Toward an Ecological Society

Dedication

Dedication For Debbie, my daughter (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Introduction These essays have been collated for a special purpose: to recover the very idea of a radical critique of social life. At the outset it should be clear that this is no abstract or insignificant task. Perhaps at no time in modern history has radical thought been in such grave peril of losing its very identity as a consistent critique of the existing social order and a coherent project for social reconstruction. Unless we are prepared to retreat to the sectarian politics of a by-gone era, it must be bluntly asserted that hardly any authentic revolutionary opposition exists in North America and Europe. Worse, the mere notion of what a revolutionary opposition consists of has itself become blurred and diluted to the point of sh... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 1 : The Power to Create, The Power...

The Power to Create, The Power to Destroy The power of this society to destroy has reached a scale unprecedented in the history of humanity — and this power is being used, almost systematically, to work an insensate havoc upon the entire world of life and its material bases. In nearly every region, air is being befouled, waterways polluted, soil washed away, the land desiccated, and wildlife destroyed. Coastal areas and even the depths of the sea are not immune to widespread pollution. More significantly in the long run, basic biological cycles such as the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle, upon which all living things (including humans) depend for the maintenance and renewal of life, are being distorted to the point of irreversible... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 2 : Toward an Ecological Society

Toward an Ecological Society The problem of environmental degradation seems to be falling into a curious focus. Despite massive public support for environmentalist measures-as witness the positive public response in recent state referendums on such issues — we are being warned about a backlash against “extremists” who are raising radical demands for arresting environmental degra- dat’on. Much of this “backlash” seems to be generated by industry and by the White House, where Mr. Nixon complacently assures us that “America is well on the way to winning the war against environmental degradation; well on the way to making our peace with nature.” This rhetoric is suspiciously familiar; presumabl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 3 : An Open Letter to the Ecologic...

An open letter to the Ecological Movement With the opening of the eighties, the ecology movement in both the United States and Europe is faced with a serious crisis. This crisis is literally one of its identity and goals, a crisis that painfully challenges the movement’s capacity to fulfill its rich promise of advancing alternatives to the domineering sensibility, the hierarchical political and economic institutions, and the manipulative strategies for social change that have produced the catastrophic split between humanity and nature. To speak bluntly: the coming decade may well determine whether the ecology movement will be reduced to a decorative appendage of an inherently diseased,anti-ecological society, a society riddled by ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 4 : Energy, “Ecotechnocracy” and E...

Energy, “Ecotechnocracy” and Ecology With the launching of the “energy crisis,” a new mystique has developed around the phrase “alternate energy.” In characteristic American fashion, this takes the form of ritualistic purification: guilt over the extravagant use of irreplacable energy resources, fear in response to the apocalyptic consequences of “shortages,” repentance over the afflictions resulting from waste, and the millenarian commitment to “new” techniques for achieving a stable energy system, i.e., “alternate energy.” The operational term here is “technique.” Whether one chooses to focus on Gerald Ford’s plan to afflict America with some 200 ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 5 : The Concept of Ecotechnologies...

The Concept of Ecotechnologies and Ecocommunities The expression “human habitat” contains a paradox that should be examined if it is not to lead us into a certain measure of confusion. Clearly any man-made structure, indeed, any artifact that figures in an environment is “human” and part of a “human habitat.” Viewed in terms of this all-embracing definition, a human habitat could include the scarring towers of New York City’s World Trade Center and the low-slung town houses of Boston’s Beacon Hill or the steel mills of Pittsburg and the artisan shops of Williamsburg. What is man-made in a habitat is “human,” strictly speaking, and many serious writers see ‘no discordancies... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 6 : Self-Management and the New Te...

Self-Management and the New Technology Self-management in all its rich and varied meanings has always been closely wedded to technical developments — often to an extent that has not received the explicit attention it deserves. By emphasizing the association between the two, I do not mean to advance a crude, reductionist theory of technological determinism. People are completely social beings. They develop values, institutions, and cultural relationships that either foster or inhibit the evolution of technics. It need hardly be emphasized that basic technical inventions such as the steam engine, so vital to capitalist, indeed to early industrial society were known to the Hellenistic world more than two millenia ago. That this major ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 6 : The Myth of City Planning

The Myth of City Planning City planning today lives within the tension of an historic contradiction: the idealization of urbanity as the summum bonum of social life and the crass realities of urban decay. In theory, at least, the city is revered as the authentic domain of culture, the strictly man-made social substance from which humanity fashions the essential achievements of consociation. In this tradition, the city is viewed as society distinguished from nature, territory from kinship, rationality from custom and myth the civic compact of individuals from the archaic group cemented by the blood oath. Ideally conceived, the city is the arena for a mode of human propinquity that is freed from the deadening grip of custom, irrationality,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 7 : Toward a Vision of the Urban F...

