The Hierophant Meeting was intended to help us reassess our position, reflect on our strengths and weaknesses and collectively create an updated vision of where we want Guerrilla Translation to be. With a few changes on the horizon, it couldn’t have been better timed.
It’s difficult to hold on to your ideals in any industry that is trying to thrive and expand within the capitalist system. Job competitiveness will ensure that wages are kept low as workers are forced to undercut each other until the work no longer provides a living wage. Meanwhile, the revenue generated by the industry is invested in technology that will eventually make the workers obsolete. The translation industry is no different.
When a language dies, ancestral knowledge is lost and the culture begins to disappear. Our human capacity for creativity becomes restricted as we increasingly adopt more homogenous points of view. We begin to lose faculties such as tolerance and the practice finding harmony within diversity. Eventually, we begin to deteriorate as a society.
What better argument to justify these pockets of poverty than to say that they’re poor because they want to be that way? Because that’s just how they are. That’s just how they want to be. Anti-Roma racism is actually very useful for justifying that capitalism works. I mean, it leaves the system intact. It’s not that the system couldn’t eradicate poverty, it’s not that there isn’t enough work for everyone; it’s just that the poor are poor because they want to be.
Hi! We’re Guerrilla Translation, a non-hierarchical translation collective run according to principles of feminist economics, mutual care and political solidarity.
As we know, the left has not been exempt from colonialism throughout its history. It has generally remained loyal to the modern Western idea of a historical continuity that aims to showcase Western communities as the most “advanced” in the world. The idea of “colonial commons” proposes that the new commons left is still dragging around this old problem inherited from the old left.
Bats, mosquitos, rats and pangolins are not to be blamed for epidemics. The fault lies with us and what we do with the ecosystems that these animals live in—how we manipulate and bring these animals into a new, artificial environment. That is the real cause of the coronavirus, something that will probably cost us a global recession. In other words, mutilating ecosystems comes with a very steep price.
“How a person lives and interacts with others and with nature is called ubuntu. This indigenous knowledge reminds us that we are humans thanks to mother nature. She belongs to us and we belong to her. But we have forgotten who we are and that we have a deep connection to nature.”
The proliferation of hydroelectric dams is one of the ecosocial conflicts – or new wars – creating the most victims around the world. In Brazil, Colombia, Honduras and Ecuador, people who oppose these dams in defense of the commons are criminalised as ‘terrorists’, persecuted and even murdered.
A more critical argument in societies with a lack of environmental awareness such as ours is that of food sovereignty. Since genetically modified organisms are always developed by megacorporations, the farmers lose control over the means of production and end up doomed to poverty and subject to market fluctuations in order to acquire the subsistence goods. This can bring periods of prosperity, but also of malnutrition, poverty and migration to impoverished slums. Only the richest survive.
Feminist resistance must be anti-racist or it is not feminism at all. Of course, as feminists, we are not immune to assuming patriarchal, racist, Eurocentric, classist and transphobic practices, because as activists, we have been socialised, just like everyone else, by a hegemonic, colonial system that rules the western and westernised world. Therefore, in order to eradicate this oppression, we must practice denunciation, reparation and restitution.
The GT Handbook is a document that welcomes the reader into the world of Guerrilla Translation with a narrative, colourful approach. It is aimed at those who have joined or are interested in joining the collective, are researching our model or have an interest in a practical understanding of Open Value Cooperativism and/or Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs).