Harbinger Committee:

• Claudia Bagiackas
• Michael Caplan
• Daniel Chodorkoff
• Michael J. Cuba

Contributors:

• Amaan – The Oromo and the Ethiopian Empire State
• Murray Bookchin – Interview with Murray Bookchin
• Michael Caplan – The Oromo and the Ethiopian Empire State
• Kai Malloy – Towards a Historical Perspective of Libertarian and Anarchist Education
• Cindy Milstein – What’s in a Name?
• Andrea del Moral – Seeds in the City
• Erin Royster – Hungry for Profit
• Brian Tokar – Radicalizing the Debate
• Amoshaun Toft – Prefigurative Politics in the Pro-Democracy Movement
• David Vanek – Interview with Murray Bookchin

Art Work:

• Michael Caplan – Corn Harvest, Urban Decay Farmers, Commodified Peas, Food as Capital, antiantidisestablishmentarianism
• Mike Flugennock – Liberation!
• Cliff Harper – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, Educate, Agitate, Organise, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman
• Peter Kuper – Protest!
• Monthly Review Press – Cover of Hungry for Profit
• Oromia Support Group – Map of Oromia
• Dustin C. Ross – DC Protest
• Marco Tulli – Cover

Layout and Design:

• Michael Caplan

Copy Editing:

• Dan Chodorkoff
• Cheri Killam

Misc.:

• Janet Biehl
• The social ecology community

Disclaimer:

Opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Institute for Social Ecology.

Editorial

Credits

What is Social Ecology?

Economics in a Social-Ecological Society
What would economics look like in an ecological society? How might free communities arrange their livelihood? Peter Staudenmaier

Buttercups and Sunflowers
On the Evolution of First and Second Nature: Healing the seemingly disparate relationship between nature and culture by reminding us of the developmental relationship between them. Sonja Schmitz

The Communalist Project
A radical politics for the twenty-first century. Murray Bookchin

A History of the ISE

Education and Community Action
A History of the ISE’s Programs: How the Institute for Social Ecology has changed the world through its educational programs and community involvement.

Social Ecology and Social Movements
From the 1960s to the Present: Exploring the important role of the Institute for Social Ecology in many of the pivotal social and ecological movements of the past four decades. Brian Tokar

Contemporary Movements

Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy
Building a movement for confederal direct democracy. AFADD

Report From Maple Hill

Lest these remarks seem too apocalyptic, I should emphasize that we also live in an era when human creativity, technology, and imagination have the capability to produce extraordinary material achievements and to endow us with societies that allow for a degree of freedom that far and away exceeds the most dramatic and emancipatory visions projected by social theorists such as Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin.1 Many thinkers of the postmodern age have obtusely singled out science and technology as the principal threats to human well-being, yet few disciplines have imparted to humanity such a stupendous knowledge of the innermost secrets of matter and life, or provided our species better with the ability to alter every important feature of reality and to improve the well-being of human and nonhuman life-forms.

We are thus in a position either to follow a path toward a grim “end of history,” in which a banal succession of vacuous events replaces genuine progress, or to move on to a path toward the true making of history, in which humanity genuinely progresses toward a rational world. We are in a position to choose between an ignominious finale, possibly including the catastrophic nuclear oblivion of history itself, and history’s rational fulfillment in a free, materially abundant society in an aesthetically crafted environment.

Notwithstanding the technological marvels that competing enterprises of the ruling class (that is, the bourgeoisie) are developing in order to achieve hegemony over one another, little of a subjective nature that exists in the existing society can redeem it. Precisely at a time when we, as a species, are capable of producing the means for amazing objective advances and improvements in the human condition and in the nonhuman natural world—advances that could make for a free and rational society— we stand almost naked morally before the onslaught of social forces that may very well lead to our physical immolation. Prognoses about the future are understandably very fragile and are easily distrusted. Pessimism has become very widespread, as capitalist social relations become more deeply entrenched in the human mind than ever before, and as culture regresses appallingly, almost to a vanishing point. To most people today, the hopeful and very radical certainties of the twenty-year period between the Russian Revolution of 1917-18 and the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 seem almost naïve.

Yet our decision to create a better society, and our choice of the way to do it, must come from within ourselves, without the aid of a deity, still less a mystical “force of nature” or a charismatic leader. If we choose the road toward a better future, our choice must be the consequence of our ability—and ours alone—to learn from the material lessons of the past and to appreciate the real prospects of the future. We will need to have recourse, not to ghostly vagaries conjured up from the murky hell of superstition or, absurdly, from the couloirs of the academy, but to the innovative attributes that make up our very humanity and the essential features that account for natural and social development, as opposed to the social pathologies and accidental events that have sidetracked humanity from its self-fulfillment in consciousness and reason. Having brought history to a point where nearly everything is possible, at least of a material nature—and having left behind a past that was permeated ideologically by mystical and religious elements produced by the human imagination—we are faced with a new challenge, one that has never before confronted humanity. We must consciously create our own world, not according to demonic fantasies, mindless customs, and destructive prejudices, but according to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.

What factors should be decisive in making our choice? First, of great significance is the immense accumulation of social and political experience that is available to revolutionaries today, a storehouse of knowledge that, properly conceived, could be used to avoid the terrible errors that our predecessors made and to spare humanity the terrible plagues of failed revolutions in the past. Of indispensable importance is the potential for a new theoretical springboard that has been created by the history of ideas, one that provides the means to catapult an emerging radical movement beyond existing social conditions into a future that fosters humanity’s emancipation.

But we must also be fully aware of the scope of the problems that we face. We must understand with complete clarity where we stand in the development of the prevailing capitalist order, and we have to grasp emergent social problems and address them in the program of a new movement. Capitalism is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appear in history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains a system of commodity exchange in which objects that are made for sale and profit pervade and mediate most human relations. Yet capitalism is also a highly mutable system, continually advancing the brutal maxim that whatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of its rivals must die. Hence “growth” and perpetual change become the very laws of life of capitalist existence. This means that capitalism never remains permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions that arise from its basic social relations.

Although capitalism became a dominant society only in the past few centuries, it long existed on the periphery of earlier societies: in a largely commercial form, structured around trade between cities and empires; in a craft form throughout the European Middle Ages; in a hugely industrial form in our own time; and if we are to believe recent seers, in an informational form in the coming period. It has created not only new technologies but also a great variety of economic and social structures, such as the small shop, the factory, the huge mill, and the industrial and commercial complex. Certainly the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution has not completely disappeared, any more than the isolated peasant family and small craftsman of a still earlier period have been consigned to complete oblivion. Much of the past is always incorporated into the present; indeed, as Marx insistently warned, there is no “pure capitalism,” and none of the earlier forms of capitalism fade away until radically new social relations are established and become overwhelmingly dominant. But today capitalism, even as it coexists with and utilizes precapitalist institutions for its own ends (see Marx’s Grundrisse for this dialectic), now reaches into the suburbs and the countryside with its shopping malls and newly styled factories. Indeed, it is by no means inconceivable that one day it will reach beyond our planet. In any case, it has produced not only new commodities to create and feed new wants but new social and cultural issues, which in turn have given rise to new supporters and antagonists of the existing system. The famous first part of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, in which they celebrate capitalism’s wonders, would have to be periodically rewritten to keep pace with the achievements—as well as the horrors—produced by the bourgeoisie’s development.

One of the most striking features of capitalism today is that in the Western world the highly simplified two-class structure—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—that Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, predicted would become dominant under “mature” capitalism (and we have yet to determine what “mature,” still less “late” or “moribund” capitalism actually is) has undergone a process of reconfiguration. The conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past. Contrary to Marx’s expectations, the industrial working class is now dwindling in numbers and is steadily losing its traditional identity as a class—which by no means excludes it from a potentially broader and perhaps more extensive conflict of society as a whole against capitalist social relations. Present-day culture, social relations, cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, and transportation have remade the traditional proletariat, upon which syndicalists and Marxists were overwhelmingly, indeed almost mystically focused, into a largely petty-bourgeois stratum whose mentality is marked by its own bourgeois utopianism of “consumption for the sake of consumption.” We can foresee a time when the proletarian, whatever the color of his or her collar or place on the assembly line, will be completely replaced by automated and even miniaturized means of production that are operated by a few white-coated manipulators of machines and by computers.

