For me, the Hydra is a narrative character since one of the tasks is to change the stories we tell. A key point of departure is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s important book, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. The hydra was the name that the men of property gave to the ubiquitous desertions, revolts and full blown revolutions by peasants, slaves, servants, sailors, soldiers, and indigenous people between the 17th and 18th centuries against the building of the colonial foundations of trans-Atlantic capitalism, until the new capitalist imperial order was finally able to cut off its many heads. The Hydra is both part of the story needing to be changed and a way to change it. The story Linebaugh and Rediker tell also teaches us that revolt and revolution are not possible without re-making something common. In the old story, the reference was to the Hydra of lake Lerna from Greek mythology, the monster created by Hera that Hercules faces in his second labour. But the hydra also has a robust presence as a meme in contemporary popular culture, hence its methodological and theoretical significance for me. The key thing about this character is its lesson for our understanding of the power of cooperation, a seed of common-being. Elitist political theory, which is the bulk of political philosophy, has never stopped humiliating subalternized people for their powerlessness.”Look at how they cooperate with their oppression!, Look at the market, the media, nationalism, look at the panopticon!” As a response, the slogan “where there is power there is resistance” is rather lame. Yes, there are weapons of the weak. But cooperation is not identical to itself and if there are weapons of the weak it is because cooperation is time-biased. Cooperation in the present, and as the present, is organized by the rules of dominant social institutions into an interlocking system of oppressions. But cooperation also has its own counter-environmental history hiding in the Hydra’s lair. For cooperation also has a foundation in the history of the planet and for this reason in the human body itself as the inhabitation of the past.