The Communalism and Democratic Confederalism of Murray Bookchin
"The belief that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."
- Murray Bookchin
“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.”
Murray Bookchin
I shall begin with Ursula Le Guin’s speech: “We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom”
“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.
The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
It's worth remembering, too, the critical resources we have for envisaging the future society. Ursula Le Guin sings the praises for the social ecology of Murray Bookchin. The problem is that Bookchin got caught up in a lot of controversies and polemics in the 1980s and his reputation suffered as a result. That's unfortunate. He saw the dangers of ecology becoming the new dismal science through the dominance of certain strains, sapping the will and diverting minds into obscurantism and worse. In resisting the turn to inhumanism, Bookchin held firm to reason, public life and democracy, seeking to redeem the radical potential of the Enlightenment in the tradition of the left republicanism of a Spinoza. In this, Bookchin offered something that was so much more substantial than the tepid liberal 'defence' of the desolidarised atomism of the present day. I would leave something over for anarchic excess, a little something that escapes a totalizing Reason, something core that evades enclosure ... that bit that Wittgenstein was silent on, the bit he thought the most meaningful. The 'active life process' is more than a 'collection of dead facts', as Marx put it in The German Ideology). But Bookchin's defence of reason, morality, and public life was needed in face of the scarcely-reasoned nihilisms and fundamentalisms that were about to sweep the western world.
Are we up for the socio-ecological transformation of the political so as to constitute a public sphere worthy of the name? Ursula Le Guin thought highly of Murray Bookchin. And so do I. He was onto the ecological as well as the social contradictions of the capital system from the very start of the 1960s. So, too, was Marx in his notion of metabolic rift. If you are serious about system change and a future beyond not merely the institutions of the capital system but the very logic of capital, then you need to get into a deep structural analysis, a critcal metabolic analysis. I have heard too many greens and ecologists advance the claim that Marx 'had nothing to say' about ecology or climate change to put it down to ignorance. Bookchin had plenty to say on these things, but has been ignored by the same people. My intellectual mentor Istvan Meszaros, too, was writing of everything The Club of Rome wrote of, before them, engaging in a deep political economic analysis that was entirely absent in the Club of Rome publications. That this work is ignored is not ignorance, it is ideological. And it is ecology's loss.
The writer, science fiction icon and radical thinker Ursula K. Le Guin strongly endorses Murray Bookchin’s collection of essays, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy.
'Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in The Next Revolution represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it. Murray Bookchin was a true son of the Enlightenment in his respect for clear thought and moral responsibility and in his honest, uncompromising search for a realistic hope.'
Murray Bookchin "was a true son of the Enlightenment" - Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on The Next Revolution
Le Guinn underlines the fact that Bookchin addresses the question of “where we’re going”:
“Impatient, idealistic readers may find him uncomfortably tough-minded. He’s unwilling to leap over reality to dreams of happy endings, unsympathetic to mere transgression pretending to be political action: “A ‘politics’ of disorder or ‘creative chaos,’ or a naïve practice of ‘taking over the streets’ (usually little more than a street festival), regresses participants to the behavior of a juvenile herd.” That applies more to the Summer of Love, certainly, than to the Occupy movement, yet it is a permanently cogent warning.”
I’m tough-minded, critical, and occasionally cantankerous too. I’m not easy to read. I write a lot, and I bury the gold. You have to dig. I don’t make it easy. I eschew soundbites and slogans. I embed the argument in a dialectical or dialogic style and expect people to read, wrestle, understand, and draw the right conclusions for themselves. When you tell people directly, they either accept or reject according to already-held personal preference and prejudice. Nothing changes. Make people search and wrestle and reason, and they may persuade themselves and change their views. Which is to say that I believe in democracy and practical reasoning rather than top-down education and instruction under a technocracy.
Le Guin turns this warning towards the subject of ecological degradation:
“What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned.
Yet this process, however destructive, can’t be restrained and stopped within unchanged institutional parameters. This endless expansion is systemic. As Bookchin writes:
“Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it ‘ecological,’ are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.”
The capital economy, by definition, lives by cancerous expansion; as Bookchin observes: 'For capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be for it to commit social suicide.' We have, essentially, chosen cancer as the model of our social system. On page 91, Bookchin explains:
Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in The Next Revolution represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it.
Le Guin concludes:
“Reading it, [The Next Revolution] I was moved and grateful, as I have so often been in reading Murray Bookchin. He was a true son of the Enlightenment in his respect for clear thought and moral responsibility and in his honest, uncompromising search for a realistic hope.”
There is a plain lesson here for the Left to learn:
Deep and enduring transitions and transformations require an actively democratic and social content. And that means taking people with you or, better still, giving people the tools and capacities that equip them with the power and motivation to take thremselves to where they need to be.
Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
“So, in a country that has all but shut its left eye and is trying to use only its right hand, where does an ambidextrous, binocular Old Rad like Murray Bookchin fit?
“I think he'll find his readers. A lot of people are seeking consistent, constructive thinking on which to base action—a frustrating search. Theoretical approaches that seem promising turn out, like the Libertarian Party, to be Ayn Rand in drag; immediate and effective solutions to a problem turn out, like the Occupy movement, to lack structure and stamina for the long run. Young people, people this society blatantly short-changes and betrays, are looking for intelligent, realistic, long-term thinking: not another ranting ideology, but a practical working hypothesis, a methodology of how to regain control of where we're going. Achieving that control will require a revolution as powerful, as deeply affecting society as a whole, as the force it wants to harness.”
“Murray Bookchin was an expert in nonviolent revolution. He thought about radical social changes, planned and unplanned, and how best to prepare for them, all his life. A new collection of his essays, "The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy," released last month by Verso Books, carries his thinking on past his own life into the threatening future we face.
“But Bookchin is no grim puritan. I first read him as an anarchist, probably the most eloquent and thoughtful one of his generation, and in moving away from anarchism he hasn't lost his sense of the joy of freedom. He doesn't want to see that joy, that freedom, come crashing down, yet again, among the ruins of its own euphoric irresponsibility.
What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned.
"Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status."
—Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin was entirely unafraid to use the "c" word, the word that scares the life out of conventional politics, and whose explicit statement sorts the radicals out from the reformers: "capitalism." There are very many people who think that you can "reform" and "green" capitalism and make it "responsible" and "democratic." There is another "c" that terrifies the life out of such people: "class." Bookchin wasn't one of the afraid:
"What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned."
"Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in "The Next Revolution” represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it. He critiques the failures of past movements for social change, resurrects the promise of direct democracy and, in the last essay in the book, sketches his hope of how we might turn the environmental crisis into a moment of true choice—a chance to transcend the paralyzing hierarchies of gender, race, class, nation, a chance to find a radical cure for the radical evil of our social system."
Bookchin didn’t pussyfoot around on the ecological crisis. He was clear and adamant that the ecological crisis at heart was a social crisis. Those who persist in saying that climate change is the problem that ‘humanity’ has to address are not addressing the roots of the problem at all, merely deflecting political attention from those roots in the capital system. Climate change itself stands in need of explanation; the problem is not merely natural or physical but social, with respect to alienative and exploitative social relations and forms of mediation. Get this crisis the wrong way round and make climate change itself the problem, rather than the physical manifestation of capital’s socio-ecological contradictions, and we will continue in the direction of civilizational crisis and collapse. For redemption, you have to have the nerve to name a sin for what it is and express contrition. And then act appropriately. Changing energy systems alone will not resolve the socio-environmental crisis, least of all when those systems are under the control of the corporations as they seek to extend their power, coming finally to realize capital's long-term goal of the total enclosure of the global commons:
'He dared to say in the mid-1960s what many today are acknowledging: that the root cause of climate change is capitalism, a system that compels firms to lay waste our common home in order to survive. The incipient greenhouse effect “is symbolic of the long-range catastrophic effects of our irrational civilization on the balance of nature.” To preserve the viability of the biosphere, he argued, we must rethink our economic system and create a “moral economy,” one that places the common good ahead of the unshackled profit motive, within the boundaries of the natural world.
For the rest of the twentieth century, Bookchin would propound his visions of a decentralized, humane, cooperative ecological society.
A prescient voice on climate change by Janet Biehl
Bookchin wrote about ecological degradation before Rachel Carson and, even more importantly, identified its socio-economic causes instead of simply documenting its effects. In other words, Bookchin developed a political ecology, the very thing environmentalism has proved to deficient in, leaving it without practical effect and thereby making the resolution of environmental crisis available to state and corporate forces.
“Industrialized agriculture, with its broad use of chemicals, constituted a threat to human health, argued Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) in his first book, Our Synthetic Environment (published by Knopf in June 1962, under the pseudonym Lewis Herber).”
Crops grown in monocultures were vulnerable to infestations, requiring pesticides; and pesticides like DDT were linked to degenerative diseases, even cancer. Meanwhile cities too were becoming toxic. Pollution was choking the air and waterways. City dwellers, toiling in a deadening monoculture of uniform glass-towered offices, were subject to high levels of stress, deprived of fresh air and sunlight, their walkable streets displaced by the soot-spewing automobile. And finally, nuclear power posed the unprecedented threat of radiation.
In Our Synthetic Environment Bookchin (as Lewis Herber) not only warned about these ecological problems; he indicted the social and economic system that generated them. That is the all-important systemic analysis of political economy that too often goes missing in ecological lamentations for a world that is being lost/destroyed. Far too many environmentalists neutralize - and neuter - the environmental issue by translating its socio-economic aspects into technically neutral pseudo-scientific terms. This is a deradicalisation that works to prevent genuine ecological resolution.
