Hello from Inhabit. We’re still locked out of Twitter, but you can catch us on Instagram (@inhabit.global) and, of course, here in the monthly newsletter Territories.
We’ve got two things for you this time around. The first is an archival text we’re excited to share, a blast from 1970 that’s worth a fresh look today. The second is our monthly reading section, with links to some of the most on-point writing to be found recently.
The New American Revolution
Tom Hayden’s lost vision of ‘power from below’
Everyone knows how the radical Sixties lost ground to the reaction of the Seventies. But what if events had turned out differently? You can practically feel that troubled era straining against itself in this 1970 text, available online for the first time. In this excerpt, SDS guru Tom Hayden imagines a revolutionary way forward that brings Black Power and countercultural “free territories” together into a dynamic strategy that could break the political impasse of his time. For those interested in theories of self-determination, dual power, and autonomous zones, Hayden’s essay is still a powerful read fifty years later.
The Territories will establish once and for all the polarized nature of the Mother Country. No longer will Americans be able to think comfortably of themselves as a homogeneous society with a few extremists at the fringes. No longer will politicians and administrators be able to feel confident in their power to govern the entire US. Beneath the surface of official power, the Territories will be giving birth to new centers of power.
Monthly Reading
Idris Robinson on the George Floyd Rebellion
Shemon on the Black counter-insurgency
Sanjana Varghese on technological control
Ann Neumann on power & the pandemic
Mushon Zer-Aviv on algorithmic determinism and utopian imagination
Kai Heron & Jodi Dean on climate revolution
Anne Boyer on practices of freedom
Jade Delisle on indigenous ecologies
Claire Evans on the biological and the computational
You’re on Path B,
Inhabit