Review by Ernest London, January 27, 2020

Floréal M. Roméro presents Murray Bookchin’s work, his critical and political journey. He proposes to find answers in social ecology and libertarian municipalism, without reproducing the structural frameworks of nationalism and capitalist globalization, based on the concrete examples of Chiapas, Rojava and the Spanish anarchist revolution of 1936, and to find a power to act here and now. This revolutionary thought, “both complex and coherent, insightful without being dogmatic”, demonstrates that “the ecological catastrophe was the logical consequence of the social disorders” accelerated by predatory capitalism and that the most suitable tool to remedy it is “the self-management of everything that falls to us day after day”.

We will not dwell on Murray Bookchin’s biography, having already extensively reviewed ECOLOGY OR CATASTROPHE – THE LIFE OF MURRAY BOOKCHIN, and we will simply recall a few milestones. Born in 1921 in New York, his family educated him “in the revolution”. The words of his grandmother upon hearing of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti had a profound effect on him: “This is what capitalism does to workers. Never forget it.” A newspaper seller for the Communist Party, he received political training and became, at the age of thirteen, educational director of the Young Pioneers. He quickly turned to Trotskyism and in July 1936 sought to enlist in the United States International Brigade to fight alongside the Spanish Republicans. In 1937, he discovered the anarchist school of thought. Noting that reason, reduced to utilitarian ends, is perverted by rationality and is no longer “mobilized by the referential centrality of the ideals of the Enlightenment”, that is to say that it is no longer at the service of emancipation but converted “into cold tools of manipulation and domination”, he applies himself to putting it at the service of cooperation and real democracy. He demonstrates that “capitalism is a dangerous system for the health and well-being of humans” and imagines “a free and ecological society”. He makes, like Jacques Ellul or Friedrich Georg Jünger, the critique of technology but in relation to the critique of the social and political structure that secretes it, without rejecting a technology at the service of humanity, to go “beyond scarcity”, which would be on the scale of the local community. He integrates ecology into the libertarian tradition. The Spanish revolution will remain one of his major sources of inspiration. Social urbanism, led by Alfonso Martinez Rizo, fuels his criticism of megacities. In the 1980s, he became close to the Grünen, the German Greens, and could not help but notice how their entry into the electoral game and the institutional politics of the State, distorted the extra-parliamentary movement that propelled it.

“At a time when capitalism is stumbling over its own contradictions,” Floréal M. Roméro suggests drawing on Murray Bookchin’s thinking to create a “new emancipatory collective imagination.” Under threat of a triple collapse: climatic, energy, and societal, he is particularly attentive to the two “fractures in the system,” attempts at direct democracy and self-organization, in Rojava and Chiapas. After having painted, with great accuracy and relevance, a “dark picture” of the world subjected to the destructive logic of capitalism, he lists his proposals, turning each symptom, each crisis, into an “opportunity to regenerate society,” and also exposes the limits of collapsology, Extinction Rebellion, We Don’t Have Time, and other movements advocating a “truncated anti-capitalism,” representative democracy, “green parties,” and “rebel town halls” in favor of a municipalism that is only a replica of the State. On the contrary, his political project starts from “the needs and means that are primarily available locally and territorially”. It is about “getting out of capitalism by diluting it”, “restoring everyone’s capacity for social creativity” by “fighting against the oppressive system” and “for emancipatory alternatives”. “But to consolidate and maintain a living and communicative imagination, it is necessary to articulate these dynamics through a libertarian culture that is fleshed out in all areas of life.” He recalls the failures of the major social protest movements (Nuit debout, the Indignés d’Espagne, etc.) due to their inability to last in their refusal of representation and in their spontaneous self-organizing dimension, while “the highly publicized spectacle of representative democracy hides the backstage of its political void, with the help of what we could objectively call the left of capital (old or new parties such as Syriza, Podemos, France Insoumise). “According to him, it is about federating social initiatives, struggles and alternatives, at the local level, to confederate them at the territorial and international level”, to raise awareness among the greatest number of people “of the real democratic concept”, “decentralized, egalitarian, non-coercive and cooperative”, to encourage pooling, the mixing of ideas leading to real commitments, to “socialize reflections”. “The claim being that of growing in number and collective capacity to one day be able to self-institute and replace the town hall, the last link in state power.” “Trying to open a third breach, that of communalism, at the very heart of capitalism and linking it to the other two, the democratic confederalism of Rojava and the Zapatismo of Chiapas, such is, in summary, our aim. » Optimistic, he concludes with a quote from Bakunin: “It is by seeking the impossible that man has always realized and recognized the possible, and those who have wisely limited themselves to what seemed possible to them have never advanced a single step.”

A very exciting text.

French source website : https://bibliothequefahrenheit.blogspot.com/2020/01/agir-ici-et-maintenant-penser-lecologie.html#more

Upcoming Conference: TRISE Conference 2024

Saturday 26th October

10.00 – 11.00 Keynote Speaker 3
• Floréal M. Romero – Movement and strategy for communalism today

Access to the full program below: