Murray Bookchin offers some libertarian focused ideas on solving the climate crisis. Can any of these ideas work?

Here is a series of interviews from Murray Bookchin.
Interview with Murray Bookchin

By David Vanek


Murray Bookchin, born in 1921, has been involved in leftist politics for seven decades and has written almost two dozen books on a great variety of subjects, encompassing ecology, nature philosophy, history, urban studies, and the Left, particularly Marxism and anarchism. In the 1950s, with his long 1952 essay "The Problem of Chemicals in Food," he warned against the chemicalization of agriculture and the environment, and with this and other writings, he helped lay foundations of the modern radical ecology movement. He helped popularize organic gardening, diversified agriculture, and other alternatives to chemcialized agriculture. His comprehensive survey of environmental ills, Our Synthetic Environment, was published in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. His manifesto of radical political ecology ("Ecology and Revolutionary Thought"), written in 1964, was the first in any language. As an author and speaker, he influenced the antinuclear movement and the formation of the early Green political movement, both in the United States and Germany. He is the cofounder of the Institute for Social Ecology, where he lectures each summer, and professor emeritus at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is currently finishing the third volume of a trilogy, The Third Revolution, which is a history of the great European and American revolutions.

David Vanek: In your books, you draw on your experiences of the 1960s and 1970s, as many environmentalists do, but you also draw on your experiences of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Murray Bookchin: I came out of the traditional Left, at a time when the Russian Revolution was still the most important event in recent history. In fact, when I was born — in January 1921, in the Bronx in New York City — the Russian Revolution and civil war were still going on. My family was made up of Russian revolutionaries. The first language I knew was Russian, and I spoke it up to the age of two or three, but then my parents stopped talking to me in that language, so that I wouldn't develop an accent. I learned English in the streets. You had to know two languages in New York at that time, because almost half the population was born in Europe.

I entered the American Communist movement when I was a child. As a Czech, you would know about the Young Pioneers — well, I was a Young Pioneer in the early 1930s. In 1934, when I was thirteen, I went into the Young Communist League (Komsomol). Soon afterward, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I broke with the Communists, because of their Popular Front line — I was on the extreme left, and I opposed what I considered to be class collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, I went back to the Communists, because they seemed to be the only ones who were fighting Franco. I wanted to fight in Spain, but I was too young. Soon after rejoining the Communists, I left them again, this time permanently. After high school, I did not go to college — I went to work in a foundry near New York. I hoped that the Second World War would end in revolutions, as the first war had, and became a Trotskyist. When the war ended without a revolution, I became disillusioned with orthodox Marxism and realized I had to rethink everything. I came out of the army and went to work in the automobile industry, where the workers, formerly militant, were becoming ever more middle class in their mentality. So in the 1950 I went to the RCA Institute, where I studied electronic engineering. I saw that many machines could ultimately replace most human toil. Being a socialist, I wanted to reduce the amount of labor that people have to give to society, whether under capitalism or socialism, so that they could be free to become creative human beings, follow their own interests, and fulfill their own talents.

I decided to go beyond Marxism and became a libertarian socialist. Already in 1952 I was writing about the chemicalization of food. I developed a critique of hierarchy and related the struggle against hierarchy and domination to the struggle for the integrity of the natural world. I tried to show that modern economics is an interaction not only between wage labor and capital, but also between human labor and the natural world. My philosophical conceptions were and are dialectical, based on Hegel, but without Hegel's teleological approach. I'm not a teleologist, I don't believe that any development is inevitable; but at the same time, I believe, some developments, like socialism, cannot be achieved without adequate material developments. I called my approach dialectical naturalism. I framed my ecological thinking around the problem of urbanization, particularly the dislocations between town and country. I wrote about alternative technology, arguing that technology should be as humanly scaled as possible. Later I brought in, above all, the idea of face-to-face democracy, under the name libertarian municipalism or communalism. As my ideas developed, I retained aspects of Marx — not Marxism but Marx's own ideas — combining them with the general anarchist ideas of confederalism. But please let me stress that I believe we have to go beyond all radical tendencies from the past — incorporating their best elements — to something new: an outlook I call communalism.

In the early 1960s I became involved with the nascent counterculture. Anarchism seemed nearly defunct both as an ideology and a movement. At the same time, it was very fluid: as an anarchist, you could be a syndicalist; you could be an egotist; you could be anything you wanted to — it was as fluid, and often as formless, as water. So I first advanced my new views under the rubric of anarchism, and they later were called "eco-anarchism." I think it is fair to say that my writings on ecology and anarchism were the first radical political writings on ecology. They became rather popular with the New Left. People don't remember the origins of radical ecology — they think Ralph Nader or maybe Barry Commoner produced it and influenced the New Left. This is quite erroneous; in fact, the true history of radical ecology has yet to be written.

In my twilight years — I'm now 80 years old — I've been trying to evaluate what I've seen and done in my life. I ask myself: What happened in the 20th century? What's going to affect the 21st? I've come to some very definite ideas about that. If we are going to change the direction of society in a libertarian way, we will need to build a systematic and coherent project. Coherence is very important, not only in politics and organization but in economics, in history, and in philosophy as well.

DV: The summarizing phrase that is commonly associated with your work is "We cannot solve the environmental crisis without solving social problems." To whom specifically were these words addressed when you wrote them for the first time? To the environmental movement of the time?

MB: No, it was 1952, and there was no environmental movement at that time — just a few books on conservation and overpopulation, most of which were very reactionary. There was no organic gardening movement except for experiments among a few people who had come over here from Europe and especially England. I strongly believed, however, that making a few small changes would not solve the ecological problem — on the contrary, a transformation into a rational, egalitarian, and libertarian society was necessary. When I talked about solar and wind energy, I didn't just propose them as alternative technologies; I proposed them as part of the technological apparatus of a new communal society.

DV: What do you consider to be the necessary prerequisites for such a transformation?

MB: I think the most important thing we are faced with today is to raise consciousness. America can be a good example. Americans by disposition and cultural heritage are activists. They don't think very much in advance, they act, and then they look for the reason why they acted. They don't think much of the past or the future, they think of the here and now. They're engineers, they don't generalize, they don't look for the connections. In America it's our job to bring out these faults Our people have to know what happened in history, what philosophy is, so they can educate. They have to have a point of view. They can't just be against something, they have to offer an alternative. And they have to learn tactics, they have to have a methodology.

DV: In terms of this methodology, what do you think of the often-stated contradiction between direct action and political methods like lobbying, legislative reform, and the like? Do you prefer lobbying to, for example, community work?

MB: I have a long and painful experience with lobbying. Many years ago I was active in the antinuclear movement, which not only occupied plants in direct actions but also circulated petitions and then brought them to local congresspeople. The results were usually not very good. In the United States today, there's the Democratic Party, and there's the Republican Party. You go to them, and they will promise you anything to get elected. They won't give you much of anything if it doesn't help the ruling class. Sometimes they make small concessions — they'll give you ten acres of "wilderness" — but then they'll cut down the rest of the forest. That's what lobbying usually achieves.

DV: You have called your approach anarchism. What do you mean by that concept?

MB: Today I prefer the word communalism, by which I mean a libertarian ideology that, as I said, includes the best of the anarchist tradition as well as the best in Marx. I think neither Marxism nor anarchism alone is adequate for our times: a great deal in both no longer applies to today's world. We have to go beyond the economism of Marx and beyond the individualism that is sometimes latent, sometimes explicit in anarchism. Marx's, Proudhon's, and Bakunin's ideas were formed in the nineteenth century. We need a left libertarian ideology for our own time, not for the days of the Russian and Spanish Revolutions.

The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality — the city, town, and village — where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy. We can transform local government into popular assemblies where people can discuss and make decisions about the economy and society in which they live. When we get power at the neighborhood level in a town or city, we can confederate all the assemblies and then confederate those towns and cities into a popular government — not a state (which is an instrument of class rule and exploitation), but a government, where the people have the power. This is what I call communalism in a practical sense. It should not be confused with communitarianism, which refers to small initiatory projects like a "people's" food cooperative, garage, printing press — projects that often become capitalistic when they don't fall apart or succumb to competition by other enterprises.

People will never achieve this kind of face-to-face democratic society spontaneously. A serious, committed movement is necessary to fight for it. And to build that movement, radical leftists need to develop an organization — one that is controlled from the base, so that we don't produce another Bolshevik Party. It has to be formed slowly on a local basis, it has to be confederally organized, and together with popular assemblies, it will build up an opposition to the existing power, the state and class rule. I call this approach libertarian municipalism.

DV: Some critics have said that you are mostly interested in what's going on the lower level, within municipalities, and that you don't say much about how to connect different municipalities into a higher structure, say confederation.

MB: That's absolutely untrue — the aim of confederating the popular assemblies is basic to libertarian municipalism. My writings on the subject always include a call for confederation. From the local confederations should come regional confederations, and then national or continental confederations. But the power must always reside in the popular assemblies, and the final decisions must always come from below, that is, from assemblies of the people. (I should add that anyone who does not attend an assembly is simply saying, "I am not a citizen, I don't care." So if they don't care to attend, let them live with the decisions of assemblies.)

Municipalities form the locus, the arena of a truly political life, but no municipality can be "autonomous." Autonomy is a myth — you can't achieve it, because each person depends on everyone else, and each municipality depends on all the others. We all depend on each other, just as our individual egos are formed to a vast degree by culture, not born all of a sudden or self-formed somehow, the way Max Stirner suggested. I also reject the vicious totalitarian notion of total dependence upon the state. I am for interdependence among self-governing people in assemblies.

Democracy is something that anarchism often seems to have problems with. This is one area in which I differ with authentic anarchists, who emphasize an individual ego and the fulfillment of its desires as the overriding consideration. Many anarchists reject democracy as the "tyranny" of the majority over the minority. They think that when a community makes decisions by majority vote, it violates the "autonomy" of the egos of the individuals who voted in the minority. They seem to think that somehow those who voted against a decision, because they are "autonomous," shouldn't have to follow it.

I think that that idea is naive at best and a prescription for chaos at worst. Decisions, once made, have to be binding. Of course minorities should always have the right to object to majority decisions and to freely voice their own views. Majorities have no right to try to prevent a minority from voicing its views and trying to win majority support for them.

The question is, what is the fairest way to make communitywide decisions? I think majority voting is not only the fairest but the only viable way for a face-to-face democratic society to function, and that decisions made by majority vote should be binding on all the members of the community, whether they voted in favor of a measure or against it.

And unlike many anarchists, I don't think a particular individual or municipality should be able to do whatever it wants to do at all times. Lack of structure and institutions leads to chaos and even arbitrary tyranny. I believe in law, and the future society I envision would also have a constitution. Of course, the constitution would have to be the product of careful consideration, by the empowered people. It would be democratically discussed and voted upon. But once the people have ratified it, it would be binding on everyone. It is not accidental that historically, oppressed people who were victims of the arbitrary behavior of the ruling classes — "barons," as Hesiod called them in seventh-century B.C. Greece — demanded constitutions and just laws as a remedy.

