Social-ecological reconstruction on the path to a solidary modernity.

This text has been developed within the ISM’s steering committee together with the active participation of other colleagues. Our aim is to advance the process of programmatic and strategic agreement, which is already under way in the social and political left as well as in critical scholarship and culture and which has recently gained new impetus from the turn in nuclear policy. In this, we are less concerned with a possibly exhaustive listing of the various single steps toward a social-ecological reconstruction. Rather, we would like to make clear that such a reconstruction can only be designed as a comprehensive social, cultural and political project, in the end as a project of another society – of a solidariy modernity. For the ongoing elaboration and carrying out of such a project, a broad alliance of diverse protagonists has to evolve. Through a discussion of the present text we would like to open up a first opportunity for such an alliance. The text itself is therefore conceived as an invitation to participation.

We are living through a transitional period. The revival of the anti-nuclear movement and the catastrophe of Fukushima have, in the space of a few weeks, not only placed on the agenda a phase-out of nuclear energy but, in the end, an exit from the whole fossil-fuel/nuclear mode of economy. Monthlong demonstrations transformed the initially merely locally significant conflict around the construction of a new railway station into a confrontation relevant to the whole of society around the shape and future of democracy. Both developments revealed what is really behind «disenchantment with politics»: the unwillingness of ever more people to accept conditions and processes that have for decades been considered «without alternative». In this the repoliticisation of German conditions is in part different from, but in many respects similar to, the processes in Greece, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and North Africa or Latin America. Despite the differences in the immediate causes as well as in the present forms of protest, people are, under the common slogan «real democracy», articulating their right to participation and their claim to have a say in the conflictual organisation of their social institutions and their daily conditions of life.

With a broadly shared feeling of having to speak up while standing on the shifting and insecure sands of a transitional situation, a crisis dynamic is being expressed that is in itself very multi-faceted. If the modes of production and life prevalent in the global North have for centuries by now led to immiseration, social polarisation and finally mass mortality due to famine, disease and violence, the environmental and climate catastrophe, as well as the destruction of biodiversity, in the course of their mutual intensification and extension due to the financial and debt crisis, are threatening everyone. If despite this the economic ascendancy of the newly industrialised countries has lifted several hundred million people out of poverty and given them access to the mode of life and consumption level of the northern middle classes, their grip on natural resources and the explosion of greenhouse gas emissions have hastened the disaster of a model of production and consumption that can no longer be sustained. With the mutual escalation of the social, economic, ecological and political crises, the threat of war, and with it the danger of the deployment of weapons of mass destruction, is increasing. Along with this, the formal extension of democracy is frustrated by its substantive undermining, and the demand for democracy still has to face dictatorships and the spirals of violence in which terror and counter-terrorism alternate. In the process the governments involved since 2008 principally with the «bailout» of the international financial system, of indebted states and of the Euro and the management of the economy are not even now in a position to syntonise their various crisis policies. If sustainable and workable solutions are not in the offing, this is above all because the «crisis-solution strategies» do not touch the basic structures of neoliberal capitalism and refuse to take the risk of calling into question the dominance of global financial markets and the transnational corporations which act without democratic control and regulation. In this the inadequacy of the short-term and onedimensional standards of decision-making within the markets and within the parliamentary electoral periods becomes increasingly palpable in the face of the long-term character and complexity of the global multi-dimensional crisis. The world-historical development seems to be slipping away from the control of states and of civil society.

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