Journal of Social Ecology

Harbinger - SPRING 2003 { 1 }SPRING 2003

What is Social Ecology?

Harbingera journal of social ecology

VOL. 3, NO. 1

{ 2 } Harbinger - SPRING 2003

Harbinger is published occasionallyby the Institute for Social Ecology,1118 Maple Hill Road, Plainfield, VT,05667, USA. Telephone / Fax.: 1 (802)454-8493. Email: [email protected]. All material within thepages of Harbinger is copyright bythe author. Reproduction of anymaterial within these pages isauthorized only if the source isindicated and the author hasgranted permission. Opinionsexpressed by the authors do notnecessarily reflect those of theInstitute for Social Ecology.

Subscriptions: Voting members ofthe Institute for Social Ecology will

receive subscriptions to Harbinger.Supporters of the ISE who donate$50 US are entitled to receive thenext two issues; $200 US the nextfour issues; $500 US the next eightissues; and $1,000 US the nextsixteen issues.

Change of Address: Please notifyus of an address change at least fourweeks before your move (the postoffice does not forward magazines).

Cover Art: This issues cover artcomes to us from the Canada basedcommunity mapping projectCommon Ground and artist GordSeward.

Colophon: Harbinger is printed onWeyerhaeuser Huskey Offset (text)and Springhill Vellum Bristol (cover).The text paper stock includes 30%postconsumer content, and the coverincludes 20%. All inks used inHarbinger are soy-based. This issue,at a total run of 600 copies, used twotrees worth of paper (according toP.A.P.E.R.s Paper Wizard). Printed inthe U.S.A. by Alonzo EnvironmentalPrinting, Hayward, CA.

publishes analysis relevant to the growing social ecology movement and newsof the activities of the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE). It is our intentionto explore the theory and practice needed to help create an ecological society,and to cultivate a generous intellectual outlook that can inform the principleof hope. Just as the outlook proposed by social ecology is concerned withboth what is and what ought to be, so too is Harbinger and we will explore thetensions between the two. The central questions we address in the pages ofHarbinger regard the process with which we must engage to create anecological society, a society free of hierarchy and domination in all of itsforms.

A harbinger is a messenger, or a sign indicating that a major event orchange is coming. It was the name given to the journal published byEmerson, the Alcotts, Thoreau and other New England transcendentalistsassociated with Brook Farm in the 19th century. The name was revived inthe early 1980s by the ISE for our literary and philosophical journal. In itscurrent incarnation Harbinger will continue the tradition of criticallyexamining theory and practice, attempt to bring you stimulating work bytalented authors, and, in addition, update you on the important work of theISE. Our intention is to publish twice a year and we invite your commentsand contributions. While Harbinger will entertain many points of view, ourprimary focus will be on a clarification and expansion of those ideas andpractices that contribute to social ecology. We encourage passionatediscourse tempered by rationality and a radical intentnothing less than thetransformation of our destructive, anti-ecological society.

Harbinger is a utopian project, but not utopia in the sense of anunachievable cloud-cuckoo land. Rather what we explore are utopian ideasrooted in real, existing potentialities. In the words of social ecologist MurrayBookchin, we seek to Be realistic and do the impossible, because if we dontdo the impossible, we face the unthinkable. Harbinger will examine ideasthat can allow us to transcend the given, to expand our intellectualframeworks, to give voice to our highest aspirations and our dreams for adecentralized, directly democratic, mutualistic and ecological society.I

Harbinger, a Journal of Social Ecology,

Harbinger - SPRING 2003 { 3 }

Welcome to the latest issue of Harbinger, a Journal ofSocial Ecology. This issue has been a long time coming, butwell worth the wait. Our goal, to inform and inspire thoseactively pursuing an ecological society rooted in decentralist, directlydemocratic ideals, is clearly expressed in the articles that make up thisissue. The thematic core focuses on the vision of social ecology, asexpressed by Peter Staudenmaier, and its relationship to newunderstandings in evolutionary theory. Murray Bookchin, the seminaltheorist of social ecology, provides an historical overview of the issues thathe faced when he first started fleshing out these ideas as far back as the1950s. For social ecology, nature is natural evolution, an ongoing dialecticof change and growth. Biologist Sonia Schmitz offers an assessment of thedialectical naturalism of Bookchin based on her interpretation of neo-Darwinian theory. Additionally Bookchin offers his vision for a newpolitics rooted in the ideas of social ecology, The Communalist Project.

The history of the Institute for Social Ecology is explored in a timelineof the 29 year history of the ISE, and Brian Tokar examines the significantimpact of social ecology on social movements from the 1960s to thepresent. A related series of articles looks at promising contemporarymovements that articulate their visions of direct democracyDemocraticAlternative, from Norway, and the North American based Alliance forFreedom and Direct Democracy.

We also review the latest developments at the Institute for SocialEcology, including a preview of upcoming programs and an update on ISEprojects.

Harbinger will continue to publish on an occasional basis, and to bringyou the latest developments in the theory and practice of social ecology, aswell as news of the ISE. We hope that you find this issue interesting andinformative.I

Daniel Chodorkoff

PUBLISHED BY

Institute for Social EcologyPopular Education for a Free Society

1118 Maple Hill Road,Plainfield, VT 05667 USA

www.harbinger.ws

Harbingera journal of social ecologyMANAGING EDITOR

Michael Caplan

ADVISORY BOARDDan Chodorkoff

Chuck MorseErin Royster

Sonja SchmitzBrian Tokar

PRINT & WEB DESIGNMichael Caplan

COPY EDITORErin Royster

CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUEAFADD,

Beehive Design Collective,Murray Bookchin,Michael Caplan,Dan Chodorkoff,

Andrea del Moral, Cliff Harper,Democratic Alternative,

Eirik Eiglad, Mike Flugennock,nico, Jared Rogness, Erin Royster,

Sonja Schmitz, Gord Seward,Peter Staudenmaier, Brian Tokar,

Ingrid Young

SPECIAL THANKSClaudia Bagiackas, Janet Biehl,Michael Cuba, Arthur Foelsche,

Heidi Hunt of Mother Earth News,and the many ISE supporters whodonated to support this project!


3 Editorial

67 Call for Contributions

W H AT I S S O C I A L E C O L O G Y ?

6 Reflections:An Overview of the Roots of SocialEcologyby Murray BookchinA personal account on the birth of socialecology.

12 Economics in a Social-Ecological Societyby Peter StaudenmaierWhat would economics look like in anecological society? How might freecommunities arrange their livelihood?

16 Buttercups and Sunflowers:On the Evolution of First and SecondNatureby Sonja SchmitzHealing the seemingly disparate relationshipbetween nature and culture by reminding us ofthe developmental relationship between them.

20 The Communalist Projectby Murray BookchinA radical politics for the twenty-first century.

A H I S T O RY O F T H E I S EA celebration of close to thirty years of educationand activism committed to the social andecological transformation of society.

38 Education and Community Action:A History of the ISEs ProgramsHow the Institute for Social Ecology haschanged the world through its educationalprograms and community involvement.

44 Social Ecology and Social Movements:From the 1960s to the Presentby Brian TokarExploring the important role of the Institute forSocial Ecology in many of the pivotal social andecological movements of the past four decades


CONTENTStable ofVolume Three - Number One

C O N T E M P O R A RY M O V E M E N T S

50 Radical Alternatives:An Interview with Ingrid Youngby Michael CaplanA discussion on a democratic alternative forScandinavia.

54 Alliance for Freedom and DirectDemocracyby AFADDBuilding a movement for confederal directdemocracy.

Andrea del Moral

R E P O RT F R O M M A P L E H I L L

56 Directors Report

57 2003 Spring & Summer Programs

63 2003 Development Goals


THE EXTENT TO WHICH RADICAL VERSIONS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM UNDERWENTsweeping metamorphoses and evolved into revolutionary ideologies when theNew Left came of age is difficult to convey to the present generation, which hasbeen almost completely divorced from the ebullient days of the New Left, not tospeak of all the major problems in classical socialism, especially in its Marxistform. These changes burden us to this very day.

