A Close Read of The Ecology of Freedom, Part 3

A cover of The Ecology of Freedom, using the art from (I believe) a Spanish-language version.

It has been several months since I produced my second part of this series, and longer since I produced the first.

Throughout these parts, the question has primarily been focused on scarcity and post-scarcity. While most vulgar conceptions of post-scarcity have hinged on some Star Trek-like replicator technology, a magical cornucopia capable of fulfilling any material desire, the form of post-scarcity society that Bookchin describes has more to do with the constitution of the individuals who form this society.

He described, in a quote I covered in part 2, people in modern society as “mutilated users” (he only uses the term the once in the book, but it sticks with me), produced by social irrationality, because we are so thoroughly propagandized and limited, which means that we have desires – needs, scarcities – implanted into us by parts of our society, such as the media apparatus that works upon us. This means that it becomes impossible to judge things in terms of their use-value as described in Marx’s work: because of how our society has treated people, for example, a hamburger from McDonald’s is viewed as food and desired as such.

This “mutilation” doesn’t need anything so invasive as the Ludovico Technique.

This isn’t simply a finger-wagging moralizing, though: it’s not simply that you want bad things – on a similar level to the “carrot” of the fulfillment of our propagandized desires, there’s also the limitations forced on us by everything else. Look: not everyone who eats at McDonald’s is under the impression that it’s something good or at least neutral – someone may be utterly convinced that it’s poison and still feed it to their kids every day because they have no other option.

Consider: imagine a single parent who lives in a food swamp (that being something like a food desert, but there’s plentiful unhealthy food options), and is working two jobs to support their children in the hope that by doing so they can provide the sort of material comfort that would allow their children to escape the cycle of poverty that they’re stuck in. If this person regularly decides to pick up McDonald’s on the way from Job A to Job B so that they can get enough calories to keep them upright for under $5, then I think that judging them is a perverse reaction to the situation. Maybe they like the taste, because it’s associated with not working, maybe they hate it because they know it’s poison, maybe they genuinely like it.

But this person is just as much a mutilated user as the childlike individual of means who eats McDonald’s every day because they like the taste. Both have had their options constrained by the social apparatuses that surround them.

Let’s see if any additional information can be gleaned from my notes.

Okay, so: the social irrationality that produces “mutilated users” is the state of unfreedom – compare this to the Societies of Control that Deleuze talked about, which seemed set not on robbing people of choice, but on allowing infinite choice within a constrained desired set (to go back to the example above, you can pick McDonalds, or Burger King, or Wendy’s, or A&W, or In & Out, or Taco Bell, or KFC, or Popeyes, or – if you’re a real freak – Captain D’s). In contrast to this, Bookchin posits:

The material dispensation that capitalism has created for the future is itself a "freedom" — one that has arisen, ironically, from the very context of bourgeois social relations. It is a freedom not merely to choose the kinds of goods society should produce (the freedom of a productivist utopia), but to choose from among the extravagant, often irrational array of needs that capitalism has created (the freedom of a consumerist utopia). When these two freedoms are melded into a still higher one, the utopian dream that lies ahead can be neither strictly productivist nor consumerist. In light of the freedom to choose products and needs, both as producer and consumer, one can envision a higher ideal of freedom — one that removes the taint of economism and restores the ethical basis of past times, and that is infused with the options opened by technical achievement. Potentially, at least, we are faced with the broadest conception of freedom known thus far: the autonomous individual's freedom to shape material life in a form that is neither ascetic nor hedonistic, but a blend of the best in both — one that is ecological, national, and artistic (p. 218)

Though, you have to admit that the aesthetic is better than most of what we get to represent the future.

Here’s what the “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (often presented with the words “Gay” and “Space” between “Luxury” and “Communism”) crowd misses. While it is, of course, incumbent upon working people to demand what they have been denied for so long – comforts that are often restricted to the middle and upper classes – at this moment in time, indeed for the last 50 years, that hasn’t been a real option.

This is because the FALC dream is one of endless consumption, enabled by full automation. While the problem for capitalism for many years has been clearly one of production – and full automation with socialized profits would be an amazing thing for the workers of the late 19th or early 20th century to achieve – we don’t simply have a problem of production these days. We have a problem of consumption.

