Critical Perspectives and Reflections

John Clarke July 24, 2018 Some time ago, an especially dogmatic and thus ultimately unendurable Facebook friend, made a testy response to something I put up on the refugee crisis. This person denounced me for even speaking of a 'refugee crisis'. The person believed that it was because it was, they asserted, really a crisis of capitalism. That struck me as rather like condemning someone for saying they were eating an orange on the grounds that what they were actually eating was fruit. What I unfortunately see all the time among dogmatic and narrow thinkers on the left, is a stubborn refusal to consider engaging in discussion of incredibly important particular issues and developments out of a fear that this might contaminate previously established general concepts. By doing this, however, those fundamentally correct concepts are reduced to mere lifeless abstractions. Thus, rather than test previously established conclusions against a developing reality, that reality mu...

                                            Pedro Cabezas2                                               July 5, 2018 The fight for the defence of water in El Salvador and the recent conflicts that have arisen between legislators and the movement for the defence of water are nothing new in this country. Since 2006, environmental organizations in El Salvador have demanded the approval of the General Water Law, a bill that recognizes water as a human right and a common good that must be managed publicly with a focus on sustainability, priority and affordabi...