Social Ecology After Bookchin: Contextualizing, Moving Beyond, and Reappraising

A text by Nicolas Casaux, recently published in *Le Partage*, revisits the work of Murray Bookchin to denounce a technological messianism and what he calls the “everyday racism” of the ideology of Progress. We will not respond to this article point by point here—that would be to grant it more authority than it deserves over a body of work it addresses only very partially, and to trap ourselves in a defensive posture that is so ill-suited to a living body of thought. We prefer to do what neither militant hagiography nor polemical attack usually does: situate Bookchin within his actual intellectual trajectory, candidly identify what no longer holds up in his later work, and show what social ecology and communalism have become since then, in hands that owe him no allegiance.

Let us state this from the outset, because it is the prerequisite for everything that follows: on at least two points, Casaux is correct in his critique of the Bookchin of the 1990s. We ourselves have taken a stance on these issues in our editorial practice, independently of his article. This text is therefore not a blanket defense of Bookchin. It is an exercise in critical history—and a statement of position.

I. Contextualizing—A Trajectory, Not a Fixed System

Bookchin is too often read as if he had produced, in one go, a stable body of work “from birth to death.” This is false, and this falsehood does as much harm to his defenders as it does to his critics.

Born in 1921 into a family of Russian émigré activists, educated from a very young age in orthodox Marxism and later in Trotskyism, Bookchin broke with the communist left in the postwar period, marked—like an entire generation—by the experience of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and by the failure of the organized labor movement in the face of fascism and Stalinism. It was in the 1960s that what would become Social Ecology took shape — *Our Synthetic Environment* (1962, published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber), followed by the seminal essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1965), in which he already articulated the thesis that would remain the backbone of the entire body of work: the domination of nature stems from the domination of humans by humans, and not the other way around. *The Ecology of Freedom* (1982) constitutes its most systematic historical and anthropological formulation; the dialectical naturalism underpinning it will be explicated and developed philosophically in *The Philosophy of Social Ecology*, particularly in its two introductory essays.

The texts that Casaux cites almost exclusively—*Re-enchanting Humanity* (1995) and the essay “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism” (1995)—belong to an entirely different phase: that of an aging Bookchin, engaged in a head-on battle against the anti-civilizational and primitivist currents that were then gaining ground in North American anarchist circles, led by John Zerzan. This is not an excuse for the most questionable formulations in these texts—they are what they are, and we will return to them below without sugarcoating them. But an uninformed reader might believe they are encountering the established and stable position of Social Ecology, when in fact they are reading the most outrageous piece of a head-on polemic, written to discredit a specific opponent. An honest critique distinguishes the consistent theoretical core—the 1965 thesis, developed in 1982—from the circumstantial polemical core of the 1990s. Casaux never makes this distinction. We make it here, not to water down what he points out—sometimes quite rightly—but because conflating the two hinders an understanding of what Social Ecology truly is.

This continuity is evident even in his later writings: the essays collected posthumously under the title *The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy* (2015), with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin, reiterate—half a century after “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1965)—the same radical incompatibility between capitalism’s imperative of unlimited growth and the ecological demand for balance and interdependence—free from any anti-primitivist polemic. The same foundation was already evident in 1993 in “What Is Social Ecology?”, revisited by Michael E. Zimmerman in 2005: contemporary ecological problems, he asserts, are rooted in deep-seated social issues, the history of which points in particular to the emergence of hierarchies, gerontocracy, and a patricentric culture¹ .

It was during this same late period that Bookchin publicly broke with the anarchist label to champion the term “communalism”—a break that he himself embraced and theorized, notably in *From Urbanization to Cities* (1995) and the essay “Whither Anarchism?” (1998). This is a point that Casaux handles poorly: he presents the elements specific to Bookchin’s project—participation in municipal elections, city government, the primacy of territorial citizenship—as the shameful dregs of an anarchism betrayed in small ways, whereas these are the very terms of a break that Bookchin named and claimed. One can—as we do below—deem this break problematic on certain specific points. But one cannot pretend that it never took place, nor that Bookchin did not know what he was doing.

An institution, not a state: what instituting communalism rejects

Here we must resolve an ambiguity inherent in the word “communalism,” which draws criticism from both opposing sides: anti-institutionalist anarchists criticize communalism for establishing institutions, while liberals and part of the institutional left equate any institution with a form of statism.

Communalism is indeed institution-building: it does not rely on pure spontaneity or informal self-organization as a sufficient goal. It is based on the belief that lasting freedom must be cultivated, and that it requires well-thought-out and evolving forms—modifiable by the very people who establish them—such as assemblies, mandates, and deliberative procedures—without which it remains at the mercy of the first power grab that comes along. But this institutionalizing has nothing to do with state or representative institutions: on the contrary, it is their most radical antithesis, precisely because it refuses to allow the institutional vacuum—the one left by movements that build only the ephemeral—to be filled by the state, the market, or a self-proclaimed vanguard. The popular assembly—which can be recalled and has no permanent delegates—as well as the confederation of free communes, combat hierarchy and centralization from within their very institutional form, and not in spite of it. This is a distinction that classical anarchist vocabulary sometimes struggles to make, and which communalism, on this specific point, usefully clarifies.

Bookchin made no secret of this: “Power that is not in the hands of the masses must inevitably fall into the hands of their oppressors. […] Social revolutionaries, far from removing the problem of power from their field of vision, must address the problem of how to give power a concrete and emancipatory institutional form.”² . Or, more succinctly: Freedom cannot exist without institutions that make it possible. The community he envisions is, moreover, nothing like a cut-rate municipal administration: “The community was an ethical community of free citizens, not a municipal enterprise established by a social contract”³ . “The municipality is the living unit that forms the basic building block of political life and from which everything else stems: citizenship, interdependence, federalism, and freedom.”⁴ , he summarized. And the confederal articulation he derives from this excludes any representative system from the outset: “I am not a localist but a confederalist, more precisely a municipal confederalist, by which I mean that popular assemblies formed in neighborhoods would be interlinked through deputies (not representatives!) by means of confederal councils and thence to regional, nationwide, and continental councils, each of which would have increasingly limited administrative powers.”⁵ .

Bookchin himself, in these same later essays, warned against confusing agitation with politics: a “politics of disorder” or of “creative chaos,” a naïve use of the streets without organization or lasting structure, are explicitly rejected there as regression rather than radicalism. It is this same demand—upheld until the end of his life—that communalism embodies institutionally.

He also formulated this demand as an educational project in its own right: “Politics was a form of education, not of mobilization; its purpose was not merely to make decisions but also to shape character and develop intelligence”⁶ . It presupposes a trust in the ordinary citizen that is the exact opposite of that upon which the state is founded: “If the ideological authority of state power and statecraft today rests on the assumption that the “citizen” is an incompetent being, the municipalist conception of citizenship rests on precisely the opposite.”⁷ . Hence this dual requirement, which he never ceased to emphasize: thinking without acting may be futile, but acting without thinking is deadly; an action that is not conceived as part of a coherent whole risks being nothing more than agitation. Authentic political debate is thus in itself a form of action: a reappropriation of the right to speak and the capacity to decide collectively⁸ .

On this point, it is well worth reading Éric Martin’s Hegelian interpretation of Bookchin’s work—“ Bookchin, Dialectical Anarchist: The Influence of Hegel’s Dialectic on Murray Bookchin’s Social Ecology”⁹ — which clearly shows that Bookchin should not be read as an anti-institutionalist, but as an heir to Proudhon and Russian populism: the institution that realizes freedom is not the Hegelian rational state, but the federation of communal forms of self-government.

There remains the question of the name itself, which must be addressed rather than hoped to go unnoticed: our website is called Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop—two named traditions, one of which bears the very suffix we express skepticism toward later in this text, even as we refuse to claim affiliation with any school of thought that has become dogmatic. There is no contradiction here, but a distinction to be made: naming a field does not mean pledging allegiance to its founder. “Social Ecology and Communalism” refers to a specific intellectual tradition, just as “Marxism” refers to a field of analysis that can be drawn upon, discussed, and amended without subscribing to every position Marx defended during his lifetime. Bookchin himself took this approach with regard to anarchism: retaining the term to denote a legacy while publicly breaking with entire sections of the tradition it represents. What we are doing here is no different—and goes a step further, since we go so far as to break with certain positions held by its founder himself—without fundamentally calling into question the emancipatory horizon we seek.

