In this episode we speak to Attila Szocs of Ecoruralis, a 14,000 member-strong peasant farmer organization in Romania that is part of La Via Campesina Europe. The first part of this episode explores the work of Ecoruralis at the community level: their seed house, peasant-to-peasant knowledge exchanges, local production and distribution networks, Ecoruralis’ approach to agroecology and organization, and the horizon for strengthening rural feminism.
This time-travel session takes us from desirable futures back to our complicated past, asking: How do we imagine transformation? Centering on a performative interview with Amaranta Herrero and Dimitris Papadopoulos, set in 2050, this session engages the playful and transdisciplinary method of the Future Archive project. Animating and complicating questions of what is desirable, this session encourages to go beyond strictly utopian and dystopian visions of the future, based on their own implicatedness in worlds and struggles.
The pandemic, like other unfolding and coming ecological crises, profoundly reshapes the terrain upon which social movements operate and emerge. We held a workshop in order to discuss different terrains of struggle over housing, reproductive rights, and ecology. Here we are allocating recordings of the talks and of the discussion on May 21st as well as further reflections on the workshop on May 22nd.
READ MORE Documentation: Learning and Struggling in Pandemic times
Commentary on the Workshop “Learning and Struggling in Pandemic Times. Available in German and French.
Die Erfahrungen von Organizing im Wohnumfeld und die Erfahrung der Pandemie (die uns auf unser Wohnumfeld zurückgeworfen hat) können Grundlage dafür sein, ein Bewusstsein für informell geleistete Care-Arbeit zu schaffen und neue solidarische Formen von Care-Arbeit zu leben und zu erkämpfen…
READ MORE Care and unconditional solidarity in the struggle for the right to housing.
Recently, I announced my intention to write a long essay about Malm to a circle of degrowth communists. One, a researcher and activist of US pipeline struggles, was exasperated at Malm’s apparently contradictory embrace of a strategy of pushing the capitalist state to do the right thing in Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency (2020) and his stringent support of sabotage in How to Blow up a Pipeline (2021).
Syriza took power through elections—not so much on the basis of a movement that could embolden or depose it. Now it is back to fighting power for many Greeks. But beyond the taking and fighting of power, there is the question of building power.