In fact, the way in which the New Left initially reacted to my writings onsocial ecology, even to such manifesto-type articles as my Ecology andRevolutionary Thought(1964), was very similar to the way my comrades of theOld Left would have reacted in the 1930s. Perhaps the most sophisticatedleftist movement of the sixtiesand certainly the most arrogant, namely, theFrench Situationists and their American hangers-onwitlessly denounced meas Smokey the Bear(a childlike symbol of the US Forest Service!), soirrelevant was the issue of humanitys place in the natural world to the Left ofthe sixties. Accordingly, I was asked repeatedly where the class struggle waslocated in my writingsas though the class struggle was not implicit ineverything I wrote!after which I was lectured on how Marx and Engels werereally firm adherents of the very views for which I had been denounced a fewyears earlier. My dogmatic opponents of the Left began to shift their ground bytrying to fit environmental issues into such frameworks such as the importanceof conservation in Marx and Engelss writings. In short, the Left had beenoblivious to ecological issues, which were merely regarded as a petty bourgeoisendeavor to redirect public attention away from a hazy need to abolishcapitalism pure and simple!

This criticism, to be sure, was not without a certain measure of truth.Anything resembling a socially oriented ecology, such William Vogts OurPlundered Planet in the fifties and especially Rachel Carsons Silent Spring in1962, was more concerned with the impacts of human population growth andthe loss of wildlife in an increasingly industrialized world than with the materialwelfare of humanity and the impact of hierarchy on attempts to create arational society. In some respects, ecologists were inspired by the reactionarymotifs raised by Ernst Haeckel, who created the word ecology in the 1880s,notably the harm produced by humanity on the planet rather than the effectsof the capitalist system in producing ostensibly biological problems. AlthoughCarson attacked the chemical industry for promoting the use of toxic pesticides,perceptive readers could see that she was more concerned with their impact onbirds than on people. Nor did she and other ecological critics examine thesocially and negatively systemic sources that produced a growing disequilibriumbetween nonhuman nature and society. She and her fellow ecological criticsoften seemed to think in terms of an abstract humanity (whatever thatsocially ambiguous word means) as distinguished from classes. To Carson andher admirers, it was not a specific social ordernamely, capitalism andentrepreneurial rivalrythat was responsible for the ecological destruction thatwas undermining the biosphere but immoral human behavior.

ReflectionsAn Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology

By Murray Bookchin


By contrast, social ecology completely inverted themeaning and implications of societys interaction withthe natural world. When I first began to use the rarelyemployed term social ecology during 1964 in my essay,Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, I emphasizedthat the idea of dominating nature has its origins in thevery real domination of human by humanthat is, inhierarchy. These status groups, I insisted could continueto exist even if economic classes were abolished.

Secondly, hierarchy had to be abolished byinstitutional changes that were no less profound and farreaching than those needed to abolish classes. Thisplaced ecology on an entirely new level of inquiry andpraxis, bringing it far above a solicitous, often romanticand mystical engagement with an undefined natureand a love-affair with wildlife. Social ecology wasconcerned with the most intimate relations betweenhuman beings and the organic world around them.Social ecology, in effect, gave ecology a sharprevolutionary and political edge. In other words, wewere obliged to seek changes not only in the objectiverealm of economic relations but also in the subjectiverealm of cultural, ethical, aesthetic, personal, andpsychological areas of inquiry.

Most fundamentally, these relations exist at the verybase of all social life: notably, the ways in which weinteract with the natural world, especially through labor,even in the simplest forms of society, such as tribal andvillage stages of social formation. And certainly, if wehad major negative ecological disequilibria betweenhumanity and the natural world which could threatenthe very existence of our species, we had to understandhow these disequilibria emerged; what we even meant bythe word nature; how did society emerge out of thenatural world; how did it necessarily alienateitself from elemental natural relations; how andwhy did basic social institutions such asgovernment, law, the state, even classes emergedialectically from each other before humansociety came into its own; and in ways thatwent beyond mere instinct and custom, not tospeak of patricentricity, patriarchy, and a hostof similar cultural relations whose emergenceare not easily explained by economic factorsalone.

BUT, IT WOULD BE AN ERROR TO VIEW THEforegoing presentation of what I would call aminimal account of social ecology as the onlytheoretical source by which one can teach acourse on the subject. I did not develop socialecology only because I was disturbed by the

nature versus society problem, although it was neverfar from my mind. Fundamental to my development ofsocial ecology is a crisis that developed in socialisttheory itself, one that I regard as unresolvable in astrictly conventional Marxist or anarchist frameworkor to use the most all-encompassing phrase of all:proletarian socialism.

This was a painful problem for me to cope withbecause I did not come to a belief in proletariansocialism as a result of an academic storm in a teacup. Iwas a very passionate participant in what I thought wasa revolutionary labor movement, notably as a member ofthe Communist youth movement early in the 1930s andas result of a thorough training in Marxism andBolshevism. I became a rank-and-file leader of theYoung Communist League as early as 1933 and wasmilitantly loyal to its ultra-revolutionary program (thereckless insurrectionism promulgated by the CommunistInternational in 1928, or so-called Third Period line).Stalin had yet to make his reputation as the major figurethat he became in the late thirties; accordingly, mycomrades and I of that period never regarded ourselvesas Stalinists but simply as committed Communists orMarxists who adhered to Lenins revolutionary views.

As a result, I was thoroughly, even intensivelytrained in classical Marxism. This background providedme with a unique insight into problems that, whileforgotten at present by young radicals, haunts all of theirsocial projects. Born when the Russian Revolution wasstill a recent event; when Makhno was still carrying onhis guerrilla war in Ukraine; when Lenin, Trotsky, andnearly all the major theorists and activists of the firstthree 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 conflictsof the erafrom the still buoyant aftermath of theRussian Revolution to the tragic outcome of theSpanish Revolution and Civil War of 1937 to 1939. Bythe outbreak of the Second World War, I was wellversed in the issues the war raised for my generationearly in the century.

Again, it is difficult to convey to young people,today, how differently proletarian socialists thought andthe ideals to which they were committed prior to 1950,which I regard as the year in which proletarian socialismwas faced by its most decisive crisis. What cannot beemphasized too strongly is that all of us who survivedthe ideological debacle produced by the war had to dealwith the complete failure of all the prognoses we heldfive years earlier. Almost all who you care to single outfrom the interwar period (1917-1940), be it a Lenin, aTrotsky (in my earnest opinion, the most optimistic andthe most competent theorist of the period), even goingback in time to Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht,Franz Mehring and the like, were absolutely convincedthat capitalism was in its death throes. The mostwidely used formulation during this stormy periodfarmore insurgent than the often pseudo-revolutionism ofthe sixtieswas the expression that capitalism (as Ihave already observed) was moribund, or facing theimminent certainty of collapse. Nothing seemed moreevident at the time than the apocalyptic belief that wewere witnessing the last days of bourgeois society,notwithstanding the fact that fascism was on the marchthroughout Europe and that proletarian socialistideology was waning and facing defeat.

THE OUTBREAK OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR LEFT NO DOUBTin our minds that the conflict would end in socialistrevolutionsor else it was faced with barbarism. And,by barbarism, we meant the expansion of Nazismofmass starvation, ethnic extermination, concentrationcamps, a monstrous totalitarian state, and mass gravesthroughout Europe, if not America and Asia. Ifsocialism did not end the war by producing a newsociety, barbarism was a historic inevitability. For us, thevictory of socialism was a near certainty, for it wasinconceivable that Europe, in particular, could gothrough the mass slaughter that marked the First WorldWar without producing successful proletarianrevolutions. Barbarism was the only alternative to afailure by the working class. To a man like Trotsky, whoStalin had killed in the year that saw the outbreak ofthe world conflict, should barbarism become establishedin the world, we would have to revise all the

expectations provided by Marxism and adopt ahistorically new ideological perspective.

As we know after more than a half century, we werewrong, indeed terribly so. Neither socialism nor fascismemerged from the war, but, to our amazement, liberalcapitalismwith its welfare state and the extension ofbourgeois democracy in most of Western Europe andthe United States. Indeed, capitalism stabilized itself inthe historic sense that a cold war provided theframework for thinking out social problemsaframework to which the masses clung for nearly fiftyyears. Capitalism, in short, managed to stabilize itself toa point where it was able to avoid any major economic,not to speak of any social crisis. The New Left, whileretaining many features of the Old Left, essentially tried(and failed) to create a cultural crisis as a substitute fora revolutionary onewhich, as we now know, became anew industry and a commercial success in its own right.

Moreover, capitalism, continued to deepen its holdon society on a scale and to an extent it had never doneduring the course of its history. All the vestigial featuresof pre-capitalist society with their monarchical, quasi-feudal, agrarian and craft strata that were still prevalentin Germany, France, and, at least, widespread inEngland in 1914 gave way, unevenly to be sure, to hugeindustrial corporations, mass production, themechanization of all aspects of the economy, widespreadcommodification at the very base of economic life andmonopolization and global accumulation at itssummitsi.e. the spread of capitalism into every nicheof social life. The concept of Fordism was quiteknown to the Old Left long before it was adopted byNew Left academics under such old names as massproduction and commodification.