II. Moving Beyond—Two of Bookchin’s Limitations in Light of the Present

From a “municipalist tactic” to total anti-electoralism

The strategy of Bookchinian libertarian municipalism is not, contrary to what a cursory reading of Casaux might suggest, a mere electoral reflex. It involves a sequence: the formation of sovereign neighborhood assemblies, their confederation, and the accumulation of de facto popular power—a logic of dual power in which elections, far from being an end in themselves, were for Bookchin at the time merely one tactic among others in the service of this strategy, intended to formalize, in the final analysis, a balance of power already built from below. Casaux completely glosses over this sequence in his article, which makes his critique easier than it ought to be—but glossing over the sequence is not enough to save the strategy as a whole.

For Bookchin did indeed, at one point in his career, view participation in municipal elections as a strategic lever within this sequence—and the institutional municipalist experiments carried out since then allow us, at the very least, to gauge its difficulties and contradictions. The so-called “rebel” Spanish city governments of 2015–2019—Barcelona en Comú, Ahora Madrid—offer a particularly illuminating example: driven by citizen movements and assembly-based dynamics that sought to profoundly transform the ways in which the city was governed, they largely ended up having to administer the capitalist city rather than transform it, gradually absorbed by the constraints and logics inherent in the very institutions they thought they could take over to transform from within. While not strictly speaking a test of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, these experiences thus reveal one of the fundamental contradictions inherent in any strategy that treats the electoral conquest of municipal institutions as a lever for emancipation: the risk that it is not the movement that transforms the institution, but the institution that transforms the movement. And this risk persists regardless of the strength of the assembly-based movement prior to entering the electoral arena—while it is easy to imagine what happens when that very strength is lacking.

In France, the municipalist or “citizen-centered” movements that come and go from one election cycle to the next do nothing else—from this perspective, they merely add to the confusion and future frustrations: they foster the belief that winning control of a city hall would be enough to give those reduced to the status of administered subjects some measure of power over their own lives, while obscuring the fact that the municipality, today, is no longer the sovereign level of government it claims to embody. It is trapped within a layered institutional structure—communities of municipalities, departments, regions—in the powers that have been taken away from it or transferred elsewhere, in the budgetary and regulatory constraints imposed upon it, and remains subject to the State’s direct control exercised by the prefect—powers that, far from being limited to mere oversight of legality, can extend, particularly in budgetary or policing matters, to the point of superseding municipal authority. Winning a mayoral seat, in this context, does not mean taking back control: it means being granted little more than a token seat under supervision—it means becoming an accomplice to the very system one claims to be fighting.

This is why the ESC Workshop is radically opposed to representative systems and therefore opposed to elections at every level, including the municipal level. Not out of posturing or for the sake of purity, but based on precise political analysis: participating in elections—even municipal ones, even with the best of intentions—means placing oneself on the opponent’s turf—a turf where all the rules are designed to produce exactly the result one wishes to avoid. This position is not a concession we are making to Casaux’s criticism: it is a conclusion we reached on our own, through experience and theory, long before the publication of his article.

Bookchin himself was under no illusions about what representation amounts to: “They are not the People. At best, they are its representatives, which sets them apart from it; at worst, they are its manipulators, which often pits them against the people”¹⁰ . This assessment applies just as much to the party apparatus as it does to the individual elected official: “Leaving metaphors aside, “political” parties are replications of the state when they are out of power and often synonymous with the state when they are in power. They are formed to mobilize, to command, to acquire power, and to rule. Thus they are as inorganic as the state itself—an excrescence of society that has no real roots in it, no responsiveness to it beyond the needs of faction, power, and mobilization.”¹¹ As early as 1969, he was already calling for a shift away from this approach: “We hope that ecology groups will eschew all appeals to the “heads of government” and to international or national state institutions, the very criminal and political bodies that have materially contributed to the ecological crisis of our time. We believe the appeals must be made to the people and to their capacity for direct action that can get them to take control of their own lives and destinies. For only in this way can a society emerge without hierarchy and domination, a society in which each individual is the master of his or her own fate.”¹²

• Floréal M. Romero on Communalism

• *[« Nouveau communalisme » : quand les partis capturent les mots pour neutraliser les forces émancipatrices]*

• Voting or the Illusion of Choice

From “liberatory technology” to communotechny

Any liberation that remains tied to the established order does not liberate from anything; it merely shifts the constraint—it does not undo it. It is precisely this promise—that of liberation from necessary labor through technology alone—that Bookchin, on this specific point, did not sufficiently resist. Orwell, however, had already exposed its flaw as early as 1949: “From the moment the machine appeared,” he wrote, “it was clear to any thoughtful mind that the need for drudgery—and thus the bulk of human inequalities—could have disappeared: hunger, overwork, illiteracy, and disease could have been eliminated within a few generations, had the machine been deliberately used for that purpose.” But such a general increase in wealth would have posed just as great a structural threat to a hierarchical society. Moreover, it is not only the wealth produced that is thus neutralized, but the very direction of innovation that is distorted: “Even technological progress occurs only when its products can, in one way or another, serve to diminish human freedom”¹³ .

Casaux rightly points out a real contradiction in Bookchin’s work: on the one hand, the thesis that technology is socially neutral—exploitative under capitalism, liberating in a cooperative system, with the only question being that of its use—and on the other, the assertion that certain technologies (nuclear, biocides, surveillance devices) are “intrinsically domineering” and should be banned as such, without, according to him, any criteria for distinguishing between them ever being made explicit. Let us clarify from the outset a point of terminology that is not insignificant: Casaux speaks of “technique” where Bookchin spoke of technology; at the ESC Workshop, we distinguish between technique and technology. The shift does not serve his argument—it broadens his target far beyond what Bookchin actually defended—but it does not alter the substance of the problem he highlights.

Moreover, this persistent faith in the liberating potential of certain technologies must be placed in a broader context than Bookchin’s trajectory alone: the critique of labor and the alienation that accompanied it dominated, in the period following 1968, the entire spectrum of radical criticism—accompanied, for many, by a certain naivety regarding the prospect of technology serving humanity. In practice, technological development has proceeded almost exclusively at the behest of and in the service of capitalism and the Megamachine—not only in terms of profit and market logic, but also in terms of heightened control over populations and widespread surveillance, with financial power determining the direction of engineering, science, and research from start to finish. Orwell, as we have seen, had discerned this political dimension of technology very early on; in the society he imagines, innovation is concentrated precisely where it serves the purposes of war and police espionage. Günther Anders, Lewis Mumford, and the Situationists—with their direct critique of cybernetics—had, each in their own way, partially discerned this same logic; but it is only in the last forty years that the phenomenon has fully revealed itself.

Here we must clarify a fact that Casaux overlooks, without thereby exonerating him: Bookchin actually employs a criterion—borrowed from Lewis Mumford, to whom he himself refers repeatedly, and rightly so—to distinguish between authoritarian technics (centralized, one-way, hierarchical) and democratic technics (decentralized, versatile, on a human scale); Mumford himself asks: “How can we explain that our era has given itself up so easily to controllers, manipulators, and developers of authoritarian techniques?”¹⁴ . That this criterion is applied inconsistently is a real problem. This is not the same as the absence of any criterion at all, and this distinction deserves to be made before proceeding further—not to exonerate Bookchin, but because a critique that exaggerates the weakness of its target to such an extent risks being disqualified on this very point.

That said, the Mumfordian criterion itself is insufficient, and this is where we diverge sharply from a certain Bookchinian tradition—the one that saw “liberatory technology” as a means of reducing the necessary labor and broadening political participation, the canonical example being the industrial robot, which, in a cooperative society, would free the worker from arduous labor. The authoritarian/democratic distinction concerns the form of organization imposed by a technology once it is built; it says nothing about what its very production requires beforehand—extractivism, international subcontracting chains, expert specialization, dependence on infrastructure that no local community controls or can reproduce. Even if it is “green” or “convivial” a complex technology involves extraction chains and an expanded division of labor that perpetuate the highly hierarchical logics of domination and alienation that it claims to abolish. The decisive question, therefore, is not only that of democratic control over its use, but also that of scale, materiality, and the social relations that a technology establishes by its very design, prior to any use.

