developed new strategies to forge new frontiers and to deepen existing ones... Governments, merchants, and financiers scaled new heights of creativity and destruction in the search for profit. But capitalism's ecology has also expanded and consolidated itself through prodigious experimentation in the arts and science of social order" 181 

 

"To maintain hegemony is, as Antonio Gramsci observed, to recruit and maintain forces from across society in a bloc that is able to continually outmaneuver its rivals. In the pursuit of order and control, the idea of 'the nation' became affixed to the state in ways that few could predict and which continue to shape the planet." 182

 

"Keeping things cheap is expensive. The forces of law and order, domestic and international, are a costly part of the management of capitalism's ecology." 182

 

"More important still, as states confront the limits of their ability both to manage the lives in their charge and to provide conducive environments for liberal capitalism, we're reaching the end of an era of cheap lives." 182

 

"In New Spain, the sistema de castas emerged as a way of policing citizens, taxes, and labor requirements, as well as proximity to god. It ranked people according to their blood, with categories emerging like answers to a combinatorial mathematics problem." 185 

 

"Once assigned, these categories were enforced. Which is to say that women's bodies, workers, taxes, religion, and property rights were policed simultaneously." 186 

"Geographers and chorographers were in the first ranks of empire, and map making helped to define not only the state but also the new story of what united the citizens of that state, the story of national blood and soil." 195

 

"Race, nation, and print capitalism were tightly linked. Strategies that required cheap care and cheap labor produced and reproduced the racial orders by which bodies were read, categorized, and policed at the boundaries of Society and Nature. Print and narratives that both fixed domestic order and offered future national greatness in reward circulated and confirmed these orders." 196

 

"No surprise then that... on the whole, racism and anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination." 196

 

"Through this idea of nationalism, states' power to police their citizens extended to everything from productive to reproductive labor through actions in defense of currency and food purity to mental health policy" 197

 

"This is the strategy of cheap lives in three words: define and rule" 198

 

"Hegemony, the idea with which we began this chapter, is never secure or guaranteed. It must always be maintained, by force and suasion... The nation is a fiction in permanent flux, written and rewritten to interpret and order its destiny - and thus the present. But the ideas of the nation and its economic destiny aren't the exclusive domain of a particular hegemonic bloc. Indeed, this is why we see in moments of capitalist crisis the rise of alternate interpretations of national destiny" 199 

conclusion

"Our cheap things didn't magically make themselves. They emerged through a violent alchemy of ideas, conquest, and commerce in the modern world. At its heart has been a series of binaries that entwined with each other from the beginning: Society and Nature, colonizer and colonized, man and woman, the West and the Rest, white and not-white, capitalist and worker. Each of these dualisms has not merely worked to describe and categorize the world but served practically to dominate and cheapen the lives of nearly all humans and the rest of nature." 202

 

"The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by 'lifestyle choices' rather than socially enforced logics." 204

 

"If we are made by capitalism's ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practice new ways of producing and caring for one another together, a praxis of redoing, rethinking, reliving our most basic relations." 206 

"But knowing that there is someone whose only fault is to be born now, likely a woman, Indigenous, harmed by climate change and pollution, and whose life will be rendered demonstrably worse by the cumulative actions of everyone able to read this sentence, how might we live differently? The outlines of such a program must include recognition, reparation, redistribution, reimagination, and recreation." 207

 

"There's no easy calculus for the computation of suffering and repayment." 208

 

"In other hands, this might be evidence of the futility of reparations, of the hopelessness of changing on thing when everything must change." 209

 

 

[quotes] Let This Radicalize You - Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba 2023

  

"This assumption can sometimes lead activists to become walking, talking encyclopedias of doom. However, as organizers, our job is to help move people into action, and no fact is so shocking or profound that its utterance will spontaneously spark a movement." 20

 "When a fact or set of facts prompts people to change course, it's usually because someone or something has interrupted the narrative they knew and told a story that feels more true - one worth making changes over." 21

"Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling. If their role in your story feels like 'doom appreciator,' most people will recoil, retreat to their own smaller story, and keep the focus there." 23

"Capitalism requires an ever-broadening disposable class of people in order to maintain itself, which in turn requires us to believe that there are people whose fates are not linked to our own: people who must be abandoned or eliminated." 32

"In order to invest in a new vision, and a new way of living, we have to believe in each other and our capacity to create something better. Our belief in human potential must outweigh our fear of human failure. Our imagination must be courageous." 34 

"Amid a landscape of catastrophe and extraction draped in bright plastic product displays and endless streams of escapism, most people are simply being herded along. They do as they are told and try to replicate the same set of relations that defined life before. As things deteriorate, they keep trying. They do not know what else to do. Nothing in their experience or imagination has prepared them to conceptualize the realities of capitalism, their real relationship to it, or any fathomable escape." 45

"An organizer can also ask, 'What would make this more interesting and appealing to you? What would make this more interesting for the people that you know? Are there other people that you know that want to get involved?' We build better relationships, Dixon said, 'when we build projects where people honestly have a stake in the project, not because we told them they have to, but because we've asked them what they need and we are responsive to the needs of multiple people." 49

"The creative power of the oppressed ill always exceed that of the oppressor, because it is the oppressed who must exercise creativity to navigate and survive a world that is set against them. It is the oppressed who create art and poetry and revolutionary ideas to cultivate hope in bleak places, so that people might galvanize and make change." 78

"... we have to break free from the shackles of individualism and commit to building a culture of care, in which everyone's well-being and survival are significant." 78

"We urge organizers to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from - the stories, wisdom, hope, and imaginings of organizers who came before us." 85

"Work that can only occur within corporate confines can be eliminated according to corporate whims. We need to strategize around alternative modes of digital outreach and use in-person outreach methods, such as canvassing, flyering, in-person mutual aid and other community events." 92

"When we believe in each other, we are more likely to take risks and to invest ourselves in possibility, even when our own hopes are not fully formed. In this way, our relationships and the work of relationship building can change our sense of what's possible." 97 

"It is important to understand the distinction between activists, organizers, and political hobbyists. Hobbyists often have very strict political standards around respectability or radicalism, to which few activists ever seem to rise. If you organize anything political, you are likely to attract the criticism of hobbyists, since for some people, critique is a pastime." 98

"Grief work, healing work, and conflict resolution have always been important to our movements, but in this age of catastrophe they are more crucial than ever. A strong organizing community is more than a labor force for social justice. It is an ecosystem of care, learning, relationship building, and action." 103 

"Sometimes becoming 'aware' of 'bearing witness' is simply an act of consumption. Given the sheer amount of media available to any person with an internet connection, we have no shortage of 'witness' to atrocity... The goal is to pull people into an active formation and build something. To do that, we have to draw people into conversations about the harms that have been done to our communities, how we can help one another, and how we can thwart the forces that are harming us. Through that work, the generation o new vision born in collectivity becomes possible." 105

"Conditions that the state characterizes as 'peaceful' are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of health care, and many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating... when they refer to 'peaceful protest,' they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state... It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice." 111 

"The violence of the state in response to protest is rarely scrutinized to the degree that protesters are scrutinized. The idea that if you are defiant in the face of authority you should expect to incur its wrath is firmly entrenched in our culture." 111

"Because, under capitalism, 'peace' is the maintenance of violence on the state's terms. Organized efforts to disrupt those harms will always be characterized, by any necessary stretch of the imagination, as violent." 115 

"As Kayali told us, the Israeli government's definition of violence 'contorts itself to repress any and all forms of our resistance.'" 125

"The maintenance of global capitalism necessitates mass death, just as the maintenance of capitalism in the United States requires the violence of the carceral system. If these systems function without interruption, you will be told you are experiencing 'peace.' After all, police are often cast as 'peace officers,' and soldiers are called 'peacekeepers.'" 128

