New articles about politics, power and movements
ROAR Magazine, a website frequently featured here for its up-to-the-minute, incisive accounts of the global uprisings that have emerged since 2011, has posted the first edition of a print magazine, available for free download (at least for now). The magazine features exceptional interviews and articles addressing core questions about politics, power, future left strategies, and […]
Kurdish revolution hits the mainstream press
2 relatively mainstream press accounts in recent weeks highlight the contributions of Murray Bookchin‘s social ecology to the continuing revolution in the Kurdish regions of Syria and beyond. Most widely noted was a first-hand account of visits to the Kurdish militias by New York Times reporter Wes Enzinna, published in the paper’s Sunday magazine on […]
Article: How to be an anti-capitalist today
Erik Olin Wright, co-author of Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a democratic economy, has a new article in Jacobin that asks some important questions about the nature and limits of different kinds of anti-capitalist politics today. His argument that “Anticapitalism isn’t simply a moral stance against injustice — it’s about building an alternative” resonates with […]
Carmelo Ruiz: Is food really becoming scarce?
To celebrate the publication of the brand new edition of Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins’ classic book, World Hunger: 10 Myths, we offer a new article by our Puerto Rico-based colleague, Carmelo Ruiz: That food is becoming scarce because demand and population growth are outstripping supply is an article of faith that is rarely […]
Is the Paris climate conference designed to fail?
… by ISE director Brian Tokar. Addressing common myths about the upcoming Paris conference, how events since the 2009 Copenhagen conference have set the stage for what could be a fatally flawed agreement, and how activists in Europe and the US are responding. available at CommonDreams, Counterpunch, ZNet, New Compass, Toward Freedom, and a terrific new website, Paris Climate Justice.
New books of interest
Several new books of interest to social ecologists are out this month: Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl, from Oxford University Press The first-ever biography of Murray Bookchin, written by his personal collaborator and copy-editor from 1987-2006. The book discusses the variety of philosophies and movements that Bookchin helped shape, […]
On Marx, Bakunin and revolutionary internationalism
ISE supporter Richard Greeman is a retired professor, was a colleague of Cornelius Castoriadis, Raya Dunayevskaya and Immanuel Wallerstein, and is a prolific translator of the anti-authoritarian Russian revolutionary Victor Serge. Richard is a founder of the Praxis Research and Education Center, based in Moscow, and director of the Victor Serge Foundation. This essay is […]
3rd annual European social ecology conference
Dan Chodorkoff reports: I recently returned from Patras, Greece where I represented the ISE at the third annual conference of TRISE, the Transnational Institute for Social Ecology. The conference drew participants from 13 countries and four continents for four days of discussions around the theme “The Power to Destroy the Power to Create; the Legacy […]
Epistemologies of Freedom: Interview with a young Kurdish revolutionary
Interview with a young revolutionary from Kobane, also a careful student of Ocalan’s thinking. He offers a brief account of his experiences as well as reflections on the Rojava Revolution, social ecology, and Turkey’s recent betrayal of the Kurdish Movement: “Unless the Middle East overcomes the nation-state, it can never be a peaceful region.”
Turkish Army burning Kurdish forests: Call for a delegation
From the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement, August 18, 2015 With the restart of the war in North-Kurdistan by Turkish state in end of July 2015 the Turkish Army has started to burn down forests. After 2,5 years of negotiations about the start of a peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, the […]
