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Feature Article | Vol. 2, No. 1 Interview with Murray BookchinBy David Vanek
David Vanek: In your books, you draw on your experiences of the 1960s and 1970s, as many environmentalists do, but you also draw on your experiences of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
I entered the American Communist movement when I was a child. As a Czech, you would know about the Young Pioneers — well, I was a Young Pioneer in the early 1930s. In 1934, when I was thirteen, I went into the Young Communist League (Komsomol). Soon afterward, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I broke with the Communists, because of their Popular Front line — I was on the extreme left, and I opposed what I considered to be class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, I went back to the Communists, because they seemed to be the only ones who were fighting Franco. I wanted to fight in Spain, but I was too young. Soon after rejoining the Communists, I left them again, this time permanently. After high school, I did not go to college — I went to work in a foundry near New York. I hoped that the Second World War would end in revolutions, as the first war had, and became a Trotskyist. When the war ended without a revolution, I became disillusioned with orthodox Marxism and realized I had to rethink everything. I came out of the army and went to work in the automobile industry, where the workers, formerly militant, were becoming ever more middle class in their mentality. So in the 1950 I went to the RCA Institute, where I studied electronic engineering. I saw that many machines could ultimately replace most human toil. Being a socialist, I wanted to reduce the amount of labor that people have to give to society, whether under capitalism or socialism, so that they could be free to become creative human beings, follow their own interests, and fulfill their own talents. I decided to go beyond Marxism and became a libertarian socialist. Already in 1952 I was writing about the chemicalization of food. I developed a critique of hierarchy and related the struggle against hierarchy and domination to the struggle for the integrity of the natural world. I tried to show that modern economics is an interaction not only between wage labor and capital, but also between human labor and the natural world. My philosophical conceptions were and are dialectical, based on Hegel, but without Hegel's teleological approach. I'm not a teleologist, I don't believe that any development is inevitable; but at the same time, I believe, some developments, like socialism, cannot be achieved without adequate material developments. I called my approach dialectical naturalism. I framed my ecological thinking around the problem of urbanization, particularly the dislocations between town and country. I wrote about alternative technology, arguing that technology should be as humanly scaled as possible. Later I brought in, above all, the idea of face-to-face democracy, under the name libertarian municipalism or communalism. As my ideas developed, I retained aspects of Marx — not Marxism but Marx's own ideas — combining them with the general anarchist ideas of confederalism. But please let me stress that I believe we have to go beyond all radical tendencies from the past — incorporating their best elements — to something new: an outlook I call communalism. In the early 1960s I became involved with the nascent counterculture. Anarchism seemed nearly defunct both as an ideology and a movement. At the same time, it was very fluid: as an anarchist, you could be a syndicalist; you could be an egotist; you could be anything you wanted to — it was as fluid, and often as formless, as water. So I first advanced my new views under the rubric of anarchism, and they later were called "eco-anarchism." I think it is fair to say that my writings on ecology and anarchism were the first radical political writings on ecology. They became rather popular with the New Left. People don't remember the origins of radical ecology — they think Ralph Nader or maybe Barry Commoner produced it and influenced the New Left. This is quite erroneous; in fact, the true history of radical ecology has yet to be written. In my twilight years — I'm now 80 years old — I've been trying to evaluate what I've seen and done in my life. I ask myself: What happened in the 20th century? What's going to affect the 21st? I've come to some very definite ideas about that. If we are going to change the direction of society in a libertarian way, we will need to build a systematic and coherent project. Coherence is very important, not only in politics and organization but in economics, in history, and in philosophy as well. DV: The summarizing phrase that is commonly associated with your work is "We cannot solve the environmental crisis without solving social problems." To whom specifically were these words addressed when you wrote them for the first time? To the environmental movement of the time? MB: No, it was 1952, and there was no environmental movement at that time — just a few books on conservation and overpopulation, most of which were very reactionary. There was no organic gardening movement except for experiments among a few people who had come over here from Europe and especially England. I strongly believed, however, that making a few small changes would not solve the ecological problem — on the contrary, a transformation into a rational, egalitarian, and libertarian society was necessary. When I talked about solar and wind energy, I didn't just propose them as alternative technologies; I proposed them as part of the technological apparatus of a new communal society. DV: What do you consider to be the necessary