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Social Ecologist Profile: Rafa Grinfeld of Antwerp, Belgium

2011-06-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

[Editor’s note: We are very grateful to Rafa for his contribution to the Social Ecologist Profile series, especially considering English is not his first language.]
This interview appeared before at the Social Ecology Blog.

Please introduce yourself (What kind of work you do, Where you live, etc.)

I live in Belgium, that’s where I have lived almost all of my life. I have been mostly active here in the northern city of Antwerp, but certainly also a bit in large cities like Ghent and Brussels. And I like to be politically active when I’m travelling too.

I originally come out of the Anarchist movement and became really interested in things like eco-anarchism and social ecology more than 15 years ago.

I had much time to study and be active in radical groups, because I never did much paid work and State support for unemployed people could be worse here in Belgium.

How did you become introduced to the ideas of social ecology? How do you define social ecology when asked about it?

I first read about Social Ecology in the mid-nineties, in Anarchist Journals from the Low Countries. There was a Belgian philosopher called Roger Jacobs who wrote much about the work of Murray Bookchin, Roger J. also regularly wrote for these left-libertarian periodicals.

I got to meet Jacobs and started to know him a bit better, although he lived far away, in a Belgian region I never visited.

There were some action camps at that time in Belgium with much eco-anarchist inspiration. Just after visiting such a camp for the first time, I bought my first book of a Social Ecologist, it was called Toward an ecological society and written by Murray Bookchin.

At that time I did not know of any other Social Ecologists, much seemed to revolve around the work of Murray.

For defining social ecology, I think that the most known attempt to define it hasn’t been bad (considering that it is actually a whole new field of thinking and thus not that easy to define):

Social Ecology n 1: a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends. 2: a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society.

This has been an influential definition so why not refer to it? But maybe I would rather say:

1: a coherent radical critique of current social, statecraft and anti-ecological trends. 2: a political, ecological and ethical approach to society. 3: a striving for communal and direct democracy.

I think that this second way of defining it is closer to defining what I would call social ecology in a strict sense. I often start with saying that it is much about making it clear that social and ecological problems are much connected with each other.

When I discovered a bit what social ecology was about, almost 17 years ago, I was much interested in anarcho-pacifism, and also in libertarian Marxism or other radical Left stuff. I quite enjoyed a concept at that time called Anarchist federalism (decentralizing the decision-making in a society and forming anti-authoritarian communes working together in a federation).

Five years before all of that happened I already had some young radical friends, I was 18 years old myself then and studied political and social sciences in Brussels.

Anyway, the radical thinking of Bakunin, Marx and others was not something completely new for me when I was in my late teens.

But it was Social Ecology and some for a long time in Latin America active writers like pedagogues Paolo Freire and Ivan Illich (he also was a radical ecologist), or the humanist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm that later really got me interested in the ideas of the radical Left.

I became more and more politically conscious and I managed to feel less bad about my academic failures while studying. Oh yes, I had really started to hate all of that schooling going on in Belgium and all that academic stuff really wasn’t my cup of tea, but it was difficult to do without those schools if I wanted to study and get subsidized by the State for it.

How does social ecology and/or your experience with the Institute for Social Ecology influence your current work?

The Belgian State still isn’t keen on the acts of civil disobedience I sometimes have fantasies about, but during the last six years it did show an interest in making me study Social work and subsidizing it.

I’m probably on my way now to being a social cultural worker with a good diploma, but I’m already 40 years old so unfortunately having it would not help me that much to find a paid job I like doing.

Recently I have been much occupied with writing a thesis, it’s mostly about climate change and ecological social work, I usually like writing texts or comments about politics and statecraft.

For that I often use the internet, but I more often appreciate having a face to face communication with people for it, so I regularly do that together with close friends and others.

In all of the things I do Social Ecology plays an important role. In lectures, writing, discussing with people in study groups (unfortunately, these are group activities less about politics and dialectical thinking than I want them to be), informing people around me, everyday life,…

What do you see as the greatest opportunities and greatest challenges for achieving a sustainable relationship between humanity and the wider world?

The greatest opportunities? Well, I think that the current movement against climate change and the role Social Ecologists play in it offers some interesting prospects for example, or the activities of people from the libertarian left who want to be active with media in a good way, interesting philosophers or social theorists, creative artists much into solidarity with the oppressed,…

A big challenge is finding solutions for the social and ecological problems we face, the ecological crisis and every other modern crisis. If the oppressed in the world find solutions for all of that we will have the sustainable relationship you refer to here.
Any great stories about being around the ISE?

I haven’t been much around the ISE but I learned much from the discussion forum it used to have a long time ago (it was called the ise-l, does anybody know if there are parts of these online discussions still available somewhere?).

The greatest experience is to be around many people knowing much about social ecology, that can really be special and quite trigger some new kind of thinking.

New contributions

2011-03-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

You can find more information about the things I and other social ecologists do at the New Compass site, the Institute for Social Ecology site and on the facebook networksite.

Farewell Facebook (Short film about Digital Suicide)

2010-11-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

Ok, I know, I could get a full screen if I would put this youtube thing on the social network site. Money rules the world.

Terrorists.The kids they sentenced 1/9

2010-09-02T16:13:00.000-07:00

DEMOCRATIC ALTERNATIVE DEMANDS RELEASE OF ALL ARRESTED

2010-09-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

PRESS STATEMENT 21.06.2001

Democratic Alternative condemns the actions of the police in Gothenburg.
"We cannot accept that the police shall be able to disrupt peaceful demonstrations" says Eirik Eiglad, the international secretary of Democratic Alternative.
What was planned to be large-scale demonstrations against the European Union and the power of the market ended up as a large-scale demonstration of the police's contempt for democracy. The planned protests in Gothenburg ended with random harassment of demonstrators and passers-by, brutal police violence and extensive mass-arrests - as well as three young citizens getting shot by the police!
Democratic Alternative is a radical organization with groups in several Nordic countries, and we had many activists engaged in the protests, counter-conferences and discussions that filled Gothenburg.
On the basis of our own experiences and others accounts we consider it obvious that the police in Gothenburg had carefully planned to carry out a non-compromising policy. "The police did not allow for dialogue or peaceful protests", Eiglad continues.
The peaceful demonstrations were disrupted by continual police provocations. Protesters were arrested and harassed for no reason. Many was even taken into custody because they were walking on the wrong street or sleeping at the wrong school. Eiglad says "the police showed a complete contempt for fundamental political rights".
Nonetheless it was obvious that when police kept away and let the protesters arrange their demonstrations in peace, song, dance and slogans filled the streets - not the chaos provoked by the police. Of this reason Democratic Alternative consider Gothenburg a victory. "The fact that so many thousands demonstrate against the market and the power elites despite the harsh reactions of the police is definitely an important victory".
In the months and years to come we will continue to highlight the unjust and undemocratic Europe designed by the elites. "But this victory must not lead us to forget those still imprisoned".
Therefore Democratic Alternative demands:
* Unconditional release of all arrested. We demand that all charges is immediately dropped.
* The establishment of an independent commission that can analyze the events in Gothenburg.
* Compensation for everyone that was taken into custody, deported or arrested.
* Official apology from the responsible powers. We also demand that all those responsible for the police actions the immediately must be removed from their posts.
Democratic Alternative will contribute in working for the release of all those who are still arrested, and the dropping of all charges. "Now all citizens must step forward to defend our democratic rights" Eiglad concludes.

Jyri Jaakkola interview 01.02.2010

2010-05-05T07:05:00.000-07:00

Interview with the Communalist who was killed in Mexico..

Adorno and poetry after the war

2010-05-03T02:46:00.000-07:00

"The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today." Theodor W. Adorno, 1949

Belgian sexual abuse scandals include longest-serving bishop and Belgium's new Primate

2010-04-29T03:31:00.000-07:00

“The longest-serving bishop in Belgium resigned Friday after admitting to sexually abusing “a boy in my close entourage” many years ago, becoming the latest cleric to quit in a spreading abuse scandal.”
New York Times

More..

“A member of the public who was sexually abused by a priest in his youth has accused Belgium's new Primate, André Léonard, of failing to intervene.”
Belgian television channel VRT

More..

Two human rights activists killed in Oaxaca, Mexico

2010-04-29T03:06:00.000-07:00

I'm in solidarity with the Finnish Communalists, who seem to have lost a friend (and he was much interested in Communalist ideas). His name is Jyri.

“Two human rights activists were shot and killed in an ambush in southern Mexico as they tried to deliver food and supplies to a town being harassed by armed groups, authorities said on Wednesday.
Beatriz Carino, the Mexican director of the rights group CACTUS, and Finnish human rights observer Jyri Antero Jaakkola died when gunmen attacked a convoy of some 30 rights workers on Tuesday, local attorney general Maria de la Luz Candelaria said.”

Source : The Washinton Post, more info here.

40 Years of Earth Days

2010-04-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

By Brian Tokar

The 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day is upon us, and many seasoned environmentalists are nostalgic for the heady days of the 1970s, when 20 million people hit in the streets and eventually got Richard Nixon to sign a series of ambitious environmental laws. Those laws managed to clean up waterways that were turning into sewers, saved the bald eagle from the ravages of DDT, and began to clear the air, which in the early 1960s was so polluted that people were passing out all over our cities.
More...

A short review of "The Anti-Jewish Riots in Oslo"

2010-04-20T02:35:00.000-07:00

I like the fact that this book of Eirik Eiglad contains enough nuances and is well documented. For those who want to know more about conflicts in the Middle East and the way people in Europe are reacting to it, this book is a must-read.
Even Leftist journalists often know little about the things that are happening in the Scandinavian Left or in the circles of ultra-authoritarian people living there, and with this book a part of it becomes more clear.
That's good, because when some people read much about countries like France or Germany in the newspapers, often they already start to think that they are enough informed about the situation in Europe to have good opinions about it. It's not true, and the things happening in the north of Europe are just as much important.
With anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe (Hungary now for example), this book comes at a good moment. The opinions of Eirik Eiglad on this matter are often original and contain apt writing. If you thought you would find enough information about all of this in newspapers, at indymediasites, in Socialist, Marxist or other Leftist journals, think again because it's not true.

Ask for this book in your local bookshop or buy it at the internet.

Mexico and rebellion

2010-03-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

Militia men from the Mexican revolution

Zapatista women

Emiliano Zapata and Ricardo Flores Magón

Siqueiros mural with Magón, Proudhon and Kropotkin

Murray Bookchin and trotskyism

2010-03-26T02:48:00.000-07:00

Murray Bookchin had a teenage admiration for Trotsky because he "stood alone against Stalin" in 1937. Bookchin about that time : “Apart from a small number of anarchists and independent leftists, relatively few American radicals knew about Kronstadt or Bolshevik atrocities against anarchists.”
Source : here

Some texts that make it clear that social ecology and trotskyism don't go well together at all :
"Listen, Marxist!", by Murray Bookchin
"Bookchin's Originality", by Janet Biehl

Social Ecology and class struggle

2010-03-13T13:03:00.000-08:00

Many libertarian socialists make the mistake of thinking that social ecology is also about not being interested in class struggle. Here are two texts (with several mistakes being made in them) which make it more clear why they are not always that much interested in social ecology:
Anarchism, Class Struggle and Political Organization. By Tom Wetzel, July 2009 and a less recent text : Radical Ecology and Class Struggle: A Re-Consideration. By Jeff Shantz.

Health And Wellness Discussion

2009-11-30T03:36:00.001-08:00

8-Day Social Ecology Intensive

2009-11-30T03:24:00.000-08:00

January 9th – 16th, 2010 — New York City — $300 (scholarships available)

The Institute for Social Ecology presents an 8-day intensive introduction to the philosophy and politics of Social Ecology. This 8-day intensive will offer students an introduction to the dialectical philosophy and politics of Social Ecology. Using the lens of Social Ecology, students will participate in four topical seminars focused the climate justice; alternatives capitalism; race; and the history of Social Ecology and radical movements. Students will also participate in a practicum applying the principles of Social Ecology to their own actual (or imagined) activist campaigns.

*The philosophy class will be held in the evening to allow for NYC students with day jobs to attend.

Some thoughts about the situation in Australia

2009-11-30T03:18:00.000-08:00

The debate about social ecology versus deep ecology should lead to a better understanding of these two influential currents in “the ecology movement”, also in Australia. It's a shame for example that ecofeminists aren't better at this than the way they talk about it all now.

What should we think of the ideas of materialist ecofeminist Ariel Salleh, who has spent some time as Associate Professor in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, and who “now writes full time and is an Honorary Associate with Political Economy in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney”? Some of these ideas, you can find here.

Let's take another example, the ideas of Barbara Noske, who considers herself “a member of both the animal movement and deep ecology”. I don't know if she calls herself an ecofeminist but she really seems so much positive about ecofeminism.
“Dr Barbara Noske holds a Master's degree in Sociocultural Anthropology and a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam.
In the nineties she taught and undertook research in the areas of environmental thought, environmental ethics, deep ecology, social ecology and ecofeminism at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University in Toronto, Canada.
Presently she is a research fellow at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in Australia.”
Source : here

I have been inspired by some of the ideas of Barbara Noske but I really disagree with several things she says in this interview (see the link) about deep ecology and animals. It's good to not be mechanistic in the approach to animals. But the human body is not “just an animal body amongst other animal bodies”. And this does not mean that social ecologists are “anthropocentric”, like deep ecologists tend to accuse us of being.

