#cover m-b-murray-bookchin-social-ecology-and-communalism-1.png
#title Social Ecology and Communalism
#author Murray Bookchin
#SORTtopics social ecology, communalism, libertarian municipalism, municipalism, post-anarchism, post-marxism
#date 2006
#source [[http://new-compass.net/publications/social-ecology-and-communalism][PDF]] provided by <em>New Compass</em>.
#lang en



** An Introduction to Social Ecology and Communalism

We are standing at a crucial crossroads. Not only does the age-old “social question” concerning the exploitation of human labor
remain unresolved, but the plundering of natural resources has
reached a point where humanity is also forced to politically deal
with an “ecological question.” Today, we have to make conscious
choices about what direction society should take, to properly meet
these challenges.

At the same time, we see that our very ability to make
the necessary choices are being undermined by an incessant
centralization of economic and political power. Not only is there
a process of centralization in most modern nation states that
divests humanity of any control over social affairs, but power is
also gradually being transferred to transnational institutions.

Simultaneously, the elites governing the multinational corporations
are virtually given free rein to continue exploiting people as well as
the natural world, in a series of new “free trade” agreements that
in turn have provoked a range of popular protests. The last few
years have also witnessed, in the ongoing “War on Terror,” serious
encroachments on a range of civil rights that we, in the Western
world, have come to take for granted. So, at a time when the
social and ecological crises are intensified in breadth and scope,
we find ourselves utterly disempowered, and virtually stripped of
possibilities to arrest and reverse this destructive “development.”

None of the established political tendencies, no matter how
“radical” they claim to be, seem to be able to counter these processes.

One after another, the European Social Democratic parties, not to
speak of the once so promising Green tendencies, have all lowered
their banners and come to accept the most pernicious market
forces. Their participation in national parliaments continuously
hollows out their expressed ideals. Not only has the traditional
Left crumbled ideologically with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc
— which indeed is a tragic irony — but today, there exists no real
extraparliamentary movement, with the will and ability to foster
and advance an *alternative politics*. No left libertarian *movement*
has yet emerged that could make use of the vast opportunities
that opened up as “Real Existing Socialism” ceased to exist. The
great hopes that were nurtured by the many new social movements
which emerged in the twentieth century have all but faded away,
and where the radical Left has not simply “melted into air,” it has
become highly confused. This is a trend that echoes throughout
the world, and, despite the recent resurgence of *protest* movements,
there are still no visible tendencies which advance practical and
credible alternative directions to the destructive tracks we are on.

If we are not able to intelligently respond to these challenges,
it is clear that popular discontents will be channeled through
the Right instead, as we indeed witness in many industrialized
countries today — notably the disconcerting growth of religious
fundamentalisms. Inasmuch as there exists no clear and principled
Left radicalism, the conservatives and the reactionaries can set the
political agenda, and as a result, the whole political spectrum has
tilted markedly toward the Right. The current political climate is
itself a reason to be concerned, as there is an urgent need to find
political *alternatives* that can seriously deal with the social and
ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. We have to open up
a debate and clarify the basic theoretical issues at stake, before we
can carve out a possible Left agenda suited for our time. It is in this
quest for political alternatives that we turn to the radical theorist
Murray Bookchin.

<br>

This book is a collection of essays written by Bookchin, a man
who dedicated his whole life to seeking rational alternatives to
capitalist society. Bookchin was born in January 1921, in New
York City to Jewish-Russian immigrants. His grandparents had
been members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and
fled the country in the wake of the failed revolution of 1905. In the
working class neighborhoods of the Bronx, Bookchin’s childhood
and youth were strongly marked by the hopeful enthusiasm that
followed in the aftermath of the October revolution of 1917. As
America entered headlong into the Great Depression, Bookchin
got in touch with the radical organizations agitating in his New
York neighborhood, and quickly he became very politically active.

This marked the beginning of a long life dedicated to the cause of
social freedom.

Because of his family’s economic situation, Bookchin had to
start working at an early age, and got involved in the activities of
the trade union movement. In the thirties, he was a member of the
various organizations spawned by the Communist Party, acting as an
agitator, organizer and study leader, although he gradually became
strongly critical of many of its policies. Already by the outbreak of
the Spanish Revolution, he broke with the Communists, mainly
because of their Popular Front strategy (notoriously the Stalinist
betrayal of the Spanish working class). He then became involved
in the Trotskyist movement — while Trotsky was still alive — and
wrote his first articles for dissident Left groups. After the Second
World War, he gravitated more and more toward a libertarian
socialism, and started reevaluating the basic premises and the
logical conclusions of conventional radical theory.

Bookchin was an untiring activist and theorist in most of the
significant radical movements that emerged after the Second World
War. He was in the worker’s movement while it was still truly radical,
and was active as a shop steward and a strike leader. He was one of
the definitive pioneers of ecological thought, and participated in the
environmental movement from its tentative inception in the 1950s.
Bookchin was also a part of the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-
nuclear movement, involved with Students for a Democratic Society,
and a series of urban development projects. He was very engaged
in efforts to develop neo-anarchist ideas, groups and projects. Later
on he became heavily involved in the emergence of the Greens,
and was active in local issues and electoral campaigns in his home
town, Burlington, Vermont. It was only in the last few years that
physical infirmities impeded him from taking part in active politics,
and relegated him to the writer’s desk. Indeed, it is probably for his
theoretical contributions Bookchin is most well-known and valued.

Bookchin published more than twenty books, and a wide range
of articles, lectures and essays, and his work has been translated
into many different languages. His writings have encompassed a
great variety of subject matters, including history, anthropology,
philosophy, science, and technology, as well as culture and social
organization. Still, it is his treatment of ecological and political issues
that has made Bookchin known to most readers, and some of his
older books, notably *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*, *Toward an Ecological
Society*, and *The Ecology of Freedom*, have been sources of inspiration
for several generations of radicals.

<br>

Murray Bookchin experienced many radical movements in his
lifetime, and had a relationship to all the major radical ideological
trends of the last century. Still, he managed to hammer out a unique
political philosophy that attempts to build on the best in these
traditions. The purpose of his work was to renew radical theory so
that it maintains its best principles and draws lessons from a broad
spectrum of historical experiences, while being adapted to new issues
and challenges.

Although by no means his first relevant work, it was with his
1964 essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” that Bookchin
started to define the outlines of the body of ideas he called social
ecology — a theory that was to be more fully developed in books
like *The Ecology of Freedom*, *Remaking Society*, *The Philosophy of
Social Ecology*, and *Re-enchanting Humanity*. In 1971, his “Spring
Offensives and Summer Vacations” was hinting at a libertarian
municipalist approach, that later was carved out in the pages of *The
Limits of the City*, and particularly in *From Urbanization to Cities*,
as well as in a series of shorter essays. His historical writings have
recently culminated in his massive history of revolutionary popular
movements — the four-volume *The Third Revolution* (1996–2005).

For more than four decades, the theory of social ecology has been
continually nuanced and developed. For a rounded introduction
to his body of ideas, readers should turn to Janet Biehl’s excellent
presentation in *The Murray Bookchin Reader*.

The basic promise of social ecology is to re-harmonize the
relationship between society and nature, and to create a rational,
ecological society. Here Bookchin suggests a dialectical interpretation
of human history, culture, and natural evolution. By looking at
humanity’s *potentialities* for freedom and cooperation he argues that
history itself suggests to us, if only in a fragmented and incomplete
form, how such a rational future can and *ought* to be formed.

While Bookchin relied partly on the the theories of Karl
Marx (particularly his critique of capitalism), he saw the need to
distance himself from the Marxist tradition, of which he had been
a part, in order to clarify the liberatory content of his ideas. As an
anti-authoritarian and a libertarian socialist, he tried to build upon
the viable fragments of anarchism to create a rounded libertarian
complement to Marx’s ideas on the radical Left. In order to create a
new ecological body of thought, as well as a new politics, he used the
words “*post-scarcity* anarchism” to express the new transcendence his
perspective reflected of both libertarian and Marxian views. Still,
he gradually felt that the traditional radical orthodoxies inhibited
the logic of his ideas. After making great efforts at defending (and
trying to *fill with meaning*) variably an “anarchist-communism,” an
“eco-anarchism,” and “social anarchism” that maintained a coherency
and political radicalism, he came to a point where this project no
longer seemed feasible. The inherent flaws of anarchism became all
the more apparent as Bookchin studied the historical emergence
of its basic ideas and its various organized expressions: Not only
had anarchism been infected by current trends of nihilism and
lifestyle approaches, it was indeed a product of *individualist* and
*anti-social* attitudes from its very inception. He openly broke with
anarchism at the second International Conference on Libertarian
Municipalism, in Vermont, 1999 — and made it clear that his
theory of social ecology had to be embodied in the ideology he
called Communalism.

This is not to say that the anarchist tradition did not provide
a set of sound *sentiments*, namely anti-statism, federalism, and self-
management (however naïvely they were formulated), but that
they never made up a coherent theoretical framework for radical
social action. Accordingly, Bookchin urged serious libertarians
to *transcend* anarchism, along with Marxism and other radical
ideologies. It is necessary, he contended, to create a new body of
thought based on a coherent and revolutionary social approach
that integrates and goes beyond all traditional forms of socialist
radicalism. Indeed, vague libertarian ideals of popular self-
management, mutual aid, and a stateless community, are through
Bookchin’s social ecology, developed into aspects of a coherent
*political* theory, marked by direct democracy, municipalization,
and confederalism. This constitutes the *political* alternative that
Bookchin argued could confront the market economy and powerful
centralized institutions.

These political ideas have been developed over many decades,
and are based on both concrete lessons as well as the creative
formulations of a man who passionately dedicated his life to the
radical movement, a glowing passion that is clearly expressed in the
essays here presented.

<br>

The purpose of this small collection of essays is to give a general
overview of Murray Bookchin’s fundamental ideas on social
ecology and Communalism. Of course four essays cannot replace
the many books and polemical essays written by Bookchin on these
subjects, and this collection is not meant as a substitute for a more
thorough study of his ideas. Still, these essays can indeed serve as
a decent introduction for serious readers, and give a good sense of
the theoretical outlines of Bookchin’s theoretical corpus.

The first essay, “What is Social Ecology?,” gives an important
overview of the basic theoretical tenets of social ecology. Here
Bookchin offers a *developmental* perspective on society and nature,
explaining how “second nature” (human culture) has developed out
of “first nature” (biological evolution), and showing that the very
“idea of dominating nature” is connected to the historical emergence
of hierarchies, and later to the breakthrough of capitalism. In
order to create an ecological society, Bookchin claimed, we have
to confront and challenge all hierarchical relationships, and
ultimately abolish hierarchy as such from the human condition.

The essay was originally published in an anthology edited by
Michael Zimmerman,  *Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology*  (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1993), although it was revised both in 1996 and 2001.

The second essay, “Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced
Capitalism,” appeared in *Green Perspectives* (#18, November 1989). The essay begins with a critique of Marxism and its
economistic class orientation, urging radicals to understand the
changing nature of capitalism. Bookchin urges us to clarify the
relationship between “society,” “politics,” and “the state,” in order
to develop an new radical ecological politics, by expanding on the
historical advances made by the public domain and the city. It is, in
my view, one of the clearest expressions of his proposal for a new
libertarian politics, insisting on the centrality of the municipality
and of confederalism. This essay was revised by Murray Bookchin
in 2001.

The third essay, “The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of
Reaction,” was written in 1995, when Bookchin had just finished
writing *Re-enchanting Humanity*. It makes very clear distinctions
between social ecology, and contemporary trends like “deep ecology,”
mysticism, anti-humanism, as well as postmodernist eclecticism
and relativism. It was first sent to an International Gathering of
social ecologists in Dunoon, Scotland, in August of that year, and
it was subsequently published as “Theses on Social Ecology in a
Period of Reaction” in *Green Perspectives* (# 33, October 1995).

In addition to many interesting comments on current cultural
and philosophical trends, Bookchin here places social ecology
unequivocally in the trajectory of the Enlightenment and its
revolutionary offshoots, and for those reasons I consider this essay
particularly appropriate to include in this anthology.

The final essay, “The Communalist Project,” is in my view the
most significant essay in this anthology, binding the other essays
together by defining a new outlook. Although an earlier version
(that was to be significantly revised and expanded) was circulated
as “The Communalist Moment,” this essay was first published in
the journal *Communalism* (#2, November, 2002). Bookchin details
the need to go beyond all the ideologies of the traditional Left,
such as Marxism, anarchism, and syndicalism, and create a new,
coherent libertarian radicalism. He explains the relationship
between Communalism and libertarian municipalism. This essay
constitutes the best exposition to the extent that Bookchin had
shaken off all the “anarchist” trappings that were formerly identified
with his theories of social ecology. In fact, this essay was initially
published with an appendix on “Anarchism and Power in the
Spanish Revolution,” that criticizes anarchism for not having any
theory of power, and for not being able to deal with this important
question in real life politics. This appendix has been left out of this
collection for one reason: in these pages, I wanted to present only
general essays — essays which were neither considered too polemical
nor too specific — which would constitute a short book properly
expressing *the main ideological aspects* of Bookchin’s theoretical
writings. (The appendix is available at [[http://www.communalism.org][www.communalism.org]], and will be published, along with other critiques of anarchism
and Marxism, in a forthcoming anthology presenting Bookchin’s
recent writings on Libertarian Municipalism.)

The red thread running through all these essays is the drive
to understand and explain the struggle for a rational society,
and to understand the necessary ideological underpinnings of a
contemporary radical politics. Although the essays included are
very different in focus and emphasis, I think that taken together,
they convey the ideological foundations of this political project,
and its roots in the rich and fecund theory of social ecology.

<br>

This book gives a highly accessible introduction to social ecology and
Communalism, as it has been developed by one of the most exciting
and pioneering thinkers of the twentieth century. Its purpose is to
give a general overview of Murray Bookchin’s ideas, and convey
a sense of his originality, by presenting some of his most central
contributions to radical theory. Despite Bookchin’s insistence that
the ideas he proposed are a product of revolutionary movements
of the past, and of the ideals of the Enlightenment, he nevertheless
created a new and unique synthesis. This political philosophy
suggests that the solution to the enormous social and ecological
problems we face today, fundamentally lie in the formation of a new
citizenry, its empowerment through new political institutions, and
a new political culture. It is my profound belief that Communalism,
as a coherent body of ideas — with a dialectical philosophy of
nature, a confederalist politics, a non-hierarchical social analysis,
and an ethics based on complementarity — can be an inspiration
for a new radical popular movement in the years to come, indeed,
for the resuscitation of the Left in a meaningful sense.

At this crossroads, we now have to decide where we want
to go, and how we can get there. The current ecological crisis is
also a social one, and we must redefine humanity’s relationship
to the natural world by remaking the basic social institutions and
advancing a new ecological humanism, in order to make science,
technology, and the human intellect serve both social development
and a natural evolution guided by reason. To carve the outlines
of a rational ecological future, and to initiate the necessary steps
in that direction, has now become not only a desideratum, but a
necessity. As Murray Bookchin so challengingly asks, “humanity
is too intelligent not to live in a rational society. It remains to see
whether it is intelligent enough to achieve one.”

Eirik Eiglad, <br> January 14<sup>th</sup>, 2006


** What is Social Ecology?

Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present
ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It
follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be
understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of
our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To
make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and
gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most
serious ecological dislocations we face today — apart, to be sure,
from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.

If this approach seems a bit too sociological for those
environmentalists who identify the primary ecological problem as
being the preservation of wildlife or wilderness, or more broadly as
attending to “Gaia” to achieve planetary “oneness,” they might wish
to consider certain recent developments. The massive oil spills that
have occurred over the past two decades, the extensive deforestation
of tropical forest and magnificent ancient trees in temperate areas,
and vast hydroelectric projects that flood places where people live,
to cite only a few problems, are sobering reminders that the real
battleground on which the ecological future of the planet will
be decided is clearly a social one, particularly between corporate
power and the long-range interests of humanity as a whole.

Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems
— or even to play down or give only token recognition to their
crucial relationship — would be to grossly misconstrue the sources
of the growing environmental crisis. In effect, the way human
beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing
the ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will fail
to see that the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that
so thoroughly permeate society are what has given rise to the very
idea of dominating the natural world.

Unless we realize that the present market society, structured
around the brutally competitive imperative of “grow or die,” is a
thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely
tend to blame other phenomena — such as technology or population
growth — for growing environmental dislocations. We will ignore
their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion for
its own sake, and the identification of progress with corporate self-
interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the *symptoms* of a grim
social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts
will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more
cosmetic than curative.

Some critics have recently questioned whether social
ecology has treated the issue of spirituality in ecological politics
adequately. In fact, social ecology was among the earliest of
contemporary ecologies to call for a sweeping change in existing
spiritual values. Indeed, such a change would involve a far-reaching
transformation of our prevailing mentality of domination into one
of complementarity, one that sees our role in the natural world as
creative, supportive, and deeply appreciative of the well-being of
nonhuman life. In social ecology a truly *natural* spirituality, free of
mystical regressions, would center on the ability of an emancipated
humanity to function as ethical agents for diminishing needless
suffering, engaging in ecological restoration, and fostering an
aesthetic appreciation of natural evolution in all its fecundity and
diversity.

