Social Ecology, Racism, Colonialism, and Identity: Assessing the Work of Murray Bookchin

What, if anything, does social ecology have to contribute to ongoing discussions of race and racism? As a lifelong leftist and a Jew, Murray Bookchin, the core theorist of social ecology, was on a personal level implacably opposed to racism, colonialism, and all forms of bigotry and domination. He was an outspoken critic of Spanish fascism and genocidal Nazism, and spent a week in jail after being arrested in the early 1960s campaigning with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). His theorization of social ecology’s core concept of hierarchy was a conscious attempt to carve out space for non-economic forms of domination like race and gender, one that could expand on Marxism’s narrower focus on class and economic exploitation. Likewise, the very term social ecology was articulated as a critique of the racist Malthusian assumptions common within both the mainstream and radical environmental movements. 

Yet at the same time, while racism and colonialism are frequently mentioned in Bookchin’s writings, they are not central concerns that receive sustained or systematic analysis. Although his early work in particular drew inspiration from indigenous lifeways, in the main it remained focused primarily on the European revolutionary and intellectual traditions. Bookchin’s strongly antistatist and universalist political commitments translated into sharp critiques of the late New Left’s uncritical support for national liberation movements outside the west, as well as the rise of “identity politics” domestically. These often converged with broader polemics against intellectual tendencies ascendant on the left like postmodernism and some versions of postcolonialism that he believed smuggled in conservative assumptions and pointed in reactionary directions. As a result, his defenses of the western tradition and “the left that was,” despite their shortcomings, clashed with the emerging theoretical culture of the left. This constellation of gaps, critiques, and positions have led some to conclude that social ecology at best has a blind spot regarding race and colonialism, or is Eurocentric at worst.

This article will assess these claims, proceeding in two parts. The first will explore what social ecology has said – and has not said – on topics related to race, racism, colonialism, and “identity,” drawing from a variety of Bookchin’s writings. In a second forthcoming installment, I will try to sketch some broad parameters for what a social ecological analysis of racism might look like, and situate this perspective within contemporary debates within antiracist theory and praxis.

The Anti-Racism of Social Ecology

First, what has the theory of social ecology, largely developed in the work of Murray Bookchin, had to say about questions of racism, colonialism, and identity? We can identify five primary areas that have foregrounded these topics in Bookchin’s work: antisemitism and antifascism, hierarchy as critique of economic reductionism, social ecology contra racist ecologies, his philosophy and historiography in relation to Europe, and critiques of nationalism and identity politics. The following section will address each of these in turn.

Antisemitism, Fascism, and Civil Rights

Bookchin grew up in the rich immigrant life of New York City, in a secular Jewish family of radicals who had fled political persecution in Russia. Although raised in a militantly secular household, Bookchin’s Jewish background likely gave him firsthand experience of racialized prejudice, as Jews were excluded from many elements of social life in the United States at least up to the Second World War. His strong identification with the Left from an early age translated into unwavering antiracist and antifascist political commitments. He helped raise money for the Spanish antifascist resistance, and the Spanish Revolution would remain a lifelong theme in his work. A close observer of the rise of fascism and antisemitism, some of his first published writings in the early 1950s were on these topics. Writing under the pseudonym M.S. Shiloh, he published three articles on this topic in the journal Contemporary Issues: “A Social Study of Genocide,” “Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe,” and “The Zionist Movement and Russian Anti-Semitism.”¹ When far-right movements like the Christian Front and German-American Bund began attacking Jews and leftists, Bookchin trained to fight fascists in the streets with the Worker’s Defense Guard.²

Bookchin was also sensitized to the black experience in America during this time. As a labor organizer in the 1940s, he worked alongside a majority black workforce in a foundry in New Jersey. “As a result of this experience, I was able to see the lives of my African-American brothers in all their richness and their oppression.”³ He became an early and ardent supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1950s and 60s he was active with the NYC branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He was arrested at a CORE protest targeting discrimination at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, and spent a week in jail.⁴

Hierarchy Contra Economic Reductionism 

These experiences sensitized Bookchin to forms of domination that transcended purely economic exploitation. This was a central motivation for his theorization of hierarchy in the 1960s and 70s, which sought to open political and analytical space for forms of domination like racial and gender subordination that were largely overlooked or reduced to economic class relations in classical Marxist theory. He frequently warned that:

the abolition of classes, exploitation, and even the State is no guarantee whatever that people will cease to be ranked hierarchically and dominated according to age, gender, race, physical qualities and often quite frivolous and irrational categories, unless liberation focuses as much on hierarchy and domination as it does on classes and exploitation.⁵

Bookchin’s concept of hierarchy was therefore explicitly formulated as an antiracist and feminist lens through which to view social domination:

Our present society has a definite hierarchical character. It is a propertied society that concentrates economic power in corporate elites. It is a bureaucratic and militaristic society that concentrates political and military power in centralized state institutions. It is a patriarchal society that allocates authority to men in varying degrees. And it is a racist society that places a minority of whites in a self-deceptive sovereignty over a vast worldwide majority of peoples of color.⁶

Taking aim at Marxism, The Ecology of Freedom repeatedly stresses that “hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a “classless” or “stateless” society. Any social analysis that failed to distinguish between these different dynamics of power might unintentionally “conceal the existence of hierarchical relationships and a hierarchical sensibility, both of which-even in the absence of economic exploitation or political coercion-would serve to perpetuate unfreedom.”⁷

Bookchin was attuned to the specificities of racial domination, noting that black oppression in the United States was of an entirely different character than that faced by white communities, commenting “today, I feel I am witnessing not only racist exploitation, I am witnessing the very destruction of the black community. I see genocide at work against black people and other people of color throughout the cities of America.”⁸ But he also noted how the anti-racist politics of the New Left pointed towards a more general critique of hierarchy and domination in general: “Starting from a rejection of racism, it brings into question the very existence of hierarchical power as such.”⁹ He saw these developments as a promising move away from Marxist economism towards something approximating what is today called intersectionality: 

the core problems of hierarchical society can be reached from every facet of life, be they personal or social, political or ecological, moral or material. Every critical act and movement erodes the domestic and imperial edifice. To repel any expression of discontent with sectarian harangues, borrowed from entirely different arenas and eras of social conflict, is simply blindness. Carried to its logical conclusions, the struggle for black liberation is the struggle against imperialism; the struggle for a balanced environment is the struggle against commodity production; the struggle for women’s liberation is the struggle for human freedom.¹⁰

Bookchin’s writings from the 1960s (published in 1971 as Post-Scarcity Anarchism) referred frequently to black liberation movements as evidence of a shift towards a more expansive post-scarcity paradigm that aimed beyond mere redistribution. “The growth of the black liberation movement over the past ten years (a movement that has heightened every sensibility of black people to their oppression) is explosive evidence of this development… It is not justice any longer that is being demanded, but rather freedom.”¹¹ Later in the same book he characterizes the slogan “Black is beautiful” as an important advance over the more prosaic “Bread and the Constitution of ‘93” that marked the French Revolution, as it “marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.”¹² Coming from someone steeped in the European revolutionary tradition, this is not idle praise.

