From Here to There

The door that can open the way to a New Left of the future, one that embodies the experience of the thirties, sixties, and the decades that have followed them, is still swinging to and fro on its hinges.

It has neither opened fully nor closed. Its swings depend partly upon the hard realities of everyday social life — namely, whether the economy is depressed or rising, the kind of political climate that exists in various parts of the world, events in the Third World as well as the First and Second, the fortunes of radical tendencies at home and abroad, and the sweeping environmental changes that confront humanity in the years that lie ahead.

Ecologically, humanity is faced with major climatic changes, rising levels of pollution, and new, environmentally induced illnesses. Terrible human tragedies in the form of hunger, famine, and malnutrition are claiming millions of lives annually. An incalculable number of animal and plant species face extinction as a result of deforestation from lumbering activities and acid rain. The global changes that are degrading the natural environment, and may eventually render it uninhabitable for complex life-forms, have an almost geological massiveness, and they may be occurring at a pace that verges on the catastrophic for many plant and animal species.

One might have hoped that these planetary changes would have catapulted the ecology movement into the foreground of social thought and added new insights to the ideals of freedom. This has not been the case. The ecology movement has divided into several questionable tendencies that often directly contradict each other. Many people are simply pragmatic environmentalists. Their efforts are focused on single-issue reforms such as the control of toxic wastes, opposition to the construction of nuclear reactors, restrictions on urban growth, and the like. These are necessary struggles, to be sure, that can never be disdained simply because they are limited and piecemeal. They serve to slow down a headlong race to disasters like Chernobyl or Love Canal.

But they cannot supplant the need to get to the roots of environmental dislocations. Indeed, insofar as they are restricted merely to reforms, they often create the dangerous illusion that the present social order is capable of rectifying its own abuses. The denaturing of the environment must always be seen as inherent to capitalism, the product of its very law of life, as a system of limitless expansion and capital accumulation. To ignore the anti-ecological core of the present social order — be it in its Western corporate form or its Eastern bureaucratic fonn — is to allay public concern about the depth of the crisis and lasting means to resolve it.

Environmentalism, conceived as a piecemeal reform movement, easily lends itself to the lure of statecraft, that is, to participation in electoral, parliamentary, and party-oriented activities. It requires no great change in consciousness to turn a lobby into a party or a petitioner into a parliamentarian. Between a person who humbly solicits from power and another who arrogantly exercises it, there exists a sinister and degenerative symbiosis. Both share the same mentality that change can be achieved only through the exercise of power, specifically, through the power of a self-corrupting professionalized corps of legislators, bureaucrats, and military forces called the State. The appeal to this power invariably legitimates and strengthens the State, with the result that it actually disempowers the people. Power allows for no vacuum in public life. Whatever power the State gains, it always does so at the expense of popular power. Conversely, whatever power the people gain, they always acquire at the expense of the State. To legitimate State power, in effect, is to delegitimate popular power.

Ecology movements that enter into parliamentary activities not only legitimate State power at the expense of popular power, but they are obliged to function within the State, ultimately to become blood of its blood and bone of its bone. They must “play the game ” which means that they must shape their priorities according to predetermined rules over which they have no control. This not only involves a given constellation of relationships that emerges with participation in State power; it becomes an ongoing process of degeneration, a steady devolution of ideals, practices, and party structures. Each demand for the “effective” exercise of parliamentary power raises the need for a further retreat from presumably cherished standards of belief and conduct.

If the State is a realm of “evil,” as Bakunin emphasized, the “art” of statecraft is essentially a realm of lesser or greater evils, not a realm of ethical right and wrong. Ethics itself is radically redefined from the classical time-honored study of good and evil into the more sinister contemporary study of compromises between lesser and greater evils — in short, what I have elsewhere called an “ethics of evil.” {1} This basic redefinition of ethics has had deadly consequences over the course of recent history. Fascism made its way to power in Germany when Social Democracy lived in a diet of choices between liberals and centrists; later, centrists and conservatives; and, finally, between conservatives and Nazis — a steady devolution in which a conservative President, Marshall von Hindenberg, finally appointed the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, to the position of Reich Chancellor. That the German working class with its huge parties and its massive trade unions permitted this appointment to occur without any ac t of resistance is an easily forgotten and dismal event in history. Not only did this moral devolution occur on the level of the State, but also on the level of German popular movements themselves, in a cruel dialectic of political degeneration and moral decomposition.

Environmental movements have not fared better in their relationship to State power. They have bartered away entire forests for token reserves of trees. Vast wilderness areas have been surrendered for national parks. Huge stretches of coastal wetlands have been exchanged for a few acres of pristine beaches. To the extent that environmentalists have entered into national parliaments as Greens, they have generally attained little more than public attention for their self-serving parliamentary deputies and achieved very little to arrest environmental decay.

The Hesse coalition of the German Greens with a Social Democratic government in the mid-1980s ended in ignominy. Not only did the “realist wing” of the German Green party taint the movement’s finest principles with compromises, it made the party more bureaucratic, manipulative, and “professional” — in short, very much like the rivals it once denounced.

Reformism and parliamentarism, at least, have a tangibility about them that raises real questions of political theory and a sense of social direction. The most recent tendency in the environmental movement, however, is completely ghostly and vaporous. Bluntly put: it consists of attempts to turn ecology into a religion by peopling the natural world with gods, goddesses, woodsprites, and the like — all serviced by a corps of financially astute gurus from India, their home-bred competitors, a variety of witches, and self-styled “wiccan anarchists,”

The American roots of this tendency, of course, should be emphasized. The United States is currently the most ill-read, ill-informed, and, culturally, the most illiterate country in the Western world. The sixties counterculture opened a rupture not only with the past, but with all knowledge of the past, including its history, literature, art, and music. The young people who arrogantly refused to “trust anyone over thirty,” to use a popular slogan of the day, severed all (heir ties with the best traditions of the past. In an era of junk food, the opening created by this breach was filled by an appalling mixture of junk ideas. Patently contradictory fantasies were congealed by drugs and rock music into a squalid ooze of atheistic religions, natural supematuralisms, pri vatistic politics, and even liberal reactionaries. If this pairing of completely opposing terms seems irrational, the reader should bear in mind that the amalgam was “made in America,” where everything is believed to be possible and the absurd is normally the result.

That ecology, an eminently naturalistic outlook and discipline, could be infested with supernatural rubbish, would seem explicable if such nonsense were confined stricdy to its American borders. What is astonishing, however, is that it has spread like a worldwide pollutant to Europe, especially to England, Germany, and Scandinavia, Given time, it will almost certainly invade the Mediterranean countries as well.

As a form of “cultural feminism,” this extension of a quasi-theological ecology to gender relationships already commands a growing, indeed enormous, following in English and German-speaking countries. The hope that ecology would enrich feminism has taken the bizarre form of a theistic “eco-feminism,” structured around woman’s uniquely “nurturing” role in the biosphere. Leaving aside this crassly anthropomorphic extension of human behavior to nature as a whole, theistic “eco-feminists” have essentially reversed the eminent role patriccntric cultures assign to men by simply inverting the same relationship in woman’s favor. Women are privileged in nature just as men are privileged in history, with the result that male chauvinism is simply replaced by female chauvinism.

Accordingly, presumably “pacific” female goddesses are substituted for male warrior gods, as though trading one deity for another is not an extension of religion and superstition into human affairs — whether they are called “immanent,” “transcendental,” “paganistic,” or “Judeo-Christian,” Female-oriented myths based on “nurture” are substituted for male-oriented myths based on military conquest, as though myths are not inherently fictitious and arbitrary — whether they are “naturalistic” or “supernaturalistic,” “earth-based,” or “heaven-based.” The world, viewed as a complex biosphere that should invite wonder, admiration, and foster an esthetic as well as caring sensibility, is re-envisioned as a basically female terrain, occupied by woodsprites, witches, goddesses, and regaled by rituals and mystified by contrived myths — an ensemble that is borne on a lucrative tidal wave of books, artifacts, and bejeweled ornaments.

Political activity and social engagement in this theistic terrain tends to shrivel from activism into quietism and from social organization into privatistic encounter-groups. One has only to cover a personal problem with the patina of gender — be it a failed love affair or a business misfortune — and it is easily designated as “political” or a form of gender victimization. The notion that the “personal is the political,” in effect, is stretched to the frivolous point where political issues are cast increasingly in a therapeutic vernacular, so that one’s “manner” of presenting ideas is considered more important than their substance. Form is increasingly replacing content and eloquence is increasingly decried as “manipulative,” with the result that a deadening mediocrity of form and content tends to become the rule in political discourse. The moral outrage that once stirred the human spirit over the ages in the thundering words of the Hebrew prophets is denounced as evidence of “aggressiveness,” “dogmatism,” “divisiveness,” and “male behavior.” What “counts,” today, is not what one says but how one says it — even if statements are insultingly naive and vacuous. “Care” can easily regress into naivety and “concern” into a childishness that makes one’s politics more infantile than feminist.

None of this is to deny the feminist claim that woman has been the pariah of a largely male history, a history that has never prevented males from dominating, exploiting, torturing, and murdering each other on a scale that beggars description. But to see woman as the protypical victim of hierarchy and her oppression as the source of all hierarchy, as some feminists claim, is to simplify the development of hierarchy in a very reductive manner. The origins of a phenomenon do not exhaust our understanding of the phenomenon any more than the origins of the cosmos exhaust or understanding of its development from a compact undifferentiated mass into extremely complex forms. Male hierarchies are highly complex affairs. They embody subtle interactions between men as fathers, brothers, sons, workers, and ethnic types, including their cultural status and their individual proclivities. The caring father, who often stands in a warm relationship with his daughter by comparison with a competitive mother, should remind us that hierarchy is intricate enough on the familial level to give us pause when we consider it on the social level.

Nor does anthropology supply conclusive support for the status of woman as the protypical victim of hierarchy. Elderly women, in fact, enjoyed a high status together with elderly men in early hierarchical gerontocracies. Nor were women the sole, or necessarily the most oppressed, victims of patriarchy. Sons of patriarchs were often confronted with unendurable demands and dealt with far more harshly on many occasions by their fathers than were their sisters or mothers. Indeed, the power of patriarchs was often shared quite openly with their eldest wives, as is evident in the commanding status of Sara in the Hebrew scriptures.

Finally it is by no means clear that women do not form hierarchies among themselves or that the abolition of male dominance will remove hierarchy as such. Hierarchy embraces vast areas of social life, today, such as bureaucracies, ethnic groups, nationalities, occupational classes, not to mention domestic life in all its aspects. It permeates the human unconscious in ways that often have no direct or even indirect relationship with women. It involves ways of looking at the natural world that in no way relate to the putative assignment of a presumably “instinctive” proclivity of women to be “caretakers” and “custodians” of life as such—a piece of crude biologism that defames woman’s role in the making of a very human-oriented culture and its artifacts like pottery, woven cloth, and agriculture. In any case, many priestesses, witches, and shamanesses seem to have stood — and still stand — in a distinctly hierarchical relationship with their female congregants and acolytes.

Toward a General Human Interest

The antirational, theistic, even antisecular impulses that are surfacing in the ecology and feminist movements raise an issue of very fundamental concern for our time. They are evidence of a sinister anti-Enlightenment tendency that is sweeping through much of contemporary Western society.

In America and Europe, nearly all the high ideals of the Enlightenment are being currently impugned: its goals of a rational society, its belief in progress, its high hopes for education, its demands for the human use of technology and science, its commitment to reason, and its ethical belief in humanity’s power to attain a materially and culturally viable world. Not only have dark atavisms replaced these goals among certain tendencies within the ecology and feminist movements; they have branched outward in the world at large in the form of a Yuppie nihilism called postmodernism, in a mystification of wilderness as “true reality” (to quote one vulgarian), in a sociobiology that festers with racism, and in a crude neo-Malthusianism that lends itself to indifference to human suffering.

The eighteenth century Enlightenment, to be sure, had serious limitations — limitations of which many of its foremost spokespersons were fully aware. But the Enlightenment left society and the centuries that followed it with heroic ideals and values. It brought the human mind from heaven down to earth, from the realm of the supernatural to the natural It fostered a clear-eyed secular view toward the dark mythic world that festered in feudalism, religion, and royal despotism. It challenged notions of political inequality, of aristocratic supremacy, of clerical hierarchy — a challenge that ultimately laid the basis for much of the antihierarchical sentiments of later generations.

Above all, the Enlightenment tried to formulate a general human interest over feudal parochialism and to establish the idea of a shared human nature that would rescue humanity as a whole from a folk-like, tribalistic, and nationalistic particularism.

The abuse of these ideals by industrial capitalism through the commodification and mechanization of the world does not negate these ideals by one whit Indeed, the Enlightenment reconnoitered areas of reason, science, and technology that are by no means reflected by the present-day forms these achievements have taken. Reason, to thinkers like Hegel, meant a dialectic of eductive development, a process that is best expressed by organic growth, not simply the deductive inferences we find in geometry and other branches of mathematics. Science, in the thinking of Leibnitz, centered on the the study of the qualitative dimensions of phenomena, not simply on Cartesian models of a machine-like mathematical world. Technology was studied by Diderot primarily from an artisanal viewpoint, with a keen eye for craft skills as well as mass production. Indeed, Fourier, the true heir of this Enlightenment tradition, was to give technology a strongly ecological bias and stress the crucial importance of natural processes in the satisfaction of material needs.

That capitalism warped these goals, reducing reason to a harsh industrial rationalism focused on efficiency rather than a high-minded intellectuality; that it used science to quantify the world and dualize thought and being; that it used technology to exploit nature, including human nature — all of these distortions have their roots in society and in ideologies that seek to dominate humanity as well as the natural world.

The trends that denigrate reason, science, and technology, today, are perhaps understandable reactions to the bourgeois distortions of the Enlightenment’s goals. They are understandable, too, in terms of the disempowerment that is felt by the individual in an era of ever-centralized and concentrated power in corporate and State hands, in the anonymity produced by urbanization, mass production, and mass consumption, and in the fragile condition of a human ego that is beset by incomprehensible and uncontrollable social forces.

But these trends, as understandable reactions, become profoundly reactionary when the substitutes they offer involve a dissolution of the general human interest advanced by the Enlightenment into gender parochialism, the substitution of a tribalistic folkdom for an emphatic humanism, and a “return to wilderness” for an ecological society.

They become crudely atavistic when they blame ecological dislocations on technics instead of the corporate and state institutions that employ them. And they retreat into the mythic darkness of a tribalistic past when they evoke a dread of the “outsider” — be it a male, an immigrant, or the member of a different ethnic group — as a threat to the integrity of the “insider’s” group.

That groups of people may have unique cultural identities—claims that are justifiable as long as they are truly cultural and not “biological” — is not in dispute, especially if we acknowledge that their strongest commitment is to humanity as a whole in a free society, not to a special portion of it. Ecology’s motifs of complementarity, mutualism, and nonhierarchical relationships are completely dishonored by evocations of a racial, gender-oriented, or national particularism. If the Enlightenment left us any single legacy that we might prize above all others, it is the belief that humanity in a free society must be conceived as a unity, a “one” that is bathed in the light of reason and empathy.

Rarely in history have we been called upon to make a stronger stand for this legacy than today, when the sludge of irrationality, mindless growth, centralized power, ecological dislocation, and mystical retreats into quietism threaten to overwhelm the human achievements of past times. Rarely before have we been called upon not only to contain this sludge but to push it back into the depths of a demonic history from which it emerged.

I have tried to show that Western history has not been a unilinear advance from one stage to another and from one “precondition” to another in an untroubled ascent to ever-greater control over a “blind,” “stingy,” and intractable “first nature.” Quite to the contrary: prehistory may have allowed for alternatives before the emergence of patricentric warrior societies—societies that might have seen a more benign social development than the one that formed our own history.

Possible alternatives were opened in the “age of cities,” before the nation-state foreclosed the opportunities opened by urban confederations with their humanly scaled communities, artisanal technologies, and sensitive balance between town and country. As recently as two centuries ago, in the “age of democratic revolutions,” the Western world with its mixed precapitalist society and economy seemed poised for an anarchic social dispensation.

Throughout, ever-expanding ideals of freedom based on the equality of unequals paralleled the more ancient “cry for justice” with its inequality of equals. To the extent that inherited custom was absorbed by a commandeering morality and both became part of a rational ethics, freedom began to develop a forward rather than a backward gaze and turn from a mere longing for a “golden age” to a fervent hope for a humanly created utopia.

The ideals of freedom became secular rather than heavenly, work-a-day rather than the fanciful bounty of nature or the largess of a privileged class. They became sensuous as well as intellectually sophisticated. Scientific and technological advances placed material security and the leisure time needed for a participatory democracy on the agenda of a radically new revolutionary project. From antinomies, or seemingly contradictory co-existent$ of these advances, particularly in the mixed economy that existed in Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, various choices were possible between city and nation, commonwealth and state, artisanal production and mass production.

Anarchism, which came fully into its own in the “age of revolutions,” stressed the importance of choice; Marxism stressed the inexorability of social laws. Anarchism remained sensitive to the spontaneity of social development, a spontaneity, to be sure, informed by consciousness and the need for a structured society. Marxism anchored itself deeply in an “embryonic” theory of society, a “science” based on “prerequisites” and “preconditions.” Tragically, Marxism virtually silenced all earlier revolutionary voices for more than a century and held history itself in the icy grip of a remarkably bourgeois theory of development based on the domination of nature and the centralization of power.

We have noted that capitalism has yet to fully define itself. No “last stage” exists, as far as we can see, anymore than such a “stage,” which was greeted with certainty by revolutionaries during the First World War and the Second, emerged in their time. If capitalism has any limits, they are neither internal, based on chronic crises, nor dependent upon the proletariat’s pursuit of its particularistic interests. Proletarian socialism, or the Old Left foundered on these myths and now lies in debris.

The success of the revolutionary project must now rest on the emergence of a general human interest that cuts across the particularistic interests of class, nationality, ethnicity, and gender. The New Left, nourished by dazzling advances in the technologies of the post—Wortd War II era and the gratification of the most trivial wants by unprecedented levels of production, thawed out the economistic grip of Marxism and returned the sixties, for a time, to the ethical, indeed sensuous, radicalism of the pre-Marxist era.

If a general interest can be reformulated today as a new libertarian agenda, it must be based on the most obvious limits capitalism faces: the ecological limits to growth imposed by the natural world. And if that general interest can be embodied in a nonhierarchical demand, it is the demand raised by women for a substantive equality of unequals — that is, the expansive ideal of freedom. The question we now face whether the ecological and feminist movements can live up to this storical challenge. That is whether these movements can be broadened into a sweeping social movement; indeed, into a libertarian New Left that will speak for a general human interest — or whether they will shatter into the particularized interests that center around reformist parliamentarism, mysticism and theism in their various forms, and gender chauvinism.

Finally, whatever may have been the prospect of achieving a free, ecological society in the past, there is not the remotest chance that it can be achieved today unless humanity is free to reject bourgeois notions of abundance precisely because abundance is available to all. We no longer live in a world that treasures gift-giving over accumulation and moral constraints that limit growth. Capitalism has warped the values of that earlier world to a point where only the prospect of abundance can eliminate insensate consumption and a sense of scarcity that exists among all underprivileged people. No general human interest can emerge when the “haves” constitute a standing reproach to the material denial of the “have-nots” and when those who are idle mock, by their very existence, the lifetime of toil imposed on working classes. Nor will a participatory democracy ever be achieved by society as a whole as long as a public life is available only to those who have the free time to participate in it.

