Toward a Radical and Feminist Ecology — A Communalist Analysis
Passages presents itself as a journal “for a radical and feminist ecology.” Its inaugural issue, devoted to the question of civilization, draws on an impressive array of theoretical tools and activist narratives: Lewis Mumford and his “megamachine,” James C. Scott and the earliest grain-based states, an ecofeminist reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a genealogy of the critique of civilization from Taoist China to the Enlightenment, reports on local struggles (against the FCC at CERN, against extractivism at the Nouvialle quarry, against industrial solar power plants on Lure Mountain), and a dual portrait of Jancovici and Grothendieck. The journal is published freely and at no cost, at the price of production; its high editorial standards and the depth of its content make it a serious publication, one that deserves to be examined with the same critical rigor it advocates.
What Passages does well—and what we share
The journal’s primary merit is that it challenges civilization as a contingent historical fact, rather than an insurmountable horizon. This work of de-ideologization—showing that the word “civilization” is itself an instrument for legitimizing the dominant order, as Jules Ferry made clear before the Chamber of Deputies on July 28, 1885, when he stated that “superior races have a right vis-à-vis inferior races […] because they have a duty. They have a duty to civilize the inferior races.”—right up to the discourse on the “energy transition”—is indispensable, and social ecology fully shares this view. Bookchin, too, tirelessly reminded us that what we call “civilization” is not a natural state of humanity but the historical product of a rupture: the emergence of hierarchy, the state, patriarchy, and the market economy as mutually constitutive forms of domination. The introductory text in Passages on the etymology and uses of the term is effective on this point, and the connection to Mumford (the “megamachine”) provides a welcome historical depth.
Regarding James C. Scott and early states, there is also genuine convergence. The central idea of Homo Domesticus—that the state is not progress but a constraint, that its subjects fled from it more than they sought it out, and that cereal farming is above all an instrument of control and taxation—draws on arguments that social ecology finds in its own critical genealogy of domination. That the state is, from its very origins, synonymous with instability, coercion, and colonial expansion is not a discovery of Passages; it has been a common point of reference among anti-authoritarian, anarchist, and communalist currents for decades.
The article on the Lure mountain is no less interesting: it moves beyond the purely theoretical realm to showcase a form of struggle—a combination of on-the-ground presence, legal recourse, local mediation, and acceptance—without claiming authorship—of the “Pénélopes’” nocturnal direct action. This articulation of distinct levels of action—this rejection of tactical purity in favor of real effectiveness—is worth considering for any movement that takes strategic issues seriously.
Jancovici’s critique—concise yet accurate—highlights what might be called “green capitalism” in its most convenient form: a techno-solutionism that never questions the productivist social order, content merely to shift its energy sources. The contrast with Grothendieck—who declared in 1972 at CERN itself that “the collapse of this civilization is something that seems to me highly desirable” and that science, far from being neutral, is “one of the main negative forces at work in today’s society”—is welcome. It aligns directly with the communalist critique of the myth of techno-scientific progress as a vehicle for emancipation: it is not technology that liberates; rather, it is non-hierarchical social organization that can put it to liberating use.
Theoretical Limits: Where Communalism Extends and Diverges
The value of a communalist reading is not measured by its superficial agreement or disagreement with the text, but by its ability to identify the implicit presuppositions that guide—sometimes unwittingly—the analyses and perspectives proposed—and to offer, from the same critical ground, tools to go further.
1. Civilization or Capitalism? A Necessary Clarification
Passages constantly shifts between “industrial civilization” and “civilization” plain and simple. This shift is not insignificant: it leads to treating the Pyramid of Cheops and the data centers in Marseille as manifestations of the same phenomenon—the “megamachine”—without asking whether capitalist social organization, with its own logic of endless valorization of value, constitutes a qualitative break rather than merely a quantitative deepening of earlier forms of organization.
Mumford’s use of the term here is revealing. The megamachine is a powerful analytical tool for describing the centralization of power, the mechanized division of labor, and the dispossession of producers in the great hydraulic states of antiquity. But Mumford himself carefully distinguished between authoritarian technology and democratic technology—a distinction that Passages carefully overlooks. The journal cites two of his works in its bibliography; it is a pity that it did not retain this central nuance, which would have allowed for a reflection on the social conditions of technology rather than on technology itself. For it is not the tool that is authoritarian or democratic by its very nature: it is the social relationship that produces it, deploys it, and defines its scale and purposes.
For the ESC Workshop, the problem is not “civilization” in general, nor even the “human-scale” city or technology as such, but a specific social form—capitalism, with its state, its market structures, and its logic of aimless accumulation—which colonizes and perverts all technical and urban organization. To confuse the two levels is to risk undermining criticism by causing it to lose its precision: we end up attacking sedentary life, writing, or cereal farming as such, rather than the social relations that turn them into instruments of exploitation. Above all, we close off the possibility of conceiving a complex social organization that is not hierarchical—a city that is not a megamachine, a technology that is not authoritarian.
