58 Facts About Joel Kovel

Joel Stephen Kovel was an American psychiatrist, scholar, human rights activist, and author known as a founder of eco-socialism.

Joel Kovel was born on August 27,1936, in Brooklyn, New York.

Joel Kovel attended Baldwin Senior High School in Baldwin, Nassau County, New York.

Joel Kovel held short-term positions as a Visiting Lecturer at San Diego State University in the spring of 1990 and another visiting professor position at UCSD in Winter 1993.

In 1988, Joel Kovel was appointed Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies, a non-tenured position, at Bard College.

Joel Kovel argued in a letter sent to the faculty of Bard College that his contract was not renewed due to his political views.

Joel Kovel reiterated his argument in a statement posted on his official website that the "termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism".

The college president Leon Botstein responded in a letter sent directly to Joel Kovel by arguing that his termination was not political but part of a larger move by Bard to reduce part-time faculty.

Joel Kovel became involved in political activism in the 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War.

Joel Kovel worked in defense of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.

Joel Kovel married Virginia Ryan, a nurse, with whom he had a daughter and a son before they divorced.

Joel Kovel then married DeeDee Halleck, with whom he had a daughter.

Joel Kovel died age 81 on April 30,2018, in New York City from pneumonia and autoimmune encephalitis.

Joel Kovel was anti-capitalist and anti-globalization, seeing globalization as a force driven by capitalism; in turn, the rapid economic growth encouraged by globalization causes acute ecological crises.

Joel Kovel believed that capitalist firms have to continue to generate profit through a combination of continually intensifying exploitation and selling to new markets, meaning that capitalism must grow indefinitely to exist, which seems impossible on a planet of finite resources.

Joel Kovel used the Bhopal Union-Carbide industrial disaster as an example.

Joel Kovel followed Marx's theories about the contradiction between use values and exchange values.

Joel Kovel stressed that this contradiction has reached a destructive extent, where certain essential activities, such as caring for relatives full-time and basic subsistence, are unrewarded, while unnecessary economic activities earn certain individuals huge fortunes.

Joel Kovel further said that capitalism itself spurs conflict and ultimately war.

Joel Kovel criticized many within the green movement for not being overtly anti-capitalist, for working within the existing capitalist, statist system, for voluntarism, or for reliance on technological fixes.

Joel Kovel suggested that eco-socialism differs from green politics at the most fundamental level because the four pillars of green politics and the "Ten Key Values" of the Green Party of the United States do not include the demand for the emancipation of labor and the end of the separation between producers and the means of production.

Joel Kovel criticized the "defeatism" of voluntarism in some local forms of environmentalism that do not connect.

Joel Kovel labelled the notion of voluntarism "ecopolitics without struggle".

Joel Kovel posits an analysis, developed from Marx, that patterns of production and social organisation are more important than the forms of technology used within a given configuration of society.

Joel Kovel warned "environmental liberals" against over-selling the virtues of renewable energies that cannot meet the mass energy consumption of the era; although he would still support renewable energy projects, he believed it is more important to restructure societies to reduce energy use before relying on renewable energy technologies alone.

Joel Kovel further rejected the neo-Smithian school, who believe in Adam Smith's vision of "a capitalism of small producers, freely exchanging with each other", which is self-regulating and competitive.

The school is represented by thinkers like David Korten who believe in "regulated markets" checked by government and civil society; for Joel Kovel, they do not provide a critique of the expansive nature of capitalism away from localized production and ignore "questions of class, gender, race or any other category of domination".

Joel Kovel has attacked deep ecology because, like other forms of green politics and green economics, it features "virtuous souls" who have "no internal connection with the critique of capitalism and the emancipation of labor".

Joel Kovel thought that this lends legitimacy to "capitalist elites" like the United States Department of State and the World Bank, who can make preservation of wilderness a part of their projects that "have added value as sites for ecotourism" but remove people from their land.

Between 1986 and 1996, Joel Kovel commented that over three million people were displaced by "conservation projects"; in the making of the United States national parks, three hundred Shoshone Indians were killed in the development of Yosemite.

Joel Kovel questioned Sale's insistence on bioregions that do "not require connections with the outside, but within strict limits", and whether this precludes journeys to visit family members and other forms of travel.