Bookchin also rejects the thesis of technological autonomy. This is clearly expressed in statements such as the following: “The idea that science and technology are ‘autonomous’ from society—that they themselves constitute determining factors in the direction of society—is perhaps one of the most insidious illusions of our time. It is certainly true that science and technology drive lines of research and open up prospects for new developments, but these developments are strictly guided by the dominant market society, and not the other way around… Technology is a heteronomous or dependent phenomenon… eco-mysticism tends to emphasize its autonomy from society and the mystique of a “technological imperative,” grossly obscuring the deeply social factors that promote or hinder technological innovation.”¹⁵ He drew concrete conclusions from this, including regarding so-called clean energy: “The hoopla about a new “Earth Day” or future “Sun Days” or “Wind Days,” like the pious rhetoric of fast-talking solar contractors and patent-hungry “ecological” inventors, conceal the all-important fact that solar energy, wind power, organic agriculture, holistic health, and “voluntary simplicity” will alter very little in our grotesque imbalance with nature if they leave the patriarchal family, the multinational corporation, the bureaucratic and centralized political structure, the property system, and the prevailing technocratic rationality untouched. Solar power, wind power, methane, and geothermal power are merely power insofar as the devices for using them are needlessly complex, bureaucratically controlled, corporately owned or institutionally centralized. Admittedly, they are less dangerous to the physical health of human beings than power derived from nuclear and fossil fuels, but they are clearly dangerous to the spiritual, moral and social health of humanity if they are treated merely as techniques that do not involve new relations between people and nature and within society itself.¹⁶ ” . And his verdict on green capitalism, even then, left little room for doubt: “Capitalism, in effect, constitutes the point of absolute negativity for society and the natural world. One cannot improve this social order, reform it, or remake it on its own terms with an ecological prefix such as ‘eco-capitalism.’ The only choice one has is to destroy it.”.¹⁷ What he proposed as an alternative to this drift, in these precise terms, was closer to our own notion of communotechny than it was distant from it: “The beauty of ecological technology—of ecotechnology, liberatory technology, or alternative technology—is that people can understand it […] It is simplicity, wherever possible; it is small scale, wherever possible”¹⁸ . Yet an unresolved contradiction lingered in his thinking: the need to free up time for politics—a sine qua non of any direct democracy—was never questioned at its root, that is, in the very conditions of production of the technology supposed to ensure it. Freeing up time without ever asking who designs the machine, who manufactures it, who controls it, and to whom it belongs is to throw wide open the door to the trap that capitalism knows better than anyone how to turn to its own advantage: it captures the apparent benefits of this promise for its own gain and gives it the name it needed—“progress.” It is precisely this root that it never manages to question—a fact all the more strange given that, as we have just seen, it possessed most of the necessary elements.

This is what we have called “communotechny”: not a catalog of virtuous tools, but a praxis and a demand for constant deliberation—why do we produce, what do we produce, with what, how, where, when, for whom, with whom, who decides, on what scale—which repositions the technical question where Bookchin posed it only incompletely: upstream from use, in the material and social conditions of design and production themselves.

But a critique of technology that remains separate from a political and organizational analysis of society goes nowhere and has no effect on people’s mindsets. The issue is first and foremost political: it is the way society is organized that is at stake, and it is only through a truly communalist mode of operation that we can determine, in concrete terms, what becomes possible and what does not.

Digital technology provides a textbook example of this requirement. A microprocessor—rare earth elements, cleanrooms, a global supply chain, energy-intensive data centers, and a highly specialized division of labor from design to production—exhibits nearly all the characteristics of what Mumford would call authoritarian technics, in the extended sense we are using here: a scale beyond any collective control, incomprehensibility to the vast majority, and structural extractivism. There is no justification for classifying this technology—even when mobilized for activist purposes—as a neutral tool. We refuse, however, to decide once and for all that digital technology is, by its very nature and forever, incompatible with communalism—perhaps the problem lies not in silicon itself, but in the centralized, energy-intensive (server farms and data centers), and commercial form that has been imposed on digital technology thus far; and nothing prevents us from imagining—even if no successful example exists today—a digital world rebuilt by repurposing what already exists for a more limited use and on an entirely different scale. What is certain, however, is that communotechny cannot be built through screens: the commune, as we have seen above, is above all a place for face-to-face dialogue—a place that digital mediation, however militant it may be, cannot replace without betraying itself.

• 🛠️ Communotechny — Toward a Social Ecology of Techniques

• “Terre et liberté” by Aurélien Berlan

• Techniques—Technologies and Communalist Society

• The idiot and impossible deliverance against autonomy

III. Three Shortcuts Worth Mentioning, Briefly

Without devoting more space to this than Casaux’s article deserves on this specific point, three oversimplifications are worth noting, because they reveal something about the nature of his article—a deliberate attack, not a proper analysis.

Casaux attacks the most shocking consequences of dialectical naturalism—humanity as the conscious culmination of evolution, “free nature”—without ever naming or situating dialectical naturalism as the framework that is supposed to articulate them in Bookchin’s work. A scholarly reading of Bookchin’s work—one free of polemical engagement with him, such as Éric Martin’s study of the Hegelian influence on Bookchin’s social ecology—shows that one cannot understand—and therefore cannot seriously refute—this thought without confronting it as a dialectical system inherited from Hegel and Marx, which Bookchin transcended rather than merely perpetuated.

