The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.3, no.3, (July 2007)


 

Editorial

 

We would like first to thank again all our readers for their sustaining and continuously growing support for the Journal. In last issue’s editorial, we pointed out that, according to the webserver statistics, the only reliable indication concerning the readership of the Journal, the number of visitors to our site has more than doubled in the first three months of this year, since the launching of the new format in January. Since then the number of visitors has increased by a further 50 percent! This further enhances our sense of responsibility to continuously improve it.

The present issue is divided into three sections. The first section consists of two major theoretical articles. The first article (Takis Fotopoulos) examines the rapidly deteriorating ecological crisis and the myths about it, and critically assesses the main approaches to deal with it, including the Inclusive Democracy approach. Furthermore, it systematically considers the other dimensions of the present multi-dimensional crisis showing the inter-relationships between them, and ends with a discussion of the ways in which we may move from the present crisis society to a new society. The second article (Steve Best) provides an insightful analysis of the present situation in which the evil Other of Communism has been superseded by the new threat of Terrorism in the era of neoliberal globalisation. The article stresses how the transnational elite (although the author, following the reformist Left on this, keeps using the much narrower concept of “the US corporate-state complex”) did not miss the chance to add to the “foreign terrorist” component of ‘terrorism’ a “domestic terrorist” component, so that it could extend the ‘war’ on terror from peoples abroad resisting the New World Order to “radical environmental and animal rights activists, and, ultimately, dissent of any kind”. Yet, although the author rightly criticises the reformist Left’s thesis about a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ for ignoring “the underlying economic dynamics, he implicitly adopts the basic assumption on which the clash of fundamentalisms thesis is based: that what we face today is the taking over of power by a bunch of religious neoconservatives in the USA who have imposed their own fundamentalism on the rest of the world rather than a systemic change in the system of the market economy (the internationalisation of the market economy) and the consequent attempt by the transnational elite to integrate every corner of the planet into it and crush any resistance to it—a process that will obviously not go away with the recent change in the governments of Germany, France and Britain, or the USA next year,

The second section consists of two articles (Takis Fotopoulos) dealing with the role of the trandsnational elite in two crucial areas of the New World Order: France and Palestine. The presidential and parliamentary elections in France brought about a new administration with an explicitly neoliberal agenda at the domestic economic level and a more consistent agenda with the policy of the transnational leite at the foreign front. This would involve implementing the main policies imposed by neoliberal globalisation in order to improve the French elite’s competitiveness (flexible labour relations, cuts in social benefits and numbers of civil servants, etc.) and bringing the French elite into line with the transnational elite on Iran, Iraq and Palestine, putting an end to the myth of France’s supposedly ‘independent’ role. In Palestine, it is shown that, contrary to the view presented by the mass media, the latest events in Gaza did not represent a civil war or an attempt by Islamists to take over but an attempt by Hamas to clean up Fattah from those elements that were considered collaborating with the transnational and the Zionist elites in crushing Hamas. This gave the opportunity to the same elites to divide the ‘moderates’ from the ‘extremists’, so that the road for the creation of a Bantustan type of regime in Palestine could be opened.

Finally, the last section consists of two articles on the crucial drug issue (Takis Fotopoulos). The first article offers a critical assessment of the new approach being adopted at the moment by European elites in favor of gradually abandoning the ‘war on drugs’ by a policy of ‘limiting the damage’ (mainly, in terms of the associated crime expansion) and regarding the addicts as ‘patients’. This, despite the fact that evidence is growing lately that even cannabis, which once was considered a harmless soft drug, is far more dangerous than it was thought, even 10 years ago. The question therefore arises that if we assume that no long-term radical solution to the problem is feasible within the system of the internationalized market economy and its political complement representative ‘democracy’, are there any steps that could be taken in the right direction in the short to medium term?  The second article, which complements the first one, assesses the two main policy options discussed by the elites and the reformist Left at the moment, the legalization and de-criminalisation approaches, and attempts to show the  dangerous implications of adopting the former approach.

 

 

The Editorial Committee

July 2007