One reviewer, William Vogt, noted that Bookchin “ranges far more widely than Miss Carson and discusses not only herbicides and insecticides, but also nutrition, chemical fertilizers […] soil structure.” The British periodical Mother Earth called Our Synthetic Environment “one of the most important books issued since the war and I thoroughly recommend it to all who are interested in the way we live.” The eminent microbiologist René Dubos lauded both Our Synthetic Environment and Silent Spring for alerting the public “to the dangers inherent in the thousands of new chemicals that technological civilization brings into our daily life.”
Given the prescience, depth, and insight of Our Synthetic Environment, why was the book overlooked for the most part? Why is Bookchin still overlooked?
One reason is surely the fact that Bookchin was a political radical, a former Communist turned anarchist, whose natural métier was broad social analysis. As the culture critic Theodore Roszak speculated a decade or so later, “the staggering breadth and ethical challenge of Bookchin’s analysis” was overwhelming: “Nobody, as of 1962, cared to believe the problem was so vast. Even the environmentalists preferred the liberal but narrowly focused Carson to the radical Bookchin.” That preference remains. Moreover the remedy Bookchin offered was social revolution, and as the environmental writer Stephanie Mills noted a decade or so later, that was “too much for people to swallow in ’62.”
It still is more than fifty years later. People in the main prefer to talk the radical talk rather than walk the radical walk. Such people are scared of politics and people. They still prefer ‘the liberal’ and ‘narrowly focused’ surface level 'pragmatism' to radical deep structural analysis and action. They can manage protests and practical workarounds; but they don't do 'system change' as anything more than a slogan on a march - unless it can be strictly limited and controlled, as in a change in energy as against a change in social forms and relations.
Bookchin correctly diagnosed the cause of the looming problem: the burning of fossil fuels. Lewis Mumford before him has referred to ‘carboniferous capitalism.’ Both Mumford and Bookchin argued for clean energy sources. But both Mumford and Bookchin addressed the material roots and causes to a deeper level than fuels.
As Janet Biehl writes on Bookchin:
“He dared to say in the mid-1960s what many today are acknowledging: that the root cause of climate change is capitalism, a system that compels firms to lay waste our common home in order to survive. The incipient greenhouse effect “is symbolic of the long-range catastrophic effects of our irrational civilization on the balance of nature.” To preserve the viability of the biosphere, he argued, we must rethink our economic system and create a “moral economy,” one that places the common good ahead of the unshackled profit motive, within the boundaries of the natural world.”
For the rest of the twentieth century, Bookchin continued to develop his visions of a decentralized, humane, cooperative ecological society. It is time. If not now, then when? In fact had we acted on this vision then, when Bookchin presented it, we would not be on the brink of catastrophe now. Time and necessity are powerless against cowardice.
I discovered the work of Murray Bookchin in a second hand book shop in Liverpool, UK, 1992. Reid of Liverpool. The book was “Post-Scarcity Anarchism", and I loved the way Bookchin wrote - clear, direct, lucid, and pertinent – he gets directly to the issues and problems and wrestles with them. I love the way he avoids the fetishism of words, concepts and movements, so that all the principles at stake - freedom, democracy, public life, reason - are brought to life, rescued from the traditions in which they are systematised and ossified. And I love the fact that he invested these principles with a robust content that we can act upon, rather than, in some supposed reaction against a 'totalising' reason, simply dissolving system and order into some barely-reasoned nihilism and relativism. Bookchin well understood that the latter would entail the implosion of the Left as a meaningful political force. Freedom, reason, public life retain their meaning and potential in his work. Bookchin shows how we can realise that potential still. ‘The Ecology of Freedom’ and ‘From Urbanisation to Cities’ are well worth reading or revisiting. And as this article makes clear, he was prescient with respect environmental issues and their connection to the way we organise our political and economic affairs. Anyone committed to an eco-public or Ecopolis, anyone interested in the revival of republican ideas and exploring their connection with political ecology should read Bookchin. I love, for instance, the way he applies insights drawn from Hegel to develop a concept of dialectical naturalism, the way he exposes epistemologies of domination and hierarchy and so much more. His writing is alive, and remains timely. Bookchin is an interesting and provocative thinker, certainly, and scandalously neglected.
New book on Bookchin by Janet Biehl
'Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was one of the most significant and influential environmental philosophers of the twentieth century. The founder of the social ecology movement, Bookchin was presenting and publishing foundational ideas about issues like air and water pollution, nuclear radiation, and the dangers of fossil fuels. He was a genuinely original and prescient thinker who was grappling with problems that we still face today-and proposing solutions for them-before most people realized those problems existed.'
