This issue of Harbinger is dedicated to exploring what might be called social ecology “heresies”—new perspectives that critique, challenge, or rethink its prevailing “orthodoxies” and take aim at some of our political community’s sacred cows. To this end, we’ve sought out perspectives that we hope will productively stir debate and shake up our received wisdom. Much of Bookchin’s political and intellectual project was directed at analyzing, amending, and transcending traditions and thinkers whose ideas, in his view, had been rendered inadequate by changed social circumstances. Just as he astutely critiqued the left for clinging to outmoded ideas and strategies that did not speak to radically different historical circumstances, we must do the same. We seek to continue this tradition of self-reflexive critical theory and immanent critique. Our goal is not to rehash tired old debates or draw lines in the sand, but rather to foster productive new discussions that ensure social ecology remains politically and theoretically relevant, vibrant, and adaptive to an ever-changing world.
All political ideas confront a tension between ideological consistency and evolution, stability and change. What ideas are foundational and should remain consistent, and which ones require updating due to new historical or theoretical developments? Although social ecology has been developed by many people and movements in a variety of settings and locations, it is still strongly identified with its foundational theorist, Murray Bookchin. He was a profoundly systemic thinker who strongly emphasized ideological coherence and vigorously—and often polemically—defended his ideas. The centrality of his individual intellectual contribution to the tradition of social ecology has at times created a perception of orthodoxy, that it is a closed political worldview tied to the work of a single thinker. As a result, debates—and occasionally splits—have periodically emerged around the incorporation of new ideas into social ecology. Of course, this is not a dynamic that is unique to social ecology, but one that has characterized a long lineage of religious, intellectual, and political movements.
An incomplete compendium of past debates would include the rift in the 1980s between social versus deep ecology concerning the nature of nature, which spurred rich discussion on biocentrism, anthropocentrism, monism, dualism, evolution, and dialectical naturalism. As poststructuralism and identity politics became ascendant in the 80s and 90s, Bookchin’s strong secularist/Enlightenment commitments increasingly brought him into conflict with advocates of eco-spiritualities, indigenist cosmologies, and nationalisms of the oppressed. In the 1990s, Bookchin’s criticism of the “unbridgeable chasm” separating social from individualist “lifestyle” anarchism, including anarcho-primitivism and post-left anarchy, became a source of fierce contention that reflected fundamental divergence on the importance of political organization, the legacy of the historical left, and social movement politics versus counterculture and personal lifestyle changes. When Bookchin eventually abandoned anarchism in 1999, his advocacy of libertarian municipalism and especially participation in local elections led to sharp disagreements with his former anarchist comrades. From the traditional left, Marxists and social democrats have critiqued social ecology’s rejection of the state and concomitant commitment to direct democracy, as well as Bookchin’s valorization of a general human interest rather than class or other particularist political interests. These often intersected with strategic and tactical concerns, such as the meaning of prefigurative politics vis-a-vis direct democracy, consensus decision-making, and questions of scale broached by the notion of confederalism. In the 2000s students at the Institute’s Maple Hill campus in Vermont debated social ecology’s compatibility with post-structuralist anti-naturalism and Butlerian gender politics, alongside the usefulness of post-marxist concepts like Hardt and Negri’s “multitude.” There have been recurring discussions about how far to expand the critique of hierarchy, how firm the line between first and second nature is or should be and related disputes over anthropocentrism, as well as clashes between those advocating an ecological omnivore position versus a vegan/total liberation perspective.
As vitally important as these specific debates are, they foreground even more fundamental questions such as: how open is social ecology to new ideas? Which ones, and why? How much can and should insights from other traditions be incorporated? What constitutes a fundamental incompatibility? What contradictions or tensions already exist within social ecology? How can political ideas navigate change versus stability? A tradition that doesn’t evolve becomes stagnant and outdated. Yet one that changes too readily becomes incoherent or merely chases after the latest political or intellectual fads. What are the most pressing historical transformations and emergent issues that require new thinking from a social ecological perspective?
For this issue we’ve collected texts that engage critically yet substantively with core aspects of social ecology’s theoretical or political worldview. We’ve tried to shine a light on what might be considered as weak links within social ecology, ideas in need of updating or correction, or perhaps, may be deemed theoretically or strategically unsalvageable. In the process, we hope to explore what other political traditions social ecology might draw upon, and why, and conversely, what sacred cows should remain sacred.
We don’t expect that those who seek an ecological and non-hierarchical society will have the same answers to these questions. In that spirit, we certainly don’t agree with everything in the following texts; in fact, we quite often fiercely disagree with the positions and arguments staked out. But we think they pose interesting or challenging questions that, at the very least, should prompt serious reflection within the social ecology movement. We hope these eight texts prompt readers to respond to the claims and critiques laid out here, so that we can continue the conversation within our movements and upcoming issues.
