Murray Bookchin: for an eco-analysis of contemporary societies

Murray Bookchin or the communocene objective. Social ecology and planetary liberation Pierre Sauvêtre 2024 Editions de l’Atelier 320 pages

Pierre Sauvêtre, author of a book on the thought of Murray Bookchin, discusses the relevance and topicality of his social ecology.

The proliferation of publications on the history of ecological thought, whether in the form of reissues, translations or historical perspectives (such as the recent Les racines de l’écologie libertaire or Figures de l’écologisme) refutes the idea that it is impossible to imagine a society reconciled with nature. With Murray Bookchin or the Communocene Objective: Social Ecology and Planetary Liberation, sociologist Pierre Sauvêtre, a specialist in Michel Foucault, is part of this dynamic and offers both a rich introduction and a contemporary extension to the thought of American ecologist Murray Bookchin, often associated with the anarchist movement.

Nonfiction: Can you present Murray Bookchin’s original background?

Pierre Sauvêtre: Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) became politicized at a very young age in the radical left-wing milieu of 1930s New York. He belonged to the Young Communists, then became a Trotskyist, but it was among the anarchists of the 1936 Spanish Revolution that he found the true inspiration for a revolutionary democratic socialism to which he remained faithful all his life.

From the early 1950s, he began to closely study environmental issues such as the effects of pollution on food and health, rampant urbanization, the risks of nuclear energy, and became one of the pioneers of ecology in the United States by alerting the public to the problem of pesticides. In the 1960s, his reflections on ecology met the counterculture movement and its generalized critique of a capitalist and conservative society. He invested himself fully in it, before participating in numerous actions within the emerging ecological movement.

Always self-taught, Bookchin began teaching in alternative universities during the 1970s. These three major encounters – those of revolutionary democratic socialism, ecology and the counterculture of the 1960s – became the three main sources of his thinking, which developed intensely from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 2000s, through respectively the definition of a new popular political project – communism –, the construction of a theory enabling us to understand the joint evolution of nature and society – social ecology – and the development of a new culture – the ethics of complementarity – which is based on the critique of all forms of hierarchy based on class, gender, race or age.

You have just mentioned social ecology. How can it be defined more precisely?

Social ecology is often presented as a social critique resulting from the assumption made by Bookchin as early as the 1960s that “the obligation imposed on humans to dominate nature derives directly from the domination of humans over humans”. He himself used this simplifying presentation to highlight the political consequence that he considered crucial, namely that the resolution of the global ecological crisis depended on the ability of humans to address and resolve social imbalances. Social ecology as an intellectual bias is therefore the idea that the improvement of the ecological situation can only occur through a critique of social domination. Social ecology can then be summarized as the critique of all hierarchies based not only on class, but also on gender, race or age, and this must be at the heart of social transformation for Bookchin.

However, it seems to me that one of the limitations of this definition of social ecology as equivalent to social criticism is that it obscures the link that exists from the outset in Bookchin’s thinking between ecology as a science and social ecology. In other words, this first definition masks a second definition of social ecology as a scientific method which consists, according to another quote from Bookchin, of “bringing society back into the analytical framework of ecology”. It is this second definition that I wanted to highlight in the second chapter of the book with the term “eco-analysis of society”. It is therefore a scientific approach integrating ecology and sociology that consists of an ecological-social holism, that is to say the study of social relations within the terrestrial totality of the interdependent and evolutionary relations that they form with biological relations other than human ones. Eco-analysis involves making ecology the standard from which the critique of society is carried out. In this respect, Bookchin identified mainly in intraspecific and interspecific mutualism the ecological factor that allowed progress towards the biodiversity of non-human nature. And, based on this assumption, it is possible to criticize the intra-human relations of domination, exploitation or competition which, by depriving human organisms of the type of relations through which they could develop all their faculties, have caused a profound imbalance between non-human nature and human society.