By the same token, the living standards of the traditional proletariat and its material expectations (no small factor in the shaping of social consciousness!) have changed enormously, soaring within only a generation or two from near poverty to a comparatively high degree of material affluence. Among the children and grandchildren of former steel and automobile workers and coal miners, who have no proletarian class identity, a college education has replaced the high school diploma as emblematic of a new class status. In the United States once-opposing class interests have converged to a point that almost 50 percent of American households own stocks and bonds, while a huge number are proprietors of one kind or another, possessing their own homes, gardens, and rural summer retreats.

Given these changes, the stern working man or woman, portrayed in radical posters of the past with a flexed, highly muscular arm holding a bone-crushing hammer, has been replaced by the genteel and well-mannered (so-called) “working middle class.” The traditional cry “Workers of the world, unite!” in its old historical sense becomes ever more meaningless. The class-consciousness of the proletariat, which Marx tried to awaken in The Communist Manifesto, has been hemorrhaging steadily and in many places has virtually disappeared. The more existential class struggle has not been eliminated, to be sure, any more than the bourgeoisie could eliminate gravity from the existing human condition, but unless radicals today become aware of the fact that it has been narrowed down largely to the individual factory or office, they will fail to see that a new, perhaps more expansive form of social consciousness can emerge in the generalized struggles that face us. Indeed, this form of social consciousness can be given a refreshingly new meaning as the concept of the rebirth of the citoyen—a concept so important to the Great Revolution of 1789 and its more broadly humanistic sentiment of sociality that it became the form of address among later revolutionaries summoned to the barricades by the heraldic crowing of the red French rooster.

Seen as a whole, the social condition that capitalism has produced today stands very much at odds with the simplistic class prognoses advanced by Marx and by the revolutionary French syndicalists. After the Second World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and working conditions: notably environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life basic to grassroots politics.

Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced an issue as class—as witness the extent to which many social analyses have singled out managers, bureaucrats, scientists, and the like as emerging, ostensibly dominant groups. New and elaborate gradations of status and interests count today to an extent that they did not in the recent past; they blur the conflict between wage labor and capital that was once so central, clearly defined, and militantly waged by traditional socialists. Class categories are now intermingled with hierarchical categories based on race, gender, sexual preference, and certainly national or regional differences. Status differentiations, characteristic of hierarchy, tend to converge with class differentiations, and a more all-inclusive capitalistic world is emerging in which ethnic, national, and gender differences often surpass the importance of class differences in the public eye. This phenomenon is not entirely new: in the First World War countless German socialist workers cast aside their earlier commitment to the red flags of proletarian unity in favor of the national flags of their well-fed and parasitic rulers and went on to plunge bayonets into the bodies of French and Russian socialist workers—as they did, in turn, under the national flags of their own oppressors.

At the same time capitalism has produced a new, perhaps paramount contradiction: the clash between an economy based on unending growth and the desiccation of the natural environment.2 This issue and its vast ramifications can no more be minimized, let alone dismissed, than the need of human beings for food or air. At present the most promising struggles in the West, where socialism was born, seem to be waged less around income and working conditions than around nuclear power, pollution, deforestation, urban blight, education, health care, community life, and the oppression of people in underdeveloped countries—as witness the (albeit sporadic) antiglobalization upsurges, in which blue- and white-collar “workers” march in the same ranks with middle-class humanitarians and are motivated by common social concerns. Proletarian combatants become indistinguishable from middle-class ones. Burly workers, whose hallmark is a combative militancy, now march behind “bread and puppet” theater performers, often with a considerable measure of shared playfulness. Members of the working and middle classes now wear many different social hats, so to speak, challenging capitalism obliquely as well as directly on cultural as well as economic grounds.

Nor can we ignore, in deciding what direction we are to follow, the fact that capitalism, if it is not checked, will in the future—and not necessarily the very distant future—differ appreciably from the system we know today. Capitalist development can be expected to vastly alter the social horizon in the years ahead. Can we suppose that factories, offices, cities, residential areas, industry, commerce, and agriculture, let alone moral values, aesthetics, media, popular desires, and the like will not change immensely before the twenty-first century is out? In the past century, capitalism, above all else, has broadened social issues—indeed, the historical social question of how a humanity, divided by classes and exploitation, will create a society based on equality, the development of authentic harmony, and freedom—to include those whose resolution was barely foreseen by the liberatory social theorists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our age, with its endless array of “bottom lines” and “investment choices,” now threatens to turn society itself into a vast and exploitative marketplace.3

The public with which the progressive socialist had to deal is also changing radically and will continue to do so in the coming decades. To lag in understanding behind the changes that capitalism is introducing and the new or broader contradictions it is producing would be to commit the recurringly disastrous error that led to the defeat of nearly all revolutionary upsurges in the past two centuries. Foremost among the lessons that a new revolutionary movement must learn from the past is that it must win over broad sectors of the middle class to its new populist program. No attempt to replace capitalism with socialism ever had or will have the remotest chance of success without the aid of the discontented petty bourgeoisie, whether it was the intelligentsia and peasantry-in-uniform of the Russian Revolution or the intellectuals, farmers, shopkeepers, clerks, and managers in industry and even in government in the German upheavals of 1918-21. Even during the most promising periods of past revolutionary cycles, the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the German Social Democrats, and Russian Communists never acquired absolute majorities in their respective legislatives bodies. So-called “proletarian revolutions” were invariably minority revolutions, usually even within the proletariat itself, and those that succeeded (often briefly, before they were subdued or drifted historically out of the revolutionary movement) depended overwhelmingly on the fact that the bourgeoisie lacked active support among its own military forces or was simply socially demoralized.

Given the changes that we are witnessing and those that are still taking form, social radicals can no longer oppose the predatory (as well as immensely creative) capitalist system by using the ideologies and methods that were born in the first Industrial Revolution, when a factory proletarian seemed to be the principal antagonist of a textile plant owner. (Nor can we use ideologies that were spawned by conflicts that an impoverished peasantry used to oppose feudal and semifeudal landowners.) None of the professedly anticapitalist ideologies of the past—Marxism, anarchism, syndicalism, and more generic forms of socialism—retain the same relevance that they had at an earlier stage of capitalist development and in an earlier period of technological advance. Nor can any of them hope to encompass the multitude of new issues, opportunities, problems, and interests that capitalism has repeatedly created over time.

Marxism was the most comprehensive and coherent effort to produce a systematic form of socialism, emphasizing the material as well as the subjective historical preconditions of a new society. This project, in the present era of precapitalist economic decomposition and of intellectual confusion, relativism, and subjectivism, must never surrender to the new barbarians, many of whom find their home in what was once a barrier to ideological regression—the academy. We owe much to Marx’s attempt to provide us with a coherent and stimulating analysis of the commodity and commodity relations, to an activist philosophy, a systematic social theory, an objectively grounded or “scientific” concept of historical development, and a flexible political strategy. Marxist political ideas were eminently relevant to the needs of a terribly disoriented proletariat and to the particular oppressions that the industrial bourgeoisie inflicted upon it in England in the 1840s, somewhat later in France, Italy, and Germany, and very presciently in Russia in the last decade of Marx’s life. Until the rise of the populist movement in Russia (most famously, the Narodnaya Volya), Marx expected the emerging proletariat to become the great majority of the population in Europe and North America, and to inevitably engage in revolutionary class war as a result of capitalist exploitation and immiseration. And especially between 1917 and 1939, long after Marx’s death, Europe was indeed beleaguered by a mounting class war that reached the point of outright workers’ insurrections. In 1917, owing to an extraordinary confluence of circumstances—particularly with the outbreak of the First World War, which rendered several quasi-feudal European social systems terribly unstable—Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to use (but greatly altered) Marx’s writings in order to take power in an economically backward empire, whose size spanned eleven time zones across Europe and Asia.4

But for the most part, as we have seen, Marxism’s economic insights belonged to an era of emerging factory capitalism in the nineteenth century. Brilliant as a theory of the material preconditions for socialism, it did not address the ecological, civic, and subjective forces or the efficient causes that could impel humanity into a movement for revolutionary social change. On the contrary, for nearly a century Marxism stagnated theoretically. Its theorists were often puzzled by developments that have passed it by and, since the 1960s, have mechanically appended environmentalist and feminist ideas to its formulaic ouvrierist outlook.

By the same token, anarchism—which, I believe, represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action—is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory. Its foremost theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism and the liberatory effects of “paradox” or even “contradiction,” to use Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have been advanced in the name of “anarchy” were often drawn from Marxism (including my own concept of “post-scarcity,” which understandably infuriated many anarchists who read my essays on the subject). Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization. Anarchism’s idea of self-regulation (auto nomos) led to a radical celebration of Nietzsche’s all-absorbing will. Indeed the history of this “ideology” is peppered with idiosyncratic acts of defiance that verge on the eccentric, which not surprisingly have attracted many young people and aesthetes.

In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare—leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.

Anarchism has often been confused with revolutionary syndicalism, a highly structured and well-developed mass form of libertarian trade unionism that, unlike anarchism, was long committed to democratic procedures,5 to discipline in action, and to organized, long-range revolutionary practice to eliminate capitalism. Its affinity with anarchism stems from its strong libertarian bias, but bitter antagonisms between anarchists and syndicalists have a long history in nearly every country in Western Europe and North America, as witness the tensions between the Spanish CNT and the anarchist groups associated with Tierra y Libertad early in the twentieth century; between the revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist groups in Russia during the 1917 revolution; and between the IWW in the United States and Sweden, to cite the more illustrative cases in the history of the libertarian labor movement. More than one American anarchist was affronted by Joe Hill’s defiant maxim on the eve of his execution in Utah: “Don’t mourn—Organize!” Alas, small groups were not quite the “organizations” that Joe Hill, or the grossly misunderstood idol of the Spanish libertarian movement, Salvador Seguí, had in mind. It was largely the shared word libertarian that made it possible for somewhat confused anarchists to coexist in the same organization with revolutionary syndicalists. It was often verbal confusion rather than ideological clarity that made possible the coexistence in Spain of the FAI, as represented by the anarchist Federica Montseny, with the syndicalists, as represented by Juan Prieto, in the CNT-FAI, a truly confused organization if ever there was one.

Revolutionary syndicalism’s destiny has been tied in varying degrees to a pathology called ouvrierisme, or “workerism,” and whatever philosophy, theory of history, or political economy it possesses has been borrowed, often piecemeal and indirectly, from Marx—indeed, Georges Sorel and many other professed revolutionary syndicalists in the early twentieth century expressly regarded themselves as Marxists and even more expressly eschewed anarchism. Moreover, revolutionary syndicalism lacks a strategy for social change beyond the general strike, which revolutionary uprisings such as the famous October and November general strikes in Russia during 1905 proved to be stirring but ultimately ineffectual. Indeed, as invaluable as the general strike may be as a prelude to direct confrontation with the state, they decidedly do not have the mystical capacity that revolutionary syndicalists assigned to them as means for social change. Their limitations are striking evidence that, as episodic forms of direct action, general strikes are not equatable with revolution nor even with profound social changes, which presuppose a mass movement and require years of gestation and a clear sense of direction. Indeed, revolutionary syndicalism exudes a typical ouvrierist anti-intellectualism that disdains attempts to formulate a purposive revolutionary direction and a reverence for proletarian “spontaneity” that, at times, has led it into highly self-destructive situations. Lacking the means for an analysis of their situation, the Spanish syndicalists (and anarchists) revealed only a minimal capacity to understand the situation in which they found themselves after their victory over Franco’s forces in the summer of 1936 and no capacity to take “the next step” to institutionalize a workers’ and peasants’ form of government.

What these observations add up to is that Marxists, revolutionary syndicalists, and authentic anarchists all have a fallacious understanding of politics, which should be conceived as the civic arena and the institutions by which people democratically and directly manage their community affairs. Indeed the Left has repeatedly mistaken statecraft for politics by its persistent failure to understand that the two are not only radically different but exist in radical tension—in fact, opposition—to each other.6 As I have written elsewhere, historically politics did not emerge from the state—an apparatus whose professional machinery is designed to dominate and facilitate the exploitation of the citizenry in the interests of a privileged class. Rather, politics, almost by definition, is the active engagement of free citizens in the handling their municipal affairs and in their defense of its freedom. One can almost say that politics is the “embodiment” of what the French revolutionaries of the 1790s called civicisme. Quite properly, in fact, the word politics itself contains the Greek word for “city” or polis, and its use in classical Athens, together with democracy, connoted the direct governing of the city by its citizens. Centuries of civic degradation, marked particularly by the formation of classes, were necessary to produce the state and its corrosive absorption of the political realm.

A defining feature of the Left is precisely the Marxist, anarchist, and revolutionary syndicalist belief that no distinction exists, in principle, between the political realm and the statist realm. By emphasizing the nation-state—including a “workers’ state”—as the locus of economic as well as political power, Marx (as well as libertarians) notoriously failed to demonstrate how workers could fully and directly control such a state without the mediation of an empowered bureaucracy and essentially statist (or equivalently, in the case of libertarians, governmental) institutions. As a result, the Marxists unavoidably saw the political realm, which it designated a “workers’ state,” as a repressive entity, ostensibly based on the interests of a single class, the proletariat.

Revolutionary syndicalism, for its part, emphasized factory control by workers’ committees and confederal economic councils as the locus of social authority, thereby simply bypassing any popular institutions that existed outside the economy. Oddly, this was economic determinism with a vengeance, which, tested by the experiences of the Spanish revolution of 1936, proved completely ineffectual. A vast domain of real governmental power, from military affairs to the administration of justice, fell to the Stalinists and the liberals of Spain, who used their authority to subvert the libertarian movement—and with it, the revolutionary achievements of the syndicalist workers in July 1936, or what was dourly called by one novelist “The Brief Summer of Spanish Anarchism.”

As for anarchism, Bakunin expressed the typical view of its adherents in 1871 when he wrote that the new social order could be created “only through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or antipolitical social power of the working class in city and country,” thereby rejecting with characteristic inconsistency the very municipal politics which he sanctioned in Italy around the same year. Accordingly, anarchists have long regarded every government as a state and condemned it accordingly—a view that is a recipe for the elimination of any organized social life whatever. While the state is the instrument by which an oppressive and exploitative class regulates and coercively controls the behavior of an exploited class by a ruling class, a government—or better still, a polity—is an ensemble of institutions designed to deal with the problems of consociational life in an orderly and hopefully fair manner. Every institutionalized association that constitutes a system for handling public affairs—with or without the presence of a state—is necessarily a government. By contrast, every state, although necessarily a form of government, is a force for class repression and control. Annoying as it must seem to Marxists and anarchist alike, the cry for a constitution, for a responsible and a responsive government, and even for law or nomos has been clearly articulated—and committed to print!—by the oppressed for centuries against the capricious rule exercised by monarchs, nobles, and bureaucrats. The libertarian opposition to law, not to speak of government as such, has been as silly as the image of a snake swallowing its tail. What remains in the end is nothing but a retinal afterimage that has no existential reality.

The issues raised in the preceding pages are of more than academic interest. As we enter the twenty-first century, social radicals need a socialism—libertarian and revolutionary—that is neither an extension of the peasant-craft “associationism” that lies at the core of anarchism nor the proletarianism that lies at the core of revolutionary syndicalism and Marxism. However fashionable the traditional ideologies (particularly anarchism) may be among young people today, a truly progressive socialism that is informed by libertarian as well as Marxian ideas but transcends these older ideologies must provide intellectual leadership. For political radicals today to simply resuscitate Marxism, anarchism, or revolutionary syndicalism and endow them with ideological immortality would be obstructive to the development of a relevant radical movement. A new and comprehensive revolutionary outlook is needed, one that is capable of systematically addressing the generalized issues that may potentially bring most of society into opposition to an ever-evolving and changing capitalist system.

The clash between a predatory society based on indefinite expansion and nonhuman nature has given rise to an ensemble of ideas that has emerged as the explication of the present social crisis and meaningful radical change. Social ecology, a coherent vision of social development that intertwines the mutual impact of hierarchy and class on the civilizing of humanity, has for decades argued that we must reorder social relations so that humanity can live in a protective balance with the natural world.7

Contrary to the simplistic ideology of “eco-anarchism,” social ecology maintains that an ecologically oriented society can be progressive rather than regressive, placing a strong emphasis not on primitivism, austerity, and denial but on material pleasure and ease. If a society is to be capable of making life not only vastly enjoyable for its members but also leisurely enough that they can engage in the intellectual and cultural self-cultivation that is necessary for creating civilization and a vibrant political life, it must not denigrate technics and science but bring them into accord with visions human happiness and leisure. Social ecology is an ecology not of hunger and material deprivation but of plenty; it seeks the creation of a rational society in which waste, indeed excess, will be controlled by a new system of values; and when or if shortages arise as a result of irrational behavior, popular assemblies will establish rational standards of consumption by democratic processes. In short, social ecology favors management, plans, and regulations formulated democratically by popular assemblies, not freewheeling forms of behavior that have their origin in individual eccentricities.

