Radical Futures: Tools for Moving Beyond Capitalism
Expand your systemic thinking, awaken imagination and find your place in creating post-capitalist realities.
"I LOVED the course. 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
Overview
Activist and writer Martin Winiecki and community facilitator Juliette Baigler – together with world-leading radical visionaries and practitioners – invite you for an adventure in systemic 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 many millions of people, they've mostly been unable to bring about structural transformation. Global capitalism is producing ever greater inequities, totalitarian oppression and genocides, while pushing us closer to ecological and social collapse.
Each one of us is presented with a stark choice: helping to create a new system or contributing to the collective descent into fascism and collapse.
But how can we begin to imagine a world beyond capitalism when its logic conditions not just economics and politics, but even our interpersonal relationships and private thinking? As Slavoj Žižek puts it, most people today find it "easier to imagine the end of the world [than] an end to capitalism."
Gathering a learning community from around the world, this course will help you to see pathways towards system change, from the big picture to concrete practical steps. With the help of embodied intersectional analysis, you will recognize how you are invested into existing systems and how you might withdraw from them while opening yourself up to a new paradigm through visioning, animism, trauma awareness and lessons from living alternatives.
You'll Learn
- • How to meet the world with an open heart
- • What connects the different current crises, struggles and systems of oppression with one another
- • How to unlearn and transform capitalist and other destructive belief systems in yourself
- • How to expand your imagination and develop a practical vision of possible post-capitalist futures
- • How you can start building alternative systems where you live
- • How to make your activism more sustainable and grounded
- • How to confront fascism effectively and with compassion
Course Content
Radical Futures consists of 8 live sessions in January, which are 3 hour webinars on Zoom from 6pm - 9pm UTC.
In the first 4 sessions, Martin will lay out his framework for holistic system change:
What, exactly, are systems?
January 15
Setting the frame and contextualizing our inquiring in an evolutionary framework, we'll be looking at how complex dynamic self-organizing entities organize all life and at why and how capitalism contradicts the fundamental conditions of life.
How to encounter the crisis with an open heart?
January 16
We'll explore what a politics based on empathy could look like and examine the logic that underpins and drives our crisis of civilization.
How does capitalism live within us?
January 17
This seminar works in a combination of intellectual provocations and somatic self-reflections, offering you a deep dive into how systems of oppression, privilege, narratives and trauma function within ourselves.
What is system change?
January 18
We will envision what life post-capitalism might look like and look at possible starting points and catalysts to move in this direction.
World-leading visionaries and practitioners of system change will join us in the second half:
Post-capitalist infrastructure
January 22 with Helena Norberg-Hodge
We'll look at how localization is a form of re-indigenization, restoring our interdependence with nature and community. The post-capitalist infrastructure is one that facilitates this process of reconnection to others and to the living world around us.
What is solidarity?
January 23 with Morena Hanbury Lemos
We'll challenge the myths of "progress" and "development." Together, we'll explore what a post-capitalist economy could look like, why Palestine is key for global liberation, and what decolonization and solidarity could practically mean.
Meeting fascism with compassion
January 24 with Paul Levy
We'll explore wetiko — a powerful concept describing the collective mind virus behind much of today's global madness. Through a nondual lens, we'll examine how to face fascism without losing our compassion or falling into dehumanization.
Healing, love and "sacred" activism
January 25 with Pat McCabe
We'll explore core questions such as: How can we liberate our life force from trauma? How can spirituality transform our politics? How do we resist systems of oppression with love?
We strongly recommend you attend the live sessions as they include interactive elements like Q&A, self-reflection questions, exercises and breakout groups. If you're not able to attend one or several live sessions, you will have access to the recordings afterwards and be able to exchange with fellow students.
Join us for a holistic learning journey that works with our minds, spirits, bodies and feelings. Our approach includes exercises for:
- • somatic regulation and embodied cognition
- • developing compassion
- • metabolizing grief
- • unleashing your imagination
- • interactive spaces of heart-centered sharing
After each lesson, we'll provide material that you can use to deepen your understanding and inquiry.
Once the course ends, you will continue to have free access to further study resources and the study platform will continue to be open indefinitely and allow you to exchange with fellow students.
As a gesture towards a post-capitalist economy, we offer this course without a paywall. We invite you to give according to your financial capacity and we will not turn anyone away for the lack of funds.
What Former Participants Say
"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
Speakers
Main Speakers and Facilitators
Martin Winiecki
A community organizer, writer and activist focusing on ecology and international solidarity. His thinking has been informed by life and mentorship in intentional community, by learning from and with frontline communities in the geopolitical south, elders and visionaries from around the world, and weaving together deep ecology, critical theory, anarchism, and systems theory.
Juliette Baigler
Is committed to exploring how we heal and flourish together. She coaches organizational leaders and independent change agents and provides supervision to other practitioners. Her approach to facilitation draws on studies of applied psychology, somatic therapy and a committed qi gong practice. Together with her family, she recently moved to a regenerative, farm-based social enterprise.
Guest Speakers
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Director of Local Futures, is an award-winning leader of the new economy movement, and a co-founder of the International Forum on Globalisation and the Global Ecovillage Network. She is the author of the bestselling Ancient Futures, of Local is Our Future, and producer of The Economics of Happiness, Planet Local and Closer to Home films.
Pat McCabe
(Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker. She focuses on reconciliation of masculine and feminine energies, restoring the Sacred Masculine, and addressing archetypal wounding caused by our misuse of technology, ceremony, and science.
Paul Levy
Had a life-changing spiritual awakening in 1981 that initiated him into becoming a wounded healer and spiritual teacher who helps others awaken to the dreamlike nature of reality. Author of six books — including three on the wetiko mind-virus driving collective psychosis — he has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 40 years. His upcoming book explores the transformative work of C. G. Jung.
Morena Hanbury Lemos
Is a doctoral candidate in Ecological Economics at ICTA-UAB. Her research examines how colonial patterns persist in the global economy and explores policies for economic sovereignty, decolonization, and sustainable resource use. She views degrowth as a justice-driven response to historical anti-colonial, environmental, and social movements.