"People who are understandably impatient for large-scale changes often want to believe that there's a shortcut: that one group, movement, or demographic is the truth and the way and that merely cheering on that contingent will spur a revolution. This places undue pressure on whatever group or demographic is being fetishized as a savior troupe." 136 

"... organizers need to develop a vision of who they want to be in relation to their community, their movement, and other people, instead of focusing on self-elevation. What role will they play in the context of the larger group? What are their skills and knowledge base? What will they not do? These are questions that must be answered together with others in the struggle." 137

"May also suggested that rotating the role of 'spokespersons' among members of the group  is a way to avoid placing one organizer on a permanent pedestal." 138

"Grief, after all, is a manifestation of love, and our capacity to grieve is in some ways proportional to our capacity to care. Grief is painful, but when we process our grief in community, we are less likely to slip into despair." 151

"Organizing makes it possible to grieve in ways that make a different future visible." 159 

"Active hope is a practice... First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we'd like things to move in or the values we'd like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction." 176

"Acts of rebellious grief can take many shapes, but all are a rejection of mass death and an insistence on the humanity of those who have passed." 178 

"... to create movements, rather than clubhouses, we need to engage with people with whom we do not fully identify and may even dislike... We will, at times, have to constructively critique people's behavior or simply allow them room to grow. There will be other times, of course, when we have to draw hard lines, but if we cannot organize beyond the bounds of our comfort zones, we will never build movements large enough to combat the forces that would destroy us." 182 

"As we struggle to balance our lives with what the work demands of us, we must ask ourselves whether the manner in which we organize reflects the world we want to build." 200

"I am the person I am today because of the people who chose to build relationships with me along the way... I feel deeply for people who are still out there, going it alone, believing they are supposed to make it as individuals and blaming themselves when they falter. We were not meant to survive that way, and it's no surprise when we cannot in a world that is set against us in so many ways." 222

"So how can you - how will you - lessen suffering where you are?" 229 

"Radical imagination is essential to organizing and also important to me because the horizon that I am working toward is a world I have never seen: a world without policing, imprisonment, or surveillance." 231

"Even if the end times are upon us, we should still plant trees." 232 

"While many of us have our own self-care rituals, few have collective-care and conflict resolution skills. Frankly, it is often easier to be dangerous to the state systems that we confront than it is to be tender with each other." 235

[quotes] The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Francis Weller 2015

 

"Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms." 

"We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfaction of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our every being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain." 

"This book is about grief, about its many moods and movements, shapes and textures. It is about how sorrow carves riverbeds in our soul, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives." 

"Establishing a relationship with grief, developing practices that keep us steady in times of distress, and staying present in our adult selves are among the central tasks in our apprenticeship with sorrow. This is the hard work of maturation. In the traditional language of apprenticeship, this would be called achieving mastery. In the language of soul, this is the work of becoming an elder. An elder is able to touch grief deftly and is able to craft sorrow into something nourishing for the community."

"Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anesthetization" 

"Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving." 

"I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive." 

"A sense of belonging offers us much-needed medicine in these times, which are marked by feelings of anonymity and isolation. In fact, belonging protects the heart from much of life's unavoidable challenges." 

"We tumble and fall as the ground beneath us opens, shaken by violent rumbling. Grief unfolds our lives, drops us close to the earth, reminding us of our inevitable return to the dark soil." 

"'How can we take a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means 'no ashes.''"

"What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth." 

"Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul. It is, indeed, a sickness of the soul. When feelings of shame arise, we pull back from the world, avoiding contact that could cause or risk exposure. The last thing we want in times of excruciating self-consciousness is to be seen." 

"Shame closes the heart to self-compassion. We live with an internal state best characterized as self-hatred. In order to loosen shame's grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgment." 

"What is the vow your soul is waiting for you to make? What will you have to sacrifice in order to honor that vow?" 

"It is our deep grief that the village did not appear."

"Instead, what is asked of us in the quiet terrain of our inner conversations is to hold these regrets with gentleness, acknowledging who we were at the time we made those choices."

"What if, however, the feelings we have when we pass through these zones of destruction are actually arising from the land itself? What if it is the grief of the forest registering in our bodies and psyches - the sorrow of the redwoods, voles, sorrel, ferns, owls, and deer, all those who lost their homes and lives as a result of this plunder of living beings?" 

"To live a life of soul means living with sensitivity to the plight of the planet."

"Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what our minds and bodies expect." 

"We, too, are meant to embody a vivid and animated life, to live close to our wild souls, our wild bodies and minds. We were meant to dance and sing, play and laugh unselfconsciously, tell stories, make love, and take delight in this brief but privileged adventure of incarnation." 

"We become acutely aware that there is no 'out there'; we have one continuous existence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing." 

"Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liefloff concludes, 'what was once man's confident expectation for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain." 

"Another facet of loss at this gate concerns the expectation of purpose in our lives. Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need."

"We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves. We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world with uniformity and mediocrity." 

"To be left with a 'shrunken residue' or to walk around 'possessed by the dullest parts' of ourselves is a great loss."

"To not be cut off, however, we need to be moving in a rhythm that is syncopated with that of the oaks and willows, heartbeats and touch. We must recall the original cadence of the soul."

"When that emptiness appeared, the arms of community were there to hold me, helping me to endure the terror of that aloneness. It was because I felt held and loved that I was able to descend into these places of darkness." 

"To be empty, to feel empty, is to live in the wasteland near the gates of death. This is intolerable to the soul. We were not meant to live such shallow lives."

"When we feel hesitant or uncertain of our worthiness to touch our sorrows, knowing these gates are there offers us a way to connect with our losses, wounds, and disappointments." 

"The powerful presence of the family and community of the individual who is ill broadens the context of illness to include the entire village. This recognizes that everyone is impacted by the illness. This is powerful medicine, as it frees the individual from having to carry the weight of the illness alone, which, as we have seen is a major preoccupation of the Western mind."

"Ritual offers two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release. Containment offers the holding space for the ones in grief. It provides the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of both the known and unknown layers of sorrow."

"Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow."

"Our activism is directly connected to our heart's ability to respond to the world."

"Ritual signals to the psyche that a different order has been established, one that invites alternative styles of behavior and modes of social engagement."

"Ritual can bring us into that state of togetherness, and there we can remember our deeper affinity and communality."

"Life is far too complex to rely solely on our intellect. We need the invisible hands of Spirit to shelter us, to support us, and to offer us the nourishment comfort that comes from that Other World. This concert between the human and the sacred is ancient; it is held in the bones. Trust this bond. It is our healing ground."

"The truth is we need both the vital exhalation of community and the renewing inhalation of our interior lives for our grief to move and change over our long walk with sorrow. Our healing is in 'every small contracting and expanding.'"

"I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy." - Rilke 

"The most commonly noted obstacle, perhaps, is that we live in a flatline culture, one that avoids depths of feeling."

"When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction, or anesthesia."

"It is our job to openly grieve for the disappearance of wetlands, the destruction of forests, the shrinking whale populations, the erosion of soil, and on and on. We know the litany of loss, but we have collectively neglected our emotional response to this emptying of our world. We need to see and participate in grief rituals in every part of this country."

"We are here for such a short time, and the call to truly live is something to which we each must respond."

"Whatever the experience, grief offers a revelation: in the midst of great loss, we find ourselves in the presence of the sacred."

"Coming to trust darkness takes time and often involves many visits to this land."

"How do we say goodbye? How do we acknowledge all that has held beauty and value in our lives - those we love, those who touched our lives with kindness, those whose shelter allowed us to extend ourselves into the world? How do we let go of sunsets and making love, pomegranates and walks on the bluff? And yet, we must. We must release the entire, fantastic world with one last breath."

"There is another face to this grief of saying goodbye. We must acknowledge the sorrow that others will feel with our death. This is an especially tender sorrow, one we must bear in our soul, the consequence of having been privileged to enter another's heart."

I Hope We Choose Love - Kai Cheng Thom 2019

 

[quotes] The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk 2014

  

[quotes] Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm 1941

 

 

[quotes] Hospicing Modernity - Vanessa Machado de Oliveira 2021

 

 

[quotes] A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics - Hadas Thier 2020

 

"At its core, capitalism was defined by Marx as a social relation of production. He meant that profits are not the result of good accounting or the inventive ideas of the superrich, but are instead the outcome of an exploitative relationship between two classes of people: bosses and workers."

"The division of society into haves and have-nots did not gently come to pass, and certainly not through the frugalness and intelligence of a small elite. It was the outcome of a violent upheaval, which forced large swaths of the population from their lands and traditional means of self-sufficiency. As we'll see, laws and coercive menas had to be employed to discipline a new class of laborers. Further, political revolutions discussed below placed a new capitalist elite at the helm of states, which could systematically repress the struggles of the dispossessed, advance markets and plunder abroad, and tend to other needs of the burgeoning elite. The violence, coercion, legislation, and upheavals necessary for the birth of this new system evince just how unnatural and vicious the road to capitalism was."

"As long as peasants and their families had some economic independence, obligation to serve their feudal lords was quite transparent - landowners and the state had to physically wrest a portion of the peasants' harvest through rent and taxes. Under the guise of freedom and democracy, the new landless wage laborers were 'free' to sell their labor-power to whomever they chose... or face starvation."

"To presume that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to presume that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity. Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over process, things, and social relations that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is presumed to work as an appropriate guide - an ethic - for all human action."

"The bosses also get a big discount when they purchase labor-power. A good deal of unpaid work also contributes heavily toward its reproduction: for instance, childbirth, childcare, food preparation, laundry, and household cleaning, to name a few."

"Yet even if we limit ourselves more narrowly to paid labor that goes into producing your subsistence, if all things were fair and just, you would give over to your boss only the amount of time that it takes to reproduce the value of your labor-power."

"Using this definition, we see that wealth and poverty do not determine class, rather they are manifestations of it. The bosses are thus not defined by the degree of their extravagance. At the same time, society's poor do not represent an 'underclass' who, due to lack of employment or wealth, stand outside of society. Poverty is an integral part of the experience of the working class, and unemployment is just a stone's throw away for most workers."

"As a 2018 Oxfam report revealed, the richest forty-two people own the same combined wealth as the world's poorest 3.7 billion. In the US, the wealth of the three richest people equals that of the bottom half of the population. This gap grows by the day."

"For Marxists, understanding the system's propensity to break down is central to our analysis of capitalism, as well as the potential for its revolutionary overthrow. We've seen that at its best, a 'healthy' capitalist economy depends on exploitation, poverty, oppression, and environmental destruction in order to function."

"Understanding capitalist crisis is central to the theory and politics of revolutionary Marxism. The volatility and destruction brought upon by endemic, periodic crises make capitalism a fundamentally precarious system, and at the same time open the way toward class struggle and the potential for revolution."

"So, for instance, a 'surplus' of housing is part of what led to the recession that began in 2008. But this is not because there isn't a need for homes! It's just that people don't have the money to buy homes."

"Speculation can take off and snowball quickly because much of bourgeois economics rests on a delusional premise that markets will always expand."

"In the 1970s, what became known as the 'neoliberal revolution' overthrew much of the regulatory structures that were imposed on finance in the wake of the Great Depression. We'll discuss neoliberalism further later. This decade saw the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement and floating exchange rates, increased capital mobility, deregulation, and privatization of social benefits, such as pensions. Deregulation opened the door to an explosion of currency markets and a drive to 'securitize' everything... Neoliberalism has meant, in short, the financialization of everything."

