Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Another Politics - From anti-colonial to Occupy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A 9s/another-politics%E2%80%94from-anticolonial-to-occupy *Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy* *Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.* Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015 [This article originally appeared in* Waging Nonviolence*.] Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum. "What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked. It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car. "Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned." I explained more about what that meant to me. He shook his head, amused. "That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book* Another Politics,* newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity. Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up. In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists." He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades. Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership? But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group* No One is Illegal*: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013." Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole. As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another." Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics. Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements. And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly. Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera." It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill. Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end). "Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself. Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less? I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage. (((((( ))))) *Andrew Willis Garcés* works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________ ** WSFDiscuss is an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practise, and theory of the World Social Forum at any level (local, national, regional, and global) and on related social and political movements and issues. Join in !** _______________________________________________ WSFDiscuss mailing list POST to LIST : Send email to [email protected] SUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to [email protected] UNSUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to [email protected] LIST ARCHIVES: http://openspaceforum.net/pipermail/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum.... LIST INFORMATION: http://openspaceforum.net/mailman/listinfo/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspac... ______________________________ Jai Sen [email protected] / [email protected] www.cacim.net / http://www.openword.in Now based in Ottawa, Canada (+1-613-282 2900), and New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) *RECENT PUBLICATIONS :* Jai Sen, ed, 2013 – *The Movements of Movements : Struggles for Other Worlds*, Part I*.* Volume 4 Part I in the *Challenging Empires* series. New Delhi : OpenWord. *Available @ http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/ <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/>* *FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS :* Jai Sen and Peter Waterman, eds, forthcoming (2015) – *The Movements of Movements : Struggles for Other Worlds**,* Part 2. Volume 4 Part II in the *Challenging Empires* series. New Delhi : OpenWord *CHECK OUT* *CACIM* @ www.cacim.net, *OpenWord* @ http://www.openword.in, and *OpenSpaceForum* @ www.openspaceforum.net *AND SUBSCRIBE TO* *WSFDiscuss*, an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practice, and theory of social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global), including the World Social Forum. *To subscribe, simply send an empty email to [email protected] <[email protected]>* _______________________________________________ ** WSFDiscuss is an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practise, and theory of the World Social Forum at any level (local, national, regional, and global) and on related social and political movements and issues. Join in !** _______________________________________________ WSFDiscuss mailing list POST to LIST : Send email to [email protected] SUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to [email protected] UNSUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to [email protected] LIST ARCHIVES: http://openspaceforum.net/pipermail/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum.... LIST INFORMATION: http://openspaceforum.net/mailman/listinfo/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspac... _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole. 'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.' Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved. How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration. Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book Another Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group No One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
hi Anna, At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental .. Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness .. I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture .. Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four .. so here is how I see it: * develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities * develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship) * embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture .. A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ... for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors) just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it .. I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me .. in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon, Michel On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A 9s/another-politics%E2%80%94from-anticolonial-to-occupy
*Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy* *Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.*
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in* Waging Nonviolence*.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book* Another Politics,* newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization:
. being against domination of all kinds;
. prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle;
. linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and
. grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group* No One is Illegal*:
"In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions:
"The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
*Andrew Willis Garcés* works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
Hello all I am doing the U.Lab MOOC <https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/15.S23x/3T2014/info> at the moment and this immersion is providing some very interesting lenses on a lot of what I am seeing... For instance, the personal-collective integrative process is central to Theory U, so the theory provides a good context for understanding it (especially for someone who has so far avoided Integral with a fair degree of emotional resistance). So, I thought I might flag that (as a potentially useful tangent), and also flag that I am interested in any comments that others might have about the applicability (or not) of Theory U in this sort of issue... Would love to explore! Cheers *John Baxter* *Cocreation Consultant & CoCreate Adelaide Facilitator* jsbaxter.com.au <http://www.jsbaxter.com.au/> | CoCreateADL.com 0405 447 829 | @jsbaxter_ <http://twitter.com/jsbaxter_> *Thank you to everyone who came, helped or spread the good word about City Grill!* *Summary and links: cocreateadl.com/localgov/grill-summary/ <http://cocreateadl.com/localgov/grill-summary/>* On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A 9s/another-politics%E2%80%94from-anticolonial-to-occupy
*Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy* *Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.*
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in* Waging Nonviolence*.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book* Another Politics,* newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization:
. being against domination of all kinds;
. prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle;
. linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and
. grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group* No One is Illegal*:
"In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions:
"The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
*Andrew Willis Garcés* works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Hello John, Thank you for this info. I had never heard of U.Lab before. Having checked it out I find it very exciting and free! and have joined the course. I agree with you it is very relevant to what we have been discussing. Course Description This interactive and experiential course is about leading profound innovation in order to pioneer a more sustainable economy and society. It focuses on the intertwined relationship of the following three questions: Transformation of Capitalism: How can capitalism and society evolve from their current forms to emerging future forms that create well-being for all (society 4.0)? Multi-stakeholder innovation: What kind of leadership is required to create profound innovation at the scale of a whole eco-system of stakeholders and partners? Presencing: How can people access their authentic self — their highest future possibility — and “act from” that heightened state of awareness? Look forward to meeting you online, Anna On 27 Jan 2015, at 07:08, John Baxter <[email protected]> wrote: Hello all I am doing the U.Lab MOOC at the moment and this immersion is providing some very interesting lenses on a lot of what I am seeing... For instance, the personal-collective integrative process is central to Theory U, so the theory provides a good context for understanding it (especially for someone who has so far avoided Integral with a fair degree of emotional resistance). So, I thought I might flag that (as a potentially useful tangent), and also flag that I am interested in any comments that others might have about the applicability (or not) of Theory U in this sort of issue... Would love to explore! Cheers John Baxter Cocreation Consultant & CoCreate Adelaide Facilitator jsbaxter.com.au | CoCreateADL.com 0405 447 829 | @jsbaxter_ Thank you to everyone who came, helped or spread the good word about City Grill! Summary and links: cocreateadl.com/localgov/grill-summary/
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book Another Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group No One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma : [–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? perma-link [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) perma-linkparent
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book Another Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group No One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures. Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand. Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list. Anna On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma : [–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? perma-link [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) perma-linkparent
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book Another Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group No One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Well, I am late to this conversation below but am energized by the fact that someone else led the charge on these always "never-time-to-fully-excavate" but in the end, trumping issues of how human beings and ultimately all human organizations succeed or do not succeed. Either these issues are explicitly addressed in any "new" government model from its inception and thus run differently from its inception, or history has taught us they will face breakdown on the same old deeply taught emotional/social oppression that Anna so effectively quotes below. Hooray Anna, that you raise your voice on this so eloquently again. I know the silence that we still face, and I support you for trying, regardless. Here's the thing and I will frame this far less eloquently than you did, Anna: patriarchy is at root a "bully culture". If any true transformational change is to be imagined, it has to be imagined in an explicitly non-bully "frame" (non-patriarchal, non-soley-left brain rational quantitative discounting of qualitative and felt experience and intelligences), from its inception. Otherwise, as has been the historic reality, once the rational and thoughtful men finally do get into power you still get "power struggles", (as happened in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all "revolutions" that didn't "revolve out" these underlying power premises). This, despite the often truly "enlightened" and liberating well argued rational dominant understanding that still doesn't address these deeper emotional social constructs in any explicit way from the beginning of that "new" power assumption. Thus, ultimately the "bullies" always end up winning those power struggles as the old patriarchal paradigm reasserts itself, having never truly been transformed at the level that it most matters and actually changes human relationships. I truly understand and even empathize Michel, with your frustration, so similar to my rational computer engineering but truly radical thinking husband on these same "global challenges" -- how big they are, how critical some things are that must be addressed to retain any possibility of sustainability together, against the powers amassed against any potential transformation at all. But you will ultimately find, as Anna and I have pointed out numerous times before with specific examples even within this organization as with any organization trying for these deep and true lasting transformations, that the breakdowns will happen in communication and mostly mis-communication, in emotional game-playing, in ego battles that no one was willing to prepare for addressing. Anna and I know they will. We have watched it all our lives from the outside seats. As have others of either gender, but still on "the outside". Dante understood this premise as the base of the underlying emotional/social and cultural construct that currently dominates, which includes patriarchy at its intrinsic base. A base assumption that generates all of its subsequent superiority/inferiority divisions which ultimately always come into play including racism, classicism, elite-educationism, imperialism, homophobia and numerous others of these most powerful de-railers of cross-cultural communications within any true "commons" vision of the "people". You, Syriza, Podemos...all can be understandably overwhelmed with the immediate political-economic priorities. But there are many who deeply understand that these socially destructive realities too are a deep priority and the deeper essence of any true geo-poitical transformation and willing to spend their time -- if validated and empowered to -- addressing it and reminding you of it, as an essential priority too, now not later. Or, what we also know deeply is that without this focus too, any real change will implode on these lines more completely or...not truly be a "change"of any real transformation in the end, at all. For those interested in the deeper context of that kind of true transformation where it makes the most difference in our resulting human relationships and organizations, my attached article here for the Journal of Sustainable Education's next issue (out on Valentine's Day) addresses these concepts explicitly in, "What has Love Got to do With Transformative Education?" I don't mind it being disregarded or considered "down in the noise" of the immediate, pressing "realities". We all have our areas of expertise and deepest effectiveness. The key is to know when they are blinding you to other potential huge pitfalls avoidable by listening to and including those "other" voices that warn you of the areas you are not validating or understanding, as potentially most destructive to your hopes and dreams in ways you haven't the ability or natural interest to see and thus prepare for preventing. Because you'll never get the "time" later, in time to avoid the conflict-constructs already embedded and allowed to continue at these levels. Sincerely meant, as I know how deeply you do work on the parts that you do believe are most critical. Nonetheless, this too can still be done...by others who know why it also is potentially, just as critical to include, if true "change" actually is allowed and empowered to happen. Best hopes, June ________________________________ From: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:39 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures. Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand. Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list. Anna On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma : [–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? * perma-link [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) * perma-link * parent On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from
anti-colonial to Occupy
Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared inWaging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?"
That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's bookAnother Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights groupNo One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/.
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
--
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Hello June, Thanks for your contribution. The attachment you gave is only the abstract of the article you mention. Can you give a link to the full article? Thanks, Anna On 29 Jan 2015, at 21:31, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: Well, I am late to this conversation below but am energized by the fact that someone else led the charge on these always "never-time-to-fully-excavate" but in the end, trumping issues of how human beings and ultimately all human organizations succeed or do not succeed. Either these issues are explicitly addressed in any "new" government model from its inception and thus run differently from its inception, or history has taught us they will face breakdown on the same old deeply taught emotional/social oppression that Anna so effectively quotes below. Hooray Anna, that you raise your voice on this so eloquently again. I know the silence that we still face, and I support you for trying, regardless. Here's the thing and I will frame this far less eloquently than you did, Anna: patriarchy is at root a "bully culture". If any true transformational change is to be imagined, it has to be imagined in an explicitly non-bully "frame" (non-patriarchal, non-soley-left brain rational quantitative discounting of qualitative and felt experience and intelligences), from its inception. Otherwise, as has been the historic reality, once the rational and thoughtful men finally do get into power you still get "power struggles", (as happened in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all "revolutions" that didn't "revolve out" these underlying power premises). This, despite the often truly "enlightened" and liberating well argued rational dominant understanding that still doesn't address these deeper emotional social constructs in any explicit way from the beginning of