Contra Racist Malthusian Ecology

Social ecology was also among the first and most visible critics of the racist assumptions of the widespread Malthusianism of the early environmental movement. Bookchin warned that the emphasis on undifferentiated “populations” or an abstract “humanity” ignored crucial power differentials that created a false equivalence between the beneficiaries and victims of ecological degradation. Already in 1979, Bookchin offered clear critiques of the racist, neo-colonial logic of the environmental movement’s fixation on population: 

We must pause to look more carefully into the population problem, touted so widely by the white races of North America and Europe – races that have wantonly exploited the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific. The exploited have delicately advised their exploiters that, what they need are not contraceptive devices, armed ‘liberators’, and Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich to resolve their population problems; rather, what they need is a fair return on the immense resources that were plundered from their lands by North America and Europe. To balance these accounts is more of a pressing need at the present time than to balance birth rates and death rates.¹³

This critique of population ecology would become a defining feature of social ecology, adding an explicitly antiracist analysis to the fundamental insight that “the environmental crisis is a social crisis.” 

To illustrate this fact, Bookchin often retold a story about an environmental exhibition at the New York Museum of Natural History in the 1970s that guided participants through a procession of environmental destruction that ended at a mirror framed by the words “The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth.” He recounts:

I remember a black child standing in front of that mirror while a white school teacher tried to explain the message which this arrogant exhibit tried to convey. Mind you, there was no exhibit of corporate boards of directors planning to deforest a mountainside or of government officials acting in collusion with them. One of the problems with this asocial, “species-centered” way of thinking, of course, is that it blames the victim. Let’s face it, when you say a black kid in Harlem is as much to blame for the ecological crisis as the President of Exxon, you are letting one off the hook and slandering the other. Such talk by environmentalists makes grassroots coalition-building next to impossible. Oppressed people know that humanity is hierarchically organized around complicated divisions that are ignored only at their peril. Black people know this well when they confront whites. The poor know this well when they confront the wealthy. The Third World knows it well when it confronts the First World. Women know it well when they confront patriarchal males. The radical ecology movement needs to know it too.¹⁴

These insights would prompt extended debates in the radical ecology movement, primarily targeting deep ecologists for racist statements about immigration, praise of HIV, and other misanthropic positions. Today, it is important to remember that these were not marginal thinkers and arguments in the radical environmental scene of the 1980s and 90s, but often articulated by leading writers like Edward Abbey and the Earth First! journal. In 1987 Bookchin called out the “barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones, and outright social reactionaries who use the word ecology to express their views.”¹⁵ He frequently targeted Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman in particular, noting:

…antihumanist and macho mountain men like David Foreman of Earth First!…preach a gospel that humanity is some kind of cancer in the world of life. It was out of this kind of crude eco-brutalism that Hitler, in the name of “population control,” with a racial orientation, fashioned theories of blood and soil that led to the transport of millions of people to murder camps like Auschwitz. The same eco-brutalism now reappears a half-century later among self-professed deep ecologists who believe that Third World peoples should be permitted to starve to death and that desperate Indian immigrants from Latin America should be excluded by the border cops from the United States lest they burden “our” ecological resources.¹⁶

Bookchin was among the most forceful critics of this racist argumentation. In a 1991 debate on the continued prominence of overpopulation discourse in the ecology movement, he reminded readers of the implicit and explicit racism embedded in this recent history and of the prominent “radical” environmentalists who expounded such positions: 

Apart from evoking the virtues of AIDS as a means of sending people to an early death in great numbers, as Christopher Manes (aka “Miss Ann Thropy”) of Earth First! proposes, or allowing them to starve outright, as Garrett Hardin proposes, or expelling “genetically inferior” races like Latinos, as the late Edward Abbey proposed, I would earnestly like to believe that Greens and environmentalists generally would explore population growth as a social issue—not as a mere numbers game.¹⁷

Bookchin understood that these racist tendencies in both the mainstream environmental and radical ecology movements were central factors in limiting the appeal of ecological politics for people of color:

It should not come as a surprise, then, that for many activists of color environmentalism has come to mean little more than racist measures for blocking needed economic improvements and for intensifying austerity among people of color in this country and in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It has also come to mean a vicious policy of limiting the “surplus” population of people of color throughout the world through starvation, disease, and forced sterilization. It is bad enough when reform environmentalists are naively complicit with this perversion of valid ecological objectives. It is shocking to me, however, when self-identified deep ecologists actively embrace such measures and call their views “radical ecology.” I may have seemed very disputatious in dealing harshly with these tendencies in the ecology movement but I think my zealousness is justified. Such views make productive alliances across ethnic lines nearly impossible. I cannot be “mellow” on this point. Both explicit and implicit racism must be challenged and uprooted from within our movement. To ignore this need is to court moral and strategic disaster.¹⁸

Social ecology was significantly developed in critical debate with these positions. Bookchin suggested that social ecology could offer “a better foundation for alliance building and a respectful unity-in-diversity because it understands that the very concept of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human,” including domination “of one ethnic or racial group by another…and of colonized people by a colonial power.” He framed this as central to social ecology’s political project, noting that the “fight against racism is not just a mere political item that can be added to ‘defending the Earth’; it is actually a vital and essential part of establishing a truly free and ecological society,” constituting a “moral as well as strategic imperative for the ecology movement.”¹⁹

Social ecology has also addressed other aspects of the intersection of racism and ecology. In his later 1995 work Re-Enchanting Humanity, Bookchin addressed the return of racist pseudoscience with The Bell Curve, contextualizing the book within a longer history of racialized eugenics, Malthusianism, and Social Darwinism. Bookchin and other social ecologists have also been among the most prominent critics of right-wing environmentalism. Peter Staudenmaier and Janet Biehl’s 1994 book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, among the few books on the subject in English, offers extensive analysis of the ecological component of Nazi racialism as well as later incarnations of racist environmental thought.²⁰ Hilary Moore, an associate of the Institute for Social Ecology, has written a book on the racist climate politics of the European right, while the present author has also published on ecofascist currents in the contemporary American right.²¹

In sum, social ecology has been a pioneer in articulating an environmental perspective that incorporated antiracism alongside other social concerns, foreshadowing key themes and arguments of the environmental justice movement. Bookchin’s antiracist commitments were clear: “The horror of racism today, which has dramatically intensified since I first confronted it in the 1930s and 1940s, violates every sense of justice I feel. The ecology movement must stand firmly against racism and actively participate in the struggle against it.”²²

Racism, Colonialism, and Eurocentrism

Despite this legacy, Bookchin’s social ecology has nonetheless been criticized for a lack of explicit attention to racism, white supremacy, and colonialism in its analysis of hierarchy and domination. Chuck Morse, a former student of Bookchin’s, has accused him of “silence on white supremacy and racism, which he never addressed in any but the most cursory fashion,” and argued that his “inattention to the topic meant that he was oblivious to one of the most important factors in the constitution of the world that he sought to change.”²³ Damian White’s book-length treatment Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal makes a similar observation on Bookchin’s writings on urbanism: 

It is striking to note, for example, that for a thinker who is so sensitive to the ways in which the power dynamics of ecological questions are always bound up with issues of race and class, Crisis in Our Cities explores the theme of ‘urban crisis’ in 1965 with no substantive discussion of racial division. It is striking to reflect that two years after the publication of this text, racial discrimination and segregation caused cities across the US to explode into violence. Indeed, whilst there are obvious connections to make between social ecology (with its attempt to view environmental and urban questions through the lens of social hierarchy and social domination) and questions of environmental justice (as we have seen in Chapter 5), Bookchin rarely engages with issues of race and urbanism in his urban writings.²⁴

Bookchin’s enthusiasm for Athenian democracy has also faced criticism on account of its status as a slave society, although he repeatedly addressed this concern directly in his work. 

