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Title: Basic Principles, Future Prospects
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1996
Language: en
Topics: interview, principles, social ecology, libertarian municipalism
Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2022 from http://new-compass.net/articles/basic-principles-future-prospects
Notes: This interview by Richard Evanoff was originally published in the Japan Environmental Monitor, 1996.

Murray Bookchin

Basic Principles, Future Prospects

In this interview from 1994, Murray Bookchin presents a summary of his

ideas on social ecology and libertarian municipalism. Although intended

for a Japanese audience, it is a very good general introduction to his

thought.

Richard Evanoff: For people in Japan who might not be so familiar with

the concept of social ecology, could you talk about what social ecology

is and what some of its basic principles are?

Bookchin: Social ecology is an attempt to get to the roots, both

historically and currently, of the ecological problems we face today –

problems of such immense dimensions that the very survival of our

species is really in question.

It was very easy to try to deal with this monumental issue by simply

talking about living in “friendly” way with the natural world, living

ecologically by recycling, saving energy, dealing with toxic wastes,

trying to diminish the use of harmful chemicals, and the like. On this

score, in fact I have been very deeply involved as far back as 1951 when

I completed an article (published in 1952) called “The Problems of

Chemicals in Food” in Contemporary Issues , an Anglo-American periodical

published by an international group with which I worked for a large

number of years. So I do not challenge the need to conserve, to prevent

the building of nuclear reactors, the building of roads, the destruction

of soil, the use of chemicals, and the like – these common, important

issues that have to be faced every day, if only to keep our

anti-ecological society from simply racing off the precipice and landing

us and coming generations in a hopelessly irrevocable crisis.

But in dealing with these problems I personally found that I had to go

deeper than just lifestyles, an ecological sensibility, and, if you

like, a spiritual attitude that was “nature-friendly”, depending on what

is meant by the word nature. Today it’s become a commonplace to advocate

these step-by-step immediate remedies – which are not remedies but just

attempts to hold back a headlong drive to who knows what type of abyss

lying before us. I felt I had to look behind these very important

attempts, attempts which I designate as “environmentalism”, and examine

what were the causes that have produced the ecological crisis. I don’t

believe, speaking from my own life experience, that it comes from mere

consumerism. I’m a man of the twentieth century. I was born in 1921 and

lived in a major city, New York, for a very large portion of my life,

through the entire pre-war/World War Two period, and for the large part

of the post-World War Two period. And I know that people are not simply

born consumers and that they are filled with stupid, often meaningless

wants that have to be satisfied by industry, which industry claims it is

trying to do. I find, in looking deeper into what seem to be the causes

of the present environmental crisis – and certainly the more formidable

one that will be emerging over the years – that I have to examine the

social causes that have produced this crisis and that are magnifying it

continually.

It’s very noble to want to protect wilderness – a word, by the way, that

I believe has to be defined. It’s very noble to try to foster a species’

diversity and prevent the destruction of many life-forms that are so

beautiful and so, in fact, necessary for ecological stability and

ecological development. But what about the social forces that produce a

mentality that advocates dominating nature? That is what intrigues me.

Because that is today, or was until recently, the prevalent mentality.

So far as modern society is concerned, particularly the economy, the

notions that we have to grow and grow and grow and structured into the

very nature of modern social thinking, particularly in the

profit-oriented business world, where the maxim “grow or die” – I use a

very common quotation – is regarded as a law of life.

Where did this mentality come from? Where did this ideology come from?

What are the social causes that have generated a “grow or die”

mentality, that is turning forests into paper, that is turning soil into

sand, that is turning the atmosphere and the oceans into a cesspool of

toxic wastes that will be with us, in the case of nuclear materials, for

tens of thousands of years, poisoning all life forms, including our own,

to one degree or another?

So social ecology is an attempt to look deeper into, look fundamentally

into, the basic social factors that have generated the present-day

ecological crisis and that have created an ideology of dominating nature

fuelled by an economy that is definable by, and determined by, its

capacity to grow. And in doing so, it is an attempt to search for the

forces historically and more contemporaneously that have given rise to

this outlook and this practice – which is even more important in a sense

than the outlook. I began to work on ecological issues from a different

standpoint that one customarily encounters. I wasn’t simply interested

in how to live in an environmentally friendly way; I was interested in

looking for the causes of and alternatives to the social conditions that

have produced and are magnifying the present ecological crisis. Even

more fundamentally social ecology is an attempt to understand how the

ideology of dominating the natural world stems from the very real

domination of human by human. I believe that the ideology of dominating

nature did not spring like Minerva from the head of Jove so to speak.

Something was going on historically, to some extent for thousands of

years and almost certainly within the past four or five centuries, in

human relationships and the way in which human beings deal with other

human beings, which produced the idea that nature is an object to be

dominated. So that approach guided me in developing the ideas of social

ecology. These ideas have been presented in a large number of books, of

which I can only hope in this discussion to give the briefest possible

summary.

Evanoff: What are some of the basic ideas of social ecology?

Bookchin: I would say that going back thousands of years a situation

began to emerge, possibly in very early tribal life, where we began to

see systems of domination emerging. Initially perhaps these systems of

domination were not very striking. For example, I have mentioned the

view that one of the earliest forms of domination in a basically

egalitarian society, say at the level of bands and the early formation

of tribes, was primarily the needs for elders, who always have been

situated in a very precarious way due to their failing physical powers

and the face that that they are often incapable of providing for their

own subsistence, to gain a certain degree of status – hierarchical

status – which privileged them amongst the rest of the population. You

see this today, most certainly in Japan and elsewhere in the world, in

the form of ancestor worship and in the form of an enormous degree of

respect toward the elders. One could understand that there was an

emerging hierarchy, which oddly enough was rather democratic in the

sense that if you grew or lived long enough you would become old enough

to become part of that hierarchy.

By degrees, however, one begins to see how the domestic world of women,

which was basic to early societies – the nurturing of children, caring

for crops, maintaining a household – tasks which primarily fell to women

in the early division of labor before cities appeared – would place a

great deal of political and social weight to women. I’m not saying that

there were matriarchies, the so-called “rule” of women over men. I would

say that there existed a complementary relationship between the men who

did the hunting and who protected the community – a very important role

in a parochialized band and tribal world – and the female world of child

caring, food preparation, and food gathering. Women were the ones who

mainly gathered the vegetable matter needed by the community, which

generally 80 per cent of the biomass of what people ate.

But by degrees, as population began to increase, as conflicts began to

occur between these highly parochialized tribal groups, you began to see

a civil society emerging, notably a society in which men – initially

hunters, but turning more and more into warriors – began to acquire a

greater and greater role in the community. And so increasingly the male

world of hunting, making treaties, engaging in what at that time would

be a form of simple politics, began to edge out and increasingly

supplant in significance the role of women – which is not to deny that

the role of women was immensely important; it formed the substrate at

all times until modern agriculture, plow agriculture, appeared and

cattle were used as draft animals as well as sources of food. Men began

to take over. And added to the gerontocracy – the rule of the elders

which at least privileged them and finally gave them more and more

authority – you begin to witness the emergence of a patricentric world

oriented toward men, which then began to give rise increasingly, with

the development of economic life and the elaboration of culture,

particularly of civil society, to male domination, often quite mild, but

still as domination over women.