"The ideology of neoliberalism thus served as a blueprint to attack the working class. Speedups, increased productivity, and declining wages transferred wealth from the bottom rungs of society to the top. Social costs were meanwhile passed on to working families through cuts to public services and welfare. The desired outcome of this restructuring was growing profitability for the ruling class alongside staggering inequality."

"But the twin features of neoliberalism - economic polarization and deregulation - gave rise to contradictions that would implode down the line: overaccumulation, mountains of debt, and soaring speculative bubbles. Rapid accumulation gave way to overproduction."

"In keeping with neoliberal principles, the US government rescued the financial system without violating the concept of private ownership of the system. In the wake of the crisis, when financial reform entered political discussion, banks and their lobbyists succeeded in dictating the terms of the debate, resulting in largely preserving the status quo."

"But thus far the ruling class has never found a crisis it wasn't able to get out of - by making the working class pay for it."

"Mozambique, one of the poorest nations in the world, holds public debt equal to 70 percent of its GDP. Over 60 percent of it is owed to foreign institutions. The so-called 'emerging markets' became a popular investment destination for speculators searching for high-yield returns. They readily lapped up a record of $1.4 trillion wroth of debt from emerging markets' governments and companies. But when prices of commodities produced in the Global South fell, booming growth slowed, and speculators responded by pulling back investments and calling in debts."

"Profits cannot be created without the exploitation of labor at the point of production, even if large sums are traded and lost."

"We live in a society where every decision made by those with power is driven by how much money can be made. In a nutshell, 'exchange-value' rules over 'use-value'. Profits over human beings."

"Workers (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically) have our hands on the gears of production. If we collectively withdraw our labor-power, along with it, we withdraw the means to turn a profit. Without profits, the system cannot survive."

[quotes] Adopted Territory - Eleana J. Kim 2010

 

"In their accounts the transnationally adopted child must be viewed as being fully embedded in and embodying cultural worlds and social relations, with values and meanings attaching to her as she passes across borders of nation and family. Otherwise, those prior histories and relationships risk being marginalized, erased, or devalued in her radical transformation from needy third world orphan to privileged first world citizen."

"As Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp note, 'Throughout history, state power has depended directly and indirectly on defining normative families and controlling populations.' In modernizing South Korea, control of the population was a key concern of the developmentalist state."

"This Janus-faced nature of the American military occupation - exploitative and humanitarian - has characterized the neo-colonial relationship between America and Korea since the 1950s. As Nancy Abelmann and John Lie write in describing the role of the United States in South Korea: "Through military and civilian contacts, the United States became at once an object of material longing and materialistic scorn, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder."

"Adoption served as a way for the state to regulate its mixed-blood population through the management of bodies and sexuality and to simultaneously maintain good will with American citizens."

"This event and personal narratives of other U.S. veterans of the Korean War underscore how the generic humanity of the children allowed U.S. soldiers to redeem their own particular humanity as Americans whose acts of charity reinstated their personal and national moral exceptionalism in the context of a dehumanizing war."

"Whereas Koreans in the West often framed them as long-lost members of the Korean community and looked upon them with a mixture of guilt, pity, and probing curiosity, adoptive parents and adoption social workers seemed to impose a whitewashed version of adoption as a highly successful social experiment."

"They contrast their proactive parenting with that of the parents of adult Korean adoptees, and while there may be some truth to this comparison many adult adoptees feel that this attitude of enlightenment disguises a defensiveness among adoptive parents who may be comfortable with providing cultural heritage in the form of multiculturalist consumer practices but who are also deeply uncomfortable with issues of racial difference and their own white privilege."

"Adoptees see white parents' inability to grasp histories of racism and experiences of racialized minorities in the United States as a problem of white privilege, which also blinds them to the inevitability that their children will fit into the nation differently than they do."

"Many adoptees feel that the discourses of pluralism and color-blindness that may have encouraged and celebrated their parents' choices to raise a nonwhite child hampered their own identity formation because they were left isolated when faced with the realities of racial difference and discrimination."

