Summer gatherings in Sweden

From September 17th to 21st 2008 the European Social Forum (ESF) is being held in Malmö, in the south of Sweden. More than 20,000 people are expected to participate in the forum, which is a meeting place for social movements in Europe.
For five days seminars and workshops will be mixed with culture, music, activism and demonstrations. The forum is more than a meeting, it is a chance to put forward alternatives and visions for the future.
For more information about the ESF...

One of the groups participating is Democratic Alternative (Demalt): “Democratic Alternative would like to invite our affiliates to come and take part in this forum. We see this as a great possibility to be part of developing social movements, to make contacts, to make plans together and to bring our perspectives to the discussion.”

Demalt will also be organizing a summercamp (6-10 august) of its own in Sweden (Motala) called Politics for the future 2008.
“How can global warming be stopped? How can we adapt our communities and societies to renewable energy and less energy use?
How can people steer society in a direction towards solidarity and ecological sanity?
With this years summer gathering scandinavian organisation Democratic Alternative is focusing on these issues.”
The primary languages of the program will be a mix of swedish and norwegian, but if there are participants who want to come from abroad the people from Demalt will look at their capacity to provide translation.

For more information...

A tribute to Murray Bookchin : some recent texts from Janet Biehl

A Remembrance of Murray Bookchin

Janet Biehl wrote this text for Adbusters...

I moved to Burlington, Vermont in January 1987 because I had heard that Murray Bookchin would be teaching in his living room - giving lectures on dialectical philosophy and the history of popular revolutions - and that curriculum intrigued me more than any graduate program. Why study political theory in graduate school, I thought, and write articles that six people will read, when a new movement was brewing, the ecology movement, raising endless new issues that were crying out to be discussed? For that, I gave up my rent-stabilized apartment and headed north.

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Bookchin’s Originality
– A Reply to Marcel Van der Linden

From the text:

In 2001 the researcher Marcel Van der Linden attempted to account more fully for the dedication. Having examined the writings of Weber and Bookchin, he wrote an article called “The Prehistory of Post-Scarcity Anarchism” in which he offered up a list of some ideas that both men had espoused. Unfortunately Van der Linden made no effort to explore the intellectual relationship between the two men, or even to prove that influence, one way or the other, occurred; he simply closed his article by stating that Murray Bookchin was “partially original.”

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