SEEDs

2009-10-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

The Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School (SEEDS) is “currently in the process of securing demonstration, education, and lodging space on 10 acres of ecologically diverse land with organic gardens and mixed forest at Vashon island (USA).”
“On pristine, remote Vashon Island it is often easy to feel removed from the enormity of the global ecological crisis. After all, the island has maintained efforts over the years to resist development pressures, especially through successfully resisting the construction of a bridge that would surely spell the end of its still largely rural character.”
Find out more here

Arts for change

2009-10-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

“A provocative, personal look at the motivations and challenges of teaching socially engaged arts, Arts for Change overturns conventional arts pedagogy with an activist's passion for creating art that matters.
How can polarized groups work together to solve social and environmental problems? How can art be used to raise consciousness? Using candid examination of her own university teaching career as well as broader social and historical perspectives, Beverly Naidus answers these questions, guiding the reader through a progression of steps to help students observe the world around them and craft artistic responses to what they see. Interviews with over 30 arts education colleagues provide additional strategies for successfully engaging students in what, to them, is most meaningful.”
Read a review of the book here

The Right, referenda and the Oosterweel Link

2009-10-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

The Oosterweel Link is a new and very expensive project for the city of Antwerp. Although only a small minority of the people in Antwerp seems to want the worst version of it, which would include a big traffic bridge (“the Lange Wapper”) for trucks and cars in the inner city of Antwerp, this month there will be a local referendum on the issue (in the largest city of Flanders). It are mainly members of the moderate part of the Right (Christian Democrats and others) who are trying to get this big bridge constructed. One of the big problems with the Lange Wapper is that it will cause many health problems, as a result of fine particle dust pollution.
The Far Right party Vlaams Belang (translation : Flemish Interest) has been fully gaining from this spectacle. The party even got involved in a campaign to collect 50.000 signatures in Antwerp city in order to stop the construction of the big traffic bridge by having a referendum about it. It was a bit strange and sad, because up until then it were people of the Left collecting a lot of these signatures. There were more than enough signatures collected for a referendum to take place at the end.
Unfortunately, many people with a foreign background will not be able to vote. This is one of the reasons why politicians of the Right like the idea of referenda sometimes, many people of the extreme part of the Right certainly like the idea of a referendum about the issue "Can non-European foreigners also vote during elections?" for example.
Just to give you an idea about the size of the issues here, the road that they are maybe planning to build (with a huge bridge included) would cost more than 3.000.000.000 euros. If too many people would vote NO the 18th of October, the Flemish government will consider building another very expensive road (a less ugly and unhealthy one). There are three options that they see as alternatives for the Oosterweelverbinding (Oosterweel Link)...
According to the well-known Antwerp port alderman Marc Van Peel (a Christian Democrat), the city council of Antwerp should not even base its recommendation to the Flemish government on the results of the Antwerp referendum on the Oosterweel Link. "It is not because the referendum will result in a NO vote to the Lange Wapper bridge that we, as a municipality, should say no”, says 'democrat' Van Peel. He reasons that as a referendum is not legally binding, the municipality and Flemish government need not necessarily act in accordance with the results of a referendum! Yes, this is what Van Peel wants “representative democracy” to look like.
I've been involved in protests against the Oosterweel Link for many years now. This road connection has probably been the most important regional topic for activists of the ecological part of the Left here in Flanders to talk about. And with it hanging above our heads, ideas and discussions about local democracy are more and more a part of the public realm today.

Social Ecology in Turkey

2009-10-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

"The root cause of the ecological, political, bureaucratic and social injustice and other social problems, which increasingly threatens our planet and is more visible every day, is domination of human over human and reflection of this domination to non-human nature. There is no partial or separate solution of these problems."
The Istanbul Social Ecology group has been active for more than 14 years now..

Some thoughts on religion and sex

2009-10-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

The more hierarchical religious institutions get, the more they tend to control the sex lifes of their adherents. It can be about restrictions or it can be about stimulating sex and having it with several partners. If you control the sex life, you control much of the mind.

Ecology, economy and tourism

2009-10-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

The concept of supernatural spirituality is never emancipatory, I like natural spirituality and societies that deliver the ecology of freedom. But when will these societies be realized? If it ever happens, I do not think I will ever see them.
Tourism provides one of the biggest economic sectors in the world. A country like Cuba for example has become very much dependent of tourism, the trade boycott of the US has played an important role in that.
Switzerland, Austria and Germany have 'the most attractive environments for developing the travel and tourism industry', according to the third annual Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report, published by the World Economic Forum this year. Among the top ten, France (4), Canada (5), Sweden (7) and the United States (8th place) post 'improvements'.

Interview with Brian Tokar about social ecology and tourism..

The new portal site of social ecology in French

2009-10-01T19:12:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Vincent Gerber for this wonderful website. Great job, Vincent.

Iain McKay about the communalism of Murray Bookchin

2008-10-14T02:51:00.000-07:00

Iain McKay wrote a review of Social Ecology and Communalism, a book that contains four essays of Murray Bookchin (with an introduction of Eirik Eiglad).

You can read the review here.

The fact that Bookchin started to oppose anarchism at the end of his life from a left-libertarian perspective makes many anarchists angry.
Iain McKay even writes at the end of his article:
It is a shame that he ended such a fruitful political life by writing such rubbish. Hopefully, his post-anarchist work will be ignored in favor of his real, important and still relevant contributions to libertarian theory—along, of course, with his silly “libertarian municipalism” fetish which became his undoing.

He could only write this after a long text with insinuations that there was a big difference between Bookchin as an anarchist and Bookchin as a communalist. But in the last four decades (and more) of his life, Murray Bookchin had a lot of communalist ideas and was much more a social anarchist than an anarchist. And so, McKay gives people the idea that Bookchin was close to anarchosyndicalism for a long time, just like McKay is. (Maybe McKay even calls himself an anarchosyndicalist, I don't know).

It's a shame that McKay does not describe the history of social anarchism, eco-anarchism or communalism at all here. Which makes me think that he does not know so much about that.
Many people of the libertarian left are afraid of criticizing anarchism, probably because it is criticized so much in the mass media. Bookchin did not have to be afraid of doing that, because even at the end of his life many people thought of him as being an anarchist.

Two reviews

2008-08-21T04:12:00.001-07:00

Remaking Society by Murray Bookchin

I have read parts of it before, certainly enjoyed reading the last few chapters. It's an excellent book to start with from Murray if you haven't read any of his books. It might be his most important work because it's a good introduction to 'early' social ecology and has been translated in several languages. He just seems a bit too positive about anarchism in it, athought it's clear that this work stands very much into the libertarian socialist tradition and isn't at all about being an individualist.

Finding Our Way. Rethinking Eco-Feminist Politics. By Janet Biehl

This is one of those books I always thought I should fully read once, just after I had started reading it. I read half of it more than ten years ago. I think I picked it up again several times but found it hard to read further, so this time I started with the beginning of the book again and then later I could more easily switch to the second half of the book because it was more easy to grasp the logic behind it.
I have read other stuff from Janet. This very long text was the most difficult one to read, it can be very philosophical sometimes, with words I did not find easy to understand so I had to take the dictionary and open it all of the time.
It's also mostly about female writers, apart from Murray Bookchin, so it can be good for male readers who don't mind a bit of subcultural genderbending. The genderbending didn't fully scare me. I'm used to it because sometimes I go to feminist meetings of twenty or thirty people present, and then there can be just a few men there. If they want to be called men, that's not always the case either.

One of the things I learned from this book is that ecofeminist Ynestra King has been less into social ecology than I thought she has been. Well, it's even harder to find texts from King in Belgium than from Janet Biehl, so... This book of Janet is the best work available to understand what's good about ecofeminism and what isn't.
Something that I really liked reading from Biehl was this : "Let me make it quite clear that I do not contend that personal life must be sacrificed to political life. Quite to the contrary, I believe that the two of them have to coexist in a balanced, rational and truly ecological manner. Attention to the personal in itself is and will always be of great individual as well as social concern. Human beings have vital needs for self-expression, love, play, a relationship with a particular place, with nonhuman nature, as well as intimate relationships with other people."
That an interesting book like this received little appreciation in the ecofeminist movement really is a shame, no wonder she doesn't seem to be much interested in ecofeminism anymore. It's an excellent work this book.

Homophobia

2008-08-15T19:41:00.001-07:00

Chumbawumba, nice lyrics.

Summer gatherings in Sweden

2008-05-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

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.

More...

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.”

More...

Remembering Murray Bookchin

2008-03-31T14:38:00.000-07:00

"Murray Bookchin, the visionary social theorist and activist, died on July 30th at his home in Burlington, Vermont. Chaia Heller has been involved for over 20 years with the Institute for Social Ecology co-founded by Bookchin in 1974. She talks about her friend and mentor."

Listen to this recent interview here.

EuroMayday Aachen 2008: transnational parade of precari@s and migrants

2008-03-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

Mayday! Mayday! Emergency call from Aachen / Aquisgranum (near Koeln/Cologne)

On the First of May in Aachen / Aken / Aix-la-Chapelle / Aquisgrana / Aquisgrán / Akwizgran / Ahan, ancient carolignian city, Nicolas Sarkozy will present Angela Merkel with the EU Oscar, the Prix Charlemagne. Irony of the calendar, syndicalist MayDay this year coincides with catholic Ascension Day, when the Eurocracy Awards are traditionally handed out.

The duo congratulates itself for having finally shielded the EU from the social demands of the people, who scream for an end to free-market theology in europe. The new european diarchy is turning the continent into a police state and would be happy to erase the heretic meaning of MayDay, and the Anarchist and Socialist traditions of europe along with it.

This year for MayDay, two worlds clash together: the global movement vs strong-armed governments; grassroots networks and squatted social centers vs EU power; Utopian Society vs Capitalist Market; the radical europe of multitudes vs the conservative Europe of élites.

We are gonna spoil the party of the powerful, by raising hell in Aachen and holding our own party: the EuroMayDay Parade, the transeuropean demonstration of all precarious and migrants against workfare, discrimination and border controls held in more than twenty cities.

We, the EuroMayDay Network cannot accept that MayDay is turned into the Ascension Day into stardom of the two failing sovereigns of Christian, NATO Europe. We reject Charlemagne as symbol of Europe, just as we denounce the neoliberalism of the Barroso Commission and the monetarism of Trichet's Central Bank.

Forced to live in precarious hell, we're going to trash the heaven of EU élites. Don't miss it: shame the twin rulers of Europe, expose their authoritarian arrogance, join the thousands coming to Aachen (close to Cologne) for the strongest protest against the core of europower ever mounted.

Show Angie and Sarko what the European movement against neoliberalism and militarism is capable of. Come to the special EuroMayDay Protest+Parade+Party that collectives in Aachen, Liège, Maastricht, and other cities of the region are organizing. Facilities, accommodation and food will be provided to protesters in Aachen in the days immediately before and after the First of May.

Activists, artists, hackers, unionists, migrant associations, queer collectives, critical cyclists, media creatives, leftist radicals of all stripes – red, black, green, pink, purple, silver – are coming to Aachen and other EuroMayDay Parades to join the fight.
First of May in Aachen:

morning: EuroMayDay PROTESTS nearby Rathaus where Karlspreis is given to Merkel by Sarkozy
afternoon: EuroMayDay PARADE starts nearby site of protest
evening: MayDay PARTY in public park

No Borders, No Workfare, No Precarity.
Join Us also in the MayDay Parades in Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg,
Lisbon, Milano, Malaga, Maribor, Tokyo, and many other cities!

EuroMayDay
fighting precarity and inequality since 2004

"Police in Japan act more subtly“

2008-02-24T04:36:00.000-08:00

Japanese activist says about G8-protest

Go Hirasawa mobilizes against the G8-summit in Japan with the group „No G8! Action“.
Is the protest culture there very much different (than in Europe)? Go Hirasawa says that in Japan, open violence is not that common.

GO HIRASAWA is lecturer of film studies at the Tokyo University and a media activist. Very recently, he has coordinated the retrospective of the Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu at the international film festival Berlinale.

Taz: Mr. Hirasawa, you were in Heiligendamm during the G8-summit last year. How did you find the protests?

Go Hirawasa: There were ten people from Japan taking part at the protest. Especially, the camps were a special experience for us. There were so many people from all over the world; that was a wonderful opportunity to exchange information and to discuss.

TAZ: Were there also things which were strange to you?

Oh yes, this never-ending search for consensus. In Germany or Europe, every part of the strategy or the tactics of the protest is discussed with everybody, and that takes so long. I found it very interesting, but it did not seem very practical at all.

TAZ: How is it in Japan?

We choose respectively one or two persons for each action or protest, who then decided on behalf of a bigger group. „Commandant” may not be the right expression, but these people bare responsibility. The age of the persons in charge does not play a role; what plays a role are the experiences and the ability to make the right decisions at the right time. Once you get arrested in Japan, you can stay in police custody for 23 days. For that reason, it is very important to prepare well for actions and to plan with the group. Spontaneous actions are less suitable.