Despite the consistent criticism I have received on this point, I do not now and never have upheld either ancient Athens or colonial New England as a “model.” None of the historical examples I cite here or anywhere else represents a “model” of libertarian municipalist ideas—not classical Athens, not the various medieval cities and city confederations—and not even the revolutionary Parisian sections and the New England town meetings. None, let me emphasize, represents an ideal image of what could or should be achieved in the future.²⁵

A survey of Bookchin’s major works reveal that while racial domination is mentioned in his writings, it is not a central theme that receives systematic attention. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, the word “racism” is mentioned twice, “black liberation” appears three times.²⁶ In The Modern Crisis, Bookchin wrote that “[t]he internalization of hierarchy and domination forms the greatest wound in human development,” noting that “even the oppressed in ‘white’ skins revelled in their self-conferred ‘superiority’ over the oppressed in more tinted skins…”²⁷ His magnum opus The Ecology of Freedom mentions race six times: once in relation to colonial racism towards indigenous people, once referencing Nazism, twice in the context of nature philosophy, and twice in quotes from Greek or Roman philosophers in reference to the human race.²⁸ The term “racism,” however, doesn’t appear at all. “Slave” and “slavery” are mentioned sixty-five times, primarily in discussion of Greek or Roman society, Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, and once noting its existence in indigenous societies. 

The words “colonial” or “colonialism” are mentioned twice in The Ecology of Freedom. In a footnote, Bookchin describes how the “ideological complex of rescuing ‘savages’ from the trials of nature (…) accorded with the colonialist mentality of Europe and America.”²⁹ The term appears again near the end of the book, in a list of caveats to democratic tendencies in the United States:

this rich galaxy of forms included the slavocracy of the southern states, institutions (and ideologies) for the genocidal occupation of Indian lands, and a barely concealed system of peonage involving not only indentured servitude during the colonial period but the plantation economy that came with the expropriation of Mexican territories.³⁰

Colonialism receives more sustained attention in Bookchin’s 1995 work, Re-Enchanting Humanity. In a chapter discussing the racist history of Malthusianism and Social Darwinism, Bookchin offers a vivid critique of colonialism:

Starting as early as the fifteenth century, Europeans and later Americans had engaged in a genocidal frenzy against native peoples on both continents of the New World and the enslavement of African tribal people. Now, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, armies marched forth from Europe to ‘tame’ the ‘uncivilized’ continents of the planet, presumably a ‘noble’ calling for which the conqueror, colonizer, and missionary deserved a ‘just reward’. The barbarities that Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany inflicted on the territories they claimed and conquered in Africa and Asia read like the horrors Dante described in the lower depths of hell.³¹

Despite these strident condemnations of racism and colonialism, some have argued that the relative lack of attention to these topics in Bookchin’s work stems from a deeper epistemological Eurocentrism. While it’s undoubtedly true that Bookchin devoted most of his attention to the European revolutionary and intellectual tradition, this is due at least in part to the fact that this is where both capitalism and the left were born. For someone rooted in and dedicated to the left, this is not surprising as the hierarchical structures of the modern capitalist nation state first historically developed in Europe, as did its main emancipatory alternatives of socialism, communism, and anarchism. Most of the nonwestern world also looked to those ideas and thinkers for inspiration (whether in Europe or later the Soviet Union), while adapting them to local conditions. 

This charge is also difficult to square with the explicit critique of Eurocentrism Bookchin develops in The Ecology of Freedom. Appearing at roughly at the same time the term was being coined by Samir Amin in the late 1970s and echoing postcolonial critiques that emerged decades later, Bookchin criticized Marx for “the European centricity of his sense of history, particularly as revealed in his emphasis on the ‘progressive role of capitalism’ and his harsh metaphors for the noncapitalist world.” He continues, “These remarks reveal Victorian arrogance at its worst and patently neglect the vital ‘prehistory’ that the nonwestern world had elaborated over many millennia of development.”³² Elaborating the critique even further, he highlights what such views in fact say about Europeans, and where the west might look for alternative value systems:

What we so arrogantly call the “stagnation” of many non-European societies may well have been a different often highly sensitive, elaboration and enrichment of cultural traits that were ethically and morally incompatible with the predatory dynamism Europeans so flippantly identify with “progress” and “history.” To fault these societies as stagnant for elaborating qualities and values that Europeans were to sacrifice to quantity and egoistic acquisition tells us more about European conceptions of history and morality than non-European conceptions of social life. Only now, after our own “pagan idols” such as nucleonics, biological warfare, and mass culture have humiliated us sufficiently, can we begin to see that non-European cultures may have followed complex social paths that were often more elegant and knowledgeable than our own. Our claims to world cultural hegemony by right of conquest has boomeranged against us. We have been obliged to turn to other cultures not only for more humane values, more delicate sensibilities, and richer ecological insights…³³

Yet in later works, Bookchin confronted new social and intellectual trends that caused him to both reassess earlier positions and stake out new ones. Towards the end of his life he wrote fierce polemics against intellectual tendencies whose critiques of universalism and reason he thought posed an existential threat to the revolutionary left tradition, taking aim at postmodernism, identity politics, mystical ecology, post-left anarchy, and anarcho-primitivism.³⁴ Despite the disparate and even contradictory ideas found in these traditions, Bookchin believed they were united by a tendency towards relativism, particularism, inwardness, and political fragmentation, which taken together, undermined the very ability to make the kinds of clear ethical and political claims necessary for revolutionary politics. Bookchin was clearly a thinker deeply embedded in the European revolutionary tradition, which was both the subject of much of his work and the source of his intellectual influences, from Marx and Trotsky to the Frankfurt School. When the “western tradition” began to be criticized in earnest from the 1980s onward by feminist, post-structuralist, and postcolonial thinkers, Bookchin sought to defend it from critiques he believed threw the baby out with the bathwater. 

