I took a lot of notes while I read through Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom. Largely, this consisted of copying passages into a small notebook as I read. Usually, I underline extensively as I read, but this was a book from a university library and doing so would have been minimally useful. I thought it would be helpful to transcribe the passages and respond to them in text, inviting commentary from the readers of this website.

As I believe I mentioned in my review of that book, I feel that Bookchin lived in something of a personal “long 70s” that was inaccessible to anyone else – while the book was published in the early 80s, he seemed to have missed the broader American turn at the start of the Reagan years, living in a sort of personal hauntological divergence.

While this might seem like I’m saying he was living in the past, even in his own time, I mean something very different: I get something of the sense that the rest of us took a bad turn, and he continued for a while on a much better course, writing letters to us from that alternate timeline we missed.

Before I begin, properly, I’m not intending this to be exhaustive, nor am I intending this to be the only entry in this series (though I will make note: I’m not going to go straight through on this one. Expect me to return to this periodically as I digest the book slowly, possibly over the course of a whole year or so). Also, I wish to point out that there are most likely things in this book that might prove fascinating to people other than me that I have ignored – I don’t intend this to be a substitute for the book, but simply my notes on what I read, which I hope to use in later discussion.

So, without further ado…

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As I published these ideas over the years — especially in the decade between the early sixties and early seventies — what began to trouble me was the extent to which people tended to subvert their unity, coherence, and radical focus. Notions like decentralization and human scale, for example, were deftly adopted without reference to solar and wind techniques or bioagricultural practices that are their material underpinnings. Each segment was permitted to plummet off on its own, while the philosophy that unified them into an integrated whole was permitted to languish. (p. 2)

One of the hallmarks of Bookchin’s thinking, I think, is that it is profoundly synthetic: not in the sense that it’s “fake” or “artificial,” but in the sense that it synthesizes from a wide variety of sources and combines them. In the course of reading this book, you may find musings on Hegel crammed cheek-to-cheek with discussions of medieval Christian heresies, then-contemporary anthropology and ecology, historical overviews, and examinations of systems theory.

Synthetic thinking, by and large, often falls prey to a very particular foible: the tendency to place one idea in the keystone position and subordinate all others to it. For my money, it seems to me that Bookchin avoids this. He does so by insisting on a sort of unitary coherence to the whole of the system of thought he puts forward: the concepts that he works with, in the space that he works with, are like celestial bodies moving within separate orbits, but dependent upon one another being present to maintain the necessary balance of forces. As such, when one idea is removed and placed on its own, it goes careening off through the cosmos, separated from the rosette in which it was placed.

The first commercial CO2 capture plant, near Zurich. Supposedly it’s 90% effective — emitting 10 kg of carbon for every 100 removed — but I have yet to see figures on the steel that makes it up, for example. Perhaps I’m ignorant, but it seems like a partial solution.

He spends a fair amount of time criticizing this line of thinking, and looking back on it, forty or so years after the publication of this book, it feels an apt criticism: “If anything, partial ‘solutions’ serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep-seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.” (p.3)

Part of what I found so fascinating about the early part of this book was his insistence on coupling the ecological crisis that became visible in the 1970s to the psychology of individual humans – not in the sense that individual choices are directly responsible for ecological devastation, but in the sense that the choices of individual humans influence the actions of systems and institutions that make up human society (as the behavior of single cells influences the behavior of a living body; it’s the patterns of mass movements within the body that change the behavior. One outlier won’t change things, unless it triggers some manner of cascade). He viewed the social disease responsible as hierarchy – I’m inclined to agree. This also leads to an important critique of “really-existing Marxism” for him:

By hierarchy, I mean the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer. Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a "classless" or "Stateless" society. I refer to the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of "masses" by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their "higher social interests," of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality, and of nature by society and technology. Indeed, classless but hierarchical societies exist today (and they existed more covertly in the past); yet the people who live in them neither enjoy freedom, nor do they exercise control over their lives. (p.4)