Marco Rossaire Rossi’s text “Prosperity, Urbanity, and Ecological Consciousness” makes a social ecological argument against degrowth rooted in the notion of post-scarcity. He argues that “an ecologically sustainable planet is dependent not on a degrowing of the global economy, but quite the opposite. For humanity to achieve a universal ecological consciousness, it is necessary to seek a rapid increase in economic growth and bring the world’s population to a state of post-scarcity so that the vast majority of the globe’s population can dedicate time and resources toward ecological concerns.” The solution to our planetary crisis, in Rossi’s view, is not the reversal of urban modernity but its full utilization, based instead on rational and democratic planning.
Harbinger co-editor Blair Taylor’s contribution, “Heretical Resonances: Historicizing Social Ecology in the Neoliberal Epoch,” historicizes Bookchin’s intellectual and political project against the late Fordist historical context it was written in to argue that many of his core ideas are foundationally directed at two targets—state-directed Fordist capitalism and New Left Marxism-Leninism—which no longer exist, rendering elements of his social critique less critical today. Taylor suggests that Bookchin’s key concept of hierarchy presumes a spatialized and personified conceptualization of power—centering verticality and “relations of command and obedience”—which are ultimately inadequate to the quasi-horizontal and self-activating modes of power which characterize contemporary capitalism, while his political alternative of decentralization, democratic self-activation, and “moralizing” the economy pose troubling resonances with aspects of neoliberalism’s critique of state-led Fordist capitalism.
In “Social Ecology after the Collapse of Western Hegemony,” Metin Guven argues that the theoretical framework of social ecology is shaped, at least in part, by its development in the historical context of American and western European hegemony. Drawing upon world-systems theory, Guven suggests that this hegemony is eroding and a quite different global order is emerging, a process which requires new analysis from social ecology if it is to be able to speak to the new world we inhabit.
Jake Fremantle’s “From Ambivalence to Profanity: Resisting the Dogmatic Ideal of Community” warns of the politically ambivalence of “community.” Drawing on Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers, Fremantle suggests community can easily become a reified and exclusionary concept, one which can just as easily be mobilized to rescue rather than undermine capitalism. While a “community” frame offers certain political benefits, it also poses risks: capitalist co-optation, new forms of disenfranchisement, or inadvertently foreclosing new forms of community from emerging in the future.
“Agency in Eugenics Thinking” by Zach Whitworth examines the left’s historical relationship to the eugenics movement, attempting to tease out distinctions between racist and ableist impulses from those which sought to improve the human condition by eliminating the “irrational” in society. The text explores uncomfortable parallels between the emphasis on consciously guiding evolution found in eugenic thinkers like Galton, Ellis, and Haeckel and similar notions found in Bookchin’s notion of third nature and his dialectical distinction between mere reality versus the rational. Against eugenic thinkers who sought to eliminate disability, Whitworth channels Kropotkin to argue that Bookchin’s gerontocracy thesis—implicitly rule by those disabled by age seeking to protect themselves by institutionalizing their social power—offers a lens for thinking about overcoming a society organized in ways that disable us all.
In the first piece of a planned series on the science of “second nature,” Mason Herson-Hord challenges social ecology’s basic philosophical premise that what we term second nature (the historical emergence of society from biological evolution) is limited to human beings. His essay reviews contemporary scientific scholarship on social learning, gene-culture coevolution, and the documentation of cultures in a great variety of other animal species. Three detailed case studies (African elephants, killer whales, and sperm whales) are used to illustrate the social development underway among certain animal societies. Social ecology, he argues, has staked out claims about our world that are simply no longer scientifically tenable, requiring significant philosophical revision to recognize “Second Nature Beyond the Human.”
In “Always Swimming Upstream: My Social Ecology Journey,” Grace Gershuny reflects on her time in the Institute for Social Ecology, as both a wellspring of her political and intellectual development and a fetter on her spiritual development. This personal essay wrestles with the tensions between rationality and non-rational ways of knowing, taking aim at Bookchin’s insistence on upholding the legacy of the European Enlightenment. It also examines his prioritization of social movement work above and indeed against the “inner work” of spiritual reflection, and points towards her work within other organizations as illustrations of a different sort of balance between these two poles.
Lastly, we have transcribed a dialogue between Chaia Heller and Peter Staudenmaier, revisiting past debates within social ecology about the philosophical viability of dialectical naturalism. Murray Bookchin believed that it was possible to extract an objective ethics out of natural history, as our rational political grounding in opposition to the dangers posed by ethical relativism. These two long-time ISE faculty members revisit these debates, reflect on the stakes then and now, and consider how their thinking has shifted over the ensuing decades as both evolutionary science and the world have changed.
It is our hope with this issue to rouse vigorous debates and prompt dissenting responses from you as readers that bring deeper self-reflection of our tradition and at the same time strengthen our intellectual limberness to critique and defend it. For a social ecology that grows!
~ The editors of Harbinger: a Journal of Social Ecology