that "new" power assumption. Thus, ultimately the "bullies" always end up winning those power struggles as the old patriarchal paradigm reasserts itself, having never truly been transformed at the level that it most matters and actually changes human relationships. I truly understand and even empathize Michel, with your frustration, so similar to my rational computer engineering but truly radical thinking husband on these same "global challenges" -- how big they are, how critical some things are that must be addressed to retain any possibility of sustainability together, against the powers amassed against any potential transformation at all. But you will ultimately find, as Anna and I have pointed out numerous times before with specific examples even within this organization as with any organization trying for these deep and true lasting transformations, that the breakdowns will happen in communication and mostly mis-communication, in emotional game-playing, in ego battles that no one was willing to prepare for addressing. Anna and I know they will. We have watched it all our lives from the outside seats. As have others of either gender, but still on "the outside". Dante understood this premise as the base of the underlying emotional/social and cultural construct that currently dominates, which includes patriarchy at its intrinsic base. A base assumption that generates all of its subsequent superiority/inferiority divisions which ultimately always come into play including racism, classicism, elite-educationism, imperialism, homophobia and numerous others of these most powerful de-railers of cross-cultural communications within any true "commons" vision of the "people". You, Syriza, Podemos...all can be understandably overwhelmed with the immediate political-economic priorities. But there are many who deeply understand that these socially destructive realities too are a deep priority and the deeper essence of any true geo-poitical transformation and willing to spend their time -- if validated and empowered to -- addressing it and reminding you of it, as an essential priority too, now not later. Or, what we also know deeply is that without this focus too, any real change will implode on these lines more completely or...not truly be a "change"of any real transformation in the end, at all. For those interested in the deeper context of that kind of true transformation where it makes the most difference in our resulting human relationships and organizations, my attached article here for the Journal of Sustainable Education's next issue (out on Valentine's Day) addresses these concepts explicitly in, "What has Love Got to do With Transformative Education?" I don't mind it being disregarded or considered "down in the noise" of the immediate, pressing "realities". We all have our areas of expertise and deepest effectiveness. The key is to know when they are blinding you to other potential huge pitfalls avoidable by listening to and including those "other" voices that warn you of the areas you are not validating or understanding, as potentially most destructive to your hopes and dreams in ways you haven't the ability or natural interest to see and thus prepare for preventing. Because you'll never get the "time" later, in time to avoid the conflict-constructs already embedded and allowed to continue at these levels. Sincerely meant, as I know how deeply you do work on the parts that you do believe are most critical. Nonetheless, this too can still be done...by others who know why it also is potentially, just as critical to include, if true "change" actually is allowed and empowered to happen. Best hopes, June From: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:39 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures. Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand. Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list. Anna On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma : [–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? perma-link [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) perma-linkparent On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: hi Anna, At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental .. Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness .. I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture .. Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four .. so here is how I see it: * develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities * develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship) * embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture .. A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ... for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors) just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it .. I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me .. in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon, Michel On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole. 'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.' Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved. How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration. Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book Another Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group No One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation <What_s Love Got To Do With Transformative Education-10-31-14-Revised.pdf> _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Hi Anna - I know that it looks that way, the abstract then "bio" coming first but that's the way they asked me to format it for the journal submission. The rest of the paper, some 10-12 pages of it are there at least in the pdf I just checked that I sent out to all, and it ends with pictures -- yes -- that I'd rather were deleted but also asked for in the submission. I just attached this longer "padded" pdf, I apologize, but the paper is there after the first page. Hope that helps. Michel, it seems to me that your argument, while just so understandable and reasonable on some level, is still the same old "we have to be realistic and patient" about these human systems issues, that those of us who question the deeper systems theory of true change in human systems, are extremely wary of accepting anymore. Especially since some of us don't actually think we have that kind of time to do incremental, incomplete, partial systems change only, or that it will end up being change that truly transforms or last. The dramatic and widespread revolution in the more human, emotional, social and deepest level constructs embodied for instance in deeply transformative movements like that of Restorative Justice -- using completely altered constructs of human justice as based in relationships and communications to truly address conflict, crime and corruption at their deepest roots -- is gaining widespread adoption in the most punitive of systems (prisons) and the most stressed and chaotic of places -- such as Sudan. And now, going into schools -- entrenched and controlled by corporate, political centralized power -- in the UK and some parts of the US. The surprise of its spread is the ease and enthusiasm with which these entrenched power systems are turned on their head, and actual deepest transformative changes result, despite all the other stresses these systems are under at the same time. I just honestly think it is the only way it actually can be done -- the positive feedback loop of the more necessary, deeper changes that sustain all the rest? Otherwise, despite all the good "intentions" you often just end up building the same box with perhaps somewhat changed dimensions but nothing truly new? ________________________________ From: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, February 2, 2015 11:22 AM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza Hello June, Thanks for your contribution. The attachment you gave is only the abstract of the article you mention. Can you give a link to the full article? Thanks, Anna On 29 Jan 2015, at 21:31, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: Well, I am late to this conversation below but am energized by the fact that someone else led the charge on these always "never-time-to-fully-excavate" but in the end, trumping issues of how human beings and ultimately all human organizations succeed or do not succeed. Either these issues are explicitly addressed in any "new" government model from its inception and thus run differently from its inception, or history has taught us they will face breakdown on the same old deeply taught emotional/social oppression that Anna so effectively quotes below. Hooray Anna, that you raise your voice on this so eloquently again. I know the silence that we still face, and I support you for trying, regardless. Here's the thing and I will frame this far less eloquently than you did, Anna: patriarchy is at root a "bully culture". If any true transformational change is to be imagined, it has to be imagined in an explicitly non-bully "frame" (non-patriarchal, non-soley-left brain rational quantitative discounting of qualitative and felt experience and intelligences), from its inception. Otherwise, as has been the historic reality, once the rational and thoughtful men finally do get into power you still get "power struggles", (as happened in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all "revolutions" that didn't "revolve out" these underlying power premises). This, despite the often truly "enlightened" and liberating well argued rational dominant understanding that still doesn't address these deeper emotional social constructs in any explicit way from the beginning of that "new" power assumption. Thus, ultimately the "bullies" always end up winning those power struggles as the old patriarchal paradigm reasserts itself, having never truly been transformed at the level that it most matters and