Insofar as humanity could make decisive choices about the social direction it should follow, its choices have been largely bad ones. The result has been that humanity has generally been less than human. Rarely has it fulfilled what it could be, given its potentialities for thought, feeling, ethical judgments, and rational social arrangements.

The ideals of freedom are now in place, as I have noted, and they can be described with reasonable clarity and coherence. We are confronted with the need not simply to improve society or alter it; we are confronted with the need to remake it. The ecological crises we face and the social conflicts that have torn us apart and have made our century the bloodiest in history, can be resolved only if we clearly recognize that our problems go to the heart of a domineering civilization, not simply to a badly structured ensemble of social relations.

Our present civilization is nothing if it is not Janus-faced and riddled with ambiguity. We cannot simply denounce it as male-oriented, exploitative, and domineering without recognizing that it also freed us, at least in part, from the parochial bonds of tribalism and an abject obedience to superstition, which ultimately made us vulnerable to domination. By the same token, we cannot simply praise it for its growing universality, the extent to which it fostered individual autonomy, and the rational secularism it brought to human affairs without recognizing that these achievements were generally purchased at the cost of human enslavement, mass degradation, class rule, and the establishment of the State. Only a dialectic that combines searching critique with social creativity can disassemble the best materials from our shattered world and bring them to the service of remaking a new one.

I have stressed that our foremost need is to create a general human interest that can unify humanity as a whole. Minimally, this interest centers around the establishment of a harmonious balance with nature. Our viability as a species depends upon our future relationship with the natural world. This problem cannot be settled by the invention of new technologies that will supplant natural processes without making society more technocratic, more centralized, and ultimately completely totalitarian. For technology to replace the natural cycles that determine the ratio of atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen, to provide a substitute for the decomposing ozone layer that protects all life from lethal solar radiation, to substitute hydroponic solutions for soil — all of this, if it were possible, would require a highly disciplined system of social management that is radically incompatible with democracy and political participation by the people.

Such an overwhelming, indeed global, reality raises questions about the future of humanity on a scale that no historical period in die past has ever been compelled to face. The message raised by an “ecological technocracy,” if it can be called that, is for a degree of social coordination that beggars the most centralized despotisms of history. Even so, it remains very unclear that such an ecological technocracy can be achieved on scientific grounds, or that, in view of the delicate checks and balances involved, whether technological substitutes for natural processes can be so well adjusted that they will not be subject to catastrophic misjudgments.

If the life processes of the planet and those of our species are not to be administered by a totalitarian system, modern society must follow certain basic ecological precepts. I have argued in this book that the harmonizadon of nature cannot be achieved without the harmonization of human with human. This means that our very notion of what constitutes humanity must be clarified. If we remain merely conflicting class beings, genders, ethnic beings, and nationalities, it is obvious that any kind of harmony between human beings will be impossible. As members of classes, genders, ethnic groups, and nationalities, we will have narrowed our meaning of what it is to be human by means of particularistic interests that explicitly set us against each other.

Although ecology advances a message of diversity, it does so as unity in diversity. Ecological diversity, in addition, does not rest on conflict; it rests on differentiation, on the wholeness that is enhanced by the variety of its constituents. Socially, this view is expressed in the Greek ideal that the complete, many-sided person is the product of a complete, many-sided society. Class, gender, ethnic, and national interests are fearfully similar in their reduction of a widely expansive view of the world to a narrow one, of larger interests to smaller ones, of complementarity to conflict. To preach a message of reconciliation when class, gender, ethnic, and national interests are very real and objectively grounded in major conflicts, would be absurd, to be sure. Our Janus-faced civilization looks toward a long past that has seen mere differences in age, sex, and kinship reworked into domineering hierarchies, hierarchies into classes, and classes into state structures. The bases for conflicting interests in society must themselves be confronted and resolved in a revolutionary manner. The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labor, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need. Power, no less that material things, must be freed from the control of the elites; it must be redistributed in a form that renders its use participatory. Until these basic problems are resolved, there can be no development of a general interest that will formulate a policy to resolve the growing ecological crisis and the inadequacy of this society to deal with it.

The point I wish to make, however, is that no general interest of this kind can be achieved by the particularistic means that marked earlier revolutionary movements. The present ecological crisis is potentially capable of mobilizing a degree of public support and involvement that is more transclass and wider than any issue that humanity has faced in the past And with the passing of time, this crisis will become starker and more all-embracing than it is today. Its mystification by religious ideologists and corporate hirelings threatens to place the very future of the biosphere in the balance.

Nor can we ignore the recent history of the revolutionary project and the advances it scored over earlier ones. Past revolutions were largely struggles for justice, not for freedom. The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, so generously advanced by the French Revolution, foundered on the faulty definition of the terms themselves. I will not belabor the fact that the crassly particularistic interests of the bourgeoisie interpreted liberty to mean free trade; equality to mean the right to contract labor; and fraternity to mean the obedience on an emerging proletariat to capitalist supremacy. Hidden more deeply in this slogan of classical republicanism was the fact that liberty meant little more than the right of the ego to pursue its own self interest; equality, the principle of justice; fraternity, taken literally, a male-centered society of “brothers” however much some men exploited others.

Taken at face value, the slogans of the revolution never ascended to the domain of freedom. On whatever level we examine the revolution, it was a project to achieve an inequality of equals, not to achieve an equality of unequals. The tragically aborted Spanish Revolution of 1936–1937 tried to go beyond this limited project but it was isolated. Its most revolutionary elements — the anarchists — never gained the popular support they needed in the country as a whole to realize their richly emancipatory goals.

Capitalism has changed in the decades that followed the era of proletarian socialism. Its impact on society and nature is perhaps more devastating than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. The modern revolutionary project, initiated by the New Left of the sixties, with its call for a participatory democracy, has gone far beyond the level of the classical revolutions and their particularistic aims. The idea of “the People,” an illusory concept that informed the emergence of democratic movements in the eighteenth century just as society was beginning to differentiate itself into clearly definable classes, has now taken on a new meaning with the steady decomposition of traditional classes and with the emergence of transclass issues like ecology, feminism, and a sense of civic responsibility to neighborhoods and communities. Movements like the Greens in Germany, and possibly other countries, or various citizens’ initiative movements in a growing number of cities and towns are addressing larger human issues than increased wages and class conflicts at the point of production. With the rise of ecology, feminist, and citizens’ movements, new possibilities exist for generalizing the ideals of freedom, for giving them a broadly human and truly populist dimension.

To talk vaguely of “the People,” however, without examining the relationship of the ordinary citizen to populist-type goals, raises the danger of dealing with the kind of vague abstractions that characterized Marxism for more than a century. Over and beyond the need to share the earth, to distribute its fruits according to need, and to develop a general human interest that goes beyond the particularistic ones of the past, the revolutionary project must take its point of departure from a fundamental libertarian precept; every normal human being is competent to manage the affairs of society and, more specifically, the community in which he or she is a member.

This precept lays down a radical gantlet to Jacobin abstractions like “the People” and Marxist abstractions like “the Proletariat” by demanding that society must be existentially “peopled” by real, living beings who are free to control their own destinies and that of their society. It challenges parliamentarism as a surrogate for an authentic democracy with Rousseau’s classical observation:

Sovereignty, for the same reason as it makes it inalienable, cannot be represented. It lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void — is, in fact, not a law. The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. [21]

Whatever interpretation one may give to Rousseau’s “general will” and other formulations he advances, the statement’s basic thrust forms an imperishable and unnegotiable ideal of human freedom. It implies that no substantive democracy is possible and no concept of self-administration is meaningful unless the people convene in open, face-to-face assemblies to formulate policies for society. No policy, in effect, is democratically legitimate unless it has been proposed, discussed, and decided upon by the people directly — not through representatives or surrogates of any kind. The administration of these policies can be left to boards, commissions, or collectives of qualified, even elected, individuals who, under close public purview and with full accountability to policy-making assemblies, may execute the popular mandate.

This distinction between policy and administration — one which Marx failed to make in his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871 — is crucial. Popular assemblies are the minds of a free society; the administrators of their policies are the hands. The former can always recall the latter and end their operations, depending upon need, dissatisfaction and the like. The latter merely effects what the former decides and remains totally dependent upon their will.

This crucial distinction makes the popular assembly’s existence a largely functional issue in democratic procedures, not a structural one. In principle, assemblies can function under any demographic and urban conditions — on the block, neighborhood, or town levels. They have only to be coordinated by appropriately confederal sinews to become forms of self-governance. Given modern logistical conditions, there can be no emergency so great that assemblies cannot be rapidly convened to make important policy decisions by a majority vote and die appropriate boards convened to execute these decisions—irrespective of a community’s size or the complexity of its problems. Experts will always be available to offer their solutions, hopefully competing ones that will foster discussion, to the more specialized problems a community may face.

Nor can populations be so large or the number of assemblies so numerous that they cannot be coordinated in a manner that perpetuates their integrity as face-to-face policy-making bodies. Delegates to town, city, and regional bodies, can be regarded simply as the walking mandates of the local assemblies. Furthermore, we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that consensus can always be attained in large groups. A minority does not have the right to abort a decision of a majority — be it within an assembly or between assemblies. If Rousseau’s “general will” could, in fact, be transformed into a generalized will — that is to say, if it could be supposed that rational people who have no interests apart from those of the community at large will make shared rational decisions about transparently clear issues — it may well be that consensus can be achieved.

But by no means is this goal even desirable. It is a hidden tyranny based on unthinking custom, in fact, an atavistic throwback to times when public opinion was as coercive as outright violence (which, at least, existed in the open). A tyranny of consensus, like the famous “tyranny of structurelessness,” demeans a free society. It tends to subvert individuality in the name of community and dissent in the name of solidarity. Neither true community nor solidarity are fostered when the individual’s development is aborted by public disapproval and his or her deviant ideas are “normalized” by the pressure of public opinion.

