Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I loved the book’s assertion that “unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire and spectacle, and, most important, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation”.
Despite their valiant efforts, Barrett contends that organizers today have yet to secure the “wide-reaching, concrete accomplishments of earlier movements.” In this interview, he expands on why this is the case, what particular campaigns have done to win meaningful victories in recent years, and where he sees glimmers of hope today.
Stopping the destructive effects of industrial, capitalist civilization has now become the defining challenge of our age. If successful grassroots struggles can be linked with equally hopeful movements for real political change, then there is hope for the future.
An ontology is basically a set of principles or assumption about how the world works; about the fundamental ‘nature of reality’.
The Massive Small compendium is a sourcebook of ideas, tools and tactics to help build viable urban neighbourhoods. It is a bold and ambitious project aimed at ‘changing hearts and minds’,
How did we do that? The possibility of Rapid Transition, by Andrew Simms and Peter Newell, STEPS Centre & New Weather Institute, 2017 shows what we can learn about rapid change through examples from history and the present day.
Individuals do make choices, but these are facilitated and constrained by the society in which they live. Therefore, it may be more useful to question the system that requires many of us to travel and consume energy as we do.
What I’m trying to say is, wealth and power are incredibly tightly concentrated and to look at a grossly unequal system and say every person has equal responsibility to fix the mess we’re in just doesn’t make any sense. We all have some power and some responsibility, but some have much more than others.
Are we ready for deep changes in society, beyond all its superficial changes? Progressives need to ask themselves some serious questions, going beyond cost-benefit analyses to rationalise progress. If by “progressives” we mean people who want to fight both neoliberal dogmas and populist demagogy, then the question that progressives should ask themselves, in the 21st century, is: are we ready for a deep change in society, beyond all its superficial changes?
I think it also matters politically, because spirituality, a whole life lived in the way Potter was describing, is of enormous importance in the struggle for social change. This may sound odd given the common image of mystics as people who are removed from the world, but I’m convinced that spiritual experience is one of the keys to the radical transformation of society.
In serving as a figure who was able to bridge different organizing traditions, Gandhi provided a model of a complex social movement ecosystem. This model illuminates a critical idea: that transformation is most likely to come about not through any one single approach to creating social change — but through the integration of many.
So below I offer my own thoughts on how to move closer to the worlds we want, based on much comparative reflection on the stories of people everywhere who have acted in the name of radical social change, which for me, means something like “deep transformation of a society”…
