A Close Read of The Ecology of Freedom, Part 2

I am far from an expert on international affairs, and I’m not yet ready to do a book roundup of my own – which will be heavily featuring Japanese literature in translation, in pursuit of a semi-scholarly project I’m working on – so I’m a bit at a loss as to what to write. Hence, I’m going to be continuing my series on Murray Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom.

On Dis-Identity Politics: How Our Social World is Continuously Created

Consider: In the absence of other human beings, what identities do we possess? If you found yourself on a desert island, far distant from other human beings, would you still think of yourself as being an American or a Briton or a Catholic or an Atheist or anything of the sort? Or would, after a period, these identities simply slip from you like dead skin, leaving you just as a person trying to survive in the wilderness?

On Class and Hierarchy

“It seems to me that if an impoverished person is no longer impoverished, they retain the traumatic awareness of money and its lack. It is inscribed on the body invisibly, in the nerves and adrenal glands, but it is inscribed.”