Harbinger -

Harbinger - SPRING 2003 { 1 }SPRING 2003

What is Social Ecology?

Harbingera journal of social ecology

VOL. 3, NO. 1

{ 2 } Harbinger - SPRING 2003

Harbinger is published occasionallyby the Institute for Social Ecology,1118 Maple Hill Road, Plainfield, VT,05667, USA. Telephone / Fax.: 1 (802)454-8493. Email: [email protected]. All material within thepages of Harbinger is copyright bythe author. Reproduction of anymaterial within these pages isauthorized only if the source isindicated and the author hasgranted permission. Opinionsexpressed by the authors do notnecessarily reflect those of theInstitute for Social Ecology.

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Cover Art: This issue’s cover artcomes to us from the Canada basedcommunity mapping projectCommon Ground and artist GordSeward.

Colophon: Harbinger is printed onWeyerhaeuser Huskey Offset (text)and Springhill Vellum Bristol (cover).The text paper stock includes 30%postconsumer content, and the coverincludes 20%. All inks used inHarbinger are soy-based. This issue,at a total run of 600 copies, used twotrees worth of paper (according toP.A.P.E.R.’s Paper Wizard). Printed inthe U.S.A. by Alonzo EnvironmentalPrinting, Hayward, CA.

publishes analysis relevant to the growing social ecology movement and newsof the activities of the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE). It is our intentionto explore the theory and practice needed to help create an ecological society,and to cultivate a generous intellectual outlook that can inform the principleof hope. Just as the outlook proposed by social ecology is concerned withboth what is and what ought to be, so too is Harbinger and we will explore thetensions between the two. The central questions we address in the pages ofHarbinger regard the process with which we must engage to create anecological society, a society free of hierarchy and domination in all of itsforms.

A harbinger is a messenger, or a sign indicating that a major event orchange is coming. It was the name given to the journal published byEmerson, the Alcotts, Thoreau and other New England transcendentalistsassociated with Brook Farm in the 19th century. The name was revived inthe early 1980s by the ISE for our literary and philosophical journal. In itscurrent incarnation Harbinger will continue the tradition of criticallyexamining theory and practice, attempt to bring you stimulating work bytalented authors, and, in addition, update you on the important work of theISE. Our intention is to publish twice a year and we invite your commentsand contributions. While Harbinger will entertain many points of view, ourprimary focus will be on a clarification and expansion of those ideas andpractices that contribute to social ecology. We encourage passionatediscourse tempered by rationality and a radical intent—nothing less than thetransformation of our destructive, anti-ecological society.

Harbinger is a utopian project, but not utopia in the sense of anunachievable cloud-cuckoo land. Rather what we explore are utopian ideasrooted in real, existing potentialities. In the words of social ecologist MurrayBookchin, we seek to “Be realistic and do the impossible, because if we don’tdo the impossible, we face the unthinkable.” Harbinger will examine ideasthat can allow us to transcend the given, to expand our intellectualframeworks, to give voice to our highest aspirations and our dreams for adecentralized, directly democratic, mutualistic and ecological society.I

Harbinger, a Journal of Social Ecology,

Harbinger - SPRING 2003 { 3 }

Welcome to the latest issue of Harbinger, a Journal ofSocial Ecology. This issue has been a long time coming, butwell worth the wait. Our goal, to inform and inspire those

actively pursuing an ecological society rooted in decentralist, directlydemocratic ideals, is clearly expressed in the articles that make up thisissue. The thematic core focuses on the vision of social ecology, asexpressed by Peter Staudenmaier, and its relationship to newunderstandings in evolutionary theory. Murray Bookchin, the seminaltheorist of social ecology, provides an historical overview of the issues thathe faced when he first started fleshing out these ideas as far back as the1950s. For social ecology, nature is natural evolution, an ongoing dialecticof change and growth. Biologist Sonia Schmitz offers an assessment of thedialectical naturalism of Bookchin based on her interpretation of neo-Darwinian theory. Additionally Bookchin offers his vision for a newpolitics rooted in the ideas of social ecology, “The Communalist Project.”

The history of the Institute for Social Ecology is explored in a timelineof the 29 year history of the ISE, and Brian Tokar examines the significantimpact of social ecology on social movements from the 1960s to thepresent. A related series of articles looks at promising contemporarymovements that articulate their visions of direct democracy—DemocraticAlternative, from Norway, and the North American based Alliance forFreedom and Direct Democracy.

We also review the latest developments at the Institute for SocialEcology, including a preview of upcoming programs and an update on ISEprojects.

Harbinger will continue to publish on an occasional basis, and to bringyou the latest developments in the theory and practice of social ecology, aswell as news of the ISE. We hope that you find this issue interesting andinformative.I

Daniel Chodorkoff

PUBLISHED BY

Institute for Social EcologyPopular Education for a Free Society

1118 Maple Hill Road,Plainfield, VT 05667 USA

www.harbinger.ws

Harbingera journal of social ecology

MANAGING EDITOR

Michael Caplan

ADVISORY BOARD

Dan ChodorkoffChuck MorseErin Royster

Sonja SchmitzBrian Tokar

PRINT & WEB DESIGN

Michael Caplan

COPY EDITOR

Erin Royster

CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

AFADD,Beehive Design Collective,

Murray Bookchin,Michael Caplan,Dan Chodorkoff,

Andrea del Moral, Cliff Harper,Democratic Alternative,

Eirik Eiglad, Mike Flugennock,nico, Jared Rogness, Erin Royster,

Sonja Schmitz, Gord Seward,Peter Staudenmaier, Brian Tokar,

Ingrid Young

SPECIAL THANKS

Claudia Bagiackas, Janet Biehl,Michael Cuba, Arthur Foelsche,

Heidi Hunt of Mother Earth News,and the many ISE supporters whodonated to support this project!


3 Editorial

67 Call for Contributions

W H AT I S S O C I A L E C O L O G Y ?

6 Reflections:An Overview of the Roots of SocialEcologyby Murray BookchinA personal account on the birth of socialecology.

12 Economics in a Social-Ecological Societyby Peter StaudenmaierWhat would economics look like in anecological society? How might freecommunities arrange their livelihood?

16 Buttercups and Sunflowers:On the Evolution of First and SecondNatureby Sonja SchmitzHealing the seemingly disparate relationshipbetween nature and culture by reminding us ofthe developmental relationship between them.

20 The Communalist Projectby Murray BookchinA radical politics for the twenty-first century.

A H I S T O RY O F T H E I S EA celebration of close to thirty years of educationand activism committed to the social andecological transformation of society.

38 Education and Community Action:A History of the ISE’s ProgramsHow the Institute for Social Ecology haschanged the world through its educationalprograms and community involvement.

44 Social Ecology and Social Movements:From the 1960s to the Presentby Brian TokarExploring the important role of the Institute forSocial Ecology in many of the pivotal social andecological movements of the past four decades


CONTENTStable ofVolume Three - Number One

C O N T E M P O R A RY M O V E M E N T S

50 Radical Alternatives:An Interview with Ingrid Youngby Michael CaplanA discussion on a democratic alternative forScandinavia.

54 Alliance for Freedom and DirectDemocracyby AFADDBuilding a movement for confederal directdemocracy.

Andrea del Moral

R E P O RT F R O M M A P L E H I L L

56 Director’s Report

57 2003 Spring & Summer Programs

63 2003 Development Goals


THE EXTENT TO WHICH RADICAL VERSIONS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM UNDERWENT

sweeping metamorphoses and evolved into revolutionary ideologies when theNew Left came of age is difficult to convey to the present generation, which hasbeen almost completely divorced from the ebullient days of the New Left, not tospeak of all the major problems in classical socialism, especially in its Marxistform. These changes burden us to this very day.

In fact, the way in which the New Left initially reacted to my writings onsocial ecology, even to such manifesto-type articles as my “Ecology andRevolutionary Thought”(1964), was very similar to the way my comrades of theOld Left would have reacted in the 1930s. Perhaps the most sophisticatedleftist “movement” of the sixties—and certainly the most arrogant, namely, theFrench Situationists and their American hangers-on—witlessly denounced meas “Smokey the Bear”(a childlike symbol of the US Forest Service!), soirrelevant was the issue of humanity’s place in the natural world to the Left ofthe sixties. Accordingly, I was asked repeatedly where the “class struggle” waslocated in my writings—as though the “class struggle” was not implicit ineverything I wrote!—after which I was lectured on how Marx and Engels were“really” firm adherents of the very views for which I had been denounced a fewyears earlier. My dogmatic opponents of the Left began to shift their ground bytrying to fit environmental issues into such frameworks such as the importanceof conservation in Marx and Engels’s writings. In short, the Left had beenoblivious to ecological issues, which were merely regarded as a “petty bourgeois”endeavor to redirect public attention away from a hazy need to abolishcapitalism pure and simple!

This criticism, to be sure, was not without a certain measure of truth.Anything resembling a socially oriented ecology, such William Vogt’s OurPlundered Planet in the fifties and especially Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in1962, was more concerned with the impacts of human population growth andthe loss of wildlife in an increasingly industrialized world than with the materialwelfare of humanity and the impact of hierarchy on attempts to create arational society. In some respects, ecologists were inspired by the reactionarymotifs raised by Ernst Haeckel, who created the word “ecology” in the 1880s,notably the harm produced by “humanity” on the planet rather than the effectsof the capitalist system in producing ostensibly “biological problems.” AlthoughCarson attacked the chemical industry for promoting the use of toxic pesticides,perceptive readers could see that she was more concerned with their impact onbirds than on people. Nor did she and other ecological critics examine thesocially and negatively systemic sources that produced a growing disequilibriumbetween nonhuman nature and society. She and her fellow ecological criticsoften seemed to think in terms of an abstract “humanity” (whatever thatsocially ambiguous word means) as distinguished from classes. To Carson andher admirers, it was not a specific social order—namely, capitalism andentrepreneurial rivalry—that was responsible for the ecological destruction thatwas undermining the biosphere but “immoral” human behavior.

ReflectionsAn Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology

By Murray Bookchin


By contrast, social ecology completely inverted themeaning and implications of society’s interaction withthe natural world. When I first began to use the rarelyemployed term “social ecology” during 1964 in my essay,“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” I emphasizedthat the idea of dominating nature has its origins in thevery real domination of human by human—that is, inhierarchy. These status groups, I insisted could continueto exist even if economic classes were abolished.

Secondly, hierarchy had to be abolished byinstitutional changes that were no less profound and farreaching than those needed to abolish classes. Thisplaced “ecology” on an entirely new level of inquiry andpraxis, bringing it far above a solicitous, often romanticand mystical engagement with an undefined “nature”and a love-affair with “wildlife.” Social ecology wasconcerned with the most intimate relations betweenhuman beings and the organic world around them.Social ecology, in effect, gave ecology a sharprevolutionary and political edge. In other words, wewere obliged to seek changes not only in the objectiverealm of economic relations but also in the subjectiverealm of cultural, ethical, aesthetic, personal, andpsychological areas of inquiry.

Most fundamentally, these relations exist at the verybase of all social life: notably, the ways in which weinteract with the natural world, especially through labor,even in the simplest forms of society, such as tribal andvillage stages of social formation. And certainly, if wehad major negative ecological disequilibria betweenhumanity and the natural world which could threatenthe very existence of our species, we had to understandhow these disequilibria emerged; what we even meant bythe word “nature;” how did society emerge out of thenatural world; how did it necessarily alienateitself from elemental natural relations; how andwhy did basic social institutions such asgovernment, law, the state, even classes emergedialectically from each other before humansociety came into its own; and in ways thatwent beyond mere instinct and custom, not tospeak of patricentricity, patriarchy, and a hostof similar “cultural” relations whose emergenceare not easily explained by economic factorsalone.

BUT, IT WOULD BE AN ERROR TO VIEW THE

foregoing presentation of what I would call aminimal account of social ecology as the onlytheoretical source by which one can teach acourse on the subject. I did not develop socialecology only because I was disturbed by the

“nature versus society” problem, although it was neverfar from my mind. Fundamental to my development ofsocial ecology is a crisis that developed in socialisttheory itself, one that I regard as unresolvable in astrictly conventional Marxist or anarchist framework—or to use the most all-encompassing phrase of all:proletarian socialism.

This was a painful problem for me to cope withbecause I did not come to a belief in proletariansocialism as a result of an academic storm in a teacup. Iwas a very passionate participant in what I thought wasa revolutionary labor movement, notably as a member ofthe Communist youth movement early in the 1930s andas result of a thorough training in Marxism andBolshevism. I became a rank-and-file leader of theYoung Communist League as early as 1933 and wasmilitantly loyal to its ultra-revolutionary program (thereckless insurrectionism promulgated by the CommunistInternational in 1928, or so-called “Third Period” line).Stalin had yet to make his reputation as the major figurethat he became in the late thirties; accordingly, mycomrades and I of that period never regarded ourselvesas “Stalinists” but simply as committed Communists orMarxists who adhered to Lenin’s revolutionary views.

As a result, I was thoroughly, even intensivelytrained in classical Marxism. This background providedme with a unique insight into problems that, whileforgotten at present by young radicals, haunts all of theirsocial projects. Born when the Russian Revolution wasstill a recent event; when Makhno was still carrying onhis guerrilla war in Ukraine; when Lenin, Trotsky, andnearly all the major theorists and activists of the firstthree decades of the century were still fairly young men;I had the rare chance to imbibe all the fundamental


issues and live through most of the great civil conflictsof the era—from the still buoyant aftermath of theRussian Revolution to the tragic outcome of theSpanish Revolution and Civil War of 1937 to 1939. Bythe outbreak of the Second World War, I was wellversed in the issues the war raised for my generationearly in the century.

Again, it is difficult to convey to young people,today, how differently proletarian socialists thought andthe ideals to which they were committed prior to 1950,which I regard as the year in which proletarian socialismwas faced by its most decisive crisis. What cannot beemphasized too strongly is that all of us who survivedthe ideological debacle produced by the war had to dealwith the complete failure of all the prognoses we heldfive years earlier. Almost all who you care to single outfrom the interwar period (1917-1940), be it a Lenin, aTrotsky (in my earnest opinion, the most optimistic andthe most competent theorist of the period), even goingback in time to Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht,Franz Mehring and the like, were absolutely convincedthat capitalism was in its “death throes.” The mostwidely used formulation during this stormy period—farmore insurgent than the often pseudo-revolutionism ofthe sixties—was the expression that capitalism (as Ihave already observed) was “moribund,” or facing theimminent certainty of “collapse.” Nothing seemed moreevident at the time than the apocalyptic belief that wewere witnessing the “last days” of bourgeois society,notwithstanding the fact that fascism was on the marchthroughout Europe and that proletarian socialistideology was waning and facing defeat.

THE OUTBREAK OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR LEFT NO DOUBT

in our minds that the conflict would end in socialistrevolutions—or else it was faced with barbarism. And,by barbarism, we meant the expansion of Nazism—ofmass starvation, ethnic extermination, concentrationcamps, a monstrous totalitarian state, and mass gravesthroughout Europe, if not America and Asia. Ifsocialism did not end the war by producing a newsociety, barbarism was a historic inevitability. For us, thevictory of socialism was a near certainty, for it wasinconceivable that Europe, in particular, could gothrough the mass slaughter that marked the First WorldWar without producing successful proletarianrevolutions. Barbarism was the only alternative to afailure by the working class. To a man like Trotsky, whoStalin had killed in the year that saw the outbreak ofthe world conflict, should barbarism become establishedin the world, we would have to revise all the

expectations provided by Marxism and adopt ahistorically new ideological perspective.

As we know after more than a half century, we werewrong, indeed terribly so. Neither socialism nor fascismemerged from the war, but, to our amazement, liberalcapitalism—with its welfare state and the extension of“bourgeois democracy” in most of Western Europe andthe United States. Indeed, capitalism stabilized itself inthe historic sense that a “cold war” provided theframework for thinking out social problems—aframework to which the masses clung for nearly fiftyyears. Capitalism, in short, managed to stabilize itself toa point where it was able to avoid any major economic,not to speak of any social crisis. The New Left, whileretaining many features of the Old Left, essentially tried(and failed) to create a cultural “crisis” as a substitute fora revolutionary one—which, as we now know, became anew industry and a commercial success in its own right.

Moreover, capitalism, continued to deepen its holdon society on a scale and to an extent it had never doneduring the course of its history. All the vestigial featuresof pre-capitalist society with their monarchical, quasi-feudal, agrarian and craft strata that were still prevalentin Germany, France, and, at least, widespread inEngland in 1914 gave way, unevenly to be sure, to hugeindustrial corporations, mass production, themechanization of all aspects of the economy, widespreadcommodification at the very base of economic life andmonopolization and global accumulation at itssummits—i.e. the spread of capitalism into every nicheof social life. The concept of “Fordism” was quiteknown to the Old Left long before it was adopted byNew Left academics under such old names as “massproduction” and “commodification.”

Finally, the proletariat not only dwindled vastly innumbers (contrary to all of Marx’s expectations) butalso in class-consciousness. Workers began to lose theirsense of class identity, even began to see themselves asproperty owners, and significantly altered their socialexpectations. Home ownership, the acquisition of land,cars, and most significantly, stock ownership nowbecame commonplace. Workers’ children wereexpected to go to colleges and universities, or, least,enter the professions or create self-employed enterprises.So vastly had class solidarity waned that the once-sturdyproletariat began to vote for conservative parties andjoin with reactionaries in opposing environmentalconservation, gender equality, immigration fromimpoverished countries, ethnic equality, and similarissues. Paris’s famous prewar 1940 “red belt,” whichfamously gave its votes to the French Communists asthe embodiment of the Russian Revolution in Western


Europe, found itself voting, often enthusiastically, forthe neo-fascism of the French reactionary, Jean-MarieLe Pen.

Notwithstanding the multitude of “breakdown”theories that Marxists and even anarchists advancedduring the interwar period, capitalism has proven to bemore sturdy and robust during the past fifty years than itwas over the course of its entire history. Not only didcommodification—its most salient feature—spreadthroughout the entire world, but it was even spared therecurrence of its notorious “periodic crises” or “businesscycles” which reminded the world that a marketeconomy is inherently unstable. Indeed, contrary to allthe expectations that followed from Marx’s theories ofsocial life-cycles, the supposition that capitalism wouldbecome an obstacle to the development of technology—another salient feature of Marx’s “moribund” society—proved to be nonsense. As a force for advances inindustry and technical sophistication, capitalismexhibits incredible vitality—notwithstanding Marx’s

prediction that it would soon become incapable oftechnical innovation and change. Indeed, all thefeatures that were to mark a “moribund” economy havenow appeared in reverse: unending technologicaladvances, the absence of the heralded “pauperization” ofthe working class in the classical areas of capitalistdevelopment (England, France, western Europegenerally, and the United States), the disappearance ofchronic economic crises, and the waning of classconsciousness.

By the 1950s, it was self-evident that Marxist (andanarchist) “breakdown” scenarios were palpablenonsense. The notion that the death of capitalismowing to an “economic imperative,” such as the“decline in the rate of profit” (a theoretical construct ofVolume III of Capital) constituted a basic explanationfor the self-destruction of capitalism was completelyuntenable. The end of the Second World War broughtneither barbarism nor socialism but rather an ideological“vacuum,” so to speak, that threatened, like a huge blackhole, to extinguish the veracity of Marx’s entiretheoretical corpus. Capitalism, I would like to reiterate,

had recovered from the war, as I have noted, withunprecedented resiliency and extended its grip onsociety with unprecedented tenacity. As the middle ofthe fifties came into view, nearly all the monarchies,their political and bureaucratic underpinnings; theextensive craft, professional, and agrarian strata thatbarely a generation earlier had linked the WesternEuropean economy with its feudal past—virtually allhad been effaced or divested of the authority theyenjoyed a generation earlier. Gone were the PrussianJunkers who survived the First World War, the tsars,dukes, and barons who peopled the upper classes ofcentral and southern Europe, the status groups thatpresided over the academies well into the thirties, andthe like. What the German Kaiser and, later, Hitlertried to achieve with terrible weapons and millions ofcorpses in 1914 and 1940, the German Bundesrepublikachieved with bundles of Deutsche Marks and, morerecently, a patina of pacifism!!

IT CANNOT BE EMPHASIZED TOO STRONGLY that, in theabsence of an imperative to challenge the desirability of acapitalistic society, and no less importantly, the need todemonstrate that capitalism’s death in the foreseeablefuture was “inevitable,” no objective reason existed forthe abolition of bourgeois society. Marx, at least, hadsatisfied this need with an economic imperative, namely,an immense body of theory (unparalleled in its scopeand historical knowledge). As I have noted, this theorywas based on such precepts as a chronic crisis producedby the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and by astructurally sophisticated class analysis that inevitablypitted a proletarian majority of an industrialized countryagainst a dwindling number of capitalists. By the 1950s,however, Marxism revealed for all who have eyes to see,that its traditional imperative was completely unsoundwhen compared with the realities of the postwar world,nor could its economic imperative be renovated to meetthe challenges posed by the last half of the twentiethcentury.

It was out of the failure of Marx’s economicimperative that social ecology was born—not solely

It was out of the failure of Marx’s economic imperative that socialecology was born

—not solely because of the impact of pollution, urbandegradation, toxic food additives, and the like.t


because of the impact of pollution, urban degradation,toxic food additives, and the like. When, in 1950, Iwrote my almost book length article, “The Problem ofChemicals in Food,” in No. 10 of Contemporary Issues,the dangers to public health posed by thechemicalization of food by pesticide residues,preservatives, coloring matter, and the like were stillrelatively minor issues. The problem of nuclear fallout,the vast number and quantity of pollutants that were tothreaten the health of many millions of people, and,later, in 1964, the hazard to the world’s climate createdby carbon dioxide, were not immediate issues or widelyforeseeable ones. The apocalyptic nature of the 1950article was dismissed by my critics as “wild and reckless”attacks upon the existing society. Actually, I was tryingto provide a viable substitute for Marx’s defuncteconomic imperative, namely an ecological imperativethat, if thought out (as I tried to do in The Ecology ofFreedom) would show that capitalism stood in anirreconcilable contradiction with the natural world. Nearlyall my articles and books—such as Our SyntheticEnvironment (1962), followed two years later by mywidely circulated article, “Ecology and RevolutionaryThought,” and a companion article, “Toward aLiberatory Technology,” (1965)—were guided primarilyby this project.

I should note that it was in “Ecology andRevolutionary Thought” that I used the words, “socialecology” for the first time and began to sketch out thecomplex body of ideas that ultimately reached theirelaboration in The Ecology of Freedom, two decades later.Let me be quite outspoken: it was not an unbridledpassion for wildlife, wilderness, organic food,primitivism, craft-like methods of production, villages(as against cities), “localism,” a belief that “small isbeautiful” —not to speak of Asian mysticism,spiritualism, naturism, etcetera—that led me toformulate and promote social ecology. I was guided bythe compelling—indeed, challenging—need toformulate a viable imperative that doomed capitalism toself-extinction. As the thirties and the war revealed, itwas not simply the class war between the proletariat andthe capitalist class—driven almost exclusively byeconomic forces and resulting from the concentration ofcapital—that were destined to destabilize capitalism andproduce a revolution. More fundamentally, the crisisproduced by capitalism’s “grow or die” imperative couldbe expected to drive society into a devastatingcontradiction with the natural world. Capital, in effect,would be compelled to simplify all the ecosystems onwhose complexity evolution depended. Driven by itscompetitive relations and rivalries, capitalism would be

obliged to turn soil into sand, the atmosphere and theplanet’s waterways into sewers, and warm the planet to apoint where the entire climatic integrity of the worldwould be radically altered because of the greenhouseeffect.

In short, precisely because capitalism was, bydefinition, a competitive and commodity-based economy,it would be compelled to turn the complex into thesimple and give rise to a planet that was incompatibleenvironmentally with advanced life forms. The growthof capitalism was incompatible with the evolution ofbiotic complexity as such—and certainly, with thedevelopment of human life and the evolution of humansociety.

What is important to see is that social ecology thusrevealed a crisis between the natural world andcapitalism that was, if anything, more fundamental thanthe crisis that was imputed to the falling rate of profitand its alleged consequences. Moreover, social ecologyopened the very real question of the kind of society thatwould have to follow the abolition of a capitalisteconomy. Self-styled Marxists (in all fairness, unlikeMarx and Engels) made a virtue out of a centralized,bureaucratically planned, and a highly technocraticideal of progress, based on an urban and mechanisticculture that was almost a parody of Corbusier’scityscapes.

Social ecology tried to fill the gap between theindustrial and agrarian worlds, not by condemningmachinery, mass production, or even industrialagriculture. My “Toward a Liberatory Technology” wasdeprecated by anarchists and Marxists alike: the formerbecause the article celebrated the use of new gardeningmachines as a substitute for backbreaking toil; the latterprecisely because it was “too utopian” in its aspirations.Frankly, I regarded both of my supposed “failings” as realvirtues that, with quality production in all spheres ofeconomic life, freed humanity from the yoke of toil anda technocratic world. Moreover, there were aspects ofthe past which, given modern technics and means ofcommunication were desiderata because they couldlighten work and vastly increase productivity, withoutwhich humanity would be afflicted with fears of materialscarcity. Such technological advances were also neededto provide sufficient free time for active participation inpublic affairs. Let me add, again, that my critics—manyof whom were later to high-jack my alleged “failings”—read “could” to mean “would,” and pompously declaredthat if “post-scarcity” simply meant we already hadtremendous technological advances, why were we stillbeset with poverty and exhausting toil? As thoughcapitalism, like a slot machine, “would” always deliver


the most optimal returns on the goodies its technologycould produce! Typically, they failed to observe that Ihad repeatedly warned my readers that almost nothingcould emerge from within the context of a marketeconomy that was not tainted by the pathologies ofcompetition, rivalry, and, quite bluntly, pure and simplegreed!

By contrast, social ecology’s ecological imperative—the contradiction between a competitive society andthe natural world—is not simply theoretical. By theeighties, it had been tested by the massive degradationthat is occurring in the social as well as the naturalworld. Speaking for myself, I am astonished by the rapidonset of the greenhouse effect, which, in 1964, Ipredicted in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” as apossibility that would require two or more centuries tounfold. Yet, as early as the eighties and nineties, thecontradiction between capitalism and the natural worldwas becoming a very visible reality. Thereafter, thegreenhouse effect and other destructive imbalances haveassumed proportions that even outweigh more“commonplace” problems such as soil erosion and wastedisposal.

This philosophy forms the basis for an educativeoutlook that yields a lengthy dialectical history andexposition of the phases of human development as itemerges out from natural evolution into socialevolution. The philosophy of social ecology centersaround a dialectical unfolding of a “legacy of freedom”that not only intertwines but interacts with a “legacy ofdomination,” and includes the evolution of a concept ofjustice that leads into an ever-expanding concept offreedom, of scarcity into post-scarcity, of folkdom intocitizenship, of hierarchy into class, and, hopefully, agrowing horizon of freedom (whose termination, if any,we are not yet equipped to foresee), yielding libertarianmunicipalities and institutions. Taken together, as awhole, this educative outlook forms the basis for apractical theory of politics.

WE ARE NOW LIVING NOT ONLY IN A DIFFERENT CENTURY THAT

the Institute for Social Ecology was founded—the ISEwas founded, I would remind you, in 1974, nearly thirtyyears ago. I would sound to young people today as analien enterprise from a very different world than the onethat exists today. The world I knew still had a workers’movement in the US and Europe, and the issues it hadto confront differ qualitatively from those that haveemerged in the past two decades.

Yet it would be unpardonable if we forgot thatsocialism was meant to be a rational society, not areplication of Stalinism and totalitarianism. Nor can we

be permitted to forget that it will require a profoundsocial imperative—an ecological imperative, in myview—to move this mass, even lethargic society alongrational lines. We must always remember that socialismwill come about as the result of logical necessity, theproduct of deep-seated and compelling forces for socialchange, not simply “good vibes.” To give these preceptsa lived meaning, we shall have to create an educationalvanguard to keep the terrible pathologies of our dayunder control, at the vary least, and abolish them at thevery most.

For such demands upon our energy and ourintelligence, our educational activities must result in amovement, not simply in a lifestyle that celebrates its“freedom” in a closeted community at a distance fromreal centers of activity and conflict. I cannot emphasizeenough that our education, be it at the ISE or among“affinity groups,” will be little more than a form of self-indulgence if it is restricted to our minds, completelyremoved from an active life.

I would be the first to acknowledge that action isonly possible when there is a real, dissident public life.For the present, I see no widespread inclination to givereality to a movement for libertarian municipalism,which, at the turn of the new century, lies dormant as aprospect for a new politics. Marx once perceptivelynoted in his early writings that not only must the Ideafollow reality, but also reality must follow the Idea. Thisaphorism might well be regarded as a recognition of theHegelian notion that freedom is a recognition ofnecessity in the sense that we need sufficientpreconditions to produce the most effective conditionsfor social change. When this is not so, the mostbrilliant of ideas lie almost silently in wait for societyitself to ripen and permit the struggle for freedom togerminate. It is then that we can give to education apriority that defies all false appeals to activism for itsown sake.

But one proviso must be voiced: ideas are only truewhen they are rational. Today, when rationality andconsistency are deprecated in the name ofpostmodernist chic, we carry a double burden of tryingto sustain, often by education alone, reason againstirrationalism, and to know when to act as well as how todo so. In such cases, let me note that education, too, isa form of activism and must always be cultivated assuch.I

NotesThis article is an abridged version of a longer letter fromthe author to Michael Caplan.


IN THE MIDST OF OUR STRUGGLES FOR A BETTER WORLD, social ecologists have fre-quently engaged in critical dialogue with other strands of radical thought aboutjust what kind of world we’re struggling for. Such dialogues often address thequestion of how people in a liberated future will organize their material relation-ships with one another and with the natural world. What would economics looklike in an ecological society? How might free communities arrange their livelihood?

Exploring questions such as these requires us to exercise an important facultyof dialectical philosophy: the capacity to think speculatively. Envisioning afuture beyond capitalism and the state means thinking past the world around usand putting ourselves inside of a different world, a world structured in a verydifferent way, a world that has developed some of the social and ecologicalpotentials that we see around us, in distorted form, today. It means trying to seethe world not merely as it is, but as it ought to be.

Social ecologists have put forward a number of concrete proposals over theyears for a municipalized economy and a moral economy. These proposals pointtoward what Bookchin calls “the recovery of the productive process itself as anecological mediation of humanity with nature.” What these practical proposalshave in common is an underlying conception of how complex economies couldbe run differently, without markets or classes or bureaucracy, along egalitarianand participatory lines. Social ecologists argue that the economic mechanisms ofa free society, whether for production, distribution, or reproduction, should havefour basic characteristics: they should be conscious, transparent, alterable, andintegrated.

Conscious: We want economic mechanisms to be deliberately chosen anddeliberately structured, so that they fulfill the purposes that we collectively giveto them, rather than the economic structures forcing us to fulfill their purposes.Transparent: We want every member of society to be able to grasp how society’seconomic mechanisms function. Alterable: We want to be able to change oureconomic structures according to ecological and social needs. And last, we wanteconomic mechanisms to be comprehensively integrated with all other aspects ofcommunal self-management.

What might these values look like in practice? How could this ensemble of specula-tive postulates actually be implemented? What follows is a brief attempt to sketch areconstructive vision of economics in a social-ecological society.

Economics in a Social-Ecological SocietyBy Peter Staudenmaier

Michael Caplan


The World Social Ecologists EnvisionThe world we envision is one of adventure and possibil-ity, of radically new relationships and potential forms ofsocial and individual life that are difficult to imagine,much less describe, from the perspective of the present.Most of what will happen in a social-ecological future,whether at an environmental level, a personal level, or acommunal level, will be spontaneous and creative—andthese are things we can neither plan nor propose norpredict. Nevertheless, such spontaneous and creativeunfolding of potentials will require both an institutionalframework and an ethical vision if they are to becomemore than mere dreams. Thus we must turn our atten-tion to the social structures that might make free natureand a free society more likely.

Social ecologists work toward a society structuredaround freedom, cooperation, and ecological and socialdiversity. Our vision of a better world draws on a wealthof practical experiments and utopian hopes raisedthroughout history by emancipatory movements frombelow. At the center of our vision of free communities isdirect democracy. Direct democracy means peoplemanaging their own lives, consciously and collectively,for the good of the communities they are part of. Insteadof handing over decision-making power to experts,professionals, representatives, or bureaucrats, socialecology foresees all people participating directly in theself-management of their communal affairs.

Because we oppose institutionalized forms of domi-nation and hierarchy, social ecologists reject the state assuch. Instead of positing a separate body that standsapart from society and makes decisions on its behalf, weenvision a network of community assemblies as the basicdecision-making body and as the primary venue forpracticing direct democracy. These assemblies includeall the residents of a local area (in cities at the neighbor-hood level and in rural areas at the township level), whomeet at regular intervals to discuss and decide on theissues before them: political as well as economic deci-sions, indeed any social decision that significantly affectsthe life of the community as a whole.

The popular assembly includes everybody who iswilling to participate in it and provides a democraticforum for all community members to engage one anotheron an equal basis and actively shape social life. Ongoinginteractions of this kind encourage a sense of sharedresponsibility and interdependence, as well as offering apublic space for resolving disputes and disagreements ina rational and non-coercive way. Recognizing thatpeople have differing interests, aspirations, and convic-tions, the neighborhood assembly and its accompanyingcivic ethos present an opportunity for reconciling

particular and general objectives. Direct democracy, inthis view, involves a commitment to the wellbeing ofone’s neighbors.

Communal wellbeing, in turn, implies an activerespect and appreciation for the natural context withinwhich local communities exist. No social order canguarantee that the ecosystems and habitats that hostour various settlements will thrive, but social ecologistsbelieve that communities built around free associationand mutual aid are much better suited to fosteringenvironmental diversity and sustainability than thosebuilt around authoritarian systems of power. Insocieties that have overcome domination and hierar-chy, ecological flourishing and human flourishing cancomplement and reinforce one another.

The ethical outlook that embodies these potentialsis as important as the practical methods themselves.Social ecologists want to create social forms thatpromote freedom and solidarity by building thesevalues into the very fabric of social relations and publicinstitutions. Thus, our emphasis on face-to-faceassemblies open to all is meant to encourage, notpreclude, the creation of other libertarian and coopera-tive social forms. An enormous variety of spontaneousassociations, living arrangements, workplaces, familystructures, and so forth all have an important place inour vision of a free world. The only forms that areexcluded are ones based on exploitation and oppres-sion.

Social ecology’s model of direct democracy cantherefore be realized in a number of different waysdepending on the needs, desires, and experiences ofthose who are inspired by it. This is especially true ofeconomic processes, and the scenario outlined here isonly one possible interpretation of the economicaspects of a social-ecological society. The fundamentalshared perspective is that of a moral economy, in whichthe material conditions of our existence are reinte-grated into a broader ethical and institutional frame-work. A moral economy means making decisionsabout production and consumption part of the civic lifeof the whole community.

Communal Self-Management in PracticeIn this scenario, workers’ councils play a crucial role inthe day-to-day administration of production, whilelocal assemblies have the final say in major economicdecisions. All members of a given community partici-pate in formulating economic policy, which is dis-cussed, debated, and decided upon within the popularassembly. Social ecology foresees an extensive physi-cal decentralization of production, so that workers at a


particular enterprise will typically live in the samemunicipality where they work. We also foresee acontinual voluntary rotation of jobs, tasks, and responsi-bilities and a radical redefinition of what ‘work’ means.Through the conscious transformation of labor into afree social activity that combines physical and intellec-tual skills, we envision the productive process as afulfillment of personal and communal needs, articulatedto their ecological context. Along with the rejection ofbosses, profits, wages, and exchange value, we seek to

overcome capitalism’s reduction of human beings toinstruments of production and consumption. Socialecology’s assembly model encourages people to approacheconomic decisions not merely as workers and consum-ers, but as community members committed to aninclusive goal of social and ecological wellbeing.

While the broad outlines of communal productionare established at the assembly level, they are imple-mented in practice by smaller collective bodies whichalso operate on an egalitarian, participatory, anddemocratic basis. Cooperative households and collec-tive workplaces form an integral part of this process.Decisions that have regional impact are worked out byconfederations of local assemblies, so that everybodyaffected by a decision can participate in making it.Specific tasks can be delegated to specialized commit-tees, but substantive issues of public concern are subjectto the discretion of each popular assembly. Directdemocracy encourages the formation and contestationof competing views and arguments, so that for any givendecision there will be several distinct options available,each of them crafted by the people who will carry themout. Assembly members consider these various propos-als and debate their merits and implications; they arediscussed, revised and amended as necessary. When noclear consensus emerges, a vote or series of votes can beheld to determine which options have the most support.

Social ecology’s vision of a moral economy centerson libertarian communism, in which the fruits ofcommon labor are freely available to all. This principleof “from each according to ability and to each according

to need,” which distinguishes our perspective from manyother anti-capitalist programs, is fleshed out by a civicethic in which concern for the common welfare shapesindividual choices. In the absence of markets, privateproperty, class divisions, commodity production, exploi-tation of labor, and accumulation of capital, libertariancommunism can become the distributive mechanism forsocial wealth and the economic counterpart to thetransparent and humanly scaled political structures thatsocial ecology proposes.

In such an arrangement, the interaction betweensmaller committees and working groups and the fullassembly becomes crucially important to maintainingthe democratic and participatory nature of this delibera-tive process. Preparing coherent proposals for presenta-tion to the assembly will require both specialized workand scrupulous information gathering, as well as analysisand interpretation. Because these activities can subtlyinfluence the eventual outcome of any decision, theresponsibility for carrying them out should be a rotatingtask entrusted to a temporary commission chosen atrandom from the members of the assembly.

Confederal Economic DemocracyWhen the assembly has considered and debated andfine-tuned the various proposals before it and has agreedon an overall outline for the local economy, communitymembers continue to refine and realize this outlinewhile implementing it in their workplaces, residences,and elsewhere. If obstacles or disagreements arise thatcannot be resolved at the immediate level of a singleenterprise, institution, or household, they can bebrought back to the full assembly for discussion andresolution. If some aspects of an agreed-upon policy arenot fulfilled for whatever reason, this will quicklybecome apparent to community members, who can thenalter or adapt the policy accordingly. While most ofeconomic life will be carried out within smaller collec-tivities, in direct cooperation with co-workers,housemates, associates and neighbors, overarchingmatters of public economic direction will be worked out

The fundamental shared perspective is that of a moral economy, inwhich the material conditions of our existence are re-integrated into abroader ethical and institutional framework.

A moral economy means making decisions about productionand consumption part of the civic life of the whole community.{


within the assembly of the entire community. Whennecessary, city-wide or regional issues will be addressedat the confederal level, with final decisions remaining inthe hands of each local assembly.

The reason for this emphasis on assembly sover-eignty is two-fold. First, the local assembly is the mostaccessible forum for practicing direct democracy andguarding against the re-emergence of power differentialsand new forms of hierarchy. Since the assembly in-cludes all members of the community on equal termsand operates through direct participation rather thanrepresentation, it offers the best opportunity for extend-ing collective self-management to all spheres of sociallife. Second, the local assembly makes it possible forpeople to decide on their economic and political affairsin a comprehensive and coherent manner, through face-to-face discussion with the people they live with, playwith, and work with. The popular assembly encouragesa holistic approach to public matters, one that recog-nizes the myriad interconnections among economic,social, and ecological concerns.

Much of this vision will only be practicable inconjunction with a radical overhaul of the technologicalinfrastructure, something which social ecologists supporton environmental as well as democratic grounds. Weforesee most production taking place locally, withspecialized functions socialized and conceptual andmanual labor integrated. Still, there will be someimportant social goods that cannot or should not becompletely decentralized; advanced research institutes,for example, will serve large regions even though theywill be hosted by one municipality. Thus confederation,which offsets parochialism and insularity, plays anessential role within social ecology’s political vision.

While the primary focus of this scenario is on localcommunities generating economic policies tailored totheir own social end ecological circumstances, socialecologists reject the notions of local self-sufficiency andeconomic autarchy as values in themselves; we considerthese things desirable if and when they contribute tosocial participation and ecologically nuanced demo-cratic decision making. We foresee a confederation ofassemblies in consistent dialogue with one another viaconfederal bodies made up of recallable and mandateddelegates from each constituent assembly. These bodiesare established as outgrowths of the directly democraticlocal communities, not as substitutes for them. Sinceeconomic relations, in particular, often involve coopera-tion with distant communities, confederation offers amutually compatible framework for sharing resources,skills, and knowledge.

A confederal network of popular assemblies offers a

Over the past few years, social ecologists andadvocates of Participatory Economics have started to

engage in a discussion on these two bodies oflibertarian thought. This discussion has raised manyimportant questions about the form a liberated society

might take. This past summer, the Institute for SocialEcology hosted a debate between ParticipatoryEconomist Michael Albert and social ecologist Peter

Staudenmaier on our on-line discussion forums.Michael Albert is the co-founder of South End

Press, Z Magazine, Z Media Institute, and various on-

line projects, including ZNet. While he writes about avery wide range of topics, one of his primaryintellectual foci has long been the development and

popularization of economic vision and strategy. Thefruits of this labor, largely undertaken with RobinHahnel, are the economic model, vision, and approach

which they call Participatory Economics.The debate sought to examine the work of these

two bodies of thought as they relate to questions of

the form a liberated society might take, the underlyingvalues that such a society rests upon, and an activistpractice that would lead us in this direction. The

debate was framed around two brief position paperson each writer’s vision for a liberated society. Theseposition papers were then followed up with critical

and questioning rejoinders which framed a month-long debate. The debate is currently open to thepublic for further discussion.

Visit the debate on-line at:

www.social-ecology.org/forums

Discuss!

practical way for all people to consciously direct theirlives together and to pursue common goals as part of aproject of social freedom. Bringing together solidarityand autonomy, we can recreate politics, the art ofcommunal self-management, as the highest form ofdirect action. In such a world, economics as we know ittoday will no longer exist. When work becomescreative activity, when production becomes the harmo-nization of human and ecological potentials, wheneconomics becomes collective self-determination andthe conscious unfolding of social, natural, and ethicalpossibilities as yet unimagined, then we will haveachieved a liberated society, and the ideas outlined herewill take on concrete form as lived realities and directexperiences.I


A REMARKABLE FEATURE OF SOCIAL ECOLOGY IS THAT MURRAY BOOKCHIN’Svision of an ecological society goes beyond the development of eco-technologies and organic agriculture, but expands into thephilosophical realm through dialectical naturalism. Murray recognizesthe importance of healing the seemingly disparate relationship betweennature and culture (first and second nature) by reminding us of thedevelopmental relationship between them (dialectical naturalism).Through his discourses on dialectical naturalism, Murray invites theparticipation of ecologists, biologists, and scientists generally involvedin the subject of evolution. The following essay is a critique of oneaspect of dialectical naturalism. It is an attempt and also an invitationto other social ecologists, to develop and refine Murray’s important andprovocative work on the relationship between nature and culture.

For Murray, dialectical naturalism serves as a potential source ofobjective ethics for developing ecological societies as demonstrated bythe following quote:

Today we may well be able to permit Nature—not God or Spirit or an Élan Vital—to open itself up to us as theground for an ethics on its own terms. Contemporary sciences’ greatest achievement is the growing evidence itprovides that randomness is subject to a directive ordering principle, mutualism is good by virtue of its fostering theevolution of natural variety and complexity.1

If there are indeed trends or universal laws that determine the evolution of first nature, then humans should deriveethics based upon these principles. Murray is particularly interested in those trends that are compatible withanarchist principles. An ecological society would be based upon a harmonious existence within its eco-community(ecosystem)2 by fostering mutualistic and non-hierarchical relationships (mutualism), diversity (variation) and self-organization (autopoeisis). In accordance with dialectical naturalism, an ecological society would, in general,maximize the opportunities for unfettered directionality toward greater complexity, diversity, and subjectivity.Murray’s ecological society takes the form of libertarian municipalism, the assemblage of multiple self-governingcommunities into a complex of confederations. The complexity of the confederation allows for a cultural diversitythat facilitates freedom by diminishing racism, classism, and any other “isms” that act to oppress and suppress thepotentialities latent within individuals of the human species.

As a student of social ecology and one trying to integrate my background as a biologist, I was drawn to thequestion of whether nature could provide a basis for deriving ethics. Scientists have been searching for universallaws in evolutionary biology ever since Darwin. The search represents a contemporary chapter in the historical questfor universal laws in the physical and chemical sciences. Aside from the satisfaction of understanding the worldaround us, there are, after all, practical reasons for deriving laws—they allow us to make predictions. In theecological sciences they provide a basis for reconstructing ecosystems (restoration ecology) and inform decisionsregarding the conservation and management of wildlife. The laws that determine evolution are not as easily subjectto testing by the scientific method as in ecology, nor is their practicality obvious. In evolutionary science the trendsare more philosophical in nature: (1) whether the tempo of evolution is rapid or gradual (punctuated equilibrium vs.gradualism), (2) whether evolution is goal-oriented and (3) whether evolution proceeds by an increase in complexityand diversity.

Murray’s argument that nature has directionality toward ever-greater complexity and diversity initially struck meas provocative, if not problematic. The existence of multicellular plants and animals is often used to argue thatevolution proceeds by an increase in complexity. Evolutionary biology is still in the process of describing the

Buttercups and SunflowersOn the Evolution of First and Second Nature

By Sonja Schmitz


extraordinary leap life took in its transitions fromprokaryotic cells (bacteria) to the first eukaryotic cells(protists) and from these single celled organisms tomulticellular fungi, plants and animals. One caninterpret this progression favorably by emphasizing thecooperative, communal, and mutualistic tendenciesrequired by these transitions, which is what MurrayBookchin does. Murray wants to equate the evolutionof a confederation of multiple self-governingcommunities with the evolution of multicellularorganisms. There is however, a darker side to thisprogression. The evolution of complex life forms is astory rife with tension between the autonomy of theindividual cell and the drive to assemble intocommunities of cells for the sake of survival. This initself is not incompatible with social ecology. But, theassemblage of autonomous beings is usuallyaccompanied by the reduction of the individual intospecialized and compartmentalized functions, words thatconjure images of authoritarian communism and fascistpolitical regimes. Therefore, I would like to examinewhether it is indeed desirable to derive ethics from whatbiologists “know” about the evolution of first nature.

The endosymbiotic theory proposed by LynnMargulis suggests that the evolution of eukaryotic cellsmay well have occurred by the ingestion (butincomplete digestion) of one bacterium by anotherabout 1.5 million years ago (mya).3 In the process, theundifferentiated soup of molecules that comprised theguts of bacterial cells was organized into an assemblageof specialized compartments called organelles, each witha separate function much like our own organs. Theresulting eukaryotic cell harbors remnants of itsprokaryotic ancestors, mitochondria and chloroplasts,once intact, autonomous individuals, now dependentupon and part of a greater assemblage. Therefore, theevolution of the eukaryotic cell occurred at the expenseof autonomous bacterial cells, which are mere vestigesof what they once were (mitochondria andchloroplasts).

The next level of differentiation involves theassemblage of single celled eukaryotes (protists) intocolonies of cells and the first multicellular organisms.Biologists see evidence of this transition in some algalspecies like Volvox. Volvox consists of a hollow spheremade up of a single layer of 500 to 60,000 flagellatedcells that function in photosynthesis and in the motilityof the colony. Other cells in the Volvox communityfunction solely in reproduction (sex cells). Thismulticellular community operates as a result of thesimultaneous specialization of function of individualcells and a division of labor among them. The next step

is the organization of hundreds of thousands of cells intotissues and organ systems. Not much is known abouthow this transition occurred, but multicellularinvertebrate animals with organ systems suddenlyappear in the fossil record about 700 mya (Ediacara,Australia). Nevertheless, the same themes of reductionand specialization are observed in the evolution ofmulticellular fungi, plants and animals.

An example from the plant kingdom, the buttercupand the sunflower, will illustrate how the themes ofspecialization and reduction resurface in the evolutionof complex multicellular organisms. The buttercupflower is considered primitive, meaning it is one of theearliest flower structures observed in the fossil recordand several million years older than the sunflowerlineage. (There are more ancient lineages amongflowering plants, but I am choosing the buttercuplineage because everyone can picture them). Each partof the flower is distinguishable and together comprises areproductive organ—the buttercup flower. It has fivegreen sepals, five yellow petals, many single stamens(male flower parts) and many pistils (female flowerparts) that develop into little fruits called achenes.Upon initial inspection, the sunflower does not appearmuch different. It has many green sepals, yellow petals,stamens, and pistils. Although the sunflower looks likea buttercup, its structure is deceivingly different. The


sunflower is a community of individual flowers, eachwith a specialized reproductive function. The outerflowers each have one yellow petal; their pistils andstamens are inactive or nonexistent. On the otherhand, the petals of the inner flowers have been fusedinto a yellow tube; and their pistils and stamens are stillfunctional. The outer flowers with petals function toattract pollinators, while the inner tubular flowersproduce seed.

The buttercup and the sunflower represent twolevels of complexity. The buttercup is a simple flowerwith many parts that produces many seeds, while thesunflower is a community of many individual flowerswith specialized functions, each producing a single seed.The buttercup is an autonomous individual capable ofreproduction, while individuals of the mega-sunflowercommunity cannot function autonomously anymore,and must reproduce as a unit.

I have often thought that Murray’s libertarianmunicipalism is like the sunflower; each self-governingmunicipality is a single flower, while the mega-sunflowercommunity represents the confederation. But, uponcloser examination, the analogy is inadequate. Theevolution of complexity in plants is not compatiblewith, nor can it be equated with, the kind of complexityand diversity Murray envisions as facilitating freedom inhis libertarian municipalities. The sort of reduction,specialization, and loss of autonomy observed in theevolution of multicellular organisms is more compatiblewith the functioning of a nation state or fascist politicalregime. Therefore the evolution of complexity hasoutcomes frighteningly compatible with politicalregimes that do not embrace the ideas of social ecology.If the buttercup and the sunflower are interpreted asexamples of the evolution of complexity, do we want tocite this trend for constructing ecological societies orconfederations?

Perhaps it is inappropriate to compare the evolutionof plants with the evolution of human social systems.While trends in the evolutionary process can beidentified, they are not universal and do not necessarilyapply across all lineages of life. Each of the fivekingdoms is on a separate evolutionary trajectory, as is

each phylum in the animal genealogy. Even if we wereto limit our examination to mammals or primates, is itappropriate to extend the “laws” or principles of firstnature and superimpose them upon cultural evolution?I would argue that because cultural evolution is uniquelyhuman, and not a generalized trend among otherlineages, the trends observed in first nature do notnecessarily apply to second nature.

Although Murray applauds science in its

achievements in illuminating the role of mutualism,diversity, complexity (and other anarchist tendencies);evolutionary biology is only beginning to yield underthe scrutiny of the scientific method, or in other words,provide an objective inquiry into the laws of evolution.The exploration into the evolution of complexity hasleft me with grave doubts as to whether social ecologistswant to derive ethics from first nature. My doubtshowever, do not diminish my desire to constructsocieties on the basis of mutualism and diversity.Perhaps the themes of mutualism and diversity hold upbetter under examination than does the evolution ofcomplexity.

In summary, this essay raises two separate yet relatedquestions. Can we derive an objective ethics from thetrends or laws of first nature? And if such trends,principles or universal laws do exist, is it appropriate oreven desirable to cite them for the construction ofecological human societies? I reserve an examinationinto these questions for future essays and invite othersocial ecologists to join in the inquiry.I

Notes1. Murray Bookchin, “Toward a Philosophy of Nature”in The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black RoseBooks, 1995), p. 64.2. Scientific terminology is in parenthesis3. Lynn Margulis, Early Life (Boston: Jones andBartlett Publishers Inc., 1984), p. 75-104.

If the buttercup and the sunflower areinterpreted as examples of the evolution of complexity,

do we want to cite this trend for constructingecological societies or confederations?

{


Beehive Design Collective


By Murray Bookchin

TheCommunalist

Project

Cliff Harper


WHETHER THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WILL BE THE MOST RADICAL OF TIMES OR THE MOST REACTIONARY

—or will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal mediocrity—will depend overwhelminglyupon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the

theoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries ofthe revolutionary era. The direction we select, from among several intersecting roads of humandevelopment, may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as thisirrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological weapons, we cannot ignore the possibilitythat the entire human enterprise may come to a devastating end. Given the exquisitely elaboratetechnical plans that the military-industrial complex has devised, the self-extermination of the humanspecies must be included in the futuristic scenarios that, at the turn of the millennium, the mass mediaare projecting—the end of a human future as such.

Lest these remarks seem too apocalyptic, I should emphasize that we also live in an era whenhuman creativity, technology, and imagination have the capability to produce extraordinary materialachievements and to endow us with societies that allow for a degree of freedom that far and awayexceeds the most dramatic and emancipatory visions projected by social theorists such as Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin.1 Many thinkers of the postmodern age haveobtusely singled out science and technology as the principal threats to human well-being, yet fewdisciplines have imparted to humanity such a stupendous knowledge of the innermost secrets ofmatter and life, or provided our species better with the ability to alter every important feature ofreality and to improve the well-being of human and nonhuman life-forms.

We are thus in a position either to follow a path toward a grim “end of history,” in which a banalsuccession of vacuous events replaces genuine progress, or to move on to a path toward the truemaking of history, in which humanity genuinely progresses toward a rational world. We are in aposition to choose between an ignominious finale, possibly including the catastrophic nuclearoblivion of history itself, and history’s rational fulfillment in a free, materially abundant society in anaesthetically crafted environment.

Notwithstanding the technological marvels that competing enterprises of the ruling class (that is,the bourgeoisie) are developing in order to achieve hegemony over one another, little of a subjectivenature that exists in the existing society can redeem it. Precisely at a time when we, as a species, arecapable of producing the means for amazing objective advances and improvements in the humancondition and in the nonhuman natural world—advances that could make for a free and rationalsociety— we stand almost naked morally before the onslaught of social forces that may very well leadto our physical immolation. Prognoses about the future are understandably very fragile and are easilydistrusted. Pessimism has become very widespread, as capitalist social relations become more deeplyentrenched in the human mind than ever before, and as culture regresses appallingly, almost to avanishing point. To most people today, the hopeful and very radical certainties of the twenty-yearperiod between the Russian Revolution of 1917-18 and the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939seem almost naïve.

Yet our decision to create a better society, and our choice of the way to do it, must come fromwithin ourselves, without the aid of a deity, still less a mystical “force of nature” or a charismatic leader.If we choose the road toward a better future, our choice must be the consequence of our ability—andours alone—to learn from the material lessons of the past and to appreciate the real prospects of thefuture. We will need to have recourse, not to ghostly vagaries conjured up from the murky hell ofsuperstition or, absurdly, from the couloirs of the academy, but to the innovative attributes that makeup our very humanity and the essential features that account for natural and social development, asopposed to the social pathologies and accidental events that have sidetracked humanity from its self-fulfillment in consciousness and reason. Having brought history to a point where nearly everything ispossible, at least of a material nature—and having left behind a past that was permeated ideologicallyby mystical and religious elements produced by the human imagination—we are faced with a newchallenge, one that has never before confronted humanity. We must consciously create our ownworld, not according to demonic fantasies, mindless customs, and destructive prejudices, butaccording to the canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our own species.


What factors should be decisive in making our choice?First, of great significance is the immense accumulationof social and political experience that is available torevolutionaries today, a storehouse of knowledge that,properly conceived, could be used to avoid the terribleerrors that our predecessors made and to spare humanitythe terrible plagues of failed revolutions in the past. Ofindispensable importance is the potential for a newtheoretical springboard that has been created by thehistory of ideas, one that provides the means to catapultan emerging radical movement beyond existing socialconditions into a future that fosters humanity’semancipation.

But we must also be fully aware of the scope of theproblems that we face. We must understand withcomplete clarity where we stand in the development ofthe prevailing capitalist order, and we have to graspemergent social problems and address them in theprogram of a new movement. Capitalism isunquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appearin history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains asystem of commodity exchange in which objects thatare made for sale and profit pervade and mediate mosthuman relations. Yet capitalism is also a highly mutablesystem, continually advancing the brutal maxim thatwhatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of itsrivals must die. Hence “growth” and perpetual changebecome the very laws of life of capitalist existence. Thismeans that capitalism never remains permanently inonly one form; it must always transform the institutionsthat arise from its basic social relations.

Although capitalism became a dominant societyonly in the past few centuries, it long existed on theperiphery of earlier societies: in a largely commercialform, structured around trade between cities andempires; in a craft form throughout the EuropeanMiddle Ages; in a hugely industrial form in our owntime; and if we are to believe recent seers, in aninformational form in the coming period. It has creatednot only new technologies but also a great variety ofeconomic and social structures, such as the small shop,the factory, the huge mill, and the industrial andcommercial complex. Certainly the capitalism of theIndustrial Revolution has not completely disappeared,any more than the isolated peasant family and smallcraftsman of a still earlier period have been consigned tocomplete oblivion. Much of the past is alwaysincorporated into the present; indeed, as Marxinsistently warned, there is no “pure capitalism,” andnone of the earlier forms of capitalism fade away untilradically new social relations are established andbecome overwhelmingly dominant. But today

capitalism, even as it coexists with and utilizesprecapitalist institutions for its own ends (see Marx’sGrundrisse for this dialectic), now reaches into thesuburbs and the countryside with its shopping malls andnewly styled factories. Indeed, it is by no meansinconceivable that one day it will reach beyond ourplanet. In any case, it has produced not only newcommodities to create and feed new wants but newsocial and cultural issues, which in turn have given riseto new supporters and antagonists of the existingsystem. The famous first part of Marx and Engels’sCommunist Manifesto, in which they celebratecapitalism’s wonders, would have to be periodicallyrewritten to keep pace with the achievements—as wellas the horrors—produced by the bourgeoisie’sdevelopment.

One of the most striking features of capitalism todayis that in the Western world the highly simplified two-class structure—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—that Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto,predicted would become dominant under “mature”capitalism (and we have yet to determine what“mature,” still less “late” or “moribund” capitalismactually is) has undergone a process of reconfiguration.The conflict between wage labor and capital, while ithas by no means disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it possessed in the past.Contrary to Marx’s expectations, the industrial workingclass is now dwindling in numbers and is steadily losingits traditional identity as a class—which by no meansexcludes it from a potentially broader and perhaps moreextensive conflict of society as a whole against capitalistsocial relations. Present-day culture, social relations,cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, andtransportation have remade the traditional proletariat,upon which syndicalists and Marxists wereoverwhelmingly, indeed almost mystically focused, intoa largely petty-bourgeois stratum whose mentality ismarked by its own bourgeois utopianism of“consumption for the sake of consumption.” We canforesee a time when the proletarian, whatever the colorof his or her collar or place on the assembly line, will becompletely replaced by automated and evenminiaturized means of production that are operated by afew white-coated manipulators of machines and bycomputers.

By the same token, the living standards of thetraditional proletariat and its material expectations (nosmall factor in the shaping of social consciousness!)have changed enormously, soaring within only ageneration or two from near poverty to a comparativelyhigh degree of material affluence. Among the children


and grandchildren of former steel and automobileworkers and coal miners, who have no proletarian classidentity, a college education has replaced the highschool diploma as emblematic of a new class status. Inthe United States once-opposing class interests haveconverged to a point that almost 50 percent ofAmerican households own stocks and bonds, while ahuge number are proprietors of one kind or another,possessing their own homes, gardens, and rural summerretreats.

Given these changes, the stern working man orwoman, portrayed in radical posters of the past with aflexed, highly muscular arm holding a bone-crushinghammer, has been replaced by the genteel and well-mannered (so-called) “working middle class.” Thetraditional cry “Workers of the world, unite!” in its oldhistorical sense becomes ever moremeaningless. The class-consciousnessof the proletariat, which Marx tried toawaken in The Communist Manifesto,has been hemorrhaging steadily and inmany places has virtually disappeared.The more existential class struggle hasnot been eliminated, to be sure, anymore than the bourgeoisie couldeliminate gravity from the existinghuman condition, but unless radicalstoday become aware of the fact that ithas been narrowed down largely to theindividual factory or office, they will fail to see that anew, perhaps more expansive form of socialconsciousness can emerge in the generalized strugglesthat face us. Indeed, this form of social consciousnesscan be given a refreshingly new meaning as the conceptof the rebirth of the citoyen—a concept so important tothe Great Revolution of 1789 and its more broadlyhumanistic sentiment of sociality that it became theform of address among later revolutionaries summonedto the barricades by the heraldic crowing of the redFrench rooster.

Seen as a whole, the social condition thatcapitalism has produced today stands very much at oddswith the simplistic class prognoses advanced by Marxand by the revolutionary French syndicalists. After theSecond World War, capitalism underwent an enormoustransformation, creating broad new social issues withextraordinary rapidity, issues that went beyondtraditional proletarian demands for improved wages,hours, and working conditions: notably environmental,gender, hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues.Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its threats tohumanity, particularly with climatic changes that may

alter the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutionsof a global scope, and rampant urbanization thatradically corrodes the civic life basic to grassrootspolitics.

Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced anissue as class—as witness the extent to which manysocial analyses have singled out managers, bureaucrats,scientists, and the like as emerging, ostensibly dominantgroups. New and elaborate gradations of status andinterests count today to an extent that they did not inthe recent past; they blur the conflict between wagelabor and capital that was once so central, clearlydefined, and militantly waged by traditional socialists.Class categories are now intermingled with hierarchicalcategories based on race, gender, sexual preference, andcertainly national or regional differences. Status

differentiations, characteristic ofhierarchy, tend to converge with classdifferentiations, and a more all-inclusivecapitalistic world is emerging in whichethnic, national, and gender differencesoften surpass the importance of classdifferences in the public eye. Thisphenomenon is not entirely new: in theFirst World War countless Germansocialist workers cast aside their earliercommitment to the red flags ofproletarian unity in favor of thenational flags of their well-fed and

parasitic rulers and went on to plunge bayonets into thebodies of French and Russian socialist workers—as theydid, in turn, under the national flags of their ownoppressors.

At the same time capitalism has produced a new,perhaps paramount contradiction: the clash between aneconomy based on unending growth and the desiccationof the natural environment.2 This issue and its vastramifications can no more be minimized, let alonedismissed, than the need of human beings for food or air.At present the most promising struggles in the West,where socialism was born, seem to be waged less aroundincome and working conditions than around nuclearpower, pollution, deforestation, urban blight, education,health care, community life, and the oppression ofpeople in underdeveloped countries—as witness the(albeit sporadic) antiglobalization upsurges, in whichblue- and white-collar “workers” march in the sameranks with middle-class humanitarians and aremotivated by common social concerns. Proletariancombatants become indistinguishable from middle-classones. Burly workers, whose hallmark is a combativemilitancy, now march behind “bread and puppet”

The more existential

class struggle has not

been eliminated any

more than the

bourgeoisie could

eliminate gravity


theater performers, often with a considerable measure ofshared playfulness. Members of the working and middleclasses now wear many different social hats, so to speak,challenging capitalism obliquely as well as directly oncultural as well as economic grounds.

Nor can we ignore, in deciding what direction weare to follow, the fact that capitalism, if it is notchecked, will in the future—and not necessarily thevery distant future—differ appreciably from the system weknow today. Capitalist development can be expected tovastly alter the social horizon in the years ahead. Canwe suppose that factories, offices, cities, residentialareas, industry, commerce, and agriculture, let alonemoral values, aesthetics, media, popular desires, and thelike will not change immensely before the twenty-firstcentury is out? In the past century, capitalism, above allelse, has broadened social issues—indeed, the historical social question ofhow a humanity, divided by classes andexploitation, will create a society basedon equality, the development ofauthentic harmony, and freedom—toinclude those whose resolution wasbarely foreseen by the liberatory socialtheorists in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Our age, with itsendless array of “bottom lines” and“investment choices,” now threatens toturn society itself into a vast andexploitative marketplace.3

The public with which the progressive socialist hadto deal is also changing radically and will continue to doso in the coming decades. To lag in understandingbehind the changes that capitalism is introducing andthe new or broader contradictions it is producing wouldbe to commit the recurringly disastrous error that led tothe defeat of nearly all revolutionary upsurges in thepast two centuries. Foremost among the lessons that anew revolutionary movement must learn from the pastis that it must win over broad sectors of the middle class toits new populist program. No attempt to replacecapitalism with socialism ever had or will have theremotest chance of success without the aid of thediscontented petty bourgeoisie, whether it was theintelligentsia and peasantry-in-uniform of the RussianRevolution or the intellectuals, farmers, shopkeepers,clerks, and managers in industry and even ingovernment in the German upheavals of 1918-21. Evenduring the most promising periods of past revolutionarycycles, the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the German SocialDemocrats, and Russian Communists never acquiredabsolute majorities in their respective legislatives

bodies. So-called “proletarian revolutions” wereinvariably minority revolutions, usually even within theproletariat itself, and those that succeeded (often briefly,before they were subdued or drifted historically out ofthe revolutionary movement) depended overwhelminglyon the fact that the bourgeoisie lacked active supportamong its own military forces or was simply sociallydemoralized.

GIVEN THE CHANGES THAT WE ARE WITNESSING AND THOSE

that are still taking form, social radicals can no longeroppose the predatory (as well as immensely creative)capitalist system by using the ideologies and methodsthat were born in the first Industrial Revolution, when afactory proletarian seemed to be the principalantagonist of a textile plant owner. (Nor can we use

ideologies that were spawned byconflicts that an impoverishedpeasantry used to oppose feudal andsemifeudal landowners.) None of theprofessedly anticapitalist ideologies ofthe past—Marxism, anarchism,syndicalism, and more generic forms ofsocialism—retain the same relevancethat they had at an earlier stage ofcapitalist development and in an earlierperiod of technological advance. Norcan any of them hope to encompass themultitude of new issues, opportunities,

problems, and interests that capitalism has repeatedlycreated over time.

Marxism was the most comprehensive and coherenteffort to produce a systematic form of socialism,emphasizing the material as well as the subjectivehistorical preconditions of a new society. This project,in the present era of precapitalist economicdecomposition and of intellectual confusion, relativism,and subjectivism, must never surrender to the newbarbarians, many of whom find their home in what wasonce a barrier to ideological regression—the academy.We owe much to Marx’s attempt to provide us with acoherent and stimulating analysis of the commodity andcommodity relations, to an activist philosophy, asystematic social theory, an objectively grounded or“scientific” concept of historical development, and aflexible political strategy. Marxist political ideas wereeminently relevant to the needs of a terribly disorientedproletariat and to the particular oppressions that theindustrial bourgeoisie inflicted upon it in England in the1840s, somewhat later in France, Italy, and Germany,and very presciently in Russia in the last decade ofMarx’s life. Until the rise of the populist movement in

for the most part, as

we have seen,

Marxism’s economic

insights belonged to

an era of emerging

factory capitalism


Russia (most famously, the Narodnaya Volya), Marxexpected the emerging proletariat to become the greatmajority of the population in Europe and NorthAmerica, and to inevitably engage in revolutionary classwar as a result of capitalist exploitation andimmiseration. And especially between 1917 and 1939,long after Marx’s death, Europe was indeed beleagueredby a mounting class war that reached the point ofoutright workers’ insurrections. In 1917, owing to anextraordinary confluence of circumstances—particularlywith the outbreak of the First World War, whichrendered several quasi-feudal European social systemsterribly unstable—Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to use(but greatly altered) Marx’s writings in order to takepower in an economically backward empire, whose sizespanned eleven time zones across Europe and Asia.4

But for the most part, as we have seen, Marxism’seconomic insights belonged to an era of emergingfactory capitalism in the nineteenth century. Brilliantas a theory of the material preconditions for socialism, itdid not address the ecological, civic, and subjectiveforces or the efficient causes that could impel humanityinto a movement for revolutionary social change. Onthe contrary, for nearly a century Marxism stagnatedtheoretically. Its theorists were often puzzled bydevelopments that have passed it by and, since the1960s, have mechanically appended environmentalistand feminist ideas to its formulaic ouvrierist outlook.

