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Institute for
Social Ecology

popular education for a free society

What is Social Ecology?  |   Vol. 3, No. 1

Reflections
An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology

By Murray Bookchin

But, it would be an error to view the foregoing presentation of what I would call a minimal account of social ecology as the only theoretical source by which one can teach a course on the subject. I did not develop social ecology only because I was disturbed by the “nature versus society” problem, although it was never far from my mind. Fundamental to my development of social ecology is a crisis that developed in socialist theory itself, one that I regard as unresolvable in a strictly conventional Marxist or anarchist framework—or to use the most all-encompassing phrase of all: proletarian socialism.

This was a painful problem for me to cope with because I did not come to a belief in proletarian socialism as a result of an academic storm in a teacup. I was a very passionate participant in what I thought was a revolutionary labor movement, notably as a member of the Communist youth movement early in the 1930s and as result of a thorough training in Marxism and Bolshevism. I became a rank-and-file leader of the Young Communist League as early as 1933 and was militantly loyal to its ultra-revolutionary program (the reckless insurrectionism promulgated by the Communist International in 1928, or so-called “Third Period” line). Stalin had yet to make his reputation as the major figure that he became in the late thirties; accordingly, my comrades and I of that period never regarded ourselves as “Stalinists” but simply as committed Communists or Marxists who adhered to Lenin’s revolutionary views.

As a result, I was thoroughly, even intensively trained in classical Marxism. This background provided me with a unique insight into problems that, while forgotten at present by young radicals, haunts all of their social projects. Born when the Russian Revolution was still a recent event; when Makhno was still carrying on his guerrilla war in Ukraine; when Lenin, Trotsky, and nearly all the major theorists and activists of the first three decades of the century were still fairly young men; I had the rare chance to imbibe all the fundamental issues and live through most of the great civil conflicts of the era—from the still buoyant aftermath of the Russian Revolution to the tragic outcome of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1937 to 1939. By the outbreak of the Second World War, I was well versed in the issues the war raised for my generation early in the century.

Again, it is difficult to convey to young people, today, how differently proletarian socialists thought and the ideals to which they were committed prior to 1950, which I regard as the year in which proletarian socialism was faced by its most decisive crisis. What cannot be emphasized too strongly is that all of us who survived the ideological debacle produced by the war had to deal with the complete failure of all the prognoses we held five years earlier. Almost all who you care to single out from the interwar period (1917-1940), be it a Lenin, a Trotsky (in my earnest opinion, the most optimistic and the most competent theorist of the period), even going back in time to Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring and the like, were absolutely convinced that capitalism was in its “death throes.” The most widely used formulation during this stormy period—far more insurgent than the often pseudo-revolutionism of the sixties—was the expression that capitalism (as I have already observed) was “moribund,” or facing the imminent certainty of “collapse.” Nothing seemed more evident at the time than the apocalyptic belief that we were witnessing the “last days” of bourgeois society, notwithstanding the fact that fascism was on the march throughout Europe and that proletarian socialist ideology was waning and facing defeat.

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