Negating Bookchin

    One could, in other words, approach Bookchin as the author of multiple discourse, pasted together so as to appear unitary, but actually the workings out of a fundamental split. In what follows, then, we shall adopt the heuristic fiction that Bookchin's manifest work is an imbrication of two such discourses, which shall be called B1 and B2, as though they were different archeological scripts. Each discourse contains a coherent narrative. However, the narratives contradict one another, thus weakening the texts within which they are imbricated, and giving rise to the bombast, vagueness, confusion, violent polemicism and distortion noted above.

    The common theme is an expansive one, nothing less than the emergence of human society, its long, tangled history of hierarchy and domination, the role of hierarchy/domination in the ecological crisis, and the possibilities of liberation from both hierarchy/domination and ecodestruction, the two being regarded as different aspects of the same process. I might emphasize again that this is merely a heuristic device. There aren't actually two discourses in Bookchin, but there is, in my view, a split state of being. Thinking in terms of two discourses will help illuminate this, after which the device, like a scaffolding that has served its purpose, may be disassembled and set aside.

   B1: The B1 narrative, in which the substantive ideas of Bookchin's social ecology are advanced, treats the overall theme within the framework of the self-creativity of nature and the emergence of ethical possibilities as part of nature's bounty. The philosophical basis is resolutely naturalistic -- hence Bookchin's choice of the term, "dialectical naturalism," to signify his ontology and philosophical anthropology. In this world-view, reason is essential, but reason of a special kind, to be distinguished from mysticism and mechanism alike. Bookchin advances the notion of "dialectical reason, conceived as the logical expression of a wide-ranging form of developmental causality." More than a method, dialectical reason is also a system of causality; "it is ontological, objective and therefore naturalistic. It explicates how processes occur in the natural world as well as in the social." [PSE 29] In this respect, Bookchin reveals himself in B1 as a follower of Hegel and a defender of Max Horkheimer's idea of "objective reason," reason that resides in nature and to which we conform as we seek freedom from hierarchy/domination. "Reason . . . is not a matter of personal opinion or taste. It seems to inhere in objective reality itself -- in a sturdy belief in a rational and meaningful universe that is independent of our needs and proclivities as individuals." [EF 270]

   B1 is very much a text promoting Enlightenment humanism and positing a universality in which the harmonization of humanity and nature is a real possibility. Since there is no essential contradiction between humanity and nature, to remove the historical contradictions of hierarchy/domination frees us for an inherent ethical development in which we care for nature, and so become able to heal the earth. In this narrative, freedom contends with unfreedom, i.e., hierarchy/domination, in the sphere of the mind as well as the world. In the tradition of the Enlightenment, B1 identifies freedom with reason and unfreedom with myth and primitive backwardness. Thus Bookchin attacks the:

utterly arbitrary character of myth, its lack of any critical correction by reason, [which] delivers us to complete falsehoods. Viewed from a primitivistic viewpoint, "freedom" takes on the treacherous form of an absence of desire, activity and will -- a condition so purposeless that humanity ceases to be capable of reflecting upon itself rationally and thereby preventing emerging ruling elites from completely dominating it. In such a mythic -- and mystifed -- world, there would be no basis for being guarded against hierarchy or for resisting it. [RS 102]

   Hierarchy/domination is the antithesis of freedom. The center of the narrative of B1 becomes, then, the story of hierarchy and its overcoming. The subtitle of Bookchin's most important work, The Ecology of Freedom states it explicitly enough: the ecology of freedom is contained in the "The Emergence and Dissolution of Heirarchy." "There is a strong theoretical need," we learn, "to contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of the words class and State; careless use of these terms can produce a dangerous simplification of social reality." A so-called classless, or even libertarian, society can still conceal hierarchical relationships and sensibility which, "even in the absence of economic exploitation or political coercion -- would serve to perpetuate unfreedom." [EF 3]

   What is this "master" category? According to Bookchin, hierarchy is the:

cultural, traditional and psychological system of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer. . . . 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.

   A great deal of Bookchin's work is given over to tracing the histories of hierarchy/domination and its overcoming. Certain landmarks stand out in this narrative terrain: the origins of hierarchy/domination in the gerontocracies of primitive, or organic societies (which according to Bookchin antedates the emergence of patriarchy); the origins of the ancient state as the coalescence of hierarchy with warrior elites; the emergence of the idea of freedom in the Athenian polis; the persistence of relatively liberated zones of freedom in the medieval commune, the guilds of early cities, and amongst the artisans who helped make the French Revolution; the reincarnation of the ideal of the polis in the New England town meeting; the early industrial utopias of Fourier and Owen; the later utopian vision of William Morris; the stirring example of Spanish anarchism, cruelly crushed in the war of 1936-393; and shadowing it all, the cancerous growth of modern industrial society, a capitalism on a grander scale than that envisioned by Karl Marx -- a capitalism that can only be overcome through the emergence of an ecological society beyond all forms of hierarchy/domination. The downfall of this capitalism was prepared when it developed the means to overcome scarcity, hence provided the basis for freedom and universality. The New Left protests of the 1960s were fervently embraced by Bookchin, who saw in the student radicals and libertarian dropouts from industrial society the germ of a new and more universal revolutionary subject. Having first published far-seeing critiques of the incipient ecological crisis in the early 1960s, Bookchin saw the possibilities for a conjugation of the New Left's critique of domination with the emergent Green consciousness and the anarchist tradition, in particular as the new radicalism would gain control of municipalities and neighborhoods from below, then gradually extend this "libertarian municipalism" over the whole of society, converting it into an ecological realm of freedom.4 Social Ecology is the name given by Bookchin to this synthesis, and B1 became its principal narrative.

   B2: B1 is, so to speak, Social Ecology's public discourse, the manifest content of Bookchin's system that he would pass on to the world and be known by. If there is a critical judgment to be passed on Bookchin's philosophy, it will have to culminate in the critique of B1. But there is more to Bookchin. Another discourse lies embedded within his works, never explicitly thematized yet inescapable once we attend to it. The shards of this narrative lie scattered about in the texts. Mostly they appear as fragments of thought, suggestive phrases which provide a kind of emotional tone, or mood, to the reasoned arguments of his philosophy. Consider two of the passages quoted above: If we are "careless" in using the terms hierarchy, class and the State, a "dangerous simplification of social reality" will result. Or myth is seen as having an "utterly arbitrary character" the use of which "delivers us to complete falsehoods." Viewed so, freedom takes on a "treacherous form" in which emerging elites will succeed in "completely dominating" humanity. "In such a mythic--and mystifed--world, there would be no basis for being guarded against hierarchy or for resisting it."