Finally, the proletariat not only dwindled vastly innumbers (contrary to all of Marxs expectations) butalso in class-consciousness. Workers began to lose theirsense of class identity, even began to see themselves asproperty owners, and significantly altered their socialexpectations. Home ownership, the acquisition of land,cars, and most significantly, stock ownership nowbecame commonplace. Workers children wereexpected 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-sturdyproletariat began to vote for conservative parties andjoin with reactionaries in opposing environmentalconservation, gender equality, immigration fromimpoverished countries, ethnic equality, and similarissues. Pariss famous prewar 1940 red belt, whichfamously gave its votes to the French Communists asthe embodiment of the Russian Revolution in Western


Europe, found itself voting, often enthusiastically, forthe neo-fascism of the French reactionary, Jean-MarieLe Pen.

Notwithstanding the multitude of breakdowntheories that Marxists and even anarchists advancedduring the interwar period, capitalism has proven to bemore sturdy and robust during the past fifty years than itwas over the course of its entire history. Not only didcommodificationits most salient featurespreadthroughout the entire world, but it was even spared therecurrence of its notorious periodic crises or businesscycles which reminded the world that a marketeconomy is inherently unstable. Indeed, contrary to allthe expectations that followed from Marxs theories ofsocial life-cycles, the supposition that capitalism wouldbecome an obstacle to the development of technologyanother salient feature of Marxs moribund societyproved to be nonsense. As a force for advances inindustry and technical sophistication, capitalismexhibits incredible vitalitynotwithstanding Marxs

prediction that it would soon become incapable oftechnical innovation and change. Indeed, all thefeatures that were to mark a moribund economy havenow appeared in reverse: unending technologicaladvances, the absence of the heralded pauperization ofthe working class in the classical areas of capitalistdevelopment (England, France, western Europegenerally, and the United States), the disappearance ofchronic economic crises, and the waning of classconsciousness.

By the 1950s, it was self-evident that Marxist (andanarchist) breakdown scenarios were palpablenonsense. The notion that the death of capitalismowing to an economic imperative, such as thedecline in the rate of profit (a theoretical construct ofVolume III of Capital) constituted a basic explanationfor the self-destruction of capitalism was completelyuntenable. The end of the Second World War broughtneither barbarism nor socialism but rather an ideologicalvacuum, so to speak, that threatened, like a huge blackhole, to extinguish the veracity of Marxs entiretheoretical corpus. Capitalism, I would like to reiterate,

had recovered from the war, as I have noted, withunprecedented resiliency and extended its grip onsociety with unprecedented tenacity. As the middle ofthe fifties came into view, nearly all the monarchies,their political and bureaucratic underpinnings; theextensive craft, professional, and agrarian strata thatbarely a generation earlier had linked the WesternEuropean economy with its feudal pastvirtually allhad been effaced or divested of the authority theyenjoyed a generation earlier. Gone were the PrussianJunkers who survived the First World War, the tsars,dukes, and barons who peopled the upper classes ofcentral and southern Europe, the status groups thatpresided over the academies well into the thirties, andthe like. What the German Kaiser and, later, Hitlertried to achieve with terrible weapons and millions ofcorpses in 1914 and 1940, the German Bundesrepublikachieved with bundles of Deutsche Marks and, morerecently, a patina of pacifism!!

IT CANNOT BE EMPHASIZED TOO STRONGLY that, in theabsence of an imperative to challenge the desirability of acapitalistic society, and no less importantly, the need todemonstrate that capitalisms death in the foreseeablefuture was inevitable, no objective reason existed forthe abolition of bourgeois society. Marx, at least, hadsatisfied this need with an economic imperative, namely,an immense body of theory (unparalleled in its scopeand historical knowledge). As I have noted, this theorywas based on such precepts as a chronic crisis producedby the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and by astructurally sophisticated class analysis that inevitablypitted a proletarian majority of an industrialized countryagainst a dwindling number of capitalists. By the 1950s,however, Marxism revealed for all who have eyes to see,that its traditional imperative was completely unsoundwhen compared with the realities of the postwar world,nor could its economic imperative be renovated to meetthe challenges posed by the last half of the twentiethcentury.

It was out of the failure of Marxs economicimperative that social ecology was bornnot solely

It was out of the failure of Marxs economic imperative that socialecology was born

not solely because of the impact of pollution, urbandegradation, toxic food additives, and the like.t


because of the impact of pollution, urban degradation,toxic food additives, and the like. When, in 1950, Iwrote my almost book length article, The Problem ofChemicals in Food, in No. 10 of Contemporary Issues,the dangers to public health posed by thechemicalization of food by pesticide residues,preservatives, coloring matter, and the like were stillrelatively minor issues. The problem of nuclear fallout,the vast number and quantity of pollutants that were tothreaten the health of many millions of people, and,later, in 1964, the hazard to the worlds climate createdby carbon dioxide, were not immediate issues or widelyforeseeable ones. The apocalyptic nature of the 1950article was dismissed by my critics as wild and recklessattacks upon the existing society. Actually, I was tryingto provide a viable substitute for Marxs defuncteconomic imperative, namely an ecological imperativethat, if thought out (as I tried to do in The Ecology ofFreedom) would show that capitalism stood in anirreconcilable contradiction with the natural world. Nearlyall my articles and bookssuch as Our SyntheticEnvironment (1962), followed two years later by mywidely circulated article, Ecology and RevolutionaryThought, and a companion article, Toward aLiberatory Technology, (1965)were guided primarilyby this project.

I should note that it was in Ecology andRevolutionary Thought that I used the words, socialecology for the first time and began to sketch out thecomplex body of ideas that ultimately reached theirelaboration in The Ecology of Freedom, two decades later.Let me be quite outspoken: it was not an unbridledpassion for wildlife, wilderness, organic food,primitivism, craft-like methods of production, villages(as against cities), localism, a belief that small isbeautiful not to speak of Asian mysticism,spiritualism, naturism, etceterathat led me toformulate and promote social ecology. I was guided bythe compellingindeed, challengingneed toformulate a viable imperative that doomed capitalism toself-extinction. As the thirties and the war revealed, itwas not simply the class war between the proletariat andthe capitalist classdriven almost exclusively byeconomic forces and resulting from the concentration ofcapitalthat were destined to destabilize capitalism andproduce a revolution. More fundamentally, the crisisproduced by capitalisms grow or die imperative couldbe expected to drive society into a devastatingcontradiction with the natural world. Capital, in effect,would be compelled to simplify all the ecosystems onwhose complexity evolution depended. Driven by itscompetitive relations and rivalries, capitalism would be

obliged to turn soil into sand, the atmosphere and theplanets waterways into sewers, and warm the planet to apoint where the entire climatic integrity of the worldwould be radically altered because of the greenhouseeffect.

In short, precisely because capitalism was, bydefinition, a competitive and commodity-based economy,it would be compelled to turn the complex into thesimple and give rise to a planet that was incompatibleenvironmentally with advanced life forms. The growthof capitalism was incompatible with the evolution ofbiotic complexity as suchand certainly, with thedevelopment of human life and the evolution of humansociety.

What is important to see is that social ecology thusrevealed a crisis between the natural world andcapitalism that was, if anything, more fundamental thanthe crisis that was imputed to the falling rate of profitand its alleged consequences. Moreover, social ecologyopened the very real question of the kind of society thatwould have to follow the abolition of a capitalisteconomy. Self-styled Marxists (in all fairness, unlikeMarx and Engels) made a virtue out of a centralized,bureaucratically planned, and a highly technocraticideal of progress, based on an urban and mechanisticculture that was almost a parody of Corbusierscityscapes.

Social ecology tried to fill the gap between theindustrial and agrarian worlds, not by condemningmachinery, mass production, or even industrialagriculture. My Toward a Liberatory Technology wasdeprecated by anarchists and Marxists alike: the formerbecause the article celebrated the use of new gardeningmachines as a substitute for backbreaking toil; the latterprecisely because it was too utopian in its aspirations.Frankly, I regarded both of my supposed failings as realvirtues that, with quality production in all spheres ofeconomic life, freed humanity from the yoke of toil anda technocratic world. Moreover, there were aspects ofthe past which, given modern technics and means ofcommunication were desiderata because they couldlighten work and vastly increase productivity, withoutwhich humanity would be afflicted with fears of materialscarcity. Such technological advances were also neededto provide sufficient free time for active participation inpublic affairs. Let me add, again, that my criticsmanyof whom were later to high-jack my alleged failingsread could to mean would, and pompously declaredthat if post-scarcity simply meant we already hadtremendous technological advances, why were we stillbeset with poverty and exhausting toil? As thoughcapitalism, like a slot machine, would always deliver


the most optimal returns on the goodies its technologycould produce! Typically, they failed to observe that Ihad repeatedly warned my readers that almost nothingcould emerge from within the context of a marketeconomy that was not tainted by the pathologies ofcompetition, rivalry, and, quite bluntly, pure and simplegreed!

By contrast, social ecologys ecological imperativethe contradiction between a competitive society andthe natural worldis not simply theoretical. By theeighties, it had been tested by the massive degradationthat is occurring in the social as well as the naturalworld. Speaking for myself, I am astonished by the rapidonset of the greenhouse effect, which, in 1964, Ipredicted in Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, as apossibility that would require two or more centuries tounfold. Yet, as early as the eighties and nineties, thecontradiction between capitalism and the natural worldwas becoming a very visible reality. Thereafter, thegreenhouse effect and other destructive imbalances haveassumed proportions that even outweigh morecommonplace problems such as soil erosion and wastedisposal.

This philosophy forms the basis for an educativeoutlook that yields a lengthy dialectical history andexposition of the phases of human development as itemerges out from natural evolution into socialevolution. The philosophy of social ecology centersaround a dialectical unfolding of a legacy of freedomthat not only intertwines but interacts with a legacy ofdomination, and includes the evolution of a concept ofjustice that leads into an ever-expanding concept offreedom, of scarcity into post-scarcity, of folkdom intocitizenship, of hierarchy into class, and, hopefully, agrowing horizon of freedom (whose termination, if any,we are not yet equipped to foresee), yielding libertarianmunicipalities and institutions. Taken together, as awhole, this educative outlook forms the basis for apractical theory of politics.

WE ARE NOW LIVING NOT ONLY IN A DIFFERENT CENTURY THATthe Institute for Social Ecology was foundedthe ISEwas founded, I would remind you, in 1974, nearly thirtyyears ago. I would sound to young people today as analien enterprise from a very different world than the onethat exists today. The world I knew still had a workersmovement in the US and Europe, and the issues it hadto confront differ qualitatively from those that haveemerged in the past two decades.

Yet it would be unpardonable if we forgot thatsocialism was meant to be a rational society, not areplication of Stalinism and totalitarianism. Nor can we

be permitted to forget that it will require a profoundsocial imperativean ecological imperative, in myviewto move this mass, even lethargic society alongrational lines. We must always remember that socialismwill come about as the result of logical necessity, theproduct of deep-seated and compelling forces for socialchange, not simply good vibes. To give these preceptsa lived meaning, we shall have to create an educationalvanguard to keep the terrible pathologies of our dayunder control, at the vary least, and abolish them at thevery most.

For such demands upon our energy and ourintelligence, our educational activities must result in amovement, not simply in a lifestyle that celebrates itsfreedom in a closeted community at a distance fromreal centers of activity and conflict. I cannot emphasizeenough that our education, be it at the ISE or amongaffinity groups, will be little more than a form of self-indulgence if it is restricted to our minds, completelyremoved from an active life.

I would be the first to acknowledge that action isonly possible when there is a real, dissident public life.For the present, I see no widespread inclination to givereality to a movement for libertarian municipalism,which, at the turn of the new century, lies dormant as aprospect for a new politics. Marx once perceptivelynoted in his early writings that not only must the Ideafollow reality, but also reality must follow the Idea. Thisaphorism might well be regarded as a recognition of theHegelian notion that freedom is a recognition ofnecessity in the sense that we need sufficientpreconditions to produce the most effective conditionsfor social change. When this is not so, the mostbrilliant of ideas lie almost silently in wait for societyitself to ripen and permit the struggle for freedom togerminate. It is then that we can give to education apriority that defies all false appeals to activism for itsown sake.

But one proviso must be voiced: ideas are only truewhen they are rational. Today, when rationality andconsistency are deprecated in the name ofpostmodernist chic, we carry a double burden of tryingto sustain, often by education alone, reason againstirrationalism, and to know when to act as well as how todo so. In such cases, let me note that education, too, isa form of activism and must always be cultivated assuch.I

NotesThis article is an abridged version of a longer letter fromthe author to Michael Caplan.


IN THE MIDST OF OUR STRUGGLES FOR A BETTER WORLD, social ecologists have fre-quently engaged in critical dialogue with other strands of radical thought aboutjust what kind of world were struggling for. Such dialogues often address thequestion of how people in a liberated future will organize their material relation-ships with one another and with the natural world. What would economics looklike in an ecological society? How might free communities arrange their livelihood?

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

Social ecologists have put forward a number of concrete proposals over theyears for a municipalized economy and a moral economy. These proposals pointtoward what Bookchin calls the recovery of the productive process itself as anecological mediation of humanity with nature. What these practical proposalshave in common is an underlying conception of how complex economies couldbe run differently, without markets or classes or bureaucracy, along egalitarianand participatory lines. Social ecologists argue that the economic mechanisms ofa free society, whether for production, distribution, or reproduction, should havefour basic characteristics: they should be conscious, transparent, alterable, andintegrated.

Conscious: We want economic mechanisms to be deliberately chosen anddeliberately structured, so that they fulfill the purposes that we collectively giveto 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 societyseconomic mechanisms function. Alterable: We want to be able to change oureconomic structures according to ecological and social needs. And last, we wanteconomic mechanisms to be comprehensively integrated with all other aspects ofcommunal self-management.

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

Economics in a Social-Ecological SocietyBy Peter Staudenmaier

Michael Caplan


The World Social Ecologists EnvisionThe world we envision is one of adventure and possibil-ity, of radically new relationships and potential forms ofsocial 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 acommunal level, will be spontaneous and creativeandthese are things we can neither plan nor propose norpredict. Nevertheless, such spontaneous and creativeunfolding of potentials will require both an institutionalframework and an ethical vision if they are to becomemore than mere dreams. Thus we must turn our atten-tion to the social structures that might make free natureand a free society more likely.

Social ecologists work toward a society structuredaround freedom, cooperation, and ecological and socialdiversity. Our vision of a better world draws on a wealthof practical experiments and utopian hopes raisedthroughout history by emancipatory movements frombelow. At the center of our vision of free communities isdirect democracy. Direct democracy means peoplemanaging their own lives, consciously and collectively,for the good of the communities they are part of. Insteadof handing over decision-making power to experts,professionals, representatives, or bureaucrats, socialecology foresees all people participating directly in theself-management of their communal affairs.

Because we oppose institutionalized forms of domi-nation and hierarchy, social ecologists reject the state assuch. Instead of positing a separate body that standsapart from society and makes decisions on its behalf, weenvision a network of community assemblies as the basicdecision-making body and as the primary venue forpracticing direct democracy. These assemblies includeall the residents of a local area (in cities at the neighbor-hood level and in rural areas at the township level), whomeet at regular intervals to discuss and decide on theissues before them: political as well as economic deci-sions, indeed any social decision that significantly affectsthe life of the community as a whole.

The popular assembly includes everybody who iswilling to participate in it and provides a democraticforum for all community members to engage one anotheron an equal basis and actively shape social life. Ongoinginteractions of this kind encourage a sense of sharedresponsibility and interdependence, as well as offering apublic space for resolving disputes and disagreements ina rational and non-coercive way. Recognizing thatpeople have differing interests, aspirations, and convic-tions, the neighborhood assembly and its accompanyingcivic ethos present an opportunity for reconciling

particular and general objectives. Direct democracy, inthis view, involves a commitment to the wellbeing ofones neighbors.

Communal wellbeing, in turn, implies an activerespect and appreciation for the natural context withinwhich local communities exist. No social order canguarantee that the ecosystems and habitats that hostour various settlements will thrive, but social ecologistsbelieve that communities built around free associationand mutual aid are much better suited to fosteringenvironmental diversity and sustainability than thosebuilt around authoritarian systems of power. Insocieties that have overcome domination and hierar-chy, ecological flourishing and human flourishing cancomplement and reinforce one another.

The ethical outlook that embodies these potentialsis as important as the practical methods themselves.Social ecologists want to create social forms thatpromote freedom and solidarity by building thesevalues into the very fabric of social relations and publicinstitutions. Thus, our emphasis on face-to-faceassemblies open to all is meant to encourage, notpreclude, the creation of other libertarian and coopera-tive social forms. An enormous variety of spontaneousassociations, living arrangements, workplaces, familystructures, and so forth all have an important place inour vision of a free world. The only forms that areexcluded are ones based on exploitation and oppres-sion.