Underlying the development of self-managing, face-to-face assemblies are a number of ethical, even educational problems that enter into developing competent individuals. The assembly reached its most sophisticated form of development in the Athenian polis, where, contrary to current criticisms of the Hellenic city as “patriarchal,” most ancients viewed it as a huge “mobocracy.” It retained this pejorative reputation well into modern times. That radicals in the twentieth century, who view it from the hindsight of more than two thousand years, can denounce it as a “tyranny” that oppressed women, slaves, and resident aliens, is not without a certain irony. Given the more morbid abuses of the ancient world, which was drenched in patriarchy, slavery, and despotism, the Athenian democracy stands out like a beacon of light. The view that Western democracy can be dismissed simply as a “male” tradition and that we should return to “tribal” traditions, whatever these may be, is atavistic to the core. In the polis, the Janus-faced nature of Western civilization — the East offers no notable improvements upon it, I may add — actually exhibits its better profile in the history of freedom.

All of this raises the question of what constitutes the ethical basis of the assembly and its time-honored standards of competence. The first was the ideal of solidarity or friendship (philia), an ideal in which loyalty to the community was given flesh and blood by intimate relationships between its members. A lived, vital, and deeply felt consociation existed among many members of the Athenian polis, in the guilds of the medieval towns, and among an endless network of small societies in the towns and cities of the precapitalist world. The Greek symposium, in which knots of friends gathered to dine, drink, and discuss, was matched in part by the rich neighborhood cafe life of French, Spanish, and Italian cities. The community was made up, in a sense, of smaller “communes,” The counterculture of the sixties turned this literally into communal forms of living. The ideal of a Commune of communes was openly advanced in 1871 in the revolutionary proclamations of the Paris Commune during its brief lifespan. Popular societies clustered around the Parisian sections of 1793 and provided ways of associating that made the revolution an intimate exercise in civic affinity.

Still another ethical ideal was the importance that was attached to roundedness. The Greeks mistrusted specialists, despite Plato’s favorable view of them, because excessive expertize seemed to involve a warping of one’s character around a particular interest or skill. To know a little bit about everything and not too much about one thing was evidence of a rounded person who, as need arose, could form an intelligent view of an issue and advance a good case for his judgments. This emphasis on amateurism, an emphasis that did not prevent the Greeks from founding Western philosophy, science, mathematics, and drama, was to be an abiding ideal for centuries after the polis disappeared into history.

Roundedness also implied a measure of self-sufficiency. To be one’s “own man” meant not only that one was competent but also independent. In earlier times, this rounded person was expected to be free of a client position. A special interest might render an individual vulnerable to and dependent upon the wishes of a master. The individual who could perform many different tasks, it was supposed, could understand a wide array of problems. If he was independent materially, say, like a farmer who owned the land he worked, and could meet most of his needs by his own efforts and skills, he was presumably capable of forming an objective judgment, free of undue influence by the opinions of others. The Greeks believed in owning property not because they were acquisitive; indeed, to give generously to one’s friends and neighbors earned the highest esteem in Greek society. But a modest piece of land that could provide the farmer and his family with the basic means of life freed him from manipulation by landed aristocracies and merchants.

To give of one’s free time and services to the polis was seen as another ideal that often led to agonistic efforts to gain public recognition, a Greek character trait that has been sharply reproached but often grossly misunderstood. The zeal with which the Greeks served their communities, in fact, was idealized as a form of civic dedication up to our own time. Civic recognition often required considerable personal sacrifices, and the zeal exhibited by leading Greeks stemmed from a desire for social immortality. Indeed, to destroy a Greek city meant to efface the memory and immortality of its more heroic figures as well as to destroy the very identity of its inhabitants.

If civic zealotry threatened to upset the relatively delicate balances of a class society that could easily plunge into insurrection, the Greeks formulated an ideal of “limit” — the “golden mean” which meant “nothing in excess”—that was to be carried deeply into Western ethics. The notion of limit was to appear in medieval towns and cities and even well into the Renaissance. Beneath the clamor that marked the Italian city-states of the late Middle Ages, there were unstated rules of civic behavior that placed constraints on excessive zealotry and fractious behavior, despite the ultimate emergence of oligarchies and one-man rule.

As M.I. Finley has pointed out, the Athenian polis — and, I would contend, many democratic towns that followed it in time — essentially established a system of civic etiquette that kept excessive ambition under a measure of control. Medieval Italian cities, for example, created remarkable checks and balances to prevent one interest in the city from gaining too much ascendancy over another, a balance that the Greek polis had established earlier in antiquity. Self-restraint, dignity, courtesy, and a strong commitment to civic decorum were part of the psychological attributes that many precapitalist cities, structured around assemblies, actually translated into institutions in a system of checks that fostered harmony, however tentative they may seem. Power was often divided and subdivided so that countervailing forces existed to prevent the ascendancy of any one institution, and the interests it represented, from becoming excessively powerful.

Taken together, this ethical ensemble was personified in a new kind of individual — a citizen. The citizen was neither a tribal person nor the member of a kin group, although strong family relationships existed in the precapitalist cities of the past and kinship ties played a major role in political conflicts. But to be a citizen in the traditional sense, one had to be more than a kinsman. The primary allegiances of the citizen were to the polis, town, or city — at least, before the nation-state turned citizenship into a parody of its original meaning.

Citizens, in turn, were created through training, a process of character-building that the Greeks called paidaia. which is not quite properly translated by the word “education.” One had to learn civic responsibility, to reason out one’s views with scrupulous care, to confront opposing arguments with clarity, and, hopefully, to advance tested principles that exhibited high ethical standards. Additionally, a citizen was expected to learn martial arts, to work together with fellow citizens in militia detachments; indeed, in many cases, to learn how to command properly during military engagements.

The citizen of a precapitalist democratic city, in short, was not the “constituent” of a parliamentary representative, or a mere “taxpayer,” to use modern civic jargon. He was, in the best of cases, a knowledgeable, civically dedicated, active, and, above all, self-governing being who exercised considerable inner discipline and made the welfare of his community — its general interest — his primary interest to the exclusion of his own self-interest.

This constellation of ethical precepts formed a unified whole, without which civic democracy and popular assemblies would not have been possible. Rousseau’s remarkable statement that citizens make cities, not merely buildings, cannot be restated often enough. Without citizens, viewed in this classical sense, cities were mere clusters of buildings which tended to degenerate into oligarchies or become absorbed into nation-states.

Libertarian Municipalism

From the foregoing, it should be obvious that the assembly of the people found its authentic home in the city — and in cities of a very special kind. The Janus-faced character of Western civilization obliges us to sift the unsavory features of the city — the legitimation it gave to the private ownership of property, classes, patricentricity, and the State — from the great civilized advances it scored as a new terrain for a universal humanitas. Today, at a time when anti-city biases have cast the city in an ugly social light, it may be well to emphasize the major advance the city scored in providing a shared domain for people of different ethnic backgrounds, occupations, and status groups. “Civilization,” a term that is derived from the Latin word for city, was not simply a “slaughter bench,” to use Hegel’s dramatic phrase. It was literally Janus-faced (as Hegel only too well appreciated) in its look toward the prospect of a common humanity as well as in its look toward barbarities that were to be justified in the name of progress and cultural advances.

Participatory democracies and popular assemblies, to be sure, originated in tribal and village communities. But they did not become self-conscious forms of consociation which people regarded as ends in themselves until the city emerged. There is some evidence that they existed as early as Sumerian times in the cities that appeared in Mesopotamia. But it was the Greek polis and later medieval towns that made these democracies and assemblies acutely aware of the fact that they were a way of life, not simply a technique for managing society, and that they should be constructed along ethical and rational lines that met certain ideals of justice and the good life, not merely institutions sanctified by custom. Cities comprised a decisive step forward in social life and, for all their limitations, gave us works like Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, works that have been an abiding presence in the Western imagination for centuries.

The self-reflective nature of the city turned it into a remarkably unique and creative human institution. To Aristotle, the city — more properly, the polis, which was a highly self-conscious ethical entity — had to conform to certain structural standards if it was to fulfill its ethical functions. It had to be large enough so that its citizens could meet most of their material needs, yet not so large that they were unable to gain a familiarity with each other and make policy decisions in open, face-to-face discourse. Structure and ethics, function and ideals of freedom, were inseparable from each other. For all his faults, Aristotle tried — as did so many of the Athenians among whom he lived — to bring form into the service of content He opposed any separation of the two, even in detailed discussions of city planning.

This approach became a cornerstone of the Western democratic tradition. It may have existed in the minds of figures like the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, Cola di Rienzi in medieval Rome, and Etienne Marcel in the Paris of the fourteenth century; men who led the urban masses in dramatic revolts to achieve city confederations and establish civic democracies. It was raised by Spanish cities that revolted against centralized rule in the sixteenth century and, again, in the French Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. It exists in our own time in New England town meetings, many of which still vigilantly guard their localist rights.

The city, in effect, opened a new terrain for social management that involves neither the use of state institutions — that is, statecraft—nor a strictly private domain that involves one’s home, workplace, schools, religious institutions, and circles of friends. Taken literally from the Greek term in which it originates, the city created politics, a very unique world in which citizens gather together to rationally discuss their problems as a community and administer their affairs in a face-to-face manner.

Whether a municipality can be administered by all its citizens in a single assembly or has to be subdivided into several confederally related assemblies depends very much upon its size, hence Aristotle’s injunction that a polis should not be so large that one could not hear a cry for help from the city walls. Although assemblies can function as networks on a block, neighborhood, or town level, they fulfill traditional ideals of civic democracy when the cities in which they arc located are decentralized. The anarchic vision of decentralized communities, united in free confederations or networks for coordinating the communities of a region, reflects the traditional ideals of a participatory democracy in a modern radical context.

Today, in the prevailing social condition that casts a dark shadow over the future of the present era, we are losing sight of the very idea of a city, of citizenship, and of politics as a domain of municipal self-management. Cities are being confused with huge urban belts that should property be described as a seemingly unending process of “urbanization ” Vast stretches of concrete and high-rise buildings are engulfing the definable, humanly scaled entities we once called cities and they are sweeping in the countryside as well.

By the same token, citizens are shriveling to the status of anonymous “constituents” of elected representatives. Their principal function is to pay taxes, to do the onerous work-a-day job of maintaining the present society, to reproduce, and to decorously withdraw from all political life — a domain that is reserved for the State and its officialdom. Our warped discourse blurs the crucial distinctions between citification and urbanization, citizens and constituents, politics and statecraft.

The city, as a humanly scaled, self-governing municipality freely and con federally associated with other humanly scaled, self-governing municipalities, is dissolving into huge urban belts. The citizen, as an active formulator of policies, is being reduced to a passive taxpayer, the mere recipient of public services provided by bureaucratic agencies. Politics is being degraded into statecraft, an art practiced by cynical, professional manipulators of power.

The entire ensemble is managed like a business. It is regarded as successful if it earns fiscal “surpluses” and provides needed services, or, it is a failure if it is burdened by fiscal “deficits” and operates inefficiently. The ethical content of city life as an arena for the inculcation of civic virtue, democratic ideals, and social responsibility is simply erased and its place is taken by an entrepreneurial mentality that emphasizes income, expenses, growth, and employment.

At the same time, power is thoroughly bureaucratized, centralized, and concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The power that should be claimed by the people is preempted by the State and by semi-monopolistic economic entities. Democracy, far from acquiring a participatory character, becomes purely formal in character. Indeed, the New Left was an expression of a deeply felt desire for reempowerment that has continued unabatedly since the sixties — a desire to regain citizenship, to end the degradation of politics into statecraft: the need to revive public life.

These issues still remain at the top of the present social agenda. The rise of citizens initiative movements in Germany, of municipal movements in the United States, of attempts to revive civic ideals in various European countries, including France’s recovery of words like decentralization, however much this term is honored in the breach, are evidence of popular attempts to achieve reempowerment over social life. In many places, the State, with its extensive cutbacks of social services, has left a vacuum that cities are obliged to Fill merely to remain functional. Transportation, housing, and welfare needs are being met more by localities than they have been in the past. Urban residents, obliged to fend for themselves, are learning the arts of teamwork and cooperation.

A gap, ideological as well as practical, is opening up between nation-state, which is becoming more anonymous, bureaucratic, remote, and the municipality, which is the one domain outside personal life that the individual must deal with on a very direct basis.

We do not go to the nation-state to find suitable schools for our children for jobs, culture, and decent places in which to live. Like it or not, the ill the most immediate environment which we encounter and which we are obliged to deal, beyond the sphere of family and in order to satisfy our needs as social beings.

Potentially, the sense of disempowerment that has become the popular malaise of our time could also become a source of dual power in the great nation-states of the Western world. Conscious movements have yet to arise that search for ways to get from a centralized, statist “here” to a civically decentralized and confederal “there,” movements that can raise the demand for communal confederation as a popular alternative to the modern-day centralization of power. Unless we try — vainly, I believe — to revive myths of proletarian insurrections, of a feeble armed confrontation with the vast nuclear armamentarium of the modern nation-state, we are obliged to seek out counter-institutions that stand opposed to the power of the nation-state.

Communes, cooperatives, and various vocational collectives, to be sure, may be excellent schools for teaching people how to administer self-managed enterprises. But they are usually marginal projects, often very short-lived, and more useful as examples than as working institutions. No cooperative will ever replace a giant supermarket chain merely by competing with it, however much good will it may earn, nor will a Proudhonian “People’s Bank” replace a major Financial institution, however many supporters it may have.

We have other things we can learn from a Proudhon, who saw in the municipality an important arena of popular activity. I do not hesitate to use the word politics, here, if it is understood in its Hellenic meaning as the management of the community or polis by popular assemblies, not as statecraft and parliamentary activity. Every society contains vestiges of the past—of earlier, often more libertarian institutions that have been incorporated into present ones. The American Republic, for example, still has elements of a democracy like the town meeting, which Tocqueville described in his book, Democracy in America. Italian cities still have vital neighborhoods that can form a basis for new community relationships. French towns still retain mainly humanly scaled features that can be organized into new political entities. Such observations can be made about communities throughout the world — communities whose solidarity opens the prospect of a new politics based on libertarian municipalism — which eventually could become a counterpower to the nation-state.

Let me emphasize that this approach presupposes that we are talking about a movement, not isolated instances where people in a single community assume control of their municipality and restructure it on the basis of neighborhood assemblies. It presupposes that a movement will exist that alters one community after another and establishes a system of confederal relationships between municipalities; one that will form a regional power in its own right. How far we can take this libertarian municipalist approach is impossible to judge without knowing in detail the lived traditions of a region, the civic resources it possesses, and the problems it faces. Given this writer’s experience with the issue of local control in the United States, this much can be said: no demand, when it has been raised, has been met with greater resistance by the State power. The nation-state knows, far better than its opponents in radical movements, how destabilizing to its authority demands for local control can be.

Yet the idea of libertarian municipalism has a pedigree that dates back to the American and French revolutions and to the Paris Commune, in which confederalism was a viable proposal to large masses of people. Dramatic as the changes have been since that time, there is no reason in principle to doubt why libertarian municipalism cannot be raised today, when squatters’ movements, neighborhood organizations, and community welfare groups have risen and fallen — only to rise again as evidence of a chronic impulse that the nation-state has never been able to exorcize.

Decentralization and Technology

Social ecology has added a unique, indeed urgent, dimension to the need for a libertarian municipalist movement and the issues it faces. The need to rescale communities to fit the natural carrying capacity of the regions in which they are located and to create a new balance between town and country — all traditional demands of the great utopian and anarchist thinkers of the last century — have become ecological imperatives today. Not only are they the seemingly utopian visions of yester-year, the dreams and desiderata of lonely thinkers; they have compelling necessities if we are to remain a viable species and live in harmony with a complex natural world that is threatened with destruction. Ecology, in effect, has essentially advanced the sharp alternatives: either we will turn to seemingly “utopian” solutions based on decentralization, a new equilibrium with nature, and the harmonization of social relations, or we face the very real subversion of the material and natural basis for human life on the planet. {2}

Urbanization threatens to efface not only the city but the countryside. The famous contradiction between town and country which figured so significantly in the history of social thought has now become meaningless. This contradiction is now being effaced by the spread of concrete over irredeemable areas of agricultural land and historically unique agrarian communities. The homogenization of rural cultures by the mass media, urban lifestyles, and an all-pervasive consumerist mentality threatens to destroy not only regionally unique and colorful lifeways; it is totally degrading the natural landscape. What argibusiness has not already poisoned with its pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and heavy machines that compact the soil, acid rain and socially induced climatic changes are destroying in the form of deforestation and aridity. The urbanization of the planet is simplifying complex ecosystems, eliminating soil that was in the making for ages, reducing wilderness to fragile “reserves,” and, whether directly or indirectly, profoundly altering regional climatic zones for the worst.

The technology we have inherited from earlier industrial revolutions, the insensate use of private motor vehicles, the concentration of massive industrial facilities near waterways, the massive use of fossil and nuclear fuels, and an economic system whose law of life is growth all are producing in only a few decades a degree of environmental degradation that human habitation did not produce from its inception. Nearly all our waterways are odious sewers. “Dead seas” have been found in oceanic waters that extend over hundreds of miles in once thriving aquatic areas. I do not have to elaborate on this dark litany of widespread, possibly deadly, wounds that are being inflicted on every part of the planet. It is only too well-known what is being done to our atmosphere, to the ozone layer that protects life on the planet, even to more remote areas of the globe like the Arctic and, more recently, Antarctica, rain forests and, of course, temperate forests.

Our ultimate survival on the planet, not only our commitment to live fully human lives and fulfill our more libertarian visions, dictates that we re-assess our notions of urbanism and the relationship of cities to the ecological substrate. It also dictates that we re-assess our technologies and the goods they produce, indeed, our entire view toward nature.

We need smaller cities not only to realize cherished ideas of freedom but also to meet the most elementary needs to live in some kind of balance with nature. Giant cities, more precisely, sprawling urban belts, not only make for cultural homogeneity, individual anonymity, and centralized power, they place an impossible burden on local water resources, the air we breathe, and all the natural features of the areas which they occupy. Congestion, noise, and the stresses introduced by modern urban living arc becoming increasingly intolerable, psychically as well as physically. Cities which historically served to bring people of diverse background together, and made for communal solidarity, are now atomizing them. The city is the place in which to hide, as it were, not to seek human propinquity. Fear tends to replace sociality, rudeness eats away at solidarity, the herding of people into overcrowded dwellings, means of transportation, offices, and shopping centers subverts their sense of individuality and fosters indifference to the overall human condition.

Decentralization of large cities into humanly scaled communities is neither a romantic mystification of a nature-loving soloist nor is it a remote anarchic ideal. It has become indispensable to an ecologically sound society. What is now at stake in these seemingly “utopian” demands is a choice between a rapidly degrading environment and a society that will live in balance with nature in a viable and on a sustainable basis.

The same can be said for reconsidering the technological basis of modern society. Production can no longer be seen as a source of profit and the realization of one’s self-interest. The finished goods human beings need to maintain their very lives as well as their cultural and physical well-being, are more hallowed than the mystified fetishes that have been used by various religions and superstitious cults to dazzle them. Bread, if you please, is more “sacred” than a priestly benediction; everyday clothing is more “holy” than clerical vestments; personal dwellings are more spiritually meaningful than churches and temples; the good life on earth is more sanctifying than the promised one in heaven. The means of life must be taken for what they literally are: means without which life is impossible. To deny them to people is more than “theft” (to use Proudhon’s choice word for property); it is outright homicide.

No one has a right to own property on which the lives of others depend, — either morally, socially, or ecologically. Nor does anyone have a right to design, employ, or impose privately owned technological equipment on society that damages human health and the health of the planet.