What Casaux treats as a method—a framework one might choose to apply, here to technology, there to history—is in reality, in Bookchin as in Hegel before him, the very structure of the object: it is not the observer who imposes this movement from the outside for the sake of intellectual convenience; rather, it is the thing itself which, taken in isolation—as if it were self-sufficient—proves incapable of understanding itself on its own and necessarily refers back to that which produces it and toward which it tends. An acorn is not yet an oak, and to be satisfied with it as it is is to confuse the abstract concept of a thing with the developed thing itself¹⁹ ; likewise, no institution, no technology, no moment in history can be understood in isolation from the movement that carries it beyond itself. To reduce this to a process that could be extracted from the system for separate evaluation is already to have missed what makes it a naturalism—a way of describing how things are actually structured—rather than a method that one could, at will, apply or set aside²⁰ .

Casaux further asserts what “anthropology and ethnology have confirmed” regarding the diversity of hunter-gatherer societies without citing a single name or reference—which is precisely the very approach he accuses Bookchin of employing when the latter “categorizes without explaining the reasons for his categorization.” A text that, at the decisive moment of its empirical refutation, employs the very rhetorical device it denounces in its target is, here too, open to a reversal.

One point, more methodological than argumentative: with nearly eighty years of hindsight since Orwell, and the now commonplace reality of widespread surveillance capitalism, it is easy to decry the technological naivety of an entire generation of radical thinkers. It is quite another matter to have, like Orwell, Mumford, Anders, or the Situationists, foreseen this development from within their own era, without the benefit of such hindsight. Our era has seen the rise of a breed of belated prophets, triumphantly announcing what is already here as if they had always known it from the cradle; this is not the most generous stance toward those who were the first to seek clarity using the means available to them at the time.

This disconnect, moreover, is not a matter of individual foresight: the material power of capitalism has allowed it to move faster than everyone else, leaving all of humanity behind and adrift.

One final oversimplification is worth noting, this time regarding the sources that Casaux himself draws upon. He presents Kropotkin, following Proudhon, as having embraced the idea that technical development is by its very nature a “positive achievement”—yet Kropotkin advocates in his work for a deliberately decentralized industry, combined with agriculture: “It will have to rely on itself for the production of food and many, if not most, of the raw materials; it must find the best means of combining agriculture with manufacture — the work in the field with a decentralised industry.”²¹ This is a vision that is markedly more decentralized and attentive to material autonomy than Casaux’s reading of it suggests.

We note this without dwelling on it further: it is not on this point that the bulk of our disagreement—or agreement—with Casaux regarding this specific text lies, but rather on the substance, which was addressed in the previous section. We also have other reasons to disagree with him, regarding other texts and other issues; it would be neither necessary nor even appropriate to address them here.

IV. Reappraising—What Social Ecology Is Becoming in Our Hands

What remains solid in Bookchin’s work, once these two departures from his positions have been acknowledged, is no small thing: the thesis that the domination of nature stems from the domination of humans by humans remains, twenty years after his death, the most accurate and least dated insight in his entire body of work—the one that distinguishes social ecology from both market ecology and technocratic ecology, both of which treat the ecological crisis as a management problem rather than as a symptom of a social order that must be dismantled.

Dialectical naturalism, stripped of its managerial drift—the tendency, evident in his later writings, to slide from conscious responsibility toward the active improvement of nature by a self-instituting humanity acting as the administrator of evolution—remains a philosophy of nature more fruitful than biocentrism or ordinary anthropocentrism: a philosophy of relations and becoming, in which freedom, subjectivity, and mutualism are not purely human values but are present, in embryonic form, throughout the living world. Humanity’s growing awareness of nature is not a mandate to correct or perfect it according to its own criteria of rationality—it is a responsibility to stop destroying it, nothing more, and that is already considerable.

Moreover, Bookchin does not merely assert this continuity: he explicitly embeds it within an ontology in which nature itself possesses a self-evolving tendency with ethical implications, with mutualism, self-organization, freedom, and subjectivity appearing as potentialities of evolution rather than as human impositions projected retroactively. He put it bluntly himself: “Mutualism, freedom, and subjectivity are not solely human values or concerns. They appear, however germinally, in larger cosmic or organic processes, but they require no Aristotelian God to motivate them, no Hegelian Spirit to vitalize them.”²² .

