Month: December 2013

Source: Open Democracy

New social movements are different. Instead of asking for alternatives, they are bringing them to life.

“The greatest problem we have is that we can’t imagine any alternative. And that is the challenge: to invent, create and think as if we were living just after the collapse, if there is a collapse of capitalism, and how we will organize.” Ana, Observatorio Metropolitano and 15M, Madrid.

For the past ten years I have been travelling the world and talking with people like Ana, who are creating new social movements that challenge our conceptions of collective action. I lived in Argentina after the 2001 economic crisis and recorded an oral history of the rebellion that followed. I spent time with self-organized water users’ groups in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and with Occupy throughout the USA. And I worked with neighborhood assemblies in Greece and Spain, as well as with housing defense groups in the USA and Germany. read more

Source: The Nation

Muslim women are fighting for their rights from within Islamic tradition, rather than against it.

Throughout the Muslim world, a groundswell of feminist sentiment is growing among women who are seeking to reclaim Islam and the Koran for themselves. For decades, many women believed they had to choose between their Muslim identity and their belief in gender equality. It was an impossible choice—one that involved betraying either their faith or their feminist consciousness. Four years ago, a global movement called Musawah—“equality” in Arabic—began to make the case that women can fight for justice and equality from within Islamic tradition. For many Muslim women, this came as a revelation. read more

The trouble with trying to tell the story of Occupy Wall Street was that it was always a million things at once. You could go to one meeting, or one action, which might have seemed especially important, but there would be something else going on meanwhile that could just as easily be the next big thing. Each sub-thread of the story, each concurrent reality, made some kind of claim to be a genuine article, an authentic manifestation of what this movement was or should be all about. You needed a lot of eyes to see it all. You needed, perhaps, a social-scientific study. read more