A pioneer, indeed. Here is another, more personal account with two video
clips, including an interview.
Joel Kovel (1936-2018): An Appreciation
<https://forhumanliberation.blogspot.com/2018/05/2904-joel-kovel-1936-2018-appreciation.html>
On Sun, May 6, 2018 at 6:09 PM, Mitchel Cohen <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>
> This is a very strange obit, especially for the way it ends, with
> reporting the number of votes Joel received in the Green Party convention
> in the year 2000 that ended up nominating Ralph Nader for president. It's
> like the NY TImes is continuing to grind its ax against the Green Party and
> Ralph Nader for "stealing" the 2000 election away from Al Gore, even though
> here it does not say so specifically and one has to read pretty deeply
> through the lines of history to get to that conclusion. But why else is
> this obit written in this disparaging way? It's as if to steal Joel's
> spirit and re-cast it as "He stood up against Ralph Nader, but only got a
> few votes" .... without really trying to intelligently convey how that
> Green Party convention worked.
>
> The obit makes other obscured but nevertheless mocking comments in other
> places too. (Can you find them?) Even in describing Joel's insightful book,
> "White Racism: A Psychohistory", the review quotes from Joel's book:
> racism is "a set of beliefs whose structure arises from the deepest levels
> of our lives.” But it does't go any further, it doesn't explain what Joel's
> statement means, and how relevant it is for today. What does it mean, "the
> deepest levels of our lives" and how does that give rise to a "structure"
> of a racist set of beliefs? No comment from the Times, though Joel of
> course delves into that in depth in his book.
>
> At BEST interpretation, the Times just shallowly plucked out a quote to
> give its readers the aura of the Times' omniscience -- of indepth,
> all-knowing coverage of the news -- in this case, Joel's book ("Hey, we did
> our homework, so trust us!") -- without doing anything of the sort. That's
> "at best"!
>
> Joel was a very strong critic of the NY Times, its promotion of war, U.S.
> imperialism and zionism, its pounding away against Iraq's non-existent
> weapons of mass destruction, and how the paper attempts to manipulate
> emotions (and thus movements) by selectively "reporting", distorting, and
> out-and-out lying about the news (Judith Miller, among others). Not a word
> in the obit about THAT, eh?
>
> - Mitchel Cohen
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/obituaries/dr-joel-kovel-a-founder-of-
> ecosocialism-is-dead-at-81.html
> OBITUARIES
>
>
> *Dr. Joel Kovel, a Founder of Ecosocialism, Is Dead at 81 *By SAM ROBERTS
> MAY 4, 2018
>
> [image: []]
>
>
> *Dr. Joel Kovel, front right, at a demonstration by the organization
> Veterans for Peace at the White House in 2010. CreditEllen Davidson *Joel
> Kovel, a former Freudian psychiatrist who evolved into an apostle of what
> he called ecosocialism, a so-called green-and-red agenda against the
> environmental evils of globalization and in favor of the nonviolent
> eradication of capitalism, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 81.
>
> His death, at a hospital, was caused by pneumonia and autoimmune
> encephalitis, his wife, Dee Dee Halleck, said.
>
> Dr. Kovel (pronounced ko-VEL) courted controversy early in his career with
> his book “White Racism: A Psychohistory,” published in 1970.
>
> Racism, he wrote whether overt bigotry in the South or cold aversion in
> the North is built into the very character of Western civilization. “Far
> from being the simple delusion of a bigoted and ignorant minority,” he
> wrote, racism is “a set of beliefs whose structure arises from the deepest
> levels of our lives.”
>
> “White Racism,” which was nominated for a National Book Award, publicly
> heralded his radicalization.
> Continue reading the main story
>
> Dr. Kovel metamorphosed from a conventional therapist into a Marxist who
> abandoned the medical profession as too corporate and commercial. He became
> a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, imperialists, Zionists and gas
> guzzlers, together with neoliberals and environmentalists who were
> insufficiently anticapitalist.
