Murray Bookchin, 1921-2006

Murray Bookchin

Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998

San Francisco: AK Press, 1999.

352 pages. ISBN: 187317635X

Essays from, and interviews with the founder of Social Ecology.

Excerpt:

by Murray Bookchin

I wrote a number of my early works in Contemporary Issues under the pseudonym Lewis Herber. One of them, The Problem of Chemicals in Food, was published in Contemporary Issues in 1952. In that article I explored the dangers of pesticides and the abuse of antibiotics, among many other related issues. In those days antibiotics were being so widely used that they were even being put in ice to preserve fish, so that giant fishing vessels, with their enormous nets, could remain at sea more or less indefinitely. Also, hormones were being injected into poultry and into cattle to fatten them -- hormones that we now know are carcinogenic. Food colorings were being used on a lavish scale -- basically coal tar dyes, which were known to be derived from cancer causing substances. So I wrote a long article, which was also published as a book in 1954 in Germany under my pen name. I said that these technologies, and specifically chemicals, were being used lavishly in agriculture, depositing residues in soil; in prepared foods; and in synthetic materials, primarily because of profit and an ideology of dominating the natural world.

What induced you to develop your ideas on social ecology?

Marx clearly argued that capitalism must either grow or die, that capitalist enterprises must either expand and devour their rivals or else themselves be devoured. In order to be able to grow, a capitalist enterprise in agribusiness must therefore continually turn soil into sand, or a capitalist build shopping centers and expand highways, must turn land into concrete, or to make paper must turn forests into newsprint. I said that these drives in capitalism were pitting capitalist society inexorably against the integrity of the natural environment, that they were forever turning the organic into the inorganic, to the detriment of the natural world. I said capitalism was simplifying the planet as well as poisoning it. I stressed the issue of simplification as emphatically as I could.

Around 1958 a disaster occurred in the United States: only a week or so before Thanksgiving, the cranberry crop was poisoned by a herbicide, I can no longer remember which one it was. This act of pollution caused a veritable panic. People ran around desperately looking for unpolluted cranberries to make cranberry sauce for their family turkey dinners on Thanksgiving. And I thought, here is a lesson that people will not forget. So I wrote a book that I called Our Synthetic Environment. I explored various diseases for which doctors had no diagnosis. I went into the whole question of simplifying the planet. I surveyed and demanded that we turn toward organic forms of agriculture.

Now you should know that hardly anyone was talking about organic in those days. And I take great pride in that fact that I was advancing fairly innovative ideas, although they were not exclusively my tea about how we were raising not only crops but poultry, beef, general, using dangerous chemicals, and I discussed the stresses people were suffering in modern urban life, as well as the problems being created by nuclear reactors and radiation. In short, I ran the out of what was wrong with our society from an ecological and I related it essentially to the capitalist imperative to grow or die.

Finally I concluded my book with a chapter called "Decentralization," in which I advocated the use of renewable forms of energy -- solar energy, wind power, water power, thermal energy -- as an alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear fuels. I called for an entirely new dispensation, a new decentralized society in which we could live in harmony with the natural world, using these alternative techniques. Alternative energy was almost unknown at that time. In fact, MIT had explored the possibilities for using solar energy for some years but had finally dismissed its feasibility with the conclusion that it was too costly to compete with fossil fuels. As for wind power, an attempt had been made in Vermont, at Grandpa's Knob, during the Second World War, to test its possibilities, but the effort had been abandoned. It was simply written off. I can say that it was at least somewhat innovative that I argued for an alternative technology, or what I called an "eco-technology" and made a blanket condemnation of the whole relationship of capitalism to the environment.

The book was published in 1962 by Alfred A. Knopf, one of the most outstanding publishers in the United States -- a "publisher's publisher," as it was called. Six months later Rachel Carson came out with Silent Spring and swamped whatever readership I might have gained. My book sold reasonably well, mainly within the scientific community I may say, but less so among the public. But nobody could compete with Rachel's stylistic magic and her great following as an established nature writer. She did a wonderful job with "Silent Spring," and it had at least five million readers. But she didn't make, by any means, the wide-ranging critique that I did.

She alerted people primarily to the dangers of pesticides, and her main focus was on birds. The attention she gave to human beings seems only secondary. But even if human beings were a secondary consideration in Carson's book, they were concerned about the kinds of sprays they were using. During those years people were using pesticides and eagerly extolling the "miracles" of chemistry everywhere. One major chemical corporation popularized the slogan "Better things for better living through chemistry" (Years later, they dropped the words "through chemistry" if I'm not mistaken. By then, chemistry had become something of a dirty word.) The nature of my critique was recognized very clearly by Rene Dubos, who became an outstanding environmentalist in later years, and by others who praised the book as more comprehensive than Carson's.