TAZ: At previous summits in Europe or the US, activists have criticized often that the police react disproportionately, and that there were assaults. Do you expect similar situations in Japan?

We expect a very similar situation during the summit like in Heiligendamm. Thus, the police in Japan operate differently than in Europe; open violence is not so common, they act rather subtly, for example, they try to intimidate political activists by visiting them at home. On the other hand, they also try to arrest organizers of protests in the run-up to the summit. And if there are no concrete grounds for the search, or if they cannot clearly name any “leaders”, they just construct something. This is a very typical procedure of the Japanese police.

TAZ: Are Japanese people critical towards the G-8 summit?

Most of the Japanese do not have even a slight doubt about the legitimacy of the G8 or the capitalist economic system. I have the impression that people in Europe are more critical about that. We hope that we can spread such a prevailing mood also in Japan, so that people do not just take things how they are but begin to put them into question and challenge them.
Until now, Europe and America play a main role in criticizing neo-liberalistic globalisation. I hope that this will change.

TAZ: Are there differences between the leftists in Japan and Germany?

Leftist groups in Germany are networked well among themselves. I was impressed that they succeeded in building up a broad coalition against the G8 summit. In Japan, the leftists are totally at odds with each other. The groups fight against each other instead of fighting together for their aims.

TAZ: Which are the main groups?

There are lots of anti-militaristic groups, and labor unions, of course. There is also the New Left-wing, although it is no longer new, because it was founded in the 60s, and comprises, e.g., the trotzkyists. Besides, there are also younger movements since the 1980’s: Movements against poverty, against homelessness or against discrimination against people with disability, and in the meantime, the May-Day movement.

TAZ: Does the anti-globalsation movement exist in Japan?

Yes. In the meantime, it is one of the largest movements in Japan. The „Battle of Seattle“ in the late 1990’s has marked a beginning point for this subject in Japan. During the G8 in Genoa, there was a demonstration to the Italian embassy, out of which an anti-globalisation group named Anti-Capitalist Action (ACA) was founded. Another important convention for the movement in East- and South-East-Asia was the WTO-Conference in 2005 in Hong Kong
This was a very good place to get to know each other and for exchange. It also strengthened mutual solidarity. It’s the island position which often isolates the movements in Asia geographically. For this reason, we very much hope that, for the protest at Lake Toya, we will obtain large support from the international activists in Japan, but also by global solidarity actions.

TAZ: Where does your group „No G8!Action“ place itself?

We define ourselves as decentralist and anti-authoritarian. No G8! Action was founded in May 2007, in the run-up to G8 in Rostock. The fundaments of our activities are the key points of the network Peoples Global Action. (www.agp.org)

TAZ: The next G8-summit takes place on the island Hokkaido. What kind of place is this?

Hokkaido is a relatively poor region and very much characterized by agriculture. Five years ago, a city went bankrupt for the first time in the Japanese history.

TAZ: How come?

Japan is an unbelievably centralized country. Companies, industry, the administration, everything is concentrated in the large cities in the center, i.e. Tokyo and Osaka. Therefore, the regions in the north and south have little income, they live on agriculture, partly with income from the military bases. So, the situation in Hokkaido is pretty much the same as in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (rural region near German G8). The people there are angry with the government, because the G8 takes place in their region and because they have the problems with the security precautions and the protests.

TAZ: Can you connect your actions to the existing local problems?

We try. Hokkaido is not just a region with economic problems. There are also Ainu. Ainu are an indigenous people; they lived in Hokkaido until Japan colonised their island. Until today, they have to fight for their rights. The group, which prepares the protests there, has also organized a meeting with the indigenous people and tries to network with them.

TAZ: Which other political subjects are currently discussed in Japan?

Especially the growing differences between the poor and the rich. The neo-liberal reform by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has worsened the difference and has led to big problems. Contrary to Germany, there are almost no social protections in Japan. Many young people live in extreme precarious situations, are homeless and live from part-time jobs. At least these young precarious workers have began to organize themselves in recent years. They play the main role in the mobilisation against the G8-summit.

TAZ: You have written in a paper, that the neo-liberalism in Japan goes hand-in-hand with neo-nationalism.

Of course, neo-liberalism in Japan comprises the same elements like elsewhere: a discourse which requires less governmental intervention but more market, the privatisation of public tasks. But to execute such a program, you need a stabilising factor, i.e. a comparison. In Japan, this factor was the nationalism. The anger caused by the neo-liberal reform shall be directed towards the outside of Japan. At the beginning, this tactic was quite successful, but – however - no longer. Unfortunately, Japan with its extremely developed capitalism still leads the way in Asia.

TAZ: The Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda has pronounced that the main subjects of the G8 will be Africa and Climate Change.

Japan very much cares about its good reputation in the international society, and this attitude can be seen in the choice of these subjects. However, the Japanese government has showed recently and over and over, how little they care about actually doing something against the climate change. The sole thing it has done is to support Japanese companies to develop more efficient technologies. But until now, this turned out to be less successful: the CO2-emmissions in Japan in the last years has not decreased, but increased by 6%. At the same time, there is a certain awareness about climate change by the people.

TAZ: Does the left-wing deal with that topic?

It barely does. In Japan, environmental protection is a subject which is very strongly dominated by the economy, they talk about technology, innovation and efficiency. For the left-wing, it is not really attractive to deal with that subject. Leftist groups try to work with another understanding of environment, which is not limited to nature and climate. Environment can be understood in a more general sense, as the entourage, the world where people are living.

Interview Juliane Schumacher.
(Translation done in Berlin).
You can find the original text here.

7th International alternative bookfair, 8th of March 2008

2008-02-22T09:10:00.000-08:00

It's an anarchist bookfair, but clearly non-sectarian, as it also invites a lot of non-anarchist groups or speakers. From 11h to 14h, there will be workshops in English. The entrance is for free.

The location? Not far from a train station in Ghent, north of Belgium.

Stalls are mostly from Belgium or The Netherlands, but there are also some initiatives from other countries :

Active Distribution

United Kingdom
http://activedistribution.org
jon@activedistribution.org

Stair
United Kingdom

FAU
Germany

Kaffee Libertad
Germany

Alternative Libertaire
France

CIRA (Suisse)
France

Journal La Brique
France
http://www.labrique.net

No Pasaran
France

CNT-AIT Lille
France
http://www.cnt-ait-fr.org/
secretariado@iwa-ait.org

You can find out more about the location here.

Listening to Aisha

2008-01-27T12:19:00.000-08:00

"If you like what you hear on The Soulful Expression, please support us by picking up a CD and spreading the word! But by all means do all that you can to support the preservation of our culture and music!"
Aisha Angela Taylor

Listen...

The libertarian left in Belgium

2008-01-27T11:42:00.000-08:00

Libertarian socialism in Belgium never got many chances. In the 19th century it gained some ground within the workers' movement. Radical intellectuals who supported the poor were much influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Workers and farmers also got the support of anarchists active in the First International. The historian Jan Moulaert has done much to get the story of the anarchists in the Belgium of the 19th century much known.
The Social democrats gave a boost to alternative economy in cities like Gent, they had the money for it. And because of this, the libertarian left became marginal again. At the beginning of the 20th century, anarcho-communism and the libertarian left were gaining ground in Mechelen, a city not far from the capital Brussels. This gave hope to the movement in the Dutch speaking part of the country (the north), anarchism mostly had been happening in the French speaking part of the country. But two World Wars virtually destroyed the movement in Belgium.
The counterculture of the sixties made anarchic tendencies influential again. One of the people responsible for that was Hem Day (picture), an anarcho-pacifist and a friend of the Spanish anarchist leader Buenaventuri Durruti.
A famous writer called Louis Paul Boon started to sympathize a lot with anarcho-syndicalism. Other anarchists were active with actions against militarism in the seventies, like refusing military service, and in the nineties also more and more with squatting and ecological direct actions.
A journal called Alternative libertaire received many readers in Belgium and France. Cities like Liège, Brussels and Gent attracted many anarchists and other radicals to be active in.
Philosophers like Leo Apostel, a libertarian marxist, and Roger Jacobs did much to infuse the movement with social theory. Jacobs also did a lot to get Murray Bookchin more known in Belgium and the Netherlands.
In Belgium, the libertarian left of the 21st century could be described as a movement in which the ideologies of those active in its main center, the Anarchist Center in a big city called Gent, are very important. This place is in the north of Belgium, not far from the border with The Netherlands.
What is the Anarchist Center? In their own words... "The Anarchistisch Centrum is a meeting place for individuals and groups active in Gent with anarchism and/or direct action. Anarchism means for us that we want to work in an anti-authoritarian way at an ecological society in which all power is equally divided." Ideas are spread by several independent media centers, indymedia.
I think the anarchism of the now in Belgium is a lot like that of Sweden, but with less syndicalist influences and a lot more people interested in squatting, because the laws around it are not that strict. It's also close to the anarchism of the Netherlands.
Recently, two people started a new project. Their website, www.anarchyisorder.org, is almost fully in English. The portal site of anarchist groups in Belgium is anarchie.be

The "clash within the Muslim world"

2007-10-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

Phyllis Bennis at Znet:

The political framework of this “Global War on Terror” has tweaked the idea of a “clash of civilizations” to refer to something slightly different. Now the Bush administration speaks not of that clash between civilizations, but rather a clash within a civilization – specifically within the Muslim world. It is a “clash,” administration officials warn, in which “we” must prevail. This has shaped the latest version of how the U.S. proposes to understand the Arab world, the Middle East, the Islamic countries – as a clash between “moderates” and “extremists.” Those people, governments, countries, dictators, militias whom “we” define as “moderate” support U.S. efforts towards control and domination of their country/region/world. The “extremists” are those who resist such efforts.

Cartoon Kate

2007-10-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

Cartoons by Kate Evans...

The bombings in Madrid

2007-10-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

The end of the Spanish army participation in the "global war" was coming, the governing Partido Popular (PP) soon after it lost the elections...

Maggie Schmitt, 2004:

Around the rest of Europe and the US the hypothesis that the bombings were produced by Al Qaeda was circulating since midday: here in Madrid the media has treated that hypothesis as a "subversive campaign" and suppressed it entirely. The government has called for a massive demonstration under the slogan "With the victims, For the Constitution, Against Terrorism." "For the Constitution," you must understand, is to say 'for the centralized state', perhaps even 'for the present government': the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was a compromise made to facilitate the transition from Francoism, but which left many (from the Left and from the autonomous regions) extremely dissatisfied. It continues to be a point of tension. Thus the demonstration proposed is a means of gathering up all the pain and fear and anger and confusion of the people and soldering this into a national consensus of support for the PP, a ban on any criticism. Three days before elections.

Now as I troll through newspapers all around the world, the hypothesis that Al Qaeda is responsible for the attacks seems more and more generally confirmed. Still the Spanish news insists on ETA. Who knows? As was the case with September 11th, to the degree that I don't have any access to the truth or any criteria for judging what is true and what is not in this case, what is important to think about is not so much 'who did it' as 'what are the consequences.' On the level of immediate consequences, many people from social movements breathed a sigh of relief to hear that Al Qaeda claimed the bombings: at least about that we have something to say. At least about that we can intervene, we can respond with things like: "This is the fault of the government that got us involved in a global war despite the opposition of 90% of the population." Or we can denounce them for having assumed it was ETA. Or we can group around the migrants' organizations, which will no doubt find themselves bombarded by a new intensified islamophobic criminalization.

War reporter Robert Fisk retired

2007-10-27T12:02:00.001-07:00

He has related war too much to the concept of anarchy because war is a lot about power and domination, but this is a video worth showing.

The US Military Expenditure

2007-10-26T19:07:00.000-07:00

9/11 and the culture of fear

2007-10-26T18:36:00.000-07:00

Cindy Milstein, 2003:

The period of a transparent politics-from-below that interlinked a multiplicity of uprisings from the Zapatistas to Genoa in a global movement against capitalism seemed to disappear with New York’s twin towers. Certainly, the nonhierarchical forms of organization that defined the “anti-globalization” movement lingered — from consultas and spokescouncils to a do-it-yourself infrastructure of media, medics, and legal aid — but now only among anti-authoritarian leftists, who had introduced such utopian notions in the first place. In the post-September 11 culture of fear, liberal social justice activists and orthodox Marxists alike raced away from the grassroots practices that had become normative at the mass direct actions of the recent past.

The anti-war movement in North America

2007-10-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein in Socialist review about her new book “The Shock Doctrine” and the movement against the war in Iraq:

I'm not really in a position to comment on the anti-war movement in Britain. But one problem with the anti-war movement in North America was the fear of seeming unpatriotic after 9/11. It really distorted the honesty of the movement.
It used slogans and iconography which were designed in response to this fear. The economic analysis was dropped because it was seen as divisive. I wrote the book because we need to be drawing the connections between the violence and the economic system it serves, and even if it means that there are fewer people out for demonstrations it would be a more sustainable movement.
We don't want activism that is just a short blast and then followed by disillusionment.

