“We interrupt this regularly scheduled program ...” Remember those television interruptions? They were often “just a test” back in the 60s and 70s and now are more likely an interruption about a severe storm or other potential crisis. Black Lives Matter, is this, the interruption of the regularly scheduled program.
Some people speak of the ways in which people in Detroit have been taking back their city as creating the new in the shell of the old. I had no idea just how accurate this image was until I began to speak with people involved in the urban farming movement.
I dropped out of my first year of college to work in a garment factory. I did this because I believed that workers were the agent of change in society, so the best way I could contribute to changing society was to become a worker. I am still dedicated to changing society, though I now believe that this generally should be done from where you are (the place the person is situated), especially if one has access to resources that people in movements or groups that one (is in) supports could use, (so, for example,) things like access to media, information or international networks, legal and medical skills, etc.
Source: Open Democracy
“We are not afraid…we shall all be free.” Pete Seeger died last night, but the power of his music lives on. One activist pays tribute to another.
My being a radical activist is in no small part due to Pete Seeger who died last night – and my parents.
My mother was a civil rights and anti-war activist and my father was a GI who organized against the Vietnam War from inside the military. They met while organizing an anti-war Coffee House in Washington DC in 1969. I arrived on the scene two years later.
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.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019