After the Black March, the Women's March on Washington. When are we going to start marching towards the future?

First: I am not sexist nor racist. I am also very proud to say that I have never participated in the rigged game of representative democracy, never voted in my entire life, although I consider myself as part of the 1% of doers when it comes to concrete action and sacrifice to make the world a better place. I am completely outside of the Hillary vs Trump or left vs right debate.

Reading the Wikipedia page and a few articles on the Women's march on Washington 2017, I understand that after some issues during its planning and organisation, the goal was to come up with a very inclusive statement and to create an inclusive movement. I am going through a bunch of videos on Youtube and although I can sense inclusiveness, here and there I also sense a divisive language, a confrontational language between women and men. During the Bush years we've experienced the religious divide. During Obama, we saw the racial divide. Trump vs Hillary brings us the sexual divide. We had the left and right divide for more than a century... How many divides can our society sustain before it disintegrates and falls pray to a tyrant who will force piece upon us? 

We don't like our friend because s/he is a communist or a libertarian. We don't like our neighbour because her/his skin is of a different colour, or s/he eats or doesn't eat pork. Am I soon going to fight with my female friends because I am a man and therefore guilty of all the sins men have done in the past? Hey, I am just a guy brought up in a traditional family, trying to be fair and to respect the complementary between men and women, doing as much as I can to support the movement of emancipation of women, but sometimes I do make stupid mistakes... I am trying to unlearn and to improve my worldview tinted by my upbringing in my traditional family, trying, ... I think I am not alone in this situation. I don't want to be criticised or accused by my female friends of being "patriarchal". I want to be able to stay focused on building a better world. I don't want to feel obliged to measure my words and calculate my actions, afraid of being called a sexist, or a racist, a leftist, or some other ...ists. I feel alienated by all this and perhaps many other men who mean good feel the same. 

There is some racism in the struggled of race emancipation. There is some sexism in the struggle of women emancipation. Let's make sure we truly emancipate and not overshoot in the opposite side. 

And by the way, about Trump's victory, I think it is part of a global trend. Our society is in deep crisis and in need of a new world view. We are bouncing between the two extremes of our debilitating right/left dichotomy. Yes, we are going to see the extremes growing more popular, both of them, in different parts of the world, until we get exhausted and realise that these old models don't apply anymore. Only then the imagination of the masses can jump to something new. Only after this exhaustion people will go through the gestalt transition and see the new paradigm, which is already here, developing and picking up steam under their gazing eyes. 

Don't get me wrong. There is racism and sexism in the world. But the general problem in our society doesn't come from the Muslim or from the Man. Let's come to terms with the past. The world is what it is now. The problem is a system in decay, facing huge transformations coming from deep within. Read more about p2p, commons-based peer production and other things like that, and you'll realise that we are trapped into all these fights because we don't have the new/proper language to speak about what's wrong with our society and about how we can make things work better. So we put the blame on what's immediately visible (skin color, gender, etc.) and on the past.  

This is my angle on it, there are others to see, in order to get the full picture.

Broken Assumptions of GovernanceThe Future of Governance is not GovernmentsSituational Assessment 2017: Trump Edition

Deep code, foundation assumptions

The Coming Great Transition

See also Arthur Brocks view on FB

By Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Re-Occupation 2.0?

What do we do next?  The question for revolutionaries in North America is to figure out how to activate the anaesthetized. But why are we anaesthetized? There is a realization, at least to some extent, that we are the ones responsible for the global ills; the reification of individualism and the exporting of capitalism and ‘democracy’, yet the vast majority of people are too ‘comfortable’ to do anything more than nod their head when presented with the evidence. Why is this? In short, most people don’t feel enough pain on a personal level to motivate them to take risks... If this is so, do we need revolution?

Yes, because we are living within a lie, and this cannot be healthy...

         Read more...

By Suresh
(more notes by Shresh)

The multitude movement limited by the pace of cultural change and of general understanding of open movements

Since the start of the #occupy movement, whenever I had the chance to engage in a deeper conversation about the movement with active members, with journalists, or simply with people passing by the  #occupy Montreal camp, where I was very active, I tried to put the movement in the broader context of what we call the multitude constructive revolution. To my surprise, almost everyone was clueless and probably saw in me signs of insanity, because I was speaking a language they were not familiar with. Only a very few surprised me, being able to absorb very quickly the information I was trying to convey, agreeing with most of it. Those individuals had one thing in common, they were very close to the software world. They understood the influence of the new technology in shifting the balance of power towards individuals and their communities.      

Rebranding the #occupy movement

What do we hear when we listen to the forgotten U.S. nation-wide End the Fed movement in 2008, which sparked the TeaParty movement, or to the so-called Twitter revolution in 2009 in the Republic of Moldova, or to the 2009-2010 Green Revolution in Iran, or to the Arab Spring, or to the 15-M movement in Spain, and now to Occupy Wall Street and to Occupy Everywhere? We hear a desire for change. Not any change, people want a PROFOUND structural change.

The multitude is now awakened thanks to the new media. We are now conscious of our situation and we are starting to imagine a better world. Moreover, the multitude becomes increasingly aware of the potential of the new democratic digital technology. As we experiment with it in various creative ways we grow confident, we grow empowered, we get this feeling that change IS indeed possible and that WE can make it happen.

What are the #occupy camps?

The Occupation camps across the world are not just protest sites. They are not just new political spaces. They are in fact embryos of the emergent new world.

They are emergent cities
If you go to the nearest camp you'll find in there everything you'd need to survive, even during a Canadian winter. For example, only two days after it's initiation the Montreal camp had already a health center, a kitchen that fed easily over 500 people the very first evening, a center of communication and coordination, an information and donation center, a political space (where the assemblies take place), a cultural space (where people play drums, dance, paint...), and obviously a housing space. Believe it or not, we even have the protection of the militia (the Quebecois patriots), who put their tent across the street from the main camp, having great visibility over the area.

The kitchen, first day

Multitude movement and its infrastructure

From the forgotten U.S. nation-wide End the Fed movement in 2008 which sparked the TeaParty movement, to the so-called Twitter revolution in 2009 in the Republic of Moldova, to the 2009-2010 Green Revolution in Iran,  to the Arab Spring, to the 15-M movement in Spain, and now to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everywhere, the Multitude has made tremendous progress in realizing the liberating power of the new technology and in putting this technology to good use in its struggle for freedom and self-determination.

As we predicted back in 2008

We are now seeing an important transformation in the way social forces organize and oppose each others. This transformation is gradual, as different social factions realize the potential of new emerging technologies, and experiment with them. Science and technology are blind; they serve better the ones who know how to use them. But knowledge about a new tool or method is not everything, social factions also differ in their disposition to receive and integrate the new technology. Their disposition can be related to a cultural specificity, their organizational structure, their leadership, etc. All this plays a role in how fast a group can actualize a new potential. (...) Activists and organizers of social mass movements are starting to think in a radically different way. Networks is the key concept. We are moving towards a highly decentralized form of social movement organization, a very organic and dynamic structure. Read the Balance of Power. 

The Occupy Everywhere movement is the synthesis of all the other movements before it.

Swarm Wall Street: why an anti-political movement is the most important force on the planet

In a post published on Coalition of the willing blog Tim Rayner brilliantly explains the Occupy movement in the US.    

"The protesters in Liberty Square and across the US are engaged in a more serious business than contesting dominant institutions. They are knitting together new cognitive maps based on peer-to-peer strategies and open source ethics and reworking politics from below. (...) All that remains is that the movement finds a way of articulating its power without reducing its intrinsic diversity. If OccupyWallStreet can achieve this, it could literally change the world.
 Read more..."

By AllOfUs