In short, I tried to raise broader issues that had immense cultural implications about the human spirit, about an ethical society, recognizing that both ecology and a very emancipatory vision of society required decentralization. I realized that the views I was advancing came more from an anarchist tradition than from a Marxist one.

I was calling for social changes that were more comprehensive than the abolition of classes and exploitation. I was calling for the abolition of hierarchies as well, of states, not of economic power alone. Hierarchy was a kind of psycho-institutional power based on social status -- in other words, rule and domination, not only exploitation for material gain. A classless society, a nonexploitative society, it seemed to me, could still have bureaucracies and states -- namely, hierarchies -- and even if elites in hierarchies had no material privileges, they had psycho-social privileges -- a sense of superiority that came from dominating people. In Plato's Republic, in fact, the guardians deny themselves the good material things of life; they rid themselves of fleshpots, live austerely, on sparse diets, indeed they are very Spartan, but they enjoy enormous authority -- they rule -- and that's what is important to them.

Here let me interject an important point on hierarchy, to counter some of the distortions of my views on the subject. A hierarchy is an institutionalized system of domination, by which clearly definable and well-organized strata of people accrue distinct material, cultural, and moral privileges -- not merely, as in classes, by the ownership or control of property and the exploitation of labor. Please let me emphasize that every word in this definition is important. Such strata appeared before classes and might well exist after their abolition -- notably patriarchy, racial degradation, bureaucratism, nationalism, and so on. One Marxist critic of mine, Joel Kovel, has recently written that some hierarchies can be classified as good. As an example of a "good hierarchy," he cites parental care: parents feed their babies rather than cast a milk bottle into a crib and compel them to feed themselves. Kovel wrongly attributes to me the notion that parental care is a "good hierarchy," but in fact I deny that it is a hierarchical relationship at all. Hierarchy is a social term, referring to structures of institutional domination; parental relationships are quasi-biological as well as social. To call a relationship of dependency a hierarchical relationship is to dissolve the meaning of hierarchy as a designation of the structures of domination. Following his logic, one might claim that a sow lying on its side to feed its piglets is evidence of a "good hierarchy," while a frog casting its eggs in a pool where insemination takes place at random exemplifies a "bad hierarch." People who can accept this silly argument deserve Professor Kovel's Zen spin on Marxism.

In any case, as important as it was to abolish classes and exploitation, a classless society, I contended, would not necessarily be a good society. It would also be necessary to abolish domination and the hierarchical structures that yield domination. This approach made me decide very assuredly that I wanted to fight for an ethical socialism, or communism, free of domination, based on confederation, based on an ethics of complementarity, in which people supplement each other with their various abilities instead of ruling each other.

In effect, I developed a form of ecological anarchism, which Victor Ferkiss, referring to my work, later called eco-anarchism. The name I gave it, though, was social ecology. I started writing about it earnestly in the 1960s. I wrote a series of works, the first of which was an essay, even a manifesto, called "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought." It declared that we are living in the age of ecology. In the days of Galileo and the Renaissance, mechanics had informed the prevailing social outlook, and in the Victorian era Darwinian biology and evolutionary theory had constituted the ideology, at least in the natural sciences. Now, I argued, we are entering the age of ecology. I've since seen this "age of ecology" designation recycled all over the place as though I never said it in 1964.

In this manifesto-essay I pointed out that the ecological crisis that was being produced by capitalism and by hierarchical society with its message of dominating nature, stemmed really from the domination of people. That is, the ideology of dominating nature stems from the real domination of human by human. Until we abolish the domination of human by human, not only exploitation but also domination, and not only classes but also hierarchies, we would always have an ideology of dominating the natural world. If capitalism continued to exist, with that ideology and with its irrational technological advances, and to grow mindlessly, then we were obliged to eliminate hierarchy, domination, classes, and exploitation before we could hope to achieve an ecological society.

As I've mentioned, I called this eco-anarchist vision social ecology, because ecology is a discipline rooted in the biological sciences, and how people deal with the natural world, with "first nature" or biological evolution, depends upon the kind of society in which they live. A society based on a grow-or-die market economy must destroy the biosphere because of the very imperatives -- growth and capital accumulation -- that drive it along this anti-ecological path irrespective of any other factors.

Almost immediately after finishing "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," I wrote "Towards a Liberatory Technology" in which I called for the use of solar power and wind power, hydroelectric power, or geothermal energy, indeed all the different renewable forms of energy that could be used in a more ecological social order. Needless to say, in 1964, I was really feeling my way in the dark, because none of these alternatives were being explored as far as I know. It was E. E Schumacher who made them very popular in Small Is Beautiful, but as his references show, he was familiar with my work when he did so. The ecology movement now takes alternative, renewable energy for granted, as though the idea came from the heavens. But that movement didn't really come into existence to any noticeable extent until the 1970s, following the first Earth Day. But that's another story.