Now, this may seem like the place to insert an ascetic overreaction, but that isn’t the answer at all. True freedom would not simply be the option to work on what you want and consume what you want, but to want what you want. For your desires to be free of outside influences and constraints so that you can pick what you would like instead of – for example – seeking out designer clothes and a fancy car to achieve status.

To put it more bluntly, in a utopia would everyone have a Ford F150, or would no one – or vanishingly few people – want a Ford F150? Would everyone wear Gucci, or would no one – or vanishingly few people – want to wear Gucci? Would everyone want caviar, or would people have tried it and maybe a few people would have it because they enjoyed it, while everyone else enjoyed other, different foods?

However, I want to stress, this isn’t about denial, it isn’t about simply not having material goods. It’s about your desires actually being self-chosen instead of implanted into you by the constant writhing spectacle we all live in the middle of. It’s about finding the shape of life that you want to live and carving that niche out for yourself. A great many people have talked about the future of work, but it is both the future of work and the future of consumption and leisure that needs to be considered here.

Let’s see if we can push further:

Rarely, to this day, do preliterate people work silently. They whisper, hum, sing, or quietly chant; they nurse and nurture the material by gently rocking and undulating their bodies, by stroking it as though it were a child. The imagery of the mother with a nursing child is perhaps more evocative of the true process of early crafthood than is the smith striking the glowing iron between hammer and anvil. Even later, at the village level, food cultivators were buoyed by choral songs and festivities, however arduous may have been their labor in sowing and harvesting grain. The "work song," a genre that still lived a century ago in nearly all preindustrial occupations, is the historic echo of the primal chant, itself a technics, that elicited spirit from substance and inspirited the artisans and their tools.

We know quite well that ores do not reproduce themselves in exhausted mines, that ivory does not conceal an animate being, and that animals do not obligingly respond to hunting ceremonies. But these fancies may serve to inculcate a human respect for nature and cause people to cherish its bounty as more than exploitable "natural resources." Ceremony and myth may enhance that respect and foster a rich sensitivity for the artistic and functional integrity of a crafted object. Group ceremonies, in fact, deepen group solidarity and make a community more effective in the pursuit of its ends. But the modern mind is unlikely to believe that mythopoeic notions of hunting and crafting are solidly rooted in natural phenomena. Function should not be mistaken for fact. And however effective mythopoeic functions may be in achieving certain practical, often aesthetic ends, their success does not validate their claims to intrinsic truth” (p. 234)

Franz Von Stuck’s painting of Sisyphus, who represents the (metaphoric) apotheosis of alienated labor.)

Here we have Bookchin examining the social dynamics of ancient and indigenous cultures – there was more on this page, but I wanted to highlight this passage. This is, specifically, about counteracting alienation from work, and the alienated worker is the flipside of the mutilated user. By attaching ritual significance to what one produces, a different connection is forged – the work of the craftsman or farmhand on the natural world is described here as analogous to the work of the nursing mother on the child.

The material world we craft – the natural world we work upon to produce “artifice” – should not be viewed as merely an object being worked upon, but as something like a child being weaned and raised and made into a subject in their own right.

Several pages on, he describes this even more explicitly, looking at the poisonous effects of contemporary industrial society and describing the utopian and to which he hoped to guide us:

Humanity's habitat is thus latent with phenomena that "are," others that are "becoming," and still others that "will be." Our imagery of technics cannot evade the highly fluid nature of the world in which we live and the highly fluid nature of humanity itself. The design imagination of our times must be capable of encompassing this flow, this dialectic (to use a grossly abused term), not to cut across it with wanton arrogance and dogmatic self-confidence. To subserve our already fragile environment only to what humanity alone "can be" — and definitely still is not! — is to immerse the world in a darkness that is largely of our own making, to taint the clarity that its own age-old evolution of wisdom has produced. We are still a curse on natural evolution, not its fulfillment. Until we become what we should be in the constellation of life, we would do well to live with a fear of what we can be (emphasis added; p. 238)

An amputated version of this final line of thinking is inherent to ecofascism – but as with most right-wing tendencies, the problem comes from a failure of analysis. Specifically an inability to imagine a future (similar to how libertarianism would obviously decay into neofeudalism within a generation or two).

Solarpunk is an aesthetic that comes close to this, but it’s still very close to the contemporary world in many ways and needs to be pushed further.

Image taken without permission from the website of Luc Schuiten.

