Online course: What is system change?

Develop your awareness and systemic thinking to be able to work out what action you can take, awakening your imagination for possible post-capitalist futures.

 

Overview

Activist and writer Martin Winiecki and community facilitator Juliette Baigler – together with world-leading radical visionaries and practitioners – invite you for an adventure of systemic global thinking, which includes interactive learning, embodied cognition and self-reflection.

As we’re facing an unprecedented global polycrisis, activism too finds itself in a profound crisis of meaning, orientation and strategy. Even though mass movements for climate and social justice have mobilized countless millions of people, they’ve mostly been unable to bring about structural transformation. Global capitalism is producing ever greater inequities and totalitarian realities, while pushing us ever closer to catastrophic ecological and social collapse.

Each one of us is presented with a stark choice: helping to change the system or being part of the problem. But how to achieve this in a world so completely controlled by capitalism? How to even imagine it, when the logic of capital not only controls economics and politics, but even much of our own behaviors and dreams? As Slavoj Žižek said, it’s today “easier to imagine the end of the world [than] an end to capitalism.”

 

Read the video transcript

 
Martin Winiecki: Foreign capitalism has not only managed to control the world up until the last corner. But it has also seeped into our very thinking and our imagination. And one of capitalism’s strongest memes that it has implanted into the minds of billions of people, is that there is no alternative. So it is actually a very absurd state that a system that is based on extreme violence and exploitation, extreme injustice, is what we see as real. While a world in which people’s needs are met, in which people coexist in in cooperation, actually seems like a dream.

Martin Winiecki: In this course we will look at the different layers starting with how the current global system functions. How different crises are interconnected with it. The different systems of oppression that are forming an integrated web. Understanding also how we ourselves with our own beliefs and day-to-day behaviors play into the systems. And we will in that way also look at what is a source of sustainable activism that goes beyond analysis anger, saviorism. And very importantly we will also look at the power of vision trying to open our imagination for possible post-capitalist futures.

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Info

Research area: System change and peace work

Type of learning: Share knowledge

Location: Online

Language: English

Cost

As an experiment with radical trust towards post-capitalist economics, we offer this course on donation. To choose how much you can and want to offer, please fill this questionnaire.

Who is the course for?

  • People who are wondering how they can contribute to system change
  • Anyone unwilling to accept war and oppression as normal
  • People who like to think systemically
  • Activists & peace workers
  • Thought leaders

What you’ll learn

  • How different current crises, struggles and systems of oppression are interconnected
  • How belief systems and intra- and interpersonal patterns within us underpin destructive systems and dynamics on the outer
  • What could make activism more “sacred” and intentional communities more politically relevant
  • A different source of activism that’s deeper than hope, anger, analysis or saviorism
  • How to open up a different logic of political success, based on resonance rather than imposition and force
  • How to expand your imagination of possible post-capitalist futures

Guest teachers

  • Miki Kashtan is an author, a practical visionary, the seed founder of the Nonviolent Global Liberation and facilitator who blogs at The Fearless Heart.
  • Geni Núñez is a Guarani Indigenous activist, writer and psychologist.
  • A’ida Al-Shibli is a Bedouin Palestinian activist, long-term member of Tamera and the founder of Global Campus Palestine.
  • Nilüfer Koç is the international relations spokesperson of the Kurdish National Congress, a Middle East expert and long-term member of the Kurdish women’s movement.
  • Andrea Ixchíu Hernández is a Maya K’iche’ women, journalist, land protector and human rights activist from Guatemala.
  • Indra Shekhar Singh is an independent agri policy analyst, journalist and environmental activist from India.
  • Claudio Miranda is a musician, peace-maker and community founder at Favela da Paz in Brazil.
  • Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and speaker.
  • Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation, speaker, writer, radio host and the founding director of Akantu Institute.

After course support

  • Free access to resources for further study
  • Study platform will continue to be open indefinitely and allow you to exchange with fellow students

Testimonials

“I LOVED the course. I watched it all… highly recommended for connecting the personal to the geopolitical, creating frameworks for us to make sense in times of insanity and help us figure out what is ours to do.”
– Gail Bradbrook, Extinction Rebellion co-founder

“Martin is an incredibly gifted teacher and speaker with an eloquence and intellect rarely encountered. His distillation of ideas into well crafted lessons sparked new realizations for me and has already shifted my day to day life. The class discussions were nourishing.”
– Julia Reeve

“Being in the “dominant sphere” and talking about identities these days can be very difficult, and I felt Martin was very respectful and conscious. I was very happy to see a place of speech very well occupied. Thank you.”
– Nikita Llerena, Festival Iris organizer

Registration is currently closed. To be notified when registration opens for the next online course, sign up to our newsletter.

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