More on reconstituting the public realm and instituting the democratic economy.
Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl, Bookchin's personal copyeditor and collaborator for nearly twenty years.
This book is the first-ever biography of Murray Bookchin, a pioneer environmental thinker of the twentieth century and a big influence on my own thinking. A fresh look at Bookchin is much needed. His reputation has been somewhat clouded in various polemics and controversies. Which is a shame, because he did great work in exposing epistemologies of rule and politics of domination to generate an ecology of freedom. His core principles and values are timely. And eminently reasonable. It depends on how serious we are about becoming eco-citizens and re-creating public life in the associational space of our everyday lives. No-one else is going to do it for us.
Municipalization of the Economy Bookchin's economic thought - a social economy based on cooperatives.
“As the Rojava revolution continues, the nature of its economy has been much discussed. As I have written previously, Rojava aspires to a social economy based on cooperatives. In recent weeks, several people have asked me for Murray Bookchin’s ideas about the economy: what are the economic aspects of libertarian municipalism? I’ve put together a summary of his thinking here, based on the sources listed at the end of this article.” –Janet Biehl
"As Bookchin put it, in a municipalized economy, “The economy ceases to be merely an economy in the strict sense of the word—whether as ‘business,’ ‘market,’ capitalist, ‘worker-controlled’ enterprises. It becomes a truly political economy: the economy of the polis or the commune.” It would become a moral economy, guided by rational and ecological standards. An ethos of public responsibility would avoid a wasteful, exclusive, and irresponsible acquisition of goods, as well as ecological destruction and violations of human rights. Classical notions of limit and balance could replace the capitalist imperative to expand and compete in the pursuit of profit. Indeed, the community would value people, not for their levels of production and consumption, but for their positive contributions to community life."
Ecology or Catastrophe discusses Bookchin's role in a variety of environmental and social movements.
"Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin is the first-ever biography of Murray Bookchin, written by his personal collaborator and copyeditor, Janet Biehl. From 1987-2006, Biehl edited every word that Bookchin wrote, and worked with him on numerous articles and books. She tells the story of Bookchin's life from a perspective that no one else could, providing a comprehensive biography that examines this pioneer environmentalist's life on both personal and professional levels. She uses her access to Bookchin's papers as well as extensive archival research, and draws upon nearly two decades' worth of a personal relationship with Bookchin. The book discusses the variety of philosophies and movements that Bookchin helped lead, including social ecology, assembly democracy, and even, in certain instances, anarchism. Ecology or Catastrophe is the definitive biography of Murray Bookchin, written by the person who knew him best."
Also worth checking out is Recovering Bookchin by Andy Price, from my old stamping ground in Manchester, with this recommendation from my former Director of Studies, Jules Townshend:
'This is a work of “recovery” in the best sense, a lucid, sympathetic yet critical account of Bookchin, demonstrating his continuing relevance in the face of ecological catastrophe. Andy Price’s insightful treatment goes beyond the polemics surrounding Bookchin to illustrate the richness and depth of his ecological philosophy, which should do much to revive interest in this bold thinker.'
— Jules Townshend, Professor Emeritus, Manchester Metropolitan University
I remember mentioning my work on Lewis Mumford to Jules, and he recommended that I seek Andy out (at least I think it was Andy. It was someone who was an expert interested in Mumford and notions of an ecological public as an alternative to the Megamachine. Either way, we were all working in the same field whilst making our own unique contributions. A fertile environment for ideas.)
Recovering Bookchin by Andy Price
Social ecology and the crises of our time New Compass Press: 2012
In Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price defends Bookchin, making it clear that the attacks on him from greens were unjustified, and that Bookchin deserves to be seen as a profound political thinker who offered a coherent practical and theoretical response to the convergent social and ecological crises of today. Bookchin exposed flaws in green theory and practice, and the image of greens as benign and non-sectarian was exposed as a sham. People are pacific when everyone sings the same song.
In defense of Murray Bookchin by Ian Angus
Bookchin analysed “two conflicting tendencies” in the environmental movement:
On one side, “deeply concerned naturalists, communitarians, social radicals and feminists” were challenging the “hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled” society responsible for environmental destruction, and developing a “coherent, and socially oriented body of ideas that can best be called social ecology.”
On the other side, “barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones, and outright social reactionaries” were directing fire at “a vague species called humanity – as though people of color were equatable with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the rich, and the exploited with their exploiters.” Drawing on the mystical deep ecology philosophy formulated by “privileged white male academics,” they “preach a gospel that humanity is some kind of cancer in the world of life.”
Bookchin wrote at extremes, maybe, but this had the merit of highlighting problems barely below the surface:
“Deep ecology, with its Malthusian thrust, its various centricities, its mystifying Eco-Ia-Ia, and its disorienting eclecticism degrades this enterprise into a crude biologism that deflects us from the social problems that underpin the ecological ones and the project of social reconstruction that alone can spare the biosphere from virtual destruction.”
