Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Thinking about the post-pandemic future and the scenarios that could emerge is as challenging as it is important. One cannot conceive of a more pressing issue for a progressive movement. Finding a workable response is thus of critical importance.
Given the rapidly changing attitudes towards care work and reproductive labor as our globalized society combats COVID-19, it may finally be time to recognize gender liberation as a practical and necessary achievement.
Trauma is not conducive to creative thinking. Which brings us to another paradox of these times ― how do we slow down enough so that we can fully utilize our neocortex and listen to our hearts while addressing the real urgency and opportunity of this moment?
Safe to say that these results reflect a clear crisis of representation alongside growing support for ecological and social transition, the defense of the commons, the advance of the feminisation of politics and a significant increase in citizen-led movements with representation on electoral lists.
I started to re-assess my assumption about who this letter would be directed to. When I looked up the dictionary definition – “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events” – and I recalled the way the world has changed since 2018, it became clearer where the power really is.
With us, the people.
When it comes to the feminist movement, monuments to individuals are “a standing historic lie” because women’s rights have been won “by a steady history of millions of women and men… working together at the best of times, separately at the worst.” Wagner believes that to honor individuals for such achievements today is to disempower the movement itself.
Swimming can be re-politicised to create a profusion of swimming commons, that both embed the value of playful public abundance and nurture an ethic of more-than-human care.
Although our chains may appear different, Kurds and Black Americans ultimately face the same oppressive system that continues to kill us and impose countless forms of violence upon us. With Rojava, we are trying to show that an alternative world is possible. Now, solidarity must become the bridge that unites us.
We can choose to believe the future is inescapably set in stone, and thereby make it so; or we can dare to create an opening for a different future, and so give us all a chance.
The Common Ground Collective’s successes and failures provide some useful insights into how to build new, effective mutual aid projects during this crisis and the next.
E-communitarian democracy (based fundamentally on direct democracy, but incorporating participatory and representative forms as well) both needs and will constantly build a rich network of provisional or long-lasting social organizations.
Deforestation is on the rise in megadiverse Colombia. Attempting to understand the complex and interconnected web of social, political, economic and environmental drivers of deforestation in Colombia – past and present, legal and illicit, direct and indirect – is critical.