   Overheated notions of this sort are neither accidental nor rare findings in Bookchin's writings. In themselves they scarcely constitute a logic, or rise above the level of emotional coloring. However they are not written in themselves, but as a set of gestures forming another account of social bondage and transformation. Viewed from this perspective, what could be set aside as peccadilloes of a fiery temperament or lapses into theoretical hysteria emerges as another grand narrative, whose spirit is no longer that of the emergence of universals but of a defense against catastrophe. The adverbs -- utterly, completely, etc. -- are suggestive of extreme states of being. And the message is of clear and present danger, with an aroma of betrayal and skullduggery. Elites are out to dominate us; those who do not adequately defend against this (by means of, it goes without saying, social ecology) are not simply mistaken but guilty of treachery.

   In this scheme of things the Enlightenment is dimly off in the future. The emergence of domination and hierarchy and its dissolution in the ecological society is now a retelling of the legend of the Fall and Redemption, the master mythos of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Humanity may now be read as the Tribes of Israel, a basically pastoral people in bondage to Pharoah, or Rome, or Babylon -- the cities of corruption. These await their Redeemer. This figure is of, for and by the people: he may simply be called the Anarchist. The Anarchist is the prophetic instrument of higher powers -- the self-creativity of nature -- on whose behalf he seeks to liberate humanity. But the Anarchist is also fated to suffer and to endure persecution. He is not primarily set upon by the powers of Rome (Bookchin having little to say about specific modalities of state repression -- the state, you will recall, is subordinated to domination-in-general in his system). The Anarchist, rather, is greatly burdened with false prophets from his own tribe. These Pharisees and Sadducees are the source of the "treachery" noted above, betraying the people of Israel to Rome. More, there seems to be a kind of "Great Satan" among them, an arch-betrayer. This diabolic deceiver now assumes one form, now another, including, in the late 1980s, the shape of the Deep Ecologist.5 However, if we look at Bookchin's work as a whole over the years, there can be little doubt that the principal incarnation of Satan in the modern age has been the Marxist, and especially that progenitor of the devilish doctrine who took the name of Karl Marx himself.

   A few remarks about the construction of B2 may be in order before we study it in greater detail. In general terms, though a finding of this sort may be of interest it is in itself neither especially remarkable nor decisive for critique. In this case, it should not even be controversial, since the finding is shared by Bookchin himself, who frankly admits of the "unabashed [sic] messianic character of [The Ecology of Freedom], a messianic character that is philosophical and ancestral."[EF 14] Nor is it so unusual to find an alternative textual narrative embedded in the grand theory of a systematic thinker. In fact, it is difficult to imagine such a thinker without such a metanarrative. It may be that what makes a mind creative is the synthesis of internally negating lines of thought, some traces of which may be expected to persist in the final product. Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx himself, are three thinkers who come immediately to mind as providing considerable material for N2, F2, or M2 texts -- and in the case of Marx there would be no problem at all in demonstrating that M2 draws heavily upon the same mythos of Fall and Redemption employed by Bookchin. A thinker with large aspirations for humanity will find abundant thematic material in the Bible, from Genesis, to Deuteronomy, to Isaiah, to Daniel, to the Gospels, and finally, in Revelation, the last, grandest and most apocalyptic rendition of all. Bookchin's appropriation of the legend of the Fall and Redemption puts him, therefore, in splendid company, from Dante, to Milton, to Goethe, to Blake, and, among contemporary thinkers, Ernst Bloch, whom Bookchin rightly admires for his radical futurism, a trait essentially linked to the notion of redemption.

   But these are just abstract considerations, whereas the effects of a metanarrative have to be decided concretely. Depending upon how it is appropriated, the mythos of the Fall and Redemption can re-emerge as the vision of Blake's Jerusalem or the nightmare of Mein Kampf . It is a question of "spirit," that is, the manner in which being expands into new and more comprehensive syntheses.6 This can be rephrased: a great deal depends on what kind of a messiah Murray Bookchin promises to be. There is a latent contradiction between the democratic ideal of B1 and the messianic promise of B2, which will be realized or not according to Bookchin's treatment of his theme. B1, the ostensible narrative of Social Ecology, makes humanity, or "the People," (Bookchin's phrase chosen to avoid using class as a leading term) as the protagonist of history; B2, on the other hand, tends to focus on the Anarchist as redeemer. To the extent that this figure hogs the stage with his personal vendettas, so will democratic promise become fraudulent. Humanity is no longer the agent of its own transformation; it becomes, rather, a sign flashed by the redeemer to demonstrate his redemptive bona fides.

   In this context, the running battles Bookchin wages with his presumed adversaries are more than irritating distractions. As it becomes evident that Bookchin is not merely dealing with the ontology of hope or the emergence of ethical being from nature, but is consumed, rather, with venom and rage against those whom he sees in the way of "freedom," the entire edifice of Social Ecology shows the strain. Intolerance and dogmatism are, to say the least, common human tendencies. But it is remarkable to find them in a thinker who announces his project as follows: "My definition of the term, "libertarian," is guided by my description of the ecosystem: the image of unity in diversity, spontaneity, and complementary relationships, free of all hierarchy and domination." [EF352] In a case of this sort, the contradiction becomes stifling. Categories with at least latent explanatory or emancipatory potential -- the very notions of hierarchy, domination, freedom itself -- become drained of intellectual vitality and turn into rhetorical devices by means of which the Anarchist establishes redemptive authority.

   There is a kind of betrayal in Bookchin's texts. It is the betrayal of a professed Enlightenment rationality by a vindictiveness of Old Testament proportion, and it severely distorts the possibilities of both B1 and B2 by splitting them into mutually repellant fragments. As a result, Bookchin's dialectic of reason withers and loses its claim on universality through a radical demythologization; while the redemptive myth which subsumes his doctrine suffers spiritual disaster by being denied its immanent rationality.

   Consider the treatment of the Enlightenment in Remaking Society [RS 166-167]. Bookchin begins this two-page passage with a ringing defense of Enlightenment universality: "it fostered a clear-eyed secular view toward the dark mythic world that festered in feudalism, religion, and royal despotism." Enlightenment reason "tried to formulate a general human interest . . . and to establish the idea of a shared human nature that would rescue humanity as a whole from a folk-like, tribalistic, and nationalistic particularism." Bookchin is a great admirer of Hegel, whose rendition of Enlightenment rationality included a "dialectic of eductive development, a process that is best expressed by organic growth . . ." Thus the true legacy of the Enlightenment is an expansive, dialectically inclusive rationality with the potential for the reharmonization of humanity and nature -- if, that is, the burdens of tribalistic particularism can be overcome. Though the imagery of festering gives some pause for concern as to whether the "dark" world has been actually transcended, the timbre of this passage is largely consistent with the aims of enlightened reason.

