Skip to content

social transformation

How Can You Make Your Community Thrive?

September 26, 2026 Vicki Robinson, Resilience. , ,
A village can be a neighborhood, a town, a group, an extended family, a church, or a business where most people know most others, at least by sight or within three degrees of separation. Thriving is a quality of a village: its culture, webs of relationships, traditions and rituals, and volunteerism. We make the village by living. Maybe it’s a verb? We village. In a recent post, I explored the role of matriarchs in thriving communities. And how “thriving communities” – as documented in dozens of films – may be like Blue Zones, places on the planet where people seem to live longer and flourish.

Cooperatives As Incubators Of Democracy

September 24, 2026 Sustainable Economies Law Center. , , ,
These days, I am somehow finding it both easier and harder to tune out our current decline into fascist authoritarianism.  It is impossible to ignore the extralegal and inhumane deportations, extreme corruption and insider dealing at all levels of the federal government, devastating rollbacks of regulations and protections for people and the environment.  And at the same time, I often feel powerless to resist it at the scale the devastation demands — the damage is happening in such massive proportions and on so many dimensions that no political formation I am in relationship to has any convincing strategies to counteract it.

Being A Dissident Is A Capacity, Not A Calling

September 19, 2026 Scot Nakagawa, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
We tend to imagine the dissident as a particular kind of person, one who’s born unafraid, temperamentally a rebel, built from some sterner material than the rest of us. It’s a comforting story, and it’s comforting in a way that quietly lets us off the hook. If dissidents are simply made differently, then their courage is admirable but not instructive. We can applaud it, but we are excused from it. The great gift of Gal Beckerman’s “How to Be a Dissident” is that it dismantles that story, gently and completely. Beckerman — a staff writer at The Atlantic who has spent a career studying how change actually begins — went looking for what dissidents across history and around the globe have in common.

A Field Guide To Institutional Capture

September 18, 2026 Arnie Saiki, Decolonize Accounting. , , , ,
As a follow up to the Black Paper, we have long been watching transformative frameworks not only being captured, but harmonizing into a winner-take-all accumulation of data through intermediaries and compliance. What I learned from that research, and what is contained in this document describes patterns by which institutions — including multilateral bodies, NGOs, certification systems, and government agencies — publicly embrace transformative frameworks while systematically hollowing them out. The examples are drawn from REDD+, organic certification, fair trade, biodiversity offsets, indigenous data sovereignty frameworks, and other fields where the gap between stated intent and operational reality is well-documented.

Nonviolent Solutions Are Everywhere And They’re Already Working

September 11, 2026 Rivera Sun, LA Progressive. , , , ,
Nonviolent solutions are everywhere! Tens of thousands of people are joining the annual Campaign Nonviolence Action Days from September 21 to October 2. For 13 years, Campaign Nonviolence has been rallying tens of thousands of people each year to take action to build a culture of peace and active nonviolence, free from war, poverty, racism, and environmental destruction. Spanning the 12 days from the International Day of Peace to the International Day of Nonviolence, the international campaign will highlight what nonviolence looks like on the structural or systemic level.

We Need To Tell The Truth About The Great Unraveling

September 4, 2026 Theresa Leisgang and Gerriet Schwen, Resilience. , , ,
Theresa Leisgang spent over ten years reporting on environmental and human rights issues as a journalist, travelling for magazines and researching for her book, in places where the effects of the climate crisis are already an existential threat to livelihoods. She has interviewed people from the Amazon region to the Arctic, from South Africa to eastern Brandenburg, and had many conversations with those who have not given up hope despite it all. Soon, major media outlets began to devote editorial departments to climate reporting. When feel-good podcasts promised to counter climate news fatigue, Theresa became alert: those hopeful stories increasingly lacked a critical assessment of the catastrophic status quo.

A Defence Of Academia At The End Of The World

August 31, 2026 Simon Mair, Resilience. , , ,
There is a widespread frustration among activists, civil society leaders and even within academia itself. The prevailing wisdom is that academia falls somewhere between an impact-less ivory tower – where small groups of academics write for and read one another – and acting as the handmaiden of capitalism – a bourgeois class refining and reproducing the logic of the dominant destructive system. There is truth to both these claims. There is pressure to publish at ever faster rates. And some of this work will only be read by a handful of people. And, yes, much academic work acts to legitimate business as usual.

