Remaking Society: A New Ecological Politics

Also by Murray Bookchin

Our Synthetic Environment

Crisis in Our Cities

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Limits of the City

The Spanish Anarchists

Toward an Ecological Society

The Ecology of Freedom

The Modern Crisis

The Philosophy of Social Ecology

From Urbanization to Cities

Defending the Earth

Which Way for the Ecology Movement?

To Remember Spain

Re-Enchanting Humanity

Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism

The Third Revolution (Volumes 1–4)

Social Ecology and Communalism

The Next Revolution

Dedication

For Art and Libera Bartell,

who fought for freedom all their lives

Foreword: Marina Sitrin & Debbie Bookchin

This book is an invitation for change. And I know that you, the reader, are likely wanting to change the world—to remake society. You might have some specific ideas of how this can be done. Or, like so many of us, you may have some guiding principles and are searching for more—a coherent theory and historical examples as to how we can create a more liberatory society. Most likely you agree that the continued erosion of women’s rights in the United States, the rise of authoritarianism worldwide, and the deepening of the ecological crisis have crystalized the need for a better path forward as never before. Or maybe you sense that, coming out of the lingering Covid pandemic, something in social relations feels increasingly off, that there is a lack of a connection among people, that despite, or perhaps because of, social media, people seem more alienated than ever from each other and the political process that undergirds so many important decisions that affect our lives.

The distinguished philosopher, social theorist, and activist Murray Bookchin was, like you, deeply concerned about the current state of the natural and social worlds. Over the course of six decades of writing and activism, he sought to examine what kind of social relations have led to the social and ecological crisis we face today. And importantly, and in many respects pioneeringly, he chose to do much more than critique the social and political landscape: he offered a detailed proposal for how to fix it. This book, one of more than two dozen that he authored, offers us the foundations of his historical and political critique—social ecology. Importantly, it also offers us a way forward out of the multiple crises we face.

In fact, Bookchin’s theory of libertarian municipalism—the horizontal practice of direct democracy—is increasingly being put into practice by innovative social movements around the world, sometimes by direct influence and sometimes from a kindred spirit of freedom. You can see this practice of direct democracy in action spanning from Chiapas in Mexico, where the Zapatistas have fashioned a grassroots democratic society that ensures complete equality for women and all elements of society, to North and East Syria, where women cochair every public office and make up a minimum of 40 percent of every legislative body. In new social movements everywhere, people are discovering that true self-determination requires the exercise of direct, grassroots, assembly-style democracy. This preference is being expressed in large movements and small: in autonomous communities throughout Mexico like Cherán, Guerrero, and Oaxaca; in small European municipalities like Montreuil, Commercy, and other towns in in France; in populous cities like Rosario, Argentina. People are looking for horizontal ways of organizing that challenge traditional representative politics. I have collaborated with and written about these autonomous movements over the past twenty-five years, generally facilitating voices from those in movement as much as possible, and they offer instructive examples that can inspire new ways of thinking about what it means to engage in politics and how we can better organize for lasting change.

In the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatistas emerged in 1994, declaring a resounding "Ya Basta! (Enough!) Rather than making demands on institutional power, they created dozens of autonomous communities, based on forms of directly democratic governance on land they have taken back and revitalized. Zapatista ideas spread to other communities in South America such as in those that emerged in 2001 in Argentina, where the popular rebellion sang, Que Se Vayan Todos! Que No Quede Ni Uno Solo!" (Everyone Must Go! Not Even One Should Remain!) As with the Zapatistas, these movements focused on creating horizontal assemblies: not asking those in power to change things, but developing an alternative prefigurative example in the present by creating new social relationships—creating power together—but totally outside of the established political structure. Instead of focusing on taking power via traditional politics, the Argentinian movements focused on direct grassroots action: taking over and running workplaces by the hundreds, retaking land, creating new collectives and cooperatives, including media and art, and breaking from past hierarchical ways of relating. Together, these activists formed what they called a new subjectivity and dignity.

