Fuck Yeah Murray Bookchin

"Social ecology is an appeal not only for moral regeneration but also, and above all, for social reconstruction along ecological lines."

[membraneshock]

rip to all the “fuckyeah___” blogs that carried our society at one point </3

[fyeahmurraybookchin]

[fyeahmurraybookchin]

Introducing Murray Bookchin, the Extraordinary Originator of “Social Ecology” ❧ Current Affairs

<p>Biographer Janet Biehl explains why the late thinker’s decentralized, anti-capitalist, ecological vision remains so important today.</p>

He talked about returning so many things to the hands of the people, like economic power. He thought that the economy needed to be put in the hands of bottom up, self-governing bodies based on the assembly. He wanted technology to be decentralized—he would have loved Apple computers, maybe not the company, but the decentralization that the laptop computer brought about was just remarkable to him. He wanted automation to be small scale. It was about decentralizing and breaking up cities to small-scale cities that are integrated with agriculture.

So, the theme that I found when I was working on the biography was so many of his ideas were about decentralizing different parts of society and reintegrating them into a new whole. I call it eco-decentralism in the book, but that’s not a term he used. It was decentralizing for the purpose of restoring control to people. When I looked at what happened with him and anarchism, I wondered, “Why was he attracted to this ideology that he later broke with?” When I read his actual reasons for embracing anarchism in his earlier writings, I noticed that it’s because the state makes people passive. He admired that active political engagement in the Athenian polis, where people could actively be involved in their society, rather than be passively turned into anonymous faceless crowds of the New York that he was living in.

And I think, regardless of what you think about anarchism or not, that’s something that we need to preserve from him. He agreed with Aristotle that we are political animals and we need to engage. That was, I think, one of his main driving features was to create the engaged citizen, engaged at the local level, and in the surrounding regions, instead of just turning over their minds to the state. 

[fyeahmurraybookchin]

We explore what confederalism means, and then look at some historical examples, from the Paris commune and the Spanish revolution to Rojava and the Zapatistas.

[probablyasocialecologist]

When a corporation or state takes action to worsen working conditions, reduce wages, or deny poor and vulnerable people the elementary amenities of life, social anarchists should raise their voices in protest and join in actions to prevent such measures from being executed. In short, they should fight exploitation and injustice on every front and become part of a variety of struggles for eliminating economic, social, and ecological abuses wherever they occur, at home or abroad. Social anarchists are no less humane in response to human suffering and no less outraged by social afflictions than the best-intentioned reformists. But their actions should not be limited merely to advancing remedial measures – which the bourgeoisie can usually adopt if it chooses to, with little loss to itself. Indeed, bourgeois society is sometimes more than willing to ameliorate social afflictions within its own framework, all the better to conceal broader social problems or to neutralize the danger of wider social unrest.

Murray Bookchin, The Unity of Ideals and Practice 

[probablyasocialecologist]

A libertarian society can be achieved only by a libertarian revolution. Freedom cannot be “delivered” to the individual as the “end-product” of a “revolution”; the assembly and community cannot be legislated or decreed into existence. A revolutionary group can seek, purposively and consciously, to promote the creation of these forms, but if assembly and community are not allowed to emerge organically, if their growth is not matured by the process of demassification, by self-activity and by self-realization, they will remain nothing but forms, like the soviets in postrevolutionary Russia. Assembly and community must arise within the revolutionary process; indeed, the revolutionary process must be the formation of assembly and community, and also the destruction of power, property, hierarchy and exploitation.

Murray Bookchin, Spontaneity and Utopia

[fyeahmurraybookchin]

Should we leave it up to General Dynamics in the United States or Mitsubishi in Japan to give us solar energy? Are we naïve enough to suppose that these giant multinational corporations are going to give us anything that would be unprofitable to them – in fact, that they must do that if they want to stay in existence? If it isn’t General Dynamics or Mitsubishi then it will be another corporation, be it in the US, in Japan, or elsewhere, that will supplant them if they happen to be too generous. Capitalists can’t afford, under capitalism, under a market economy based on bitter competition, and guided by the rule “grow or die”, to be generous – assuming they even care. It isn’t a question of what the personal attitude of an entrepreneur or the leading members of a corporation may be; they are forced no less than we are forced to grow or die. Thus we are told, if there is no growth we will not have jobs. Well, one should welcome the possibility of not having jobs if we lived in an economy that was guided by “from each according to his or her ability, and to each according to his or her needs.” The fewer jobs there are, the more free time we would have in such a society. And the more free time we have, the more we can cultivate ourselves as individuals. The more we can cultivate ourselves as individuals, the more democratic our society hopefully will become, the richer it will become culturally, and the more ecologically sensitive it will become.