Thus, in its call for a collective effort to change society, social
ecology has never eschewed the need for a radically new spirituality
or mentality. As early as 1965, the first public statement to advance
the ideas of social ecology concluded with the injunction: “The cast
of mind that today organizes differences among human and other
life-forms along hierarchical lines of ‘supremacy or ‘inferiority’ will
give way to an outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological
manner — that is, according to an ethics of complementarity.”[1]
In such an ethics, human beings would complement nonhuman
beings with their own capacities to produce a richer, creative, and
developmental whole — not as a“dominant” species but as supportive
one. Although this ethics, expressed at times as an appeal for
the “respiritization of the natural world,” recurs throughout the
literature of social ecology, it should not be mistaken for a theology
that raises a deity above the natural world or even that seeks to
discover one within it. The spirituality advanced by social ecology
is definitively *naturalist* (as one would expect, given its relation to
ecology itself, which stems from the biological sciences) rather
than supernaturalistic or pantheistic areas of speculation.

[1] Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” originally published in the libertarian socialist periodical *Comment* (September 1965) and collected, together with all my major essays of the 1960s, in *Post-Scarcity Anarchism* (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1972; reprinted Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977). The expression “ethics of complementarity” is from my *The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy* (San Francisco: Cheshire Books, 1982; revised edition Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991; reprinted with a new introduction by AK Press, 2005).

The effort in some quarters of the ecology movement to
prioritize the need to develop a pantheistic “eco-spirituality” over
the need to address social factors raises serious questions about
their ability to come to grips with reality. At a time when a blind
social mechanism — the market — is turning soil into sand, covering
fertile land with concrete, poisoning air and water, and producing
sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes, we cannot ignore the
impact that an aggressive hierarchical and exploitative class society
has on the natural world. We must face the fact that economic
growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic domination — not to speak
of corporate, state, and bureaucratic incursions on human well-
being — are much more capable of shaping the future of the natural
world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-redemption. These
forms of domination must be confronted by collective action and
by major social movements that challenge the social sources of the
ecological crisis, not simply by personalistic forms of consumption
and investment that often go under the oxymoronic rubric of
“green capitalism.” The present highly cooptative society is only
too eager to find new means of commercial aggrandizement and
to add ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations
efforts.


*** Nature and Society

To escape from this profit-oriented image of ecology, let us
begin with some basics — namely, by asking what society and the
natural world actually are. Among the many definitions of  *nature* 
that have been formulated over time, the one that has the most
affinity with social ecology is rather elusive and often difficult to
grasp because understanding and articulating it requires a certain
way of thinking — one that stands at odds with what is popularly
called “linear thinking.” This “nonlinear” or organic way of thinking
is developmental rather than analytical, or in more technical
terms, it is dialectical rather than instrumental. It conceives the
natural world as a  *developmental process* , rather than the beautiful
vistas we see from a mountaintop or images fixed on the backs of
picture postcards. Such vistas and images of nonhuman nature are
basically static and immobile. As we gaze over a landscape, to be
sure, our attention may momentarily be arrested by the soaring
flight of a hawk, or the bolting leap of a deer, or the low-slung
shadowy lope of a coyote. But what we are really witnessing in such
cases is the mere kinetics of physical motion, caught in the frame
of an essentially static image of the scene before our eyes. Such
static images deceive us into believing in the “eternality” of single
moments in nature.

But nonhuman nature is more than a scenic view, and as we
examine it with some care, we begin to sense that it is basically an
evolving and unfolding phenomenon, a richly fecund, even dramatic
development that is forever changing. I mean to define nonhuman
nature precisely as an evolving process, as the  *totality*, in fact, of
its evolution. Nature, so concerned, encompasses the development
from the inorganic into the organic, and from the less differentiated
and relatively limited world of unicellular organisms into that of
multicellular ones equipped with simple, then, complex, and in
time fairly intelligent neural apparatuses that allow them to make
innovative choices. Finally, the acquisition of warm-bloodedness
gives to organisms the astonishing flexibility to exist in the most
demanding climatic environments.

This vast drama of nonhuman nature is in every respect
stunning and wondrous. Its evolution is marked by increasing
subjectivity and flexibility and by increasing differentiation
that makes an organism more adaptable to new environmental
challenges and opportunities and that better equips living beings
(specifically human beings) to  *alter*  their environment to meet their
own needs rather than merely adapt to environmental changes. One
may speculate that the potentiality of matter itself — the ceaseless
interactivity of atoms in forming new chemical combinations to
produce ever more complex molecules, amino acids, proteins, and
under suitable conditions, elementary life-forms — is inherent in
inorganic nature. [2] Or one may decide quite matter-of-factly that
the “struggle for existence” or the “survival of the fittest” explains
why increasingly subjective and more flexible beings are capable
of addressing environmental change more effectively that are less
subjective and flexible beings. But the simple fact remains that
these evolutionary dramas did occur, indeed the evidence is carved
in stone in the fossil record. That nonhuman nature is this record,
this history, this developmental or evolutionary process, is a very
sobering fact that cannot be ignored without ignoring reality
itself.

[2] I am not saying that complexity necessarily yields subjectivity, merely that it is difficult
to conceive of subjectivity without complexity, specifically the nervous system. Human
beings, as active agents in changing their environments to suit their needs, could not
have achieved their present level of control over their environments without their
extraordinary complex brains and nervous systems – a remarkable example of the
specialization of an organ system that had highly general functions.

Conceiving nonhuman nature as its own interactive evolution
rather than as a mere scenic vista has profound implications
— ethical as well as biological — for ecologically minded people.
Human beings embody, at least potentially, attributes of nonhuman
development that place them squarely within organic evolution.
They are not “natural aliens,” to use Neil Evernden’s phrase, strong
exotics, phylogenetic deformities that, owing to their tool-making
capacities, “cannot evolve  *with*  an ecosystem anywhere.” [3] Nor are
they “intelligent fleas,” to use the language of Gaian theorists
who believe that the earth (“Gaia”) is one living organism. [4] These
untenable disjunctions between humanity and the evolutionary
process are as superficial as they are potentially misanthropic.
Humans are highly intelligent, indeed, very self-conscious primates,
which is to say that they have emerged — not diverged — from a
long evolution of vertebrate life-forms into mammalian and finally
primate life-forms. They are a product of a significant evolutionary
trend toward intellectuality, self-awareness, will, intentionality, and
expressiveness, be it in verbal or in body language.

[3] Neil Evernden, *The Natural Alien* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 109.

[4] Quoted in Alan Wolfe, “Up from Humanism,”  *American Prospect*  (Winter 1991), p. 125.

Human beings belong to a natural continuum, no less than
their primate ancestors and mammals in general. To depict them
as “aliens” that have no place or pedigree in natural evolution, or
to see them essentially as an infestation that parasitizes the planet
the way fleas parasitize dogs and cats, is not only bad ecology but
bad thinking. Lacking any sense of process, this kind of thinking —
regrettably so commonplace among ethicists — radically divides the
nonhuman from the human. Indeed, to the degree environmental
thinkers romanticize nonhuman nature as wilderness and see it as
more authentically “natural” than the works of humans, they freeze
nonhuman nature as a circumscribed domain in which human
innovation, foresight, and creativity have no place and offer no
possibilities.

The truth is that human beings not only belong in nature, they
are products of a long, natural evolutionary process. Their seemingly
“unnatural” activities — like the development of technology and
science, the formation of mutable social institutions, highly
symbolic forms of communication, and aesthetic sensibilities, and
the creation of towns and cities — all would have been impossible
without the large array of physical human attributes that have been
aeons in the making, be they the large human brain or the bipedal
motion that frees human hands for making tools and carrying food.
In many respects, human traits are enlargements of nonhuman
traits that have been evolving over the ages. Increasing care for the
young, cooperation, the substitution of mentally guided behavior for
largely instinctive behavior — all are present more keenly in human
behavior. Among humans, as opposed to nonhuman beings, these
traits are developed sufficiently to reach a degree of elaboration and
integration that yields cultures, comprising institutions of families,
bands, tribes, hierarchies, economic classes, and the state — in
short, highly mutable  *societies*  for which there is no precedent in
the nonhuman world, unless the genetically programmed behavior
of insects is to be regarded as social. In fact, the emergence and
development of human society has been a continual process of
shedding instinctive behavioral traits and of clearing a new terrain
for potentially rational behavior.

Human beings always remain rooted in their biological
evolutionary history, which we may call “first nature,” but they
produce a characteristically human social nature of their own,
which we may call “second nature.” Far from being unnatural,
human second nature is eminently a creation of organic evolution’s
first nature. To write second nature out of nature as a whole,
or indeed to minimize it, is to ignore the creativity of natural
evolution itself and to view it one-sidedly. If “true” evolution
embodies itself simply in creatures like grizzly bears, wolves, and
whales — generally, animals that  *people*  find aesthetically pleasing
or relatively intelligent — then human beings are <em>de</em>-natured. Such
views, whether they see human beings as “aliens” or as “fleas,”
essentially place them outside the self-organizing thrust of natural
evolution toward increasing subjectivity and flexibility. The more
enthusiastic proponents of this de-naturing of humanity may
see human beings as existing apart from nonhuman evolution, as
a “freaking,” as Paul Shepard put it, of the evolutionary process.
Others simply avoid the problem of clarifying humanity’s unique
place in natural evolution by promiscuously putting human beings
on a par with beetles in terms of their “intrinsic worth.” The “either/
or” propositional thinking that produces such obfuscations either
separates the social from the organic altogether or flippantly makes
it disappear into the organic, resulting in an inexplicable dualism
at one extreme or a naive reductionism at the other. The dualistic
approach, with its quasi-theological premise that the world was
“made” for human use, is saddled with the name *anthropocentrism*,
while the reductionist approach, with its almost meaningless notion
of a “biocentric democracy,” is saddled with the name *biocentrism*.

The bifurcation of the human from the nonhuman reflects a
failure to think organically or to approach evolutionary phenomena
with an evolutionary way of thought. Needless to say, if nature
were no more than a scenic vista, then mere metaphoric and poetic
descriptions of it might suffice to replace systematic thinking about
it. But *nature is the history of nature*, an evolutionary process that is
going on to one degree or another under our very eyes, and as such,
we dishonor it by thinking of it in anything but a processual way.
That is to say, we require a way of thinking that recognizes that
“what is,” as it seems to lie before our eyes, is always developing
into “what is not,” that it is engaged in a continual self-organizing
process in which past and present, along a richly differentiated but
shared continuum, give rise to a new potentiality for an ever-richer
degree of  *wholeness*. Life, clearly in its human form, becomes open-
endedly innovative and transcends its relatively narrow capacity to
adapt only to a pregiven set of environmental conditions. As V.
Gordon Childe once put it, “Man makes himself; he is not preset
to survive by his genetic makeup.”

By the same token, a processual, organic, and dialectical way
of thinking has little difficulty in locating and explaining the
emergence of the social out of the biological, of second nature
out of first nature. It seems more fashionable these days to deal
with ecologically significant social issues like an accountant. Thus,
one simply juxtaposes two lists of cultural facts — one labeled “old
paradigm” and the other, “new paradigm” — as though they were
columns of debits and credits. Obviously distasteful items like
 *centralization*  are listed under “old paradigm,” while more appealing
ones like  *decentralization*  are regarded as “new paradigm.” The
result is an inventory of bumper-sticker slogans whose “bottom
line” is patently absolute good versus absolute evil. All of this may
be deliciously synoptic and easy on the eyes, but it is singularly
lacking as food for the brain. To truly *know* and be able to give
interpretive *meaning* to the social issues and ideas so arranged, we
should want to know how each one derived from the other and
what its part is in an overall development. What, in fact, is meant
by “decentralization,” and how, in the history of human society,
does it derive from or give rise to centralization? Again, we need
processual thinking to comprehend processual realities, if we are to
gain some sense of *direction* — practical as well as theoretical — in
addressing our ecological problems.

Social ecology seems to stand alone, at present, in calling
for an organic, developmental way of thinking out problems that
are basically organic and developmental in character. The very
definition of the natural world as a development (albeit not any
one) indicates the need for organic thinking, as does the derivation
of human from nonhuman nature — a derivation from which we can
draw far-reaching conclusions for the development of an ecological
ethics that in turn can provide serious guidelines for the solution
of our ecological problems.

Social ecology calls upon us to see that the natural world and
the social are interlinked by evolution into one nature that consists
of two differentiations: first or biotic nature, and second or social
nature. Social nature and biotic nature share an evolutionary
potential for greater subjectivity and flexibility. Second nature is the
way in which human beings, as flexible, highly intelligent primates,
inhabit and *alter* the natural world. That is to say, people create an
environment that is most suitable for their mode of existence. In
this respect, second nature is no different from the environment
that *every* animal, depending upon its abilities, partially creates
as well as primarily adapts to — the biophysical circumstances
or ecocommunity in which it must live. In principle, on this very
simple level, human beings are doing nothing that differs from the
survival activities of nonhuman beings, be it building beaver dams
or digging gopher holes.

But the environmental changes that human beings produce are
profoundly different from those produced by nonhuman beings.
Humans act upon their environments with considerable technical
*foresight*, however lacking that foresight may be in ecological ideals.
Animals adapt to the world around them; human beings innovate
through thought and social labor. For better or worse, they alter the
natural world to meet their needs and desires — not because they
are perverse, but because they have evolved quite naturally over
the ages to do so. Their cultures are rich in knowledge, experience,
cooperation, and conceptual intellectuality; however, they have
been sharply divided against themselves at many points of their
development, through conflicts between groups, classes, nation-
states, and even city-states. Nonhuman beings generally live in
ecological niches, their behavior guided primarily by instinctive
drives and conditioned reflexes. Human societies are “bonded”
together by *institutions* that change radically over centuries.
Nonhuman communities are notable for their general fixity, by
their clearly preset, often genetically imprinted rhythms. Human
communities are guided in part by ideological factors and are subject
to changes conditioned by those factors. Nonhuman communities
are generally tied together by genetically rooted instinctive factors
— to the extent that these communities exist at all.

Hence human beings, emerging from an organic evolutionary
process, initiate, by the sheer force of their biological and survival
needs, a social evolutionary development that clearly involves their
organic evolutionary process. Owing to their naturally endowed
intelligence, powers of communication, capacity for institutional
organization, and relative freedom from instinctive behavior, they
refashion their environment — as do nonhuman beings — to the
full extent that their biological equipment allows. This equipment
makes it possible for them to engage not only in social life but
in social development. It is not so much that human beings,
in principle, behave differently from animals or are inherently
more problematical in a strictly ecological sense, as it is that the
social development by which they grade out of their biological
development often becomes more problematical for themselves
and nonhuman life. How these problems emerge, the ideologies
they produce, the extent to which they contribute to biotic
evolution or abort it, and the damage they inflict on the planet
as a whole lie at the very heart of the modern ecological crisis.
Second nature as it exists today, far from marking the fulfillment
of human potentialities, is riddled by contradictions, antagonisms,
and conflicting interests that have distorted humanity’s unique
capacities for development. Its future prospects encompass both
the danger of tearing down the biosphere and alas, given the
struggle to achieve an ecological society, the capacity to provide an
entirely new ecological dispensation.

*** Social Hierarchy and Domination

How, then, did the social emerge from the biological? We have good
reason to believe that as biological facts such as kin lineage, gender
distinctions, and age differences were slowly institutionalized, their
uniquely social dimension was initially quite egalitarian. Later
this development acquired an oppressive hierarchical and then an
exploitative class form. The lineage or blood tie in early prehistory
obviously formed the organic basis of the family. Indeed, it joined
together groups of families into bands, clans, and tribes, through
either intermarriage or fictive forms of descent, thereby forming
the earliest social horizon of our ancestors. More than in other
mammals, the simple biological facts of human reproduction and
the protracted maternal care of the human infant tended to knit
siblings together and produced a strong sense of solidarity and
group inwardness. Men, women, and their children were socialize
by means of a fairly stable family life, based on mutual obligation
and an expressed affinity that was often sanctified by initiation
ceremonies and marital vows of one kind or another.

Human beings who were outside the family and all its
elaborations into bands, clans, tribes, and the like, were regarded
as “strangers” who could alternatively be welcomed hospitably
or enslaved or put to death. What mores existed were based on
unreflective *customs* that seemed to have been inherited from
time immemorial. What we call *morality* began as the rules or
commandments of a deity or various deities, in that moral beliefs
required some kind of supernatural or mystical reinforcement
or sanctification to be accepted by a community. Only later,
beginning with the ancient Greeks, did *ethics* emerge, based on
rational discourse and reflection. The shift from blind custom to
a commanding morality and finally to a rational ethics occurred
with the rise of cities and urban cosmopolitanism, although by no
means did custom and morality diminish in importance. Humanity,
gradually disengaging its social organization from the biological
facts of blood ties, began to admit the “stranger” and increasingly
recognize itself as a shared community of human beings (and
ultimately a community of citizens) rather than an ethnic folk or
group of kinsmen.

In this primordial and socially formative world, other human
biological traits were also reworked from the strictly natural to
the social. One of these was the fact of age and its distinctions.
In social groups among early humans, the absence of a written
language helped to confer on the elderly a high degree of status,
for it was they who possessed the traditional wisdom of the
community, including knowledge of the traditional kinship lines
that prescribed marital ties in obedience to extensive incest taboos
as well as survival techniques that had to be acquired by both the
young and the mature members of the group. In addition, the
*biological* fact of gender distinctions was slowly reworked along
*social* lines into what were initially complementary sororal and
fraternal groups. Women formed their own food-gathering and
care-taking groups with their own customs, belief systems, and
values, while men formed their own hunting and warrior groups
with their own behavioral characteristics, mores, and ideologies.

From everything we know about the socialization of the
biological facts of kinship, age, and gender groups — their
elaboration into early institutions — there is no reason to doubt
that these groups existed initially in complementary relationships
with one another. Each, in effect, needed the others to form a
relatively stable whole. No one group “dominated” the others or
tried to privilege itself in the normal course of things. Yet even
as the biological underpinnings of consociation were, over time,
further reworked into social institutions, so the social institutions
were slowly reworked, at various periods and in various degrees,
into hierarchical structures based on command and obedience.
I speak here of a historical trend, in no way predetermined by
any mystical force or deity, and one that was often a very limited
development among many preliterate or aboriginal cultures and
even in certain fairly elaborate civilizations.

Hierarchy in its earliest forms was probably not marked
by the harsh qualities it has acquired over history. Elders, at the
very beginnings of gerontocracy, were not only respected for their
wisdom but were often beloved of the young, with affection that
was often reciprocated in kind. We can probably account for the
increasing harshness of later gerontocracies by supposing that the
elderly, burdened by their failing physical powers and dependent
upon their community’s goodwill, were more vulnerable to
abandonment in periods of material want than any other part of
the population. “Even in simple food-gathering cultures,” observed
anthropologist Paul Radin, “individuals above fifty, let us say,
apparently arrogate to themselves certain powers and privileges
which benefited themselves specifically, and were not necessarily,
if at all, dictated by considerations either of the rights of others
or the welfare of the community.” [5] In any case, that gerontocracy
was probably the earliest form of hierarchy is corroborated by its
existence in communities as disparate as the Australian Aborigines,
tribal societies in East Africa, and Native communities in the
Americas. Many tribal councils throughout the world were really
councils of elders, an institution that never completely disappeared
(as the word  *alderman*  suggests), even after they were overlaid by
warrior societies, chiefdoms, and kingships.

[5] Paul Radin,  *The World of Primitive Man*  (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 211.

Patricentricity, in which masculine values, institutions, and
forms of behavior prevail over feminine ones, seems to have
developed in the wake of gerontocracy. Initially, the emergence of
patricentricity may have been a useful adjunct to a life deeply rooted
in the primordial natural world; preliterate and early aboriginal
societies were essentially small domestic communities in which
the authentic center of material life was the home, not the “men’s
house” so widely present in later, more elaborate tribal societies.
Male rule, if such it can strictly be called, takes on its harshest and
most coercive form in  *patriarchy*, an institution in which the eldest
male of an extended family or clan has a life-and-death command
over  *all*  other members of the group. Women may be ordered
whom to marry, but they are by no means the exclusive or even the
principal object of a patriarch’s domination. Sons, like daughters,
may be ordered how to behave at the patriarch’s command or be
killed at his whim.

So far as patricentricity is concerned, however, the authority
and prerogative of the male are the product of a long, often
subtly negotiated development in which the male fraternity
edges out the female sorority by virtue of the former’s growing
“civil” responsibilities. Increasing population, marauding bands of
outsiders whose migrations may be induced by drought or other
unfavorable conditions, and vendettas of one kind or another, to
cite common causes of hostility or war, create a new “civil” sphere
side by side with woman’s domestic sphere, and the former gradually
encroaches upon the latter. With the appearance of cattle-drawn
plow agriculture, the male, who is the “master of the beasts,” begins
to invade the horticultural sphere of woman, whose primacy as the
food cultivator and food gatherer gives her cultural preeminence
in the community’s internal life, slowly diluting her preeminence.
Warrior societies and chiefdoms carry the momentum of male
dominance to the level of a new material and cultural dispensation.
Male dominance becomes extremely active and ultimately yields a
world in which male elites dominate not only women but also, in
the form of classes, other men.

The causes of the emergence of hierarchy are transparent
enough: the infirmities of age, increasing population numbers,
natural disasters, technological changes that privileged activities of
hunting and animal husbandry over horticultural responsibilities,
the growth of civil society, and the spread of warfare. All served to
enhance the male’s standing at the expense of the female’s. It must
be emphasized that hierarchical domination, however coercive it
may be, is not the same thing as class exploitation. As I wrote in
*The Ecology of Freedom*, hierarchy

<quote>
must be viewed as *institutionalized* relationships, relationships that
living beings literally institute or create but which are neither ruthlessly
fixed by instinct on the one hand nor idiosyncratic on the other. By this,
I mean that they must comprise a clearly *social* structure of coercive
and privileged ranks that exist apart from the idiosyncratic individuals
who seem to be dominant within a given community, a hierarchy that
is guided by a social logic that goes beyond individual interactions or
inborn patterns of behavior. [6]
</quote>

[6] Murray Bookchin,  *The Ecology of Freedom*  (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), p. 29.

They are not reducible to strictly economic relationships based on
the exploitation of labor. In fact, many chiefs earn their prestige,
so essential to their authority, by disposing of gifts, and even by a
considerable disaccumulation of their personal goods. The respect
accorded to many chiefs is earned, not by hoarding surpluses
as a source of power but by disposing of them as evidence of
generosity.

By contrast, classes tend to operate along different lines. In class
societies power is usually gained by the *acquisition* of wealth, not by
its disposal; rulership is guaranteed by outright physical coercion,
not simply by persuasion; and the state is the ultimate guarantor
of authority. That hierarchy is historically more entrenched than
class can perhaps be verified by the fact that despite sweeping
changes in class societies, even of an economically egalitarian kind,
women have still been dominated beings for millennia. By the same
token, the abolition of class rule and economic exploitation offers
no guarantee whatever that elaborate hierarchies and systems of
domination will also disappear.

In nonhierarchical societies, certain customs guide human
behavior along basically decent lines. Of primary importance among
early customs was the principle of the *irreducible minimum* (to use
Paul Radin’s expression), the shared notion that all members of
the same community are entitled to the means of life, irrespective
of the amount of work they perform. To deny anyone food, shelter,
and the basic means of life because of their infirmities or even their
frivolous behavior would have been seen as a heinous denial of the
very right to live. Nor were the basic resources needed to sustain
the community ever permitted to be privately owned; overriding
individualistic control was the broader principle of *usufruct* — the
notion that the means of life that were not being used by one
group could be used, as needed, by another. Thus unused land,
orchards, and even tools and weapons, if left idle, were often at the
disposition of anyone in the community who needed them. Lastly,
custom fostered the practice of *mutual aid*, the rather sensible
cooperative sharing of things and labor, so that an individual or
family in straitened circumstances could expect to be helped by
others. Taken as whole, these customs became so sedimented into
organic society that they persisted long after hierarchy became
oppressive and class society became predominant.

*** The Idea of Dominating Nature

Nature, in the sense of the biotic environment from which humans
take the simple things they need for survival, often has no meaning
to preliterate peoples as a general concept. Immersed in it as they
are, even celebrating animistic rituals in an environment they view
as a nexus of life, often imputing their own social institutions to
the behavior of nonhuman species, as in the case of beaver “lodges”
and humanlike spirits, the concept of “nature” a such eludes them.
Words that express our conventional notions of nature are not easy
to find, if they exist at all, in the languages of aboriginal peoples.

With the rise of hierarchy and domination, however, the
seeds were planted for the belief that first nature not only exists
as a world that is increasingly distinguishable from the community
but one that is hierarchically organized and can be dominated
by human beings. The worldview of magic reveal this shift
clearly. Here nature was not conceived as a world apart; rather, a
practitioner of magic essentially pleaded with the “chief spirit” of a
game animal (itself a puzzling figure in the dream world) to coax it
in the direction of an arrow or a spear. Later, magic became almost
entirely instrumental; the hunter used magical techniques to
“coerce” the game to become prey. While the earliest forms of magic
may be regarded as the practices of a generally nonhierarchical and
egalitarian community, the later kinds of animistic beliefs betray
a more or less hierarchical view of the natural world and of latent
human powers of domination over reality.

We must emphasize here that the  *idea*  of dominating nature
has its primary source in the domination of human by human and
in the structuring of the natural world into a hierarchical chain
of being (a static conception, incidentally, that has no relationship
to the dynamic evolution of life into increasingly advanced forms
of subjectivity and flexibility). The biblical injunction that gave
command of the living world to Adam and Noah was above all an
expression of a  *social*  dispensation. Its idea of dominating nature
— so essential to the view of the nonhuman world as an object
of domination — can be overcome only through the creation of a
society without those class and hierarchical structures that make
for rule and obedience in private as well as public life, and the
objectifications of reality as mere materials for exploitation. That
this revolutionary dispensation would involve changes in attitudes
and values should go without saying. But new ecological attitudes
and values will remain vaporous if they are not given substance and
solidity through real and objective institutions (the structures by
which humans concretely interact with each other) and through
the tangible realities of everyday life from childrearing to work
and play. Until human beings cease to live in societies that are
structured around hierarchies as well as economic classes, we shall
never be free of domination, however much we try to dispel it with
rituals, incantations, ecotheologies, and the adoption of seemingly
“natural” lifeways.

The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost
as old as that of hierarchy itself. Already in the  *Gilgamesh*  epic of
Mesopotamia, a drama whose written form dates back some four
thousand years, the hero defies the deities and cuts down their
sacred trees in his quest for immortality. The  *Odyssey*  is a vast
travelogue of the Greek warrior, more canny than heroic, who in his
wanderings essentially subdues the nature deities that the Hellenic
world had inherited form its less well-known precursors (ironically,
the dark pre-Olympian world that has been revived by purveyors
of eco-mysticism and spiritualism). Long before the emergence of
modern science, “linear” rationality, and “industrial society” (to cite
causal factors that are invoked so flippantly in the modern ecology
movement), hierarchical and class societies laid waste to much of the
Mediterranean basin as well as the hillsides of China, beginning a
vast remaking and often despoliation of the planet.

To be sure, human second nature, in inflicting harm on
first nature, created no Garden of Eden. More often than not, it
despoiled much that was beautiful, creative, and dynamic in the
biotic world, just as it ravaged human life itself in murderous
warfare, genocide, and acts of heartless oppression. Social ecology
maintains that the future of human life goes hand in hand with the
future of the nonhuman world, yet it does not overlook the fact
that the harm that hierarchical and class society inflicted on the
natural world was more than matched by the harm it inflicted on
much of humanity.

However troubling the ills produced by second nature, the
customs of the irreducible minimum, usufruct, and mutual aid
cannot be ignored in any account of anthropology and history.
These customs persisted well into historical times and surfaced
sometimes explosively in massive popular uprisings, from revolts
in ancient Sumer to the present time. Many of those revolts
demanded the recovery of caring and communistic values, at times
when these were coming under the onslaught of elitist and class
oppression. Indeed, despite the armies that roamed the landscape
of warring areas, the tax-gatherers who plundered ordinary village
peoples, and the daily abuses that overseers inflicted on peasants
and workers, community life still persisted and retained many of
the cherished values of a more egalitarian past. Neither ancient
despots nor feudal lords could fully obliterate them in peasant
villages and in the towns with independent craft associations. In
ancient Greece, a rational philosophy that rejected the encumbering
of thought and political life by extravagant wants, as well as a
religion based on austerity, tended to scale down needs and delimit
human appetites for material goods. Together they served to slow
the pace of technological innovation sufficiently that when new
means of production were developed, they could be sensitively
integrated into a balanced society. In medieval times, markets
were still modest, usually local affairs, in which guilds exercised
strict control over prices, competition, and the quality of the goods
produced by their members.

*** “Grow or Die”

But just as hierarchies and class structures had acquired momentum
and permeated much of society, so too the market began to acquire
a life of its own and extended its reach beyond a few limited
regions into the depths of vast continents. Where exchange had
once been primarily a means to provide for essential needs, limited
by guilds or by moral and religious restrictions, long-distance trade
subverted those limits. Not only did trade place a high premium
on techniques for increasing production; it also became the
progenitor of new needs, many of them wholly artificial, and gave
a tremendous impetus to consumption and the growth of capital.
First in northern Italy and the European lowlands, and later — and
most decisively — in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the production of goods exclusively for sale and profit
(the production of the capitalistic commodity) rapidly swept aside
all cultural and social barriers to market growth.

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the new
industrial capitalist class, with its factory system and commitment
to limitless expansion, had embarked on its colonization of the
entire world, including most aspects of personal life. Unlike the
feudal nobility, with its cherished lands and castles, the bourgeoisie
had no home but the marketplace and its bank vaults. As a class,
it turned more and more of the world into a domain of factories.
In the ancient and medieval worlds, entrepreneurs had normally
invested profits in land and lived like country gentry, given the
prejudices of the times against “ill-gotten” gains from trade. But
the industrial capitalists of the modern world spawned a bitterly
competitive marketplace that placed a high premium on industrial
expansion and the commercial power it conferred, functioning as
though growth were an end in itself.

In social ecology it is crucially important to recognize that
industrial growth did not and does not result from changes in
cultural outlook alone — least of all from the impact of scientific and
technological rationality on society. Growth occurs above all from
 *harshly objective factors*  churned up by the expansion of the market
itself,  *factors that are largely impervious to moral considerations and efforts at ethical persuasion.* Indeed, despite the close association
between capitalist development and technological innovation, the
most driving imperative of any enterprise in the harshly capitalist
marketplace, given the savagely dehumanizing competition that
prevails there, is the need of an enterprise to grow in order to
avoid perishing at the hands of its savage rivals. Important as even
greed may be as a motivating force, sheer survival requires that the
entrepreneur must expand his or her productive apparatus in order
to remain ahead of others. Each capitalist, in short, must try to
devour his or her rivals — or else be devoured by them. The key to
this law of life — to survival — is expansion, and the quest for ever-
greater profits, to be invested, in turn, in still further expansion.
Indeed, the notion of progress, once regarded as faith in the
evolution of greater human cooperation and care, is now identified
with ever greater competition and reckless economic growth.

The effort by many well-intentioned ecology theorists and
their admirers to reduce the ecological crisis to a cultural crisis
rather than a social one becomes very obfuscatory and misleading.
However ecologically well-meaning an entrepreneur may be,
the harsh fact is that his or her very survival in the marketplace
precludes the development of a meaningful ecological orientation.
The adoption of ecologically sound practices places a morally
concerned entrepreneur at a striking and indeed fatal disadvantage
in a competitive relationship with a rival — who, operating without
ecological guidelines and moral constraints, produces cheap
commodities at lower costs and reaps higher profits for further
capital expansion. The marketplace has its own law of survival:
only the most unscrupulous can rise to the top of that competitive
struggle.

Indeed, to the extent that environmental movements and
ideologies merely moralize about the wickedness of our anti-
ecological society and call for changes in personal lifestyles and
attitudes, they obscure the need for concerted social action and tend
to deflect the struggle for far-reaching social change. Meanwhile,
corporations are skillfully manipulating this popular desire for
personal ecologically sound practices by cultivating ecological
mirages. Mercedes-Benz, for example, declaims in a two-page
magazine advertisement, decorated with a bison painting from a
Paleolithic cave wall, that “we must work to make progress more
environmentally sustainable by including environmental themes in
the planning of new products.” [7] Such messages are commonplace in
Germany, one of western Europe’s worst polluters. Such advertising
is equally manipulative in the United States, where leading polluters
piously declare that for them, “every day is Earth Day.”

[7] *Der Spiegel* (Sept. 16, 1991), pp. 144–45.

The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and
spiritual persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary;
they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism
is  *structurally*  amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals.
The modern marketplace is driven by imperatives of its own,
irrespective of what kind of CEO sits in a corporation’s driver’s
seat or holds on to its handlebars. The direction it follows depends
not upon ethical prescriptions and personal inclinations but upon
objective laws of profit or loss, growth or death, eat or be eaten,
and the like. The maxim “Business is business” explicitly tells us
that ethical, religious, psychological, and emotional factors have
virtually no place in the predatory world of production, profit, and
growth. It is grossly misleading to think that we can divest this
harsh, indeed mechanistic world of its objective characteristics by
means of ethical appeals.

