published by:

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

We are now living not only in a different century that the Institute for Social Ecology was founded—the ISE was founded, I would remind you, in 1974, nearly thirty years ago. I would sound to young people today as an alien enterprise from a very different world than the one that exists today. The world I knew still had a workers’ movement in the US and Europe, and the issues it had to confront differ qualitatively from those that have emerged in the past two decades.

Yet it would be unpardonable if we forgot that socialism was meant to be a rational society, not a replication of Stalinism and totalitarianism. Nor can we be permitted to forget that it will require a profound social imperative—an ecological imperative, in my view—to move this mass, even lethargic society along rational lines. We must always remember that socialism will come about as the result of logical necessity, the product of deep-seated and compelling forces for social change, not simply “good vibes.” To give these precepts a lived meaning, we shall have to create an educational vanguard to keep the terrible pathologies of our day under control, at the vary least, and abolish them at the very most.

For such demands upon our energy and our intelligence, our educational activities must result in a movement, not simply in a lifestyle that celebrates its “freedom” in a closeted community at a distance from real centers of activity and conflict. I cannot emphasize enough that our education, be it at the ISE or among “affinity groups,” will be little more than a form of self-indulgence if it is restricted to our minds, completely removed from an active life.

I would be the first to acknowledge that action is only possible when there is a real, dissident public life. For the present, I see no widespread inclination to give reality to a movement for libertarian municipalism, which, at the turn of the new century, lies dormant as a prospect for a new politics. Marx once perceptively noted in his early writings that not only must the Idea follow reality, but also reality must follow the Idea. This aphorism might well be regarded as a recognition of the Hegelian notion that freedom is a recognition of necessity in the sense that we need sufficient preconditions to produce the most effective conditions for social change. When this is not so, the most brilliant of ideas lie almost silently in wait for society itself to ripen and permit the struggle for freedom to germinate. It is then that we can give to education a priority that defies all false appeals to activism for its own sake.

But one proviso must be voiced: ideas are only true when they are rational. Today, when rationality and consistency are deprecated in the name of postmodernist chic, we carry a double burden of trying to sustain, often by education alone, reason against irrationalism, and to know when to act as well as how to do so. In such cases, let me note that education, too, is a form of activism and must always be cultivated as such.I

Notes

This article is an abridged version of a longer letter from the author to Michael Caplan.

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