More than seven thousand miles away from the Zapatista project of resistance and autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico, is another extraordinary autonomous region: a nonstate project, similar in many ways to the Zapatistas, which has been evolving for decades and which burst into the open in 2012, a year after the Syrian civil war began. Initiated by the Kurdish freedom movement, the region known as North and East Syria that runs along the southern Turkish border in a land mass about the size of Massachusetts, is now comprised of five million people and is open to people from all surrounding regions who wish to come and participate. The territory, more informally known as Rojava, is made up of seven regions, based on a structure in which all decision making, apart from military, begins at the block (commune) level with face-to-face assemblies of thirty to four hundred households at its core. At each level, the people select male and female chairpersons and spokespersons who take the wishes of the community up to the next level: from local, to neighborhood (seven to thirty communes), to district, to regional until the delegates—who unlike political representatives in our system are all accountable, recallable, and serving only as the voice of the assembly—are able to make region-wide decisions that reflect as best possible the wishes of the base in a confederated democracy. The Kurds call their political system Democratic Confederalism, the name given to it by Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, who considered himself a student of social ecology and was deeply influenced by Bookchin’s books The Ecology of Freedom and From Urbanization to Cities, among others, which he read in Turkish translation after he was kidnapped by the Turkish state and imprisoned in 1999. Importantly, the Kurdish system prioritizes women’s rights, and at every level has separate women’s councils that can overrule the decisions by the mixed-gender assemblies when those decisions affect women’s issues.

Eschewing hierarchy and domination in every aspect of life, political and personal, is essential to both the Kurdish and Zapatista paradigms. Both of these projects are significant in understanding that the new social movements must go beyond traditional class issues that have dominated radical theory, in the form of proletarian socialism, for so many years. And indeed, in this volume, Bookchin offers a powerful rebuttal to the Marxist analysis of society and what Bookchin calls a terribly flawed model of social change that Marx introduced into the revolutionary project of the last hundred years—the myth of an embryonic capitalism and the inevitability of its predominance. Like David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, who observe that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the state, Bookchin observes that this was true not only for the state, but for capitalism itself. In a cogent critique, Bookchin dismantles the central tenets of Marxism: that the proletariat could be a hegemonic class, that capitalism was not only inevi­table but desirable, and that art and culture could be relegated to serving as conduits of propaganda. He argues for the primacy of nature and a critique of domination and hierarchy as central tenets to any movement for reconstructing society.

Fortunately the critique of domination and hierarchy and the need to adopt an ecological paradigm, with its emphasis on symbiosis, has grown in recent decades within movements around the world. Like the Kurdish and Zapatistas freedom movements, which took hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the Global South, similar forms grew in the Global North between 2010 and 2016, with the birth of the Movement of the Squares throughout cities in Spain, Greece, and other parts of Western Europe, and the Occupy Movement in the United States. Spurred by the austerity politics of neoliberalism, people took to the streets and squares, in the process developing new social relationships and new ways of being, often taking the form of directly democratic assemblies. These movements have evolved to take on questions of alternative forms of production, agriculture, defense of the land, housing, health care, and education, that is to say: they are beginning to recreate how we organize those things most important to our survival, and doing so in ways that are participatory and empowering. Based on their successful organizing, in some cities these groups have begun to challenge traditional political formations and bring new ideas into what were once traditional party politics, with examples including the Yellow Vests in Commercy and Nantes en Commune in Brittany, France, and Coalizione Civica in Bologna, Italy, just three examples of various levels of municipalist-based organizing that span the globe. Here and elsewhere, candidates have run on directly democratic platforms and in some cases, such as Bologna, are now participating in municipal governance.

Another example of this spirit of horizontal organization was the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around the world, in different countries and cities, millions acted and organized spontaneously when our governments and so-called representatives failed to support local communities or respond adequately to the global pandemic. Thousands of people participated in mutual aid and solidarity groups to feed, protect, and provide company for those most vulnerable. Although these have not generally evolved into structured social and political movements, they hold the potential to do so because of their underlying impetus: people responding directly to a social need by organizing at the grassroots level.

What are the features of these geographically and ethnically diverse popular movements? Why have they been successful? The key, I think, is their horizontal, nonhierarchical orientation. These movements all seek to empower people from below, who are rising up, rather than the traditional top-down approach to organizing. From the bottom up, they are moving, as the Zapatistas suggested, from below and to the left, where the heart resides. Power, domination, hierarchy, and representation are being rejected ideologically. Instead, these movements focus on self-governance and self-­representation, women’s liberation, and a deeply ecological perspective.