A humanity freed from the mutilation that leads us to desire more and more, to extract more and more from the natural world to the detriment of that natural world, would become the conscious faculty of nature. To an extent, some premodern and indigenous societies made movements in this direction – explained to themselves and to their neighbors in mythopoetic terms. If we simply dismiss these on the grounds that the explanation is mythopoetic, then we limit ourselves unnecessarily, perhaps ensuring a decay into a purely extractive capitalist mode that could be understood as an expression of the death drive of the Earth itself.

I am not, personally, a terribly religious or spiritual person. I find such matters interesting, and I find rituals psychologically beneficial even if I do not believe the ritual has any direct material effect, itself. That being said, if such techniques can lead to a more genial relationship between humanity and the “constellation of life” that we label nature, then I can’t think of any reason that these rituals and beliefs should be abandoned.

This is not an inherent thing, not some mystical connection between the person and the land. It is a body of techniques and practices that are forged over millennia. For more information on this, I’d suggest reading Chapter 11 of The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow – specifically the portion on the fall of the Indigenous American Mississippian Civilization (mentioned here and here).

In the wake of collapse, there is an opening for a new manner of interacting with the world. Part of the problem, though, is that European-derived society tends to be in a constant state of crisis. Consider:

Once we grant that the term "technics" must also include political, managerial, and bureaucratic institutions, we are obliged to seek the nontechnical spheres — the social spheres — that have resisted the technical control of social life. More precisely, how can the social sphere absorb the machines that foster the mechanization of society? I have already noted that the great majority of humankind often resisted technical development. Historically, Europeans stood almost alone in their willingness to accept and foster technical innovation uncritically. And even this proclivity occurred fairly late, with the emergence of modern capitalism. The historical puzzle of what renders some cultures more amenable to technical developments than others can only be resolved concretely — by exploring various cultures internally and revealing, if possible, the nature of their development. (p. 244)

This constant acceptance of new technological developments comes from a misunderstanding of technologies as somehow “natural” – but has led to constant disruptions. The societies of western Europe and their colonies throughout the world are drunk on technological advancement, and have leaned further and further into it as time goes on. This addiction to technological development even leads to us positioning periods of stagnation as golden ages of technology – similar to our own tendency to see ourselves as living in such a period despite reasonable arguments that no significant technological developments outside of medicine, communication, and surveillance have happened since the third quarter of the last century.

For more information on how technology is ideologically motivated, just examine the history of the streetcar in America.

There is a liberal idea that technology doesn’t “want” anything. There are two possible interpretations of this, one wrong and one right. The wrong – and most widespread – of these interpretations is that – as mentioned – technological development is somehow natural. It just happens, and you need to adapt to it like it’s the weather.

The other interpretation, the right one, is that technology might not “want” anything – but it is, itself, the product of its creator’s wants. There is nothing natural, for example, about social media: it exists simply because Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Myspace Tom all decided to put it together. The technology obviously had unintentional consequences – it’s made democracy much more difficult to actually do, and I don’t believe that Myspace Tom wanted that (the other two, I’m not so sure about.)

You see a consciousness of this in some writings from the Roman period – I can think of two stories of Roman Emperors resisting the spread of technologies that they feared would disrupt the social orders that they stood at the top of. The first involved the story of Tiberius Caesar (42 BCE – 37 CE) and the flexible glass (virtum flexile), while the second one involved Vespasian (9 CE – 79 CE) who bought, but refused to use, a machine that would transport heavy stone columns a great distance, on the grounds that “You must let me feed my poor commons” (i.e., the labor saving device would not be used because it would mean less wages paid to laborers).

In the subsequent paragraph of Bookchin’s work, he wrote that:

The most important feature of technics in a preindustrial societal complex is the extent to which it ordinarily is adaptive rather than innovative. Where a culture is rich in social structure, where it enjoys a wealth of human relationships, communal responsibilities, and a shared body of mutual concerns, it tends to elaborate a new technical ensemble rather than "develop" it. Controlled by the constraints of usufruct, complementarity, the irreducible minimum, and disaccumulation, early societies tended to elaborate technics with considerable prudence and with a keen sensitivity for the extent to which it could be integrated into existing social institutions. Ordinarily, the ability of technics to alter a societal structure significantly was the exception. Technical innovation occurred in response to major climatic changes or to violent invasions that often transformed the invader as much as the invaded. Even when the "superstructure" of a society changed considerably or acquired a highly dynamic character, the "structure" of the society changed little or not at all. The "riddle of the unchangeability of Asian societies," as Marx was to call it, is in fact the solution to the entire puzzle of the interaction of society with technics. Where technics — bureaucratic, priestly, and dynastic as well as tools, machines, and new forms of labor — encroached upon the social life of tribes and villages, the latter tended to bifurcate from the former and stolidly develop a life and dynamic of its own. The real powers of the Asian village to resist technical invasions or to assimilate them to their social forms lay not in a fixed "systematic division of labor," as Marx believed. Its powers of resistance lay in the intensity of Indian family life, in the high degree of care, mutualism, courtesy, and human amenities that villagers shared as cultural norms, in the rituals that surrounded personal and social life, in the profound sense of rootedness in a communal group, and in the deep sense of meaning these cultural elaborations imparted to the community. (ibid)