German Greens : the transition to professionalism

2007-10-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

Janet Biehl (1993):

Almost as soon as die Grünen entered the federal apparatus, the defining democratic impulses of the movement were brought into question and even abandoned by many of the Bundestag delegates themselves. Those who became generally committed to exercising parliamentary power came to be known as "realos"; those who defended the original values, in turn, generally came to be known as "fundis" and later regrouped as the left within the movement; this also encompassed Greens who accepted the use of the parliamentary apparatus to publicize and dramatize their program. It was the realos who now rejected the principles of Green extraparliamentary grassroots-democratic radicalism and adapted to the conventional framework of the parliamentary establishment. Otto Schily, a lawyer who in the 1970s had been a flamboyant, defense attorney for the members of the Baader Meinhof terrorist group, now basked in the limelight as a Bundestag deputy and did as much as he could to professionalize die Grünen and eliminate rotation. (He later left the Greens and joined the Social Democratic Party.) Two former leaders of the "Spontis" (or Revolutionary Struggle, anarchistic street revolutionaries from Frankfurt in the 1970s) ―Joschka Fischer and Daniel ("the Red") Cohn-Bendit― entered the party after it had achieved a measure of success and became media darlings and joined Schily in arguing that Greens should be able to hold parliamentary offices in the conventional way. Together these realos attempted to professionalize the Greens into an environmentalist and pragmatist party that would be comfortable within in the existing system rather than remain a collectivist "non-party party" that would challenge it.

More about the early Greens in Europe...

Social ecology and humanism

2007-10-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

What was social ecology according to Murray Bookchin? How did it relate to humanism and "deep ecology"?

Morally, it is avowedly humanistic in the high Renaissance meaning of the word, not the degraded meaning of humanism that has been imparted by Foreman, Ehrenfeld, a salad of academic deep ecologists, and the like. Humanism from its inception has meant a shift in vision from the skies to the earth, from superstition to reason, from deities to people---who are no less products of natural evolution than grizzly bears and whales. Social ecology rejects a "biocentrism" that essentially denies or degrades the uniqueness of human beings, human subjectivity, rationality, aesthetic sensibility, and the ethical potentiality of this extraordinary species. By the same token, it rejects an "anthropocentrism" that confers on the privileged few the right to plunder the world of life, including women, the young, the poor, and the underprivileged. Indeed, it opposes "centrism" of any kind as a new word for hierarchy and domination---be it that of nature by a mystical "man" or the domination of people by an equally mystical "nature." It firmly denies that nature is a scenic view that mountain men like Foreman survey from a peak in Nevada or a picture window that spoiled Yuppies place in their ticky-tacky country homes. To social ecology, nature is natural evolution, not a cosmic arrangement of beings frozen in a moment of eternity to be abjectly revered, adored, and worshiped like the gods and goddesses that priests and priestesses place above us in a realm of supernature that subverts the naturalistic integrity of an authentic ecology. Natural evolution is nature in the very real sense that it is composed of atoms, molecules that have evolved into amino acids, proteins, unicellular organisms, genetic codes, invertebrates and vertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, primates, and human beings---all in a cumulative thrust toward ever greater complexity, ever greater subjectivity, and finally ever-greater mind with a capacity for conceptual thought, symbolic communication of the most sophisticated kinds, and self-consciousness in which natural evolution knows itself purposively and willfully.

From Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology:
A Challenge for the Ecology Movement
by Murray Bookchin

What is anarchism?

2007-10-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

Authentic anarchism is about some good ideas, but (unfortunately) also is apolitical and power phobic. The first anarchist was the 19th century thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, he had differing intellectual periods in his life, some more interesting than others. The most interesting period was at the end of his life, when he laid the foundations for communalism, while advocating a federation of communes that would replace the concept of the Nation-State. But he was only very much interested in a negation of the existing economic (capitalist) institutions, and so, he never managed to develop very interesting alternatives for States and capitalism.
Anarchism then was, and still is, quite individualistic. There has been a tendency within anarchism that has tried to get rid of that situation, to get anarchism more organized, moral and rational, it's called social anarchism. Unfortunately, social anarchists have failed : anarchism experiences one of its most badly organized periods in history. Social anarchists try to overthrow coercive and exploitative social relationships, and are often so impatient that they start behaving in an irrational, flippant way.
So the gap between social and individualist anarchism has become quite bridgeable. Social anarchists try to replace exploitation with egalitarian, self-managed, and cooperative society forms. They want to obtain more liberties, even freedom. But while trying to achieve freedom, they often get disappointed, because these times are reactionary, not times at all in which we can achieve (social) freedom. So anarchists often look for scapegoats, that can be Socialists or Greens or former anarchists. Anarchists do not easily understand why anarchism is doing so bad, and remains so much unpopular.
The primary concern of the classical libertarian socialists and anarchists was negation, an opposition to the States and capitalism. They were against politics, they did not understand that politics was something else than statecraft. And so, they were not much interested in alternative, communal politics. They liked alternative economics, but they were thinking of power and politics as things that were bad. They did not want political empowerment, so they remained quite powerless.

And this only changed when revolutionary syndicalism got more influential wthin the libertarian part of the Left, about a century ago. The organized anarchists were opposing power but achieved empowerment, because they were advocating workers' assemblies, factory occupations and social revolutions. And before the rise of fascism, revolutionary syndicalism was quite succesful, a dream so many people liked to believe in, a fairy tale. This kind of syndicalism was about involvement in trade unions, mutual aid, and decentralization of decision making. In Spain, revolutionary syndicalism became so influential that it led to a Spanish revolution in the thirties.
Later, the social anarchist critique widened into a more generalized condemnation of domination and hierarchy : libertarian socialists like Murray Bookchin not only opposed classism but often also criticized patriarchy and racism. Many people within the Left realized what racism could lead to, they had experienced the World War holocaust and the victories of fascism. Bookchin also opposed the devastation of non-human nature and was a forerunner in making ecology and libertarian municipalism vital themes for the neo-libertarian left.
But anarchists did not always appreciate all of this renewing of the anarchist tradition. Many anarchists wanted anarchism to remain old-style or individualistic. And so, Bookchin and some other influential left-libertarian thinkers or activists left the anarchist movement, or were never willing to participate in it. Anarchism then further degenerated.

Ulrike Meinhof. A biography

2007-10-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

In november 2007, a book will appear about Ulrike Meinhof and her involvement with the Rote Armee Fraktion: “Ulrike Meinhof. Die Biografie”. Jutta Ditfurth is the writer. Before, she has written much about ecofascism, the German Greens and left-wing theory. I mentioned some time ago that this book had already appeared in 2005, but I was wrong.
I got a letter from Jutta Ditfurth. Apparently, Wikipedia was not correct. "Ulrike Meinhof. The Biography" has not appeared yet. Jutta wrote to me that it "will be in its first edition on german market on about the 20th of november (latest), Publisher is: Ullstein Buchverlage, Berlin"
Thanks for letting us know Jutta! And good luck with your book.

A memoir of Cathy Wilkerson

2007-10-07T16:23:00.000-07:00

Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman.

"In the 1960’s Cathy Wilkerson, a white, middle-class girl from Connecticut, became a member of the Weather Underground and famously blew up a Greenwich village townhouse. In this thoughtful memoir, she wrestles with the legacy of the movement; the absence of women’s voices then and in the retelling; the incompetence and the egos; the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest. In searching for new paradigms for change, Wilkerson asserts with brave humanity and confessional honesty an assessment of her past."

Murray breaks with anarchism

2007-10-05T14:33:00.002-07:00

In Norwegian, as in other European languages, the word municipalism is translated as an equivalent of “communalism.” Our Norwegian comrades therefore easily called themselves “communalists.” In 1994 Murray had referred to communalism as “the democratic dimension of anarchism”; his next, inevitable step was to separate communalism from anarchism. The Norwegians gave him the political and psychological support he needed in order to make the break with the ideology that had been his home for forty years.

From “Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism”. A new excellent text at communalism.net, written by Janet Biehl, explaining the development of the ideas of Murray Bookchin, who died in 2006.

Janet Biehl : “I realized after Murray died that some people didn't realize that late in life he'd broken with anarchism, or if they did, they didn't understand the reasons. I saw what happened during the late 1980s and 1990s, and how the break unfolded, so in this article I recount what I observed.”

INDIGENOUS ANARCHISM IN BOLIVIA - An Interview with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

2007-10-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

The South American nation of Bolivia has filled the headlines of the global press with its fight against water privatization, struggle for nationalization of gas, non-compliance with free trade policies, and the 2005 election of the continent’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales. These struggles are rooted in the long history of indigenous resistance to colonialism and imperialism in Bolivia. In an interview conducted during her recent stay in Pittsburgh. subaltern theorist Aymara sociologist and historian Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui discussed Bolivian anarchism, the health benefits of the coca plant and the cocaleros' (coca growers) fight for sovereignty. Rivera Cusicanqu is a founder of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Workshop on Andean Oral History) and author of Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, 1910-1980 (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1987). She was born in 1949 in La Paz.
More...

Mexico’s “Democratic” Transition: Impunity and Counterinsurgency

2007-10-03T15:10:00.001-07:00

A text by John Gibler

Almost a year after President Felipe Calderon took office, “democracy” in Mexico continues its study of the theater of the absurd. As Calderon gives speeches on the rule of law, police and soldiers attack social movements, drug-trafficking gangsters murder with impunity killing 1,951 people since January, and femicides continue in Ciudad Juarez and spread to other states. Roughly 50 million people are dropping deeper into the wreckage of hunger and exclusion. The true design of the political class may be deciphered by juxtaposing Fortune magazine’s announcement that Mexican monopolist Carlos Slim, with an estimated wealth of $59 billion, is now the richest man in the world with the tales of impunity and counterinsurgency in two of Mexico’s most marginalized states, Oaxaca and Chiapas.
The divisions in Oaxaca could not be starker, or more revealing. As the Oaxaca Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) spent the late spring months preparing a cultural festival, the state government was preparing to crack skulls. Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz hired a North Korean Tae Kwon Do champion, Kim Myong Chong, to come to Oaxaca to train the state police in submission techniques using a four-foot long wooden staff.

More...

The Left in Norway gets bad electoral results

2007-10-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

Norway’s Socialist Left Party (SV) was the clear loser in the local and county council elections of september. The Party, which was a coalition partner in the country’s centre-left government, saw its support falling nationally from 12.3 per cent at the 2003 election to only 6.1 per cent.
In Oslo, communalists participated in the municipal elections, but received very poor media coverage... so the electoral results were also very disappointing (not even 200 votes).
Demokratisk Alternativ for Oslo :
“The goal of our participation was not to get a seat in city-hall, but rather to present a program for a different Oslo.”

Some facts from the electoral campaign of Demalt for Oslo:
In March through April Demokratisk Alternativ (Demalt) gathered more than 900 signatures to be able to participate in the elections. “In total our activists talked to more than 2000 individuals during the signature-campaign.”
Demokratisk Alternativ handed out several thousand leaflets and about 1000 programs in the streets of Oslo, during the campaign in August and September.
Despite poor media coverage during the actual campaign, Demokratisk Alternativ got some coverage in important newspapers and radios some months earlier.

You can find the program of Demalt for Oslo (in English) here.

Saartje

2007-09-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

Saartje liked to play the music of the Dutch band De Kift in her caravan for me. "It's great!", she said. She really liked that poetry in Dutch put on music. Soon after that, Saartje moved to another city. She was young and active in the libertarian left of 'our' city for many years. She had lived for a long time in the Antwerp neigbourhood of the alternative youth center Scheld'apen, in a caravan standing on squatted terrains.
One day, she told me Hugo Schiltz was mad at her. Schiltz was one of those well-known politicians in the region, and a member of the Ultraright as a youngster in the forties, he has always been a supporter of Flemish nationalism too. Schiltz was a lawyer and tried to get her sentenced for a thing that happened at the squatted terrain, a crime she had not commited. She was convicted and had to pay a lot of money.
And then Saartje died last year. De Kift played in Antwerp at the day of her funeral. Just like yesterday : it was a really good concert at Scheld'apen. After they had performed, I talked to the singer. "You're too old for Scheld'apen", I said... and we both laughed. Hugo Schiltz has died too.

Manuel Castells and neo-anarchism

2007-09-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

Manuel Castells (picture) has had a significant impact on sociology, urban studies, communication, and many other fields. He is best known in Spain and Latin America, where he regularly contributes columns to daily newspapers. What follows is a long comment on an essay that he published in Catalonia’s La Vanguardia on May 21, 2005. If you want to read the entire text, you can find the translation in English of it here.

