The Christian anarchists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement in the midst of the Great Depression in 1933. They rejected war and pledged support for workers and the dispossessed, maintaining these views even in the face of growing persecution from a state that wanted to destroy […]
I sat nervously near the end of an aisle, somewhere in the middle of the hall. It was BP’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) in London’s Excel Centre, on 12 April 2012. The room contained several hundred shareholders, and I was waiting for my turn to address the board of directors. […]
I haven’t seen a lot of my house recently. For most of the last four months I’ve been on the road (or rather the rails) visiting different towns and cities to run workshops and seminars looking at the methods adopted by movements for change. I tend to begin by asking […]
The police snoop on protests and protesters in many ways. They call it ‘intelligence gathering’. Some of this is done by murky methods, with undercover police and informants, but a lot of it is open, obvious and in-your-face. The Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and their methods of intelligence gathering should […]
Everything you wanted to know about the terrifying shadow banking system but were afraid to ask. By John Aziz, an independent financial writer from England. Meet James. James bought a house. It cost him £150,000, of which £30,000 had come from his own savings, leaving him with a £120,000 30-year […]
COP Recent events could have you yearning to join those you’ve stood in the way of for so long. Rather than denying yourself or feeling guilty, use it as an opportunity to grow. You often feel empowered, but are you really as strong as you think? The summer will see […]
Before George Osborne’s 2012 budget address, Nick Clegg informed the country that it would be a ‘Robin Hood’ budget, whereby the rich would be taxed to help the poor. If the government were sincere about this pledge and truly wanted to support those who are suffering at this time of […]
The numbers are known. In January 2012 unemployment figures in Spain passed the five million mark, which points to an incredibly high and growing number of families without any source of income. Civil servants’ salaries were frozen, and have now been cut. Such measures are being sold to many active […]
It wasn’t more than a few years ago that proponents of healthcare reform would point out that the United States was the only developed nation without a universal healthcare system. Right-wing electoral victories and several IMF interventions later, a number of European nations have joined the United States on the […]
Striking students in the Canadian province of Quebec are vowing to escalate their fight against an increase in tuition fees after police used tear gas, shock grenades and arrested dozens of protesters last Friday. For more than ten weeks now, 170,000 students from approximately 180 local unions have been on […]