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\title{The Murray Bookchin Reader}
\date{1999}
\author{Edited by Janet Biehl}
\subtitle{}
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{\usekomafont{title}{\huge The Murray Bookchin Reader\par}}%
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\begin{quote}
\emph{We must always be on a quest for the new, for the potentialities that ripen with the development of the world and the new visions that unfold with them. An outlook that ceases to look for what is new and potential in the name of “realism” has already lost contact with the present, for the present is always conditioned by the future. True development is cumulative, not sequential; it is growth, not succession. The new always embodies the present and past, but it does so in new ways and more adequately as the parts of a greater whole.}
Murray Bookchin, “On Spontaneity and Organization,” 1971
\end{quote}
\section{Acknowledgments}
The idea for this reader initially came from David Goodway, who, one
sunny afternoon in May 1992, sat down with Bookchin, Gideon
Kossoff, and myself in an attic in Keighley, West Yorkshire, to draft a
table of contents. Although the present book bears only the faintest
resemblance to the one we sketched that afternoon, its origins do lie
in this meeting. Goodway has my warm thanks for setting the wheels
in motion.
I am immensely grateful to Dimitri Roussopoulos for his permission
to reprint from works issued by his press, Black Rose Books; and to
Ramsey Kanaan for his permission to use the materials published under
the auspices of A.K. Press. Heartfelt thanks as well to Steve Cook and
Jane Greenwood of Cassell for their support for this project. Peter
Zegers commented helpfully on the manuscript.
My greatest debt, however, is to Murray Bookchin himself, my
companion, who encouraged me to take on this project. Rereading his
writings, for this book, has reminded me yet again that it is a privilege
to be associated with him.
\chapter{Introduction}
In the aftermath of the cold war, in a world that glorifies markets and
commodities, it sometimes seems difficult to remember that generations
of people once fought to create a very different kind of world. To many,
the aspirations of this grand tradition of socialism often seem archaic
today, or utopian in the pejorative sense, the stuff of idle dreams; others,
more dismissive, consider socialism to be an inherently coercive system,
one whose consignment to the past is well-deserved.
Yet for a century preceding World War I, and for nearly a half century
thereafter, various kinds of socialism — statist and libertarian; economistic
and moral; industrial and communalistic — constituted a powerful
mass movement for the transformation of a competitive society into a
cooperative one — and for the creation of a generous and humane system
in which emancipated human beings could fulfill their creative and
rational potentialities. People are ends in their own right, the socialist
tradition asserted, not means for one another’s use; and they are
substantive beings, with considered opinions and deep feelings, not
mass-produced things with artificially induced notions and wants.
People can and should throw away the economic shackles that bind
them, socialists argued, cast off the fictions and unrealities that mystify
them, and plan and construct, deliberately and consciously, a truly
enlightened and emancipated society based on freedom and
cooperation, reason and solidarity. Material aims would be secondary
to ethical concerns, people would have rich, spontaneous social
relationships with one another, and they would actively and responsibly
participate in making all decisions about their lives, rather than subject
themselves to external authoritarian control.
After 1917 a general enthusiasm for the stunning accomplishment
of the Bolshevik Revolution pervaded almost all sectors of the
international left, so much so that the humanistic ideals of socialism
came to be attached to the Communist movement. In the 1930s young
American intellectuals growing up under Depression conditions,
especially in the vibrant radical political culture of New York City, cut
their teeth on the version of socialism that the Communist movement
taught them. Their minds brimming with revolutionary strategies and
Marxian dialectics, their hopes and passions spurred by lifeendangering
battles against a capitalist system that seemed on the brink
of collapse, they marshaled all their abilities to achieve the century-old
socialist ideal.
Tragically, international Communism defiled that ideal. It committed
monstrous abuses in the name of socialism, and when these abuses
became too much to bear — the show trials of 1936–8, the betrayal of
the Spanish Revolution, and the Hitler–Stalin pact — hopes that the
Communist movement could usher in a socialist world were
shipwrecked. Many radicals, reeling from these blows, withdrew into
private life; others accommodated themselves to the capitalist system
in varying degrees, even to the point of supporting the United States in
the cold war. Still others, who did remain on the left politically, turned
their attention to more limited arenas: aesthetics, or “new class” theory,
or Frankfurt School sociology. Meanwhile, outside the academy, what
remained of the Marxian left persisted in small groups, defying the
prevailing “consensus” in favor of capitalism and accommodation.
Among the young intellectuals who had emerged from the 1930s
Communist movement, relatively few responded to its failure by
attempting to keep the centuries-old revolutionary tradition alive, by
advancing a libertarian alternative to Marxism, one better suited to
pursue a humane socialist society in the postwar era. It is a distinction
of Murray Bookchin that in these years of disillusion, disenchantment,
and retreat, he attempted to create just such an alternative.
Born in January 1921 in New York City to Russian Jewish
immigrants, Bookchin was raised under the very shadow of the Russian
Revolution, partaking of the excitement that it aroused among his
immigrant and working-class neighbors. At the same time, from his
earliest years, he imbibed libertarian ideas from his maternal grandmother,
who had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a
quasi-anarchistic populist movement, in czarist Russia. In the early
1930s, as the United States plunged deeper into the Depression, he
entered the Communist movement’s youth organizations, speaking at
streetcorner meetings, participating in rent strikes, and helping to
organize the unemployed, even as an adolescent, eventually running
the educational program for his branch of the Young Communist
League. After breaking with Stalinism — initially, in 1935, because of
its class-collaborationist policies (the so-called Popular Front), then
conclusively in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War — he turned to
Trotskyism and later to libertarian socialism, joining a group
surrounding the exiled German Trotskyist Josef Weber in the mid — 1940s; his earliest works were published in this group’s periodical,
\emph{Contemporary Issues.}
In the meantime, Bookchin was deeply involved in trade union
organizing in northern New Jersey, where he worked for years as a
foundryman and an autoworker. (Due to his family’s poverty, he went
to work in heavy industry directly after high school.) In whatever
factory he worked, he engaged in union activities as a member of the
burgeoning and intensely militant Congress of Industrial Organizations,
particularly the United Automobile Workers.
During the 1930s, Marxian precepts had seemed to explain
conclusively the Great Depression and the turbulent labor insurgency
that arose during the decade, seeming to challenge the very foundations
of the capitalist system. But Marxist prognoses about the 1940s were
glaringly unfulfilled. These predictions had it that World War II, like
World War I, would end in proletarian revolutions among the
belligerent countries. But the proletariat, far from making a revolution
in any Western country under the banner of internationalism, fought
out the war under the banner of nationalism. Even the German working
class abandoned the class consciousness of its earlier socialist history
and fought on behalf of Hitler to the very end. Far from collapsing,
capitalism emerged from the war unscathed and strengthened, with
more stability than ever before.
The Soviet Union, for its part, was clearly far from a socialist society,
let alone a communist one. Far from playing a revolutionary role during
the war, it was actively involved in suppressing revolutionary movements
in its own national interests. Finally, American industrial
workers, far from challenging the capitalist system, were becoming
assimilated into it. When a major General Motors strike in 1946 ended
with his co-workers placidly accepting company pension plans and
unemployment benefits, Bookchin’s disillusionment with the workers’
movement as a uniquely revolutionary force was complete, and his
years as a union activist came to an end. The revolutionary tradition,
he concluded, would have to dispense with the notion of proletarian
hegemony as the compelling force for basic social change. With the
consolidation of capitalism on a massive international scale, the idea
that conflict between wage labor and capital would bring capitalism
to an end had to be called into serious question.
To his credit, Bookchin, faced with these dispiriting conditions,
nonetheless refused to relinquish his commitment to revolution. Rather,
the revolutionary tradition, he felt, had to explore new possibilities for
creating a free cooperative society and reclaim nonauthoritarian
socialism in a new form. Anarchism, whose history had long
intertwined with that of Marxian socialism, argued that people could
manage their own affairs without benefit of a state, and that the object
of revolution should be not the seizure of state power but its dissolution.
In 1950s America, in the aftermath of the McCarthy period, the left
generally — especially the anarchist movement — was small, fragmented,
and seemingly on the wane. Yet anarchism’s libertarian ideals — “a
stateless, decentralized society, based on the communal ownership of
the means of production”\footnote{Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” 1964; as reprinted in \emph{Anarchy} 69, val. 6 (1966), p. 18. The section “Observations on Classical Anarchism” appeared in the original essay, as it was published in \emph{Comment} in 1964 and in \emph{Anarchy} in 1966, but it was cut from the reprinting in \emph{PostScarcity Anarchism} (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977).} — seemed to be the basis, in Bookchin’s mind,
for a viable revolutionary alternative in the postwar era.
Moving decisively toward this left-libertarian tradition in the middle
of the decade, Bookchin tried to free anarchism of its more dated
nineteenth-century aspects and recast its honorable principles in
contemporary terms. “The future of the anarchist movement will
depend upon its ability to apply basic libertarian principles to new
historical situations,” he wrote in 1964 .
\begin{quote}
\dots{} Life itself compels the anarchist to concern himself increasingly with
the quality of urban life, with the reorganization of society along
humanistic lines, with the subcultures created by new, often indefinable
strata — students, unemployables, an immense bohemia of intellectuals,
and above all a youth which began to gain social awareness with the
peace movement and civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.\footnote{Ibid., pp. 18, 21.}
\end{quote}
Even as he embraced the anarchist tradition, however, Bookchin never
entirely abandoned Marx’s basic ideas. In effect, he drew on the best
of both Marxism and anarchism to synthesize a coherent hybrid
political philosophy of freedom and cooperation, one that drew on
both intellectual rigor and cultural sensibility, analysis and
reconstruction. He would call this synthesis social ecology.
\bigskip
Even as Bookchin was moving toward an anarchist outlook, the
American economy of the early 1950s was undergoing enormous
expansion, with unprecedented economic advances that catapulted even
industrial workers into the booming middle class. It was not only
military spending that propelled this growth: with government support,
science and industry had combined to spawn a wide array of new
technologies, suitable for civilian as well as military use. These new
technologies, so it was said, seemed poised to cure all social ills of the
time, if not engineer an entirely new civilization.
Automobiles, fast becoming a standard consumer item, were
promising mobility, suburbs, and jobs — giving plausibility, in the eyes
of many Americans, to the slogan, “What’s good for GM is good for
America.” Nuclear power, it was avowed, would meet US energy needs
more or less for free; indeed, Lewis Strauss, the former Wall Street
investment banker who first chaired the Atomic Energy Commission,
predicted that electricity from nuclear power plants would become “too
cheap to meter.” Miracle grains would feed humanity, and new pharmaceuticals
would control formerly intractable diseases. Petrochemicals
and petrochemical products — including plastics, food additives,
detergents, solvents, and abrasives — would make life comfortable and
provide labor-saving convenience for everyone. As for pesticides, as
environmental historian Robert Gottlieb observes, they were “being
touted as a kind of miracle product, supported by advertising campaigns
(‘Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry’), by government
policies designed to increase agricultural productivity, and a media
celebration of the wonders of the new technology.” Most of the
American public welcomed these new technologies, seeming to agree
with the director of the US Geological Survey, Thomas Nolan, that the
new technological resources were “inexhaustible.”\footnote{Robert Gottlieb, \emph{Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement} (Washington, DC and Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1993), p. 83; Nolan is quoted on p. 37.}
It was just at this moment of collective anticipation that Bookchin
audaciously suggested that an ecological crisis lay on the horizon.
“Within recent years,” he wrote in a long 1952 essay, “the rise of little
known and even unknown infectious diseases, the increase of
degenerative illnesses and finally the high incidence of cancer suggests
some connection between the growing use of chemicals in food and
human diseases.”\footnote{Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” \emph{Contemporary Issues,} val. 3, no. 12 (June-August 1952), p. 235.} The chemicals being used in food additives, he
insisted in “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” could well be
carcinogenic. The new economic and technological boom, despite all
its rosy promises, could also have harmful environmental consequences.
Little environmentalist writing existed in the United States in these
years, apart from neo-Malthusian tracts that issued dire warnings about
overpopulation, like Fairfield Osborn’s \emph{Our Plundered Planet} and
William Vogt’s \emph{The Road to Survival} (both published in 1948).
Although a conservation movement existed, it worked primarily for
the preservation of wilderness areas in national parks and showed little
interest in social or political analysis. The existing literature on chemical
pollution, for its part, was silent on the driving role that modern
capitalism was playing in the development and application of chemicals.
So it was that before most Americans even realized that an
environmental crisis was in the offing, Bookchin was telling them it
was. Even more striking, he was already probing its sources. “The
principal motives for chemicals,” he warned, and the “demands
imposed upon [farm] land” are “shaped neither by the needs of the
public nor by the limits of nature, but by the exigencies of profit and
competition.”\footnote{Ibid., pp. 206, 211.} The use of carcinogenic chemicals was rooted in a profitoriented
society; “profit-minded businessmen” have produced
“ecological disturbances \dots{} throughout the American countryside. For
decades, lumber companies and railroads were permitted a free hand
in destroying valuable forest lands and wildlife.”\footnote{Ibid., p. 209.} Bookchin had not
only rooted environmental dislocations in modern capitalism — he had
found a new limit to capitalist expansion, one that held the potential
to supersede the misery of the working class as a source of fundamental
social change: environmental destruction.
Amid the McCarthyite intolerance of all social radicalism in 1952,
it required considerable courage to write and publish a radical social
analysis of environmental problems. Yet not only did Bookchin write
such an analysis, he advanced, albeit in rudimentary terms, an anarchist
solution to the problems he explored, calling for the decentralization
of society to countervail the looming ecological crisis, in passages that
presage the marriage of anarchism and ecology that he would expound
more fully twelve years later:
\begin{quote}
In decentralization exists a real possibility for developing the best
traditions of social life and for solving agricultural and nutritional
difficulties that have thus far been delivered to chemistry. Most of the
food problems of the world would be solved today by well-balanced
and rounded communities, intelligently urbanized, well-equipped with
industry and with easy access to the land\dots{} The problem has become
a social problem — an issue concerning the misuse of industry as a
whole.\footnote{Ibid., p. 240.}
\end{quote}
For almost half a century, this assertion of the social causes of
ecological problems, and the insistence on their solution by a revolutionary
decentralization of society have remained consistent in
Bookchin’s writings. He elaborated these ideas further in \emph{Our Synthetic Environment,} a pioneering 1962 work that was published five months
before Rachel Carson’s \emph{Silent Spring;} unlike Carson’s book, \emph{Our Synthetic Environment} did not limit its focus to pesticides. A comprehensive
overview of ecological degradation, it addressed not only the
connections between food additives and cancer but the impact of X-radiation,
radionuclides from fallout, and the stresses of urban life,
giving a social elaboration of what in those days was called “human
ecology.”\footnote{Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), \emph{Our Synthetic Environment} (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). For a comparison with \emph{Silent Spring,} see Yaakov Garb, “Change and Continuity in Environmental World-View,” in \emph{Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology,} edited by David Macauley (New York: Guilford, 1996), pp. 246–7.}
The freer political atmosphere of the 1960s allowed Bookchin to
express more clearly his revolutionary perspective. His 1964 essay
“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” the first manifesto of radical
ecology, overtly called for revolutionary change as a solution to the
ecological crisis. It advanced a conjunction of anarchism and ecology
to create an ecological society that would be humane and free,
libertarian and decentralized, mutualistic and cooperative.
In its range and depth, Bookchin’s dialectical synthesis of anarchism
and ecology, which he called social ecology, had no equal in the postwar
international Left. The first major effort to fuse ecological awareness
with the need for fundamental social change, and to link a philosophy
of nature with a philosophy of social revolution, it remains the most
important such effort to this day.
Social ecology, drawing on multiple domains of knowledge, traces
the roots of the ecological crisis to dislocations in society. As Bookchin
put it in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”: “The imbalances man
has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has
produced in the social world.”\footnote{“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in \emph{Post-Scarcity Anarchism,} p. 62.} This inextricable relation between
society and ecology remains a pillar of social ecology.
But social ecology has not only a critical dimension but a
reconstructive one as well. Since the causes of the ecological crisis are
social in nature, we can avert the present danger of ecological disaster
only by fundamentally transforming the present society into a rational
and ecological one. In this same 1964 article, in “Toward a Liberatory
Technology” (written the following year), and in many subsequent
works, Bookchin described his version of the truly libertarian socialist
society. It would be a decentralized and mutualistic one, free of
hierarchy and domination. Town and country would no longer be
opposed to each other but would instead be integrated. Social life would
be scaled to human dimensions. Politics would be directly democratic
at the community level, so that citizens can manage their own social
and political affairs on a face-to-face basis, forming confederations to
address larger-scale problems. Economic life would be cooperative and
communal, and technology would eliminate onerous and tedious labor.
Bookchin would elaborate and refine many aspects of this societyand
the means to achieve it — over subsequent decades. But its earliest
outlines were sketched as early as 1962 and developed in 1964 and
1965. Here Bookchin also proposed that an ecological society could
make use of solar and wind power as sources of energy, replacing fossil
fuels. At that time renewable energy sources — solar and wind powerwere
subjects of some research and experimentation, but they had
essentially been abandoned as practical alternatives to fossil and nuclear
fuels; nor did the existing environmental literature pay much attention
to them. Not only did Bookchin show their relevance to the solution
of ecological problems, he stood alone in demonstrating their integral
importance to the creation of an ecological society:
\begin{quote}
To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of coal and
petroleum. By contrast, solar, wind, and tidal energy can reach us mainly
in small packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the new devices
seldom provide more than a few thousand kilowatt-hours of
electricity\dots{} To use solar, wind, and tidal power effectively, the
megalopolis must be decentralized. A new type of community, carefully
tailored to the characteristics and resources of a region, must replace
the sprawling urban belts that are emerging today.\footnote{Ibid., p. 74–5.}
\end{quote}
These renewable sources of energy, in effect, had far-reaching
anarchistic as well as ecological implications.
The list of Bookchin’s innovations in ecological politics does not stop
here. To take another example — warnings of a greenhouse effect were
hardly common in the early 1960s, yet Bookchin issued just such a
warning in 1964:
\begin{quote}
It can be argued on very sound theoretical grounds that this growing
blanket of carbon dioxide, by intercepting heat radiated from the earth,
will lead to rising atmospheric temperatures, a more violent circulation
of air, more destructive storm patterns, and eventually a melting of the
polar ice caps (possibly in two or three centuries), rising sea levels, and
the inundation of vast land areas.\footnote{“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” as it appeared in \emph{Anarchy,} p. 5. Some of the words from this passage were cut when the essay was republished in \emph{Post-Scarcity Anarchism;} see p. 60 of that book.}
\end{quote}
Bookchin underestimated only the time frame — and it is testimony to
the enormity of the ecological problem that the damage that he
anticipated would take centuries to develop has actually developed in
only a matter of decades.
Bookchin spent much of the 1960s criss-crossing the United States
and Canada, indefatigably educating the counterculture and New Left
about ecology and its revolutionary significance. The first Earth Day in
1970, followed by the publication of \emph{The Limits to Growth} in 1972,
signaled the arrival of ecology as a popular issue. But in the following
years a less radical, more technocratic approach to ecological issues
came to the fore, one that, in Bookchin’s view, represented mere environmental
tinkering: instead of proposing to transform society as a whole,
it looked for technological solutions to specific environmental problems.
Calling this approach reformistic rather than revolutionary, Bookchin
labeled it “environmentalism,” in contradistinction to his more radical
“ecology.” Although some histories of the ecological and environmental
movements now assert that Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess was
the first to distinguish between environmentalism and ecology (in a
paper on deep ecology, presented as a lecture in 1972\footnote{Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” \emph{Inquiry,} val. 16 (1973), pp. 95–100.}), Bookchin made
this distinction in November 1971, in “Spontaneity and Organization,”
anchoring it, as always, in a social and political matrix:
\begin{quote}
I speak, here, of \emph{ecology,} not environmentalism. Environmentalism deals
with the serviceability of the human habitat, a passive habitat that people
\emph{use,} in short, an assemblage of things called “natural resources” and
“urban resources.” Taken by themselves, environmental issues require
the use of no greater wisdom than the instrumentalist modes of thought
and methods that are used by city planners, engineers, physicians,
lawyers — and socialists.
Ecology, by contrast, \dots{} is an outlook that interprets all
interdependencies (social and psychological as well as natural)
nonhierarchically. Ecology denies that nature can be interpreted from
a hierarchical viewpoint. Moreover, it affirms that diversity and
spontaneous development are ends in themselves, to be respected in
their own right. Formulated in terms of ecology’s “ecosystem approach,”
this means that each form of life has a unique place in the balance of
nature and its removal from the ecosystem could imperil the stability
of the whole.\footnote{Murray Bookchin, “Spontaneity and Organization,” lecture delivered at \emph{Telos} conference, Buffalo, NY, 1971; published in \emph{Anarchos,} no. 4 (1973) and in \emph{Liberation} (March 1972); republished in \emph{Toward an Ecological Society} (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), where this quotation is on pp. 270–1.}
\end{quote}
Bookchin’s core political program remained far too radical to gain
general social acceptance in those decades. But many of his remarkably
prescient insights have by now become commonplaces, not only in
ecological thought but in mainstream popular culture, while their
originating source has been forgotten or obscured. By advancing these
ideas when he did, Bookchin exercised a strong and steady influence
on the international development of radical ecological thought.
