The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.1, no.2, (January 2005)
Editorial
We would like, first, to express our gratitude to the hundreds of new ’subscribers’ to our journal, as well as to the thousands of visitors to the website of the journal and that of the ID Newsletter. It is very encouraging indeed that a new antisystemic electronic journal, which is not part of an electronic ‘empire’ of the reformist Left —as it is usually the case— receives such a magnificent reception in its very early steps.
The inaugural issue’s theme was a dossier on Inclusive Democracy (ID), whose aim was to introduce our new readers to the ID project. In this issue, we begin a two-parts debate on the ID project. Although a few of the articles in this debate have been uploaded in the Democracy & Nature website, the vast majority of them are published for the first time in the internet and express very different political viewpoints, from the social democratic to the libertarian ones. Similarly, the topics they deal with range from the feasibility of Inclusive Democracy, the nature of the present crisis and the ID transitional strategy to the issue of compatibility of the ID and autonomy projects to social democracy. Finally, for the first time, we offer not only the English versions of the published contributions but also the original non-English versions, wherever available.
The first three contributions come from well known Latin American political writers who, 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, Rafael Sposito, Guido Galafassi and Jorge Camil 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. On the other hand, Jean-Claude Richard’s contribution concentrates on the more theoretical aspects of the matter and briefly assesses the libertarian foundations of the ID project. Similarly, Takis Nikolopoulos’ contribution analyses some of the crucial issues raised by the ID project with particular reference to its relationship to the civil society approach. Finally, Takis Fotopoulos’ contribution attempts to compare and contrast the ID project with the Parecon model. This is particularly important because it seems that Michael Albert, ignoring the present systematic and detailed critique of Parecon even though it was first published more than a year ago, prefers to criticise (in Znet, his electronic empire) a very early version of our critique on Parecon which —as part of a broader article on economic democracy— necessarily dealt very briefly with it!
We hope that this issue, as well as the following issue which will continue the theoretical debate on the ID project, will provide the incentive for a rich discussion on the crucial matter of an antisystemic project for the 21st century.
The Editorial Committee