Bookchin, decades earlier, described the necessity of a new antiauthoritarian sensibility and, remarkably, it is as if these movements around the globe took pages directly from his work. In fact, in my participation and work with movements around the globe, from Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil, to the U.S., Canada, Greece, Spain, Germany, the U.K., and more, I have seen Bookchin’s influence. Key organizers in the early days of the Movements of the Squares also participated in the Global Justice Movement (Anti-Globalization Movement), a movement that had direct relationships with students of Murray Bookchin. Many of the participants in the Direct Action Network in the U.S. had studied directly with him; and Bookchin study groups using translations of his work into many languages influenced movements in Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Thailand, Scandinavian countries, and beyond. As you read this book, you will notice the extraordinary alignment between what Bookchin proposes for the organization of a free society—and how we remake that society—and the social organization and priorities of these new social movements.

It is important to understand that what Bookchin is proposing is not the same as merely employing voting as the strategy to achieve change (such as American Bernie Sanders-, Spanish Podemos-, or Greek Syriza-style socialism). Rather, it is about people coming together to discus, debate, and decide in face-to-face assemblies, and organizing societies in movements that go beyond just voting. This is particularly important for those of us who have become conditioned to think that our civic responsibilities are limited to the ballot box and choosing between the lesser of evils to represent us. Libertarian municipalism, in Bookchin’s formulation, is about ordinary people empowering themselves and assuming their true role as owners and directors of local and civic life. This means creating alternative institutions, recuperating workplaces, creating coops, community health care centers, etc., but just as importantly, it is also a vision that brings together the recuperation of what is ours by strengthening the local municipality through popular-assembly-selected delegates elected to political office in municipalities that can then confederate to challenge the power of the nation-state. Importantly, in Bookchin’s model the locally elected citizens are accountable to the local assembly that sponsored them. Thus, they are not politicians but citizen-spokespeople for their neighborhoods—precisely the model that Rojava has enacted. In short, Bookchin is asking us to reinvent the very notion of politics.

What can we learn from Bookchin and how his ideas have influenced the movements I have been describing? Remaking Society lays out, with clear specificity, conceptual markers for our practices and the basis for a new society. As described above, many of these theories and concepts have started to come into practice in various popular movements. While that is a tremendous beginning, engaging with more fleshed out theory and historical points of reference and practice should be our collective goal, so that we can deepen our application of these ideas and expand our movements. Bookchin is one of the few social theorists who expands his critique with a revolutionary new practice that offers a way out of the current crisis.

Some of the key concepts in this book that Bookchin encourages us to incorporate into all of our popular movements are at the core of his philosophy of social ecology—the rejection of domination, understanding the historical role of hierarchy in human history, and our relationship to the natural world. He explains:

I refer to social ecology’s insight that all our notions of dominating nature stem from the very real domination of human by human. This statement, with its use of the word stem, must be examined in terms of its intent. Not only is it a historical statement of the human condition, but it is also a challenge to our contemporary condition which has far-reaching implications for social change. As a historical statement it declares, in no uncertain terms, that the domination of human by human preceded the notion of dominating nature. Indeed, human domination of human gave rise to the very idea of dominating nature.

This passage reminds us of the centrality of our relationships to one another, a focus of so many of the contemporary horizontal movements and assemblies. Indeed, when we do not stress these connections, hierarchical relations become ascendant, oppressing not only humans, but our planet and all living things. Bookchin teaches us that the ecological crisis we face today is grounded in this original domination of humans over humans. He argues that we cannot solve the ecological crisis and thus the climate crisis without eliminating domination in the social sphere, including but not limited to gender and patriarchy, race and ethnic hierarchy, age, ableism, and economics. And as the enforcer of all sorts of relationships of command and obedience, the nation-state itself is a powerful oppressor that must be dismantled. His insightful critique in the chapter Hierarchies, Classes, and States makes this clear. He concludes:

The nation-state, as we know it today, finally divests politics of all its seemingly traditional features: direct democracy, citizen participation in the affairs of governmental life, and a sensitive responsiveness to the communal welfare. The word democracy itself undergoes degradation. It becomes representative rather than freely confederal between relatively independent communities, and divested of its grassroots institutions. . . . Hierarchies, classes, and states warp the creative powers of humanity. They decide whether humanity’s ecological creativity will be placed in the service of life or in the service of power and privilege.

