Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 13:28, 12 November 2005

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Dissenting views

The following text has been repeatedly deleted from the main page, despite containing editorial responses from the magazine.

Murray Bookchin, although never on the editorial board but officially a simple member of the international advisory board, can be said to have had great influence in founding and promoting the journal during its first few years of publication. He severed all connections to Democracy & Nature in 1996 (see his "Advisory Board Resignation Letter" and the "Editorial Board Response" ).

Cornelius Castoriadis was another ground-breaking libertarian socialist theorist on the international advisory board. Castoriadis's influence, however, arose solely from the significance his previously published works held for members of the editorial board, i.e. he was never involved in the publication of the journal. A dialogue between David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis's American translator, and Takis Fotopoulos published in the journal sheds light on the inter-relation between the works of Bookchin, Castoriadis and Fotopoulos: see "On the Bookchin/Biehl Resignations and the Creation of a New Liberatory Project" and the response "On a distorted view of the Inclusive Democracy Project" .

The above text DOES NOT contain editorial responses from the journal, as it was wrongly asserted above. As a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Inclusive Democracy which succeeded Democracy & Nature (who uploaded the relevant entry in Misplaced Pages), I can confirm that the author of this text has nothing to do with the Editorial Board.

As founder of Democracy & Nature I am greatly disappointed by the fact that Misplaced Pages seems to be considering adopting a historically-inaccurate assessment of the journal by a person who obviously has no idea of its historical record. Initially using the title ‘Main Theoretical Influences’ and later employing the device of devoting two separate sections to two historical members of the International Advisory Board, this person attempted to distort the historical record, leading Misplaced Pages to present misleading information about the journal.

It is true that both Bookchin and Castoriadis supported the journal in its first steps. However, this was only moral support and nothing else. Needless to say that similar support was provided by other members of the original Advisory Board whom I approached when I was planning the journal, particularly James Robertson, who actually first encouraged me to start an English edition of the Greek journal that I had originally planned. Although the author of the inaccurate entry recognises that Castoriadis was never involved in the publication of the journal, he went on to support the grossly inaccurate view that Bookchin “had great influence in founding and promoting the journal during its first few years of publication”. However, Bookchin, while helping us significantly with his important contributions, was never involved in the founding of the journal, as will become obvious from the extracts from my letters to him below. In fact, as my correspondence with James O’Connor shows, the initial idea was to publish a new Greek “sister” journal of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (an idea later abandoned was it was established that O’Connor misconceived the planned journal as an organ of CNS—something which contradicted the aims of Society & Nature (later Democracy & Nature) http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol2/fotopoulos_dialogue_3.htm

It should be noted that a similar misconception, this time by Bookchin, led him to withraw from our Editorial Board

http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol3/biehl_bookchin.htm http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol3/editorial_response.htm

and also led to an open conflict with the main associate of Castoriadis,

http://www.agorainternational.org/dnweb1.html http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol5/fotopoulos_distorted.htm

all of which highlighted the enormously significant differences between the social ecology project (Bookchin), the autonomy project (Castoriadis) and Inclusive Democracy and, therefore, the complete ideological independence of Democracy & Nature itself.

It is, consequently, not just grossly inaccurate but also a distortion to characterise the work of Bookchin and Castoriadis as constituting “the main theoretical influences of the journal”. Although their theoretical contributions were significant in formulating the synthesis for the Inclusive Democracy project which I began, it was the historical traditions of classical democracy, libertarian socialism and the radical trends within the new social movements (feminist, Green etc) that inspired this synthesis, as I have always stressed in my work. The fact that particular writers may have exercised a greater influence than others is of course nothing new in the history of ideas and one could easily establish, for instance, that Hegel and Kropotkin played a similar role in the formation of Bookchin’s thought and so on. However, despite the possible influence that the thought of particular writers may have had on some members of the Editorial Board (and by no means all, as was shown by the split within it in 1995!) this was hardly reflected in the pages of the journal—as it was inaccurately attempted to be shown. Thus, out of a total of 181 articles published in the journal, 10 were authored by Bookchin and 4 by Castoriadis, i.e. less than 8 percent of the total!

I hope this puts the record straight and I have no intention at all of continuing this dialogue with persons who deliberately attempt to distort the truth.

Takis Fotopoulos