It is my contention that Communalism is the overarching political category most suitable to encompass the fully thought out and systematic views of social ecology, including libertarian municipalism and dialectical naturalism.8 As an ideology, Communalism draws on the best of the older Left ideologies—Marxism and anarchism, more properly the libertarian socialist tradition—while offering a wider and more relevant scope for our time. From Marxism, it draws the basic project of formulating a rationally systematic and coherent socialism that integrates philosophy, history, economics, and politics. Avowedly dialectical, it attempts to infuse theory with practice. From anarchism, it draws its commitment to antistatism and confederalism, as well as its recognition that hierarchy is a basic problem that can be overcome only by a libertarian socialist society.9

The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophical, historical, political, and organizational components of a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The word originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of Paris and its administrative substructures but also to create a nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican nation-state. Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the individualism and the often explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism. It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent; and it does not reduce the free community of the future to a fanciful medieval village. Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is ”a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”10

Communalism seeks to recapture the meaning of politics in its broadest, most emancipatory sense, indeed, to fulfill the historic potential of the municipality as the developmental arena of mind and discourse. It conceptualizes the municipality, potentially at least, as a transformative development beyond organic evolution into the domain of social evolution. The city is the domain where the archaic blood-tie that was once limited to the unification of families and tribes, to the exclusion of outsiders, was—juridically, at least—dissolved. It became the domain where hierarchies based on parochial and sociobiological attributes of kinship, gender, and age could be eliminated and replaced by a free society based on a shared common humanity. Potentially, it remains the domain where the once-feared stranger can be fully absorbed into the community—initially as a protected resident of a common territory and eventually as a citizen, engaged in making policy decisions in the public arena. It is above all the domain where institutions and values have their roots not in zoology but in civil human activity.

Looking beyond these historical functions, the municipality constitutes the only domain for an association based on the free exchange of ideas and a creative endeavor to bring the capacities of consciousness to the service of freedom. It is the domain where a mere animalistic adaptation to an existing and pregiven environment can be radically supplanted by proactive, rational intervention into the world—indeed, a world yet to be made and molded by reason— with a view toward ending the environmental, social, and political insults to which humanity and the biosphere have been subjected by classes and hierarchies. Freed of domination as well as material exploitation—indeed, recreated as a rational arena for human creativity in all spheres of life—the municipality becomes the ethical space for the good life. Communalism is thus no contrived product of mere fancy: it expresses an abiding concept and practice of political life, formed by a dialectic of social development and reason.

As a explicitly political body of ideas, Communalism seeks to recover and advance the development of the city (or commune) in a form that accords with its greatest potentialities and historical traditions. This is not to say that Communalism accepts the municipality as it is today. Quite to the contrary, the modern municipality is infused with many statist features and often functions as an agent of the bourgeois nation-state. Today, when the nation-state still seems supreme, the rights that modern municipalities possess cannot be dismissed as the epiphenomena of more basic economic relations. Indeed, to a great degree, they are the hard-won gains of commoners, who long defended them against assaults by ruling classes over the course of history—even against the bourgeoisie itself.

The concrete political dimension of Communalism is known as libertarian municipalism, about which I have previously written extensively.11 In its libertarian municipalist program, Communalism resolutely seeks to eliminate statist municipal structures and replace them with the institutions of a libertarian polity. It seeks to radically restructure cities’ governing institutions into popular democratic assemblies based on neighborhoods, towns, and villages. In these popular assemblies, citizens—including the middle classes as well as the working classes—deal with community affairs on a face-to-face basis, making policy decisions in a direct democracy, and giving reality to the ideal of a humanistic, rational society.

Minimally, if we are to have the kind of free social life to which we aspire, democracy should be our form of a shared political life. To address problems and issues that transcend the boundaries of a single municipality, in turn, the democratized municipalities should join together to form a broader confederation. These assemblies and confederations, by their very existence, could then challenge the legitimacy of the state and statist forms of power. They could expressly be aimed at replacing state power and statecraft with popular power and a socially rational transformative politics. And they would become arenas where class conflicts could be played out and where classes could be eliminated.

Libertarian municipalists do not delude themselves that the state will view with equanimity their attempts to replace professionalized power with popular power. They harbor no illusions that the ruling classes will indifferently allow a Communalist movement to demand rights that infringe on the state’s sovereignty over towns and cities. Historically, regions, localities, and above all towns and cities have desperately struggled to reclaim their local sovereignty from the state (albeit not always for high-minded purposes). Communalists’ attempt to restore the powers of towns and cities and to knit them together into confederations can be expected to evoke increasing resistance from national institutions. That the new popular-assemblyist municipal confederations will embody a dual power against the state that becomes a source of growing political tension is obvious. Either a Communalist movement will be radicalized by this tension and will resolutely face all its consequences, or it will surely sink into a morass of compromises that absorb it back into the social order that it once sought to change. How the movement meets this challenge is a clear measure of its seriousness in seeking to change the existing political system and the social consciousness it develops as a source of public education and leadership.

Communalism constitutes a critique of hierarchical and capitalist society as a whole. It seeks to alter not only the political life of society but also its economic life. On this score, its aim is not to nationalize the economy or retain private ownership of the means of production but to municipalize the economy. It seeks to integrate the means of production into the existential life of the municipality, such that every productive enterprise falls under the purview of the local assembly, which decides how it will function to meet the interests of the community as a whole. The separation between life and work, so prevalent in the modern capitalist economy, must be overcome so that citizens’ desires and needs, the artful challenges of creation in the course of production, and role of production in fashioning thought and self-definition are not lost. “Humanity makes itself,” to cite the title of V. Gordon Childe’s book on the urban revolution at the end of the Neolithic age and the rise of cities, and it does so not only intellectually and esthetically, but by expanding human needs as well as the productive methods for satisfying them. We discover ourselves—our potentialities and their actualization—through creative and useful work that not only transforms the natural world but leads to our self-formation and self-definition.

We must also avoid the parochialism and ultimately the desires for proprietorship that have afflicted so many self-managed enterprises, such as the “collectives” in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. Not enough has been written about the drift among many “socialistic” self-managed enterprises, even under the red and red-and-black flags, respectively, of revolutionary Russia and revolutionary Spain, toward forms of collective capitalism that ultimately led many of these concerns to compete with one another for raw materials and markets.12

Most importantly, in Communalist political life, workers of different occupations would take their seats in popular assemblies not as workers—printers, plumbers, foundry workers and the like, with special occupational interests to advance—but as citizens, whose overriding concern should be the general interest of the society in which they live. Citizens should be freed of their particularistic identity as workers, specialists, and individuals concerned primarily with their own particularistic interests. Municipal life should become a school for the formation of citizens, both by absorbing new citizens and by educating the young, while the assemblies themselves should function not only as permanent decision-making institutions but as arenas for educating the people in handling complex civic and regional affairs.13

In a Communalist way of life, conventional economics, with its focus on prices and scarce resources, would be replaced by ethics, with its concern for human needs and the good life. Human solidarity—or philia, as the Greeks called it—would replace material gain and egotism. Municipal assemblies would become not only vital arenas for civic life and decision-making but centers where the shadowy world of economic logistics, properly coordinated production, and civic operations would be demystified and opened to the scrutiny and participation of the citizenry as a whole. The emergence of the new citizen would mark a transcendence of the particularistic class being of traditional socialism and the formation of the “new man” which the Russian revolutionaries hoped they could eventually achieve. Humanity would now be able to rise to the universal state of consciousness and rationality that the great utopians of the nineteenth century and the Marxists hoped their efforts would create, opening the way to humanity’s fulfillment as a species that embodies reason rather than material interest and that affords material post-scarcity rather than an austere harmony enforced by a morality of scarcity and material deprivation.14

Classical Athenian democracy of the fifth century B.C.E., the source of the Western democratic tradition, was based on face-to-face decision-making in communal assemblies of the people and confederations of those municipal assemblies. For more than two millennia, the political writings of Aristotle recurrently served to heighten our awareness of the city as the arena for the fulfillment of human potentialities for reason, self-consciousness, and the good life. Appropriately, Aristotle traced the emergence of the polis from the family or oikos—i.e., the realm of necessity, where human beings satisfied their basically animalistic needs, and where authority rested with the eldest male. But the association of several families, he observed, “aim[ed] at something more than the supply of daily needs”15; this aim initiated the earliest political formation, the village. Aristotle famously described man (by which he meant the adult Greek male16) as a “political animal” (politikon zoon) who presided over family members not only to meet their material needs but as the material precondition for his participation in political life, in which discourse and reason replaced mindless deeds, custom, and violence. Thus, “[w]hen several villages are united in a single complete community (koinonan), large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing,” he continued, “the polis comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.”17

For Aristotle, and we may assume also for the ancient Athenians, the municipality’s proper functions were thus not strictly instrumental or even economic. As the locale of human consociation, the municipality, and the social and political arrangements that people living there constructed, was humanity’s telos, the arena par excellence where human beings, over the course of history, could actualize their potentiality for reason, self-consciousness, and creativity. Thus for the ancient Athenians, politics denoted not only the handling of the practical affairs of a polity but civic activities that were charged with moral obligation to one’s community. All citizens of a city were expected to participate in civic activities as ethical beings.