   Bookchin proceeds with a familiar -- though essential -- reminder that capitalism "warped these goals, reducing reason to a harsh industrial rationalism focussed on efficiency rather than a high-minded intellectuality . . . , " and that it did so as part of a project of bourgeois domination. But he develops barely more than six lines to this point, which serves less as a thesis concerning the dominant enemy of the Enlightenment than a launching pad for what he really wants to do, namely, assault his enemies. These emerge from the ranks of those who stand apart from the bourgeois synthesis, i.e., the left and especially the ecological left. The attack occupies a full page, and while it starts modestly enough, with a reminder that the "trends that denigrate reason" are "perhaps understandable reactions" to the alienating conditions of late capitalism, momentum starts picking up in the second paragraph as the force of narrative B2 begins to kick in. Now the "perhaps" is brushed aside and the Anarchist takes off his gloves to go after the betrayers of humanity. However "understandable," these trends -- which, roughly speaking, comprise all identitarian, deep-ecological and spiritually-driven political movements -- may be, they are also "profoundly reactionary" because they dissolve general human interest "into gender parochialism . . . tribalistic folkdom . . . and a 'return to wilderness.'" They become "crudely atavistic," they "retreat into the mythic darkness of a tribalistic past . . ." "Ecology's motifs of complementarity, mutualism, and nonhierarchical relationships are completely dishonoured . . ." For [i]f the Enlightenment left us any single legacy that we might prize above all others, it is the belief that humanity in a free society must be conceived as a unity, a 'one' that is bathed in the light of reason and empathy." By this time, Bookchin is fairly shrieking:

Rarely in history have we been called upon to make a stronger stand for this legacy than today, when the sludge of irrationality, mindless growth, centralized power, ecological dislocation, and mystical retreats into quietism threaten to overwhelm the human achievements of past times. Rarely before have we been called upon not only to contain this sludge but to push it back into the depths of a demonic history from which it emerged.

   At first glance, the passage is ostensibly consistent: there are "atavistic" groups; they threaten to impair the Enlightenment project, which is a good thing; therefore, they must be turned away. But here a rupture occurs. Bookchin seems unable to recognize that the dialectical and ecological sensibility doesn't just turn things away, or to use his vivid phrase, "push . . . back into the depths of a demonic history." That is to say, he does not recognize his self-professed logic. For does he not himself say in this very passage that Enlightenment-oriented eco-logic is "bathed in the light of reason," but also, "empathy" -- that is, fellow-feeling with others, a condition that would surely apply to those undergoing the painful struggle of contending with the ecological crisis? But who can feel with "sludge?"

   Language, in this case excremental language, has real consequences; it is not just little boys talking "ca-ca." Bookchin's excremental metaphor sets up a universe of radical rejection and non-recognition: associating an alternative view with what is shit out of the body. To use his apt evocation of Hegel, eco-logic entails a "dialectic of eductive [that is, drawing forth] development, a process that is best expressed by organic growth . . ." Exactly -- and exactly what this apostle of a humanity harmonized with nature rules out, because sludge can at best be further de-differentiated and broken down. But Bookchin cannot even tolerate this. He wants the "sludge" of a spiritual worldview pushed back, buried, even destroyed. The outburst is therefore a call for repression rather than dialectical unification. Since we are dealing here with human beings and not just ideas to be forgotten, the violent implications of this pushing back cannot be overlooked. Not physical violence, but the violation which comes from regarding another's existentially held position with contempt. Hegel's dialectic is a process of recognition, a painfully won encounter between self and other. Bookchin will give the requisite lip-service to this notion, but when it counts, that is, when he encounters another, a potential comrade no less, who may have areas of difference, then the other's position becomes sludge to be pushed away rather than a premonitory insight to be incorporated into a larger unity.

   The premise of dialectic is central for Bookchin. But this is a dialectic of non-recognition, of exclusion and splitting, which is to say, it is no dialectic at all. Nor is it ground for an ethic, nor any prescription for real democracy. Bookchin leaves those with "high-minded intellectuality," that is, the social ecological elect, on their pinnacle, the remainder of humanity swarming below, lost in their pathetic spiritual delusions and parochial interests. This sectarianism in the midst of universalism has been paralleled in the actual record of Bookchin's political engagement, a trail littered with aborted or ruptured alliances between the high-minded intellectual and those not deemed good enough for him -- solidarity groups, labor groups, civic-action groups, women's groups, cultural groups, even the Left Green network when it made honest demands for social justice. In other words, whoever stands for the fitful yet concrete emergence of humanity from domination, in a way not sanctioned by purified social-ecological revolution, is treated like toxic sludge. Would that Bookchin have applied to his practice his own best theory: "A libertarian rationality raises natural ecology's tenet of unity in diversity to the level of reason itself; it evokes a logic of unity between the 'I' and the 'other' that recognizes the stabilizing and integrative function of diversity--of a cosmos of 'others' that can be comprehended and integrated symbiotically." [EF 306].

3. Coping with Satan

   A number of points before we can take up the substance of Bookchin's relationship to Marx. First, it should be emphasized that no serious assessment of Marx's relation to radical ecology can be made within the confines of this essay. Second, although my sympathies will be clear in what follows, nothing written here should be taken to mean that either Marx or the Marxist tradition is above reproach, especially from an ecological standpoint. An ecological critique of Marx is necessary in light of the economism, fetishism of industrial growth, and the centralizing, antidemocratic record of actual Marxist projects. These may not have been truly Marxist, but they were not unrelated to Marxism, either. Further, although a distinction between Marx himself and the tradition that carries his name has to be made (he did, after all, say he was no Marxist), I do not believe that there is some "pure" essence of Marx that, if followed, could have avoided the counter-ecological and anti-democratic history of Marxisms.7

   This is by way of saying that a substantial portion of Bookchin's attack against the economism and centralism of the Marxist tradition is valid. It is certainly not original with him -- which Bookchin strenuously implies; and it should be pointed out that similar criticism has come from within Marxism itself -- which Bookchin strenuously ignores; but the critique remains important. On what grounds, then, does one question these texts? Simply this: that Bookchin on Marx all too often ceases to be a critique and slides off into grandiose posturing, propelled by equivalent portions of hatred, ignorance and lack of understanding.

   For example, we are informed of Marx's "atrocious misreadings of 'savage' society" [EF 304] in the course of a disputation of Marx's view that there is an essential 'otherness' in our relation to nature. We will return to the more abstract point below, but it might be worth asking about this "atrocious misreading." No evidence is offered, a characteristic feature of Bookchin's writings; perhaps he refers to Marx's bias for town over country, or Engels' reading of primitive society, drawn from Morgan and presumably reflective of Marx's final views. Now there are difficulties with Engels' work, though it is scarcely "atrocious," but is it really reflective of Marx on primitive society? In fact, there was precious little in the standard Marxist oeuvre to indicate just what Marx really thought about this question. By 1980, however, whenThe Ecology of Freedom was being composed, serious students of this question finally had access to a remarkable document devoted just to this subject, the Ethnological Notebooks, a collection of notes and drafts on primitive society published in 1972 as the last of Marx's works. The Notebooks are doubly remarkable -- for what they say about the vitality and genius of primitive society; and for what they reveal about Marx's continuing capacity, even in his fading last years, for intellectual renewal. Franklin Rosemont, a libertarian surrealist (if any label can be applied) deeply critical of established Marxism, finds the Notebooks quite wondrous, a work that "still glows brightly with the colors of the future," yet also a return to the spirit of the 1844 Manuscripts. Then there is the late Raya Dunayevskaya, a Marxist-humanist whose theoretical ambitions could match those of Bookchin himself. Dunayevskaya's Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, published in 1982, the same year as The Ecology of Freedom, was inspired by the Ethnological Notebooks, which revealed to her through its treatment of primitive society, "how very deep must be the uprooting of class society and how broad the view of the forces of revolution."8 Note that this is precisely Bookchin's own thesis. Do not expect him, however, to welcome the finding as evidence of convergence between radical social theories. There can, after all, only be one Messiah. And so, if there is an "atrocious misreading" here, it is Bookchin's -- not the only instance, by the way, of the mechanism of psychological projection in his texts.