It seems to me today that, at a time when the ecological and climate crisis predicted by Bookchin as early as the 1960s has turned into a global catastrophe, nothing is more urgent for societies than to carry out their own eco-analysis. Finally, if we want to give a comprehensive definition of social ecology, this scientific dimension must ultimately be complemented by the reconstructive, clinical practice that follows from it, which consists in the humanization of the ecological factors that have allowed the progress of nature other than human nature. Bookchin thus identified in an ethics of the complementarity of differences, based on the human values of care for others, co-participation, mutualization, spontaneity and subjectivity, the basis of social relations that will enable us to put an end to our eco-pathological society.

In short, social ecology in Bookchin’s work can be defined as the critical and clinical whole, the theory of the eco-analysis of societies on the one hand, and the practical ethics of complementarity between humans, as well as between humans and other-than-humans, on the other.

After these theoretical aspects, let us turn to more concrete questions. What form of decentralization does Bookchin promote, and how does it serve an ecological society?

What Bookchin promotes is an ecological decentralization of social organization, that is to say a dispersal of hitherto concentrated population groups, their infrastructures and their economic activities into a set of decentralized towns and villages throughout the territory that are adapted to local ecosystems or, in his words, to local “eco-communities” of plants and animals. This primarily implies a decentralization of the largest metropolises, but this is not possible without a decentralization – and a transformation – of the agricultural, energy, technical and economic infrastructures.

As early as the 1960s, Bookchin considered that the gigantism of companies, the uncontrolled growth of urban sprawl and highly industrialized agriculture had become unavoidable problems for a society that sought to interrupt the process of radical simplification of the living world in which our societies still find themselves and which they have aggravated.

Its decentralism makes the region the appropriate scale for achieving a balance between social organization and eco-communities. But it is more than just decentralization, it is ecodecentralism, in the sense of the incorporation by decentralized social systems of ecological rationality, that is to say the norm of integration into a unitary whole of elements differentiated by the development of mutualistic and non-hierarchical relationships of complementarity. Bookchin thus advocates an agriculture based on respect for the biological diversity of the soil, what is known today as agro-ecology; in the energy sector, the development of systems combining various energy sources based on a main source of locally available energy (for example solar energy in very sunny regions, etc.); economically, a regional economy federating municipalities that are themselves conceived as production and consumption communities in which the inhabitants join forces to satisfy basic needs through the communal division of complementary economic functions.

Finally, an essential characteristic of this eco-decentralism is that it is democratic in nature, which means in all cases the use of small-scale technologies, adjusted to the ecosystem and democratically appropriable by the inhabitants at the local level. Such an eco-decentralist project is ultimately an exclusive alternative to state management of the environment, whose proven characteristics of solutionism, technocratism, one-dimensionalism and gigantism are structurally incompatible with respect for and development of biodiversity. The eco-decentralist society must therefore be associated with democratic decentralism, as its necessary correlate – the confederation of communes as the form that must replace the nation-state.

In general, how is Bookchin’s approach still relevant for our time?

I think Bookchin was a visionary. He warned about pesticides from the early 1950s, anticipated global warming from the 1960s and was one of the first to highlight the fundamental contradiction between the development of capitalism and ecology. Although he died almost twenty years ago, his thinking is therefore still fully relevant to our times, and once again, the definition in social ecology of a unitary global approach to natural and social processes is absolutely necessary if we are to be able to raise awareness and develop an appropriate attitude to the violence of the climatic events that contemporary societies are experiencing. In other words, knowledge must be produced that integrates the life sciences and the social sciences. Separated from each other, they are indeed insufficient because they cannot provide an answer to the main challenge of knowing how human societies can incorporate relationships that harmonize their co-existence with the natural world. I repeat, our societies must now carry out their own eco-analysis; they must reflect not only on human phenomena but also on the non-human phenomena that penetrate them and condition the possibility of their evolution. Without this, they will continue to head towards the abyss.

Furthermore, his political project of communalism as the institution of a democratic confederation of communes based on popular decision-making assemblies, which should replace the nation-state, is also proving its relevance today. Even if they are in the minority, communal experiments such as those carried out by the Zapatistas in Chiapas and by the Kurds in Rojava – whose leader Abdullah Öcalan was explicitly inspired by Bookchin’s communalism to set up a “democratic confederalism” in northern Syria – are proof that the nation-state is by no means a universal form. More specifically, the question of the capacity of the state form to deepen democracy is directly posed today, and what we are witnessing in an increasingly obvious way is, on the contrary, the manifestation of a contradiction between the state form and democracy. In these circumstances, Bookchin is an increasingly present reference for social movements aspiring to democracy on all continents, as he was for example for some of the Gilets jaunes in France.