I have some problems with this text. Castells says that anarchism “seems to enjoy excellent health in the social movements that sprout everywhere from the depths of the resistance to our increasingly destructive global social order.” I would not agree with this, social movements are not sprouting everywhere and anarchism isn't enjoying excellent health.
“It is enough to follow the debates in the movement against capitalist globalization, online or otherwise, to note the prevalence of anarchist principles such as self-organization and the rejection of the state in any form”. Maybe so, but a lack of organization (often an anarchist principle) in this movement is also very present.
“Likewise, the autonomist perspective, which is so closely linked to anarchism, has a very strong presence on the theoretical and political terrains.” That's not true, autonomism isn't that much theoretical or political, it can also just be sometimes about fighting in the streets or throwing bricks at people. Ofcourse, I'm not saying that Negri and Hardt do that. But France’s May ‘68 revolt, I guess these writers have been much inspired by that event, was also about these violent things happening in the streets of Paris.
“Anarchism’s great difficulty has always been reconciling personal and local autonomy with the complexities of daily life and production in an industrialized world on an interdependent planet. And here technology turns out to be anarchism’s ally more so than Marxism’s.”
I'm much more interested in a social revolution than in personal or local autonomy actually. People have to work together, communes too. I don't know why Castells is so positive about autonomy, people often need support from others. I prefer the things Murray Bookchin has written about autonomy at the end of his life, he wasn't that positive about autonomy either, it's just too much individualistic. And to think of technology as an ally of anarchists? Many anarchists don't like the fact that technology is so important these days, some of them have even opposed technology.
“And instead of the nation-state controlling territory, we have city-states managing the interchange between territories.” That cities have become statified is largely the result of nation-states controlling territory. And with a striving for utopia one not always dreams, Castells is wrong about that too, it can be realistic to strive for utopias. Then Castells wants us to believe that anarchists don't believe in God and that socialism is settling into retirement.
“With ideology one struggles. Anarchism is an ideology. And neo-anarchism is an instrument of struggle that appears commensurate with the needs of the twenty-first century social revolt.”
I think anarchism was a lot more suitable for struggle in the 19th century. Authentic anarchism is not an ideology, it's several ideologies in one package. Some of its most known proponents, have not cried out “no God, no master!”. The christian-anarchist Tolstoyans have never done that for example. And authentic socialism that is “settling into retirement”? It's regaining its strength in Europe and Latin America, it's not much libertarian either.

The undemocratic thoughts of Wolfi Landstreicher

2007-09-15T08:01:00.001-07:00

Wolfi Landstreicher is the name of a contemporary activist. He has edited the anarchist publication Willful Disobedience, which was published from 1996 until 2005, and currently publishes a variety of anarchist texts and booklets through his project, Venomous Butterfly Publications. "Landstreicher" is the German word for vagabond, tramp.

Landstreicher is an insurrectionist, he thinks an individual should rise up in open revolt against her or his condition (individual insurrection) and wants “a destructive, subversive rupture on the large scale with the current social order”, indeed, the rising of “the exploited and excluded classes against their condition (social insurrection). “ Now, I never believed much in the importance of destruction, I nowadays think it is really important to revolt in a constructive way, by advocating true democracy, educating people and myself, working together with others.
This is why I really dislike individualist anarchism. While Landstreicher thinks that daily acts of sabotage, theft, subversion and revolt of exploited people are interesting, I think such acts are often badly informed, and can also just be personalistic revolts or deeds of despair. While Wolfi Landstreicher sees no dichotomy between individualism and libertarian communism, I do. And I also see individual revolts as something really differing from class struggle. Individual revolt often is unorganized behaviour. But class struggle can only be successful when it's organized well. While Landstreicher thinks of freedom as something that is opposed to democracy, I and other communalists see democracy as a necessary condition for freedom. Democracy should be deepened and established in confederations of communes. Democracy should therefor become authentic, not often be faked or “representative”.
“At present, capitalism and the socio-political system that best corresponds with it—democracy—dominate the planet”, writes Landstreicher in one of his pamphlets. But capitalism is not at all democratic, in fact it is close to the totalitarian. The anarchist perspective of Landstreicher is egoist and communist at the same time, which is very eclectic. I believe in ecological industrialism, he opposes industrialism. I think institutions of property, commodity exchange and work can sometimes lead to some liberation, he wants to destroy them. No, I am not an ecological anarchist.

Anarchoprimitivism and corporate media

2007-09-15T04:49:00.000-07:00

Brian Oliver Sheppard (2003):

With the rise of the anti-corporate globalization movement in recent years, the primitivist problem has assumed a new urgency. Whereas in the past primitive thinkers were consigned to the margins of the movement by virtue of the absurdity of their ideas, a recent absence of lively, mass class struggle activism has allowed primitive thinkers to exert greater influence. The onus is on traditional anarchists to take the movement back, and force primitive thinkers to their previous place on the sidelines.

Not to be discounted, either, is the influence of the corporate media, which has taken primitivism and situated it front and center, presenting it to the public as the lifeblood of a 21st-century anarchist resurgence. Primitivism, the corporate media tells us, is the "new" anarchism - and young adults, hungry for any ideas that point to a way out of the capitalist ghetto, sometimes believe it, and sign up. The popularity of the anti-corporate globalization movement holds much promise for anarchism; the media's attempts to associate it with primitive ideas, however, does not.

Time magazine, for example, ran two articles in 2001 on John Zerzan and the cult-like following he has attracted in his home town of Eugene, Oregon (among other places). And a few years prior, Time bestowed the title "king of the anarchists" upon primitivist/Unabomber Ted Kaczynski in one of the more than 30 articles they devoted to him. The December 13, 1999, issue of Newsweek featured a picture of anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky with images of Zerzan and convicted murderer Kaczynski beside him; the publication associated all three as leading lights of modem anarchist thought. NPR, 60 Minutes, and other news outlets have given air time to the absurd proclamations of John Zerzan even as the unofficial media ban of Noam Chomsky and other more capable analysts continues. Again, as Fabbri, noted: "[A]nd so anarchism comes to be known precisely for the illogical character and ridiculousness which ignorance and bourgeois calumny have attributed to anarchist doctrines."

The effect of the media's focus on anarchism's most embarrassing side has been advantageous for elites; by focusing laser like on the looniest elements of anarchism, the entire movement can be marginalized and discredited. This follows a historical pattern in which anarchist activists are ignored by the establishment until one does something so antisocial or outlandish that elites can score cheap points by reporting it. If the public sees only the primitivist wing of anarchism, it will be unlikely to support anything associated with anarchism. Understandably, few people want to support something that is hostile to the life-saving medical care, information technology, and electronic entertainment they enjoy.

The media's gravitation towards primitivism has pressured other parts of the anarchist movement to accept it as well. The University of Michigan's Joseph A. Labadie collection, commonly regarded as an "archive of record" for the anarchist movement, recently decided to admit the papers of unabomber Theodore Kaczynski into its vaults. This includes interviews where Kaczynski reports on attempts to have a dialogue with terrorist Timothy McVeigh, dragging again the shadiest figures of modem politics into anarchist history. The shelving of Kaczynski's murderous Unabomber Manifesto alongside classics by Emma Goldman and others is presumably something the anarchist community will have to live with. The acquisition is of further irony, given that the figure for which the University of Michigan's archive is named, labor activist Joseph Labadie, favored public control over industrial society, not a Kaczynski-style mail bombing of it. As well, Kaczynski admirer John Zerzan works with a self-styled "Green Anarchy" collective in Oregon. When Z Magazine editor Michael Albert approached John Zerzan to debate primitivism, Zerzan ultimately sniffed, "As an anarchist, I'm not interested."

Murray Bookchin in Dutch

2007-09-11T04:52:00.000-07:00

1964

“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” under the pseudonym Lewis Herber
translated into Dutch as “Ekologie en revolutionair denken,” in Ekologie en anarchisme (1977)

1965

Crisis in Our Cities, under the pseudonym Lewis Herber (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall)
translated into Dutch as Stikkende Steden

1967

“Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” written Oct. 1967-Dec. 1968
translated into Dutch as “Anarchisme in het tijdperk na de schaarste,” in Ekologie en anarchisme (1977), online.

1973

“Toward an Ecological Society,” lecture to Future World Lecture Series, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Feb. 19, 1973
translated into Dutch as “Naar een ekologiese maatschappij,” in Ekologie en anarchisme (1977)

1974

“Radical Agriculture,” written Sept. 20, 1974
translated into Dutch as “Radicale Landbouw,” by André Bons, in De AS, no. 130-131 (Summer 2000)

1975

“Energy, Ecotechnocracy, and Ecology,” Liberation (Feb. 1975)
translated into Dutch as “Energie, ‘ekotechnologie,’ en ekologie,” in Ekologie en anarchisme (1977)

1979

“Self-Management and the New Technology,” address to international conference on self-management, Venice, Italy, Sept. 28-29, 1979
translated into Dutch as “Zelfbestuur en de Nieuwe Technologie” (Bas Moreel, NL-Wageningen, Feb. 1980), brochure

1984

“Theses on Libertarian Municipalism,” written Sept. 9, 1984
translated into Dutch as Stellingen over libertair municipalisme,” in Eerste Jaarboek Anarchisme, ed. Wim de Lobel and Hans Ramaer (Moerkapelle: De AS, 1994), pp. 135-50

Interview by Peter Einarsson, Stockholm, Oct. 22, 1984
translated into Dutch as “Murray Bookchin: Het anarchisme was als het breken van een schaal,” De Vrije (n.d.)

1987

“Social Ecology versus ‘Deep Ecology’: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement,” written Jun. 1987
translated into Dutch as “Social Ecology versus ‘Deep Ecology’: Een uitdaging voor de ecologische beweging,” Perspectief (Apr.-Jun. 1989), pp. 11-42

1989

Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Montreal: Black Rose Books)
excerpts translated into Dutch as “Over Vrijheidsidealen,” by Marius de Geus, in De AS: Anarchistisch Tijdschrift [Rotterdam] 94 (Apr.-Jun. 1991), pp. 20-22

“Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Green Perspectives, no. 18 (Nov. 1989) (a revised version of “Society, Politics, and the State”)
translated into Dutch as “Radicale politiek in een tijdperk van voortdurend kapitalisme,” by Simon Radius, in De AS: Anarchistisch Tijdschrift [Rotterdam] 91 (Jul.-Sept. 1990), online.

1990

“The Meaning of Confederalism,” written Nov. 3, 1990
translated into Dutch as “De betekenis van het Confederalisme,” in De AS: Anarchistisch Tijdschrift [Rotterdam] 93 (Jan.-Mar. 1991), online.

1991

“The Left That Was: A Personal Reflection,” written Apr. 3, 1991
portions translated into Dutch by Rafa Grinfeld (2007), online at http://libertair.blogspot.com

“Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview,” introduction to Readings in Libertarian Municipalism (Burlington, Vt.: Social Ecology Project, 1991), written Apr. 3, 1991
translated into Dutch as “Libertair Municipalisme: Een Overzicht,” by Ferd. v.d. Bruggen, in De AS, no. 107 (Summer 1994), pp. 18-25, online.

1996

“Interview with Murray Bookchin,” by Janet Biehl, Nov. 12, 1996
translated into Dutch by Ronald de Vries, online

1997

“The Unity of Ideals and Practice,” written Mar. 26, 1997
portions translated into Dutch as “De Eenheid van Idealen en Praktijk,” in De Raaf: Anarchistisch Tijdschrift, no. 106 (Apr.-Jun. 1997), pp. 9-10; no. 107 (Nov.-Dec. 1997), pp. 22-23

1999

Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998, completed in 1998; published by San Francisco and Edinburgh: A.K. Press
portions translated into Dutch as “Een beweging opbouwen”, translated by Bookshop Rosa and edited by Rafa Grinfeld (2007), online

2000

“Malé není vzdy krásné: Rozhovor s Murray Bookchinem,” interview by David Vanek, Aug. 2000
translated into Dutch as “Het sociale vraagstuk van de ecologie. Interview met Murray Bookchin”, translated by Filip Vanden Berghe, in De Nar. Anarchistisch actieblad. no. 172. Aug. 2002, pp 18-22, online

2004

“The Twilight Comes Early,” written Nov. 2004
translated into Dutch by Rafa Grinfeld (2006) as “De deemstering komt vroeg”, online

The Left that Was : A Personal Reflection

2007-09-11T03:30:00.000-07:00

Some of you might wonder what has happened to the translation (I was working on it) of the text The Left that Was : A Personal Reflection by Murray Bookchin. I have now translated another part of the text. I'm going to stop for the moment with translating it. I had hoped it was not much work to improve the original translation that appeared in the Vlaams Marxistisch Tijdschrift (Flemish Marxist Periodical) many years ago, but I was wrong. Up until now, it hasn't helped at all, the original translation (it's full of mistakes and things that are quite unclear). Now, people who want to help me with translating or distributing texts of social ecology can ofcourse contact me at tomsk_be@yahoo.com. At my blog in Dutch, I will continue now with publishing some interesting text parts that have already been translated in Dutch and that deal with the issue of nationalism and nation-states.

Old Joy

2007-09-10T02:45:00.001-07:00

The story of two old friends, who reunite for a weekend camping trip in Oregon's Cascade Mountains. It hasn't been shown in the cinema yet in Belgium, but it is shown this month at Cinema Nova in Brussels and it's also on DVD. I haven't seen it yet, but it looks like a nice movie.

