Right around a year ago, I finished reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. That gigantic work amounted to a systematic report on the tendencies of capitalism to generate vast political and economic inequality between the overwhelming majority of the population and a tiny elite, for whom laws did not seem to apply and to whom democracy was a pithy joke played on the great mass of simpletons like me. The supposed improvements made to capitalism in the wake of the social democratic era after the Great Depression proved to have more to do with a brief disruptive period due to the economic devastation left in the wake of two World Wars, and capitalism was quickly reorganizing itself into its old, almost feudal order-an order which more resembled the manorial economy of lazy lords living on rents from land they inherited, as described by Jane Austen or Tolstoy at the end of the 19th century than anything Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman claimed capitalism had to offer us in the 21st.
And yet, Piketty is not a Marxist, and his book did not predict capitalism falling into a death spiral, nor a global proletarian revolution. Such an analysis, which seemed plausible in the 19th century, was self-evidently absurd today. The truth was more complicated, and there didn’t seem to be any straightforward solution-what was obvious was that capitalism presented a gross imposition upon human freedom, and while Piketty held out hope for reformism (hope which seemed tempered in his more recent Capital and Ideology, in which he embraced a decidedly more radical, if tempered, “Participatory Socialism”), it seemed clear to me that the solutions would not be achieved by any government. The ruling elite would not save us from itself, whatever self-restraining ideologies they may embrace, so long as the basic incentive structures of neoliberal capitalism remained in place.
Thus, that book got me over the social-democratic hangover that came from volunteering for Bernie Sanders (which in its own turn got me over the queasy, vague progressive liberalism I’d embraced up to that point), and I started actively identifying as an anarchist. I liked the aesthetic feel of the word, a flavor of leftism which was explicitly anti-authoritarian, and the fact that it was synonymous with “libertarian socialism,” a term which throws the minds of liberals and conservatives alike into confusion and tended to make for interesting conversation.
Even moreso, there’s a swarthy directness to the term that was lacking in a sanctimonious phrase like “democratic socialism,” the very name of which seemed to be apologizing for itself. Whereas that term evoked images of Martin Luther King (which felt a bit presumptuous), anarchy evokes classic punk rock-much more on my level.
Most importantly, it connected the dots I hadn’t quite put together thoroughly before-capitalism has only ever existed (and likely only can exist) with a strong central government to oversee the market, defend property rights, and mint currency. It wasn’t a matter of big government or big business-they were the same, chimerical beast, composed of members of the same calcified social stratum, and no right-thinking person could despise one without despising the other.
But the term anarchy is very much negativistic-derived from the Greek anarchos, its literal meaning is “without a ruler.” Typically interpreted by the general public to mean “without order,” this definition actually comes much closer to what classical 19th century anarchism as described by typified by Mikhail Bakunin’s Collectivist Anarchism or Peter Kropotkin’s Anarcho-communism (which my word processor insists is a typo, suggesting how well it turned out as a political project) came to mean. Negativistic as it is, it implies an ordered, leaderless political structure of some sort-and there are as many “sorts” to speak of as there are anarchists to speak of them, with no honest person pretending to know exactly what their end goal would look like.
Surely, there was a chaotic tendency within anarchism, typified by Max Stirner and derived from the worst ideas of the grandaddy anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Stirner turned the idea of absolute liberty into a supreme egotism in which the only thing one should reasonably care about is oneself, and in this sense right-wing libertarianism isn’t quite so guilty of plagiarism when it adopts a word originally used by anarchists to describe themselves. When people use the term anarchist as a pejorative, it’s typically with these sorts of people in mind.
But of those self-described anarchist experiments in history, however few in number, all took something along the lines of a direct-democratic structure. Certainly the most dramatic and impressive example of this was the anarcho-syndicalist organization, the C.N.T.-F.A.I. in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, which existed from 1936 up to the fascist victory in 1939. This constituted a relatively serious revolutionary project-approximately three million people living, working, and fighting under the black and red banner of trade union-based anarchism.
