Great Throughts Treasury

"In the late 1950s, when anarchism in the United States was a barely discernible presence, it seemed like a sufficiently clear field in which I could develop social ecology, as well as the ... political ideas that would eventually become ... libertarian municipalism. I well knew that these views were not consistent with traditional anarchist ideas ... Today I find that anarchism remains the very simplistic individualistic and antirationalist society it has always been. My attempt to retain anarchism under the name of ?social anarchism? has largely been a failure, and I now find that the term I have used to denote my views must be replaced with Communalism, which coherently integrate and goes beyond the most viable features of the anarchist and Marxist traditions."

"Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems ? or even to play down or give only token recognition to their crucial relationship ? would be to grossly misconstrue the sources of the growing environmental crisis. In effect, the way human beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will surely fail to see that the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate society are what has given rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world."

"Invertebrate protests, directionless escapades, self-assertions, and a very personal ?recolonization? of everyday life parallel the psychotherapeutic, New Age, self-oriented lifestyles of bored baby boomers and members of Generation X. Today what passes for anarchism in America and increasingly in Europe is little more than an introspective personalism that denigrates responsible social commitment; an encounter group variously renamed a collective or an affinity group; a state of mind that arrogantly derides structure, organization, and public involvement; and a playground for juvenile antics."

"It is my contention that Communalism is the overarching political category most suitable to encompass the fully thought out and systematic views of social ecology, including libertarian municipalism and dialectical naturalism. As an ideology, Communalism draws on the best of the older Left ideologies ? Marxism and anarchism, more properly the libertarian socialist tradition ? while offering a wider and more relevant scope for our time."

"Municipal elections can more accurately reflect the popular will than parliamentary ones."

"My views on libertarian municipalism are entirely oriented toward creating a dual power composed of directly democratic assemblies of the people in revolutionary opposition to the state. The idea that libertarian municipalism should try to capture the local state and operate within a statist framework is alien to my views. My hope is that a movement can be created that seeks to enlarge whatever local democracy still remains in a community ? particularly a direct face-to-face democracy ? in the hope that it can be thrown against the state on all levels, from the municipality to the central government."

"Not only in the factory but also in the family, not only in the economy but also in the psyche, not only in the material conditions of life but also in the spiritual ones."

"Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution."

"Our choices on how to transform the existing society are still on the table of history and are faced with immense problems. But unless present and future generations are beaten into complete submission by a culture based on queasy calculation as well as by police with tear gas and water cannons, we cannot desist from fighting for what freedoms we have and try to expand them into a free society wherever the opportunity to do so emerge."

"Our effort must now be directed throughout the entire year to catalyzing popular antiwar groups: popular assemblies and local action committees, if you like, each rooted in a community, campus, school, professional arena... factory, office, and research establishment. A real movement must be built out of these formations for the immediate purpose of antiwar activity and perhaps in the long run as popular modes of self-activity to achieve a society based on self-management... each popular institution is free to make its own local decisions, free to act or not act as it feels necessary."

"Partial ?solutions? serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis."

"Power to the people' can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never have power until they disappear as a 'people."

"Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society... Both the ecologist and the anarchist view differentiation as a measure of progress... to both the ecologist and the anarchist, an ever-increasing unity is achieved by growing differentiations."

"Several years ago, while I still identified myself as an anarchist, I attempted to formulate a distinction between ?social? and ?lifestyle? anarchism, and I wrote an article that identified Communalism as ?the democratic dimension of anarchism.? ... I no longer believe that Communalism is a mere ?dimension? of anarchism, democratic or otherwise; rather, it is a distinct ideology with a revolutionary tradition that has yet to be explored."

"Social ecologists believe that things like racism, sexism, third world exploitation are a product of the same mechanisms that cause rainforest devastation."

"Social ecology is a fairly integrated and coherent view point that encompasses a philosophy of natural evolution and of humanity? s place in that evolutionary process; a reformulation of dialectics along ecological lines; an account of the emergence of hierarchy; a historical examination of the dialectic between legacies and epistemologies of domination and freedom; an evaluation of technology from an historical , ethical, and philosophical standpoint; a wide-ranging critique of Marxism, the Frankfurt School, justice, rationalism, scientism, and instrumentalism; and finally an eduction of a vision of a utopian, decentralized, confederal, and aesthetically grounded future society based on an objective ethics of complementarity... Whether adequately or not, this holistic body of ideas endeavors to place ?eco-anarchism? on a theoretical and intellectual par with the best systematic works in radical social theory."

"Social ecology is an ecology not of hunger and material deprivation but of plenty; it seeks the creation of a rational society in which waste, indeed excess, will be controlled by a new system of values; and when or if shortages arise as a result of irrational behavior, popular assemblies will establish rational standards of consumption by democratic processes."

"Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today?apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes."