That being said, Bookchin’s view of psychology is largely shaped by Freudian thought – and while I have somewhat turned the corner on some of Freud’s ideas (I can’t read as much mid-century philosophy as I have and not), I do maintain that it’s more cultural studies than an actual view of the dynamics of the human mind. Bookchin’s own hostility to postmodern philosophy is, I think, a bit of stumbling block: his own project might have benefited somewhat from being less resistant to the ideas put forward by Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Baudrillard (I’m still making up my mind about Lyotard – it’s clear that he’s important, but Edgar and I are reading through his “evil book,” Libidinal Economy, after the Post-Capitalist Desire reading list that Mark Fisher put forward, but it’s a difficult, obscure text).

I feel that he would have found allies in those thinkers if he had taken the time to engage with them, though it’s entirely true that those other thinkers could have taken steps to engage with him, as well – I have yet to read a Foucauldian, Deleuzian/Deleuzoguattarian, or Baudrillardian engagement with his thinking. Of course, there is the perception that these thinkers were somehow pro-Capitalist, largely among those who have had minimal engagement with them directly.

Still, it might be a bit of a stretch to characterize those thinkers as Freudians, though they made heavy use of Freud in their texts – it is my thinking on this that Bookchin is roughly as Freudian as they are, and he still has bones to pick with them, especially in regard to the line of thinking as found in Civilization and its Discontents:

A hierarchical mentality fosters the renunciation of the pleasures of life. It justifies toil, guilt, and sacrifice by the "inferiors," and pleasure and the indulgent gratification of virtually every caprice by their "superiors." The objective history of the social structure becomes internalized as a subjective history of the psychic structure. Heinous as my view may be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day — not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception. Unless we explore this history, which lives actively within us like earlier phases of our individual lives, we will never be free of its hold. (p. 8)

This focus on history in Bookchin is one of the things I found most relatable, though I was simultaneously reading The Dawn of Everything from Davids Graeber and Wengrow, which has the benefit of specialized knowledge and another forty years of research behind it, and is thus more detailed and accurate in its critique of our understanding of prehistory.

Look, I had to work Graeber in somehow. It’s a problem I have.

Still, I think it is important to understand that a text like The Dawn of Everything and The Ecology of Freedom are fundamentally doing different things: the former is an analysis of the evidence, and the latter is a mythologization of an early understanding of that evidence. The two are in line with one another to a certain extent, and I think that reading them in concert is not only useful but appealing. In the gaps between the two texts certain questions come up that I would need to review the texts more closely to find – frustratingly, while I’ve got the Graeber/Wengrow text, I had to return Ecology of Freedom.

However, I do think that Bookchin’s mythologization is useful: he is crafting a mythic framework to understand the emergence of hierarchy in human society, and it isn’t specifically incorrect – it’s simply nonspecific. His treatment early on of Norse myth as a framework for his discussion, gives some explanation for this, I feel:

In this Norse cosmography, there seems to be more than the old theme of "eternal recurrence," of a time-sense that spins around perpetual cycles of birth, maturation, death, and rebirth. Rather, one is aware of prophecy infused with historical trauma; the legend belongs to a little-explored area of mythology that might be called "myths of disintegration." Although the Ragnarok legend is known to be quite old, we know very little about when it appeared in the evolution of the Norse sagas. We do know that Christianity, with its bargain of eternal reward, came later to the Norsemen than to any other large ethnic group in western Europe, and its roots were shallow for generations afterward. The heathenism of the north had long made contact with the commerce of the south. During the Viking raids on Europe, the sacred places of the north had become polluted by gold, and the pursuit of riches was dividing kinsman from kinsman. (p. 17)

Whenever I read about Norse mythology, I just think about revisiting *The Well and the Tree*. Unfortunately, every copy I’ve found is — at minimum — $300. Academic reading is an expensive habit.