By the same token, anarchism—which, I believe,represents in its authentic form a highly individualisticoutlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, oftenas a substitute for mass action—is far better suited toarticulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craftworld than a modern urban and industrial environment.I myself once used this political label, but furtherthought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it issimply not a social theory. Its foremost theoristscelebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism and theliberatory effects of “paradox” or even “contradiction,”to use Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, andwithout prejudice to the earnestness of many anarchisticpractices, a case can made that many of the ideas ofsocial and economic reconstruction that in the pasthave been advanced in the name of “anarchy” wereoften drawn from Marxism (including my own conceptof “post-scarcity,” which understandably infuriatedmany anarchists who read my essays on the subject).Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has oftenprevented anarchists from telling us or evenunderstanding clearly what they are: individualistswhose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong

commitment to personal liberty rather than to socialfreedom, or socialists committed to a structured,institutionalized, and responsible form of socialorganization. Anarchism’s idea of self-regulation (auto-nomos) led to a radical celebration of Nietzsche’s all-absorbing will. Indeed the history of this “ideology” ispeppered with idiosyncratic acts of defiance that vergeon the eccentric, which not surprisingly have attractedmany young people and aesthetes.

In fact anarchism represents the most extremeformulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfetteredautonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts ofdefiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of theindividual over or even against society and the personalisticabsence of responsibility for the collective welfare—leads toa radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so centralto Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass socialaction as futile and alien to their private concerns andmade a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists calledgrupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highlypersonal rather than social.

Anarchism has often been confused withrevolutionary syndicalism, a highly structured and well-developed mass form of libertarian trade unionism that,unlike anarchism, was long committed to democraticprocedures,5 to discipline in action, and to organized,long-range revolutionary practice to eliminatecapitalism. Its affinity with anarchism stems from itsstrong libertarian bias, but bitter antagonisms betweenanarchists and syndicalists have a long history in nearlyevery country in Western Europe and North America, aswitness the tensions between the Spanish CNT and theanarchist groups associated with Tierra y Libertad earlyin the twentieth century; between the revolutionarysyndicalist and anarchist groups in Russia during the1917 revolution; and between the IWW in the UnitedStates and Sweden, to cite the more illustrative cases inthe history of the libertarian labor movement. Morethan one American anarchist was affronted by Joe Hill’sdefiant maxim on the eve of his execution in Utah:“Don’t mourn—Organize!” Alas, small groups were notquite the “organizations” that Joe Hill, or the grosslymisunderstood idol of the Spanish libertarianmovement, Salvador Seguí, had in mind. It was largelythe shared word libertarian that made it possible forsomewhat confused anarchists to coexist in the sameorganization with revolutionary syndicalists. It wasoften verbal confusion rather than ideological claritythat made possible the coexistence in Spain of the FAI,as represented by the anarchist Federica Montseny, with


the syndicalists, as represented by Juan Prieto, in theCNT-FAI, a truly confused organization if ever therewas one.

Revolutionary syndicalism’s destiny has been tied invarying degrees to a pathology called ouvrierisme, or“workerism,” and whatever philosophy, theory ofhistory, or political economy it possesses has beenborrowed, often piecemeal and indirectly, from Marx—indeed, Georges Sorel and many other professedrevolutionary syndicalists in the early twentieth centuryexpressly regarded themselves as Marxists and evenmore expressly eschewed anarchism. Moreover,revolutionary syndicalism lacks a strategy for socialchange beyond the general strike, which revolutionaryuprisings such as the famous October and Novembergeneral strikes in Russia during 1905 proved to bestirring but ultimately ineffectual. Indeed, as invaluableas the general strike may be as a prelude to directconfrontation with the state, they decidedly do nothave the mystical capacity that revolutionarysyndicalists assigned to them as means for social change.Their limitations are striking evidence that, as episodicforms of direct action, general strikes are not equatablewith revolution nor even with profound social changes,which presuppose a mass movement and require years ofgestation and a clear sense of direction. Indeed,revolutionary syndicalism exudes a typical ouvrieristanti-intellectualism that disdains attempts to formulatea purposive revolutionary direction and a reverence forproletarian “spontaneity” that, at times, has led it intohighly self-destructive situations. Lacking the means foran analysis of their situation, the Spanish syndicalists(and anarchists) revealed only a minimal capacity tounderstand the situation in which they foundthemselves after their victory over Franco’s forces in thesummer of 1936 and no capacity to take “the next step”to institutionalize a workers’ and peasants’ form ofgovernment.

What these observations add up to is that Marxists,revolutionary syndicalists, and authentic anarchists allhave a fallacious understanding of politics, which shouldbe conceived as the civic arena and the institutions bywhich people democratically and directly manage theircommunity affairs. Indeed the Left has repeatedlymistaken statecraft for politics by its persistent failure tounderstand that the two are not only radically differentbut exist in radical tension—in fact, opposition—toeach other.6 As I have written elsewhere, historicallypolitics did not emerge from the state—an apparatuswhose professional machinery is designed to dominateand facilitate the exploitation of the citizenry in theinterests of a privileged class. Rather, politics, almost by

definition, is the active engagement of free citizens inthe handling their municipal affairs and in their defenseof its freedom. One can almost say that politics is the“embodiment” of what the French revolutionaries of the1790s called civicisme. Quite properly, in fact, the wordpolitics itself contains the Greek word for “city” or polis,and its use in classical Athens, together with democracy,connoted the direct governing of the city by its citizens.Centuries of civic degradation, marked particularly bythe formation of classes, were necessary to produce thestate and its corrosive absorption of the political realm.

A defining feature of the Left is precisely theMarxist, anarchist, and revolutionary syndicalist beliefthat no distinction exists, in principle, between thepolitical realm and the statist realm. By emphasizingthe nation-state—including a “workers’ state”—as thelocus of economic as well as political power, Marx (aswell as libertarians) notoriously failed to demonstratehow workers could fully and directly control such a statewithout the mediation of an empowered bureaucracyand essentially statist (or equivalently, in the case oflibertarians, governmental) institutions. As a result, theMarxists unavoidably saw the political realm, which itdesignated a “workers’ state,” as a repressive entity,ostensibly based on the interests of a single class, theproletariat.

Revolutionary syndicalism, for its part, emphasizedfactory control by workers’ committees and confederaleconomic councils as the locus of social authority,thereby simply bypassing any popular institutions thatexisted outside the economy. Oddly, this was economicdeterminism with a vengeance, which, tested by theexperiences of the Spanish revolution of 1936, provedcompletely ineffectual. A vast domain of realgovernmental power, from military affairs to theadministration of justice, fell to the Stalinists and theliberals of Spain, who used their authority to subvert thelibertarian movement—and with it, the revolutionaryachievements of the syndicalist workers in July 1936, orwhat was dourly called by one novelist “The BriefSummer of Spanish Anarchism.”

As for anarchism, Bakunin expressed the typicalview of its adherents in 1871 when he wrote that thenew social order could be created “only through thedevelopment and organization of the nonpolitical orantipolitical social power of the working class in cityand country,” thereby rejecting with characteristicinconsistency the very municipal politics which hesanctioned in Italy around the same year. Accordingly,anarchists have long regarded every government as a stateand condemned it accordingly—a view that is a recipefor the elimination of any organized social life whatever.


While the state is the instrument by which an oppressiveand exploitative class regulates and coercively controlsthe behavior of an exploited class by a ruling class, agovernment—or better still, a polity—is an ensemble ofinstitutions designed to deal with the problems ofconsociational life in an orderly and hopefully fairmanner. Every institutionalized association thatconstitutes a system for handling public affairs—with orwithout the presence of a state—is necessarily agovernment. By contrast, every state, althoughnecessarily a form of government, is a force for classrepression and control. Annoying as it must seem toMarxists and anarchist alike, the cry for a constitution,for a responsible and a responsivegovernment, and even for law or nomoshas been clearly articulated—andcommitted to print!—by the oppressedfor centuries against the capricious ruleexercised by monarchs, nobles, andbureaucrats. The libertarian oppositionto law, not to speak of government assuch, has been as silly as the image of asnake swallowing its tail. Whatremains in the end is nothing but aretinal afterimage that has noexistential reality.

The issues raised in the preceding pages are of morethan academic interest. As we enter the twenty-firstcentury, social radicals need a socialism—libertarian andrevolutionary—that is neither an extension of thepeasant-craft “associationism” that lies at the core ofanarchism nor the proletarianism that lies at the core ofrevolutionary syndicalism and Marxism. Howeverfashionable the traditional ideologies (particularlyanarchism) may be among young people today, a trulyprogressive socialism that is informed by libertarian aswell as Marxian ideas but transcends these olderideologies must provide intellectual leadership. Forpolitical radicals today to simply resuscitate Marxism,anarchism, or revolutionary syndicalism and endowthem with ideological immortality would be obstructiveto the development of a relevant radical movement. Anew and comprehensive revolutionary outlook isneeded, one that is capable of systematically addressingthe generalized issues that may potentially bring most ofsociety into opposition to an ever-evolving andchanging capitalist system.

The clash between a predatory society based onindefinite expansion and nonhuman nature has given riseto an ensemble of ideas that has emerged as theexplication of the present social crisis and meaningfulradical change. Social ecology, a coherent vision of

social development that intertwines the mutual impactof hierarchy and class on the civilizing of humanity, hasfor decades argued that we must reorder social relationsso that humanity can live in a protective balance withthe natural world.7

Contrary to the simplistic ideology of “eco-anarchism,” social ecology maintains that anecologically oriented society can be progressive ratherthan regressive, placing a strong emphasis not onprimitivism, austerity, and denial but on materialpleasure and ease. If a society is to be capable of makinglife not only vastly enjoyable for its members but alsoleisurely enough that they can engage in the intellectual

and cultural self-cultivation that isnecessary for creating civilization and avibrant political life, it must notdenigrate technics and science butbring them into accord with visionshuman happiness and leisure. Socialecology is an ecology not of hunger andmaterial deprivation but of plenty; itseeks the creation of a rational societyin which waste, indeed excess, will becontrolled by a new system of values;and when or if shortages arise as aresult of irrational behavior, popular

assemblies will establish rational standards ofconsumption by democratic processes. In short, socialecology favors management, plans, and regulationsformulated democratically by popular assemblies, notfreewheeling forms of behavior that have their origin inindividual eccentricities.

IT IS MY CONTENTION THAT COMMUNALISM IS THE

overarching political category most suitable toencompass the fully thought out and systematic views ofsocial ecology, including libertarian municipalism anddialectical naturalism.8 As an ideology, Communalismdraws on the best of the older Left ideologies—Marxismand anarchism, more properly the libertarian socialisttradition—while offering a wider and more relevantscope for our time. From Marxism, it draws the basicproject of formulating a rationally systematic andcoherent socialism that integrates philosophy, history,economics, and politics. Avowedly dialectical, itattempts to infuse theory with practice. Fromanarchism, it draws its commitment to antistatism andconfederalism, as well as its recognition that hierarchy isa basic problem that can be overcome only by alibertarian socialist society.9

The choice of the term Communalism to encompassthe philosophical, historical, political, and

A defining feature ofthe Left is... thebelief that no

distinction exists, inprinciple, betweenthe political realm

and the statist realm


organizational components of a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The wordoriginated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when thearmed people of the French capital raised barricades notonly to defend the city council of Paris and itsadministrative substructures but also to create anationwide confederation of cities and towns to replacethe republican nation-state. Communalism as anideology is not sullied by the individualism and theoften explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor does itcarry the historical burden of Marxism’sauthoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism. It doesnot focus on the factory as its principal social arena oron the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent;and it does not reduce the free community of the futureto a fanciful medieval village. Its most important goal isclearly spelled out in a conventionaldictionary definition: Communalism,according to The American HeritageDictionary of the English Language, is ”atheory or system of government inwhich virtually autonomous localcommunities are loosely bound in afederation.”10

Communalism seeks to recapturethe meaning of politics in its broadest,most emancipatory sense, indeed, tofulfill the historic potential of themunicipality as the developmentalarena of mind and discourse. It conceptualizes themunicipality, potentially at least, as a transformativedevelopment beyond organic evolution into the domainof social evolution. The city is the domain where thearchaic blood-tie that was once limited to theunification of families and tribes, to the exclusion ofoutsiders, was—juridically, at least—dissolved. Itbecame the domain where hierarchies based onparochial and sociobiological attributes of kinship,gender, and age could be eliminated and replaced by afree society based on a shared common humanity.Potentially, it remains the domain where the once-feared stranger can be fully absorbed into thecommunity—initially as a protected resident of acommon territory and eventually as a citizen, engaged inmaking policy decisions in the public arena. It is aboveall the domain where institutions and values have theirroots not in zoology but in civil human activity.

Looking beyond these historical functions, themunicipality constitutes the only domain for anassociation based on the free exchange of ideas and acreative endeavor to bring the capacities ofconsciousness to the service of freedom. It is the

domain where a mere animalistic adaptation to anexisting and pregiven environment can be radicallysupplanted by proactive, rational intervention into theworld—indeed, a world yet to be made and molded byreason— with a view toward ending the environmental,social, and political insults to which humanity and thebiosphere have been subjected by classes andhierarchies. Freed of domination as well as materialexploitation—indeed, recreated as a rational arena forhuman creativity in all spheres of life—the municipalitybecomes the ethical space for the good life.Communalism is thus no contrived product of merefancy: it expresses an abiding concept and practice ofpolitical life, formed by a dialectic of social developmentand reason.

As a explicitly political body of ideas, Communalismseeks to recover and advance thedevelopment of the city (or commune)in a form that accords with its greatestpotentialities and historical traditions.This is not to say that Communalismaccepts the municipality as it is today.Quite to the contrary, the modernmunicipality is infused with manystatist features and often functions asan agent of the bourgeois nation-state.Today, when the nation-state stillseems supreme, the rights that modernmunicipalities possess cannot be

dismissed as the epiphenomena of more basic economicrelations. Indeed, to a great degree, they are the hard-won gains of commoners, who long defended themagainst assaults by ruling classes over the course ofhistory—even against the bourgeoisie itself.

The concrete political dimension of Communalismis known as libertarian municipalism, about which Ihave previously written extensively.11 In its libertarianmunicipalist program, Communalism resolutely seeks toeliminate statist municipal structures and replace themwith the institutions of a libertarian polity. It seeks toradically restructure cities’ governing institutions intopopular democratic assemblies based on neighborhoods,towns, and villages. In these popular assemblies,citizens—including the middle classes as well as theworking classes—deal with community affairs on a face-to-face basis, making policy decisions in a directdemocracy, and giving reality to the ideal of ahumanistic, rational society.

Minimally, if we are to have the kind of free sociallife to which we aspire, democracy should be our form ofa shared political life. To address problems and issuesthat transcend the boundaries of a single municipality,

Communalism seeks

to recapture the

meaning of politics

in its broadest, most

emancipatory sense


in turn, the democratized municipalities should jointogether to form a broader confederation. Theseassemblies and confederations, by their very existence,could then challenge the legitimacy of the state andstatist forms of power. They could expressly be aimed atreplacing state power and statecraft with popular powerand a socially rational transformative politics. And theywould become arenas where class conflicts could beplayed out and where classes could be eliminated.

Libertarian municipalists do not delude themselvesthat the state will view with equanimity their attemptsto replace professionalized power with popular power.They harbor no illusions that the ruling classes willindifferently allow a Communalist movement todemand rights that infringe on the state’s sovereigntyover towns and cities. Historically, regions, localities,and above all towns and cities have desperatelystruggled to reclaim their local sovereignty from thestate (albeit not always for high-minded purposes).Communalists’ attempt to restore the powers of townsand cities and to knit them together into confederationscan be expected to evoke increasing resistance fromnational institutions. That the new popular-assemblyistmunicipal confederations will embody a dual poweragainst the state that becomes a source of growingpolitical tension is obvious. Either a Communalistmovement will be radicalized by this tension and willresolutely face all its consequences, or it will surely sinkinto a morass of compromises that absorb it back intothe social order that it once sought to change. How themovement meets this challenge is a clear measure of itsseriousness in seeking to change the existing politicalsystem and the social consciousness it develops as asource of public education and leadership.

Communalism constitutes a critique of hierarchicaland capitalist society as a whole. It seeks to alter notonly the political life of society but also its economiclife. On this score, its aim is not to nationalize theeconomy or retain private ownership of the means ofproduction but to municipalize the economy. It seeks tointegrate the means of production into the existentiallife of the municipality, such that every productiveenterprise falls under the purview of the local assembly,which decides how it will function to meet the interestsof the community as a whole. The separation betweenlife and work, so prevalent in the modern capitalisteconomy, must be overcome so that citizens’ desires andneeds, the artful challenges of creation in the course ofproduction, and role of production in fashioningthought and self-definition are not lost. “Humanitymakes itself,” to cite the title of V. Gordon Childe’sbook on the urban revolution at the end of the

Neolithic age and the rise of cities, and it does so notonly intellectually and esthetically, but by expandinghuman needs as well as the productive methods forsatisfying them. We discover ourselves—ourpotentialities and their actualization—through creativeand useful work that not only transforms the naturalworld but leads to our self-formation and self-definition.

We must also avoid the parochialism and ultimatelythe desires for proprietorship that have afflicted so manyself-managed enterprises, such as the “collectives” in theRussian and Spanish revolutions. Not enough has beenwritten about the drift among many “socialistic” self-managed enterprises, even under the red and red-and-black flags, respectively, of revolutionary Russia andrevolutionary Spain, toward forms of collectivecapitalism that ultimately led many of these concerns tocompete with one another for raw materials andmarkets.12

Most importantly, in Communalist political life,workers of different occupations would take their seatsin popular assemblies not as workers—printers,plumbers, foundry workers and the like, with specialoccupational interests to advance—but as citizens,whose overriding concern should be the general interestof the society in which they live. Citizens should befreed of their particularistic identity as workers,specialists, and individuals concerned primarily withtheir own particularistic interests. Municipal life shouldbecome a school for the formation of citizens, both byabsorbing new citizens and by educating the young,while the assemblies themselves should function notonly as permanent decision-making institutions but asarenas for educating the people in handling complexcivic and regional affairs.13

In a Communalist way of life, conventionaleconomics, with its focus on prices and scarce resources,would be replaced by ethics, with its concern for humanneeds and the good life. Human solidarity—or philia, asthe Greeks called it—would replace material gain andegotism. Municipal assemblies would become not onlyvital arenas for civic life and decision-making butcenters where the shadowy world of economic logistics,properly coordinated production, and civic operationswould be demystified and opened to the scrutiny andparticipation of the citizenry as a whole. Theemergence of the new citizen would mark atranscendence of the particularistic class being oftraditional socialism and the formation of the “newman” which the Russian revolutionaries hoped theycould eventually achieve. Humanity would now be ableto rise to the universal state of consciousness andrationality that the great utopians of the nineteenth


century and the Marxists hoped their efforts wouldcreate, opening the way to humanity’s fulfillment as aspecies that embodies reason rather than materialinterest and that affords material post-scarcity ratherthan an austere harmony enforced by a morality ofscarcity and material deprivation.14

Classical Athenian democracy of the fifth centuryB.C.E., the source of the Western democratic tradition,was based on face-to-face decision-making in communalassemblies of the people and confederations of thosemunicipal assemblies. For more than two millennia, thepolitical writings of Aristotle recurrently served toheighten our awareness of the city as the arena for thefulfillment of human potentialities for reason, self-consciousness, and the good life. Appropriately,Aristotle traced the emergence of the polis from thefamily or oikos—i.e., the realm of necessity, wherehuman beings satisfied their basically animalistic needs,and where authority rested with the eldest male. Butthe association of several families, he observed, “aim[ed]at something more than the supply of daily needs”15; thisaim initiated the earliest political formation, the village.Aristotle famously described man (by which he meantthe adult Greek male16) as a “political animal” (politikonzoon) who presided over family members not only tomeet their material needs but as the materialprecondition for his participation in political life, inwhich discourse and reason replaced mindless deeds,custom, and violence. Thus, “[w]hen several villages areunited in a single complete community (koinonan), largeenough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing,” hecontinued, “the polis comes into existence, originating inthe bare needs of life, and continuing in existence forthe sake of a good life.”17

For Aristotle, and we may assume also for theancient Athenians, the municipality’s proper functionswere thus not strictly instrumental or even economic.As the locale of human consociation, the municipality,and the social and political arrangements that peopleliving there constructed, was humanity’s telos, the arenapar excellence where human beings, over the course ofhistory, could actualize their potentiality for reason, self-consciousness, and creativity. Thus for the ancientAthenians, politics denoted not only the handling ofthe practical affairs of a polity but civic activities thatwere charged with moral obligation to one’s community.All citizens of a city were expected to participate incivic activities as ethical beings.

Examples of municipal democracy were not limitedto ancient Athens. Quite to the contrary, long beforeclass differentiations gave rise to the state, manyrelatively secular towns produced the earliest

institutional structures of local democracy. Assembliesof the people may have existed in ancient Sumer, at thevery beginning of the so-called “urban revolution” someseven or eight thousand years ago. They clearlyappeared among the Greeks, and until the defeat of theGracchus brothers, they were popular centers of powerin republican Rome. They were nearly ubiquitous inthe medieval towns of Europe and even in Russia,notably in Novgorod and Pskov, which, for a time, wereamong the most democratic cities in the Slavic world.The assembly, it should be emphasized, began toapproximate its truly modern form in the neighborhoodParisian sections of 1793, when they became theauthentic motive forces of the Great Revolution andconscious agents for the making of a new body politic.That they were never given the consideration theydeserve in the literature on democracy, particularlydemocratic Marxist tendencies and revolutionarysyndicalists, is dramatic evidence of the flaws thatexisted in the revolutionary tradition.

These democratic municipal institutions normallyexisted in combative tension with grasping monarchs,feudal lords, wealthy families, and freebooting invadersuntil they were crushed, frequently in bloody struggles.It cannot be emphasized too strongly that every greatrevolution in modern history had a civic dimension that hasbeen smothered in radical histories by an emphasis onclass antagonisms, however important theseantagonisms have been. Thus it is unthinkable that theEnglish Revolution of the 1640s can be understoodwithout singling out London as its terrain; or, by thesame token, any discussions of the various FrenchRevolutions without focusing on Paris, or the RussianRevolutions without dwelling on Petrograd, or theSpanish Revolution of 1936 without citing Barcelona asits most advanced social center. This centrality of thecity is not a mere geographic fact; it is, above all, aprofoundly political one, which involved the ways inwhich revolutionary masses aggregated and debated, thecivic traditions that nourished them, and theenvironment that fostered their revolutionary views.

Libertarian municipalism is an integral part of theCommunalist framework, indeed its praxis, just asCommunalism as a systematic body of revolutionarythought is meaningless without libertarianmunicipalism. The differences between Communalismand authentic or “pure” anarchism, let alone Marxism,are much too great to be spanned by a prefix such asanarcho-, social, neo-, or even libertarian. Any attempt toreduce Communalism to a mere variant of anarchismwould be to deny the integrity of both ideas—indeed, toignore their conflicting concepts of democracy,


organization, elections, government, and the like.Gustave Lefrancais, the Paris Communard who mayhave coined this political term, adamantly declared thathe was “a Communalist, not an anarchist.”18

Above all, Communalism is engaged with theproblem of power.19 In marked contrast to the variouskinds of communitarian enterprises favored by many self-designated anarchists, such as “people’s” garages, printshops, food coops, and backyard gardens, adherents ofCommunalism mobilize themselves to electorally engagein a potentially important center of power—themunicipal council—and try to compel it to createlegislatively potent neighborhood assemblies. Theseassemblies, it should be emphasized, would make everyeffort to delegitimate and depose the statist organs thatcurrently control their villages, towns, or cities andthereafter act as the real engines in theexercise of power. Once a number ofmunicipalities are democratized alongcommunalist lines, they wouldmethodically confederate intomunicipal leagues and challenge therole of the nation-state and, throughpopular assemblies and confederalcouncils, try to acquire control overeconomic and political life.