DV: What dangers do you find in the idea of autonomy or self-sufficiency?

MB: The main danger is parochialism: some people might decide that they want to exclude people of a certain race or ethnicity or sexual preference or the like. The American South, for example, long wanted to allow blacks to live in its midst as slaves or else as menial servants. Today people in many European countries want to exclude immigrants arriving from outside Europe. Our movement would have to counter such parochialism with cosmopolitanism, an outlook that affirms and even celebrates the interdependence of all people.

I think that a workable confederation must ultimately be very broad, reflecting the interdependence of municipalities. Some of the nineteenth-century anarchists who wrote about confederation left open a large loophole. Proudhon and Bakunin, in their writings, allowed for the possibility that a single community could opt out of the confederation if it so desired. The community could say to the rest of the confederation," I don't like what you're doing, I'm leaving." But I don't agree that this should be permitted. Every municipality has a deep, fundamental responsibility to every other municipality in a confederation. When a community joins a confederation, it's bound by a compact, a constitution. It shouldn't be able to leave unilaterally, just because it doesn't want to do something that the majority of the confederation has agreed to do. A community shouldn't be able to say, for example, "We want to exclude black people, but you in the confederation would force them on us, so we are going to defy you and leave the confederation." Participation is binding, because our interdependence is indissoluble. The only way a community could leave a confederation, in my opinion, would be when the majority in the confederation, acting as though it were one huge assembly, says, "All right, okay, leave if you choose, but don't expect us to help you when you need aid."

DV: So, decentralization is not the whole story.

MB: I definitely disagree with the fetishization of decentralization, the notion that decentralization per se has some kind of mystical qualities. Big things are not necessarily bad, and small things are not necessarily good. Small is not always beautiful — small units can sometimes be destructive and reactionary. The world of feudal Europe was mostly decentralized — but it was poisoned by a good deal of tyranny.

Size is a purely physical measurement. Decentralization must involve economics, technology, political structure, confederalism, and so on. It has to be placed in a communalistic construct. The advantage of decentralization is that it lodges the civic arena and its components in a human and familiar scale.

DV: In your books, you developed a historical genealogy of hierarchy. Like many anthropologists, you place an egalitarian society — something like Marx's class-free society — at its beginning. Is this a sort of Bookchinian Golden Age?

MB: Absolutely not! I don't want to go back to the past. I am not a primitivist. It's been a source of great concern to me that many anarchists in the United States are primitivists. They believe that technology is the main cause of our problems. One has the impression sometimes that they want to return to flint tools and a foraging economy.

I think that the main causes of our problems lie in social relations — in capitalism, the nation-state — and in the commodification of all things and relations. If we organized social life along cooperative and humanistic lines, technology could be one of the major solutions to our problems. Primitivists believe we have too much civilization. I believe we're not civilized enough. Some primitivists are even against "society," but I think that without society you are not a human being. They believe in personal autonomy, I believe in social freedom. They seem to believe that there is a "natural man," an "uncorrupted ego," which civilization has poisoned. I believe that competition and other class and hierarchical relations have corrupted society, and that we need instead a cooperative civilization.

DV: So you adopt Marx's - or, more precisely, Hegel's - perspective that history is something essentially indispensable and positive, as a process of perfection and "cultural learning," not that of decline and corruption?

MB: Again, yes and no. Let's put aside the word perfection, since only deities are perfect. In fact, really monstrous things have happened in the past and are happening today. It was necessary to break away from crude animality — and this has still not been fully achieved. As I wrote in Reenchanting Humanity, animality is basically the realm of adaptation to what exists, and animal life is marked by a good deal of suffering even without the efforts of human beings. People can and should go beyond animality into the realm of culture. Human beings can innovate — they can create and develop. Marx's theory of labor is very useful on this score, because it conceives of labor not only as a source of value but above all as a process of self-formation and social formation. It is through labor, said Marx, that human beings go beyond mere animality. People take the conditions of the world and, potentially at least, can form them more and more to meet human needs.

But defining human needs has always been very problematical. They are obviously historically conditioned. In earlier societies in most of the world, where resources were scarce, people were very poor indeed, and their basic needs could be satisfied only by very hard work. In earlier times, for example, even in northern climates, central heating would have been inconceivable or, later, considered an extravagant luxury. People often had a fireplace in only one room of their home. But today central heating is considered a basic need. Still, in our commodity society, other things that are considered "needs" are actually ridiculous trivialities. I'm concerned with a potentially post-scarcity society that produces enough to meet all the basic needs of life. And if society were rational, it could redistribute our abundant resources so that people could live comfortably without too much work and very little toil. We could have a true paradise and minimalize suffering in the social and even the natural world.

I don't know what the ideal society is, but it should finally resolve the social question: the domination of human beings and the exploitation of human labor. To achieve a society free of domination and exploitation, we need a certain level of economic development - I agree with Marx on that score. A free and rational society will have economic and technological preconditions: I don't think that people could have a good society in the wastes of the Sahara Desert with nothing more than some camels. On the other hand, I don't think the good life requires us to have magnificent estates, ten swimming pools, and fifty television sets. Some libertarians might object: "Well, if somebody wants ten swimming pools, they should be allowed to have them. You shouldn't try to stop them. They are autonomous." I would reply that acceptable needs should be determined by the community as a whole — the municipality. An assembly there can say: "Two pairs of shoes is enough. You don't need ten." They can say that a certain limit is enough, that we don't need the sky.

Has there been progress in human society? Yes and no, but without the rise of civilization and its history, even with all its horrors, human life would have constituted little more than animality. Forgive me, but I don't want to live in a world that is stagnant and vacuous.

DV: What do you think of the notion of voluntary simplicity?

MB: We shouldn't load ourselves up with so many goods and spend our lives thinking about how we should have much more of everything. But voluntary simplicity often makes a religion out of a life of virtual poverty: The less one needs, it seems to say, the better one is. That's a simplistic statement. The more cultivated and rational our needs are, the better we are, indeed the more human we are. We could have a long discussion about what "cultivated" and "rational" mean, but the point is that needs evolve. I don't want to live like a monk, but like a knowledgeable, cultured human being. And today that requires fulfilling many needs, like books, music recordings, decent food, appropriate clothing, and the like. I know what it is to live in poverty, to live without a secure home. New York in the 1930s was not a ball, and I am puzzled by people who choose to live with the technologies of seventy years ago in the name of "voluntary simplicity."

DV: You've been very critical of the concept of biocentrism as well. I think of nature as natural evolution, the evolution above all of organic life and the potentialities that it may actualize. I see in the natural world the potentiality of actualizing subjectivity and thinking; that human beings can potentially become nature rendered self-conscious. So I can never be biocentric. In fact I think human beings are still the most remarkable product of natural evolution.

DV: Aristotle seems to loom behind your ideas.

MB: Yes, as do a lot of philosophers in the history of ideas. I have great respect for Aristotle, especially because his outlook is permeated with ideas of growth and the unfolding of potentialities and development. But because of the limitations of his time, Aristotle's overall concept of nature is static: he had no concept of natural evolution. He regarded his hierarchical system of life as a given. In the nineteenth century Hegel, who was the other great developmental thinker, knew about theories of natural evolution (although he died a few decades before The Origin of Species was published). But he rejected them in volume 2 of his Encyclopedia. Today we have the benefit of knowing about organic evolution and can allow it to inform our thinking.

Please let me stress one debt that I must always acknowledge. Marx taught me to look for connections between phenomena, to synthesize, and to place the problem of humanity and nature and their interaction into the context of philosophy and history. My concept of the natural world is thus evolutionary and dynamic. In the 1950s, I brought together my understanding of Aristotle, Hegel, and other philosophers with the problems of humanity's place in the natural world. To me, human beings are a potential fulfillment of natural evolution — which is the way I define the word nature. My thinking on this matter culminated in The Ecology of Freedom and my books on philosophy and history. For me it's always a question of synthesis and, above all, the idea that humanity is what gives nature meaning. I would not want to be on this planet with only mammoths or dinosaurs. The potentiality that human beings could emerge has always been latent in natural evolution. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but the point is: human beings are here, and we have to explain what existed in natural evolution that brought about their evolution.

DV: Aren't you afraid of falling into "anthropocentrism"? Even if you don't say the Earth was made for human beings, you maintain that humans are the most valuable beings on Earth. I can imagine many people calling this anthropocentrism.

MB: The word anthropocentrism doesn't frighten me. It implies that the natural world was "made for" human beings by some sort of deity. This, in my opinion, is absurd. One of my critics, Robyn Eckersley, challenged me in the journal Environmental Ethics to explain, "Why should human thinking be regarded more valuable than the navigational skills of birds?" But that's just a silly question. In "navigating," birds are affected by the magnetic field of the Earth, they're affected by the changes of temperature; they're adapting to their surroundings. But human beings, crucially, can innovate, as I pointed out, and they live on another level of phenomena, culture. They can make airplanes, and they know how to navigate. Now they can go beyond birds and farther than birds and higher than birds.

Human beings differ profoundly from all living things, because potentially at least, they can be natural evolution rendered self-conscious. They can be a "natural force," so to speak, that can enter into that evolution, reflect upon it, and act on it empathically, morally, and rationally, to make life a better experience for animals as well as themselves.

DV: Can we come back to your thesis that there is no solution to the environmental crisis without solving social problems?

MB: By all means. The society we live in was made by the bourgeoisie and its use of modern industry. We can't ignore the fact that we are living in a capitalist world. Contrary to what Marxism believed, capitalism is not falling apart — it is disturbingly stable. Cyclical depressions used to take place every ten years or so. But now there hasn't been a depression in decades. Lenin predicted that capitalism was entering a period of war and socialist revolutions. It might have done so between 1914 and 1945 or 1950, but it's not doing so today — at least, not on a scale comparable to the twentieth-century world wars.

What capitalism is doing is creating a synthetic environment, one in which "wilderness" is more of a metaphor than a reality. That's particularly true in the United States, which has a long history of dealing with "wilderness." Here "wilderness" is a formative cultural concept. Today American deep ecologists sing the praises of wilderness, by which they seem to mean places like Glacier National Park and Olympic National Park. But Indians were living in and transforming those places long before any Europeans came, thousands of years ago. In fact, human beings began to change the planet as far back as the time of Homo erectus and perhaps even earlier. They started burning forests systematically soon after they learned to make and use fire.

Now, especially, it's ridiculous to believe in the myth of wilderness. There are no wilderness areas anymore. Yes, wild animals are now drifting into the cities - deer are coming into Burlington, wolves are going into Nome, Alaska. Wild animals look for food in urban garbage cans. There are polar bears in Churchill, on the Hudson Bay, about 700 of them. They all congregate there, breaking open garbage cans and trying to open the doors of houses. But wilderness areas are gone — they're reserves. The whole planet has been changed, and now the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers are melting. A synthetic world is being created that flatly contradicts deep ecology hopes about returning to primeval nature.

Will science and technology be able to keep up with this destruction, prevent the worst damage, and make this synthetic world sustainable? That issue hangs in the balance. I don't know anymore. Things that seemed inconceivable 40 years ago have now come into existence. Scientists have mapped the human genome, they have discovered the secrets of life - genes, genetics, and bioengineering. They have discovered the secrets of matter - nuclear energy, nucleonics. Maybe your generation or your children will witness innovations that will prevent the synthetic world from becoming uninhabitable.

The whole ecological question is up for grabs today, and people should focus on the main thing: to try to create a free, rational — and ecologically oriented — society. We have to raise consciousness so that reason and an ecological outlook will prevail. This is a profoundly social — and I should add political — problem. And we have to create a movement that is educational and political, that has a real philosophy, a real concept of history, a real economics, a real politics, and a real ecological sensibility. This movement has to talk to people, assuming - and this is a big problem - that their minds are not destroyed by capitalism. People have to learn from history and understand what they can apply from the past to the present and future. We have to have a creative point of view. We can't just be against something, we have to offer alternatives, rational and ecological ones, and offer ways to change this society. Basically, if we are to resolve the ecological crisis today, we have to build a new political culture.

Unfortunately, commodification is not only turning everything into an object of exchange, it is changing the way people think. The famous question in America today is "What's the bottom line?" That's the language of accounting, of business. It frightens me that people think in those terms.

DV: People like to "invest" in their children…

MB: Yes, especially by educating them to go out and make money.

DV: You've written that the movements of the 1960s were opposed to commodification — and that while the 1960s were radical, the 1970s were reactionary.

MB: Relatively so, compared with today. In terms of their potentiality for making social change, the 1960s were more interesting than the 1970s. In the 1960s ecology seemed to be developing toward a revolutionary outlook, toward social ecology. The counterculture, it seemed, was challenging hierarchy and elitism. Feminism was expressing an opposition to hierarchy. Utopian wishes favored humanly scaled and ecological communities.

But in the 1970s things changed. The counterculture drifted into the New Age. Much of feminism turned into a lobbying movement for getting women into corporations and high military positions. That change is hardly progressive. The 1960s, in effect, were swallowed up by capitalism. What is revolutionary today about wearing a beard and wearing long hair? Nothing. Many 1960s radicals have since become professors and teach postmodernism. And social ecology, founded in the 1960s and truly radical, was to a great extent replaced by deep ecology, whose naive biocentrism I find regressive at best.

DV: In my country, deep ecology is often labeled a very radical movement. I know that "radical" is not necessarily the opposite of "reactionary" - you can be reactionary in a radical way. I just mean that deep ecology is not usually taken as a movement for conserving the political status quo.

MB: It's not the first time popular opinion is wrong. Capitalism has a remarkable ability to take ideas that seem to be against it and use them to deflect attention from the real problems of capitalism itself. For example, believers in deep ecology don't focus on capitalism as the source of ecological ills, or hierarchy, for that matter. They blame technology and certain religions. They call for greater spiritual development, getting in tune with the cosmos, becoming part of the web of life. They are not building a social movement — they're offering a religion. This spiritual rubbish, decorated with ecological language, ultimately supports the status quo. Capitalism is ready to embrace any religion, as long as it doesn't have to surrender its profits.

A good example that supports my concerns is that deep ecology has distorted radical ecology into an apologia for statism. In a recent interview, Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology who has called himself a sort of Gandhian anarchist, recently came out in support of a strong centralized state. He wants a strong centralized state because, he believes, if you leave the solution to ecological problems up to small localities, they will do great ecological damage. Yes, in a capitalist society, to be sure; but strong centralized states will do that in any society. In the same interview he attacked me for "localism" — as if I had never written about interdependence and confederation. But Naess is popular because he gives people an ecology — a spiritual ecology — that is very personal. And that is easy to understand, especially when vast numbers of people go to psychoanalysts and movies where all they hear about is love affairs and personal problems.

DV: What do you find unacceptable about deep ecology's diagnosis of the roots of the environmental crisis?

MB: First of all, it addresses people's attitudes, not social issues. Most deep ecologists seem to think that by changing human attitudes alone, we can produce an ecological, beautiful, harmonious world, in which all forms of life, and human beings among them, can live in harmony. Now, I regard that as the height of naïveté. To begin with, our social environment is extremely important in shaping the acceptability of new ideas. Many centuries ago - whether rightly or wrongly - Roger Bacon, a monk, anticipated many ideas that modern science and engineering turned into realities. But he lived in the 13th century, and the world around him was so socially conditioned by the Church and hierarchy that his fairly naturalistic ideas were not accepted. Who knows how many of these Roger Bacons existed before him, people who died in obscurity?

Today we are faced with a basically anti-ecological social environment. The social environment today favors atomization and money-making. People look after themselves, after their families, after their jobs, after their income, and that pretty much constitutes their concerns. It's not like in the 1930s, when everyone I knew seemed concerned above all with changing the world. There were always group meetings, street-corner meetings, there was activity, vitality, and a high degree of public concern. We had a radical, lively political culture. We were embattled especially against the dangers of fascism.

Now being embattled about anything is regarded as disruptive: When people speak out in anger, they are told, "You're rocking the boat. We have to hug each other." It's a hugging culture. It's a culture that fosters passivity. And deep ecology plays up to these moods. Deep ecology emphasizes our kinship with birds and spiders, our place in a supposed mystical circle of life, not differences in wealth and lifeways. At something called a "Council of all Beings," people sit in a circle, and one person says: "I represent rabbits." Another person says: "I represent trees." Deep ecologists love these rituals. Actually, people represent nothing but themselves. Such deceptions are all over the place in America. And we all have to live in harmony with each other! Tell it to people of color and oppressed women.

DV: But Joanna Macy, the author of that ritual, does not seem to be a passive person. Many other deep ecologists are very active as well.

MB: I don't know about her recent activities, and certainly some deep ecologists participate in protests around environmental issues. But most deep ecologists emphasize, as Macy does, spiritual change over political and social change, and the cultivation of a reverential consciousness or sensibility about the natural world rather than organization and movement building. They talk about inwardness and Buddhism and archetypes rather than the real social forces that produce the ecological crisis. They call upon human beings to follow their instincts and feeling, not remake the world according to reason. This is a turn toward private sensibility rather than public action and often produces little more than lifestyle changes. That easily leads to accommodation. Other aspects of deep ecology — its biocentrism — are simply reactionary.

DV: I heard that Prince Charles calls himself a deep ecologist. When did you realize for the first time the reactionary character of deep ecology?

MB: In the very beginning, when I heard about biocentrism. In the mid-1980s, I met the deep ecologist Bill Devall at a conference in Wisconsin, where we had a discussion, and he talked about it. I tried to be friendly enough, but I had to criticize this idea. In the summer of 1986 at the first national gathering of the American Greens at Amherst, Massachusetts, I launched a public criticism of deep ecology. I was the keynote speaker, and I distributed an article called "Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology." I didn't realize at the time that I was dealing with people who didn't want to debate ideas, and because I was very sharp, I antagonized a lot of them. They paid less attention to what I had said than to my tone. That was the big issue — my tone! I was criticizing David Foreman for his statement that we should let Ethiopian children starve and "let nature take its course," but his reactionary views bothered them less than they way I criticized him.

I don't know what's going on among deep ecologists today. I don't read their press anymore. I'm too old to waste my limited time reading their materials. I've already written what I had to say about them.

DV: I've met many people within the environmental movement who have a rather equivocal view of modern society or modernity in a broader sense, covering technology, specific sets of ideas, lifestyle, and so on. They acknowledge that modernity has brought many positives - or at least they do not want to simply go back to the pre-modern society - but they do not want to talk about these positives publicly. Their rationale is we are overmodernized right now, so putting the pendulum into balance requires talking only about the opposite extreme: since we face the negative effects of technology, let's minimize talking about its positives. What do you think of this shyness? Is it a good strategy?

MB: Let's face it — by deliberately telling people things that they know are not true — by refusing to acknowledge the positive aspects of modernity — these people are being dishonest. I don't approve of such strategic falsification, which is what it amounts to. If you want people to work with you, you can't patronize them by talking down to them and telling them fairy tales. You have to tell them the whole story, not just the parts that serve your cause. You have to talk to them as intelligent, competent people. Otherwise there is no purpose to our educational efforts. By treating people like children, we are behaving like the politicians we criticize.

The fact is that we will have to use modern technology in a different social order. There's no sense in misleading people about that. Nowadays technology obviously can be used to produce the greatest amount of destruction, but it can also be used to produce the great amounts of good. Even if we succeed in preserving more forests, open land, and wildlife, we will still need technology desperately to keep these forests, open land, and wildlife intact. It will take high levels of technology to engage in ecological restoration and maintenance.

The real problem is not technology itself — although there are some technologies, admittedly, like nuclear energy, that I'd like to see disappear. The basic question we face is, by what standards and toward what ends do we use technology? Today its is used primarily to make money, not to improve people's lives. In this country now there's a big scandal about defective automobile tires. The Firestone tires on many large "sport utility vehicles" have fallen apart when the vehicle is going at high speeds. Everyone in the country knows that this problem stems from one thing: the companies are producing cheap or unsuitable goods to make larger profits. The people don't believe fairy tales about benevolent auto manufacturers.

Sooner or later, however, society will produce vehicles and tires that never wear out but can be handed down from generation to generation. If this technology is used for rational ends, it will be a boon. Therefore I can't single out technology alone as the source of the problem. I can single out the reasons for which technology is being used and toward what ends.

We live in a very confusing time. Sometimes people look for easy answers to complex questions. If a machine or item functions poorly, it is easy to blame technology rather than the competitive corporations that try to make money, or to blame people's attitudes rather than the mass media that shapes people's thinking, or to say we should go back to old ideologies — Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, orthodox Marxism, orthodox anarchism, even orthodox capitalism — for solutions.

People need new ideas based on reason, not superstition; on freedom, not personal autonomy; on creativity, not adaptation; on coherence, not chaos; and on a vision of a free society, based on popular assemblies and confederalism, not on rulers and a state. If we do not organize a real movement — a structured movement — that tries to guide people toward a rational society based on reason and freedom, we face eventual disaster. We cannot withdraw into our "autonomous" egos or retreat to a primitive, indeed unknown past. We must change this insane world, or else society will dissolve into an irrational barbarism — as it is already beginning to do these days.

David Vanek (born in 1974) does postgraduate studies in philosophy at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, where he is also the editor of Sedma Generace (Seventh Generation) magazine, a publication of Friends of the Earth Czech Republic. He interviewed Bookchin in Burlington, Vermont, in the summer of 2000. The interview was originally published in Sedma Generace.



What is Social Ecology? Interview 2

What is Social Ecology? | Vol. 3, No. 1
Reflections
An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology

By Murray Bookchin


The extent to which radical versions of environmentalism underwent sweeping metamorphoses and evolved into revolutionary ideologies when the New Left came of age is difficult to convey to the present generation, which has been almost completely divorced from the ebullient days of the New Left, not to speak of all the major problems in classical socialism, especially in its Marxist form. These changes burden us to this very day.

