Milan Rai
We are halfway through Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be before Shon Meckfessel clarifies what his title is about.
Along the way, he refers to postmodernists such as Deleuze and Althusser and sprinkles in words like ‘materiality’, ‘imaginary’ (as a noun) and ‘profanation’.
The main purpose of the book is to justify ‘counterhegemonic’ rioting. There are chapters on the ‘eloquence’ of public property destruction and of clashing with the police.
Meckfessel writes…
In the wake of the Westminster terror attack, British society needs ‘courageous introspection’, and ‘a re-examination of the neo-conservative and violent Western foreign and domestic policy towards Muslims’.
That was the response of CAGE, a Muslim NGO ‘working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror’, to the car-and-knife attack in London on 22 March which had led to five deaths by the time of going to press.
CAGE pointed to ‘the death this month of at…
Has the election of Donald Trump as president of the US got you down? Are there days you just don’t believe any more that we can win, that we can change big important things?
Jane McAlevey’s Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) is the perfect antidote to Trump-era pessimism and despondency. I’m going to buy a bunch of copies for people I know, and I think you should too.
There are books out there filled with inspiring…
In May 2007, just after I started editing PN, we ran a front-page opinion piece by Dan Clawson, a US union activist and academic, on what trade unions and grassroots movements could learn from each other. He’d written a wonderful book about this, called The Next Upsurge.
Clawson gave an example of the new unionism he favoured: the…
In the summer of 2005, Rebecca Dale had three young children, Nik (3), Ben (2) and Katherine (six months old). She had been working as a research fellow at Warwick University, increasing co-operation between industry and the academy, especially within the automation industry.
Now she needed a new job that could fit in with her commitment to her…
Class and classism are becoming more and more important issues for all sorts of movements, especially as we try to deal with the rise of racism, Islamophobia and authoritarianism at home and abroad. It’s important that these efforts don’t themselves become oppressive to working-class and poor people, and that we find class-inclusive ways to work on these issues.
Peace News…
One of Britain’s oldest activist training organisations has divided into two. Seeds for Change used to have two groups, one in Oxford, one in Lancaster. As reported last issue, Seeds for Change (Oxford) has become ‘Navigate’; and Seeds for Change (Lancaster) has become just ‘Seeds for Change’.
Seeds for Change say: ‘Towards the middle of last year, Seeds for Change Oxford and Lancaster realised we’d be able to offer more on-the-ground support through a looser relationship with…
Women’s marches on 21 January took place on seven continents and involved over five million marchers, according to the organisers of the Women’s March on Washington, to show that ‘women’s rights are human rights’ and more: ‘We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us.’
There were marches in Antarctica, Belarus, Botswana, the Congo, Costa Rica, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Macau,…
Yemen may be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with twice as many ‘food insecure’ people (14 million) as in Syria (seven million). A naval blockade led by Saudi Arabia has been a major factor in creating the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ (Red Cross spokeswoman Marie Claire Feghali, April 2015) in Yemen, where over 18 million people need…
By the time this issue lands on your doorstep, it will probably have become clear just how much British prime minister Theresa May has been forced to back down from her signature policy of putting workers’ representatives on company boards.
Responding in May 1977 to the British government’s Bullock Report on industrial democracy, Noam Chomsky quoted the Dutch left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek. Pannekoek wrote decades earlier that the workers’ revolution ‘is not a single event of limited…
In 2015, there was one death for every 269 arrivals. This year, the UN reports, the rate for migrants crossing the Mediterranean has risen to one death for 88 arrivals.
…
How should we respond here in the UK to the Trump presidency? For a number of reasons, we should not focus on Trump himself – on boycotts of outlets that carry Trump-branded goods, for example.
Following Erika Thorne’s wise words elsewhere in this issue, we can focus instead on those leadership can help us turn back the dangers that confront us, those who are most threatened by Trump’s rise.
There are some inspiring things happening in the US.
I was moved…
The Lucas Aerospace plan was developed in the mid-1970s by workers who wanted to move the aircraft manufacturer away from military production towards socially-useful production, in order to make their jobs more secure and more productive.
Lucas Aerospace had 18,000 workers spread out over Britain in 17 different factories, making collective action a real challenge.
The workforce was also divided into 13 different trade unions, adding to the…
What, if anything, links Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate in the US, and Jeremy Corbyn, just re-elected Labour party leader here in the UK?…
The climate crisis is a racist crisis. That was the message of a Black Lives Matter UK protest at London City Airport on 6 September, when nine activists used a tripod and chains to close down a runway for over six hours, grounding over 130 flights.
The action sparked two debates. One was about the relevance of climate change, aviation and pollution to the anti-racist struggle.
Black Lives Matter UK (BLM) said: ‘Black people are the first to die, not the first to fly,…