Finally, Communalism, in contrastto anarchism, decidedly calls fordecision-making by majority voting asthe only equitable way for a large number of people tomake decisions. Authentic anarchists claim that thisprinciple—the “rule” of the minority by the majority—is authoritarian and propose instead to make decisionsby consensus. Consensus, in which single individualscan veto majority decisions, threatens to abolish societyas such. A free society is not one in which its members,like Homer’s lotus-eaters, live in a state of bliss withoutmemory, temptation, or knowledge. Like it or not,humanity has eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and itsmemories are laden with history and experience. In alived mode of freedom—contrary to mere café chatter—the rights of minorities to express their dissenting viewswill always be protected as fully as the rights ofmajorities. Any abridgements of those rights would beinstantly corrected by the community—hopefullygently, but if unavoidable, forcefully—lest social lifecollapse into sheer chaos. Indeed, the views of aminority would be treasured as potential source of newinsights and nascent truths that, if abridged, would denysociety the sources of creativity and developmentaladvances—for new ideas generally emerge from inspiredminorities that gradually gain the centrality they

deserve at a given time and place—until, again, theytoo are challenged as the conventional wisdom of aperiod that is beginning to pass away and requires new(minority) views to replace frozen orthodoxies.

IT REMAINS TO ASK: HOW ARE WE TO ACHIEVE THIS RATIONAL

society? One anarchist writer would have it that thegood society (or a true “natural” disposition of affairs,including a “natural man”) exists beneath the oppressiveburdens of civilization like fertile soil beneath the snow.It follows from this mentality that all we are obliged todo to achieve the good society is to somehow eliminatethe snow, which is to say capitalism, nation-states,churches, conventional schools, and other almostendless types of institutions that perversely embodydomination in one form or another. Presumably an

anarchist society—once state,governmental, and cultural institutionsare merely removed—would emergeintact, ready to function and thrive as afree society. Such a “society,” if onecan even call it such, would not requirethat we proactively create it: we wouldsimply let the snow above it melt away.The process of rationally creating a freeCommunalist society, alas, will requiresubstantially more thought and workthan embracing a mystified concept ofaboriginal innocence and bliss.

A Communalist society should rest, above all, onthe efforts of a new radical organization to change theworld, one that has a new political vocabulary toexplain its goals, and a new program and theoreticalframework to make those goals coherent. It would,above all, require dedicated individuals who are willingto take on the responsibilities of education and, yes,leadership. Unless words are not to become completelymystified and obscure a reality that exists before ourvery eyes, it should minimally be acknowledged thatleadership always exists and does not disappear becauseit is clouded by euphemisms such as “militants” or, as inSpain, “influential militants.” It must also beacknowledge that many individuals in earlier groups likethe CNT were not just “influential militants” butoutright leaders, whose views were given moreconsideration—and deservedly so!—than those ofothers because they were based on more experience,knowledge, and wisdom, as well as the psychologicaltraits that were needed to provide effective guidance. Aserious libertarian approach to leadership would indeedacknowledge the reality and crucial importance ofleaders—all the more to establish the greatly needed

The separation

between life and

work... must be

overcome so that

citizens’ desires and

needs... are not lost.


formal structures and regulations that can effectivelycontrol and modify the activities of leaders and recallthem when the membership decides their respect isbeing misused or when leadership becomes an exercisein the abusive exercise of power.

A libertarian municipalist movement shouldfunction, not with the adherence of flippant andtentative members, but with people who have beenschooled in the movement’s ideas, procedures andactivities. They should, in effect, demonstrate a seriouscommitment to their organization—an organizationwhose structure is laid out explicitly in a formalconstitution and appropriate bylaws. Without ademocratically formulated and approved institutionalframework whose members and leaders can be heldaccountable, clearly articulated standards ofresponsibility cease to exist. Indeed, itis precisely when a membership is nolonger responsible to its constitutionaland regulatory provisions thatauthoritarianism develops andeventually leads to the movement’simmolation. Freedom fromauthoritarianism can best be assuredonly by the clear, concise, and detailedallocation of power, not by pretensionsthat power and leadership are forms of“rule” or by libertarian metaphors thatconceal their reality. It has beenprecisely when an organization fails to articulate theseregulatory details that the conditions emerge for itsdegeneration and decay.

Ironically, no stratum has been more insistent indemanding its freedom to exercise its will againstregulation than chiefs, monarchs, nobles, and thebourgeoisie; similarly even well-meaning anarchistshave seen individual autonomy as the true expression offreedom from the “artificialities” of civilization. In therealm of true freedom—that is, freedom that has beenactualized as the result of consciousness, knowledge, andnecessity—to know what we can and cannot do is morecleanly honest and true to reality than to avert theresponsibility of knowing the limits of the lived world.Said a very wise man more than a century and a halfago: “Men make their own history, but they do notmake it just as they please.”

THE NEED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LEFT TO ADVANCE

courageously beyond a Marxist, anarchist, syndicalist, orvague socialist framework toward a Communalistframework is particularly compelling today. Rarely inthe history of leftist political ideas have ideologies been

so wildly and irresponsibly muddled; rarely has ideologyitself been so disparaged; rarely has the cry for “Unity!”on any terms been heard with such desperation. To besure, the various tendencies that oppose capitalismshould indeed unite around efforts to discredit andultimately efface the market system. To such ends,unity is an invaluable desideratum: a united front of theentire Left is needed in order to counter the entrenchedsystem—indeed, culture—of commodity production andexchange, and to defend the residual rights that themasses have won in earlier struggles against oppressivegovernments and social systems.

The urgency of this need, however, does not requiremovement participants to abandon mutual criticism, orto stifle their criticism of the authoritarian traits presentin anticapitalist organizations. Least of all does it

require them to compromise the integrityand identity of their various programs.The vast majority of participants intoday’s movement are inexperiencedyoung radicals who have come of age inan era of postmodernist relativism. Asa consequence, the movement ismarked by a chilling eclecticism, inwhich tentative opinions arechaotically mismarried to ideals thatshould rest on soundly objectivepremises.20 In a milieu where the clearexpression of ideas is not valued and

terms are inappropriately used, and whereargumentation is disparaged as “aggressive” and, worse,“divisive,” it becomes difficult to formulate ideas in thecrucible of debate. Ideas grow and mature best, in fact,not in the silence and controlled humidity of anideological nursery, but in the tumult of dispute andmutual criticism.

Following revolutionary socialist practices of thepast, Communalists would try to formulate a minimumprogram that calls for satisfaction of the immediateconcerns of the masses, such as improved wages andshelter or adequate park space and transportation. Thisminimum program would aim to satisfy the mostelemental needs of the masses, to improve their accessto the resources that make daily life tolerable. Themaximum program, by contrast, would present an imageof what human life could be like under libertariansocialism, at least as far as such a society is foreseeablein a world that is continually changing under theimpact of seemingly unending industrial revolutions.

Even more, however, Communalists would see theirprogram and practice as a process. Indeed, a transitionalprogram in which each new demand provides the

What these demands

try to achieve, in the

short term, are new

rules of engagement

between the people

and capital


existing irrational society into a rational one. Ourchoices on how to transform the existing society are stillon the table of history and are faced with immenseproblems. But unless present and future generations arebeaten into complete submission by a culture based onqueasy calculation as well as by police with tear gas andwater cannons, we cannot desist from fighting for whatfreedoms we have and try to expand them into a freesociety wherever the opportunity to do so emerges. Atany rate we now know, in the light of all the weaponryand means of ecological destruction that are at hand,that the need for radical change cannot be indefinitelydeferred. What is clear is that human beings are muchtoo intelligent not to have a rational society; the mostserious question we face is whether they are rationalenough to achieve one.I

Notes1. Many less-well-known names could be added to thislist, but one that in particular I would like very much tosingle out is the gallant leader of the Left SocialistRevolutionary Party, Maria Spiridonova, whose supporterswere virtually alone in proposing a workable revolutionaryprogram for the Russian people in 1917-18. Their failureto implement their political insights and replace theBolsheviks (with whom they initially joined in forming thefirst Soviet government) not only led to their defeat butcontributed to the disastrous failure of revolutionarymovements in the century that followed.

2. I frankly regard this contradiction as morefundamental than the often-indiscernible tendency of therate of profit to decline and thereby to render capitalistexchange inoperable—a contradiction to which Marxistsassigned a decisive role in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.

3. Contrary to Marx’s assertion that a society disappearsonly when it has exhausted its capacity for newtechnological developments, capitalism is in a state ofpermanent technological revolution—at times,frighteningly so. Marx erred on this score: it will takemore than technological stagnation to terminate thissystem of social relations. As new issues challenge thevalidity of the entire system, the political and ecologicaldomains will become all the more important.Alternatively, we are faced with the prospect thatcapitalism may pull down the entire world and leavebehind little more than ashes and ruin—achieving, inshort, the “capitalist barbarism” of which Rosa Luxemburgwarned in her “Junius” essay.

springboard for escalating demands that lead towardmore radical and eventually revolutionary demands.One of the most striking examples of a transitionaldemand was the programmatic call in the latenineteenth century by the Second International for apopular militia to replace a professional army. In stillother cases, revolutionary socialists demanded thatrailroads be publicly owned (or, as revolutionarysyndicalists might have demanded, be controlled byrailroad workers) rather than privately owned andoperated. None of these demands were in themselvesrevolutionary, but they opened pathways, politically, torevolutionary forms of ownership and operation—which, in turn, could be escalated to achieve themovement’s maximum program. Others might criticizesuch step-by-step endeavors as “reformist,” butCommunalists do not contend that a Communalistsociety can be legislated into existence. What thesedemands try to achieve, in the short term, are new rulesof engagement between the people and capital—rulesthat are all the more needed at a time when “directaction” is being confused with protests of mere eventswhose agenda is set entirely by the ruling classes.

On the whole, Communalism is trying to rescue arealm of public action and discourse that is eitherdisappearing or that is being be reduced to often-meaningless engagements with the police, or to streettheater that, however artfully, reduces serious issues tosimplistic performances that have no instructiveinfluence. By contrast, Communalists try to buildlasting organizations and institutions that can play asocially transformative role in the real world.Significantly, Communalists do not hesitate to runcandidates in municipal elections who, if elected, woulduse what real power their offices confer to legislatepopular assemblies into existence. These assemblies, inturn, would have the power ultimately to createeffective forms of town-meeting government. Inasmuchas the emergence of the city—and city councils—longpreceded the emergence of class society, councils basedon popular assemblies are not inherently statist organs,and to participate seriously in municipal electionscountervails reformist socialist attempts to elect statistdelegates by offering the historic libertarian vision ofmunicipal confederations as a practical, combative, andpolitically credible popular alternative to state power.Indeed, Communalist candidacies, which explicitlydenounce parliamentary candidacies as opportunist, keepalive the debate over how libertarian socialism can beachieved—a debate that has been languishing for years.

There should be no self-deception about theopportunities that exist as a means of transforming our


4. I use the word extraordinary because, by Marxiststandards, Europe was still objectively unprepared for asocialist revolution in 1914. Much of the continent, infact, had yet to be colonized by the capitalist market orbourgeois social relations. The proletariat—still a veryconspicuous minority of the population in a sea of peasantsand small producers—had yet to mature as a class into asignificant force. Despite the opprobrium that has beenheaped on Plekhanov, Kautsky, Bernstein et al., they had abetter understanding of the failure of Marxist socialism toembed itself in proletarian consciousness than did Lenin.Luxemburg, in any case, straddled the so-called “social-patriotic” and “internationalist” camps in her image of aMarxist party’s function, in contrast to Lenin, herprincipal opponent in the so-called “organizationalquestion” in the Left of the wartime socialists, who wasprepared to establish a “proletarian dictatorship” under alland any circumstances. The First World War was by nomeans inevitable, and it generated democratic andnationalist revolutions rather than proletarian ones.(Russia, in this respect, was no more a “workers’ state”under Bolshevik rule than were the Hungarian andBavarian “soviet” republics.) Not until 1939 was Europeplaced in a position where a world war was inevitable.The revolutionary Left (to which I belonged at the time)frankly erred profoundly when it took a so-called“internationalist” position and refused to support theAllies (their imperialist pathologies notwithstanding)against the vanguard of world fascism, the Third Reich.

5. Kropotkin, for example, rejected democratic decision-making procedures: “Majority rule is as defective as anyother kind of rule,” he asserted. See Peter Kropotkin,“Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles,” inKropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, edited by Roger N.Baldwin (1927; reprinted by New York: Dover, 1970), p.68.

6. I have made the distinction between politics andstatecraft in, for example, Murray Bookchin, FromUrbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship(1987; reprinted by London: Cassell, 1992), pp. 41-3, 59-61

7. On social ecology, see Murray Bookchin, The Ecologyof Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy(1982; reprinted by Warner, NH: Silver Brook, 2002); TheModern Crisis (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987); andRemaking Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989).The latter two books are out of print; some copies may beavailable from the Institute for Social Ecology inPlainfield, Vermont ([email protected]).

8. Several years ago, while I still identified myself as ananarchist, I attempted to formulate a distinction between

“social” and “lifestyle” anarchism, and I wrote an articlethat identified Communalism as “the democraticdimension of anarchism” (see Left Green Perspectives, no.31, October 1994). I no longer believe thatCommunalism is a mere “dimension” of anarchism,democratic or otherwise; rather, it is a distinct ideologywith a revolutionary tradition that has yet to be explored.

9. To be sure, these points undergo modification inCommunalism: for example, Marxism’s historicalmaterialism, explaining the rise of class societies, isexpanded by social ecology’s explanation of theanthropological and historical rise of hierarchy. Marxiandialectical materialism, in turn, is transcended bydialectical naturalism; and the anarcho-communist notionof a very loose “federation of autonomous communes” isreplaced with a confederation from which its components,functioning in a democratic manner through citizens’assemblies, may withdraw only with the approval of theconfederation as a whole.

10. What is so surprising about this minimalist dictionarydefinition is its overall accuracy: I would take issue onlywith its formulations “virtually autonomous” and “looselybound,” which suggest a parochial and particularistic, evenirresponsible relationship of the components of aconfederation to the whole.

11. My writings on libertarian municipalism date back tothe early 1970s, with “Spring Offensives and SummerVacations,” Anarchos, no. 4 (1972). The more significantworks include From Urbanization to Cities (1987; reprintedby London: Cassell, 1992), “Theses on LibertarianMunicipalism,” Our Generation [Montreal], vol. 16, nos. 3-4 (Spring/Summer 1985); “Radical Politics in an Era ofAdvanced Capitalism,” Green Perspectives, no. 18 (Nov.1989); “The Meaning of Confederalism,” GreenPerspectives, no. 20 (November 1990); “LibertarianMunicipalism: An Overview,” Green Perspectives, no. 24(October 1991); and The Limits of the City (New York:Harper Colophon, 1974). For a concise summary, seeJanet Biehl, The Politics of Social Ecology: LibertarianMunicipalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).

12. For one such discussion, see Murray Bookchin, “TheGhost of Anarchosyndicalism,” Anarchist Studies, vol. 1,no. 1 (Spring 1993).

13. One of the great tragedies of the Russian Revolutionof 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936 was thefailure of the masses to acquire more than the scantiestknowledge of social logistics and the complex interlinkagesinvolved in providing for the necessities of life in amodern society. Inasmuch as those who had the expertiseinvolved in managing productive enterprises and inmaking cities functional were supporters of the old regime,


workers were in fact unable to actually take over the fullcontrol of factories. They were obliged instead to dependon “bourgeois specialists” to operate them, individuals whosteadily made them the victims of a technocratic elite.

14. I have previously discussed this transformation ofworkers from mere class beings into citizens, among otherplaces, in From Urbanization to Cities (1987; reprinted byLondon: Cassell, 1995), and in “Workers and the PeaceMovement” (1983), published in The Modern Crisis(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987).

15. Aristotle, Politics (1252 [b] 16), trans. BenjaminJowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised OxfordTranslation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, p. 1987.

16. As a libertarian ideal for the future of humanity and agenuine domain of freedom, the Athenian polis falls farshort of the city’s ultimate promise. Its populationincluded slaves, subordinated women, and franchiselessresident aliens. Only a minority of male citizens possessedcivic rights, and they ran the city without consulting alarger population. Materially, the stability of the polisdepended upon the labor of its noncitizens. These areamong the several monumental failings that latermunicipalities would have to correct. The polis issignificant, however, not an example of an emancipatedcommunity but for the successful functioning of its freeinstitutions.

17. Aristotle, Politics (1252 [b] 29-30), trans. Jowett;emphasis added. The words from the original Greek textmay be found in the Loeb Classical Library edition:Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1972).

18. Lefrancais is quoted in Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of aRevolutionist (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), p. 393. I

too would be obliged today to make the same statement.In the late 1950s, when anarchism in the United Stateswas a barely discernible presence, it seemed like asufficiently clear field in which I could develop socialecology, as well as the philosophical and political ideasthat would eventually become dialectical naturalism andlibertarian municipalism. I well knew that these viewswere not consistent with traditional anarchist ideas, leastof all post-scarcity, which implied that a modernlibertarian society rested on advanced materialpreconditions. Today I find that anarchism remains thevery simplistic individualistic and antirationalistpsychology it has always been. My attempt to retainanarchism under the name of “social anarchism” haslargely been a failure, and I now find that the term I haveused to denote my views must be replaced withCommunalism, which coherently integrates and goesbeyond the most viable features of the anarchist andMarxist traditions. Recent attempts to use the wordanarchism as a leveler to minimize the abundant andcontradictory differences that are grouped under that termand even celebrate its openness to “differences” make it adiffuse catch-all for tendencies that properly should be insharp conflict with one another.

19. For a discussion of the very real problems created byanarchists’ disdain for power during the 1936 SpanishRevolution, see the forthcoming article, “Anarchism andPower in the Spanish Revolution.”

20. I should note that by objective I do not refer merely toexistential entities and events but also to potentialitiesthat can be rationally conceived, nurtured, and in timeactualized into what we would narrowly call realities. Ifmere substantiality were all that the term objective meant,no ideal or promise of freedom would be an objectivelyvalid goal unless it existed under our very noses.

The Ecology of FreedomThe Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy — Third EditionSilver Book Press, an imprint of Writers Publishing Cooperative in Warner, NH.

$29.95 — Contact the ISE for ordering info.

"The Ecology of Freedom is a wayward book that takes on a life of its own. I cannot refrainfrom inviting the reader to participate in formulating the views it expresses—or shouldexpress—an invitation that it was commonplace enough for authors to make fifty years or soago, but that seems to be on its way into oblivion in the age of the television and the massmedia, where every thought has to be spelled out merely to gain the reader's understanding.Hence I will close these acknowledgments with the exquisite remarks (all failings of genderaside) of William Morris, my favorite utopian.

“Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat,and when it comes turns out to be not what the want, and other men have to fight for what theymeant under another name."

-Murray Bookchin (from acknowledgements to the third edition)


A History of theInstitute for Social EcologyPopular Education for a Free Society


THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL ECOLOGY WAS FOUNDED

IN 1974 BY SOCIAL philosopher Murray Bookchinand cultural anthropologist Daniel Chodorkoff.The ISE was created for the purpose of research,education, and outreach in the field of socialecology, an interdisciplinary perspective thatexamines peoples’ relationship to the naturalworld, and the prospects for a decentralized,directly democratic, ecological society. For almostthirty years the ISE has pursued its mission, and asa result has been involved in a myriad ofeducational programs, community organizingprojects, publications, and popular educationcampaigns, encompassing most of the significantissues and movements that have been a part ofthe radical ecology movement.

Over three thousand students from everycontinent have attended ISE programs, and keyactivists in many of the most significant socialmovements of our time have been influenced byideas they were exposed to at the ISE. For a tiny,underfunded grassroots organization in ruralVermont, the Institute has had an outsizedimpact. Its faculty are known internationally fortheir scholarship and their activism on behalf ofsocial and ecological justice.

The two articles that follow offer an outlinethat, while by no means exhaustive, cover someof the highlights of the past 29 years at the ISE.The timeline of the ISE’s history gives a sense ofthe range and scope of the projects we haveundertaken, and Brian Tokar’s article examinessocial ecology’s impact on social movements fromthe 60’s to the present. As the world enters yetanother period of crisis the ideas of social ecologyare more relevant than ever.I


EMERGING FROM THE PROLETARIAN SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS OF THE OLD LEFT, infusinga distinctly libertarian ecological outlook in the rise of the New Left, socialtheorist and activist Murray Bookchin started to lay the foundations of aremarkable revolutionary body of work which he soon called social ecology. Hispioneering book, Our Synthetic Environment, which predated Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring by five months, offered a comprehensive overview of ecologicaldegradation and elaborated upon the need for a revolutionary decentralizationof society in order to address these grave issues. By the early seventies,Bookchin’s writings were fairly well known in the US and abroad. He hadpublished several influential books and articles including “Ecology andRevolutionary Thought,” (1964) “Towards a Liberatory Technology,” (1965)“Forms of Freedom,” (1968) the essay “Post-Scarcity Anarchism,” (1969) and“Listen, Marxist!,” (1969) all of which were then compiled into the New Leftclassic Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971). Bookchin’s written work and activistengagements brought him many opportunities to address large audiences overNorth America and Europe.

It was when Daniel Chodorkoff, who at the time was a graduate studentand teaching intern at the Vermont based progressive school, Goddard College,approached Bookchin in 1972 about filling a course at the College ontechnology that the history of the Institute for Social Ecology began. Thisnewfound relationship between Bookchin and Chodorkoff had them soonplanning what would be the founding conference of the ISE.

This pioneering conference set out to examine solutions to ecologicalproblems by integrating alternative technologies with a strong social critique ofanti-ecological trends and visions for a new society based on social ecology.Noted participants included John Todd, aquatic biologist and founder of theNew Alchemy Institute; Karl Hess, social theorist, author and activist; WilsonClark, energy adviser to the governor of California; Day Charoudi, a pioneer in

Education and Community ActionA History of the Institute for Social Ecology’s Programs


solar architecture; Eugene Eccli, engineer and pioneer inthe alternative energy network; Sam Love, notedenvironmental activist; and Milton Kolter, urbanologist.This highly successful conference served to assess theviability of setting up the envisioned Institute for SocialEcology. As with the conference, the ISE would act as an importantlaboratory for teaching and learning about the ideals that Bookchin advanced inhis work.