But, in this respect, what I wanted to do in my book is to highlight the whole decisive background of Bookchin’s ecological and social thinking in order to link it to the communalist political project. The reading I propose consists in producing a shift from a communalism restricted to the problem of political organization to an ecological communalism as a policy of democratic, social and earthly transformation. Thus, ecological communism is the policy by which inhabitants regain control of politics and the economy in order to adapt their social activities, their lifestyle and their social technologies to the ecosystem in which they live, by promoting the development of the living world other than humans.

What extensions to Bookchin’s thinking do you propose, particularly in terms of the “Communocene”?

I first tried to draw inspiration from Gilles Deleuze and his creative way of reading philosophy, building on Bookchin’s thinking with unique concepts such as “life-world” or “cosmo-power”. The latter refers to Foucault’s concept of “biopower” and aims to take a further step by proposing to say that power in the West has not only been constructed as a power over life, but as a power to make the world in the sense of the reconfiguration by the power of earthly materiality. This is now culminating in the neoliberal system as an articulation of the state and capital in the service of a world-making power that accelerates the regression of the living. The vocation of political ecology is therefore to question cosmo-power and to build a democratic movement that allows people to collectively reclaim their power to interact with the natural world, which has been taken away from them.

As for the concept of the “Communocene”, it aims to invite Bookchin’s thinking into the debate on the Anthropocene. On this subject, I wanted to show in the first chapter of the book that Bookchin’s work contained critical arguments that were ahead of their time in terms of an understanding of the Anthropocene and an attempt to go beyond the terrestrial configuration of things to which it corresponds. In particular through the reference to the Gaia hypothesis, which appeared in his work from the early 1980s, and his relational and self-evolving conception of nature as a historical process of self-organization of others than humans, the issue of the reactivation of the power of making-world of others than humans is at the heart of his thinking. Consequently, what the concept of the communocene aims to suggest is that the communalist political project is not anthropocentric, unlike Kohei Saito’s “degrowth communism”, for example. The communocene thus refers to the post-anthropocenic historical possibility of a transformed terrestrial configuration in which others than humans and humans would participate in a mutualistic and complementary way in planetary formation.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the limitation of the Latourian and Descolian perspectives of overcoming the Anthropocene is that they do not address the nature of the social transformation – I mean the transformation of the institutions of civil society, the economy (and in particular of labor) and politics – which is indispensable to the transformation of the Earth. Indeed, the existence of complementary relationships between non-humans and humans is impossible if a society characterized by hierarchy, exploitation and competition continues to impose on the dominated the forms of their interaction with the living world other than the human. The commocene therefore also means that it is only through the establishment of social institutions underpinned by non-hierarchical, complementary, mutualistic relationships – which I identify in the book as the commons and communes, and which are intended to replace the social institutions of domination – that human society will be able to balance its relations with the living world other than the human world in the sense of common earthly progress.

Source (in French): Nonfiction / author Benjamin CARACO

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In addition to this interview, you will most likely appreciate the insight we wish to provide regarding Foucault and his thinking:

Foucault against social ecology

Today, he observed, it is the liberals who are afraid of freedom and the intellectuals who are ready to do anything to oppose thought. George Orwell – First Preface to Animal Farm –

Subject to competition, most of the intellectuals of service only fulfill their class duty in a university or more simply journalistic form. It is through the university that the ideology of neoliberalism has been able to rush in and sow the seeds of discord in the fertile soil of confusion in order to develop better. Thomist in the great Christian era, then Kantian in the secular era, Heideggerian during Nazi Germany and social democrat in the post-war period. From the 1960s onwards, it became structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructivist, bringing all its knowledge to the ideologues and strategists of neoliberalism, who were thus able to undermine the very heart of the dangerous subversive thoughts of the time, particularly those of feminism and radical ecology. Michel Foucault is a significant example in this regard. It makes you wonder how left-wing – or even anarchist – theorists could have fallen for the bait he set.

