Several recent articles have chronicled the emergence of an emerging municipal uprising in several U.S. cities, sometimes encouraged by European models.
• Based in north-central Vermont, the Institute for Social Ecology has offered experiential radical education and support for grassroots organizing and community-building for more than 40 years.
• Social Ecology advocates a reconstructive and transformative outlook on social and environmental issues, and promotes a directly democratic, confederal politics. Social Ecology envisions a moral economy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy, toward a world that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom.
'Social Ecology and Urban Movements' panel with Dan Chodorkoff & Dimitri Roussopoulos at the recent Transnational Institute of Social Ecology conference in Thessaloniki, Greece ... See MoreSee Less
'Social Ecology and Urban Movements'. With Dan Chodorkoff & Dimitri Roussopoulos A talk at Ecopolis social centre, Thessaloniki, Greece, September 11, 2017. ...
Thanks to everyone who made the 2017 ISE Annual Gathering such a wonderful weekend! With over 70 amazing people from across North America as well as Kurdistan, Sweden, Belgium, and Chile, we hope to see you all again next year! ... See MoreSee Less
The Symbiosis Research Collective will be speaking at the ISE Annual Gathering this weekend - read their excellent prize-winning article Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid here:
"Our aim in this essay is to channel our struggles against oppression and domination into a strategic approach toward building real utopias—to transform the poetry of Occupy into the prose of real social change. Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical community institutions of participatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives.
This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework for crafting such a society from the ground up—to, as the Wobblies declared, build the new world in the shell of the old." ... See MoreSee Less