   Common ground does not exist for Bookchin; there is one way the revolution must not go. Bookchin's hostility to socialism is adamant, all-consuming, and redolent with excremental vision: "A 'socialist' ecology, a 'socialist' feminism, and a 'socialist' community movement . . . are not only contradictions in terms; they infest the newly formed, living movements of the future with the maggots of cadavers from the past and need to be opposed unrelentingly." [TES 16] To buttress this stunningly sectarian view, no distortion is too outlandish. Thus "the Marxian revolutionary project reinforced the very degradation, deculturalization and depersonalization of the workers produced by the factory system. The worker was at his or her best as a good trade-unionist or a devoted party functionary, not as a culturally sophisticated being with wide human and moral concerns" [RS 136] -- a remarkable statement from someone who grew up in the atmosphere of New York City communism of the 1930s, with its worker schools, libraries and culturally vibrant summer camps. Or perhaps Bookchin has never heard of Paul Robeson, Diego Rivera or Pablo Neruda. There were many things wromg with the Communist movement, but deculturalization of the workers was not one of them.

   The reader will be impressed to learn that all this dehumanization started with the "remarkably insidious reduction of human beings to objective forces of 'history'" by a certain nineteenth century thinker, who, like the serpent in the Garden, gives us "a mentality that is more disconcerting than the most unfeeling form of 'anthropocentrism.'" No wonder that the "contribution proletarian socialism made to the revolutionary project was minimal. at best, and largely economic in character." [RS 136-137] This stems, in Bookchin's view, from Marx's objectification and lack of moral vision: "Evil was not a word that Marx was wont to use when he tried to turn the critique of capitalism into an 'objective' science, freed of all moral connotations." [RS 84] Yet even within the terms of objective science, Marx is second rate. He "mystifies"; he is impossibly "vague"; his views on labor are apparently full of ''innocence,'" but in actuality "highly deceptive" and "riddled by ideology--an ideology that is all the more deceptive because Marx himself is unaware of the trap into which he has fallen. The trap lies precisely in the abstraction that Marx imparts to the labor process, its ahistorical autonomy and character as a strictly technical process." [EF 225; RS 174, 191]. And finally, from an earlier broadside, Marx's "theories were still anchored in the realm of survival, not the realm of life." [PSA 232]9 Never at a loss for florid and panoramic prose, Bookchin sums it all up for the "remarkably insidious" Marx: "Tragically, Marxism virtually silenced all earlier revolutionary voices for more than a century and held history itself in the icy grip of a remarkably bourgeois theory of development based on the domination of nature and the centralization of power." [RS 169]

   What are we to make of these pathetic caricatures? Do we need to consume more paper in refuting them, in proving that no, Marx is not the figure represented here, that he saw humans as the makers of history, that his work is suffused with moral categories, that his is perhaps the most important contribution to the revolutionary project, that Marx's theory of labor is anything but ahistorical and technicist -- and finally, that his ontology is anchored in the realm of life and not survival? There is no point in doing so; this is not a study of Marx but of Bookchin, and the convinced are not to be persuaded. But it is necessary to reflect on the significance of the fact that Bookchin's rendition of Marx is a caricature and not a critique, for it is precisely in this regard that we can appreciate where he loses his way.

   To caricature some figure -- and this would apply to the above-noted treatment of the spiritual position as well as Marx -- it is necessary to reduce the complexity of that figure, specifically, to take seemingly contradictory features that coexist in the living organism and split them apart, discarding what doesn't suit one's predilictions and highlighting only what serves ideology. This is fine for political cartoons, a disaster for theory. Consider Marx for a moment. Anyone with reasonable familiarity with Marx's writings will find abstraction from the rich articulation of social existence -- the feature singled out by Bookchin -- but will also find the concrete wealth of that existence, as well as moral and objective categories interpenetrating each other.10 Thus Bookchin caricatures Marx by reducing him and regarding him with single vision only.

   But the alternative, namely, using two-fold, or multiple vision, is also how Marx surpasses the bourgeois world-view, for bourgeois thought is pre-eminently the reduction of the universe to monocular perspective. Marx's capacity to range over multiple registers is a realization of the eternally fresh words of William Blake: "May God us keep/ From Single vision & Newtons sleep".11 Thus if we are to hurl epithets about, the bourgeois thought pertains to Bookchin for his reductionism -- another instance of projection (which we also find in the ascription of vagueness to Marx). In his need to destroy Marx, Bookchin uses radical rhetoric while retreating theoretically into a one-sided and ultimately static materialism. It is as if he goes back from Marx to Feuerbach -- except that Feuerbach couldn't have been expected to know better, nor, of course, was his thought tendentious and riddled with hateful projections.

   We return to the point of dialectic. Bookchin professes himself a dialectical thinker, but dialectic and single-vision are mutually exclusive. The sense of multiple possibility is the core of dialectic -- that and the movement through contradiction between different entities. Dialectic requires recognition of the negative along with affirmation. Such is the essential dialectical quality missing from Bookchin -- the dwelling in negation, the capacity to hold together opposites so that the life immanent within their contradictoriness can grow. Instead of negation, he sees "sludge," or something "insidious," or "deceptive," and expels it. Striving toward Enlightenment universality, he ends with repression. Dialectic, instead of unfolding, becomes static, frozen in an endless series of vendettas.

   Dialectical stasis weakens the ecological vision, because ecology itself is the recognition of dialectic in nature; and it undermines the theory of hierarchy/domination. To be more exact, Bookchin's undialectical notion of hierarchy/domination replaces theory with rhetoric, as, for example, when he proclaims that

Hierarchy as such--be it in the form of ways of thinking, basic human relationships, social relations, and society's interaction with nature--could now be disentangled from the traditional nexus of class analysis that concealed it under a carpet of economic interpretations of society. [RS 156 italics in text]

   Viewed as theory, however, the sense breaks down. Consider the axiomatic identity between hierarc and domination. According to Bookchin, hierarchy is an "as such," some kind of essence that can be abstracted out of all concrete instances; it is an ontological flaw in B1, original sin in B2. Hence the assertion, repeatedly made, that the domination of nature is tightly linked to any and all manifestations of hierarchy, all of these being expressions of the same essence. Aside from the personal claims, therefore, the anarchism of social-ecological politics rests upon the postulation of the absolute value of hierarchy, since anything less than eliminating all hierarchies (as, for example, building a strategy around workers, or peasant women), will leave untouched the roots of the domination of nature.

