The World Transformed 2021

transform! europe’s observer organisation The World Transformed (TWT) hosts an annual festival of politics, arts and music. TWT aims to create spaces for debate and exchange between grassroot activists, politicians, community groups, unionists and interested persons to address social movement’s most pressing issues.

The World Transformed is a political education project that emerged out of the movement around Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party. The first festival took place in 2016, as an attempt to revitalise the left’s presence at the Labour Party conference, bridge the gap between the parliamentary and social movement left, and develop a space for radical, participatory and creative political education.

Since then the festival has grown to become the biggest left wing multi-day event in the UK, and TWT was able to launch a number of other year round educational projects from short courses to organising schools, podcasts, trainings and pedagogical research.

TWT’s vision of political education has been guided by the following principles:

• • Socialist and Utopian. Fundamentally opposing capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other forms of domination and oppression, TWT’s vision is for a genuinely democratic and classless society based on the principles of solidarity, collectivity and sustainability, where social life is organised around common ownership rather than private property and where free time is distributed equally.
  • Creative. The movement connected to this project must be forward-looking and innovative, and that art and culture must be at the heart of it, striving for a socialist culture capable of responding with imagination to the demands of the moment, and within which creative and non-traditional forms of organising and education are valued, cultivated and celebrated.
  • Collaborative. Building an effective movement requires forging working relationships and links of solidarity across causes, sectors and borders. TWT strives to work with a multitude of different actors within the movement and to learn from and collaborate with movements across the world.