This first volume contains some initial scattered writings dated to late 2016 in the Capitalist Calendar. We describe this era now as The Interlude; the systems of governance that had regulated the world throughout the second half of the 20th century were breaking down, and the wage labor foundation of the economy was disingegrating concurrently. The latter we now recognize as posthumous capitalism: surplus value extraction from surplus labor was disappearing, but the form would continue, zombie-like, for decades more. Partisans were still finding their strength, just beginning to understand their rebellions not as protests but as the construction of worlds.

The ascension to power of a fascist president in the United States came at the end of the hottest year to date, but also during an upsurge of rebellion that could only grow. The fractures that had long been spreading under the veneer of civil society were finally revealed, and ever fewer people seemed to care about democracy. It would still take time for partisans to fully inhabit their own worlds, to complete their exodus to such a degree that the twin prisons of capital and state faded to a background grey and their lives became more than mere survival. The war had been ongoing since the origin of control and domination, but the battles in this era regained their intensity and their clarity.

We will be transmitting these archival notes intermittently over the coming years. From where we are it is hard to understand a world measured by value and time, a regime of government and police. It is hard to imagine a single world, when here there are so many different communes, so many different worlds, all with their own truths. So this archival research is for our own sake, for the sake of memory and understanding. But it is also for the sake of those partisans who fought in that era; it is imperative that voices and tactics, poetry and violence, the whole arsenal of world building and living and struggling are not forgotten. We forge a secret agreement between past generations and the present one, and send memory backwards so that it might be seized in a moment of danger.

-The Committee for Combative Memory