The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 7, No. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2011)
Editorial
First, we would like to apologize to our readers for the long delay in the publication of this issue, which was entirely due to the fact that the rapid succession of very important events in 2011, both in the Arab world and in the EU periphery and beyond, put the Journal under a tremendous pressure. Yet, in the last issue, as well as in this one, we tried to cover as many and, as comprehensively as possible, of these seismic events. But, whereas in the last issue we attempted to cover extensively the impending, at the moment of publication, destruction of Libya by the brutal NATO attack and the so-called ‘revolutionaries’ (offering in the process an analysis which has already been fully justified by events), and also the movement of the ‘indignados’ in Greece, in this issue, the focus is on corresponding revolts in the North.
Thus, the first section begins with an article on the Insurrection of the English Underclass, in which Takis Fotopoulos saw the tremendous explosion of anger by the British underclass, as part of similar recent explosions in France and Greece, of the main victims of neoliberal globalization and particularly those who have not yet been integrated into it. In other words, of the present-day sans culottes, who do not belong to any of the established social classes, as they have not (yet) been integrated into the social system of the internationalized market economy and its political complement, representative “democracy” — unlike the working class, for example, who have been integrated into it to various degrees. The second article by John Sargis attempts to interpret the Occupy Wall Street movement and he insightfully blames its inevitable failure on the lack of any political project to back it, which inevitably led this (potentially very significant) uprising to a painless (for the elites) protest. Inevitably, it was usurped, mainly by the reformist Left, and was relatively easily suppressed and eventually phased out. In this sense, this movement had the same fate as the Spanish and Greek indignados had earlier in the year. Finally, on the same topic, Panos Livitsanos, in a letter to Global Research (which unfortunately was suppressed by it, leaving GR exposed to the accusation that they only promote the reformist Left’s views) shows the similar role to the US reformist Left played by its Greek counterpart and in particular the way it attempted to interpret the social unrest following the catastrophic measures imposed by the troika (IMF, ECB, European Commission), not through an antisystemic analysis that would blame the systemic causes of the crisis and particularly the role of the EU, but, instead, in terms of its symptoms (the public debt) and the ways to tackle it.
In the second section, which is devoted to theoretical issues, two important topics are covered. In the first article, Panos Drakos attempts to ‘dissect’ the present protest movements, from the now defunct World Social Forum, which essentially undermined any antisystemic trends within the anti-globalization movement, up to the OWS and direct action movements and the increasingly dominant post-modernist trends within the anarchist movement. The insightful conclusion of this brilliant article is that the underlying cause of the present decay of both the anarchist and the protest movements in general is the lack of any antisystermic political project to back them (something that post-modern anarchists are even ‘proud’ about!), in contrast to the ID project, which does provide the necessary ingredients for a present-day antisystemic movement (as the classical libertarian and Marxist movements did), in terms of an analysis of the crisis, the outline of the conditions which a liberatory society should meet and the way from here to there. Finally, Takis Fotopoulos, in his second intervention in this issue, attempts to show the catastrophically disorienting role that disaster ‘theories’ about the crisis play, with particular reference to the ‘peak oil’ case.
The Editorial Committee
December 2011