\bigskip
As significant as Bookchin’s prescient insights are, they are only part
of what is actually a large theoretical corpus. Over the course of five
decades, the ideas of social ecology have grown steadily in richness.
Encompassing anthropology and history, politics and social criticism,
philosophy and natural science, Bookchin’s works evoke the grand
tradition of nineteenth-century generalists, who could write knowledgeably
on a multiplicity of subjects — a tradition that is, lamentably,
fast disappearing in the present age of scholarly specialization and
postmodernist fragmentation.
Drawing on anthropology and history, Bookchin explored the
libertarian and democratic traditions that could contribute to the
creation of an ecological and rational society. A “legacy of freedom,”
he believes, has run like an undercurrent within Western civilization
and in other parts of the world, with certain social virtues and practices
that are relevant to the socialist ideal. In its nascent form this legacy
appears in the “organic society” of prehistoric Europe, with a constellation
of relatively egalitarian social relations. These societies were
destroyed by the rise of hierarchy and domination and ultimately by
the emergence of states and the capitalist system.
Hierarchy and domination, it should be noted, are key concepts in
Bookchin’s political work, for although in his view the ecological crisis
has stemmed proximately from a capitalist economy, its ultimate roots
lie in social hierarchies. The ideology of dominating the natural world,
he has long maintained, is an anthropomorphic projection of human
social domination onto the natural world. It could only have stemmed
historically from the domination of human by human, and not the other
way around. During the late 1960s and 1970s Bookchin’s anthropological,
historical, and political explorations of the “legacy of
freedom” and the “legacy of domination,” as he called it, percolated
through radical social movements — not only the ecology movement
but the feminist, communitarian, and anarchist movements as well.
The concept of hierarchy in particular, assimilated by the counterculture
into conventional wisdom, has become essential to radical thought due
largely to Bookchin’s insistence on its nature and importance in many
lectures in the late 1960s.
Bookchin’s ideas have retained an underlying continuity over the
decades, and it is precisely by upholding his original principles that he
has maintained his stalwart opposition to the existing capitalist and
hierarchical system. As could be expected of any writer engaged in
concrete political activity, his ideas have also changed over time; yet they
have done so not to effect a compromise with the existing social order
but to sustain a revolutionary position in response to regressive
developments both in the larger society and within social movements for
change. Often he has initiated intramural debates by objecting to
tendencies that he considered out of place in a revolutionary movement,
due to their opportunism, their accommodation to the system, or their
quietism; his frequently polemical style stems from an earnest attempt to
preserve the revolutionary impulse in movements that hold potential for
radical social transformation. To his credit, he raised such objections even
when the tendencies to which he objected were the more popular ones
and when acquiescence would have enhanced his own popularity. Still,
even as the key concepts of social ecology remain fundamentally
unchanged since the 1960s, the many debates in which he has been
engaged have primarily defined and sharpened them. If anything, his ideas
have become more sophisticated over time as a result of these debates.
It is typical of Bookchin that his ideas should become honed as a
result of practical movement experience. Despite his large body of
theoretical writing, he is no mere armchair theorist. Throughout his
life he has consistently maintained an active political practice: his union
and protest activities in the Depression decade, his libertarian activities
of the 1950s and 1960s, his mobilization of opposition to a nuclear
power plant proposed for Queens in 1964, his civil rights activities, his
participation in endless demonstrations and actions in the 1960s against
the Vietnam war and in support of ecology and anarchism, his 1970s
involvement in the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, his efforts to preserve
and expand democracy in his adopted state of Vermont, and finally his
influence, in the 1980s, on the development of Green movements in
the United States and abroad, trying — often unsuccessfully — to keep
them on a radical course. Only in his eighth decade have physical
infirmities — especially a nearly crippling arthritis — obliged him to
withdraw from organized political activity.
Yet withdrawal from active political work has not meant that
Bookchin has put down his pen. On the contrary, in an era of reaction,
he continues to denounce tendencies that compromise the radicalism
of the ecological and anarchist movements, be it a mystical “deep
ecology” or an individualistic “lifestyle anarchism,” both of which he
sees as personalistic and irrationalistic departures from the social,
rational, and democratic eco-anarchism and socialism he has
championed for decades. With the emergence of ecological-political
tendencies that embraced irrationalism, he emphasized that an
ecological society would neither renounce nor denigrate reason, science,
and technology. So crucial is this point that he today prefers the phrase
“rational society” to other labels for a free society, since a rational
society would necessarily be one that is ecological. His commitment to
longstanding socialist ideals, informed by Marx as well as by social
anarchist thinkers, remains firm: for Murray Bookchin, the socialist
utopia is still, as he once said, “the only reality that makes any sense.”
\bigskip
To all his writing, Bookchin brings a passionate hatred of the capitalist
social order, expressed in the cadences of six decades of radical oratory.
He brings the grim hatred of the grueling toil that he experienced in
factories, and the acerbic intensity of one who has looked down the
barrel of a gun during 1930s labor protests. At the same time he brings
the originality and creativity of a thinker who is largely self-taught,
and the love of coherence of one who studied dialectics with Marxists
as a youth. He brings to it, in this age of diminished expectations, the
outrage of one who consistently chooses morality over realpolitik, and
he serves as the lacerating conscience of those who once held revolutionary
sentiments but have since abandoned them.
A thorough understanding of his project would require a reading of
his most important books. \emph{Post-Scarcity Anarchism} (1971) contains
the two pivotal mid-1960s essays mentioned in this introduction, which
encapsulate so many ideas that he later developed more fully and that,
in their uncompromising intensity, remain fresh to this day. \emph{The Ecology of Freedom} (1982) is an anthropological and historical account not
only of the rise of hierarchy and domination but of the “legacy of
freedom,” including the cultural, psychological, and epistemological
components of both. Although \emph{The Ecology of Freedom} has been
heralded in some quarters as Bookchin’s \emph{magnum opus,} it has been
followed by several books of at least equal importance. \emph{The Philosophy of Social Ecology,} especially its revised edition (1995), is a collection
of five philosophical essays on dialectical naturalism, the nature
philosophy that underpins his political and social thought; he himself
regards it as his most important work to date. \emph{Remaking Society} ( 1989)
is a summary overview of his ideas, with emphasis on their anarchist
roots. \emph{From Urbanization to Cities} (which has previously appeared
under the titles \emph{Urbanization without Cities} and \emph{The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship)} is a wide-ranging exposition of
libertarian municipalism, Bookchin’s political program, giving much
attention to popular democratic institutional forms in European and
American history. \emph{Re-enchanting Humanity} (1995) is his defense of the
Enlightenment against a variety of antihumanistic and irrationalistic
trends in popular culture today. Finally, his three-volume \emph{The Third Revolution} (of which the first volume is already in print at the time of
writing) traces the history of popular movements within EuroAmerican
revolutions, beginning with the peasant revolts of the
fourteenth century and closing with the Spanish Revolution of 1936–7.
The present Reader brings together selections from Bookchin’s major
writings, organized thematically. Even as I have tried to show the
development of his ideas over time, I have emphasized those works
that have stood the test of time and that are most in accordance with
his views today, at the expense of works that, generated in the heat of
polemic, sometimes verged on one-sidedness. All of the selections are
excerpted from larger works, and all have been pruned in some way,
be it to achieve conciseness, to eliminate repetition among the selections
in this book, or to produce a thematic balance among them. I have very
lightly edited a few of the selections, but only where the need for it was
distracting. Regrettably, but necessarily for reasons of space, I have had
to cut all textual footnotes, retaining only those that cite a specific
source. Except for these notes, I have indicated all cuts in the text with
ellipsis points. I have provided the sources for all the selections in the
listing that appears before this introduction.
\begin{flushright}
Janet Biehl
\end{flushright}
\chapter{Chapter 1: An Ecological Society}
\section{Introduction}
Bookchin’s interest in ecology arose primarily from his boyhood
curiosity about natural phenomena, from his studies of biology in
high school. and from his love of green spaces in the environs of
his native New York City, as well as from his dismay at their
diminution with the buildup of urban streets and buildings.
Yet another source of inspiration for his thinking about ecology
were the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In scattered
passages the two progenitors of Marxian socialism had alluded
provocatively to a conflicted relationship between town and
country. “The greatest division of material and mental labour,” they
wrote, “is the separation of town and country. The antagonism
between town and country begins with the transition from
barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State, from locality to nation,
and runs through the whole history of civilisation to the present
day.”\footnote{Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, \emph{The German Ideology} (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 ), p. 64.} Engels, writing alone, lamented the spread of industrial
capitalist towns into the countryside. “The present poisoning of the
air, water and land can be put to an end only by the fusion” of town
and country:
\begin{quote}
and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now
languishing in the towns\dots{} The abolition of the separation
between town and country is \dots{} not utopian, even in so far as it
presupposes the most equal distribution possible of large-scale
industry over the whole country. It is true that in the huge towns
civilisation has bequeathed us a heritage to rid ourselves of which
will take much time and trouble. But this heritage must and will
be got rid of, however protracted the process may be.\footnote{Friedrich Engels, \emph{Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring),} trans. Emile Burns (New York: International Publishers, 1939), pp. \emph{323–4.}}
\end{quote}
Such unsystematic but suggestive statements, reinforced by
discussions in the \emph{Contemporary Issues} group, gave Bookchin a
rough framework for interpreting the environmental changes that
he was observing. He began to explore the origins of this cleavage
between town and country, between human society and the natural
world, and he speculated about how it could be annulled — that is,
how town and country could be reintegrated.
It is significant that from his earliest writings on environmental
issues, Bookchin did not interpret the ecological crisis as the
consequence of a rift between pristine natural world and human
culture as such, or as a basic antithesis that could be overcome only
by exalting wilderness over civilization. Rather, from the outset he
thought in terms of attaining a reconciliation between human and
nonhuman nature in a particular kind of society, in which
“rounded” human communities would be sensitively embedded in
nonhuman nature. This integrative approach contrasts markedly
with the romantic nature-worship of later mystical ecologies that
would reject civilization with a militancy that sometimes passes over
into antihumanism and misanthropy. From their standpoint the very
notion of an “ecological society” would be a contradiction in terms:
the antidote to ecological crisis is, for them, the veneration of
nature, understood as wilderness. Bookchin’s integrative approach,
by contrast, has been fundamental to his thought from the outset.
A legacy of Enlightenment humanism, which he early absorbed
from Marxian socialism, it compelled him to look for ecological
solutions that would enhance human creativity, not deny it.