In some cases, where there were pastoral communities, such as existed

among Semitic peoples in the Arabian desert or among people in the

steppes of central Asia such as the Mongols, even among Nordic peoples

in the Northern parts of Europe, as well as Asia, one begins to witness

patriarchies – outright patriarchies – in which not only women, but also

young men, were subservient to their fathers. As late as classical times

a Greek or Roman patriarch still had to right to kill his own son if the

son was disobedient. In fact, one of the major functions of the state

was to deprive the patriarch of that privilege because it needed the

young men as soldiers, bureaucrats, and so forth and wanted to remove

them from the disposition of their fathers. Patriarchy, in other words,

seems to combine at once a system of domination of the elder male, often

side by side with the elder female, such as one finds in the

Judeo-Christian religion, as, for example, in the case of Abraham and

Sarah. She has as much to say as he does – but it is a patriarchy

nonetheless.

Gradually, with the emergence of warriors, you begin to see the

chieftains and so on, and finally you have a whole scale of domination.

Now this domination of human by human begins to give rise very slowly to

the idea of dominating the natural world. Just as human beings are being

increasingly reduced to subjects, and ultimately to objects in the case

of slavery or serfdom, so the natural world is reduced to objects to be

used and to be exploited. I use the word “exploitation” in a very

qualified way because I don’t think what we call “nature” knows that it

is being exploited or dominated. But these human attitudes are projected

outward to the nonhuman world. In fact, it remains ironical that to the

extent that the natural world is seen in a highly animistic way, the

more social forms of domination become feasible. We begin to treat outer

nonhuman phenomena “as though” they are human, such as in Disney

cartoons. That’s the flip side of the idea that we are disenchanting the

natural world.

With the emergence of modern capitalism, all of these relationships are

exacerbated to a breaking point. Whatever you can say about the past,

there at least existed the ideal, whether it was Buddhist, Taoist,

Christian, Jewish – it makes no difference what religion you’re talking

about – that people should live cooperatively. It’s with modern

capitalism that the ideal of cooperation is replaced with the ideal of

competition. Each individual is urged to go out into the world on his or

her own and to make his or her own fortune at the expense of everyone

else. This leads to unrestricted transgressions of what could basically

be called ecological tenets for development.

Society now begins to run riot, as we can see. No matter how

well-intentioned anyone may be – be it a corporation or an individual, a

property owner or a wealthy person – in trying to facilitate our

relationship with the natural world and trying to behave in an

ecologically sound way, the capitalist market drives corporations and

entrepreneurs like an engine. It is not they who exercise any control

over this engine. It is the system as such – the imperative to grow or

die, compete or be destroyed, expand or be devoured – that ultimately

governs everyone’s behaviour. Thus, to emphasize consumption as such, as

though it were autonomous, and to contend that people autonomously

devoured the earth because they want more of this or more of that –

whatever the commodities may be is grossly misleading. That such a

mentality can exist does not explain how it came to be and how to remove

it.

Evanoff: You’ve talked about social ecology as a critique of past and

existing social relations, but I think within social ecology there is

also a strong emphasis on imaginative thinking about the future. I’d

like to hear a little about the positive vision of social ecology.

Bookchin: If we can demolish hierarchy, if we can create an atmosphere

in which we live in a friendly way with what we call the natural world –

I’m using the language that seems to be coming into vogue these days: in

an “environmentally friendly way” with the natural world – then we can

conceive of a society where it would be possible to take all our

enormous knowledge of science and our enormous knowledge of technology

and bring it to the service not only of meeting our own needs but in

fact in creating, and improving upon, the natural world itself. We can

begin to develop techniques that do minimal, if any, damage to the

environment. We can in fact develop sciences and technologies that will

improve the natural world, for example in fostering biological

diversity.

Where ordinarily we might have very inhospitable areas for life, the

soil can be enriched within a few years – a process that would take ten

or twenty thousand years to achieve under natural conditions. We can

prevent, or at least mitigate, the impact of natural catastrophes that

have been visited upon the natural world by what we broadly call

“nature” itself. We can create a cooperative society, living on the land

and sharing it with other life forms, in such a way that we not only

improve the human condition and sensitize people to the natural world,

but also deal with problems that our whole biosphere confronts, such as

the situations that arise from earthquakes, volcanic activity, storms,

and the like, fostering life in places which even “nature” would render

life impossible. Finally, we can create a society, non-hierarchical and

nonclass in character, in which we, living in cooperation with each

other and creating entirely new institutional forms of direct democracy,

would produce a garden in the best sense of the word, necessary both of

our own well-being and for other life forms.

Evanoff: How would you distinguish social ecology from some of the other

forms of environmentalism that have come up in the last two decades or

so?

Bookchin: The kind of “Al Gore” environmentalism that I encounter

generally – the good-natured benign idea of living within the limits of

the planet – is certainly to be welcomed as long as we recognise that

these limits are not set by an abstract law or by murky,

well-intentioned attitudes. Limits to growth can hardly be determined in

advance by a system whose very nature, notably capitalism, is structured

around growth. Capitalism is defined as a growth society. It is defined

as a competitive society. You might as well ask an elephant to fly or a

whale to talk. It’s absurd. Such intentions may be well-meaning but they

don’t go to the roots of the problem, which is the reason why

environmentalism generally today takes the form of cost-benefit

analyses. Environmentalists negotiate with lumber companies, mining

companies, and developers, not on whether or not there should be

lumbering, mining or development as such, but merely how much.

Usually this negotiation involves the surrender of pristine areas, or

fertile areas, or what are euphemistically called “natural resources” in

which the environmentalist gets one-tenth and the

developer/miner/lumberer gets the other nine-tenths. We keep whittling

down the amount that we get all the time when we function merely as

environmentalists.

In other words, we’re always being placed in the position where we, if

we are environmentalists, have to work on the terms and according to the

rules of those who are degrading the environment. They set up the rules

and then afterward we who are trying to negotiate with them really adopt

the rules. We offer no basic challenge to the rules themselves, to the

whole system itself, or any basic alternative to them.

Thus, 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.

So notice the trap in which we’re placed. We are told that we must have

jobs. If we must have jobs we have must economic growth. Now why are the

two co-related except for the fact that we live in a world based on

private property, organized around corporations, which in turn have to

grow or die? At that point, by playing according to these insane rules,

we are always going to be the losers, because there can’t be enough

growth to supply enough jobs to supply enough means of life within the

framework of this kind of setup.

And environmentalists generally miss the point. They think that if they

personally don’t throw any trash on the ground or recycle everything

they get, they, like devout Christians in the Middle Ages, will create a

new Eden. Well, we’ve had 2,000 years of this message – this spiritual

message, this self-help message, this plea for doing the good thing – by

the Catholic Church throughout medieval Europe and into early modern

times with absolutely no real consequences for human progress. That

there has been progress in civilization is something I do not deny. In

fact, I would affirm this against most anti-social people nowadays who

claim that humanity is a cancer on this planet.

Which brings me to the so-called deep ecologists, who tell us that we

have to change our outlook. Good – but if everyone changed his or her

outlook today, and went no further than doing that, there be a

tremendous economic crisis. Given the kind of economy we have today,

people are obliged to consume if the wheels of industry are to keep

turning. And before long, former deep ecologists would be banging on the

doors of banks and corporations looking for jobs and the wherewithal by

which to live. If we all decided as the result of a miraculous sweep of

an angelic wand to stop buying, except what we strictly need, does

anyone in his or her right mind believe that this would transform the

global corporations that exist today, that they would somehow say,

“Here, take over the society. We want to dispossess ourselves of our

wealth, our means of life, and our resources that belong to you.” I

would say such a viewpoint is incredibly naïve.

What we have to do then is to form social movements, and more precisely

political movements, that directly challenge the market society, the

competitive imperatives that guide it, and the grow-or-die consequences

that flow from it and that give rise to the ecological crisis we face

today. I’m not going to go back again to the Middle Ages and the

spirituality involved there, in which converting people one by one is

supposed to produce an Edenic world. I’m very blunt in saying that

well-meaning as many of these people may be – either environmentalists

or deep ecologists (and I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything in the

meantime to try and stop as much damage as we can) – we must ultimately

create a social ecology movement that directly confronts the sources of

hierarchy, the ideologies of domination, systems of private property,

class rule, competition, and the like which have given rise to the

present ecological crisis. And in turn we must offer an alternative –

politically, socially, economically and technologically – to the

existing society.

That’s why I call the ecology I adhere to “social” ecology. It would be

very cheap and easy for me to call it “spiritual” ecology. But I’m

saying that a good deal of the so-called spiritual that abounds

everywhere has yielded futile results and has, in a sense, become more

of an introverted, privatistic indifference to the suffering of those

who can’t afford to hold such lofty attitudes, such as people in the

South, people in the so-called “Third World”. I’m particularly irritated

by the extent to which many so-called environmentalists or deep

ecologists are indifferent to the human condition, as though human

beings were less victims of the existing social order and its values,

than, let us say, bald eagles, dolphins, whales, seals, wolves and the

like. Indeed much of what today passes for deep ecology and to a great

extend even environmentalism is merely conservation. This conservation

movement has existed for over a hundred years in the United States, and

it has yielded very limited results indeed.

Evanoff: On the one hand, there are people who would say that the only

way to improve our quality of life is by more economic growth. On the

other hand, there are those who would say that since economic growth is

not ecologically sustainable we need to go back to some kind of

primitive lifestyle. But social ecology seems to offer a third

alternative. Could you elaborate on what kind of alternative that is?

Bookchin: First, I’m realistic enough to realize that since mere

persuasion will not induce multinationals to surrender their strangling

control over what we call “natural resources”, growth rates, and the

lifeways that exist today, I would call for the organization of a

movement to oppose them. And I don’t mean a movement that consists of a

lot of well-meaning people holding rallies and demonstrations, putting

signs on their cars protesting against this or that. I would call for a

political movement that tries to empower people at a grass roots level.

We have tried political parties in the past, only to find that they

almost invariably become corrupt. They are structured, as Robert Nichols

once wrote, to turn into bureaucracies that become ends in themselves.

Moreover, they work within the existing social order – or the

“political” order, to use the word political in a conventional sense.

They go into parliaments working within the framework of what

parliamentary activity allows, notably negotiation within the existing

social system, as in the case of the German Greens. The Green Party in

Germany has turned into servants of the existing social order, providing

that order with a patina of being Green, so that “Green” in Germany –

even France and elsewhere – today often means little more than

beautification of city streets, preservation of certain recreation areas

that go under the name of “wilderness”, using automobiles that are less

polluting, and doing what one can without inhibiting industrial growth.

What I’m speaking of, therefore, is a movement that tries to do what I

would call a genuine new politics, operating on the neighbourhood,

municipal, town level, in which people try, not only through education

but political activity, to create, even in the largest cities,

neighbourhood assemblies based around compact, or at least definable,

groups of individuals who can meet and discuss and then, if possible –

and I believe it is possible give enough time – elect city councils in

which the people in these various neighbourhoods will make the decisions

and the deputies of these people in the city councils will try to

execute these decisions.

This involves creating a tension, frankly, between the local level –

more precisely the municipal level – and the nation-state. Needless to

say, the nation-state will say that everything you’re doing is illegal.

So what you do may take on an extralegal form, say by building up

counter-institutions, not just a counterculture, to the highly

concentrated power of the nation-state. Now, if you did that in only one

community, it would obviously be inadequate. So I would like to

introduce again a very old, a very traditional, and in my opinion a

potentially democratic form of association between communities, namely

“confederalism”. Instead of speaking in terms of a centralized state in

which people surrender their power to a representative who meets in

parliament and who functions as an executive or judge, people would

elect deputies to confederal councils, whose main goal is to negotiate

all the different views that exist in different municipalities, given a

certain region, and bring back to the assemblies a shared proposal or

anything that involves an approximation to a shared proposal to the

assemblies. Then, by a majority vote the region would decide what

positions to take on specific issues.

Today the nation-state penetrates almost every aspect of life. It

penetrates provinces in Canada, states in the US, and prefectures in

Japan. It’s also a presence through funding and taxes in the life of

municipalities. I’m only too cognizant of the fact that it would do

everything it can to prevent such a development, a confederal

development, from taking place in Japan, as it would in the United

States. But let’s start out with the idea that such an attempt begins

first as a moral movement. Such an effort would try to organize these

assemblies, which as yet did not have legal power, and these assemblies

would send deputies to municipal councils, who as yet cannot executive

these policies.

But they would, in making demands for a change to democratize and gain

legitimacy for neighbourhood assemblies and to confederal councils

produce a tension between confederated municipalities and the

nation-state. I would regard such a tension as absolutely necessary. If

the nation-state gave in to the municipal councils and then tried to

coopt them – as I’ve seen this in Burlington, Vermont where the city

council made it possible for neighbourhood planning assemblies to exist

primarily so that they could be used by a liberal city government – then

I would say that any movement that tries to form them is not practicing

a libertarian or confederal municipalist policy – the names that I give

to the political approach that I have. I want to see confrontation!

That’s the name of the politics in which I believe. In other words, I am

trying – and I will make no denial about this – to pit the great

majority of the people organized through municipal councils and

neighbourhood assemblies against the nation-state. As long as the

nation-state exists we will never have a true democracy in which people

directly manage their own affairs.

So the political solutions that I advocate are actually very

developmental. They must be seen as a formative and transformative

process that involves profound social and structural changes in

municipal life. They start with a minimum program of electing social

ecologists to municipal councils, establishing neighbourhood assemblies

in various districts of various communities, even in parts of a larger

city or megalopolis such as Tokyo, without the consent of municipal

governments. I believe that we can institutionally break down controls

and devolve power to the people even in at least part of the most

gigantic of urban areas. Why? Because we’re talking about institutions.

I’m not talking at this moment about physical decentralization, which

must ultimately occur.

Thereafter, a transitional program would consist of developing this

activity, first by spreading it as much as possible through the United

States and Japan, and second by demanding more and more and more, such

as demanding city charters if they don’t exist. Where they do exist or

when they are given, we would demand that greater legality and power be

given to neighbourhood assemblies. And finally, ultimately, I believe

that there would have to be a confrontation with the nation-state. How

that would be resolved is not anything I can envision. It’s something

that would be the result of a long process, depending on the traditions

of a particular country and the power of the nation-state itself. More

than one nation-state has simply been hollowed out by developments

similar to what I’m talking about and thereby lost the ability to

effectively demolish alternative forms of democratic political

structure.

Note well that when I talk about politics here I’m not talking about

statecraft. Statecraft should be seen exactly for what it is: the

techniques used by the state as a professional body of men and women who

have been plucked out of society, so to speak, given jobs as policy, as

military, as judges, as deputies in various parliaments, as executives,

as administrators, and as bureaucrats. That is the state. The state is

notable in that it is not part of society. Rather, it is a kind of

corporate mechanism in its own right. When I talk of politics, I’m using

the word in its original Greek meaning, which suggests a polis,

controlled by the community itself. That is to say, I define politics in

its original sense, not in the conventional sense today of politicians,

which generally means parliamentarians, bureaucrats, or appointed

administrators.

So I draw a distinction between the political sphere and the state. And

then, of course, there is the social sphere – my view is tripartite – in

which one has children, belongs to a family, has friends, engages in

economic activity and so on. What I’m trying to emphasize as a political

solution is the creation of a new kind of politics and a new phenomenon

call the “citizen” which today is basically a meaningless word. At

present, most people, even in so-called democracies – really republics,

let’s be quite frank, because democracy means direct rule by the people

– are basically “constituents” or “taxpayers”. They’re not citizens in

the active sense that this word meant thousands of years ago and indeed

meant throughout a good deal of the Middle Ages and certainly in many

parts of the West. To re-create citizens involves the development of

individuals who now see themselves as members of the community, not as

members of a specific profession, or of a specific class, or of a

specific ethnic group, or of a specific geographical area. Citizens are

people who – freed of the concerns that modern capitalism has imposed on

them, are reflective and engaged in self-management – are in a position

to make judgments that are not guided by any special interests,

including their own special interests. As citizens they are concerned

with their communities, not with their particular professions or

personal interests.

It is for this reason that I am not a great advocate of workers’ control

of industry, because what often happens in such cases is that where the

workers even control a particular factory, they tend to become a

separate interest, even under socialist or communist concepts of

society. I’m not interested in multiplying the number of professional

associations among doctors, teachers, lawyers – as if lawyers would be

needed any more! – because these would all become separate interests,

which if brought into a neighbourhood assembly, would pit their

interests against others’. So I’m talking of a new kind of human being,

a truly civic human being, a communal human being. I would call many of

my ideas basically communalist, in the sense they include but go beyond

socialism, anarchism and communism, while drawing the best out of

Marxist and anarchist theories. A communalist theory, I think, is more

encompassing than the nineteenth century radical theories that are at

our disposal today.

Evanoff: How do you feel about the word “communalism”?

Bookchin: I would use the word “communalist” politically and I would

explain my ideas as being rooted in “social ecology”. There’s nothing

new about that. One’s specific designation, whether one wants to call

oneself an anarchist, a libertarian socialist, a libertarian communist,

or in my case a libertarian communalist, denotes a distinct politics.

Social ecology denotes a philosophy, an outlook. So one can say that

social ecology represents a form of communalism that is more radical

than many people who are even likely to call themselves “communalists”.

I can think of writers today who would call themselves “communalists”

but would have a more restricted concept of what constituted a

libertarian or confederal municipalist politics than I have. They might

believe, for example, that we should have more organic food stores, more

community centers, more democratically controlled cooperatives of one

sort or another, that patients should have more of a say in the medical

community than they have today, and so forth. I would distinguish my

views – libertarian communalism if you like – from these restricted

concepts of community and often reformist concepts of “community

control”.

Additionally, I believe that municipalities should begin increasingly to

take over the means of life – land, workshops, factories – and place

them under control of popular assemblies, knitted together by city, town

and village councils, or municipal councils. In other words, I believe

in a libertarian communalism that is not only political, but also

economic. And here we face a very interesting series of choices. We can

either believe in the nationalization of the economy, Soviet-style,

Leninist-style, or even social democratic style, which in my opinion has

patently proved to be a failure. What the nationalization of the economy

has produced in the twentieth century has been immense industrial

bureaucracies. One can believe in workers’ control of industry, which

often leads to competition between collectively owned shops by workers.

This happened in the Spanish Civil War among the anarchosyndicalists.

Evanoff: You’re talking about employee ownership and the like?

Bookchin: Employee ownerships and even workplace democracy. Regrettably,

such forms of ownership or democracy have never prevented workplaces

from becoming little collective capitalistic entrepreneurs competing

with similar workplaces in the same industry. This actually occurred in

Barcelona in 1936, when workers took over the factories and in many

cases, even though they were members of anarchosyndicalist trade unions,

competed with each other in the same industry until the

anarchosyndicalist unions took over control of the workshops, and very

pathetically, established trade-union bureaucracies, merging together

with the Catalan government (Catalonia, I should add, was the province

most significantly peopled by anarchists – indeed the Spanish homeland

in 1936 of anarchosyndicalism, together with Aragon). So we have the

alternative of either nationalized industries with their huge

bureaucracies or so-called workers’ control of shops, which can easily

turn into collectivized forms of capitalist enterprise, each competing

with others. Or we have the choice of private property – which has

produced the mess we have today. So almost by a form of elimination the

idea of a citizens’ controlled municipal economy, confederated with

other economies, also municipally controlled within a given region,

provides for me the most disinterested solution to the social problems

generated by the other three forms of property ownership or control.

To achieve municipal control of the economy in a confederated way, in my

opinion, is part of a transitional program in which municipalities try

step by step, and hopefully through the control o f neighbourhood

assemblies, to take over more and more of the local economy. If we think

this solution through, and work it out, and if there is a movement

devoted to achieving the two goals of genuine participatory democracy on

the political level and a genuine municipalized economy on the material

level – then, I believe, there is a potential answer to the global

crisis we face today. If municipalities begin to generate their own

means of life through confederations – I don’t believe that one

municipality can do anything at all by itself – and to utilize an ever

greater number of material resources in their own localities or regions,

we can begin to circumvent the mobility of capital, notably its ability

to simply take off when it doesn’t like a situation and go to some other

part of the world.

Evanoff: Which really is the big problem in the world right now.

Bookchin: But it hasn’t been answered, from my point of view, by

socialists or, for that matter, by many people who call themselves

anarchists in any of the literature I’ve encountered.

Evanoff: You see a very active participatory form of citizen developing,

but when we look at the situation now it seems that people tend to be

fairly passive and inactive politically. Do you think that there’s a

need for a kind of psychological transformation of consciousness for

people to become this new type of citizen?

Bookchin: A movement cannot be a substitute for the fact that there are

historical forces that must converge with ideas. A Robespierre, a

Danton, a Jacques Roux, or whoever you like in the French Revolution ,

would simply be lost in the crowd if the revolution wasn’t brewing. A

Bakunin would have had no influence if he had been confined to the Peter

and Paul Fortress by Nicholas I for the rest of his life. He had to get

out of there, and there also had to be an International Workingmen’s

Association to which he could present his views. Similarly, a Lenin

needed the stormy year 1917, a time of tremendous social upheaval in

Russia, to try to realize his goals, which, tragically became

increasingly limited by virtue of the waning of the revolutionary forces

toward the end of his life. I would say that at least history has to

cooperate, so to speak, with any movement – as seemed to be the case

toward the end of the First World War, and as seemed to be the case in

the 1930s, or in the 1960s (although there was more theatre in the

sixties than reality). It is my personal conviction that history is not

stagnant and that one does not simply recycle the same old ideas again

and again.

But by degrees forces may eventually converge that will create a period

of social transformation. These are not entirely dependent upon

movements. What movements can best do is bring to consciousness what is

already going on subterraneanly as a result of historical and social

forces in what we might call the collective unconscious. When Lenin

cried “Land, Peace and Bread” and “All Power to the Soviets!” he was

merely articulating in simple words what people were feeling in varying

degrees during the months leading up to the famous October Revolution of

1917. That is true of all great revolutionary movements.

At the same time, I don’t believe that without developing – and I’m

going to be very explicit about this – a vanguard, by which I do not

means a highly centralized general staff whose orders have to be

followed as though one were in the military but people who are an

avant-garde – a term that seems quite acceptable when we speak of art

and I don’t know why it isn’t any more acceptable when we speak of

politics – an avant-garde, notably of those who have a higher level of

consciousness as a result of more education, experience, training,

reflection, and discussion – without such an avant-garde emerging I

doubt that people will inevitably, spontaneously, and miraculously

arrive at a solution to their problems. They’ll go in many different

ways.

So I believe that it is very important to establish a political movement

and specifically an organization that advocates, hopefully, the views

that I have tried to advance and that is continually educating itself,

partly through study groups, exploring old and new ideas, and to produce

an increasingly creative political program and outlook. I believe in

movements. I believe in institutions. I believe in organizations. It’s

in this sense that I think a vanguard is necessary.

Let me stress that I’m not talking of a vanguard party that’s running

for parliament. I’m not talking of a vanguard that trying to command

people the way a general staff commands an army. I’m talking of people

who are educators and mobilizers, who are more advanced in their

thinking and consciousness than most, just as we would like to think

more mature people are ahead of adolescents and children in knowledge

and experience. Why that grouping necessarily has to become an elitist

force in any domineering sense is beyond my understanding. If its main

thrust is to empower the great majority of people in a country, and

specifically in a municipality; if it is trying to create forces, such

as popular assemblies, that would countervail any attempt on its part to

become literally a commanding force – what do we have to fear?

Evanoff: Do you see the various types of alternative institutions that

are developing, such as cooperatives and worker-owned companies, as

being stepping stones towards the society you envision or do you feel we

need to go directly from our present situation to into libertarian

municipalist point of view? Put differently, do alternative institutions

give people a foretaste of what might be possible in the future? Do they

help to prepare people psychologically, so to speak, for the future?

Bookchin: To some degree, yes – but they are not substitutes for a

political movement. Insofar as people learn methods of self-organization

– good, but in terms of their ultimate effects, my response would be

that no food co-op can ever compete in the United States or Japan with

giant shopping centers. I don’t believe that any worker-owned factory is

likely to make workers more libertarian in their outlook. If anything

it’s likely to make them more “proprietarian” although the attempt to

organize a factory may seem, on the surface of it, a more democratic way

of proceeding economically. On the whole, many of these institutions,

insofar as they last – and most do not last; they’re amazingly ephemeral

– tend to provide a patina for the existing social order.

The existing social order is only too glad to create a myth of workplace

democracy so that it can exploit workers more effectively. It’s only too

glad to adopt an “environmentally friendly” face and a seemingly humane

demeanor, for the express purpose of preserving what is basically an

oppressive society. In other words, there is an enormous intellectual

industry today, fostered in great part by various managerial types who

advocate “worker participation,” even using anarchist terms such as

“affinity groups,” who advocate a more “personalistic” relationship

between the boss and the worker. But the boss still remains the boss.

The worker still remains the worker. And this seemingly more humane

relationship is more easily capable of exploiting and manipulating

workers by bringing them into complicity with their own exploitation. So

I have a very jaundiced view towards such attempts. More often they tend

to dissolve into lifestyle forms of “politics”. People go into the

countryside and form co-ops, but what does it all turn out to be?

They’re living nicely or they’re living as comfortably as they can. And

sooner or later, as with the kibbutzim in Israel, they begin to hire

employees if they’re successful or they break up over who should wash

the dishes, who should paint the rooms, or how the furniture should be

arranged. So I tend not to have a very positive view about the outcome

of such endeavors.

I believe the system is covered by a whole series of masks, if I may use

postmodernist language, and we have to peel away these masks. One of

these masks is that the system is more humane, that it is concerned with

human welfare – this is especially true of Japan I’m sorry to say; less

so in the United States – and therefore one should go along with it. And

there are more than enough social democrats and liberals who are

prepared to find this the best possible approach for dealing with the

ills of the existing society. Environmentalists are very striking in

this respect. We have a real problem in California where it’s impossible

for the Green party, which is not exactly anything to celebrate, to run

candidates against Democrats, because they and the Democrats are so much

in agreement with each other. That is to say, Greens are so reformist

and so willing to work within the system that they have no reason to run

against the Democrats.

Evanoff: How do you assess the direction that the Green movement is

going in the United States now?

Bookchin: I’m sorry to say that I regard most of the Green movement that

I know of as being failures, mainly because they are so politically

uneducated, so theoretically anaemic, and made up so much, particularly

in the United States, of pure activists – because, you know, in the

United States to do things is more important than to think about things.

The Greens fail to recognise the need to maintain principled positions

against the social order as such. They thus tend to work within the

existing irrational system as “rationally” as they can, which, as I

said, simply makes an irrational system seem less irrational. But it

remains irrational and continues to get worse and worse.

Evanoff: How do you view the formation of Green parties at the state

level?

