Overcoming the State by Reinventing the Polis

By Yavor Tarinski

*The present text was delivered as a speech in a panel, entitled “Overcoming the State”, part of the 3rd Antiauthoritarian Festival in Ioannina, Greece (June, 2017).

[T]he rhetoric of Thatcher and of Reagan has changed nothing of importance (the change in formal ownership of a few large enterprises does not essentially alter their relation to the State), . . . the bureaucratic structure of the large firm remains intact [and] half of the national product transits the public sector in one way or another (State, local governmental organizations, Social Security); . . . between half and two-thirds of the price of goods and services entering into the final national expenditure are in one way or another fixed, regulated, controlled, or influenced by State policy, and . . . the situation is irreversible (ten years of Thatcher and Reagan made no essential changes therein).[1]

Cornelius Castoriadis

Climate Change and the Need for a New Paradigm

By Yavor Tarinski

Despite many international meetings, dealing with every subject from biodiversity to climate change, the national political elites have found it impossible to come to meaningful agreements to deal with the environmental crisis. […] There is no avoiding imagining new and different scenarios than the status quo. Surely another world is possible.
– Dimitrios Roussopoulos[1]

Politicizing Ecology – Beyond Technocracy and Constant Growth

By Yavor Tarinski

For some decades now the human civilization has embarked on a journey to rapidly extract whatever resource it can from the planet as to maintain its current predominant doctrine — unlimited economic growth. There are, as one could imagine, dire consequences resulting from this activity that places in danger our very future. Despite the dangers that are going together with the growth doctrine, we are being told to blindly direct our hopes towards “science” as the ultimate crisis resolver, to clean up the mess left from extreme extractivism.

The Future is a “Pluriverse”- An Interview with David Bollier on the Potential of the Commons

Interview by Antonis Brumas and Yavor Tarinski

Some believe that the commons are incompatible with commodity markets. Others claim that markets and commons may form mutually beneficial relations with each other. What are your own views on this issue?

Democratizing Education

By Yavor Tarinski

Just think how the old traditional hierarchy is always trying to find out who is the best among us… and I think this is a bad idea. It is not the best, the greatest, but different that is beautiful. I don’t want to see if someone is better or not better than me: I want to learn if something is different. That, from my point of the view is at the core of what we call democratic education.

-Yaacov Hecht[1]

Individuals and minorities in the framework of direct democracy

Jan Lingelbach’s Campo Vaccino te Rome (1653)

 By Yavor Tarinski

First of all, direct democracy, the democratic regime I’m thinking about, is not paradise on earth. It’s not the perfect regime, and I don’t know what perfect regime means.
Cornelius Castoriadis [1]

With the recent electoral success of the far-right in Europe and around the world certain fears of society, of the excessive masses, has been resurrected among liberals and leftists (if such fears were ever dead). They are rooted in an elitist tradition, shared by many political tendencies, that views society as inherently irresponsible, if not even cannibalistic, and thus in need of restrainment by enlightened extra-social institutions which to keep it “civilized”.

Castoriadis in the context of post-socialist Eastern Europe

By Yavor Tarinski

This year marks 95 years from the birth of the big philosopher Cornilius Castoriadis as well as 20 years from his death. A long period of time in which much have changed but somewhat his thought remains as relevant and as fresh as during those rebellious days and nights of May ’68 when the Parisian youth, influenced to a large extent by him and his associates, challenged the dominant and bankrupt significations of that period, proposing instead new and radical narrative, rooted in one democratic tradition.

Our best chance for solving the climate crisis — direct democracy and equality

Illustration by Yuko Shimizu

By Yavor Tarinski

The apocalyptic images that we see in contemporary fictional cinema and literature seem to be not that far from materializing and in real life. Talks about the end of life as we know it are beginning to make more sense as information about the possible consequences of the unfolding global warming is coming from the scientific community, as well as from communities from the global South, already facing droughts and other related meteorological phenomena.

Pirates and Hobos: Radical Politics on the Margins of Society

By Yavor Tarinski

Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls.

Captain Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy[1]

Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right; But when asked how ’bout something to eat they will answer with voices so sweet: You will eat, bye and bye, in that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

Joe Hill[2]

On Anti-Authority, Cooperation and Utopia

Interview with Yavor Tarinski

Excerpts from an interview given at the end of May 2016 for an activist group from Freiburg (Germany), aired on radio dreyeckland and freie-radios.