If one wanted to learn about this fascinating movement (and I enthusiastically did), there was only one really authoritative historian of the subject (apart from a few documentaries and George Orwell, whose relatively brief firsthand account of the anarchist syndicates and militias, and their downfall, is described in Road to Catalonia)-Murray Bookchin, who wrote not one but two books on the subject, To Remember Spain and The Spanish Anarchists.
Bookchin’s prose was utterly dry-one got the distinct sense that this was the kind of guy who would talk at you for hours and hours about whatever he felt like (and this sense doesn’t fade away from watching his actual lectures). Nevertheless, Bookchin came across as an exceptionally well-educated historian of the left, someone who knew the political tendencies of the groups and individuals almost implicitly. More importantly, he demonstrated a clear passion for the ideals of the anarchist movement, a commitment to this expanded concept of liberty which I was particularly fascinated by at the time. This made a great deal of sense, as Bookchin himself was an active participant in the labor movement in the US while the Spanish uprising was occurring. But fascinatingly, he wasn’t a supporter of the movement at the time-he couldn’t be, both because the political differences within the Spanish front against fascism were unarticulated by the American press (who lumped republican, communist, and anarchist forces as fighters for “democracy” against an attempted fascist military coup without articulating the outright hostilities between them), and because Bookchin himself was a Stalinist at the time, ideologically about as far as anyone on the left could be from an anarchist. His political trajectory-from Stalinist to anarchist to one of the earliest environmentalists, to a radical left-wing ecologist who nonetheless by the 1980s seemed to get along with objectivists better than Marxists-was the sort of trajectory taken by someone who was never intellectually satisfied, and who didn’t have any interest in being polite about it.
Having some inkling of the man, I decided it would be worthwhile to see what else he had produced, and an online search produced this lecture, which remains probably my single favorite piece of left-wing media.
The “Forms of Freedom” lecture is in my opinion a rhetorical masterpiece. In it, Bookchin details the direction of and impetus for his political philosophy in a way that is not only intellectually serious, but gut-wrenchingly relatable. He starts by reminding people of a (hopefully still) largely universal experience, that of being a child in a neighborhood of children. He reminds us of a time when we constructed our own cultures, in our own little groups, and made worlds of our own instead of buying them from someone. That stark image of a culture that was experienced by walking out into one’s neighborhood, as opposed to turning on one’s television, was one of those sorts of incredibly obvious yet earth shattering things that left me affected since I first heard it.
Murray Bookchin, born to a working class Russian Jewish family in the Bronx in 1921, could almost be thought of as the living history of the American left, someone who came from its disposition in the 20s and charted a forward-looking path for it in the 21st century. His grandmother Zeitel, a member of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, gave him a left-wing political orientation very early on-so early that he joined the Young Pioneers, a communist youth organization, when he was 9 years old. His demeanor was utterly unlike those of the more familiar New Left intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse-he came across not as urbane, but urban. Bookchin is striking precisely because he was an intellectual who did not seem like an intellectual-he looked like a garden gnome dressed like an old-timey farmer, and mixed with his thick Brooklyn accent one would guess he was a mechanic or ran a kosher deli. Though his range of knowledge on philosophy and critical theory was as broad as that of any scholar, his degree was not in humanities, but civil engineering. In his lectures, he frequently referred to his time as a shop steward in a General Motors factory, and particularly to the ten years he worked in a steel foundry. Ideologically, he never seemed content-he abandoned his Stalinism for Trotskyism, his Trotskyism for anarchism, and eventually disavowed anarchism (or more particularly the direction anarchism had taken in the latter half of the 20th century) for social ecology or communalism, political ideologies and philosophical disciplines of his own creation. And something did come of them-social ecology actually became the ideological cornerstone of Kurdish revolutionaries when his works were read by the leader of the Kurdish workers party, Abdullah Ocalan. Ocalan’s “Democratic Confederalism”, the governing ideology of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (commonly known as Rojava), was very largely based on Bookchin’s philosophy.
