Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Nonviolent Revolutionary Ecocultural Prefigurative Direct Action, while quite a mouthful, means to propose a route out of what’s broken in our politics. It’s a way of suggesting what we do rather than to pound screws.
The initiative of the Movement for Black Lives needs to be picked up by others. The vision can be enlarged to advance key goals of each of the progressive movements operating today.
Campaigns are perfect for turning away from defensive fights and moving back into what works: Going on the offensive by framing an issue into a demand, choosing a decider, planning a series of actions then escalating and growing. The issue can be local, regional, national, highly ambitious in its demand or less so. We get to choose — it’s an existential move of empowerment.
Olympia Assembly started in March of 2017, amidst ecological and political catastrophe. It was created as a communal assembly project, coalescing around points of unity such as direct democracy, non-hierarchy, ecology, mutual aid, and direct action.
It’s called creating direct action campaigns. Choose a demand that is winnable and a target that can yield the demand, gather a group of people eager to win and willing to focus their attention, and begin.
For the past year I’ve been book touring to over 60 cities and towns across the United States and have been asked repeatedly for a direct action manual that addresses challenges we face now. The requests come from people concerned about a variety of issues. While each situation is in some ways unique, organizers in multiple movements face some similar problems in both organization and action.
In the face of climate change, we have the dual challenge of both resisting new fossil fuel infrastructure projects and building a resilient, sustainable and equitable economy in the shell of the old.
As we found out on May 3rd, 2016, coal comes in a variety of shapes, textures, and sizes.
In the south of Spain, the street is the collective living room.
In this rare television interview with Bill Moyers, the poet, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry discusses his vision for society living in harmony with the planet.