Erik De Bruyn and the Left in Antwerp

2007-09-08T16:19:00.000-07:00

The party of the Social-democrats in Antwerp city is the electorally most succesful party in this megalopolis, a quite new situation because the Far Right party has been getting more votes here for a very long time before that occured.
It's strange that it obtains so many votes here in Antwerp (and delivers the mayor), because it's really badly organized. At the most recent general members meeting, there were about 200 people present, which is not much because the party has 4500 members in the biggest city of Belgium.
The most militant members in this party are the Marxists, who are trying to take over the party and want everybody to believe that this is possible. They mobilize a lot these days to try and make that happen. At this "general members meeting", a lot of left-leaning people showed up to support the candidacy of the Marxist Erik De Bruyn for the presidency in the party of the Social-democrats.
He got a majority of the votes, so he can participate in the elections for the presidency now. De Bruyn doesn't have a chance in winning these elections for the presidency, but wants everybody to believe that he has. For this he advocates "economic democracy" and "party democracy", but the Social-democratic parties of Belgium (one for each region) are two of the most bureaucratic parties around here. In Belgium they are only getting many votes in the big cities. They have been attracting a lot of currupt politicians, and have fully supported the capitalist economy of Belgium. The marxists in the party often like Leo Trotski and Hugo Chavez a lot, two politicians who have not been good at all in advocating direct democracy.
The bolsjevists Lenin and Trotski have been two of the most influential men within the Left of Antwerp city. The libertarian Left has always been very marginal and little organized here. It's about a few small groups gathering sometimes or some people being active in "social movements", the libertarian Left is not even a movement in Antwerp. In fact, members of the libertarian Left here often move to other cities or travel a lot.

The MOVE stigmata

2007-09-08T07:06:00.000-07:00

In 1980 a judge sentenced nine people (the Move 9) in the USA to 30-100 years in prison, after a deadening confrontation with the police had occured. In 1978, a gunfight between MOVE and Philadelphia police had left one police officer dead and nine of the MOVE members later imprisoned for murder. Almost seven years later, a police effort to serve warrants on several other MOVE members resulted in more shooting and a raging house fire that incinerated an entire city block, leaving 11 MOVE members dead, including MOVE founder John Africa, and 250 people homeless. The police had bombed “MOVE's communal residence”. Six adults and five children in the MOVE house were killed.

MOVE is very committed to trying to get the Move 9, that have been in prison for a very long time now, liberated. It also tries to get Mumia Abu-Jamal (picture) out of prison, he has been the most known follower of John Africa. Mumia Abu-Jamal is a journalist from Philadelphia who has been in prison since 1981 and on death row since 1983 for allegedly shooting a Philadelphia police officer.

MOVE is also, in its own words, “a deeply religious organization”. The people in it see their message as very threatening to “those in power” and, according to the group, this is why the very powerful come down so hard on them. “JOHN AFRICA taught us that Life is the priority. Nothing is more important or as important as Life, the force that keeps us alive. All life comes from one source, from God, MOM NATURE, MOMA.“
It is disturbing to see how MOVE is mystical and idolizes its founder, many people see the group as a cult and therefor it receives little support. “JOHN AFRICA live very simply; JOHN AFRICA don't wear no jewelry at all because He don't believe in exploiting MOM-NATURE in any way”. What is also disturbing about the MOVE group, is that it is biocentric. “JOHN AFRICA teach MOVE people to believe in and love life, to understand the absolute necessity of life and protect all life equally, meaning all living beings (people, animals, water, soil, air), because all life come from one source and is necessary, so all living beings are equally important. JOHN AFRICA teach us the principle of equality, the principle of life and there's nothing crazy about that.” All of this makes it more hard to support those MOVE members that are in prison, because it leads to ideological confusion.

Naomi Klein on China

2007-09-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein in an interview published this week :

You have major new investments in the countryside, you have a commitment to waive school fees for the first nine years for rural children, because there were 87,000 protests in China last year -- an unbelievable statistic -- so clearly someone's not happy with how things are going in China.

At the same time we're starting to see the extraordinary ways in which China is becoming a laboratory for new technologies to put people under a level of surveillance that would have been impossible under Mao. There was just an article in the New York Times about how Shenzhen -- the port city where the export processing zone model was born -- is now this testing ground for biometric identification cards that have everything from your landlord's phone number to your reproductive history to your credit history to your police record. They are leading the way in terms of networking CCTV cameras -- there are 200,000 of them in one city -- and all the police are equipped with GPS. I mean, it is totally sci-fi what is going on there.

Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine

2007-09-07T17:34:00.001-07:00

Revolution or Submersion: The Politics of Global Warming

2007-09-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

"Tokar, an author, activist, and social ecologist, discusses the consequences of warming, the environmental destruction inherent in our political-economic system, and the revolutionary movement required to build an alternative.
A talk from June 2007 at the Z Media Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Runtime, approximately 1 hour, 10 minutes."

Again intimidation in Iran

2007-09-07T16:16:00.000-07:00

The wife and sister of the imprisoned Iranian bus union leader, Mansour Osanloo, were arrested in Tehran after they attempted to meet with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights who was visiting Iran.

More...

Iran newsticker

2007-09-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

TEHRAN, Sep 6 (IPS) - The Iranian establishment has an unstated policy to deal with rising dissidence among academics, artistes and political activists -- encourage them to leave the country and go into self-exile.

More...

Car drivers in the mist

2007-09-06T03:25:00.001-07:00

Not the ecology of everyday life...

Ivan Illich:

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role.

Jutta Ditfurth and extraparliamentary movements of the seventies

2007-09-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

Jutta Ditfurth studied Sociology, Politics, Art, Philosophy,... in Germany, Scotland and the USA. She became a sociologist in 1977 and has since then been very active in the city of Frankfurt. She already became quite active at the beginning of the seventies: in the undogmatic Left, the women's movement and the movement against nuclear energy.

Jutta Ditfurth was a cofounder of the German Green Party. But in 1991, she decided to leave this Green Party (die Grünen) to establish a party for the Ecological Left ( die Ökologischen Linken). Certain decisions had been made that had been destroying the party's alternative culture, step by step. Up until then, the Green Party had been an alliance of tendencies ranging from reformist to revolutionary. But at that time, all revolutionary positions and radical positions had been given up. There had been different left tendencies within the Green Party, there was an anticapitalist tendency that opposed the capitalist kind of economical growth and the social injustice inherent to it.
Jutta Ditfurth (1991) : “A lot of objective developments take place in every radical movement that takes part in parliamentarism. We knew before we founded the Green party that to found a party is an ambiguous undertaking: On the one hand, you get a chance to spread radical ideas to the public for a period of time, but on the other, you are in effect making an offer to integrate your radical movement into the state. But we went ahead and started it anyway in 1977-79 because of the historical situation, the large extraparliamentary movement of that time. We thought we had a chance to reach a large public.”

There was a corruptive careerism going on in the large Green bureaucracy, which led to many problems in and outside the Green movement of Germany. Jutta Ditfurth later wrote this book about the issue.

“Going beyond the Greens, radical ecology has to fill the enormous vacuum that once constituted the left--our movement must be against capitalism, it must be independent, and people in it must be accountable. With the Greens we were too naive--it was too easy for people like Joschka Fischer to take over the Green project for his own purposes. Now we have to keep this from happening again. And we must be prepared to work patiently to build this movement.” (Jutta Ditfurth,summer of 1991)
Before the Green Party was established, environmental and ecology associations, anti-nuclear (energy) groups, the women’s movement, the third world movement, and other alternative groups had not shown much interest in discussing the idea of a new political party (in West-Germany) that would bring these movements together. The social movement activists of the 1970s felt it was more important to establish public legitimacy, and for this they relied on journalists and often even Social-democratic members of city councils, among others. The demand for “an independent newspaper” was met in 1977 with the founding of the Tageszeitung (Taz) following the example of the French newspaper Libération. The idea of organizing regional and national networks of local activist groups was very much in the air in the 1970’s.

The Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) had also been very active in Germany, with the support of the “intelligence services” of East Germany. In 1976, Ulrike Meinhof (of the RAF) was found dead in her cell, hanging from a rope made from jail towels. An investigation report concluded that she had hanged herself. The RAF described itself as a communist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance, while it was described by the West German government as a terrorist group.

Jutta Ditfurth wrote many texts and books as a journalist, she has also been a novelist. She has remained politically very active. In november 2007, a book will appear about Ulrike Meinhof and her involvement with the Rote Armee Fraktion: “Ulrike Meinhof. Die Biografie”. Jutta Ditfurth is the writer. Before, she has written much about ecofascism, the German Greens and left-wing theory.

(edited post)

The radical criminology of Clara Wichmann

2007-09-05T04:04:00.000-07:00

The short life of the criminologist and essayist Clara Wichmann (1885-1922) can be seen as a search for freedom. At the age of 17, she got interested in the study of Hegel's dialectical method, which became the core of her philosophical activity. She became active in the feminist movement, the libertarian left and got involved with revolutionary antimilitarism. She saw the application of violence as the most fundamental problem humanity had to deal with. Wichmann saw inner growth as the necessary condition for the emancipation of women. She once suffered from a serious depression, and received treatment in a sanatorium in the Netherlands for it. In her thoughts on crime she was very inspired by the ideas of the pedagogue Maria Montessori. Wichmann saw crime as a product of the existing conditions and relations in a society.

Clara Wichmann (1920) :

And all the inner contradictions and enormous abuses in the “rights”-position of the pet animals are a result of this: that, toward them (like once toward the slaves and in many legislations toward the women), one upholds the fiction that they are things.

The ALF past of Anja Hermans

2007-09-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

Anja Hermans is clearly distancing herself from her past these days. She's giving interviews showed on Belgian television, and she's receiving other big media attention. There's also a book (in Dutch) that just has come out in which her story is told.
In March 2001, the in Belgium active Anja Hermans was found guilty of attempting to set fire to the car of a judge. Before that, the activist had put fire to many fast food restaurants in and around the city of Antwerp. Anja admitted then that she was involved with the Animal Liberation Front arsons. She spent many years in prison and in a psychiatric institution.
After a brain tumor had been found and removed, she largely recovered from her continuing physical disorders (leading to many psychological problems). She was a bright teenager, but then got influenced a lot by the ideas of animal liberation activists, anarchoprimitivism and authoritarian communism. At that time, she also got a small alcohol problem and suffered from depressions. Then, the arsons started to happen.

Nationalisms as social nightmares

2007-09-04T04:19:00.000-07:00

Murray Bookchin (1993) :

The "nation" as a cultural entity is superseded by an overpowering and oppressive state apparatus. Racism commonly goes hand in hand with "national liberation" struggles, such as "ethnic cleansing" and wars for territorial gain, as we see most poignantly today in the Middle East, India, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe. Nationalisms that only a generation ago might have been regarded as "national liberation" struggles are more clearly seen today, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire, as little more than social nightmares and decivilizing blights.

Put bluntly, nationalisms are regressive atavisms that the Enlightenment tried to overcome long ago. They introject the worst features of the very empires from which oppressed peoples have tried to shake loose. Not only do they typically reproduce state-machines that are as oppressive as the ones that colonial powers imposed on them, but they reinforce those machines with cultural, religious, ethnic, and xenophobic traits that are often used to foster regional and even domestic hatreds and subimperialisms. No less important, in the absence of genuine popular democracies the sequelae of understandably anti-imperialist struggles too often include the strengthening of imperialism itself, such that the powers that have been seemingly dispossessed of their colonies can now play the state of one former colony against that of another, as witness the conflicts that ravage Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.

Nationality and the authentic anarchism of Proudhon

2007-09-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865) was the first one to call himself an anarchist. He was also one of the most influential writers within the 19th century Left of France and Belgium. Together with anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Elisée Reclus, he has been very important for the historical anarchist movement in these countries.

Proudhon (lying at his death bed at the picture) openly opposed nationalist movements in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. In 1851 he declared : “If then science, and no longer religion or authority, is taken in every land as the rule of society, the sovereign arbiter of interests, government being void, all the legislation of the universe will be in harmony. There will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth.”
And 11 years later he wrote : "I will never put devotion to my country before the rights of Man. If the French Government behaves unjustly to any people, I am deeply grieved and protest in every way that I can.”
In the Principle of Federation (1863) he argued that nationalism inevitably leads to war. To reduce the power of nationalism Proudhon called for a Federal Europe. He advocated a federation of autonomous communes. He believed that Federalism was "the supreme guarantee of all liberty and of all law, and must, without soldiers or priests, replace both feudal and Christian society." Proudhon went on to predict that "the twentieth century will open the era of federations, or humanity will begin again a purgatory of a thousand years."
But his antinationalist notions and strong opposition to the ideas of Napoleon Bonaparte were somewhat diluted by his own Francophilism. Proudhon (1851) : “It was the mania for annexation which, under the Convention and the Directory, aroused the distrust of other nations against the Republic, and which, giving us a taste for Bonaparte, brought us to our finish at Waterloo. Revolutionize, I tell you. Your frontiers will always be long enough and French enough if they are revolutionary.”
In 1995, Murray Bookchin wrote that Proudhon “attempted to formulate a fairly concrete image of a libertarian society. Based on contracts, essentially between small producers, cooperatives, and communes, Proudhon's vision was redolent of the provincial craft world into which he was born. But his attempt to meld a patroniste, often patriarchal notion of liberty with contractual social arrangements was lacking in depth. The craftsman, cooperative, and commune, relating to one another on bourgeois contractual terms of equity or justice rather than on the communist terms of ability and needs, reflected the artisan's bias for personal autonomy, leaving any moral commitment to a collective undefined beyond the good intentions of its members.”
Indeed, Proudhon did not advocate the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. Leftists like Karl Marx, Errico Malatesta and others did do that later. The phrase summarizes the idea that, under a communist system, every person shall produce to the best of his or her ability in accordance with his/her talent, and each person shall receive the fruits of this production in accordance with his/her need, irrespective of what he or she has produced.