A society based on the law of “grow or die” as its all-pervasive
imperative must of necessity have a devastating impact on first
nature. Nor does “growth” here refer to population growth; the
current wisdom of population-boomers to the contrary, the
most serious disruptors of ecological cycles are found in the large
industrial centers of the world, which are not only poisoning water
and air but producing the greenhouse gases that threaten to melt
the ice caps and flood vast areas of the planet. Suppose we could
somehow cut the world’s population in half: would growth and the
despoliation of the earth be reduced at all? Capital would insist
that it was “indispensable” to own two or three of every appliance,
motor vehicle, or electronic gadget, where one would more than
suffice if not be too many. In addition, the military would continue
to demand ever more lethal instruments of death and devastation,
of which new models would be provided annually.

Nor would “softer” technologies, if produced by a grow-or-die market, fail to be used for destructive capitalistic ends. Two
centuries ago, large forested areas in England were hacked into fuel
for iron forges with axes that had not changed appreciably since the
Bronze Age, and ordinary sails guided ships laden with commodities
to all parts of the world well into the nineteenth century. Indeed,
much of the United States was cleared of its forests, wildlife, and
aboriginal inhabitants with tools and weapons that could have
easily been recognized, however much they were modified, by
Renaissance people centuries earlier. What modern technics did
was  *accelerate*  a process that had been well under way at the close of
the Middle Ages. It cannot be held solely responsible for endeavors
that were under way for centuries; it essentially abetted damage
caused by the ever-expanding market system, whose roots, in turn,
lay in one of history’s most fundamental social transformations:
the elaboration of a system of production and distribution based
on exchange rather than complementarity and mutual aid.

*** An Ecological Society

Social ecology is an appeal not only for moral regeneration but,
and above all, for social reconstruction along ecological lines. It
emphasizes that, taken by itself, an ethical appeal to the powers
that be, based on blind market forces and ruthless competition,
is certain to be futile. Indeed, taken by itself, such an appeal
 *obscures* the real power relationships that prevail today by making
the attainment of an ecological society seem merely a matter of
changing individual attitudes, spiritual renewal, or quasi-religious
redemption.

Although always mindful of the importance of a new ethical
outlook, social ecology seeks to redress the ecological abuses that
the prevailing society has inflicted on the natural world by going
to the structural as well as the subjective sources of notions like
the domination of first nature. That is, it challenges the entire
system of domination itself — its economy, its misuse of technics,
its administrative apparatus, its degradations of political life,
its destruction of the city as a center of cultural development,
indeed the entire panoply of its moral hypocrisies and defiling
of the human spirit — and seeks to eliminate the hierarchical
and class edifices that have imposed themselves on humanity
and defined the relationship between nonhuman and human
nature. It advances an ethics of complementary in which human
beings play a supportive role in perpetuating the integrity of the
biosphere — the potentiality of human beings to be the most
conscious products of natural evolution. Indeed, humans have
an ethical responsibility to function creatively in the unfolding of
that evolution. Social ecology thus stresses the need to embody
its ethics of complementarity in palpable social institutions that
will make human beings conscious ethical agents in promoting the
well-being of themselves and the nonhuman world. It seeks the
enrichment of the evolutionary process by the diversification of
life-forms and the application of reason to a wondrous remaking of
the planet along ecological lines. Notwithstanding most romantic
views, “Mother Nature” does not necessarily “know best.” To
oppose activities of the corporate world does not require one to
become naively biocentric. Indeed by the same token, to applaud
humanity’s potential for foresight, rationality, and technological
achievement does not make one anthropocentric. The loose usage
of such buzzwords, so commonplace in the ecology movement
today, must be brought to a definitive end by reflective discussion,
not by deprecating denunciations.

Social ecology, in effect, recognizes that — like it or not — the
future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society. It
contends that evolution, both in first nature and in second, is not
yet complete. Nor are the two realms so separated from each other
that we must choose one or the other — either national evolution,
with its “biocentric” halo, or social evolution, as we have known
it up to now, with its “anthropocentric” halo — as the basis for a
creative biosphere. We must go beyond both the natural and
the social toward a new synthesis that contains the best of both.
Such a synthesis must transcend both first and second nature in
the form of a creative, self-conscious, and therefore “free nature,”
in which human beings intervene in natural evolution with their
best capacities — their ethical sense, their unequaled capacity for
conceptual thought, and their remarkable powers and range of
communication.

But such a goal remains mere rhetoric unless a  *movement*  gives
it logistical and social tangibility. How are we to organize such a
movement? Logistically, “free nature” is unattainable without the
decentralization of cities into confederally united communities
sensitively tailored to the natural areas in which they are located.
Ecotechnologies, and of solar, wind, methane, and other renewable
sources of energy; organic forms of agriculture; and the design
of humanly scaled, versatile industrial installations to meet the
regional needs of confederated municipalities — all must be
brought into the service of an ecologically sound world based on
an ethics of complementarity. It means too an emphasis not only
on recycling but on the production of high-quality goods that can,
in many cases, last for generations. It means the replacement of
needlessly insensate labor with creative work and an emphasis on
artful craftspersonship in preference to mechanized production.
It means the free time to be artful and to fully engage in public
affairs. One would hope that the sheer availability of goods, the
mechanization of production, and the freedom to choose one’s
material lifestyle would sooner or later influence people to practice
moderation in all aspects of life as a response to the consumerism
promoted by the capitalist market. [8] 

[8] I spelled out all these views in my 1964–65 essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,”
and they were assimilated over time by subsequent ecology movements. Many of the
technological views advanced in my 1965 essay “Toward a Liberatory Technology”
were also assimilated and renamed “appropriate technology,” a rather socially neutral
expression in comparison with my original term ecotechnology. Both of these essays can
be found in *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*.

But no ethics or vision of an ecological society, however
inspired, can be meaningful unless it is embodied in a living
politics. By  *politics*, I do not mean the statecraft practiced by what
we call politicians — namely, representatives elected or selected
to manage public affairs and formulate policies as guidelines for
social life. To social ecology, politics means what it meant in the
democratic  *polis*  of classical Athens some two thousand years ago:
direct democracy, the formulation of policies by directly democratic
popular assemblies, and the administration of those policies by
mandated coordinators who can easily be recalled if they fail to
abide by the decision of the assembly’s citizens. I am very mindful
that Athenian politics, even in its most democratic periods, was
marred by the existence of slavery and patriarchy, and by the
exclusion of the stranger from public life. In this respect, to be sure,
it differed very little from most of the other ancient Mediterranean
civilizations — and certainly ancient Asian ones — of the time. What
made Athenian politics unique, however, was that it produced
institutions that were extraordinarily democratic — even directly so
— by comparison with the republican institutions of the so-called
“democracies” of today’s world. Either directly or indirectly, the
Athenian democracy inspired later, more all-encompassing direct
democracies, such as many medieval European towns, the little-
known Parisian “sections” (or neighborhood assemblies) of 1793
that propelled the French Revolution in a highly radical direction,
and more indirectly, New England town meetings, and other, more
recent attempts at civic self-governance.[9]

[9] See “The Forms of Freedom” in  *Post Scarcity-Anarchism;*  “The Legacy of Freedom” in  *The Ecology of Freedom* ; and “Patterns of Civic Freedom “ in  *From Urbanization to Cities: Towards a New Politics of Citizenship*  (1982, 1992; rev. ed. London: Cassell, 1995).

Any self-managed community, however, that tries to live
in isolation and develop self-sufficiency risks the danger of
becoming parochial, even racist. Hence the need to extend the
ecological politics of a direct democracy into confederations of
ecocommunities, and to foster a healthy interdependence, rather
than an introverted, stultifying independence. Social ecology
would be obliged to embody its ethics in a politics of libertarian
municipalism, in which municipalities conjointly gain rights
to self-governance through networks of confederal councils, to
which towns and cities would be expected to send their mandated,
recallable delegates to adjust differences. All decisions would
have to be ratified by a majority of the popular assemblies of the
confederated towns and cities. This institutional process could be
initiated in the neighborhoods of giant cities as well as in networks
of small towns. In fact, the formation of numerous “town halls” has
already repeatedly been proposed in cities as large as New York
and Paris, only to be defeated by well-organized elitist groups that
sought to centralize power rather than allow its decentralization.

Power will always belong to elite and commanding strata if it
is not institutionalized in face-to-face democracies, among people
who are fully empowered as social beings to make decisions in
new communal assemblies. Attempts to empower people in this
manner and form constitute an abiding challenge to the nation-
state — that is, a dual power in which the free municipality exists
in open tension with the nation-state. Power that does not belong
to the people invariably belongs to the state and the exploitative
interests it represents. Which is not to say that diversity is not a
desideratum; to the contrary, it is the source of cultural creativity.
Still it never should be celebrated in a nationalistic sense of
“apartness” from the general interests of humanity as a whole, or
else it will regress into the parochialism of folkdom and tribalism.

Should the full reality of citizenship in all its discursiveness
and political vitality begin to wane, its disappearance would mark
an unprecedented loss in human development. Citizenship, in
the classical sense of the term, which involved a lifelong, ethically
oriented education in the art of participation in public affairs (not
the empty form of national legitimation that it so often consists
of today), would disappear. Its loss would mean the atrophying
of a communal life beyond the limits of the family, the waning of
a civic sensibility to the point of the shriveled ego, the complete
replacement of the public arena with the private world and with
private pursuits.

The failure of a rational, socially committed ecology movement
would yield a mechanized, aesthetically arid, and administered
society, composed of vacuous egos at best and totalitarian automata
at worst. Before the planet was rendered physically uninhabitable,
there would be few humans who would be able to inhabit it.

Alternatively, a truly ecological society would open the vista
of a “free nature” with a sophisticated eco-technology based on
solar, wind, and water; carefully treated fossil fuels would be sited
to produce power to meet rationally conceived needs. Production
would occur entirely for use, not for profit, and the distribution
of goods would occur entirely to meet human needs based on
norms established by citizens’ assemblies and confederations of
assemblies. Decisions by the community would be made according
to direct, face-to-face procedures with all the coordinative
judgments mandated delegates. These judgments, in turn, would
be referred back for discussion, approval, modification, or rejection
by the assembly of assemblies (or Commune of communes)  *as a
whole*, reflecting the wishes of the fully assembled majority.

We cannot tell how much technology will be expanded a few
decades from now, let alone a few generations. Its growth and
the prospects it is likely to open over the course of this century
alone are too dazzling even for the most imaginative utopian to
envision. If nothing else, we have been swept into a permanent
technological and communications revolution whose culmination
it is impossible to foresee. This amassing of power and knowledge
opens two radically opposing prospects: either humanity will truly
destroy itself and its habitat, or it will create a garden, a fruitful
and benign world that not even the most fanciful utopian, Charles
Fourier, could have imagined.

It is fitting that such dire alternatives should appear now and
in such extreme forms. Unless social ecology — with its naturalistic
outlook, its developmental interpretations of natural and social
phenomena, its emphasis on discipline with freedom and
responsibility with imagination — can be brought to the service of
such historic ends, humanity may well prove to be incapable of
changing the world. We cannot defer the need to deal with these
prospects indefinitely: either a movement will arise that will bestir
humanity into action, or the last great chance in history for the
complete emancipation of humanity will perish in unrestrained
self-destruction.

** Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism

Defying all the theoretical predictions of the 1930s, capitalism
has restabilized itself with a vengeance and acquired extraordinary
flexibility in the decades since World War II. In fact, we have yet
to clearly determine what constitutes capitalism in its most “mature”
form, not to speak of its social trajectory in the years to come. But
what is clear, I would argue, is that capitalism has transformed
itself from an  *economy*  surrounded by many precapitalist social and
political formations into a society that itself has become “economized.”
Terms like  *consumerism*  and  *industrialism*  are merely obscurantist
euphemisms for an all-pervasive embourgeoisement that involves
not simply an appetite for commodities and sophisticated
technologies but the expansion of commodity relationships — of
market relationships — into areas of life and social movements that
once offered some degree of resistance to, if not a refuge from, utterly
amoral, accumulative, and competitive forms of human interaction.
Marketplace values have increasingly percolated into familial,
educational, personal, and even spiritual relationships and have
largely edged out the precapitalist traditions that made for mutual
aid, idealism, and moral responsibility in contrast to businesslike
norms of behavior.

There is a sense in which any new forms of resistance — be they
by left libertarians, or radicals generally — must open alternative
areas of life that can countervail and undo the embourgeoisement
of society at all its levels. The issue of the relationship of “society,”
“politics,” and “the state” becomes one of programmatic urgency. Can
there be any room for a radical public realm beyond the communes,
cooperatives, and neighborhood service organizations fostered by
the 1960s counterculture — structures that easily degenerated into
boutique-type businesses when they did not disappear completely?
Is there, perhaps, a public realm that can become an arena for the
interplay of conflicting forces for change, education, empowerment,
and ultimately, confrontation with the established way of life?


*** Marxism, Capitalism, and the Public Sphere

The very concept of a  *public realm*  stands at odds with traditional
radical notions of a  *class realm*. Marxism, in particular, denied the
existence of a definable “public,” or what in the Age of Democratic
Revolutions of two centuries ago was called “the People,” because
the notion ostensibly obscured specific class interests — interests
that were ultimately supposed to bring the bourgeoisie into
unrelenting conflict with the proletariat. If “the People” meant
anything, according to Marxist theorists, it seemed to mean a
waning, unformed, nondescript petty bourgeoisie — a legacy of
the past and of past revolutions — that could be expected to side
mainly with the capitalist class it aspired to enter and ultimately
with the working class it was forced to enter. The proletariat, to the
degree that it became class conscious, would ultimately express the
general interests of humanity once it absorbed this vague middle
class, particularly during a general economic or “chronic” crisis
within capitalism itself.

The 1930s, with its waves of strikes, its workers’ insurrections,
its street confrontations between revolutionary and fascist groups,
and its prospect of war and bloody social upheaval, seemed to
confirm this vision. But we cannot any longer ignore the fact
that this traditional radical vision has since been replaced by the
present-day reality of a managed capitalist system — managed
culturally and ideologically as well as economically. However
much living standards have been eroded for millions of people,
the unprecedented fact remains that capitalism has been free of
a “chronic crisis” for a half-century. Nor are there any signs that
we are faced in the foreseeable future with a crisis comparable to
that of the Great Depression. Far from having an internal source
of long-term economic breakdown that will presumably create
a general interest for a new society, capitalism has been more
successful in crisis management in the last fifty years than it was
in the previous century and a half, the period of its so-called
“historical ascendancy.”

The classical industrial proletariat, too, has waned in numbers
in the First World (the historical  *locus classicus*  of socialist
confrontation with capitalism), in class consciousness, and even
in political consciousness of itself as a historically unique class.
Attempts to rewrite Marxian theory to include salaried people
in the proletariat are not only nonsensical, they stand flatly at
odds with how this vastly differentiated middle-class population
conceives itself and its relationship to a market society. To live with
the hope that capitalism will “immanently” collapse from within
as a result of its own contradictory self-development is illusory as
things stand today.

But there are dramatic signs that capitalism, as I have
emphasized elsewhere, is producing external conditions for a
crisis an ecological crisis — that may well generate a general human
interest for radical social change. Capitalism, organized around a
“grow-or-die” market system based on rivalry and expansion, must
tear down the natural world — turning soil into sand, polluting the
atmosphere, changing the entire climatic pattern of the planet, and
possibly making the earth unsuitable for complex forms of life. In
effect, it is proving to be an ecological cancer and may well simplify
complex ecosystems that have been in the making for countless aeons.

If mindless and unceasing growth as an end in itself — forced
by competition to accumulate and devour the organic world
— creates problems that cut across material, ethnic, and cultural
differences, the concept of “the People” and of a “public sphere” may
become a living reality in history. Some kind of radical ecology
movement has yet to be established that could acquire a unique,
cohering, and political significance to replace the influence of the
traditional workers’ movement. If the  *locus*  of proletarian radicalism
was the factory, the  *locus*  of the ecology movement would be the
community: the neighborhood, the town, and the municipality. A
new alternative, a political one, would have to be developed that
is neither parliamentary on the one hand nor locked into direct
action and countercultural activities on the other. Indeed, direct
action could mesh with this new politics in the form of community
assemblies oriented toward a fully participatory democracy — in
the highest form of direct action, the full empowerment of the
people in determining the destiny of society.

*** Society, Politics, and the State

If the 1960s gave rise to a counterculture to resist the prevailing
culture, the following decades have created the need for popular
counter-institutions to countervail the centralized state. Although
the specific form that such institutions could take may vary according
to the traditions, values, concerns, and culture of a given area, certain
basic theoretical premises must be clarified if one is to advance the
need for new institutions and, more broadly, for a new radical  *politics*.
The need once again to define politics — indeed, to give it a broader
meaning than it has had in the past — becomes a practical imperative.
The ability and wilingness of radicals to meet this need may well
determine the future of movements like the Greens and the very
possibility of radicalism to exist as a coherent force for basic social
change.

