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Category: Strategize!

  • Multisolving: Creating Systems Change In A Fractured World

    “Some years ago, my colleagues and I began studying interventions that solve multiple problems at the same time. We found them everywhere, at both neighborhood and national scales and in every country we looked. We found them across sectors: in urban planning, health, agriculture, forestry, energy, transportation, and disaster management.

    On the surface, these projects were all quite different, and the people undertaking them certainly didn’t think of themselves as using any special methodology. Still, we found that the projects had much in common with each other.” It would be helpful, we thought, to find a word that would categorize these diverse projects. It seemed to us that they had much to learn from each other and much to teach the world. We couldn’t find any word in use that quite captured these approaches and their potential impacts. So, we began to use the word multisolving.

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  • University Of Toronto Students Score A Win For The Climate

    When the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment announced in October that it will no longer accept donations from the fossil fuel industry, the news sent waves through the growing movement to get coal, oil and gas companies off campuses. Among other things, that means banning fossil fuel corporations from financing academic research.

    “This victory shows students have the ability to enact institutional change,” said Erin Mackey, a leader of the group Climate Justice UofT, which pushed for the fossil fuel money ban. “That’s especially important when, at many universities, students who want to make change are having the door slammed in their faces.”

    The post University Of Toronto Students Score A Win For The Climate appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Behind UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is A Larger System Of Corporate Rule

    The killing of UnitedHealthcare’s Brian Thompson — a brazen assassination of a wealthy CEO in the streets of midtown Manhattan — shocked the United States. But the tsunami of mass anger unleashed against a hated for-profit health care system has so far defined the story in the news. The killing sparked a deluge of personal testimonies of horrifying experiences with health insurance corporations. Dark humor around the shooting continues to flood social media.

    Millions of people in the U.S. viscerally hate health insurance corporations, and see these companies and their CEOs as symbols of the worst kind of corporate greed.

    The post Behind UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is A Larger System Of Corporate Rule appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Conflicted Transformation Of CAW-Unifor, A Canadian Union

    Recent commentaries on the political trajectory of the major private sector union in Canada, CAW-Unifor, have often had a rather simplistic and problematic perspective. That the CAW-Unifor (the latter being the new name and re-foundation of the union in 2013) drifted from a left, struggle-oriented approach, summarized in the slogan “Fighting back makes a difference,” toward a more collaborative centrist and Gomperist political approach, as the union distanced itself and ultimately moved away from the New Democratic Party (NDP).

    The post The Conflicted Transformation Of CAW-Unifor, A Canadian Union appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Black South’s Revolutionary Anti-Fascist Tradition

    The Black South has a rich history of antifascist organizing and militant strategy through direct struggle and conflict with fascistic forces. If we are going to study and promote an organizing lineage, it is this one that we should look to. What would it look like for our movement’s rallying cry to evolve from “My ancestors died for the right to vote” to “My ancestors died fighting fascism”? This move does not intend to erase nor obscure historic political struggles of The South that center voting; such a reduction is counter-insurgency.

    The post The Black South’s Revolutionary Anti-Fascist Tradition appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Interview With Historic Palestinian Activist Leila Khaled: ‘Surrender Or Fight’

    Leila Khaled is a historic activist for the liberation of the Palestinian people. At 80 years old, she continues to be active in promoting international collaboration with political organizations, popular movements and governments to denounce Israeli violence and broaden the struggle for the formation of the Palestinian state.

    Venezuela is one of the countries that echoes this struggle the most. The defense of the Palestinian people has been, since Hugo Chávez, one of the pillars of Venezuelan foreign policy. In the last week of November, Khaled was in Caracas to participate in the International Conference of Solidarity with Palestine.

    The post Interview With Historic Palestinian Activist Leila Khaled: ‘Surrender Or Fight’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Why escalation is the best response in moments of crises

    Between the lack of action around police brutality, the threats to Roe v. Wade, increasing mass shootings, and the ever looming threat of climate catastrophe, desperation and despair have become the emotions of the day. Polling shows most Americans still care about these issues, but they’ve long lost faith in mainstream institutions and their capacity for change.

