Against the misery of power,
the politics of happiness
Disillusioned with the powermongers, Katharine Ainger discovers the possibilities of a politics generated from below.

Junk sale
Take a walk around the junkyard of leaders past their sell-by dates.

The power of the cooking pot
In the poor townships of South Africa, the only politics that matters is the kind that gets you fed. Local activist Ashwin Desai talks to Holly Wren Spaulding about community solidarity.

The web of democracy
Could the science of systems theory help us devise intelligent, self-organizing and truly networked democracies? Roy Madron and John Jopling investigate.

Ideas about power
From feminism to Foucault, some key concepts.

A flower in the hands of the people
In southern Mexico, indigenous people have remarkable ideas about how to exercise power. Gustavo Esteva explains why, for them, nation-states are irrelevant.

Walking our talk
From religious leaders in the rainforests of Thailand to marginalized minorities in the US, George Lakey has some lessons about transforming power-relations.

Bomb-catching
Priscilla Elworthy on how to defeat warmongers, authoritarians and other bullies without becoming a bully yourself.

Experiments in democracy
Whether it’s Hutus and Tutsis with a history of massacre, the losing side in post-civil war Spain, or shell-shocked Argentineans, human beings are endlessly reinventing real democracies of infinite variety and hope.

On-line power debate
Got an opinion about the great power debate? Use our on-line forum to voice it now!

The NI is run as a workers’ co-op. This can mean long and occasionally tortuous weekly meetings, as I explained apologetically to Tomás, an Argentinean volunteer who helped me with this magazine.

After he’d sat through his first co-op meeting – a particularly mundane one – he turned to me enthusiastically and said: ‘You run your magazine like an asamblea!’ An asamblea is a neighbourhood assembly, one of the innovative forms of direct democracy that have sprung up in Argentina in response to the economic crisis and virtual collapse in government authority.

Put that way, I thought in surprise, we almost sound glamorous!

We have a flat, equal-pay structure in our organization. Though we’re currently wrestling with how to work as an international co-operative across several offices – the debate between internationalism and localization is a recurring one at the NI – it’s a far cry from the usual problems organizations face.

When I think about it, interminable meetings are the price of real democracy. It’s lucky really, as I suspect that most of us at the NI are by now constitutionally unable to follow orders.

Katharine Ainger
for the New Internationalist
Co-operative
kat@newint.org