2. What Social Ecology and Non-Hierarchy Contribute: Shared Foundations, a Distinct Horizon
Social ecology shares with Passages a rejection of social naturalism—the idea that hierarchy is inherent in human nature or in the order of things. This is a crucial point. Bookchin devoted a large part of his work to dismantling what, in our cultural representations, leads us to regard domination as inevitable: “second nature” (the human social order) is not a mechanical extension of “first nature” (biological and ecological processes); rather, it is a qualitatively new development, capable of realizing—or betraying—the potential for self-organization, emancipation, and subjectivity inherent in natural evolution.
This non-hierarchical naturalist foundation is what distinguishes social ecology from mere anti-statism or principled anarchism. Non-hierarchy here is not a moral postulate but an ecological necessity: the most resilient ecosystems are those that maximize diversity, interdependence, and complementarity without a dominant predator. Non-hierarchical social organization is not an abstract utopia; it is the manifestation, at the level of human communities, of a logic that nature itself has been unfolding over billions of years. In this sense, ecology is political, and the political is ecological: the two are not separate domains to be artificially reconciled, but the two sides of the same process of emancipation of living beings.
Passages perceives this unity—which is why its texts on the city, on Gilgamesh, or on the Paleolithic are never mere disciplinary analyses, but political acts. What communalism can add here is the institutional dimension of this unity: how does a non-hierarchical human community organize itself in concrete terms? What political forms foreshadow and make possible non-dominating social relations? These are the questions that Passages leaves unanswered.
3. A Politics of Absence: Neither Germinal Forms Nor Confederalism
The journal is radical in its diagnosis; it is virtually silent on its prospects. The section “Strategy, Part 1” promises much but so far offers only generalities about “the necessity of a culture of resistance.” It is precisely here that the void is felt—and where communalist social ecology has the most to offer.
For Bookchin, as for us at the Atelier, the question is never limited to what we are fighting against, but rather what we are building toward. The duality of power—the development of popular institutions that prefigure and challenge state power—has no equivalent in Passages. The struggles described (against the FCC, for the Nouvialle reservoir, on Lure Mountain) are courageous and deserve support; but they remain defensive and reactive, with the journal making no attempt to link these acts of resistance to a positive vision of an alternative social organization. This is likely due to the fact that identifying civilization as the sole root cause of the disaster makes it difficult to conceive of anything other than resignation or a return to the wild—in its positive sense, to be sure, but one whose horizon remains unclear, as evidenced by the quote from Simone Weil that closes the journal: “Generally speaking, we who are currently blind have little choice but between capitulation and adventure. ” If civilization itself is the problem, any positive endeavor risks, in fact, reproducing what we are fighting against. Passages is nevertheless aware of this, calling itself to “put these struggles at the service of a movement of movements”—an apt phrase, but one that lacks precise institutional content. This is exactly where communalist social ecology can take the lead: this “movement of movements” that the journal calls for without being able to name it—we believe it could very well align with communalist perspectives. For social ecology offers precisely what Passages seeks but cannot find—a holistic approach to the causes of the disaster (hierarchy, capitalism, the state, patriarchy as a coherent system rather than a catalog of separate evils) and a horizon of institution-building: embryonic forms, communal assemblies, a confederalism that articulates local struggles without dissolving them into a centralized vanguard. Not a program imposed from above, but a logic of construction that gives acts of resistance their political meaning beyond the defense of territory.
This is the difference between the critique of civilization and social ecology: the latter does not merely denounce; it constructs a theory of germinal forms—those institutions and practices that, even now, carry within them the seeds of a non-hierarchical, non-state, and ecologically sound social order. Communal assemblies, forms of confederal direct democracy, and anti-economic practices that replace the market and the state with forms of reciprocity and collective deliberation: these are all dimensions absent from an issue whose logical conclusion seems to be, at best, a withdrawal from civilization, or—better yet—a defensive sabotage of its infrastructure. Sabotage may be a tactic; it is not a strategy, and even less so a vision.
The communalist horizon, on the other hand, is that of libertarian municipalism: neighborhood and communal assemblies that break free from the prerogatives of the state and the market; confederations that link these communes without establishing a hierarchy among them; and a municipalized economy that substitutes the logic of common need—and the equality of the unequal—for that of profit. This is not a utopia of some distant future: it is the name we give to the nascent forms that already exist, in an embryonic state, in all the practices of self-management, cooperation, and collective deliberation that civil society generates in response to the failures of capitalism and the state. The movement’s role is to recognize these forms, strengthen them, and articulate them into a coherent emancipatory political project.
4. The Primitivist Risk and the Natural Dialectic
The essay “Our Lives Before: A Return to the Paleolithic” is the most ambiguous piece in this issue—or perhaps not, given that its argument is ultimately consistent with the journal’s general line. The author takes care to distance herself from any naïve idealization; she is aware that one cannot “return ” to the Paleolithic. But the tension between the desire for these ways of life and the acknowledged impossibility of reconstructing them is never truly resolved. The intellectual current remains that of critical primitivism: civilization as a catastrophe, the Paleolithic as a normative reference point, and the present as an impasse from which no other way out is visible except the “cry to rally behind: Nature and Freedom .”
Yet, for social ecology, the natural dialectic—inherited from Hegel via Bookchin—precisely rejects this type of dichotomy between nature and society, between “wild” and “civilized.” Nature is not a status quo to be restored but an evolutionary process of which humanity is a part, and whose guiding principle is self-organization and interdependence at all levels—from ecosystems to human communities. Natural evolution is not a march toward domination: over the long term, it tends toward increasing differentiation, an ever-richer complementarity among beings, and a deepening of subjectivity. It is this process that hierarchy and capitalism have interrupted and perverted—not because they are “unnatural”—though…—but because they constitute a form of regression within “second nature,” a return to simplified and mechanical forms of social organization where evolution called for non-dominating complexity.
What we seek, therefore, is not a return to a mythologized past, but the dialectical overcoming of civilization’s contradictions in a higher social form that integrates—without denying them—the achievements of social complexity. The city need not be a megamachine; it can be a polis, a space for deliberation and communal life. Technology—simple and on a human scale—need not be authoritarian; it can be put at the service of collective emancipation. Writing need not be an instrument of fiscal control; it can be a tool for collective memory, for critique, or an art that shapes the imagination. What social ecology rejects is not complexity, but the hierarchy that has thus far appropriated its fruits.
5. Radical Feminism and the Question of Gender Relations
The article on Gilgamesh is probably one of the most thought-provoking in this issue, even if its deliberately polemical tone—which is entirely legitimate—can at times detract from the analytical argument. Its essential contribution is to show how patriarchy is co-constitutive of civilization, and not merely one of its aspects: the domination of women, the domestication of bodies, and war as institutionalized virility are threads that run continuously through the earliest founding myths and across the millennia.
This is a point that communalism must fully embrace. Bookchin, in this regard, has acknowledged blind spots; he was slow to link social ecology to a theory of gender, and the first hierarchy—the one that was imposed on women before extending to classes, colonized peoples, and non-humans—occupies a less central place in his work than it deserves, even though his struggle against all forms of domination and against hierarchy clearly included it. The dialogue with ecofeminist theories—from Starhawk to Val Plumwood, from Silvia Federici to Maria Mies—is an ongoing project for the ESC Workshop through the series Social Ecology Today—Dialogues, and Passages moves in the right direction by making it a central theme rather than a mere afterthought. The challenge lies in articulating this critique with a theory of gendered social relations as relations of production and social reproduction—without making it an independent variable in the analysis of capitalism and the state, yet without dissolving it into a totality that would absorb and erase it. Social ecology needs this articulation to live up to what it claims to be: a theory of all hierarchies and their collective overcoming.
Conclusion: A must-read journal, equipped with the tools of communalist social ecology
Passages No. 0 is a serious, well-structured publication that takes a radical and feminist stance without resorting to demagoguery. It is a useful resource for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary anti-civilization movement in its most sophisticated French forms—its analytical strengths, its strategic blind spots, and the questions it poses to anyone who claims to adhere to a truly emancipatory ecology.
What communalist social ecology can contribute here is not a condescending correction, but an extension: the same rejection of hierarchy, but grounded in a natural dialectic that rejects the sterile opposition between nature to be restored and civilization to be destroyed; the same critique of the state and capitalism, but extended to the question of what replaces them and the institutional forms that make this replacement possible; the same attention to local struggles, but articulated within a confederal vision that gives them political meaning beyond mere resistance.
We must, however, be honest about the limitations of this assessment: it focuses on Issue 0—a launch issue by definition—and in no way foreshadows the contributions that Passages might reveal in future issues—Passages No. 1 devoted to nature, Passages No. 2 to feminism. These themes are precisely where the journal could refine, or even shift, the positions we have analyzed here. At this stage, our reading seems consistent with the vision we hold at the Atelier—but we express it with the modesty warranted by a journal whose project is still in the process of unfolding.
The question is not so much to leave civilization behind as to transcend it—to realize, within non-hierarchical social forms, what civilization has promised and betrayed: freedom, solidarity, and the reconciliation of humanity with nature, for as Élisée Reclus aptly put it, “Humanity is nature becoming conscious of itself.” This is a task of a completely different scale than sabotage, mystical rewilding, or withdrawal—and it is precisely the task that communalism has set for itself.