The problems with Limonov and National Bolshevism

2007-09-02T03:32:00.000-07:00

Eduard Limonov (picture) set up the National Bolshevik Party (Russia). As in many former Eastern Bloc countries, this party is difficult to discuss in simple left-right terms. Eduard Limonov was once an important dissident writer in the Soviet Union. He left Russia but went back later to receive more press. He had a column in the English-language paper in Moscow called The eXile, which was a paper for the English-speaking people who came to Russia to grab what they could after the fall. He then also got involved with some of the ties between the Russian mercenaries who fought on the Serbian side during the Balkan wars.

Limonov looks to the era of Stalin as a period of social stability within the Soviet Union, and this is the part about National Bolshevism.

Peter McNally on the National Bolshevism of Eduard Limonov (the interview was published a few days ago):

Well, for him all this was a logical extension of where to push Russian nationalism, especially with the older folks, who might not have liked Stalin at the time, and it was not a stable regime, but it was a point of Russian dignity, et cetera. So that’s sort of where Limonov comes from.
And another thing about Limonov is that he attracts a lot of people on the cultural margins. And in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, because of punk rock, Oi and so on, you have the beginnings of what we’d now call Russian skinheads, in the sense of a worldwide skinhead movement, or a grouping of people who are aping right-wing skinheads in Britain. So you have people who are in punk bands, industrial bands or whatever, and he courted that because he was a marginal cultural worker and was sympathetic to those aesthetics and hyped them up. And these days he heavily recruits within the Goth and black metal scene, which is probably the central cultural scene for the more avant-garde, out-there far right – the bands, the graphic art houses and so on are serious cultural players there.

What was Rexism?

2007-08-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

The danger in supporting Belgicistic nationalism is bigger than many people in and outside of Belgium think it is.

Ultranationalism of this kind was present in the once electorally very succesful Rexist movement. In the thirties, the party Rex could easily get ten or twenty percent of the votes in Belgium. It was a time when more and more people started to embrace very dubious forms of nationalism, also Social-democratic leaders like the Belgian Hendrik de Man (who began to sympathize with Nazism) and Bolsjevist leaders like Joseph Stalin.

Rexism was a fascist movement in the first half of the twentieth century in Belgium. The Rexist Party (Parti Rexiste), officially called Christus Rex, was founded by Léon Degrelle (picture). The name was derived from the Roman Catholic social teachings concerning Christus Rex, and it was also the title of a conservative Catholic journal led by Degrelle. Rexism was mostly about Belgicistic ultranationalism.

Early Rexism called for the “moral renewal” of Belgian society in large conformity with the teachings of the Church and other ultra-right parties, by forming a corporatist society and abolishing parlementiary democracy. Rexism soon began to ally itself with the interests of Nazi Germany.

Let people create politics themselves

2007-08-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

Democratic Alternative For Oslo now has the possibility to run candidates in the upcoming municipal elections. But what is the purpose of the electoral campaign?

Anett Andreassen : "First and foremost: It’s about spreading our ideas, getting people to think about their role in politics and mobilize people to participate more active. It may sound strange for some but our main goal is to let people create politics themselves."

More about the organization Anett is active in , you can find here (in English).

An Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial festival in Belgium

2007-08-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

Blood&Honour Flanders, which is notorious for organizing Nazi concerts to entertain boneheads from Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, will be organizing an Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial festival, the 27th of october 2007. Donaldson was the Nazi singer of a band called Screwdriver and died in a car accident. Unfortunately, these kind of concerts will not be stopped in Belgium. But Nazis from all over Europe gather at them. Blood&Honour Flanders likes to make it clear to people that it is friends with the ecofascist Groen Rechts and groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
There will be bands performing from Germany, the UK, Italy, Hungary, and a surprise band.

Social ecology in German

2007-08-27T03:57:00.000-07:00

I have noticed that these are sites in German where one can find out more about social ecology:

Kommunalismus
Knol (although this one links social ecology too much to Anarchism)

You can also read works of social ecology in German. Here are some books...

Triskel, a bizar shop

2007-08-26T21:37:00.001-07:00

Triskel is the paganist shop of the 64-year old Wim Verreycken. He has been one of the most known politicians of the Far Right in Belgium for many years.

Verreycken sells propaganda, Celtic and Germanic inspired jewelry, leather articles, swords, mystical postcards, etcetera. The shop is in the heart of the city of Antwerp.

People of the ultra-right have often tried to justify a nationalism that is mystical.

In the New Age milieu of today, the ultra-right may well find the mystical component it needs to make a truly updated, modernized authoritarian nationalism.

It is said that alternative people sometimes go to the Triskel shop and buy things there without knowing the background of the shop. Antirational cults of the New Age -- primitivistic, esoteric -- abound in the West of today. Such antirationalism and mysticism are appealed to by the 'New' Right. It wants to redefine social norms so that rational doubt is regarded as decadent and therefore eliminated.

Notorious Nazi attacks in Norway

2007-08-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

November 2000: a Nazi connected with the notorious Bootboys was arrested in Bergen (Norway), after pouring gasoline at the entrance of a left-wing book cafe. The Bootboys have commited several arson attacks, but also bombings, mistreatment, and illegal possession of firearms, illegal possession of dynamite, and knife stabbing.
The original Bootboys group was founded in the late eighties by Ole Krogstad. He had been convicted before that occured to ten months imprisonment. He was arrested after a bomb attack on a Muslim mosque in 1985. One of the most serious incidents with the Bootboys occurred eight years later, when Krogstad, together with several other Nazis attacked the anarchist youth house Blitz, hurling fire bombs at the building, and firing shots with a sawn-off shotgun when the youngsters inside the house tried to extinguish the fire.

Blitz has been a busy autonomist liberty space/social center in Oslo with a vegetarian cafe, newspaper, radio station, library/bookstore/record store, and meeting/hang out/band space. Just before it was attacked by the Bootboys, antifascists had “spontaneously” broken into the radio offices of fascists and smashed the place. It took the fascist radiostation Nite Rocket 3 hours to get back on the air.

A few days later Blitz was attacked by 25 boneheads, with molotov-cocktails. The Nazis fired four rounds from a shotgun through the windows. Nobody was hurt. The house was defended by people on guard inside the Blitz. It was clear that it was a revenge action after the attack on the fascist radiostation. Radio Nite Rocket (which was on air 8 hours per night) was sending threats on air to Blitz in the hours before the attack. And the bonehead leader Ole Krogstad was a guest in the studio. The fascists also used the radio offices to gather before they attacked Blitz.

A short history of La plume noire

2007-08-26T19:04:00.001-07:00

La plume noire is a bookshop, info- and action center of anarchists in Lyon. It was established in 1989. Eight years later, an act of arson was committed there (probably by fascists), which destroyed a part of the bookshop. To try and destroy bookshops of the Left, by putting fire to it, regularly happens in Europe.

Social ecology in French

2007-08-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

You can also order some writings of Murray Bookchin in France, at this site.

You can also find a good introduction to libertarian municipalism in a translated version of a book that Janet Biehl wrote, and there is a book of Chaia Heller that has been translated in French.

Or you can read some texts online...

Textes de Vincent Gerber:

L'écologie sociale, ou l'utopie réalisable d'une société écologique

Apprendre à decider

Entretien avec Murray Bookchin par Janet Biehl (1996)

The case of Soetkin Collier

2007-08-26T06:36:00.001-07:00

One of the most known folkbands in Belgium is Urban Trad. At the end of 2002, there was a small misunderstanding in this group. The leading vocalist, Soetkin Collier (picture), was accused of being in connection with ultra-Right Flemish groups, although this was mostly a thing of the past, when she was still singing in the (nowadays much into ecofolk) band Laïs. Still, Collier kept connections with her very nationalist parents. Collier could not perform at the very prestigious Eurovision Contest. Therefore, Urban Trad acted with another female vocalist who was born in Spain. The group became second in the Song Contest, representing “the French-speaking community” in Belgium.

National-anarchism in the United Kingdom and Belgium

2007-08-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

The most known national-anarchist group is based in Great Britain. Le Cercle de la rose noire is a United Kingdom-based national-anarchist group.

The president of Le Cercle de la rose noire is the musician Troy Southgate and its web presence is the online journal Synthesis. According to Wikipedia, Southgate and other national-anarchists “have been on the editorial board of the journal Alternative Green for three issues”.
Alternative Green is (unfortunately) often called a Green Anarchist journal, and is much connected to the writings of the neo-primitivist Richard Hunt, who has also worked together with people of the 'New' Right in Belgium. In Belgium, the ideas of Hunt have inspired the people of the “neither Left nor Right” journal Vrijbuiter, in which national-anarchism has been embraced a lot. The group of Vrijbuiter is much into ecofolk, and very active near the city of Antwerp to preserve the village Doel from disappearing (a disappearance planned in the near future, due to the expansion of the Antwerp harbor).
According to Wikipedia, Hunt is “the editor of various environmentalist magazines, such as Green Anarchist and Alternative Green. He was widely criticised in the anarchist community for his support of nationalism, and consequent support of the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq, leading to him setting up his own Alternative Green magazine. Hunt has contributed to The English Alternative, the journal of Troy Southgate's National Revolutionary Faction.”

Synthesis is an irregularly-published “intellectual and cultural journal devoted to Anarchy”, "the appreciation and understanding of the Esoteric nature of Life and Culture”, and anti-humanism.
Its aim mainly is to explore key figures of the Right, such as Ernst Juenger or Julius Evola, but it also wants to explore key figures of the Left (like Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechayev) or the neither Left nor Right (like Friedrich Nietzsche).

The Belgian nation and "identity politics"

2007-08-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

One of the worst nationalist groups in Belgium is called Nation. The members of it sometimes work together with Flemish Nazis, ecofascists and other members of the far Right. They generally are explicitly opposed to globalisation and the Nato. The Belgian identity is very important for them.

The Right is also successful in the south of Belgium

2007-08-25T20:35:00.000-07:00

The Right is on the rise in Belgium. At first only in Flanders, but now also in the south of the country. The ultra-nationalist Front National de Belgique (Belgian National Front) can easily obtain 5 or 10% of the votes in the French-speaking part of Belgium (I refer here to the mother tongue). The party is won for a Belgian national unity. Some of its members are also explicitly against globalisation. The active defenders of right-wing liberalism and catholicism are even more successful. Taken together, all these parts of the Right in the French-speaking part of Belgium are not only won for a Belgian national unity, they also have the support of a French-speaking electoral majority.

The symbol of the Front National de Belgique : flames in the national colours of Belgium

ZNet, "communalism" and the libertarian Left

2007-08-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

Are the people of the libertarian Left positive about communalism then? Do many of them understand that authentic communalism is a thing of the Left? Not really. ZNet will never be really positive about communalism for example. In French many people of the libertarian Left will start referring to something they will call communalisme libertaire, while rejecting the project of municipalisme libertaire. And when ZNet refers to communalism, it will almost never point to social ecology and the libertarian Left. It will just start publishing things about problems in India a lot. Like this...

Hanif Lakdawala (2005):

Muslim groups generally think that the only sort of communalism that has to be fought is Hindu communalism, but this is wrong since Muslim communalism is also a threat. In fact, it is more of a threat to Muslims themselves than to others. We should stop this habit that we have of blaming others alone for our plight and do some serious introspection and admit that we, too, have had our share of responsibility for the communal problem. Hindu and Muslim communalism, as I said, feed on each other, so both need to be combated. Hence, intra-Muslim dialogue on the issue of Muslim communalism is very necessary. There is an urgent need for internal reforms and democratisation within the Muslim community, be it on the issue of leadership, women or the poor. We need progressive interpretations of the Quran on issues such as women or inter-community and inter-faith relations.

ZNet will be positive about anarchism though, it will never point to the danger of national-anarchism for example. And it wil not easily criticize anarcho-syndicalism or other forms of anarchism. But ofcourse, it doesn't like individualistic anarchism or anarcho-capitalism very much.

The 'New' Right and symbols

2007-08-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

People of the Far Right have tried to recuperate symbols for years and years. Nazis already tried to recuperate the symbol/name of socialism. In Flanders the Far Right does nothing else than trying to recuperate symbols of the Left. Famous examples : the celebrations of the 1st of May...

The 'New' Right and "communalism"

2007-08-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

Ayub Khan (2003):
“In the past decade Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst has emerged as the most prominent advocate of Sangh Parivar in the West. His vociferous defence of the Hindu right is equally matched by his rabid attacks on Islam.”

Koenraad Elst is one of the most important ideologues of the 'New' Right in Europe. He has often been accused of islamophobic writings, and his writings have formed an important inspiration for the, in the north of Belgium, electorally very successful far Right.