Here, ecology completely dovetails with society to yield a social ecology that emphasizes the close interconnection between ecological social problems. Technology — the kind society uses to maintain human planetary life and the kind that undermines both — is one of the social values and ecological values. At a time of sweeping ecological degradation, we can no longer retain techniques that wantonly damage human beings and the planet alike — and it is hard to think that damage can be inflicted on the one without being inflicted on the other.

A major tragedy of our times is that we no longer look at technics as an ethical relationship, Greek thought maintained that to produce an object of high quality and artistry was a moral calling that involved a special relationship between an artisan and the object he or she produced. Indeed, to many tribal peoples, to craft a thing was to actualize the raw material’s potentialities, to give soapstone, marble. bronze, and other materials, a “voice,” as it were, an expression that realized its latent capacity for form.

Capitalism eliminated this outlook completely. Indeed, it severed the relationship of the producer to the consumer, eliminating any sense of ethical responsibility of the former to the latter, leaving all other ethical or moral responsibilities aside. If there was any moral dimension to capitalist production, it was the claim that self interest was guided by an “invisible hand” — the interplay of market forces — so that production for profit and personal gain would ultimately serve the “general good.”

But even this shabby apologia has all but disappeared today, abated greed, another example of the ethics of evil, has replaced any sense of the public good. A corporation is lauded simply because it is less greedy than another — not because its operations are intrinsically good. Although it is all too easy to blame on technics what is really the result of bourgeois interest, technics, when divested of any moral constraints can also become demonic under capitalism. A nuclear power plant, for example is intrinsically evil; it can have no justification for existence. That increased nuclear reactors will eventually turn the entire planet into a huge nuclear bomb if enough Chernobyl accidents occur — and with more plants, they cease to be a matter of mere accident and become one of probability — is no longer doubted by any informed person today.

Growing ecological dislocations are making what were once conventional industrial operations equally problematic. Agribusiness, at one time marginal to die family-type farm, has become so widespread in recent decades that its pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are becoming global problems. Smoke-belching installations and the wanton use of automobiles are changing the entire ecological balance of nature, particularly the earth’s atmosphere, for the worse. If one surveys the landscape of modern technology, it is not hard to see a profound need to alter it enormously. Not only ecological interests, but human self-interest requires that we move toward ecological technologies and render our technological interaction with nature creative rather than destructive.

Let me emphasize again that such a change cannot be made without doing the same for our interaction with each other and formulating a general interest that outweighs the particularized interests of hierarchy, class, gender, ethnic backgrounds, and the Stale. The precondition for a harmonious relationship with nature is social: a harmonious relationship between human and human. This involves the abolition of hierarchy in all its forms — psychological and cultural as well as social — and of classes, private property, and the State.

The move from “here to there” will not be a sudden explosion of change without a long period of intellectual and ethical preparation. The world has to be educated as fully as possible if people are to change their lives, not merely have it changed for them by self-anointed elites who will eventually become self-seeking oligarchies. Sensibility, ethics, ways of viewing reality, and selfhood have to be changed by educational means, by a politics of reasoned discourse, experimentation, and the expectation of repeated failures from which we have to learn, if humanity is to achieve the self-consciousness it needs to finally engage in self-management.

No longer can radical movements afford to plunge unthinkingly into action for its own sake. We have never been in greater need of theoretical insight and study than we are today, when political illiteracy has reached appalling proportions and action has become a fetish as an end in itself. We are also in dire need of organization—not the nihilistic chaos of self-indulgent egotists in which structure of any kind is decried as “elitist” and “centralist,” Patience, the hard work of responsible commitment in the day-to-day work of building a movement, is to be prized over the theatrics of prima donnas who are always willing to “die” on the barricades of a distant “revolution” but who are too high-minded to engage in the humdrum tasks of spreading ideas and maintaining an organization.

To move from “here to there” is a demanding process, not a dramatic gesture. It will always be marked by uncertainties, failures, digressions, and disputes before it finds its sense of direction. Nor is there any certainty that basic social change will succeed in one’s lifetime. Revolutionaries today must draw their inspiration from the high idealists of the past like the great Russian and French revolutionaries of the last century who had little hope that they would witness the great upheavals that confronted later generations but to which they contributed the example of their lives, dedication, and convictions. Revolutionary commitment is not only a calling that seeks to change the world; it is also an inward imperative to save one’s own identity and individuality from a corruptive society that degrades one’s very personality with the lure of cheap emoluments and the promise of status in a totally meaningless world.

A new politics must be created that eschews the snares of parliamentarism and the immediate gratification of a media-contrived “forum,” which is more self-aggrandizing than educational. Movements like the German Greens are already filled with self-serving stars who are undermining the integrity, ethical outlook, and elan of their more heroic days. New programs and a new politics must be structured around the immediate environment of the individual — his or her housing conditions, neighborhood problems, transportation facilities, economic conditions, pollution issues, and workplace conditions. Power must be steadily shifted to neighborhoods and municipalities in the form of community centers, cooperatives, occupational centers, and ultimately, citizens’ assemblies.

Success cannot be measured by the immediate and constant support a movement of this kind gains. Only a relatively small number of people will initially work with such a movement and only a relatively few are likely to participate in neighborhood assemblies and municipal confederations — except perhaps when very important issues emerge that command wide public attention. Old ideas and methods which have become routine in every day life die very slowly; new ones are likely to grow very slowly. Citizen initiatives’ groups may spring up suddenly with fervor and elan when a community is confronted with, say, the siting of a nuclear power plant in its midst or the discovery of a toxic dump in its environs. An ecologically oriented municipalist movement must never delude itself that such mass activities are necessarily lasting ones. They can fade away as quickly as they emerge. One can only hope that they establish a tradition that can be invoked in the future and that the popular education they provide has not been lost on the community at large.

At the same time, truly committed members of such a movement must advance with a vision of what society should be like in the long run. They must go very far in their goals so that others increasingly go far enough in their activities. Such a core of people must advance historic solutions as well as immediately practical ones. The present society makes all the rules of the game by which even the most well-intentioned rebels play. If this all-important fact is not clearly seen, morally debilitating compromises will, in fact, become the rule that will lead to an ethics of evil based on lesser evils that eventually yield the worst of evils. No radical movement, in effect, can lose sight of its ultimate vision of an ecological society without losing, bit by bit, all the constituents that give it its own identity.

This vision must be stated clearly so that it can never be compromised. The vagueness of socialist and Marxist ends has done irreparable damage in degrading these ends by the exigencies of a “pragmatic” politics and by manipulative compromises — ultimately, the surrender of a movement’s very reason for existing. A movement must give a visual character to its ideals so that it enters into the imagination of a new politics, not merely present its ideas in programmatic statements. Such attempts have been made with considerable success in the past by groups like People’s Architecture, which took the pains to replan entire neighborhoods in Berkeley, California, and visually demonstrate how they could become more habitable, communal, and esthetically attractive.

An Ecological Society

Today, we have a magnificent repertoire of new ideas, plans, technological designs, and working data that can give us a graphic picture of an ecological community and a participatory democracy. Valuable as these materials may be in demonstrating that we can finally build sustainable communities based on renewable resources, they should not be seen simply as new systems of engineering society into a balanced relationship with a given natural environment.

They also have far-reaching ethical implications that can only be ignored by fostering an eco-technocratic mentality toward so-called appropriate technologies, a term that is too ambiguous to be used in a larger ecological context of ideas. That organic gardening can meet our basic requirements for chemically untreated food, provide us with a superior inventory of nutrients, and improve our soil rather than destroy it are the conventional arguments for shifting from agribusiness to ecological forms of food cultivation. But organic farming does much more than this. It brings us into the cultivation of food, not merely its consumption. We enter into the food chain itself that has its beginnings in the soil, a chain of which we are a living component and play a transformative role. It brings us closer to the natural world as a whole from which we have been alienated. We grow part or all of our food and use our bodies artfully to plant, weed, and harvest crops. We engage in an ecological “ballet,” if you like, that greatly improves upon the current fad for jogging on asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks. As one occupation among many that the individual can practice in the course of a day (to follow Fourier’s advice), organic gardening enriches the diversity of our everyday lives, sharpens our natural sensibilities to growth and decay, and attunes us to natural rhythms. Hence, organic gardening, to take only one case in point, would be seen in an ecological society as more than the solution to our nutritional problems. It would become part of our entire being as socially, culturally, and biologically aware beings.

The same is true if we engage in aqua-culture, particularly in monitoring self-sustaining systems developed at the pioneering Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, where the very wastes of herbivorous fish were recycled by aquatic plants to provide food for the fish themselves, thus creating a fairly closed, self-sufficient ecological cycle in providing human communities with edible proteins. The use of solar power, a technology that has reached an extraordinarily high degree of sophistication and efficiency, can be regarded as ecological not only because it is based on a renewable energy resource, but also because it brings the sun, changing climatic conditions, indeed the heavens, as it were, into our everyday lives in a very palpable way. The same can be said for windpower, the presence of livestock in a community, mixed farming, composting techniques that recycle a community’s wastes into soil nutrients; indeed, an entire ecological ensemble or pattern in which one component is used to interact with others to produce a humanly modified ecosystem that meets human needs while enriching the natural ecosystem as a whole. {3}

An ecological society, structured around a confederal Commune of communes, each of which is shaped to conform with the ecosystem and bioregion in which it located, would deploy this ensemble of technologies in an artistic way. It would make use of local resources, many of which have been abandoned because of mass production techniques.

How would property and the control of property be dealt with in such a society? Historically, modern radicalism has emphasized nationalization of land and industry or workers’ control of these resources. A nationalized economy, as anarchists have been quick to point out, presupposes the existence of the State. This single fact would be enough to reject it outright. What is no less disquieting is that a nationalized economy is the breeding ground for parasitic economic bureaucracies that have left even the so-called socialist countries of the East in an economic, crisis-ridden limbo. We no longer have to question its operational validity on strictly theoretical grounds as a source of statism, even totalitarianism. Its own acolytes have been abandoning it, ironically, for a relatively “free-market” solution.

