Common Strategies for Eco-Feminists and Eco-Socialists: An Introduction to the New Co-Editors in Chief of CNS

Abstract

I am a bad Leftist. I am an under-employed contingent academic labourer at an online university (Athabasca U); but I love my job and my school does some cool things, like periodically offering free massive open online courses. I volunteer at my union Local, not to wait for “the Great Leap Forward,” but rather to prepare for and participate in the democratic practice of people-led power, within my small sphere of activity and impact. I am at times out of place – neither anti-state enough for anarchists, nor economically-determinist enough for orthodox Marxists. I grew up in one of the poor branches of a long-time white settler New England family. My parents’ divorce in the 1970s meant I experienced what millions of children of divorce endure, that is, a precipitous drop in household income and, for us, the stigma of poverty in an otherwise relatively well-off oceanside town. Impacted by the prejudices around me, I developed a keen radar for and stance against discrimination and a very early fellow-feeling for other poor people. In 1982, in a torturous “game” of Russian roulette played with a stolen gun, a likely-mentally ill juvenile shot dead a beloved relative of mine at age 15. I mourned and have since acted to join campaigns for the release of juvenile lifers. I campaign for the abolition of prisons, police, and the military industrial complex(es). I march for gun control and against war. I am a survivor and an activist against rape and violence against women. While steeped experientially in contexts that led me to these political and philosophical positions, my biography also shapes my interactions with history – both the history being made in movements of which I have been a part (like the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s and Extinction Rebellion of the 2020s), as well as the history rooting all current struggles in their specific socio-cultural and geo-political pasts. I am an unorthodox marxist; lower-case “m.” My marxism is rooted in exposure (as a teenager and ever since) to the persuasive and radical works of Trinidadian Marxist, CLR James; “persuasive and radical” to me because of his Pan-African, feminist, ‘from below’ perspective, as might be