As the last “male principal speaker” for the Green Party for England and Wales, the author of numerous books on environmentalism and a lecturer in political economy, Derek Wall is well placed to write on Green politics.
Due to the quickening climate crisis, it is a politics he describes, in the No-nonsense Guide, as one “of survival”. Wall manages to pack a lot of interesting information and ideas into a short book, including summaries of what he sees as the four pillars of Green…
I suspect many activists struggle with the bigger political context outside their immediate areas of concern and engagement – I know I do. An insidious feature of current mainstream political culture is that sense of “this is how it is; this is the only way things can be”; that capitalism, of a neoliberal variety, is the only game in town. Hence for activists the choice can feel like either doing single-issue politics, or none at all. This book can change all that.
Moments of Excess…
PN 2530, in February , was one of the most informative, interesting and exciting I’ve read, especially Michael Albert’s article “Parecon”. I agree with every word he wrote, but then a professor of politics once called me an anarcho-syndicalist, so.… I am enclosing a cheque for £15 which I would like you to use to send copies of PN 2530 to the following names and addresses.... I hope there’s a little over for a small donation.
For a long time we in the peace movement have been looking in the wrong places when we’ve been looking for the deepest roots of war. This has led to misdirection in creating strategies for abolishing war.
The common argument against the effort to get rid of war is that violence is innate in human nature, and that therefore there will always be war. I would like to suggest that arguing with this position is the wrong move. If we as abolitionists allow ourselves to be trapped by arguing…
Chris’ recent stay in Wandsworth Prison has led to some interesting conversations lately. And that’s got me thinking about when I became a pacifist and why I still am one.
I’m not sure I can pinpoint an exact moment in my life when pacifism made sense to me. But I know the milestones. The first was reading the World War 1 poets – particularly Wilfred Owen - whose lines in…
Zimbardo suggests that just as the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann demonstrated the ‘banality of evil’, so a survey of known good actions demonstrated the ‘banality of heroism’. He suggests that most people seem to be capable of heroism, which includes a willingness to risk social sacrifices (in terms of ridicule or ostracism or harm to one’s career) as well as physical danger, and long-term, enduring, considered action as well as spontaneous responses to unforeseen events.
What…
This violation of conscience may occur as much in the pacifist society as in the munitions factory or the research laboratory.
Having said this, different institutions and different social frameworks make different kinds of behaviour more or less likely. In professor Philip Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, college students were randomly allocated the roles of guard or prisoner in a mock prison. Zimbardo wrote later: ‘We selected only those judged to be emotionally stable…
It turns out that it is quite hard to train soldiers to kill.
Former US army ranger, and later professor of military science at Arkansas State University, lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman has written two books dealing with the psychology of inflicting lethal violence: On Killing – The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995); and (with Loren Christensen) On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace (2004).
Grossman…
The argument of this paper is that for a long time we in the peace movement have been looking in the wrong places when we’ve been looking for the deepest roots of war. This has led to misdirection in creating strategies for abolishing war.
The common argument against the effort to get rid of war is that violence is innate in human nature, and that therefore there will always be war.
I would like to suggest that arguing against this position is the wrong move.
If we as…
On the second morning (the third day) of the Triennial, we had our first “reflectors” session. The reflectors were five people who had been chosen to give their reaction to the conference so far. There were four women (all English-speaking, one African, one Australasian, one European, one North American) and one man (Spanish-speaking, Latin American).
Incidentally, this reminds me of something Jai Sen said about the book he co-edited: World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. They set…
To mark his eightieth birthday The New Press have published a new selection of Noam Chomsky’s political and linguistic writings (The Essential Chomsky).
While some of the selections (which span almost five decades) would have to be included in any essential collection - the famous demolition of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, or his reflections on the 1967 march on the Pentagon, where he was arrested for civil disobedience – there are also some surprising omissions, eg. his brilliant…
How can we prepare for the 21st century without considering the four new contracts proposed in The World Ahead?
Mayor and Bride propose a new social contract. It requires that: the third industrial revolution and its accompanying globalisation work in an ethical manner; a new natural contract to coexist with the environment; a new cultural contract, whereby the intangible treasures of cultures will be enhanced and their conviviality promoted; and finally a new ethical…
