Written by Dr Clemens Hoffmann, lecturer in International Politics, University of Stirling, Scotland. The present text is the speech of Dr Hoffmann at Direct Democracy Festival, held on 06/09/18 in Thessaloniki. Thanks for the invite, it is great to be part of something I had always dreamt of in a way doing myself but the […]
Read More The Social Dimension of Energy Transition
Written by Yavor Tarinski / Image source: conservationmagazine.org The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man[1] Murray Bookchin Nowadays the need to act against the ongoing environmental degradation seems more than evident. From marginal activist groups to governments of the strongest countries on the planet, […]
Read More Preventing Ecological Catastrophe Means Abolishing Hierarchy and Domination
Written by Mathew Little I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Rojava (the predominantly Kurdish region in Northern Syria) recently and I think what they are doing in terms of building democracy from the street upwards (in contrast to our barely representative systems) deserves our studied attention. It certainly appears very impressive and they aren’t […]
Read More Democratic Revolution in Rojava
Written by Vicente Rubio-Pueyo. Originally published as a brochure by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung The 2017 Catalan independence referendum has been called “undemocratic,” a “power grab,” and even a “coup d’état” in international media. No matter the specific terminology, the referendum as well as the dispute over its democratic legitimacy indicate that Spanish political culture […]
Read More Municipalism in Spain: From Barcelona to Madrid, and Beyond
Written by Federico Venturini. The article below has been originally published as a preface in the book Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan’s Turkey Your Freedom and Mine began with the idea of shining a brighter light on the work of the EUTCC International İmralı Peace Delegations. Given […]
Read More Your Freedom and Mine: Preface
Written by Vincent Gerber (Geneva, September 2010, revised in 2017) “The ‘population problem’ has a Phoenix-like existence: it rises from the ashes at least every generation and sometimes every decade or so. The prophecies are usually the same – namely, that human beings are populating the earth in ‘unprecedented numbers’ and ‘devouring’ its resources […]
Read More One Less Child for One More Car?
Written by Yavor Tarinski Introduction With the rise of cities, a major power shift is occurring this century across the planet in both economic and political terms. Dimitrios Roussopoulos[1] Nowadays the importance of the city is increasing, not only because of the fact that the majority of the human population is currently living […]
Read More City, Municipality, Commons: Rebel Cities in the Neoliberal Age
Written by Eliana Kanaveli This article was presented at the conversation with title: “Changing Lives: Experiential Approaches to the Lives of Trans Subjects” which had taken place at B-Fest (International, anti-authoritarian festival of Babylonia magazine in Athens, School of Fine Arts, at 22-28 of May). As the lives of all or most of us […]
Read More Changing Lives
Written by Michalis Theodoropoulos “If we do not dare the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable” Murray Bookchin in The Ecology of Freedom Degrowth is the backbone of political ecology and political ecology is at the core of degrowth. Political Ecology was born, as a movement and at academic level, already by the 1960s […]
Read More Political Ecology and Degrowth
Written by Mike Davis. Excerpts from Davis’ article The Coming Desert: Kropotkin, Mars and the Pulse of Asia (originally published in New Left Review 97, January-February 2016) Anthropogenic climate change is usually portrayed as a recent discovery, with a genealogy that extends no further backwards than Charles Keeling sampling atmospheric gases from his station near […]
Read More Kropotkin and Climate Change