It was against this changing intellectual and political backdrop that Bookchin reassessed some of his earlier positions. One such example was rejecting his previous valorization of past indigenous lifeways (“organic society” in his terminology) as sources for social inspiration as overly romantic. In a new Introduction to the 1991 edition of The Ecology of Freedom titled “Twenty Years Later… Seeking a Balanced Viewpoint,” he wrote:

I examined organic society’s various religious beliefs, and cosmologies: its naturalistic rituals, its mythic personalizations of animals and animal spirits, its embodiment of fertility in a Mother Goddess, and its overall animistic outlook. I believed that the Enlightenment’s battle against superstition had been long since won in American and European culture, and that no one would mistake me for advocating a revival of animism or Goddess worship. As much as I admired many features of organic cultures, I never believed that we could or should introduce their naive religious, mythic, or magical beliefs or their cosmologies into the present-day ecology movement.³⁵

It is important to note that Bookchin’s critique was not specific to native spirituality, but rather consistent with a principled critique of all forms of religion and mysticism – ideologies he understood as central to the emergence of hierarchy. Yet some, like critic David Lewis, have interpreted this as an impetus to “forever stamp out the spirituality that was central to all pre-hierarchical culture,” amounting to a “Native culture euthanasia program.”³⁶ In his response, Bookchin argued: 

My point, here, is not to impugn native beliefs. What I would actually like to do is get beyond the romanticization that surrounds native belief-systems and examine how tribal peoples really lived and thought. Had Lewis put his hatchet aside long enough to read the second chapter of my book The Ecology of Freedom, he would have found eloquent praise on my part for the communitarian, ethical, and, yes, many of the spiritual practices of aboriginal peoples—albeit not as fodder for the mills of superstition, magic, and New Age mysticism that is so much in vogue today.³⁷ 

Bookchin also stressed that his critique was not primarily directed at Native cosmology, but at its white appropriators in the ecology movement. He notes, “The abuse of native spirituality by the likes of Lewis, I may add, troubles not only me but many native Americans, who feel that they are being exploited anew by white caricatures of their belief-systems.” Nonetheless, his commitment to the importance of a rational outlook not shrouded by mystical foundations beyond the reach of critique was clear and consistent. He warned that “The strategy of mystifying reality with myths and deities has been the technique par excellence of virtually all absolute rulers, despots, and reactionaries from time immemorial as a means of inducing people to acquiesce to their rule.” As a result, he urged “no one to bend down to the authority of a Supreme Creator, Supreme Deity, a Supreme Lord, a Supreme Master, or a Supreme Leader—whether such a supreme being be dressed in dollar bills, a buffalo skin, or bright green oak leaves.”³⁸ His reappraisal of earlier positions was also informed by new developments in scientific consensus, noting that “much of the archaeological evidence does not support the ecological-romantic view of early peoples, however unpleasant the data may be.”³⁹ This perspective has recently been seconded by the anthropologist and archaeologist David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything.⁴⁰ The good society, Bookchin was at pains to stress, was in front of, not behind us.

While critics could interpret these shifts as the defensiveness of an older white (yet also Jewish) male radical confronting changing times, Bookchin insisted they reflected principled critiques animated by the universalist aspirations of the libertarian socialist tradition – a tradition flowing out of the Enlightenment. Indeed, his polemics were increasingly accompanied by strident defenses of the Enlightenment and nostalgic remembrances of “the left that was.” This constellation of political and theoretical positions put Bookchin at odds with the political culture becoming hegemonic on the radical left at the time. For even sympathetic critics like Karl Hardy, Bookchin’s “insistence upon a singular or hegemonic Enlightenment cosmology is indicative of and perpetuates the ongoing colonial violence being experienced by indigenous peoples whose knowledges and practices do not fall within the Enlightenment project.”⁴¹

Yet it is difficult to portray Bookchin as a simplistic defender of a monolithic Enlightenment. One of his core critiques of Marxism was its scientistic pretensions. Indeed, he identifies scientism, understood as emphasizing “efficiency and value free ‘objectivity’ in social affairs,” as a “naive failing of the Enlightenment thinkers.”⁴² He instead sought to rescue a dialectical tradition that avoided the problematic binaries of “mechanistic” and “reductive” positivism on the one hand, and romantic monist thinkers who sought to dissolve humanity into an undifferentiated whole on the other. Bookchin’s philosophy explicitly sought to reclaim the critical dialectical and naturalist traditions of the Enlightenment from its narrower mechanistic and scientistic elements. He notes, “To equate the Enlightenment’s naturalism with narrow-minded mechanism, without regard for the evolutionary and dialectical theories that were also very much in the air, is to caricature it in support of modern-day mystical and irrational ends.”⁴³ 

In fact, Bookchin also wrote rather extensively on the ambiguous role of the Enlightenment, focusing in particular on how it was used to both challenge and justify racial domination. In Re-Enchanting Humanity, he describes how “social Darwinism was transposed from the domain of domestic affairs to world affairs, providing the rationale par excellence for imperialism – the ‘improvement’ of the dark races of the world who lived in demonic ‘barbarism.’”⁴⁴ Addressing the intersection of race and empire, he wrote:

The French transformed the homebred British version [of Social Darwinism] into a vulgarized mission to spread the Enlightenment, even the ideals of their great Revolution, to the “less endowed” peoples of the world. The German version took on a specifically racial form, celebrating the virtues of Teutonic Man over all other ethnic groups, particularly people of color. Empire, dressed up as the “white man’s burden”, became in all its various nationalistic mutations specific forms of social Darwinism, each with its barely concealed roots in Malthus’s notion of “fitness” – namely the ability of the “able” to survive and “feast” at the table of nature.⁴⁵

Bookchin’s defense of Enlightenment principles included the continued necessity of critiquing various religious and spiritual worldviews. Although criticism of religious obfuscation is mostly unremarkable when lodged against dominant religions, many leftists are less receptive when these are applied to subaltern and non-Western belief systems. As a result, his critical comments on animism in particular have been criticized as perpetuating a racist or colonial epistemology. Yet, Bookchin was consistent in arguing that rejecting reason or rooting politics in mysticism in fact opens the door to domination, while closing it on the very tools needed to criticize it: 

In our aversion to an insensitive and unfeeling form of reason, we may easily opt for a cloudy intuitionism and mysticism as an alternative. Unlike instrumental and analytical reason, after all, a surrender to emotion and mythic beliefs yields cooperative feelings of “interconnectedness” with the natural world and perhaps even a caring attitude toward it. But precisely because intuition and mystical beliefs are so cloudy and arbitrary—which is to say, so un-reasoned—they may also “connect” us with things we really shouldn’t be connected with at all—namely, racism, sexism, and an abject subservience to charismatic leaders. Indeed, following this intuitional alternative could potentially render our ecological outlook very dangerous.⁴⁶

Bookchin’s universalist and rationalist commitments should not be understood as either quirky appendages to his main body of thought, or as in any way similar to the conservative positivist ideology of the “New Atheists.” Rather, they are central to his wider project of uprooting hierarchy and social domination and replacing them with a rational, ecological, democratic, and communist society. His critical orientation toward religion is also not surprising given the central role it plays in The Ecology of Freedom, which identifies the emergence of social hierarchy as stemming from gerontocracies that use spirituality to legitimize and perpetuate elite rule by a priestly caste of shamans.⁴⁷ Putting social arrangements of any kind, and inequality in particular, as something outside the realm of critical interrogation was anathema to both Bookchin and Enlightenment thinkers. While he was highly critical of the developmentalist logic of Marxism, Bookchin nonetheless celebrated the uniquely new historical possibilities for freedom posed by modernity, including the erosion of parochial blood ties, the replacement of custom and tradition by critical inquiry, religious dogma by scientific knowledge, and the novel freedom afforded by the anonymity and expanded social interaction that characterizes urban life. 