actually changes human relationships. I truly understand and even empathize Michel, with your frustration, so similar to my rational computer engineering but truly radical thinking husband on these same "global challenges" -- how big they are, how critical some things are that must be addressed to retain any possibility of sustainability together, against the powers amassed against any potential transformation at all. But you will ultimately find, as Anna and I have pointed out numerous times before with specific examples even within this organization as with any organization trying for these deep and true lasting transformations, that the breakdowns will happen in communication and mostly mis-communication, in emotional game-playing, in ego battles that no one was willing to prepare for addressing. Anna and I know they will. We have watched it all our lives from the outside seats. As have others of either gender, but still on "the outside". Dante understood this premise as the base of the underlying emotional/social and cultural construct that currently dominates, which includes patriarchy at its intrinsic base. A base assumption that generates all of its subsequent superiority/inferiority divisions which ultimately always come into play including racism, classicism, elite-educationism, imperialism, homophobia and numerous others of these most powerful de-railers of cross-cultural communications within any true "commons" vision of the "people". You, Syriza, Podemos...all can be understandably overwhelmed with the immediate political-economic priorities. But there are many who deeply understand that these socially destructive realities too are a deep priority and the deeper essence of any true geo-poitical transformation and willing to spend their time -- if validated and empowered to -- addressing it and reminding you of it, as an essential priority too, now not later. Or, what we also know deeply is that without this focus too, any real change will implode on these lines more completely or...not truly be a "change"of any real transformation in the end, at all. For those interested in the deeper context of that kind of true transformation where it makes the most difference in our resulting human relationships and organizations, my attached article here for the Journal of Sustainable Education's next issue (out on Valentine's Day) addresses these concepts explicitly in, "What has Love Got to do With Transformative Education?" I don't mind it being disregarded or considered "down in the noise" of the immediate, pressing "realities". We all have our areas of expertise and deepest effectiveness. The key is to know when they are blinding you to other potential huge pitfalls avoidable by listening to and including those "other" voices that warn you of the areas you are not validating or understanding, as potentially most destructive to your hopes and dreams in ways you haven't the ability or natural interest to see and thus prepare for preventing. Because you'll never get the "time" later, in time to avoid the conflict-constructs already embedded and allowed to continue at these levels. Sincerely meant, as I know how deeply you do work on the parts that you do believe are most critical. Nonetheless, this too can still be done...by others who know why it also is potentially, just as critical to include, if true "change" actually is allowed and empowered to happen. Best hopes, June ________________________________ From: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:39 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures. Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand. Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list. Anna On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma : [–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? * perma-link [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) * perma-link * parent On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from
anti-colonial to Occupy
Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared inWaging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?"
That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's bookAnother Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights groupNo One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/.
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
--
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation <What_s Love Got To Do With Transformative Education-10-31-14-Revised.pdf> _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
by the way, I am not disagreeing that such a radical shift is desirable, what I am pointing out is the complexity of this wished for change, and especially the belief that this radical change can happen in an instant in time, rather than a process; the only realistic option is that the people who think they are ready, start right now with micro-communities ... as someone who has lived in three failed communes, I can tell you, not even that is easy ... but we are practicing what we preach in the p2p foundation, with difficulty, with problems, but attempting it nevertheless but I don't find it productive to blame social movements because they are not perfect and in that way, if support is withdrawn rather than constructively embraced, to in fact support the social forces that are tremendously worth ./ we have already seen how the anti-political and purist attitude of some 15M and Occupiers led to radically worse right wing governments destroying the social fabric even more, so I am with the people who are imperfectly trying to better the situations, radical vision, meliorist approaches .. until we can move faster and further, as reality will dictate Michel On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello June,
Thanks for your contribution. The attachment you gave is only the abstract of the article you mention. Can you give a link to the full article?
Thanks,
Anna
On 29 Jan 2015, at 21:31, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
Well, I am late to this conversation below but am energized by the fact that someone else led the charge on these always "never-time-to-fully-excavate" but in the end, trumping issues of how human beings and ultimately all human organizations succeed or do not succeed. Either these issues are explicitly addressed in any "new" government model from its inception and thus run differently from its inception, or history has taught us they will face breakdown on the same old deeply taught emotional/social oppression that Anna so effectively quotes below. Hooray Anna, that you raise your voice on this so eloquently again. I know the silence that we still face, and I support you for trying, regardless.
Here's the thing and I will frame this far less eloquently than you did, Anna: patriarchy is at root a "bully culture". If any true transformational change is to be imagined, it has to be imagined in an explicitly non-bully "frame" (non-patriarchal, non-soley-left brain rational quantitative discounting of qualitative and felt experience and intelligences), from its inception. Otherwise, as has been the historic reality, once the rational and thoughtful men finally do get into power you still get "power struggles", (as happened in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all "revolutions" that didn't "revolve out" these underlying power premises). This, despite the often truly "enlightened" and liberating well argued rational dominant understanding that still doesn't address these deeper emotional social constructs in any explicit way from the beginning of that "new" power assumption. Thus, ultimately the "bullies" always end up winning those power struggles as the old patriarchal paradigm reasserts itself, having never truly been transformed at the level that it most matters and actually changes human relationships.
I truly understand and even empathize Michel, with your frustration, so similar to my rational computer engineering but truly radical thinking husband on these same "global challenges" -- how big they are, how critical some things are that must be addressed to retain any possibility of sustainability together, against the powers amassed against any potential transformation at all. But you will ultimately find, as Anna and I have pointed out numerous times before with specific examples even within this organization as with any organization trying for these deep and true lasting transformations, that the breakdowns will happen in communication and mostly mis-communication, in emotional game-playing, in ego battles that no one was willing to prepare for addressing. Anna and I know they will. We have watched it all our lives from the outside seats. As have others of either gender, but still on "the outside".
Dante understood this premise as the base of the underlying emotional/social and cultural construct that currently dominates, which includes patriarchy at its intrinsic base. A base assumption that generates all of its subsequent superiority/inferiority divisions which ultimately always come into play including racism, classicism, elite-educationism, imperialism, homophobia and numerous others of these most powerful de-railers of cross-cultural communications within any true "commons" vision of the "people".
You, Syriza, Podemos...all can be understandably overwhelmed with the immediate political-economic priorities. But there are many who deeply understand that these socially destructive realities too are a deep priority and the deeper essence of any true geo-poitical transformation and willing to spend their time -- if validated and empowered to -- addressing it and reminding you of it, as an essential priority too, now not later. Or, what we also know deeply is that without this focus too, any real change will implode on these lines more completely or...not truly be a "change"of any real transformation in the end, at all.