Social ecologys model of direct democracy cantherefore be realized in a number of different waysdepending on the needs, desires, and experiences ofthose who are inspired by it. This is especially true ofeconomic processes, and the scenario outlined here isonly one possible interpretation of the economicaspects of a social-ecological society. The fundamentalshared perspective is that of a moral economy, in whichthe material conditions of our existence are reinte-grated into a broader ethical and institutional frame-work. A moral economy means making decisionsabout production and consumption part of the civic lifeof the whole community.

Communal Self-Management in PracticeIn this scenario, workers councils play a crucial role inthe day-to-day administration of production, whilelocal assemblies have the final say in major economicdecisions. All members of a given community partici-pate in formulating economic policy, which is dis-cussed, debated, and decided upon within the popularassembly. Social ecology foresees an extensive physi-cal decentralization of production, so that workers at a


particular enterprise will typically live in the samemunicipality where they work. We also foresee acontinual voluntary rotation of jobs, tasks, and responsi-bilities and a radical redefinition of what work means.Through the conscious transformation of labor into afree social activity that combines physical and intellec-tual skills, we envision the productive process as afulfillment of personal and communal needs, articulatedto their ecological context. Along with the rejection ofbosses, profits, wages, and exchange value, we seek to

overcome capitalisms reduction of human beings toinstruments of production and consumption. Socialecologys assembly model encourages people to approacheconomic decisions not merely as workers and consum-ers, but as community members committed to aninclusive goal of social and ecological wellbeing.

While the broad outlines of communal productionare established at the assembly level, they are imple-mented in practice by smaller collective bodies whichalso operate on an egalitarian, participatory, anddemocratic basis. Cooperative households and collec-tive workplaces form an integral part of this process.Decisions that have regional impact are worked out byconfederations of local assemblies, so that everybodyaffected by a decision can participate in making it.Specific tasks can be delegated to specialized commit-tees, but substantive issues of public concern are subjectto the discretion of each popular assembly. Directdemocracy encourages the formation and contestationof competing views and arguments, so that for any givendecision there will be several distinct options available,each of them crafted by the people who will carry themout. Assembly members consider these various propos-als and debate their merits and implications; they arediscussed, revised and amended as necessary. When noclear consensus emerges, a vote or series of votes can beheld to determine which options have the most support.

Social ecologys vision of a moral economy centerson libertarian communism, in which the fruits ofcommon labor are freely available to all. This principleof from each according to ability and to each according

to need, which distinguishes our perspective from manyother anti-capitalist programs, is fleshed out by a civicethic in which concern for the common welfare shapesindividual choices. In the absence of markets, privateproperty, class divisions, commodity production, exploi-tation of labor, and accumulation of capital, libertariancommunism can become the distributive mechanism forsocial wealth and the economic counterpart to thetransparent and humanly scaled political structures thatsocial ecology proposes.

In such an arrangement, the interaction betweensmaller committees and working groups and the fullassembly becomes crucially important to maintainingthe democratic and participatory nature of this delibera-tive process. Preparing coherent proposals for presenta-tion to the assembly will require both specialized workand scrupulous information gathering, as well as analysisand interpretation. Because these activities can subtlyinfluence the eventual outcome of any decision, theresponsibility for carrying them out should be a rotatingtask entrusted to a temporary commission chosen atrandom from the members of the assembly.

Confederal Economic DemocracyWhen the assembly has considered and debated andfine-tuned the various proposals before it and has agreedon an overall outline for the local economy, communitymembers continue to refine and realize this outlinewhile implementing it in their workplaces, residences,and elsewhere. If obstacles or disagreements arise thatcannot be resolved at the immediate level of a singleenterprise, institution, or household, they can bebrought back to the full assembly for discussion andresolution. If some aspects of an agreed-upon policy arenot fulfilled for whatever reason, this will quicklybecome apparent to community members, who can thenalter or adapt the policy accordingly. While most ofeconomic life will be carried out within smaller collec-tivities, in direct cooperation with co-workers,housemates, associates and neighbors, overarchingmatters of public economic direction will be worked out

The fundamental shared perspective is that of a moral economy, inwhich the material conditions of our existence are re-integrated into abroader ethical and institutional framework.

A moral economy means making decisions about productionand consumption part of the civic life of the whole community.

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within the assembly of the entire community. Whennecessary, city-wide or regional issues will be addressedat the confederal level, with final decisions remaining inthe hands of each local assembly.

The reason for this emphasis on assembly sover-eignty is two-fold. First, the local assembly is the mostaccessible forum for practicing direct democracy andguarding against the re-emergence of power differentialsand new forms of hierarchy. Since the assembly in-cludes all members of the community on equal termsand operates through direct participation rather thanrepresentation, it offers the best opportunity for extend-ing collective self-management to all spheres of sociallife. Second, the local assembly makes it possible forpeople to decide on their economic and political affairsin a comprehensive and coherent manner, through face-to-face discussion with the people they live with, playwith, and work with. The popular assembly encouragesa holistic approach to public matters, one that recog-nizes the myriad interconnections among economic,social, and ecological concerns.

Much of this vision will only be practicable inconjunction with a radical overhaul of the technologicalinfrastructure, something which social ecologists supporton environmental as well as democratic grounds. Weforesee most production taking place locally, withspecialized functions socialized and conceptual andmanual labor integrated. Still, there will be someimportant social goods that cannot or should not becompletely decentralized; advanced research institutes,for example, will serve large regions even though theywill be hosted by one municipality. Thus confederation,which offsets parochialism and insularity, plays anessential role within social ecologys political vision.

While the primary focus of this scenario is on localcommunities generating economic policies tailored totheir own social end ecological circumstances, socialecologists reject the notions of local self-sufficiency andeconomic autarchy as values in themselves; we considerthese things desirable if and when they contribute tosocial participation and ecologically nuanced demo-cratic decision making. We foresee a confederation ofassemblies in consistent dialogue with one another viaconfederal bodies made up of recallable and mandateddelegates from each constituent assembly. These bodiesare established as outgrowths of the directly democraticlocal communities, not as substitutes for them. Sinceeconomic relations, in particular, often involve coopera-tion with distant communities, confederation offers amutually compatible framework for sharing resources,skills, and knowledge.

A confederal network of popular assemblies offers a

Over the past few years, social ecologists andadvocates of Participatory Economics have started to

engage in a discussion on these two bodies oflibertarian thought. This discussion has raised manyimportant questions about the form a liberated society

might take. This past summer, the Institute for SocialEcology hosted a debate between ParticipatoryEconomist Michael Albert and social ecologist Peter

Staudenmaier on our on-line discussion forums.Michael Albert is the co-founder of South End

Press, Z Magazine, Z Media Institute, and various on-line projects, including ZNet. While he writes about avery wide range of topics, one of his primaryintellectual foci has long been the development and

popularization of economic vision and strategy. Thefruits of this labor, largely undertaken with RobinHahnel, are the economic model, vision, and approach

which they call Participatory Economics.The debate sought to examine the work of these

two bodies of thought as they relate to questions of

the form a liberated society might take, the underlyingvalues that such a society rests upon, and an activistpractice that would lead us in this direction. The

debate was framed around two brief position paperson each writers vision for a liberated society. Theseposition papers were then followed up with critical

and questioning rejoinders which framed a month-long debate. The debate is currently open to thepublic for further discussion.

Visit the debate on-line at:

www.social-ecology.org/forums

Discuss!

practical way for all people to consciously direct theirlives together and to pursue common goals as part of aproject of social freedom. Bringing together solidarityand autonomy, we can recreate politics, the art ofcommunal self-management, as the highest form ofdirect action. In such a world, economics as we know ittoday will no longer exist. When work becomescreative activity, when production becomes the harmo-nization of human and ecological potentials, wheneconomics becomes collective self-determination andthe conscious unfolding of social, natural, and ethicalpossibilities as yet unimagined, then we will haveachieved a liberated society, and the ideas outlined herewill take on concrete form as lived realities and directexperiences.I


A REMARKABLE FEATURE OF SOCIAL ECOLOGY IS THAT MURRAY BOOKCHINSvision of an ecological society goes beyond the development of eco-technologies and organic agriculture, but expands into thephilosophical realm through dialectical naturalism. Murray recognizesthe importance of healing the seemingly disparate relationship betweennature and culture (first and second nature) by reminding us of thedevelopmental relationship between them (dialectical naturalism).Through his discourses on dialectical naturalism, Murray invites theparticipation of ecologists, biologists, and scientists generally involvedin the subject of evolution. The following essay is a critique of oneaspect of dialectical naturalism. It is an attempt and also an invitationto other social ecologists, to develop and refine Murrays important andprovocative work on the relationship between nature and culture.