Bookchin’s magnum opus, in which he introduces and articulates his view of history as an unfolding dialectic of freedom and domination, is The Ecology of Freedom. It’s a book I know intimately now, having spent the past six months reading and discussing it with my study group at length, which was probably one of the more challenging intellectual exercises I’ve undertaken in my life, partially because of the book’s enormously ambitious scope and partially because of Bookchin’s often maddening writing style-pretentious, humorless, repetitive, and vague.
The primary argument of Ecology is Bookchin’s belief that hierarchy is not a fixed state of human nature, but something which developed through the machinations of history. In fact, it’s a metaphysical fiction-the structure of reality, Bookchin argues, is better viewed along the lines of complex mutualistic networks-in other words, ecologies. The idea of hierarchy is essentially a cultural byproduct of circumstance, but one which Bookchin regards as instructive.
Where does hierarchy come from, then? “Organic societies” of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, originally living in highly solidaristic extended kin groups and given to seeing themselves as one part of an enormous ecological tapestry, gradually gave way to patriarchal militarism and organized religion as a result of increasing pressure to grow more food on less land. Whereas peaceful hunter-gatherers had (and still have) fairly egalitarian gender relations, those forced into conflict or negotiation with one another naturally became male-dominated as the traditional male roles (all of which were undertaken away from the home) took on greater importance. Paired with religion, which Bookchin regards as the outcome of the need of elderly people in organic societies to find ways to justify their presence in times of famine, warrior culture and shamanism together form the basis for class society.
Bookchin regards this as an inevitable outcome of primitive naivete-lacking a grasp of the threat posed by domination and hierarchy to the relative freedom of tribal life (the “original affluent society” as described by Marshall Sahlins), a coherent libertarian ideology had no countervailing force upon which it could be formed. By the time we reach the ancient historical record, we see two conflicting forces in the minds of men-that of a prehistoric nature worship, mixed with the rigid hierarchies inherited from the slow descent of organic society into patriarchy and the warrior code of the Bronze Age.
These ways of life, oriented toward domination and control of the other, whether that be foreigners, women, slaves, or competing social classes, are aided by “epistemologies of rule”, philosophies which give legitimacy to domination. He gives a few examples of this, chief among them the two primary sources of all following western thought-Greek philosophy as articulated by Plato and Aristotle (note: Bookchin eventually reveals himself to be Aristotelian, but hold on that), and the doctrine of the monotheistic, patriarchal god of the Hebrews, Yahweh. Both epistemologies-that of reason or of faith-are ones Bookchin has some sympathy towards and finds value in. But at the same time, particularly in Aristotle, we find justifications for slavery and patriarchy built into an ethical system supposedly defensible on the grounds of sound reason. In Hebrew faith, we find a God who is not of nature but above it, one who’s word is law without any reason to answer to, and whose authority is a means of contriving a class hierarchy-Bookchin references the story of Joseph in Genesis, who by accurately interpreting the dreams of the pharoah (sent by Yahweh) is effectively turned from a prisoner into a dictator. Here, Bookchin argues, is the connection between god and class rule in action-the exclusive capacity to inherit authority from god utterly delegitimizes the opinion of any political community.
But Bookchin has much more to say about Christianity. He describes the history of Christianity in the west, from its early forms in Rome and Jerusalem through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment as the onward march of the State and class hierarchy, becoming larger and interfering more and more into the daily affairs of life within what were otherwise relatively autonomous communities. But he also gives a lengthy history of revolt, particularly in the form of proto-Protestant hereticism-from the early Gnostics in the second century A.D., who viewed the Hebrew god as a sadistic narcissist, a minor player who couldn’t even conceive of the true Creator, to the communistic instincts of the English Peasants Revolt in 1381 and the Digger commune on St. George’s Hill in 1649. The western development of libertarianism comes to us through moral ambiguities within the bible and catholic orthodoxy, which lead inevitably to not only the Reformation, but the secular ideologies of the Enlightenment soon after.