    It can be difficult to know how to respond in moments of crisis like these. Besides panicking, one traditional approach is what is called the “ladder of engagement,” which relies on a series of actions that increase in intensity over time to win over supporters and apply pressure to people in power. This usually begins with gathering petition signatures and holding educational events while gradually building the support and capacity to move towards rallies and eventually, though rarely, more confrontational protests like occupations.

    The post Why escalation is the best response in moments of crises appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • How Latin American Women Are Winning Abortion Rights

    It was inconceivable, just five years ago, that ultra-conservative Colombia would decriminalize abortion, or that Catholic, neoliberal Chile would be gearing up to vote on a new constitution that enshrines sexual and reproductive rights, including on-request abortion.

    Yet in February, Colombia’s constitutional court removed abortion (up to 24 weeks) from the criminal code in response to a court case brought by Causa Justa—the spearhead of a wide-ranging social and legal campaign of more than 120 groups and thousands of activists.

    Colombia is now “at the forefront of the region and the world,” according to doctor and feminist activist Ana Cristina González, a spokesperson for Causa Justa.

    The post How Latin American Women Are Winning Abortion Rights appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Creative Methods Workers Are Using to Stop Bosses’ Abuse

    In the past six months, workers at more than 150 Starbucks locations have successfully unionized, fighting back against unfair labor practices by their employer. And in April, Amazon warehouse workers won a victory against one of the most powerful corporations in the world when they became the first company facility to vote to unionize in the United States.

    Public opinion has shifted to a high point since 1965 of support for unions, with 68% of U.S. adults saying they approve of unions, according to a Gallup poll from September 2021. Most workers would vote for a union tomorrow, if they had the opportunity. Yet, private sector union density continues to hover around a low point of 6.2%. The unionization rate overall is a little over 10%, with public sector participation around one-third.

    While recent victories are inspiring, large sectors of the workforce still are not unionized. As we work to change this reality, we also need to make sure that those without unions are protected in the meantime. One important tool for doing so is worker-led enforcement of our labor rights.

    The post The Creative Methods Workers Are Using to Stop Bosses’ Abuse appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • “The new Director-General has a titanic task to rethink and reposition the role of the ILO”

    The Covid 19 pandemic is not yet over and we are already looming in the face of a new crisis spurred on by the war in Ukraine and a rampant inflation that is affecting many countries in the developed and developing world alike.

    The ILO Director-General’s report to the Conference warns that a food, energy and financial crisis is approaching. This scenario will also lead to a new refugees and migration emergency and a climate catastrophe that will affect all countries. In the reality, we do not need to wait for future events to happen as we are already in the middle of a global structural crisis of the neo-liberal economic model that is responsible for the obscene growth of inequality, injustice and poverty and for the irreparable damages to our planet.

    The post “The new Director-General has a titanic task to rethink and reposition the role of the ILO” appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • How Antifascists Helped Push Back Against White Supremacists at Coeur d’Alene Pride

    In the months leading up to June 11th, antifascists in and surrounding Coeur d’Alene recognized the threat that queer folks were facing from both local and faraway fascists. Different collectives outside Coeur d’Alene got together to assess the risks of traveling to north Idaho to support and defend Pride and to establish goals for the day. Antifascist crews worked hard brainstorming and predicting potential outcomes, taking care to prioritize the safety of Pride attendees and vulnerable folks living in north Idaho.

    The post How Antifascists Helped Push Back Against White Supremacists at Coeur d’Alene Pride appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The AFL-CIO’s Official New Goal: Continued Decline

    The single best measurement of the strength of labor unions is union density — the percentage of the total workforce that is unionized. Nothing makes the crushing decline of unions in America more intelligible than the fact that at their height in the mid-20th century, one in three workers was a union member, and today, scarcely one in 10 is. All of the downstream damages to the working class — lower relative wages, higher economic inequality, less political power — flow from this decline.

    We know, therefore, that increasing union density is the labor movement’s most pressing task. Thus, the AFL-CIO — America’s largest union coalition, representing the vast majority of our nation’s union members — unveiled, at its convention in Philadelphia, with much fanfare, a brand new formal goal: to see to it that union density keeps declining for the next decade.

