Defragmenting our selves
I’ve just finished my first attempt at Participatory Action Research within a social movement organisation, specifically London Renters Union. I designed the research so that there would be two types of participatory interaction – interviews and workshops – and two different outputs, one for academia and one for the union. I wouldn’t expect anyone in…
The left in Britain has a great narrative of loss in the story of enclosures. The rich stole the land of the commoners, forcing them to be wage slaves at best, forcibly urbanised slumdwellers dying from disease at worst. The narrative was written strongly and passionately by Marx, and many of the best social historians…
Residents of New Cross, London have rejected the borough of Lewisham’s proposal to build council-owned private rental housing on public land. The council plans to run a profit-making housing business in an area of deprivation and housing need. “We want more council housing, not private housing. The council just wants to make money,” said a…
This work by Pablo Iglesias, leader of insurgent Spanish party Podemos, is now subtitled ‘Podemos and the future of a Democratic Europe’. It wouldn’t have been so originally, because Podemos did not exist when the book was first written. This makes the book of historical interest, though the addition of appendices in this 2015 edition…
I’ve written about organisations on this blog, and I’ve written about people, and I’ve written about politics. What I haven’t talked about enough is relationships. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks but was finally prompted to do it today by this story about the role of Blair’s personal leadership…
Curious things keep happening in UK and US politics. The pundits are puzzled: why do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn exist? Why Brexit? A collective madness has settled over the populations of these countries, is the impression you might get from reading seasoned commentators. Ordinary people keep deciding things that make no sense to those who rule…
It appears that many people in the UK, some of them left-inclined, joined a right-driven rush to exit the EU, because they feel abandoned by the institutions that rule us. Leave voters have reacted to this with clear anti-establishment sentiment; it is even visible in claims that we simply need ‘a change’. Voters’ services had…
There was much that interested me in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future. The first part of the book constructs a critique of what they call ‘folk politics’. This they define as privileging the local, the small over the large, fetishising horizontalism and direct action, refusing to make demands, and a lack of…
This is a video of a protest I went to in Buenos Aires, in defense of murgas and street culture. A murga is a carnival performance group, usually attached to a particular barrio, and associated with the poorer end of society. A couple of weeks ago police attacked, allegedly without warning, a murga in a…
The reader’s attitude to this book is likely to depend on what they think of the subtitle. Do you want an alternative to capitalism, and do you think co-ops can offer it? People Over Capital is a book of essays on co-operatives put together in 2012 and published by New Internationalist. What makes it interesting…