For those interested in the deeper context of that kind of true transformation where it makes the most difference in our resulting human relationships and organizations, my attached article here for the Journal of Sustainable Education's next issue (out on Valentine's Day) addresses these concepts explicitly in, "What has Love Got to do With Transformative Education?"
I don't mind it being disregarded or considered "down in the noise" of the immediate, pressing "realities". We all have our areas of expertise and deepest effectiveness. The key is to know when they are blinding you to other potential huge pitfalls avoidable by listening to and including those "other" voices that warn you of the areas you are not validating or understanding, as potentially most destructive to your hopes and dreams in ways you haven't the ability or natural interest to see and thus prepare for preventing. Because you'll never get the "time" later, in time to avoid the conflict-constructs already embedded and allowed to continue at these levels.
Sincerely meant, as I know how deeply you do work on the parts that you do believe are most critical. Nonetheless, this too can still be done...by others who know why it also is potentially, just as critical to include, if true "change" actually is allowed and empowered to happen.
Best hopes, June
------------------------------ *From:* P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *To:* P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *Cc:* "[email protected]" < [email protected]> *Sent:* Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:39 PM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza
After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures.
Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand.
Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list.
Anna
On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma :
[–]rodneyrod <http://www.reddit.com/user/rodneyrod> 6 points 6 days ago
Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others?
- perma-link <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/cnw57t3>
[–]OttoScharmer <http://www.reddit.com/user/OttoScharmer>[S <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/> ] 5 points 6 days ago
i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet)
- perma-link <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/cnw5gks> - parent <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/#cnw57t3>
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A 9s/another-politics%E2%80%94from-anticolonial-to-occupy
*Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy* *Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.*
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in* Waging Nonviolence*.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book* Another Politics,* newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization:
. being against domination of all kinds;
. prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle;
. linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and
. grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group* No One is Illegal*:
"In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions:
"The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
*Andrew Willis Garcés* works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
<What_s Love Got To Do With Transformative Education-10-31-14-Revised.pdf> _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
Thank you, Michel and Vasilis for getting the actual clarification data. I had meant the actual "ministers" though it is good to know that women are there to help out as "deputy ministers". That is more sincerely meant, than it might sound. But no Michel, I like you too much and value the work you do with the P2P Foundation too much, to let you or the P2P Foundation off the hook as accepting that asking for more female (and other previously left out "others") representation in the leadership of a modern industrialised "new-vision" Commons-oriented government in the year 2015, is too "radical" an ask. Again, that makes no "Commons sense" to me and shouldn't to anyone. I think my "support" (and Anna's clearly it seemed to me) is actually given rather than withdrawn in these very comments, warning that not addressing these underlying "misses", certainly in not admitting and validating them, is the very reality-most-likely to-derail any hoped for true value-systems change that all sustainable political-economic systems rest on or certainly fall on, ultimately. Why it is seen as "either/or" and oppositional to even raise these warning flags in order to easily, and it is quite easily done, rectify them or put it on the agenda to rectify them down the line, seems to me a very old paradigm to work from. I certainly understand not letting the "perfect be the enemy of the good" when there are so many real "enemies", but as my last comment on this, this would seem to fall more under "but we are practicing what we preach in the p2p foundation, with difficulty, with problems, but attempting it nevertheless" -- Michel In essence, it is this discussion that makes me feel that's true, not in not having it at all. Really supportively meant, Michel, June ________________________________ From: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> To: Anna Harris <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, February 5, 2015 9:24 AM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza by the way, I am not disagreeing that such a radical shift is desirable, what I am pointing out is the complexity of this wished for change, and especially the belief that this radical change can happen in an instant in time, rather than a process; the only realistic option is that the people who think they are ready, start right now with micro-communities ... as someone who has lived in three failed communes, I can tell you, not even that is easy ... but we are practicing what we preach in the p2p foundation, with difficulty, with problems, but attempting it nevertheless but I don't find it productive to blame social movements because they are not perfect and in that way, if support is withdrawn rather than constructively embraced, to in fact support the social forces that are tremendously worth ./ we have already seen how the anti-political and purist attitude of some 15M and Occupiers led to radically worse right wing governments destroying the social fabric even more, so I am with the people who are imperfectly trying to better the situations, radical vision, meliorist approaches .. until we can move faster and further, as reality will dictate Michel On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: Hello June,
Thanks for your contribution. The attachment you gave is only the abstract of the article you mention. Can you give a link to the full article?
Thanks,
Anna
On 29 Jan 2015, at 21:31, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
Well, I am late to this conversation below but am energized by the fact that someone else led the charge on these always "never-time-to-fully-excavate" but in the end, trumping issues of how human beings and ultimately all human organizations succeed or do not succeed. Either these issues are explicitly addressed in any "new" government model from its inception and thus run differently from its inception, or history has taught us they will face breakdown on the same old deeply taught emotional/social oppression that Anna so effectively quotes below. Hooray Anna, that you raise your voice on this so eloquently again. I know the silence that we still face, and I support you for trying, regardless.
Here's the thing and I will frame this far less eloquently than you did, Anna: patriarchy is at root a "bully culture". If any true transformational change is to be imagined, it has to be imagined in an explicitly non-bully "frame" (non-patriarchal, non-soley-left brain rational quantitative discounting of qualitative and felt experience and intelligences), from its inception. Otherwise, as has been the historic reality, once the rational and thoughtful men finally do get into power you still get "power struggles", (as happened in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all "revolutions" that didn't "revolve out" these underlying power premises). This, despite the often truly "enlightened" and liberating well argued rational dominant understanding that still doesn't address these deeper emotional social constructs in any explicit way from the beginning of that "new" power assumption. Thus, ultimately the "bullies" always end up winning those
power struggles as the old patriarchal paradigm reasserts itself, having never truly been transformed at the level that it most matters and actually changes human relationships.
I truly understand and even empathize Michel, with your frustration, so similar to my rational computer engineering but truly radical thinking husband on these same "global challenges" -- how big they are, how critical some things are that must be addressed to retain any possibility of sustainability together, against the powers amassed against any potential transformation at all. But you will ultimately find, as Anna and I have pointed out numerous times before with specific examples even within this organization as with any organization trying for these deep and true lasting transformations, that the breakdowns will happen in communication and mostly mis-communication, in emotional game-playing, in ego battles that no one was willing to prepare for addressing. Anna and I know they will. We have watched it all our lives from the outside seats. As have others of either gender, but still on "the outside".
