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Social Ecology

popular education for a free society

Feature Article  |   Vol. 2, No. 1

Interview with Murray Bookchin

By David Vanek

DV: So, decentralization is not the whole story.

MB: I definitely disagree with the fetishization of decentralization, the notion that decentralization per se has some kind of mystical qualities. Big things are not necessarily bad, and small things are not necessarily good. Small is not always beautiful — small units can sometimes be destructive and reactionary. The world of feudal Europe was mostly decentralized — but it was poisoned by a good deal of tyranny.

Size is a purely physical measurement. Decentralization must involve economics, technology, political structure, confederalism, and so on. It has to be placed in a communalistic construct. The advantage of decentralization is that it lodges the civic arena and its components in a human and familiar scale.

DV: In your books, you developed a historical genealogy of hierarchy. Like many anthropologists, you place an egalitarian society — something like Marx's class-free society — at its beginning. Is this a sort of Bookchinian Golden Age?

MB: Absolutely not! I don't want to go back to the past. I am not a primitivist. It's been a source of great concern to me that many anarchists in the United States are primitivists. They believe that technology is the main cause of our problems. One has the impression sometimes that they want to return to flint tools and a foraging economy.

I think that the main causes of our problems lie in social relations — in capitalism, the nation-state — and in the commodification of all things and relations. If we organized social life along cooperative and humanistic lines, technology could be one of the major solutions to our problems. Primitivists believe we have too much civilization. I believe we're not civilized enough. Some primitivists are even against "society," but I think that without society you are not a human being. They believe in personal autonomy, I believe in social freedom. They seem to believe that there is a "natural man," an "uncorrupted ego," which civilization has poisoned. I believe that competition and other class and hierarchical relations have corrupted society, and that we need instead a cooperative civilization.

DV: So you adopt Marx's - or, more precisely, Hegel's - perspective that history is something essentially indispensable and positive, as a process of perfection and "cultural learning," not that of decline and corruption?

MB: Again, yes and no. Let's put aside the word perfection, since only deities are perfect. In fact, really monstrous things have happened in the past and are happening today. It was necessary to break away from crude animality — and this has still not been fully achieved. As I wrote in Reenchanting Humanity, animality is basically the realm of adaptation to what exists, and animal life is marked by a good deal of suffering even without the efforts of human beings. People can and should go beyond animality into the realm of culture. Human beings can innovate — they can create and develop. Marx's theory of labor is very useful on this score, because it conceives of labor not only as a source of value but above all as a process of self-formation and social formation. It is through labor, said Marx, that human beings go beyond mere animality. People take the conditions of the world and, potentially at least, can form them more and more to meet human needs.

But defining human needs has always been very problematical. They are obviously historically conditioned. In earlier societies in most of the world, where resources were scarce, people were very poor indeed, and their basic needs could be satisfied only by very hard work. In earlier times, for example, even in northern climates, central heating would have been inconceivable or, later, considered an extravagant luxury. People often had a fireplace in only one room of their home. But today central heating is considered a basic need. Still, in our commodity society, other things that are considered "needs" are actually ridiculous trivialities. I'm concerned with a potentially post-scarcity society that produces enough to meet all the basic needs of life. And if society were rational, it could redistribute our abundant resources so that people could live comfortably without too much work and very little toil. We could have a true paradise and minimalize suffering in the social and even the natural world.

I don't know what the ideal society is, but it should finally resolve the social question: the domination of human beings and the exploitation of human labor. To achieve a society free of domination and exploitation, we need a certain level of economic development - I agree with Marx on that score. A free and rational society will have economic and technological preconditions: I don't think that people could have a good society in the wastes of the Sahara Desert with nothing more than some camels. On the other hand, I don't think the good life requires us to have magnificent estates, ten swimming pools, and fifty television sets. Some libertarians might object: "Well, if somebody wants ten swimming pools, they should be allowed to have them. You shouldn't try to stop them. They are autonomous." I would reply that acceptable needs should be determined by the community as a whole — the municipality. An assembly there can say: "Two pairs of shoes is enough. You don't need ten." They can say that a certain limit is enough, that we don't need the sky.

Has there been progress in human society? Yes and no, but without the rise of civilization and its history, even with all its horrors, human life would have constituted little more than animality. Forgive me, but I don't want to live in a world that is stagnant and vacuous.

DV: What do you think of the notion of voluntary simplicity?

MB: We shouldn't load ourselves up with so many goods and spend our lives thinking about how we should have much more of everything. But voluntary simplicity often makes a religion out of a life of virtual poverty: The less one needs, it seems to say, the better one is. That's a simplistic statement. The more cultivated and rational our needs are, the better we are, indeed the more human we are. We could have a long discussion about what "cultivated" and "rational" mean, but the point is that needs evolve. I don't want to live like a monk, but like a knowledgeable, cultured human being. And today that requires fulfilling many needs, like books, music recordings, decent food, appropriate clothing, and the like. I know what it is to live in poverty, to live without a secure home. New York in the 1930s was not a ball, and I am puzzled by people who choose to live with the technologies of seventy years ago in the name of "voluntary simplicity."

DV: You've been very critical of the concept of biocentrism as well. I think of nature as natural evolution, the evolution above all of organic life and the potentialities that it may actualize. I see in the natural world the potentiality of actualizing subjectivity and thinking; that human beings can potentially become nature rendered self-conscious. So I can never be biocentric. In fact I think human beings are still the most remarkable product of natural evolution.

DV: Aristotle seems to loom behind your ideas.

MB: Yes, as do a lot of philosophers in the history of ideas. I have great respect for Aristotle, especially because his outlook is permeated with ideas of growth and the unfolding of potentialities and development. But because of the limitations of his time, Aristotle's overall concept of nature is static: he had no concept of natural evolution. He regarded his hierarchical system of life as a given. In the nineteenth century Hegel, who was the other great developmental thinker, knew about theories of natural evolution (although he died a few decades before The Origin of Species was published). But he rejected them in volume 2 of his Encyclopedia. Today we have the benefit of knowing about organic evolution and can allow it to inform our thinking.

Please let me stress one debt that I must always acknowledge. Marx taught me to look for connections between phenomena, to synthesize, and to place the problem of humanity and nature and their interaction into the context of philosophy and history. My concept of the natural world is thus evolutionary and dynamic. In the 1950s, I brought together my understanding of Aristotle, Hegel, and other philosophers with the problems of humanity's place in the natural world. To me, human beings are a potential fulfillment of natural evolution — which is the way I define the word nature. My thinking on this matter culminated in The Ecology of Freedom and my books on philosophy and history. For me it's always a question of synthesis and, above all, the idea that humanity is what gives nature meaning. I would not want to be on this planet with only mammoths or dinosaurs. The potentiality that human beings could emerge has always been latent in natural evolution. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but the point is: human beings are here, and we have to explain what existed in natural evolution that brought about their evolution.

Social Ecology n 1: a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends. 2: a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society.

Published by the Institute for Social Ecology