    The post The AFL-CIO’s Official New Goal: Continued Decline appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Calling For A Radical Break With The Status Quo Of Incrementalism

    While Democrats march around in Washington DC pretending they care about quality of life for poor people, it’s important to remember who actually walks the walk as opposed to just talking the talk.

    A joint press conference held by the Philadelphia-based Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign with the Black Alliance for Peace, shared these words of wisdom via zoom on June 16, 2022. Note that the PPEHRC operates as the Poor People’s Army, a well-established organization that has struggled and won housing for single mothers and their children. Details about attending their August boot camp to learn how it’s done are at the end of this post.

    The post Calling For A Radical Break With The Status Quo Of Incrementalism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Labor Notes 2022: Which Way Forward For The Movement?

    After decades of decline and stagnation, U.S. Labor stands at a crossroads. On one side is the same old path of the labor bureaucracy that has sold its soul to the Democratic Party and which has no vision for a renewed labor movement beyond further entrenching itself in the U.S. state. On the other side are the thousands of new young activists and workers marching to the beat of a new grassroots unionism who have the potential to build a national movement to organize millions of workers from below. The formation of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and the victory at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, as well as the hundreds of new Starbucks stores that have formed unions in the last four months show the power and potential of rank-and-file organizing.

    The post Labor Notes 2022: Which Way Forward For The Movement? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Beware The Corporate Appropriation Of ‘Sustainable’ Farming Practices

    Global food systems are at a breaking point. Not only are they responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, they are also the top contributors to water pollution and biodiversity collapse.

    On top of that, many aspects of our food systems are extremely vulnerable to disruptions from climate change and other shocks, as we saw in the first months of the pandemic.

    Agroecology — an approach to farming long practiced by Indigenous and peasant communities around the world — could transform our food systems for the better. And agribusinesses in the Global North are actively looking to agroecology to rebrand and build new markets under the banners of carbon farming and regenerative agriculture.

    The post Beware The Corporate Appropriation Of ‘Sustainable’ Farming Practices appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • To Fight Far Right Attacks We Must Reclaim the Radical Legacy of Pride

    Attacks on trans people are continuing to become more prevalent and more vicious. Not only are there currently more than 150 bills making their way through state legislatures that specifically target trans people, but the far right, aligned with certain sectors of the feminist movement, are also becoming more and more explicit in their calls for a eugenics campaign against trans people, with the end goal of as few trans people in existence as possible. One Twitter user, echoing language used by Tucker Carlson, even called for a “post-Weimar cleanup” of “degenerates.”

    The post To Fight Far Right Attacks We Must Reclaim the Radical Legacy of Pride appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Palestine’s New Resistance Model: How The Past Year Redefined The Struggle For Freedom

    What took place between May 2021 and May 2022 is nothing less than a paradigm shift in Palestinian resistance. Thanks to the popular and inclusive nature of Palestinian mobilization against the Israeli occupation, resistance in Palestine is no longer an ideological, political or regional preference.

    In the period between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and only a few years ago, Palestinian muqawama – or resistance –  was constantly put in the dock, often criticized and condemned, as if an oppressed nation had a moral responsibility in selecting the type of resistance to suit the needs and interests of its oppressors.

    As such, Palestinian resistance became a political and ideological litmus test. The Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas, called for ‘popular resistance’, but it seems that it neither understood what the strategy actually meant, and certainly was not prepared to act upon such a call.

    The post Palestine’s New Resistance Model: How The Past Year Redefined The Struggle For Freedom appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Inspiration From Argentina For The Trans Rights Movement

    This Pride month is a one of great fear and grief for many. After decades of (slowly) advancing queer rights, we are in the midst of the worst backlash we’ve seen in years. Laws are being passed across the country that dramatically roll back queer rights and specifically target trans children. These policies being put forward by far-right politicians would (in effect) forcibly detransition and socially isolate trans children, and in many cases they are already being used to attack the lives of trans people.

    These attacks are in direct contradiction with supposed ideas about progress that many of us have been told for years. This can have a demoralizing effect, making us feel as if struggling for our rights is futile, since the right wing seems so much more powerful than we are.

