• Learning from Zohran Mamdani’s victory

    Zohran Mamdani (left) out campaigning in Flushing last June. The New York City mayoral election has drawn more attention than usual this year, thanks to the initially surprising rise and eventual victory last night of the radical left candidate Zohran Mamdani. At a time when American democracy is declining at an alarming speed thanks to…

  • Why we need to abolish political parties, and how to do it

    In April 2012, Bill Shorten, a minister in the Australian government, gave an interview that drew unusually wide attention, and has occasionally been circulated since. The topic was about Peter Slipper, the parliamentary speaker who had temporarily left his post in light of allegations of sexual abuse. Shorten was asked whether Slipper should return to…

  • Your Party, Grasping at the Enormity of the Moment by Roger Hallam, review and analysis

    Roger Hallam is not known for optimism. The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is quite the fire-and-brimstone preacher when it comes to climate change. But when I heard him a few weeks ago on a call with Assemble and like-minded activists, he sounded genuinely hopeful about the assemblies that they were about…

  • All In: A Revolutionary Theory to Stop Climate Collapse, review and analysis

    All In: A Revolutionary Theory to Stop Climate Collapse is a book by two activists connected with the Portuguese climate campaign Climáximo, Mariana Rodrigues and Sinan Eden. I heard about All In during a Rev21 webinar with Alice Gato, another Climáximo activist, and gave it a read. All In begins with the argument that the…

  • A movement is stirring — my experience at Rev21’s convention

    If you’re in despair about the state of the world, the best thing you can do is join a movement for an alternatives — one that can make a real difference. My view is that the current crises are too severe to be answered in the existing mainstream. And while past radical movements like communism…

  • Why do protest movements fail? If We Burn by Vincent Bevins, review and analysis

    Something odd happened in the 2010s. As the journalist Vincent Bevins puts it: From 2010 to 2020, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. I was one of them. I marched in November 2010 against the British government’s plans to treble the tuition fees for universities. It didn’t…