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How Ideology Can Help (or Hurt) Movements Trying To Build Power

Mark Engler and Paul Engler Waging Nonviolence
Bernie Sanders and the Squad have helped pave the way for open socialists to win elected seats in multiple levels of government at a scale that has not been seen in a century. Many progressives are taking a new look at the importance of ideology.

Pedagogy of the Occupied

Rodrigo Nunes Verso Blog
How can Paulo Freire, who would have turned 100 this year, help us think the limits that Occupy encountered ten years ago?

Barcelona's Occupy Mayor Wins a Second Term

Elia Gran The Indypendent
Three weeks after appearing to lose her re-election bid, Barcelona's leftist mayor Ada Colau won another four-year term Saturday. Barcelona was not the only city that had elected a "municipalist" government.

Barcelona’s Experiment in Radical Democracy

Masha Gessen The New Yorker
Issues that Barcelona en Comú is tackling come up against limitations set by Catalan and Spanish law. The city lacks authority to regulate housing, although the city has created new affordable housing, has successfully limited the reach of Airbnb...

The Long Arc of Protest

David Karpf The American Prospect
Successful social movements rarely travel along a linear route toward victory, or a fast one. Even with new digital media, organizing for change requires all the old virtues.

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#NuitDebout: A Movement is Growing in France’s Squares

Sam Cossar-Gilbert ROAR
Fed up with inequality, unemployment and labor reforms — and increasingly outraged at the financial and political elite — tens of thousands across France are taking to the streets and the squares.

How the World is Proving Martin Luther King Right About Nonviolence

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan Washington Post
"I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom." - "The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.," edited by Clayborne Carson. In this decade - in which more people are using nonviolent resistance than ever before - scholars and practitioners alike would do well to consult the pragmatic and principled wisdom of Gandhi and King in building a way forward.

The Pugnacious, Relentless Progressive Party That Wants to Remake America

Molly Ball The Atlantic
The Working Families Party has pushed the political debate to the left in the states where it's already active. Now-in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders-it's ready to take that fight nationwide. The WFP's agenda-frankly redistributionist and devoted to social equality-targets a class of Democratic elected officials who, in the view of many liberals, seem to listen more to their moneyed donors than to the left-wing rank and file.

Harry Belafonte on Activism, Unrest and the Importance of Making People Squirm

Cambria Roth Crosscut
If the state says you go to bed by 10 o'clock, then you should make sure that by 11, the streets of our cities are filled with human protest and bodies! The fact that some might have a restless night with the noise downstairs or find it inconvenient because people blocked traffic, well that's the point - to snap you out of your indifference! So those who are turned off by radical thinking, or radical behavior, well, as a matter of fact, in many ways, you are our target.
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