Emily Johns
'Flickr - Laenulfean - crossroads' by Carsten Tolkmit from Kiel, Germany. Photo: Carsten Tolkmit CC-by-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
After 26 years supporting its activist membership in taking over £4m-worth of housing out of the private property market, the Radical Routes network of radical housing and worker co-ops deleted a fundamental membership condition in the summer of 2014 and may well abolish another before the end of 2015.
Shortly after being formed in 1988,…
The pink house, Walden Pond Housing Co-op in St Leonards-on-Sea. photo: Milan Rai
Radical Routes has been an amazing radical success story, proving that democratic radical institutions can survive and thrive, operating by a modified form of consensus decision-making, and turning private property into collectively-owned, activist-controlled spaces. For some, the success of Radical Routes (RR) has proven that ‘anarchists can deal with money’.
Today, Radical Routes is changing…
There is something hopeful about the rise of UKIP (UK Independence Party). Yes, it is a racist far-right party; yes, the mainstream parties have responded to its increasing strength by becoming more repressive and racist; and yes, it may win several seats in the general election in May 2015 – all frightening developments.
On the other hand, UKIP is part of a global anti-establishment phenomenon which in Europe is represented not only by far-right parties like Golden Dawn in Greece…
Trident submarine. Photo: Paul O’Shau/MOD
Different groups are using different strategies to try to make an election issue out of Trident replacement. The British decision on whether/how to replace the Trident nuclear weapon system is scheduled to be made in 2016, which means the 7 May 2015 election will elect the government that takes this £100bn decision. This has been described as ‘a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scrap Trident and ban all nuclear weapons’.
Lobbying…
William Morris by Frederick Hollyer, 1884. Photo: National Portriat Gallery, London
William Morris is woven into our lives, sung upon our soul, written into our minds.
When I was a very small child, maybe four years old, I remember laughing at the slapstick of Albert Meltzer being stuck in our armchair. It was low, black wood with green upholstery. Albert, the enormous anarchist, had his plump hands on the velvet arms and was straining to extricate his bulk from between the…
Te Puea Herangi, the Maori princess who led the Waikaito tribal confederation’s successful campaign of nonviolent resistance to conscription during the First World War, articulated one of their reasons for not fighting as follows: ‘They tell us to fight for king and country. Well, that’s all right. We’ve got a king.…
Have you ever been in this situation?
You’re in a grassroots, very-low budget campaigning group. You have a group website.
Then the person who set the website up – and who has been maintaining it – moves away, or they move onto another issue, or they withdraw from activism completely.
Suddenly, you find out no one knows what the passwords are, and you can’t actually use your own website. Or, if you do know what the passwords are, no one else in the group is…
The British view of the world, even today, is fundamentally shaped by a 100-year-old lie, a powerful myth that contrasts German aggressiveness with the US-UK defence of small countries and high principles. In reality, it is a documented fact that the sovereignty of ‘plucky little Belgium’ was irrelevant to Britain’s decision to enter the First World War. In reality, it is a documented fact that the military alliances that Britain entered into were born of a desperate need to shore up…
By 1918, Britain’s No-Conscription Fellowship was led by women, as the male leadership was in prison. Catherine Marshall was a key organiser of the NCF. Joan Beauchamp was the official publisher of the NCF’s newspaper, The Tribunal, and Lydia Smith her secret co-editor, using a woman with a pram as a…
In Marge Piercy’s wonderful visionary work, Woman on the Edge of Time (1985), a young visitor from a future North American utopia wants to see a car. Dawn says: ‘I studied about them. I saw them on holi. How the whole society was built around them, they paved over the earth for them to run on and sit on right in the middle of where they lived! Everyone had to have one. And they all set out in their private autocar to go someplace at the same time and got stuck in jams and breathed…
Here’s a book to counter climate change! I travelled through New Orleans every night from my bed, becoming intimate with neighbourhoods through maps of sounds and corpses and bananas; poetic and political maps such as ‘Snakes and Ladders: What rose up and what fell down during Hurricane Katrina’; I followed the fluidity of a delta city where the concrete and metaphor elide in ‘Of Levees and Prisons: failures of containment, surges of freedom’, with many ‘did you know?’ moments (Louisiana was…
