DEMOCRACY & NATURE: The International Journal of INCLUSIVE
DEMOCRACY
vol.9, no.3,
(November 2003)
Editorial
I will start this editorial, as doctors always do, with the
good news. The good news is that the Inclusive Democracy (ID) project
—the
project for a new type of democracy extending to the political, the economic,
the social and the ecological realms —
is six years old. It was in 1997 that the term
‘inclusive democracy’ began to be used in this journal, which had, by then,
changed its name from Society & Nature to Democracy & Nature —and
to which the subtitle ‘The International journal of Inclusive Democracy’ was
added a couple of years later. It was also in 1997 that the original English
edition of Towards An Inclusive Democracy was published, to be followed
by the Italian, Greek, French, Spanish and German editions of it, to date —
remarkably, with no publicity at all, in the time honoured tradition of radical
Left publications. Since then, this project has led to a rich dialogue on the
matter, both in this journal and in journals and books all over the world. It
has led also to the further development of the project itself, mainly in the
pages of this journal, as Alexandros Gezerlis,
who co-edited this special issue on the ID project, shows in his significant and
comprehensive Introduction.
However, although the ID project was developed into its
present form in 1997, theoretical work on the project had in fact begun much
earlier, since the appearance of Society & Nature, the precursor of D&N,
in 1992. The very first issue of Society & Nature declared in the
editorial that ‘our ambition is to initiate an urgently needed dialogue on the
crucial question of developing a new liberatory social project, at a moment in
History when the Left has abandoned this traditional role.’ The same editorial
specified that the new project should be seen as the outcome of a synthesis of
the democratic, libertarian socialist and radical green traditions. Since then,
a wide- ranging and very fruitful dialogue has followed in the pages of this
journal, in which libertarians and state-socialists of every persuasion, as well
as green thinkers and activists have taken part. It was out of this theoretical
work and the fruitful dialogue which developed in Society & Nature
between 1992 and 1997 that the ID project was born.
The contributors to the present critical assessment of the ID
project offer significant insights with reference to the various editions of Towards An Inclusive Democracy.
Their contributions consist, mainly, of
extended and updated versions of reviews on the ID project that have been
published in journals other than the present one. Thus, David
Freeman, Michael Levin and Arran Gare are three of the most important
reviewers of the ID project and their contributions offer significant food for
thought. Their reviews have been chosen not only because of their importance but
also because they could initiate a rich discussion on the ID project,
particularly since they express very different political viewpoints, from the
social democratic to the libertarian ones. The topics they deal with
include the feasibility of Inclusive Democracy, the nature of the present
crisis, the ID transitional strategy and the issue of compatibility of the ID
and autonomy projects to social democracy.
Serge Latouche
and
Jean-Claude Richard offer two
equally significant contributions on the French edition of the book, from
opposite sides of the political spectrum which examine the desirability of the
ID project, as well as the relationship of radical democracy to inclusive
democracy. Takis Nikolopoulos’s review has been chosen from many reviews
written for the Greek edition because of its insightful analysis of some of the
crucial issues raised by the ID project with particular reference to its
relationship to the civil society approach. Finally, the reviewers of the Latin
American edition of the ID book, having to face an even harsher form of
neoliberal globalisation than those in the North (USA, Europe, Japan,
Australia), are perhaps in a better position to assess the need for a new
liberatory project. Thus, Guido Galafassi,
Jorge Camil and Rafael
Sposito offer a ‘first hand’ account of the
significance of a new liberatory project like the ID project for the Latin
American area, including the relevance of ID ideas to the present Argentinian
situation. Unfortunately, it was not possible to present reviews of the Italian
edition and the German edition, which has only just been published.
In my contribution (Takis Fotopoulos)
to this debate,
apart from a rejoinder at the end of it, I have attempted to compare and
contrast the ID project with the Parecon model, so that people can make up their
minds about the real merits and flaws of the two projects on the basis of real
arguments rather than marketing and sophisticated publicity which have lately,
since the publication of Empire, invaded even the space of radical Left
publications.
In the Dialogue section,
Dario
Padovan continues the discussion,
which began in the last issue, on
the various dimensions of authoritarianism and provides an excellent analysis of
the way in which the bio-political mechanisms functioned during the era of
totalitarian states, and how similar mechanisms have been informally established
in today’s liberal ‘democracies’. Thus, old biopolitics, in the pre-war period,
either turned to racism, or sought to improve the social body and to relieve it
of the economic and social burdens of future disease and degeneracy by acting
upon the reproductive capacities of individuals. On the other hand, the new
biopolitics are manifested in the preventative policies of penal repression and
criminalisation of the poor and deviants being introduced — the new ‘risk
groups’ — as well as in the opening of a ‘backdoor to eugenics’, as the author
calls it, which the new genetics, prenatal screening etc might lead to. No
wonder that in the era of neoliberal globalisation genetic policies are being
suggested, instead of social, educational, family and environmental policies. A
very interesting analogy that Padovan develops is that between the old
biopolitical concept of ‘population’ and today’s fashionable concept of the
‘multitude’. As the author aptly observes, the sociological culture underlying
fascism distinguished between the concepts of “people” and of “population”,
removing connections and analogies between the two. This was not accidental
given that the concept of people denotes something intentional, subjective, an
entity endowed with a political will and inalienable rights whereas the
population is, instead, an object, a body without a head, an organism ruled by
biological and social predictable rules. In other words, the concept of
population denoted the multitude, “a sociological and biological organic mass, a
whole group of individuals with no particular qualification or specific feature,
whose priority is renewability and functions as an economic resource”.
Ironically enough, as Padovan stresses, the concept of multitude, with its
biopolitical connotations, was recently brought back into fashion by the authors
of a self-declared radical best seller!
Finally, the bad news. We are sorry to announce that
Democracy & Nature will have to suspend its publication for two years after
this issue, in search of a new editor and a new publisher. The problem with the
editorship is not a new one since, long ago, I had expressed my wish to other
members of the Editorial Board to cease functioning as the editor of this
important journal at the end of this year, after a long period of service
extending over thirteen years. On the other hand, the problem with the publisher
was indeed a new one, although it should perhaps have been foreseen. The
uncompromising stand of D&N with respect to the New World Order was in obvious
incompatibility with the neoliberal/social-liberal/reformist Left consensus
prevailing in academia, which, nowadays, determines the survival or otherwise of
any theoretical journal that has to rely on publishers’ commercial
considerations for its survival. It is not accidental anyway that the only
radical political journals of the Left that still survive today are basically
those relying on their own financial resources.
On this sad occasion, I would wish to thank all those
subscribers and contributors who have honoured the journal all these years and
encouraged it in so many ways and also ask them to watch our website at
www.democracynature.org/ for further news about possible re-publication in
2006. Until then, la lutte continue and, hopefully, au revoir.
Takis Fotopoulos,
Editor