If hierarchy has deeply wounded our relationships with each other and the natural world, capitalism has plunged a knife that much more deeply into the wound. Bookchin presciently, as early as 1964, specifically excoriated the grow or die mentality of capitalism as one of the central driving forces for humanity’s rapacious treatment of the natural world. Capitalism, he believes, has distorted every aspect of political, social, and even personal life. Not only does Bookchin want to reinvent political discourse, he wants us to re-­enchant a humanity that has been dislocated by an incipient form of capitalism that insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives. As he writes in his final chapter of the book:

Above all, the Enlightenment tried to formulate a general human interest over feudal parochialism and to establish the idea of a shared human nature that would rescue humanity as a whole from a folk-like, tribalistic, and nationalistic particularism. . . . That capitalism warped these goals, reducing reason to a harsh industrial rationalism focused on efficiency rather than a high-minded intellectuality; that it used science to quantify the world and dualize thought and being; that it used technology to exploit nature, including human nature—all of these distortions have their roots in society and in ideologies that seek to dominate humanity as well as the natural world.

Bookchin thus presents all of us who strive for a changed world and a better society a theoretical framework that can undergird our social movements of liberation no matter where they spring up. Our challenge then is to build movements everywhere that will preserve and expand our innate creativity and eradicate any tendencies toward hierarchy, status, or other forms of domination. In direct, popular, face-to-face assemblies with horizontal-based relationships at the core, we find both a tool and a goal. (The section of this book on assemblies will be an affirmation for many who practice them, and a reminder that they are not only a momentary practice, or something that is affective, but also effective and necessary—as Bookchin describes, "a way of life, not simply a technique for managing society.) Libertarian municipalism—which Bookchin later in his life also termed Communalism"—is one of the most important practical concepts on offer for those of us who wish to expand popular, grassroots democratic movements—and, as we have seen, is a concept already being put into nascent practice around the world. Deeply instructive and profoundly inspiring, this book is replete with analysis, history, and practical advice that every activist should be familiar with. If theory is a tool for constructing a better world, and history helps us understand the struggles our ancestors confronted and the lessons they learned that can still guide us today, I expect these pages will bring us all closer—to each other and to building a new, ecological, and liberatory society.

Introduction

I had long thought of writing a compact book that would clearly summarize my views on remaking society from an ecological viewpoint. It seemed to me (as it did to many of my friends) that a need existed to bring the ideas I have developed over several large books into a compact work of some two hundred pages for readers interested in an overview of social ecology.

This short volume is the fulfillment of that goal. It is not a substitute for the many books I have already written, in particular, The Ecology of Freedom, but rather it is a survey of their main arguments, an opportunity to add new ideas I developed since the earlier books were written, and an introduction to my thinking.

There are ideas that I’ve advanced throughout all of my writings—that our ecological problems have their roots in social problems and that the present clash between humanity and nature can be traced back primarily to social conflicts between human and human. I do not believe that we can develop any balance between humanity and nature unless we achieve a new balance based on freedom from domination and hierarchy among human beings themselves. I have called such a new society an ecological one, and I have been careful to describe my views as social ecology in contrast to terms like human ecology or deep ecology, which tend to deflect our attention away from the social aspects of the present ecological crisis. I believe we must soberly confront the fact that, unless we fundamentally change society along left-libertarian lines, the attitudes and institutions that drive us insanely toward ecological disaster will continue, despite all efforts to reform the prevailing social system.

What is of particular importance to me is to show that social ecology is a unifying, coherent, and clearly focused body of theory that not only explains why ecological breakdown occurs today, but also how it unites environmental, feminist, class, urban, and agrarian issues into a shared body of ideas. The increasing domination of people that began to occur ages ago, even before the emergence of economic classes and the State, provided the groundwork for the idea of the domination of nature. But it also gave rise to the very real domination of the young by the old in gerontocracies; of women by men in patriarchies; of one ethnic group by another in the form of racial status hierarchies; and of the countryside by the town in urban civilizations. All of these systems of domination have a shared origin and were elaborated from a common problem—systems of command and obedience based on hierarchical institutions.

What makes these systems ecologically significant rather than economically determined is that they involve the destruction of ecological values like complementarity, mutual aid, a belief in limit, a deep sense of community, and an organic outlook based on unity in diversity. These values and the institutions in which they were embodied have been replaced today by competition, egotism, limitless growth, anomie, and a purely means/end rationality structured around instrumentalism—the belief that reason is merely a tool or a skill rather than an inherent feature of an ordered, comprehensible reality. This vast modern ensemble that plays so alienating a role in our relationships with each other and our collective relationship with nature finds its most vicious expression in capitalism, be it the corporate capitalism of the West or the bureaucratic capitalism of the East: a grow-or-die