prerequisites for such a transformation? MB: I think the most important thing we are faced with today is to raise consciousness. America can be a good example. Americans by disposition and cultural heritage are activists. They don't think very much in advance, they act, and then they look for the reason why they acted. They don't think much of the past or the future, they think of the here and now. They're engineers, they don't generalize, they don't look for the connections. In America it's our job to bring out these faults Our people have to know what happened in history, what philosophy is, so they can educate. They have to have a point of view. They can't just be against something, they have to offer an alternative. And they have to learn tactics, they have to have a methodology. DV: In terms of this methodology, what do you think of the often-stated contradiction between direct action and political methods like lobbying, legislative reform, and the like? Do you prefer lobbying to, for example, community work? MB: I have a long and painful experience with lobbying. Many years ago I was active in the antinuclear movement, which not only occupied plants in direct actions but also circulated petitions and then brought them to local congresspeople. The results were usually not very good. In the United States today, there's the Democratic Party, and there's the Republican Party. You go to them, and they will promise you anything to get elected. They won't give you much of anything if it doesn't help the ruling class. Sometimes they make small concessions — they'll give you ten acres of "wilderness" — but then they'll cut down the rest of the forest. That's what lobbying usually achieves. DV: You have called your approach anarchism. What do you mean by that concept? MB: Today I prefer the word communalism, by which I mean a libertarian ideology that, as I said, includes the best of the anarchist tradition as well as the best in Marx. I think neither Marxism nor anarchism alone is adequate for our times: a great deal in both no longer applies to today's world. We have to go beyond the economism of Marx and beyond the individualism that is sometimes latent, sometimes explicit in anarchism. Marx's, Proudhon's, and Bakunin's ideas were formed in the nineteenth century. We need a left libertarian ideology for our own time, not for the days of the Russian and Spanish Revolutions. The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality — the city, town, and village — where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy. We can transform local government into popular assemblies where people can discuss and make decisions about the economy and society in which they live. When we get power at the neighborhood level in a town or city, we can confederate all the assemblies and then confederate those towns and cities into a popular government — not a state (which is an instrument of class rule and exploitation), but a government, where the people have the power. This is what I call communalism in a practical sense. It should not be confused with communitarianism, which refers to small initiatory projects like a "people's" food cooperative, garage, printing press — projects that often become capitalistic when they don't fall apart or succumb to competition by other enterprises. People will never achieve this kind of face-to-face democratic society spontaneously. A serious, committed movement is necessary to fight for it. And to build that movement, radical leftists need to develop an organization — one that is controlled from the base, so that we don't produce another Bolshevik Party. It has to be formed slowly on a local basis, it has to be confederally organized, and together with popular assemblies, it will build up an opposition to the existing power, the state and class rule. I call this approach libertarian municipalism. DV: Some critics have said that you are mostly interested in what's going on the lower level, within municipalities, and that you don't say much about how to connect different municipalities into a higher structure, say confederation. MB: That's absolutely untrue — the aim of confederating the popular assemblies is basic to libertarian municipalism. My writings on the subject always include a call for confederation. From the local confederations should come regional confederations, and then national or continental confederations. But the power must always reside in the popular assemblies, and the final decisions must always come from below, that is, from assemblies of the people. (I should add that anyone who does not attend an assembly is simply saying, "I am not a citizen, I don't care." So if they don't care to attend, let them live with the decisions of assemblies.) Municipalities form the locus, the arena of a truly political life, but no municipality can be "autonomous." Autonomy is a myth — you can't achieve it, because each person depends on everyone else, and each municipality depends on all the others. We all depend on each other, just as our individual egos are formed to a vast degree by culture, not born all of a sudden or self-formed somehow, the way Max Stirner suggested. I also reject the vicious totalitarian notion of total dependence upon the state. I am for interdependence among self-governing people in assemblies. Democracy is something that anarchism often seems to have problems with. This is one area in which I differ with authentic anarchists, who emphasize an individual ego and the fulfillment of its desires as the overriding consideration. Many anarchists reject democracy as the "tyranny" of the majority over the minority. They think that when a community makes decisions by majority vote, it violates the "autonomy" of the egos of the individuals