with Jamie Kelsey
Time: Fri 10th, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Labels: Workshops and Activities , Wellness and Community Action
Location: Plotting Shed
Faith in established politics is at an all time low, the creaking, corrupted system is broken as the corporate capture of democracy has become complete. The current system is unable to find solutions to the key crises that face the species and is only able to exacerbate already critical problems.
Since 2011, countless grassroots groups including Occupy, Indignados, 15M, Rekjavik Rising, the Rojava movement and the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong have sought to challenge the broken systems of democracy and instead platform alternatives that have at their heart participatory democracy and new systems for the 99% to be heard through digital democracy. The municipalism movement in Spain has brought together the global intiatives that are using these systems to challenge traditional politics under the banner ‘fearless cities’.
The session will serve as a primer to the global movement as well as an update on vTaiwan, Y’en a Marre and Sortition. Critical to human beings being able to face the global crises in any meaningful way and establish a sustainable stewardship of planet earth is a radical uprooting of the broken systems that have got us here and an upsurge of engagement by all people through new systems of democracy.
Jamie Kelsey
Jamie Kelsey Fry is contributing editor for New Internationalist, authour of the Rax Active Citizenship Toolkit and a media activist. He has been involved in grassroots activism since 1981. He was one of the initiators of Reclaim the Power, co-founded Talk Fracking and was a central character in the UK Occupy movement. He has made over 100 appearances on mainstream media as a news commentator, advocating for an end to neoliberal economic policies, for a greater sense of internationalism and the use of mass civil disobedience as central to the struggle for climate justice, as well as representing the emerging radical democracy movement. The Daily Mail, Telegraph, Times and Sun have all stated their disgust at his activities.