Nothing in such a line of thought allows us to decide whether hierarchy could have been avoided—the question itself goes beyond what dialectical naturalism can legitimately establish, and attempting to answer it would amount to making it say more than it does. The potentialities of nature may just as well have been “realized, aborted, or warped”²³ . Nothing in this vocabulary guarantees that the second nature will actualize the first: dialectical naturalism describes a structure of graded possibility, not a prophecy.

This awareness and this responsibility do not come out of nowhere: they are part of a critical tradition far older than Bookchin himself, one that has long identified the harmful effects of technology—from the Naturians of the late 19th century to Ellul and Charbonneau, from the Frankfurt School to contemporary anti-industrial movements. This tradition was not wrong; today, given the unprecedented scale of ecological damage, it has taken on renewed relevance—in many respects, it even foresaw what Bookchin himself sometimes underestimated, without at the time having the acceleration that late capitalism would impose on his own intuitions. But with rare exceptions, it never anchored its diagnosis in a political framework capable of giving it substance: a critique of the Megamachine without assemblies, without confederalism, without a strategy of dual power, remains—however accurate it may be—a lucid insight without leverage. The third way that Bookchin outlined—which, as we have said, could have been improved in its time, both regarding electoralism and “liberatory technology”—remains, in this respect, one of the most elaborate contemporary attempts to fuse this insight with a bottom-up institutional strategy. It is this fusion that we are pursuing.

This observation applies, directly and not in a generic sense, to Casaux himself: he explicitly acknowledges, in the conclusion of his own book *Renewable Lies & Decarbonized Capitalism* (2024), that the question of “what to do” goes beyond the scope of his work—which he devoted primarily to establishing what not to do—and leaves the task of building an alternative to others. He goes so far as to admit that “it is extremely unlikely that a majority of the world’s population will come to embrace the Naturian perspective in the coming years, or even in the coming decades”²⁴ — an admission, on his part, that is less a matter of strategic unreality than of a complete lack of strategy. What can be pieced together as the most concrete element in his work is not a political project, nor even a tactic—at most, an inclination: he himself writes that, given the absence of a “truly realistic, convincing proposal to stem the catastrophe, the idea of hastening the collapse of industrial civilization does not seem so absurd, so extreme ”²⁵ — an “accelerationism” of collapse rather than a vision for society. This school of thought is not monolithic: some of its currents ground and articulate their critique through concrete practices—low-tech, peasant autonomy, workshops, recycling centers, etc.—while others stick to theoretical and polemical deconstruction. Casaux, by his own admission, seems to fall into the latter category. This represents a clear difference in political orientation from communalism, which, for its part, proposes a precise institutional framework—confederalism, direct democracy, and the communalization of the economy (anti-economy)—which Bookchin summarized by proposing that “land and enterprises be progressively entrusted to the community—more precisely, to citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal councils”²⁶ both as a concrete political horizon and as a prefigurative practice to be built here and now. We share Casaux’s observation that the collapse is already underway and will accelerate; we make no secret of this. But our response is not to hope for its arrival at any cost, nor to simply let it run its course: it is to build, starting now and from the very rubble itself, the embryonic forms of a dual and confederal popular power—a way to preserve, even in the midst of the collapse, a form of human dignity that may, in the end, be the only thing to survive capitalism. Bookchin had stated this plainly: the texts that advance this project offer, he said, “ideas, ways, and means not only to dismantle the present social order, but to radically rebuild it”²⁷ . In this sense, it is also one of the horizons of our struggle.

• I – Social Ecology: Foundations, Current Events and Perspectives
• Review: Passages No. 0 — Civilization

This is why, ultimately, we do not align ourselves with any “-ism” established as dogma—neither Bookchin’s nor that of any other school. For us, social ecology is not a doctrine to be defended but a living paradigm, to be tested, enriched, and corrected through practice and debate. A way of thinking that can no longer be questioned is a way of thinking that has begun to die—and this is precisely what this exercise in critically moving beyond Bookchin has sought to prevent in our own thinking.

What We Have Not Resolved

It would be dishonest to conclude this text as if it had settled all the questions it raises. Communotechny poses a demand—to question the scale and materiality of a technique before its use—without providing, at this stage, any operational criteria for determining, for a given technique, the precise threshold beyond which its production ceases to be compatible with the non-destruction of nature, personal and communal autonomy, or confederal cooperation and interdependence. Between village craftsmanship and the nuclear reactor, there exists a vast spectrum of intermediate techniques—motorized agricultural equipment, decentralized “renewable” energy production systems derived as much as possible from the reuse of existing resources, low-tech communication networks—whose status remains, to this day, a matter of deliberation rather than a settled position in our work. We prefer to address this here rather than artificially resolve an issue that instituting practice, more than theory, will need to continue to illuminate.