The society capable of performing such an integration, Bookchin
argued, would be not a strictly Marxist one, focused primarily on
economic facts, but an anarchist one, decentralized and mutualistic,
nonhierarchical and cooperative. Over the decades he would flesh
out this concept more fully, with a social-political program as well
as a nature philosophy. Yet even his earliest writings express its
major points: its ecological humanism, its technological infrastructure,
and especially its ethical outlook, based on principles
beneficial to both the social and natural worlds, like unity in
diversity and complementarity, differentiation, and development.
And he has consistently held to the idea that achieving the
integration of human and nonhuman nature requires, as a
precondition, changing human social relations — creating a society
of freedom and cooperation.
\section{Decentralization}
(from \emph{Our Synthetic Environment,} 1962)
Without having read any books or articles on human ecology, millions
of Americans have sensed the overall deterioration of modern urban
life. They have turned to the suburbs and “exurbs” as a refuge from
the burdens of the metropolitan milieu. From all accounts of suburban
life, many of these burdens have followed them into the countryside.
Suburbanites have not adapted to the land; they have merely adapted
a metropolitan manner of life to semirural surroundings. The
metropolis remains the axis around which their lives turn. It is the
source of their livelihood, their food staples, and in large part their
tensions. The suburbs have branched away from the city, but they still
belong to the metropolitan tree.
It would be wise, however, to stop ridiculing the exodus to the
suburbs and to try to understand what lies behind this phenomenon.
The modern city has reached its limits. Megalopolitan life is breaking
down — psychically, economically, and biologically. Millions of people
have acknowledged this breakdown by “voting with their feet”: they
have picked up their belongings and left. If they have not been able to
sever their connections with the metropolis, at least they have tried. As
a social symptom, the effort is significant. The reconciliation of man
with the natural world is no longer merely desirable; it has become a
necessity. It is a compelling need that is sending millions of people into
the countryside. The need has created a new interest in camping,
handicrafts, and horticulture. In ever-increasing numbers, Americans
are acquiring a passionate interest in their national parks and forests,
in their rural landscape, and in their small-town agrarian heritage.
Despite its many shortcomings, this trend reflects a basically sound
orientation. The average American is making an attempt, however
confusedly, to reduce his environment to a human scale. He is trying
to recreate a world that he can cope with as an individual, a world that
he correctly identifies with the freedom, gentler rhythms, and quietude
of rural surroundings. His attempts at gardening, landscaping, carpentry,
home maintenance, and other so-called suburban “vices” reflect
a need to function within an intelligible, manipulable, and individually
creative sphere of human activity. The suburbanite, like the camper,
senses that he is working with basic, abiding things that have slipped
from his control in the metropolitan world — shelter, the handiwork
that enters into daily life, vegetation, and the land. He is fortunate, to
be sure, if these activities do not descend to the level of caricature.
Nevertheless, they are important, not only because they reflect basic
needs of man but because they also reflect basic needs of the things
with which he is working. The human scale is also the natural scale.
The soil, the land, the living things on which man depends for his
nutriment and recreation are direly in need of individual care.
For one thing, proper maintenance of the soil not only depends upon
advances in our knowledge of soil chemistry and soil fertility; it also
requires a more personalized approach to agriculture. Thus far, the
trend has been the other way; agriculture has become depersonalized
and overindustrialized. Modern farming is suffering from gigantism.
The average agricultural unit is getting so big that the finer aspects of
soil performance and soil needs are being overlooked. If differences in
the quality and performance of various kinds of soil are to receive more
attention, American farming must be reduced to a more human scale.
It will become necessary to bring agriculture within the scope of the
individual, so that the farmer and the soil can develop together, each
responding as fully as possible to the needs of the other.
The same is true for the management of livestock. Today food animals
are being manipulated like a lifeless industrial resource. Normally, large
numbers of animals are collected in the smallest possible area and are
allowed only as much movement as is necessary for mere survival. Our
meat animals have been placed on a diet composed for the most part of
medicated feed high in carbohydrates. Before they are slaughtered, these
obese, rapidly matured creatures seldom spend more than six months
on the range and six months on farms, where they are kept on
concentrated rations and gain about two pounds daily. Our dairy herds
are handled like machines; our poultry flocks, like hothouse tomatoes.
The need to restore the time-honored intimacy between man and his
livestock is just as pronounced as the need to bring agriculture within
the horizon of the individual farmer. Although modern technology has
enlarged the elements that enter into the agricultural situation, giving
each man a wider area of sovereignty and control, machines have not
lessened the importance of personal familiarity with the land, its
vegetation, and the living things it supports. Unless principles of good
land use permit otherwise, a farm should not become smaller or larger
than the individual farmer can command. If it is smaller, agriculture will
become inefficient; if larger, it will become depersonalized.
With the decline in the quality of urban life, on the one hand, and
the growing imbalance in agriculture, on the other, our times are
beginning to witness a remarkable confluence of human interests with
the needs of the natural world. Men of the nineteenth century assumed
a posture of defiance toward the forests, plains, and mountains. Their
applause was reserved for the engineer, the technician, the inventor, at
times even the robber baron, and the railroader, who seemed to offer
the promise of a more abundant material life. Today we are filled with
a vague nostalgia for the past. To a large degree this nostalgia reflects
the insecurity and uncertainty of our times, in contrast with the echoes
of a more optimistic and perhaps more tranquil era. But it also reflects
a deep sense of loss, a longing for the free, unblemished land that lay
before the eyes of the frontiersman and early settler. We are seeking
out the mountains they tried to avoid and we are trying to recover
fragments of the forests they removed. Our nostalgia springs neither
from a greater sensitivity nor from the wilder depths of human instinct.
It springs from a growing need to restore the normal, balanced, and
manageable rhythms of human life — that is, an environment that meets
our requirements as individuals and biological beings.
Modern man can never return to the primitive life he so often idealizes,
but the point is that he doesn’t have to. The use of farm machinery as
such does not conflict with sound agricultural practices; nor are industry
and an urbanized community incompatible with a more agrarian, more
natural environment. Ironically, advances in technology itself have
largely overcome the industrial problems that once justified the huge
concentratioAs of people and facilities in a few urban areas.
Automobiles, aircraft, electric power, and electronic devices have
eliminated nearly all the problems of transportation, communication,
and social isolation that burdened man in past eras. We can now
communicate with one another over a distance of thousands of miles in
a matter of seconds, and we can travel to the most remote areas of the
world in a few hours. The obstacles created by space and time are
essentially gone. Similarly, size need no longer be a problem.
Technologists have developed remarkable small-scale alternatives to
many of the giant facilities that still dominate modern industry. The
smoky steel town, for example, is an anachronism. Excellent steel can
be made and rolled with installations that occupy about two or three
city blocks. Many of the latest machines are highly versatile and
compact. They lend themselves to a large variety of manufacturing and
finishing operations. Today the more modern plant, with its clean, quiet,
versatile, and largely automated facilities, contrasts sharply with the
huge, ugly, congested factories inherited from an earlier era.
Thus, almost without realizing it, we have been preparing the
material conditions for a new type of human community — one that
constitutes neither a complete return to the past nor a suburban
accommodation to the present. It is no longer fanciful to think of man’s
future environment in terms of a decentralized, moderate-sized city that
combines industry with agriculture, not only in the same civic entity
but in the occupational activities of the same individual. The “urbanized
farmer” or the “agrarianized townsman” need not be a contradiction
in terms. This way of life was achieved for a time by the Greek \emph{polis,}
by early Republican Rome, and by the Renaissance commune. The
urban centers that became the well-springs of Western civilization were
not strictly cities in the modern sense of the term. Rather, they brought
agriculture together with urban life, synthesizing both into a rounded
human, cultural, and social development.
Whether modern man manages to reach this point or travels only
part of the way, some kind of decentralization will be necessary to
achieve a lasting equilibrium between society and nature. Urban
decentralization underlies any hope of achieving ecological control of
pest infestations in agriculture. Only a community well integrated with
the resources of the surrounding region can promote agricultural and
biological diversity. With careful planning, man could use plants and
animals not only as a source of food but also, by pitting one species of
life against another, as a means of controlling pests, thus eliminating
much of his need for chemical methods. What is equally important, a
decentralized community holds the greatest promise for conserving
natural resources, particularly as it would promote the use of local
sources of energy. Instead of relying primarily on concentrated sources
of fuel in distant regions of the continent, the community could make
maximum use of its own energy resources, such as wind power, solar
energy, and hydroelectric power. These sources of energy, so often
overlooked because of an almost exclusive reliance on a national
division of labor, would help greatly to conserve the remaining supply
of high-grade petroleum and coal. They would almost certainly
postpone, if not eliminate, the need for turning to radioactive substances
and nuclear reactors as major sources of industrial energy. With more
time at his disposal for intensive research, man might learn either to
employ solar energy and wind power as the principal sources of energy
or to eliminate the hazard of radioactive contamination from nuclear
reactors.
It is true, of course, that our life lines would become more complex
and, from a technological point of view, less “efficient.” There would
be many duplications of effort. Instead of being concentrated in two
or three areas of the country, steel plants would be spread out, with
many communities employing small-scale facilities to meet regional or
local needs. But the word \emph{efficiency,} like the word \emph{pest,} is relative.
Although duplication of facilities would be somewhat costly, many
local mineral sources that are not used today because they are too
widely scattered or too small for the purposes of large-scale production
would become economical for the purposes of a smaller community.
Thus, in the long run, a more localized or regional form of industrial
activity is likely to promote a more efficient use of resources than our
prevailing methods of production.
It is also true that we will never entirely eliminate the need for a
national and international division of labor in agriculture and industry.
The Midwest will always remain our best source of grains; the East
and Far West, the best sources of lumber and certain field crops. Our
petroleum, high-grade coal, and certain minerals will still have to be
supplied, in large part, by a few regions of the country. But there is no
reason why we cannot reduce the burden that our national division of
labor currently places on these areas by spreading the agricultural and
industrial loads over wider areas of the country. This seems to be the
only approach to the task of creating a long-range balance between
man and the natural world and of remaking man’s synthetic
environment in a form that will promote human health and fitness.
An emphasis on agriculture and urban regionalism is somewhat
disconcerting to the average city dweller. It conjures up an image of
cultural isolation and social stagnation, of a journey backward in
history to the agrarian societies of the medieval and ancient worlds.
Actually, the urban dweller today is more isolated in the big city than
his ancestors were in the countryside. The city man in the modern
metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomization, and
spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history.
Today man’s alienation from man is almost absolute. His standards of
cooperation, mutual aid, simple human hospitality, and decency have
suffered an appalling erosion in the urban milieu. Man’s civic
institutions have become cold, impersonal agencies for the manipulation
of his destiny, and his culture has increasingly accommodated itself to
the least common denominator of intelligence and taste. He has nothing
to lose even by a backward glance; indeed, in this way he is likely to
place his present-day world and its limitations in a clearer perspective.
