For our next gathering, we will be discussing Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry (2009) by Richard Singer and Delfina Vannucci, published by AK Press. The authors share their insight about collective organizing experiences in this handbook. The handbook is useful for anarchist organizations, horizontal social or political groups, worker co-ops, or just for trying to incorporate egalitarian processes where they don’t already exist.
We will read Preface (p.7) to the end of Is This Really Democracy? (p.80) ahead of time for our discussion.
The text is available here through the Boston Anarchist Black Cross.
As always, we meet at Camas Books and Infoshop, 2620 Quadra Street, on unceded Lekwungen Territory at 6:30pm on Sunday January 7th.
Our next reading will be the academic article Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra, which covers the Zapatistas’ and Movimento Sem Terra’s (Landless Movement-MST) methods of organizing through participatory democracy, which emphasizes obligation to participate in decision making and a shared concern for autonomy.