Let's read: Social Ecology and Communalism (Bookchin)

[FreeWhisky]

Hello all:

I have decided to do a let's read of the collection of Murray Bookchin's essays Social Ecology and Communalism. (PDF Here). In this post I will give a little bit of background on Bookchin, give basic definitions of Social Ecology and Communalism and begin to orient these things in the broader left-libertarian movement.

Bookchin the person
Bookchin was steeped in the American Anarchist tradition, and for much of his career as a social and political theorist was one himself. The author of over two dozen books and many essays and an early environmentalist, Bookchin helped pioneer social ecology and communalism to better incorporate environmental considerations into left-libertarian discourse. On a personal level this is what drew my interest to doing a Let's read of his work, one of my biggest issues with "green" parties world-wide is how infested they are with shit liberalism. Additionally I have a desire to expand my knowledge of theory beyond the canonical anarchist and socialist texts.

In brief (to be explored in depth later), what is Social Ecology?

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

In brief (to be explored in depth later), what is Communalism?

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. This he called communalism.

Tentative Schedule & Outline
Generally speaking I will do my best to look at 10-12 page blocks of the text, with this material broken up into two posts, over the course of a week.

1. An Introduction to Social Ecology
   1. Introduction
   2. Nature and Society - Week 1 to here
   3. Social Hierarchy and Domination
   4. The Idea of Dominating Nature - Week 2 to here
   5. "Grow or Die"
   6. An Ecological Society - Week 3 to here
2. Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism
   1. Marxism, Capitalism, and the Public Sphere - Week 4 to here
   2. Society, Politics, and the State
   3. The Rise of the Public Domain - week 5 to here
   4. The Importance of Municipality and Confederation
   5. The Need for a New Politics - week 6 to here
3. The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction
   1. The Struggle for a Rational Society - week 7 to here
   2. The Relevance of Social Ecology
4. The Communalist Project
   1. Capitalism, Classes, and Hierarchy - week 8 to here
   2. Marxism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism
   3. Communalism and Municipal Libertarianism - week 9 to here
   4. The Need for Organization and Education
   5. Creating a New Left
5. After Bookchin - week 10 to here

Though of course the schedule will be adjusted as IRL demands.

 

[FreeWhisky]

With apologies for the delay, an update.

The present highly cooptative society is only too eager to find new means of commercial aggrandizement and to add ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations efforts.

To escape from this profit-oriented image of ecology, let us begin with some basics – namely, by asking what society and the natural world actually are. Among the many definitions of nature that have been formulated over time, the one that has the most affinity with social ecology is rather elusive and often difficult to grasp because understanding and articulating it requires a certain way of thinking – one that stands at odds with what is popularly called “linear thinking.” This “nonlinear” or organic way of thinking is developmental rather than analytical, or in more technical terms, it is dialectical rather than instrumental. It conceives the natural world as a developmental process, rather than the beautiful vistas we see from a mountaintop or images fixed on the backs of picture postcards. Such vistas and images of nonhuman nature are basically static and immobile.

To me this is particularly evident in national parks and nature preserves worldwide. This conception of a static and pristine unchanging natural landscape totally ignores the history of managed forest garden systems globally, but in particular in the Americas. For those of us not of European ancestry, to my mind, an important step of decolonizing the mind is to divorce ourselves from this understanding of the natural world as separate from humanity. And indeed I (and Bookchin) view it as a critical necessity for all leftists.

This vast drama of nonhuman nature is in every respect stunning and wondrous. Its evolution is marked by increasing subjectivity and flexibility and by increasing differentiation that makes an organism more adaptable to new environmental challenges and opportunities and that better equips living beings (specifically human beings) to alter their environment to meet their own needs rather than merely adapt to environmental changes.

Conceiving nonhuman nature as its own interactive evolution rather than as a mere scenic vista has profound implications – ethical as well as biological – for ecologically minded people. Human beings embody, at least potentially, attributes of nonhuman development that place them squarely within organic evolution. They are not “natural aliens,” to use Neil Evernden’s phrase, strong exotics, phylogenetic deformities that, owing to their tool-making capacities, “cannot evolve with an ecosystem anywhere.” Nor are they “intelligent fleas,” to use the language of Gaian theorists who believe that the earth (“Gaia”) is one living organism. These untenable disjunctions between humanity and the evolutionary process are as superficial as they are potentially misanthropic.