who voted in the minority. They seem to think that somehow those who voted against a decision, because they are "autonomous," shouldn't have to follow it. I think that that idea is naive at best and a prescription for chaos at worst. Decisions, once made, have to be binding. Of course minorities should always have the right to object to majority decisions and to freely voice their own views. Majorities have no right to try to prevent a minority from voicing its views and trying to win majority support for them. The question is, what is the fairest way to make communitywide decisions? I think majority voting is not only the fairest but the only viable way for a face-to-face democratic society to function, and that decisions made by majority vote should be binding on all the members of the community, whether they voted in favor of a measure or against it. And unlike many anarchists, I don't think a particular individual or municipality should be able to do whatever it wants to do at all times. Lack of structure and institutions leads to chaos and even arbitrary tyranny. I believe in law, and the future society I envision would also have a constitution. Of course, the constitution would have to be the product of careful consideration, by the empowered people. It would be democratically discussed and voted upon. But once the people have ratified it, it would be binding on everyone. It is not accidental that historically, oppressed people who were victims of the arbitrary behavior of the ruling classes — "barons," as Hesiod called them in seventh-century B.C. Greece — demanded constitutions and just laws as a remedy. DV: What dangers do you find in the idea of autonomy or self-sufficiency? MB: The main danger is parochialism: some people might decide that they want to exclude people of a certain race or ethnicity or sexual preference or the like. The American South, for example, long wanted to allow blacks to live in its midst as slaves or else as menial servants. Today people in many European countries want to exclude immigrants arriving from outside Europe. Our movement would have to counter such parochialism with cosmopolitanism, an outlook that affirms and even celebrates the interdependence of all people. I think that a workable confederation must ultimately be very broad, reflecting the interdependence of municipalities. Some of the nineteenth-century anarchists who wrote about confederation left open a large loophole. Proudhon and Bakunin, in their writings, allowed for the possibility that a single community could opt out of the confederation if it so desired. The community could say to the rest of the confederation," I don't like what you're doing, I'm leaving." But I don't agree that this should be permitted. Every municipality has a deep, fundamental responsibility to every other municipality in a confederation. When a community joins a confederation, it's bound by a compact, a constitution. It shouldn't be able to leave unilaterally, just because it doesn't want to do something that the majority of the confederation has agreed to do. A community shouldn't be able to say, for example, "We want to exclude black people, but you in the confederation would force them on us, so we are going to defy you and leave the confederation." Participation is binding, because our interdependence is indissoluble. The only way a community could leave a confederation, in my opinion, would be when the majority in the confederation, acting as though it were one huge assembly, says, "All right, okay, leave if you choose, but don't expect us to help you when you need aid." 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. DV: Aren't you afraid of falling into "anthropocentrism"? Even if you don't say the Earth was made for human beings, you maintain that humans are the most valuable beings on Earth. I can imagine many people calling this anthropocentrism. MB: The word anthropocentrism doesn't frighten me. It implies that the natural world was "made for" human beings by some sort of deity. This, in my opinion, is absurd. One of my critics, Robyn Eckersley, challenged me in the journal Environmental Ethics to explain, "Why should human thinking be regarded more valuable than the navigational skills of birds?" But that's just a silly question. In "navigating," birds are affected by the magnetic field of the Earth, they're affected by the changes of temperature; they're adapting to their surroundings. But human beings, crucially, can innovate, as I pointed out, and they live on another level of phenomena, culture. They can make airplanes, and they know how to navigate. Now they can go beyond birds and farther than birds and higher than birds. Human beings differ profoundly from all living things, because potentially at least, they can be natural evolution rendered self-conscious. They can be a "natural force," so to speak, that can enter into that evolution, reflect upon it, and act on it empathically, morally, and rationally, to make life a better experience for animals as well as themselves. DV: Can we come back to your thesis that there is no solution to the environmental crisis without solving social problems? MB: By all means. The society we live in was made by the bourgeoisie and its use of modern industry. We can't ignore the fact that we are living in a capitalist world. Contrary to what Marxism believed, capitalism is not falling apart — it is disturbingly stable. Cyclical depressions used to take place every ten years or so. But now there hasn't been a depression in decades. Lenin predicted that capitalism was entering a period of war and socialist revolutions. It might have done so between 1914 and 1945 or 1950, but it's not doing so today — at least, not on a scale comparable to the twentieth-century