With its nascent program in the summer of 1974, more than 100 studentsattended the first twelve-week program of the ISE on Goddard’s campus. Thesuccess of this program was in part due to a donated full-page ad by JohnShuttleworth in the then highly influential alternative technologymagazine The Mother Earth News. This foundational programcombined theoretical classroom work with practical, hands-onexperience, and focused on interrelated areas to provide educational andresearch opportunities. It was this first summer program thatpaved the way for more than 29 years of educational programsdesigned to further the mission of the ISE while providing aneducational experience for people interested in radical socialchange.

The Cate Farm EraIn 1975, the Institute moved onto a 40-acre farm at GoddardCollege. This farm served as a demonstration site forexperimentation, teaching, research, and community outreach. The first solar building in Vermont was built there,as well as many other innovative technological systems. During the years spent at Cate Farm, the ISE researchedand tested organic agriculture and aquaculture techniques, and published wind power designs. Bookchin recalls:

During the summer days, classes were conducted in nearly every dormitory and open area on Goddard’s campus. A visitorto the campus would have seen students sitting round in small circles discussing the history of hierarchy, various radicalsocial ideas, the emergence and development of the state, radical anthropology, the changing status of women and otherunderprivileged strata, ecological economics—as well technological innovations in energy, diversified applications ofmachinery, the construction and multifaceted use of fish tanks, window heat-retainers, and so on. Students used the openfields in Cate Farm to study organic agriculture and experiment with different kinds of fertilizers. Others could study andactually make new composting toilets that allowed for the recycling of human wastes into agriculturally fertile compost,

while more theoretically inclinedstudents could explore ideologies suchas socialism in its various forms, thehistory of radical movements, andutopian ideas… Free evenings werefilled with study circles to follow up onthe courses that had been givenduring the day.2

The Institute remained at Cate Farmfor five years, offering a variety ofprograms in addition to its popularsummer sessions. By 1976, the ISE’ssummer program grew toaccommodate approximately 180students. The following year alsosaw the creation of a Masters of Arts

Windmill at Cate Farm - 1978


in Social Ecology in collaboration with Goddard College, combining intensive on-campus course work with off-campus practicums.

The 80sThe eighties saw a major change in the ISE’s activities. Due to financial circumstances, Goddard College sold CateFarm in 1981, forcing the ISE to reconsider how to host its summer programs. Without a home, the ISE startedrenting various campuses for a month each summer in 1983. In 1986, Chodorkoff, who had earned a Ph.D. inCultural Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, resumed teaching at Goddard, giving the ISE’sprograms a stable home for the next decade.

Other major changes took place as well. The ISE took the first step towards becoming a fully autonomousorganization in 1981 when it was incorporated as an independent non-profit educational organization. In addition,Chodorkoff took over the directorship of the organization in 1978, as Bookchin stepped down for reasons of age andhealth. While Bookchin, then honored with the title “Director Emeritus,” maintained his involvement with the ISEas a teacher, it was under the leadership of Chodorkoff that the ISE grew—to this very day.

The focus of the ISE’s educational programs greatly expanded throughout the eighties. In 1984, the ISEsponsored an Urban Permaculture Design Course—a three-week intensive course created to educate people with abasic background in design, farming, gardening, community development or education, about the possibilities ofurban permaculture. Taking place in New York City, students designed and created a permaculture program in

conjunction with a community building.Completion in the course qualified thegraduates as Apprentice PermacultureDesigners in the InternationalAssociation of Permaculture Design.The ISE also hosted study tours includinga 15-day study tour of Mexico in 1986.This study tour was initiated to allow adozen college students a unique look at a“developing” country, investigating thesocial roots of development patterns, theimpact of both western style developmentand alternative ecological approaches.

The 1986 summer program, heldat the Green Mountain Valley School,introduced two new curricula, Planning

Overview of Cate Farm - 1978

Solar Collectors on 519 E. 11th St. NYC - 1976


and Design for Sustainable Communities and Advanced Seminars in SocialEcology. In 1987, two more programs were started for the summersemester, Ecology and Community, and Sense of Self/Sense of Place-AWilderness Experience.

The 90sThroughout the nineties, in addition to its regular summer programs,the ISE continued to sponsor conferences and colloquia, both nationaland international, on topics ranging from alternative education andlibertarian municipalism, to ecological activism and biotechnology.

The mid-nineties saw major changes to the ISE’s campus. In 1996,the ISE summer programs moved from Goddard College to the MapleHill community in Plainfield, Vermont. The following year saw thepurchase of a new campus on Maple Hill—the home of a defunctalternative school for children that featured a large land base, pond,farmhouse and schoolhouse. This new site became the focus for theISE’s continued experimentation and education around issues ofalternative technology and ecological land use. That same year, theISE started offering a B.A. Degree in Social Ecology in cooperationwith Goddard College.

During the first program on its new campus, students, faculty, andstaff began planning and drafting designs of what the new campuswould look like. In 1998, students constructed a solar washhouse andeco-campground, began a permaculture orchard and gardens, andcreated a master plan for the campus on Maple Hill as part of theirwork in the Planning, Design and Construction for SustainableCommunities program.

The Institute for Social Ecology celebrated its 25th Anniversary inthe summer of 1999, commemorating a quarter century of activism andeducation for radical social change. In 2000, after the ISE began topulled out of all relations with Goddard College, the ISE andBurlington College formed a relationship to accredit the ISE’s yearround programs and a B.A. Degree in Social Ecology with both on-and off-site campus options. While the ISE gained a new B.A.

Other ActivitiesIn accompaniment with its coreeducational programs, such as theinternationally acclaimed summerprogram Ecology & Community, the ISEhas pioneered many innovativecommunity initiatives, as well asresearched and published theories ontechnology, social theory and socialpolicy since its inception. The ISE wasalso instrumental in bringing togetherindividuals and organizations througheducational programs and conferencesto continue to develop the field of socialecology. A brief overview of suchactivities follows.

New York City: During the 1970s and1980s, the ISE cultivated a strongrelationship with various organizationsand communities in New York City,particularly within the Lower East Side’sPuerto Rican community. The ISE notonly sponsored educational events inNYC, such as Urban Alternatives:Towards an Ecological City (1975) and afollow up conference in 1982, but alsoworked collaboratively with a variety oforganizations. The ISE providedtechnical and planning assistance inalternative technology to CHARAS,CUANDO, the 11th Street Movement,and other community organizationsinvolved in the urban homesteadingmovement in NYC’s Lower East Side. Aneducational exchange was alsoestablished with these communitygroups, bringing NYC residents to theISE’s Vermont based summer programs,and sending interns from the summerprograms to work on projects with theseorganizations.

The Learning Alliance, a NYC basedorganization for community education,was founded with assistance from the

ISE Group Photo at Vershire Campus - 1985

continued...


program, the joint M.A. in SocialEcology with Goddard College was lost.

The ISE continues to offer itssummer programs, workshops, forums,conferences, and degree program at theMaple Hill campus, including newprograms such as Arts, Media, Activism,and Social Change and a year-round on-site degree program with tracks inEcological Building, Ecological Land Use,and Social Theory and Action.

THE SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL ISSUES AS

explored by Bookchin and his colleaguesover the span of his lifetime and theISE’s are still as relevant today as theywere fifty years ago. With the

rejuvenated political awareness found within the Global Justice Movement, the ISE’s educational work has drawnthe attention of a new generation of activists. As the anti-ecological trends of the 20th century become furtherentrenched within the 21st, this educational work serves multiple purposes. Now in his 82nd year, Bookchin reflectson the importance for such education:

But one proviso must be voiced: ideas areonly true when they are rational. Today,when rationality and consistency aredeprecated in the name of postmodernistchic, we carry a double burden of trying tosustain, often by education alone, reasonagainst irrationalism, and to know when toact as well as how to do so. In such cases,let me note that education, too, is a formof activism and must always be cultivatedas such.3

Notes1 While this final piece is the work of MichaelCaplan, the work herein is drawn from theinvaluable assistance and contribution of DanChodorkoff, Brian Tokar, Erin Royster, ChaiaHeller, and Murray Bookchin.2 Quoted from a personal letter from Bookchin toCaplan, February 28, 2003.3 Ibid.

Ecology & Community - 2001

Murray Bookchin at the ISE’s new Campus on Maple Hill - 1997


ISE in 1985. A large number of courses, seminars, workshops, and lectures were held on a wide range of topics in urbanaffairs and the social ecology of the city. The program then spun off to become an independent project which served as acenter for popular education, and a NYC landmark for the next ten years.

Low-Income Training: Continuing its important focus on the creation and dissemination of ecological technology, the ISEhosted a conference in 1976, which resulted in the creation of NCAT, The National Center for Appropriate Technology,which provides technical assistance to low-income communities to this day. In 1977, the ISE’s Aquaculture OutreachProgram began, providing technical assistance to low-income Vermonters interested in fish farming. The project made useof local resources to provide jobs and food for local residents. Some of the fish and crayfish programs are still in activeproduction for home consumption and as small businesses. The ISE also began a collaborative project with the CentralVermont Community Action Council (CVCAC) to teach low-income Vermonters about energy conservation and solartechnologies.

Publishing: The ISE’s education and research activities naturally resulted in several publishing projects. In 1982,Harbinger, the Journal of Social Ecology was created as a special project of the ISE to promote the study of social ecology.While only three issues were created during its short-lived existence in the 80s, the newly revamped Harbinger holds thesame goals. Next to Harbinger, the ISE has also supported various other print publishing projects, such as Society & Nature,the International Journal of Political Ecology (1992).

In 1983, a video collective associated with the ISE produced a film focused on an American community living inNicaragua—clergy, engineers, doctors, nurses, agronomists and cultural workers—who dedicated their skills to building ademocratic and ecologically sound society in Nicaragua. The film explores the conflict between social ecology principlesand the pressing needs for material development experienced by the majority of the world’s population.

Ecofeminism: In 1978, the ISE invited Ynestra King to develop what would become the first curriculum in ecofeminism.The same year, an ISE sponsored conference, Women and Life on Earth, held at the University of Massachusetts, resulted inThe Women’s Pentagon Action, a mass civil disobedience action that served as a model for the international women’speace movement.

The ISE hosted a conference called Spring Fever in 1982, a two day women’s gathering organized by the Women’sAffinity Group of the ISE that included workshops, readings, and demonstrations exploring the relationship betweenwomen, nature and community. In the late 80s, in collaboration with the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, aplanning session and workshop on women and community development was attended by low-income women andorganizations from across the continent. During the early 90s, the ISE hosted annual conferences on ecofeminism. To thisday, the ISE continues to pursue the ever important subject of feminism and ecology.

Vermont: Located within Vermont for a majority of its existence, the ISE has always been committed to working withinthe community in both an activist and educational capacity. In 1982, the ISE participated in a community organizingcampaign in cooperation with the Burlington Environmental Alliance. Together they hosted a one-day seminar forresidents who were concerned with the development of the Burlington waterfront. This group went on to helped defeat aplan for a municipal waste incinerator on the Intervale.

A pilot program in Montpelier called Gardens for Children (1984), was also sponsored by the ISE. This programinitiated learning projects in the classrooms of several schools that instructed children on gardening techniques through thecreation of gardens on school grounds. Linking into issues of local and world hunger, the garden projects donated theproduce to the local Emergency Food Shelf. Food Works, a nationally known, independent, not-for-profit organization,was a result of this project.

Conferences: Next to all the above mentioned conferences, the ISE has sponsored several other worthy of note. In 1990,the ISE co-sponsored the third annual Pitkin Conference on Higher Education. Attended by educators from all over NorthAmerica, the conference explored the converging themes of social ecology, higher education and community action. Thesame year, the Annual Continental Conference on Social Ecology was initiated, and continues today, with conferences heldin many cities over North America, including New York City, Minneapolis, Montréal, and Los Angeles.

In 1995, an International Social Ecology Network Gathering was held in Dunoon, Scotland with the aid of the ISE—thetheme was democracy and ecology. That same year, the ISE hosted an international conference, New Currents in EcologicalActivism, which brought together activists and theorists from a wide range of movements and organizations to shareexperiences and evaluate future directions. A follow-up conference was held in 1996, along with a weekend conferenceon globalization.

More recently, the ISE helped organized the International Conference on the Politics of Social Ecology: LibertarianMunicipalism. The first conference (1998), held in Lisbon, Portugal, brought together a wide range of internationalactivists and political theorists to study libertarian municipalism. The follow-up conference (1999), hosted at the ISE’s newcampus, again drew a wide range of people to continue debating issues raised at the proceeding conference.

...continued


IN THE 1950S AND EARLY 1960S, ECOLOGY WAS LARGELY AN

academic and technocratic enterprise. Several corporatethink tanks emerged during the fifties to address the rapidpace of resource depletion that accompanied theunprecedented postwar economic boom. There was littlethat was reconstructive or radical in the ecology of thatperiod, but there were already important new stirrings.The effects of nuclear fallout from weapons testing wasbecoming a volatile public issue, for example, and peopleliving close to some of the earliest nuclear power reactors,such as Indian Point just north of New York City, beganquestioning the safety of these facilities.

Within a few months in 1962, Murray Bookchinpublished his book, Our Synthetic Environment, and RachelCarson published Silent Spring. Carson’s book was serializedin the New Yorker, and eventually shocked millions ofpeople into an awareness of the devastating effects of DDTand other toxic pesticides. Bookchin’s work extended thecritique to encompass issues such as the hazards of urbanconcentration, chemical agriculture as a whole, and therise of chronic, environmentally related disease.Bookchin’s perspective on these issues emerged partly fromhis own pioneering work during the 1950s around thehazards of pesticides and food additives, as well as hispersonal involvement in some of the first anti-nuclearpower campaigns, at Indian Point and in opposition to areactor proposed for Ravenswood, Queens, just across theEast River from central Manhattan.

Meanwhile, academic ecologists were slowly beginning tosee that their work had broad, previously unappreciatedsocial and political implications. A 1964 article inBioScience labeled ecology “A Subversive Science”embodied a direct challenge to many accepted social andeconomic practices. The pace of uncontrolled economicgrowth that characterized the 1950s and early 1960s clearlycould not continue, ecologists began to argue, withoutseverely impacting the health of living ecosystems and thediversity of life on earth.

Social Ecology and Social MovementsFrom the 1960s to the Present

By Brian Tokar

nico

Social ecologists have played an important catalytic role in many of the pivotal social andecological movements of the past four decades. The discussion that follows will focus on eventsthat staff, students and volunteers around the ISE in Plainfield have been most directly involvedwith. We hope that subsequent issues of Harbinger will include stories from many others whoseinvolvement around a wide array of social, ecological and political issues have been stronglyinfluenced by the ideas of social ecology.


It was Murray Bookchin, again, who took thisunderstanding to its fullest conclusion. In an influentialarticle originally published in the newsletter Anarchos in1965 (later reprinted in Post Scarcity Anarchism), hewrote:

The explosive implications of an ecologicalapproach arise not only because ecology isintrinsically a critical science—critical on a scalethat the most radical systems of political economyhave failed to attain—but also because it is anintegrative and reconstructive science. Thisintegrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology,carried through to all its implications, leadsdirectly into anarchic areas of social thought. Forin the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve aharmonization of man [sic] and nature withoutcreating a human community that lives in a lastingbalance with its natural environment.1

This was the beginning of the radical synthesis thatsoon became social ecology. To relieve the destructiveimbalances imposed by capitalist civilization on thenatural world, only a stateless society based on face-to-face democracy, “humanistic” technologies, and aprofound decentralization of social and economic powerwould suffice. Bookchin’s writings about social ecologyevolved over the next several decades to encompass anuncompromising political analysis of the institutionalroots of the ecological crisis, an historical critique of themyth of the domination of nature, a libertarianmunicipalist political strategy, and an ethical philosophythat views the potential for human freedom as anemergent property of the dialectic of natural evolution.Ideas first articulated by Bookchin, such as thedistinction between technocratic environmentalism anda fundamentally radical ecology, became commonwisdom among the growing ranks of ecologically-informed radicals in the late 1960s. Actions such as theoccupation of the administration building at ColumbiaUniversity in 1968 (initially a protest against theuniversity’s expansion plans in West Harlem), and thecreation of People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969, began toreflect some of these new understandings.

Anti-Nuclear AlliancesSocial ecology achieved a much fuller expression in thepopular movement against nuclear power that aroseduring the late 1970s and early 1980s. This movementembraced direct action and decentralized organizationalmodels, expressed a sophisticated understanding of thecomplex relationship between technological and social

changes, and was captivated by the utopian dimensionof the emerging “appropriate technology” movement,within which the recently founded Institute for SocialEcology played a dynamic, critical and catalytic role.During the late 1970s, well over a hundred studentseach summer came to the ISE, then located at CateFarm in Plainfield, to acquire hands-on experience inorganic gardening and alternative technology, whilestudying social ecology, ecofeminism, reconstructiveanthropology and other theoretical approaches withvirtually all of the pioneering thinkers in the ecologymovement of that period.

The ISE, as a central participant in the emergingCentral Vermont activist community, sent affinitygroups to Seabrook for the landmark 1977 occupation ofthe nuclear construction site in that coastal NewHampshire town. Over 2,000 demonstrators convergedon Seabrook that spring, for what became the mostsignificant act of mass civil disobedience since the endof the 1960s. Over 1,400 people were arrested by theNew Hampshire State Police for refusing to leave theconstruction site; most declined bail and wereincarcerated for two weeks in National Guard armoriesscattered throughout the Granite State. This was wherethe concept of the affinity group first became theunderlying basis of a growing popular organization.

The affinity group concept, of course, originatedwith the Spanish anarchists of the FederaciónAnarquista Ibérica (FAI). In an appendix to hisinfluential pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!” MurrayBookchin compared the Spanish grupos de afinidad tothe countercultural collectives that had appeared bythen in numerous U.S. cities. The concept was adaptedby organizers of a huge antiwar action in Washington,D.C. in 1971, where people were encouraged to formsmall collectives to offer mutual support and security inthe face of an overwhelming police presence. In theantinuclear Clamshell Alliance, affinity groups wereinitially formed at nonviolence training sessions forsimilar purposes, but the experience of incarceration inNew Hampshire’s armories raised the expectation thatthese collectives were not only useful as support groupsduring an action, but could form the basis for a muchmore widely participatory, directly democratic form ofmovement organization than had ever been realizedbefore. In the preparations for a planned follow-upaction at Seabrook in June of 1978, the wider meaningof affinity groups was actively promoted, Bookchin’s“Note on Affinity Groups” was distributed widely, andactivists in Vermont, Boston and elsewhere in NewEngland worked hard to make the Clamshell Alliancelive up to the most profoundly democratic potential of


the organizational model it had pioneered. Antinuclearalliances organized along similar lines sprouted up allacross the country; many, like the Clamshell, took theirnames from local species of animals and plants that wereendangered by the spread of nuclear power, and adoptedaffinity groups and spokescouncils as their basicdecision-making structures.

The euphoria of affinity group-based democracy wasto be short-lived in the Clamshell, however. Protracteddebates over the appropriateness of various tacticswithin a context of organized nonviolence led to agrowing polarization. When most of the originalfounders of the Clamshell Alliance acceded to a dealwith the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office thatled to the cancellation of the 1978 Seabrook occupation

—a large legal rally was held at Seabrook instead—activists at the ISE and elsewhere helped expose theantidemocratic nature of that decision and pressed for arenewal of affinity group democracy. The Boston areachapter was completely reorganized around affinitygroups and neighborhood-based organizing collectives,and a new organization, the Coalition for Direct Actionat Seabrook, picked up where the now-falteringClamshell left off. ISE-based activists in Vermontplayed a central role in setting an appropriately openand participatory tone for that new organization, whichstaged significantly more militant-styled actions atSeabrook in 1979 and 1980.

Ecofeminist activism also arose during the yearsimmediately following the first Seabrook occupation,and the ISE played a catalytic role here as well. YnestraKing taught the first-ever courses on ecofeminism at theISE in the late 1970s, and the ISE sponsored thehistoric Women and Life on Earth conference inwestern Massachusetts in 1980. This led directly to theplanning of the first Women’s Pentagon Action laterthat year, which planted the seed for feminist peacecamps throughout Europe, and in the U.S. as well.

ISE students and staff during the 1970s and 1980salso took numerous initiatives to support NativeAmerican struggles. They worked closely with thetraditionalist Mohawks of Akwesasne—ISE studentscamped out overnight in the lobby of the New Yorkstate capitol in 1980 to protest a state of siege against

the Akwesasne Mohawks. Social ecologists traveled tothe lakes of northern Wisconsin in support of traditionalChippewa spear-fishing, looked after Navajo families’sheep in the contested Big Mountain region of Arizona,and caravaned to Montreal for a rally at theheadquarters of the Hydro-Quebec utility in solidaritywith the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec.

Green PoliticsBy the early 1980s, another important politicaldevelopment attracted the attention of social ecologistsin Vermont and elsewhere: the origins of a Greenpolitical movement in West Germany and otherEuropean countries. Long before Greens began to beelected to state and national Parliaments in Europe,

social ecologists became excited about this “anti-partyparty” that initially functioned more as an alliance ofgrassroots “citizen initiatives” than a conventionalparliamentary party. In the early 1980s, EuropeanGreens were running for office as delegates from varioussocial movements, decisions were made primarily at thelocal level, and candidates for both public office andpositions of responsibility within the Greens wereobliged to rotate their positions every two years. Greensin Germany and other countries were articulating asweeping ecological critique in all areas of public policy,from urban design, energy use and transportation, tonuclear disarmament and the need to support emergingdissident movements in Eastern Europe. Translations ofMurray Bookchin’s writings played an influential role inthe development of this new Green political agenda.

A staff member of the Institute for Social Ecologyattended the first public discussion of strategies fordeveloping a Green movement in the U.S. Thisoccurred at the first North American BioregionalCongress, in the Ozark foothills of Missouri in 1984.Within a few short weeks after that meeting was writtenup in the pages of The Nation, nearly 2,000 lettersappeared at the post office box in Marshfield, Vermontthat had been set up for Green correspondence. AGreen “Committees of Correspondence” organizationwas formally established at a gathering in St. Paul,Minnesota later that year; the ISE helped organize thatevent, and several prominent social ecologists were

Ideas from social ecology, and activists based at the ISE, playedan important role in the development of the first nationalGreen Program{


invited, including ISE director Dan Chodorkoff,community media guru Paul McIsaac and Chino Garciaof the CHARAS community center on the Lower EastSide of Manhattan.

At the St. Paul meeting, several nationally knownwriters and activists were pushing for a nationalorganization, through which self-named representativesof various Green constituencies would form a nationalorganization, relate to other NGOs on the nationallevel, and perhaps create a national Green Party withinthe year. The model that prevailed, however, was thatof a more decentralized, grassroots-based movement,rooted in Green locals empowering regional delegates tomake confederal decisions following locally-debatedmandates. Social ecologists in New England hadalready begun creating a confederation of Green localson that model, and the idea once again spread acrossthe country. By the first public national conference ofthe Greens, in Amherst, Massachusetts in July of 1987,there were already over a hundred grassroots Greenlocals spread across the U.S., along with numerous otheraffiliated groups. Ideas from social ecology, and activistsbased at the Institute, played an important role in thedevelopment of the first national Green Programbetween 1988 and 1990.

