Takis Fotopoulos
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Takis Fotopoulos (born October 14, 1940) is a Greek political writer and former academic.
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[edit] Early life
He was born in Chios and his family moved to Athens soon afterwards. After earning degrees in Economics & Political Science, as well as in Law from the University of Athens, he moved to London in 1967 for postgraduate study at the London School of Economics, on a scholarship from Athens University. He was a student syndicalist and activist in Athens and then a political activist in London, taking an active part in the 1968 student movement in London, as well as in organisations of the revolutionary Greek Left during the struggle against the military junta in Greece (1967-74).
[edit] Academia and afterwards
He was Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Polytechnic of North London for over twenty years until he started editing the journal Society & Nature, later Democracy & Nature and subsequently the online International Journal of Inclusive Democracy. He is also a columnist of Eleftherotypia, one of the most widely-circulated newspapers in Greece.
[edit] Inclusive Democracy
Takis Fotopoulos developed the political project of Inclusive Democracy in 1997 (an exposition can be found in Towards An Inclusive Democracy). The first issue of Society & Nature declared in the editorial that
- "our ambition is to initiate an urgently needed dialogue on the crucial question of developing a new liberatory social project, at a moment in History when the Left has abandoned this traditional role."
The same editorial specified that the new project should be seen as the outcome of a synthesis of the democratic, libertarian socialist and radical Green traditions. Since then, a dialogue has followed in the pages of the journal, in which libertarian socialists like Cornelius Castoriadis, Green libertarians like Murray Bookchin, and Green activists and academics like Steven Best have taken part.
The starting point for Fotopoulos's work is that the world faces a multi-dimensional crisis (economic, ecological, social, cultural and political) which is caused by the concentration of power in elites, as a result of the market economy, representative democracy and related forms of hierarchical structure. An inclusive democracy, which involves the equal distribution of power at all levels, is seen not as a utopia (in the negative sense of the word) or a "vision" but as perhaps the only way out of the present crisis, with trends towards its creation manifesting themselves today in many parts of the world. Fotopoulos is in favor of market abolitionism, although he would not identify himself as a market abolitionist as such because he considers market abolition as one aspect of an Inclusive Democracy which refers only to the Economic Democracy component of it. He proposes a model of economic democracy for a stateless, marketless and moneyless economy but he considers that the economic democracy component is equally significant to the other components of ID, i.e. Political or Direct Democracy, Ecological Democracy and Democracy in the Social Realm.
Takis Fotopoulos is also the author of numerous books in Greek, as well as of over 500 articles in English, American, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Turkish, Arab and Greek theoretical journals, magazines and newspapers.
[edit] Major works
- Towards An Inclusive Democracy, Cassell/Continuum, London/New York, 1997, 401 pp. ISBN 0-304-33627-0 and 0-304-33628-9.
- Vers Une Démocratie Générale, Seuil, Paris, 2002, 250 pp. ISBN 2-02-052846-0
- Umfassende Demokratie, Die Antwort auf die Krise der Wachstums-und Marktwirtschaft, Trotzdem Verlag, Grafenau, 2003, 445 pp. ISBN 3-931786-23-4
- Hacia Una Democracia Inclusiva, Un nuevo proyecto liberador, Nordan, Montevideo, 2002, 325 pp. ISBN9974-42-098-9
- Per Una Democrazia Globale, Eleuthera, Milano, 1999, 254 pp. ISBN 88-85060-37-4
- Periektiki Dimokratia, Kastaniotis, Athens, 1999, 656 pp. ISBN 960-03-2416-6
- The Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/
(English translation of the book with the same title published in Athens by Gordios, 334 pp. ISBN 960-7083-69-5)
[edit] Books published in Greece
- Dependent Development: The Case of Greece (Exantas, 1985&1987)
- The Gulf War: The First Battle in the North-South Conflict (Exantas, 1991)
- The Neo-Liberal Consensus (Gordios, 1993)
- The New World Order and Greece (Kastaniotis, 1997)
- Inclusive Democracy (Kastaniotis, 1997)
- Drugs: Beyond the Demonology of Penalisation and the 'Progressive' Mythology of Liberalisation (Eleftheros Typos, 1999)
- The New Order in the Balkans and the First War of the Internationalised Market Economy (Staxy, 1999)
- Religion, Autonomy and Democracy (Eleftheros Typos, 2000)
- From the Athenian Democracy to Inclusive Democracy (Ellinika Grammata, 2002)
- The War against 'Terrorism': the Elites Generalised Attack (Gordios, 2003)
- Chomsky's capitalism, Albert's post-capitalism and Inclusive Democracy (Gordios, 2004)
- The Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy (Gordios, 2005)
[edit] Contributions to other books
- Education, Culture and Modernization, (ed. by Peter Alheit), Roskide University, 1995
- Defending Public Schools (ed. by David A. Gabbard & E. Wayne Ross), Praeger, 2004
- Complessità sistemica e svillupo eco-sostenibile (ed. by I.Spano & D.Padovan), Sapere 2001
- Studies on the contemporary Greek Economy (ed.by S.Papaspiliopoulos), Papazisis, 1978
- Globalisation, Technology and Paideia in the New Cosmopolis, Atrapos, 2004.
- Critical Perspectives on Globalisation, Edward Elgar, 2006
[edit] Further reading
- The Inclusive Democracy project – six years on: essays on the ID project by Michael Levin, Arran Gare, David Freeman, Serge Latouche, Jean-Claude Richard , Takis Nikolopoulos, Rafael Sposito, Guido Galafassi, Takis Fotopoulos and others (Democracy & Nature, Volume 9 Number 3, November 2003)
- [1] See also the "Inclusive Democracy" entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy, (ed. by Barry Jones), 2001; (vol 2, pp. 732-740)