But why should an emphasis on agriculture and urban regionalism
be regarded as an attempt to return to the past? Can we not develop
our environment more selectively, more subtly, and more rationally
than we have thus far, combining the best of the past and present and
bringing forth a new synthesis of man and nature, nation and region,
town and country? Life would indeed cease to be an adventure if we
merely elaborated the present by extending urban sprawl and by
extending civic life until it completely escapes from the control of its
individual elements. To continue along these lines would serve not to
promote social evolution but rather to “fatten” the social organism to
a point where it could no longer move. Our purpose should be to make
individual life a more rounded experience, and this we can hope to
accomplish at the present stage of our development only by restoring
the complexity of man’s environment and by reducing the community
to a human scale.
Is there any evidence that reason will prevail in the management of
our affairs? It is difficult to give a direct answer. Certainly we are
beginning to look for qualitative improvements in many aspects of life;
we are getting weary and resentful of the shoddiness in goods and
services. We are gaining a new appreciation of the land and its
problems, and a greater realization of the social promise offered by a
more manageable human community. More and more is being written
about our synthetic environment, and the criticism is more pointed
than it has been in almost half a century. Perhaps we can still hope, as
Mumford did more than two decades ago in the closing lines of \emph{The Culture of Cities:}
\begin{quote}
We have much to unbuild, and much more to build: but the foundations
are ready: the machines are set in place and the tools are bright and
keen: the architects, the engineers, and the workmen are assembled.
None of us may live to see the complete building, and perhaps in the
nature of things the building can never be completed: but some of us
will see the flag or the fir tree that the workers will plant aloft in ancient
ritual when they capt the topmost story.
\end{quote}
\section{Anarchism and Ecology}
(from “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” 1964)
An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a
precondition for the practice of ecological principles. To sum up the
critical message of ecology: If we diminish variety in the natural world,
we debase its unity and wholeness; we destroy the forces making for
natural harmony and for a lasting equilibrium; and, what is even more
significant, we introduce an absolute retrogression in the development
of the natural world that may eventually render the environment unfit
for advanced forms of life. To sum up the reconstructive message of
ecology: If we wish to advance the unity and stability of the natural
world, if we wish to harmonize it, we must conserve and promote
variety. To be sure, mere variety for its own sake is a vacuous goal. In
nature, variety emerges spontaneously. The capacities of a new species
are tested by the rigors of climate, by its ability to deal with predators,
and by its capacity to establish and enlarge its niche. \emph{Yet the species that succeeds in enlarging its niche in the environment also enlarges the ecological situation as a whole.} To borrow E. A. Gutkind’s phrase,
it “expands the environment,” both for itself and for the species with
which it enters into a balanced relationship.\footnote{E. A. Gutkind, \emph{The Expanding Environment} (London: Freedom Press, rul.); later incorporated into \emph{The Twilight of Cities} (Glencoe, NY: Free Pre·;s, 1962), pp. 55–144.}
How do these concepts apply to social theory? To many readers, I
suppose, it should suffice to say that, inasmuch as man is part of nature,
an expanding natural environment enlarges the basis for social
development. But the answer to the question goes much deeper than
many ecologists and libertarians suspect. Again, allow me to return to
the ecological principle of wholeness and balance as a product of
diversity. Keeping this principle in mind, the first step toward an answer
is provided by a passage in Herbert Read’s “The Philosophy of
Anarchism.” In presenting his “measure of progress,” Read observes:
“Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life will be limited,
dull, and mechanical. If the individual is a unit on his own, with space
and potentiality for separate action, then he may be more subject to
accident or chance, but at least he can expand and express himself. He
can develop — develop in the only real meaning of the word — develop
in consciousness of strength, vitality, and joy.”\footnote{Herbert Read, “The Philosophy of Anarchism,” in \emph{Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics} (1954; Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 37.}
Read’s thought, unfortunately, is not fully developed, but it provides
an interesting point of departure. What first strikes us is that both the
ecologist and the anarchist place a strong emphasis on spontaneity. The
ecologist, insofar as he is more than a technician, tends to reject the
notion of “power over nature.” He speaks instead of “steering” his
way through an ecological situation, of \emph{managing} rather than \emph{recreating}
an ecosystem. The anarchist, in turn, speaks in terms of social
spontaneity, of releasing the potentialities of society and humanity, of
giving free and unfettered rein to the creativity of people. Each in its
own way regards authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting the
creative potential of a natural and social situation. Their object is not
to \emph{rule} a domain, but to \emph{release} it. They regard insight, reason, and
knowledge as a means for fulfilling the potentialities of a situation, as
facilitating the working out of the logic of a situation, not as replacing
its potentialities with preconceived notions or distorting their
development with dogmas.
Returning to Read’s words, what strikes us is that like the ecologist,
the anarchist views differentiation as a measure of progress. The ecologist
uses the term \emph{biotic pyramid} in speaking of biological advances;
the anarchist, the word \emph{individuation} to denote social advances. If we
go beyond Read, we will observe that, to both the ecologist and the
anarchist, an ever-increasing unity is achieved by growing differentiation.
\emph{An expanding whole is created by the diversification and enrichment of its parts.}
Just as the ecologist seeks to expand the range of an ecosystem and
promote a free interplay between species, so the anarchist seeks to
expand the range of social experience and remove all fetters from its
development. Anarchism is not only a stateless society but a
harmonized society that exposes man to the stimuli provided by both
agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to
unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal
solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and
worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the
elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid
society, these goals are regarded as mutually exclusive, indeed as
sharply opposed. They appear as dualities because of the very logistics
of present-day society — the separation of town and country, the
specialization of labor, the atomization of man — and it would be
preposterous to believe that these dualities could be resolved without
a general idea of the \emph{physical} structure of an anarchist society. We can
gain some idea of what such a society would be like by reading William
Morris’s \emph{News From Nowhere} and the writings of Peter Kropotkin.
But these works provide us with mere glimpses. They do not take into
account the post-World War II developments of technology and the
contributions made by the development of ecology. This is not the
place to embark on a discussion of “utopian writing,” but certain
guidelines can be presented. And in presenting these guidelines, I am
eager to emphasize not only the more obvious ecological premises that
support them but also the humanistic ones.
An anarchist society should be a decentralized society, not only to
establish a lasting basis for the harmonization of man and nature \emph{but also to add new dimensions to the harmonization of man and man.}
The Greeks, we are often reminded, would have been horrified by a
city whose size and population precluded face-to-face, familiar
relationships among citizens. Today there is plainly a need to reduce
the dimensions of the human community — partly to solve our pollution
and transportation problems, partly also to create \emph{real} communities.
In a sense, we must \emph{humanize} humanity. Electronic devices such as
telephones, telegraphs, radios, and television receivers should be used
as little as possible to mediate the relations between people. In making
collective decisions — the ancient Athenian ecclesia was, in some ways,
a model for making social decisions — all members of the community
should have an opportunity to acquire in full the measure of anyone
who addresses the assembly. They should be in a position to absorb
his attitudes, study his expressions, and weigh his motives as well as
his ideas in a direct personal encounter and through face-to-face
discussion.
Our small communities should be economically balanced and well
rounded, partly so that they can make full use of local raw materials
and energy resources, partly also to enlarge the agricultural and
industrial stimuli to which individuals are exposed. The member of a
community who has a predilection for engineering, for instance, should
be encouraged to steep his hands in humus; the man of ideas should
be encouraged to employ his musculature; the “inborn” farmer should
gain a familiarity with the workings of a rolling mill. To separate the
engineer from the soil, the thinker from the spade, and the farmer from
the industrial plant promotes a degree of vocational overspecialization
that leads to a dangerous measure of social control by specialists. What
is equally important, professional and vocational specialization prevents
society from achieving a vital goal: the humanization of nature by the
technician and the naturalization of society by the biologist.
I submit that an anarchist community would approximate a clearly
definable ecosystem — it would be diversified, balanced, and
harmonious. It is arguable whether such an ecosystem would acquire
the configuration of an urban entity with a distinct center, such as we
find in the Greek \emph{polis,} or the medieval commune, or whether, as
Gutkind proposes, society would consist of widely dispersed
communities without a distinct center. In any case, the ecological scale
for any of these communities would be determined by the smallest
ecosystem capable of supporting a population of moderate size.
A relatively self-sufficient community, visibly dependent on its
environment for the means of life, would gain a new respect for the
organic interrelationships that sustain it. In the long run, the attempt
to approximate self-sufficiency would, I think, prove more efficient
than the exaggerated national division of labor that prevails today.
Although there would doubtless be many duplications of small
industrial facilities from community to community, the familiarity of
each group with its local environment and its ecological roots would
make for a more intelligent and more loving use of its environment. I
submit that, far from producing provincialism, relative self-sufficiency
would create a new matrix for individual and communal developmenta
oneness with the surroundings that would vitalize the community.
The rotation of civic, vocational, and professional responsibilities
would stimulate the senses in the being of the individual, creating and
rounding out new dimensions in self-development. In a complete society
we could hope to create complete men; in a rounded society, rounded
men. In the Western world, the Athenians, for all their shortcomings
and limitations, were the first to give us a notion of this completeness.
“The \emph{polis} was made for the amateur,” H.D.F. Kitto tells us. “Its ideal
was that every citizen (more or less, according as the \emph{polis} was
democratic or oligarchic) should play his part in all of its many
activities — an ideal that is recognizably descended from the generous
Homeric conception of \emph{arete} as an all-round excellence and an allround
activity. It implies a respect for the wholeness or the oneness of
life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt
for efficiency — or rather a much higher ideal of efficiency; an efficiency
which exists not in one department of life, but in life itself.”\footnote{H.D.F. Kitto, \emph{The Greeks} (Chicago: Aldine, 1951), p. 16.} An
anarchist society, although it would surely aspire to more, could hardly
hope to achieve less than this state of mind.
If the ecological community is ever achieved in practice, social life
would yield a sensitive development of human and natural diversity,
falling together into a well-balanced, harmonious whole. Ranging from
community through region to entire continents, we would see a colorful
differentiation of human groups and ecosystems, each developing its
unique potentialities and exposing members of the community to a wide
spectrum of economic, cultural, and behavioral stimuli. Falling within
our purview would be an exciting, often dramatic variety of communal
forms — here marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to
semiarid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to
forested areas. We would witness a creative interplay between individual
and group, community and environment, humanity and nature. Freed
from an oppressive routine, from paralyzing repressions and insecurities,
from the burdens of toil and false needs, from the trammels of authority
and irrational compulsion, individuals would finally, for the first time
in history, be in a position to realize their potentialities as members of
the human community and the natural world.