Bookchin’s grievance with Foucault was that he extolled “a practice of staging Foucauldian personal insurrections”. In other words, an existential and aesthetic approach that he referred to as “lifestyle anarchism”, which involves “adapting, making one’s life a work of art or changing one’s life – and one’s thinking – without changing the world”. He was right to wonder when it would finally be possible to “draw something clear from Foucault, as the formulations found in his work lend themselves to contradictory interpretations.” But on closer inspection, it could be that this lack of clarity conceals a much more partisan and unacknowledged Foucauldian approach. Thus, from 1967 to 1984, Foucault’s critique of Marxism became more radical, and far from waging a resolute intellectual struggle against the free market dogma, he seemed to adhere to it in many respects. Moreover, he never systematically opposed what he calls the juridical-deductive and axiomatic liberalism way to the utilitarian and neoliberal way. However, he seemed fascinated by neoliberalism, which he did not present in any way as the system to be overthrown, nor as a nightmare from which we should wake up. He insisted instead on the difference between the traditional doctrine of laissez-faire and the neoliberal doctrine of the promotion of competition, including through state action. The subject is conceived as a power to act rather than as a holder of rights. This power to act has a positive aspect that he calls empowerment, capacity building, and a negative one in the form of victimhood – guilt versus responsibility. The aim of neoliberal law is to unleash action, and it relies, like the economy, on the capacity of each individual to act and to make transactions. The term rational actor assumes that the reference to action is as important as that to reason because what counts above all is acting. The liberal path hard, that of the uncompromising economists, opens up to something quite fascinating in that it substitutes for the disciplinary society a policy of respect for differences, until then impossible to envisage, even from the simple theoretical point of view. This respect for heterodoxies certainly counts more than anything else in Foucault’s political reflection. Certainly, he put on the agenda a whole range of dominations that had hitherto been rather ignored, but they are theorized and thought out apart from questions relating to exploitation. Far from outlining a theoretical perspective that considers the relationship between these two problems, he gradually set them against each other, even considering them to be contradictory. This semantic shift contributed to “replacing exploitation and its critique with a refocusing on the victim of the denial of rights, prisoners, dissidents, homosexuals, refugees, etc.” – Isabelle Garo -. Thus François Ewald, his assistant at the Collège de France, was able to become an advisor to MEDEF, while claiming to be a follower of his thinking, and the elites of neoliberal orthodoxy venerated him on American campuses, but also through the purchase – for the modest price of €3.8 million – in 2015 of his archives by the French National Library.

And the first attempt at diversity/diversion was marked

As if Margaret Thatcher had taken her courses for her speech at the Conservative Party Conference on October 10, 1975, where she was acclaimed for her vision of society. – her utopia: Some socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in an administrative computer. We believe that they should be people. We are all unequal. No one, thank goodness, is the same as another, contrary to what most socialists may claim. We believe that everyone has the right to be different, but for us every human being is of equal importance.

Let us remember this fine example of the shift in liberal discourse that opened the door to the neoliberal revolution. The term ‘unequal’ was used very cleverly, as it has two meanings in English: unequal but also different – in order to contrast the beautiful concept of difference with a levelling socialism. In this way, it transformed something perceived as negative by the vast majority of the population, economic inequality, into a question of diversity, demanded by both the humanist tradition and ecology. From then on, the problem was no longer that we are unequal because of the capitalist class system that serves the owners of the means of production to the detriment of their servants, but that having the right to be different and rebellious, we must oppose all those anti-capitalists who, like the communists, seek to make us all the same. With this sleight of hand, Mrs. Thatcher had not only found an effective alibi for transforming an unjust and skewed system from the outset into a game in which the best will be rewarded, she had succeeded in breaking up the class struggles of the time.

Floréal Romero for the Atelier d’Écologie Sociale et Communalisme

Rebound:

• Review of Remaking society

Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.