Grassroots Gathering

The Grassroots Gatherings are open get-togethers for people who want to transform Irish society and the world in radical ways – ‘grassroots’ ways, in their focus on real democracy, and bottom-up methods. Reclaiming the streets, building social centres, resisting war, environmental destruction and EU neoliberalism, since 2001 the network around the Grassroots Gatherings has taken part in the global uprising against an equally global capitalism gone out of control.

There is an upcoming Gathering taking place in Dublin over the June Bank Holiday Weekend. You can find out more about it here. You can also find details of previous Gatherings here. Links to articles written about the Gathering and published elsewhere can be found here.

The Grassroots Gathering aims towards a network which would:

- Be based on the principle that people should control their own lives and work together as equals, as part of how we work as well as what we are working towards.

- Within the network this means rejecting top-down and state-centred forms of organisation (hierarchical, authoritarian, expert-based, Leninist etc.) We need a network that’s open, decentralised, and really democratic.

- Call for solutions that involve ordinary people controlling their own lives and having the resources to do so: the abolition, not reform, of global bodies like the World Bank and WTO, and a challenge to underlying structures of power and inequality.

- Organise for the control of the workplace by those who work there.

- Call for the control of communities by the people who live there.

- Argue for a sustainable environmental, economic and social system, agreed by the people of the planet.

- Working together in ways which are accessible to ordinary people, particularly women and working-class people, rather than reproducing feelings of disempowerment and alienation within our own network.