Defragmenting our selves
I have noticed that one key difference between people who are left wing activists and – for want of a better term – ‘normal people’, is that the former are motivated by the very idea of collective action. In the more orthodox left tradition this is collective action in the workplace, while in the post-60s…
It’s exciting to see tenants in Berlin campaigning to take formerly government owned properties back into public hands, but it does rely on specific elements of German law that we don’t have in the UK. So how could we equalise the relationship between renters and landlords in the UK – not in some hand-wavy level-playing…
I have been interested in community organising for some time, and am currently part of an organisation trying to do it. When you try to do it, you find it is hard, or at least, we find that. But has it always been this hard? I’ve been reading some historical accounts of community organising in…
I have been re-reading a classic of social movement studies ‘Poor people’s movements: Why they succeed and how they fail’ by Piven and Cloward. It has energised me a lot more than most social movement studies texts because it’s authors are very concerned with how to win. Their thesis was provocative in the 1970s and…
There isn’t much academic work on deepening the involvement of new members in a social movement organisation. Since I am doing some research around this I wanted to get beyond Hahrie Han’s ‘How organisations develop activists’, which while excellent, is limited by only a couple of case studies in fairly middle-of-the-road organisations. So I was…
We all exist within networks, and through these networks move material goods, information, power. The stuff-info-power network is easy to explain. What is less easy is to discuss the ways that stuff, information and power interact with each other. Life is complicated. We should probably complicate it even further. I think the landscape of care…
An organisation I am part of – let’s call it The Process because I like it that the Spanish language uses that term for organising – held a large assembly last weekend. The Process is aiming to do ‘relational organising’, or perhaps another way of putting that is that we are trying to form a…