The extended discussion of the Ragnarok myth places the discussion of that first chapter (prior quotes were from the introduction,) in the context of myth, and discusses myth as a way of understanding lived social reality at the time – presenting the story as fossilized anxieties. As the raiding Norsemen brought home gold and slaves, they lost touch with their earlier roots, the farming and nature deities that made up the Vanir pantheon falling by the wayside and shifting focus to the more warlike Aesir pantheon, to the point where the only deities from that pantheon to receive much attention are those of the sea and human love and reproduction.

Bookchin traces the Ragnarok myth to the influx of gold and the growth of more stratified social hierarchy (the Norse, of course, practiced slavery, and should not be understood to be purely egalitarian in any sense, but there were some aspects of their society that would seem radical today – such as generally being willing to welcome outsiders into their culture and offering somewhat more freedoms to women. Not as much as some would argue, but still, more). This mechanism, the increase of hierarchic thought, is an important aspect of the story that Bookchin tells in these early chapters, which trace how hierarchy supposedly emerged in human society.

However, like most thinkers, Bookchin is doing multiple things with this and associated passages. The examination of the Norse, however, is part of a larger idea that Bookchin is sketching. Namely, the material grounding of social change: changes in sciences (and circumstances) largely lead to changes in political and philosophical thinking. Consider:

In almost every period since the Renaissance, a very close link has existed between radical advances in the natural sciences and upheavals in social thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the emerging sciences of astronomy and mechanics, with their liberating visions of a heliocentric world and the unity of local and cosmic motion, found their social counterparts in equally critical and rational social ideologies that challenged religious bigotry and political absolutism. The Enlightenment brought a new appreciation of sensory perception and the claims of human reason to divine a world that had been the ideological monopoly of the clergy. Later, anthropology and evolutionary biology demolished traditional static notions of the human enterprise along with its myths of original creation and history as a theological calling. By enlarging the map and revealing the earthly dynamics of social history, these sciences reinforced the new doctrines of socialism, with its ideal of human progress, that followed the French Revolution. (p.20)

What Bookchin proposes for the latter 20th and early 21st century as the driving science is not, as we would expect looking over the past 40 years, the science of computation, but ecology. These two lines of thinking – computer science and ecology – are radically different in their ways of approaching the world. The former, as we have learned, is well-suited to hybridize with the more predatory forms of finance capital, while the latter would most likely be opposed.

He tries to explain, throughout the book, that ecology stresses an integrative, wide-ranging system of thinking as opposed to environmentalism, which has weaknesses. Bookchin explains:

I am mindful that many ecologically oriented individuals use "ecology" and "environmentalism" interchangeably. Here, I would like to draw a semantically convenient distinction. By "environmentalism" I propose to designate a mechanistic, instrumental outlook that sees nature as a passive habitat composed of "objects" such as animals, plants, minerals, and the like that must merely be rendered more serviceable for human use. Given my use of the term, environmentalism tends to reduce nature to a storage bin of "natural resources" or "raw materials." Within this context, very little of a social nature is spared from the environmentalist's vocabulary: cities become "urban resources" and their inhabitants "human resources." If the word resources leaps out so frequently from environmentalistic discussions of nature, cities, and people, an issue more important than mere word play is at stake. Environmentalism, as I use this term, tends to view the ecological project for attaining a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature as a truce rather than a lasting equilibrium. The "harmony" of the environmentalist centers around the development of new techniques for plundering the natural world with minimal disruption of the human "habitat." Environmentalism does not question the most basic premise of the present society, notably, that humanity must dominate nature; rather, it seeks to facilitate that notion by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by the reckless despoilation of the environment. (p. 21, emphasis mine)

The “banking” analogy is one that I always think of when I hear about the establishment of the national parks in the USA.

Here we have the emergence of what I find to be Bookchin’s most challenging idea. I don’t know if he originated it, or if he is simply propagating it, but this sort of anti-instrumentalist thinking is particularly challenging for me. Despite this challenge, I can intuit a certain utility to it: we shouldn’t think of the world as simply here for human use and consumption, as he posits environmentalism does. We can look at this as the sort of “banking” view of conservation – preserving natural spaces not as goods in and of themselves but as resources saved for later consumption.

