Social Ecology Journals

"This is the near-dystopian endpoint of the neoliberal city: gargantuan corporations forcing cash-strapped cities to publicly bid against each other with tax breaks, subsidies and crass public relations campaigns. In the excellently titled “Amazon’s New Headquarters Should Be In Hell,” author Hamilton Nolan argued: “This is what the extortion of public resources looks like.”

And the only solution is reasserting our collective right to the city." ... See MoreSee Less

23 hours ago  ·  

Bookchin and Democratic Confederalism in today's Guardian:

"The third, most radical, model is the Kurdish system. Particularly in Rojava, in northern Syria, but throughout the Kurdish region, the people have sought to introduce a system first proposed by the US ecologist Murray Bookchin and refined and adapted by the imprisoned leader of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s called democratic confederalism. Here, power is devolved not from the top down but from the bottom up: the primary political unit is a local assembly representing a village or an urban district. These assemblies then elect people to represent their interests in wider confederations, which in turn choose members to provide a voice in the region as a whole (Ocalan rejects the idea of the nation state). The federal government is purely administrative: it does not make policy but implements the proposals passed up to it by the assemblies." ... See MoreSee Less

1 week ago  ·