Murray Bookchin
social ecology
1989
Black Rose Books
222 pages
I first learned about the eco-socialist thinker Murray Bookchin through Bob Black, an anarchist writer who became a pariah through his caustic criticism directed at others in the anarchist scene. Bookchin, who had been involved with direct action activism since the early 1940s, wrote a text criticizing the 'lifestyle' anarchists, a term he applied to a selection of anarchist writers whom he charged as constructing anarchism as a matter of individual lifestyle rather than a mode of social organization. I have yet to read Bookchin's critique of the lifestyle anarchists, however I know that his targets were the anarchist writers who I, as a teenager, found most appealing. In particular, I enjoyed the work of Peter Lamborn Wilson (who produced the book T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism under his Sufi-Situationist alter-ego, Hakim Bey) and Bob Black, best known for his 1985 essay, The Abolition of Work. Bob Black is a laser-precise satirist and a master of witticism, and a trained lawyer, and he returned Bookchin's fire with a book-length counter-critique titled Anarchy after Leftism, where he derisively referred to Bookchin as 'The Dean' and savaged the elder activist’s philosophy over 140 or so pages. The effect Black's attack on Bookchin had on me was that it lead me to read a number of The Dean's books, including Remaking Society, a text where Bookchin faces down some of the eco-fascist tendencies within the environmental movement. What I found in reading ‘The Dean’s’ texts was a robust philosophy that notes the historical roots of of contemporary social conditions, and their relationships to contemporary environmental conditions. Furthermore, Bookchin is always prepared to identify the vast potential for reform towards his ideals of social ecology that are present in contemporary social arrangements.
So concludes my personal path towards reading the work of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, was a prominent American activist for leftist causes throughout the 20th century. He shifted political positions, from socialism to anarchism, to libertarianism, to etc. a number of times throughout his career but he was always a stalwart of the left. He was a member of the Young Pioneers, a communist organization for Children, in the early 1930s, and proceeded from a socially conscious childhood towards a career as an activist for the causes of labour, the environment, and the socially vulnerable. Despite his shifting ideological ground, he has written on topics such as the environment, technology, the city, and society, always from a far left perspective. Bookchin never attended college, however he taught at free schools during the 1960s and 70s, and in 1974 he founded the Institute for Social Ecology with urban anthropologist, Dan Chodorkoff. Bookchin taught at the institute from ‘74 to the end of his life.
Remaking Society arises from a need felt by Bookchin to argue against some frequently expressed sentiments heard from members of the environmental movement. Specifically, Bookchin sought to argue against the environmentalist notion that we, humanity, in general, has destroyed the environment. Bookchin believed that sentiments which charge humanity in general as a destructive leviathan are too wide in their focus when, according to Bookchin, it is important to consider the nuances in how class is constructed with regards to environmental devastation. Bookchin argues that humanity as a whole is not responsible for the wearing down of the environment but rather there are particular classes and agencies within the broad human family that manage societies in such a way that is destructive to nature.
Bookchin's basic premise in Remaking Society is that man's subjection of man precedes man's subjection of nature. Much of his book describes how various cultures have constituted their society, and the concepts of freedom deployed within particular societies and the degrees to which those concepts are applied to the different categories of social subjects. Bookchin describes the history of society and freedom in detail in order to claim that the modes of social construction he identifies are far from natural - or necessary - and that there are possible alternative social models which may eliminate both man's subjection of man, and man's subjection of nature. Bookchin is a strong advocate of ecology, in society and in nature, which he describes as a balance through diversity. Remaking Society proposes to put a concept of social ecology into practice for the benefit of humanity and the environment. The book is also an argument that the destruction of the environment is not simply a result of consuming products, but is a necessary result of the way our society is managed for the benefit of capitalist producers.
Bookchin’s critique is not aimed strictly at dominant social structures. Marx is deftly criticized by Bookchin, as is Proudhon furthermore much of Remaking Society dissects the failures of past revolutionary movements, including a focus on such movements as the American counterculture of the 1960s and the Paris Commune. Ultimately Bookchin argues that through allowing for freedom to flourish in society, and in nature, nature may better serve man than it currently does as the slave of segments of the total population. Additionally he argued that under such conditions the fruits of nature may be better distributed through the population. Finally, Bookchin argues that feminism and environmentalism were the two most important movements to emerge from the 1960s. Two movements that Bookchin argues were interrelated and still hold a promise for producing a better society for all of mankind. Remaking Society is a concise introduction to Bookchin’s theories of social ecology, and is probably a good place to start research into the theories of the environmental movement as well as the author’s body of work.
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