Anarchism and the Cooperative Ideal
(This is an abridged version of the workshop I gave at the NASCO conference on cooperatives in Ann Arbor each November from 1997 to 2003. As I pointed out to the audience beforehand, my take on anarchism is a partisan one; there’s nothing “objective” about it, and many other anarchists would disagree with my presentation. […]
The Political Decomposition of the German Greens
(This article originally appeared in the North American Green journal Synthesis / Regeneration in 1997.) At the beginning of the decade the German Green Party was on the verge of collapse. Torn throughout the 1980’s by bitter internal struggles over basic questions of political direction, the party was entirely unprepared for the tumultuous events of […]
The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Keynote speech to the International Conference on the Politics of Social Ecology)
For two centuries social revolutionaries have cherished the ideal of the “Commune of communes” as part of their vision of a future liberatory society. Ever since the Great French Revolution of 1789, they have dreamed of creating decentralized, stateless, and collectively managed “communes,” joined together in confederations of free municipalities. All three of the major […]
The Third Revolution Vol 2: Britain’s Socialist Trajectory
Economic factors alone, to be sure, cannot account for the differences in the socialist movements that emerged in Britain and France: political traditions, the flexibility of existing institutions, and the cultural élan of the laboring classes had significant effects as well. But the role of economic factors should not be underrated. Reaching unprecedented peaks early […]
Third World Ecologists Challenge Development, “Progress”
This article originally apeared in Toward Freedom, May 1997. Environmental awareness in the industrialized world is still often seen as a product of affluence and economic security. Despite the very real and immediate consequences of air and water pollution, habitat destruction, and the disproportionate siting of toxic industrial facilities in the most impoverished communities, environmental […]
Send in the Clones?
This article originally appeared in Food & Water Journal, Spring 1997 This past winter, a group of scientists in Edinburgh, Scotland accomplished a feat that has long been speculated about but never before realized: they produced the first living clone of an adult mammal. The world’s media were saturated with photos of this unique newborn […]
Questioning Official Environmentalism
This article orignially appeared in Z Magazine, April 1997. Seven years ago in these pages, we launched an in-depth investigation of the mainstream environmental movement. The occasion was the widely publicized 20th anniversary of the original Earth Day, an event which in many ways helped institutionalize the widespread corporate co-optation of environmental themes. The year […]
The Unity of Ideals and Practice
Recently I have begun to encounter, especially among young people, individuals who call themselves “leftists” but who have little or no awareness of the most basic features of the Left’s longstanding analysis of capitalism, or of the history of the revolutionary movements that have stood in fundamental opposition to bourgeois society. It distresses me that […]
Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda
This article consists of excerpts from From Urbanization to Cities (1987; London: Cassell, 1995), with revisions. Any agenda that tries to restore and amplify the classical meaning of politics and citizenship must clearly indicate what they are not, if only because of the confusion that surrounds the two words… Politics is not statecraft, and citizens […]
The Nader for President Fiasco
This article originally appeared in Z Magazine, November 1996. During the spring and summer of 1996, I spent considerable time following and supporting the Green Party’s effort to run Ralph Nader for President. I got involved in all this extremely reluctantly, as a person who has long insisted that the Greens should in principle abstain […]