Bookchin: You mean running for governors and their equivalent in Japan?

I bitterly oppose that. My whole point about libertarian or confederal

municipalism is that I want to increase the tension between confederated

localities and the state, and by the state I don’t mean they

nation-state alone; I also mean all its intermediate structures and even

within the municipality itself.

Let me stress that if people adopt the approach that I am advocating and

some are beginning to do that, they must be prepared to be in a minority

until the time has come to change things, until the opportunity exists

to make basic transformations. They will be in the minority in the very

neighbourhood assembly that they call for. They will in the minority in

the very town meetings that they have helped to create. There will

always be tendencies even within a libertarian or confederal

municipalist movement that want to make concessions to the system, and

they will have to fight that attempt to compromise a libertarian

municipalism. I’ve seen this in Canada, very painfully, where people who

avowed a libertarian or confederal municipalist position entered in a

coalition with social democrats, denaturing their own position so that

they could form an electoral coalition in a given city. I regard that as

reprehensible, and disassociate myself from any such attempts to do so.

If we are not willing as libertarian municipalists to stand in the

minority and fight and be guided by principles that are uncompromising

in relationship to the nation-state and in relationship to strictly

reformist movements that wish to work within the framework of the

nation-state and may need our help – if they agree to accept these

coalitions and these compromises, then I would disassociate myself from

them, and I would do so very critically.

Evanoff: One of the objections that often comes up when I try to explain

the concept of libertarian municipalism to students in Japan is what

happens in the case when, for example, one small community decides that

they want to build factories and cause a lot of pollution and the

pollution is going to be carried over into another local area. Isn’t

there a need for some type of centralized organization to be able to

handle these kinds of interregional problems? How are these problems

resolved in libertarian municipalism?

Bookchin: They are resolved in every practical way that is necessary to

prevent them from doing it, neither more nor less. First of all, I

believe in majority votes, not consensus. This separates me from

anarchists who are strictly individualists and say that society is

merely a collection of individuals. That sounds very much like Margaret

Thatcher’s statement that there is no society, there are only

individuals. There are many anarchists who believe that – I’m not

including socialists or communists because they don’t believe it. There

are also anarchists who say that you have to operate by consensus, even

if you have institutions (the individualist anarchists don’t even

believe in institutions) and I totally separate myself from that.

Majority votes must exist.

I believe that one cannot separate ideas, values, and practices from the

kind of movement one has been creating. If a libertarian municipal

society is brought about as a result of a movement and people who are

ecologically oriented, it would be utterly incongruous if suddenly a

portion of that society decided it wanted to go around and freely

pollute – additionally, pollute because it wanted to expand industry! We

would have to enter into consultation with either such a municipality or

such a region and say, “You have to stop this. By trying to pollute and

by trying to develop entirely on your own, you’re acting in the same

manner as the very society we tried to eliminate.” And if they say,

“Well, we demand our sovereign right (either as individuals or as

communities) to do what we want, or to secede,” we would answer, “You

can secede. You can do whatever you like provided it doesn’t affect

other people. And if you’re polluting an area, damaging the planet or

even part of it, a planet that should be the common heritage of all

living forms including human beings, then we’re going to stop you.”

Suppose they defiantly answer, “We refuse!” Well, if things come to such

as point, we’ll come in with armed militias and we’ll put an end to it –

unless one assumes that society is made up of “autonomous individuals”

who are free to veto anything, who are free to do whatever they want –

to “do your thing” as Jerry Rubin said.

This individualistic point of view is simply ridiculous. I do not

believe that individuals can ever be completely “autonomous”. From birth

onward, we always depend on numerous collective efforts to sustain us

and to permit us to mature and become functional beings. I flatly reject

a so-called individualism of this nature – and if this is anarchism, I’m

not anarchist. I’m a socialist. Let me add that a tremendous schism is

opening up in anarchism between individualistic extremes on one side –

“lifestyle” anarchists – and social anarchists, who hold views similar

to my own. I would prefer in some respects to use the word “communalist”

because it focuses more clearly on what I believe. Without any adjective

to describe it, anarchism is a negative term; it means no authority, no

archon, no rule. I’m not a “negative” libertarian. The negative liberty

advocated by Isaiah Berlin is not enough for me. I have a substantive

notion of what constitutes liberty; in fact I would prefer the word

freedom, because liberty is much too closely associated with the

personal autonomy that characterizes liberalism. Freedom has a more

collective meaning, and in my view, more radical implications.

Now in that case I definitely oppose, as petty bourgeois at best and

perhaps even simply bourgeois, “individuals” who tell me, “I oppose

democracy because democracy is the rule of the majority over the

minority.” First of all, I do not like their use of the pejorative word

“rule”. A minority should be given every opportunity to transform

popular opinion or to transform the ideas of the majority. But at least

let us agree that there are certain institutions without which any

society would be impossible, that there are ways of making decisions

without which any decision-making would be impossible. And that must be

by a majority. In fact, I don’t even want a homogeneity of opinion that

one encounters in a graveyard. Dissension is very important, first of

all because it stimulates people to think. It keeps them in a

developmental stance and makes them into developmental beings. A

minority is needed to egg things on, to stimulate.

But that doesn’t mean that the minority has a right to do whatever it

wants on the basis of negative liberty. “I’m free to do whatever I want

as long as I don’t harm anyone”. Hogwash! There are a lot of things one

can do that initially do not seem to harm anyone but ultimately do harm

people in the long run. We are living in a society. No individual can be

free of some type of collective responsibility. It’s interesting to note

that the anarchosyndicalists had a very great slogan, which incidentally

was borrowed from the First International, the International

Workingmen’s Association: “No rights without duties; no duties without

rights.” Whoever wants to abdicate from the society, well, let them

build a raft and go out into the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans and build

their own little society there, if society it can be. To me society is

much more than a collection of individuals.

Now, I’ve heard this from anarchists who oppose organization, who call

for total individual autonomy – “Do your own thing”. No single person,

according to one recent anarchist writer L. Susan Brown, can be obliged

by a majority to do what he or she disagrees with. Well, in that case

step out of society and see how well you do – if you can even find a way

to step out of society. There is one lunatic in Finland who has recently

stepped out of society – or he thinks he has. But of course he has axes

and other tools that were acquired from a hardware store. Such

implements do not grow on trees. He has decided that World War III

should come, remove most of the world’s population so we can then live

more harmoniously with “nature.” He lives by fishing, gathering berries,

and has turned into a total misanthrope. I do not remember his name but

his book is a rage in Finland today. This to me is not self-sufficiency.

It’s the dissolution of selfhood and, what I regard as an important

component of selfhood, of responsibility to a community of people. The

individual who so separates himself from society wanders off into a

dreamland of his own, and his opinions aren’t worth a damn.

Evanoff: In Japan decisions often are made on a consensus basis – it

seems to be part of the culture of Japan. The idea of deciding things by

majority is pretty much alien to Japanese culture. These types of

differences exist between different cultures. One of the things you’ve

tried to do is to show the fact that rationality as such is potentially

universal. How does this work out in light of the fact that there are

various cultural differences which exist between peoples?