In fact, the way in which the New Left initially reacted to my writings on social ecology, even to such manifesto-type articles as my “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”(1964), was very similar to the way my comrades of the Old Left would have reacted in the 1930s. Perhaps the most sophisticated leftist “movement” of the sixties—and certainly the most arrogant, namely, the French Situationists and their American hangers-on—witlessly denounced me as “Smokey the Bear”(a childlike symbol of the US Forest Service!), so irrelevant was the issue of humanity’s place in the natural world to the Left of the sixties. Accordingly, I was asked repeatedly where the “class struggle” was located in my writings—as though the “class struggle” was not implicit in everything I wrote!—after which I was lectured on how Marx and Engels were “really” firm adherents of the very views for which I had been denounced a few years earlier. My dogmatic opponents of the Left began to shift their ground by trying to fit environmental issues into such frameworks such as the importance of conservation in Marx and Engels’s writings. In short, the Left had been oblivious to ecological issues, which were merely regarded as a “petty bourgeois” endeavor to redirect public attention away from a hazy need to abolish capitalism pure and simple!

This criticism, to be sure, was not without a certain measure of truth. Anything resembling a socially oriented ecology, such William Vogt’s Our Plundered Planet in the fifties and especially Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, was more concerned with the impacts of human population growth and the loss of wildlife in an increasingly industrialized world than with the material welfare of humanity and the impact of hierarchy on attempts to create a rational society. In some respects, ecologists were inspired by the reactionary motifs raised by Ernst Haeckel, who created the word “ecology” in the 1880s, notably the harm produced by “humanity” on the planet rather than the effects of the capitalist system in producing ostensibly “biological problems.” Although Carson attacked the chemical industry for promoting the use of toxic pesticides, perceptive readers could see that she was more concerned with their impact on birds than on people. Nor did she and other ecological critics examine the socially and negatively systemic sources that produced a growing disequilibrium between nonhuman nature and society. She and her fellow ecological critics often seemed to think in terms of an abstract “humanity” (whatever that socially ambiguous word means) as distinguished from classes. To Carson and her admirers, it was not a specific social order—namely, capitalism and entrepreneurial rivalry—that was responsible for the ecological destruction that was undermining the biosphere but “immoral” human behavior.

By contrast, social ecology completely inverted the meaning and implications of society’s interaction with the natural world. When I first began to use the rarely employed term “social ecology” during 1964 in my essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” I emphasized that the idea of dominating nature has its origins in the very real domination of human by human—that is, in hierarchy. These status groups, I insisted could continue to exist even if economic classes were abolished.

Secondly, hierarchy had to be abolished by institutional changes that were no less profound and far reaching than those needed to abolish classes. This placed “ecology” on an entirely new level of inquiry and praxis, bringing it far above a solicitous, often romantic and mystical engagement with an undefined “nature” and a love-affair with “wildlife.” Social ecology was concerned with the most intimate relations between human beings and the organic world around them. Social ecology, in effect, gave ecology a sharp revolutionary and political edge. In other words, we were obliged to seek changes not only in the objective realm of economic relations but also in the subjective realm of cultural, ethical, aesthetic, personal, and psychological areas of inquiry.

Most fundamentally, these relations exist at the very base of all social life: notably, the ways in which we interact with the natural world, especially through labor, even in the simplest forms of society, such as tribal and village stages of social formation. And certainly, if we had major negative ecological disequilibria between humanity and the natural world which could threaten the very existence of our species, we had to understand how these disequilibria emerged; what we even meant by the word “nature;” how did society emerge out of the natural world; how did it necessarily alienate itself from elemental natural relations; how and why did basic social institutions such as government, law, the state, even classes emerge dialectically from each other before human society came into its own; and in ways that went beyond mere instinct and custom, not to speak of patricentricity, patriarchy, and a host of similar “cultural” relations whose emergence are not easily explained by economic factors alone.



But, it would be an error to view the foregoing presentation of what I would call a minimal account of social ecology as the only theoretical source by which one can teach a course on the subject. I did not develop social ecology only because I was disturbed by the “nature versus society” problem, although it was never far from my mind. Fundamental to my development of social ecology is a crisis that developed in socialist theory itself, one that I regard as unresolvable in a strictly conventional Marxist or anarchist framework—or to use the most all-encompassing phrase of all: proletarian socialism.

This was a painful problem for me to cope with because I did not come to a belief in proletarian socialism as a result of an academic storm in a teacup. I was a very passionate participant in what I thought was a revolutionary labor movement, notably as a member of the Communist youth movement early in the 1930s and as result of a thorough training in Marxism and Bolshevism. I became a rank-and-file leader of the Young Communist League as early as 1933 and was militantly loyal to its ultra-revolutionary program (the reckless insurrectionism promulgated by the Communist International in 1928, or so-called “Third Period” line). Stalin had yet to make his reputation as the major figure that he became in the late thirties; accordingly, my comrades and I of that period never regarded ourselves as “Stalinists” but simply as committed Communists or Marxists who adhered to Lenin’s revolutionary views.

As a result, I was thoroughly, even intensively trained in classical Marxism. This background provided me with a unique insight into problems that, while forgotten at present by young radicals, haunts all of their social projects. Born when the Russian Revolution was still a recent event; when Makhno was still carrying on his guerrilla war in Ukraine; when Lenin, Trotsky, and nearly all the major theorists and activists of the first three decades of the century were still fairly young men; I had the rare chance to imbibe all the fundamental issues and live through most of the great civil conflicts of the era—from the still buoyant aftermath of the Russian Revolution to the tragic outcome of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1937 to 1939. By the outbreak of the Second World War, I was well versed in the issues the war raised for my generation early in the century.

Again, it is difficult to convey to young people, today, how differently proletarian socialists thought and the ideals to which they were committed prior to 1950, which I regard as the year in which proletarian socialism was faced by its most decisive crisis. What cannot be emphasized too strongly is that all of us who survived the ideological debacle produced by the war had to deal with the complete failure of all the prognoses we held five years earlier. Resource Depletion - Jared RognessAlmost all who you care to single out from the interwar period (1917-1940), be it a Lenin, a Trotsky (in my earnest opinion, the most optimistic and the most competent theorist of the period), even going back in time to Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring and the like, were absolutely convinced that capitalism was in its “death throes.” The most widely used formulation during this stormy period—far more insurgent than the often pseudo-revolutionism of the sixties—was the expression that capitalism (as I have already observed) was “moribund,” or facing the imminent certainty of “collapse.” Nothing seemed more evident at the time than the apocalyptic belief that we were witnessing the “last days” of bourgeois society, notwithstanding the fact that fascism was on the march throughout Europe and that proletarian socialist ideology was waning and facing defeat.



The outbreak of the Second World War left no doubt in our minds that the conflict would end in socialist revolutions—or else it was faced with barbarism. And, by barbarism, we meant the expansion of Nazism—of mass starvation, ethnic extermination, concentration camps, a monstrous totalitarian state, and mass graves throughout Europe, if not America and Asia. If socialism did not end the war by producing a new society, barbarism was a historic inevitability. For us, the victory of socialism was a near certainty, for it was inconceivable that Europe, in particular, could go through the mass slaughter that marked the First World War without producing successful proletarian revolutions. Barbarism was the only alternative to a failure by the working class. To a man like Trotsky, who Stalin had killed in the year that saw the outbreak of the world conflict, should barbarism become established in the world, we would have to revise all the expectations provided by Marxism and adopt a historically new ideological perspective.

As we know after more than a half century, we were wrong, indeed terribly so. Neither socialism nor fascism emerged from the war, but, to our amazement, liberal capitalism—with its welfare state and the extension of “bourgeois democracy” in most of Western Europe and the United States. Indeed, capitalism stabilized itself in the historic sense that a “cold war” provided the framework for thinking out social problems—a framework to which the masses clung for nearly fifty years. Capitalism, in short, managed to stabilize itself to a point where it was able to avoid any major economic, not to speak of any social crisis. The New Left, while retaining many features of the Old Left, essentially tried (and failed) to create a cultural “crisis” as a substitute for a revolutionary one—which, as we now know, became a new industry and a commercial success in its own right.

Moreover, capitalism, continued to deepen its hold on society on a scale and to an extent it had never done during the course of its history. All the vestigial features of pre-capitalist society with their monarchical, quasi-feudal, agrarian and craft strata that were still prevalent in Germany, France, and, at least, widespread in England in 1914 gave way, unevenly to be sure, to huge industrial corporations, mass production, the mechanization of all aspects of the economy, widespread commodification at the very base of economic life and monopolization and global accumulation at its summits—i.e. the spread of capitalism into every niche of social life. The concept of “Fordism” was quite known to the Old Left long before it was adopted by New Left academics under such old names as “mass production” and “commodification.”

Finally, the proletariat not only dwindled vastly in numbers (contrary to all of Marx’s expectations) but also in class-consciousness. Workers began to lose their sense of class identity, even began to see themselves as property owners, and significantly altered their social expectations. Home ownership, the acquisition of land, cars, and most significantly, stock ownership now became commonplace. Workers’ children were expected to go to colleges and universities, or, least, enter the professions or create self-employed enterprises. So vastly had class solidarity waned that the once-sturdy proletariat began to vote for conservative parties and join with reactionaries in opposing environmental conservation, gender equality, immigration from impoverished countries, ethnic equality, and similar issues. Paris’s famous prewar 1940 “red belt,” which famously gave its votes to the French Communists as the embodiment of the Russian Revolution in Western Europe, found itself voting, often enthusiastically, for the neo-fascism of the French reactionary, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Notwithstanding the multitude of “breakdown” theories that Marxists and even anarchists advanced during the interwar period, capitalism has proven to be more sturdy and robust during the past fifty years than it was over the course of its entire history. Not only did commodification—its most salient feature—spread throughout the entire world, but it was even spared the recurrence of its notorious “periodic crises” or “business cycles” which reminded the world that a market economy is inherently unstable. Indeed, contrary to all the expectations that followed from Marx’s theories of social life-cycles, the supposition that capitalism would become an obstacle to the development of technology—another salient feature of Marx’s “moribund” society—proved to be nonsense. As a force for advances in industry and technical sophistication, capitalism exhibits incredible vitality—notwithstanding Marx’s prediction that it would soon become incapable of technical innovation and change. Indeed, all the features that were to mark a “moribund” economy have now appeared in reverse: unending technological advances, the absence of the heralded “pauperization” of the working class in the classical areas of capitalist development (England, France, western Europe generally, and the United States), the disappearance of chronic economic crises, and the waning of class consciousness.