The language is undiplomatic and maybe ungenerous. It is possible to present deep ecology in better light. But problems remain. Deep down, what may appear to be Bookchin’s simplifications encapsulated the bleak inhumanism at the heart of deep ecology. Bookchin’s views caused an uproar.
“EarthFirst! activists and academic deep ecologists joined in an all out battle to repel one anarchist critic. In articles and speeches and back rooms, Bookchin was accused of waging an ideological turf war, of attacking real environmentalists because he was jealous that they were winning support while he was not. He was portrayed as a bitter, dogmatic and sectarian old man who only wanted to control the green movement and was determined to destroy everyone who disagreed with him.”
So they all united to destroy one man and his ideas. The caricature stuck, Bookchin was marginalised, and the green movement went on in the wrong direction. Decades of political failure and futility lay in store, with environmentalism being washed up here, climate catastrophe on the horizon, and nothing but incremental institutionalism complicit with the system or hopeless utopian fantasies to offer in response.
Bookchin was read out of the green movement. And it shows. “He was much too radical for the mainstream NGOs, and much too politically principled for the lifestyle and direct action greens.” Price is spot on in his analysis and conclusions.
“Price shows conclusively that Bookchin’s critique of deep ecology was based on real problems in that current’s ideology and pronouncements, and that his opponents, apparently unable to reply effectively to his ideas, resorted to personal attacks with no basis in reality. It was they who were engaged in a turf war, treating all criticism as illegitimate. Recovering Bookchin is worth reading just for its rehabilitation of Bookchin’s reputation, and for its exposure of his deep ecology critics as dishonest and shallow.”
That’s a controversial statement. But when pushed on politics and ethics, I have found far too many greens short of what is required. And far short at that.
Ian Angus’ article is worth reading closely, because in showing Price to be entirely right with respect to the above, he notes some flaws in Bookchin’s position. “Bookchin didn’t offer any materialist definition of hierarchy and domination. Nor could he: they are ahistorical ethical concepts, not materialist social analysis.” That reinstates the materialist (social and natural) ontology of Marx, which is my view. But I wholeheartedly agree with Angus’ conclusion:
“Despite my political disagreements with anarchism and my criticisms of his philosophy, Bookchin is one of my heroes. He devoted his life to the cause of the liberation of humanity. Much of his writing on society and ecology was brilliant, and deserves to be read carefully by ecosocialists and everyone else who realizes that we can only save the world by radically changing society.
While his efforts to enunciate a coherent revolutionary worldview didn’t succeed, at least he tried – in contrast to the shallow thinkers who resorted to insults instead of reason. He’ll be read and remembered when their books just gather dust. [And who continue to talk radical and demand big changes, whilst thinking and acting small, reformist, and incrementally.]
That’s why Recovering Bookchin is an important book. It’s … an impressive effort to rehabilitate Bookchin’s reputation, and to make his views accessible to a new generation of left-green activists.”
Bookchin was a bold thinker, indeed, his positive contribution to political thought coming to be somewhat lost through all kinds of political fall outs and squabbles. Which is a shame. In the book Recovering Bookchin, published by New Compass, Andy Price recounts the debates between Murray Bookchin and deep ecologists, anarchists and primitivists, identifying and critically discounting the Bookchin caricature as a body of critique levelled against Bookchin the person rather than his ideas.
Instead, Price argues, Bookchin's contribution can be seen to provide a coherent practical and theoretical response to the ecological and social crises of our time.
“I would argue that looking at his ideas afresh is now more timely than ever, for in them not only do we find some very useful discussions indeed of our relationship to the natural world and the current ecological crisis that will prove very helpful in trying to respond, as a society, to that crisis, but also, we find a fascinating discussion of radical social practice as a way of articulating that response. Not only does this an examination of the practical side of Bookchin chime with the lessons we have all learnt from the growth in ecological awareness over recent decades – about land management, about scale, about balance and participation in ecology as well as society – but perhaps most tantalisingly of all, it also proves a fascinating precursor to the kind of political protests we have seen within the last 24 months in places like Madrid, New York, and London.”
Murray Bookchin was a pivotal, polarizing figure in the post-WWII history of anarchism. He put ecology, politics, and democracy on the agenda in a way that was as novel as it is enduring. He was also a pugilist and a polemicist unafraid to punch out important truths, and flatten decadent falsehoods. It made him many enemies. The dominant trends in environmentalism wrote this man and his awkward radicalism out. It shows. Radical terms are now used as slogans to mobilize a mass externally in protest.