The major institutional arenas — the social, the political, and
the statist — were once clearly distinguishable from each other. The
social arena could be clearly demarcated from the political, and the
political, in turn, from the state. But in our present, historically
clouded world, these have been blurred and mystified. Politics has
been absorbed by the state, just as society has increasingly been
absorbed by the economy today. If new, truly radical movements to
deal with ecological breakdown are to emerge and if an ecologically
oriented society is to end attempts to dominate nature as well as
people, this process must be arrested and reversed.

It easy to think of society, politics, and the state ahistorically,
as if they had always existed as we find them today. But the fact
is that each one of these has had a complex development, one
that should be understood if we are to gain a clear sense of their
importance in social theory and practice. Much of what we today
call  *politics*, for one, is really statecraft, structured around staffing the
state apparatus with parliamentarians, judges, bureaucrats, police,
the military, and the like, a phenomenon often replicated from the
summits of the state to the smallest of communities. But the term
 *politics*,  Greek etymologically, once referred to a public arena peopled
by conscious citizens who felt competent to directly manage their
own communities, or *poleis*.

 *Society*, in turn, was the relatively private arena, the realm
of familial obligation, friendship, personal self-maintenance,
production, and reproduction. From its first emergence as merely
human group existence to its highly institutionalized forms,
which we properly call society, social life was structured around
the family or *oikos*. (Economy, in fact, once meant little more than
the management of the family.) Its core was the domestic world of
woman, complemented by the civil world of man.

In early human communities, the most important functions
for survival, care, and maintenance occurred in the domestic arena,
to which the civil arena, such as it was, largely existed in service. A
tribe (to use this term in a very broad sense to include bands and
clans) was a truly social entity, knitted together by blood, marital,
and functional ties based on age and work. These strong centripetal
forces, rooted in the biological facts of life, held these eminently social
communities together. They gave them a sense of internal solidarity
so strong that the tribes largely excluded the “stranger” or “outsider,”
whose acceptability usually depended upon canons of hospitality
and the need for new members to replenish warriors when warfare
became increasingly important.

A great part of recorded history is an account of the growth
of the male civil arena at the expense of this domestic or social one.
Males gained growing authority over the early community as a result
of intertribal warfare and clashes over territory in which to hunt.
Perhaps more important, agricultural peoples appropriated large
areas of the land that hunting peoples required to sustain themselves
and their lifeways.

It was from this undifferentiated civil arena (again, to use the
word  *civil*  in a very broad sense) that politics and the state emerged.
Which is not to say that politics and statecraft were the same from
the beginning. Despite their common origins in the early civil arena,
these two were sharply opposed to each other. History’s garments
are never neat and unwrinkled. The evolution of society from small
domestic social groups into highly differentiated, hierarchical, and
class systems whose authority encompassed vast territorial empires
is nothing if not complex and irregular.

The domestic and familial arena itself — that is to say, the social
arena — helped to shape the formation of these states. Early despotic
kingdoms, such as those of Egypt and Persia, were seen not as clearly
civil entities but as the personal “households” or domestic domains
of monarchs. These vast palatial estates of “divine” kings and their
families were later carved up by lesser families into manorial or
feudal estates. The social values of present-day aristocracies are
redolent of a time when kinship and lineage, not citizenship or
wealth, determined one’s status and power.


*** The Rise of the Public Domain

It was the Bronze Age “urban revolution,” to use V. Gordon
Childe’s expression, that slowly eliminated the trappings of the
social or domestic arena from the state and created a new terrain
for the political arena. The rise of cities — largely around temples,
military fortresses, administrative centers, and interregional markets
— created the basis for a new, more secular and more universalistic
form of political space. Given time and development, this space
slowly evolved an unprecedented public domain.

Cities that are perfect models of such a public space do not
exist in either history or social theory. But some cities were neither
predominantly social (in the domestic sense) nor statist, but gave
rise to an entirely new societal dispensation. The most remarkable
of these were the seaports of ancient Hellas and the craft and
commercial cities of medieval Italy, Russia, and central Europe. Even
modern cities of newly forming nation- states like Spain, England,
and France developed identities of their own and relatively popular
forms of citizen participation. Their parochial, even patriarchal
attributes should not be permitted to overshadow their universal
humanistic attributes. From the Olympian standpoint of modernity,
it would be as petty as it would be ahistorical to highlight failings
that cities shared with nearly all “civilizations” over thousands of
years.

What should stand out as a matter of vital importance is that
these cities created the public domain. There, in the agora of the
Greek democracies, the forum of the Roman republic, the town
center of the medieval commune, and the plaza of the Renaissance
city, citizens could congregate. To one degree or another in this
public domain a radically new arena — a political one — emerged,
based on limited but often participatory forms of democracy and a
new concept of civic personhood, the citizen.

Defined in terms of its etymological roots,  *politics*  means the
mangement of the community or  *polis*  by its members, the citizens.
 *Politics* also meant the recognition of civic rights for strangers or
“outsiders” who were not linked to the population by blood ties. That
is, it meant the idea of a universal  *humanitas*, as distinguished from
the genealogically related “folk.” Together with these fundamental
developments, politics was marked by the increasing secularization of
societal affairs, a new respect for the individual, and a growing regard
for rational canons of behavior over the unthinking imperatives of
custom.

I do not wish to suggest that privilege, inequality of rights,
supernatural vagaries, custom, or even mistrust of the “stranger”
totally disappeared with the rise of cities and politics. During the
most radical and democratic periods of the French Revolution,
for example, Paris was rife with fears of “foreign conspiracies” and
a xenophobic mistrust of “outsiders. “ Nor did women ever fully
share the freedoms enjoyed by men. My point, however, is that
something very new was created by the city that cannot be buried in
the folds of the social or of the state: namely, a public domain. This
domain narrowed and expanded with time, but it never completely
disappeared from history. It stood very much at odds with the state,
which tried in varying degrees to professionalize and centralize power,
often becoming an end in itself, such as the state power that emerged
in Ptolemaic Egypt, the absolute monarchies of seventeenth-century
Europe, and the totalitarian systems of rule established in Russia
and in China in the past century.

*** The Importance of the Municipality and the Confederation

The abiding physical arena of politics has almost always been the city
or town — more generically, the municipality. The size of a politically
viable city is not unimportant, to be sure. To the Greeks, notably
Aristotle, a city or  *polis*  should not be so large that it cannot deal
with its affairs on a face-to-face basis or eliminate a certain degree of
familiarity among its citizens. These standards, by no means fixed or
inviolable, were meant to foster urban development along lines that
directly countervailed the emerging state. Given a modest but by no
means small size, the  *polis*  could be arranged institutionally so that
it could conduct its affairs by rounded, publicly engaged men with a
minimal, carefully guarded degree of representation.

To be a political person, it was supposed, required certain material
preconditions. A modicum of free time was needed to participate
in political affairs, leisure that was probably supplied by slave labor,
although it is by no means true that all active Greek citizens were
slaveowners. Even more important than leisure time was the need
for personal training or character formation — the Greek notion of
 *paidaeia*  — which inculcated the reasoned restraint by which citizens
maintained the decorum needed to keep an assembly of the people
viable. An ideal of public service was necessary to outweigh narrow,
egoistic impulses and to develop the ideal of a general interest. This
was achieved by establishing a complex network of relationships,
ranging from loyal friendships — the Greek notion of  *philia*  — to
shared experiences in civic festivals and military service.

But politics in this sense was not a strictly Hellenic phenomenon.
Similar problems and needs arose and were solved in a variety of
ways in the free cities not only in the Mediterranean basin but
in continental Europe, England, and North America. Nearly all
these free cities created a public domain and a politics that were
democratic to varying degrees over long periods of time. Deeply
hostile to centralized states, free cities and their federations formed
some of history’s crucial turning points in which humanity was faced
with the possibility of establishing societies based on municipal
confederations or on nation-states.

The state, too, had a historical development and cannot be
reduced to a simplistic ahistorical image. Ancient states were
historically followed by quasi- states, monarchical states, feudal
states, and republican states. The totalitarian states of this century
beggar the harshest tyrannies of the past. But essential to the rise
of the nation-state was the ability of centralized states to weaken
the vitality of urban, town, and village structures and replace their
functions by bureaucracies, police, and military forces. A subtle
interplay between the municipality and the state, often exploding
in open conflict, has occurred throughout history and has shaped
the societal landscape of the present day. Unfortunately, not enough
attention has been given to the fact that the capacity of states to
exercise the full measure of their power has often been limited by the
municipal obstacles they encountered.

Nationalism, like statism, has so deeply imprinted itself on
modern thinking that the very idea of a municipalist politics as an
option for societal organization has virtually been written off. For
one thing, as I have already emphasized, politics these days has
been identified completely with statecraft, the professionalization
of power. That the political realm and the state have often been in
sharp conflict with each other — indeed, in conflicts that exploded
in bloody civil wars — has been almost completely overlooked.

The great revolutionary movements of the past, from the English
Revolution of the 1640s to those in our own century, have always
been marked by strong community upsurges and depended for their
success on strong community ties. That fears of municipal autonomy
still haunt the nation-state can be seen in the endless arguments that
are brought against it. Phenomena as “dead” as the free community
and participatory democracy should presumably arouse far fewer
opponents than we continue to encounter.

The rise of the great megalopolis has not ended the historic
quest for community and civic politics, any more than the rise of
multinational corporations has removed the issue of nationalism
from the modern agenda. Cities like New York, London, Frankfurt,
Milan, and Madrid can be  *politically* decentralized institutionally,
be they by neighborhood or district networks, despite their large
structural size and their internal interdependence. Indeed, how
well they can function if they do not decentralize structurally is
an ecological issue of paramount importance, as problems of air
pollution, adequate water supply, crime, the quality of life, and
transportation suggest.

History has shown very dramatically that major cities of
Europe with populations approaching a million and with primitive
means of communication functioned by means of well-coordinated
decentralized institutions of extraordinary political vitality. From
the Castilian cities that exploded in the  *Comuñero*  revolt in the
early l500s through the Parisian sections or assemblies of the early
1790s to the Madrid Citizens’ Movement of the 1960s (to cite only
a few), municipal movements in large cities have posed crucial issues
of where power should be centered and how societal life should be
managed institutionally.

That a municipality can be as parochial as a tribe is fairly obvious
— and is no less true today than it has been in the past. Hence, any
municipal movement that is not confederal — that is to say, that
does not enter into a network of mutual obligations to towns and
cities in its own region — can no more be regarded as a truly political
entity in any traditional sense than a neighborhood that does not
work with other neighborhoods in the city in which it is located.
Confederation, based on shared responsibilities, full accountability
of confederal delegates to their communities, the right to recall, and
firmly mandated representative forms an indispensable part of a
new politics. To demand that existing towns and cities replicate the
nation-state on a local level is to surrender any commitment to social
change as such.

What is of immense practical importance is that prestatist
institutions, traditions, and sentiments remain alive in varying degrees
throughout most of the world. Resistance to the encroachment
of oppressive states has been nourished by village, neighborhood,
and town community networks, as witness such struggles in
South Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. To ignore the
communal basis of this resistance would be as myopic as to ignore
the latent instability of every nation-state; worse would be to take
the nation-state as it is for granted and deal with it merely on its
own terms. Indeed, whether a state remains “more” of a state or ”less”
— no trifling matter to radical theorists as disparate as Bakunin and
Marx — depends heavily upon the power of local, confederal, and
community movements to countervail it and hopefully establish
a dual power that will replace it. The major role that the Madrid
Citizens’ Movement played nearly three decades ago in weakening
the Franco regime would require a major study to do it justice. 

Notwithstanding Marxist visions of a largely economistic
conflict between “wage labor and capital,” the revolutionary working
class movements of the past were not simply industrial movements.
The volatile Parisian labor movement, largely artisanal in character,
for example, was also a  *community* movement that was centered
on quartiers and nourished by a rich neighborhood life. From the
Levellers of seventeenth-century London to the anarcho-syndicalists
of Barcelona in the twentieth century, radical activity has been
sustained by strong community bonds, a public sphere provided by
streets, squares, and cafes.


*** The Need for a New Politics

This municipal life cannot be ignored in radical practice and must
even be recreated where it has been undermined by the modern state.
A new politics, rooted in towns, neighborhoods, cities, and regions,
forms the only viable alternative to the anemic parliamentarism
that is percolating through various Green parties today and similar
social movements — in short, their recourse to sheer and corruptive
statecraft in which the larger bourgeois parties can always be expected
to outmaneuver them and absorb them into coalitions. The duration
of strictly single-issue movements, too, is limited to the problems
they are opposing. Militant action around such issues should not
be confused with the long-range radicalism that is needed to change
consciousness and ultimately society itself. Such movements flare
up and pass away, even when they are successful. They lack the
institutional underpinnings that are so necessary to create lasting
movements for social change and the arena in which they can be a
permanent presence in political conflict.

Hence the enormous need for genuinely political grassroots
movements, united confederally, that are anchored in abiding and
democratic institutions that can be evolved into truly libertarian
ones.

Life would indeed be marvelous, if not miraculous, if we were
born with all the training, literacy, skills, and mental equipment we
need to practice a profession or vocation. Alas, we must go though
the toil of acquiring these abilities, a toil that requires struggle,
confrontation, education, and development. It is very unlikely that
a radical municipalist approach, too, is meaningful at all merely as
an easy means for institutional change. It must be fought for if it is
to be cherished, just as the fight for a free society must itself be as
liberating and self-transforming as the existence of a free society.

<br>

The municipality is a potential time-bomb. To create local networks
and try to transform municipal institutions that replicate the state
is to pick up a historic challenge — a truly political one — that has
existed for centuries. New social movements are foundering today
for want of a political perspective that will bring them into the public
arena, hence the ease with which they slip into parliarnentarism.
Historically, libertarian theory has always focused on the free
municipality that was to provide the cellular tissue for a new society.
To ignore the potential of this free municipality because it is not yet
free is to bypass a slumbering domain of politics that could give lived
meaning to the great libertarian demand: a commune of communes.
For in these municipal institutions and the changes that we can
make in their structure — turning them more and more into a new
public sphere — lies the  *abiding*  institutional basis for a grassroots
dual power, a grassroots concept of citizenship, and municipalized
economic systems that can be counterposed to the growing power of
the centralized nation-state and centralized economic corporations.


** The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction

Social ecology developed out of important social and theoretical
problems that faced the Left in the post-World War II period.
The historical realities of the 1940s and the 1950s completely
invalidated the perspectives of a proletarian revolution, of a “chronic
economic crisis” that would bring capitalism to its knees, and of
commitment to a centralistic workers’ party that would seize state
power and, by dictatorial means, initiate a transition to socialism
and communism. It became painfully evident in time that no such
generalized crisis was in the offing; indeed, that the proletariat and
any party — or labor confederation — that spoke in the name of the
working class could not be regarded as a hegemonic force in social
transformation.

Quite to the contrary: capitalism emerged from the war
stronger and more stable than it had been at any time in its history.
A generalized crisis could be managed to one degree or another
within a strictly bourgeois framework, let alone the many limited
and cyclical crises normal to capitalism. The proletariat, in turn,
ceased to play the hegemonic role that the Left had assigned to it
for more than a century, and Leninist forms of organization were
evidently vulnerable to bureaucratic degeneration.

Moreover, capitalism, following the logic of its own nature
as a competitive market economy, was creating social and cultural
issues that had not been adequately encompassed by the traditional
Left of the interwar era (1917–39). To be sure, the traditional
Left’s theoretical cornerstone, notably, the class struggle between
wage labor and capital, had not disappeared; nor had economic
exploitation ceased to exist. But the issues that had defined the
traditional Left — more precisely, “proletarian socialism” in all its
forms — had broadened immensely, expanding both the nature
of oppression and the meaning of freedom. Hierarchy, while
not supplanting the issue of class struggle, began to move to the
foreground of at least Euro-American radical concerns, in the
widespread challenges raised by the sixties “New Left” and youth
culture to authority as such, not only to the State. Domination,
while not supplanting exploitation, became the target of radical
critique and practice, in the early civil rights movement in the
United States, in attempts to remove conventional constraints on
sexual behavior, dress, lifestyle, and values, and later, in the rise
of feminist movements, ecological movements that challenged the
myth of “dominating” the natural world, and movements for gay
and lesbian liberation.

It is unlikely that any of these movements would have emerged
had capitalism at midcentury not created all the indispensable
technological preconditions for a libertarian communist society
— prospects that are consistent with Enlightenment ideals and the
progressive dimensions of modernity. One must return to the great
debates that began in the late 1950s over the prospects for free time
and material abundance to understand the ideological atmosphere
that new technologies such as automation created and the extent
to which they were absorbed by the “New Left” of the 1960s.

The prospect of a post-scarcity society, free of material want and
demanding toil, opened a new horizon of potentiality and hope —
ironically, reiterating the prescient demands of the Berlin Dadaists
of 1919 for “universal unemployment,” which stood in marked
contrast to the traditional Left’s demand for “full employment.”