\section{The New Technology and the Human Scale}
(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)
To the degree that material production is decentralized and localized,
the primacy of the community is asserted over national institutions. In
these circumstances the popular assembly of the local community,
convened in a face-to-face democracy, would take over the full management
of social life. The question is whether a future society would be
organized around technology, or whether technology is now sufficiently
malleable that it can be organized around society. To answer this question
we must further examine certain features of the new technology\dots{}
[Since 1945, computer technology has undergone a startling
miniaturization, from vacuum tubes to microcircuits. Where computers
were once enormous, advanced IPlits now occupy the size of an office
desk.] Paralleling the miniaturization of computer components is the
remarkable sophistication of more traditional forms of technology.
Ever-smaller machines are beginning to replace large ones. Continuous
hot-strip steel rolling mills, which are among the largest and costliest
facilities in modern industry, \dots{} are geared to a national division of
labor, to highly concentrated sources of raw materials (generally located
a great distance from the complex), and to large national and international
markets. Even if the complex were totally automated, its
operating and management needs would far transcend the capabilities
of a small, decentralized community. The type of administration it
requires tends to foster centralized social forms.
Fortunately, we now have a number of alternatives — more efficient
alternatives in many respects — to the modern steel complex\dots{} A
future steel complex based on electric furnaces, continuous casting, a
planetary mill, and a small continuous cold-reducing mill would require
only a fraction of the acreage occupied by a conventional installation.
It would be fully capable of meeting the steel needs of several moderate-sized
communities with low quantities of fuel. This complex would not
have to meet the needs of a national market. On the contrary, it is suited
only for meeting the steel requirements of small and moderate-sized
communities and industrially undeveloped countries\dots{} The very scale
of our hypothetical steel complex constitutes one of its most attractive
features. Also, the steel it produces is more durable, so the community’s
rate of replenishing its steel products would be appreciably reduced.
Since the smaller complex requires ore, fuel, and reducing agents in
relatively small quantities, many communities could rely on local
resources for their raw materials, thereby conserving the more concentrated resources of centrally located sources of supply, strengthening
the independence of the community itself vis-a-vis the traditional
centralized economy and reducing the expense of transportation. What
would at first glance seem to be a costly, inefficient duplication of effort
would prove, in the long run, to be more efficient as well as socially
more desirable than a few centralized complexes.
The new technology has produced not only miniaturized electronic
components and smaller production facilities but highly versatile,
multipurpose machines. For more than a century, the trend in machine
design moved increasingly toward technological specialization and
single-purpose devices, underpinning the intensive division of labor
required by the factory system. Industrial operations were subordinated
entirely to the product. In time, this narrow pragmatic approach has
“led industry far from the rational line of development in production
machinery,” observe Eric W. Leaver and John J. Brown.
\begin{quote}
It has led to increasingly uneconomic specialization\dots{} Specialization
of machines in terms of end product requires that the machine be thrown
away when the product is no longer needed. Yet the work the production
machine does can be reduced to a set of basic functions — forming,
holding, cutting, and so on — and these functions, if correctly analyzed,
can be packaged and applied to operate on a part as needed.\footnote{Eric W. Leaver and John J. Brown, “Machines Without Men,” \emph{Fortune} (November 1946).}
\end{quote}
\dots{} A small or moderate-sized community using multipurpose machines
could satisfy many of its limited industrial needs without being
burdened with underused industrial facilities. There would be less loss
in scrapping tools and less need for single-purpose plants. The
community’s economy would be more compact and versatile, more
rounded and self-contained, than anything we find in the communities
of industrially advanced countries. The effort that goes into retooling
machines for new products would be enormously reduced. Finally,
multipurpose machines with a wide operational range are relatively
easy to automate. The changes required to use these machines in a
cybernated industrial facility would generally be in circuitry and
programming rather than in machine form and structure\dots{}
I do not claim that all of man’s economic activities can be completely
decentralized, but the majority can surely be scaled to human and
communitarian dimensions. This much is certain: we can shift the center
of economic power from national to local scale and from centralized
bureaucratic forms to local, popular assemblies. This shift would be a
revolutionary change of vast proportions, for it would create powerful
economic foundations for the sovereignty and autonomy of the local
community.
\section{Ecological Technology}
(from “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” 1965)
In our own time, the development of technology and the growth of
cities have brought man’s alienation from nature to the breaking point.
Western man finds himself confined to a largely synthetic urban
environment, far removed physically from the land, and his relationship
to the natural world is mediated entirely by machines. He lacks
familiarity with how most of his goods are produced, and his foods
bear only the faintest resemblance to the animals and plants from which
they were derived. Boxed into a sanitized urban milieu (almost
institutional in form and appearance), modern man is denied even a
spectator’s role in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfy
his material needs. He is a pure consumer, an insensate receptacle. It
would be unfair, perhaps, to say that he is disrespectful toward the
natural environment; the fact is, he scarcely knows what ecology means
or what his environment requires to remain in balance.
The balance between man and nature must be restored. Unless we
establish some kind of equilibrium between man and the natural world,
the viability of the human species will be placed in grave jeopardy. The
new technology can be used ecologically to reawaken man’s sense of
dependence upon the environment; by reintroducing the natural world
into the human experience, we can contribute to the achievement of
human wholeness.
The classical utopians fully realized that the first step toward
wholeness must be to remove the contradiction between town and
country. “It is impossible,” wrote Fourier nearly a century and a half
ago, “to organize a regular and well balanced association without
bringing into play the labors of the field, or at least gardens, orchards,
flocks and herds, poultry yards, and a great variety of species, animal
and vegetable.” Shocked by the social effects of the Industrial
Revolution, Fourier added: “They are ignorant of this principle in
England, where they experiment with artisans, with manufacturing
labor alone, which cannot by itself suffice to sustain social union.”
To argue that the modern urban dweller should once again enjoy
“the labors of the field” may well seem like gallows humor. A
restoration of the peasant agriculture that was prevalent in Fourier’s
day is neither possible nor desirable. Charles Gide is surely correct
when he observes that agricultural labor “is not necessarily more
attractive than industrial labor; to till the earth has always been
regarded \dots{} as the type of painful toil, of toil which is done with ‘the
sweat of one’s brow.”’\footnote{Charles Gide, introduction to F.M.C. founer, \emph{Selections from the Works of Fourier} (London: S. Sonnenschein and Co., 1901), p. 14.} \dots{} If our vision were to extend no further than
land management, the only alternative to peasant agriculture would
seem to be highly specialized and centralized farming, its techniques
paralleling the methods used in present-day industry. Far from achieving
a balance between town and country, we would be faced with a
synthetic environment that had totally assimilated the natural world.
If the land and community are to be reintegrated physically, and if
the community is to exist in an agricultural matrix that renders man’s
dependence upon nature explicit, the problem is how to achieve this
transformation without imposing “painful toil” on the community.
How, in short, can husbandry, ecological forms of food cultivation,
and farming on a human scale be practiced and, at the same time, toil
be eliminated?
Some of the most promising technological advances in agriculture
made since World War II are as suitable for small-scale ecological forms
of land management as they are for the immense, industrial-type
commercial units that have become prevalent over the past few decades.
The augermatic feeding of livestock illustrates a cardinal principle of
rational farm mechanization — the deployment of conventional
machines and devices in a way that virtually eliminates arduous farm
labor. By linking a battery of silos with augers, different nutrients can
be mixed and transported to feed pens merely by pushing some buttons
and pulling a few switches. A job that may once have required the labor
of five or six men working half a day with pitchforks and buckets can
now be performed by one man in a few minutes. This type of
mechanization is intrinsically neutral: it can be used to feed immense
herds or just a few hundred head of cattle; the silos may contain natural
feed or synthetic, harmonized nutrients; the feeder can be employed
on relatively small farms with mixed livestock, or on large beef-raising
ranches, or on dairy farms of all sizes. In short, augermatic feeding can
be placed in the service either of the most abusive kind of commercial
exploitation, or of the most sensitive applications of ecological
principles. This holds true for most of the farm machines that have
been designed (in many cases, simply redesigned to achieve greater
versatility) in recent years\dots{}
Let us pause at this point to envision how our free community might
be integrated with its natural environment. The community has been
established after a careful study was made of its natural ecology — its
air and water resources, its climate, its geological formations, its raw
materials, its soils, and its natural flora and fauna. Land management
by the community is guided entirely by ecological principles, so that
an equilibrium is maintained between the environment and its human
inhabitants. Industrially rounded, the community forms a distinct unit
within a natural matrix; it is socially and aesthetically in balance with
the area it occupies.
Agriculture is highly mechanized in the community, but as mixed as
possible with respect to crops, livestock, and timber. Variety of flora
and fauna is promoted as a means of controlling pest infestations and
enhancing scenic beauty. Large-scale farming is practiced only where
it does not conflict with the ecology of the region. Owing to the
generally mixed character of food cultivation, agriculture is pursued
by small farming units, each demarcated from the others by tree belts,
shrubs, pastures, and meadows. In rolling, hilly, or mountainous
country, land with sharp gradients is covered by timber to prevent
erosion and conserve water. The soil on each acre is studied carefully
and committed only to those crops for which it is most suited. Every
effort is made to blend town and country without sacrificing the
distinctive contribution that each has to offer to the human experience.
The ecological region forms the living social, cultural, and biotic
boundaries of the community or of the several communities that share
its resources. Each community contains many vegetable and flower
gardens, attractive arbors, park land, even streams and ponds that
support fish and aquatic birds. The countryside, from which food and
raw materials are acquired, not only constitutes the immediate environs
of the community, accessible to all by foot, but invades the community.
Although town and country retain their identity and the uniqueness of
each is highly prized and fostered, nature appears everywhere in the
town, while the town seems to have caressed and left a gentle human
imprint on nature\dots{}
There is a kind of industrial archaeology that reveals in many areas
evidence of a once-burgeoning economic activity long abandoned by
our precapitalist predecessors. In the Hudson Valley, the Rhine Valley,
the Appalachians, and the Pyrenees are relics of mines and once highly
developed metallurgical crafts, the fragmentary remains of local
industries, and the outlines of long-deserted farms — all vestiges of
flourishing communities based on local raw materials and resources.
