Consensus decision-making has become dominant in activist circles. Not everyone practises it, but almost everyone wants to be using it, or to lay some claim to be using it. Among some folk, consensus decision-making has become not only an essential part of social change, but a pre-condition of working in a group.
We discovered in earlier segments of this interview (PN 2544 and 2545), that US activist and trainer George Lakey was one of the people who helped spread the ‘affinity-group-…
In late May, I was invited to a meeting of the Edge Fund, which is attempting to create an activist-led or -advised grant-making body in the UK, breaking down some of the inequalities that exist even in radical-minded philanthropy. The discussion was lively, and the openness of the Edge Fund to activist input was dizzying in its latitude.
Much of current UK activism depends on grants from bodies like the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (the major donor behind the PN-initiated…
Andrew Cornell’s Oppose and Propose offers an extraordinarily well-researched examination of the 1971-1988 US-based organisation Movement for a New Society (MNS).
Cornell mixes documentary evidence and interviews with key participants in MNS to provide a comprehensive account of the movement, from its roots in Quaker anti-war groups through 17 years of rich and varied history, during which MNS was the only US-wide…
George Lakey photo: john Meyer
Nearly 200 years ago, revolutionary English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that poets were the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The poet ‘not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered’, Shelley argued, she also ‘beholds the future in the present’, and her thoughts are ‘the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time’.
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The White Book, which can be signed by anyone, contains a simple declaration: ‘Yr wyf i, drwy dorry fy enw yn y Llyfr Gwyn, yn ymrwymo i weithio dros heddwch yn y byd.’
‘By signing my name in the Llyfr Gwyn, I commit myself to work for peace in the world.’
PN spoke to renowned poet Mererid Hopwood, the first woman ever to win the bardic Chair at the National Eisteddfod of Wales (in…
Rare image of symposium co-organiser Andrew Rigby, 10 April. photo: Milan Rai
Over 50 activists and peace researchers from around the world assembled at Coventry University’s Technopark in mid-April for a highly-successful ‘International Symposium on Nonviolent Movements and the Barrier of Fear’.
Extracts from an interview with Noam Chomsky recorded in London in Oct 2011. Chomsky was keynote speaker at the Rebellious Media Conference organised by Peace News and others. Thanks to Toaster Productions for filming.
Every one knows the environmental damage that cars cause, but the response is usually to make them greener and cleaner... but why not try to get rid of them altogether? Because that’s just not possible? Because we love our cars too much? Because we need them? This article hopes to explain why we’re in this mess, and to show that we can in fact park the car...for good.
Understanding Car…
As a reader and subscriber to PN since the 1930s, and as one of the founders of the Scott Bader Commonwealth – totally engaged since the end of the Second World War in working to demonstrate a living, economic way of working life beyond capitalism, I found Lucy Lant’s letter and the editor’s reply (PN 2542) deeply challenging and enormously relevant.
[The Scott Bader Commonwealth was established in 1951, when Ernest Bader gave the company to its workforce. Today, Scott Bader is an £…
Well, I agree with everything Lucy Lant (PN 2542) says about climate change and most of what she says about capitalism, but I can’t understand why much of the environmental movement ignores the role of those officially communist countries which are at least as exploitative of the environment and its natural resources.
Yes I know they are not genuinely socialist but they certainly wouldn’t call themselves capitalist and China, to take the worst example, is responsible for huge and…
A common argument in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein could only be toppled by a foreign invasion, that it was impossible for Iraqis themselves to remove such a brutal dictator.
An insightful and stirring look at the life and work of Gene Sharp, How To Start A Revolution demolishes this argument. Countering the widely accepted view of nonviolence as hopelessly naïve, the 84-year-old professor of political science has spent his life documenting the…
George Lakey gets arrested ...
George has stood up for radical nonviolence for decades. He persuaded PN to adopt the slogan ‘for nonviolent revolution’ in 1969. George was a co-founder of two important US radical institutions, the Movement for a New Society and Training for Change, he has led 1,500 workshops around the world.
George will be touring the UK and attending the entire five days of Peace News Summer Camp (26-30 July), where he will lead several sessions.
To be kept…
Someone selling Peace News at the St Paul’s Occupy site was taken to task for our (front page) description of the camp in the last issue as an “anti-capitalist occupation”. It turns out that there has been a vigorous debate at Occupy LSX over its attitude towards capitalism, resulting in a decision to move away from the “anti-capitalist” tag.
The site newspaper, The Occupied Times, published two views from the camp. One asked: “Is the best you can wish for yourself and your loved one…
1) Why do we need “radical” media?
Anne Beech: Most recent reasons? Phone-tapping scandals, reportage (and analysis) of the disturbances in Tottenham, Hackney et al, the ongoing misrepresentation of events, individuals and communities (Dale Farm, anyone? Palestine?), the sclerotic hardening of information arteries online and in print, in media and in book publishing, the continued conglomeration – but all at a time when new start-ups (the ones that want to retain their independence,…
This issue we carry a report from a participant in this year’s Uncivilisation festival, inspired by the Dark Mountain project and manifesto (see p3). This is a very intriguing initiative, self-consciously metaphorical. There are two faces to the Dark Mountain manifesto, it seems to us. On the one hand, it is refreshing to hear despair honestly spoken: “our sense that civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system…