*** The Struggle for a Rational Society

Social ecology, as developed in the United States in the early sixties
(long after the expression had fallen into disuse as a variant of
“human ecology”), tried to advance a coherent, developmental, and
socially practical outlook to deal with the changes in radicalism
and capitalism that were in the offing. Indeed, in great part, it
actually anticipated them. Long before an ecology movement
emerged, social ecology delineated the scope of the ecological crisis
that capitalism must necessarily produce, tracing its roots back
to hierarchical domination, and emphasizing that a competitive
capitalist economy must unavoidably give rise to unprecendented
contradictions with the nonhuman natural world. None of these
perspectives, it should be noted, were in the air in the early sixties
— Rachel Carson’s  *Silent Spring*  with its emphasis on pesticides
notwithstanding. Indeed, as early as 1962, social ecology projected
the alternative of solar energy, wind power, and water power, among
other new ecotechnologies, and alternatives to existing productive
facilities that were to become axiomatic to a later generation of
ecologists. It also advanced the vision of new ecocommunities
based on direct democracy and nonhierarchical forms of human
relations. These facts should be emphasized in view of deep ecology’s
attempt to rewrite the history of the ecology movement in terms of
its own quasi-religious and scarcity-oriented outlook. Nor should
we overlook the fact that social ecology’s antihierarchical analyses
laid the theoretical basis for early feminism, various community
movements, the antinuclear movement, and in varying degrees,
Green movements, before they turned from “nonparty parties” into
conventional electoral machines.

Nonetheless, social ecology makes no claim that it emerged
ab novo. It was — and it remains — deeply rooted in Enlightenment
ideals and the revolutionary tradition of the past two centuries.
Its analyses and goals have never been detached from the
understandably less developed theoretical analyses of Karl Marx
and classical radical thinkers (like Peter Kropotkin), or from the
great revolutions that culminated in the Spanish Revolution of
1936–37. It eschews any attempt to defame the historic traditions
of the Left in favor a neo-liberal patchwork of ideas or a queasy
political centrism that parades as “postmodernism” and “post-
industrialism,” not to speak of the “post-materialist” spiritualism
fostered by eco-feminists, life-style anarchists, deep ecologists, and
so-called “social deep ecologists” or “deep social ecologists.”

Quite to the contrary: social ecology functions to countervail
attempts to denature the Enlightenment and revolutionary project
by emphasizing the need for theoretical coherence, no less today
than it did in the 1960s, when the “New Left” drifted from a
healthy libertarian populism into a quagmire of Leninist, Maoist,
and Trotskyist tendencies. Social ecology retains its filiations with
the Enlightenment and the revolutionary tradition all the more
emphatically in opposition to the quasi-mystical and expressly
mystical trends that are thoroughly sweeping up the privileged petty
bourgeoisie of North America and Europe, with their goulash of
antirational, spiritualistic, and atavastic ideologies. Social ecology
is only too mindful that capitalism today has a nearly infinite
capacity to coopt, indeed commodify, self-styled “oppositional
trends” that remain as the detritus of the “New Left” and the old
counterculture. Today, anarchism comes packaged by Hakim Bey,
Bob Black, David Watson, and Jason McQuinn, and is little more
than a merchandisable boutique ideology that panders to petty-
bourgeois tastes for naughtiness and eccentricity.

Ecology, too, has been packaged and repackaged into a
variety of “deep ecologies” that generally emphasize an animalistic
reductionism, neo-Malthusian “hunger politics,” antihumanism,
and bio- or “eco-”centrism — in short, a pastiche that renders it
equally palatable to members of the British royal family at the
summit of the social hierarchy and to lumpenized anarchoids at
its base. Feminism, initially a universalized challenge to hierarchy
as such, has devolved into parochial, often self-serving, and even
materially rewarding species of eco-feminism and express theisms
that pander to a myth of gender superiority (no less ugly when
it concerns women than when it concerns men) in one form or
another — not to speak of the outright wealth-oriented “feminism”
promoted by Naomi Wolf et al.

Capitalism, in effect, has not only rendered the human
condition more and more irrational, but it has absorbed into its
orbit, to one degree or another, the very consciousness that once
professed to oppose it. If Fourier insightfully declared that the way
a society treats its women can be regarded as a measure of its status
as a civilization, so today we can add that the extent to which a
society devolves into mysticism and eclecticism can be regarded
as measure of its cultural decline. By these standards, no society
has more thoroughly denatured its once-radical opponents than
capitalism in the closing years of the twentieth century.


*** The Relevance of Social Ecology

This devolution of consciousness is by no means solely the product
of our century’s new global media, as even radical theorists of
popular culture tend to believe. Absolutism and medievalism, no
less than capitalism, had its own “media,” the Church, that reached
as ubiquitously into every village as television reaches into the
modern living room. The roots of modern cultural devolution are
as deep-seated as the ecological crisis itself. Capitalism, today, is
openly flaunted not only as a system of social relationships but as
the “end of history,” indeed, as a natural society that expresses the
most intrinsic qualities of “human nature” — its ostensible “drive” to
compete, win, and grow. This transmutation of means into ends,
vicious as the means may be, is not merely “the American way”; it
is the bourgeois way.

The commodity has now colonized every aspect of life,
rendering what was once a capitalist economy into a capitalist
culture. It has produced literally a “marketplace of ideas,” in
which the coin for exchanging inchoate notions and intuitions is
validated by the academy, the corrupter par excellence of the “best
and brightest” in modern society and the eviscerator of all that is
coherent and clearly delineable. Indeed, never has “high culture,”
once guarded by academic mandarins, been so scandalously
debased by academic presses that have become the pornographers
of ideology.

Bourgeois society qua culture, particularly its academic
purveyors, abhors a principled stand, particularly a combative one
that is prepared to clearly articulate a body of coherent principles
and thrust it into opposition against the capitalist system as a whole.
Theoretically and practically, serious opposition takes its point of
departure from the need to understand the logic of an ideology, not
its euphemistic metaphors and drifting inconsistencies. Capitalism
has nothing to fear from an ecological, feminist, anarchist, or
socialist hash of hazy ideas (often fatuously justified as “pluralistic”
or “relativistic”) that leaves its social premises untouched. It is
all the better for the prevailing order that reason be denounced
as “logocentrism,” that bourgeois social relations be concealed
under the rubric of “industrial society,” that the social need for an
oppositional movement be brushed aside in favor of a personal
need for spiritual redemption, that the political be reduced to the
personal, that the project of social revolution be erased by hopeless
communitarian endeavors to create “alternative” enterprises.

Except where its profits and “growth opportunities” are
concerned, capitalism now delights in avowals of the need to
“compromise,” to seek a “common ground” — the language of
its professoriat no less than its political establishment — which
invariably turns out to be its own terrain in a mystified form.

Hence the popularity of “market socialism” in self-styled “leftist”
periodicals; or possibly “social deep ecology” in deep ecology
periodicals like  *The Trumpeter*; or more brazenly, accolades to
Gramsci by the  *Nouvelle Droite*  in France, or to a “Green Adolf ”
in Germany. A Robin Eckersley has no difficulty juggling the ideas
of the Frankfurt School with deep ecology while comparing in
truly biocentric fashion the “navigational skills” of birds with the
workings of the human mind. The wisdom of making friends with
everyone that underpins this academic “discourse” can only lead to
a blurring of latent and serious differences — and ultimately to the
compromise of all principles and the loss of political direction.

<br>

The social and cultural decomposition produced by capitalism
can be resisted only by taking the most principled stand against
the corrosion of nearly all self-professed oppositional ideas. More
than at any time in the past, social ecologists should abandon the
illusion that a shared use of the word “social” renders all of us
into socialists, or “ecology,” into radical ecologists. The measure of
social ecology’s relevance and theoretical integrity consists of its
ability to be rational, ethical, coherent, and true to the ideal of the
Enlightenment and the revolutionary tradition — not of any ability
to earn plaudits from the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, or Gary Snyder,
still less from academics, spiritualists, and mystics. In this darkening
age when capitalism — the mystified social order par excellence
— threatens to globalize the world with capital, commodities, and
a facile spirit of “negotiation” and “compromise,” it is necessary
to keep alive the very idea of uncompromising critique. It is not
dogmatic to insist on consistency, to infer and contest the logic of
a given body of premises, to demand clarity in a time of cultural
twilight. Indeed, quite to the contrary, eclecticism and theoretical
chaos, not to speak of practices that are more theatrical than
threatening and that consist more of posturing than convincing,
will only dim the light of truth and critique. Until social forces
emerge that can provide a voice for basic social change rather than
spiritual redemption, social ecology must take upon itself the task
of preserving and extending the great traditions from which it has
emerged.

Should the darkness of capitalist barbarism thicken to the
point where this enterprise is no longer possible, history as the
rational development of humanity’s potentialities for freedom and
consciousness will indeed reach its definitive end.


** The Communalist Project

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

Lest these remarks seem too apocalyptic, I should emphasize
that we  *also*  live in an era when human creativity, technology, and
imagination have the capability to produce extraordinary material
achievements and to endow us with societies that allow for a
degree of freedom that far and away exceeds the most dramatic and
emancipatory visions projected by social theorists such as Saint-
Simon, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin.[10] Many
thinkers of the postmodern age have obtusely singled out science
and technology as the principal threats to human well-being, yet
few disciplines have imparted to humanity such a stupendous
knowledge of the innermost secrets of matter and life, or provided
our species better with the ability to alter every important feature
of reality and to improve the well-being of human and nonhuman
life-forms.

[10] Many less-well-known names could be added to this list, but one that in particular I
would like very much to single out is the gallant leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary
Party, Maria Spiridonova, whose supporters were virtually alone in proposing a workable
revolutionary program for the Russian people in 1917–18. Their failure to implement
their political insights and replace the Bolsheviks (with whom they initially joined in
forming the first Soviet government) not only led to their defeat but contributed to the
disastrous failure of revolutionary movements in the century that followed.

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

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

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


*** Capitalism, Classes, and Hierarchies

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

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

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

One of the most striking features of capitalism today is that
in the Western world the highly simplified two-class structure-
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat-that Marx and Engels, in T *he Communist Manifesto*, predicted would become dominant under
“mature” capitalism (and we have yet to determine what “mature,”
still less “late” or “moribund” capitalism actually is) has undergone
a process of reconfiguration. The conflict between wage labor and
capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the
 *all-embracing importance* that it possessed in the past. Contrary to
Marx’s expectations, the industrial working class is now dwindling
in numbers and is steadily losing its traditional identity as a class
— which by no means excludes it from a potentially broader and
perhaps more extensive conflict of society as a whole against
capitalist social relations. Present-day culture, social relations,
cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, and transportation
have remade the traditional proletariat, upon which syndicalists
and Marxists were overwhelmingly, indeed almost mystically
focused, into a largely petty-bourgeois stratum whose mentality is
marked by its own bourgeois utopianism of “consumption for the
sake of consumption.” We can foresee a time when the proletarian,
whatever the color of his or her collar or place on the assembly line,
will be completely replaced by automated and even miniaturized
means of production that are operated by a few white-coated
manipulators of machines and by computers.

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

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

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

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

At the same time capitalism has produced a new, perhaps
paramount contradiction: the clash between an economy based on
unending growth and the desiccation of the natural environment. [11]
This issue and its vast ramifications can no more be minimized, let
alone dismissed, than the need of human beings for food or air. At
present the most promising struggles in the West, where socialism
was born, seem to be waged less around income and working
conditions than around nuclear power, pollution, deforestation,
urban blight, education, health care, community life, and the
oppression of people in underdeveloped countries-as witness the
(albeit sporadic) antiglobalization upsurges, in which blue- and
white-collar “workers” march in the same ranks with middle-class
humanitarians and are motivated by common social concerns.
Proletarian combatants become indistinguishable from middle-
class ones. Burly workers, whose hallmark is a combative militancy,
now march behind “bread and puppet” theater performers, often
with a considerable measure of shared playfulness. Members of the
working and middle classes now wear many different social hats,
so to speak, challenging capitalism obliquely as well as directly on
cultural as well as economic grounds.

[11] I frankly regard this contradiction as more fundamental than the often-indiscernible tendency of the rate of profit to decline and thereby to render capitalist exchange inoperable – a contradiction to which Marxists assigned a decisive role in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nor can we ignore, in deciding what direction we are to follow,
the fact that capitalism, if it is not checked, will in the future-and not
necessarily the very distant future —  *differ appreciably from the system we know today*. Capitalist development can be expected to vastly alter
the social horizon in the years ahead. Can we suppose that factories,
offices, cities, residential areas, industry, commerce, and agriculture,
let alone moral values, aesthetics, media, popular desires, and the like
will not change immensely before the twenty-first century is out?
In the past century, capitalism, above all else, has  *broadened* social
issues — indeed, the historical social question of how a humanity,
divided by classes and exploitation, will create a society based on
equality, the development of authentic harmony, and freedom — to
include those whose resolution was barely foreseen by the liberatory
social theorists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Our age, with its endless array of “bottom lines” and “investment
choices,” now threatens  *to turn society itself into a vast and exploitative marketplace.*  [12] 

[12] Contrary to Marx’s assertion that a society disappears only when it has exhausted its capacity for new technological developments, capitalism is in a state of permanent technological revolution – at times, frighteningly so. Marx erred on this score: it will take more than technological stagnation to terminate this system of social relations. As new issues challenge the validity of the entire system, the political and ecological domains will become all the more important. Alternatively, we are faced with the prospect that capitalism may pull down the entire world and leave behind little more than ashes and ruin – achieving, in short, the “capitalist barbarism” of which Rosa Luxemburg warned
in her “Junius” essay.

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

*** Marxism, Anarchism and Syndicalism

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

Marxism was the most comprehensive and coherent effort to
produce a systematic form of socialism, emphasizing the material as
well as the subjective historical preconditions of a new society. This
project, in the present era of precapitalist economic decomposition
and of intellectual confusion, relativism, and subjectivism, must
never surrender to the new barbarians, many of whom find their
home in what was once a barrier to ideological regression-the
academy. We owe much to Marx’s attempt to provide us with
a coherent and stimulating analysis of the commodity and
commodity relations, to an activist philosophy, a systematic social
theory, an objectively grounded or “scientific” concept of historical
development, and a flexible political strategy. Marxist political
ideas were eminently relevant to the needs of a terribly disoriented
proletariat and to the particular oppressions that the industrial
bourgeoisie inflicted upon it in England in the 1840s, somewhat
later in France, Italy, and Germany, and very presciently in Russia
in the last decade of Marx’s life. Until the rise of the populist
movement in Russia (most famously, the  *Narodnaya Volya*), Marx
expected the emerging proletariat to become the great majority of
the population in Europe and North America, and to inevitably
engage in revolutionary class war as a result of capitalist exploitation
and immiseration. And especially between 1917 and 1939, long
after Marx’s death, Europe was indeed beleaguered by a mounting
class war that reached the point of outright workers’ insurrections.
In 1917, owing to an extraordinary confluence of circumstances
— particularly with the outbreak of the First World War, which
rendered several quasi-feudal European social systems terribly
unstable — Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to use (but greatly
altered) Marx’s writings in order to take power in an economically
backward empire, whose size spanned eleven time zones across
Europe and Asia. [13] 

[13] I use the word  *extraordinary*  because, by Marxist standards, Europe was still objectively unprepared for a socialist revolution in 1914. Much of the continent, in fact, had yet to be colonized by the capitalist market or bourgeois social relations. The proletariat – still a very conspicuous minority of the population in a sea of peasants and small producers – had yet to mature as a class into a significant force. Despite the opprobrium that has been heaped on Plekhanov, Kautsky, Bernstein et al., they had a better understanding of the failure of Marxist socialism to embed itself in proletarian consciousness than
did Lenin. Luxemburg, in any case, straddled the so-called “social-patriotic” and
“internationalist” camps in her image of a Marxist party’s function, in contrast to Lenin, her principal opponent in the so-called “organizational question” in the Left of the wartime socialists, who was prepared to establish a “proletarian dictatorship” under all and any circumstances. The First World War was by no means inevitable, and it generated democratic and nationalist revolutions rather than proletarian ones. (Russia, in this respect, was no more a “workers’ state” under Bolshevik rule than were the Hungarian and Bavarian “soviet” republics.) Not until 1939 was Europe placed in a position where a world war was inevitable. The revolutionary Left (to which I belonged at the time) frankly erred profoundly when it took a so-called “internationalist” position and refused to support the Allies (their imperialist pathologies notwithstanding) against the vanguard of world fascism, the Third Reich.

