Measures of Failure
and Success: Part 1

Reflections on Chuck Morse's "Being a Bookchinite"

By Eirik Eiglad

In order to mature and develop, every radical movement must clarify its ideals and ideological foundations. Distinct and recognizable ideas about social change are one of the necessary preconditions for a distinct and recognizable social movement. Furthermore, in order to maintain its relevance, it must continuously reassess these ideological foundations, as well as their underlying intellectual premises, and evaluate their impact on its political practices. To guide its practice, such a movement needs no gurus or prophets, nor does it need any ossified dogmas or hallowed canons – it needs a solid theoretical grounding, and must make use of available critical insights in order to consistently reorient itself. Intellectual or ideological stagnation signifies – by definition – the death of any social movement.

If we are to create a new political practice – direly needed in our times – a new radical social movement has to be nurtured, one that aims for fundamental social change. Social ecologists suggest that such a movement should base itself on the ideological legacy of the radical theorist Murray Bookchin, and advance a revolutionary and libertarian municipalist approach to counter the crises of our time. Such a movement cannot, for reasons given above, eschew critique; On the contrary, it should consistently welcome critique as a means of reorienting itself. At all times, this movement must be able to explain and justify its ideological foundations, as well as its political relevance.

Still, there are many forms of critique. Not everything that passes for criticism today lives up to its promises of being a compass, by providing real analysis and assessments of ideas and their social consequences. In order to maintain focus and integrity, social ecologists should insist on certain intellectual standards; at the very least, criticisms must be expected to be factually consistent, theoretically substantiated, and coherently contextualized, simply to help ensure that the critique actually helps the movement reassess and possibly reorient itself. Very fine lines exist in polemics and political debates, and real theoretical issues can easily be obscured by self-importance, squabbles, and slander. Just as important as the necessary openness toward critique and subsequent re-evaluation processes is the capacity to distinguish the components of a given critique, and cut to the core of the argument. In my view, real critique can always be fruitful and constructive if it is true to its aspirations, as a real “critical art.” By following transparent and consistent practices for critical engagement with ideas, we can hope that everyone in our movement learns to discern what authentic and substantial criticisms are, and that the movement as such can mature in the process.

Particularly relevant for a movement that identifies with the ideas of social ecology could, at this point, be a critical assessment of the life and works of Murray Bookchin. After all, Bookchin was undisputedly the leading theoretical figure of this movement, and he devoted more than twenty books, as well as numerous speeches and essays, to develop this body of ideas. [1] Furthermore, Bookchin was not only the most prominent social ecologist, but a major theorist of the post-war libertarian Left, and his wide-ranging and original works should be considered important also for broader social movements concerned with issues like direct democracy, non-hierarchy, radical ecology, or libertarian socialism. For these reasons, such an assessment would be most appropriate – as well as timely, in light of Bookchin’s recent passing – as the ideas he developed deserve serious attention, perhaps more now than ever before. As a participant in this emerging international movement, I am very much looking forward to seeing social ecologists critically engage with Bookchin’s ideas, and help develop social ecology.

Recently we have witnessed an attempt to formulate a criticism of Bookchin’s life and work, by Chuck Morse, a New York anarchist, who was associated with Murray Bookchin and the Youth Greens in the early nineties, and ostensibly still is sympathetic to social ecology. In his recent pamphlet, “Being a Bookchinite,”[2] he seeks to assess Murray Bookchin’s influence and relevance as a social theorist, as seen from the perspective a participant in the political milieus surrounding Bookchin, if only for a period of about two years.[3] This pamphlet falls short of contributing to a critical assessment of Murray Bookchin’s theoretical contributions and political activities.

It does so for several reasons. One immediate problem in Morse’s account is that it contains many factual mistakes. Just on the first page, when we supposedly learn that Bookchin had “much in common with other sect builders of the socialist left,” the footnote refers to Bookchin as a former “member of Shachtman’s Socialist Workers Party.” Bookchin, however, was never a follower of Max Shachtman, but sided with his main political rival in the Trotskyist movement, James P. Cannon.[4] In the very next sentence we find a different kind of erroneousness. Here we can learn that Marcel Van der Linden presents an “excellent” discussion of the degree to which Josef “Weber’s views actually prefigured many of Bookchin’s later contributions.”[5] Regardless of whether we agree on judging Van der Linden’s thesis as “excellent” or not, it is clearly an academic piece specifically attempting to detect the influence of Josef Weber on the writing of Bookchin’s essays in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), not simply “many” of Bookchin’s later contributions, as Morse wants us to believe. Are either of these mistakes important in and of themselves? Of course not! They are next to negligible. The problem is that this pamphlet is congested with such “negligible” errors: These examples are simply chosen because they appear in the very first sentences in the first footnote on the first page.