Dante understood this premise as the base of the underlying emotional/social and cultural construct that currently dominates, which includes patriarchy at its intrinsic base. A base assumption that generates all of its subsequent superiority/inferiority divisions which ultimately always come into play including racism, classicism, elite-educationism, imperialism, homophobia and numerous others of these most powerful de-railers of cross-cultural communications within any true "commons" vision of the "people".
You, Syriza, Podemos...all can be understandably overwhelmed with the immediate political-economic priorities. But there are many who deeply understand that these socially destructive realities too are a deep priority and the deeper essence of any true geo-poitical transformation and willing to spend their time -- if validated and empowered to -- addressing it and reminding you of it, as an essential priority too, now not later. Or, what we also know deeply is that without this focus too, any real change will implode on these lines more completely or...not truly be a "change"of any real transformation in the end, at all.
For those interested in the deeper context of that kind of true transformation where it makes the most difference in our resulting human relationships and organizations, my attached article here for the Journal of Sustainable Education's next issue (out on Valentine's Day) addresses these concepts explicitly in, "What has Love Got to do With Transformative Education?"
I don't mind it being disregarded or considered "down in the noise" of the immediate, pressing "realities". We all have our areas of expertise and deepest effectiveness. The key is to know when they are blinding you to other potential huge pitfalls avoidable by listening to and including those "other" voices that warn you of the areas you are not validating or understanding, as potentially most destructive to your hopes and dreams in ways you haven't the ability or natural interest to see and thus prepare for preventing. Because you'll never get the "time" later, in time to avoid the conflict-constructs already embedded and allowed to continue at these levels.
Sincerely meant, as I know how deeply you do work on the parts that you do believe are most critical. Nonetheless, this too can still be done...by others who know why it also is potentially, just as critical to include, if true "change" actually is allowed and empowered to happen.
Best hopes, June
________________________________ From: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:39 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza
After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures.
Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand.
Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list.
Anna
On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma :
[–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago
Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? * perma-link [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago
i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) * perma-link * parent
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from
anti-colonial to Occupy
Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared inWaging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?"
That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's bookAnother Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights groupNo One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/.
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
--
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
<What_s Love Got To Do With Transformative Education-10-31-14-Revised.pdf> _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
thanks June and Anna for your input, I want to alert our more techno-savvy friends (Kevin ?), about a new issue, I have the daily summary version of the mailing list, in which the contributions come together in one mail, however, lately, it doesn't say anymore, 'who the emails are from' .. which can be annoying, I would appreciate if anyone could look into this Michel On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 9:29 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Thank you, Michel and Vasilis for getting the actual clarification data. I had meant the actual "ministers" though it is good to know that women are there to help out as "deputy ministers". That is more sincerely meant, than it might sound.
But no Michel, I like you too much and value the work you do with the P2P Foundation too much, to let you or the P2P Foundation off the hook as accepting that asking for more female (and other previously left out "others") representation in the leadership of a modern industrialised "new-vision" Commons-oriented government in the year 2015, is too "radical" an ask. Again, that makes no "Commons sense" to me and shouldn't to anyone.
I think my "support" (and Anna's clearly it seemed to me) is actually given rather than withdrawn in these very comments, warning that not addressing these underlying "misses", certainly in not admitting and validating them, is the very reality-most-likely to-derail any hoped for true value-systems change that all sustainable political-economic systems rest on or certainly fall on, ultimately.
Why it is seen as "either/or" and oppositional to even raise these warning flags in order to easily, and it is quite easily done, rectify them or put it on the agenda to rectify them down the line, seems to me a very old paradigm to work from. I certainly understand not letting the "perfect be the enemy of the good" when there are so many real "enemies", but as my last comment on this, this would seem to fall more under
"but we are practicing what we preach in the p2p foundation, with difficulty, with problems, but attempting it nevertheless" -- Michel
In essence, it is this discussion that makes me feel that's true, not in not having it at all.
Really supportively meant, Michel, June
------------------------------ *From:* P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *To:* Anna Harris <[email protected]> *Cc:* "[email protected]" < [email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> *Sent:* Thursday, February 5, 2015 9:24 AM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza
by the way, I am not disagreeing that such a radical shift is desirable, what I am pointing out is the complexity of this wished for change, and especially the belief that this radical change can happen in an instant in time, rather than a process;
the only realistic option is that the people who think they are ready, start right now with micro-communities ... as someone who has lived in three failed communes, I can tell you, not even that is easy ...
but we are practicing what we preach in the p2p foundation, with difficulty, with problems, but attempting it nevertheless
but I don't find it productive to blame social movements because they are not perfect and in that way, if support is withdrawn rather than constructively embraced, to in fact support the social forces that are tremendously worth ./
we have already seen how the anti-political and purist attitude of some 15M and Occupiers led to radically worse right wing governments destroying the social fabric even more,
so I am with the people who are imperfectly trying to better the situations,
radical vision, meliorist approaches .. until we can move faster and further, as reality will dictate
Michel
On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello June,
Thanks for your contribution. The attachment you gave is only the abstract of the article you mention. Can you give a link to the full article?
Thanks,
Anna
On 29 Jan 2015, at 21:31, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
Well, I am late to this conversation below but am energized by the fact that someone else led the charge on these always "never-time-to-fully-excavate" but in the end, trumping issues of how human beings and ultimately all human organizations succeed or do not succeed. Either these issues are explicitly addressed in any "new" government model from its inception and thus run differently from its inception, or history has taught us they will face breakdown on the same old deeply taught emotional/social oppression that Anna so effectively quotes below. Hooray Anna, that you raise your voice on this so eloquently again. I know the silence that we still face, and I support you for trying, regardless.
