Co-operatives and Liberation, not necessarily in that order
It’s an amazing time to be alive. As a society, it genuinely feels like we’re making progress on discussions of systemic racism. This is a huge step forward, both in that I can now have conversations about racism within contexts which felt too “conservative” to have them in the past. And also – the fact […]
Read More Opposing White Supremacy AND Meritocracy (shouldn’t be this hard)The pandemic offers an instructive lesson: individual action towards a social goal, in the absence of a social effort to coordinate the actions of all, is meaningless. As individuals we can pursue certain types of goals – we can perhaps build a garden, write a play, bake a pie, etc, but we cannot end poverty […]
Read More Thinking the Pandemic: Compliance and FreedomCo-operators go on and on about the “Rochdale Principles”. If you hear someone doing this, it might be the case that they are less than familiar with happened at Rochdale, or why Rochdale is an important part of Co-operative history. As Orion Ulrey, founding father of student co-ops at Michigan State University has argued, there […]
Read More Abolish the Rochdale PrinciplesI mean this both as a diagnosis of the social moment, and as a description of my private life. In my private life, which is to say in my personal relationships, multiple things have happened over the last year, the last month, the last few days, which have revealed to me two things: just how […]
Read More I feel like it’s all falling apart.When an abused, repressed and oppressed people fights back using means that cause genuine hurt to members of the oppressor group, even members who are not directly involved in oppression themselves, and even when the acts are even arguably “counter productive” with respect to the struggle for justice, these acts must not be equivocated with […]
Read More Statement on the rising situation in al QudsAll parties in conflict want peace. Oppressed groups want peace in the sense of the end of their oppression, which they interpret as a continuation of war, whereas oppressor groups want peace and quiet, in the sense of the absence of any rebellion against the oppression they instituted through mechanisms of pacification. Calls for “peace” […]
Read More Towards a non-vacuous concept of “Just Peace”We have no right to dishonesty of any sort. The Israeli massacre of Palestinians is political, it is what they judge to be required to maintain the current situation of political impasse. We must avoid calling for an end to violence by both sides and instead recognize that the explicit violence of massacres is part […]
Read More On the need for honesty as Gaza burnsAsef Bayat‘s idea of “social non-movements” might be crucial for thinking about “social movements” today. The very idea that we “ought” to respond to the political crises we face by organized “movements” is perhaps overly narrow. Let me say that by “social non-movements,” I mean broadly the collective action of dispersed and unorganized actors. These […]
Read More A few thoughts on Bayat’s notion of “Social Non-Movements”I’ve always loved living-history museums. Growing up I was lucky enough to visit many in Canada – grand ones like Heritage Park in Calgary and Fort Steele in south eastern B.C., and smaller ones closer to home – Burnaby Village and Fort Langley (both in the greater Vancouver area) come to mind. When I was […]
Read More Beamish historical park: a living history of life and class realities in Northeast EnglandIf you aren’t from Vancouver, you’ve probably never heard of the Portland Hotel Society (PHS) a non-profit started in ’93 to provide services and advocacy for the marginalized people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The society operates many hotels which rent mostly single-room-occupancy (SRO’s) in that area, and specializes in harder to house populations. In conjunction with Vancouver […]
Read More Defending the Portland Hotel Society
Only a Northern Song 