All about our political imagination workshops with Mushon Zer-Aviv <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
\u201cIf there\u2019s one thing to remember: the future<\/em> does not exist. There are always futures<\/em>.\u201d <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
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That was Mushon Zer-Aviv\u2019s central message in Forging Anti-Fascist Futures<\/strong>, a political imagination workshop series we hosted with him in January and April.<\/p>\n
When we asked participants why they wanted to join the workshops, they told us they needed<\/em> this. They shared about wanting to<\/strong> break the exhaustion of survival loops, to find strategic paths forward, to radically imagine a just world with like-minded folks<\/strong>. One participant said, \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to imagine that people globally can be united and stand up against all injustice. But I\u2019m here.\u201d That \u201cbut I\u2019m here\u201d carried weight.<\/strong><\/p>\n
The fascist turn is a global phenomenon. But so is the fight against it.<\/strong> Fascist leaders drag their countries to wars together. The participants of these workshops, joining from across the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Palestine, Israel, and beyond, showed there is room for collaboration between those fighting against them as well.<\/p>\n
Mushon was leading the workshops from Tel Aviv where he\u2019s been organizing for peace through unimaginable darkness. He shared a quote from Rebecca Solnit\u2019s Hope in the Dark<\/em> that has made a critical distinction for him between hope and optimism<\/strong> when imagining futures:<\/p>\n
\u201cHope locates itself in the premises that we don\u2019t know what will happen, and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.\u201d <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As Mushon put it, hope isn\u2019t in the light; it\u2019s in the dark. Our fears are in the dark too, which is why we\u2019re afraid of it. But Solnit is telling us that the unknown is where we find room to act<\/strong>. The workshops were an exercise in training our ability to see in the dark \u2014 to map the space of possibilities that is not necessarily visible under the lamplight of certainty.<\/p>\n
The future isn\u2019t a single timeline we\u2019re heading toward. It\u2019s a wide-open landscape of possibility. And right now, in many moments of crisis, the question isn\u2019t whether the future will change. It\u2019s whose vision of the future will win. Political imagination is our capacity to envision what we make possible and win together. <\/strong><\/p>\n
Read on for more from Forging Anti-Fascist Futures, including:<\/p>\n
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