    The post Inspiration From Argentina For The Trans Rights Movement appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Europe is at a crossroads of and the aspirations of the people

    “Neither war that destroys us, nor peace that oppresses us”: This historic anti-war slogan of the Spanish feminist movement holds one of the fundamental keys to building a horizon of peace. It claims that peace is not just a ceasefire, nor is it surrender to or silence before those who impose their wars on others. Rather, peace is the building of a foundation for fostering relations based on mutual respect and cooperation.

    Such an idea is neither naïve nor impossible. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

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  • No More “Normal”

    For two years, many teachers have longed for a “return to normal” from the devastation the pandemic has wrought. Yet, as those leaving the profession realize, our problems stem not just from a virus, but also from what was considered “normal” even before the pandemic. There was never enough time to do the job adequately. Never enough time to support all the students we served. Never money for the books or materials students needed. The pandemic may have been that extra can of gasoline, exacerbating the flames burning our schools, but the fire was not caused by COVID-19: It is the result of decades of disinvestment, a corporate ideology that values the voices of business leaders over educators, and the broader failure of the political and economic system to adequately provide for working people’s mental and physical well-being.

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  • The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat The Robber Barons

    “I was born in Fayette County, Texas, from German parents, and who fled from the reaction [to] the 1848 revolution. I think that I inherited some of my revolutionary qualifications. I am not responsible for them. I cannot help it.”

    So testified E.O. Meitzen before the Commission on Industrial Relations in March 1915 about why he involved himself in the political struggles of working farmers. At the time, Meitzen was a veteran leader of the Texas Socialist Party. Nearly thirty years earlier, his inheritance led him to help organize and lead the Fayette County Farmers’ Alliance. When the Farmers’ Alliance failed to bring relief to farmers, Meitzen joined the Populist revolt, becoming a statewide leader of the People’s Party. The Meitzen political legacy extended to E.O.’s children, in particular his son E.R., who was a leader successively in the Farmers’ Union, the Socialist Party, the Nonpartisan League and the Farm-Labor Union of America. For three generations, from the 1840s to 1940s, the Meitzens spearheaded movements and organizations that fought for the economic and political rights of laborers and working farmers.

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  • Talking Back: A Preemptive Response To Media Attacks On Defend The Atlanta Forest

    Perhaps it is not too early to say that the media spin against the current movement (which will be driven completely by whatever public relations firm the Police Foundation hires) will be poorly written and unimaginative. So completely has the consolidated media apparatus degraded over the last forty years, one can hardly imagine that police spokespersons, editors, or city representatives will manage to construct fascinating, clear-headed, or invigorating lies. Since the articles are all hidden behind paywalls, the real talking points must be reducible to headlines and captions alone. Lucky for them, considering that the articles are all filled with embedded Tweets, misattributions, and inane quotations. Unless actual writers are given control of these companies, they will surely be totally replaced by decentralized social media platforms in a decade.

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  • Bolivia: “We Are The Center Of The World”

    Humanity is at a turning point. Not only war and climate change threaten life on our planet. Ideologies and some people as well.

    We know that money and the production of wealth and well-being have created a widening and deepening gap between people, neighborhoods, cities and countries that has been exacerbated in the wake of the pandemic.

    So I would like to stop thinking of ourselves as the poor periphery of an unequal, colonial and racist globalization.

    In Bolivia, since the beginning of this century, we have been struggling with some of the most important and decisive issues for the future of the human species: water, our sacred coca leaf, the goods that we can distribute thanks to the generosity of the Pachamama and – of course – the right to decide collectively about our lives.

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  • Economic Disobedience: What Is It And How Does It Work?

    As the COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy to a standstill in March 2020, a peculiar trend popped up in multiple cities: People started hanging white sheets out of their windows.

    With April rent coming due alongside record unemployment numbers, the white flags became a protest symbol for struggling tenants on the verge of a rent strike. The symbol spread online and eventually showed up in Chicago, Brooklyn, and New Orleans, according to reporting from CNN. The rent crisis also led to a rise in tenant unions, with tenants-turned-housing-activists in Oakland and San Francisco successfully organizing multi-month rent strikes that resulted in impressive wins.