Murray Bookchin, Basic Principles, Future Prospects

[probablyasocialecologist]

“To pretend that an authentic Left can always offer a practical solution to every problem in society is chimerical. Offering “lesser evils” as a solution to every evil that this society generates will lead to the worst of all possible evils–the dissolution of the Left into a liberal morass of endless compromises and humiliations. Amid all its fights in support of concrete issues, an authentic Left advances the message that the present society must be demolished and replaced by one that is rational. Such was the case with socialists like Eugene V. Debs and anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman in the Left That Was. Put bluntly: What this society usually does should not deter Leftists from probing the logic of events from a rational standpoint or from calling for what society should do. Any attempt to adapt the rational “should” to the irrational “is” vacates that space on the political spectrum that should be occupied by a Left premised on reason, freedom, and ecological humanism. The need to steadfastly maintain the principal commitments that minimally define a Left may not always be popular, but the alternative to the monstrous irrationalities that permeate present-day society must always be kept open, fostered, and developed if we are ever to achieve a free society.”

— Murray Bookchin, The Left That Was: A Personal Reflection

[probablyasocialecologist]

In one of the most radical state constitutions to be adopted during the American Revolution, Vermont yeomen, gathering at Windsor in July 1777, not only abolished slavery and property qualifications for the franchise; they also avowed that “as standing armies, in the time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up.” Accordingly, “the people have a right to bear arms for a defense of themselves and the State,” a right that explicitly goes far beyond the reticent wording of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. These sentiments reflected the yeomanry’s state of mind two-hundred years ago. They had nothing to do with the West’s “gun slinging” and its bullying machismo. Rather they expressed the sound conviction that the state cannot be trusted to claim a monopoly of violence over its citizenry and the full custody of public freedom. Democracy, if it was to mean anything, presupposed the active involvement of the citizen in developing a participatory politics, public security, and the direct face-to-face resolution of community problems. Lacking the means and instruments, particularly the weapons, to enforce its decisions, such a citizenry in the eyes of the yeomanry would be reduced to a mere instrument of the state, whose legitimacy in their eyes was extremely dubious.

Murray Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship

[probablyasocialecologist]

This economic image of moral self-development is inseparable from the tools and machines that give it reality. Ecotechnologies, such as small-scale solar and wind-power devices, ecological agriculture, aquacultural techniques, energy-conserving shelters and devices, in short, that entire panoply of so-called appropriate technologies … should be seen more in terms of their ethical function than their operational efficiency. That we must bring the sun, wind, land, flora, fauna, and the building materials of our shelters into our lives in a new, ecologically oriented way if we are to develop an authentic respect for the natural world, its fecundity, and our dependence on it should be obvious. There is more to ecotechnology than its efficiency and renewability: our metabolism with nature will either be mutually interdependent such that our vision of ourselves will place us firmly within the natural world — not “above it” — or we will become its most destructive parasites.

Murray Bookchin, Market Economy or Moral Economy?

[probablyasocialecologist]

Nature without an active human presence would be as unnatural as a tropical rainforest that lacked monkeys and ants.

Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology 

[probablyasocialecologist]

Mutualism, self-organization, freedom, and subjectivity, together with social ecology’s principles of unity in diversity, informed spontaneity, and non-hierarchical relationships, coheers into an ethics of complementarity that sees human beings in a rational, ecological society as playing the creative role of “nature” rendered self-conscious. Aside from the ecological responsibilities this ethics confers on our species as the self-reflexive voice of nature, it literally defines us. “Nature,” conceived as natural evolution, does not “exist” for us to use; it legitimates us and our uniqueness ecologically. Like the concept of “being,” these principles of social ecology require no explanation, merely verification. They are elements of an ethical ontology, not “rules of a game” that can be changed to suit one’s personal needs.

