As I often say, these pieces are some of my favorites to write on Substack. There is nothing more pleasurable to me than sharing the work of great incisive writers. It reminds me of the lesson that Borges taught us, writers. You see, Borges saw himself more as a reader than a writer. Interestingly, too, the bibliophile first read Cervantes in English and Walt Whitman in German. The takeaway is this: to improve our writing, we must always be reading. That’s why I cut out time each day to read. So, on that note, let’s dig in.
First up is a piece by Ammar titled “Questioning the Hierarchies of Love.” In Ammar’s essay, they tell us upfront that they will explore romance, friendship, sex, kinship, and the capitalist form through a multitude of lenses—materialist, queer, decolonial, and anarchist. In this way, they suggest “we might love without turning freedom into disposability, ambiguity into irresponsibility, or non-hierarchy into indifference.”
The opening is personal; they speak of their desire to “nest” with someone, and how nesting involves doing mundane things with someone, that closeness that we begin to feel with another being as our toothbrushes become entangled, our groceries become one, and so forth. Ammar is currently not nesting; they remain by themself. Yet they still find love and, they add, “love keeps finding me in its own strange ways, in different localities and geographies and densities and shapes and forms, sometimes through somebody physically around every day and sometimes through somebody whose relationship with me has somehow survived whole countries being placed between us.”
They’re not concerned about their friendships being non-romantic and question what puts romance in a category of its own. After all, they note, friendships can evoke feelings in individuals similar to those categorized as romantic—tenderness, intimacy, trust, frustration, jealousy, etc.
Ammar proceeds to explain that the historical distinction between friend and lover was once not so differentiated as it is now. For instance, they note, during Shakespeare’s era in early modern English, “friend” and “lover” could both mean a close male friendship. In South Asia, and in Urdu, the classification is even odder.
Ammar explains:
The classical Urdu ghazal revolves around the ʿāshiq and maʿshūq, the lover and beloved, yet as Frances Pritchett’s Digital Urdu Ghazal Reader explains, the beloved can remain deliberately ambiguous — male, female, human, divine — while the lover inhabits a stylised poetic universe where erotic, mystical, philosophical and social registers continually overlap. The point is not to anachronistically announce that the ghazal was practising twenty-first-century relationship anarchy. It was not. The point is more basic: our own literary history refuses the smug modern assumption that one universal category called heterosexual romantic couple-love has always been the transparent object toward which every language of ishq has pointed.
So, Ammar asks, what does it mean to be just friends? They find it puzzling.
That said, Ammar makes it clear that they aren’t saying they don’t want friendships without commitment, even though they want anarchist-based relationships. They state, “I want commitments whose contents emerge from what the people involved have actually chosen and built rather than automatically downloading an entire package from the label.” (They are also not a fan of dating apps.)
They also delve into the intricacies of queer kinship, explaining that cishet relationships are not on one end of a spectrum with queer relationships on the other. They add, “Queer people can reproduce couple supremacy, possessiveness, rigid domestic roles, private property, and complete social isolation.” But what makes queer kinship and their relationships important is their historicity.
What interests Ammar the most is freedom and interdependence in relationships, both of which are healthy and break out of the capitalist structure.
The piece is meaty and long, but it’s well worth the read.
The second piece is a devastating poem, Dāgh, by Meditations On Permafrost. Brace yourself when reading it. It’s emotionally difficult to get through the poem without crying.
The subject is about Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Iran. On February 28, 2026, the U.S. military committed a war crime by bombing the school, killing 160 innocent people, mostly girls.1 Meditations on Permafrost takes the horrific event and honors the dead and those left behind.
Here are a few haunting lines from the poem:
The roof was ravaged, dark flames rising,
the scene was all smoke and frantic eyes and
screaming parents forced their way inside.
Someone pulled him back by his shoulders.
Habeeb. They are all dead. They are all dead.
He knew by the sound, then by silence,
what he’d been taught all his life then.
And the Minab flows into the Strait of Hormuz.
The poem is superb in that it personalizes geopolitics. The Strait of Hormuz is not just some vague place, but where people, families, in this case, little girls, live, go to school, play, but now all of them are dead, obliterated by a bomb sent by the Trump regime. And for what? Trump’s bellicose idiocy, that’s what.
Do read the entire poem. It’s beautifully lyrical; the imagery is rich, yet horrific, but we must remember that we read such things to honor the dead and victims of such unnecessary atrocities. You’re doing it for those girls and their families. I thank Meditations on Permafrost for penning this invaluable poem.
The third and final piece is by Anti-Capitalist Musings, and titled “Putinism is a Direct Threat to Britain. The Left Must See It.”