The bible is thus a source for three things- 1) the development of the idea of a universal humanitas, one united human community under God (an idea Bookchin accurately notes is found earlier on in Stoic philosophy), 2) a linear, eschatological view of human history as progress towards a meaningful change (the birth of utopianism), and 3) the development of a radical concept of human individuality, separate from any binding structure, through the individual’s personal relationship with God.
The Enlightenment and its descendants-whether they be socialism, capitalism, fascism or anarchism-are all guilty of the same mistake, however. To Bookchin, they are mired in a Cartesian dualism which he would replace with what comes across as essentially a secular animistic nature philosophy-what he referred to elsewhere as “dialectical naturalism” as opposed to “dialectical materialism.” He has particularly harsh words for Marx, a thinker Bookchin is obviously deeply fond of and yet disillusioned with. Marx thus becomes Bookchin’s prototypical materialist punching bag.
While Marx brilliantly demonstrated the dysfunction of capitalism, he failed to break with its central theses-that of a dead and arbitrary nature which was to be given order and purpose by human wit. Among his many failings, he embraced an authoritarian means of achieving social change which Bookchin detests. To truly resolve the crises brought about by capitalism, a proletarian dictatorship simply would not do. Despite critiquing some aspects of anarchist thought, Bookchin feels a far better path was carved out by Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, who envisioned a society of free association, one which gave some credit to the basic decency of free individuals to treat each other humanely, freed from the antagonistic social relations imposed by capitalism and artificial scarcity.
The problem runs deeper than politics and even social relations, however. It is at this point that Bookchin moves beyond political philosophy into ontology. Coming from an earlier generation, Bookchin was fundamentally Aristotelian in his ethical orientation, not postmodern. He felt that nature itself was rational and teleological-extant reality has a developmental, goal-oriented quality from which we can derive ethical meaning. This orientation puts him almost in a class of his own on the left-but in his cosmology one finds a great deal more kinship with Catholic philosophers like Charles Taylor and Alisdair MacIntyre than with a secular left that has largely fallen into aimless moral relativism. Not to say the usual suspects conservatives point to as evidence of moral relativism-particularly gay and transgender people-have no place in Bookchin’s naturalistic ethics (they most certainly do), but that he seeks to ground such phenomena in objective moral standards of right and wrong, as opposed to phenomena that simply are and are as legitimate or illegitimate as one happens to feel.
For Bookchin, the point isn’t that matter is alive, but that matter as such does not exist. One cannot go to the store and buy “matter”-all matter has a tricky, persistent need to manifest in the form of something which has identity, a natural history, which Bookchin argues is redolent with teleological meaning. Contrast this perspective with that of Marx, who speaks of human labor as the “fire” which raises matter from its “death-sleep” to be converted into “use-value.” To Bookchin, this is pure human arrogance-matter is not asleep, it is in the process of doing something-developing towards some meaningful end. Whether that end is something the human should allow to carry on or interfere in is subject to deliberation, but to fail to even acknowledge that such a trajectory exists is the height of Victorian arrogance, in Bookchin’s eyes, an orientation towards the world and its phenomena entirely consistent with the subjugation of women, of the poor, of racial minorities-all that which can be reduced to simply another means of production.
Bookchin rather regards the natural world as not only our home, but as a world which functions rationally and purposefully towards some end-particularly, towards the formation of sustainable, complex and continuously elaborating mutualistic ecosystems. The fact that inorganic matter gave birth to organic compounds, out of which matter which was not alive somehow came to be so, and then these lifeforms themselves developed into ever more elaborate and complex structures and ecological communities, was not a mere “accident.” Nor was it a conscious decision-it needn’t be one or the other. To call the creation of life “accidental” itself implies an animistic outlook-unconscious matter cannot do anything, neither purposefully nor accidentally. Rather, Bookchin asks us to look at natural phenomena and see them for what they are-not conscious, but subjective, in the sense that something is being accomplished, and it tends to be accomplished in a remarkably rational way. Reason is not merely how we understand the universe, but rather our capacity to reason is a capacity borne out of the fact that the structure of the universe adheres to physical laws which can be understood and explained-they are reliable, non-contradictory, and crucially developmental.
