This is a video of my interview with Noam Chomsky that took place at his office at MIT on Friday, 28 March 2014. We discussed the place of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism vis-à-vis the profound and ever-worsening environmental and climatic crises today. Specifically, we conversed about Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment, participatory economics (Parecon), indigenous struggle, the commons, direct action, really existing capitalist democracy (RECD), vegetarianism and veganism, conservatism, democracy, and reform vs. revolution.
This is a link to an important essay by Nihil0 as published on Infoshop.org that deals with issues of depression and suicidality among radical critics of existing society. As the author writes,
“While a variety of factors contribute to individual instances of suicide and the overall suicide rate, I believe that progressive radicals, anarchists, and social justice activists have somewhat unique psychological factors that can also come into play. Although they are probably just as likely to suffer from problems like social isolation or drug dependency, I believe that those who are informed about the myriad of crises that humanity currently faces are given an extra punctuation in terms of reasons to be dismayed. So, in addition to any personal problems they may have, they are also aware that the world seems to be going to hell in a proverbial handbasket […].
When a progressive radical commits suicide it’s equivalent to a fascist putting another notch in his rifle. It is equivalent to the war machine rolling its tank treads over another freedom fighter. This, I hope, is reason enough for many to avoid death at their own hands.”
This is an excerpt from a very excellent interview conducted in November 2013 by Maciej Zurowski of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) with Susann Witt-Stalh, Christian Wittgen, and Christin Bernhold of the Assoziation Dämmerung (“Twilight” or “Dawn” Association), a German anti-capitalist grouping which places stress on the importance of animal liberation within Marxism, drawing both from the work of Marx himself as well as that of the Frankfurt School theorists especially.
“As a Marxist, one should know that due to the development of productive forces and a number of social factors, we have arrived at a stage where there is no longer a necessity for socially produced suffering. We know that suffering is something that humans share with [other] animals and that we have the possibility to abolish it. […]
The most important feature we share with [other] animals is that we possess a tormentable body. Most Marxists disregard the significance of this commonality, which effectively means that they hold the body in very low esteem. They restrict themselves to defining the differences and only want to talk about reason, which is where neo-Kantianism comes in: consistent historical materialists would never be so assertive about an understanding of reason that is basically identical with the way bourgeois society defines and fetishises it.
Don’t get me wrong: reason is important, and I do not wish to minimise it. However, to many Marxists, humans possess reason; animals do not – and that’s the end of the story. The problem is that this is unscientific and wrong, given that early forms of reason already exist in nature. At a primal level, animals act reasonably: eg, by storing up winter supplies. Of course, it is not identical with reason as humans possess it – but we must recognise that reason didn’t just fall from the sky, and that is where most Marxists revert to idealism.”
Notes toward an International Libertarian Eco-Socialism 