Other critics have lodged charges of Eurocentrism based on Bookchin’s lack of attention to non-western history in works like The Third Revolution and scattered comments related to his philosophy of history.⁴⁸ It’s undeniable that Bookchin’s oeuvre largely focuses on European revolutionary and intellectual history, and devotes little space to non-western history. Although The Ecology of Freedom drew extensively on revisionist anthropology to correct earlier racist colonial understandings of both past and present indigenous societies, beyond noting the word “freedom” first appears in ancient Sumerian tablets (amargi), his discussion of the “legacy of freedom” in this work focuses almost exclusively on Europe. He addresses this criticism directly in the Introduction to The Third Revolution, where he states that the omission is due partly to limitations of space and expertise, but also to important historical differences that impact his primary aim of excavating a libertarian revolutionary tradition:

I have omitted from this book any account of the “Third World” revolutions that have occurred since the Second World war. Although space limitations alone would necessarily restrict me to revolutions in Europe (and North America) the “Third World” revolutions have been and still are different in significant respects from the European revolutions. For one thing, the European revolutions, even the American, emerged from already formed nation-states, often absolutist monarchies; the “Third World” revolutions are attempts to form nation-states, to gain a sense of national identity after long periods of colonial rule. They are largely national struggles against imperialism in which colonized peoples seek to define their identity and achieve national independence… Their nationalistic and anti-imperialistic aspects may be understandable in the context in which they occurred; but these revolutions should not be mystified, nor should their justifiable claims to freedom from imperialism be viewed as comparable to the universal appeals to humanity that marked the great revolutions that occurred in Europe.⁴⁹

Bookchin grounds these claims in an appeal to respect historical specificity and novelty, suggesting that a unique confluence of contingent social forces contributed to the revolutionary upsurge in Europe. In Re-Enchanting Humanity, he states “it was primarily in Europe that a remarkable constellation of historical and ideological factors converged to produce a common emphasis on reason, the importance of the individual, and a healthy naturalism – unequaled in so fecund a combination by other cultures.”⁵⁰ The specific factors he identifies include the Germanic and Roman legal traditions, Christian individualism, emergent rationalism, and a mixed peasant/craft economy that enabled an independent bourgeoisie, which together he argues gave Europe a social “dynamism unequaled anywhere else in the world.”⁵¹

Anticipating objections, a footnote in the same section states, “if these remarks seem Eurocentric, so be it. I have an immense respect for cultural creativity wherever it exists—whether in Asia, Africa, Polynesia, or Australia.”⁵² Bookchin insists that the important aspect is not the who and where, but rather the what – historically new potentialities for freedom. He continues, “if it ‘hierarchises’ human development to assert that one era is more expansive in its concept of freedom, humaneness, rationality, and values than an earlier one, then historians can cheerfully acknowledge the accusation that they are hierarchical.”⁵³

Yet this view of history, especially when combined with his philosophical efforts to rescue the notions of progress and civilization from postmodern and primitivist critics, can lead to statements that can easily be interpreted as Eurocentric. This excerpt from The Philosophy of Social Ecology provides perhaps the most controversial example: 

The civilizing process has been ambiguous (…) but it has nonetheless historically turned folk into citizens, while the process of environmental adaptation that humans share with animals has been transformed into a wide-ranging, strictly human process of innovation in distinctly alterable environments. It is a process that reached its greatest universality primarily in Europe, however much other parts of the world have fed into the experience.⁵⁴

Read on its own, this statement sounds dangerously close to the very eurocentrism Bookchin denounced in his earlier works. While the phrase “civilizing process” is not one that many leftists are likely to find worth reclaiming, it must nevertheless be understood in its broader context of meaning. The definition of “civilization” described here echoes an even more concise description offered in Re-Enchanting Humanity of a generalized “movement of human beings from folk to citizens, from a life structured around biological facts to one structured around civic facts.”⁵⁵ For Bookchin, concepts like civilization and universalism were not apologia for chauvinism, colonialism, or a “stageist” understanding of history, but rather the best defense against them. Like many left thinkers prior to the 1980s and 90s, he understood war, imperialism, racism, and colonialism as expressions of particularism run amok – whether nationalist, tribalist, or ethno-chauvinist in nature. He warns of the seemingly “infinite capacity, deeply rooted in tribal dependencies and a darkly primitivist sense of parochialism, to regard outsiders or strangers as non-human and thus as potential enemies.”⁵⁶ These problems could therefore not be solved by counter-particularisms, but only by a more complete universalism, firmly embedded in rational, humanistic principles. 

Unlike many contemporary right-wing and liberal defenders of Enlightenment universalism or “progress,” Bookchin was clear that the dialectic of history contains legacies of both freedom and domination. Even in the revised Introduction to The Ecology of Freedom, which forcefully critiques his own earlier romanticization of organic society, his condemnation of colonialism is clear: 

The greed and exploitation that has destroyed Indian cultures over the past five centuries can in no way be justified morally or culturally. The interaction of European settlers and Native Americans could have opened a new opportunity for a sensitive integration of both cultures, but that opportunity was lost in an orgy of bloodletting and plunder by European settlers.⁵⁷

If Bookchin argues that a qualitatively new and different form of human civilization in terms of science, medicine, technology, individuality, self-critique, and freedom reached its most developed form in Europe, he also insisted these were not teleological phenomenon but rather latent dialectical potentialities that transcended any particular group or geography.

[I]nsofar as the historical process effected by living human agents is likely to expand our notions of the rational, the democratic, the free, and the cooperative, it is undesirable to dogmatically assert that they have any finality… Every society has the possibility of attaining a remarkable degree of rationality, given the material, cultural, and intellectual conditions that allow for it or, at least, are available to it.⁵⁸

Despite these qualifications, one can still wonder if the Russian peasant radicalism of the narodovoltsy that Bookchin praises was truly so different from the quasi-anarchic socialisms of Chinese peasant groups or the libertarian aspects of African socialism. There are clues which suggest this blind spot resulted from Bookchin’s forceful polemics against emergent intellectual shifts on the left, such as the embrace of mysticism and Eastern philosophy in the ecology movement or the New Left turn towards Maoist national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (a theme returned to below). He elaborates on this dynamic in an interview:

During the 1960s, to be sure, I was deeply concerned about working from specifically American traditions. But that approach didn’t come from any American chauvinism on my part—although I’ve been accused of that. I was opposing “New Lefties” who were talking to the American people in terms of German Marxism, Russian Leninism or Stalinism, and Chinese Maoism. That’s not to say that Marxism was or is irrelevant to the United States, not at all. But in their understandable opposition to American imperialism, they were really venerating Chinese and Vietnamese totalitarianism.⁵⁹

