Democracy Rising 9: Facilitating Democratic Conversations, Part 1
What forms of self-governance will enhance our efforts to create resilient local communities?
Society
Deep adaptation – or climate justice?
The debates within XR often centre on a difference of approach between long standing members who were influenced by Dr Jem Bendell’s paper calling for “deep adaptation” and those who want to focus on climate justice and a rapid dismantling of “fossil fuel capitalism” to avoid the need for such adaption.
How Cooperation Birmingham went beyond crisis relief to build democracy
It’s not just about «seizing the means of production», we also need to co-produce alternative cosmovisions that liberate us from capitalist common sense and normalise horizontal relations based on mutual aid, cooperation and solidarity.
The place and (place-ness) of Occupy, ten years on
[T}he legacy of Occupy Wall Street was “something that touches our deepest spiritual yearning,” in a very un-Walzerian sense; “its practice says: ‘We will no longer live in hatred and competition. We will live in love and community.'”
Should we disrupt the Democratic Party or try to take it over?
When trying to figure out how they should interact with political parties, social movements face a common challenge: Should they push from without or seek to operate from within?
My Manifesto: Toward a Politics for Life
The most recent events tell us that the time has come for us to assume our responsibility as human beings who share a common destiny, and that implies the end of ideologies, not one or the other, but all of them, those of the left, center and right, and their replacement by the eco-political, generic and planetary consciousness of women and men.
The importance of reminding people to Look Up (over and over and over again)
Humanity, with its competing interests, its cultural myopia, its dominant economic philosophy that puts growth above all, will be hard to redirect from self-destruction—hopefully not in the case of a simple asteroid strike, but certainly in a multi-faceted slow acting, status-quo-disrupting crisis like ecological overshoot.
UK activists keep being acquitted by juries. What does that mean for protest?
When juries deliver verdicts that offend the political establishment, they are commonly termed ‘perverse’ – and Boris Johnson’s government has been experiencing a veritable plague of perversity in recent months.
Amitav Ghosh: The Nutmeg’s Curse
As we’ve seen, the few environmental movements that have succeeded in the long run are almost all built around certain ideas of the relationship between humans and certain spaces.
Not a Democracy
This is not a democracy. But it may be… soon… if we just acknowledge that it is not democracy. And start working toward making something that is.
When Reparations Grow From the Grassroots
This whole idea of the ‘land of the free,’ this idea of democracy and triumphalism, is false,” Farmer says. “So both on a symbolic level and a material level, it’s very hard to reckon with, because [making reparations] means undermining white supremacy.”
Time for a Little “Self-Gentrification”
Carter’s investment in her community and in developing her personal home across the street from her family home is part of her identity, but is also a wealth-building mechanism, the most common successful method in North America. She wants it for her community: something she calls “self-gentrifying in the South Bronx.”
