As a collaboration of European Alternatives, the Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung, and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, we are so excited to announce our Transnational Organizing Talk evening with Rodrigo Nunes on June 21st, 2022, at Laika Bar in Neukölln (Emser Str. 131, 12051 Berlin) at 19:00. The event will be facilitated in English by Spadework podcast co-host Daniel Gutiérrez. We warmly welcome you to pull up a stool and crack open a cool beverage with us and talk shop. The conversation will be held in English.

 

Transnational Organizing Talk: The Ecology of Political Organization

Our objective in organizing this Transnational Organizing Talk series is to develop a forum where invited speakers can not only speak to but just as importantly speak with the activists, organizers, and movement-builders struggling on the frontlines of today’s emancipatory struggles. To do that, we have to get rid of the stage, and bring the speaker to eye-level, where they can talk not as experts, but as companions working on the same problems we all face, together, though from different vantage points and experiences.

The common road we share is the cultivation of transnational capacities to change the world and develop socially just, ecological, and planetary modalities of social reproduction. The crises of our epoch demand that we articulate new organizational abilities that not only stem transversally from many local points but that come together in coordinated and complementary ways upon a transnational scale and level. Only by breaking beyond both the local and the national, will we forge the strength to define a democratic avenue beyond today’s crises. It is the objective of this Transnational Organizing Talk series to therefore tackle the problems of scale and the organizational obstacles that stand in our way.

Always one to be suspicious of dogma, Rodrigo Nunes' transnational experience in organizing and movement building helped him develop a theory of political organization that fuses insights from different (and often disparate) theoretical sources and political traditions, from Europe as much as from the former colonies. This theory is presented in full in his latest work, "Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization", a powerful examination of the limits of the inherited ways in which we tend to think of organization, and a bold, inventive proposal of new ways to do so. To help us get over the hangover left by the defeats of the 20th century, Rodrigo concentrates on the problems posed by tradition rather than the solutions it offered, and builds a conceptual framework in which they can be recast without the baggage that usually surrounds them. In so doing, he at once develops a penetrating analysis of the reasons why the debate on organization disappeared for a long time and lays a foundation on which it can start again.

 

Rodrigo Nunes and His Works

Rodrigo Nunes is a philosopher and political theorist who first cut his teeth as an activist in his native Brazil in the alter-globalization movement of the early 2000s, before moving to Great Britain to pursue his graduate studies. From Great Britain, he was involved in the EuroMayDay movement and worked as a union organizer in the Justice for Janitors campaign in the UK. He returned to Brazil in 2010, and in 2015 took a professorship at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).

Here’s a list of some of our favorite works by Rodrigo Nunes:

“The Scale of Things to Come: The Local, the Global, and Organization,” Viewpoint Magazine, May 27, 2021.

“Organizing in the Midnight Hour: An Interview with Rodrigo Nunes,” Roar Magazine, June 29, 2021.

“It Takes Organizers to Make a Revolution,” Viewpoint Magazine, Nov. 9, 2017.

“Spain: From Networks to Parties … and Back,” Viewpoint Magazine, June 1, 2015.

“A New Grammar of Organization,” Spadework Podcast, June 3, 2021.

“NO ONE WAY WORKS: Political Organisation for the 21st Century,” Novara Media, June 25, 2021.

“Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: w/ Richard Seymour, Paulo Gerbaudo, and Camille Barbagallo,” Red May 2021, June 1, 2021.

“Den Spaten Ergreifen,” Arranca!, Herbst 2021.

“Drei Thesen zur Organisierungsfrage,” Zeitschrift Luxemburg, Dez. 2013.

 

About the School of Transnational Organizing

European Alternatives' Berlin Hub is running the »School of Transnational Organizing«. A grassroots school where everyday people, social movement builders, trade union organizers, migrant workers, climate justice activists, community artists as well as marginalized communities meet to learn the tools and skills to master the lost art of organizing solidarity and together shape the landscape of what we think is possible.

We create brave spaces involving different people: allowing us to overcome the deep sense of powerlessness many of us share and enabling people "to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want" (Marshall Ganz). With a wide community of trainers, facilitators, and educators, we inspire, train, and support new popular pioneers, organisations, and movements to lead more hopeful, more joyful, and more powerful struggles in their countries, cities, and communities.

Learn more: www.transnationalorganizing.eu

 

Join our Progressive Community of Transnationalists

Are you a progressive activist, worker, academic, organizer, or artist? Are you part of a grassroots initiative, civil society organisation or social movement? Across borders, citizens in communities and cities build a new world of solidarity and justice.

Join us: www.transnationalorganizing.eu/join