Which referred back to a portion of the writing of Karl Marx, and interprets it through the lens that he’s been crafting: it was the order of technological developments in non-occidental societies that hardened them against the madness that gripped them. Because the social technologies that grew up around non-occidental families, villages, and cultures, they were more resistant to the material technologies that disrupt their natural environment.

For example of soft technologies, consider the Australian Aboriginal traditions of songlines — recording history and geography on a myriadic time scale: a cultural memory that stretches back ten thousand years.

I’m not completely sold on this – though I do, generally, agree with Bookchin’s analysis of technology and its means of working on human cultures. We do need to understand social practices as technologies, and we do need to come up with ways of explaining how some cultures lean hard into what might be called “hard” technologies of a material nature, while other cultures lean harder into what might be called “soft” technologies of an immaterial nature. Still other cultures, it seems to me, make use of both, or switch emphases as time goes on. One thing that appears to be the case, though, is that overemphasizing hard technologies has a tendency to cause ecological destruction and a certain tendency to lead to authoritarian social structures.

Given the stories I mentioned above about Roman Emperors, both of which are apocryphal, but which both communicate a cultural idea of how the Romans felt technology is supposed to be understood, it seems logical to place the point of divergence in either the later empire (which I doubt) or post-collapse.

Bookchin identifies this as the emergence of the “factory” as a social phenomenon:

The early factory introduced no sweeping technical dispensation other than the abstraction, rationalization, and objectification of labor — and its embodiment in human beings. Spinning, weaving, and dyeing were still performed with all the machines that cottagers had used in their own homes for generations. No engines or prime movers were added to this old ensemble until the machinery for spinning, weaving, and dyeing yarn were invented a century or so later. But a new technics had supplanted the old: the technics of supervision, with its heartless intensification of the labor-process, its conscienceless introduction of fear and insecurity, and its debasing forms of supervisory behavior. Where the "factors" had bought products, not people, the factory bought people, not products. This reduction of labor from its embodiment in products into a capacity of people was decisive; it turned fairly autonomous individuals into totally administered products and gave products an autonomy that made them seem like people. The animate quality that things acquired — qualities which Marx aptly called the "fetishism of commodities" — was purchased at the expense of the animate qualities of people. An underclass was being produced that was almost as inorganic as the factory in which it worked and the tools it used — a transubstantiation of humanity itself that was to have profound consequences for the legacy of domination and the future of human freedom. (p. 250)

The mode of production of the factory – with its management of labor (necessitating the alienation of labor) and increased scale of commodity production (necessitating the social apparatuses that led to the emergence of the “mutilated user”) – is the point of origin for the social shifts that currently grip the various occidental societies.

In the terms used by Foucault, this represented the Society of Discipline supplanting the Society of Sovereignty. The workers are managed and worked to the point of exhaustion – which conveniently leaves them as exhausted and desirous of labor-saving commodities produced in factories. This regime of labor was the crucible that produced contemporary subjectivity, composed of alienation and mutilation. By these means were the modern world created.

Thus far, the text examined here has been a fairly standard – if very insightful – analysis of social phenomena. I’m running out of steam, though, which prevents me from getting through the one subsequent chapter and jumping into what really sets The Ecology of Freedom apart: the conception of an Ecological Society that it ends with, providing the beginnings of a blueprint for what Bookchin proposes for the next stage of society.

Far from falling prey to the “nine chapters of Marx and one of Keynes” problem found in modern leftist works, Bookchin turns the dial in the opposite direction, beginning to propose something that moves beyond the Star Trek fantasies and Soviet nostalgia that often dominates left utopianism.

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