The Right, referenda and the Oosterweel Link

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

"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

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

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

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

Iain McKay about the communalism of Murray Bookchin

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

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

Chumbawumba, nice lyrics.

Summer gatherings in Sweden

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

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

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

For more information...

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

A Remembrance of Murray Bookchin

Janet Biehl wrote this text for Adbusters...

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

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

From the text:

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

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