As we step out of our homes this September to go back to school, go back to work, go back to traveling, we might pause for a moment to look back into this home, this peculiar chamber of private life that, in one way or another, we couldn’t exit for some time. Perhaps the outside world appears strange, menacing, or deceitful. Maybe it was from staying inside for too long.

Today, after two decades of this rule by those beasts, capitalist domination endures because a subjectivity capable of emancipating itself is not able to emerge. When those thousands descended on Piazzale Kennedy in Genoa, when a collective subjectivity roared through the streets, the police of capitalist empire showed their fascist nature, as they have done many times since, in Ferguson, in Athens, in Santiago. But Western civilization is in agony. Maybe capitalism and the West are diverging. Either way, the capitalist kingdom of abstraction and accumulation remains strong while the living organism of humanity is breathless.

1. We Are All Terrorists Here A young cat is curling around the legs of Diyar Hesso—filmmaker, teacher, and one of the main organizers of the Rojava Film Commune in the city of Derbisiye, in the Canton of Cezîre. 1 As I watch the animal play, I hear Hesso say, “He’s Terrorist.” I look up confused. “His name,” Hesso explains, “the name of the cat is Terrorist.” And with a smile, “Because we’re all terrorists here.” 2 “Here” is the autonomous region of Rojava (West-Kurdistan),…

And then the lights went off. The glistening, glittering, blinking structure turned into a skeleton of blackness, with only a few lights remaining in the picture. On January 8, 2015, at 8:00 p.m., the Eiffel Tower was stripped of its spectacular illumination for six minutes following the orders of the Paris town hall, or someone in the higher ranks of the French nation’s government, who had decided that dimming the lights of the “iconic” monument in the “City of Light” would be an…