Cath
The Zapatistas are coming!
Oh no they’re not! Oh yes they are!
Activists around Europe have been planning since January to receive touring Zapatistas, on a ‘Journey of Life’, a field survey of Europe, trying to understand our social and political context and to find accomplices.
The news that they might arrive in a week is apparently surprising.
A chance conversation, being in the right place at the right time, means I’m suddenly involved in trying to find…
Today was weird. On whatever untrained basis, I ‘mediated’ two people from another housing co-op for six hours. A really overwhelming sentiment was the disappointment, disillusion and disengagement created by other people’s apathy.
It’s hard to hold a neutral space and encourage creative, open thinking when you’re hearing your own cynical and depressed thoughts repeated back to you.
So what I need now is to celebrate all the joyous, proactive, connected, determined, adventurous…
For climate campaigners, Penny was best known for supergluing – she glued herself to the revolving doors of lastminute.com’s HQ as part of a Plane Stupid action, she glued herself to a shelf in Boots because of their accounting practices, and she famously glued herself to the gates of the Heathrow Climate Camp to stop the police entering the site, earning enormous gratitude and respect.
But this was really the tiny cherry on the enormous cake of her life’s work to mitigate climate…
Money is power, money is message, money makes the world go round. Time is money. Every little counts. It’s all about money.
Credo: I want to see a world without money, where people give according their ability and receive according to their needs, where power is collective and resources are shared.
In the meantime though….
As I go to sleep thinking about money for this article, Liza Minelli and Joel Grey* are shimmying, pouting and grimacing across my mental…
The Laurieston Hall and Lifespan communes are rare survivors of a wave of ambitious efforts by a generation who knew they were changing the world. The creation stories and quotes in these two books speak to a faith in oneself and in others, of the confidence of youth and the power of ideas to harness collective energy.
Laurieston, in Galloway, was born from a desire by London feminists to start living the feminist, ecological revolution as an experiment and an example. Lifespan’s…
Photograph: my parents’ registry-office wedding in 1971, drinks with my dad’s family.
Photograph: my mother with all my dad’s female relatives, glamorous hair and flowing dresses and cigarettes, all laughing.
Photographs: one-year-old, two-year-old, three-year-old me with various other small children in various large gardens.
Odd/not odd – all white faces, well I suppose they would be. Even though they were living in a country with a white population around 20 percent.…
Unlearning racism. Surely, Cath, you can’t be questioning such an obviously good thing to do? No, no, honest to god, I’m glad, I wanted to be part of a white caucus doing this stuff years ago, but, excuses, excuses, didn’t prioritise it.
And the housing co-op is an excellent ready-made group of people who know each other well – it is clear that most of us want to be held accountable and want the skills to hold each other accountable. Fab!
But I do feel a bit defeated and glum…
‘I can’t speak openly’. This phrase has become a motif for me in the last fortnight. I’ve heard it from people involved in a messy social club conflict, from both sides in a housing co-op divided in two, and from people feeling bullied in their own co-op.
I’ve had it confided to me by friends and heard it in my own head.
It’s so frustrating, this (often justified) fear, which contributes to a vicious circle of lost trust, lack of communication, (sometimes wilful)…
Initially there was disappointment, frequently blended with relief, over cancelled events and the slowing down of social life.
Then came the realisation that space and time no longer matter when the only place you are is your bedroom desk at whatever time of day or night you choose.
It suddenly seemed not only sensible, but important to attend webinars, training, forums and socials all over the English-speaking world.
You came across more and more and more people doing…
‘So… er… Rita, why do you want to live in our housing co-op?’. Eight down, three to go and I’m valiantly keeping hold of the differences between all the applicants.
The strange rituals of recruitment are pushing us to categorise, compare, assess this parade of complex, unique, incomparable, creative humans, whose hidden facets of darkness and lightness make a nonsense of the idea that we can judge who would best live with us.
It’s a process that requires us to acknowledge the…
As I started writing this diary yesterday, I found myself unable to focus on any particular thing, but just spewing cynicism, resignation, frustration and despair onto the page.
These have been my baseline emotions for several years now and the mainstream narrative of a ‘climate emergency’ isn’t helping.
People are a bit more concerned, some people are getting really quite active, but the majority are carrying on as normal – which is to say generally increasing their levels of…
Last year, I travelled around Spain and North America, wanting to learn everything I could about the possibilities of creating an alternative economy outside capitalism.
I hung out in Love & Solidarity Housing Co-op and Riot Bayit Housing Co-op and Red Emma’s worker co-op anarchist bookshop.
I felt at home in Twin Oaks worker-owned egalitarian commune and now harbour plans for setting up a commune here.
I wondered what I would be doing when I got back – I…
In the last three months, I have been to two funerals for Radical Routes activists, both in their early 50s.
Radical Routes (RR) is a network of co-operatives and for the last few years, Sean was a big presence at almost every quarterly gathering and a driving force in Catfish housing co-op, who just bought their first house in Huddersfield a few months ago.
Dave, on the other hand, a founding member of Zion Housing Co-op (aka Nutclough HC) in Hebden Bridge in 2001, hadn’t been…
In the last issue, I declared my intention to achieve the impossible and set up a commune – a living, working, playing, caring community of about 100 people. I don’t really believe it’s possible, but I am going to talk about it a lot and am full of good intentions to give it a go, just as soon as I have some time, maybe after the conference-organising is over, maybe once I’m in the swing of my new part-time job, maybe once we’ve dealt with the moths, updated the book, organised the house…
I used to love the slogan ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible’. It speaks to the necessity (at least for the last few decades) of fundamental change in order to survive the consequences of capitalism’s onslaught on the earth and its children.
But somewhere along the line, disillusion and burnout taught me that ‘the impossible’ was, well… impossible and I switched to working on…