   One problem with this abstraction is that it remains abstract. Despite an ocean of descriptive and hortatory material about hierarchy, at no point in Bookchin's work have I been able to find an account of what actually makes a hierarchy tick. He will say that "for reasons that involve complex evaluation" history was "diverted" from a cooperative to a hierarchical direction" [PSE 178], but we never learn what this complex evaluation entails. Hierarchy remains, therefore, a somewhat mysterious wrong turn to which human being is subject. What has happened? Has nature mysteriously screwed up in the evolution of the human species -- an impossibility by Bookchin's lights, who never ceases extolling the creative fecundity of nature. Or is humanity really in the grip of original sin, which would make impossible the optimism of social ecology?

   Or could the question be rephrased? Could it be, in contrast to Bookchin's view, that we do not have to get rid of hierarchy as such, but need to attend, rather, to those hierarchies that degenerate into domination? In other words, the identity, hierarchy=domination, would be broken. At one level this issue is essentially empirical and comes down to the following: are hierarchies ubiquitous? are there different dominative values attached to different hierarchies, so some are less bad than others? are some hierarchies even beneficial?

   The answer is yes to all these questions, which is to say, the category of hierarchy/domination as Bookchin develops it breaks down. Oddly enough, Bookchin himself recognizes this. He contradicts himself at the most vital point in his theory by recognizing that some hierarchies can be good, admitting tacitly that hierarchy is ubiquitous in human existence, and moreover -- though he would surely deny that this is so -- that class domination has priority within the set of hierarchies.

   In a recent essay, "What is Social Ecology?," Bookchin has the following to say:

It is worth emphasizing that hierarchical domination, however, coercive it may be, is not to be confused with class exploitation. Often the role of high-status individuals is very well-meaning, as in commands given by caring parents to their children, of concerned husbands and wives to each other, or of elderly people to younger ones. In tribal societies . . . [t]he respect accorded to many chiefs is earned, not by hoarding surpluses as a means to power but by disposing of them as evidence of generosity.

   There is a muddle here which is both revealing and puzzling. Logically, if the ecological society is to be without hierarchies, then it will have to dispense with the parent-child relationship, since this is a hierarchy according to Bookchin. Perhaps the little ones can be put in an autonomously run nursery, where they may learn the joys of freedom, preparing their own food and putting themselves to bed at night without anybody telling them what to do. If this is not to his taste and he would prefer, like other people, that small children be protected and cared for, then Bookchin must be willing to live with hierarchy, which is to say in his terms, domination. Where, then, is the theory of Social Ecology? Ah, but he says that the parent-child relationship is, or at least can be a good hierarchy -- a perfectly snesible idea which requires, however, that we detach hierarchy from domination. More specifically, we need then to concretely specify hierarchies to discern those that are harmful for humans and nature. And it also follows that there can be no necessary correlation between the domination of humnas and that of nature, since such a correlation is grounded, according to Bookchin, in the generalization hierarchy=domination.

   In sum, we have to recognize that certain hierarchies are both ubiquitous and at least potentially good. This would include the parent-child relation, but also that of teacher-student, or indeed any place in the cultural system where some people have something beneficial to impart to others and claim an authority to do so. Can we imagine a surgical operating room without hierarchy? An ocean-going ship? In other words, hierarchy is as inherent in the human situation as is childhood, culture, and the division of labor. Indeed, hierarchyis a concrete manifestation of human being. It is embedded in the very essentials of our species life, in the facts that we are born helpless and live through the creation and transmission of a created world. In other words, if you want to eliminate hierarchies, you have to eliminate what is specifically human.

   This distinction needs to be clearly drawn. There should be no doubt that any hierarchy contans the seeds of domination, and that, therefore, in every instance of hierarchy work has to be done to ensure that these dominative potentials are not realized: the over-controlling parent; the teacher who stifles the self-expression of the student; the surgical operating room that turns into an exhibit of patriarchy, etc. More concretely, what this means is that hierarchies need to evolve dialectically through a continuing sublation of their internal negativities.13 For all hierarchies have reciprocal character, which is to say, they are never unitary top-down structures except as an approximation in the extremes of domination. Children, to take the example of the most fundamental situation, reveal from earliest infancy a capacity to steer the parent-child hierarchy through teh immanent logic of their emergent self-expression. As this grows, so does the parent-child relationship, the parents growing -- hopefully, but as experience confirms, all too rarely -- along with it in a continuous evolution of roles and capacities.

   But an evolving hierarchy is not necessarily a disappearing hierarchy. Reciprocity should not be confused with identity or the disappearance of structure. Certain differentiations can intrinsically remain and be given ordered, i.e., hierarchical, status according to experience, wisdom, physical capacity, even symbolic need. We could call this the rational exercise of authoirty so long as it is recognized that the form of reason involved is distinct from that established by the ruling order.

   In any case, this reasoing removes the character of as such from hierarchy. It obliges us, rather, to think conceretely about hierarchies, in order to understand how they can be ecodestructive and murderous and the forms they take as they become so. If there is no hierarchy as such, then we are back to square one, where the job consists of looking closely at hierarchies and sorting them out. We might even find that the bad ones go under the names of capitalism and patriarchy, and decide on this basis to give priority to their immediate confrontation rather than going the route outlined by Bookchin. Admittedly, this might require bypassing the libertarian municipalist model of social transformation in certain instances, or to be more exact, downgrading it to the status of one pathway among many toward social-ecological transformation. If I am not mistaken, however, I think this would be on the whole quite a good thing. It would mean, at the least, that we would take the real world -- and the rest of the world -- a lot more seriously than Bookchin would allow. Imagine -- seeing ecological possibilities in a Marxist-Leninist state, or in peasants who have never known the glories of the Enlightenment! These developments are off Bookchin's map; he would most likely smear such developments with his choicest excremental epithet and warn us against the grave and insidious dangers that lay in store if we took them seriously, or -- Hegel forbid! -- try to learn from them. But freed from Bookchin's rigid messianism, we could do just that.

   Consider, for example, the substantial efforts made toward the development of organic agriculture in a Cuba driven to the wall by Soviet collapse and United States hostility, a project which Peter Rosset and Medea Benjamin have called "unprecedented, with potentially enormous implications for other countries suffering from the declining sustainability of conventional agricultural production."14 This turn of events is by definition impossible according to the single vision of Social Ecology. But if we attend to concrete and intermediate formations rather than grand teleological abstractions such as the Ecological Society, we would be able to appreciate that there are degrees of freedom for restructuring agriculture afforded by the absence of agribusiness, i.e., capitalism -- and appreciate, too, the potentialities for growth inherent in that despised entity, the socialist party-state. The lesson to be learned is the importance of getting capitalism off the back, and not that Cuba is a good model for ecological transformation -- which it cannot be, given all the deformations sedimented into Cuban society.