Workers’ control, long favored by syndicalist tendencies in opposition to nationalized economies, has serious limitations of its own. Except for Spain, where anarchist-influenced unions like the CNT maintained a tight grip on any wayward enterprises that might easily have turned into collective capitalist concerns, a collective enterprise is not necessarily a commune — nor is it necessarily communistic in its outlook. More than one workers’ controlled enterprise has functioned in a capitalistic manner, competing with like concerns for resources, customers, privileges, and even profits. Publicly owned, or workers’-controlled cooperatives all too often turn into oligarchic corporations, a trend widely experienced in the United States and Scandinavia. What singles out many of these enterprises is the fact that they become a particularistic interest, more or less benign. But they are no different in kind from capitalistic enterprises and are subjected to the same social pressures by the market in which they must function. This particularism tends increasingly to encroach on their higher ethical goals — generally, in the name of “efficiency,” the need to “grow” if they are to survive, and the overwhelming temptation to acquire larger earnings.

Libertarian municipalism advances a holistic approach to an ecologically oriented economy. Policies and concrete decisions that deal with agriculture and industrial production would be made by citizens in face-to-face assemblies—as citizens, not simply as workers, farmers, or professionals who, in any case, would themselves be involved in rotating productive activities, irrespective of their professional expertize. As citizens, they would function in such assemblies at their highest level — their human level — rather than as socially ghettoized beings. They would express their general human interests, not their particular status interests.

Instead of nationalizing and collectivizing land, factories, workshops, and distribution centers, an ecological community would municipalize its economy and join with other municipalities in integrating its resources into a regional confederal system. Land, factories, and workshops would be controlled by the popular assemblies of free communities, not by a nation-state or by worker-producers who might very well develop a proprietary interest in them. Everyone, in a sense, would function as a citizen, not as a self-interested ego, a class being, or pan of a particularized “collective.” The classical ideal of the rational citizen, engaged in a discursive, face-to-face relationship with other members of his or her community, would acquire economic underpinnings as well as pervade every aspect of public life. Such an individual, presumably free of a particularistic interest in a community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs, would give citizenship a broad, indeed unprecedented, material solidity that goes beyond the private ownership of property.

It is not too fanciful to suppose that an ecological society would ultimately consist of moderately sized municipalities, each a commune of smaller household communes or private dwellings that would be delicately attuned to the natural ecosystem in which it is located. The wisdom of living communally or individually is an issue that can only be left to decisions made by future generations, individual by individual, just as it is made today.

Communal intimacy would be consciously fostered. No municipality would be so far from another that it would not be within reasonable walking distance from its neighbors. Transportation would be organized around the collective use of vehicles, be they monorails, railroads, bicycles, automobiles, and the like, not single drivers who clutter huge highway systems with their largely empty vehicles.

Work would be rotated between town and country and between everyday tasks. Fourier’s ideal of a highly variegated workday might well be honored in apportioning the working day into gardening, the crafting of objects, reading, recitations, and a fair portion of time for manufacturing installations. Land would be used ecologically such that forests would grow in areas that are most suitable for aboreal flora and widely mixed food plants in areas that are most suitable for crops. Orchards and hedges would abound to provide niches for a wide diversity of life-forms and thereby remove the need for pesticides through a system of biological checks and balances. Still other areas would be set aside, perhaps more extensively than they are today, for wildlife. The physical use of the body would be fostered as part of a diversified work process and greater athleticism. Solar and wind power would be used extensively and wastes would be collected, composted, and recycled. Production would emphasize quality over quantity: homes, furnishings, utensil, and clothing would be made to last for years, in some cases, for generations. The entire municipal pattern I have described would be planned with a deep sensitivity for a given region to preserve its natural features as much as possible with a concern for nonhuman life-forms and the balance of nature.

Industrial installations, based on small, multipurpose machines, the latest innovations in humanly scaled technologies, the production of quality goods, and a minimal expenditure of energy, would be placed within regions to serve as many communities as possible without the mindless duplication of the same facilities and products that occurs in a market economy.

Let me state flatly that a high premium would be placed on labor-saving devices — be they computers or automatic machinery — that would free human beings from needless toil and give them unstructured leisure time for their self-cultivation as individuals and citizens. The recent emphasis of the ecology movement, particularly in the United States, on labor-intensive technologies, presumably to “save” energy by exhausting the working classes of society, is a scandalous, often self-indulgent, middle-class affectation. The salad of academics, students, professionals, and their like, who have expressed these views are often people who have never been obliged to do a day of onerous toil in their lives in, say, a foundry or on an automobile assembly line. Their own labor-intensive activities have generally been centered around their “hobbies,” which may include jogging, sports, and elevating hikes in national parks and forests. A few weeks during a hot summer in a steel foundry would quickly disabuse them of the virtues of labor-intensive industries and technologies.

Between a here that is totally irrational, wasteful, based on giant industrial and urban belts, a highly chemical agribusiness, centralized and bureaucratic power, a staggering armaments economy, massive pollution, and mindless labor on the one hand, and the ecological society I have tried to describe on the other, lies an indefinable zone of highly complex transitions, one that involves the development of a new sensibility as well as new politics. There is no substitute for the role of consciousness and the support of history to mediate this transition. No deus ex machina can be invoked to make the leap from “here to there,” nor should we desire one. What people cannot shape for themselves, they will never control. It can be taken away from them as readily as it is bestowed upon them.

Ultimately, every revolutionary project rests on the hope that the people will develop a new consciousness if they are exposed to thoughtful ideas that patently meet their needs and if objective reality — be it history, nature, or both—renders them susceptible to the need for basic social change. Without the objective circumstances that favor a new consciousness and the organized means to advance it publicly, there will be no long-range change or even the measured steps needed to achieve it. Every revolutionary project is, above all, an educational one. The rest must come from the real world in which people live and the changes that occur in it.

An educational process that does not retain contact with that real world, its traditions as well as everyday realities, will perform only a part of its task. Every people has its own libertarian background, to repeat a claim I made earlier, and its own libertarian dreams, however much they may be confused with media-generated propaganda and the images that distort them.

The “American Dream,” so much in fashion today, for example, has anarchistic components as well as bourgeois ones and has taken many different forms. One strand can be traced back to the revolutionary Puritans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish a quasi-communistic “New Jerusalem.” For all their failings, they produced coherent basically egalitarian communities which governed themselves in directly democratic town-meetings. Another “American Dream” was shaped by the southwest cowboy culture in which the New England domestic hearth was replaced by the lonely campfire. Its heroes were fiercely individualistic gun-slingers that are celebrated in Sergio Leone’s so-called spaghetti westerns such as the movie, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly “ Still another that emerged at the turn of the century was the impoverished immigrant “American Dream,” the myth that American streets are “paved of gold,” in short, a dream of unlimited material possibilities for betterment and the notion that “everything is possible” in the United States.

I have adduced these quasi-utopian visions, each uniquely national when one tries to ferret out a variety of “dreams” in European countries, to emphasize that in one way or another, the revolutionary project must make contact with these popular longings and find ways to rework them into the contemporary ideals of freedom. Anarchism is not a product of the labors of a genius who spent most of his life in the London Museum and delivered a socialist “science” to the world of his tinier Either it is a social product—sophisticated, to be sure, by able theorists, but one that stems from the deepest, most generous, and liberty loving aspirations of a people — or it is nothing. Such was the case with Spanish anarchism between the 1880s and the late 1930s or Italian and Russian anarchism before the rise of Mussolini and Stalin, when the writings of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta gave theoretical expression to deeply felt aspirations of oppressed people. Wherever anarchism took root, it did so because it literally became a voice of freedom for a yearning people and spoke in their language — notably, their most cherished ideals, most fervent hopes, and in the idiom of their specific tongues. It is this deeply popular attribute, its rootedness in the social life of a people and their communities, that has made anarchist ideas profoundly ecological in nature and that has made anarchist theorists the authentic radical initiators of ecological ideas in our own day.

Toward a Free Nature

Anarchism and social ecology — that is, eco-anarchism — must count on the probability that normal people have the untapped power to reason on a level that does not differ from that of humanity’s most brilliant individuals. Eco-anarchism must work with the supposition that humanity as a whole is highly distinctive. It occupies a very unique place in evolution, which, to be sure, does not justify the notion that it should, much less can, “dominate” nature. What makes human beings unique in contrast to all nonhuman forms of life is that they have extraordinary powers of conceptual thought, verbal communication structured around a formidable array of concepts, and sweeping powers to alter the natural world in ways that could be utterly destructive or magnificently creative.

Can we dismiss these remarkable powers as mere accidents or incidents in the evolution of life, indeed, of nature as a whole? There is no way to disprove Bertrand Russell’s famous lament that human consciousness is the mere accidental product of unforeseeable circumstances, a short-lived spark of light in a black, meaningless, and lifeless cosmos that emerged out of the nothingness of reality and must eventually disappear into it without leaving a trace. Perhaps — but every philosophical approach that raises the question of the “meaning” of humanity must be derived from unprovable presuppositions. In the last century, physics made the all-important presupposition that motion is an “attribute” of matter and proceeded to erect a highly sophisticated body of tenable ideas on this unprovable notion. The ability of these presuppositions to clarify reality may well have been the best “proof” physics needed to validate the role of presuppositions as such.

Modern ecology, specifically social ecology, is also in need of presuppositions if it is to become a coherent outlook that tries to explain humanity’s place in the natural world. A number of frivolous ecological theories have emerged that essentially deny humanity any unique place in nature, say, one that is different from the “intrinsic worth” of a snail. This view, as I have observed, has a name — “biocentricity” — and it advances the view that human beings are neither more nor less “worthy” than snails in the natural world (hence the myth of a “biocentric democracy”). In the natural scheme of things the two are merely “different.” That they are “different” is a rather trite fact, but one that tells us nothing whatever about the way they are different and the significance of that difference in the natural world.

