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What is Social Ecology? | Vol. 3, No. 1
Reflections
An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology
By Murray Bookchin
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that, in the absence of an imperative to challenge the desirability of a capitalistic society, and no less importantly, the need to demonstrate that capitalism’s death in the foreseeable future was “inevitable,” no objective reason existed for the abolition of bourgeois society. Marx, at least, had satisfied this need with an economic imperative, namely, an immense body of theory (unparalleled in its scope and historical knowledge). As I have noted, this theory was based on such precepts as a chronic crisis produced by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and by a structurally sophisticated class analysis that inevitably pitted a proletarian majority of an industrialized country against a dwindling number of capitalists. By the 1950s, however, Marxism revealed for all who have eyes to see, that its traditional imperative was completely unsound when compared with the realities of the postwar world, nor could its economic imperative be renovated to meet the challenges posed by the last half of the twentieth century.
It was out of the failure of Marx’s economic imperative that social ecology was born—not solely because of the impact of pollution, urban degradation, toxic food additives, and the like. When, in 1950, I wrote my almost book length article, “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” in No. 10 of Contemporary Issues, the dangers to public health posed by the chemicalization of food by pesticide residues, preservatives, coloring matter, and the like were still relatively minor issues. The problem of nuclear fallout, the vast number and quantity of pollutants that were to threaten the health of many millions of people, and, later, in 1964, the hazard to the world’s climate created by carbon dioxide, were not immediate issues or widely foreseeable ones. The apocalyptic nature of the 1950 article was dismissed by my critics as “wild and reckless” attacks upon the existing society. Actually, I was trying to provide a viable substitute for Marx’s defunct economic imperative, namely an ecological imperative that, if thought out (as I tried to do in The Ecology of Freedom) would show that capitalism stood in an irreconcilable contradiction with the natural world. Nearly all my articles and books—such as Our Synthetic Environment (1962), followed two years later by my widely circulated article, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” and a companion article, “Toward a Liberatory Technology,” (1965)—were guided primarily by this project.
I should note that it was in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” that I used the words, “social ecology” for the first time and began to sketch out the complex body of ideas that ultimately reached their elaboration in The Ecology of Freedom, two decades later. Let me be quite outspoken: it was not an unbridled passion for wildlife, wilderness, organic food, primitivism, craft-like methods of production, villages (as against cities), “localism,” a belief that “small is beautiful”—not to speak of Asian mysticism, spiritualism, naturism, etcetera—that led me to formulate and promote social ecology. I was guided by the compelling—indeed, challenging—need to formulate a viable imperative that doomed capitalism to self-extinction. As the thirties and the war revealed, it was not simply the class war between the proletariat and the capitalist class—driven almost exclusively by economic forces and resulting from the concentration of capital—that were destined to destabilize capitalism and produce a revolution. More fundamentally, the crisis produced by capitalism’s “grow or die” imperative could be expected to drive society into a devastating contradiction with the natural world. Capital, in effect, would be compelled to simplify all the ecosystems on whose complexity evolution depended. Driven by its competitive relations and rivalries, capitalism would be obliged to turn soil into sand, the atmosphere and the planet’s waterways into sewers, and warm the planet to a point where the entire climatic integrity of the world would be radically altered because of the greenhouse effect.
In short, precisely because capitalism was, by definition, a competitive and commodity-based economy, it would be compelled to turn the complex into the simple and give rise to a planet that was incompatible environmentally with advanced life forms. The growth of capitalism was incompatible with the evolution of biotic complexity as such—and certainly, with the development of human life and the evolution of human society.
What is important to see is that social ecology thus revealed a crisis between the natural world and capitalism that was, if anything, more fundamental than the crisis that was imputed to the falling rate of profit and its alleged consequences. Moreover, social ecology opened the very real question of the kind of society that would have to follow the abolition of a capitalist economy. Self-styled Marxists (in all fairness, unlike Marx and Engels) made a virtue out of a centralized, bureaucratically planned, and a highly technocratic ideal of progress, based on an urban and mechanistic culture that was almost a parody of Corbusier’s cityscapes.
Social ecology tried to fill the gap between the industrial and agrarian worlds, not by condemning machinery, mass production, or even industrial agriculture. My “Toward a Liberatory Technology” was deprecated by anarchists and Marxists alike: the former because the article celebrated the use of new gardening machines as a substitute for backbreaking toil; the latter precisely because it was “too utopian” in its aspirations. Frankly, I regarded both of my supposed “failings” as real virtues that, with quality production in all spheres of economic life, freed humanity from the yoke of toil and a technocratic world. Moreover, there were aspects of the past which, given modern technics and means of communication were desiderata because they could lighten work and vastly increase productivity, without which humanity would be afflicted with fears of material scarcity. Such technological advances were also needed to provide sufficient free time for active participation in public affairs. Let me add, again, that my critics—many of whom were later to high-jack my alleged “failings”—read “could” to mean “would,” and pompously declared that if “post-scarcity” simply meant we already had tremendous technological advances, why were we still beset with poverty and exhausting toil? As though capitalism, like a slot machine, “would” always deliver the most optimal returns on the goodies its technology could produce! Typically, they failed to observe that I had repeatedly warned my readers that almost nothing could emerge from within the context of a market economy that was not tainted by the pathologies of competition, rivalry, and, quite bluntly, pure and simple greed!
By contrast, social ecology’s ecological imperative—the contradiction between a competitive society and the natural world—is not simply theoretical. By the eighties, it had been tested by the massive degradation that is occurring in the social as well as the natural world. Speaking for myself, I am astonished by the rapid onset of the greenhouse effect, which, in 1964, I predicted in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” as a possibility that would require two or more centuries to unfold. Yet, as early as the eighties and nineties, the contradiction between capitalism and the natural world was becoming a very visible reality. Thereafter, the greenhouse effect and other destructive imbalances have assumed proportions that even outweigh more “commonplace” problems such as soil erosion and waste disposal.
This philosophy forms the basis for an educative outlook that yields a lengthy dialectical history and exposition of the phases of human development as it emerges out from natural evolution into social evolution. The philosophy of social ecology centers around a dialectical unfolding of a “legacy of freedom” that not only intertwines but interacts with a “legacy of domination,” and includes the evolution of a concept of justice that leads into an ever-expanding concept of freedom, of scarcity into post-scarcity, of folkdom into citizenship, of hierarchy into class, and, hopefully, a growing horizon of freedom (whose termination, if any, we are not yet equipped to foresee), yielding libertarian municipalities and institutions. Taken together, as a whole, this educative outlook forms the basis for a practical theory of politics.
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