Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Marx is famous for standing Hegel on his head, arguing that ideas and culture are not the fundamental causes of a society’s form as Hegel claimed, but that it is the productive situation which determines a society’s superstructure of ideas and values. Sorry socialist comrades but he was wrong about that. And it’s important for thinking about revolutionary strategy.
In Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador, Thea Riofrancos examines how conflicting visions of resource extraction have divided the Ecuadorian Left, focusing particularly on the struggles between the Ecuadorian government and grassroots anti-extractivism activists during the era of Rafael Correa’s governance.
Democratic socialism is, I think, at least potentially compatible with, and perhaps even capable of drawing strength from, the small towns and churches of U.S. society.
If we want to stand a chance of building socialism in the near future, we must become eco-socialists and stop catastrophic climate change now.
Socialism is the bogeyman that conservatives of all stripes find easy to associate with all that distorts or corrupts those thinks they, in theory at least, hold most dear: namely, civil society, and the goods which social interactions in and through one’s community, church, and family make possible.
An implacable and inclusive feminism remains essential for building the larger solidarity politics and economics we need for a Great Transition that eliminates oppression of all kinds.
Incipient anti-fascist coalitions hold the potential to call a new politics into existence in the United States. Socialist municipalism could be a means for both resisting the far right as well as articulating a libertarian socialist alternative. While there is much to critique in Bookchin — even from a municipalist angle — the basic guiding principles hold.
A serious fault in Localism is the assumption that if we just go on building one good new thing here and another there, then someday it will add up to be the good new society. But the standard socialist approach to transition can’t do the job either.
Sometimes you read a book that helps to crystalize your thinking, not because you agree with it, but because you don’t.
“Women have been creating a Commons for a long time: the domestic labor and economy is, de facto, an invisible economy”.
What would it mean for the Wall Street system (or, again, mainly the one which has emerged over the past generation or so) itself to see less activity?
I have, in short, become an advocate for peasantisation, localisation, agrarian populism, anti-globalisation and degrowth – a cluster of ideas that I think of as an economics of the home