For Murray, dialectical naturalism serves as a potential source ofobjective ethics for developing ecological societies as demonstrated bythe following quote:

Today we may well be able to permit Naturenot God or Spirit or an lan Vitalto open itself up to us as theground for an ethics on its own terms. Contemporary sciences greatest achievement is the growing evidence itprovides that randomness is subject to a directive ordering principle, mutualism is good by virtue of its fostering theevolution of natural variety and complexity.1

If there are indeed trends or universal laws that determine the evolution of first nature, then humans should deriveethics based upon these principles. Murray is particularly interested in those trends that are compatible withanarchist principles. An ecological society would be based upon a harmonious existence within its eco-community(ecosystem)2 by fostering mutualistic and non-hierarchical relationships (mutualism), diversity (variation) and self-organization (autopoeisis). In accordance with dialectical naturalism, an ecological society would, in general,maximize the opportunities for unfettered directionality toward greater complexity, diversity, and subjectivity.Murrays ecological society takes the form of libertarian municipalism, the assemblage of multiple self-governingcommunities into a complex of confederations. The complexity of the confederation allows for a cultural diversitythat facilitates freedom by diminishing racism, classism, and any other isms that act to oppress and suppress thepotentialities latent within individuals of the human species.

As a student of social ecology and one trying to integrate my background as a biologist, I was drawn to thequestion of whether nature could provide a basis for deriving ethics. Scientists have been searching for universallaws in evolutionary biology ever since Darwin. The search represents a contemporary chapter in the historical questfor universal laws in the physical and chemical sciences. Aside from the satisfaction of understanding the worldaround us, there are, after all, practical reasons for deriving lawsthey allow us to make predictions. In theecological sciences they provide a basis for reconstructing ecosystems (restoration ecology) and inform decisionsregarding the conservation and management of wildlife. The laws that determine evolution are not as easily subjectto testing by the scientific method as in ecology, nor is their practicality obvious. In evolutionary science the trendsare more philosophical in nature: (1) whether the tempo of evolution is rapid or gradual (punctuated equilibrium vs.gradualism), (2) whether evolution is goal-oriented and (3) whether evolution proceeds by an increase in complexityand diversity.

Murrays argument that nature has directionality toward ever-greater complexity and diversity initially struck meas provocative, if not problematic. The existence of multicellular plants and animals is often used to argue thatevolution proceeds by an increase in complexity. Evolutionary biology is still in the process of describing the

Buttercups and SunflowersOn the Evolution of First and Second Nature

By Sonja Schmitz


extraordinary leap life took in its transitions fromprokaryotic cells (bacteria) to the first eukaryotic cells(protists) and from these single celled organisms tomulticellular fungi, plants and animals. One caninterpret this progression favorably by emphasizing thecooperative, communal, and mutualistic tendenciesrequired by these transitions, which is what MurrayBookchin does. Murray wants to equate the evolutionof a confederation of multiple self-governingcommunities with the evolution of multicellularorganisms. There is however, a darker side to thisprogression. The evolution of complex life forms is astory rife with tension between the autonomy of theindividual cell and the drive to assemble intocommunities of cells for the sake of survival. This initself is not incompatible with social ecology. But, theassemblage of autonomous beings is usuallyaccompanied by the reduction of the individual intospecialized and compartmentalized functions, words thatconjure images of authoritarian communism and fascistpolitical regimes. Therefore, I would like to examinewhether it is indeed desirable to derive ethics from whatbiologists know about the evolution of first nature.

The endosymbiotic theory proposed by LynnMargulis suggests that the evolution of eukaryotic cellsmay well have occurred by the ingestion (butincomplete digestion) of one bacterium by anotherabout 1.5 million years ago (mya).3 In the process, theundifferentiated soup of molecules that comprised theguts of bacterial cells was organized into an assemblageof specialized compartments called organelles, each witha separate function much like our own organs. Theresulting eukaryotic cell harbors remnants of itsprokaryotic ancestors, mitochondria and chloroplasts,once intact, autonomous individuals, now dependentupon and part of a greater assemblage. Therefore, theevolution of the eukaryotic cell occurred at the expenseof autonomous bacterial cells, which are mere vestigesof what they once were (mitochondria andchloroplasts).

The next level of differentiation involves theassemblage of single celled eukaryotes (protists) intocolonies of cells and the first multicellular organisms.Biologists see evidence of this transition in some algalspecies like Volvox. Volvox consists of a hollow spheremade up of a single layer of 500 to 60,000 flagellatedcells that function in photosynthesis and in the motilityof the colony. Other cells in the Volvox communityfunction solely in reproduction (sex cells). Thismulticellular community operates as a result of thesimultaneous specialization of function of individualcells and a division of labor among them. The next step

is the organization of hundreds of thousands of cells intotissues and organ systems. Not much is known abouthow this transition occurred, but multicellularinvertebrate animals with organ systems suddenlyappear in the fossil record about 700 mya (Ediacara,Australia). Nevertheless, the same themes of reductionand specialization are observed in the evolution ofmulticellular fungi, plants and animals.

An example from the plant kingdom, the buttercupand the sunflower, will illustrate how the themes ofspecialization and reduction resurface in the evolutionof complex multicellular organisms. The buttercupflower is considered primitive, meaning it is one of theearliest flower structures observed in the fossil recordand several million years older than the sunflowerlineage. (There are more ancient lineages amongflowering plants, but I am choosing the buttercuplineage because everyone can picture them). Each partof the flower is distinguishable and together comprises areproductive organthe buttercup flower. It has fivegreen sepals, five yellow petals, many single stamens(male flower parts) and many pistils (female flowerparts) that develop into little fruits called achenes.Upon initial inspection, the sunflower does not appearmuch different. It has many green sepals, yellow petals,stamens, and pistils. Although the sunflower looks likea buttercup, its structure is deceivingly different. The


sunflower is a community of individual flowers, eachwith a specialized reproductive function. The outerflowers each have one yellow petal; their pistils andstamens are inactive or nonexistent. On the otherhand, the petals of the inner flowers have been fusedinto a yellow tube; and their pistils and stamens are stillfunctional. The outer flowers with petals function toattract pollinators, while the inner tubular flowersproduce seed.

The buttercup and the sunflower represent twolevels of complexity. The buttercup is a simple flowerwith many parts that produces many seeds, while thesunflower is a community of many individual flowerswith specialized functions, each producing a single seed.The buttercup is an autonomous individual capable ofreproduction, while individuals of the mega-sunflowercommunity cannot function autonomously anymore,and must reproduce as a unit.

I have often thought that Murrays libertarianmunicipalism is like the sunflower; each self-governingmunicipality is a single flower, while the mega-sunflowercommunity represents the confederation. But, uponcloser examination, the analogy is inadequate. Theevolution of complexity in plants is not compatiblewith, nor can it be equated with, the kind of complexityand diversity Murray envisions as facilitating freedom inhis libertarian municipalities. The sort of reduction,specialization, and loss of autonomy observed in theevolution of multicellular organisms is more compatiblewith the functioning of a nation state or fascist politicalregime. Therefore the evolution of complexity hasoutcomes frighteningly compatible with politicalregimes that do not embrace the ideas of social ecology.If the buttercup and the sunflower are interpreted asexamples of the evolution of complexity, do we want tocite this trend for constructing ecological societies orconfederations?

Perhaps it is inappropriate to compare the evolutionof plants with the evolution of human social systems.While trends in the evolutionary process can beidentified, they are not universal and do not necessarilyapply across all lineages of life. Each of the fivekingdoms is on a separate evolutionary trajectory, as is

each phylum in the animal genealogy. Even if we wereto limit our examination to mammals or primates, is itappropriate to extend the laws or principles of firstnature and superimpose them upon cultural evolution?I would argue that because cultural evolution is uniquelyhuman, and not a generalized trend among otherlineages, the trends observed in first nature do notnecessarily apply to second nature.