Bookchin: Well, I have due respect for cultural differences –

aesthetically speaking. This involves a respect for musical traditions,

which may be alien to my ear but which may be very meaningful or

desirable to another ear. This may involve painting which may be alien

to my eye but which may be very congenial to another people. Dress …

traditions … belief systems. But when it comes to how people are going

to share this world together, I am frankly universalistic. I am much

more concerned with human beings as human beings than I am with their

specific cultural, national, and ethnic background. I’m in this respect,

however unecological it sounds, a cosmopolitan. I believe this accords

with social ecology in a very special way. One may love one’s locale.

One may treasure the habitat in which one lives. But I believe that

human beings are also more than animals that live in a habitat and

merely adapt to it. I believe that human beings are constituted by their

own natural evolution, which in their later development, is always

intertwined with a certain measure of cultural evolution, notably a

collective evolution, participatory evolution.

This view isn’t an ideology that someone created in the West or

elsewhere. This is the way we are structured. The Japan that may seek

consensus is one that has been so greatly modified by human beings as to

be only vaguely and remotely related to what it was before human beings

appeared there. And this is true, I believe, of every part of the world,

including the most remote fastnesses of the Amazonian forest. As human

beings we all descend from one species called Homo erectus. Our

ancestors used fire to radically transform so-called “original nature”.

We have created a “second nature” which involves not only the

modification of non-human nature but also the elaboration of human

nature through cultural, institutional and historical experiences.

So the question that arises in my mind when you ask about a people’s

proclivity for consensus is, “How are they going to develop without

dissent?” – and the need to preserve dissent, not to erode it by seeking

a low common denominator on which everybody can agree. If people in

Japan arrive at a decision only if everyone agrees with each other, they

run the risk of precluding disagreements that may ultimately turn out to

be stimuli for a better decision or for a more creative act or for

further development later in time. I therefore feel that this is an

issue that should be debated in Japan. The wisdom of arriving at

consensus is very arguable, unless one assumes that a society is so

perfect and homogenous that everyone will hold the same opinion

automatically if they are reasonably intelligent.

I would say that there’s no such thing as a completely perfect society,

an “end to history,” or a “last man”, to use the language of Hegel and

Nietzsche. So I think that dissent is terribly important. I think what

we have to work out is how to accommodate a minority and to give it all

the freedom of expression it requires to provoke us, until ultimately

the minority through the give-and-take of dialogue changes the

majority’s view. Imagine having to agree on everything, including

whether or not one wants to go out for a walk, whether or not to use

green paint for a room and someone else wants to use yellow paint. I

know I’m caricaturing the position. But the situation becomes very

serious when we’re talking about a major course of action, such as, in a

rational and ecological society, whether or not to build a road, whether

or not to deal with recalcitrants who want to pollute the air. At that

particular point we get into major debates. Debates that arrive at the

lowest common denominator, which often happens with consensus, may

involve no lasting solution whatever.

I’ve seen this in practice in the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear

movement that reached mass proportions in New England, where I live.

Their attempt to arrive at consensus led them to adopt the most minimal,

least stimulating, and insignificant decisions that they could reach in

order to achieve consensus. Worse still, it led to tyranny by a minority

over the majority, and indeed the manipulation of that majority by a

handful or well-organized people who in the name of seeking consensus

actually imposed their own will over a much larger and more passive

majority. So I’m very suspicious of consensus in practice and I’m very

alienated from it in theory.

But how do you deal with it? Well, this is something that I do not have

to deal with, as a Westerner or an American, but something Japanese

people will have to deal with. I have a suspicion that when historical

forces begin to collect to shake Japan, and pose major alternatives to

the Japanese people, there will be a great deal of dissent. That

apparently happened even in the recent decision to install a socialist

prime minister in Japan, although I can’t say that I know enough about

Japanese politics to make any further comment. I’m positive right now

that in the trade war that might develop between Japan and the United

States there are many Japanese businessmen who feel very uncomfortable

and whether in the name of consensus or just by abstention would like to

see things otherwise – and that sentiment may very well act against the

existing policy of the Japanese government, despite the myth that

consensus is supposed to exist everywhere.

Evanoff: In the West we might have more of tendency to speak, as

Roderick Nash does, of the “rights of nature” whereas in Japan there may

be more of a tendency of think in terms of “obligations towards nature”.

Is there a way for us to reason out this apparent cultural difference?

Bookchin: Nature has no “rights”. It does not have “intrinsic rights”.

Like it or not, we confer rights on the natural world, just as we create

rights among ourselves as human beings. There may be an objective basis

for these rights. One might say, for example, that freedom,

self-consciousness are potentialities that imply the existence of latent

rights. I wouldn’t call them “rights,” however, but “norms” or ethical

standards which people would ultimately want to achieve. The whole toil

of history, I would like to think (insofar as I identify history

exclusively with progress in ever-greater developments of freedom,

technology and self-consciousness) consists of the unfolding of latent

rights which history will actualize one day in a rational and ecological

society. One can even trace the potentiality for self-consciousness and

freedom in the ever-greater subjectivity that occurs over the course of

evolution in increasingly complex animals, that at certain levels begin

to make seemingly intelligent choices. They are intelligent to one

degree or another, though let’s not exaggerate the extent to which they

are so. But we know that chimpanzees don’t know what death is. We know

that because they cannot speak and cannot create symbolically formed

concepts; they are very limited in the range of their intelligence and

their level of consciousness. These abilities are minimal by comparison

with those of human beings. Humanity has made a quantum leap over all

other forms of life.

So one can trace the potentiality for freedom and self-consciousness in

natural evolution. That is the way I define the word “nature.” “First”

nature, or biological nature, for me is the cumulative evolution of life

toward ever-greater subjectivity and nascent forms of freedom, such as

choice. But to speak of rights in a meaningful, recognizable,

acknowledged, and clearly formulated sense is something that only human

beings can do. I would take issue with the title of Roderick Nash’s

book, The Rights of Nature, as though there were intrinsic rights in the

natural world that existed in the absence of human beings. I believe

that the words “intrinsic worth,” which are so commonly used by deep

ecologists, simply beg the question of how did they ever become

“intrinsic” in the first place and what kind of “worth” one is talking

about. Kant has allowed himself the liberty of speaking that way, but he

did that at the expense of any kind of contact with the “real��

thing-in-itself and talked essentially about how the human mind

formulates and structures a system of rights. At various points,

particularly in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of

Judgment, he fell back on intuition.

From my viewpoint we merely beg the question when we say that there are

rights intrinsic in “nature.” “Nature” is not a realm of ethical

judgment. Apart from human beings, there is no subject in “nature” that

is making such ethical judgments. Animals have no notion of each other’s

“rights”. When we start talking about their rights it’s what we endow

them with, just as we begin to formulate rights during the course of our

own social development in “second” nature, hopefully to a point where we

finally reach a synthesis of both “first” and “second” nature in what I

have called “free” nature, namely a nature as expressed through human

beings that is self-conscious and free. But without human beings there

are no rights.