Mutual Aid Isn’t A Handout, It’s A Framework For Resistance

August 16, 2026 Ella Fassler, Truthout. , , , ,
After neighbors took care of neighbors during the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of mutual aid suddenly catapulted into the national spotlight. The speed and nimbleness with which mutual aid projects emerged was a strength, but it also meant many participants did not have preexisting relationships, trust, or shared political commitments. What has happened to the mutual aid movement since then? Maroon and Cassa, longtime organizers with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, are well-positioned to tackle this difficult question. They are co-directors of a new four-part docuseries, The Elements of Mutual Aid.

Prefiguring Postcapitalist Work

July 25, 2026 Colin Long, Arena Quarterly. , , ,
‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.’ Marx wrote these words at the height of the industrial revolution as the forces of industrial capital wrought shattering changes on rural workers, turning them into proletarians crammed into dirty, crowded cities. In response, workers organised into unions and cooperatives, created political parties, and demanded and won industrial, social and political rights. In a gradual, halting, sometimes bloody process over the following 120 years, the labour movement and its allies sought to embed the economy within a social framework, to de-commodify labour and some of life’s necessities, and to bring markets under some form of political control.

Resistance Is Only Half The Equation

June 4, 2026 Barbara Peterson, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
We no longer live in a world where courts reliably enforce limits on executive power; where media calls out abuse as abuse or where politicians depend on legitimacy to hold power. These conditions are eroding, and power is becoming more and more centralized.  In the U.S., the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States in 2024 significantly expanded presidential immunity for official acts, raising concerns about accountability. Globally, ruling parties in Hungary and Poland have reshaped judicial systems through court-packing and disciplinary regimes that weaken independent checks on executive authority.

Tyranny Or Revolution

June 2, 2026 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
Mexico City — There are two ways to confront global capitalism. There are mass movements, especially strikes, which disrupt commerce and government to force the ruling class to create systems of justice and equality — albeit ones where capitalists retain significant power. The National Coordinator of Education Workers in Mexico (CNTE) — a grassroots union created in 1979 by dissident teachers — is currently attempting this in Mexico. It announced that if its demands for salary increases and job security are not met it will occupy public spaces and shut down the World Cup soccer matches scheduled to take place later this month in Mexico City.

South Africa’s Conference Of The Left: A Bold Call For Working-Class Unity

June 1, 2026 Nicholas Mwangi, People's Dispatch. , , ,
South Africa’s progressive forces are converging. On May 29, 2026, a diverse array of socialist, communist, and Pan-Africanist organizations converged for the “Conference of the Left.” The meeting was held under a definitive mandate of “Building a Left Movement for Working Class & Popular Power.” At a moment marked by deepening economic crisis, unemployment, austerity, and fragmentation within progressive politics, the gathering reflects an attempt to rethink the future of left politics in the country. The conference, organized by the South African Communist Party (SACP) has brought together an distinctly broad spectrum of organizations.

Socialism Is Slow To Mature

May 22, 2026 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. , , ,
In 1921, a few years into the Soviet experiment, V. I. Lenin published an essay with the revealing title ‘New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise’. The essay opened a line of inquiry that would remain with Lenin until the end of his life three years later. What captivated him was the issue of how to build socialism in a country ravaged by war, with minimal capital at its disposal, a largely peasant society with high rates of illiteracy (around 70%), and no public administration capable of running a socialist-oriented state.

History Suggests Inequality Ends In Catastrophe

May 19, 2026 Jeremy Lent, Resilience. , , , ,
There may never have been a group that had it so good as the Japanese plutocrats of the 1930s. In that era, the richest one percent of Japanese society captured twenty percent of national income — a third more than the top earners in America command today. Within a decade, however, most of that bounty had vanished. Their share of national income collapsed by more than two-thirds; the value of their estates fell by 98 percent. What happened? Total war, total defeat, and foreign occupation. Mass mobilization forced the state to intervene in industrial production, double income taxes, restrict dividends, and requisition merchant ships.

‘Ecocivilization’ – A Bold Vision For System Change

May 4, 2026 David Bollier. , , , ,
With so many social movements seeking system change – cooperatives, commons, Doughnut Economics, peer production, relocalization and more – things quickly get confusing. There are so many different vocabularies, political premises, and theories of change swirling about. How can we possibly work toward a coherent, common future?  Jeremy Lent’s new book, Ecocivilization, is a significant beachhead in answering this question. It demonstrates that a feasible future is possible precisely by drawing upon the rich pluriverse of possibilities. Lent’s book is therefore a relief to encounter.
«12»
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.