Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
These and other feminist practices depend on face-to-face interactions, a disposition to change, trust and shared experiences. New municipalism offers a great opportunity to experiment with these innovations. It is one we must embrace.
The very “incoherence” for which US and Canadian municipalists are criticized is a sign of a evolving movement grappling with historical problems on a civilizational scale.
President-elect Gabriel Boric is a testament to Chile’s changing tides. No longer afraid, a new generation—with help from the old—took to the streets on October 19th, 2019 to win back the rights that the Pinochet dictatorship had stripped away.
Based on their concrete situations, such as pollution, lack of housing, or lack of drinking water, people are able to build a relational power that challenges and changes reality.
We take the feminisation of politics to mean ‘making politics more feminist’, but that does not simply mean seeing more women in traditional positions of power.
I think these are the two conflicting urban visions today: the one is about a top-down enforced homogenization and zoning of the city, and then there is the possibility for the citizens themselves to engage autonomously in morphing their urban environment.
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.
Municipalist syndicalism broadly means democratizing unions as a means to democratizing local and regional public power. This is done through advancing an anti-racist dual power agenda for the labor movement by building and acting with communities of color on issues beyond the job.
In general, the power of the elite cannot be confronted by timidly asking or jumping to compromises. It can only be confronted by hampering the source of their power in the first place: the ability to make a profit.
The odds may be diminishing with each passing year of climate inaction, but it is more necessary than ever to sustain a hope that humanity can unite to reject authoritarian false solutions to the climate crisis and social inequities, embrace the potential for an enhanced quality of life beyond fossil-fueled capitalism, and begin to realize the dream of a liberated and truly interdependent global community of communities.
The goal is thus not to repeat the tightly-knitted knot and inherited linear understanding of power, but to weave a new political geography, a new terrain of distributed power. No longer is this a challenge of an expansive fiefdom to be owned and controlled, but a series of humans whose relationships need to be collectively organized.
One of the worst effects of capitalist realism is the endless bad-mouthing of alternatives to its toxicity. With this in mind, I’d like to share with you some extraordinary examples of imaginative prototyping exercises towards commons-oriented futures — presented by the very people who will bring them about in the face of darker possibilities.