Something shifted in the movement when he died in 2006. For the preceding fifty years, his writings had been a point of reference through which we could clarify our views, even when we disagreed with them, whereas now that he was gone we had to make sense of him. Who was he and how had he lived? These are compelling questions for those who had worked with him and for anyone who wants to understand contemporary anarchism.
I thought this an intriguing title because the ideas of Murray Bookchin, along with those of Lewis Mumford, have seeped into my own view. But it does seem that the views of both these thinkers, who generated so many ideas pertinent to politics, ecology, cities, have somewhat slipped from view. I wasn’t sure why since, as the years have gone by, their ideas have become all the more timely. The reason lay in Bookchin’s social and ethical concerns, something which set him apart from certain strains in the ‘deep ecology’ movement (as well as from the green movemenrt as liberal, technocratic, and reformist). As Andrew Blackman explains, “Deep Ecology claims that living beings are all of equal value and should be treated as such – humans are just a part of the ecology of the world, with no claim to superiority.” If that sounds good, “Bookchin saw in the work of many deep ecologists of the 1980s was a callousness towards people, and an inability to see the social causes of ecological crises.” Bookchin emphasised the social causes of problems and sought social solutions. “By seeking to redress the anthropocentric view of the world, the deep ecologists went too far and made humans into a kind of scourge that existed outside nature. Bookchin’s idea was to create a truly ecological society that respected nature and saw humans as part of nature, not separate from it.”
I’m with Bookchin on this, seeking to develop a social and a moral ecology that sees human activity as something more than fitting biological imperatives and “natural” processes.
Bookchin advocated the reconstitution of public life through the decentralisation of power and control along ecological and democratic lines. His libertarian municipalism affirmed a face-to-face concept of democratic assembly.
My own views combine representative and direct modes of political expression, power residing at the most appropriate level of competence, as close as possible to the base, but ascending upwards, a positive role for government, extensive public spaces. An ecological reading of the old Hegelian Sittlichkeit. That conception incorporates plenty of themes which are central to Bookchin’s view, politics as a good, politics as creative self-realisation, civic freedom, active citizenship, the social ecology of urbanisation, confederal municipalism, the ecological society. All worth looking at in light of the pressing need to reinvigorate political life.
"There is an urgent need for a new radical approach to adequately address the new economic, ecological, technological, and cultural challenges of contemporary society; it must be one of theory and action, one that will draw on features from classical Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, yet go beyond their historical and theoretical limitations.
Communalism .. seeks to construct a broad civic sphere and markedly enhance political involvement. Indeed, it seeks to reconstruct municipalities as a whole to form a counter-power to the nation-state.
On closer inspection, the civic nature of most modern revolutions points to the fundamental role that municipalities have played as incubators of social development and the functions they have performed in fulfilling humanity’s potentialities. When Aristotle wrote his political works he set a standard for the Western conception of the city, defining it as the arena for the development of citizenship and even humanness itself, specifically reason, self-consciousness, and the good life. The Hellenic word polis, from which we derive the word political, has too often been wrongly translated as “city-state.” In fact the Athenian polis was not a state but a humanly scaled municipality that became an outright face-to-face democracy."
The ideas of Murray Bookchin are well worth recovering.
“the problem Bookchin saw in the work of many deep ecologists of the 1980s was a callousness towards people, and an inability to see the social causes of ecological crises.
Bookchin, on the other hand, emphasised the social causes, and believed in social solutions…
“By seeking to redress the anthropocentric view of the world, the deep ecologists went too far and made humans into a kind of scourge that existed outside nature. Bookchin’s idea was to create a truly ecological society that respected nature and saw humans as part of nature, not separate from it…
“He saw the municipality as the vehicle for social change, and argued that social ecologists should take control of local councils and gradually federate with other like-minded local councils to effect change from the bottom up. To me it doesn’t sound very plausible, but then neither do the alternatives. Changing a system you fundamentally disagree with is a hard thing to do. Price does a good job of laying out exactly what Bookchin meant, and answering some of the main criticisms from anarchists who prefer to work outside the system.”
Why Recover Bookchin? By Sveinung Legard
Bookchin offers a coherent and cogent theoretical and practical response to the ecological and social crises of our time. This article challenges and counters the “green” backlash that did much to undermine Bookchin’s influence and importance, to the long-term detriment of environmentalism:
“Bookchin would critique some of the more problematic aspects of the Green movement – movements like deep ecology, which had produced some worrying trends – as misanthropic, as blaming humanity per se for ecological degradation rather than focusing on class, hierarchy, and capital.
From this critique (which I examine at length in the book) there was an almighty backlash, from different thinkers and activists within the green movement as a whole who would accuse Bookchin of attempting to dominate the movement as a whole. However, as I argue throughout Recovering Bookchin, these accusations were nothing more than that: unsubstantiated, personal attacks. Worse still, they failed to address the issues Bookchin had raised, and failed to acknowledge that these issues stemmed from Bookchin’s by then 20 year career of writing and thinking about ecological issues.”