Left Greens and Youth GreensDuring that grassroots program-building process, anincreasing tension emerged between Greens committedto grassroots democracy and municipalist politics, andthose aiming toward a Green Party that could fieldcandidates for national office. Social ecologists in NewEngland circulated a call for a Left Green Network in1988, and like-minded activists in the San FranciscoBay Area developed a Radical Green caucus. The LeftGreens held their first national caucus meetings duringthe Greens’ national conference in Eugene, Oregon inJune of 1989, with a very large proportion of conferenceattendees participating.

While some in the Greens viewed the Left Greensin grimly conspiratorial terms, it turned out that LeftGreen positions were widely popular with grassrootsGreens all across the country, and significantlyinfluenced the shaping of the Green Program. Thefollowing year’s Greens gathering was held in an eliteresort town in the Rocky Mountains, and there were fartoo few Left Greens in attendance to even hold caucusmeetings. Still, most of the platform positions arguedfor by the Left Greens became incorporated in the finalprogram document. This, apparently, was the occasionwhen several influential moderate Greens decided thatthey would have to eventually secede from the existing

Green organization to create a more traditional nationalparty. Ironically, many Left Greens and other grassrootsactivists also began losing interest in the Greens at thispoint. Green moderates went on to form a separatenational organization, based exclusively on state-certified Green Parties, while the Left Green Networkcontinued holding educational conferences andpublishing materials largely independent of any otherGreen entity.

During the same period, a group of recent ISEstudents formed a youth caucus in the Greens, whicheventually became an independent organization knownas the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens debatedpositions on a wide array of issues, refined theirpositions on both external and internal matters, andattracted a significant base of young radicals largely fromoutside the Greens. However it was at the EugeneGreens gathering that Youth Greens and Left Greensunited around the idea of a major direct action tocoincide with the twentieth anniversary of the originalEarth Day during April of 1990. While mainstreamEarth Day celebrations were taking on an increasinglycompromised character—essentially casting the searchfor environmental solutions as an expression ofindividual lifestyles and consumer choices—the YouthGreens, Left Greens, and a wide array of grassrootssupporters, chose to focus on the symbolic home ofcapitalist ecocide: Wall Street.

April 22, 1990—Earth Day Sunday—was a day ofpolite, feel-good commemorations with strikingly littlesocial or political content; many big city events werealmost wholly sponsored by major corporations. Butearly Monday morning, several hundred Left Greens,Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justiceactivists, Earth First!ers and urban squatters convergedon the nerve center of U.S. capitalism seeking toobstruct the opening of trading on that day. Activistsbased around the ISE in Vermont had prepared acomprehensive action handbook, featuring a wide rangeof social ecological writings, and helped create a broad,empowering coalition effort. The next day, columnistJuan Gonzalez wrote in the New York Daily News:

Certainly, those who sought to co-opt EarthDay into a media and marketing extravaganza, tomake the public feel good while obscuring thecorporate root of the Earth’s pollution almostsucceeded. It took angry Americans from placeslike Maine and Vermont to come to Wall Street ona workday and point the blame where it belongs.

Meanwhile, in Burlington, Vermont, social


ecologists formed the Burlington Greens to developpositions on urban issues and run candidates for localoffice. The Greens opposed the commercialdevelopment of the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront,and argued that the neighborhood assembliesestablished by the Progressive city administration forplanning and administrative purposes should becomethe basis for a more empowered model of democraticneighborhood governance. The Burlington Greensgained national headlines in 1989 when the Greenscontested several City Council seats and a Greencandidate challenged the city’s Progressive mayor in acitywide election.

Confronting BiotechnologyThe ISE also became actively involved in issues aroundbiotechnology during the late 1980s, as farmers andenvironmentalists in Vermont and elsewhere werebecoming concerned that the impending release of agenetically engineered growth hormone for dairy cowswould have a devastating impact on Vermont’s smallfarm economy. A Vermont Biotechnology WorkingGroup, including activists from the ISE, Rural Vermont,the Progressive Party and the Burlington Greens, helpedraise public awareness about recombinant BovineGrowth Hormone (rBGH), and published the firstwidely accessible activist handbook on biotechnology.The Vermont effort played a significant role in delayingthe approval for the commercial use of Monsanto’srBGH by several years. Social ecologists were alsoinvolved in protesting a planned new biotechnologybuilding at the University of Vermont in Burlington,and supporting activists in New York City who wereopposing a planned biotechnology complex on the siteof the Audubon Ballroom, the famous Harlem culturalcenter where Malcolm X was assassinated following aspeech in 1965.

By the mid-1990s, it was clear that the impendingrelease of a wide variety of genetically engineered foodproducts was going to have profound implications for

public health, the environment, and society at large.Sonja Schmitz had recently come to study at the ISEafter leaving a position at DuPont’s biotechnologylaboratories, faculty member Chaia Heller becameinvolved in the early ecofeminist opposition tobiotechnology, and Brian Tokar was advising M.A.student Zoë Erwin on a biotechnology-centered Mastersstudy, while considering appropriate next steps followingthe Vermont rBGH campaign. The four began doingpresentations together at the ISE, as well as at venues inNew York, Montreal and other cities. They participatedin the First Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation inSt. Louis in 1998, launched a regional activist network,NorthEast Resistance Against Genetic Engineering

(NERAGE) and began developing plans for acomprehensive published collection on biotechnologyissues, which eventually appeared as Redesigning Life?The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (ZedBooks, 2001).

In the spring of 2000, the ISE BiotechnologyProject was the initiator and the main organizationalsponsor of Biodevastation 2000, which became the largestpublic gathering in opposition to biotechnology inNorth America to date. Some 4,000 people convergedin Boston’s Copley Square, and marched on the annualconvention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization(BIO); this protest followed a three-day public teach-inthat highlighted a wide array of issues related to boththe genetic engineering of food, and the implications ofbiotechnology for health care, medical research,globalization, and the survival of indigenous culturesaround the world. Since 2000, the BiotechnologyProject has provided significant support forBiodevastation and Biojustice events in San Diego andToronto, and is helping develop plans for major eventsin St. Louis and Washington, D.C. during 2003.

In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont townsvoted for labeling genetically engineered (GE) foodsand a moratorium on GE crops at their annual TownMeetings. Eight towns took the further step of

The work of the ISE Biotechnology Project today reflects a distinctpolitical outlook on grassroots organizing,

an approach that is firmly grounded in the principles ofdecentralism, community control, and face-to-face democracy.{


discouraging or declaring a moratorium on the plantingof GE crops in their town. This was the first round ofthe Town-to-Town campaign, in which the ISE’sBiotechnology Project has played a central educationaland organizational role, in collaboration with the farmadvocacy group Rural Vermont and the VermontGenetic Engineering Action Network. In a followupeffort in March of 2003, an additional 37 towns votedagainst GE food and crops. Vermont now has thedistinction of having 70 municipalities that have votedagainst GE food and crops out of more than 85 in theentire U.S. Our coalition partners are now focusing onpassing anti-GE legislation in Vermont, while we areworking to sustain the grassroots focus of a growing GE-Free Vermont campaign.

The work of the ISE Biotechnology Project todayreflects a distinct political outlook on grassrootsorganizing, an approach that is firmly grounded in theprinciples of decentralism, community control, andface-to-face democracy. This work has encouragedbiotechnology activists to consider the widest social andpolitical implications of these issues, and helped thoseconfronting the institutions of global capitalism tounderstand how globalization directly impacts our foodand our health. The Biotechnology Project seeks toaddress the widest possible implications of geneticengineering and other biotechnologies and solidify linksbetween biotech activists and those working primarilyon global justice issues. Similarly, ongoing workshopsand courses on biotechnology issues at the ISE reflectsocial ecology’s holistic and dialectical understandingsof society, nature, politics and technology. (For details,see, “Biotechnology: Radicalizing the Debate,” inHarbinger, Vol. 2, No. 1).

Movement for Global JusticeFinally, the ISE has played a central educational role inthe current movement for global justice and to counterthe institutions of capitalist globalism. Social ecologistshave raised discussions around the potential for directdemocracy as an alternative to increasingly centralizedeconomic and political institutions, and helped furtherthe evolution of what began as largely a protestmovement to one that is unusually conscious of theneed for a long-range reconstructive vision. During thesummer of 1999, ISE students intervened in an officialhearing in Burlington, Vermont that addressed USagricultural policy in anticipation of the Seattle WTOmeetings. Three ISE students were centrally involvedin the organizing for the WTO shutdown in Seattle, andseveral others formed an affinity group to participate inand document the actions. After Seattle, the ISE

pamphlet Bringing Democracy Home highlighted thewritings of social ecologists on potential futuredirections for the movement, and various facultymembers have highlighted these themes in theirspeaking tours. Many antiglobalization activists fromacross the country have come to the ISE in Vermontduring the past few summers to further their ownpolitical analysis and participate in discussions of wherethe movement might be heading. We look forward toongoing exchanges of ideas, theories and inspirations asthis dynamic new movement continues to evolve overthe coming years.I

Notes1. Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and RevolutionaryThought” in Post Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black RoseBooks, 1986), p. 80.


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Of the past few years, Norway and surrounding Scandinavian countries have proven to be a hotbedof activism inspired by the works of social ecology. Study groups, publishing projects, protests,conferences and seminars, anti-racist and ecological activism, and political organizational buildingare all common activities of the 4-year-old group Democratic Alternative (DA). DemocraticAlternative, an emerging Scandinavian-wide organization committed to the political visionadvanced by social ecology, represents an exciting attempt of a new association to put these idealsinto practice. According to Democratic Alternative International Secretary Eirik Eglad, theorganizations “has explicit aims to strengthen a principled and innovative international Left, andencourage the consolidation of a Communalist tendency.”

Ingrid Young, an Oslo-based member of Democratic Alternative, attended the Institute forSocial Ecology’s Ecology and Community program the summer of 2000. She became interested insocial ecology after starting high school, and soon joined the Norway-based Social Ecology Project.This now defunct group, superseded by Democratic Alternative, was devoted to the study of socialecology and community education. Ingrid came to the ISE to further her study of social ecologytheory and practice. I had the opportunity to speak to Ingrid over email about her activities.

Harbinger: What sort of political activities have you been involved with prior to studying at theInstitute for Social Ecology, and afterwards?Ingrid Young: I was introduced to the ideas of social ecology when I started high school. Soon Ibecame a member of what was called the Social Ecology Project. This little local group discussedand tried to spread the ideas of social ecology as developed by Murray Bookchin. As the projectdeveloped, we saw the need for a broader organization—one that could bring these ideas further andhelp us build a stronger social ecology movement. After some different attempts to found such anorganization, we formed Democratic Alternative. In the last two years we have grown to be aScandinavian-wide organization, and we have been met by a lot of interest from different people.

Since I left the Institute for Social Ecology, I’ve continued my work in Democratic Alternative.I have moved to the capital of Norway and have started to work with the local DA group there. Wedo not have that many members yet, but it’s a good group. Still, our activities mainly consist oftrying to spread the ideas of social ecology and Communalism in every possible way. That means alot of writing and also participating in different social forums where we can present our alternativesand ideas.

H: How did the Institute for Social Ecology and the ideas of social ecology impact you?I: My involvement in Democratic Alternative is more or less the same both before and after myparticipation in the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) Ecology and Community program. The ISEoffered me the opportunity to spend a month discussing and reading politics full time. It was a greatexperience, not to be forced back to work or to school. The ISE was a free place to reflect on theideas of social ecology without being interrupted. It was also nice to meet leftists from other groups,other than the Scandinavian ones I am familiar with, and to learn about their experiences andvisions.

How have the ideas of social ecology influenced me? I guess that only a book can answer. Ithink for me personally, the ideas of social ecology have evolved my ability to see opportunities forthe future. They have raised my consciousness from just protesting against what I find wrong, toactually being able to put forward an alternative and hope for a better future.

Radical AlternativesAn Interview with Ingrid Young

By Michael Caplan


H: What type of activities has DA been involved in sinceits formation? What plans do you have for the future?I: Democratic Alternative is, as you know, a fairly neworganization. First and foremost we value theimportance of spreading our ideas through study circles,meetings, writing and other educational work. Besidesthat, the different local DA groups work on differentinitiatives in their local communities. Largely,environmental and anti-racist work has been importantareas of focus for our local groups. Lately, we have beeninvolved with the association Globalization From Belowthat is connected to Peoples Global Action. We hadrepresentatives in Gothenburg helping to coordinatethe protests during the European Union summit thisJune.

In the future… that’s a huge question. What Ithink is so good about Democratic Alternative as anorganization is the potential we have to create and buildcounter-institutions where citizens can be in control.We want our different groups, in the long-term, toparticipate in municipal elections on radical programscontaining both maximum and minimum demands.This is an important way to raise people’s consciousnessabout these ideas, and to make people see that directdemocracy is possible.

As our membership grows, hopefully DemocraticAlternative will develop to be a powerful force able tohelp create peoples’ assemblies that are meaningful andcan be treated as a genuine alternative to representativedemocracy.

H: The politics of social ecology has been very challengingfor the revolutionary left here in North America. What sortof response has DA received from the Scandinavian Left?I: The Norwegian Left consists mostly of socialdemocrats. There are still some hard line Marxists, butthey are hardly visible in the political picture. DA isstill a relatively marginalized organization due partly toour size and partly to our short existence. It is hard toget publicity in the national media. We do cooperatewith the radical Left mainly on single cause issues. Inthese forums our ideas are accepted and discussed. Thecommunists strangely enough have problemsdistinguishing Communalism from their own ideology.The small libertarian milieu recognizes that there aredifferences between anarchism and communalism,especially on the issue of voting on the municipal level.Sweden has stronger libertarian socialist traditions,especially anarcho-syndicalism. Here, there is a widerrange of forums for discussing the ideas of Communalismand libertarian municipalism.

H: Given that the municipality is an integral locus ofmovement building for DA, are there any traditions ofNorwegian radical municipalism that you are able to buildupon?I: Here in Norway, there is a tradition of neighborhoodresidents unions that might be a possible entry point forbuilding a movement for direct democracy. They docommunity work and look after the interests of theirparticular neighborhoods. Membership is based onresidence, and its borders are formed organically bytradition. This locus has the potential to host a popularassembly. As the residents have shared interests, it isrealistic that the members might foster support forpolitical activity.

The nascent, or retreated, democratic traditionswhich already exist in the municipality represent apossible way for us to spread our ideas and to try tocreate counter institutions. There are two remains ofdemocratic tradition in Norway: residence unions andpublic meetings. A democratized municipality and aconfederation of these form a counter institution thatpresents a dual power against the State. DA sees


Where do we Stand?Statement of Purpose of Democratic Alternative

Direct DemocracyToday a small minority of professional politicians, bureaucrats and wealthy individuals enjoy enormous power,while the majority of the world’s population has been relegated to the sidelines as impotent spectators. Politicshas been reduced to a media-competition between top-down parliamentary parties. Ordinary citizens are nottreated as people, but have rather been degraded to the role of voters, taxpayers and consumers. This mustchange. We therefore advance a new politics for popular empowerment. The power over society rightly belongsin the hands of ordinary citizens and their own democratic institutions. Such a direct democracy must buildupon popular assemblies in boroughs, towns and neighborhoods, where all citizens can meet, discuss and makecollective decisions.

DecentralizationA true democracy has to build upon decentralized political institutions, allowing for public participation. Directdemocracy must therefore be anchored in the municipalities - not at the level of the county or the state.Political and economic power has to reside on the municipal level. Decentralization is also necessary from anecological point of view.

ConfederalismIn a decentralized political system many decisions and tasks must be coordinated over larger areas. Today, suchdecisions are implemented through the top-down apparatus of the nation-state. We hold up Confederalism asthe only alternative to this centralized and oppressive system. In a confederation, politics will be determined atthe grassroots level while administration and coordination will be facilitated through councils that have beenlocally elected, mandated and subject to recall.

Moral EconomyCapitalism concentrates enormous wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of business owners, corporatemanagers and stockbrokers, while systematically producing insecurity, poverty, class divisions and environmentaldestruction. Profit comes first, human beings and the environment second. This anti-social economic system hasto be replaced by a democratic and moral economy. Economic resources must be municipalized and put underdirect popular control.

Freedom for AllWe are against all forms of oppression; whether political, economic, or based on gender, skin color, age, ability,or sexual preferences. We fight for a politics that can include all, and support struggles for preserving social rightsand achieving new freedoms. We work to spread a secular, critical outlook, based on reason and a libertarianworldview.

InternationalismNationalism is a poison, which constructs imaginary demarcation lines between human beings, pitting oppressedsocial groups against one another. We will spread the knowledge that we are all part of a common humanity. Weare against all forms of immigration control and we fight all forms of racism. We will contribute to thedevelopment of a humanist politics shattering today’s borders.

From Here to ThereSocial change must be fought for at the grassroots level. We will strengthen municipalities and work for theinitiation of local forums and new democratic institutions, gathering a truly democratic counter-force inboroughs, towns and neighborhoods. We will participate in municipal elections, continually radicalizing ourdemands for drawing political and economic power down to the municipal level.


municipal elections as means to spread ideas oflibertarian municipalism, and in the long runhelp to create popular assemblies with the powerof genuine political decision-making over themunicipality. The goal is an anti-capitalist,stateless world of confederated directlydemocratic municipalities. These issues areexplored in Janet Bielh’s book LibertarianMunicipalism, the Politics of Social Ecology, which Irecommend as introductory reading.

The most important democratic tradition forour purpose are the forums where people gatherto discuss in the municipality; this includesparticipating in municipal citizen-basedorganizations and peoples initiatives. Before amajor decision is made there is an old tradition ofarranging public meetings for the residents.These are sadly currently being reduced toinformational meetings where bureaucrats andpoliticians lecture about a current project. DAsees that these forums have the potential to beradicalized and ultimately institutionalized. Bypeoples initiatives I mean popular citizen(neighborhood) mobilizations for single-causeissues, and not referendums. Using peoplesinitiatives, DA can connect particular minimumdemands to a maximum demand program.

H: What sort of response has DA generated fromthe citizens of the different regions of Scandinaviathat you are involved in?I: It’s important to say that DemocraticAlternative is an organization consisting ofdifferent local groups. The response varies fromplace to place. In Sweden we are growing ratherrapidly. I think the radical scene in Scandinaviais ready for new ideas and we are able to offerthese ideas. Also, in an era when we see anincreasing interest in the anti-globalizationmovement, there is a need for ideas thatrepresent an alternative, not just a method ofprotesting.

When we continue to increase both ouractivities and members, we will be able to takemore effective action influencing the politicalagenda. I think this is just a question of time.Meanwhile we have to make people aware of theideas we are working with and the organization.We need to make them see the potential for abetter society, which is right in front of us for thegrabbing.I

Web Pages of InterestDemocratic Alternative

http://www.demalt.org/Communalism: International Journal for a Rational Society

http://www.communalism.org/Peoples’ Global Action

http://www.agp.org


BETWEEN AUGUST 23ND TO AUGUST 25TH, 2002, THIRTY ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ORGANIZERS FROM AROUND THE U.S. CONVERGED

on a farm in upstate New York to found a new political confederation: the Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy.

Our MissionAFADD is a confederation of anti-authoritarians working toward the realization of a free society. We believe thatthere can be no justice without freedom, and no freedom without the power to participate directly anddemocratically in the decisions that affect our lives. This freedom is thwarted whenever one group of people assumescontrol over another. Thus, we resist not only the domination of the working classes by the ruling class, people ofcolor by white people, women by men, and communities by the state; we struggle against all forms of domination, asthey serve only to uphold the power of the privileged, further exploit the oppressed and the earth, and limiteveryone’s ability to develop their individual and collective potentials.

We believe that domination, or hierarchy, is the fundamental cause of the current social and ecological crises.Hierarchy is systemic. It is deeply embedded within the ideologies and institutions that govern society. While westrive to transform our personal relationships, we recognize that the systems of power that generate hierarchicalsocial relations must be dismantled and replaced with liberatory institutions of our own making if humanity is ever tobe free to collectively determine its future.

Given this, AFADD commits itself to the following objectives:

—Popularizing a call for non-hierarchy, confederated direct democracies, communal economics, socialfreedom, and an ecological sensibility;—Helping to build revolutionary movements aimed at fundamental social transformation;—Confronting hierarchical institutions, including but not limited to capitalism and the state;—Challenging all systems of oppression, including but not limited to racism, classism, sexism, andheterosexism—within society as well as our own movements;—Demonstrating active solidarity with movements of oppressed peoples as well as other anti-authoritariansthroughout the world via collaborative campaigns of mutual interest;—Further developing our own analyses and ability to think critically, as well as our reconstructive vision andstrategies, and advancing them within social movements; and—Creating a dual power of strong resistance movements and liberatory counter institutions that inspire andempower people to take directly democratic control over the decisions that affect their lives.

Why a Revolutionary Organization?The vehicle that we believe offers us the greatest foundation from which to begin to actualize our vision is ourrevolutionary organization. AFADD is premised upon a shared analysis, vision and strategy; and can provide us witha framework to further develop our ideas, share resources, and unify our action in our struggle for a free society. Wedo not aspire to be “the movement,” but rather one tendency within it.

Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy is a membership-based organization, as opposed to collective oraffinity group models of organization. We choose to organize around political affinity, rather than personality orlifestyle affinity, in order to remain politically coherent while keeping the organization as open as possible. We hopethat our confederal organizational structure will allow us to act with a high degree of unity and coordination, withoutsacrificing the benefits of directly democratic decision-making and local autonomy.

Join Us!Our full manifesto and by-laws can be found on-line at www.afadd.org. There are many other political approachesand organizations, and we encourage you to explore them all. However, if you find that the collection of ideasexpressed in our manifesto resonates well with your own, we invite you to join us in our struggle for a free anddemocratic society.I

Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy

w w w . a f a d d . o r g

Harbinger - SPRING 2003 { 55 }Mike Flugennock


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IT HAS BEEN ANOTHER YEAR OF TREMENDOUS GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT AT THE ISE. Our campus on

Maple Hill has been bustling. We have been offering year-round classes to a small group of B.A.

students (in affiliation with Burlington College) in three areas of concentration: Social Theory and

Action; Ecological Land Use; and Ecological Building. Students combine classroom studies with

hands-on, experiential learning. Those engaged in Social Theory and Action worked with a variety

of activist organizations in Central Vermont, including the Worker’s Center and the ISE

Biotechnology Project. Students in Ecological Land Use concentrated their energy on the ISE’s

permaculture and organic gardens, and those studying ecological building had the opportunity to

work on our new straw bale, timber framed multi-use barn, which will house classroom and shop

space.