"Some critics have recently questioned whether social ecology has treated the issue of spirituality in ecological politics adequately, but social ecology was in fact among the earliest of contemporary ecologies to call for a sweeping change in existing spiritual values. Such a change would be a far-reaching transformation of our prevailing mentality of domination into one of complementarity, one that sees our role in the natural world as creative, supportive, and deeply appreciative of the needs of nonhuman life. In social ecology a truly ?natural? spirituality would center on the ability of an awakened humanity to function as moral agents for diminishing needless suffering, engaging in ecological restoration, and fostering an aesthetic appreciation of natural evolution in all its fecundity and diversity."

"Some kind of decentralization will be necessary to achieve a lasting equilibrium between society and nature. Urban decentralization underlies any hope of achieving ecological control of pest infestations in agriculture. Only a community well integrated with the resources of the surrounding region can promote agricultural and biological diversity... a decentralized community holds the greatest promise for conserving natural resources, particularly as it would promote the use of local sources of energy [and use] wind power, solar energy, and hydroelectric power."

"Someone wrote a reply to me stating that anarchists should never participate in any elections of any kind... I?m saying that city government, as you call it, has to be restructured at the grassroots level... What anarchists should be doing is not hesitating to get involved in local politics to create forms of organization in which they may run once they?ve established these forms or, alternatively, running on a platform to establish these forms."

"The aim is not to nationalize the economy or retain private ownership of the means of production but to municipalize the economy. It seeks to integrate the means of production into the existential life of the municipality, such that every productive enterprise falls under the purview of local assemblies, which decides how it will meet the interests and needs of the community as a whole."

"The domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human."

"The effort in some quarters of the ecology movement to prioritize the need to develop a pantheistic ?eco-spirituality? over the need to address social factors (which actually erode all forms of spirituality) raises serious questions about their ability to comes to grips with reality. At a time when a blind social mechanism, the market, is turning soil into sand, covering fertile land with concrete, poisoning air and water, and producing sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes, we cannot ignore the impact that a hierarchical and class society has on the natural world. We must face the fact that economic growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic domination ? not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic interests ? are much more capable of shaping the future of the natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-regeneration. These forms of domination must be confronted by collective action and by major social movements that challenge the social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply by personalistic forms of consumption and investment that often go under the rubric of ?green capitalism.? The present highly cooptative society is only too eager to find new means of commercial aggrandizement and to add ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations efforts."

"The factory serves not only to discipline, unite, and organize the workers, but also to do so in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion. In the factory, capitalistic production not only renews the social relations of capitalism with each working day, as Marx observed, it also renews the psyche, values and ideologies of capitalism."

"The formation of local coalitions of non-party groups ? the best of the urban and rural communes, independent student groups, radical professional, working class, and women?s groups ... independent antiwar groups ? to act concertedly in choosing and presenting candidates for city councils in the municipalities of this country. These coalitions, we believe, must be free and non-hierarchical; they must try to be rooted in their local communities and act openly with each other in a consistently democratic manner, eschewing any form of bureaucratic or manipulatory behavior."

"The hollow cone that we call a movement must acquire a more solid geometry. It must be filled in by an authentic popular movement based on the self-activity of the American people, not the theatrical eruptions of a dedicated minority."

"The idea of dominating nature has its primary source in the domination of human by human and the structuring of the natural world into a hierarchical Chain of Being."

"The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man? But it was not until organic community relation? dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly? The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital."

"The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little ?Red Book? and other sacred litanies."

"The root causes of environmental problems are such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification of "progress" with corporate self-interest."

"The sections provide us with a rough model of assembly organization in a large city and during a period of revolutionary transition from a centralized political state to a potentially decentralized society.? Just so, the Athenian ?ecclesia provides us with a rough model of assembly organization in a decentralized society."

"The spirituality advanced by social ecology is definitively naturalistic rather than super-naturalistic or pantheistic."

"The trend toward popular democracy ... achieved a form that has never quite been equaled elsewhere. By Periclean times the Athenians had perfected their polis to a point where it represented a triumph of rationality within the material limitations of the ancient world."

"The truth, indeed, is out?but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight."

"There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things."

"There must be a place on the political spectrum where a body of anti-authoritarian thought that advances humanity?s bitter struggle to arrive at the realization of its authentic social life ? the famous ?Commune of communes? ? can be clearly articulated institutionally as well as ideologically. There must be a means by which socially concerned anti-authoritarians can develop a program and a practice for attempting to change the world, not merely their psyches. There must be an arena of struggle that can mobilize people, help them to educate themselves and develop an anti-authoritarian politics ... that pits a new public sphere against the state and capitalism. In short, we must recover not only the socialist dimension of anarchism but its political dimension, democracy."

