Round-up: Silver Action, Freedom fires and the aftermath, Occupy Twitter

Sharing of women activist experiences at the Tate

"Hundreds of women over the age of sixty will converge on The Tanks at Tate Modern to participate in Suzanne Lacy’s new participatory artwork, Silver Action, a live and unscripted performance of staged conversations. Women from across the UK who took part in significant activist movements and protests from the 1950s to 80s have been invited to share their personal stories in a series of workshops, culminating in this day-long public performance."

(plus write-up from the Women's Room blog)

Freedom Bookshop Re-Opens after Fire

"And so it is today that written concepts are lived in reality and anarchy is demonstrated in action."

My colleague, Tim Gee helped with the clean-up: this is his account.

(plus a good write up with videos from Vice magazine here)

Occupy Twitter

The takeover of the HMV Twitter feed by disgruntled staff connects to a longer, broader tradition of occupations. From Richard Seymour on The Guardian.

Obama commits to action on climate in inaugural address

With thanks to @chilledasad100 for the tip-off.
Thoughts?

"We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.

But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks.

That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared."

 Image copyright the Obama-Biden Transition Project

Environmental groups should support anti-cuts coalitions

See first  It’s Time To Shut The City Down” – Packed Meeting Vows To Fight Council Cuts from Birmingham Against The Cuts.

Plus - for added context - tweet by tweet report from @BrumProtestor

I could only attend for about an hour and fifteen minutes of the two and a half hour meeting, but I'd gone along to pursue my survey of signs of hope for the future in 2013.  

First up, the turnout. I'd seen 180 positive replies on Facebook, so I'd gone expecting a good number of people but know from personal experience that you can't always rely on FB -RSVP's. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a packed meeting of 100-150 people.

I recognised some of the usual suspects - student activists, trade unionists, socialists, clerics  - but even to get these people in a room together in numbers is promising. And with the numbers of attendees the meeting had, there had to be a fair proportion of the unaffiliated and curious, like me.

Second, the quality of the conversation. More often than not, it was a meeting guided by radical realism, by tactical considerations and by an awareness that in a city the size of Birmingham the support of a lot more than 150 people was required. 

And the conversation had solid conclusions at its end – not only "there will be a demonstration and lobbying of the Labour Group on the 4th February when they meet to agree internally their budget proposals. Further to that will be a demonstration and direct action day on the budget day itself, which will either be at a special council meeting at the end of February, or at the usual council meeting in March."

...but the creation of a long-term strategy working group among many set-up that night.

It's my opinion that local enviromental groups should definitely be involved in supporting the legal actions of anti-cuts campaigns. There's the obvious threat to cuts to environmental services to oppose, but we should also bear in  mind that other cuts may affect the ability of communities to make green choices. For example, they may mean  people having to travel further to access council facilities.

Then there's the danger that environmental considerations will go hang in decision-making processes like planning given the need to save-save-save. Finally, there's the ethical duty to act in solidarity with suffering - we cannot save the planet if we're not standing up for the rights of others.

It would be great if staff and volunteers in The Warehouse - a wider cross-section of groups than just Friends of the Earth - could come out in solidarity with some of these upcoming actions.

Looking at the matter more strategically, the challenges for the anti-cuts movement seem to be to build on a short-term consensus and a) develop and enact a medium term strategy for broadening the movement and staving off the cuts as well as b) decide how to be the change - how to transform society for the better now. I found the level of honesty about this at the meeting gratifying.  

Perhaps what we need at this juncture is a highfalutin' conversation about the future. But what we want is also for our short-term needs to be met. And that's where the link between challenging political decisions politically and bettering people's lives now must be struck.

Postscript: there appears to be no anti-cuts platform in Cannock Chase at the moment - the presence of the food bank in the Methodist Church down the road attests to the fact that austerity is biting there too. Perhaps this is something for me to look into?

Towards a cartography of hope

For the start of a new year, some state of the world reviews:

Bruce Sterling and John Lebkowsky on The Well (in conversation with other participants)

Charles Stross (again, in conversation with others).

They're not entirely doom-y, you're dealing with SF authors and tech experts after all, but they do flag up the morass of environmental, economic and political problems coming up.

As I walked to a pub on New Year's Eve, I was talking to a friend about the search for a narrative of hope for these troubled times. Who's on the bridge of the Good Ship, and where are they taking us? Do they have our consent? What is it that we can look forward to in the future?

If I've remembered our conversation correctly, she pointed out that psychologically speaking there was nothing more corrosive than false hope. And in many senses we're still dealing with the hangover from the twentieth century - the utopian century par excellence - when a thousand isms pointed the way towards a better tomorrow.

I agree, but what also concerns me is that without some kind of map, a story we can tell ourselves as communities, as societies - however adjusted for pragmatism we make this vision  - we avoid the danger of false hope only to fall into the politics of cultural despair. 

Whether your brand of doom is Daily Mail or the more apocalyptic ends of the environmental movement, recording the failings of contemporary Britain is not enough. Similarly, an ethic of resignation, a la Silverweed from Watership Down, does not appeal to me on an emotional level, nor do I believe you can raise people to sainthood fast enough to make it work as a political solution.

As an inveterate reader of science fiction, I believe in the need to describe possible futures to improve the present and avert both cultural despair and the TINA we find ourselves in at the moment, politically speaking. Technology is one strand of this, but I'm mainly interested in tech in as far as it provides game-changers for economy and society.

Or: It ain't what you've got, it's what you do with it.

So, one of the main themes on this blog for 2013 will be examining these futures, to provide a cartography of hope, but also to look at where these debates are already happening.