The construction of the new building was moving along quickly until winter set in, forcing us to

stop until things thaw out this spring. After weeks on end of sub-zero weather we are all ready for

Spring. Our B.A. students will begin the Spring Semester on March 23rd, with a 9-week block of

classes followed by our Summer Institute programs: Sustainable Design, Building and Land Use;

Ecology and Community; Arts, Media, Activism, and Social Change; and Theoretical Inquiries in

the Age of Globalization. We expect our usual international student body to rock the house this

Summer, as they have for the previous 28 years.

As I write the ISE is awaiting word from the Vermont Department of Higher Education as to

whether we will be able to re-institute our M.A. Program, this time in affiliation with Prescott

College. The program we have proposed would involve students in study at the ISE and work with

Prescott through their low-residency Master of Arts Program, providing both a rigorous learning

environment and maximum flexibility to M.A. students.

Also of note is the ISE’s Biotechnology Project’s successful campaign to place resolutions against

biotechnology on the agenda of over 70 town meetings around New England, a tremendous effort to

educate people about this important issue.

Overall it has been a busy year, with the prospect of more work to come. We thrive on hard

work, simple living, critical thinking, and the support of the social ecology community. We ask all

our friends to renew their support and commitment to the ISE by contributing to our annual donor

campaign. The following pages details our upcoming programs and development goals for the year.

Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to our important work. In thanks for your

support of the Institute, we are pleased to offer several book titles from South End Press as gifts for

donations of $200 or more. We need the support of all our members and friends—every donation

counts!

Dr. Daniel Chodorkoff

Director

Directors Report


2003 Spring & Summer Programs

BURLINGTON COLLEGE IN COLLABORATION WITH THE ISE OFFERS A B.A. DEGREE IN THE FIELD

of social ecology. Students interested in this program may pursue self-designed majorsin many areas of study, including: sustainable design, building, and land use; social andpolitical theory; activism, organizing, and community development; alternativeagriculture and food systems; and popular education. Most students initiate their majorby attending the ISE’s summer programs and then continue their studies throughBurlington College’s Independent Degree Program (IDP).

Students in the IDP undertake independent studies with the guidance of a mentor,who is also an ISE faculty member. This option allows self-motivated students tocomplete their degree from anywhere, without attending weekly classes. Students mayalso choose to participate in the ISE’s on-site intensive learning options, taking part inclasses, action learning, and workshops offered throughout the year at the ISE.

ISE and Burlington College studies are rooted in the understanding that everystudent is an individual. Rather than the standardized learning offered by traditionalcolleges and universities, the ISE believes in an alternative education model that isflexible and interdisciplinary. The ISE also holds that the most rigorous andmeaningful education results from a collaborative process. In line with this educationalphilosophy, assessment of student work is ongoing, and narrative evaluations ratherthan letter grades are provided.

On-site Intensive LearningThe ISE offers three concentrations in the on-site intensive study for B.A. degreestudents enrolled in the IDP through Burlington College: Ecological Building, SocialTheory and Action, and Ecological Land Use. Each concentration’s thematic coreserves to guide students’ learning, which takes place through a flexible combination ofcourse work, hands-on projects, workshops, and facilitated study groups. Studentsparticipate in real-world projects supervised by expert practitioners, such as work incentral Vermont community food projects, the ISE’s Biotechnology Project, organicgardens and composting systems, the construction of buildings and experimentalprojects on the ISE campus, community media projects, and much more. Studentscontextualize their action learning through rigorous reflection, discussion, and readingsthat help them to both refine their theoretical understanding of their area of study andimprove their practice. Faculty advisers work closely with students to design a well-rounded semester, drawing on an increasingly wide variety of courses, facilitated study,workshops, and special events offered at the ISE, in addition to the action learning.

B.A. in SocialEcology

Semester Schedule

Spring 2003Application DeadlineI Feb. 7II March 14

Registration & ResidencyI March 21-24II May 31-June 2

Final EvaluationsI Aug. 15II Oct. 24

Fall 2003Application DeadlineI Aug. 29II Oct. 31

Registration & ResidencyI Oct. 10-13II Dec. 12-15

Final EvaluationsI March 5II May 7


Ecological Building ConcentrationThe Ecological Building concentration is based on the study of design and buildingthrough the development of the ISE’s 50-acre site as a laboratory for ecological livingand learning. Students will explore ecological design from the unique perspectiveembodied in the ISE’s approach to building and land use—taking into accountcommunity needs and desires as well as the ecological impacts of any building project.Students participate in the planning, design, construction, and evaluation of majorprojects at the ISE, thereby learning the concepts and skills necessary to design andimplement ecological building projects. Workshops on specific topics, such as straw-bale and cordwood construction, give students the chance to gain additional skills.

Social Theory and Action ConcentrationThe Social Theory and Action concentration takes a two-pronged approach tolearning, balancing interdisciplinary classroom study with active engagement in real-world projects. A variety of courses and workshops allow students to exploresociopolitical, philosophical, and historical phenomena; here, the emphasis is oncritical thinking, honing students’ writing and reading abilities, and providing agrounding in the humanities and social sciences. Students will also involve themselvesin campaigns and organizations intended to bring about meaningful, ecologicallyoriented social change. They will have the opportunity to participate in ongoing work

around issues like globalization, food security, andworkers’ rights, while learning the skills of communityorganizing and development, public advocacy, and theeffective utilization of video, radio, and print media.

Ecological Land Use ConcentrationStudents in the Ecological Land Use concentrationwill learn the skills and theory of organic agriculture,permaculture, forest ecology, and other forms ofecological land use. Using the ISE’s organic gardens,permaculture orchard, and forest as an educationalbase, students will engage in hands-on practice and anintensive exploration of the concepts behind anecological as well as community-supportive approachto land use. As an understanding of ecology forms thebasis for study in this concentration, students willaddress not only the relationships between plants andanimals in “natural” systems but also those that definehow human communities can interact with naturalcommunities sustainably, regeneratively, andproductively. Working within the ISE and greatercentral Vermont communities to examine real socialand ecological concerns around food production,distribution, and land use will provide students in thisconcentration with a wide range of experientiallearning opportunities.


B.A. in SocialEcologycontinued


SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1974, THE ISE HAS OFFERED EXPERIENTIAL STUDIES IN LAND-USE

alternatives and sustainable technologies. The building of a new campus, on landpurchased in 1997, presents a wonderful opportunity to learn about subjects at the heartof ISE’s mission. The Sustainable Design, Building, and Land Use program includesinstruction in permaculture, organic agriculture, community design, ecological building,and forest ecology, while fostering a critical understanding of the social and politicalcontexts in which these alternatives may be applied.

Once again this summer, students will be involved in the development of the ISE’scampus while deepening their knowledge of how to create and live in a community.The program’s format will be a mixture of lecture and discussion with readings, hands-on projects, and a design studio. Using the ISE’s 50-acre site as a laboratory, the designportion of the program will be devoted to the study of fundamental principles and skillsthat can be applied to any design task: a building, an orchard, a garden, or a campus.There will be demonstrations and lecture/discussions on the following topics:

• The ISE site—its history and plans • History of agriculture• Layout and design principles • Ecological restoration• Social ecology and design • Organic agriculture• Drawing and drafting • Appropriate technology• Alternative building • Mapping and surveying• Tool use and safety • Permaculture• Forest ecology

After several days of studying both site analysis and general design principles, studentswill divide into two subgroups: Building or Land Use. Students will participate in oneof these two groups for the rest of the program, doing hands-on work several days eachweek. This allows first-time students to gain a greater depth of knowledge in their areaof concentration, even as it gives returning students the ability to do more advancedwork.

In past years, students in the Building track have worked on such projects ascamping cabins, tent platforms, a solar washhouse, and a barn. There will beopportunities to experiment with a variety of building techniques in different phases ofconstruction, learn basic tool-use skills, andcompare the environmental costs and durabilityof various technologies.

Students in the Land Use track will dohands-on work in three areas: organicagriculture, permaculture, and forest ecology.The ISE location on Maple Hill—with a varietyof open, aquatic, and forested spaces—allowsstudents to interweave their experiences withorganic gardening, composting, gray waterrecycling, cover cropping, and ediblelandscaping, as well as to examine the ecologyof and possible uses for forests. The aim forstudents will be to explore how humanrelationships with the natural world can beregenerative, creative, and ecological.

SustainableDesign,

Building, &Land Use

May 30 to June 20


THIS FOURTEEN-DAY PROGRAM IS INTENDED FOR ARTISTS, ACTIVISTS, AND MEDIA MAKERS WHO

wish to create and examine socially engaged art and media projects. Over the course ofthe program, students will receive hands-on experience and exposure to a wide array ofactivist art and media, including playback theater, spoken word, installation art, artist’sbooks, cartooning, culture jamming, puppetry, audio and video production, radioproduction, and web-based media and art.

This program functions as an arts and media laboratory where students brainstorm,collaborate, and develop projects and proposals based on their own political visions.Central to this program is a lecture series introducing key theoretical concepts in socialecology, providing a framework for students to identify and promote their politicalvisions.

Students will discuss the role of the artist as animator, someone who facilitates theexpression of community stories and helps to build bridges between polarized groups;and scrutinize the challenges and benefits of long-term community cultural work thatlays the groundwork for developing truly grassroots movements.

This program critically examines the nature of media in society as well as varioustheories of media in order to develop new notions of form, process, function, andcontent in media projects. Students will look at the differences between alternativeand revolutionary media in detail, specifically focusing on issues such as objectivity,editorial control, democracy, and how media shapes the shaping of culture, power, andinformation.

Students will also explore historical and theoretical perspectives on theintersection of art, media, and politics, and discuss different strategies for engagingdiverse communities through political art and media. Throughout the program,participants choose between workshops on different media and art topics, whileconcentrating on their particular area of interest.

The aim of Arts, Media, Activism, and Social Change is to provide participantswith the practical and conceptual skills, along with a theoretical perspective, to makeactivist art and media that is at once accessible, transformative, and revolutionary.

Arts, Media,Activism, &

Social ChangeMay 30 to June 13



THE ISE’S ECOLOGY AND COMMUNITY PROGRAM IS INTENDED AS AN INTENSIVE EDUCATIONAL

experience in the field of social ecology. This interdisciplinary, college-level programexplores social ecology, nature philosophy, community development, political theory,social movements and activism, popular education, radical agriculture, capitalism andglobalization, racism, feminism, and more. The curriculum is holistic and multifaceted,set in the context of an integrative learning approach that helps students understandthe underlying principles and philosophy as well as connections between variousdisciplines that comprise social ecology. Moreover, the ISE emphasizes a progressiveeducation model that attempts to empower students through the learning process itself.

The four-week Ecology and Community program consists of a mix of lectures,discussions, hands-on practica, writing exercises, and readings. An integrative seminar,Principles of Social Ecology, is offered to all students, along with a weekly lecture byMurray Bookchin. In addition, students can design their own program of study byelecting to take several seminars including: Feminism and Ecology; Deschooling andSocial Ecology; Understanding Capitalism: Global Perspectives; Toward DirectDemocracy; Radical Agriculture; and Movement Building: Theory and Practice. Theprogram also features an antiracism series, which attempts to shed light on the originsof racism as well as how it relates to other forms of systemic oppression andhierarchy, while suggesting strategies to build effective, multiculturalmovements for radical social change.

Students are encouraged to deepen their own insights via study groups, orto take part in an array of guest lectures, videos, and evening entertainment,or to enjoy hiking, swimming, conversations around the ISE’s fire pit, a visitto the Bread and Puppet museum, and a tour of sites related to labor historyin nearby Barre, Vermont.

Community life is also a central part of the Ecology andCommunity program. Within the limits of time and purpose, the ISEhopes to create an educational experience that reflects the ISE’sbelief in self-reliance, democracy, and participation. There are avariety of activities, both formal and informal, that contribute tothis sense of connection. For instance, weekly communitymeetings provide a forum to talk about the issues faced togetherduring the program. Faculty, staff, and students also make acommitment of four hours per week to work on site to prep andclean up after meals, upkeep common spaces, take care of thegarden, and expand the campus.

The Ecology and Community program, in short, offers aradical, coherent critique of current social and political trends,as well as a reconstructive and ethical approach to socialchange, all the while facilitating self-directed learning in asupportive yet challenging community-basedenvironment.

Ecology &Community

June 27 to July 26


THIS EIGHT-DAY INTENSIVE, open only to those who have already gone through theEcology and Community program, focuses on areas such as philosophy, social andpolitical theory, and history as part of a scholarly inquiry into the “age of globalization.”By theoretically exploring the past as well as the present, this continuing studiesprogram hopes to deepen students’ understanding of dynamic social phenomena such ascapitalism, statecraft, racism, and the devastation of the natural world, to name a few.To that end, this intensive draws on a variety of radical traditions, revolutionaryhistories, and social and political analyses, including those underpinning social ecology.The intensive is intended both to rekindle students’ desire for further study and offerintellectual inspiration for ongoing activist work.

Theoretical Inquiries in the Age of Globalization consists of eight mini-courses intwo consecutive four-day blocks. Thus, students must choose from one of two classesduring each morning and afternoon session. All of the courses are lecture-discussion orseminar style, although the relatively small class sizes keep them engaging and intimate.They all involve various amounts of required readings. There will also be severalevening guest lectures. Although structured as an educational intensive, the dailyschedule is fairly light by Summer Institute standards, allowing plenty of time outside ofclass for informal discussions, reading, writing, films, socializing, and recreation.

This continuing studies program rotates mini-courses and even some faculty eachyear, both to allow students who have already attended the eight-day session to returnagain and to ensure that the subject matter is fresh, topical, and vibrant. Topicsexplored in the past include: alternatives to capitalism, dialectical and naturephilosophies, the anarchist tradition, changes to the contemporary city and theimplications for municipal politics, nationalism, as well as science, technology, andglobalization.

The 2003 Age of Globalization intensive will offer a completely new lineup ofclasses along with several new faculty members. This August’s courses will range fromthe history of revolutionary movements in Latin America, the United States, andEurope, to a study of the Frankfurt school and its critical theory, to an exploration of

theories of natural evolution, to anexamination of liberatory politicalnotions, to a philosophical survey ofethics, and more (a detailed flyer on thisprogram will be available from the ISEand on the ISE’s web site in the spring).As in past summers, Theoretical Inquiriesin the Age of Globalization promises to beboth stimulating and reinvigorating.


TheoreticalInquiries

in theAge of

GlobalizationAug. 6 to Aug. 14


2003 Development Goals

With the support of the social ecology community, we were able to successfully undertake many important projectsand program developments over the last year. Our goals for 2003 are equally as demanding and important as theaccomplishments from 2002. Your generous donation to the Institute for Social Ecology will help to support thefollowing projects:

Campus DevelopmentThe ISE purchased a 50-acre campus in Plainfield, Vermont in 1997.Our campus functions as both an educational community and ademonstration site that illustrates our holistic and liberatory approachto community development and land use. In keeping with our socialecological principles of democratic community design, ecologicalbuilding, and sustainable land use, we have developed organic gardensand permaculture orchards; a solar powered washhouse with a livingmachine waste water system; camping facilities; and an energy efficientkitchen. This past spring, we began building a timber frame barn, andin the near future we hope to further apply our ecological designmethods to the construction of more student housing and expandedclassroom and library space.

The ISE Barn Project was initiated in 2001 by students in our year-round B.A. program as an ecological solution to our growing needs forclassrooms, storage, studio and workshop space, as well as a large meeting space. The Barn Project is one of manyprojects in our Long Range Plan that offers an opportunity for the ISE to put into practice our understanding ofcommunity-based ecological development. Students participating in this project gain experience in communitydesign and land use planning, and practical experience with alternative energy technology and building techniques,such as straw bale, cob, cordwood masonry, and timber framing. Students also gain exposure to the concepts aroundsustainable forestry as the lumber used in this project has been sustainably harvested from our land and milled onsite.

The Barn Project is now well underway. Once the timber frame is raised, different sections of the barn will beenclosed with alternative wall systems (straw bale, cob, cordwood). In order to finish this important project we needto raise an estimated $25,000 for construction and workshop costs. With your continued support, we hope to providea rich learning environment for our students, while accomplishing the much-needed development of our campus.

Program DevelopmentAs an educational and activist organization, the ISE iscommitted to the social and ecological transformation ofsociety. In recent years we have considerably expanded ourprograms. In addition to our Ecology and Community programand our Sustainable Design, Building and Land Use program,the ISE now offers a Continuing Studies in Social Ecologyprogram, an Arts Media, Activism, and Social Change program,and a week-long Biotechnology course. We have also recentlyexpanded our B.A. program to include an on-site option,allowing students to take classes and workshops on-site at ourPlainfield campus year-round. We also continue to offer ourwinter public lecture series and art-shows as well as summerinternship opportunities. With your support we hope to furtherexpand the educational opportunities and perspectives that wehave to offer our students.


Independent AccreditationThe ISE’s programs are accredited through a partnership with Burlington College. Though we are grateful for thispartnership, the current cost per credit doubles the price of tuition for our students. Until the ISE becomesindependently accredited, the cost of our accredited programs will remain a prohibitive burden for many of ourstudents. Self-accreditation will allow the ISE to offer students accredited undergraduate and graduate work at asignificantly lower cost, while maintaining financial and academic independence from other accredited institutions.

Our Accreditation Committee has assumed the primary responsibility for moving through the accreditationprocess. Yet completing this lengthy process requires that we hire an additional staff person to coordinate the project.

Scholarship FundThe ISE’s educational programs serve over 100 students annually. Inaddition to the financial assistance that we struggle to provide for our low-income students from the U.S., each summer we offer considerableassistance to our international students. As we recognize that not all peoplehave equal access to financial resources, we offer scholarship and work-study assistance to students who would not otherwise be able to attend ourprograms. The ISE is committed to making its programs accessible to allpeople regardless of gender, race, color, class, age, physical ability, religion,national origin, or sexual preference. Within the spirit of this goal, it is ourhope to be able to offer more financial assistance to students each year sothat we may serve an ever-wider and more diverse constituency.

Unfortunately, our ability to provide financial aid is limited. The highdemand on our already limited budget does not allow us to offer as muchfinancial assistance as is needed. With your support, we can offer financialaid to students who otherwise would not be able to access our programs.

Biotechnology ProjectThe ISE Biotechnology Project is an independent project of the ISE, operating since 1997. The ISE BiotechnologyProject is the only effort in the U.S. that is focused almost entirely on facilitating grassroots action around geneticengineering and other biotechnologies.

The ISE Biotechnology Project has been a consistent voice for scientific clarity in the growing opposition togenetically engineered foods. As well, we are pushing for the enlarging of the debate to encompass the widestpossible implications of genetic engineering and other biotechnologies, particularly the importance of thebiotechnology industry’s links to corporate driven globalization.

Our approach to grassroots organizing is firmly grounded in the principlesof decentralism, community control, and face-to-face democracy that are centralto social ecology, and have been widely embraced by the growing movementagainst corporate-driven globalization. We anticipate that our work will continueto offer an important model for U.S. activists seeking a long-range, sustainableapproach to activism, one that seeks to understand the widest implications offood biotechnology, rooted in an understanding of its social and political context,as well as the potential for sustainable alternatives.

Over the course of the next year, the ISE Biotechnology Project will beworking in specific areas to generate increased momentum in the fight against thebiotechnology industry. This work includes expanding our existing networkinfrastructure, and helping to initiate and support local and national campaigns.We cannot do this work without your support. Your tax-deductible contributionwill help us allocate much needed resources to this ever-important movement.

2003 Development Goals


Thank you for contributing to the ISE’s annual donor campaign. Your donation will be invaluable in helping us meet ourdevelopment goals for 2003. In thanks for your support of the ISE, we are pleased to offer the following gifts:

Donation of $50: 2 issues of Harbinger Donation of $200: 4 issues of Harbinger & one bookDonation of $500: 8 issues of Harbinger & two books Donation of $1000: 16 issues of Harbinger & two books

Book Gifts (Please choose however many apply)

� Marx in Soho, by Howard Zinn� Black Looks: Race and Representation, by bell hooks� Steets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood, by Peter Medoff & Holly Sklar� Earth For Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash, by Brian Tokar� Race, Gender, and Work: A Multi-cultural Economic History of Women in the United States, by Teresa Amott &

Julie Matthaei� Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations, by Al Gedicks� Hear my Testimony: Human rights activist of El Salvador, by Maria Teresa Tula� Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, edited by Robert Bullard� Democracy in Mexico: Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform, by Dan La Botz� The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960, by Marty Jezer

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Harbinger, a Journal of Social Ecology, is planning its spring 2003 issue that will focus on perspectives in social ecology.As an emergent body of thought that continues to inspire and shape the libertarian left, social ecology and socialecologists have contributed to numerous domains of radical theory and practice, and continue to do so.

Within this issue, we will examine the many different ways in which social ecologists have attempted to applysocial ecology to a range of social and political projects. Further, we will continue to examine perspectives withinsocial ecology on contemporary theoretical issues.

Constructing Ethics: Can we look to first nature to provide an objective ethic for constructing anecologically sound society? If not, where can we look? Building on the discussion initiated by SonjaSchmitz in this issue, where do other social ecologists stand on this issue?

Moral Economics: Does social ecology successfully theorize the integration of economic life into it’spolitical vision? Recent debates with the Participatory Economics school of thought suggests wehave much rethinking to do on our economic vision. Where do we stand on such libertariancommunist economic proposals?

The Libertarian Left: Today, many social ecologists are pushing for a clean split from anarchismbecause of overwhelmingly undesirable tendencies within contemporary anarchism. What placedoes anarchism, if any, have within the social ecology of today? Do the current anti-social and anti-technology currents in contemporary anarchism soil the social anarchist project beyond repair, andwarrant the severing of social ecology from any social anarchism?

Revolutionary Education: If education is central to this revolutionary project, how do weunderstand dominant notions and practices of education, and what does a liberatory education looklike? What current approaches in childhood and young adult alternative education deserve ourattention? As political activists, how does our understanding of liberatory education influence ourpolitical work?

Political Organizing: Libertarian municipalists from around the globe have been engaged inpolitical activism for many years. What can we learn from these hot spots of activism in which tofurther sharpen our theoretical understanding of politics and practice?

These and other key questions will be addressed in the pages of the next issue of Harbinger. Our hope is topublish the broad continuum of ideas that represent the best thinking in social ecology, highlighting both points ofagreement and difference. We also welcome submissions that explore these ideas in the more visceral form of poetryand fiction.

If you are interested in submitting to this issue of Harbinger, please contact the Editorial Board with your ideas.For more information:

Harbinger, a Journal of Social Ecologyc/o Institute for Social Ecology

1118 Maple Hill Road,Plainfield, VT, 05667, USA

[email protected]://www.harbinger.ws/

Call for Contributions - Harbinger, Vol. 3 No. 2

Perspectives in Social Ecology

Deadline for submissions: September 1st, 2003


Institute forSocial Ecology1118 Maple Hill Road,Plainfield, Vermont 05667 USA

NonprofitOrganizationU.S. Postage

PAIDPlainfield, VTPermit No. 13

Our Being is Becoming, not stasis.Our Science is Utopia,

our Reality is Eros,our Desire is Revolution.

Murray Bookchin—1967

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