Here Bookchin arrives at what I consider a contradiction. By invoking the presence of reason throughout nature, he can’t help but imply determinism as well. In essence, all things have causes which can theoretically be rationally derived, provided we have the means to work it all out. But if they don’t-if things simply happen at random-we lose our ability to ascribe rationality, and possibly meaning, to nature. Nevertheless, he attempts to wiggle out of strict determinism in several passages of the book, a decision I felt was unfortunate.
But granting the general thrust of the argument-nature evidences rational, goal-oriented development in the ongoing trajectory of natural evolution, and from this we can derive ethics, meaning, and purpose-Bookchin charts a way out of the existentialist mire without the crutch of blind religious faith. What are the ethics of social ecology? Bookchin doesn’t get overly specific about this-his work is intended to provide a method rather than a dogma, a general framework through which to think about one’s own studies and develop one’s own ideas-except to argue that natural and human communities function on a principle of mutualistic interdependence, a unity of diverse elements. He envisions relatively small ecological communities which function as direct democracies, decisions being made in general assemblies and carried out by administrative branches. These communities are to be confederated with one another to maintain peaceful relations, jointly handle external threats, and circulate resources among the communes. Lacking capitalist property relations, technology could be designed to be used rather than sold, and homes, cars, tools, computers, clothes and other artifacts could be designed to last generations. As the economy would be far less productive (as there would be far less need to produce, both due to reduction of waste and automation of what industry was still necessary), people would have more free time to devote to their own interests, whether they be athletic, technical, artistic, intellectual, or what have you. As high quality education would be made free and universal, manual and administrative labor would be rotated or shared-no white collar or blue collar workers, but a mixture of the two. Projects would be coordinated through the free association of interested individuals and resources to carry them out secured within the general assembly of a given community, rather than through the investment of some bank, hedge fund, or private capitalist.
All of this would be achieved within the boundaries of a local ecological context-humans would recognize themselves as a part of rather than apart from the natural world, and would tailor their projects, both on the communal and confederal scale, in light of this. The goal is to recognize what a given ecology is developing toward on its own, and then try to intervene in a mutualistic way-to enhance the humus-building capacities of grasslands and forests, for instance, or to do controlled, localized burnings to eliminate the biomass accumulation that leads to forest fires. Social ecology seeks to integrate itself into nature, rather than superimpose itself over it. This doesn’t require either some futuristic eco-utopia of people living in geodesic domes, nor does it require a primitivistic return to hunting and gathering and living in grass huts. It merely requires implementing the technology which we have, here and now, to serve a different set of social goals.
To the informed reader, the last paragraph reads somewhat like what it would sound like if an A.I. was fed the entire Mother Earth News catalogue and asked to condense it into a single article. He never uses the term in Ecology of Freedom, but Bookchin’s work nevertheless dovetailed remarkably with the permaculture movement, which was developing contemporaneously with his own. But whereas permaculture was interested in the technical methodology for an ecologically sustainable society, Bookchin was concerned with the social matrix in which such a project could be made possible on a meaningful scale. He recognized what most in the permaculture movement were eager to ignore: there was absolutely no reconciling this project with capitalism-nor with the other head of the post-Enlightenment cerberus, bourgeois republicanism.