Examples of municipal democracy were not limited to ancient Athens. Quite to the contrary, long before class differentiations gave rise to the state, many relatively secular towns produced the earliest institutional structures of local democracy. Assemblies of the people may have existed in ancient Sumer, at the very beginning of the so-called “urban revolution” some seven or eight thousand years ago. They clearly appeared among the Greeks, and until the defeat of the Gracchus brothers, they were popular centers of power in republican Rome. They were nearly ubiquitous in the medieval towns of Europe and even in Russia, notably in Novgorod and Pskov, which, for a time, were among the most democratic cities in the Slavic world. The assembly, it should be emphasized, began to approximate its truly modern form in the neighborhood Parisian sections of 1793, when they became the authentic motive forces of the Great Revolution and conscious agents for the making of a new body politic. That they were never given the consideration they deserve in the literature on democracy, particularly democratic Marxist tendencies and revolutionary syndicalists, is dramatic evidence of the flaws that existed in the revolutionary tradition.

These democratic municipal institutions normally existed in combative tension with grasping monarchs, feudal lords, wealthy families, and freebooting invaders until they were crushed, frequently in bloody struggles. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that every great revolution in modern history had a civic dimension that has been smothered in radical histories by an emphasis on class antagonisms, however important these antagonisms have been. Thus it is unthinkable that the English Revolution of the 1640s can be understood without singling out London as its terrain; or, by the same token, any discussions of the various French Revolutions without focusing on Paris, or the Russian Revolutions without dwelling on Petrograd, or the Spanish Revolution of 1936 without citing Barcelona as its most advanced social center. This centrality of the city is not a mere geographic fact; it is, above all, a profoundly political one, which involved the ways in which revolutionary masses aggregated and debated, the civic traditions that nourished them, and the environment that fostered their revolutionary views.

Libertarian municipalism is an integral part of the Communalist framework, indeed its praxis, just as Communalism as a systematic body of revolutionary thought is meaningless without libertarian municipalism. The differences between Communalism and authentic or “pure” anarchism, let alone Marxism, are much too great to be spanned by a prefix such as anarcho-, social, neo-, or even libertarian. Any attempt to reduce Communalism to a mere variant of anarchism would be to deny the integrity of both ideas—indeed, to ignore their conflicting concepts of democracy, organization, elections, government, and the like. Gustave Lefrancais, the Paris Communard who may have coined this political term, adamantly declared that he was “a Communalist, not an anarchist.”18

Above all, Communalism is engaged with the problem of power.19 In marked contrast to the various kinds of communitarian enterprises favored by many self-designated anarchists, such as “people’s” garages, print shops, food coops, and backyard gardens, adherents of Communalism mobilize themselves to electorally engage in a potentially important center of power—the municipal council—and try to compel it to create legislatively potent neighborhood assemblies. These assemblies, it should be emphasized, would make every effort to delegitimate and depose the statist organs that currently control their villages, towns, or cities and thereafter act as the real engines in the exercise of power. Once a number of municipalities are democratized along communalist lines, they would methodically confederate into municipal leagues and challenge the role of the nation-state and, through popular assemblies and confederal councils, try to acquire control over economic and political life.

Finally, Communalism, in contrast to anarchism, decidedly calls for decision-making by majority voting as the only equitable way for a large number of people to make decisions. Authentic anarchists claim that this principle—the “rule” of the minority by the majority—is authoritarian and propose instead to make decisions by consensus. Consensus, in which single individuals can veto majority decisions, threatens to abolish society as such. A free society is not one in which its members, like Homer’s lotus-eaters, live in a state of bliss without memory, temptation, or knowledge. Like it or not, humanity has eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and its memories are laden with history and experience. In a lived mode of freedom—contrary to mere café chatter—the rights of minorities to express their dissenting views will always be protected as fully as the rights of majorities. Any abridgements of those rights would be instantly corrected by the community—hopefully gently, but if unavoidable, forcefully—lest social life collapse into sheer chaos. Indeed, the views of a minority would be treasured as potential source of new insights and nascent truths that, if abridged, would deny society the sources of creativity and developmental advances—for new ideas generally emerge from inspired minorities that gradually gain the centrality they deserve at a given time and place—until, again, they too are challenged as the conventional wisdom of a period that is beginning to pass away and requires new (minority) views to replace frozen orthodoxies.

It remains to ask: how are we to achieve this rational society? One anarchist writer would have it that the good society (or a true “natural” disposition of affairs, including a “natural man”) exists beneath the oppressive burdens of civilization like fertile soil beneath the snow. It follows from this mentality that all we are obliged to do to achieve the good society is to somehow eliminate the snow, which is to say capitalism, nation-states, churches, conventional schools, and other almost endless types of institutions that perversely embody domination in one form or another. Presumably an anarchist society—once state, governmental, and cultural institutions are merely removed—would emerge intact, ready to function and thrive as a free society. Such a “society,” if one can even call it such, would not require that we proactively create it: we would simply let the snow above it melt away. The process of rationally creating a free Communalist society, alas, will require substantially more thought and work than embracing a mystified concept of aboriginal innocence and bliss.

A Communalist society should rest, above all, on the efforts of a new radical organization to change the world, one that has a new political vocabulary to explain its goals, and a new program and theoretical framework to make those goals coherent. It would, above all, require dedicated individuals who are willing to take on the responsibilities of education and, yes, leadership. Unless words are not to become completely mystified and obscure a reality that exists before our very eyes, it should minimally be acknowledged that leadership always exists and does not disappear because it is clouded by euphemisms such as “militants” or, as in Spain, “influential militants.” It must also be acknowledge that many individuals in earlier groups like the CNT were not just “influential militants” but outright leaders, whose views were given more consideration—and deservedly so!—than those of others because they were based on more experience, knowledge, and wisdom, as well as the psychological traits that were needed to provide effective guidance. A serious libertarian approach to leadership would indeed acknowledge the reality and crucial importance of leaders—all the more to establish the greatly needed formal structures and regulations that can effectively control and modify the activities of leaders and recall them when the membership decides their respect is being misused or when leadership becomes an exercise in the abusive exercise of power.

A libertarian municipalist movement should function, not with the adherence of flippant and tentative members, but with people who have been schooled in the movement’s ideas, procedures and activities. They should, in effect, demonstrate a serious commitment to their organization—an organization whose structure is laid out explicitly in a formal constitution and appropriate bylaws. Without a democratically formulated and approved institutional framework whose members and leaders can be held accountable, clearly articulated standards of responsibility cease to exist. Indeed, it is precisely when a membership is no longer responsible to its constitutional and regulatory provisions that authoritarianism develops and eventually leads to the movement’s immolation. Freedom from authoritarianism can best be assured only by the clear, concise, and detailed allocation of power, not by pretensions that power and leadership are forms of “rule” or by libertarian metaphors that conceal their reality. It has been precisely when an organization fails to articulate these regulatory details that the conditions emerge for its degeneration and decay.

Ironically, no stratum has been more insistent in demanding its freedom to exercise its will against regulation than chiefs, monarchs, nobles, and the bourgeoisie; similarly even well-meaning anarchists have seen individual autonomy as the true expression of freedom from the “artificialities” of civilization. In the realm of true freedom—that is, freedom that has been actualized as the result of consciousness, knowledge, and necessity—to know what we can and cannot do is more cleanly honest and true to reality than to avert the responsibility of knowing the limits of the lived world. Said a very wise man more than a century and a half ago: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.”