Toward a Vision of the Urban Future “Without testament,” observed Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future, “... without tradition — which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is — there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the biological cycle of creatures in it.”[57] If the city can be added to the lost treasures which Arendt laments in her deeply sensitive essays, this loss is due in no small measure to the modern stance of “contemporaneity,” a stance which virtually denies an urban past in its deadening claim to se... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 8 : Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology

Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology Marx’s work, perhaps the most remarkable project to demystify bourgeois social relations, has itself become the most subtle mystification of capitalism in our era. I refer not to any latent “positivism” in the Marxian corpus or to any retrospective recognition of its “historical limits.” A serious critique of Marxism must begin with its innermost nature as the most advanced product — indeed, the culmination — of the bourgeois Enlightenment. It will no longer suffice to see Marx’s work as the point of departure for a new social critique, to accept its “method” as valid despite the limited content it yielded in its day, to extoll its goals as liberat... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 9 : On Neo-Marxism, Bureaucracy, a...

On Neo-Marxism, Bureaucracy, and the Body Politic The historic failure of proletarian socialism, particularly its Marxian form, to provide a revolutionary theory and practice for our time has been followed by a highly abstract form of socialist theoretics that stands sharply at odds with the very notion of a revolutionary project — notably, a theory that is meant to yield a viable revolutionary practice. If this judgment seems harsh, it hardly conveys the extent to which this theoretics has become a considerable culture industry in its own right. The retreat of socialism from the factory to the academy — an astonishing phenomenon that cannot be justified by viewing “knowledge” as a technical force in society &mda... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 10 : Conclusion: Utopianism and Fut...

Conclusion: Utopianism and Futurism To the memory of our martyred dead, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti — let time never allow us to forget... To build the future from the rich potentialities of humanity, not from paralyzing limitations created by presentday social barbarism; to seek what is fresh, new, and emergent in the human condition, not what is stagnant, given, and regressive; to work within the realm of what should be, not what is — these alternatives separate two entirely antagonistic ways about thinking about the world. Truth, conceived as an evolving process of thought and reality, always appears on the margins of experience and practice, even as the center seems triumphant and almost all- pervasive. To be i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix

Appendix: Andre Gorz Rides Again — or Politics as Environmentalism Ecology and the ecological imbalances of our time open a sweeping social horizon that profoundly challenges every conventional theory in the ideological spectrum. The split between humanity and nature; the notion that man can dominate nature, a notion that derives from the domination of human by human; the role of the market economy in developing technologies that can undo the work of natural evolution in only a few generations; the absurdity of dealing with ecosystems and food webs in hierarchical terms — all of these issues and tenets raise immense possibilities for developing a radical social ecology that transcends orthodox Left ideologies at one extreme a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I would like to express my appreciation to Dimitri Rousso- poulos and Lucia Kowaluk for the contribution they have made to the preparation and publication of this book. My deep personal friendship and high regard for both of these splendid people should not color their many years of effort they have given to our shared libertarian ideals. Their own gifts aside, their’s is a virtue and dedication of nearly two decades of day-to-day work, of moral probity, and reliability that quietly and unobtrusively turn dreams into reality amid the clamor and oratorical flourishes of compatriots long gone. For this steadfastness, loyalty to our common ideas, and depth of perception, I thank them earnestly and warmly. Apart from t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Notes

[82] It is interesting to note that, as far back as the 19th century, Marx’s labor theory of value has been justly criticized for its schzoid nature. In Capital, Vol. I, the labor theory of value functions brilliantly as a qualitative analysis of the emergence and form of bourgeois social relations. In Capital, Vol. Ill, however, the theory functions quantitatively as a very dubious description of price formation, the distribution of profits between different enterprises and the so-called “tendency of the rate of profit to decline.” This “tendency” has never been clearly established in terms of Marx’s labor theory because it is largely unprovable. It becomes meaningless and mechanistic, in fact, when valu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

<< Last Entry in Anarchism Total Liberation – Zero War	Current Entry in Anarchism Toward an Ecological Society	Next Entry in Anarchism >> The Wage System
All Nearby Items in Anarchism Total Liberation – Zero War, by Anonymous Totality For Kids, The, by Raoul Vaneigem Tour Impressions, by Voltairine De Cleyre Toward a Communalist Approach, by Murray Bookchin Toward a New Kind of Political Practice, by Murray Bookchin Toward a non European Anarchism or Why a movement is the last thing that people of color need, by Aragorn! Toward a post-scarcity society: American perspective and the SDS, the, by Murray Bookchin Toward an Anarchist Policy on Syria, by First of May Anarchist Alliance Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, by David Graeber A Word, The, by Anonymous Toward an Ecological Society “Electoral Pursuits Have Veered Us Away”, by Adam Weaver “Dear Citizens, This Is Your Police”, by CrimethInc. “Each Crueler Than the Last”, by CrimethInc. “The Barricades Must Be Torn Down.” Moscow-Fascism in Spain, by Paul Mattick “Ceasefire” Is a Deadly Fraud, The, by CrimethInc. “Anti-Government Ideologues” and Coronavirus, by Iain McKay “Anarchism … is a living force within our life …” Anarchism, Education and Alternative Possibilities, by Abraham P. DeLeon Words of a Rebel, by Peter Kropotkin War!, by Peter Kropotkin Wage System, The, by Peter Kropotkin

Toward an Ecological Society

By Murray Bookchin

Entry 5074

Public

Author : Murray Bookchin

Chapters