Newsletter #34
Live streamed | Affective dimension | Collective surplus
Hi everyone,
Hope you’re finding ways to be okay out there, or as Ella suggested last week – to be okay with not being okay.
As you might have seen we’ve changed the timing of our Public Session on Wealth Narratives with Cassie Robinson, which will now be in February. Updated details below, along with some related material to explore in the meantime.
Trigger warning for this week’s shares: there are references to war crimes, genocide, and colonial violence. Our thoughts are with all those suffering from such atrocities around the world today.
Shared in solidarity.
Public Session DATE CHANGE
What Narratives Will Help Us Challenge a World Where 7 People Own 70% of the World’s Wealth?
Cassie Robinson, Jake Hayman, Sarah Kerr, Wealth Hackers
Feb 27th (UPDATED) | 13:00-14:30 | Online
We are having to postpone this session until February. If you have already registered, your registration will carry over to the new date. If you’ve yet to register, see the link below.
Cassie Robinson will be in conversation with Jake Hayman, author of ‘Wealth Unpublished’ and co-founder of the Good Ancestor Movement, Ten Years Time and Impatience Earth; Sarah Kerr from the Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice team at LSE's International Inequalities Institute and author of ‘Wealth, Poverty and Enduring Inequality: Let's talk Wealtherty’; and someone TBC from the Wealth Hackers.
In the meantime, see a report about the risks of extreme wealth and a conversation with Jake Hayman about the wealth holders rejecting extreme wealth.
Shares
Key: 🎬 Film | 🎙️ Podcast | 📝 Article | 📋 Report
Israeli Soldiers’ War Crimes
Richard Sanders; Double Down News, Al Jazeera
An overview of Al Jazeera’s investigation into the ‘live streamed genocide’ in Gaza. “This is the film you will not see on the BBC, CNN or any of the other Western Media. Over the last year we have witnessed what is the greatest crime of the 21st century, and perversely it's a crime that has been meticulously documented and presented to us by the people who are carrying it out…what it reveals is truly shocking… No one can say they didn't know. The Israelis could not have made it clearer to us what they were doing in their rhetoric, social media they were posting, and what their own media was saying – that this was an exercise in ethnic cleansing, quite possibly an exercise in genocide. They were making it abundantly clear to us, and if we are ignorant we are wilfully ignorant.” Also see Democracy Now!’s coverage of the film, and this piece from susan abulhawa.
#insight #tactics
🎬 See here
Palestine Is the End of the Rules-based International Order
Jayati Ghosh; Transnational Institute
“Palestine has been a replay of a 200 year colonial expansion and genocide in the Americas. So what you’re seeing is really a compressed version of that today, and it has all the extermination and brutality and really othering of people that was the basis of the kind of global capitalism that we see today. So in a way it’s not really a surprise that this is where we have ended up, because this is how a lot of it really started.” Ghosh warns that “the rules based international order doesn’t exist anymore, it’s been blown up…the only rules that still remain are the rules for finance…and they too are increasingly unable to cope with the multiple and cascading crises that we’re seeing.”
#deepnarrative
🎬 See here
Beings Seen and Unseen
Amitav Ghosh; Emergence
A discussion around Ghosh’s ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ explores the colonial roots of capitalism and the European “ideology of conquest and supremacy” – “it wasn’t the ideas leading to the mastery; rather, it was the mastery leading to the ideas… It was really this violence that Europeans unleashed upon other peoples that ultimately became a violence unleashed upon the Earth… You don’t get capitalism without first colonialism and slavery. What is really ‘harder to imagine than the end of the world’ is the end of the absolute geopolitical dominance of the West.” Ghosh goes on to suggest how storytellers should respond: “the planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit a living Earth… This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans.”
