ISE faculty and students were key organizers and active participants in the alterglobalization movement. To commemorate the 16th anniversary of the "A16" action in Washington D.C. and the important role played by Social Ecologists in this movement, we're posting the widely-read Bringing Democracy Home pamphlet that helped give the movement its political flavor. Although written 16 years ago, its insights remain as relevant as ever.
Join the ISE for our annual summer gathering in Vermont. This year's theme: Social Ecology, Socialism, and the State. How can we move from protest to social transformation?
Join us in the Hudson Valley in August for a week-long program on Democracy, Ecology & Social Movements, also featuring an advanced track on the politics and philosophy of social ecology.
Interview with a young revolutionary from Kobane, also a careful student of Ocalan’s thinking. He offers a brief account of his experiences as well as reflections on the Rojava Revolution, social ecology, and Turkey’s recent betrayal of the Kurdish Movement: "Unless the Middle East overcomes the nation-state, it can never be a peaceful region."
• Based in north-central Vermont, the Institute for Social Ecology has offered experiential radical education and support for grassroots organizing and community-building for more than 40 years.
• Social Ecology advocates a reconstructive and transformative outlook on social and environmental issues, and promotes a directly democratic, confederal politics. Social Ecology envisions a moral economy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy, toward a world that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom.
We are standing at a most unique historical moment of crisis and opportunity. In the Middle East, while ISIS is assembling into a violent state-like formation, a multi-ethnic coalition led by Kurdish revolutionaries is exploring how to build a stateless democracy based on principles of self- governance, gender-equality, ethnic pluralism, and communal economy. Meanwhile, in Europe and the U.S., discontent is growing over the prevailing social order. Reform politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Bill DeBlasio in the US and Left-wing parties like Syriza and Podemos in Europe have successfully marshaled recent tides of dissatisfaction, yet are rendered structurally incapable of posing coherent and holistic solutions. We too can consider a social and ecological revolution toward popular assemblies. This panel presents and debates the politics of Communalism (a concept developed by the late Leftist philosopher Murray Bookchin and renewed in the emergent formulation of democratic confederalism by Kurdish political leader Abdullah Ocalan) from a historical perspective. What kind of institutions are necessary to bring about a society committed to ecology, anti-racism, gender equality, and a non-capitalist economy? How do we address seemingly disparate social issues while working to provide a holistic and democratic alternative? Please join us as we approach these challenging and dynamic questions.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Featured Speaker) is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, published by Haymarket Books in January 2016. Dr. Cornel West has described Taylor’s book as, “This brilliant book is the best analysis we have of the #BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle fo…