Let me say furthermore, at the risk of being very provocative, that my

interest in this planet would be minimal if I were a space traveller

from another planet who visited earth and saw no evidence of human

beings. I would find a lot of greenery and protoplasm. Splendid! But I

would have to undergo a whole process of acculturation to say that

elephants are “beautiful,” that lions are “sleek,” and that deer are

“graceful”. Do these words mean anything if there were no human beings

and society around to celebrate them?

Evanoff: In social ecology you’ve developed what I think is one of the

most comprehensive theoretical approaches towards ecology. At this time,

there are a number of conflicting views of how we should be thinking

about ecology. How do you balance a need for theoretical coherence with

an acceptance of the face that in the environmental movement in general

there are a variety of different perspectives? How important do you feel

it is to keep that theoretical coherence and unity, even if it’s at the

expense of perhaps alienating people who are coming at ecology from

other perspectives?

Bookchin: I couldn’t give a damn about who I alienate! If I am ever

concerned about popular opinion, I’m doomed. I’m doomed subjectively

speaking. At this time in particular, popular opinion couldn’t interest

me in the least. I am now approaching my seventy-fifth year. I have a

very limited amount of lifespan left, and I am not trying to benefit

from anything I do in any personal sense. I’m going to be as truthful as

I can possibly be. I should make that very plain.

Nor do I find that it will do any movement that seeks to get to the

roots of any question any good by trying to compromise my views. There

are enough liberals who stand between me and the rest of the public who

do more compromising than is good for the public. Let me take over that

job. Someone has to come out and speak for what, to me in any case, is a

tremendous tradition, the grand tradition of social emancipation – and

very ecumenically in a sense that could be shared by Marx, Engels,

Bakunin, Kropotkin, in short socialism, which, as Kropotkin said, lies

at the core of anarchism.

Coherence is vital. I’m not saying that coherence means dogma. But

coherence is vital insofar as we have to have an ordered sense of our

relationship with the world – or else we will have no real relationship

with the world. If we do not have coherence, if we do not see the

connections between things, if we do not know how to order a future

reality rationally as well as imaginatively, we will have no meaningful

and creative relationship to reality. We will be “free” vendors of any

kind of tripe that comes along. Therefore I’m not impressed by people

who say, “I have no answer to this question”. I’m not suggesting that

they should lie. I’m not suggesting that if they don’t have an answer to

a question they shouldn’t be honest enough to say so – and there are

many questions I have no answer to. I’m suggesting this as a bad credo,

this celebration of ignorance and indecision. Socrates was a liar when

he repeatedly declared: “I know nothing”. He knew a great deal indeed.

And his statement was merely a form of posturing. Admittedly it was an

expression of his critical mind. But it was posturing nonetheless. So

consequently, I’m not overly impressed by liberal views that claim they

are “wide open” When I’m “wide open” I’m shapeless, I’m formless, I’m

lacking in perspective, and I’m not fit to have an opinion until I work

desperately and hard enough to formulate one, or at least formulate a

hypothesis to test one.

Today one of our biggest problems is lack of coherence. I saw this very

dramatically in the 1960s. You see, I’ve come out of and was very deeply

immersed in the left of the 1930s. I was immensely conscious of the

entire left tradition going back to the French Revolution – and in my

opinion, as far back as the English Revolution of the 1640s. I was

immensely conscious of the enormity of this tradition and its desperate

attempt to create an ordered world based on reason and freedom.

In the 1960s, this tradition was mindlessly abandoned. Suddenly history

was supposed to being all over again with the Free Speech Movement of

1964, say, or the Civil Rights Movement of 1963. Well, that was rubbish.

We can now look back in retrospect, after witnessing this whole parade

of “holier-than-thou” revolutionaries who sprang up like mushrooms after

a rain between 1965 and 1969, and see with what wanton abandonment they

have fled back into the present social order and are busy in academies,

or as publishers and writers, continually trying to efface the real

meaning of the ‘60s were, a meaning that I think, alas, was in some

respects far more limited than I believed at the time. The ‘60s was a

period of great potentialities, but these were not actualized in the

years that followed, not even by the ecology movement.

Therefore I’m all the more desperately concerned with retaining my

identity – I mean this in an intellectual, a subjective, an ideological

way – through coherence. Take away coherence and as Paul K. Feyeraband –

in my opinion one of the most repellent nihilists to appear in recent

memory – said, “Anything goes.” That is the maxim of his Against Method.

Jerry Rubin said “Do your thing” and Jerry Rubin was in Wall Street

until his recent death. But “anything” does not go. It is very important

to find out what “goes” and what does not. If anything goes and one’s

relativism is that extreme, one will have no basis for choosing between

the validity of anti-Semitism and the validity of humanitarianism. This

literally came up in Feyeraband’s book, Science in a Free Society. And

do you know what Feyeraband believed determines which decision is sound

or correct? Power. Might. He sounds like Thrasymachus in Book I of

Plato’s Republic: “Might makes right.” So the answer to anti-Semitism is

that humanitarianism will prove to be more powerful than anti-Semitism!

But anti-Semitism and humanitarianism, indeed racism and

humanitarianism, are, so far as Feyeraband is concerned, in a purely

relational situation. One is defined by the other, and relativism is all

that prevails in forming a judgment about whether racism or

humanitarianism, anti-Semitism or for that matter fascism, are correct

or sound views. The functional role that what is going to prevail or not

is vicious.

Thus, coherence is absolutely essential in sorting out this vicious

relativism, and discarding and replacing it with an objectivism that, on

the one hand, is not totalitarian, but that enjoys the validity of truth

per se in the most naturalistic and indeed materialistic way. I feel

very strongly about this. Coherence is absolutely essential in being

able to make a judgment that does not dissolve into relativism and

formlessness. And if coherence seems like a tyranny to most

postmodernists today, may I suggest that coherence does not mean

dogmatism.

On the other hand, their incoherence is one form of dogmatism. When I

hear from Nietzsche that all facts are interpretations, I’m getting a

dogma. How does he know this? He tries nowhere to validate this maxim.

The same can be said for that whole prelapsarian mentality of Heidegger,

who spent his time working for the Nazis until 1945. He never seriously

tried to account for this relationship to fascism. There have been far

too many fascist precursors of postmodernism, people who if they opposed

the Nazis did so because they were French nationalists, not because they

opposed fascism. One thinks of Maurice Blanchard, the man who gave us

the “Great Refusal” – this remark is wrongly attributed to Marcuse. And

there is Georges Bataille. So forgive me on this score: I am very

emphatically for coherence because that’s the only way I can at least

even say that I have an idea that can be subjected to the test of

reality. Otherwise, I have to deny reality, and thereby toss out

incoherent statements that cannot be tested, which seems to be very

common these days.