By the 1950s, it was self-evident that Marxist (and anarchist) “breakdown” scenarios were palpable nonsense. The notion that the death of capitalism owing to an “economic imperative,” such as the “decline in the rate of profit” (a theoretical construct of Volume III of Capital) constituted a basic explanation for the self-destruction of capitalism was completely untenable. The end of the Second World War brought neither barbarism nor socialism but rather an ideological “vacuum,” so to speak, that threatened, like a huge black hole, to extinguish the veracity of Marx’s entire theoretical corpus. Capitalism, I would like to reiterate, had recovered from the war, as I have noted, with unprecedented resiliency and extended its grip on society with unprecedented tenacity. As the middle of the fifties came into view, nearly all the monarchies, their political and bureaucratic underpinnings; the extensive craft, professional, and agrarian strata that barely a generation earlier had linked the Western European economy with its feudal past—virtually all had been effaced or divested of the authority they enjoyed a generation earlier. Gone were the Prussian Junkers who survived the First World War, the tsars, dukes, and barons who peopled the upper classes of central and southern Europe, the status groups that presided over the academies well into the thirties, and the like. What the German Kaiser and, later, Hitler tried to achieve with terrible weapons and millions of corpses in 1914 and 1940, the German Bundesrepublik achieved with bundles of Deutsche Marks and, more recently, a patina of pacifism!!



It cannot be emphasized too strongly that, in the absence of an imperative to challenge the desirability of a capitalistic society, and no less importantly, the need to demonstrate that capitalism’s death in the foreseeable future was “inevitable,” no objective reason existed for the abolition of bourgeois society. Marx, at least, had satisfied this need with an economic imperative, namely, an immense body of theory (unparalleled in its scope and historical knowledge). As I have noted, this theory was based on such precepts as a chronic crisis produced by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and by a structurally sophisticated class analysis that inevitably pitted a proletarian majority of an industrialized country against a dwindling number of capitalists. By the 1950s, however, Marxism revealed for all who have eyes to see, that its traditional imperative was completely unsound when compared with the realities of the postwar world, nor could its economic imperative be renovated to meet the challenges posed by the last half of the twentieth century.

It was out of the failure of Marx’s economic imperative that social ecology was born—not solely because of the impact of pollution, urban degradation, toxic food additives, and the like. When, in 1950, I wrote my almost book length article, “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” in No. 10 of Contemporary Issues, the dangers to public health posed by the chemicalization of food by pesticide residues, preservatives, coloring matter, and the like were still relatively minor issues. The problem of nuclear fallout, the vast number and quantity of pollutants that were to threaten the health of many millions of people, and, later, in 1964, the hazard to the world’s climate created by carbon dioxide, were not immediate issues or widely foreseeable ones. The apocalyptic nature of the 1950 article was dismissed by my critics as “wild and reckless” attacks upon the existing society. Actually, I was trying to provide a viable substitute for Marx’s defunct economic imperative, namely an ecological imperative that, if thought out (as I tried to do in The Ecology of Freedom) would show that capitalism stood in an irreconcilable contradiction with the natural world. Nearly all my articles and books—such as Our Synthetic Environment (1962), followed two years later by my widely circulated article, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” and a companion article, “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” (1965)—were guided primarily by this project.

I should note that it was in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” that I used the words, “social ecology” for the first time and began to sketch out the complex body of ideas that ultimately reached their elaboration in The Ecology of Freedom, two decades later. Let me be quite outspoken: it was not an unbridled passion for wildlife, wilderness, organic food, primitivism, craft-like methods of production, villages (as against cities), “localism,” a belief that “small is beautiful”—not to speak of Asian mysticism, spiritualism, naturism, etcetera—that led me to formulate and promote social ecology. I was guided by the compelling—indeed, challenging—need to formulate a viable imperative that doomed capitalism to self-extinction. As the thirties and the war revealed, it was not simply the class war between the proletariat and the capitalist class—driven almost exclusively by economic forces and resulting from the concentration of capital—that were destined to destabilize capitalism and produce a revolution. More fundamentally, the crisis produced by capitalism’s “grow or die” imperative could be expected to drive society into a devastating contradiction with the natural world. Capital, in effect, would be compelled to simplify all the ecosystems on whose complexity evolution depended. Driven by its competitive relations and rivalries, capitalism would be obliged to turn soil into sand, the atmosphere and the planet’s waterways into sewers, and warm the planet to a point where the entire climatic integrity of the world would be radically altered because of the greenhouse effect.

In short, precisely because capitalism was, by definition, a competitive and commodity-based economy, it would be compelled to turn the complex into the simple and give rise to a planet that was incompatible environmentally with advanced life forms. The growth of capitalism was incompatible with the evolution of biotic complexity as such—and certainly, with the development of human life and the evolution of human society.

What is important to see is that social ecology thus revealed a crisis between the natural world and capitalism that was, if anything, more fundamental than the crisis that was imputed to the falling rate of profit and its alleged consequences. Moreover, social ecology opened the very real question of the kind of society that would have to follow the abolition of a capitalist economy. Self-styled Marxists (in all fairness, unlike Marx and Engels) made a virtue out of a centralized, bureaucratically planned, and a highly technocratic ideal of progress, based on an urban and mechanistic culture that was almost a parody of Corbusier’s cityscapes.

Social ecology tried to fill the gap between the industrial and agrarian worlds, not by condemning machinery, mass production, or even industrial agriculture. My “Toward a Liberatory Technology” was deprecated by anarchists and Marxists alike: the former because the article celebrated the use of new gardening machines as a substitute for backbreaking toil; the latter precisely because it was “too utopian” in its aspirations. Frankly, I regarded both of my supposed “failings” as real virtues that, with quality production in all spheres of economic life, freed humanity from the yoke of toil and a technocratic world. Moreover, there were aspects of the past which, given modern technics and means of communication were desiderata because they could lighten work and vastly increase productivity, without which humanity would be afflicted with fears of material scarcity. Such technological advances were also needed to provide sufficient free time for active participation in public affairs. Let me add, again, that my critics—many of whom were later to high-jack my alleged “failings”—read “could” to mean “would,” and pompously declared that if “post-scarcity” simply meant we already had tremendous technological advances, why were we still beset with poverty and exhausting toil? As though capitalism, like a slot machine, “would” always deliver the most optimal returns on the goodies its technology could produce! Typically, they failed to observe that I had repeatedly warned my readers that almost nothing could emerge from within the context of a market economy that was not tainted by the pathologies of competition, rivalry, and, quite bluntly, pure and simple greed!

By contrast, social ecology’s ecological imperative—the contradiction between a competitive society and the natural world—is not simply theoretical. By the eighties, it had been tested by the massive degradation that is occurring in the social as well as the natural world. Speaking for myself, I am astonished by the rapid onset of the greenhouse effect, which, in 1964, I predicted in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” as a possibility that would require two or more centuries to unfold. Yet, as early as the eighties and nineties, the contradiction between capitalism and the natural world was becoming a very visible reality. Thereafter, the greenhouse effect and other destructive imbalances have assumed proportions that even outweigh more “commonplace” problems such as soil erosion and waste disposal.

This philosophy forms the basis for an educative outlook that yields a lengthy dialectical history and exposition of the phases of human development as it emerges out from natural evolution into social evolution. The philosophy of social ecology centers around a dialectical unfolding of a “legacy of freedom” that not only intertwines but interacts with a “legacy of domination,” and includes the evolution of a concept of justice that leads into an ever-expanding concept of freedom, of scarcity into post-scarcity, of folkdom into citizenship, of hierarchy into class, and, hopefully, a growing horizon of freedom (whose termination, if any, we are not yet equipped to foresee), yielding libertarian municipalities and institutions. Taken together, as a whole, this educative outlook forms the basis for a practical theory of politics.



We are now living not only in a different century that the Institute for Social Ecology was founded—the ISE was founded, I would remind you, in 1974, nearly thirty years ago. I would sound to young people today as an alien enterprise from a very different world than the one that exists today. The world I knew still had a workers’ movement in the US and Europe, and the issues it had to confront differ qualitatively from those that have emerged in the past two decades.

Yet it would be unpardonable if we forgot that socialism was meant to be a rational society, not a replication of Stalinism and totalitarianism. Nor can we be permitted to forget that it will require a profound social imperative—an ecological imperative, in my view—to move this mass, even lethargic society along rational lines. We must always remember that socialism will come about as the result of logical necessity, the product of deep-seated and compelling forces for social change, not simply “good vibes.” To give these precepts a lived meaning, we shall have to create an educational vanguard to keep the terrible pathologies of our day under control, at the vary least, and abolish them at the very most.

For such demands upon our energy and our intelligence, our educational activities must result in a movement, not simply in a lifestyle that celebrates its “freedom” in a closeted community at a distance from real centers of activity and conflict. I cannot emphasize enough that our education, be it at the ISE or among “affinity groups,” will be little more than a form of self-indulgence if it is restricted to our minds, completely removed from an active life.

I would be the first to acknowledge that action is only possible when there is a real, dissident public life. For the present, I see no widespread inclination to give reality to a movement for libertarian municipalism, which, at the turn of the new century, lies dormant as a prospect for a new politics. Marx once perceptively noted in his early writings that not only must the Idea follow reality, but also reality must follow the Idea. This aphorism might well be regarded as a recognition of the Hegelian notion that freedom is a recognition of necessity in the sense that we need sufficient preconditions to produce the most effective conditions for social change. When this is not so, the most brilliant of ideas lie almost silently in wait for society itself to ripen and permit the struggle for freedom to germinate. It is then that we can give to education a priority that defies all false appeals to activism for its own sake.

But one proviso must be voiced: ideas are only true when they are rational. Today, when rationality and consistency are deprecated in the name of postmodernist chic, we carry a double burden of trying to sustain, often by education alone, reason against irrationalism, and to know when to act as well as how to do so. In such cases, let me note that education, too, is a form of activism and must always be cultivated as such.I
Notes

This article is an abridged version of a longer letter from the author to Michael Caplan.


Economics in a Social Ecological Society

What is Social Ecology? | Vol. 3, No. 1
Economics in a Social-Ecological Society

By Peter Staudenmaier

Town and Country Landscape - Michael Caplan

In the midst of our struggles for a better world, social ecologists have frequently engaged in critical dialogue with other strands of radical thought about just what kind of world we’re struggling for. Such dialogues often address the question of how people in a liberated future will organize their material relationships with one another and with the natural world. What would economics look like in an ecological society? How might free communities arrange their livelihood?

Exploring questions such as these requires us to exercise an important faculty of dialectical philosophy: the capacity to think speculatively. Envisioning a future beyond capitalism and the state means thinking past the world around us and putting ourselves inside of a different world, a world structured in a very different way, a world that has developed some of the social and ecological potentials that we see around us, in distorted form, today. It means trying to see the world not merely as it is, but as it ought to be.

Social ecologists have put forward a number of concrete proposals over the years for a municipalized economy and a moral economy. These proposals point toward what Bookchin calls “the recovery of the productive process itself as an ecological mediation of humanity with nature.” What these practical proposals have in common is an underlying conception of how complex economies could be run differently, without markets or classes or bureaucracy, along egalitarian and participatory lines. Social ecologists argue that the economic mechanisms of a free society, whether for production, distribution, or reproduction, should have four basic characteristics: they should be conscious, transparent, alterable, and integrated.

