Kovel, Joel

KOVEL, JOEL (1936-2018). A polymorph intellectual of the Left, Joel Kovel achieved fame early with writings on psychology and moved onward to racism and to other issues, including his own version of ecological transformation.

Born in Brooklyn to an immigrant Jewish family, Joel Stephen Kovel attended Yale University, received an MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and in 1977 graduated from the Psychoanalytic Institution in Brooklyn. That year, he also became the Director of Residency Training at Albert Einstein College and soon after a professor of Psychiatry there. In 1980, he had shifted to become an adjunct professor of anthropology at the New School, lecturing on Marx and Freud. Antiwar activism had helped pushed him to rethink Freudian theory and accept Marxism, setting him on a course toward a synthesis. His transition from Freud to Marx cost him his career in psychiatry, forcing him out of Albert Einstein.

Beginning with Complete Guide to Therapy (1976), his several widely read books on psychiatry gained Kovel a reputation in successfully summarizing and synthesizing psychotherapy techniques for a lay audience. White Racism (1984), nominated for a National Book Award, took him on a different and more controversial tack. Here, he coined key terms of in the more subtle categories of racism and offered broad concepts destined to be debated widely in the following decades.

During his period of transition from psychiatry to revolutionary Marxism, Kovel was inspired and guided by Stanley Diamond, founder of the journal Dialectical Anthropology, but likewise touched by many other sources. His evolving Marxism, influenced by various traditions from economics to psychology and poetry, feminism and anthropology, liberation theology and the visual arts, prompted Kovel to quip that he was “a bad Marxist – the best kind of Marxist.” After his stint at the New School, he taught at various schools and institutes from East to West coasts including the University of California, San Diego. In 2009, he was fired for political reasons from Bard College and the Alger Hiss Chair that he had held since 1986.

His book Red Hunting in the Promised Land (1994) further cemented his exclusion and alienation from the dominant, liberal mainstream in the United States. Here, he synthesized the findings of a major national conference on anti-communism, for which he was one of the organizers. A deep study of the American psyche, this work controversially connected the dots between modern anti-communism and the genocide of Native Americans.

Caught up in the struggle to defend the Nicaraguan Revolution against the US-backed Contras, Kovel worked closely with the former rebels in a medical capacity, risking his life with Pastors for Peace and becoming involved in solidarity actions for Cuba. In Nicaragua (1989) undergirded his ongoing political work. History and Spirit (1991), inspired by Jesuit revolutionaries in Nicaragua, further investigated the perennial questions of spirit and spirituality, applying the methodologies and disciplines of psychology and Marxism to tackling the most puzzling and protracted of all questions.

Kovel’s participation in the struggle against nuclear war and for nuclear disarmament led to the volume Against the State of Nuclear Terror (1984),which diagnosed nuclear terror as an outcome of capital, patriarchy and the lineage of science, going back to the traditions of the British Royal Society, founded in the seventeenth century. This study prefigured Kovel’s development of ecosocialist/ecofeminist theory and his analysis of direct-action affinity peace groups, with which he had a wide personal involvement.

Kovel’s Overcoming Zionism (2007) proved to be his most controversial work. Offering strong and systematic proposals for the “Single State Solution” with Palestinians as fully equal citizens, it was banned by a distributor and caused his firing from Bard College. The experience with censorship also prompted him to become a convener of the Committee for the Open Discussion of Zionism.

He co-authored with Michael Lowy “An Ecosocialist Manifesto,” a historic document that aided in the founding of the ecosocialist movement. This manifesto, elaborated in The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (2002) did much to convene the Ecosocialist International Network at the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2009. Almost a decade earlier, he had assumed the editorship of Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) from its founder, James O’Connor, maintaining CNS as the only academic journal of eco-socialism in the world. For more than a decade, Kovel also worked closely with the Green Party, running unsuccessfully for the Senate in New York in 1998 and running in 2000 against Ralph Nader to be presidential candidate of the Greens. This experience led him to conclude that neither the social transformation nor the ecosocialist movement itself could be developed through the US electoral process.

His memoir, A Lost Traveller Dream (2017), chronicled his life and works from his childhood to his old age, culminating in his conversion to Christianity at St. Mary’s Episcopal church in Harlem. In his own words, it added up to a personal and political synthesis of “ruthless criticism and the holy trinity.”

Over his lifetime Kovel lectured around the world, including the United States, Canada, Ecuador, China, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey, United Kingdom, India, and France. His books have been widely translated and his ideas more well known outside of the United States than within.

A long-time puppeteer in the Bread and Puppet Theater, Kovel introduced founder Peter Schuman to the writings of the young Marx. Active for decades with Veterans for Peace, he was arrested for civil disobedience on multiple occasions. In 2011, he co-founded “Ecosocialist Horizons,” project of global action in the Caribbean Basin, and played a supportive supervisory role in the process leading up in 2017 to the convocation and constitution of the First Ecosocialist International. The first posthumous book of his essays, The Emergence of Ecosocialism, was published in 2020.

Kovel, Joel. A Lost Traveler’s Dream. New York: Autonomedia, 2017.

Roberts, Sam. “Dr. Joel Kovel, a Founder of Ecosocialism, is Dead at 81,” New York Times, 4 May, 2018.