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There were more protests in Britain last year than at any time since the 1970s. 
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From
roarmag
For decades, the FARC has led the revolutionary struggle in Colombia, but now farmers are taking over control by means of communal assemblies.
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"This is where Bernie Sanders comes into play. You may not subscribe to many of Sanders’s ideas—particularly, those on limiting trade. But one thing is certain: he is really beginning a political and economical revolution. According to our research, Sanders is the only candidate in this race, and actually in the last few decades, who is not taking money from special interest groups. Sanders managed through grassroots movements to raise close to 100 million dollars from the “dispersed public”: that is, taxpayers, consumers, and investors that usually cannot organize and get representation in democracy because they are a large, heterogeneous group that cannot overcome the free rider problem. Sanders is defeating the model that has ruled politics for many years."
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As his candidancy falters, where can that rapturous energy be channelled? Into building an economy that serves ordinary people, and excludes the 1%
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There is an urgent need for citizens to demand the pressing structural reforms needed to address interconnected social, political and environmental crises.
jean lievens's insight:
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X-net's Simona Levi corrects some popular misconceptions resulting from international press coverage on the role of Podemos.
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"‘Against Power Inequalities’ provides a historical guide to the contest for power redistribution through the centuries, and draws out the underlying obstacles to the development of more inclusive communities."
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"In the mid-1990s, as the Internet and the World Wide Web went public, a utopian near consensus about their likely social impact seemed to bubble up out of nowhere. The Net would level social hierarchies, distribute and personalize work, and dematerialize communication, exclaimed pundits and CEOs alike. The protocols of the Net were said to embody new, egalitarian forms of political organization. They offered the technological underpinnings for peer-to-peer commerce, and with them, claimed many, an end to corporate power. And well above the human plains of financial and political haggling, suggested some, those same protocols might finally link the now-disembodied species in a single, harmonious electrosphere.
Michelle Franco's curator insight,
December 10, 2014 11:15 PM
According to the article, scholars pointed out that new technologies as diverse as telephones and airplanes have always generated utopian hopes. This piece focuses on Internet aspects that became viewed as Utopian. I focused on the social benefits of the Internet and the Web.
Utopian views of the Internet have been discussed since the introduction of this revolutionary technology. The Internet masks users and creates a "world" or "culture" where everyone is equal. The internet also connects people from all over the world. As I read this piece and looked up what certain terms meant, I found myself further researching. The Internet has the ability to give people a chance that they are never able to receive face-to-face. I read about a girl who was born deaf and was only able to communicate with people using sign language. When she was in her mid-teenage years, she learned how to use the Internet. She was able to interact with people on social media on the same level that everyone else interacted. She sat at her computer and responded to people's comments. She felt so included and did not think about her disability even once during her session. She also researched people who are just like her and made many new friends. Overall, the Internet allowed for this girl to feel more and more confident, until she found ways to interact and people to interact with where and with whom she no longer felt insecure.
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Here’s a very special treat. Originally published on Guerrilla Translation, Movimiento por la Democracia´s “Charter for Democracy” stands out as premier example of citizen-led solution making to the various crises we face. It is a constitution for the commons written by commons.
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The group carries out research about the social digital divide, public technological debt, technopolitics, activism and technology in digital literacy in Colombia
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The water Commons in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, are under threat (an older post about here). Needless to say that in time of crisis such an enclosure of a common good is a common practice. A recent text by Theodoros Karyotis, a member of the Initiative 136 for social control of Thessaloniki’s water services, gives a thought-provoking summary of the current situation, the social movements and some recent related developments:
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= the Program on Liberation Technology seeks to understand how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development, and pursue a variety of other social goods.
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A scholarly paper titled "Commons Movements & 'Progressive' Governments as Dual Power: The Potential for Social Transformation in Europe" by A. Broumas.
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From
www
The answer to the question is a surprisingly complicated and contested one. This all began with revelations about links between government ministers and offshore companies in so-called tax havens or tax shelters. On Sunday evening media outlets across the world, including RUV and Reykjavík Media, published documentation that linked these offshore accounts to prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, his wife, finance minister Bjarni Benediktsson and interior minister Ólöf Nordal
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Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, or DiEM 25, is billed as an alternative to prevailing authoritarianism and austerity.
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Continual innovation in technologically mediated communications has excited social movement scholars, particularly over the past two decades. As a result there is now a great deal of empirical research detailing the uses of a variety of technologies by activists in a wide range of movements. However, the developing literature displays a number of conceptual problems and empirical gaps and we believe that addressing them could significantly advance our understanding of the interaction of movements with information and communication technologies (ICTs). We are calling for papers that address problems or gaps in the state of the art in scholarship on ICTs, digital media and social movements.
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"Nick Dyer-Witheford (2007) has proposed the term Commonism for a society where the basic social form of production are the Commons (while in capitalism, commodities are the basic social form). As the success of commons-based peer production shows, commons and peer production go together very well. We can therefore expect peer production to be the typical form of production in a commons-based society. Commonism would be a society where production is organized by people who cooperate voluntarily and on an equal footing for the benefit of all.
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"The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement demonstrates how labour can self-organise production, and, as is shown by the free operating system GNU/Linux, even compete with some of the worlds largest firms. The book examines the hopes of such thinkers as Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Negri, in the light of the recent achievements of the hacker movement. This book is the first to examine a different kind of political activism that consists in the development of technology from below."
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Liberation sat down with Eugene Puryear on Nov. 5 to discuss the outcome and significance of his campaign for the seat of D.C. Councilmember At-Large.
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Caroline Lucas joins a panel of activists and campaigners including Mark Steel to launch the People's Assembly event in June this year.
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"Throughout the globe there is a blossoming of interest in the old idea of ‘the commons’. For many, it offers a radical escape from the all-too-apparent devastations of capitalism and the impoverishments of a world possessed by the idea of possession. For these commoners, the commons were not all lost with the European land enclosures of the sixteenth century, but continue to be produced, enclosed, and reclaimed today. For them, commoning implies an abandonment of the rule of ‘the economy’ that reduces us to hyper-individualised consumers, and more and more of the natural world to resources that can be bought and sold. It carries promises of more convivial, communal and enspirited relationships and transformations in the material quality of people’s lives. Defiantly utopian, as a first step, these commoners call on us to ‘clean our gaze’ so we can see existing commons and, more importantly, see the quiet revolution that is underway in actual movements of the common people.
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(Reuters) - Brazilian security forces are using undercover agents, intercepting e-mails, and rigorously monitoring social media to try to ensure that violent anti-government protesters do not ruin soccer's World Cup this year, officials told Reuters.
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The notion of a popular front has drawn so much suspicion in the past that its usage has almost been dropped completely from our political vocabulary. The historic example of The Workers’ Movement raised the materialised spectre of collaboration, compromise and the dilution of more heterogeneous radical intents through an adoption of the formalities of state politics. Did these endeavours to form popular fronts, an effort to massify, become one with the notion of a ‘historical compromise’? Whilst in Italy in the 1970s this phrase marked the willed vicinity of the Italian Communist Party to state power, could it not be said, reading this history backwards, that some form of ‘historical compromise’ came to mark the Workers’ Movement in general? A history of compromise with power as it was already instituted and hence a compromise with the forces of capital? At the parliamentary origins of the British Labour Party there was the Lib-Lab pact that got Kier Hardie elected as an MP; at the origins of the Communist Party of Great Britain there was a streamlining of the movement via the adoption of the Bolshevik Central Committee’s 21 points which enabled its legitimating membership of the Comintern.1
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