world wars. What capitalism is doing is creating a synthetic environment, one in which "wilderness" is more of a metaphor than a reality. That's particularly true in the United States, which has a long history of dealing with "wilderness." Here "wilderness" is a formative cultural concept. Today American deep ecologists sing the praises of wilderness, by which they seem to mean places like Glacier National Park and Olympic National Park. But Indians were living in and transforming those places long before any Europeans came, thousands of years ago. In fact, human beings began to change the planet as far back as the time of Homo erectus and perhaps even earlier. They started burning forests systematically soon after they learned to make and use fire. Now, especially, it's ridiculous to believe in the myth of wilderness. There are no wilderness areas anymore. Yes, wild animals are now drifting into the cities - deer are coming into Burlington, wolves are going into Nome, Alaska. Wild animals look for food in urban garbage cans. There are polar bears in Churchill, on the Hudson Bay, about 700 of them. They all congregate there, breaking open garbage cans and trying to open the doors of houses. But wilderness areas are gone — they're reserves. The whole planet has been changed, and now the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers are melting. A synthetic world is being created that flatly contradicts deep ecology hopes about returning to primeval nature. Will science and technology be able to keep up with this destruction, prevent the worst damage, and make this synthetic world sustainable? That issue hangs in the balance. I don't know anymore. Things that seemed inconceivable 40 years ago have now come into existence. Scientists have mapped the human genome, they have discovered the secrets of life - genes, genetics, and bioengineering. They have discovered the secrets of matter - nuclear energy, nucleonics. Maybe your generation or your children will witness innovations that will prevent the synthetic world from becoming uninhabitable. The whole ecological question is up for grabs today, and people should focus on the main thing: to try to create a free, rational — and ecologically oriented — society. We have to raise consciousness so that reason and an ecological outlook will prevail. This is a profoundly social — and I should add political — problem. And we have to create a movement that is educational and political, that has a real philosophy, a real concept of history, a real economics, a real politics, and a real ecological sensibility. This movement has to talk to people, assuming - and this is a big problem - that their minds are not destroyed by capitalism. People have to learn from history and understand what they can apply from the past to the present and future. We have to have a creative point of view. We can't just be against something, we have to offer alternatives, rational and ecological ones, and offer ways to change this society. Basically, if we are to resolve the ecological crisis today, we have to build a new political culture. Unfortunately, commodification is not only turning everything into an object of exchange, it is changing the way people think. The famous question in America today is "What's the bottom line?" That's the language of accounting, of business. It frightens me that people think in those terms. DV: People like to "invest" in their children… MB: Yes, especially by educating them to go out and make money. DV: You've written that the movements of the 1960s were opposed to commodification — and that while the 1960s were radical, the 1970s were reactionary. MB: Relatively so, compared with today. In terms of their potentiality for making social change, the 1960s were more interesting than the 1970s. In the 1960s ecology seemed to be developing toward a revolutionary outlook, toward social ecology. The counterculture, it seemed, was challenging hierarchy and elitism. Feminism was expressing an opposition to hierarchy. Utopian wishes favored humanly scaled and ecological communities. But in the 1970s things changed. The counterculture drifted into the New Age. Much of feminism turned into a lobbying movement for getting women into corporations and high military positions. That change is hardly progressive. The 1960s, in effect, were swallowed up by capitalism. What is revolutionary today about wearing a beard and wearing long hair? Nothing. Many 1960s radicals have since become professors and teach postmodernism. And social ecology, founded in the 1960s and truly radical, was to a great extent replaced by deep ecology, whose naive biocentrism I find regressive at best. DV: In my country, deep ecology is often labeled a very radical movement. I know that "radical" is not necessarily the opposite of "reactionary" - you can be reactionary in a radical way. I just mean that deep ecology is not usually taken as a movement for conserving the political status quo. MB: It's not the first time popular opinion is wrong. Capitalism has a remarkable ability to take ideas that seem to be against it and use them to deflect attention from the real problems of capitalism itself. For example, believers in deep ecology don't focus on capitalism as the source of ecological ills, or hierarchy, for that matter. They blame technology and certain religions. They call for greater spiritual development, getting in tune with the cosmos, becoming part of the web of life. They are not building a social movement — they're offering a religion. This spiritual rubbish, decorated with ecological language, ultimately supports the status quo. Capitalism is ready to embrace any religion, as long as it doesn't have to surrender its profits. A good example that supports my