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popular education for a free society
What is Social Ecology? | Vol. 3, No. 1
Economics in a Social-Ecological
Society
By Peter Staudenmaier
n
the midst of our struggles for a better world, social ecologists have frequently
engaged in critical dialogue with other
strands of radical thought about just what kind of world we’re struggling
for. Such dialogues often address the question of how people in a liberated
future will organize their material relationships with one another and
with the natural world. What would economics look like in an ecological
society?
How might free communities arrange their livelihood?
Exploring questions such as these requires us to exercise an important faculty of dialectical philosophy: the capacity to think speculatively. Envisioning a future beyond capitalism and the state means thinking past the world around us and putting ourselves inside of a different world, a world structured in a very different way, a world that has developed some of the social and ecological potentials that we see around us, in distorted form, today. It means trying to see the world not merely as it is, but as it ought to be.
Social ecologists have put forward a number of concrete proposals over the years for a municipalized economy and a moral economy. These proposals point toward what Bookchin calls “the recovery of the productive process itself as an ecological mediation of humanity with nature.” What these practical proposals have in common is an underlying conception of how complex economies could be run differently, without markets or classes or bureaucracy, along egalitarian and participatory lines. Social ecologists argue that the economic mechanisms of a free society, whether for production, distribution, or reproduction, should have four basic characteristics: they should be conscious, transparent, alterable, and integrated.
Conscious: We want economic mechanisms to be deliberately chosen and deliberately structured, so that they fulfill the purposes that we collectively give to them, rather than the economic structures forcing us to fulfill their purposes. Transparent: We want every member of society to be able to grasp how society’s economic mechanisms function. Alterable: We want to be able to change our economic structures according to ecological and social needs. And last, we want economic mechanisms to be comprehensively integrated with all other aspects of communal self-management.
What might these values look like in practice? How could this ensemble of speculative postulates actually be implemented? What follows is a brief attempt to sketch a reconstructive vision of economics in a social-ecological society.
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