#narrativestrategy #deepnarrative
🎙️ Listen here
Real Men Reject Fascism
Anand Giridharadas; The.Ink
How do you reach the men who are supporting a fascist presidential candidate, to avoid “dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death“ and curtail a wider eugenics revival? Focus on the “affective dimension” of the problem because, as has been stated clearly elsewhere, policy alone isn’t moving people. “A lot of what a lot of men are going through right now is simply the inner experience of the old line, ‘When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression’… one of the great sweeping mistakes of our era has been assuming that, because certain kinds of change are morally correct, they go down easy… (men) need to feel seen and heard and recognized in their stress and anxiety and sense of dislocation in the future that is coming… Saving the country from tyranny needs to become aspirational for men. Not a lecture.”
#narrativestrategy #framing #tactics
Do We Really Need To Tax The Rich?
Stephanie Kelton; Novara Media Downstream
An argument that wealth taxation is not the way to fund government spending, and that it should be a “separate fight” to tackle inequality. Kelton presents a few reasons for this, including that “it’s unhealthy to center the rich in our collective pursuit of well-being”, with her main point being that we don’t need a “balanced budget” – we need a “balanced economy” (full employment, low inflation). “We've got to reframe and relabel and rethink this whole notion of what it means to have the government's budget ‘not in balance’ and how we understand the role of the government's deficit on our side of the ledger… think of it as our collective financial surplus.” What matters ultimately is who has that surplus – so yes, taxation is needed to stop it accumulating in a few hands and manage inflation – but taxation is not needed to enable government spending. (Banks tend not to like this, because if the government can spend, they don’t get to lend).
#deepnarrative #framing
🎬 See here
Constructing Consensus: The Case For Community-Powered Development and Regeneration
Adam Lent, Imran Hashmi; New Local
“The key to unlocking our fraught planning system is to give communities more power and influence to shape local development… The focus thus far emphasises top-down mandates combined with deregulation of the planning system… The whole process is set up to be adversarial, so it is no wonder friction is often the result… By opening out the planning process to enable more and deeper community involvement, it is possible to build consensus rather than create opposition. Our proposition is that a more constructive and engaged role for communities can lead to speedier and higher-quality development…drawing on evidence and case studies which show that when communities are given a voice and influence, both quality and quantity of development can be increased.”
#insight #tactics
Transformative Philanthropy: A Manual For Social Change
Fozia Irfan; Why Philanthropy Matters, Churchill Fellowship
“I was privileged to meet some of the most powerful and ambitious funders and changemakers in the US and witness how they implemented their vision and values, in a way which was profoundly humbling and moving. Day after day, I sat with these unapologetically bold and brilliant philanthropy practitioners and questioned them about their philosophy, their methodology, their grantmaking and their aims – this is an attempt to capture and share that wisdom with practitioners here in the UK… The critical issues facing our communities are too important and the need too urgent, to continue to carry out philanthropy in an ad hoc approach – we need to have a cohesive and ambitious vision, a focus on social justice and greater boldness in our aims… to see philanthropy as more than a transactional act of giving, and see it instead as a profound catalyst for social change.”
#narrativestrategy #tactics
In Defence Of Talk
Dr Sanjiv Lingayah; Reframing Race
“There is a strand of thinking which suggests that talk and action are opposites, and you hear this idea within social change circles. It is a perception that comes from a valid place. Because there is a world of difference between saying we need change and doing what is required to make it happen… Yet the thing about talk is that it carries power… bell hooks argues that language is used as a way to recover from and push back against racism and its harms: ‘Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance’. Specifically, hooks tells us that: ‘Language is also a place of struggle’... For those committed to transformative social change, we can think of talk as part of the architecture of systems of harm and domination but also as a means to create a world that looks very different from the one we inhabit today... a world transformed.”
#tactics #framing
The Big Thing People Miss When Talking About Values
Ruth Taylor; Common Cause
Taylor explores the three main ways that ‘values’ tend to be thought of – as individual characteristics, organisational beliefs, or a communications tool – and suggests a deeper orientation to better support their “possible transformative power” for change efforts. “Values influence the way we collectively make decisions about what is important in the world; they determine what we see as necessary and desirable in the face of social and environmental violence and injustice… We should be asking ‘how can we co-create and sustain cultures in which different values are foregrounded and championed?’… (it’s) less about using values to connect more people to our particular issue area, and more about addressing the underlying, root causes of why we find ourselves facing so many interconnected challenges in the first place.”