Conscious: We want economic mechanisms to be deliberately chosen and deliberately structured, so that they fulfill the purposes that we collectively give to them, rather than the economic structures forcing us to fulfill their purposes. Transparent: We want every member of society to be able to grasp how society’s economic mechanisms function. Alterable: We want to be able to change our economic structures according to ecological and social needs. And last, we want economic mechanisms to be comprehensively integrated with all other aspects of communal self-management.

What might these values look like in practice? How could this ensemble of speculative postulates actually be implemented? What follows is a brief attempt to sketch a reconstructive vision of economics in a social-ecological society.


The World Social Ecologists Envision

The world we envision is one of adventure and possibility, of radically new relationships and potential forms of social and individual life that are difficult to imagine, much less describe, from the perspective of the present. Most of what will happen in a social-ecological future, whether at an environmental level, a personal level, or a communal level, will be spontaneous and creative—and these are things we can neither plan nor propose nor predict. Nevertheless, such spontaneous and creative unfolding of potentials will require both an institutional framework and an ethical vision if they are to become more than mere dreams. Thus we must turn our attention to the social structures that might make free nature and a free society more likely.

Social ecologists work toward a society structured around freedom, cooperation, and ecological and social diversity. Our vision of a better world draws on a wealth of practical experiments and utopian hopes raised throughout history by emancipatory movements from below. At the center of our vision of free communities is direct democracy. Direct democracy means people managing their own lives, consciously and collectively, for the good of the communities they are part of. Instead of handing over decision-making power to experts, professionals, representatives, or bureaucrats, social ecology foresees all people participating directly in the self-management of their communal affairs.

Because we oppose institutionalized forms of domination and hierarchy, social ecologists reject the state as such. Instead of positing a separate body that stands apart from society and makes decisions on its behalf, we envision a network of community assemblies as the basic decision-making body and as the primary venue for practicing direct democracy. These assemblies include all the residents of a local area (in cities at the neighborhood level and in rural areas at the township level), who meet at regular intervals to discuss and decide on the issues before them: political as well as economic decisions, indeed any social decision that significantly affects the life of the community as a whole.

The popular assembly includes everybody who is willing to participate in it and provides a democratic forum for all community members to engage one another on an equal basis and actively shape social life. Ongoing interactions of this kind encourage a sense of shared responsibility and interdependence, as well as offering a public space for resolving disputes and disagreements in a rational and non-coercive way. Recognizing that people have differing interests, aspirations, and convictions, the neighborhood assembly and its accompanying civic ethos present an opportunity for reconciling particular and general objectives. Direct democracy, in this view, involves a commitment to the wellbeing of one’s neighbors.

Communal wellbeing, in turn, implies an active respect and appreciation for the natural context within which local communities exist. No social order can guarantee that the ecosystems and habitats that host our various settlements will thrive, but social ecologists believe that communities built around free association and mutual aid are much better suited to fostering environmental diversity and sustainability than those built around authoritarian systems of power. In societies that have overcome domination and hierarchy, ecological flourishing and human flourishing can complement and reinforce one another.

The ethical outlook that embodies these potentials is as important as the practical methods themselves. Social ecologists want to create social forms that promote freedom and solidarity by building these values into the very fabric of social relations and public institutions. Thus, our emphasis on face-to-face assemblies open to all is meant to encourage, not preclude, the creation of other libertarian and cooperative social forms. An enormous variety of spontaneous associations, living arrangements, workplaces, family structures, and so forth all have an important place in our vision of a free world. The only forms that are excluded are ones based on exploitation and oppression.

Social ecology’s model of direct democracy can therefore be realized in a number of different ways depending on the needs, desires, and experiences of those who are inspired by it. This is especially true of economic processes, and the scenario outlined here is only one possible interpretation of the economic aspects of a social-ecological society. The fundamental shared perspective is that of a moral economy, in which the material conditions of our existence are reintegrated into a broader ethical and institutional framework. A moral economy means making decisions about production and consumption part of the civic life of the whole community.


Communal Self-Management in Practice

In this scenario, workers’ councils play a crucial role in the day-to-day administration of production, while local assemblies have the final say in major economic decisions. All members of a given community participate in formulating economic policy, which is discussed, debated, and decided upon within the popular assembly. Social ecology foresees an extensive physical decentralization of production, so that workers at a particular enterprise will typically live in the same municipality where they work. We also foresee a continual voluntary rotation of jobs, tasks, and responsibilities and a radical redefinition of what ‘work’ means. Through the conscious transformation of labor into a free social activity that combines physical and intellectual skills, we envision the productive process as a fulfillment of personal and communal needs, articulated to their ecological context. Along with the rejection of bosses, profits, wages, and exchange value, we seek to overcome capitalism’s reduction of human beings to instruments of production and consumption. Social ecology’s assembly model encourages people to approach economic decisions not merely as workers and consumers, but as community members committed to an inclusive goal of social and ecological wellbeing.

While the broad outlines of communal production are established at the assembly level, they are implemented in practice by smaller collective bodies which also operate on an egalitarian, participatory, and democratic basis. Cooperative households and collective workplaces form an integral part of this process. Decisions that have regional impact are worked out by confederations of local assemblies, so that everybody affected by a decision can participate in making it. Specific tasks can be delegated to specialized committees, but substantive issues of public concern are subject to the discretion of each popular assembly. Direct democracy encourages the formation and contestation of competing views and arguments, so that for any given decision there will be several distinct options available, each of them crafted by the people who will carry them out. Assembly members consider these various proposals and debate their merits and implications; they are discussed, revised and amended as necessary. When no clear consensus emerges, a vote or series of votes can be held to determine which options have the most support.

Social ecology’s vision of a moral economy centers on libertarian communism, in which the fruits of common labor are freely available to all. This principle of “from each according to ability and to each according to need,” which distinguishes our perspective from many other anti-capitalist programs, is fleshed out by a civic ethic in which concern for the common welfare shapes individual choices. In the absence of markets, private property, class divisions, commodity production, exploitation of labor, and accumulation of capital, libertarian communism can become the distributive mechanism for social wealth and the economic counterpart to the transparent and humanly scaled political structures that social ecology proposes.

In such an arrangement, the interaction between smaller committees and working groups and the full assembly becomes crucially important to maintaining the democratic and participatory nature of this deliberative process. Preparing coherent proposals for presentation to the assembly will require both specialized work and scrupulous information gathering, as well as analysis and interpretation. Because these activities can subtly influence the eventual outcome of any decision, the responsibility for carrying them out should be a rotating task entrusted to a temporary commission chosen at random from the members of the assembly.


Confederal Economic Democracy

When the assembly has considered and debated and fine-tuned the various proposals before it and has agreed on an overall outline for the local economy, community members continue to refine and realize this outline while implementing it in their workplaces, residences, and elsewhere. If obstacles or disagreements arise that cannot be resolved at the immediate level of a single enterprise, institution, or household, they can be brought back to the full assembly for discussion and resolution. If some aspects of an agreed-upon policy are not fulfilled for whatever reason, this will quickly become apparent to community members, who can then alter or adapt the policy accordingly. While most of economic life will be carried out within smaller collectivities, in direct cooperation with co-workers, housemates, associates and neighbors, overarching matters of public economic direction will be worked out within the assembly of the entire community. When necessary, city-wide or regional issues will be addressed at the confederal level, with final decisions remaining in the hands of each local assembly.

The reason for this emphasis on assembly sovereignty is two-fold. First, the local assembly is the most accessible forum for practicing direct democracy and guarding against the re-emergence of power differentials and new forms of hierarchy. Since the assembly includes all members of the community on equal terms and operates through direct participation rather than representation, it offers the best opportunity for extending collective self-management to all spheres of social life. Second, the local assembly makes it possible for people to decide on their economic and political affairs in a comprehensive and coherent manner, through face-to-face discussion with the people they live with, play with, and work with. The popular assembly encourages a holistic approach to public matters, one that recognizes the myriad interconnections among economic, social, and ecological concerns.

Much of this vision will only be practicable in conjunction with a radical overhaul of the technological infrastructure, something which social ecologists support on environmental as well as democratic grounds. We foresee most production taking place locally, with specialized functions socialized and conceptual and manual labor integrated. Still, there will be some important social goods that cannot or should not be completely decentralized; advanced research institutes, for example, will serve large regions even though they will be hosted by one municipality. Thus confederation, which offsets parochialism and insularity, plays an essential role within social ecology’s political vision.

While the primary focus of this scenario is on local communities generating economic policies tailored to their own social end ecological circumstances, social ecologists reject the notions of local self-sufficiency and economic autarchy as values in themselves; we consider these things desirable if and when they contribute to social participation and ecologically nuanced democratic decision making. We foresee a confederation of assemblies in consistent dialogue with one another via confederal bodies made up of recallable and mandated delegates from each constituent assembly. These bodies are established as outgrowths of the directly democratic local communities, not as substitutes for them. Since economic relations, in particular, often involve cooperation with distant communities, confederation offers a mutually compatible framework for sharing resources, skills, and knowledge.

A confederal network of popular assemblies offers a practical way for all people to consciously direct their lives together and to pursue common goals as part of a project of social freedom. Bringing together solidarity and autonomy, we can recreate politics, the art of communal self-management, as the highest form of direct action. In such a world, economics as we know it today will no longer exist. When work becomes creative activity, when production becomes the harmonization of human and ecological potentials, when economics becomes collective self-determination and the conscious unfolding of social, natural, and ethical possibilities as yet unimagined, then we will have achieved a liberated society, and the ideas outlined here will take on concrete form as lived realities and direct experiences.


Final Interview, Communalist Project


Harbinger - A Journal of Social Ecology

What is Social Ecology? | Vol. 3, No. 1
The Communalist Project

By Murray Bookchin


Revolution - Cliff HarperWhether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or the most reactionary—or will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal mediocrity—will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries of the revolutionary era. The direction we select, from among several intersecting roads of human development, may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as this irrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological weapons, we cannot ignore the possibility that the entire human enterprise may come to a devastating end. Given the exquisitely elaborate technical plans that the military-industrial complex has devised, the self-extermination of the human species must be included in the futuristic scenarios that, at the turn of the millennium, the mass media are projecting—the end of a human future as such.

Lest these remarks seem too apocalyptic, I should emphasize that we also live in an era when human creativity, technology, and imagination have the capability to produce extraordinary material achievements and to endow us with societies that allow for a degree of freedom that far and away exceeds the most dramatic and emancipatory visions projected by social theorists such as Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin.1 Many thinkers of the postmodern age have obtusely singled out science and technology as the principal threats to human well-being, yet few disciplines have imparted to humanity such a stupendous knowledge of the innermost secrets of matter and life, or provided our species better with the ability to alter every important feature of reality and to improve the well-being of human and nonhuman life-forms.

We are thus in a position either to follow a path toward a grim “end of history,” in which a banal succession of vacuous events replaces genuine progress, or to move on to a path toward the true making of history, in which humanity genuinely progresses toward a rational world. We are in a position to choose between an ignominious finale, possibly including the catastrophic nuclear oblivion of history itself, and history’s rational fulfillment in a free, materially abundant society in an aesthetically crafted environment.