Here's the thing and I will frame this far less eloquently than you did, Anna: patriarchy is at root a "bully culture". If any true transformational change is to be imagined, it has to be imagined in an explicitly non-bully "frame" (non-patriarchal, non-soley-left brain rational quantitative discounting of qualitative and felt experience and intelligences), from its inception. Otherwise, as has been the historic reality, once the rational and thoughtful men finally do get into power you still get "power struggles", (as happened in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all "revolutions" that didn't "revolve out" these underlying power premises). This, despite the often truly "enlightened" and liberating well argued rational dominant understanding that still doesn't address these deeper emotional social constructs in any explicit way from the beginning of that "new" power assumption. Thus, ultimately the "bullies" always end up winning those power struggles as the old patriarchal paradigm reasserts itself, having never truly been transformed at the level that it most matters and actually changes human relationships.
I truly understand and even empathize Michel, with your frustration, so similar to my rational computer engineering but truly radical thinking husband on these same "global challenges" -- how big they are, how critical some things are that must be addressed to retain any possibility of sustainability together, against the powers amassed against any potential transformation at all. But you will ultimately find, as Anna and I have pointed out numerous times before with specific examples even within this organization as with any organization trying for these deep and true lasting transformations, that the breakdowns will happen in communication and mostly mis-communication, in emotional game-playing, in ego battles that no one was willing to prepare for addressing. Anna and I know they will. We have watched it all our lives from the outside seats. As have others of either gender, but still on "the outside".
Dante understood this premise as the base of the underlying emotional/social and cultural construct that currently dominates, which includes patriarchy at its intrinsic base. A base assumption that generates all of its subsequent superiority/inferiority divisions which ultimately always come into play including racism, classicism, elite-educationism, imperialism, homophobia and numerous others of these most powerful de-railers of cross-cultural communications within any true "commons" vision of the "people".
You, Syriza, Podemos...all can be understandably overwhelmed with the immediate political-economic priorities. But there are many who deeply understand that these socially destructive realities too are a deep priority and the deeper essence of any true geo-poitical transformation and willing to spend their time -- if validated and empowered to -- addressing it and reminding you of it, as an essential priority too, now not later. Or, what we also know deeply is that without this focus too, any real change will implode on these lines more completely or...not truly be a "change"of any real transformation in the end, at all.
For those interested in the deeper context of that kind of true transformation where it makes the most difference in our resulting human relationships and organizations, my attached article here for the Journal of Sustainable Education's next issue (out on Valentine's Day) addresses these concepts explicitly in, "What has Love Got to do With Transformative Education?"
I don't mind it being disregarded or considered "down in the noise" of the immediate, pressing "realities". We all have our areas of expertise and deepest effectiveness. The key is to know when they are blinding you to other potential huge pitfalls avoidable by listening to and including those "other" voices that warn you of the areas you are not validating or understanding, as potentially most destructive to your hopes and dreams in ways you haven't the ability or natural interest to see and thus prepare for preventing. Because you'll never get the "time" later, in time to avoid the conflict-constructs already embedded and allowed to continue at these levels.
Sincerely meant, as I know how deeply you do work on the parts that you do believe are most critical. Nonetheless, this too can still be done...by others who know why it also is potentially, just as critical to include, if true "change" actually is allowed and empowered to happen.
Best hopes, June
------------------------------ *From:* P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *To:* P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *Cc:* "[email protected]" < [email protected]> *Sent:* Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:39 PM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza
After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures.
Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand.
Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list.
Anna
On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma :
[–]rodneyrod <http://www.reddit.com/user/rodneyrod> 6 points 6 days ago
Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others?
- perma-link <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/cnw57t3>
[–]OttoScharmer <http://www.reddit.com/user/OttoScharmer>[S <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/> ] 5 points 6 days ago
i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet)
- perma-link <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/cnw5gks> - parent <http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2t6gy3/iama_a_senior_lecturer_at_the_mit_sloan_school_of/#cnw57t3>
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A 9s/another-politics%E2%80%94from-anticolonial-to-occupy
*Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy* *Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.*
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in* Waging Nonviolence*.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book* Another Politics,* newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization:
. being against domination of all kinds;
. prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle;
. linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and
. grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group* No One is Illegal*:
"In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions:
"The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
*Andrew Willis Garcés* works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
<What_s Love Got To Do With Transformative Education-10-31-14-Revised.pdf> _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
I do feel hurt when my desire for a more authentic communication is seen as a belief in instantaneous wish fulfilment. But I'm guessing that when you talk about me not appreciating how difficult this process is, and my expecting it to happen instantaneously, that you might be feeling that it is easier for me, that I am ready, and do not struggle with it as you do. If that is the case, perhaps it might be more helpful if I were to talk about how difficult I find it to put these feelings into words, or take on board what someone else is saying, how often I might dismiss what they say by making judgements before I can really hear what is being said, what a struggle it is to try and stay with what is real and alive. On 5 Feb 2015, at 09:24, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote: by the way, I am not disagreeing that such a radical shift is desirable, what I am pointing out is the complexity of this wished for change, and especially the belief that this radical change can happen in an instant in time, rather than a process; the only realistic option is that the people who think they are ready, start right now with micro-communities ... as someone who has lived in three failed communes, I can tell you, not even that is easy ... but we are practicing what we preach in the p2p foundation, with difficulty, with problems, but attempting it nevertheless but I don't find it productive to blame social movements because they are not perfect and in that way, if support is withdrawn rather than constructively embraced, to in fact support the social forces that are tremendously worth ./ we have already seen how the anti-political and purist attitude of some 15M and Occupiers led to radically worse right wing governments destroying the social fabric even more, so I am with the people who are imperfectly trying to better the situations, radical vision, meliorist approaches .. until we can move faster and further, as reality will dictate Michel
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
This is link to the new movie, about the real story of Enigma, Nazis, 2. world war and the West... http://www.bicaps.net/yapay-oyun-the-imitation-game-izle-720p-turkce-altyazi... it is looking from one man's perspective, Alan Turing's. which did make direct influenced on the lives of millions, in interaction with the structural forces and the spirit of the time. It is also about the complexity of problems, urgency in solutions, the role of the individual skills, and the team work, secrecy and openness, state and the deep state, in the state of war... The movie made me think of the needed perspective on or for a theory of the Deep State, in relation to Partner State and Commons Transition. The reason I do post it here is that the lesson I got from the movie was; 'another politics is necessary' :) especially after Syriza and Podemos, since the deep state must be getting ready to engage more direct counter politics. best, Orsan
On 5 feb. 2015, at 10:24, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
by the way, I am not disagreeing that such a radical shift is desirable, what I am pointing out is the complexity of this wished for change, and especially the belief that this radical change can happen in an instant in time, rather than a process;
the only realistic option is that the people who think they are ready, start right now with micro-communities ... as someone who has lived in three failed communes, I can tell you, not even that is easy ...
