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


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.
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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.”


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.