Reflections - An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology

[Wordie]

This is a thought-provoking article that I happened to run across. The four paragraph limit prevents justice being done to it. It's a long read, but worth it.

Reflections
An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology

By Murray Bookchin

The extent to which radical versions of environmentalism underwent sweeping metamorphoses and evolved into revolutionary ideologies when the New Left came of age is difficult to convey to the present generation, which has been almost completely divorced from the ebullient days of the New Left, not to speak of all the major problems in classical socialism, especially in its Marxist form. These changes burden us to this very day.

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

Secondly, hierarchy had to be abolished by institutional changes that were no less profound and far reaching than those needed to abolish classes. This placed “ecology” on an entirely new level of inquiry and praxis, bringing it far above a solicitous, often romantic and mystical engagement with an undefined “nature” and a love-affair with “wildlife.” Social ecology was concerned with the most intimate relations between human beings and the organic world around them. Social ecology, in effect, gave ecology a sharp revolutionary and political edge. In other words, we were obliged to seek changes not only in the objective realm of economic relations but also in the subjective realm of cultural, ethical, aesthetic, personal, and psychological areas of inquiry.

Most fundamentally, these relations exist at the very base of all social life: notably, the ways in which we interact with the natural world, especially through labor, even in the simplest forms of society, such as tribal and village stages of social formation. And certainly, if we had major negative ecological disequilibria between humanity and the natural world which could threaten the very existence of our species, we had to understand how these disequilibria emerged; what we even meant by the word “nature;” how did society emerge out of the natural world; how did it necessarily alienate itself from elemental natural relations; how and why did basic social institutions such as government, law, the state, even classes emerge dialectically from each other before human society came into its own; and in ways that went beyond mere instinct and custom, not to speak of patricentricity, patriarchy, and a host of similar “cultural” relations whose emergence are not easily explained by economic factors alone.

[Clara T]

1. Bookchin's work is interesting and the Institute for Social Ecology

in Goddard, VT is an excellent place.

I think the link is missing.

Rec'd

[Wordie]

2. Apologies for that...here it is:

http://www.social-ecology.org/harbinger/vol3no1/reflections.html

I thought it was interesting because it is a way of looking at politics from the left that transcends classical Marxism.

...I had repeatedly warned my readers that almost nothing could emerge from within the context of a market economy that was not tainted by the pathologies of competition, rivalry, and, quite bluntly, pure and simple greed!

By contrast, social ecology’s ecological imperative—the contradiction between a competitive society and the natural world—is not simply theoretical. By the eighties, it had been tested by the massive degradation that is occurring in the social as well as the natural world. ...as early as the eighties and nineties, the contradiction between capitalism and the natural world was becoming a very visible reality. Thereafter, the greenhouse effect and other destructive imbalances have assumed proportions that even outweigh more “commonplace” problems such as soil erosion and waste disposal.

This philosophy forms the basis for an educative outlook that yields a lengthy dialectical history and exposition of the phases of human development as it emerges out from natural evolution into social evolution. The philosophy of social ecology centers around a dialectical unfolding of a “legacy of freedom” that not only intertwines but interacts with a “legacy of domination,” and includes the evolution of a concept of justice that leads into an ever-expanding concept of freedom, of scarcity into post-scarcity, of folkdom into citizenship, of hierarchy into class, and, hopefully, a growing horizon of freedom (whose termination, if any, we are not yet equipped to foresee), yielding libertarian municipalities and institutions. Taken together, as a whole, this educative outlook forms the basis for a practical theory of politics.

Heady stuff!

[Wordie]

3. Some additional thoughts (meant to be an edit but I was a little too late)

I do have some questions, such as whether humans have truly "emerged out from natural evolution into social evolution." Rather, it would seem to me that social evolution may be simply a part of natural evolution.

And much as I hate to admit it for egalitarian reasons, I'm not entirely convinced that "competition" and "rivalry" are truly pathologies, either, in and of themselves. Competition and rivalry are part of the natural world. Perhaps he intended to say (or really has said, but I missed it somehow) that competion and rivalry, when carried to the extremes often found in unfettered capitalism are pathological, as some capitalistic extremes are so extreme that they threaten not just individuals, or societies, but the planet and all it's inhabitants as well.

At any rate, the idea of applying social ecological principles to politics is intriguing, and I hope that it takes hold. It seems to me to have the elegance of "a theory of everything," but instead of physics, for leftist politics.