"Unlike second-generation ethnic Americans for whom cultural awakenings or interest is often grounds for strengthening family ties and belonging, for transracial adoptees this assertion may instead be the grounds for greater individuation and differentiation from adoptive family."

"For critics of adoption, however, broader structural inequalities and political circumstances inform their own moral perspective, whether they see it as an imperfect system that is in dire need of reform or as an unconscionable practice grounded in colonial power relations and centuries of white privilege."

"Seeing Korean women date white men could be particularly galling to some male adoptees who realized that the heterosexual stratifications that have emasculated them in their adoptive countries were also mirrored and replicated in Korea. They thereby witness how neocolonial relationships with the United States have produced a sexual economy in Korea in which it seems that white men, no matter how physically unattractive or morally repugnant, possess greater social capital than do Korean men."

"The suicide not only brought the hidden histories of adoptees who, in Minhee's words, 'had less of a chance to survive' but also a recognition of the limits of cultural citizenship for adoptees in Korea - who, caught between nation-states and cultural locations, can die as foreigners in thier so-called motherland. It also demonstrated clearly how adoptee kinship fills in for the absence of genealogical ties to family and nation for adoptees in Korea."

"This rather flippant characterization depends upon a neoliberal logic of rational self-actualization that radically downplays the importance not only of state regulation but also of social relations and intimacy. For other adoptees, however, the ease with which this equation or 'huge trade' can be drawn, from needing to eat to wanting a 'fat-ass computer,' and from severed kinship ties and knowledge to a 'high-speed Internet connection,' points to some of the moral and ethical dangers in uncritical celebrations of transnational adoptees as exemplars of globalization."

"It was during the 1980s, in fact, when overseas adoption was actively encouraged by the state as a form of 'emigration' and tied to the state's population control project. This policy also construed oversea adoption as a form of 'civil diplomacy' prefiguring a surplus population of children as future bridge builders and eventually as productive supplies of Western knowledge and skills to further South Korea's economic development."

"Some adoptees now view adoption agencies as seeking to reproduce their own existence and legitimacy rather than uphold the best interests of the child in ways that resonate with the description of 'goal displacement' in South Korea adoptions offered by the social work scholar Rosemary Sarri and her colleagues. Goal displacement describes a condition in which 'organizations are under pressure to secure resources to maintain themselves.'"

"All these cases reveal how agencies focused less on family preservation than on processing children, often on the basis of minimal background investigation, to shuttle them quickly through the system to new parents overseas."

"The organization CCEJ, which was established in 1989 by some five hundred Korean lawyers, professors, and ministers under the leadership of Reverend So Kyong Sok, is widely regarded as the first civic organization in postauthoritarian South Korea."

"His masters thesis conceptualized a theology of birth mothers by drawing upon minjung and feminist theologies to argue that Korean birth mothers are part of the minjung, and as such they should be liberated from their guilt by reframing the relinquishment of their children from being an individual sin to one that is embedded in structures of inequality - namely those of capitalism and patriarchy."

"As this example suggests, the personal motivations of Koreans, especially those of Revereng Kim's generation, are entirely shaped by their membership in the Korean nation, local and national politics, and a moral vision for the future of the world, as well as of democracy in Korea..."

"What Dae-won articulated is similar to what Julia Paley in her study of social movements in postdictatorial Chile calls 'paradoxical participation,' in which the encouragement of civic participation actively recruits individuals into the neoliberal rollback of state services and thereby displaces state accountability onto self-regulating, 'responsibilized' subjects: 'Participation offered a sense of meaning to citizens at the same time as it limited avenues through which citizens could act.'"

"But under the 'clean break' paradigm instituted by international adoption law, being a good mother also required the full surrender of her child and taking on a lifetime of guilt and uncertainties."

"In this logic, the orphanage is, like the camp, a zone of indistinction in which children 'die' or are 'next to nothing,' and from which children must be 'rescued' in order to become full persons."