Within a few months in 1962, Murray Bookchin published his book, Our Synthetic Environment, and Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. Carson’s book was serialized in the New Yorker, and eventually shocked millions of people into an awareness of the devastating effects of DDT and other toxic pesticides. Bookchin’s work extended the critique to encompass issues such as the hazards of urban concentration, chemical agriculture as a whole, and the rise of chronic, environmentally related disease. Bookchin’s perspective on these issues emerged partly from his own pioneering work during the 1950s around the hazards of pesticides and food additives, as well as his personal involvement in some of the first anti-nuclear power campaigns, at Indian Point and in opposition to a reactor proposed for Ravenswood, Queens, just across the East River from central Manhattan.

Meanwhile, academic ecologists were slowly beginning to see that their work had broad, previously unappreciated social and political implications. A 1964 article in BioScience labeled ecology “A Subversive Science” embodied a direct challenge to many accepted social and economic practices. The pace of uncontrolled economic growth that characterized the 1950s and early 1960s clearly could not continue, ecologists began to argue, without severely impacting the health of living ecosystems and the diversity of life on earth.

It was Murray Bookchin, again, who took this understanding to its fullest conclusion. In an influential article originally published in the newsletter Anarchos in 1965 (later reprinted in Post Scarcity Anarchism), he wrote:

The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a critical science—critical on a scale that the most radical systems of political economy have failed to attain—but also because it is an integrative and reconstructive science. This integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic areas of social thought. For in the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man [sic] and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.1

This was the beginning of the radical synthesis that soon became social ecology. To relieve the destructive imbalances imposed by capitalist civilization on the natural world, only a stateless society based on face-to-face democracy, “humanistic” technologies, and a profound decentralization of social and economic power would suffice. Bookchin’s writings about social ecology evolved over the next several decades to encompass an uncompromising political analysis of the institutional roots of the ecological crisis, an historical critique of the myth of the domination of nature, a libertarian municipalist political strategy, and an ethical philosophy that views the potential for human freedom as an emergent property of the dialectic of natural evolution. Ideas first articulated by Bookchin, such as the distinction between technocratic environmentalism and a fundamentally radical ecology, became common wisdom among the growing ranks of ecologically-informed radicals in the late 1960s. Actions such as the occupation of the administration building at Columbia University in 1968 (initially a protest against the university’s expansion plans in West Harlem), and the creation of People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969, began to reflect some of these new understandings.

Anti-Nuclear Alliances

Social ecology achieved a much fuller expression in the popular movement against nuclear power that arose during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This movement embraced direct action and decentralized organizational models, expressed a sophisticated understanding of the complex relationship between technological and social changes, and was captivated by the utopian dimension of the emerging “appropriate technology” movement, within which the recently founded Institute for Social Ecology played a dynamic, critical and catalytic role. During the late 1970s, well over a hundred students each summer came to the ISE, then located at Cate Farm in Plainfield, to acquire hands-on experience in organic gardening and alternative technology, while studying social ecology, ecofeminism, reconstructive anthropology and other theoretical approaches with virtually all of the pioneering thinkers in the ecology movement of that period.

The ISE, as a central participant in the emerging Central Vermont activist community, sent affinity groups to Seabrook for the landmark 1977 occupation of the nuclear construction site in that coastal New Hampshire town. Over 2,000 demonstrators converged on Seabrook that spring, for what became the most significant act of mass civil disobedience since the end of the 1960s. Over 1,400 people were arrested by the New Hampshire State Police for refusing to leave the construction site; most declined bail and were incarcerated for two weeks in National Guard armories scattered throughout the Granite State. This was where the concept of the affinity group first became the underlying basis of a growing popular organization.

The affinity group concept, of course, originated with the Spanish anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI). In an appendix to his influential pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!” Murray Bookchin compared the Spanish grupos de afinidad to the countercultural collectives that had appeared by then in numerous U.S. cities. The concept was adapted by organizers of a huge antiwar action in Washington, D.C. in 1971, where people were encouraged to form small collectives to offer mutual support and security in the face of an overwhelming police presence. In the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, affinity groups were initially formed at nonviolence training sessions for similar purposes, but the experience of incarceration in New Hampshire’s armories raised the expectation that these collectives were not only useful as support groups during an action, but could form the basis for a much more widely participatory, directly democratic form of movement organization than had ever been realized before. In the preparations for a planned follow-up action at Seabrook in June of 1978, the wider meaning of affinity groups was actively promoted, Bookchin’s “Note on Affinity Groups” was distributed widely, and activists in Vermont, Boston and elsewhere in New England worked hard to make the Clamshell Alliance live up to the most profoundly democratic potential of the organizational model it had pioneered. Antinuclear alliances organized along similar lines sprouted up all across the country; many, like the Clamshell, took their names from local species of animals and plants that were endangered by the spread of nuclear power, and adopted affinity groups and spokescouncils as their basic decision-making structures.

The euphoria of affinity group-based democracy was to be short-lived in the Clamshell, however. Protracted debates over the appropriateness of various tactics within a context of organized nonviolence led to a growing polarization. When most of the original founders of the Clamshell Alliance acceded to a deal with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office that led to the cancellation of the 1978 Seabrook occupation —a large legal rally was held at Seabrook instead—activists at the ISE and elsewhere helped expose the antidemocratic nature of that decision and pressed for a renewal of affinity group democracy. The Boston area chapter was completely reorganized around affinity groups and neighborhood-based organizing collectives, and a new organization, the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, picked up where the now-faltering Clamshell left off. ISE-based activists in Vermont played a central role in setting an appropriately open and participatory tone for that new organization, which staged significantly more militant-styled actions at Seabrook in 1979 and 1980.

Ecofeminist activism also arose during the years immediately following the first Seabrook occupation, and the ISE played a catalytic role here as well. Ynestra King taught the first-ever courses on ecofeminism at the ISE in the late 1970s, and the ISE sponsored the historic Women and Life on Earth conference in western Massachusetts in 1980. This led directly to the planning of the first Women’s Pentagon Action later that year, which planted the seed for feminist peace camps throughout Europe, and in the U.S. as well.

ISE students and staff during the 1970s and 1980s also took numerous initiatives to support Native American struggles. They worked closely with the traditionalist Mohawks of Akwesasne—ISE students camped out overnight in the lobby of the New York state capitol in 1980 to protest a state of siege against the Akwesasne Mohawks. Social ecologists traveled to the lakes of northern Wisconsin in support of traditional Chippewa spear-fishing, looked after Navajo families’ sheep in the contested Big Mountain region of Arizona, and caravaned to Montreal for a rally at the headquarters of the Hydro-Quebec utility in solidarity with the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec.

Green Politics

By the early 1980s, another important political development attracted the attention of social ecologists in Vermont and elsewhere: the origins of a Green political movement in West Germany and other European countries. Long before Greens began to be elected to state and national Parliaments in Europe, social ecologists became excited about this “anti-party party” that initially functioned more as an alliance of grassroots “citizen initiatives” than a conventional parliamentary party. In the early 1980s, European Greens were running for office as delegates from various social movements, decisions were made primarily at the local level, and candidates for both public office and positions of responsibility within the Greens were obliged to rotate their positions every two years. Greens in Germany and other countries were articulating a sweeping ecological critique in all areas of public policy, from urban design, energy use and transportation, to nuclear disarmament and the need to support emerging dissident movements in Eastern Europe. Translations of Murray Bookchin’s writings played an influential role in the development of this new Green political agenda.

A staff member of the Institute for Social Ecology attended the first public discussion of strategies for developing a Green movement in the U.S. This occurred at the first North American Bioregional Congress, in the Ozark foothills of Missouri in 1984. Within a few short weeks after that meeting was written up in the pages of The Nation, nearly 2,000 letters appeared at the post office box in Marshfield, Vermont that had been set up for Green correspondence. A Green “Committees of Correspondence” organization was formally established at a gathering in St. Paul, Minnesota later that year; the ISE helped organize that event, and several prominent social ecologists were invited, including ISE director Dan Chodorkoff, community media guru Paul McIsaac and Chino Garcia of the CHARAS community center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

At the St. Paul meeting, several nationally known writers and activists were pushing for a national organization, through which self-named representatives of various Green constituencies would form a national organization, relate to other NGOs on the national level, and perhaps create a national Green Party within the year. The model that prevailed, however, was that of a more decentralized, grassroots-based movement, rooted in Green locals empowering regional delegates to make confederal decisions following locally-debated mandates. Social ecologists in New England had already begun creating a confederation of Green locals on that model, and the idea once again spread across the country. By the first public national conference of the Greens, in Amherst, Massachusetts in July of 1987, there were already over a hundred grassroots Green locals spread across the U.S., along with numerous other affiliated groups. Ideas from social ecology, and activists based at the Institute, played an important role in the development of the first national Green Program between 1988 and 1990.