The failure of permaculture to connect the dots between its methodological framework and the political changes needed to bring it to fruition-let alone its tolerance for and eventual absorbtion into New-Age mysticism-have rendered it something of a joke. Bill Mollison, the primary founder of the discipline, was himself disgusted with where it had ended up (Bookchin’s description of the Holism movement as a “queasy mystical sigh” comes to mind-one of the better turns of phrase in his otherwise humorless prose). Permaculture is now little more than a vaguely gestured at basis for doing a rain dance and then covering one’s garden in wet cardboard on the one hand, or an equally vague gesture to “sustainability and harmony with nature” which has been commodified as “consulting services,” or an aesthetic flavor of landscaping. Lacking a revolutionary core, it was pulled apart by the decidedly un-ecological world for which it was trying to create an ecological avenue. Social ecology, for its part, committed two cardinal sins-having no money behind it on the one hand and a crappy name on the other-which rendered it a relic of post-seventies environmentalism.
Nevertheless, looking back on these projects, one can legitimately view them as an attempt to salvage the revolutionary projects of the sixties from existentialist materialism on the one side and hippie pseudo spirituality on the other. Bookchin attempts to take the best out of primitive animism, feminism, Greek philosophy, hard-headed scientific rationalism, Marxism, social anarchism, and Christian esotericism-and condense all of it into a sort of common sense, feel-good nature philosophy laced with libertarian socialism. He does no less than try to imbue scientific rationalism with the warmth and passion of religion-arguably he is trying to resolve the tension between materialism and idealism present since the ancient Greeks, and certainly the dualistic split invoked by Descartes.
Whatever holes one can poke in how he gets there (and there’s room for plenty, as his writing leaves a lot to be desired), the image of utopia Bookchin creates is to me a beautiful one-not the weird, bourgeois environmentalist futurism which seemed to prevail instead. Bookchin cares deeply about the development of unique cultures of fully-realized individuals. In some sense one can tell he’s grasping to get back to the Brooklyn of the ‘20s and ‘30s he spoke of so nostalgically, where working-class people congregated on street corners to discuss their revolutionary politics (among other things), and in the bosom of a rich community and in multi-generational households, forceful personalities could develop through a diversity of cultural experiences and perspectives.
But it’s not quite that Brooklyn either-he wants a Brooklyn without racism, without patriarchy, one that could balance cultural diversity and uniqueness with a commitment to a universal human community, and indeed to a communion with the natural world as a whole. Like Aristotle, Bookchin sees politics and ethics as intrinsically linked-an ethical society can only be composed of ethical individuals, and ethical individuals can only flourish in an ethical society. We are at once produced by and authors of both our community and our broader environment. It is only by coming together that we can really be ourselves. However trite it may sound, there is value in remembering this as we approach what looks like a new Dark Ages.
That last point is probably the great shame of this book. The sickening part of having read The Ecology of Freedom in 2021 is to see how much farther down the road of social atomization and environmental degradation we’ve come since it was published in 1982. In the near forty years since, technology has cemented market relations into almost every aspect of life-indeed, one of the most profitable sectors of the economy is now in “social media”-literally the commodification of human interaction. Technology has taken the marketplace and put it into our pockets, and the line between the marketplace and the social sphere is so blurred that for most in the developed world there is little awareness of a difference. As far as the natural world is concerned, we are more intimately aware of how we are sealing the fate of both ourselves and the biosphere as a whole than we have ever been, and no less helpless to stop ourselves and change course. We are like Jude Law ravenously eating the “Special” made of rotting alien carcasses at the Chinese restaurant in eXistenZ-”I find this disgusting, but I can’t stop.”
At least on a philosophical level (say nothing of the practicality of it) Bookchin’s program is the closest to a coherent proposal I’ve encountered for dealing with the problems of the 21st century. But it’s almost as if the blueprints for the Sistine Chapel have been made only to find out the plan was actually to build a McDonald’s-like so many social theorists, Bookchin has his critiques of the present, his image of the future, and absolutely no clear plan to cross from one into the other. We seem to be hurtling toward a future we can’t avoid, and we may only be engaging in utopian fantasies to soften the blow.
Perhaps that’s true, perhaps not. Either way, I would argue it’s a worthwhile endeavor. As Bookchin insists at the very end of the book, we deserve a fate better than the one that seems to await us.