In The Third Revolution he writes: “It is my hope that this book will revive the flagging interest in the great revolutions that so profoundly shaped modern history and encourage the reader to examine the dynamics of the classical Western revolutions from the standpoint of movements from below.”⁶⁰ Yet equally aware of the possible charge of hypocrisy given the nationalist aims of the French and American Revolutions, he continues with a qualification: “I wish to lift, as best I can, the chauvinistic clouds that obscure the hopes that the great revolutions produced in the hearts of all enlightened human beings, and the ideologies that have influenced them over the greater part of two centuries.”⁶¹ Having made his case, he concludes by stating that the “possible charge that I am ‘Eurocentric’ leaves me singularly untroubled.”⁶²

This attitude resulted in an unfortunate missed opportunity. Bookchin’s intellectual background in Marx and Western classics, his critiques of New Left Maoism and national liberation movements, desire to create an American revolutionary idiom, and hostility to new political trends on the left converged in a manner that caused him to miss or underappreciate vital contributions to the “legacy of freedom” that came from outside the west. Bookchin’s own work expresses a tension between universality and particularity, as arguably any political thinker must in order to contextualize their intervention. If Bookchin was committed to developing a distinct revolutionary language that made sense to Americans, one might ask how or why this is any different from the nationally specific rhetoric articulated by Vietnamese or Tanzanian revolutionaries? If authoritarian statist outcomes in the Third World disqualify national liberation movements from serious consideration, why doesn’t Europe’s colonial project to “civilize” the world or the racism of New England town hall democracy raise the same concerns?⁶³ These gaps are not merely “bad optics,” but weaken Bookchin’s theoretical and political project. 

Bookchin’s Critique of Identity Politics, National Liberation, and Anti-Imperialist Movements

Bookchin was also a strident critic of identity politics and national liberation movements, positions which put him increasingly out of step with the conventional wisdom of the left from the late 1960s on. He argued that these political tendencies, mostly legacies of the New Left, marked a historic regression of the left in that they abandoned the earlier goal of universal human emancipation in favor of a politics based on asserting much narrower national, ethnic, or other identity interests. In his 1994 essay “Nationalism and the National Question,” he states:  

Embracing the particularism into which racial politics had degenerated instead of the potential universalism of a humanitas, the New Left placed blacks, colonial peoples, and even totalitarian colonial nations on the top of its theoretical pyramid, endowing them with a commanding or “hegemonic” position in relation to whites, Euro-Americans, and bourgeois-democratic nations… A highly parochial “identity politics” began to emerge, even to dominate many New Leftists as new “micronationalisms.” Not only do certain tendencies in such “identity” movements closely resemble those of very traditional forms of oppression like patriarchy, but identity politics also constitutes a regression from the libertarian and even general Marxian message of the Internationale and a transcendence of all “micronationalist” differentia in a truly humanistic communist society. What passes for “radical consciousness” today is shifting increasingly toward a biologically oriented emphasis on human differentiation like gender and ethnicity, not an emphasis on the need to foster human universality that was so pronounced among the anarchist writers of the last century and in The Communist Manifesto.⁶⁴

Given his strong universalist commitments, Bookchin’s antipathy towards identity politics is unsurprising. This critique is consistent with several core themes addressed above: his historical narrative of exclusionary kinship or tribal relations giving way to increasingly universal social forms not based in biology or custom, and his analysis of racism, nation-states, and war being driven by irrational particularisms like nationalism or ethnos. Yet at the same time, he was keenly aware that universalism could be used to justify the obliteration of difference. Indeed, he explicitly warned that “a narrow universalist perspective has historically plagued predominantly white and middle-class movements,” and cautioned against “mistaking the currently dominant culture as the universal and expecting other people to adopt the perspective of this dominant culture. This is not a productive transcendence of particularism.”⁶⁵ This sensitivity also translated into a clear defense of the right to diverse cultural expression:

That specific peoples should be free to fully develop their own cultural capacities is not merely a right but a desideratum. The world will be a drab place indeed if a magnificent mosaic of different cultures does not replace the largely deculturated and homogenized world created by modern capitalism.⁶⁶

But he also insisted that cultural diversity should complement, not obstruct, a recognition of our ultimate shared humanity: 

[B]y the same token, the world will be completely divided and peoples will be chronically at odds with one another if their cultural differences are parochialized and if seeming “cultural differences” are rooted in biologistic notions of gender, racial, and physical superiority … neither tribal affinities nor territorial boundaries constitute a realization of humanity’s potential to achieve a full sense of commonality with rich but harmonious cultural variations. Frontiers have no place on the map of the planet, any more than they have a place on the landscape of the mind.⁶⁷

His critique of identity politics was closely related to his earlier criticisms of the New Left’s uncritical support for anti-imperialist and national liberation movements, which he believed substituted campist realpolitik for radical social transformation. Indeed, he describes identity politics as “an extension of the ‘Cold War’ into domestic spheres of life,”⁶⁸ wherein the logic of “taking sides” in international relations had produced “yet another form of nationalism on the Left.”⁶⁹ This impression wasn’t dampened by the close association of Maoism and black nationalism in groups like the Black Panthers, or in the Weather Underground’s rhetorical shift from “power to the people” to “fight the people.” Bookchin’s disinterest in national liberation movements was not because he saw them as unjustified, but rather due to their relatively limited nationalist and statist political goals. By focusing primarily on expelling an outside colonizer/imperialist, the question of what a liberatory post-colonial society should look like was often eclipsed. As a result, postcolonial societies all too frequently became equally authoritarian class societies, simply ruled by local elites instead:

In the Near East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, colonized or formerly colonized peoples have developed imperial appetites of their own, so that many of what now pass for former colonies that have been liberated from Euro-American imperialist powers are now pursuing brutally imperialist aspirations of their own. For the emergence of an authentic Left what is disastrous here is that leftists in the United States and Europe often condone appalling behavior on the part of former colonies, in the name of “socialism,” “anti-imperialism,” and of course “national liberation.”⁷⁰

This critique prefigures one made much later by Albert Memmi, author of the postcolonial classic The Colonizer and the Colonized, in his 2006 follow-up Decolonization and the Decolonized, which echoes Bookchin’s observations. Whether in the international or domestic arenas, Bookchin warned that the nationalism of the oppressed could easily become new forms of oppression. 

In sum, Bookchin’s critique of identity politics, national liberation, and anti-imperialist movements was not that they were too radical, but rather not radical enough. He believed that while frequently necessary, they were insufficient in that they aimed not at the creation of a radically new society but rather a simple rearrangement of the old, only with previous power relations and normative polarities inverted. Bookchin observed that this political constellation also tended to reinforce representation, statism, and vanguardism, all anathema to his political goal of direct democracy. In liberal guise, the notion of group identity leans towards recognition and political representation by “spokespeople for ethnic groups.” In its radical variant, it becomes the justification for new forms of political vanguardism. He warned that these “particularistic claims to hegemonic roles” threatened to “turn the Left back to a more parochial, exclusionary, and ironically, more hierarchical past insofar as one group, whether alone or in concert with others, affirms its superior qualifications to lead society and guide movements for social change.” In the process, the left replaced the vision of a universal humanity with ethnic and national differentiation, and a more expansive notion of freedom with mere distributive justice among groups or nations.

Bookchin was well aware that these positions put him at odds with the emergent left of the day, commenting that “these remarks will be viewed by many contemporary leftists as unsatisfactory.”⁷¹ Yet he believed this was only one aspect of a general process of historical regression afflicting both mainstream society and its traditional radical opponent, the left. By “destroying a great tradition of human solidarity and a belief in the potentiality for humanness,” the Left was abandoning the very traits that had defined it historically and given it radical energy.⁷²

Conclusion

This article has attempted to evaluate Murray Bookchin’s work in relation to race, racism, colonialism and Eurocentrism, looking at his comments on these topics across several key works over time. It has sought to recover the antiracist content of social ecology, including his early critiques of antisemitism and fascism, theorization of hierarchy contra Marxist class reductionism, and articulation of a social ecology that challenged the racist (as well as sexist and classist) assumptions of much environmental politics. Indeed, Bookchin’s interventions played a significant role in injecting a social analysis into environmental politics in general. These insights were informed by Bookchin’s own personal and political experience as a radical leftist and Jew, spanning early attention to Soviet antisemitism, multiracial labor organizing, and activism with the Civil Rights Movement. 

The present text has also sought to assess the claim that social ecology is blind to racism and colonialism, tone deaf to identity concerns, and Eurocentrically focused on the western intellectual and political tradition. Looking at Bookchin’s work, it is clear that while he was a forceful critic of racism and colonialism, these were not core theoretical or political topics outside of the aforementioned instances. These themes were often articulated through polemics criticizing other political tendencies, illustrating the point via negative dialectic rather than positive articulation. However, Bookchin suggests this lacuna reflects theoretical and personal humility rather than racist oversight. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, he was explicit about the limited scope of his work, noting that while “[e]xploitation, racism, poverty, class struggle and imperialism are still with us—and in many respects have deepened their grip on society,” he notes there “is little I can contribute to these issues, however, that has not been exhaustively discussed by others.”⁷³

Indeed, Bookchin was sensitive to the problem of representing other’s experience. His hostility to academia was based not only on its politically neutralizing effects, but also because he resented well-paid academics speaking authoritatively about topics that did not affect them. He even deployed the language of “white privilege” long before it became mainstream, as when he suggested in 1987 that deep ecology’s obliviousness to race, class, and gender was due in part to the fact that it was theorized by “privileged male white academics.” In the same text, published a year before the Peggy McIntosh article “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” credited with popularizing the concept of white privilege, he wrote of “the struggle by people of color for complete freedom from domination by privileged white people.” Elsewhere he warned that the environmental movement must not preach green austerity to the developing world, arguing “It hardly befits fairly privileged white, middle-class Greens to lecture the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and, yes, the homeless, poor, and underprivileged in their own countries about the virtues of austerity and the horrors of abundance.”⁷⁴

For these reasons, Damian White’s appraisal of Bookchin’s work suggests that “Whilst the issues of racism, colonialism and imperialism are not addressed in a systematic and singular fashion in Bookchin’s work, they nevertheless do provide a central backdrop to his thoughts.” Indeed, he concludes that “exposing the racism, and imperialism of much radical ecological discourse has been central to his work and he deserves credit for this.”⁷⁵

Why then does Bookchin seem to get a bad rap on race? Arguably, because his assessment is correct – the Left has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, shifting significantly from a politics rooted in shared class or human solidarity to one instead centering difference and identity. This profound historical and epistemological transformation within left political culture makes Bookchin’s principled critiques of identity politics and nationalism, as well as his spirited defenses of universalism, secularism, and a common humanitas sound suspiciously out of tune with contemporary left discourse – especially to younger readers with no connection to the culture and ideas of “the left that was.” The discourse of the left today is shaped by postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, and spirituality as much as either Marxism or anarchism. 

However, it’s worth noting that Bookchin’s own politics did not simply stand still during this time. While the left has undeniably become more particularist, skeptical of Enlightenment, and minoritarian in outlook, these shifts also shaped Bookchin’s political evolution. He substantially revised The Ecology of Freedom and wrote Re-Enchanting Humanity in response to trends on the left, and eventually renounced the very anarchist tradition he spent much of his public life associated with. Recent years have witnessed yet another pronounced shift on the left: away from anarchism and back towards socialism and Marxism. In this regard, Bookchin’s late-life reconciliation with the Marxist tradition he’d spent much of his life criticizing is interesting; similar critiques of identity politics are much more commonly found there than on the ecological and anarchist left, frequently articulated by Marxist critical theorists of color.⁷⁶

However, it is also clear that these positions closed Bookchin off to important insights from political traditions he found problematic. While the gradual decentering of the western canon was often led by postcolonial and postmodern thinkers that Bookchin believed pointed in problematic political directions, it foreclosed a fruitful engagement that could have powerfully expanded his work by developing a global history of domination and freedom. His insistence on not throwing the baby of western thought with the bathwater of racism and colonialism was correct, yet also true from the other side: this long-overdue attention to non-European history and thought was mostly dismissed due to the excesses of its most polemical advocates. Given Bookchin’s own penchant for polemic, there is some irony here. Although much of this literature was published or translated after his death, there was nonetheless a missed opportunity to include the contribution of non-western thinkers like Ibn Khaldun to what is now recognized as a global process of Enlightenment.⁷⁷ Likewise for scholarship on the rich anarchist and libertarian traditions of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, largely published after his death. Bookchin was very much a pre-internet thinker; the vast and more diverse resources we now take for granted were only just developing, and he did not utilize them. 

But there is no reason why these insights can’t be integrated into the general framework Bookchin developed. For example, Bao Jingyuan’s Taoist critique of hierarchy and state power in “Neither Lord nor Subject” from 300 CE could be seen as just as essential to the “legacy of freedom” as the heretical Gnostic Christian sects he explores in The Ecology of Freedom.⁷⁸ This underscores a related point about the relationship between theory and history in Bookchin’s work; his political theory and revolutionary politics are far more universal in scope than his historical writings, which are by nature more place, time, and context-specific. History is empirical, and the absence of missing voices or events significantly undermines it; however, this also makes it easier to correct. By contrast, political philosophy operates at a level of abstraction and generalizability which is less reliant on particulars or empirical accuracy.⁷⁹ Bookchin’s historical work and philosophy of history were largely developed near the end of his life, and were strongly influenced by the theoretical debates of his day. But his political project, terminological shifts aside, was remarkably consistent throughout his life. The desire to tightly fuse his theory, politics, and philosophy of history in the name of “coherence” created its own baby and bathwater dilemma, creating an unnecessarily “all or nothing” proposition. Bookchin himself was an avowedly dialectical thinker, building on a tradition of immanent critique which recognizes the need to pull out emancipatory potentialities from an inherently broken reality. Insistence on purity of thinkers or traditions enforces a rigidity which robs us of insights from imperfect and partial sources. A central task for social ecological theory is to incorporate what is useful in the historical and theoretical scholarship that Bookchin didn’t have access to or neglected, without also smuggling in the problematic political assumptions that he correctly warned of, and which still frequently characterize much of the “decolonial” and postmodern theory that still suffuses the academy today.⁸⁰

A forthcoming second part of this article will outline a theory of racism that builds on these foundations instead of simply borrowing theories of racism or colonialism that present significant theoretical tensions if not incompatibilities with social ecology. To this end, it will explore and elaborate on Bookchin’s ideas regarding identity, community, cosmopolitanism, and freedom and situate this sketch of a social ecological approach to racism within recent debates in antiracist theory.  It will also consider strategic objections to direct democracy based on racism, suggesting there is an important but underappreciated relationship between Bookchin’s critique of representation and rejection of identity politics, as well as his distinction between freedom and justice.