In many respects, human traits are enlargements of nonhuman traits that have been evolving over the ages. Increasing care for the young, cooperation, the substitution of mentally guided behavior for largely instinctive behavior – all are present more keenly in human behavior

Social Ecology is, to me, the idea that we must conceptualize nature as complex and ever-changing, and possessed of most of the qualities that are purportedly what it means to be a person. With this view in mind it is logically impossible to view coercive labor relationships between capitalists and labor as materially different than destructive exploitation of nature. It is this that, to me, highlights one of the main limitations of Marx: specifically his total failure to view unethical exploitation of animal labor in the same light as that of coercive exploitation of person labor. Note I do not make this as an argument against the use of nature, and neither do I believe, does Bookchin. Just as Marxism doesn't call for an end to labor, to me Social Ecology doesn't call for a total end of the use of our ecosystems, but rather an end to destructive and abusive use of nature.

The bifurcation of the human from the nonhuman reflects a failure to think organically or to approach evolutionary phenomena with an evolutionary way of thought. Needless to say, if nature were no more than a scenic vista, then mere metaphoric and poetic descriptions of it might suffice to replace systematic thinking about it. But nature is the history of nature, an evolutionary process that is going on to one degree or another under our very eyes, and as such, we dishonor it by thinking of it in anything but a processual way.

Social ecology seems to stand alone, at present, in calling for an organic, developmental way of thinking out problems that are basically organic and developmental in character. The very definition of the natural world as a development (albeit not any one) indicates the need for organic thinking, as does the derivation of human from nonhuman nature – a derivation from which we can draw far-reaching conclusions for the development of an ecological ethics that in turn can provide serious guidelines for the solution of our ecological problems. Social ecology calls upon us to see that the natural world and the social are interlinked by evolution into one nature that consists of two differentiations: first or biotic nature, and second or social nature. Social nature and biotic nature share an evolutionary potential for greater subjectivity and flexibility. Second nature is the way in which human beings, as flexible, highly intelligent primates, inhabit and alter the natural world. That is to say, people create an environment that is most suitable for their mode of existence. In this respect, second nature is no different from the environment that every animal, depending upon its abilities, partially creates as well as primarily adapts to – the biophysical circumstances or ecocommunity in which it must live. In principle, on this very simple level, human beings are doing nothing that differs from the survival activities of nonhuman beings, be it building beaver dams or digging gopher hole

To me this is the crux of why Social Ecology is so important. We must address the myriad environmental issues confronting us at the same time as the myriad labor relation and social hierarchy issues. These problems are inherently and deeply linked as the exploitation of nature is largely tied to a desire to obtain and retain power. Those that have no concern with exploiting persons similarly have no concern with exploiting the resources of the world around them. Addressing one without considering the other is fundamentally flawed and will inevitably lead to backsliding into previous modes of thought. It is my consideration that all serious leftists movements in the modern context must integrate social ecology into its revolutionary framework.

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

I'll close this portion of the let's read with this: in the small scale liberals will likely view Social Ecology with the typical "what about mah property" and similar specious claims. To me then some thought should be spared on how to convince those who are well intentioned but misguided of the essential nature of treating environmental issues as integral to all other social concerns. In my experience one way to begin to do this is to actually go out in scale. Personally I have found that if one presses the underlying assumptions of these viewpoints on the landscape scale. I have found that most rooted in the capitalistic propaganda they were raised still find the idea that a single person can own a river, or a mountain, or a forest as fundamentally absurd. This can potentially be an avenue to challenge their assumptions about private property and nature as an object to be exploited.

 

[Strigix]

For those of us not of European ancestry, to my mind, an important step of decolonizing the mind is to divorce ourselves from this understanding of the natural world as separate from humanity. And indeed I (and Bookchin) view it as a critical necessity for all leftists.

I read an interesting little essay about this a while back- Williom Cronon's The Trouble with Wildnerness. Cronon talks extensively here about how much of our idea of 'Wilderness' and a pristine, untouched, and even 'sublime' nature is based around a particularly european set of ideas- ones which inherently worked to suppress and ignore the very real people who had been touching, working, and maintaining the scenery before we showed up.

I should probably re-read it at some point soon, as it's a quite informative little essay.