We are thus faced with an important question. What is humanity’s place in nature? Looking back almost intuitively over the evolution of the universe, we can see — as no other animal can — an overall tendency of active, turbulent substance to develop from the simple to the complex, from the relatively homogeneous to the relatively heterogeneous, from the simple to the variegated and differentiated. The most striking attribute of substance — a term I believe we require to single out the dynamic and creative notion of a seemingly “dead,” static “matter” — is a process of development. By development, I do not mean a mere change of place or location; rather I refer to an unfolding of the latent potentialities of a phenomenon, the actualization of possibility and undeveloped form in the fullness of being. Within substance at its most primal level is a germinal unfolding over varying gradations of development in which each whole is a potentiality for a more differentiated whole, of tendency toward ever-greater subjectivity and flexibility. I speak, here, not of a preordained teleology or a predetermined end that marks the completion of an inexorable development. Rather, what I am trying to explore is an inherent striving or nisus and tendency toward greater differentiation, complexity, increasing subjectivity (which is not yet intellectuality until we encounter it in human beings), and physical flexibility.

These are presuppositions, and basic ones. But apparently, at a certain point, the tendency of the inorganic development toward complexity does reach a visible and clear threshold at which point life emerges. The dividing line between the two domains consists of a phenomenon called metabolism, in which proteins, formed from amino acids, developed the property of active self-maintenance and, with it,a vague sense of self-identity. Rocks and the running water that erodes them are passive. Water simply erodes and dissolves the mineral material in rocks.

By contrast, a mere amoeba is intensely active. It is literally occupied with being itself by maintaining a dynamic equilibrium between the building-up and breaking-down process that determines its existence. It is not simply passive in its relationship to its environment: it is an incipient self, an identifiable being, that is engaged in immanently preserving its identity. Indeed, it exhibits a dim sense of self-directiveness, the germ of what eventually appears as purposiveness, will, and intentionality when we examine more complex and more subjectively developed life-forms at later periods of evolution.

The further differentiation of unicellular organisms like the amoeba into multicellular ones like the sponge and eventually high complex ones like mammals yields an ever-greater specialization of organs and organ-systems. A point arrives in this process where we begin to clearly witness the emergence of nerve networks, autonomic nervous systems, layered brains, and finally, self-conscious beings over a long evolutionary process.

This is simply evidence of a trend in nature itself that reaches back to the interactivity of atoms to form complex molecules, amino acids, and proteins. Life acquires greater flexibility with warm-bloodedness, a development that renders specific life-forms more adaptable to different climates. Species interact with each other and their environment, moreover, to produce increasingly more diversified ecosystems, many of which open new avenues for evolutionary development and greater subjectivity that leads to elementary choices in following, even developing, new evolutionary pathways. Life, at these levels of complexity, begins to play an increasingly active role in its own evolution. It is not the mere passive object of “natural selection”; it participates in its evolution so that we are obliged to change our terminology from Darwin’s day and speak of “participatory evolution.”

If we survey the evolutionary unfolding of this ever-cumulative process — in which life-forms reabsorb early developments into their own development, be it early nerve networks that cover skin, nerve ganglia that form our spinal cord, “reptile” brains and the like — we can more than hypothesize that nature exhibits a tendency towards its own self-directive evolution, a drift toward a more conscious development in which choice, however dim, reveals that biotic evolution contains a potential for freedom. To speak of nature simply as a “realm of necessity” is to overlook its fecundity, trend toward diversity, matrix as a development of subjectivity, self-identity, rudimentary choice, and conscious intentionality, in short, a realm of potential freedom in which life, at least, emerges from its long evolution as the basis for genuine selfhood and self-directiveness. It is in the human species that we find this development fully actualized, at least within the limits created by social life and the application of reason to the conduct of human affairs. Humanity, in effect, becomes the potential voice of a nature rendered self-conscious and self-formative.

We can thus speak of prehuman nature as “first nature” in the sense that selfhood, consciousness, and the bases for freedom are still too dim and rudimentary to be regarded as fully self-directive. We may even encounter many approximations of self-consciousness, primarily in the primate world. But it is not until we reach humanity that this potentiality acquires a new social or “second nature” that lends itself to full realization: a product of evolution that has the fullness of mind, of extraordinary communicative abilities, of conscious association, and the ability to knowingly alter itself and the natural world. To deny these extraordinary human attributes which manifest themselves in real life, to submerge them in notions like a “biocentric democracy” that renders human beings and snails “equal” in terms of their “intrinsic worth” (whatever that phrase may mean) is simply frivolous.

Moreover — and very significantly—this “biocentric” approach is meant to dilute the most characteristic trait of humankind: its capacity to engage in purposeful activity. It denies humanity’s power to change the world and, in great part, to change itself. Instead, disarmed by a deadening gospel of passivity and receptivity, the trend of this “biocentric” mode of thinking is largely adaptive and basically noncritical. One hears such quietistic tenets from Taoism and from Western philosophies of “Being” that range from the static views of Parmeniedes up to, Martin Heidegger, whose outlook, in my view, can be easily brought into conformity with the ideas of National Socialism, a movement to which he belonged for more than a decade.

The great precepts of early radicals, from Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Michael Bakunin, and Karl Marx, among many others, to our own time, placed a crucial emphasis on the belief that humanity must be an active agent in the world. These precepts lie at the core of the revolutionary project and the ideals of freedom. That various schools of ecology have emerged that preach the need for a passive relationship between humanity and nature; indeed, for an abject obedience of human beings to the “laws of nature,” which presumably produce famines as “checks on population,” may well earn ecology a reputation even worse than that of economics. If economics once acquired a reputation as the “dismal science,” ecology, in its more reactionary forms, may well deserve the sobriquet of the “cruel science.”

Humanity, as I have noted, is still less than human. Given the present competitive, divided, and unfeeling society, it has a long way to go in order to fulfill its potentiality for reason, care, and sympathy. But that potentiality expresses itself in countless ways that have no equal in other life-forms and its actualization depends upon basic social changes that have yet to be made. The most heinous crime of certain ecologists in dealing with these social imperatives stems from the ease with which they have dropped the human social condition from the very discourse of their concerns. This treatment of people merely as a “species” brings all human beings into complicity with their own degradation by elites, classes, and the State, not only the degradation of nature by a grow-or-die society.

Viewed from the standpoint of what humanity can be, we have reason to speak of a relationship between human and human and between humanity and nature that will transcend the pristine “first nature” from which a social “second nature” emerges and will open the way to a radically new “free nature” in which an emancipated humanity will become the voice, indeed the expression, of a natural evolution rendered self-conscious, caring, and sympathetic to the pain, suffering, and incoherent aspects of an evolution left to its own, often wayward, unfolding. Nature, due to human rational intervention, will thence acquire the intentionality, power of developing more complex lifeforms, and capacity to differentiate itself. We encounter at this point the far-reaching questions of developing an ecological ethics. Human intervention into the natural world is not a sick aberration of evolution. Human beings can no more be separated from nature and their own animality than lemmings can thrive without their skins. What makes the human animal a product of natural evolution is not only its physical primate characteristics; it is also the extent to which humanity actualizes a deep-seated nisus in evolution toward self-consciousness and freedom. Herein lies the grounding for a truly objective ethics, conceived in terms of a philosophy of potentiality and actuality, not a mechanical cause-and-effect relationship or the causal agnosticism of Hume and his modern-day positivist followers.

Reality is always formative. It is not a mere “here” and “now” that exists no further than what we can perceive with our eyes and noses. Conceived as formative, reality is always a process of actualization of potentialities. It is no less “real” or “objective” in terms of what it could be as well as what it is at any given moment.

Humanity, conceived from this dialectical notion of causality, is more than it is today; it is also what it could be — and perhaps will be tomorrow or generations from now. Insofar as we encounter a tendency, even a potentiality, that could yield freedom and self-consciousness, freedom and self-consciousness are no less real (or, in Hegel’s more precise term, “actual”) in society than they are as potentialities in nature.

What also makes the human animal a product of nature is not only the voice it gives to nature, but the fact that it can intervene into nature precisely as a product of natural evolution; indeed, that it has been organized over eons of organic development to do precisely that, insofar as it has any place in the natural world. What is warped about the human condition is not that people actively intervene in nature and alter it, but that they intervene actively to destroy it because hum anity’s social development has been warped. To react mindlessly to the compelling fact that human social development is warped by demanding that human beings “minimize” their intervention in nature or perhaps even terminate it, as so many concerned ecologists have done, today, is as naive as the behavior of a child that furiously lucks the chair over which it has stumbled.

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution — social and natural — fully self-conscious and as free as possible in its ability to make evolution as rational as possible in meeting nonhuman and human needs. I am not advancing a view that approves of “natural engineering.” The natural world, as I have stressed repeatedly in earlier writings, is much too complex to be “controlled” by human ingenuity, science, and technology. My own anarchist proclivities have fostered in my thinking a love of spontaneity, be it in human behavior or in natural development. The imagination has a major place beside the rational; the intuitive, esthetic, and a sense of wonder for the marvelous, belong as much to the human spirit as does the intellectual. Natural evolution can not be denied its own spontaneity and fecundity any more than can social evolution.

But we cannot reject the place of rationality in life and the extent to which it is no less a product of natural development than it is of human development We stand at a crossroads of conflicting pathways: either we will surrender to a mindless irrationalism that mystifies social evolution with myths, deities, and a crude particularism in the name of gender or hidden elites — one that renders social evolution aimless, with grim results for human and nonhuman life alike — or we will regain the activism, that is denigrated today, and turn the world into an ever-broader domain of freedom and rationality. This entails a new form of rationality, a new technology, a new science, a new sensibility and self — and, above all, a truly libertarian society.