About Us

Los Altos Institute: Mandate and Mission

Founded in September 2012, Los Altos Institute is a non-profit socialist institute or “think tank” based in British Columbia. Geographically situated at an intersection between the US and Chinese imperial spheres, Los Altos seeks to engage with both global and local issues with an eye to the dynamics of empire and its accidents at this particular place and time. Los Altos seeks to create a space that encourages and facilitates lay dialogue on major contemporary political and cultural questions, approached from a perspective of, in the words of Edward P Thompson, “theoretically informed empiricism.”

The Los Altos Institute has three overlapping purposes:

  1. to create a social and institutional space to support people without advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences participating in advanced, scholarly exchange in the humanities and social sciences;
  2. to gather a socialist internationalist community of that challenges the extinction event through a rejection of capitalism and the work towards a post-capitalist society;
  3. to engage in shifting public discourse about politics, knowledge and culture in the long-term, rather than focusing on issues of the moment, except insofar as these serve to dramatize or expose deep, structural issues.

The Los Altos Institute has four spheres of operation:

    1. teaching college -level, zero-barrier classes both in in-person intensive settings and online; and
    2. hosting zero-barrier reading groups to facilitate substantive, sophisticated engagement with major issues from a theoretically-informed perspective; and
    3. teaching college-level zero-barrier courses to educate Institute members and others about our contributions and perspectives to anti-capitalist analysis
    4. seeding strategic interventions in politics, both electoral and otherwise through established and new organizations.

Los Altos

Our name is inspired, in part, by the Republic of Los Altos (Spanish for “the Highlands”), which declared independence from the United Provinces of Central America in 1838. With an indigenous and mixed-race majority population who were committed to maintaining their developed systems of collective land tenure in the face of privatization, this state struggled to maintain its independence for the next decade until finally being forcibly annexed by the adjacent Guatemalan dictatorship. More broadly, Los Altos represents just one of many attempts on the Americas’ Pacific Slope – from communities of aboriginal peoples and escaped slaves in colonial Spanish America, through Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, to British Columbia’s 1980s Solidarity Coalition – to put forward socially and politically courageous alternatives to elite-driven orders of various kinds.

Masthead Quotation Footnote

[1] This quotation comes from a biography of the putative founder of an ancient Mediterranean social movement, called the Ebionim or Ebionites, literally translated as “the poor.” The Ebionim traced their origins to a Judean man who split publicly with the John the Baptist movement and founded his own group; the historical record is unclear on what he called his movement but after his death, it came to be known as the Jesus Movement (after his first name) and later, Christianity. The Ebionim first appear in the historical record with their authorship. sometime between 60 and 90 CE, of the biography from which our masthead quotation is taken, which later came to be called the “Gospel of Matthew.”

The Ebionim, in their rendering of their movement’s founding, placed considerable emphasis on opposing economic inequality and the abuse of power by elites. Because their movement’s centre was based in Palestine during the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, and due to their early loss of and subsequent rivalry with their main recruiting agent for Greek-speaking converts, the original Ebionim fell into obscurity and may have ceased to exist altogether sometime in the second century CE.

However, their founding document has remained a highly important text in Christianity up to the present day, resulting in periodic attempts to reorient society based on its radical critique of self-interest, capital accumulation and legitimacy of social elites. The fourth-century Ebionim who opposed the successful efforts of the Jesus movement’s dominant faction to merge with the Roman state are an example of these efforts, as are the early generations of the Franciscan movement, the nineteenth-century Abolitionist movement and present-day Liberation Theology. Los Altos identifies itself as an ally of these movements and their efforts.