but we are practicing what we preach in the p2p foundation, with difficulty, with problems, but attempting it nevertheless
but I don't find it productive to blame social movements because they are not perfect and in that way, if support is withdrawn rather than constructively embraced, to in fact support the social forces that are tremendously worth ./
we have already seen how the anti-political and purist attitude of some 15M and Occupiers led to radically worse right wing governments destroying the social fabric even more,
so I am with the people who are imperfectly trying to better the situations,
radical vision, meliorist approaches .. until we can move faster and further, as reality will dictate
Michel
On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: Hello June,
Thanks for your contribution. The attachment you gave is only the abstract of the article you mention. Can you give a link to the full article?
Thanks,
Anna
On 29 Jan 2015, at 21:31, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
Well, I am late to this conversation below but am energized by the fact that someone else led the charge on these always "never-time-to-fully-excavate" but in the end, trumping issues of how human beings and ultimately all human organizations succeed or do not succeed. Either these issues are explicitly addressed in any "new" government model from its inception and thus run differently from its inception, or history has taught us they will face breakdown on the same old deeply taught emotional/social oppression that Anna so effectively quotes below. Hooray Anna, that you raise your voice on this so eloquently again. I know the silence that we still face, and I support you for trying, regardless.
Here's the thing and I will frame this far less eloquently than you did, Anna: patriarchy is at root a "bully culture". If any true transformational change is to be imagined, it has to be imagined in an explicitly non-bully "frame" (non-patriarchal, non-soley-left brain rational quantitative discounting of qualitative and felt experience and intelligences), from its inception. Otherwise, as has been the historic reality, once the rational and thoughtful men finally do get into power you still get "power struggles", (as happened in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, all "revolutions" that didn't "revolve out" these underlying power premises). This, despite the often truly "enlightened" and liberating well argued rational dominant understanding that still doesn't address these deeper emotional social constructs in any explicit way from the beginning of that "new" power assumption. Thus, ultimately the "bullies" always end up winning those power struggles as the old patriarchal paradigm reasserts itself, having never truly been transformed at the level that it most matters and actually changes human relationships.
I truly understand and even empathize Michel, with your frustration, so similar to my rational computer engineering but truly radical thinking husband on these same "global challenges" -- how big they are, how critical some things are that must be addressed to retain any possibility of sustainability together, against the powers amassed against any potential transformation at all. But you will ultimately find, as Anna and I have pointed out numerous times before with specific examples even within this organization as with any organization trying for these deep and true lasting transformations, that the breakdowns will happen in communication and mostly mis-communication, in emotional game-playing, in ego battles that no one was willing to prepare for addressing. Anna and I know they will. We have watched it all our lives from the outside seats. As have others of either gender, but still on "the outside".
Dante understood this premise as the base of the underlying emotional/social and cultural construct that currently dominates, which includes patriarchy at its intrinsic base. A base assumption that generates all of its subsequent superiority/inferiority divisions which ultimately always come into play including racism, classicism, elite-educationism, imperialism, homophobia and numerous others of these most powerful de-railers of cross-cultural communications within any true "commons" vision of the "people".
You, Syriza, Podemos...all can be understandably overwhelmed with the immediate political-economic priorities. But there are many who deeply understand that these socially destructive realities too are a deep priority and the deeper essence of any true geo-poitical transformation and willing to spend their time -- if validated and empowered to -- addressing it and reminding you of it, as an essential priority too, now not later. Or, what we also know deeply is that without this focus too, any real change will implode on these lines more completely or...not truly be a "change"of any real transformation in the end, at all.
For those interested in the deeper context of that kind of true transformation where it makes the most difference in our resulting human relationships and organizations, my attached article here for the Journal of Sustainable Education's next issue (out on Valentine's Day) addresses these concepts explicitly in, "What has Love Got to do With Transformative Education?"
I don't mind it being disregarded or considered "down in the noise" of the immediate, pressing "realities". We all have our areas of expertise and deepest effectiveness. The key is to know when they are blinding you to other potential huge pitfalls avoidable by listening to and including those "other" voices that warn you of the areas you are not validating or understanding, as potentially most destructive to your hopes and dreams in ways you haven't the ability or natural interest to see and thus prepare for preventing. Because you'll never get the "time" later, in time to avoid the conflict-constructs already embedded and allowed to continue at these levels.
Sincerely meant, as I know how deeply you do work on the parts that you do believe are most critical. Nonetheless, this too can still be done...by others who know why it also is potentially, just as critical to include, if true "change" actually is allowed and empowered to happen.
Best hopes, June
From: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:39 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza
After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures.
Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand.
Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list.
Anna
On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma :
[–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago
Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? perma-link [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago
i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) perma-linkparent
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote: hi Anna,
At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental ..
Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness ..
I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture ..
Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four ..
so here is how I see it:
* develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities
* develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship)
* embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture ..
A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ...
for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic
for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open
see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors)
just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it ..
I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me ..
in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon,
Michel
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote: Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole.
'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.'
Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved.
How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration.
Anna
On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anoth... Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.
Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015
[This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.]
Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum.
"What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked.
It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car.
"Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned."
I explained more about what that meant to me.
He shook his head, amused.
"That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book Another Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity.
Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up.
In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists."
He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades.
Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership?
But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group No One is Illegal: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013."
Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole.
As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another."
Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics.
Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements.
And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly.
Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera."
It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill.
Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end).
"Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less?
I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage.
(((((( )))))
Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
<What_s Love Got To Do With Transformative Education-10-31-14-Revised.pdf> _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
participants (1)
-
P2P Foundation mailing list