Joel Kovel acknowledged the importance of "the gendered bifurcation of nature" and supported the emancipation of gender as it "is at the root of patriarchy and class".

Joel Kovel feared that this is political, springing from historic hostility to Marxism among anarchists and sectarianism, which he pointed out as a fault of Murray Bookchin, the "brilliant" but "dogmatic" founder of social ecology.

Furthermore, Joel Kovel quoted Trotsky, who believed in a communist "superman" who would "learn how to move rivers and mountains".

Joel Kovel added that Stalin "would win the gold medal for enmity to nature", and that, in the face of massive environmental degradation, the inflexible Soviet bureaucracy became increasingly inefficient and unable to emulate capitalist accumulation, leading to a "vicious cycle" that led to its collapse.

Joel Kovel advocated the non-violent dismantling of capitalism and the state, focusing on collective ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers and restoration of the Commons.

Joel Kovel focused on working-class involvement in the formation of eco-socialist parties or their increased involvement in existing Green Parties; however, he believed that, unlike many other forms of socialist analysis, "there is no privileged agent" or revolutionary class, and that there is potential for agency in numerous autonomous, grassroots individuals and groups who can build "prefigurative" projects for non-violent radical social change.

Joel Kovel advocated economic localisation in the same vein as many in the green movement, although only as a prefigurative step rather than an end in itself.

Joel Kovel believed that such parties should focus on "the local rungs of the political system" first, before running national campaigns that "challenge the existing system by the elementary means of exposing its broken promises".

Joel Kovel believed in building prefigurations around forms of production based on use values, which will provide a practical vision of a post-capitalist, post-statist system.

Joel Kovel advocated a form of political party "grounded in communities of resistance", where delegates from these communities form the core of the party's activists, and these delegates and the "open and transparent" assembly they form are subject to recall and regular rotation of members.

Joel Kovel held up the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Gaviotas movement as examples of such communities, which "are produced outside capitalist circuits" and show that "there can be no single way valid for all peoples".

Joel Kovel used the term "eco-socialist revolution" to describe the transition to an eco-socialist world society.

Joel Kovel suggested the end of military aid and other forms of support to "comprador elites in the South" will eventually "lead to their collapse".

Joel Kovel posited that the WPTO should have an elected council that will oversee a reform of prices in favour of an ecological price "determined by the difference between actual use-values and fully realized ones", having low tariffs for forms of ecological production like organic agriculture; he envisaged the high tariffs on non-ecological production providing subsidies to ecological production units.

Joel Kovel thought that this will provide a "standard of transformation" for non-ecological industries, like the automobile industry, spurring changes towards ecological production.

Joel Kovel pursued "ecological production" that goes beyond the socialist vision of the emancipation of labor to "the realization of use-values and the appropriation of intrinsic value".

Joel Kovel believed that the new enterprises can build "socially developed plans" of production for societal needs, such as efficient light-rail transport components.

Joel Kovel stated that the focus on "production" does not mean that there will be an increase in production and labor under eco-socialism.

Joel Kovel thought that the emancipation of labor and the realization of use-value will allow "the spheres of work and culture to be reintegrated".

Joel Kovel cited the example of Paraguayan Indian communities organized by Jesuits in the 18th century who made sure that all community members learned musical instruments, and had laborers take musical instruments to the fields and takes turns playing music or harvesting.

Joel Kovel focused on a modified version of the notion of usufruct to replace capitalist private property arrangements.

Joel Kovel highlighted the fact that Marx mentioned the idea when he stated that human beings are no more than the planet's "usufructaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition".

For Joel Kovel, this reversed what Marxists see as the commodity fetishism and atomization of individuals through the "unappeasable craving" for "having and excluding others from having" under capitalism.

Joel Kovel hoped that the "hubris" of the notion of "ownership of the planet" will be replaced with usufruct.

Joel Kovel wrote that "violence is the rupturing of ecosystems" and is therefore "deeply contrary to ecosocialist values".

Joel Kovel's works include A Complete Guide to Therapy, The Age of Desire, Against the State of Nuclear Terror, In Nicaragua, The Radical Spirit: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Society, History and Spirit, Red Hunting in the Promised Land, The Enemy of Nature, and Overcoming Zionism.

Joel Kovel's last work, published in 2017, was a memoir entitled The Lost Traveller's Dream.