concerns is that deep ecology has distorted radical ecology into an apologia for statism. In a recent interview, Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology who has called himself a sort of Gandhian anarchist, recently came out in support of a strong centralized state. He wants a strong centralized state because, he believes, if you leave the solution to ecological problems up to small localities, they will do great ecological damage. Yes, in a capitalist society, to be sure; but strong centralized states will do that in any society. In the same interview he attacked me for "localism" — as if I had never written about interdependence and confederation. But Naess is popular because he gives people an ecology — a spiritual ecology — that is very personal. And that is easy to understand, especially when vast numbers of people go to psychoanalysts and movies where all they hear about is love affairs and personal problems. DV: What do you find unacceptable about deep ecology's diagnosis of the roots of the environmental crisis? MB: First of all, it addresses people's attitudes, not social issues. Most deep ecologists seem to think that by changing human attitudes alone, we can produce an ecological, beautiful, harmonious world, in which all forms of life, and human beings among them, can live in harmony. Now, I regard that as the height of naïveté. To begin with, our social environment is extremely important in shaping the acceptability of new ideas. Many centuries ago - whether rightly or wrongly - Roger Bacon, a monk, anticipated many ideas that modern science and engineering turned into realities. But he lived in the 13th century, and the world around him was so socially conditioned by the Church and hierarchy that his fairly naturalistic ideas were not accepted. Who knows how many of these Roger Bacons existed before him, people who died in obscurity? Today we are faced with a basically anti-ecological social environment. The social environment today favors atomization and money-making. People look after themselves, after their families, after their jobs, after their income, and that pretty much constitutes their concerns. It's not like in the 1930s, when everyone I knew seemed concerned above all with changing the world. There were always group meetings, street-corner meetings, there was activity, vitality, and a high degree of public concern. We had a radical, lively political culture. We were embattled especially against the dangers of fascism. Now being embattled about anything is regarded as disruptive: When people speak out in anger, they are told, "You're rocking the boat. We have to hug each other." It's a hugging culture. It's a culture that fosters passivity. And deep ecology plays up to these moods. Deep ecology emphasizes our kinship with birds and spiders, our place in a supposed mystical circle of life, not differences in wealth and lifeways. At something called a "Council of all Beings," people sit in a circle, and one person says: "I represent rabbits." Another person says: "I represent trees." Deep ecologists love these rituals. Actually, people represent nothing but themselves. Such deceptions are all over the place in America. And we all have to live in harmony with each other! Tell it to people of color and oppressed women. DV: But Joanna Macy, the author of that ritual, does not seem to be a passive person. Many other deep ecologists are very active as well. MB: I don't know about her recent activities, and certainly some deep ecologists participate in protests around environmental issues. But most deep ecologists emphasize, as Macy does, spiritual change over political and social change, and the cultivation of a reverential consciousness or sensibility about the natural world rather than organization and movement building. They talk about inwardness and Buddhism and archetypes rather than the real social forces that produce the ecological crisis. They call upon human beings to follow their instincts and feeling, not remake the world according to reason. This is a turn toward private sensibility rather than public action and often produces little more than lifestyle changes. That easily leads to accommodation. Other aspects of deep ecology — its biocentrism — are simply reactionary. DV: I heard that Prince Charles calls himself a deep ecologist. When did you realize for the first time the reactionary character of deep ecology? MB: In the very beginning, when I heard about biocentrism. In the mid-1980s, I met the deep ecologist Bill Devall at a conference in Wisconsin, where we had a discussion, and he talked about it. I tried to be friendly enough, but I had to criticize this idea. In the summer of 1986 at the first national gathering of the American Greens at Amherst, Massachusetts, I launched a public criticism of deep ecology. I was the keynote speaker, and I distributed an article called "Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology." I didn't realize at the time that I was dealing with people who didn't want to debate ideas, and because I was very sharp, I antagonized a lot of them. They paid less attention to what I had said than to my tone. That was the big issue — my tone! I was criticizing David Foreman for his statement that we should let Ethiopian children starve and "let nature take its course," but his reactionary views bothered them less than they way I criticized him. I don't know what's going on among deep ecologists today. I don't read their press anymore. I'm too old to waste my limited time reading their materials. I've already written what I had to say about them. DV: I've met many people within the environmental movement who have a rather equivocal view of modern society or modernity in a broader sense, covering