Bookchin’s ideas have been obscured by caricature and calumny.
“I would argue that looking at his ideas afresh is now more timely than ever, for in them not only do we find some very useful discussions indeed of our relationship to the natural world and the current ecological crisis that will prove very helpful in trying to respond, as a society, to that crisis, but also, we find a fascinating discussion of radical social practice as a way of articulating that response. Not only does this an examination of the practical side of Bookchin chime with the lessons we have all learnt from the growth in ecological awareness over recent decades – about land management, about scale, about balance and participation in ecology as well as society – but perhaps most tantalisingly of all, it also proves a fascinating precursor to the kind of political protests we have seen within the last 24 months in places like Madrid, New York, and London. Again, Bookchin is well worth a revisit, shorn of any of the politics or silliness that surrounded him in the 1980s and left us with the caricature.”
Murray Bookchin's libertarian technics
Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a pioneer of radical ecological thought. He is sometimes described as a neglected figure. If true, then that's a real loss. He argued for the reclaiming of public life against the alien forces that have hijacked our social and co-operative capacities, and he was a vociferous critic of the scarcely reasoned nihilisms that threatened to take 'the left' down a cul-de-sac. Well worth checking out if he is a new name to you, well worth revisiting if you do know him.
Here is an article which looks at his advocacy of liberatory technology, a.k.a. libertarian technics.
"Bookchin drew on Aristotle's notion of techné, technique, as encompassing a wider web of social relations and ethical principles.
A libertarian technics would therefore require the re-embedding of technology in a web of communal social relations and ethics.
"How can we heal the fracture that separates living men from dead machines without sacrificing either men or machines?" (Towards a liberatory technology (1965), published in Post-scarcity anarchism. p.155).
For Bookchin, the profit motive constrains and limits human creativity to that which can be commodified. This favours large-scale industry, hierarchical management, and the subsumption of the labour process into the deadening, alienated toil of the assembly line (Bookchin was an auto worker in his youth).
Perhaps most intriguingly, Bookchin's understanding of technology as imbricated with social relations leads him to look towards technologies which can support the reproduction of libertarian, communal relations, operating in line with wider ecological processes.
In fact, the real issue we face today is not whether this new technology can provide us with the means of life in a toil-less society, but whether it can help to humanise society, whether it can contribute to the creation of entirely new relationships between man and man. (Towards a liberatory technology p.116). This remaking of social relations seeks "a balanced relationship with nature" (Towards a liberatory technology p.127-128), communities which live in a "symbiotic relationship with their environment" (Towards a liberatory technology p. 160). For Bookchin, just as capitalist technology tends to separate us from natural processes, to keep 'nature' at bay and to dominate it, a liberatory technology can inculcate a sense of mutual dependence on nature into the fabric of everyday life. To "add a sense of haunting symbiosis to the common productive activity of human and natural beings" (Ecology of Freedom p.264).
Finally, Bookchin stresses the need for technologies to be compatible with face-to-face, assembly-based direct democracy… Importantly, he stresses that "an authentic community is not merely a structural constellation of human beings but rather a practice of communising" (Ecology of Freedom p.263), that is, a commons, a set of relationships continually reproduced through social and ecological interactions."
Here is an article on Bookchin’s relevance with respect to contemporary politics.
Bookchin opposed the ideas and practices of the emerging environmentalist movements, accusing them of advocating mere “technical fixes” of capitalism, counter-posing it to an ecological approach that seeks to address the root causes of the systemic problem. In his view, capitalism’s fatal flaw lay not in its exploitation of the working class, as Marxists believe, but rather in its conflict with the natural environment which, if allowed to develop unopposed, would inevitably lead to the dehumanization of people and the destruction of nature.
The Next Revolution includes the 1992 essay The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society. In it, Bookchin argues that “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.” For an ecological society to develop, first the inter-human domination must be eradicated. According to Bookchin, “capitalism and its alter-ego, ‘state socialism,’ have brought all the historic problems of domination to a head,” and the market economy, if it is not stopped, will succeed in destroying our natural environment as a result of its “grow or die” ideology.
For years, Bookchin sought to convince anarchist groups in the US that his idea of libertarian municipalism — which, in his own words “seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of parliamentarism and its mystification of the ‘party’ mechanism as a means for public representation” — was the key to making anarchism politically and socially relevant again.
Libertarian municipalism promotes the use of direct face-to-face assemblies in order to “steal” the practice of politics back from the professional, careerist politicians and place it back in the hands of citizens. Describing the state as “a completely alien formation” and a “thorn in the side of human development,” Bookchin presents libertarian municipalism as “democratic to its core and non-hierarchical in its structure,” as well as “premised on the struggle to achieve a rational and ecological society.”
Democratic Confederalism
In Öcalan’s view, the only way out of the crisis in the Middle East is the establishment of a democratic confederal system “that will derive its strength directly from the people, and not from globalization based on nation states.” According to the imprisoned rebel leader, “neither the capitalist system nor the pressure of imperialist forces will lead to democracy; except to serve their own interests. The task is to assist in developing a grassroots-based democracy … which takes into consideration the religious, ethnic and class differences in society.”
It is no coincidence that the idea of Democratic Confederalism, as developed by Öcalan, shows many parallels with Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology. In the early 2000s Öcalan had begun to read Ecology of Freedom and Urbanization Without Cities while in prison and soon after declared himself a student of Bookchin’s. [These are the books I read just a little earlier]. Through his lawyers, Öcalan attempted to set up a meeting with the radical thinker to figure out ways in which Bookchin’s ideas could be made applicable to the Middle Eastern context.
Dual power, confederalism and social ecology
Over the past decade, democratic confederalism has slowly but surely become an integral part of Kurdish society. Three elements of Bookchin’s thought have particularly influenced the development of a “democratic modernity” across Kurdistan: the concept of “dual power,” the confederal structure as proposed by Bookchin under the header of libertarian municipalism, and the theory of social ecology which traces the roots of many contemporary struggles back to the origins of civilization and places the natural environment at the heart of the solution to these problems.
“Global capital, precisely because of its very hugeness, can only be eaten away at its roots,” Bookchin writes in A Politics for the Twenty-First Century, “specifically by means of a libertarian municipalist resistance at the base of society. It must be eroded by the myriad millions who, mobilized by a grassroots movement, challenge global capital’s sovereignty over their lives and try to develop local and regional economic alternatives to its industrial operations.”
Bookchin believes that if our ideal is a Commune of Communes, [a very Aristotelian notion, I must say] the natural place to start is at the local political level, with a movement and program as the “uncompromising advocate of popular neighborhood and town assemblies and the development of a municipalized economy.”
Ultimately, the best way to support the struggles of the Kurds, the Zapatistas and many other revolutionary movements and initiatives that have sprung up across the globe in the past few years, is by listening to their stories, learning from their experiences and following in their footsteps.
A confederation of self-organized municipalities, transcending national borders and ethnic and religious boundaries is the best bulwark against the ever-encroaching imperialist powers and capitalist forces. In the struggle to achieve this goal, there are worse examples to follow than the ideas set out by Murray Bookchin and the practice of libertarian municipalism.
An interview with Debbie Bookchin on her father’s contributions to revolutionary theory and the adoption of his ideas by the Kurdish liberation movement.
Bookchin was (and remains) as influential as he was controversial. His radical critiques of deep ecology and ‘lifestyle anarchism’ stirred up a number of heated debates that continue to this day. Now that his revolutionary ideas have been picked up by the Kurdish liberation movement, who are using Bookchin’s works to build a democratic, gender-equal and ecologically sustainable society in the heart of the Middle East, we are seeing a renewed interest in the life and thoughts of this great political thinker.
For this reason ROAR is very excited to publish this interview with Debbie Bookchin, which not only provides valuable insights into her father’s political legacy, but also offers a glimpse into the life of the man behind the ideas.
This is a curious quote (not least because Marx advocated the abolition [Aufhebung] of the state): "Briefly, Žižek advocates revolution with the power given to a centralized state – a rehashing of Marxist theory. Critchley, on the other hand, advocates social change that takes place in the interstices of society."
Here is an article which sets Bookchin in the context of an ecological humanism.
“In our world of ecological catastrophe and social crisis, some roundly condemn modern civilisation as the source of our Promethean predicament. What can follow is a rejection of humanism, science and the City and a turn to either nostalgic primitivism or esoteric spirituality. But do we really need to flee the city for the woods in order to build a free society? In this triple intellectual biography, Brian Morris lucidly discusses three intellectual giants who made an enormous, though often overlooked, contribution to modern ecology: Lewis Mumford, Ren Dubos, and Murray Bookchin. Morris argues that they have forged a third way beyond both industrialism and anti-modernism: ecological humanism (also known as social ecology), a tradition that embraces both ecological realities and the ethical and cultural wealth of humanism. In examining their thought, Professor Morris paves the way for fresh debate on ecology, charting an optimistic vision for the profound reharmonisation of nature and culture as well as the ecological, egalitarian and democratic transformation of our cities and society.”
That’s very much a tradition I work in. Bookchin is a kindred spirit. I have my own little corner in my room, books piled all around, from which I work and generate ideas and words, and dreams and visions.
Here are some of my books in that vain (available in free access in the humanities commons and :
This book contains substantial chapters and sections on the ecological society and the urban public sphere.
On Green Republicanism