Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher who is best known for his book Animal Liberation. His work on ethics is respected within the academy and he has had an impact on public opinion unmatched by almost any other professional philosopher. He is the world’s foremost proponent of utilitarianism, one of the two major doctrines within mainstream western ethics. Singer was recently appointed to a prestigious chair at Princeton University, a top US school. That appointment has brought to these shores a heated controversy …

(In 2003 I was asked by the Institute for Anarchist Studies to write a response to Jason McQuinn’s essay “Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind.” McQuinn’s essay can be found here: http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/postleft.htm The essay below is my response.)
Since the editors of Anarchy Magazine began promoting it several years ago, the vague category of post-left anarchism has generated considerable debate among practically and theoretically engaged anarchists. In the course of these discussions, anarchists from a variety of backgrounds have posed a wide range of critical questions to the promoters of the …

n the midst of our struggles for a better world, social ecologists have frequently engaged in critical dialogue with other strands of radical thought about just what kind of world we’re struggling for. Such dialogues often address the question of how people in a liberated future will organize their material relationships with one another and with the natural world. What would economics look like in an …

Response to Michael Albert, Summarizing Participatory Economics
(The following exchange, four essays in all, took place in 2002 as a joint debate organized by the Institute for Social Ecology, beginning with introductory statements by Michael Albert on participatory economics or ‘parecon’ and by me on economics in a social-ecological society. The four essays here are my successive replies to Albert.)
I’m pleased to see the degree of compatibility and overlap between the economic vision outlined by Michael Albert and the proposals for a liberated society put forward by social ecologists. Both of …

Hi Michael,
Thanks for your two thorough responses. I’m going to try to reply to each of them individually, despite the thematic overlap, though I’m sure I’ll miss some important issues. You asked:
“Are you saying there is no place in politics for representatives deliberating and voting, by some algorithm, even with recall, challenges, and so on — so that all decisions must be by referendum?”
Direct democracy works precisely by negating the need for representation of this sort. The point of social ecology’s emphasis on local assemblies is that they offer an …

Hi again Michael,
I think we’re getting into more detail in this thread, so I’ll try to use this rejoinder as an opportunity to explore some of the themes I’ve neglected so far and go a little deeper into those we’ve already broached. You asked:
“why shouldn’t decisions about production, allocation, and consumption be carried out by the actors involved in these functions, organized in councils rooted in both workplaces and regions.”
They should be. We agree that councils have an important role to play in carrying out economic decisions. It is definitely …

Hi Michael,
I’m not sure what to make of your complaint that I have skipped some central matters. I can’t possibly reply to every point in your posts, of course, but I thought I had covered the main ones. In several cases you say I’ve ignored issues that I have, in fact, discussed at length in this exchange; and in other cases you claim that social ecologists are silent on questions that we have, in fact, addressed repeatedly in our published works. A number of these latter questions are discussed in …

This article originally appeared in the October 2001 issue of Direct Democracy, a publication of Demokratisk Alternativ.
For many people involved in the worldwide struggle against capitalism, the past two years had seemed, for once, to offer some promise of progress toward a freer society. History appeared to be taking a rare turn in our favor, with the ranks of the global movement expanding and its politics becoming sharpened and defined. But the massive crimes against humanity perpetrated on September 11 have stifled these …

In August 1999, just a few months before the newly invigorated anti-capitalist movement scored a provisional victory in Seattle, an unemployed white supremacist named Buford Furrow shot a group of children at a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles. Furrow went on to kill an Asian-American mail carrier before turning himself in. This murderous outburst happened a month after a frighteningly similar racist rampage in Chicago. Such atrocities obviously represent the opposite of everything that the movement against global capital stands for. Yet Furrow’s …

Because too much thinking, unwavering autonomy, makes conforming to the administered world difficult and causes suffering, countless people project this suffering, which is in fact socially dictated, onto reason as such. Reason is supposed to have brought suffering and disaster into the world. The dialectic of enlightenment, which must indeed name the price of progress, all the ruin wrought by rationality in the form of increasing domination of nature, is in a …