What is social ecology?

A presentation

Murray Bookchin, born in 1921 in the United States, became involved in the class struggle at a very young age as a trade unionist and then in favor of civil rights and feminism. From the 1950s, he would fight and get involved in developing a radical ecological movement and pointing out capitalism and its logic of constraint to grow or die. During this long journey, in this pivotal period of a capitalism in crisis and mutation, he would gradually lay the foundations of social ecology and its corresponding political proposal: communalism. He died in 2006, after having influenced the thinking of the Kurds who would pay tribute to him in their attempt to establish Democratic Confederalism in Rojava, inspired by communalism.

The social ecology that Bookchin bequeathed to us and from which we will work in this workshop presents itself under two fundamental and complementary aspects without which any political proposal would remain shaky. Because before wanting to act, confront, create and build, there is nothing like knowing the substrate in which we evolve. Starting by understanding how and to what extent human societies have been able to degenerate to a suicidal point, that of destroying the natural environment that gave birth to them and after millennia of mutually favorable interactions.

« To pick a quarrel with such a (capitalist) system about its values, to try to scare it with the consequences of growth, is to reproach it for what constitutes its very metabolism. » For social ecology, the current ecological disaster is fueled by the social relations established in modern state societies, relations that themselves have their roots in the historical dynamics of the domination of man by man, starting with patriarchy. Thus: « none of the ecological problems we face can be resolved without a profound social change. » abolishing any form of power hierarchy.

The second part of social ecology, its dialectical naturalism, allows us to find the thread of our evolutionary process as human societies based on mutual aid. Society is defined as second nature since it is born from the first nature: our natural environment. Thus « nature is a prerequisite for the development of society. » … « human history will never be able to get rid of or detach itself from nature. »

Social ecology, far from retreating into a negative totality and being just as careful not to propose a positive totality, nevertheless allows us to trigger a process of rupture with the ambient fatality. Thus, in all coherence, communalism remains one of the rare proposals capable of overcoming the aporia of dominant capitalist thought short of possibilities not only in the discourse of those in power, but also in that of its opponents. To the point that There is no alternative seems to have colonized daily life, even in language.

Inspired by past and present revolutionary experiences here and elsewhere, the communalist project, nourished by social ecology, aims high. It is about breaking the circle of the impossible to avoid the unthinkable, that is, to get rid of capitalism and domination. It is by turning towards the spirit of utopia that communalism can, thanks to the principle of hope, conceive of itself as a radical democracy and thereby effectively counter the entropy that continues to endanger it. Rejecting back to back the myths of the Great Evening and of each his share, this revolutionary and ecological project aspires to reconfigure here and now, in daily life, society from the bottom up, through direct democracy, commune by commune, decentralized, integrated into their natural habitats, federated regionally and confederated globally. According to Bookchin: « This radicalization… is the only means available to the libertarian municipalist movement to develop a parallel power directed against the State. […] to replace it with a libertarian communist society. » That is, a return to the human management of public affairs and to collective decision-making starting from the municipalities.

But how can we break the circle of alienation, that of neutralized thought? That of asphyxiation which keeps us unable to establish a dialogue to really differ. The proliferation of identities only confirms the homogenization of a world which, in order to give them a surface consistency, will hierarchize them in order to better put them in competition. So, in what way do the constraints and formatting undergone in this type of societal organization affect mentalities and behaviors, by distorting their primary nature and this right to the very heart of subjectivities: this will be one of the main objects of our research.

This question is not insignificant and shows us how immense the task is to begin to open ourselves up to the creation of a collective intelligence, the only one capable of getting us out of this impasse while developing a consistent strategy for a communalist movement that will have to be just as much.

To grasp the concept of Social Ecology, we refer of course to Murray Bookchin’s works, including “The Philosophy of Social Ecology” by Murray Bookchin