A second question deserves mention, in the same vein. Casaux, following Mumford, contends that delegation can never remain delegation on a large scale: it would necessarily degenerate, through the accumulation of information and experience among those who coordinate, into a form of de facto representation. Our response rests on a simple principle, one that must be upheld to the very end: the confederal level has no decision-making power of its own. Decisions originate from local assemblies and flow upward to the coordination levels, never the other way around; the confederal function is limited to coordination, the pooling of resources, and facilitation—including in the resolution of disputes between municipalities, where it provides the space, procedures, and appointed mediators necessary for a disagreement to be resolved through dialogue, without ever making a decision in place of the assemblies themselves. Added to this is a specific institutional safeguard: a systematic rotation of delegates—appointed for a fixed term and a mission established at the grassroots level, and subject to recall at any time—precludes any professionalization of the role—in contrast to the current representative system and its career politicians. This does not preclude calling upon competent peers in a particular field, when the situation requires it, to inform the assembly’s decisions; but such consultation remains advisory, never decision-making. This does not entirely dispel the objection: coordination always involves interpreting signals that are sometimes contradictory, and it is within this margin of interpretation—well before any formal decision is made—that Mumford locates the emergence of de facto authority. But this is a difference in nature, not in degree, from the planning-oriented councilism that Casaux criticizes—and it requires vigilance on our part, not a matter settled once and for all by the mere proclamation of the principle.

A third, even more profound question deserves to be raised in conclusion—it concerns the very foundation of what we have established above, not its applications. Gustav Landauer—an anarchist whose practical proposals showed strong parallels with those of Bookchin: the same rejection of the conquest of the state, the same conviction that social transformation must take root in autonomous and federated communities²⁸ —coined the term Hegelei²⁹ , a mocking term for what he considered to be inherently superstitious in any dialectical use of history: the shift whereby thinking about the movement of reality turns into the certainty that it will bring about what one desires³⁰ . Yet this is precisely the structure we defended earlier against Casaux—that dialectical movement is not a method chosen from the outside, but the very structure of the object. Landauer would object that this assertion, however rigorous it may be, remains itself a projection: to say that potential is “objectively” graded remains a thesis about nature and history, of precisely the kind he tracks down even in non-Marxist uses of dialectics³¹ . Bookchin avoids the crudest version of this criticism, as we have seen: he guarantees no actualization. Landauer, however, refused to base anarchism on a structure of this kind: “Only the present is real, and what people do not do now, do not begin to do immediately, they will never do for all eternity”³² — an act of will, with no basis in either history or nature. These are, in essence, two distinct forms of communalism, whose political propositions show profound convergences without their philosophical foundations ever fully aligning. We will not decide between the two here—but it would be disingenuous to pretend that the question does not arise.

Finally, there is the question of what such a reorientation actually entails in our own lives: giving up some of the conveniences on which the Megamachine has made us dependent is no easy task. To present this as merely a matter of institutional consistency would be to turn a blind eye. If a great deal of uncertainty persists—even among many circles critical of capitalism—it is no coincidence: the sticking point also stems from a form of hypocrisy that refuses to truly confront what this entails—giving up a whole host of conveniences. The system itself fuels the frustrations for which it then sells the solutions; the idea of having to give up these trinkets quickly becomes unbearable, even though we will inevitably have to come to terms with it one way or another. So what lies before us is not merely an institutional project: it is a largely unconscious attachment to the chains themselves that we must break—before it is too late to do so of our own free will rather than under the coercion of current and future catastrophes. A freedom that depends on capitalism—and thus on the continued functioning of the Megamachine—is not freedom but a new chain around our ankles.

These open questions are merely the outposts of a broader question, one that no theory will resolve for us. For some of what could have been saved, it is undoubtedly already too late; what we are experiencing is no accident, and we are left with only one choice—the third way, self-institution from below, here and now—as a condition for survival, both biological and in terms of dignity. This lucidity must not paralyze us: it is precisely what makes action possible rather than leaving us stunned into inaction. We will have to renounce what the Megamachine has made us dependent on. Will we do so in time? That is the whole question—and the whole task.