"Thus people come to relate to one another through things. If we?re unhappy, we are advised to buy a new outfit or household device, and then we?ll feel better. The family mutates into a unit of consumption. Acquiring an education is reduced to training for earning an income; gaining one?s livelihood often involves the exploitation of other people and plundering the natural world. Friendships are reduced to relationships designed to advance one?s career. Commodification, in short, replaces genuine social ties to such an extent that things seem to preside over human relationships, as Marx observed, instead of human beings administering the disposition of things."

"Thus, in its call for a collective effort to change society, social ecology has never eschewed the need for a radically new spirituality or mentality. As early as 1965, the first public statement to advance the ideas of social ecology concluded with the injunction: ?The cast of mind that today organizes differences among human and other life-forms along hierarchical lines of ?supremacy or ?inferiority? will give way to an outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner ? that is, according to an ethics of complementarity.?1 In such an ethics, human beings would complement nonhuman beings with their own capacities to produce a richer, creative, and developmental whole ? not as a ?dominant? species but as supportive one. Although this ethics, expressed at times as an appeal for the ?re-spiritization of the natural world,? recurs throughout the literature of social ecology, it should not be mistaken for a theology that raises a deity above the natural world or even that seeks to discover one within it. The spirituality advanced by social ecology is definitively naturalist (as one would expect, given its relation to ecology itself, which stems from the biological sciences) rather than super-naturalistic or pantheistic."

"To sum up the reconstructive message of ecology: if we wish to advance the unity and stability of the natural world, if we wish to harmonize it, we must conserve and promote variety."

"Ultimately there is no civic ?curriculum,? as it were, that can be a substitute for a living and creative political realm. But what we must clearly do in an era of commodification, rivalry, anomie, and egoism is formulate and consciously inculcate the values of humanism, cooperation, community, and public service in the everyday practice of civic life... Grass-roots citizenship must go hand in hand with grass-roots politics."

"Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of ?grow or die,? is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena ? technology as such or population growth as such ? for environmental problems. We will ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification of progress with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative."

"Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems."

"We are asked to orient our ?strategies? and ?tactics? around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance."

"We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood? Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate."

"We have permitted cynical political reactionaries and the spokesmen of large corporations to pre-empt these basic libertarian American ideals. We have permitted them not only to become the specious voice of these ideals such that individualism has been used to justify egotism; the pursuit of happiness to justify greed, and even our emphasis on local and regional autonomy has been used to justify parochialism, insularism, and exclusivity -- often against ethnic minorities and so-called deviant individuals. We have even permitted these reactionaries to stake out a claim to the word libertarian, a word, in fact, that was literally devised in the 1890s in France by Elis‚e Reclus as a substitute for the word anarchist, which the government had rendered an illegal expression for identifying one's views. The propertarians, in effect -- acolytes of Ayn Rand, the earth mother of greed, egotism, and the virtues of property -- have appropriated expressions and traditions that should have been expressed by radicals but were willfully neglected because of the lure of European and Asian traditions of socialism, socialisms that are now entering into decline in the very countries in which they originated."

"We have to clarify the meaning of the word. We have to give it a rich content. And that content has to stand apart from a critique of other ideologies, because the way you sharpen a knife is, frankly, on a grindstone. And the grindstone for me is Marxism. I?ve developed my anarchism, my critique of Marxism, which has been the most advanced bourgeois ideology I know of, into a community of ideas and ultimately a common sense of responsibilities and commitments. I don?t think anarchism consists of sitting down and saying let?s form a collective. I don?t think it consists of saying we?re all anarchists: you?re an anarcho-syndicalist; you?re an anarcho-communist; you?re an anarcho-individualist. I believe that anarchists should agree to disagree but not to fight with each other. We don?t have to go around as the Protestant reformation did, or as the socialist revolution did, and execute each other as soon as we are successful?assuming we?ll ever be successful. But I believe that if we do have a commonality of beliefs we should clarify them, we should strengthen their coherence and we should also develop common projects that produce a lived community of relationships."

"We live in a highly co-optative society that is only too eager to find new areas of commercial aggrandizement and to add ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations."

"We should try to become better people, ethically speaking, reflect upon ourselves and our very limited existences and develop a sense of tolerance for each other, as well as for other anarchist groups with which we may disagree. But we?re not committed to toeing a line called anarchism; there are many different anarchisms. My anarchism is frankly anarcho-communalism, and it?s eco-anarchism as well. And it?s not oriented toward the proletariat. I would like to see a critical mass of very gifted anarchists come together in an appropriate place in order to do highly productive work. That?s it. I don?t know why that can?t be done except for the fact that I think that people mistrust their own ideals today. I don?t think that they don?t believe in them; I think they mistrust the viability of them. They?re afraid to commit themselves to their ideals."

"We tend to think of environmental catastrophes -such as the recent Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in the Bay of Alaska-as accidents: isolated phenomena that erupt without notice or warning. But when does the word accident become inappropriate? When are such occurrences inevitable rather than accidental? And when does a consistent pattern of inevitable disasters point to a deep-seated crisis that is not only environmental but profoundly social?"