Takis Fotopoulos

Takis Fotopoulos (Τάκης Φωτόπουλος), born October 14, 1940 (1940-10-14) (age 69), is a political philosopher and economist who founded the inclusive democracy movement. He is noted for his synthesis of the classical democracy with the libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He was an academic, and has written many books and over 600 articles which have been published in various languages. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (which succeeded Democracy & Nature ) and author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy in which the foundations of the inclusive democracy project were set. Fotopoulos is Greek and lives in London.
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 1966 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).

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.

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, Social ecologists 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.

Major works

• Towards An Inclusive Democracy (London/New York: Cassell Continuum, 1997), 401 pp. ISBN 0-304-33627-0 and 0-304-33628-9.
  
• Περιεκτική Δημοκρατία (Athens: Kastaniotis, 1999), 656 pp. ISBN 960-03-2416-6
  
• Per Una Democrazia Globale (Milano: Eleuthera, 1999), 254 pp. ISBN 88-85060-37-4
  
• Hacia Una Democracia Inclusiva, Un nuevo proyecto liberador (Montevideo: Nordam, 2002), 325 pp. ISBN 9974-42-098-9
  
• Vers Une Démocratie Générale (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 250 pp. ISBN 2-02-052846-0
  
• Umfassende Demokratie, Die Antwort auf die Krise der Wachstums-und Marktwirtschaft (Grafenau: Trotzdem Verlag, 2003), 445 pp. ISBN 3-931786-23-4
  
• The Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy (Entire English E-book publication [2005] of the book with the same title published in Athens, 2005 by Gordios, 334 pp. ISBN 960-7083-69-5. Published in Chinese, 2008. ISBN 978-7-5607-3533-7)
  
• Περιεκτική Δημοκρατία - 10 Χρόνια Μετά (Athens: Eleftheros Typos, 2008), 591 pp.