The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 14, Nos. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2018)

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Contributors 

 

Arthur Scargill is the historical President of UK’s National Union of Miners (NUM) (1982 – 2002), who led an unofficial strike in 1969 and played a key organising role during the strikes of 1972 and 1974, which were crucial in the downfall of the Conservative Government led by Ted Heath. In the early 1980’s, as soon as Margaret Thatcher took over with the mission to lead the first, effectively, government of the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization, it was clear to the British and transnational elites that such a government would have no chance of survival unless the British Trade union movement in general and the most militant part of it, the NUM, in particular, was smashed. An elaborate plan for this outcome was elaborated by the elites, so that the Ted Heath fiasco will not be repeated and the miners’ strike that they provoked in 1984-85 would be defeated. Following fierce battles with the security services, reminiscent of today’s repression of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in France, the miners were defeated and, since then , decimated, following the closure of most mines. The historical significance of this first battle was that it opened the road for the NWO which has now become dominant, with the EU playing a crucial role in this. Arthur Scargill is now the party leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which he founded in 1996.

 

Takis Fotopoulos is a political philosopher and economist who founded the Inclusive Democracy movement, aiming at a synthesis of classical democracy with libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He was an academic, teaching political economy for 20 years at the then University of North London and has written many books and thousands of articles which have been published in British, American and Greek theoretical journals, magazines and newspapers, several of which have been translated into over twenty languages. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (which succeeded Democracy & Nature) and is the author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy (1997) in which the foundations of the Inclusive Democracy project were set. His latest book is The New World Order in Action: Volume 1: Globalization, the Brexit Revolution and the "Left"- Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations (Second edition-December 2016).