These communities declined because the products they once furnished
were elbowed out by the large-scale national industries based on mass
production techniques and concentrated sources of raw materials. Their
old infrastructure is often still available as a resource for use by each
locality; “valueless” in a highly urbanized society, it is eminently suitable
for use by decentralized communities, and it awaits the application of
industrial techniques adapted for small-scale quality production. If we
were to take a careful inventory of the resources available in many
depopulated regions of the world, the possibility that communities
could satisfy many of their material needs locally would likely be much
greater than we suspect\dots{}
It is not that we lack energy per se, but we are only just beginning
to learn how to use energy sources that are available in almost limitless
quantity. The gross radiant energy striking the earth’s surface from the
sun is estimated to be more than three thousand times the annual energy
consumed by mankind today. Although a portion of this energy is
converted into wind or used for photosynthesis by vegetation, a
staggering quantity is available for human use. The problem is how to
collect it to satisfy a portion of our energy needs. If solar energy could
be collected for house heating, for example, twenty to thirty percent
of the conventional energy resources we normally employ could be
redirected to other purposes. If we could collect solar energy for most
or all of our cooking, water heating, smelting, and power production,
we would have relatively little need for fossil fuels. Solar devices have
been designed for nearly all of these functions. We can heat houses,
cook food, boil water, melt metals, and produce electricity with devices
that use the sun’s energy exclusively, but we can’t do it efficiently in
every latitude of the earth, and we are still confronted with a number
of technical problems that can be solved only by crash research
programs\dots{}
The ocean’s tides are still another untapped resource to which we
could turn for electric power. We could trap the ocean’s waters at high
tide in a natural basis — say, a bay or the mouth of a river — and release
them through turbines at low tide. A number of places exist where the
tides are high enough to produce electric power in large quantities\dots{}
We could use temperature differences in the sea or in the earth to
generate electric power in sizable quantities. A temperature differential
as high as seventeen degrees centigrade is not uncommon in the surface
layers of tropical waters; along coastal areas of Siberia, winter differences
of thirty degrees exist between water below the ice crust and the air. The
interior of the earth becomes progressively warmer as we descend,
providing selective temperature differentials with respect to the surface.
Heat pumps could be used to avail ourselves of these differentials\dots{}
If we could acquire electricity or direct heat from solar energy, wind
power, or temperature differentials, the heating system of a home or
factory would be completely self-sustaining; it would not drain valuable
hydrocarbon resources or require external sources of supply.
Winds could also be used to provide electric power in many areas of
the world. About one-fortieth of the solar energy reaching the earth’s
surface is converted into wind. Although much of this goes into the
making of the jet stream, a great deal of wind energy is available a few
hundred feet above the ground. A United Nations report, using
monetary terms to gauge the feasibility of wind power, finds that
efficient wind plants in many areas could produce electricity at an
overall cost of five mills per kilowatt-hour, a figure that approximates
the price of commercially generated electric power\dots{}
There should be no illusions about the possibilities of extracting trace
minerals from rocks, of solar and wind power, and the use of heat
pumps [as alternative sources of energy and raw materials]. Except
perhaps for tidal power and the extraction of raw materials from the
sea, these sources cannot supply man with the bulky quantities of raw
materials and large blocks of energy needed to sustain densely
concentrated populations and highly centralized industries. Solar
devices, wind turbines, and heat pumps will produce relatively small
quantities of power. Used locally and in conjunction with each other,
they could probably meet all the power needs of small communities,
but we cannot foresee a time when they will be able to furnish electricity
in the quantities currently used by cities the size of New York, London,
and Paris.
Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage
from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind, and the earth are
experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and
reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man
developed his sense of dependence on — and respect for — the natural
environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check.
The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed
obscured nature’s role in human experience — hiding the sun with a pall
of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the
earth with sprawling cities. Man’s dependence on the natural world
became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the
subject matter of textbooks, monographs, and lectures. True, this
theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (although partial ones
at best) into the natural world, but its one-sidedness robbed us of all
sensuous dependence on, and all visible contact and unity with nature.
In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became
alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally
inanimate, totally synthetic — a purely inorganic physical milieu that
promoted the deanimization of man and his thought.
To bring the sun, the wind, the earth, indeed the world of life back
into technology, into the means of human survival, would be a
revolutionary renewal of man’s ties to nature. To restore this dependence
in a way that evoked a sense of regional uniqueness in each
community — a sense not only of generalized dependence but of
dependence on a specific region with distinct qualities of its own —
would give this renewal a truly ecological character. A real ecological
system would emerge, a delicately interlaced pattern of local resources,
honored by continual study and artful modification. With a true sense
of regionalism every resource would find its place in a natural, stable
balance, an organic unity of social, technological, and natural
elements. Art would assimilate technology by becoming social art, the
art of the community as a whole. The free community would be able
to rescale the tempo of life, the work patterns of man, its architecture,
and its systems of transportation and communication to human
dimensions. The electric car, quiet, slow-moving, and clean, would
become the preferred mode of urban transportation, replacing the
noisy, filthy, high-speed automobile. Monorails would link community
to community, reducing the number of highways that scar the
countryside. Crafts would regain their honored position as
supplements to mass manufacture; they would become a form of
domestic, day-to-day artistry. A high standard of excellence, I believe,
would replace the strictly quantitative criteria of production that
prevail today; a respect for the durability of goods and the conservation
of raw materials would replace the shabby, huckster-oriented
criteria that result in built-in obsolescence and an insensate consumer
society. The community would become a beautifully molded arena of
life, a vitalizing source of culture, and a deeply personal, evernourishing
source of human solidarity.
\section{Social Ecology}
(from \emph{The Ecology of Freedom,} 1982)
In almost every period since the Renaissance, a very close link has
existed between radical advances in the natural sciences and upheavals
in social thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
emerging sciences of astronomy and mechanics, with their liberating
visions of a heliocentric world and the unity of local and cosmic motion,
found their social counterparts in equally critical and rational social
ideologies that challenged religious bigotry and political absolutism.
The Enlightenment brought a new appreciation of sensory perception
and the claims of human reason to divine a world that had been the
ideological monopoly of the clergy. Later, anthropology and evolutionary
biology demolished traditional static notions of the human enterprise,
along with its myths of original creating and history as a
theological calling. By enlarging the map and revealing the earthly
dynamics of social history, these sciences reinforced the new doctrines
of socialism, with its ideal of human progress, that followed the French
Revolution.
In view of the enormous dislocations that now confront us, our own
era needs a more sweeping and insightful body of knowledge — scientific
as well as social — to deal with our problems. Without renouncing the
gains of earlier scientific and social theories, we must develop a more
rounded critical analysis of our relationship with the natural world.
We must seek the foundations for a more reconstructive approach to
the grave problems posed by the apparent contradictions between
nature and society. We can no longer afford to remain captive to the
tendency of the more traditional sciences to dissect phenomena and
examine their fragments. We must combine them, relate them, and see
them in their totality as well as their specificity.
In response to these needs, we have formulated a discipline unique
to our age: \emph{social ecology.} The more well-known term \emph{ecology} was
coined by Ernst Haeckel a century ago to denote the investigation of
the interrelationships between animals, plants, and their inorganic
environment. Since Haeckel’s day, the term has been expanded to
include ecologies of cities, of health, and of the mind. This proliferation
of a word into widely disparate areas may seem particularly desirable
to an age that fervently seeks some kind of intellectual coherence and
unity of perception. But it can also prove to be extremely treacherous.
Like such newly arrived words as \emph{holism, decentralization,} and
\emph{dialectics,} the term \emph{ecology} runs the peril of merely hanging in the air
without any roots, context, or texture. Often it is used as a metaphor,
an alluring catchword, that loses the potentially compelling internal
logic of its premises.
Accordingly, the radical thrust of these words is easily neutralized.
\emph{Holism} evaporates into a mystical sigh, a rhetorical expression for
ecological fellowship and community that ends with such in-group
greetings and salutations as “holistically yours.” What was once a
serious philosophical stance has been reduced to environmentalist
kitsch. \emph{Decentralization} commonly means logistical alternatives to
gigantism, not the human scale that would make an intimate and direct
democracy possible. \emph{Ecology} fares even worse. All too often it becomes
a metaphor, like the word \emph{dialectics,} for any kind of integration and
development.
Perhaps even more troubling, the word in recent years has been
identified with a very crude form of natural engineering that might well
be called \emph{environmentalism.} \dots{} To distinguish ecology from
environmentalism and from abstract, often obfuscatory definitions of
the term, I must return to its original usage and explore its direct
relevance to society. Put quite simply, ecology deals with the dynamic
balance of nature, with the interdependence of living and nonliving
things. Since nature also includes human beings, the science must
include humanity’s role in the natural world — specifically, the character,
form, and structure of humanity’s relationship with other species and
with the inorganic substrate of the biotic environment. From a critical
viewpoint, ecology opens to a wide purview the vast disequilibrium
that has emerged from humanity’s split with the natural world. One of
nature’s unique species, \emph{homo sapiens,} has slowly and painstakingly
developed from the natural world into a unique social world of its own.
As both worlds interact with each other through highly complex phases
of evolution, it has become as important to speak of a social ecology
as to speak of a natural ecology.
Let me emphasize that to ignore these phases of human evolutionwhich
have yielded a succession of hierarchies, classes, cities, and finally
states — is to make a mockery of the term \emph{social ecology.} Unfortunately,
the discipline has been beleaguered by adherents who try to collapse
all the phases of natural and human development into a universal
“oneness” (not wholeness) — a yawning “night in which all cows are
black,” to borrow one of Hegel’s caustic phrases. If nothing else, our
common use of the word \emph{species} to denote the wealth of life around
us should alert us to the fact of \emph{specificity,} of \emph{particularity} — the rich
abundance of \emph{differentiated} beings and things that enter into the very
subject-matter of natural ecology. To explore these differentiae, to
examine the phases and interfaces that enter into their making and into
humanity’s long development from animality to society — a development
latent with problems and possibilities — is to make social ecology one
of the most powerful disciplines from which to draw our critique of
the present social order.
But social ecology provides more than a critique of the split between
humanity and nature; it also poses the need to heal it. Indeed, it poses
the need to radically transcend them. As E. A. Gutkind pointed out,
“the goal of Social Ecology is wholeness, and not mere adding together
of innumerable details collected at random and interpreted subjectively
and insufficiently.” The science deals with social and natural relationships
in communities or “ecosystems.” In conceiving them holisticallythat
is to say, in terms of their mutual interdependence — social ecology
seeks to unravel the forms and patterns of interrelationships that give
intelligibility to a community, be it natural or social. Holism, here, is
the result of a conscious effort to discern how the particulars of a
community are arranged, how its “geometry” (as the ancient Greeks
might have put it) makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.
Hence, the wholeness to which Gutkind refers is not to be mistaken
for a spectral oneness that yields cosmic dissolution in a structureless
nirvana; it is a richly articulated structure with a history and internal
logic of its own.
History, in fact, is as important as form or structure. To a large
extent, the history of a phenomenon \emph{is} the phenomenon itself. We are,
in a real sense, everything that existed before us, and in turn, we can
eventually become vastly more than what we are. Surprisingly, very
little in the evolution of life-forms has been lost in natural and social
evolution — indeed in our very bodies, as our embryonic development
attests. Evolution lies within us (as well as around us) as parts of the
very nature of our beings.