In this piece, Anti-Capitalist Musings does not mince words, making it clear that Putinism is a clear and present danger to Great Britain, stating, “We may now be entering the most dangerous period in Anglo-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War.” But he’s careful to note how it should be responded to, adding, “that should frighten us without driving us towards either of the comforting positions available in British politics: pretending Putinism represents no serious threat, or believing that every escalation undertaken in the name of confronting it must therefore be prudent. The danger lies precisely in the fact that both propositions can be false at the same time.”
Furthermore, the essay, as noted in the title, is directed at leftists. He acknowledges the problems of the expansion of NATO eastward, as leftists argue, and the way in which Washington is eager to destroy Russia and profit from arms deals. However, that does not excuse Putinism or the threat it poses to both Great Britain and the rest of the world. Let’s recall: Putin has annexed Crimea, invaded sovereign countries, Ukraine (2014 and 2022) and Georgia (2008), where he’s slaughtered scores of innocent civilians, belligerently and recently threatened to shut off gas to Hungary, and carried out terrorist activities on the soil of Great Britain.
The point that I agree with the most in Anti-Capitalist Musings’s analysis is the false notion amongst many leftists, far too many, that the U.S. is the only imperialist country on the planet. That is false and a poor understanding of the complexity of geopolitics, especially when it comes to Putin’s imperialist vision of Russia. Even worse, as Anti-Capitalist Musings notes, once that premise is accepted, numerous assertions and biases fall like illogical dominoes. Namely, that all other countries, such as Russia, Iran, or China, are de facto anti-imperialists (again, utterly false). Most notably, as Anti-Capitalist Musings states:
imperialism has never required competing powers to possess equal economic weight. The world system is hierarchical. States occupy different positions within it while still attempting to secure privileged markets, strategic resources, territorial depth and political subordination beyond their borders. Russia’s relative economic weakness helps explain why coercive state and military power have assumed such importance in its attempt to compensate for that weakness. Calling Russia imperialist does not mean pretending it is another United States. It means recognising that a subordinate position within the global hierarchy does not prevent a capitalist state from pursuing domination over states weaker than itself
To put it bluntly, it boggles my mind that leftists do not understand, or willfully ignore, the fact that Putin is a kleptocratic mafioso thief who robbed the country blind with the aid of similar mafioso thieves. He allowed casino capitalism to run amok because it benefitted him the most once he assumed power, and Trump and his cronies are trying to implement a similar model here by hollowing out the U.S. and hoarding the wealth for themselves.
Even worse, for Great Britain, there have been, as noted above, attacks on their own soil by the Russians. (Don’t even get me started on Russia’s Wagner group and its terrorism and military violence in African countries.) As Anti-Capitalist Musings notes, in 2018 Russian military intelligence officers fatally poisoned Dawn Sturgess after they brought in the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury. The final report of her death stated that Putin was "morally responsible" for her death—he himself authorized the GRU operation. Sturgess found a bottle of perfume with the deadly nerve agent at a charity collection bin and sprayed herself with it. The inquiry stated that the bottle contained enough Novichok to “kill thousands.” That’s right, thousands. Sturgess was just an ordinary citizen with, as Anti-Capitalist Musings writes, “no connection to espionage, Russia, or the conflict between states.” But this was not the only operation. In March 2024, in Leyton, someone committed arson, burning down a warehouse with humanitarian aid and Starlink equipment set to be delivered to Ukraine. Prosecutors discovered that the attack was carried out “on behalf of the Wagner Group, [and the] conspirators had also discussed burning businesses belonging to a Russian critic and kidnapping him.” All of these are gravely serious crimes that were committed by one state against another.
Of course, as Anti-Capitalist Musings notes, “the left needs a politics of defense without a politics of rearmament.” That’s the tricky part. Russia’s threat to Great Britain is not illusory, but it should not devolve into propaganda and arms deals that enable war profiteers to manipulate the state’s purse or the public’s perception. The same applies to Ukraine. Ukraine needs continued support via arms replenishment. And the same goes for all of Europe against the threat of Russia (the Baltic States know this all too well). But promoting and engaging in self-defense does not mean falling into the trap of promoting old, anachronistic forms of British or European imperialism.
Anti-Capitalist Musings registers his arguments in dialectical and paradoxical terms, but that’s necessary when teasing out contemporary geopolitics, addressing the entanglement of casino/mafioso capitalism in both Russia and the U.S., Putinism, the expansion of NATO, the hierarchical structure of imperialism, Washington’s overarching imperialist role on the world stage, and Russia’s threat to Great Britain. Anti-Capitalist Musings provides invaluable insights into these themes, their interplay, and how we move forward in thinking about them.
All right, folks, that’s a wrap for this time ’round! As I always say, be kind to one another. Until next time, much love.
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