technology, specific sets of ideas, lifestyle, and so on. They acknowledge that modernity has brought many positives - or at least they do not want to simply go back to the pre-modern society - but they do not want to talk about these positives publicly. Their rationale is we are overmodernized right now, so putting the pendulum into balance requires talking only about the opposite extreme: since we face the negative effects of technology, let's minimize talking about its positives. What do you think of this shyness? Is it a good strategy? MB: Let's face it — by deliberately telling people things that they know are not true — by refusing to acknowledge the positive aspects of modernity — these people are being dishonest. I don't approve of such strategic falsification, which is what it amounts to. If you want people to work with you, you can't patronize them by talking down to them and telling them fairy tales. You have to tell them the whole story, not just the parts that serve your cause. You have to talk to them as intelligent, competent people. Otherwise there is no purpose to our educational efforts. By treating people like children, we are behaving like the politicians we criticize. The fact is that we will have to use modern technology in a different social order. There's no sense in misleading people about that. Nowadays technology obviously can be used to produce the greatest amount of destruction, but it can also be used to produce the great amounts of good. Even if we succeed in preserving more forests, open land, and wildlife, we will still need technology desperately to keep these forests, open land, and wildlife intact. It will take high levels of technology to engage in ecological restoration and maintenance. The real problem is not technology itself — although there are some technologies, admittedly, like nuclear energy, that I'd like to see disappear. The basic question we face is, by what standards and toward what ends do we use technology? Today its is used primarily to make money, not to improve people's lives. In this country now there's a big scandal about defective automobile tires. The Firestone tires on many large "sport utility vehicles" have fallen apart when the vehicle is going at high speeds. Everyone in the country knows that this problem stems from one thing: the companies are producing cheap or unsuitable goods to make larger profits. The people don't believe fairy tales about benevolent auto manufacturers. Sooner or later, however, society will produce vehicles and tires that never wear out but can be handed down from generation to generation. If this technology is used for rational ends, it will be a boon. Therefore I can't single out technology alone as the source of the problem. I can single out the reasons for which technology is being used and toward what ends. We live in a very confusing time. Sometimes people look for easy answers to complex questions. If a machine or item functions poorly, it is easy to blame technology rather than the competitive corporations that try to make money, or to blame people's attitudes rather than the mass media that shapes people's thinking, or to say we should go back to old ideologies — Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, orthodox Marxism, orthodox anarchism, even orthodox capitalism — for solutions. People need new ideas based on reason, not superstition; on freedom, not personal autonomy; on creativity, not adaptation; on coherence, not chaos; and on a vision of a free society, based on popular assemblies and confederalism, not on rulers and a state. If we do not organize a real movement — a structured movement — that tries to guide people toward a rational society based on reason and freedom, we face eventual disaster. We cannot withdraw into our "autonomous" egos or retreat to a primitive, indeed unknown past. We must change this insane world, or else society will dissolve into an irrational barbarism — as it is already beginning to do these days.
|
urray
Bookchin, born in 1921, has been involved in leftist politics for seven
decades and has written almost two dozen books on a great variety of subjects,
encompassing ecology, nature philosophy, history, urban studies, and the
Left, particularly Marxism and anarchism. In the 1950s, with his long 1952
essay "The Problem of Chemicals in Food," he warned against the
chemicalization of agriculture and the environment, and with this and other
writings, he helped lay foundations of the modern radical ecology movement.
He helped popularize organic gardening, diversified agriculture, and other
alternatives to chemcialized agriculture. His comprehensive survey of environmental
ills, Our Synthetic Environment, was published in 1962, a few months
before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. His manifesto of radical political
ecology ("Ecology and Revolutionary Thought"), written in 1964,
was the first in any language. As an author and speaker, he influenced the
antinuclear movement and the formation of the early Green political movement,
both in the United States and Germany. He is the cofounder of the 
Murray
Bookchin: I came out of the traditional Left, at a time when the Russian
Revolution was still the most important event in recent history. In fact,
when I was born — in January 1921, in the Bronx in New York City
— the Russian Revolution and civil war were still going on. My family
was made up of Russian revolutionaries. The first language I knew was
Russian, and I spoke it up to the age of two or three, but then my parents
stopped talking to me in that language, so that I wouldn't develop an
accent. I learned English in the streets. You had to know two languages
in New York at that time, because almost half the population was born
in Europe.