For the present, it suffices to say that wholeness is not a bleak
undifferentiated “universality” that involves the reduction of a
phenomenon to what it has in common with everything else. Nor is it
a celestial, omnipresent “energy” that replaces the vast material differentiae
of which the natural and social realms are composed. To the
contrary, wholeness comprises the variegated structures, the articulations,
and the mediations that impart to the whole a rich variety of
forms and thereby add unique qualitative properties to what a strictly
analytical mind often reduces to “innumerable” and “random” details.
Terms like \emph{wholeness, totality,} and even \emph{community} have perilous
nuances for a generation that has known fascism and other totalitarian
ideologies. The words evoke images of a “wholeness” achieved through
homogenization, standardization, and a repressive coordination of
human beings. These fears are reinforced by a “wholeness” that seems
to provide an inexorable finality to the course of human history — one
that implies a suprahuman, narrowly teleological concept of social law
and that denies the ability of human will and individual choice to shape
the course of social events. Such notions of social law and teleology
have been used to achieve a ruthless subjugation of the individual to
suprahuman forces beyond human control. Our century has been
afflicted by a plethora of totalitarian ideologies that, placing human
beings in the service of history, have denied them a place in the service
of their own humanity.
Actually, such a totalitarian concept of “wholeness” stands sharply
at odds with what ecologists denote by the term. Ecological wholeness
is not an immutable homogeneity but rather the very opposite — a
dynamic \emph{unity of diversity.} In nature, balance and harmony are
achieved by ever-changing differentiation, by ever-expanding diversity.
Ecological stability, in effect, is a function not of simplicity and
homogeneity but of complexity and variety. The capacity of an
ecosystem to retain its integrity depends not on the uniformity of the
environment but on its diversity.
A striking example of this tenet can be drawn from experiences with
ecological strategies for cultivating food. Farmers have repeatedly met
with disastrous results because of the conventional emphasis on singlecrop
approaches to agriculture — or \emph{monoculture,} to use a widely
accepted term for those endless wheat and corn fields that extend to
the horizon in many parts of the world. Without the mixed crops that
normally provide both the countervailing forces and mutualistic support
that come with mixed populations of plants and animals, the entire
agricultural situation in an area has been known to collapse. Benign
insects become pests because their natural controls, including birds and
small mammals, have been removed. The soil, lacking earthworms,
nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and green manure in sufficient quantities, is
reduced to mere sand — a mineral medium for absorbing enormous
quantities of inorganic nitrogen salts, which were originally supplied
more cyclically and timed more appropriately for crop growth in the
ecosystem. In reckless disregard for the complexity of nature and for
the subtle requirements of plant and animal life, the agricultural
situation is crudely simplified; its needs must now be satisfied by highly
soluble synthetic fertilizers that percolate into drinking water and by
dangerous pesticides that remain as residues in food. A high standard
of food cultivation that was once achieved by a diversity of crops and
animals, one that was free of lasting toxic agents and probably more
healthful nutritionally, is now barely approximated by single crops
whose main supports are toxic chemicals and highly simple nutrients.
If the thrust of natural evolution has been toward increasing
complexity, and if the colonization of the planet by life has been made
possible only as a result of biotic variety, a prudent rescaling of man’s
hubris should call for caution in disturbing natural processes. That
living things, emerging ages ago from their primal aquatic habitat to
colonize the most inhospitable areas of the earth, have created the rich
biosphere that now covers it has been possible only because of life’s
incredible mutability and the enormous legacy of life-forms inherited
from its long development. Many of these life-forms, even the most
primal and simplest, have never disappeared — however much they have
been modified by evolution. The simple algal forms that marked the
beginnings of plant life and the simple invertebrates that marked the
beginnings of animal life still exist in large numbers. They comprise
the preconditions for the existence of the more complex organic beings
to which they provide sustenance, the sources of decomposition, and
even atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide. Although they may
antedate the “higher” plants and mammals by over a billion years, they
interrelate with their more complex descendants in often unravelable
ecosystems.
To assume that science commands this vast nexus of organic and
inorganic interrelationships in all its details is worse than arrogance:
it is sheer stupidity. If unity in diversity forms one of the cardinal tenets
of ecology, the wealth of biota that exists in a single acre of soil leads
us to still another basic ecological tenet: the need to allow for a high
degree of natural spontaneity. The compelling dictum “respect for
nature” has concrete implications. To assume that our knowledge of
this complex, richly textured, and perpetually changing natural
kaleidoscope of life-forms lends itself to a degree of “mastery” that
allows us free rein in manipulating the biosphere is sheer foolishness.
Thus, a considerable amount of leeway must be permitted for natural
spontaneity — for the diverse biological forces that yield a variegated
ecological situation. “Working with nature” requires that we foster the
biotic variety that emerges from a spontaneous development of natural
phenomena. I hardly mean that we must surrender ourselves to a
mystical “Nature” that is beyond all human comprehension and
intervention — a Nature that demands human awe and subservience.
Perhaps the most obvious conclusion we can draw from these ecological
tenets is Charles Elton’s sensitive observation: “The world’s future has
to be managed, but this management would not be just like a game of
chess — more like steering a boat.” What ecology, both natural and
social, can hope to teach us is how to find the current and understand
the direction of the stream.
\chapter{Chapter 2: Nature, First and Second}
\section{Introduction}
Amid the technological enchantment of the 1950s, proponents of
organic farming, like Bookchin himself, had to defend organic
agricultural techniques against the scorn of federal agencies and
the chemical industry, both of which were busily making pesticides
into agricultural commonplaces. Unlike today, when the value
of organic farming is recognized, in those years its value had to be
fought for.
As part of that struggle to defend organic farming, Bookchin
borrowed the concept “unity in diversity” from the German idealist
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Recast as a principle of organic
agriculture, the concept suggested an alternative farming technique
that was able to rid crops of pests, without the use of carcinogenic
pesticides. Unlike the monocultures that demanded pesticide use,
a diversity of crops in one field could play off potential pests against
one another, leaving the crops themselves pest-free. And unlike
monocultures, which are susceptible to complete destruction with
one pest infestation, ecosystems that are highly diversified yield
optimal stability. “Unity in diversity” became a catchword for
stability, not only in organic agriculture but in ecosystems generally;
it entered the vocabulary of the ecology movement as a concept
underpinning the value of diverse species in an ecosystem.
Once organic agriculture gained a measure of acceptance,
however, Bookchin himself began to use the phrase “unity in
diversity” in a different sense, giving it a more dynamic interpretation.
While stability can strengthen an ecosystem, he maintained,
it cannot make for species variegation. Diversity plays an
important role in producing not only stability but change and
innovation. Indeed, without diversification natural evolution could
not occur. Today, Bookchin uses the phrase “unity in diversity” to
refer to the increasing differentiation that a self-formative
biosphere undergoes, within the natural continuum of evolutionary
processes.
This evolutionary emphasis is what markedly distinguishes
Bookchin’s philosophy of nature from that of other schools of
ecological-political thought today. Natural evolution, he has long
argued, encompasses not only a strictly biological realm (or “first
nature”) but also a social realm (or “second nature”).\footnote{In his earlier writings Bookchin often refers to first nature simply as “nature,” following convention. But because the meanings of the word \emph{nature} are so numerous and varied, in his more recent writings he no longer uses the word unmodified.} Far from
being inherently antagonistic to each other, first and second nature
are actually two aspects of one continuum, Bookchin maintainsat
once separate from each other but also mutually imbricated in
a shared evolutionary process. Human beings and human society,
with their potentialities for self-consciousness and freedom, differ
in profound respects from first nature yet emerge from and
incorporate it in a graded development.
Perhaps of most interest to social ecology, the evolutionary
processes in first nature generate increasing complexity and subjectivity
in life-forms. Consciousness has evolved in a cumulative process,
from the simple reactivity of unicellular organisms, to the neurological
activity of mammals and reptiles, to a culmination in human
intellection. As life-forms attain higher levels of subjectivity, they
are able to exercise greater choice in selecting and even improving
their own ecological niches.
The dim, emergent subjectivity in first nature can make only
rudimentary “choices,” but in second nature human beings,
possessed of the highest level of subjectivity, are capable of actively
and consciously altering their environments, of shaping the societies
in which they live — and of creating the ecological society that
integrates town and country, or first and second nature, in what
Bookchin would later call “free nature.”
At first glance, the great significance Bookchin attaches to human
consciousness would seem to represent a sharp demarcation
between human and nonhuman nature in his thought, one that
sets human beings on an entirely different plane from the rest of
the natural world. And it is true that he considers humanity as a
radically new development in natural evolution, manifesting the
potentiality for self-consciouseness, freedom, and innovation. He
does regard human consciousness as qualitatively different from
that of other life-forms. But by his use of the categories of first and
second nature, he also emphasizes the rootedness of human beings
in nonhuman nature.
In the mid-1980s a tendency arose within the ecology movement
that denigrated the notion that human beings are in any way
superior or more advanced than other life-forms in the biosphere.
Blaming human-centered ness, or “anthropocentrism,” as the cause
of the ecological crisis, deep ecology — with its fundamental precept
of biocentrism — advanced a notion of “biospheric democracy,”
which saw human beings as having “intrinsic worth” equal to that
of any other species. Bookchin’s sharp criticism of this tendency is
rooted in two conflicting views of humanity’s relationship to the rest
of the natural world. Where biocentrism would reduce human
beings into “plain citizens” of the biosphere, morally interchangeable
with other life-forms, social ecology asserts that human beings
are unique in natural evolution. By virtue of their powers of thought
and communication, they have the ability to create and even the
responsibility to achieve a harmonious, indeed creative relationship
with the first nature.
The nineteenth-century philosopher Johann Fichte once
remarked that humanity is nature rendered self-conscious. Although
this view has sometimes been attributed to Bookchin as
well, he actually maintains that second nature has thus far fallen
short of realizing humanity’s potentiality for creating a liberatory
society and an integrative relationship with the nonhuman world.
“Where Fichte patently erred was in his assumption that a possibility
is a fact,” he wrote in \emph{The Ecology of Freedom.}
\begin{quote}
We are no more nature rendered self-conscious than we are
humanity rendered self-conscious. Reason may give us the capacity
to play this role, but we and our society are still totally irrationalindeed,
we are cunningly dangerous to ourselves and all that lives
around us.\footnote{Murray Bookchin, \emph{The Ecology of Freedom} (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), pp. 315–16.}
\end{quote}
He therefore modifies Fichte’s statement to argue that humanity is
\emph{potentially} nature rendered self-conscious — that it would actualize
that potential only if it were to create an ecological society.
\section{Images of First Nature}
(from “What Is Social Ecology?” 1984)
More than any single notion in the history of religion and pl