>
> Dr. Kovel was an intellectual father of ecosocialism. A Brooklyn-born son
> of Jewish immigrants, he also experienced in his later years what he called
> a Christian spiritual conversion.
>
> When he published his autobiography last year, after so many metaphysical
> meanderings, he titled it “The Lost Traveller’s Dream,” a nod to the poet
> William Blake’s reference to wanderers in the wilderness seeking to
> distinguish between good and evil.
>
> Dr. Kovel rarely defined his positions in shades of gray.
>
> He renounced psychiatry because, he said, he was fed up with “the
> pernicious system of diagnosis” dictated by professional associations and
> their manuals, and by insurance companies driven by statistics and
> reflexive prescriptions.”
>
> [image: []]
>
>
> *Dr. Kovel speaking at an anti-nuclear rally in New York in 1982.
> CreditDith Pran/The New York Times *Whenever he launched an ideological
> crusade, he did so zealously even if, as in the case of ecosocialism, its
> very definition and the collateral demand for an appealing alternative to
> capitalism were not self-evident.
>
> Under ecosocialist theory, income would be guaranteed, most property and
> means of production would be commonly owned, and the abolition of
> capitalism, globalism and imperialism would unleash environmentalists to
> vastly curtail industrialization and development whose pollution would
> otherwise cause catastrophic global warming.
>
> “Capitalist production, in its endless search for profit, seeks to turn
> everything into a commodity,” Dr. Kovel wrote in 2007 on the socialist
> website Climate and Capitalism. “It is plain that production will have to
> shift from being dominated by exchange the path of the commodity to
> that which is for use, that is for the direct meeting of human needs.”
>
> Joel Stephen Kovel was born on Aug. 27, 1936, in Brooklyn to Louis and
> Rose (Farber) Kovel. His father was an accountant and the namesake of the
> Kovel Rule, a legal doctrine that extended the lawyer-client
> confidentiality privilege to other professionals and experts. It arose when
> a federal appeals court voided the elder Mr. Kovel’s one-year sentence for
> contempt after he had refused to answer questions about a client in a case.
>
> After graduating from Baldwin High School in Baldwin, N.Y., Joel received
> a bachelor’s from Yale in 1957 and a medical degree from Columbia
> University College of Physicians and Surgeons. While in medical school, he
> was first exposed to extreme poverty during field study in Suriname. He
> trained at Downstate Psychoanalytic Institute in Brooklyn.
>
> In addition to his wife, a filmmaker, Mr. Kovel is survived by two
> children, Jonathan Kovel and Erin Fitzsimmons, from his marriage to
> Virginia Ryan, which ended in divorce; a daughter, Molly Kovel, from his
> marriage to Ms. Halleck; her sons, Ezra, Peter and Tovey Halleck, from an
> earlier marriage; his brother, Alex; and nine grandchildren.
>
> Dr. Kovel was director of resident training in psychiatry at Albert
> Einstein Medical School in the Bronx from 1977 to 1983. He was also a
> professor of psychiatry there until 1986, when he left to teach courses in
> Marx and Freud at the New School in Manhattan. He taught at Bard College
> from 1988 to 2009.
>
> He was also editor emeritus of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism;
> wrote for The New York Times Book Review; and, with Michel Lowy, drafted
> the Ecosocialist Manifesto in 2001, on which the movement was founded.
>
> Among his other books is “A Complete Guide to Therapy” (1976), which,
> aTimes reviewer wrote, “can be recommended to everyone from people
> looking for help with emotional problems to those with serious questions
> about the entire business of emotional help.” Another is “Overcoming
> Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine” (2007).
>
> Dr. Kovel was the Green Party candidate for the United States Senate from
> New York in 1998. (He finished fourth, with about 15,000 votes; Chuck
> Schumer won, with about 2.4 million.)
>
> He unsuccessfully challenged Ralph Nader for the Green Party’s
> presidential nomination in 2000. Mr. Nader was nominated at a convention
> with 295 votes. Two other candidates were tied for second place with 10
> each. Dr. Kovel came in last with three.
>
--
Kamran Nayeri