   Then there is the spiritual/ecological radicalism in places like the Indian subcontinent, manifest in phenomena such as the tree-hugging Chipko movement. We might approach this through the work of Vandana Shiva, in whose person advanced science (Shiva having originally trained as a nuclear physicist), radical feminism, Marxism and ancient spirituality come together in a working out of dialectic with important consequences for the critique of science, of "development,"and of modernism itself.15 To do so commits neither to the fetishization of the East, nor to an ecofeminist "vanguard," nor to any particular spirituality as the Way to ecological transformation. As with the situation in Cuba, it simply consists of taking a more differentiated look at the emergence of ecological politics.

   The issue is no longer hierarchy as such, but hierarchy as it becomes domination -- and domination as it is undone to become emancipation. Here a criterion is at hand in the notion of dialectic, as the emergence of being through negation. Is this occluded or thwarted? Then we have an instance of domination. Is the occlusion undone so that negations emerge, proliferate, expand and move toward universality? Then domination is to that degree overcome, while emancipation supervenes. Such an approach fosters concrete engagement with points of resistance and transformation as they spontaneously emerge. The abstract denunciation of hierarchy as such favors an equivalently abstract kind of politics, the abstraction becoming filled with the localization of whoever enunciates it. Thus Social Ecology's municipalism, rigidly advanced by Bookchin, is a doctrine unable to be shared with or to learn from that 90 per cent of the world which does not share the blessings of Vermont town, German philosophy, or the emancipatory heritage of the white West. There is, in short, a kind of crypto-racism inherent in Social Ecology as Bookchin develops the notion, no matter how anti-racist its individual practitioners may be.

   A more dialectical ecological politics, by contrast would be open to the emergence of multiple points of resistance and social transformation as these are conditioned in different settings by the forms of domination peculiar to the ecological crisis, namely, capitalism and patriarchy. Thus the ecological society is prefigured in the light of socialism and post-patriarchal social relations, for these are the specific negations of the prevailing domination of nature even if their positive content has not yet been adequately defined.

   Questioning the hierarchy/domination nexus leads to a rethinking of the freedom/justice nexus. Recall that Bookchin's view subordinates the latter to the former. This is not just a theoretical issue. Although he makes the customary obeisances to the victims of oppression in his writings, anyone familiar with Bookchin's political practice will know that he really does give a lesser role to struggles for a more just, egalitarian society as compared to his municipalism and the broad goals of Social Ecology. To Bookchin, justice is the mere rearrangement of inequities, freedom the positive good of overcoming hierarchy. Freedom is "not only the equality of unequals, but also the enlargement of our concepts of subjectivity, technics, science and ethics . . ." [EF351] Justice, stained with the retrograde Marxian emphasis on economics, has actually become a bad thing:

What is so stunning to the careful observer is that if justice never came to compensate but merely to reward, its spirit has finally become mean and its coinage small. Like every limited ideal, its history has always been greater than its present. But the future of justice threatens to betray even its claims to have upheld the "rights" of the individual and humanity. For as human inequality inreases in fact, if not in theory, its ideology of equivalence assails the ideal of freedom with its cynical opportunism and a sleazy meliorism. [EF 166]

   In any case, if there is no hierarchy/domination in general, then there can be no freedom in general as an undoing of same. And if the issue is those hierarchies that have turned into domination, then the approach to emancipation needs to pass through the overcoming of specific dominations. Another name for this is bringing justice to bear. A freedom detached from justice is, frankly, silly; fully developed, it turns into one of those New Age parodies Bookchin rightly despises, where the comfortable prance freely about their Growth Center. In contrast, as anyone who has participated in a campaign for justice can testify, struggle can acquire an existential intensity which is the sine qua non for real social transformation. Here is where the revolutionary subject is forged, from Marx's youthful engagement with the wine growers of the Moselle to those who fight on for justice in places of little importance to Bookchin's Social Ecology, like Haiti, Guatemala, and East Timor.17 For justice is both individual, in that one particular case has to be addressed, and universalizing, in that the emancipation of one cannot fully take place until the emancipation of all is realized. This relation gives the various environmental justice movements a value they occupy in neither the theory nor the practice of Bookchinian social ecology.18 As it is said, No Justice, No Peace!, so may it be added, No Justice, No Freedom!

4. Toward a Negative Ecology

   One implication of this is a teleological ethic in which what is and what ought to be converge toward identity. "Ethics is not merely a matter of personal taste and values; it is factually anchored in the world itself as an objective standard of self-realization." [PSE 35] This implies a definite, preset way toward which the development of things points. "Until [things and phenomena] are what they have been constituted to become, they exist in a dynamic tension."[PSE 30] Bookchin is at pains to point out that such a view only commits one to a general idea of growth and development of an ethical sensibility, and not to any particular moral content, nor to a religious framework. "There is an 'end in view' -- not preordained, to state this from an ecological viewpoint rather than a theological one, but as the actualization of what is implicit in the potential." [PSE 171]

   Nevertheless, Bookchin has a problem here, as would anyone who sought, for ecological reasons, to ground us in nature while also postulating freedom as a cardinal human goal. It is hard to see how things can be "not preordained," yet also "constituted to be" through an "objective standard of self-realization," something which is "implicit" and can be actualized. This is, after all, the way homophobes or racists tend to argue. In fact, it is difficult to see how a thoroughly repressive naturalization can be avoided unless some principle is introduced which, so to speak, introduces plasticity and contingency into the schemata of nature where humans are concerned. That is, a chicken is pretty well locked in to becoming a chicken who behaves in a quite definite, "natural" way. If we found a hen, for example, that insisted on hanging out with dogs or showed an interest in Bartok, we would be justified in calling that chicken abnormal and looking for some wrinkle in the internal wiring or imprinting of said beast. Presumably we are not content to regard humans in this vein.19 An individual who decides not to have children, or to undergo a sex-change operation, or to put a safety-pin in his lip, or to blow up a federal office building, or become an ecological marxist or a social ecologist, may be doing something good, bad or indifferent, but in any case is exercizing a very basic aspect of human nature. This involves more than "subjectivity" or "self-reflexivity;" there is also what may be said to be a tendency to reject the given, whether this be defined as inherited social or natural convention. That is, humans are very much part of nature; but there is also something in them which is never content with nature. That is what the "self" in self-reflexivity is about -- an entity that stands apart, or rather, is engaged in a continuing dialectic of attachment and separateness in the expression of which nature is necessarily transformed. It seems very much impossible to think of a human being who does not function by transforming nature in such an expressive way. After all, we are the only species who cooks food or adorns the body, or buries the dead with ceremony, or thinks on the possible relations between humans and nature -- all processes that involve the transformation of the given, i.e., of nature.

