An Introduction to Social Ecology and Communalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eirik Eiglad,
January 14^th, 2006