Elst, according to Wikipedia, lives near Antwerp. In the city of Antwerp the far Right sometimes obtains more than one third of the votes. Elst has graduated in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven.
During a stay at the Benares Hindu University, he (in his own words) “discovered” India's “communal problem” and wrote his first book about “the budding Ayodhya conflict”. While establishing himself as a columnist for a number of Belgian and Indian papers, he frequently returned to India to study “various aspects of its ethno-religio-political configuration” and interviewed Hindu and other leaders and thinkers. His research on the ideological developments within “Hindu revivalism” earned him his Ph.D. in the Belgian university city of Leuven in 1998.
Elst has also edited a book on Sita Ram Goel, a writer who passed away at his residence in Delhi at the end of 2003. He often courted the label of “Hindu communalist”. Koenraad Elst, the ardent supporter of paganism then invited eighteen contributors to write on Goel and what he stood for. Some of the contributions were testimonial or biographical, but others dealt with the ideological controversies that Goel initiated and thrived on.

The book?
India's Only Communalist : In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel/edited by Koenraad Elst. New Delhi, Voice of India, 2005, vii, 353 p., $25. ISBN 81-85990-78-6.

The title of this book was a tongue-in-the-cheek response to the fact that Goel called himself a communalist. According to Elst, Goel was one of India's most important thinkers in the post-independence era. “His writings are central to the recent Hindu awakening in the country that is now growing rapidly to world prominence. While his Guru and colleague, Ram Swarup, laid the spiritual and philosophical basis for the movement, the detailed analysis and in-depth articulation was supplied by Mr. Goel. The current generation of Hindu writers owes a lot to him for charting a clear course for them to follow. As this movement develops, his work is bound to become yet more significant.” (Koenraad Elst, 2005)
According to Elst the man “sometimes made his task of gaining support for his views unnecessarily difficult by his way of expressing dissent, e.g. by openly courting the label 'Hindu Communalist', which clashed with some people's excessive sensitivity to his candid language. Happily, there are now winds of change and the ideas he propounded are proving their worth. It is time that the people of India, the media in particular, gave him his due.”
The book that Elst edited was in Goel's honour. Elst, 2005 : “It contains 18 contributions written independently of one another. Some are purely testimonial or biographical, others set out to continue his work by taking on historical or ideological controversies.”

The ecofascist network

2007-08-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

Janet Biehl (1995):

Ecology is warped for mystical-nationalist ends by a whole series of neofascist groups and parties. Indeed, so multifarious are the ecofascist parties that have arisen, and so much do their memberships overlap, that they form what antifascist researcher Volkmar Wölk calls an "ecofascist network." Their programmatic literature often combines ecology and nationalism in ways that are designed to appeal to people who do not consider themselves fascists, while at the same time they ideologically support neo-Nazi street-fighting skinheads who commit acts of violence against foreigners.

If you do not know much about ecofascism, read this book from Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier about it. It was published by AK Press in 1995.

Ecofascism in Belgium

2007-08-24T12:07:00.001-07:00

One of the worst Flemish nationalist groups is Groen Rechts (Green Right). They like advocating animal rights, are inspired by deep ecologists, a neo-primitivist called Richard Hunt and Nazism, and they have a militant group that likes to go to demonstrations of the Far Right. Their main symbol is the celtic cross.

The dark past of Earth First!

2007-08-24T11:47:00.000-07:00

Murray Bookchin (1988):

Let's face it: There is a major dispute in the ecology and Green movements, today. It is a dispute between social ecology and "deep ecology" -- the first, a body of ideas that asks that we deal with human beings primarily as social beings who differ profoundly as to their status as poor and rich, women and men, black and white, gays and "straights," oppressed and oppressor; the second, that sees human beings as a mere "species" -- as mammals and, to some people like the "Earth First!" leaders, as "vicious" creatures -- who are subject almost entirely to the "forces of nature" and are essentially interchangeable with lemmings, grizzly bears (a favorite species!), or, for that matter, with insects, bacteria, and viruses.

"Earth First!" means exactly what it says and what "deep ecology" implies -- the "earth" comes before people, indeed, people (to the periodical's editor, David Foreman) are superfluous, perhaps even harmful, and certainly dispensable. "Natural law" tends to supplant social factors. Thus: is there a famine in Ethiopia? If so, argues Foreman to an admiring Devall in a notorious interview, nature should be permitted to "take its course" and the Ethiopian should be left to starve. Are Latins (and, one may add, Indians) crossing the Rio Grande? Then they should be stopped or removed, contends Foreman, because they are burdening "our" resources.

The Commune of communes

2007-08-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

Murray Bookchin (1994):

I wish to propose that the democratic and potentially practicable dimension of the libertarian goal be expressed as Communalism, a term that, unlike political terms that once stood unequivocally for radical social change, has not been historically sullied by abuse. Even ordinary dictionary definitions of Communalism, I submit, capture to a great degree the vision of a "Commune of communes" that is being lost by current Anglo-American trends that celebrate anarchy variously as "chaos," as a mystical "oneness" with "nature," as self-fulfillment or as "ecstasy," but above all as personalistic.

Albert Camus and artists of the libertarian Left in France

2007-08-24T02:34:00.000-07:00

Albert Camus wrote his most celebrated book The Plague (a novel) in 1947 and a quite anarchic book The Rebel in 1951. In the 1950s he was drawn ever closer to the struggling journals of the anarchists, after breaking with the authoritarian communist Jean-Paul Sartre and, wrongly, associating many of the ideas of Bakunin with Bolsjevism. His biographer Herbert Lottman has commented on his association with Pierre Monatte, who published Révolution Prolétarienne, Maurice Joyeux of Le Libertaire and Le Monde Libertaire, and with the Spanish exiles who produced Solidaridad Obrera in France until, as Lottman explains, "the paper was eventually banned by the de Gaulle government to avoid giving offence to General Franco."
In his political isolation he had recourse to "the men and women of political movements with which he could still sympathize, those of the far-out left, who on their own chosen terrain were often as lonely as he was." Other French avant-garde artists had, around that time, also broken with authoritarian communism, like André Breton and some other surrealists.
Surrealists like Breton and Benjamin Péret had become members of the libertarian Left, while another surrealist called Salvador Dali wasn't supporting the anti-authoritarian movement at all. Péret had even fought as an anarchist in the Spanish civil war. French anti-authoritarian singers like Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré have also become well-known, certainly in the sixties and seventies. Today, radical artists in France get little attention. Some members of the libertarian Left in France recieve a lot of media attention, like the activist and farmer José Bové or the philosopher Michel Onfray, but their political views aren't always coherent.

Nationalisms lead to a small crisis in Belgium

2007-08-24T02:13:00.001-07:00

There are several nationalisms quite vivid in Belgium. One of them is Belgicistic nationalism. It defines an amorphous ideology, with a lack of ideas, that favours a strong centralized Belgian government, with little autonomy for the Flemish Community, the French-speaking Community of Belgium, the German-speaking Community of Belgium and the Brussels-Capital Region. To those who have read something about this variety of nationalism at the site of Wikipedia, the description given there is really bad, so forget about it now.

Belgium became a federal state in the 1970s – which was the reformist wish of many Flemish nationalists. Flemish nationalists often advocate the independence of their region Flanders, certainly those of the far Right. But Belgicistic nationalists advocate the unity between all language groups in Belgium, sometimes even the knowledge of all official languages (Dutch, French, German), and they often reject internationalism just like all other nationalists in Belgium.
The Belgian National Front (a sometimes electorally successful extreme-right party of the French-speaking part) and other politicians of the Right are more belgicistic than the politicians of the Left in the French-speaking part of Belgium (this region is called the Walloon Community). Some people of the flawed Left have embraced Walloon nationalism, which has historically been led by self-styled socialist trade unions, while Catholic trade unions have formed a part of the Flemish nationalist movement.
About the latest elections in Belgium... The 10 June poll made the Francophone right-wing liberal MR the largest statecraft party in the French-speaking part of Belgium, while Yves Leterme's nationalist “Christian democrats” were victorious in Flanders. For the first time the MR overtook the Francophone Social-democrats. The talks about forming a new coalition soon started. And five weeks ago, Albert, king of Belgium, appointed Leterme as "formateur" and asked him to put together a new coalition, a “federal government” for the whole of Belgium. At first, talks made progress on the budget and nuclear energy (the existence of nuclear power stations in Belgium would be more supported again), but community issues and Flemish demands for institutional reform cast a long shadow over the talks. Yves Leterme has now been obliged to terminate his mission. It could take a long time before a new federal government arises. The Flemish nationalists are benefiting of this small crisis, many of them really want to split up Belgium now.
The forms of nationalism in Belgium have marginalized the internationalist part of the Left. While the libertarian Left in Belgium is suffering difficulties, like organization problems, the Greens and Communists are not always interested in authentic internationalism. Greens think it's not reformist or realistic enough, while authoritarian Marxists embrace many third-world-nationalisms.

Update on communalism in Oslo

2007-08-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

Sveinung Legard (1978–) lives in Oslo, Norway. He was one of the founders of Democratic Alternative (Demalt), and has been editor of its Norwegian journal, Direkte Demokrati. He is now involved in an electoral campaign for the municipal elections in september.

Legard:

Because of certain "disagreements" with city-hall, Demokratisk Alternativ for Oslo had to collect more signature than necessary to participate in the elections. In March-May we collected close to 1000 signatures, and spread our message face-to-face to more than double that amount of people.

The people of Demalt in Oslo organize open meetings, participate in some debates and hand out leaflets/programs at events on squares and in the streets of Oslo. This is the first electoral campaign of Demokratisk Alternativ in Scandinavia.

What is ageism?

2007-08-23T04:44:00.000-07:00

Ageism can be defined as any attitude, action, or institutional structure which subordinates a person or group because of age, or any discriminating assignment of roles in society on the basis of age or looks because of age. Ageism reflects prejudices in society against older adults or young people. It can also refer to the tendency of young people being dominated by the elder. All of this includes the discrimination in commercial functions and cultural settings where the often supposed greater vitality and/or physical beauty of youth is more appreciated than the sometimes supposed greater moral and/or intellectual rigor of old age.

(edited post)

You-noT-cute-on-YouTube?

2007-08-23T04:28:00.000-07:00

Well, for those wanting to surf to my favorite videos on the site of YouTube, you can only watch nine of them for the moment. I hope I'm not being boycotted by YouyoungbutnotCute, or how is that spelled again?

What's wrong with indymedia.be?

2007-08-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard of an independent media center (imc) that gives little attention to libertarian socialism, although Noam Chomsky has much inspired some of the people who have been working for it? Do you know of an indymedia that wants to professionalize indymedia-activism and likes Hugo Chavez? Have you ever heard about an imc that often dislikes open publishing when it's about Stalin, Lenin, Mao or Fidel Castro? Do you know the "independendent media center" that is close to an authoritarian communist party in Belgium, and has not much criticized regimes like those of China, North Korea and Iran?

It's indymedia minus, better known as indymedia.be!

Social ecology of everyday life

2007-08-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

Chaia Heller (2005) :

Leftist theories, whether it is anarchist syndicalism, socialism, or left libertarian socialism, tend to see production and the production process and economics as the central human activity, through which one mobilizes society and social change. Social Ecology really takes a different approach and sees human beings not primarily as working animals, but primarily as what Aristotle called "political animals", conscious animals. Animals that actually have the ability to think and talk and speak with compassion and reason with one another. Like every aspect of society economics would be put into the hands of the citizens in the general assembly. The municipalized economics or directly democratic economics means simply that economics would be the stuff of every day civic life of citizens. The citizens themselves in their general assembly would convene with other citizens and consider carefully what are the needs and desires of their community, and take that into consideration with considering the needs and desires of other communities, with which they are confederated. That means in a very concrete way, that economics is not in the hands of the worker or the factory, but in the hands of the everyday citizen.

A painting made by Chaia...

La Commune

2007-08-22T05:24:00.001-07:00

Peter Watkins, La Commune (Paris 1871), 2000. A fragment of less than 2 minutes...

La Commune shown in Leiden, the Netherlands

2007-08-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia :
La Commune (Paris, 1871) is a 2000 historical drama film directed by Peter Watkins about the Paris Commune. It is a historical re-enactment in the style of a documentary, and was shot in just 13 days in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Paris. The large cast is mainly non-professional, including many immigrants from North Africa, and they did much of their own research for the project. As Watkins says, "The Paris Commune has always been severely marginalized by the French education system, despite - or perhaps because - it is a key event in the history of the European working class, and when we first met, most of the cast admitted that they knew little or nothing about the subject. It was very important that the people become directly involved in our research on the Paris Commune, thereby gaining an experiential process in analyzing those aspects of the current French system which are failing in their responsibility to provide citizens with a truly democratic and participatory process." Like many of Watkins' later films, it is quite lengthy - a long cut runs 5 hours and 45 minutes, though the more common version is 3 and a half hours long.

Eurodusnie (Leiden, the Netherlands) will be showing the lengthy film La Commune at the 8th and 9th of september.
http://eurodusnie.nl/agenda/5668.html

A text from Philippe Lafosse : Peter Watkins verfilmt de Commune van Parijs.