Notwithstanding the technological marvels that competing enterprises of the ruling class (that is, the bourgeoisie) are developing in order to achieve hegemony over one another, little of a subjective nature that exists in the existing society can redeem it. Precisely at a time when we, as a species, are capable of producing the means for amazing objective advances and improvements in the human condition and in the nonhuman natural world—advances that could make for a free and rational society— we stand almost naked morally before the onslaught of social forces that may very well lead to our physical immolation. Prognoses about the future are understandably very fragile and are easily distrusted. Pessimism has become very widespread, as capitalist social relations become more deeply entrenched in the human mind than ever before, and as culture regresses appallingly, almost to a vanishing point. To most people today, the hopeful and very radical certainties of the twenty-year period between the Russian Revolution of 1917-18 and the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 seem almost naïve.

Yet our decision to create a better society, and our choice of the way to do it, must come from within ourselves, without the aid of a deity, still less a mystical “force of nature” or a charismatic leader. If we choose the road toward a better future, our choice must be the consequence of our ability—and ours alone—to learn from the material lessons of the past and to appreciate the real prospects of the future. We will need to have recourse, not to ghostly vagaries conjured up from the murky hell of superstition or, absurdly, from the couloirs of the academy, but to the innovative attributes that make up our very humanity and the essential features that account for natural and social development, as opposed to the social pathologies and accidental events that have sidetracked humanity from its self-fulfillment in consciousness and reason. Having brought history to a point where nearly everything is possible, at least of a material nature—and having left behind a past that was permeated ideologically by mystical and religious elements produced by the human imagination—we are faced with a new challenge, one that has never before confronted humanity. We must consciously create our own world, not according to demonic fantasies, mindless customs, and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.



What factors should be decisive in making our choice? First, of great significance is the immense accumulation of social and political experience that is available to revolutionaries today, a storehouse of knowledge that, properly conceived, could be used to avoid the terrible errors that our predecessors made and to spare humanity the terrible plagues of failed revolutions in the past. Of indispensable importance is the potential for a new theoretical springboard that has been created by the history of ideas, one that provides the means to catapult an emerging radical movement beyond existing social conditions into a future that fosters humanity’s emancipation.

But we must also be fully aware of the scope of the problems that we face. We must understand with complete clarity where we stand in the development of the prevailing capitalist order, and we have to grasp emergent social problems and address them in the program of a new movement. Capitalism is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appear in history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains a system of commodity exchange in which objects that are made for sale and profit pervade and mediate most human relations. Yet capitalism is also a highly mutable system, continually advancing the brutal maxim that whatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of its rivals must die. Hence “growth” and perpetual change become the very laws of life of capitalist existence. This means that capitalism never remains permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions that arise from its basic social relations.

Although capitalism became a dominant society only in the past few centuries, it long existed on the periphery of earlier societies: in a largely commercial form, structured around trade between cities and empires; in a craft form throughout the European Middle Ages; in a hugely industrial form in our own time; and if we are to believe recent seers, in an informational form in the coming period. It has created not only new technologies but also a great variety of economic and social structures, such as the small shop, the factory, the huge mill, and the industrial and commercial complex. Certainly the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution has not completely disappeared, any more than the isolated peasant family and small craftsman of a still earlier period have been consigned to complete oblivion. Much of the past is always incorporated into the present; indeed, as Marx insistently warned, there is no “pure capitalism,” and none of the earlier forms of capitalism fade away until radically new social relations are established and become overwhelmingly dominant. But today capitalism, even as it coexists with and utilizes precapitalist institutions for its own ends (see Marx’s Grundrisse for this dialectic), now reaches into the suburbs and the countryside with its shopping malls and newly styled factories. Indeed, it is by no means inconceivable that one day it will reach beyond our planet. In any case, it has produced not only new commodities to create and feed new wants but new social and cultural issues, which in turn have given rise to new supporters and antagonists of the existing system. The famous first part of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, in which they celebrate capitalism’s wonders, would have to be periodically rewritten to keep pace with the achievements—as well as the horrors—produced by the bourgeoisie’s development.

One of the most striking features of capitalism today is that in the Western world the highly simplified two-class structure—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—that Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, predicted would become dominant under “mature” capitalism (and we have yet to determine what “mature,” still less “late” or “moribund” capitalism actually is) has undergone a process of reconfiguration. The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past. Contrary to Marx’s expectations, the industrial working class is now dwindling in numbers and is steadily losing its traditional identity as a class—which by no means excludes it from a potentially broader and perhaps more extensive conflict of society as a whole against capitalist social relations. Present-day culture, social relations, cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, and transportation have remade the traditional proletariat, upon which syndicalists and Marxists were overwhelmingly, indeed almost mystically focused, into a largely petty-bourgeois stratum whose mentality is marked by its own bourgeois utopianism of “consumption for the sake of consumption.” We can foresee a time when the proletarian, whatever the color of his or her collar or place on the assembly line, will be completely replaced by automated and even miniaturized means of production that are operated by a few white-coated manipulators of machines and by computers.

By the same token, the living standards of the traditional proletariat and its material expectations (no small factor in the shaping of social consciousness!) have changed enormously, soaring within only a generation or two from near poverty to a comparatively high degree of material affluence. Among the children and grandchildren of former steel and automobile workers and coal miners, who have no proletarian class identity, a college education has replaced the high school diploma as emblematic of a new class status. In the United States once-opposing class interests have converged to a point that almost 50 percent of American households own stocks and bonds, while a huge number are proprietors of one kind or another, possessing their own homes, gardens, and rural summer retreats.

Given these changes, the stern working man or woman, portrayed in radical posters of the past with a flexed, highly muscular arm holding a bone-crushing hammer, has been replaced by the genteel and well-mannered (so-called) “working middle class.” The traditional cry “Workers of the world, unite!” in its old historical sense becomes ever more meaningless. The class-consciousness of the proletariat, which Marx tried to awaken in The Communist Manifesto, has been hemorrhaging steadily and in many places has virtually disappeared. The more existential class struggle has not been eliminated, to be sure, any more than the bourgeoisie could eliminate gravity from the existing human condition, but unless radicals today become aware of the fact that it has been narrowed down largely to the individual factory or office, they will fail to see that a new, perhaps more expansive form of social consciousness can emerge in the generalized struggles that face us. Indeed, this form of social consciousness can be given a refreshingly new meaning as the concept of the rebirth of the citoyen—a concept so important to the Great Revolution of 1789 and its more broadly humanistic sentiment of sociality that it became the form of address among later revolutionaries summoned to the barricades by the heraldic crowing of the red French rooster.

Seen as a whole, the social condition that capitalism has produced today stands very much at odds with the simplistic class prognoses advanced by Marx and by the revolutionary French syndicalists. After the Second World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and working conditions: notably environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life basic to grassroots politics.

Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced an issue as class—as witness the extent to which many social analyses have singled out managers, bureaucrats, scientists, and the like as emerging, ostensibly dominant groups. New and elaborate gradations of status and interests count today to an extent that they did not in the recent past; they blur the conflict between wage labor and capital that was once so central, clearly defined, and militantly waged by traditional socialists. Class categories are now intermingled with hierarchical categories based on race, gender, sexual preference, and certainly national or regional differences. Status differentiations, characteristic of hierarchy, tend to converge with class differentiations, and a more all-inclusive capitalistic world is emerging in which ethnic, national, and gender differences often surpass the importance of class differences in the public eye. This phenomenon is not entirely new: in the First World War countless German socialist workers cast aside their earlier commitment to the red flags of proletarian unity in favor of the national flags of their well-fed and parasitic rulers and went on to plunge bayonets into the bodies of French and Russian socialist workers—as they did, in turn, under the national flags of their own oppressors.

At the same time capitalism has produced a new, perhaps paramount contradiction: the clash between an economy based on unending growth and the desiccation of the natural environment.2 This issue and its vast ramifications can no more be minimized, let alone dismissed, than the need of human beings for food or air. At present the most promising struggles in the West, where socialism was born, seem to be waged less around income and working conditions than around nuclear power, pollution, deforestation, urban blight, education, health care, community life, and the oppression of people in underdeveloped countries—as witness the (albeit sporadic) antiglobalization upsurges, in which blue- and white-collar “workers” march in the same ranks with middle-class humanitarians and are motivated by common social concerns. Proletarian combatants become indistinguishable from middle-class ones. Burly workers, whose hallmark is a combative militancy, now march behind “bread and puppet” theater performers, often with a considerable measure of shared playfulness. Members of the working and middle classes now wear many different social hats, so to speak, challenging capitalism obliquely as well as directly on cultural as well as economic grounds.

Nor can we ignore, in deciding what direction we are to follow, the fact that capitalism, if it is not checked, will in the future—and not necessarily the very distant future—differ appreciably from the system we know today. Capitalist development can be expected to vastly alter the social horizon in the years ahead. Can we suppose that factories, offices, cities, residential areas, industry, commerce, and agriculture, let alone moral values, aesthetics, media, popular desires, and the like will not change immensely before the twenty-first century is out? In the past century, capitalism, above all else, has broadened social issues—indeed, the historical social question of how a humanity, divided by classes and exploitation, will create a society based on equality, the development of authentic harmony, and freedom—to include those whose resolution was barely foreseen by the liberatory social theorists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our age, with its endless array of “bottom lines” and “investment choices,” now threatens to turn society itself into a vast and exploitative marketplace.3

The public with which the progressive socialist had to deal is also changing radically and will continue to do so in the coming decades. To lag in understanding behind the changes that capitalism is introducing and the new or broader contradictions it is producing would be to commit the recurringly disastrous error that led to the defeat of nearly all revolutionary upsurges in the past two centuries. Foremost among the lessons that a new revolutionary movement must learn from the past is that it must win over broad sectors of the middle class to its new populist program. No attempt to replace capitalism with socialism ever had or will have the remotest chance of success without the aid of the discontented petty bourgeoisie, whether it was the intelligentsia and peasantry-in-uniform of the Russian Revolution or the intellectuals, farmers, shopkeepers, clerks, and managers in industry and even in government in the German upheavals of 1918-21. Even during the most promising periods of past revolutionary cycles, the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the German Social Democrats, and Russian Communists never acquired absolute majorities in their respective legislatives bodies. So-called “proletarian revolutions” were invariably minority revolutions, usually even within the proletariat itself, and those that succeeded (often briefly, before they were subdued or drifted historically out of the revolutionary movement) depended overwhelmingly on the fact that the bourgeoisie lacked active support among its own military forces or was simply socially demoralized.



Given the changes that we are witnessing and those that are still taking form, social radicals can no longer oppose the predatory (as well as immensely creative) capitalist system by using the ideologies and methods that were born in the first Industrial Revolution, when a factory proletarian seemed to be the principal antagonist of a textile plant owner. (Nor can we use ideologies that were spawned by conflicts that an impoverished peasantry used to oppose feudal and semifeudal landowners.) None of the professedly anticapitalist ideologies of the past—Marxism, anarchism, syndicalism, and more generic forms of socialism—retain the same relevance that they had at an earlier stage of capitalist development and in an earlier period of technological advance. Nor can any of them hope to encompass the multitude of new issues, opportunities, problems, and interests that capitalism has repeatedly created over time.

