Dual Power Series – Bottom-up Democracy: From Crisis to System Change through Dual Power

COVID-19 has exposed tremendous gaps in social, economic, and governance systems upending our daily experience of living and working.  Communities have offered an active response to the crisis with autonomous and decentralized mutual aid efforts rising to address neglected and unmet needs.  Arundhati Roy names this pandemic a portal, opening a path for us to uproot unjust, unsustainable conditions within our current society and mobilize movements for transformative systemic change. Protests of the police killing of George Flood have swept the US and further exposed the unjust and crushing gaps and inequities of our current systems, and especially, regarding policing of Black communities.

These crises raise questions about the legitimacy of our economic and “State” systems.  This 9 webinar series offers a space for those wanting to shift or deepen their current organizing lens towards more transformative power building and systems change. This shift speaks to an inclusive, liberated future of direct democracy, ecological well-being and a just, regenerative economy.

From mutual aid to tenant organizing, to municipal governance, and more, we will examine initiatives that emerge from social justice, economic solidarity, and collective self-determination, including those recently inspired by COVID-19, policing protests and beyond.  These movements for a people’s direct democracy which challenge our current governing and economic structures will inform presentation and exchange among participants. We will consider how these initiatives and those of attendees can continue to: meet immediate needs, protest injustice,  build grassroots people power,  establish alternative social, economic and environmental  institutions, and create alternative governing institutions,  together creating counter power capable of challenging and ultimately supplanting existing systems (the strategy known as “dual power”).

Register here

Dates of the sessions available on the Symbiosis website