Murray Bookchin, Sociobiology or Social Ecology 

[probablyasocialecologist]

To participate in struggles for reforms was seen as a means to educate the masses, not a way to dole out charity or improve their material lot. Demands for reforms were always permeated by the broader message that fundamental social reconstruction was needed. The fight for the eight-hour day, years ago, and strikes for better living conditions, not to speak of legislative improvements for working people, were seen as means for mobilizing the oppressed, for engaging them in struggles, and for disclosing the limits–and basic irrationalism–of capitalism, not simply or even significantly as a means for bettering life under capitalism. It was not until a later day that reforms were advocated by so-called leftist parties, candidates, deputies, and humane devotees of the working class, the poor, and the elderly as techniques for “humanizing” capitalism or rendering leftist candidates more popular–and electable for public office.

Murray Bookchin, The Left That Was: A Personal Reflection 

[probablyasocialecologist]

Freedom dialectically interweaves the individual with the collective. The word freedom has its analogue in the Greek eleutheria and derives from the German Freiheit, a term that still retains a gemeinschaftlich or communal ancestry in Teutonic tribal life and law. When applied to the individual, freedom thus preserves a social or collective interpretation of that individual’s origins and development as a self. In ‘freedom,’ individual selfhood does not stand opposed to or apart from the collective but is significantly formed — and in a rational society, would be realized — by his or her own social existence. Freedom thus does not subsume the individual’s liberty but denotes its actualization.

Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm

[probablyasocialecologist]

Confederalism as a principle of social organization reaches its fullest development when the economy itself is confederalized by placing local farms, factories, and other needed enterprises in local municipal hands - that is, when a community, however large or small, begins to manage its own economic resources in an interlinked network with other communities. To force a choice between either self-sufficiency on the one hand or a market system of exchange on the other is a simplistic and unnecessary dichotomy. I would like to think that a confederal ecological society would be a sharing one, one based on the pleasure that is felt in distributing among communities according to their needs, not one in which “cooperative” capitalist communities mire themselves in the quid pro quo of exchange relationships.

Murray Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship

[probablyasocialecologist]

The anarchists of the last century were deeply preoccupied with the question of achieving industrialization without crushing the revolutionary spirit of the “masses” and rearing new obstacles to emancipation. They feared that centralization would reinforce the ability of the bourgeoisie to resist the revolution and instill in the workers a sense of obedience. They tried to rescue all those precapitalist communal forms (such as the Russian mir and the Spanish pueblo) which might provide a springboard to a free society, not only in a structural sense but also a spiritual one. Hence they emphasized the need for decentralization even under capitalism. In contrast to the Marxian parties, their organizations gave considerable attention to what they called “Integral education” — the development of the whole man — to counteract the debasing and banalizing influence of bourgeois society. The anarchists tried to live by the values of the future to the extent that this was possible under capitalism. They believed in direct action to foster the initiative of the “masses,” to preserve the spirit of revolt, to encourage spontaneity. They tried to develop organizations based on mutual aid and brotherhood, in which control would be exercised from below upward, not downward from above.

Murray Bookchin, Listen, Marxist!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Communalists seek to create a fully democratic society, but they never fetishize numbers, be it numbers of members, voters, participants in public assemblies, and the like. In a communalist polity it suffices that the doors of a public assembly are always open to the citizenry. If a majority of a neighborhood, town, or city choose to attend an assembly meeting and become participants in making important decisions, all the better, but if only a few are sufficiently interested in the political fate of their community to attend, so be it. The assembly’s decisions carry the same weight, regardless of whether the number of people present is a dozen, a hundred, or several thousand. Political decisions should be made by politically involved citizens: Under no circumstances should poor attendance at a public assembly be an excuse to abandon a direct and discursive democracy in favor of anonymous voting at polls, which renders politics impersonal and non-discursive.

Murray Bookchin, Toward a Communalist Approach

[probablyasocialecologist]

Social ecology rests on the basic minimal claim that our entire endeavor to dominate nature stems from the domination of human by human — not from agriculture, from technology per se, from a vague thing called industrialism, from religion, from anthropocentrism, from humanism, or from whatever buzzword one chooses to pull out of the bumper-sticker slogans of deep zoology. Which is not to say that agriculture, technology, religion, and the rest are unimportant. But they should not be used to distract us from the all — important fact that social domination, particularly hierarchy as well as class exploitation, has given rise to all the religious, moral, and philosophical justifications for the domination of nature, the destruction of wildlife, and the destruction of human life. Every ecological problem that we face today apart from those caused by nature itself has its roots in social problems.

Murray Bookchin, Yes! — Whither Earth First?