#narrativestrategy #deepnarrative
Tools
These would usually appear in the main shares, but they kept getting cut so we’re putting them here for this issue (partly inspired by Ruth Taylor’s Narrative & Culture Change Roundup newsletter).
⚙️ Tools For Narrative Change – Purpose, The Voices For Economic Opportunity Incubator
⚙️ Activists Resource Hub – Social Change Lab
⚙️ Collective Inspiration – The Climate Story Unit; Doc Society
Events & Courses
Key: 🗓️ Event | 🎓 Course
What Happened in France’s Shock Election?
Anat Shenker-Osorio, Sarah Durieux; NEON
Oct 30th, 16:00-17:00 GMT | Online
“What was the role of civil society and what coalitions and alliances enabled the left to mobilise against the threat of the far-right? And what campaign and communications strategies did they deploy to turn the tide at this election? Join us to explore these questions and hear a candid set of reflections from two people at the heart of the campaign. Anat Shenker-Osorio, communications consultant, political strategist and Principal of ASO Communications, will open the session to share some reflections on how to build narrative to fight fascism. Sarah Durieux, activist and organizer who coordinated the largest civil society coalition will talk through the infrastructure, action and messaging that led to this victory.”
Strategic Foresight: An Interactive Workshop for Social Justice Leaders
United Edge
Nov 1st - 21st, 23hrs total | Online
“With strategic foresight, change-making will no longer be reactive to our broken systems but rather truly engage in co-creative transformations beyond our linear, preconceived trajectories of the future. This series of workshops will guide participants in using some of the most important and accessible tools of futures thinking and strategic foresight to equip them to develop a broader, longer term view of justice, anticipate potential challenges in community development and social change work, and leverage emerging opportunities for innovation.”
Changing Hearts & Minds
Sense and Solidarity; Kairos
Nov 14th - 17th | London
“Join us for a three and a half day workshop with Sarah Stein Lubrano and Max Haiven…and grapple with some of the toughest challenges in organising and activism… Together, we’ll learn what does and does not change people’s minds (hint: actions over words), how to be strategic about whose hearts and minds we want to change (it can’t be everyone); how to work with common fears, anxieties and antagonism; how and when activism can provide a welcoming community (and when it shouldn't); how to disrupt and divide our opponents and recognise when they’re doing the same. And much much more.”
Should I Stay, Or Should I Go?
Steffi Bednarek & Matthew Green; The Conduit
Dec 7th, 10;00-16:30 (incl. lunch) | London
“A seminar for professionals torn between conflicting priorities in the metacrisis. Are you conflicted about the demands of your career path and your personal values and concerns in a time of ecological collapse? Are you confused about how best to respond? Are you asking what a meaningful life looks like in the context of the climate crisis?”
🗓️ Buy tickets
Quotes
(This selection of quotes is intended as a resource, in the hope that they may be useful for your own communications. See a full list of all the previous quotes.)
“This is my message to the western world – your civilisation is killing life on Earth”. – Nemonte Nenquimo
“In the west there’s been this denial… The present horrors fit into a long history of western colonialism and western mass murder of indigenous people.” – Gabor Mate
“There are millions and millions of people, hundreds of thousands of movements who are saying ‘no’, and this is the world, this is the world we want to build together – the few powers that are supporting the colonial project at any cost are not the world.” – Abir Kopty
“The primary use of 'misinformation' is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” – Michael Caulfield
“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.” – bell hooks
Thanks for joining us, see you here again in two weeks.
A reminder that if you have something that you’d love to see in these newsletters, or work you’d like to share in the community sessions, or if you have any feedback, please reach out at inter-narratives@greenfunders.org
Very best,
Paddy & Ella