Defragmenting our selves
This week I interviewed some people from Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), an organisation for people affected by bad mortgages and evictions in Spain. I’ll write it up properly later but a summary of why they seem to be successful: 1. The organisation is a network of local groups made up mostly of…
Last night I was at an event put on by Stir magazine, ‘Old Forms, New Strategies: Trade Unions, Co-operatives and the Commons’, which discussed the historical lack of co-operation between trade unions and the co-operative movement in the UK. The lack of interaction is not an accident. A mixture of ideology and self-interest means that…
This is something of a follow-up to the previous post, as I have just been reading about someone else, James Meade, who proposed a Citizen’s Trust that would hold shares on behalf of the population – a type of property ownership certainly more real than Thatcher’s version in which we all own a lot of…
Rudolf Meidner, one of the architects of the Swedish welfare state – a pretty impressive thing to have on your CV – wanted to go a step further than simply taxing corporations. He proposed that companies issue new shares every year to the value of 20% of their profits. This share levy would be passed…
A few weeks ago I was asked to contribute to Elevate Festival by watching livestreams of debates, joining in on Twitter and otherwise increasing the web presence of the festival. Elevate is discussing a wide range of things I am interested so I was happy to do this, but these days I really like to…
Recently I spoke with the manager of a foodbank in South London. She didn’t offer to go on the record but I afterwards made a few notes on what she was saying: They have recently seen a big increase in people coming to them, many due to delays in benefit, the abolition of crisis loans…
Here is an interesting post from elsewhere on the vacuum of politics in most of the NGO sector in the UK. It suggests that part of the reason for this is that they have allowed themselves to be contracted by the state, becoming part of the outsourcing industry. http://www.independentaction.net/2013/07/16/state-of-the-voluntary-services-sector-bob-baker-writes/ However this can’t be the whole…
I did some work in Colombia with REDHER, a network of social organisations, and yesterday discovered that on Saturday (20th July) their office was broken into and computers and other equipment stolen. This appears to be part of a campaign of retaliation and intimidation in response to a Juicio Etico – a people’s tribunal –…
Or somewhat more democratic and inclusive forms of organising anyway – this article is interesting: Carne Ross: our forms must reflect our fundamental political values I’ve thought a fair bit about the prospects for making NGOs more cooperative. Campaigning NGOs could have much more of a two way decision-making process with their donors and supporters….
So who are the re-emerging Colombian left? I met my companions in this small Casanare village at a meeting in Bogotá organized by the group ‘Congreso de los Pueblos’, or People’s Congress. That meeting attracted 15,000 attendees from all over Colombia, mostly from rural areas, many campesinos and indigenous people, but also students groups, women’s…