Although Murray applauds science in its

achievements in illuminating the role of mutualism,diversity, complexity (and other anarchist tendencies);evolutionary biology is only beginning to yield underthe scrutiny of the scientific method, or in other words,provide an objective inquiry into the laws of evolution.The exploration into the evolution of complexity hasleft me with grave doubts as to whether social ecologistswant to derive ethics from first nature. My doubtshowever, do not diminish my desire to constructsocieties on the basis of mutualism and diversity.Perhaps the themes of mutualism and diversity hold upbetter under examination than does the evolution ofcomplexity.

In summary, this essay raises two separate yet relatedquestions. Can we derive an objective ethics from thetrends or laws of first nature? And if such trends,principles or universal laws do exist, is it appropriate oreven desirable to cite them for the construction ofecological human societies? I reserve an examinationinto these questions for future essays and invite othersocial ecologists to join in the inquiry.I

Notes1. Murray Bookchin, Toward a Philosophy of Naturein The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black RoseBooks, 1995), p. 64.2. Scientific terminology is in parenthesis3. Lynn Margulis, Early Life (Boston: Jones andBartlett Publishers Inc., 1984), p. 75-104.

If the buttercup and the sunflower areinterpreted as examples of the evolution of complexity,

do we want to cite this trend for constructingecological societies or confederations?

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Beehive Design Collective


By Murray Bookchin

TheCommunalist

Project

Cliff Harper


WHETHER THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WILL BE THE MOST RADICAL OF TIMES OR THE MOST REACTIONARYor will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal mediocritywill depend overwhelminglyupon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of thetheoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries ofthe revolutionary era. The direction we select, from among several intersecting roads of humandevelopment, may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as thisirrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological weapons, we cannot ignore the possibilitythat the entire human enterprise may come to a devastating end. Given the exquisitely elaboratetechnical plans that the military-industrial complex has devised, the self-extermination of the humanspecies must be included in the futuristic scenarios that, at the turn of the millennium, the mass mediaare projectingthe end of a human future as such.

Lest these remarks seem too apocalyptic, I should emphasize that we also live in an era whenhuman creativity, technology, and imagination have the capability to produce extraordinary materialachievements and to endow us with societies that allow for a degree of freedom that far and awayexceeds 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 haveobtusely singled out science and technology as the principal threats to human well-being, yet fewdisciplines have imparted to humanity such a stupendous knowledge of the innermost secrets ofmatter and life, or provided our species better with the ability to alter every important feature ofreality 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 banalsuccession of vacuous events replaces genuine progress, or to move on to a path toward the truemaking of history, in which humanity genuinely progresses toward a rational world. We are in aposition to choose between an ignominious finale, possibly including the catastrophic nuclearoblivion of history itself, and historys rational fulfillment in a free, materially abundant society in anaesthetically 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 subjectivenature that exists in the existing society can redeem it. Precisely at a time when we, as a species, arecapable of producing the means for amazing objective advances and improvements in the humancondition and in the nonhuman natural worldadvances that could make for a free and rationalsociety we stand almost naked morally before the onslaught of social forces that may very well leadto our physical immolation. Prognoses about the future are understandably very fragile and are easilydistrusted. Pessimism has become very widespread, as capitalist social relations become more deeplyentrenched in the human mind than ever before, and as culture regresses appallingly, almost to avanishing point. To most people today, the hopeful and very radical certainties of the twenty-yearperiod between the Russian Revolution of 1917-18 and the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939seem almost nave.

Yet our decision to create a better society, and our choice of the way to do it, must come fromwithin 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 abilityandours aloneto learn from the material lessons of the past and to appreciate the real prospects of thefuture. We will need to have recourse, not to ghostly vagaries conjured up from the murky hell ofsuperstition or, absurdly, from the couloirs of the academy, but to the innovative attributes that makeup our very humanity and the essential features that account for natural and social development, asopposed 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 ispossible, at least of a material natureand having left behind a past that was permeated ideologicallyby mystical and religious elements produced by the human imaginationwe are faced with a newchallenge, one that has never before confronted humanity. We must consciously create our ownworld, not according to demonic fantasies, mindless customs, and destructive prejudices, butaccording 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 accumulationof social and political experience that is available torevolutionaries today, a storehouse of knowledge that,properly conceived, could be used to avoid the terribleerrors that our predecessors made and to spare humanitythe terrible plagues of failed revolutions in the past. Ofindispensable importance is the potential for a newtheoretical springboard that has been created by thehistory of ideas, one that provides the means to catapultan emerging radical movement beyond existing socialconditions into a future that fosters humanitysemancipation.

But we must also be fully aware of the scope of theproblems that we face. We must understand withcomplete clarity where we stand in the development ofthe prevailing capitalist order, and we have to graspemergent social problems and address them in theprogram of a new movement. Capitalism isunquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appearin history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains asystem of commodity exchange in which objects thatare made for sale and profit pervade and mediate mosthuman relations. Yet capitalism is also a highly mutablesystem, continually advancing the brutal maxim thatwhatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of itsrivals must die. Hence growth and perpetual changebecome the very laws of life of capitalist existence. Thismeans that capitalism never remains permanently inonly one form; it must always transform the institutionsthat arise from its basic social relations.

Although capitalism became a dominant societyonly in the past few centuries, it long existed on theperiphery of earlier societies: in a largely commercialform, structured around trade between cities andempires; in a craft form throughout the EuropeanMiddle Ages; in a hugely industrial form in our owntime; and if we are to believe recent seers, in aninformational form in the coming period. It has creatednot only new technologies but also a great variety ofeconomic and social structures, such as the small shop,the factory, the huge mill, and the industrial andcommercial complex. Certainly the capitalism of theIndustrial Revolution has not completely disappeared,any more than the isolated peasant family and smallcraftsman of a still earlier period have been consigned tocomplete oblivion. Much of the past is alwaysincorporated into the present; indeed, as Marxinsistently warned, there is no pure capitalism, andnone of the earlier forms of capitalism fade away untilradically new social relations are established andbecome overwhelmingly dominant. But today

capitalism, even as it coexists with and utilizesprecapitalist institutions for its own ends (see MarxsGrundrisse for this dialectic), now reaches into thesuburbs and the countryside with its shopping malls andnewly styled factories. Indeed, it is by no meansinconceivable that one day it will reach beyond ourplanet. In any case, it has produced not only newcommodities to create and feed new wants but newsocial and cultural issues, which in turn have given riseto new supporters and antagonists of the existingsystem. The famous first part of Marx and EngelssCommunist Manifesto, in which they celebratecapitalisms wonders, would have to be periodicallyrewritten to keep pace with the achievementsas wellas the horrorsproduced by the bourgeoisiesdevelopment.

One of the most striking features of capitalism todayis that in the Western world the highly simplified two-class structurethe bourgeoisie and the proletariatthat Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto,predicted would become dominant under maturecapitalism (and we have yet to determine whatmature, still less late or moribund capitalismactually is) has undergone a process of reconfiguration.The conflict between wage labor and capital, while ithas by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past.Contrary to Marxs expectations, the industrial workingclass is now dwindling in numbers and is steadily losingits traditional identity as a classwhich by no meansexcludes it from a potentially broader and perhaps moreextensive conflict of society as a whole against capitalistsocial relations. Present-day culture, social relations,cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, andtransportation have remade the traditional proletariat,upon which syndicalists and Marxists wereoverwhelmingly, indeed almost mystically focused, intoa largely petty-bourgeois stratum whose mentality ismarked by its own bourgeois utopianism ofconsumption for the sake of consumption. We canforesee a time when the proletarian, whatever the colorof his or her collar or place on the assembly line, will becompletely replaced by automated and evenminiaturized means of production that are operated by afew white-coated manipulators of machines and bycomputers.

By the same token, the living standards of thetraditional proletariat and its material expectations (nosmall factor in the shaping of social consciousness!)have changed enormously, soaring within only ageneration or two from near poverty to a comparativelyhigh degree of material affluence. Among the children


and grandchildren of former steel and automobileworkers and coal miners, who have no proletarian classidentity, a college education has replaced the highschool diploma as emblematic of a new class status. Inthe United States once-opposing class interests haveconverged to a point that almost 50 percent ofAmerican households own stocks and bonds, while ahuge number are proprietors of one kind or another,possessing their own homes, gardens, and rural summerretreats.

