For many years at Stir to Action, our work has explored the democratic institutions that enable people to act together: from membership bodies to co-operatives to political parties and trade unions. Running through all of this has been a concern with associational life – the everyday relationships, organisations, and shared spaces through which people learn to participate in collective life. Increasingly, I've come to think that these institutions deserve greater attention, not simply because they strengthen communities, but because they shape the conditions under which democracy itself becomes possible.
Interviewing Margaret Kohn for this issue places this contemporary revival in a much longer historical perspective. Her book Radical Space recovers a political tradition that understood associational spaces as fundamental to democratic life: not simply spaces for social interaction, but institutions where people learned to organise, deliberate, govern, and exercise collective power. Reading her work alongside our recent report, How Do I Join?, about the embattled existence of 21st Century Social Clubs, is another prompt to save this legacy and culture before it fades from our national life.
It's encouraging to see Andy Burnham host his by-election campaign in Stubshaw Cross Community and Sports Club, but it still feels like a marginal conversation across movements and institutions for social change. I’m with Nick Troy, Chair of Unite Hospitality Glasgow when he says: “Logistically, financially, and politically, this task may prove a headache – but it is far preferable to the continued decline we have seen in the past 40 years.”
Subscribe to STIR magazine to read the Winter Issue and to access the entire archive of articles, interviews, profiles and more via Exact Editions.