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

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

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

Anarchism has often been confused with revolutionary
syndicalism, a highly structured and well-developed  *mass*  form
of libertarian trade unionism that, unlike anarchism, was long
committed to democratic procedures,[14] to discipline in action, and to
organized, long-range revolutionary practice to eliminate capitalism.
Its affinity with anarchism stems from its strong libertarian bias,
but bitter antagonisms between anarchists and syndicalists have a
long history in nearly every country in Western Europe and North
America, as witness the tensions between the Spanish CNT
and the anarchist groups associated with  *Tierra y Libertad*  early
in the twentieth century; between the revolutionary syndicalist
and anarchist groups in Russia during the 1917 revolution; and
between the IWW in the United States and the SAC in Sweden,
to cite the more illustrative cases in the history of the libertarian
labor movement. More than one American anarchist was affronted
by Joe Hill’s defiant maxim on the eve of his execution in Utah: 
“Don’t mourn — Organize!” Alas, small groups were not quite the
“organizations” that Joe Hill, or the grossly misunderstood idol of
the Spanish libertarian movement, Salvador Seguí, had in mind.
It was largely the shared word  *libertarian*  that made it possible for
somewhat confused anarchists to coexist in the same organization
with revolutionary syndicalists. It was often verbal confusion rather
than ideological clarity that made possible the coexistence in Spain
of the FAI, as represented by the anarchist Federica Montseny,
with the syndicalists, as represented by Juan Prieto, in the CNT-
FAI, a truly confused organization if ever there was one.

[14] Kropotkin, for example, rejected democratic decision-making procedures: “Majority rule is as defective as any other kind of rule,” he asserted. See Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles,” in *Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets*, edited by Roger N. Baldwin (1927; reprinted by New York: Dover, 1970), p. 68.

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

What these observations add up to is that Marxists,
revolutionary syndicalists, and authentic anarchists all have a
fallacious understanding of  *politics*, which should be conceived as
the civic arena and the institutions by which people democratically
and directly manage their community affairs. Indeed the Left has
repeatedly mistaken statecraft for politics by its persistent failure
to understand that the two are not only radically different but
exist in radical tension — in fact, opposition — to each other.[15] As
I have written elsewhere, historically politics did not emerge from
the state — an apparatus whose professional machinery is designed
to dominate and facilitate the exploitation of the citizenry in the
interests of a privileged class. Rather, politics, almost by definition,
is the active engagement of free citizens in the handling their
municipal affairs and in their defense of its freedom. One can
almost say that politics is the “embodiment” of what the French
revolutionaries of the 1790s called  *civicisme*. Quite properly, in fact,
the word  *politics* itself contains the Greek word for “city” or  *polis*,
and its use in classical Athens, together with  *democracy*, connoted
the  *direct* governing of the city by its citizens. Centuries of civic
degradation, marked particularly by the formation of classes, were
necessary to produce the state and its corrosive absorption of the
political realm.

[15] I have made the distinction between politics and statecraft in, for example, Murray Bookchin, *From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship* (1987; reprinted by London: Cassell, 1992), pp. 41–3, 59–61.

A defining feature of the Left is precisely the Marxist,
anarchist, and revolutionary syndicalist belief that  *no distinction exists*, in principle, between the political realm and the statist realm.

By emphasizing the nation-state — including a “workers’ state”- as
the locus of economic as well as political power, Marx (as well as
libertarians) notoriously failed to demonstrate how workers could
 *fully*  and  *directly*  control such a state without the mediation of an
empowered bureaucracy and essentially statist (or equivalently, in
the case of libertarians, governmental) institutions. As a result, the
Marxists unavoidably saw the political realm, which it designated
a “workers’ state,” as a repressive entity, ostensibly based on the
interests of a single class, the proletariat.

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

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

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

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

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

*** Communalism and Libertarian Municipalism

It is my contention that Communalism is the overarching political
category most suitable to encompass the fully thought out and
systematic views of social ecology, including libertarian municipalism
and dialectical naturalism.[16] As an ideology, Communalism draws
on the best of the older Left ideologies-Marxism and anarchism,
more properly the libertarian socialist tradition-while offering
a wider and more relevant scope for our time. From Marxism, it
draws the basic project of formulating a rationally systematic and
coherent socialism that integrates philosophy, history, economics,
and politics. Avowedly dialectical, it attempts to infuse theory with
practice. From anarchism, it draws its commitment to antistatism
and confederalism, as well as its recognition that hierarchy is a
basic problem that can be overcome only by a libertarian socialist
society.[17]

[16] Several years ago, while I still identified myself as an anarchist, I attempted to formulate
a distinction between “social” and “lifestyle” anarchism, and I wrote an article that
identified Communalism as “the democratic dimension of anarchism” (see *Left Green Perspectives*, no. 31, October 1994). I no longer believe that Communalism is a mere
“dimension” of anarchism, democratic or otherwise; rather, it is a distinct ideology with
a revolutionary tradition that has yet to be explored.

[17] To be sure, these points undergo modification in Communalism: for example, Marxism’s
historical materialism, explaining the rise of class societies, is expanded by social
ecology’s explanation of the anthropological and historical rise of hierarchy. Marxian
dialectical materialism, in turn, is transcended by dialectical naturalism; and the
anarcho-communist notion of a very loose “federation of autonomous communes” is
replaced with a confederation from which its *components*, functioning in a democratic
manner through citizens’ assemblies, may withdraw *only* with the approval of the
confederation *as a whole*.

The choice of the term  *Communalism*  to encompass the
philosophical, historical, political, and organizational components
of a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant
one. The word originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the
armed people of the French capital raised barricades not only to
defend the city council of Paris and its administrative substructures
but also to create a nationwide confederation of cities and towns
to replace the republican nation-state. Communalism as an
ideology is not sullied by the individualism and the often explicit
antirationalism of anarchism; nor does it carry the historical
burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism.

It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or
on the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent; and it
does not reduce the free community of the future to a fanciful
medieval village. Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in
a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism, according
to  *The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language*, is ”a
theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous
local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”[18] 

[18] What is so surprising about this minimalist dictionary definition is its overall accuracy: I
would take issue only with its formulations “virtually autonomous” and “loosely bound,”
which suggest a parochial and particularistic, even irresponsible relationship of the
components of a confederation.

Communalism seeks to recapture the meaning of politics in
its broadest, most emancipatory sense, indeed, to fulfill the historic
potential of the municipality as the developmental arena of mind
and discourse. It conceptualizes the municipality, potentially at
least, as a transformative development  *beyond*  organic evolution
into the domain of  *social* evolution. The city is the domain where
the archaic blood-tie that was once limited to the unification of
families and tribes, to the exclusion of outsiders, was-juridically,
at least-dissolved. It became the domain where hierarchies based
on parochial and sociobiological attributes of kinship, gender, and
age could be eliminated and replaced by a free society based on
a shared common humanity. Potentially, it remains the domain
where the once-feared stranger can be fully absorbed into the
community-initially as a protected resident of a common territory
and eventually as a  *citizen*, engaged in making policy decisions in
the public arena. It is above all the domain where institutions and
values have their roots not in zoology but in civil human activity.

Looking beyond these historical functions, the municipality
constitutes the only domain for an association based on the free
exchange of ideas and a creative endeavor to bring the capacities of
consciousness to the service of freedom. It is the domain where a
mere  *animalistic*  adaptation to an existing and pregiven environment
can be radically supplanted by  *proactive*,  *rational*  intervention into
the world — indeed, a world yet to be made and molded by reason-
with a view toward ending the environmental, social, and political
insults to which humanity and the biosphere have been subjected
by classes and hierarchies. Freed of domination as well as material
exploitation-indeed, recreated as a rational arena for human
creativity in all spheres of life — the municipality becomes the
 *ethical*  space for the good life. Communalism is thus no contrived
product of mere fancy: it expresses an abiding concept and practice
of political life, formed by a dialectic of social development and
reason.

As a explicitly  *political*  body of ideas, Communalism seeks to
recover and advance the development of the city (or  *commune*) in
a form that accords with its greatest potentialities and historical
traditions. This is not to say that Communalism accepts the
municipality as it is today. Quite to the contrary, the modern
municipality is infused with many statist features and often
functions as an agent of the bourgeois nation-state. Today, when
the nation-state still seems supreme, the rights that modern
municipalities possess cannot be dismissed as the epiphenomena
of more basic economic relations. Indeed, to a great degree, they
are the hard-won gains of commoners, who long defended them
against assaults by ruling classes over the course of history — even
against the bourgeoisie itself.

The concrete political dimension of Communalism is known
as libertarian municipalism, about which I have previously written
extensively. [19] In its libertarian municipalist program, Communalism
resolutely seeks to eliminate statist municipal structures and replace
them with the institutions of a libertarian polity. It seeks to radically
restructure cities’ governing institutions into popular democratic
assemblies based on neighborhoods, towns, and villages. In these
popular assemblies, citizens — including the middle classes as well
as the working classes-deal with community affairs on a face-
to-face basis, making policy decisions in a direct democracy, and
giving reality to the ideal of a humanistic, rational society.

[19] My writings on libertarian municipalism date back to the early 1970s, with “Spring
Offensives and Summer Vacations,” *Anarchos*, no. 4 (1972). The more significant works
include the books *From Urbanization to Cities* (1987; reprinted by London: Cassell, 1992)
and *The Limits of the City* (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974), as well as the articles
“Theses on Libertarian Municipalism,” *Our Generation* [Montreal], vol. 16, nos. 3–4
(Spring/Summer 1985); “Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism,” (included
herein); “The Meaning of Confederalism,” *Green Perspectives*, no. 20 (November 1990);
and “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview,” *Green Perspectives*, no. 24 (October
1991). For a concise summary, see Janet Biehl, *The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism* (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).

Minimally, if we are to have the kind of free social life to which
we aspire,  *democracy*  should be our form of a shared political life.
To address problems and issues that transcend the boundaries of a
single municipality, in turn, the democratized municipalities should
join together to form a broader confederation. These assemblies
and confederations, by their very existence, could then challenge
the legitimacy of the state and statist forms of power. They could
expressly be aimed at replacing state power and statecraft with
popular power and a socially rational transformative politics. And
they would become arenas where class conflicts could be played
out and where classes could be eliminated.

Libertarian municipalists do not delude themselves that
the state will view with equanimity their attempts to replace
professionalized power with popular power. They harbor
no illusions that the ruling classes will indifferently allow a
Communalist movement to demand rights that infringe on the
state’s sovereignty over towns and cities. Historically, regions,
localities, and above all towns and cities have desperately struggled
to reclaim their local sovereignty from the state (albeit not always
for high-minded purposes). Communalists’ attempt to restore
the powers of towns and cities and to knit them together into
confederations can be expected to evoke increasing resistance from
national institutions. That the new popular-assemblyist municipal
confederations will embody a dual power against the state that
becomes a source of growing political tension is obvious. Either
a Communalist  *movement*  will be radicalized by this tension
and will resolutely face all its consequences, or it will surely sink
into a morass of compromises that absorb it back into the social
order that it once sought to change. How the movement meets
this challenge is a clear measure of its seriousness in seeking to
change the existing political system and the social consciousness it
develops as a source of public education and leadership.

Communalism constitutes a critique of hierarchical and
capitalist society as a whole. It seeks to alter not only the political
life of society but also its economic life. On this score, its aim is
not to nationalize the economy or retain private ownership of the
means of production but to  *municipalize*  the economy. It seeks to
integrate the means of production into the existential life of the
municipality, such that every productive enterprise falls under the
purview of the local assembly, which decides how it will function
to meet the interests of the community  *as a whole*. The separation
between life and work, so prevalent in the modern capitalist
economy, must be overcome so that citizens’ desires and needs, the
artful challenges of creation in the course of production, and role
of production in fashioning thought and self-definition are not
lost. “Humanity makes itself,” to cite the title of V. Gordon Childe’s
book on the urban revolution at the end of the Neolithic age and the
rise of cities, and it does so not only intellectually and esthetically,
but by expanding human needs as well as the productive methods
for satisfying them. We discover ourselves — our potentialities and
their actualization — through creative and useful work that not
only transforms the natural world but leads to our self-formation
and self-definition.

We must also avoid the parochialism and ultimately the
desires for proprietorship that have afflicted so many self-managed
enterprises, such as the “collectives” in the Russian and Spanish
revolutions. Not enough has been written about the drift among
many “socialistic” self-managed enterprises, even under the red
and red-and-black flags, respectively, of revolutionary Russia and
revolutionary Spain, toward forms of collective capitalism that
ultimately led many of these concerns to compete with one another
for raw materials and markets. [20]

[20] For one such discussion, see Murray Bookchin, “The Ghost of Anarchosyndicalism,” *Anarchist Studies*, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1993).

Most importantly, in Communalist political life, workers of
different occupations would take their seats in popular assemblies
not as  *workers*  — printers, plumbers, foundry workers and the
like, with special occupational interests to advance — but as
 *citizens*, whose overriding concern should be the  *general interest*  of
the society in which they live. Citizens should be freed of their
particularistic identity as workers, specialists, and individuals
concerned primarily with their own particularistic interests.
Municipal life should become a school for the formation of citizens,
both by absorbing new citizens and by educating the young, while
the assemblies themselves should function not only as permanent
decision-making institutions but as arenas for  *educating*  the people
in handling complex civic and regional affairs. [21]

[21] One of the great tragedies of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution
of 1936 was the failure of the masses to acquire more than the scantiest knowledge of
social logistics and the complex interlinkages involved in providing for the necessities of
life in a modern society. Inasmuch as those who had the expertise involved in managing
productive enterprises and in making cities functional were supporters of the old regime,
workers were in fact unable to actually take over the full control of factories. They were
obliged instead to depend on “bourgeois specialists” to operate them, individuals who
steadily made them the victims of a technocratic elite.

In a Communalist way of life, conventional economics, with
its focus on prices and scarce resources, would be replaced by
 *ethics*, with its concern for human needs and the good life. Human
solidarity — or  *philia*, as the Greeks called it — would replace material
gain and egotism. Municipal assemblies would become not only
vital arenas for civic life and decision-making but centers where
the shadowy world of economic logistics, properly coordinated
production, and civic operations would be demystified and opened
to the scrutiny and participation of the citizenry as a whole. The
emergence of the  *new citizen* would mark a transcendence of the
particularistic class being of traditional socialism and the formation
of the “new man” which the Russian revolutionaries hoped they
could eventually achieve. Humanity would now be able to rise to
the universal state of consciousness and rationality that the great
utopians of the nineteenth century and the Marxists hoped their
efforts would create, opening the way to humanity’s fulfillment as
a species that embodies reason rather than material interest and
that affords material post-scarcity rather than an austere harmony
enforced by a morality of scarcity and material deprivation.[22]

[22] I have previously discussed this transformation of workers from mere class beings into
citizens, among other places, in *From Urbanization to Cities* (1987; reprinted by London:
Cassell, 1995), and in “Workers and the Peace Movement” (1983), published in The
*Modern Crisis* (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987). 

Classical Athenian democracy of the fifth century B.C.E., the
source of the Western democratic tradition, was based on face-to-face decision-making in communal assemblies of the people and
confederations of those municipal assemblies. For more than two
millennia, the political writings of Aristotle recurrently served to
heighten our awareness of the city as the arena for the fulfillment
of human potentialities for reason, self-consciousness, and the
good life. Appropriately, Aristotle traced the emergence of the
 *polis*  from the family or  *oikos* — i.e., the realm of necessity, where
human beings satisfied their basically animalistic needs, and where
authority rested with the eldest male. But the association of several
families, he observed, “aim[ed] at something more than the supply
of daily needs”[23]; this aim initiated the earliest political formation,
the village. Aristotle famously described man (by which he meant
the adult Greek male [24]) as a “political animal” (*politikon zoon*) who
presided over family members not only to meet their material
needs but as the material precondition for his participation in
political life, in which discourse and reason replaced mindless
deeds, custom, and violence. Thus, “[w]hen several villages are
united in a single complete community (*koinonan*), large enough
to be nearly or quite self-sufficing,” he continued, “the *polis* comes
into existence, *originating* in the bare needs of life, and continuing
in existence for the sake of a good life.”[25] 

[23] Aristotle,  *Politics*  (1252 [b] 16), trans. Benjamin Jowett, in  *The Complete Works of Aristotle* , Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984), vol. 2, p. 1987.

[24] As a libertarian ideal for the future of humanity and a genuine domain of freedom, the
Athenian  *polis* falls far short of the city’s ultimate promise. Its population included slaves,
subordinated women, and franchiseless resident aliens. Only a minority of male citizens
possessed civic rights, and they ran the city without consulting a larger population.
Materially, the stability of the polis depended upon the labor of its noncitizens. These
are among the several monumental failings that later municipalities would have to
correct. The *polis* is significant, however, not an example of an emancipated community
but for the successful functioning of its free  *institutions*.

[25] Aristotle,  *Politics*  (1252 [b] 29–30), trans. Jowett; emphasis added. The words from
the original Greek text may be found in the Loeb Classical Library edition: Aristotle,
 *Politics*, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

For Aristotle, and we may assume also for the ancient
Athenians, the municipality’s proper functions were thus not
strictly instrumental or even economic. As the locale of human
consociation, the municipality, and the social and political
arrangements that people living there constructed, was humanity’s
 *telos*, the arena par excellence where human beings, over the
course of history, could actualize their potentiality for reason,
self-consciousness, and creativity. Thus for the ancient Athenians,
politics denoted not only the handling of the practical affairs of a
polity but civic activities that were charged with moral obligation to
one’s community. All citizens of a city were expected to participate
in civic activities as  *ethical*  beings.