   Therefore, while it is essential to posit a connectedness between humanity and nature -- for any ecological way of being depends upon this -- the thinker who wants to posit a direct continuity between humanity and nature has a burden to contend with. This is because in the very expression of the notion of continuity with nature one is also expressing discontinuity with nature, and doing so in an entirely human-natural way. Thus I would go further: such a thinker is in deep conceptual trouble unless s/he specifies some intermediate zone according to which the continuity/discontinuity between humans and nature can be understood.

   Happily we have such a zone to conceptualize. Call it, if you will, the sphere of representation, or the imaginary, or of language, or of knowledge -- whatever terms are best to indicate the presence in human being of the possibility of a kind of dialectical space in which nature is affirmed/negated. Without such a notion, we either collapse human being into nature, or radically split the two apart in Cartesian dualism.

   Unhappily, Bookchin does not seem to realize this, for there is no such zone conceptualized within his discourse. Or to the extent he realizes it, he rejects it and flees from it. Remarkably, Bookchin is even anti-Kantian, in the sense that Kant put the critique of knowledge, or epistemology, in the foreground of inquiry. This for Bookchin is a graver philosophical problem than that of the Cartesian split. Even some of the "best theorists" of ecology "commit an error . . . . they have dug their trenches poorly: they have defined themselves against Descartes rather than Kant." "As a result, philosophical theories of nature and the objective ecological ethics derived from them are still being created in the false light of the 'epistemological turn' that Kant ultimately gave to Western philosophy." [PSE 57]

   The epistemological turn Bookchin so abhors contains among its components the notion that we should be humble about the limits of our knowledge and the kinds of propositions we make about the world. Whatever else Kant did, he taught us the virtue of skepticism about truth claims. Both modernism and postmodernism agree on this point -- Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucalut and Derrida alike. But not Murray Bookchin. He knows. Nautre and history alike are open books to the social ecologist cum redeemer.

   By denying a sphere of representation, Bookchin gains justification for his dogmatism, since whatever he decides becomes the one true way in which nature expresses itself. But he also locks himself into a highly objectivistic rendering of human nature. The question of interpretation, the play of language and the imagination, the exercise, in short of our faculties of freedom -- all this Enlightenment is denied as a false light. Such a maneuver may give rigid support to Bookchin's prejudices; but like any rigidity, the result is oppressive, stifling and headed for collapse. The rejection of a concept of representation underlies his inability to give the category of hierarchy real substance, since what distinguishes dominative from non-dominative hierarchies occupies the realm of the imaginary. And it enters into the single-visioned repressiveness that pervades his work. Without an intermediate sphere of representation, the negative can no longer be freely admitted into the real. Nature unfolds immediately into the human; it must be this way and no other.

   The epistemological themeswas not merely imagined by Kant. It is embedded, rather, in the actualities of human biology, in our dialectical relation to nature. Here, in the situation of childhood and the collective production of culture, arises the linguistic capacity and, perhaps more essential, the ground of its dialectical efflorescence. The condition of childhood and culture -- where, as we have already seen, hierarchies arise "naturally" inhuman existence -- is also the condition of the imaginary in the configuration of language and desire. Here occurs the positing of an alternative, represented universe which cannot be collapsed into the given universe. Human being is shaped as the co-existence of subjective and objective spheres, continually self-transforming. It is a state of differentiation from nature and will never be identical with nature -- at least so long as people cook their food, adorn their bodies, wonder about the world and use speech. The differentiation from nature is paralleled by the emergence of the human self, as the alternative universe of the self-represented person. This is, no doubt, the source of misery when it turns into greed, the will to power and all the endless varieties of self-aggrandizement -- and finds structures such as capitalism and patriarchy for realization. But it is also the source of poetry, or music, or love, or indeed, of the ideas of freedom and justice. And it is the only world where the overcoming of domination and the reconciliation with nature must occur.

   The presence of a differentiated sphere of representation embeds dialectic in human being and thereby raises it to a new level. For what is non-collapsing is also mutually negating. It lives by a continual transform of absence/presence, a presentation, re-presentation, a search for the imaginary in the real and a seach for the realization of the imaginary. It is, in sum, the createdness of subject and object. The young Marx recognized the implications of this, and incorporated it into the foundation for his world-view.

Man is a directly natural being . . . The fact that man is an embodied, living, real, sentient objective being means that he has real, sensuous objects as the objects of his life expression.

But man is not only a natural being, he is a human natural being. This means that he is a being that exists for himself20 . . . that must confirm and exercise himself as such in his being and knowledge. Thus human objects are not natural objects as they immediately present themselves nor is human sense, in its purely objective existence, human sensitivity and human objectivity. Neither nature in its objective aspect nor in its subjective aspect is immediately adequate to the human being. And as everything natural must have an origin, so man too has his process of origin, history, which can, however by known by him and thus is a conscious process of origin that transcends itself. History is the true natural history of man.21

   By the same token, Bookchin closes off his theory when he blocks the dialectical opening afforded by the imaginary. All these tendencies come together in his treatment of myth, to which we return in rounding off this study. We have already commented on the following passage in which Bookchin attacks myth as the enemy of reason, lashing out at the:

utterly arbitrary character of myth, its lack of any critical correction by reason, [which] delivers us to complete falsehoods. Viewed from a primitivistic viewpoint, "freedom" takes on the treacherous form of an absence of desire, activity and will--a condition so purposeless that humanity ceases to be capable of reflecting upon itself rationally and thereby preventing emerging ruling elites from completely dominating it. In such a mythic--and mystifed--world, there would be no basis for being guarded against hierarchy or for resisting it. [RS 102]

Indeed, the island of the Lotus Eaters is a regressive myth of a return to infancy and passivity, when the newly born merely responds to caresses, a full breast, and is lulled into sedated receptivity by an ever-attentive mother. . . . [And thus,] to retreat back into myth, today, is to lay the basis for a dangerous quietism that thrusts us beyond the threshold of history into the dim, often imagined, and largely atavistic world of prehistory. Such a retreat obliges us to forget history and the wealth of experience it has to offer. Personality dissolves into a vegetative state that antedates animal development and nature's evolutionary thrust toward greater sensibility and subjectivity. Thus even 'first nature' is libeled, degraded, and denied its own rich dynamic in favor of a frozen and static image of the natural world where the richly coloured evolution of life is painted in washed-out pastels, bereft of form, activity, and self-directiveness. [RS 103]

   Secondly, these are the words of the typically masculinest position that fears merger with the archaic mother and therefore establishing a kind of hypertrophic rationalism that sharply discriminates between subject and object. This position is, needless to add, depressingly familiar in the modern history of the West, and specifically associated with the enemies of the ecological world-view.

