This second online issue of Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology has been a long time coming, after being effectively put on pause for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During that time, we saw—and participated in, as a handful among millions—the largest mass mobilization in American history in response to the murder of George Floyd. For those of us who had been working on this themed issue, these historic events in the unfolding of new radical movements against white supremacy and the armed agents of the state confirmed the necessity of deepening social ecology’s analysis of race as a system of hierarchy.
The bulk of that mass participation in the summer of 2020 was through peaceful, non-disruptive marches, but these existed alongside a series of direct confrontations with police forces in cities all across the United States at a scale not seen since the urban rebellions of the long, hot summer of 1967. This visible militancy was not just tactical but also political-theoretical. The idea of police abolition was able to leap beyond its traditional political home in the anti-statist radical left and Black revolutionary nationalism into a set of real questions and possibilities that socialists and indeed liberals more broadly were forced to seriously contend with, often for the first time. As has so often been the case in the intellectual histories of revolutionary movements, it was these struggles fought on city streets that catapulted their concomitant social theory into public consciousness, not the other way around.
One of the most important outcomes of this widespread politicization of young people experiencing street politics for the first time, then, has been a broadened interest in the Black anarchist tradition. The works of Black revolutionaries such as Lucy Parsons, Kuwasi Balagoon, Russell Maroon Shoats, Martin Sostre, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, and Ashanti Alston theorizing their struggle have been taken up by reading groups and mutual aid collectives of the freshly radicalized, while new waves of anti-statist thought have bloomed in the Black liberation movement through the recent writings of Modibo Kadalie, William Anderson, Mariame Kaba, and many others.
This is a natural intellectual development for a movement against the police, as this new abolitionism amounts to a synthesis of Black liberation and anti-statism, and it forms not merely a package of policy goals but a radical critique of colonial capitalist society.
Recent struggles against racism in the United States have required confrontations with the state on other fronts as well—not just against the current batch of policy-makers who wield state power, but against the very apparatus of repression itself. In addition to the police, we have also seen grassroots challenges to the existence of prisons and borders. Direct actions against ICE and the Border Patrol as well as illegal humanitarian campaigns like No More Deaths have helped radicalize left-wing thinking about borders, in a developmental move from “comprehensive immigration reform” to “open borders” to “border abolition.”
The project of abolition has become, by necessity, more than a politics of resistance to the current state of things. The challenge of making a world without state repression requires building a world of collective security on a fundamentally different basis—as embodied in the abolitionist slogan “We keep us safe.” This fusion of the oppositional and reconstructive dimensions of a revolutionary struggle is precisely why the unfolding abolitionist movements have such generative overlap with the theory and practice of social ecology.
Our contention in assembling this issue is both that the ideas of social ecology have important—even necessary—insights for militant movements against racism and that social ecology as a body of revolutionary thought stands to develop itself much further through a deeper engagement with the ideas animating anti-colonial, anti-racist struggles. Race in America structures the demography and geography of our towns and cities—the very sites of political change for social ecology. It structures our economy, shaping who labors for whom and on what terms; it structures the state, both in the social composition of its commanding political class and in the reach of its repressive power; it serves to socially bind a sufficiently popular bloc of the citizenry to the ruling class. As a global social institution, it often plays a contextually distinct yet similarly immense role in shaping societies around the world. Race, in other words, must be understood: how it operates as an institution of social domination; how it interacts with other arenas of hierarchy such as patriarchy, capitalism, and the state; how it changes over time and how mass movements are potentially able to unmake it in the creation of a future free society. For social ecologists, who seek to understand the dynamics of all social hierarchy and how it relates to the ecology in which human society is nested, such detailed study of racial oppression is foundational. Racism cannot, as one of this issue’s essays puts it, be “merely referred to within the long litany of hierarchies that plague our society: ableism, transphobia, homophobia, colonialism, etc., all to be recognized and overcome…[yet remain] submerged into the generalizable principle of anti-hierarchy.” We are seeking to push social-ecological analysis of race much deeper than mere affirmation of anti-racist principle.
With this purpose in mind, our present issue features eight original contributions related to race, white supremacy, and colonialism. Collectively, they explore questions at the core of social ecology: How are ideas of “nature” and the “natural” used to reinforce the concept of race and racism? What are the historical and conceptual relationships between racial domination and the state? What should social ecologists learn from antiracist and anticolonial movements and thinkers, past and present? How do our concepts of race/racism shape our political praxis?
As an introduction to the issue, Blair Taylor systematically examines in “Social Ecology, Racism, Colonialism, and Identity: Assessing the Work of Murray Bookchin” what social ecology’s primary theorist, Murray Bookchin, does—and does not—say about questions of race, identity, and colonialism.
Peter Staudenmaier discusses the politically ambiguous nature of ecological politics against the backdrop of contemporary ecofascism and far-right racial thought in his text “The Politics of Nature Left and Right: Radicals, Reactionaries, and Ecological Responses to Modernity”, the first chapter of his recently published book Ecology Contested.
In “The Walled Commons to the Picket Fence: Racism as an Ecological Force in Mid-Twentieth Century America,” Mason Herson-Hord inverts the environmental justice truism that ecological devastation has racist effects to argue that racism has catastrophic ecological effects, using as a case study the central role of anti-Black racism in the suburbanization of American cities in the mid-twentieth century.
Taking aim at the intersection of genetic determinism and racial categorization, Joe Madison’s “Individualized Medicine as Racial Eugenics: A Critical Appraisal” suggests that social ecology offers an alternative epistemology to current medicine trends that reinforce essentialist and deterministic notions of identity, social control, and reduction of genetic diversity.
Chaia Heller’s “Questioning Öcalan’s Jewish Question” interrogates antisemitic tropes about the relationship between Jews, capitalism, and the nation-state found in the work of imprisoned Kurdish revolutionary leader Abdullah Öcalan.
Nate Owen’s “Decolonizing Nature: How ‘Wilderness’ Dispossesses Indigenous People” explores how the concept of “wilderness” emerges out of a specifically settler-colonial imaginary that serves to dispossess indigenous people, looking at the case of American conservation politics and the National Park system.
“From the Homestead Act to YouTube: Settler Colonial Continuities of the Homesteading Movement” by Ryan Edgar shows that while the homesteader movement’s romantic fantasy of living outside of the capitalist system rests on indigenous land dispossession, racist land policies, and reinforcing statist-capitalist norms, its motivations also often reflect a nascent critique of contemporary society potentially open to Communalist interventions.
A.X.’s essay “Blackness and Democratic Modernity” brings the tradition of Black revolutionary nationalism into conversation with Kurdish revolutionary nationalism, highlighting how the struggles of oppressed groups, from slave revolts to cooperative economics, offer a prefigurative praxis towards a truly free society.
In “Unsettling, Rooting, and Shifting: Growing Pains for the Bottom-up Confederal Democracy Movement in North American Racial-Settler Context,” Boyd Rossing argues that municipalist movements in North America have yet to adequately address the centrality of white supremacy and settler colonialism in their political theory or practice, and offers some concrete organizing approaches to set aside Eurocentric thinking and build multi-racial, transformative movements.
These nine essays are by no means a definitive account of social-ecological thought on white supremacy, colonization, or racism. This issue is imagined instead as an invitation to further discussion and exchange of ideas across our movements for a free and ecological society. We hope these inspire new writings on these topics for future issues, new constructive critiques of the revolutionary democratic project, new debates to hone and clarify our thinking.
For a free, antiracist, and ecological society,
The editors of Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology