Based on my Introduction to, and some excerpts from, David Watson’s Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology (Detroit: Black & Red, 1996)
(a version of this was published as an article in the Fall 2006 issue of Green Horizon Magazine)
In his extensive writings on ecology and anarchism, Murray Bookchin tried to take us beyond Marx toward a more fundamental critique, a more holistic rationality, a deeper freedom. Under the watchword of “coherence,” Bookchin sought nothing less than the full explanation.
Murray’s work is often stimulating, suggesting interesting avenues of thought. During the 1960s and 1970s he gained a reputation for prescience with his recognition of the centrality of the ecological critique and his understanding that the New Left’s vision of a participatory democracy could only be realized under conditions of radical decentralization. In developing what he would call social ecology, Bookchin had come a long way from his early “Marxian intellectual training.”[1]
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Murray Bookchin came of age politically in New York City at the height of the Depression-era socialist ferment. Disdaining armchair radicalism, he became a Marxist militant and union organizer. Many of his cohort of New York-based radicals would “stick with the union” movement for life. But Bookchin’s intellectual development took an interesting turn during the 1950s. He began to examine issues that mainstream leftists tended to regard as peripheral, such as environmental degradation and cultural dissent. In 1952 he published “The Problem of Chemicals in Foods,” and was nearing completion of his first comprehensive ecological tract, Our Synthetic Environment, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring appeared in 1962.
As early as 1966-69, Bookchin’s work gained recognition within those currents of “The Movement” that were the first expressions of an emerging post-Marxist radicalism. His essays from that period were collected in an influential volume, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), excerpts of which immediately and repeatedly appeared throughout the thriving alternative press of that era. Bookchin moved ecology front and center at a time when most leftists continued to view it as merely a subset of the analysis of capital’s drive to minimize costs and exploit resources. His treatment of the subject was more sophisticated, and when activists (notably those associated with the American Clamshell Alliance and the emerging European Green Parties) acknowledged Bookchin’s theoretical influence, more serious attention was given to his writings, especially early essays such as “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964). Clearly inspired by the attention, Bookchin set out to codify his ideas into a new system. Standing on the shoulders of Hegel and Marx, he felt he could see all the way to the horizon, beyond Class to Hierarchy, beyond Exploitation to Domination, beyond Justice to Freedom, and beyond Historical Materialism to Dialectical Naturalism.
It is instructive to compare Bookchin’s elaboration of social ecology in his best-known work, The Ecology of Freedom, with other post-sixties efforts to extend the domain of theory.[2] Most of the latter did little but de-center the “class contradiction” by incorporating feminist, national-liberation, and/or ecological perspectives. Bookchin’s work, to his credit, was self-consciously part of a more profound transition of thought, from a “red” to a “green” analysis and critique.[3] Yet, despite his pivotal role in the initiatory phases of that process, it would turn out that he had opened doors through which he could not pass. It would be left to others to explore the full implications of the emerging ecological-communitarian radicalism.
During the period that Bookchin was writing The Ecology of Freedom, a group of activists publishing the Fifth Estate (FE) newspaper in Detroit was also addressing the question of a post-Marxist radicalism. Their attention was drawn to alternatives such as eco-anarchism (several pieces by Bookchin were reproduced in FE with positive commentary), council communism, and situationist theory.[4] When they took over and re-invigorated the failing weekly in 1975, the new-staff Fifth Estaters were prone to call themselves “libertarian communists.” But the group was exploring critiques from disparate sources and, as editorial board member Peter Werbe later wrote, “… we decided the dictum, ‘All isms are wasms’ was correct and began extending the anti-authoritarian critique beyond the obvious oppression of capitalism and the state to uncover deeper roots of the repression of the human spirit and the biosphere.”[5]
The idea of “liberating theory” is an entirely appropriate one for our time. But those who thought they could find a way forward through the “coherence” of Bookchin’s social ecology have either been disillusioned or have learned to tolerate a very uneven and idiosyncratic stream of work from an increasingly cantankerous pen. In Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology, David Watson expresses the hope that a viable, healthy, open social ecology may yet be realized. What’s clear is that it will have to emanate from a chastened perspective, one willing to “look with new/old eyes” right through the mystique of progress, in order to confront the complexity of the human heart and its mis-strivings for freedom within the experiment called civilization.[6]
Murray Bookchin’s wide-ranging work prompted important discussions in New Left, counterculture, and ecology circles about technology, the nature of rationality, and the prospects for social transformation. But David Watson demonstrates that Bookchin has been far too much the modernist to comprehend the implications of the “holocaust of holocausts” unfolding in our time.[7]
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Ascent, progress, liberation, utopia … excerpts from Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology
Abbreviations for books by Murray Bookchin cited below:
EF: The Ecology of Freedom (1982)
PSA: Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971)
RS: Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (1990)
SALA: Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995)
TES: Toward an Ecological Society (1980)
Given the marvels of evolution, Murray Bookchin says, “we cannot help but speculate about the existence of a broadly conceived telos and a latent subjectivity in substance itself that eventually yields mind and intellectuality.” (EF: 364) A problem is that his teleology of freedom turns out to be only a variant of the ideology of anthropocentric progress and human mastery. His idea of history capitulates to bourgeois and Marxist notions. He approves of Bakunin’s argument that the state was a “necessary evil” for progress. “There is an ancient recognition that certain evils could not easily be avoided in humanity’s ascent out of animality.” (RS: 89, 84)
Bookchin doesn’t deny that foraging societies may have toiled significantly less than people in so-called civilized societies—from peasants to office workers—but surmises that these early societies had to “answer to very strict material imperatives” in a world “often harsh and insecure, a world ruled by natural necessity.” It would be difficult to find a passage more charged with the Hobbesian lie in its ethnocentric dismissal of the cultures of aboriginal peoples—proof of Stanley Diamond’s remark that progress is “the basic apology for imperialism.” [8] Of course, as Marshall Sahlins has noted, “Scarcity is the judgment decreed by our own economy … Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and paleolithic tools, we judge his situation hopeless in advance.” [9] In fact, nature has for the most part been not stingy but profuse, which explains the prodigality and “laziness” of the people the Europeans encountered everywhere in their conquests. Civilizing missionaries, entrepreneurs, and others may not have approved of the perceived misuse of leisure among primary peoples in “less advanced” mythopoeic activities, but they had to wear thick ideological blinders to observe that their new wards both scrabbled desperately to eke out a bare existence and were lazy and spent their afternoons lying in hammocks.
Bookchin’s notion of social evolution is clearly linked to technological development and an expansion of production. Thus, we read that in the future revolutionary society “the most pressing task of technology will be to produce a surfeit of goods with a minimum of toil.” With “liberatory” technology, “Free communities would stand at the end of a cybernated assembly line with baskets to cart the goods home.” (PSA: 130, 133) His scenario fails to acknowledge what may be the greatest problem for a future sane society, that the industrial bribe of technology in the service of capitalist abundance has everywhere—even where its dubious benefits have proved the most meager—tended to undermine the capacities of human beings to resist it, to choose another way, another kind of plenitude. The recognition that less could be more might come from a radical rejection of the fetishism of artifactual abundance without having to go through Bookchin’s transitional periods of evil or surfeit.
His utopianism was rooted in the faith that the new technics created by modern industrial capitalism have brought about preconditions for a rational, free society. Just when Lewis Mumford was reaching his gloomiest conclusions about such, Bookchin appeared as its febrile enthusiast. [10] “For the first time in the long succession of centuries,” he proclaimed, “this century—and this one alone—has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to an entirely new level of the human experience.” (PSA: 10) “Utopia … once a mere dream in the preindustrial world, increasingly became a possibility with the development of modern technology.”
“Bourgeois society,” he insists, “if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want.” “It is easy to foresee a time when a rationally organized economy could automatically manufacture small ‘packaged’ factories without human labor … Machines would make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a highly industrialized economy.” With the new technology, “The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man.” Only bourgeois control of technology prevents its liberatory potential from being realized. (PSA: 33-4, 105, 17)
Bookchin reveals himself to be an acolyte of the mystique when he argues for advanced technology to protect nature from itself—for example, from “ice ages, land desiccation, or cosmic collisions with asteroids.” “If there is any truth to the theory that the great Mesozoic reptiles were extinguished by climatic changes that presumably followed the collision of an asteroid with the earth, the survival of existing mammals might well be just as precarious in the face of an equally meaningless natural catastrophe unless there is a conscious, ecologically-oriented-life-form that has the technological means to rescue them.” (RS: 38) Of course, it probably won’t be a “meaningless natural catastrophe” that extinguishes mammalian life, but a series of “meaningful” catastrophes set off by the very megatechnic civilization Bookchin portrays as nature’s great hope. His projection is a Rube Goldberg nightmare filled with lurid delusions of grandeur and scientific hubris.
Market capitalism has been everywhere the vehicle for a mass nuclear-cybernetic-petrochemical-communications-commodity grid being developed globally. Technicization is the armature of the economic-instrumental culture now extinguishing vast skeins in the fabric of life and transforming the planet into an enormous megalopolis, with its glittering high-tech havens and wasted, contaminated sacrifice zones.
Though Bookchin argues that Mumford’s later works do not “reveal any evidence that he relented” in his optimism toward technology and rejection of primitivism (SALA: 32), The Pentagon of Power (1970) clearly evinced an increasing ambivalence about technology’s promise and grave doubts about the realization of its rational potential. In the 1920s Mumford believed that technological development was linked to human progress, but after the Second World War he turned more pessimistic. His rejection of a technologically premised utopia, his defense of archaic societies and of the extra-rational side of the human personality, could be taken as signposts suggesting the path to a future social ecology, evidenced by his unequivocal call for “mechanical simplification and human amplification.” [11]
For those who have the courage to look clearly at life today, the claims of mass technics are already dramatically eroded by decades, even centuries of catastrophe, imperial plunder and war, the unprecedented dislocation of human communities and the ongoing eclipse of the human spirit. A new perspective now haunts the industrial capitalist necropolis. As inchoate and embryonic as it may now be, this “epistemological luddism,” as Langdon Winner has called it, “insists that the entire structure of the technological order be the subject of its critical inquiry.” [12] Bookchin’s great theoretical and personal tragedy was to become this sensibility’s vociferous opponent, as was apparent in his Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Oakland: AK Press, 1995). This book is little more than a tirade filled with misrepresentation and seething with rancor. The “unbridgeable chasm” follows a familiar pattern: like Bookchin’s denunciation of deep ecology, it is a bipolar götterdämmerung between social ecology and its enemies on which the fate of the cosmos depends. It follows that those whom Bookchin criticizes are never well-intentioned people with erroneous ideas; they are invariably misanthropic eco-brutes, reactionary nihilist yuppies, dishonest and fashionable postmodern obscurantists, opportunist academics and careerists, self-indulgent new age charlatans, accomplices of “neo-Heideggerian reaction,” and “lifestyle anarchists”! He blames the latter for “supplanting social action and revolutionary politics,” arguing that because a “growing ‘inwardness’ and narcissism of the yuppie generation have left their mark upon many avowed radicals, what passes for anarchism in America and increasingly in Europe is little more than an introspective personalism that denigrates responsible social commitment; an encounter group variously renamed a ‘collective’ or an ‘affinity-group’; a state of mind that arrogantly derides structure, organization, and public involvement; and a playground for juvenile antics.” (SALA: 9-10)
Bookchin is hardly the first to point out the problems of structurelessness and irresponsibility, but here he tars young anarchists as cynical in an age when so many other young people are trying to work their way into capital’s hierarchy. To attack the eccentricities and excesses of some anarchists today while ignoring the positive work this milieu has carried out in groups like Food Not Bombs, Seeds of Peace, Earth First!, various support groups for native peoples, etc. is nothing less than reprehensible.
Social ecological concerns can be found in the work of many writers. Murray Bookchin had a tendency to treat social ecology—as interpreted by him alone—as the last word on transformation to an ecological society. He reified the social ecology idea into a program allowing no difference, no unanswered questions,
I agree with Bookchin that an authentically radical social ecology beyond the “bare bones” of the scientific discipline (TES: 67), an ecological sensibility and ethical perspective that discerns the connections between natural and social history, between social crisis and ecological crisis, is essential in halting humanity’s present inertia toward apocalypse. I share his hunger for a social movement that can become the seed of the new society within the shell of the old, his insistence on the possibility of a different kind of organic reason. “We desperately need coherence,” he writes. “I do not mean dogma. I mean a real structure of ideas that places philosophy, anthropology, history, ethics, a new rationality, and utopian visions in the service of freedom.” Then he goes on, not to declare that such a structure will be developed collectively by human beings confronting our unique and precarious destiny, but that he is actually going to build it “in the pages that follow.” The state of coherence, c’est moi.
Notes
- Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), page 1.
- Michael Albert, et. al., Liberating Theory (Boston: South End Press, 1986); or Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Marxist Theory (New York: Praeger, 1981).
- “Ecological thinking, today, can provide the most important synthesis of ideas we have seen since the Enlightenment, two centuries ago” (Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future [Boston: South End Press, 1990], page 18).
- Through Fredy Perlman, who was living in Detroit at that time and contributing articles occasionally to the paper, the Fifth Estaters had direct contact back to the 1968 events in Paris. See Lorraine Perlman, Having Little, Being Much: A Chronicle of Fredy Perlman’s Fifty Years (Detroit: Black & Red, 1989).
- Peter Werbe, “History of the Fifth Estate, Part I: The Early Years,” in Fifth Estate, Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 1996), page 9.
- David Watson (George Bradford), “Civilization in Bulk” in Fifth Estate, Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 1991), page 10.
- Reference in David Watson (Lewis Cannon), “Earth Day? We Want a Festival of the Oppressed!” in Fifth Estate, Special Earth Day Issue (Spring 1990), page 1.
- Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive (originally 1974; New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1981), p. 38.
- Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972), p. 4.
- Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power and Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism both appeared in 1970-71.
- Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 286.
- Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978), pp. 325-35, 226.