   Finally, this censorious attitude has a multiply repressive effect. On the one hand, it blocks not only the mythic world view, with its immanent rationality, but closes off all radical spirituality. What implications does Bookchin's fear of regression have for Buddhist or Taoist conceptions of the Void? Are we to assume that these are simply infantilisms? That they lack the rationality of the clear minded? That their lessons as to the reconciliation with nature and the critique of domination are meaningless?23

   But perhaps enough has been said of the intellectual misadventures of Murray Bookchin. The great goal he has outlined -- a free society in harmony with nature -- remains the most fundamental project of all. In working to realize it, we should keep before us the famous aphorism of Terrence. For we will not find our way home, this being the hidden text of ecology, until we are open to the entire universe, inner as well as outer, negative as well as affirmative, until it can be truly said the "nothing human is alien to us."24

Footnotes

1. The principle works considered here, with page references keyed in the text are: Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal:Black Rose Books, 1980) [TES]; Post-Scarcity Anarchism 2nd ed (Montreal: Black Rose, 1986 [PSA]; The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982) [EF] , Bookchin's chef d'oeuvre; Remaking Society (Montreal: Black Rose, 1989) [RS]; The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black Rose, 1990) [PSE]; and "What is Social Ecology," in Michael Zimmerman, et. al. eds, Environmental Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993) [WSE].

2. As the great hymn at the beginning of Milton ends: "I will not cease from Mental Fight,/Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,/Till we have built Jerusalem/In England's green & pleasant Land." (William Blake, Milton (Boulder: Shambala, 1978), 62.)
      A brief personal note may be in order. For a while I was given to embrace social ecology and considered myself a comrade of Bookchin's. Having come into this area relatively late in my political and intellectual evolution, I was at first disposed to adopt the doctrine that seemed the most radical and comprehensive, and this appeared best exemplified by Bookchin's work. I made three appearances at the summer Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, and belonged to the Left Green Network of the Green Party, both of which were heavily influenced by Bookchin. This essay represents the working out of a slowly growing conviction which arose on the basis of this experience that certain points of Bookchin's thought needed fundamental critique. It should also be noted that, although the Left Green Network is more or less defunct, perhaps for reasons having to do with the themes raised by this essay, I remain active in the Green Party and regard it as a potential force for radical change.

3. Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists (NY: Harper and Row, 1977), is one of his finest achievements.

4. In addition to the above, see, for example, Lewis Herber (pseudonym), Our Synthetic Environment (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962) -- published the same year as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. For the synthesis of Bookchin's municipalism, see The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1987). Bookchin also played a role in the emergence of the German Greens during the 1970s, and is virtually the only American ecological thinker taken seriously by them.

5. For a recapitulation of this quarrel, in which Bookchin backs away from his more strident denunciation while under a degree of public pressure see Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

6. See Joel Kovel, History and Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) for an elaboration of this notion.

7. For a sense of the debate, see John Clark, "Marx's Inorganic Body," in Zimmerman, op. cit., 390-405; John Bellamy Foster, "Marx and the Environment," Monthly Review 47: 108-123, July-August, 1995. Clark, who was long associated with Bookchin., represents his anti-Marxism much more fairly and sophisticatedly than Bookchin himself; while Foster gives a vigorous defense of Marx.

8. Lawrence Krader, trans. and ed., The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Assen: van Gorcum, 1972). Franklin Rosemont, "Karl Marx and the Iroquois," Arsenal/ Surrealist Subversion 4 (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989) 201-13; the quote is from p. 212; Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981), ix

9. The broadside in question was "Listen Marxist!," a pamphlet first distributed at an SDS convention in 1969 and reprinted in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Two features about this work deserve some emphasis. First, the "Marxist" in the title immediately refers to the neo-Stalinist tendencies such as Progressive Labor that were beginning to appear out of the frustrations of the New Left. Bookchin was trying to steer the movement back into the libertarian-anarchist path; and in this effort, the figures of Marx and Engels were not as demonized as they became in later works. Thus despite its stridency, "Listen Marxist!" offers something close to a real critique of Marxism, in contrast to the post-1980 works. Second, the foundation of this critique was similar to the point raised by Marcuse, that capitalism had solved the problem of scarcity, hence a revolution of needs could be contemplated, rather than one confined to addressing the injustices of the proletariat. Obviously the crisis which has afflicted the capitalist world since the early 1970s and produced ever-widening class differences, etc., scrambles these assumptions badly. One might speculate that the increasing stridency of Bookchin's later works reflects a reaction to the fact that the locomotive of history has pulled away from the station, leaving the post-scarcity hypothesis behind. He attempts to deal with the problem in the Introdution to the second edition of Post-Scarcity Anarchism by stating, not unreasonably, that we still have to build on the realization that capitalism potentially can overcome scarcity. True, but this does take the steam from Bookchin's project. More, the notion was that of Marx, as well.

10. For a treatment of abstraction in Marx's dialectic, see Bertell Ollman, Dialectical Investigations (NY and London: Routledge, 1993).

11. From a letter of 1802. David Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City: Doubleday, 1982), 722.

12. Murray Bookchin, "What is Social Ecology," in Michael Zimmerman, et. al. eds, Environmental Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 364-66.

13. Paolo Friere's theses on education remain the definitive study on how dialectic should enter the educational process. His notions are primarily directed toward adult literacy campaigns -- an instance in the real world where, despite Bookchin, a good hierarchy needs to be introduced rather than erased -- but certainly apply to the education of children. Here the best teachers remain definitely in command, yet continuously evoke the intrinisic unfolding of the child's being in such a way that the outcome appears spontaneous. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971).

14. A category, by the way, that includes pretty much the entire world. Peter Rosset and Medea Benjamin, eds., The Greening of the Revolution (Melbourne, Australia, and San Francisco: Ocean Press and Global Exchange, 1994), p. 8. See also, Richard Levins, The Struggle for Alternative Agriculture in Cuba, Red Balloon Pamphlet 1 (7652 Cropsey Ave. #74, Brooklyn NY 11214), 1991

15. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive (London: Zed, 1989).

16. See, for example, Lester Brown, State of the World 1995 (NY: W.W. Norton, 1995), for the looming prospect of famine, especially in China.

17. As far as I know, the only time Bookchin ever intervened on behalf of a struggle involving so-called Third (or Fourth) world people was to lend support to the Miskito Indians in their strugle with Nicaragua's Sandinistas. Here, however, his principle motive was clearly hatred of the presumed Marxism-Leninism of the FSLN, a sympathy he shared with the CIA. Eventually the main faction of the Miskitos and the Sandinistas made peace, no thanks to Bookchin, who had done his share in setting back the solidarity movement.

18. Richard Hofrichter, ed., Toxic Struggles (Philadelphia: New Society, 1993)

19. Unless, of course, we were modern practitioners of psychiatry, but that is another story.

20. In other words, for the self that is our natural legacy.

21. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," in David McClellan, ed., Karl Marx Selected Writings (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 104-105. It is worth noting that I cannot recall encountering a reference to this work in Bookchin's writings.

22. As argued by Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans., Peggy Kamuf (NY and London: Routledge, 1994).

23. For an argument, within anarchist theory, of the radical potentials of Taoism, see John Clark, "Master Lao and the Anarchist Prince," in The Anarchist Moment (Montreal: Black Rose, 1984).

24. Chosen by Marx (in a little quiz administered by his daughters) as his favorite motto.