Marxism was the most comprehensive and coherent effort to produce a systematic form of socialism, emphasizing the material as well as the subjective historical preconditions of a new society. This project, in the present era of precapitalist economic decomposition and of intellectual confusion, relativism, and subjectivism, must never surrender to the new barbarians, many of whom find their home in what was once a barrier to ideological regression—the academy. We owe much to Marx’s attempt to provide us with a coherent and stimulating analysis of the commodity and commodity relations, to an activist philosophy, a systematic social theory, an objectively grounded or “scientific” concept of historical development, and a flexible political strategy. Marxist political ideas were eminently relevant to the needs of a terribly disoriented proletariat and to the particular oppressions that the industrial bourgeoisie inflicted upon it in England in the 1840s, somewhat later in France, Italy, and Germany, and very presciently in Russia in the last decade of Marx’s life. Until the rise of the populist movement in Russia (most famously, the Narodnaya Volya), Marx expected the emerging proletariat to become the great majority of the population in Europe and North America, and to inevitably engage in revolutionary class war as a result of capitalist exploitation and immiseration. And especially between 1917 and 1939, long after Marx’s death, Europe was indeed beleaguered by a mounting class war that reached the point of outright workers’ insurrections. In 1917, owing to an extraordinary confluence of circumstances—particularly with the outbreak of the First World War, which rendered several quasi-feudal European social systems terribly unstable—Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to use (but greatly altered) Marx’s writings in order to take power in an economically backward empire, whose size spanned eleven time zones across Europe and Asia.4

But for the most part, as we have seen, Marxism’s economic insights belonged to an era of emerging factory capitalism in the nineteenth century. Brilliant as a theory of the material preconditions for socialism, it did not address the ecological, civic, and subjective forces or the efficient causes that could impel humanity into a movement for revolutionary social change. On the contrary, for nearly a century Marxism stagnated theoretically. Its theorists were often puzzled by developments that have passed it by and, since the 1960s, have mechanically appended environmentalist and feminist ideas to its formulaic ouvrierist outlook.

By the same token, anarchism—which, I believe, represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action—is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory. Its foremost theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism and the liberatory effects of “paradox” or even “contradiction,” to use Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have been advanced in the name of “anarchy” were often drawn from Marxism (including my own concept of “post-scarcity,” which understandably infuriated many anarchists who read my essays on the subject). Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization. Anarchism’s idea of self-regulation (auto nomos) led to a radical celebration of Nietzsche’s all-absorbing will. Indeed the history of this “ideology” is peppered with idiosyncratic acts of defiance that verge on the eccentric, which not surprisingly have attracted many young people and aesthetes.

In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare—leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.

Anarchism has often been confused with revolutionary syndicalism, a highly structured and well-developed mass form of libertarian trade unionism that, unlike anarchism, was long committed to democratic procedures,5 to discipline in action, and to organized, long-range revolutionary practice to eliminate capitalism. Its affinity with anarchism stems from its strong libertarian bias, but bitter antagonisms between anarchists and syndicalists have a long history in nearly every country in Western Europe and North America, as witness the tensions between the Spanish CNT and the anarchist groups associated with Tierra y Libertad early in the twentieth century; between the revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist groups in Russia during the 1917 revolution; and between the IWW in the United States and Sweden, to cite the more illustrative cases in the history of the libertarian labor movement. More than one American anarchist was affronted by Joe Hill’s defiant maxim on the eve of his execution in Utah: “Don’t mourn—Organize!” Alas, small groups were not quite the “organizations” that Joe Hill, or the grossly misunderstood idol of the Spanish libertarian movement, Salvador Seguí, had in mind. It was largely the shared word libertarian that made it possible for somewhat confused anarchists to coexist in the same organization with revolutionary syndicalists. It was often verbal confusion rather than ideological clarity that made possible the coexistence in Spain of the FAI, as represented by the anarchist Federica Montseny, with the syndicalists, as represented by Juan Prieto, in the CNT-FAI, a truly confused organization if ever there was one.

Revolutionary syndicalism’s destiny has been tied in varying degrees to a pathology called ouvrierisme, or “workerism,” and whatever philosophy, theory of history, or political economy it possesses has been borrowed, often piecemeal and indirectly, from Marx—indeed, Georges Sorel and many other professed revolutionary syndicalists in the early twentieth century expressly regarded themselves as Marxists and even more expressly eschewed anarchism. Moreover, revolutionary syndicalism lacks a strategy for social change beyond the general strike, which revolutionary uprisings such as the famous October and November general strikes in Russia during 1905 proved to be stirring but ultimately ineffectual. Indeed, as invaluable as the general strike may be as a prelude to direct confrontation with the state, they decidedly do not have the mystical capacity that revolutionary syndicalists assigned to them as means for social change. Their limitations are striking evidence that, as episodic forms of direct action, general strikes are not equatable with revolution nor even with profound social changes, which presuppose a mass movement and require years of gestation and a clear sense of direction. Indeed, revolutionary syndicalism exudes a typical ouvrierist anti-intellectualism that disdains attempts to formulate a purposive revolutionary direction and a reverence for proletarian “spontaneity” that, at times, has led it into highly self-destructive situations. Lacking the means for an analysis of their situation, the Spanish syndicalists (and anarchists) revealed only a minimal capacity to understand the situation in which they found themselves after their victory over Franco’s forces in the summer of 1936 and no capacity to take “the next step” to institutionalize a workers’ and peasants’ form of government.

What these observations add up to is that Marxists, revolutionary syndicalists, and authentic anarchists all have a fallacious understanding of politics, which should be conceived as the civic arena and the institutions by which people democratically and directly manage their community affairs. Indeed the Left has repeatedly mistaken statecraft for politics by its persistent failure to understand that the two are not only radically different but exist in radical tension—in fact, opposition—to each other.6 As I have written elsewhere, historically politics did not emerge from the state—an apparatus whose professional machinery is designed to dominate and facilitate the exploitation of the citizenry in the interests of a privileged class. Rather, politics, almost by definition, is the active engagement of free citizens in the handling their municipal affairs and in their defense of its freedom. One can almost say that politics is the “embodiment” of what the French revolutionaries of the 1790s called civicisme. Quite properly, in fact, the word politics itself contains the Greek word for “city” or polis, and its use in classical Athens, together with democracy, connoted the direct governing of the city by its citizens. Centuries of civic degradation, marked particularly by the formation of classes, were necessary to produce the state and its corrosive absorption of the political realm.

A defining feature of the Left is precisely the Marxist, anarchist, and revolutionary syndicalist belief that no distinction exists, in principle, between the political realm and the statist realm. By emphasizing the nation-state—including a “workers’ state”—as the locus of economic as well as political power, Marx (as well as libertarians) notoriously failed to demonstrate how workers could fully and directly control such a state without the mediation of an empowered bureaucracy and essentially statist (or equivalently, in the case of libertarians, governmental) institutions. As a result, the Marxists unavoidably saw the political realm, which it designated a “workers’ state,” as a repressive entity, ostensibly based on the interests of a single class, the proletariat.

Revolutionary syndicalism, for its part, emphasized factory control by workers’ committees and confederal economic councils as the locus of social authority, thereby simply bypassing any popular institutions that existed outside the economy. Oddly, this was economic determinism with a vengeance, which, tested by the experiences of the Spanish revolution of 1936, proved completely ineffectual. A vast domain of real governmental power, from military affairs to the administration of justice, fell to the Stalinists and the liberals of Spain, who used their authority to subvert the libertarian movement—and with it, the revolutionary achievements of the syndicalist workers in July 1936, or what was dourly called by one novelist “The Brief Summer of Spanish Anarchism.”

As for anarchism, Bakunin expressed the typical view of its adherents in 1871 when he wrote that the new social order could be created “only through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or antipolitical social power of the working class in city and country,” thereby rejecting with characteristic inconsistency the very municipal politics which he sanctioned in Italy around the same year. Accordingly, anarchists have long regarded every government as a state and condemned it accordingly—a view that is a recipe for the elimination of any organized social life whatever. While the state is the instrument by which an oppressive and exploitative class regulates and coercively controls the behavior of an exploited class by a ruling class, a government—or better still, a polity—is an ensemble of institutions designed to deal with the problems of consociational life in an orderly and hopefully fair manner. Every institutionalized association that constitutes a system for handling public affairs—with or without the presence of a state—is necessarily a government. By contrast, every state, although necessarily a form of government, is a force for class repression and control. Annoying as it must seem to Marxists and anarchist alike, the cry for a constitution, for a responsible and a responsive government, and even for law or nomos has been clearly articulated—and committed to print!—by the oppressed for centuries against the capricious rule exercised by monarchs, nobles, and bureaucrats. The libertarian opposition to law, not to speak of government as such, has been as silly as the image of a snake swallowing its tail. What remains in the end is nothing but a retinal afterimage that has no existential reality.

The issues raised in the preceding pages are of more than academic interest. As we enter the twenty-first century, social radicals need a socialism—libertarian and revolutionary—that is neither an extension of the peasant-craft “associationism” that lies at the core of anarchism nor the proletarianism that lies at the core of revolutionary syndicalism and Marxism. However fashionable the traditional ideologies (particularly anarchism) may be among young people today, a truly progressive socialism that is informed by libertarian as well as Marxian ideas but transcends these older ideologies must provide intellectual leadership. For political radicals today to simply resuscitate Marxism, anarchism, or revolutionary syndicalism and endow them with ideological immortality would be obstructive to the development of a relevant radical movement. A new and comprehensive revolutionary outlook is needed, one that is capable of systematically addressing the generalized issues that may potentially bring most of society into opposition to an ever-evolving and changing capitalist system.

The clash between a predatory society based on indefinite expansion and nonhuman nature has given rise to an ensemble of ideas that has emerged as the explication of the present social crisis and meaningful radical change. Social ecology, a coherent vision of social development that intertwines the mutual impact of hierarchy and class on the civilizing of humanity, has for decades argued that we must reorder social relations so that humanity can live in a protective balance with the natural world.7

Contrary to the simplistic ideology of “eco-anarchism,” social ecology maintains that an ecologically oriented society can be progressive rather than regressive, placing a strong emphasis not on primitivism, austerity, and denial but on material pleasure and ease. If a society is to be capable of making life not only vastly enjoyable for its members but also leisurely enough that they can engage in the intellectual and cultural self-cultivation that is necessary for creating civilization and a vibrant political life, it must not denigrate technics and science but bring them into accord with visions human happiness and leisure. Social ecology is an ecology not of hunger and material deprivation but of plenty; it seeks the creation of a rational society in which waste, indeed excess, will be controlled by a new system of values; and when or if shortages arise as a result of irrational behavior, popular assemblies will establish rational standards of consumption by democratic processes. In short, social ecology favors management, plans, and regulations formulated democratically by popular assemblies, not freewheeling forms of behavior that have their origin in indiv