The point, after all, is to change the world.
Rebecca Tarlau reviews Jonathan Smucker’s Hegemony How-To, and argues that in addition to building stronger working-class, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-imperialist movements in the United States, the political alignment we build should be international, connecting with the many other working-class groups that are fighting against the same oppressive political and economic system.
Current discussions about prefigurative politics bring back warm and reflective memories for former SNCC organizer Mike Miller. He discusses SNCC’s beloved community and its strategic dilemmas.
Comparing Occupy Wall Street and an outgrowth of the movement in the SF Bay Area called Occupy the Farm, participant-researcher Daniel Murray argues that the movement for radical democracy must do more than create spaces for discourse and dissent. It must be a movement of democratic counter-institutions.
It will take well-designed alternative institutions and robust popular movements to create a better world. Gabriel Hetland explores the complicated relationship between institution- and movement-building that has taken place in Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution”, highlighting the lessons activists and scholars in the US might learn from this.
The recent global wave of revolt has reinvigorated a crucial (and longstanding) question on the Left: what kind of a politics is to be pursued, here and now, if we are to build a more democratic and egalitarian society?
Occupy Wall Street participant Jonathan Smucker takes a critical look at the movement’s “prefigurative politics” through the theoretical lenses of Gramsci and Habermas.
Few know more about democracy and governance in Iceland than Jón Ólafsson. Thomas Hintze interviews Ólafsson, asking if it is fair to characterize Iceland’s “cutlery revolution” of 2009 as prefigurative or leaderless.