    Despite the threat of eviction and potential economic and legal fallout, ordinary people, acting out of necessity, engaged in a collective act of defiance. It was one of the most visible recent examples of a type of organizing with deep historic roots in the U.S. and around the world: economic disobedience.

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  • The Poor People’s Campaign and the Moral Dilemma of Liberalism

    Rev. William Barber, an indisputable champion of the poor and a consistent voice demanding an end to poverty, may have made a serious moral and ethical error that effectively placed him outside of the “Kingian” framework that informed Dr. King’s work especially during the last year of his life.

    In an attempt to make a point about the flawed priorities of the duopoly, Dr. Barber wrote in an email to the “movement family” on Saturday, April 30, 2022 that, “despite the political gridlock on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats have acted swiftly to approve historic military aid to Ukraine. In the face of such a moral imperative, it would be anathema for either party to ask, “How are we going to pay for it?”

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  • The Full Story Of How Louisianans Defeated The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill

    On May 3, the Louisiana House of Representatives Education Committee struck down this state’s version of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by a seven to four vote. This decision came after a mass upsurge of students, parents, teachers, social workers and LGBTQ+ community members demanding to shut the bill down.

    HB 837, the “Don’t Say Gay” or “Classroom censorship” bill, attempted to prohibit all discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in K-8 classrooms. On top of this, it was an effort to ban teachers from disclosing their gender identities or sexual orientations to students.

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  • Marking Workers’ Day in Dispiriting Times

    Most young people in South Africa do not have a job and are, under current circumstances, unlikely to ever have one. For years, deindustrialization and the collapse of mining laid waste to unionized jobs. Now state austerity is hacking away at the public sector. Many of the few new jobs that are being created are poorly paid, precarious and not well unionized.

    Some of this can be ascribed to powerful global forces that are difficult for any state to resist. And the deep structural features of our society were built by colonialism and are so entrenched that they cannot easily be changed. But there is no doubt that the ANC’s poor economic policy choices have also been a significant part of the failure to build a viable economy. This has been compounded by the appalling state of public education, the collapse of a significant part of the ANC into a violent kleptocracy, the decay of infrastructure and a series of damaging events such as the brutally enforced hard Covid lockdowns, the winter riots and the recent floods in KwaZulu-Natal.

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  • ‘You’ve Got To Shut It Down’: Lessons From Wisconsin’s 2011 Worker Uprising

    The statewide protests against Act 10, known as the Wisconsin Uprising, comprised one of the largest sustained collective actions in the history of the United States. Anyone who was there in 2011 will attest to the collective spirit of resistance and solidarity that the uprising embodied, and the lasting impact it left on all who participated. But the protests were ultimately unsuccessful in beating back Act 10, and the short- and long-term effects of its passage have been devastating for working people and organized labor. How did this coordinated assault on labor come to pass in Wisconsin? How are people around the state today working to rebuild worker power out of the rubble left by Act 10? And what lessons can the rest of us around the country learn from the 50-year war on workers that has changed the state of Wisconsin for generations?

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  • A Life In Transit: ‘What You Can Get Is Set By How Far You Are Prepared To Go’

    I got hired by the New York City Transit Authority, which runs the subways and buses, in the aftermath of a 1980 strike. Even though the strike was a victory, its early ending by local leadership betrayed us—and that hurt.

    There was still an old opposition in the union, but they were at the point in their careers that they were retiring before long. At the same time, there were people getting hired who were members of socialist organizations, like me. We wanted to work in transit because transit workers have potential power, and we wanted to change the union to be more democratic and militant.

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  • Peace Movement Needs To Demand Dismantling Of NATO

    During World War II an “unnatural alliance” was created between the United States, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union. What brought the three countries together—the emerging imperial giant (the United States), the declining capitalist power (Great Britain), and the first socialist state (the Soviet Union)—was the shared need to defeat fascism in Europe. Rhetorically, the high point of collaboration was reflected in the agreements made at the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, three months before the German armies were defeated.

    At Yalta, the great powers made decisions to facilitate democratization of former Nazi regimes in Eastern Europe, a “temporary” division of Germany for occupation purposes, and a schedule of future Soviet participation in the ongoing war against Japan.

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