Given these changes, the stern working man orwoman, portrayed in radical posters of the past with aflexed, highly muscular arm holding a bone-crushinghammer, has been replaced by the genteel and well-mannered (so-called) working middle class. Thetraditional cry Workers of the world, unite! in its oldhistorical sense becomes ever moremeaningless. The class-consciousnessof the proletariat, which Marx tried toawaken in The Communist Manifesto,has been hemorrhaging steadily and inmany places has virtually disappeared.The more existential class struggle hasnot been eliminated, to be sure, anymore than the bourgeoisie couldeliminate gravity from the existinghuman condition, but unless radicalstoday become aware of the fact that ithas been narrowed down largely to theindividual factory or office, they will fail to see that anew, perhaps more expansive form of socialconsciousness can emerge in the generalized strugglesthat face us. Indeed, this form of social consciousnesscan be given a refreshingly new meaning as the conceptof the rebirth of the citoyena concept so important tothe Great Revolution of 1789 and its more broadlyhumanistic sentiment of sociality that it became theform of address among later revolutionaries summonedto the barricades by the heraldic crowing of the redFrench rooster.

Seen as a whole, the social condition thatcapitalism has produced today stands very much at oddswith the simplistic class prognoses advanced by Marxand by the revolutionary French syndicalists. After theSecond World War, capitalism underwent an enormoustransformation, creating broad new social issues withextraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyondtraditional proletarian demands for improved wages,hours, and working conditions: notably environmental,gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues.Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats tohumanity, particularly with climatic changes that may

alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutionsof a global scope, and rampant urbanization thatradically corrodes the civic life basic to grassrootspolitics.

Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced anissue as classas witness the extent to which manysocial analyses have singled out managers, bureaucrats,scientists, and the like as emerging, ostensibly dominantgroups. New and elaborate gradations of status andinterests count today to an extent that they did not inthe recent past; they blur the conflict between wagelabor and capital that was once so central, clearlydefined, and militantly waged by traditional socialists.Class categories are now intermingled with hierarchicalcategories based on race, gender, sexual preference, andcertainly national or regional differences. Status

differentiations, characteristic ofhierarchy, tend to converge with classdifferentiations, and a more all-inclusivecapitalistic world is emerging in whichethnic, national, and gender differencesoften surpass the importance of classdifferences in the public eye. Thisphenomenon is not entirely new: in theFirst World War countless Germansocialist workers cast aside their earliercommitment to the red flags ofproletarian unity in favor of thenational flags of their well-fed and

parasitic rulers and went on to plunge bayonets into thebodies of French and Russian socialist workersas theydid, in turn, under the national flags of their ownoppressors.

At the same time capitalism has produced a new,perhaps paramount contradiction: the clash between aneconomy based on unending growth and the desiccationof the natural environment.2 This issue and its vastramifications can no more be minimized, let alonedismissed, 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 aroundincome and working conditions than around nuclearpower, pollution, deforestation, urban blight, education,health care, community life, and the oppression ofpeople in underdeveloped countriesas witness the(albeit sporadic) antiglobalization upsurges, in whichblue- and white-collar workers march in the sameranks with middle-class humanitarians and aremotivated by common social concerns. Proletariancombatants become indistinguishable from middle-classones. Burly workers, whose hallmark is a combativemilitancy, now march behind bread and puppet

The more existential

class struggle has not

been eliminated any

more than the

bourgeoisie could

eliminate gravity


theater performers, often with a considerable measure ofshared playfulness. Members of the working and middleclasses now wear many different social hats, so to speak,challenging capitalism obliquely as well as directly oncultural as well as economic grounds.

Nor can we ignore, in deciding what direction weare to follow, the fact that capitalism, if it is notchecked, will in the futureand not necessarily thevery distant futurediffer appreciably from the system weknow today. Capitalist development can be expected tovastly alter the social horizon in the years ahead. Canwe suppose that factories, offices, cities, residentialareas, industry, commerce, and agriculture, let alonemoral values, aesthetics, media, popular desires, and thelike will not change immensely before the twenty-firstcentury is out? In the past century, capitalism, above allelse, has broadened social issuesindeed, the historical social question ofhow a humanity, divided by classes andexploitation, will create a society basedon equality, the development ofauthentic harmony, and freedomtoinclude those whose resolution wasbarely foreseen by the liberatory socialtheorists in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Our age, with itsendless array of bottom lines andinvestment choices, now threatens toturn society itself into a vast andexploitative marketplace.3

The public with which the progressive socialist hadto deal is also changing radically and will continue to doso in the coming decades. To lag in understandingbehind the changes that capitalism is introducing andthe new or broader contradictions it is producing wouldbe to commit the recurringly disastrous error that led tothe defeat of nearly all revolutionary upsurges in thepast two centuries. Foremost among the lessons that anew revolutionary movement must learn from the pastis that it must win over broad sectors of the middle class toits new populist program. No attempt to replacecapitalism with socialism ever had or will have theremotest chance of success without the aid of thediscontented petty bourgeoisie, whether it was theintelligentsia and peasantry-in-uniform of the RussianRevolution or the intellectuals, farmers, shopkeepers,clerks, and managers in industry and even ingovernment in the German upheavals of 1918-21. Evenduring the most promising periods of past revolutionarycycles, the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the German SocialDemocrats, and Russian Communists never acquiredabsolute majorities in their respective legislatives

bodies. So-called proletarian revolutions wereinvariably minority revolutions, usually even within theproletariat itself, and those that succeeded (often briefly,before they were subdued or drifted historically out ofthe revolutionary movement) depended overwhelminglyon the fact that the bourgeoisie lacked active supportamong its own military forces or was simply sociallydemoralized.

GIVEN THE CHANGES THAT WE ARE WITNESSING AND THOSEthat are still taking form, social radicals can no longeroppose the predatory (as well as immensely creative)capitalist system by using the ideologies and methodsthat were born in the first Industrial Revolution, when afactory proletarian seemed to be the principalantagonist of a textile plant owner. (Nor can we use

ideologies that were spawned byconflicts that an impoverishedpeasantry used to oppose feudal andsemifeudal landowners.) None of theprofessedly anticapitalist ideologies ofthe pastMarxism, anarchism,syndicalism, and more generic forms ofsocialismretain the same relevancethat they had at an earlier stage ofcapitalist development and in an earlierperiod of technological advance. Norcan any of them hope to encompass themultitude of new issues, opportunities,

problems, and interests that capitalism has repeatedlycreated over time.

Marxism was the most comprehensive and coherenteffort to produce a systematic form of socialism,emphasizing the material as well as the subjectivehistorical preconditions of a new society. This project,in the present era of precapitalist economicdecomposition and of intellectual confusion, relativism,and subjectivism, must never surrender to the newbarbarians, many of whom find their home in what wasonce a barrier to ideological regressionthe academy.We owe much to Marxs attempt to provide us with acoherent and stimulating analysis of the commodity andcommodity relations, to an activist philosophy, asystematic social theory, an objectively grounded orscientific concept of historical development, and aflexible political strategy. Marxist political ideas wereeminently relevant to the needs of a terribly disorientedproletariat and to the particular oppressions that theindustrial bourgeoisie inflicted upon it in England in the1840s, somewhat later in France, Italy, and Germany,and very presciently in Russia in the last decade ofMarxs life. Until the rise of the populist movement in

for the most part, as

we have seen,

Marxisms economic

insights belonged to

an era of emerging

factory capitalism


Russia (most famously, the Narodnaya Volya), Marxexpected the emerging proletariat to become the greatmajority of the population in Europe and NorthAmerica, and to inevitably engage in revolutionary classwar as a result of capitalist exploitation andimmiseration. And especially between 1917 and 1939,long after Marxs death, Europe was indeed beleagueredby a mounting class war that reached the point ofoutright workers insurrections. In 1917, owing to anextraordinary confluence of circumstancesparticularlywith the outbreak of the First World War, whichrendered several quasi-feudal European social systemsterribly unstableLenin and the Bolsheviks tried to use(but greatly altered) Marxs writings in order to takepower in an economically backward empire, whose sizespanned eleven time zones across Europe and Asia.4

But for the most part, as we have seen, Marxismseconomic insights belonged to an era of emergingfactory capitalism in the nineteenth century. Brilliantas a theory of the material preconditions for socialism, itdid not address the ecological, civic, and subjectiveforces or the efficient causes that could impel humanityinto a movement for revolutionary social change. Onthe contrary, for nearly a century Marxism stagnatedtheoretically. Its theorists were often puzzled bydevelopments that have passed it by and, since the1960s, have mechanically appended environmentalistand feminist ideas to its formulaic ouvrierist outlook.

By the same token, anarchismwhich, I believe,represents in its authentic form a highly individualisticoutlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, oftenas a substitute for mass actionis far better suited toarticulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craftworld than a modern urban and industrial environment.I myself once used this political label, but furtherthought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it issimply not a social theory. Its foremost theorist

Documents

Journal of Social Ecology