My own knowledge of ecology is very shallow, though the style of thinking that Bookchin puts forward – the very “synthetic” quality that I mentioned earlier – is very seductive and interesting to me, doubly so when Bookchin begins to marry ecological and historical thinking. While there are shades of it before the following, I think that a good, early articulation is found in the passage:

“History, in fact, is as important as form or structure. To a large extent, the history of a phenomenon is the phenomenon itself. We are, in a real sense, everything that existed before us and, in turn, we can eventually become vastly more than we are. Surprisingly, very little in the evolution of life-forms has been lost in natural and social evolution, indeed in our very bodies as our embryonic development attests. Evolution lies within us (as well as around us) as parts of the very nature of our beings. (p. 23)

It is possible that Bookchin would object to this characterization, but I see a certain kinship between this line of thinking and that I have heard described as “anti-naturalism”. The idea is that the division between the “natural” world and the human world is, itself, an artificial distinction: there is no hard and fast line between the two, because everything that we have is derived from the natural world. We process it and change it, but we don’t claim that beeswax, for example, is unnatural: as a product of the natural world, it is, itself, natural. Why, then, do we think of steel – or similar -- as unnatural?

As Bookchin says shortly afterward: “ecological wholeness is not an immutable homogeneity but rather the very opposite — a dynamic unity of diversity.” (p. 25) He continues with this theme for several tens of pages further, but I won’t be going into the quotes that I have picked out there (expect to see me use those in a further piece on anti-naturalist thought at some point).

He does, however, begin to examine the state as a “natural” phenomenon: not in the sense that it has an inevitable form, but in the sense that it is a natural product of human behavior. Human beings, placed into a group, inevitably develop some manner of politics. These politics can be fiercely egalitarian, as is found in many supposedly “primitive” tribal societies – which are considered as such because of their institutions that interfere with the unchecked accumulation of wealth and prestige that we consider to be so important in our own society – or equally fiercely hierarchic, as we find in our own society.

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The book’s early chapters is largely concerned with the emergence of hierarchic ordering of human societies, working from a conception of people living first in a sort of primitive communism and then developing more and more divisions and orderings. First comes the domination of women by men, then the domination of the young by the old, and lastly the domination of those with specialized knowledge – whether religious or martial in nature – over those without. These systems have never properly gone away, they’ve simply transmuted over time.

This is largely driven by the point of view that resources are scarce – as Bookchin puts it, that nature is “stingy” – and that it is necessary to secure excess resources for yourself and harm others. This is driven by the thought that,

An egalitarian division of the surpluses would merely yield a society based on equality in poverty, an equality that would simply perpetuate the latent conditions for the restoration of class rule. Ultimately, the abolition of classes presupposes the "development of the productive forces," the advance of technology to a point where everyone can be free from the burdens of "want," material insecurity, and toil. As long as surpluses are merely marginal, social development occurs in a gray zone between a remote past in which productivity is too low to support classes and a distant future in which it is sufficiently high to abolish class rule. (p. 65)

The pop-cultural image of post-scarcity: the replicator from *Star Trek* (*Voyager*, specifically, here.) To use an inappropriately market-related metaphor, the Replicator can be thought of as a Supply-side route to Post-Scarcity. Bookchin’s approach can be thought of as a “demand-side.”

This brings me to another of the more interesting ideas Bookchin grapples with at points throughout this book – that “post-scarcity” doesn’t refer to a fantastical point in future history at which magical technology secures an infinite amount of wealth and material surplus. It refers to a shift away from a mindset of scarcity, of thinking about things in terms of what is absent and what is desperately wanted.

Instead, what is needed is to wrestle control of the determination of our needs from the various social apparatuses that would impose new needs upon us. The manipulation of human desire – and perception of necessity – for profit or selfish benefit is the imposition of scarcity. In short, in our society, “[n]eeds, in effect, become a force of production, not a subjective force. They become blind in the same sense that the production of commodities becomes blind. Orchestrated by forces that are external to the subject, they exist beyond its control like the production of the very commodities that are meant to satisfy them” (p. 68-69).

In this, we see that the scarcity of human pre-, proto-, and early history has been revived and used to animate the systems of domination around us. This is, admittedly, not always a matter of desire: sometimes a new need is imposed on us by changes in the institutions around us. The best example of this that I can think of is the change in the past 10 – 15 years that led to a cellphone (or a smart phone,) moving from a luxury item to an essential tool for navigating day-to-day life. This was a new scarcity imposed on us, and these new scarcities produce in us feelings of anxiety and an awareness of lack.

This of course leaves aside the suffering of workers in the productive centers that make the phones, or in those who have to work in the extraction of necessary resources to support this – at every stage of the process, human suffering is engendered and propagated. Certainly more intensely at the start of the process, but unquestionably present at all.

Similar phenomena can be seen earlier, in the computer in the nineties and aughts, in the automobile before it, and in commodities increasingly vague to my vision before that. While, in many cases, it arose through the manipulation of desires, in others it came about by making the system in general more hostile – largely to the benefit of a small elite who controlled the use of the industrial apparatus of extraction.

Which leads to the final point from Bookchin that I will be quoting today, where he explains what he means by “post-scarcity”:

Freedom from scarcity, or post-scarcity, must be seen in this light if it is to have any liberatory meaning. The concept presupposes that individuals have the material possibility of choosing what they need — not only a sufficiency of available goods from which to choose but a transformation of work, both qualitatively and quantitatively. But none of these achievements is adequate to the idea of post-scarcity if the individual does not have the autonomy, moral insight, and wisdom to choose rationally. Consumerism and mere abundance are mindless. Choice is vitiated by the association of needs with consumption for the sake of consumption — with the use of advertising and the mass media to render the acquisition of good an imperative — to make "need" into "necessity" devoid of rational judgment. What is ultimately at stake for the individual whose needs are rational is the achievement of an autonomous personality and selfhood. Just as work, to use Marx's concepts, defines the subject's identity and provides it with a sense of the ability to transform or alter reality, so needs too define the subject's rationality and provide it with a capacity to transform and alter the nature of the goods produced by work. In both cases, the subject is obliged to form judgments that reflect the extent to which it is rational or irrational, free and autonomous or under the sway of forces beyond its control. Post-scarcity presupposes the former; consumerism, the latter. If the object of capitalism or socialism is to increase needs, the object of anarchism is to increase choice. However much the consumer is deluded into the belief that he or she is choosing freely, the consumer is heteronomous and under the sway of a contrived necessity; the free subject, by contrast, is autonomous and spontaneously fulfills his or her rationally conceived wants.” (p. 69, emphasis mine.)

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Bookchin was, at one point in his life, a Marxist. While he broke with Marx later on, and was never fully accepted as an anarchist (his feud with Bob Black, the originator of the anti-work critique, is legendary in some circles), he is, I think, an example of a true Post-Marxist, retaining what in Marx is useful to his project and casting away that which is not useful.

This is largely because Bookchin was writing a full century after Marx, and while there are certainly places where one might accuse Bookchin of being a utopian, it seems to me that his post-Marxist orientation is one desperately needed in discussions of leftist politics in the 21st century. We no longer live in the world Bookchin was writing for, but we are even further from the one Marx wrote for: by tracing the trajectory described by these two points, perhaps we can find a place to land – and hopefully we can do so before the next turn-off point, where we land in some hauntological space we can’t even properly conceive of yet.

I will be continuing this series later – I have more quotes written down and more thoughts springing from them.

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If you’re interested in reading more about Murray Bookchin and his thinking, and don’t want to wait for me to gather more quotes, you can learn more about the concepts here by visiting the website for the Institute for Social Ecology.

A Close Read of The Ecology of Freedom, Part 1