Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis insisted that what he envisioned as project of autonomy- the project of a society in which all citizens have an equal, effectively actual possibility of participating in the institution of society – is far from a utopian vision.
When the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood or complex of buildings manage to institute a radically different mode of collective co-existance, then the self-managed units, of which Castoriadis speaks, begin to emerge.
President-elect Gabriel Boric is a testament to Chile’s changing tides. No longer afraid, a new generation—with help from the old—took to the streets on October 19th, 2019 to win back the rights that the Pinochet dictatorship had stripped away.
Democratic Autonomy means that despite of and parallel to the oppressive structures of the nation-state, local and regional people’s councils, cooperatives, academia, and self-defence forces are being built up.
What can help us move in the direction of a genuine social emancipation is not the passive belonging to a certain social stratum, be it economic or other, but the active stance and praxis in everyday life.
Disillusioned with the representative democracy that had allowed the rise of national socialism, and inspired by the Ancient Greek polis, political theorist Hannah Arendt firmly believed in the power of direct democracy to enable true political freedom.
The threat of climate change is too grave for us to continue thinking that we can work our way around it without major (revolutionary) changes that will radically alter the very social fabric beyond capitalism and statecraft.
Eric Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University. He also directs the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship & American Identity Program. Eric addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
For almost every important political moment in Western Europe and North America over the past 20 years, there was an article or book by David Graeber that could be said to have helped define it.
It is only by means of direct political participation, that is, by engaging in common action and collective deliberation, that citizenship can be reaffirmed and political agency effectively exercised.
Throughout his life, prophetic American philosopher Murray Bookchin created social ecology as a comprehensive social program for the challenges of our present era.
The truth is that democracy, in its authentic direct form, has nothing to do with capitalism and is in fact at odds with it. James Madison, one of US’s Founding Fathers, seems to have been aware of this when saying that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.
