Who are we?
We are a leftist collective. Our outlook is materialist and feminist. For us, the rhizome is no mere metaphor. It is a practice: a way of existing, of struggling, of doing politics.
We refuse to see ourselves as a center, as a fixed structure, as a hierarchical collective. Like the rhizome, we sprout in every direction at once. We grow. Our connections are always moving, our shapes always shifting. Among us, any point can become a beginning. Any one of us can send out an impulse, trace a line, weave a tie. There is nothing above us and nothing below. Only a web of comradeship, of struggle, of shared experience.
Patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, racism, and the other relations of power are not abstractions to us. They are material structures, concrete and real, shaping our bodies, our labor, our time, our places. Our materialism rises from the critical analysis of these concrete class conditions, and from there it sets the course of our collective struggle. That is why our collective labor is, at the same time, an organized fight: for access to common resources, for a life worth living, for collective autonomy.
We do not believe in any “pure” history. We do not believe in a single, unchanging identity. We are a multiplicity, formed inside many experiences, many positions, many struggles.
Our political work stands on decentered, comradely, collective relations. We do not gather around a center. We organize through the ties we forge with one another, and with every struggle that meets ours. We see ourselves not only in the Caucasus, but inside, between, and alongside the wider struggles of our region and of the world.
We welcome rupture, we welcome passage. When structures close in on us, we draw collective lines of flight, tearing the limits down, transforming them, weaving new connections elsewhere. We know that anything built can turn to stone. To keep from turning to stone, we choose to remain in movement, in critique, in process. So we stay in movement, in critique, in process. Always.
To be rhizome, for us, means
growing without waiting for any fixed point of origin,
building bonds without hierarchy,
turning ruptures into tools instead of fearing them,
and fighting inside multiplicity and comradeship, sharing and protecting our power to act.
Why Rhizome?
The rhizome has no center. It has no hierarchy.
It does not rise on points. It rises on lines, and on the connections between them.
The rhizome knows no fixed beginning. It exists by connecting, by spreading, by transforming. Its strength does not come from a lone root. It lives in the many lines that open in every direction.
The tree system is its opposite. It rises on hierarchy. It produces a center. It fixes directions. It bends whatever differs from it into submission. The logic of the tree is a form of power built on control, on order, on stability.
We are weary of trees felled before they could grow and bloom. We have grieved enough springs that never arrived.
We refuse this logic.
The rhizome slips away from control. It will not fit a fixed form. It will not bow to a center. It branches. When it meets an obstacle, it changes course, but it never lets the obstacle pull it from its path. Through everything in the way, it traces its path anew. It digs deeper. It never tires of throwing out its roots, again and again. You can cut it. You can break it apart. Still it keeps branching, along its old lines or along new ones.
The rhizome breaks, and rises again.
The rhizome is torn down, and surfaces somewhere else.
The rhizome is uprooted, and only spreads further.
It does not reproduce. It transforms.
It does not stand still. It moves.
It is not one. It is many.
The rhizome that cracks walls, that climbs and overruns them, sprouts again even when uprooted, reaches out again even when broken. It can neither be destroyed nor tamed.
Its resistance, its endurance: this is its revolutionary force.
This is how we work.
This is how we spread.
We are rhizome.
For free and equal society!