The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 2008)
Editorial
This issue is divided in two parts. The theoretical issues part begins with Mika Pekkola's wide-ranging Interview with Takis Fotopoulos which covers many crucial problems facing the radical Left today. It then continues with the first, as far as we know, major critical review of Castoriadis’ project of Autonomy from the libertarian perspective and its relation to the Inclusive Democracy project. Its major contribution to the debate is that it shows clearly that most of the flawed, if not unacceptable, political theses of Castoriadis, which have been a source of embarrassment to many in the antisystemic Left sympathetic to his thought, in effect, do not simply reflect errors in political judgement, as a superficial reading of his work might imply, but directly emanate from the philosophical core of his thought and in particular the stand he adopts on the relationship between radical imaginary, social imaginary and institutions.
The second part consists of four articles on various aspects of the multi-dimensional crisis. It begins with Ted Trainer’s devastating critique of the “renewable energy myth”, according to which, the greenhouse problem and the consequent ecological crisis can supposedly be sorted out even within the present capitalist market economy and its offspring the growth economy, as long as we introduce the appropriate technological fixes and maximise the use of renewable sources of energy. Next, it continues with articles on various aspects of the crisis of what passes as “democracy” today: the crisis in politics, which is obvious by the ritual of elections, as it is revealingly shown by John Sargis with respect to the US presidential elections and the crisis of ‘free speech’ (one of the supposed foundations of representative ‘democracy’) which becomes clear by the growing concentration of media power in the hands of conglomerates—a concentration which, far from being ameliorated by the supposed virtual ‘democracy’ of the Internet, is further enhanced by it, as Takis Fotopoulos shows.
The Editorial Committee
April 2008