It is my hope that these articles will spark a conversation about how social ecology’s political vision relates to the current political moment, wherein issues of racist police violence are being tied to socialist material demands and – in some cases – are discussed and articulated in directly democratic popular assemblies. The convergence of the uprising against white supremacy, the COVID pandemic, the resultant economic crisis, and the existential threat of climate change have transformed slogans like “defund the police” and “cancel rent” that only recently seemed revolutionary into accepted liberal positions. Seemingly abstract debates about how we understand the maintenance of racial inequality will directly impact whether the current energy is channeled into ineffectual symbolic gestures and a more diverse ruling class, or whether it will lead to demands for a radically different society. In this context, I will suggest that Bookchin’s insights on these topics remain highly relevant, especially in the context of creating a cosmopolitan, democratic, non-hierarchical, and ecological society. 

1. See the discussion in Janet Biehl’s Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin. Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 56. The three texts include: M.S. Shiloh, “A Social Study of Genocide,” Contemporary Issues (Vol. 3, No. 10, Winter 1952); “Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe”, Contemporary Issues (Vol. 4, No. 13, Nov.-Dec. 1952); and “The Zionist Movement and Russian Anti-Semitism,” Contemporary Issues (Vol. 4, No. 15, 1953).
2. Biehl 2015, 22.
3. Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, ed. Steve Chase (Boston, South End Press, 1999), 123.
4. ibid 91-93.
5. Murray Bookchin, “What is Social Ecology?” in The Modern Crisis (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1986), 67.
6. Bookchin and Foreman 1999, 122.
7. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, Cheshire Books, 1982), 3.
8. Bookchin and Foreman 1999, 123.
9. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Ramparts Press 1971), 70.
10. ibid 26.
11. ibid.
12. ibid 75.
13.  Murray Bookchin, Towards an Ecological Society (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1980), 37.
14. Bookchin and Foreman 1999, 23-4.
15. Murray Bookchin, “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology”, Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project (Nos. 4-5, summer 1987).
16. ibid.
17. Murray Bookchin, “Community Control or Status Politics: A Reply to David Lewis,” Green Multilogue (May 13, 1991a). http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/communitycontrol.html.
18. Bookchin and Foreman 1999, 124.
19. ibid 122.
20. Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (Oakland, AK Press, 1995).
21. Hilary Moore, Burning Earth, Changing Europe: How the Racist Right Exploits the Climate Crisis – and What We Can Do About It (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2020); Blair Taylor, “Alt-Right Ecology: Right-Wing Environmentalism and Ecofascism in the United States,” in The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication, ed. Bernhard Forchtner (Routledge, 2019).
22. Bookchin and Foreman 1999, 123.
23. Chuck Morse, “Being a Bookchinite”, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (2007). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chuck-morse-being-a-bookchinite.
24. Damian White, Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (London, Pluto, 2008), 143.
25. Janet Biehl with Murray Bookchin, The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1998), 92.
26. Bookchin 1971, 16, 26, 29, 70.
27. Murray Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia, New Society Publishers, 1986), 121-22.
28. Bookchin 1982: Colonial racism, p. 98; quote from Epictetus, p. 158; Quote by Epictitus, p. 158; Augustine quote p. 160; Nazism, p, 273; in relation to nature philosophy, p. 274 and p. 353.
29. ibid 64.
30. ibid 296.
31. Murray Bookchin, Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism (London, Cassell, 1995a), 71-72.
32. Bookchin 1982, 87.
33. ibid 87-88.
34. Elements of this critique can be found in previous works, but are stated more systematically (and polemically) in Re-Enchanting Humanity (1995).
35. Murray Bookchin, “Twenty Years Later ” Introduction to the second edition of The Ecology of Freedom (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1991b), xiv-xv.
36. Bookchin 1991a.
37. ibid.
38. ibid.
39. Murray Bookchin, The Murray Bookchin Reader, ed. Janet Biehl (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1999), 68.
40. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
41. Karl Hardy, “Continuing the Dialogue”, Institute for Social Ecology blog (2011). https://social-ecology.org/wp/2011/04/continuing-the-dialogue/.
42. Bookchin 1995a, 206.
43. ibid 149.
44. ibid 71.
45. ibid 72.
46. Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1995b), 3-4.
47. Bookchin 1982, chapter 2.
48. Chuck Morse, blog comment on “Continuing the dialogue” from April 6, 2011. https://social-ecology.org/wp/2011/04/continuing-the-dialogue/.
49. Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era, Volume 1 (London, Cassell, 1996), 17-18.
50. Bookchin 1995a, 249.
51. ibid.
52. ibid 257.
53. ibid 239.
54. Bookchin 1995b, 166.
55. Bookchin 1995a, 248.
56. Bookchin 1999, 69.
57. ibid.
58. Biehl with Bookchin 1998, 168.
59. ibid 93.
60. Bookchin 1996, 18.
61. ibid 19.
62. ibid 18.
63. Thanks to Mason Herson-Hord for highlighting this tension.
64. Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, ed. Blair Taylor and Debbie Bookchin (London and New York, Verso Books, 2015), 130-131.
65. Bookchin and Foreman 1999, 65.
66. Bookchin 2015, 111-112.
67. ibid 132.
68. Murray Bookchin, “The Left that Was,” 1991c. https://social-ecology.org/wp/1991/04/the-left-that-was-a-personal-reflection/.
69. Bookchin 2015, 130.
70. Bookchin 1991c.
71. ibid.
72. ibid.
73. Bookchin 1971, 30.
74. Bookchin 1991a.
75. White 2008, 215.
76. This overlooked yet critically important group of thinkers includes Adolph Reed, Cedric Johnson, Touré Reed, Asad Haider, and Saladdin Ahmed.
77. Sebastian Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 4, October 2012, Pages 999–1027.
78. Bao Jingyuan, “Neither Lord Nor Subject”, trans. Etienne Balazs. https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/chinas-first-political-anarchist-bao-jingyan.
79. Credit to an unnamed comrade for clarifying this point.
80. One can look at the admiration for reactionary Islamist movements voiced by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, or more recently Houria Bouteldja.