Left Greens and Youth Greens

During that grassroots program-building process, an increasing tension emerged between Greens committed to grassroots democracy and municipalist politics, and those aiming toward a Green Party that could field candidates for national office. Social ecologists in New England circulated a call for a Left Green Network in 1988, and like-minded activists in the San Francisco Bay Area developed a Radical Green caucus. The Left Greens held their first national caucus meetings during the Greens’ national conference in Eugene, Oregon in June of 1989, with a very large proportion of conference attendees participating.

While some in the Greens viewed the Left Greens in grimly conspiratorial terms, it turned out that Left Green positions were widely popular with grassroots Greens all across the country, and significantly influenced the shaping of the Green Program. The following year’s Greens gathering was held in an elite resort town in the Rocky Mountains, and there were far too few Left Greens in attendance to even hold caucus meetings. Still, most of the platform positions argued for by the Left Greens became incorporated in the final program document. This, apparently, was the occasion when several influential moderate Greens decided that they would have to eventually secede from the existing Green organization to create a more traditional national party. Ironically, many Left Greens and other grassroots activists also began losing interest in the Greens at this point. Green moderates went on to form a separate national organization, based exclusively on state-certified Green Parties, while the Left Green Network continued holding educational conferences and publishing materials largely independent of any other Green entity.

During the same period, a group of recent ISE students formed a youth caucus in the Greens, which eventually became an independent organization known as the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens debated positions on a wide array of issues, refined their positions on both external and internal matters, and attracted a significant base of young radicals largely from outside the Greens. However it was at the Eugene Greens gathering that Youth Greens and Left Greens united around the idea of a major direct action to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day during April of 1990. While mainstream Earth Day celebrations were taking on an increasingly compromised character—essentially casting the search for environmental solutions as an expression of individual lifestyles and consumer choices—the Youth Greens, Left Greens, and a wide array of grassroots supporters, chose to focus on the symbolic home of capitalist ecocide: Wall Street.

April 22, 1990—Earth Day Sunday—was a day of polite, feel-good commemorations with strikingly little social or political content; many big city events were almost wholly sponsored by major corporations. But early Monday morning, several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justice activists, Earth First!ers and urban squatters converged on the nerve center of U.S. capitalism seeking to obstruct the opening of trading on that day. Activists based around the ISE in Vermont had prepared a comprehensive action handbook, featuring a wide range of social ecological writings, and helped create a broad, empowering coalition effort. The next day, columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in the New York Daily News:

Certainly, those who sought to co-opt Earth Day into a media and marketing extravaganza, to make the public feel good while obscuring the corporate root of the Earth’s pollution almost succeeded. It took angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to Wall Street on a workday and point the blame where it belongs.

Meanwhile, in Burlington, Vermont, social ecologists formed the Burlington Greens to develop positions on urban issues and run candidates for local office. The Greens opposed the commercial development of the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront, and argued that the neighborhood assemblies established by the Progressive city administration for planning and administrative purposes should become the basis for a more empowered model of democratic neighborhood governance. The Burlington Greens gained national headlines in 1989 when the Greens contested several City Council seats and a Green candidate challenged the city’s Progressive mayor in a citywide election.

Confronting Biotechnology

The ISE also became actively involved in issues around biotechnology during the late 1980s, as farmers and environmentalists in Vermont and elsewhere were becoming concerned that the impending release of a genetically engineered growth hormone for dairy cows would have a devastating impact on Vermont’s small farm economy. A Vermont Biotechnology Working Group, including activists from the ISE, Rural Vermont, the Progressive Party and the Burlington Greens, helped raise public awareness about recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), and published the first widely accessible activist handbook on biotechnology. The Vermont effort played a significant role in delaying the approval for the commercial use of Monsanto’s rBGH by several years. Social ecologists were also involved in protesting a planned new biotechnology building at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and supporting activists in New York City who were opposing a planned biotechnology complex on the site of the Audubon Ballroom, the famous Harlem cultural center where Malcolm X was assassinated following a speech in 1965.

By the mid-1990s, it was clear that the impending release of a wide variety of genetically engineered food products was going to have profound implications for public health, the environment, and society at large. Sonja Schmitz had recently come to study at the ISE after leaving a position at DuPont’s biotechnology laboratories, faculty member Chaia Heller became involved in the early ecofeminist opposition to biotechnology, and Brian Tokar was advising M.A. student Zoë Erwin on a biotechnology-centered Masters study, while considering appropriate next steps following the Vermont rBGH campaign. The four began doing presentations together at the ISE, as well as at venues in New York, Montreal and other cities. They participated in the First Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation in St. Louis in 1998, launched a regional activist network, NorthEast Resistance Against Genetic Engineering (NERAGE) and began developing plans for a comprehensive published collection on biotechnology issues, which eventually appeared as Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Zed Books, 2001).

In the spring of 2000, the ISE Biotechnology Project was the initiator and the main organizational sponsor of Biodevastation 2000, which became the largest public gathering in opposition to biotechnology in North America to date. Some 4,000 people converged in Boston’s Copley Square, and marched on the annual convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO); this protest followed a three-day public teach-in that highlighted a wide array of issues related to both the genetic engineering of food, and the implications of biotechnology for health care, medical research, globalization, and the survival of indigenous cultures around the world. Since 2000, the Biotechnology Project has provided significant support for Biodevastation and Biojustice events in San Diego and Toronto, and is helping develop plans for major events in St. Louis and Washington, D.C. during 2003.

In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont towns voted for labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods and a moratorium on GE crops at their annual Town Meetings. Eight towns took the further step of discouraging or declaring a moratorium on the planting of GE crops in their town. This was the first round of the Town-to-Town campaign, in which the ISE’s Biotechnology Project has played a central educational and organizational role, in collaboration with the farm advocacy group Rural Vermont and the Vermont Genetic Engineering Action Network. In a followup effort in March of 2003, an additional 37 towns voted against GE food and crops. Vermont now has the distinction of having 70 municipalities that have voted against GE food and crops out of more than 85 in the entire U.S. Our coalition partners are now focusing on passing anti-GE legislation in Vermont, while we are working to sustain the grassroots focus of a growing GE-Free Vermont campaign.

The work of the ISE Biotechnology Project today reflects a distinct political outlook on grassroots organizing, an approach that is firmly grounded in the principles of decentralism, community control, and face-to-face democracy. This work has encouraged biotechnology activists to consider the widest social and political implications of these issues, and helped those confronting the institutions of global capitalism to understand how globalization directly impacts our food and our health. The Biotechnology Project seeks to address the widest possible implications of genetic engineering and other biotechnologies and solidify links between biotech activists and those working primarily on global justice issues. Similarly, ongoing workshops and courses on biotechnology issues at the ISE reflect social ecology’s holistic and dialectical understandings of society, nature, politics and technology. (For details, see, “Biotechnology: Radicalizing the Debate,” in Harbinger, Vol. 2, No. 1).

Movement for Global Justice

Finally, the ISE has played a central educational role in the current movement for global justice and to counter the institutions of capitalist globalism. Social ecologists have raised discussions around the potential for direct democracy as an alternative to increasingly centralized economic and political institutions, and helped further the evolution of what began as largely a protest movement to one that is unusually conscious of the need for a long-range reconstructive vision. During the summer of 1999, ISE students intervened in an official hearing in Burlington, Vermont that addressed US agricultural policy in anticipation of the Seattle WTO meetings. Three ISE students were centrally involved in the organizing for the WTO shutdown in Seattle, and several others formed an affinity group to participate in and document the actions. After Seattle, the ISE pamphlet Bringing Democracy Home highlighted the writings of social ecologists on potential future directions for the movement, and various faculty members have highlighted these themes in their speaking tours. Many antiglobalization activists from across the country have come to the ISE in Vermont during the past few summers to further their own political analysis and participate in discussions of where the movement might be heading. We look forward to ongoing exchanges of ideas, theories and inspirations as this dynamic new movement continues to evolve over the coming years.

Notes

1. Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” in Post Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), p. 80

For Murray, dialectical naturalism serves as a potential source of objective ethics for developing ecological societies as demonstrated by the following quote:

Today we may well be able to permit Nature—not God or Spirit or an Élan Vital—to open itself up to us as the ground for an ethics on its own terms. Contemporary sciences’ greatest achievement is the growing evidence it provides that randomness is subject to a directive ordering principle, mutualism is good by virtue of its fostering the evolution of natural variety and complexity.1

If there are indeed trends or universal laws that determine the evolution of first nature, then humans should derive ethics based upon these principles. Murray is particularly interested in those trends that are compatible with anarchist principles. An ecological society would be based upon a harmonious existence within its eco-community (ecosystem)2 by fostering mutualistic and non-hierarchical relationships (mutualism), diversity (variation) and self-organization (autopoeisis). In accordance with dialectical naturalism, an ecological society would, in general, maximize the opportunities for unfettered directionality toward greater complexity, diversity, and subjectivity. Murray’s ecological society takes the form of libertarian municipalism, the assemblage of multiple self-governing communities into a complex of confederations. The complexity of the confederation allows for a cultural diversity that facilitates freedom by diminishing racism, classism, and any other “isms” that act to oppress and suppress the potentialities latent within individuals of the human species.

As a student of social ecology and one trying to integrate my background as a biologist, I was drawn to the question of whether nature could provide a basis for deriving ethics. Scientists have been searching for universal laws in evolutionary biology ever since Darwin. The search represents a contemporary chapter in the historical quest for universal laws in the physical and chemical sciences. Aside from the satisfaction of understanding the world around us, there are, after all, practical reasons for deriving laws—they allow us to make predictions. In the ecological sciences they provide a basis for reconstructing ecosystems (restoration ecology) and inform decisions regarding the conservation and management of wildlife. The laws that determine evolution are not as easily subject to testing by the scientific method as in ecology, nor is their practicality obvious. In evolutionary science the trends are more philosophical in nature: (1) whether the tempo of evolution is rapid or gradual (punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism), (2) whether evolution is goal-oriented and (3) whether evolution proceeds by an increase in complexity and diversity.

Murray’s argument that nature has directionality toward ever-greater complexity and diversity initially struck me as provocative, if not problematic. The existence of multicellular plants and animals is often used to argue that evolution proceeds by an increase in complexity. Evolutionary biology is still in the process of describing the extraordinary leap life took in its transitions from prokaryotic cells (bacteria) to the first eukaryotic cells (protists) and from these single celled organisms to multicellular fungi, plants and animals. One can interpret this progression favorably by emphasizing the cooperative, communal, and mutualistic tendencies required by these transitions, which is what Murray Bookchin does. Murray wants to equate the evolution of a confederation of multiple self-governing communities with the evolution of multicellular organisms. There is however, a darker side to this progression. The evolution of complex life forms is a story rife with tension between the autonomy of the individual cell and the drive to assemble into communities of cells for the sake of survival. This in itself is not incompatible with social ecology. But, the assemblage of autonomous beings is usually accompanied by the reduction of the individual into specialized and compartmentalized functions, words that conjure images of authoritarian communism and fascist political regimes. Therefore, I would like to examine whether it is indeed desirable to derive ethics from what biologists “know” about the evolution of first nature.

The endosymbiotic theory proposed by Lynn Margulis suggests that the evolution of eukaryotic cells may well have occurred by the ingestion (but incomplete digestion) of one bacterium by another about 1.5 million years ago (mya).3 In the process, the undifferentiated soup of molecules that comprised the guts of bacterial cells was organized into an assemblage of specialized compartments called organelles, each with a separate function much like our own organs. The resulting eukaryotic cell harbors remnants of its prokaryotic ancestors, mitochondria and chloroplasts, once intact, autonomous individuals, now dependent upon and part of a greater assemblage. Therefore, the evolution of the eukaryotic cell occurred at the expense of autonomous bacterial cells, which are mere vestiges of what they once were (mitochondria and chloroplasts).

The next level of differentiation involves the assemblage of single celled eukaryotes (protists) into colonies of cells and the first multicellular organisms. Biologists see evidence of this transition in some algal species like Volvox. Volvox consists of a hollow sphere made up of a single layer of 500 to 60,000 flagellated cells that function in photosynthesis and in the motility of the colony. Other cells in the Volvox community function solely in reproduction (sex cells). This multicellular community operates as a result of the simultaneous specialization of function of individual cells and a division of labor among them. The next step is the organization of hundreds of thousands of cells into tissues and organ systems. Not much is known about how this transition occurred, but multicellular invertebrate animals with organ systems suddenly appear in the fossil record about 700 mya (Ediacara, Australia). Nevertheless, the same themes of reduction and specialization are observed in the evolution of multicellular fungi, plants and animals.

An example from the plant kingdom, the buttercup and the sunflower, will illustrate how the themes of specialization and reduction resurface in the evolution of complex multicellular organisms. The buttercup flower is considered primitive, meaning it is one of the earliest flower structures observed in the fossil record and several million years older than the sunflower lineage. (There are more ancient lineages among flowering plants, but I am choosing the buttercup lineage because everyone can picture them). Each part of the flower is distinguishable and together comprises a reproductive organ—the buttercup flower. It has five green sepals, five yellow petals, many single stamens (male flower parts) and many pistils (female flower parts) that develop into little fruits called achenes. Upon initial inspection, the sunflower does not appear much different. It has many green sepals, yellow petals, stamens, and pistils. Although the sunflower looks like a buttercup, its structure is deceivingly different. The sunflower is a community of individual flowers, each with a specialized reproductive function. The outer flowers each have one yellow petal; their pistils and stamens are inactive or nonexistent. On the other hand, the petals of the inner flowers have been fused into a yellow tube; and their pistils and stamens are still functional. The outer flowers with petals function to attract pollinators, while the inner tubular flowers produce seed.

The buttercup and the sunflower represent two levels of complexity. The buttercup is a simple flower with many parts that produces many seeds, while the sunflower is a community of many individual flowers with specialized functions, each producing a single seed. The buttercup is an autonomous individual capable of reproduction, while individuals of the mega-sunflower community cannot function autonomously anymore, and must reproduce as a unit.

I have often thought that Murray’s libertarian municipalism is like the sunflower; each self-governing municipality is a single flower, while the mega-sunflower community represents the confederation. But, upon closer examination, the analogy is inadequate. The evolution of complexity in plants is not compatible with, nor can it be equated with, the kind of complexity and diversity Murray envisions as facilitating freedom in his libertarian municipalities. The sort of reduction, specialization, and loss of autonomy observed in the evolution of multicellular organisms is more compatible with the functioning of a nation state or fascist political regime. Therefore the evolution of complexity has outcomes frighteningly compatible with political regimes that do not embrace the ideas of social ecology. If the buttercup and the sunflower are interpreted as examples of the evolution of complexity, do we want to cite this trend for constructing ecological societies or confederations?

Perhaps it is inappropriate to compare the evolution of plants with the evolution of human social systems. While trends in the evolutionary process can be identified, they are not universal and do not necessarily apply across all lineages of life. Each of the five kingdoms is on a separate evolutionary trajectory, as is each phylum in the animal genealogy. Even if we were to limit our examination to mammals or primates, is it appropriate to extend the “laws” or principles of first nature and superimpose them upon cultural evolution? I would argue that because cultural evolution is uniquely human, and not a generalized trend among other lineages, the trends observed in first nature do not necessarily apply to second nature.

Although Murray applauds science in its achievements in illuminating the role of mutualism, diversity, complexity (and other anarchist tendencies); evolutionary biology is only beginning to yield under the scrutiny of the scientific method, or in other words, provide an objective inquiry into the laws of evolution. The exploration into the evolution of complexity has left me with grave doubts as to whether social ecologists want to derive ethics from first nature. My doubts however, do not diminish my desire to construct societies on the basis of mutualism and diversity. Perhaps the themes of mutualism and diversity hold up better under examination than does the evolution of complexity.

In summary, this essay raises two separate yet related questions. Can we derive an objective ethics from the trends or laws of first nature? And if such trends, principles or universal laws do exist, is it appropriate or even desirable to cite them for the construction of ecological human societies? I reserve an examination into these questions for future essays and invite other social ecologists to join in the inquiry.

Notes

1. Murray Bookchin, “Toward a Philosophy of Nature” in The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995), p. 64.
2. Scientific terminology is in parenthesis
3. Lynn Margulis, Early Life (Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers Inc., 1984), p. 75-104.