Defragmenting our selves
Participating in London Renters Union has been a life-changing experience for me. It has been a major presence in much of the last five years of my life. It was an organisation I loved as soon as I understood what it would be, and I still love it. For the last three years I have…
“It’s class, you don’t have to talk about class but maybe talk about money and income. Documented or undocumented or black and brown communities and being immigrants, so there’s an intersection, so the issues are connected, but it’s also about, you know, the structure [of the union] is about…’we need to do meetings’. Not everyone…
While having staff in the union does increase capacity in some ways, I had assumed that taking on more staff would mean that the ordinary members would feel less pressurised, and that burnout among them would become less of a problem. Instead what seems to have happened is an expansion of the work that everyone…
It is my conviction that the most effective organising in the Global North involves a partnership of class groups. The partnership is between the working class and what is sometimes called the middle class, mostly meaning a fairly unmoneyed middle class – though moneyed people do join too sometimes. Dan Evans’ new book A Nation…
One of the things I’ve realised through my research is that it is a vain hope that everyone who cares about the issues you are organising around will get involved in intensive community organising. The meetings and one-to-ones and campaign building are all very time-consuming. Many people – the majority of people, if we are…
An organisation like London Renters Union sees itself as part of a renters’ movement, or sometimes a housing movement. Like all movements it is not clear where the boundaries of the movement are, nor should it be. However activists in LRU do sometimes talk about a ‘renter identity’ that LRU is trying to marshall into…
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…
There is today no strong relationship between therapy and radical politics. In my experience many people who are interested in changing the world are very unsure about therapy. They worry it will seek to dampen their anger. They worry that they will become better adjusted to a world which does not deserve to be accommodated….
Academia likes to see itself as a producer of knowledge, and that’s difficult to argue with. But most of the time its self-conception goes further than this. We are the knowledge experts, think the academics. We are better at developing knowledge than other people. It’s what we’re paid for. Years of post-modernism has, curiously, failed…
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…