Dr. Joel Kovel, a Founder of Ecosocialism, Is Dead at 81
[ad_1] 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 compan...