On Bookchin's Social Ecology and its Contributions to Social Movements

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Marcel van der Linden, “The Prehistory of Post-Scarcity Anarchism: Josef Weber and the Movement for a Democracy of Content (1947-1964),” Anarchist Studies, 9, 2001, p. 127.

²Quoted at http://essentialbooks.com/id50.htm.

³A partial bibliography is available at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_archives/bookchin/bookchinbiblio.html.

⁴Bookchin's evolution from anarchism to communalism is described in Janet Biehl, “Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism,” Communalism, 12, October 2007, at http://communalism.net/Archive/12/bba.php. Also see note 26 below.

⁵van der Linden, op. cit.

⁶Paul B. Sears, “Ecology: A Subversive Subject,” BioScience, 14, 7, July 1964.

⁷René Dubos, Man Adapting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 196.

⁸Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 58. Post-Scarcity Anarchism was reprinted by Black Rose Books (Montreal) in 1986 and by AK Press (San Francisco) in 2004.

⁹Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), especially Chapters 2 and 3. The Ecology of Freedom has also been reissued by both Black Rose (1991) and AK Press (2005).

¹⁰Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), especially Chapters 2 and 3. The Ecology of Freedom has also been reissued by both Black Rose (1991) and AK Press (2005), Chapters 9, 10.

¹¹The fullest elaboration of these ideas appears in Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990 [Revised 1995]).

¹²Murray Bookchin, “A New Municipal Agenda,” in Urbanization Without Cities (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992 [republished by Cassell in London, U.K. in 1995]). Also see his earlier Limits of the City, originally published by Harper & Row in 1974 and in an expanded edition by Black Rose Books.

¹³Murray Bookchin, “Market Economy or Moral Economy?,” in The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986).

¹⁴Murray Bookchin's The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era was published in four volumes, the first two by Cassell and the latter two by Continuum, and are dated 1996, 1998, 2004 and 2006.

¹⁵At least one earlier mass action, which was aimed at shutting down Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War in the spring of 1971, was organized on the affinity group model, but Clamshell activists were the first in the U.S. to make this the underlying structure of their organization.

¹⁶Reprinted in Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

¹⁷A sympathetic, but factually flawed description of the libertarian and feminist roots of this movement, on both the east and west coasts, is available in Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

¹⁸See, for example, “Open Letter to the Ecology Movement,” in Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose, 1980), pp. 73-83.

¹⁹These essays were adapted and updated in Toward an Ecological Society.

²⁰These essays were adapted and updated in Toward an Ecological Society, p. 200.

²¹For a fuller account of the U.S. Greens and the role of social ecologists, see Brian Tokar, “The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts,” in Frank Zelko and Carolin Brinkmann (eds.), Green Parties: Reflections on the First Three Decades (Washington, D.C.: Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, 2006).

²²See, for example, articles by John Rensenbrink and Charlene Spretnak in Zelko and Brinkman, ibid.

²³Juan Gonzalez, “Getting Serious about Ecology,” New York Daily News, April 24, 1990.

²⁴See Chaia Heller, Ecology of Everyday Life (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999); also Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

²⁵See Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

²⁶The most comprehensive statement of the latter tendency, increasingly popular among self-identified anarchists, is John Zerzan, “Future Primitive,” online at http://www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm.

²⁷See Biehl, 2007, op. cit. Bookchin's 2002 essay, “The Communalist Project,” appeared in the short-lived social ecology webzine, Harbinger (http://www.social-ecology.org/index.php?topic=harbinger), and is currently available at http://communalism.net/Archive/02/tcp.html, as well as in the newly edited volume, Social Ecology and Communalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2007). The communalism.net webzine was established in 2002 by social ecologists in Norway.

²⁹“The Communalist Project,” op. cit.

²⁸Quotes in this paragraph are all from “The Communalist Project,” Social Ecology and Communalism. On Bookchin's re-evaluation of Marxism, see also his Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left (Oakland: AK Press, 1999).

³⁰On the evolution of resistance to genetic engineering in the U.S., see Brian Tokar, “Resisting the Engineering of Life,” in Brian Tokar (ed.), Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2001). For a more theoretical treatment, see Brian Tokar, “Biotechnology: Enlarging the Debate,” Z Magazine, June 2001. On the Vermont and New England town meeting campaigns vs. GMOs, see the pamphlet “Vermont Towns vs. Genetic Engineering: A Guide to Reclaiming our Democracy,” available from [email protected].

³¹The most comprehensive paper on this topic is Ben Grosscup, “Town Meeting Advocacy in New England: Potentials and Pitfalls,” presented at the 2007 Social Ecology Colloquium, Marshfield, Vermont.

³²Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” online at http://www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf.

³³Michel Gelobter, Michael Dorsey, Leslie Fields, Tom Goldtooth, Anuja Mendiratta, Richard Moore, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Peggy M. Shepard, and Gerald Torres, “The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering Transformational Politics in the 21^st Century,” Redefining Progress, Oakland, CA, 2005, available online at http://www.rprogress.org/soul/soul.pdf.

³⁴Larry Lohmann, “Visitors to the Commons,” in Bron Taylor (ed.), Ecological Resistance Movements (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

³⁵For an historical overview, see Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale (Boston: South End Press, 1997), Chapter 2; for a detailed examination of the consequences of present carbon trading policies, see Larry Lohmann, Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatization and Power, Development Dialogue, 48, September 2006 (Uppsala: Dag Hammerskjold Center).

³⁶George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Boston: South End Press, 2007). For a comprehensive review of more radical solutions to the climate crisis, see the “Less Energy” series in the Green politics journal Synthesis/Regeneration, beginning with the Winter 2007 issue, No. 42, available at http://www.greens.org/s-r.

³⁷See Brian Tokar, “The Real Scoop on Biofuels,” online at http://www.4report.com/node/2864; also Eric Holt-Gimenez, “The Great Biofuel Hoax,” online at http://www.alternet.org/environment/54218.

³⁸See note 13 above.