Examples of municipal democracy were not limited to ancient
Athens. Quite to the contrary, long before class differentiations
gave rise to the state, many relatively secular towns produced the
earliest institutional structures of local democracy. Assemblies of
the people may have existed in ancient Sumer, at the very beginning
of the so-called “urban revolution” some seven or eight thousand
years ago. They clearly appeared among the Greeks, and until the
defeat of the Gracchus brothers, they were popular centers of power
in republican Rome. They were nearly ubiquitous in the medieval
towns of Europe and even in Russia, notably in Novgorod and
Pskov, which, for a time, were among the most democratic cities in
the Slavic world. The assembly, it should be emphasized, began to
approximate its truly modern form in the neighborhood Parisian
sections of 1793, when they became the authentic motive forces of
the Great Revolution and  *conscious*  agents for the making of a new
body politic. That they were never given the consideration they
deserve in the literature on democracy, particularly democratic
Marxist tendencies and revolutionary syndicalists, is dramatic
evidence of the flaws that existed in the revolutionary tradition.

These democratic municipal institutions normally existed in
combative tension with grasping monarchs, feudal lords, wealthy
families, and freebooting invaders until they were crushed,
frequently in bloody struggles. It cannot be emphasized too strongly
that  *every great revolution in modern history had a civic dimension* 
that has been smothered in radical histories by an emphasis on
class antagonisms, however important these antagonisms have
been. Thus it is unthinkable that the English Revolution of the
1640s can be understood without singling out London as its
terrain; or, by the same token, any discussions of the various French
Revolutions without focusing on Paris, or the Russian Revolutions
without dwelling on Petrograd, or the Spanish Revolution of 1936
without citing Barcelona as its most advanced social center. This
centrality of the city is not a mere geographic fact; it is, above
all, a profoundly political one, which involved the ways in which
revolutionary masses aggregated and debated, the civic traditions
that nourished them, and the environment that fostered their
revolutionary views.

Libertarian municipalism is an integral part of the Communalist
framework, indeed its praxis, just as Communalism as a systematic
body of revolutionary thought is meaningless without libertarian
municipalism. The differences between Communalism and
authentic or “pure” anarchism, let alone Marxism, are much too
great to be spanned by a prefix such as  *anarcho-*,  *social-*,  *neo-*, or even
 *libertarian*. Any attempt to reduce Communalism to a mere variant
of anarchism would be to deny the integrity of both ideas — indeed,
to ignore their conflicting concepts of democracy, organization,
elections, government, and the like. Gustave Lefrancais, the Paris
Communard who may have coined this political term, adamantly
declared that he was “a Communalist, not an anarchist.”[26] 

[26] Lefrancais is quoted in Peter Kropotkin,  *Memoirs of a Revolutionist* (New York: Horizon
Press, 1968), p. 393. I too would be obliged today to make the same statement. In the
late 1950s, when anarchism in the United States was a barely discernible presence, it
seemed like a sufficiently clear field in which I could develop social ecology, as well as the
philosophical and political ideas that would eventually become dialectical naturalism and
libertarian municipalism. I well knew that these views were not consistent with traditional
anarchist ideas, least of all post-scarcity, which implied that a modern libertarian society
rested on advanced material preconditions. Today I find that anarchism remains the very
simplistic individualistic and antirationalist psychology it has always been. My attempt to
retain anarchism under the name of “social anarchism” has largely been a failure, and I now find that the term I have used to denote my views must be replaced with Communalism,
which coherently integrates and goes beyond the most viable features of the anarchist and
Marxist traditions. Recent attempts to use the word  *anarchism*  as a leveler to minimize
the abundant and contradictory differences that are grouped under that term and even
celebrate its openness to “differences” make it a diffuse catch-all for tendencies that properly
should be in sharp conflict with one another.

Above all, Communalism is engaged with the problem of
power.[27] In marked contrast to the various kinds of  *communitarian* 
enterprises favored by many self-designated anarchists, such
as
“people’s” garages, print shops, food coops, and backyard
gardens, adherents of Communalism mobilize themselves to
electorally engage in a potentially important center of power — the
municipal council — and try to compel it to create legislatively
potent neighborhood assemblies. These assemblies, it should be
emphasized, would make every effort to delegitimate and depose
the statist organs that currently control their villages, towns,
or cities and thereafter act as the real engines in the exercise of
power. Once a number of municipalities are democratized along
communalist lines, they would methodically confederate into
municipal leagues and challenge the role of the nation-state and,
through popular assemblies and confederal councils, try to acquire
control over economic and political life.

[27] For a discussion of the very real problems created by anarchists’ disdain for power during
the Spanish Revolution, see the appendix originally written to this article, “Anarchism
and Power in the Spanish Revolution.” (Available at [[http://www.communalism.org][www.communalism.org]].)

Finally, Communalism, in contrast to anarchism, decidedly
calls for decision-making by majority voting as the only equitable
way for a large number of people to make decisions. Authentic
anarchists claim that this principle — the “rule” of the minority
by the majority — is authoritarian and propose instead to make
decisions by consensus. Consensus, in which single individuals can
veto majority decisions, threatens to abolish society as such. A free
society is not one in which its members, like Homer’s lotus-eaters,
live in a state of bliss without memory, temptation, or knowledge.
Like it or not, humanity has eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and its
memories are laden with history and experience. In a lived mode of
freedom — contrary to mere café chatter — the rights of minorities
to express their dissenting views will always be protected as fully
as the rights of majorities. Any abridgements of those rights would
be instantly corrected by the community — hopefully gently, but if
unavoidable, forcefully — lest social life collapse into sheer chaos.
Indeed, the views of a minority would be treasured as potential
source of new insights and nascent truths that, if abridged, would
deny society the sources of creativity and developmental advances
— for new ideas generally emerge from inspired minorities that
gradually gain the centrality they deserve at a given time and
place — until, again, they too are challenged as the conventional
wisdom of a period that is beginning to pass away and requires
new (minority) views to replace frozen orthodoxies.


*** The Need for Organization and Education

It remains to ask: how are we to achieve this rational society? One
anarchist writer would have it that the good society (or a true
“natural” disposition of affairs, including a “natural man”) exists
beneath the oppressive burdens of civilization like fertile soil
beneath the snow. It follows from this mentality that all we are
obliged to do to achieve the good society is to somehow eliminate
the snow, which is to say capitalism, nation-states, churches,
conventional schools, and other almost endless types of institutions
that perversely embody domination in one form or another.
Presumably an anarchist society — once state, governmental, and
cultural institutions are merely removed-would emerge intact,
ready to function and thrive as a free society. Such a “society,” if one
can even call it such, would not require that we proactively create
it: we would simply let the snow above it melt away. The process
of rationally creating a free Communalist society, alas, will require
substantially more thought and work than embracing a mystified
concept of aboriginal innocence and bliss.

A Communalist society should rest, above all, on the efforts
of a new radical organization to change the world, one that has a
new political vocabulary to explain its goals, and a new program
and theoretical framework to make those goals coherent. It would,
above all, require dedicated individuals who are willing to take on
the responsibilities of education and, yes,  *leadership*. Unless words
are not to become completely mystified and obscure a reality that
exists before our very eyes, it should minimally be acknowledged
that leadership  *always* exists and does not disappear because
it is clouded by euphemisms such as “militants” or, as in Spain,
“influential militants.” It must also be acknowledge that many
individuals in earlier groups like the CNT were not just “influential
militants” but outright leaders, whose views were given more
consideration — and deservedly so! — than those of others because
they were based on more experience, knowledge, and wisdom, as
well as the psychological traits that were needed to provide effective
guidance. A serious libertarian approach to leadership would
indeed acknowledge the reality and crucial importance of leaders
— all the more to establish the greatly needed formal  *structures and regulations*  that can effectively  *control and modify*  the activities of
leaders and recall them when the membership decides their respect
is being misused or when leadership becomes an exercise in the
abusive exercise of power.

A libertarian municipalist movement should function,
not with the adherence of flippant and tentative members, but
with people who have been schooled in the movement’s ideas,
procedures and activities. They should, in effect, demonstrate
a serious commitment to their organization — an organization
whose structure is laid out explicitly in a formal  *constitution*  and
appropriate  *bylaws*. Without a democratically formulated and
approved institutional framework whose members and leaders can
be held accountable, clearly articulated standards of responsibility
cease to exist. Indeed, it is precisely when a membership is no
longer responsible to its constitutional and regulatory provisions
that authoritarianism develops and eventually leads to the
movement’s immolation. Freedom from authoritarianism can
best be assured only by the clear, concise, and detailed allocation
of power, not by pretensions that power and leadership are forms
of “rule” or by libertarian metaphors that conceal their reality. It
has been precisely when an organization fails to articulate these
regulatory details that the conditions emerge for its degeneration
and decay.

Ironically, no stratum has been more insistent in demanding
its freedom to exercise its will against regulation than chiefs,
monarchs, nobles, and the bourgeoisie; similarly even well-
meaning anarchists have seen individual autonomy as the true
expression of freedom from the “artificialities” of civilization.
In the realm of  *true*  freedom — that is, freedom that has been
actualized as the result of consciousness, knowledge, and necessity
— to know  *what we can and cannot do*  is more cleanly honest
and true to reality than to avert the responsibility of knowing
the limits of the lived world. Said a very wise man more than a
century and a half ago: “Men make their own history, but they do
not make it just as they please.”


*** Creating a New Left

The need for the international Left to advance courageously beyond
a Marxist, anarchist, syndicalist, or vague socialist framework
toward a Communalist framework is particularly compelling today.
Rarely in the history of leftist political ideas have ideologies been
so wildly and irresponsibly muddled; rarely has ideology itself been
so disparaged; rarely has the cry for “Unity!” on any terms been
heard with such desperation. To be sure, the various tendencies
that oppose capitalism should indeed unite around efforts to
discredit and ultimately efface the market system. To such ends,
unity is an invaluable desideratum: a united front of the entire
Left is needed in order to counter the entrenched system-indeed,
culture-of commodity production and exchange, and to defend
the residual rights that the masses have won in earlier struggles
against oppressive governments and social systems.

The urgency of this need, however, does not require movement
participants to abandon mutual criticism, or to stifle their criticism
of the authoritarian traits present in anticapitalist organizations.
Least of all does it require them to  *compromise the integrity and identity of their various programs*. Th vast majority of participants in
today’s movement are inexperienced young radicals who have come
of age in an era of postmodernist relativism. As a consequence, the
movement is marked by a chilling eclecticism, in which tentative
opinions are chaotically mismarried to ideals that should rest on
soundly objective premises.[28] In a milieu where the clear expression
of ideas is not valued and terms are inappropriately used, and where
argumentation is disparaged as “aggressive” and, worse, “divisive,” it
becomes difficult to formulate ideas in the crucible of debate. Ideas
grow and mature best, in fact, not in the silence and controlled
humidity of an ideological nursery, but in the tumult of dispute
and mutual criticism.

[28] I should note that by  *objective*  I do not refer merely to existential entities and events but
also to potentialities that can be rationally conceived, nurtured, and in time actualized
into what we would narrowly call realities. If mere substantiality were all that the term
objective meant, no ideal or promise of freedom would be an  *objectively*  valid goal unless
it existed under our very noses.

Following revolutionary socialist practices of the past,
Communalists would try to formulate a minimum program that
calls for satisfaction of the immediate concerns of the masses,
such as improved wages and shelter or adequate park space and
transportation. This minimum program would aim to satisfy the
most elemental needs of the masses, to improve their access to the
resources that make daily life tolerable. The maximum program,
by contrast, would present an image of what human life could be
like under libertarian socialism, at least as far as such a society
is foreseeable in a world that is continually changing under the
impact of seemingly unending industrial revolutions.

Even more, however, Communalists would see their program
and practice as a process. Indeed, a transitional program in which
each new demand provides the springboard for escalating demands
that lead toward more radical and eventually revolutionary demands.
One of the most striking examples of a transitional demand
was the programmatic call in the late nineteenth century by the
Second International for a popular militia to replace a professional
army. In still other cases, revolutionary socialists demanded that
railroads be publicly owned (or, as revolutionary syndicalists might
have demanded, be controlled by railroad workers) rather than
privately owned and operated. None of these demands were  *in themselves*  revolutionary, but they opened  *pathways*, politically, to
revolutionary forms of ownership and operation — which, in turn,
could be escalated to achieve the movement’s maximum program.
Others might criticize such step-by-step endeavors as “reformist,”
but Communalists do not contend that a Communalist society can
be legislated into existence. What these demands try to achieve, in
the short term, are new rules of engagement between the people
and capital — rules that are all the more needed at a time when
“direct action” is being confused with protests of mere events whose
agenda is set entirely by the ruling classes.

On the whole, Communalism is trying to rescue a realm of
public action and discourse that is either disappearing or that is
being be reduced to often-meaningless engagements with the
police, or to street theater that, however artfully, reduces serious
issues to simplistic performances that have no instructive influence.
By contrast, Communalists try to build lasting organizations and
institutions that can play a socially transformative role in the real
world. Significantly, Communalists do not hesitate to run candidates
in  *municipal*  elections who, if elected, would use what real power
their offices confer to legislate popular assemblies into existence.
These assemblies, in turn, would have the power ultimately to
create effective forms of town-meeting government. Inasmuch as
the emergence of the city — and city councils — long preceded the
emergence of class society, councils based on popular assemblies
are not inherently statist organs, and to participate seriously in
municipal elections countervails reformist socialist attempts to
elect statist delegates by offering the historic libertarian vision of
municipal confederations as a practical, combative, and politically
 *credible*  popular alternative to state power. Indeed, Communalist
candidacies, which explicitly  *denounce*  parliamentary candidacies
as opportunist, keep alive the debate over how libertarian socialism
can be achieved — a debate that has been languishing for years.

There should be no self-deception about the opportunities
that exist as a means of transforming our existing irrational society
into a rational one. Our choices on how to transform the existing
society are still on the table of history and are faced with immense
problems. But unless present and future generations are beaten into
complete submission by a culture based on queasy calculation as
well as by police with tear gas and water cannons, we cannot desist
from fighting for what freedoms we have and try to expand them
into a free society wherever the opportunity to do so emerges. At
any rate we now know, in the light of all the weaponry and means
of ecological destruction that are at hand, that the need for radical
change cannot be indefinitely deferred. What is clear is that human
beings are much too intelligent not to have a rational society; the
most serious question we face is whether they are rational enough
to achieve one.


** After Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin unfortunately did not live to see the publication of
 *Social Ecology and Communalism*. July 30<sup>th</sup>, 2006, he died peacefully
in his home, surrounded by family and friends.

Until his very last breath, Bookchin never abandoned his
commitment to humanism and Enlightenment, and he was always
a forceful representative of the great radical traditions he strove to
nurture and develop. Although his impact on the ecology movement
and on grassroots activism is recognized and appreciated, Bookchin’s
real importance and originality has yet to be asserted. Fortunately
Bookchin was not only a lifelong activist but also a prolific writer,
leaving behind numerous books, essays, lectures, and interviews.
Bookchin was a real  *thinker*  — controversial and stimulating — and he
maintained a consistent social focus all his life. Without doubt, the
loss of this great revolutionary will be felt for many years to come.

The publication of these essays seems particularly appropriate
now, as they can help us understand how Bookchin has left us a
comprehensive and coherent corpus. This book is important for
two reasons. First, it provides a decent and accessible introduction
to Bookchin’s basic ideas, and it is my sincere hope that this book
will encourage the reader to take a closer look at his rich theoretical
works. Second, it provides a very definable and ideological focus by
which we can evaluate his older works and his many polemics. Indeed,
“The Communalist Project” was the last proper essay Bookchin ever
wrote, and the oldest essays were revised quite recently. (It could also
be noted that I presented my editorial choices to him while working
on this project, and he even read and commented on the introduction
I have written for this book.) Bookchin was enthusiastic about this
specific collection of essays, and thought that they represented the
most recent and, in many ways, clearest expression of his ideological
stance. In that respect, they can be considered a political testament.

I believe that social ecology and Communalism, and the whole
body of ideas that Bookchin created, has left us with a tremendous
legacy that will continue to challenge us and inspire us in the
struggle for a new libertarian and ecological society. Let us make
sure these ideas get the attention they deserve, and help create the
free society that Bookchin never had the privilege to see come into
being. Creating a new radical movement, and indeed a new society,
is an immense project that can not be taken lightly. As Bookchin
himself wrote in  *Re-enchanting Humanity*: “The achievement of
freedom must be a free act on the highest level of intellectual and
moral probity, for if we cannot act vigorously to free ourselves, we
will not deserve to be free.”

Murray Bookchin threw down the gauntlet.

The future is our responsibility.

Eirik Eiglad, <br> October 30<sup>th</sup>, 2006