Another problem is the heavily laden language in this pamphlet. Bookchin is consistently presented as a “sect builder” and an instigator of a “cultish” project. Although Morse admits that “Bookchin never used the word ‘sect’ to describe his efforts and surely would have rejected it,” he deems it “applicable nonetheless,” and uses The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary as reference. (This is one of the rare instances, I may add, where Morse actually tries to substantiate his reasoning.) This dictionary describes a sect as – and I use Morse’s exact quote – “a separate group adhering to a distinctive doctrine or way of thinking or to a particular leader … a school of philosophy or of philosophic opinion … a group holding similar political, economic, or other views.”[6] Of course, to the perceptive reader, it is clear that such a vague and all-encompassing description could be used for just about any political movement or ideological tendency, not only what commonly passes for a “sect” or a “cultish” phenomenon. Not only would this probably describe, say, the Republican Party of America, but also the critical theorists of the Frankfurter Schule, and the argument could be made that even Morse’s own Institute for Anarchist Studies would fit this description. Such an interpretation would of course quickly render the very concept meaningless. This, however, does not seem to trouble Morse. Not only does he accuse Bookchin of sectarianism, he deliberately characterizes Bookchin’s political project at the time (the Burlington Greens) as a sect, and even intensifies its religious connotations. He insists that Bookchin’s ideas “played a quasi-religious role” to the “disciples and protégés” that surrounded him and that Bookchin became “something of a prophet.” We even curiously learn that “Bookchin seemed relish in his own isolation, as if it were a sign of grace.”

Certainly, people committed to building a revolutionary social alternative have always been accused of sectarianism. Generally, revolutionaries are not troubled by such accusations; usually they are levelled by openly reformist and centrist tendencies. However, since Morse claims he used to be a “core disciple” in Bookchin’s “inner circle,” the charges could seem to carry some more weight, and we could be interested in learning more about the dynamics and characteristics that qualify his terminology. However, any substantiation is woefully lacking; it all boils down to an exposition of persuasions, clad in a politically laden terminology. Indeed, the very language Morse uses, filled with both explicit charges and insinuations, leaves us wondering what Morse really intends to say even when he uses other words in this context, for instance when he, in the very first sentence of the pamphlet, describes Murray Bookchin as an “ambitious” and “compelling” figure.

I am not going to give a detailed exposition of Morse’s rather sophomoric use of footnotes and references. However, in this particular instance it is perhaps worth noting that Morse chose Maurice Isserman as one of his sources on the American Left. Isserman was one of the “new historians” that wrote approvingly of the policies of the Communist Party (The Stalinists), vehemently stamping all forms of Trotskyism and libertarian socialism as “sectarian.”[7] By learning from Isserman and other “new historians,” we can easily dismiss Trotskyist party leaders as “sect-builders.” But it will not help us understand anything.

Another problem is the many inconsistencies of this article. Some times they point to major contradictions (and these I intend to address later on), but often these inconsistencies merely concern trifle anecdotes. Consider for example how Morse writes (in footnote 13 on page 10) that he essentially had forsaken a college education and academic career, only to write later (on page 25) that he left Burlington to study at the New School for Social Research in New York. Of course it is not interesting for us to know whether Morse pursued academic degrees or not, and it is certainly not relevant for this essay. But then again, why does he make an issue out of his apparent “sacrifice”?

One of the more problematic aspects of this pamphlet is how Morse makes far-reaching generalizations on the bases of his often trivial and inconsistent recollections. Some of these reflections are patently absurd, like when Morse explains how Bookchin indirectly encouraged “obsequiousness” by constantly speaking about his ill health: “These remarks created a tragic aura around him and the feeling that we should treasure every moment with him.”[8] Aside from the quite pathetic stunt to blame a dead man for being concerned about his frail health – issues that naturally concern most old people – the conclusions Morse draws are quite staggering. I see no need to counter Morse’s indictments here: If Bookchin did exert a calculated self-pity to “demand obsequiousness,” he seems to have had very weak means at his disposal indeed. Actually, in my opinion, petty remarks like this (that Morse uses to describe and explain Bookchin’s “exalted position within [their] milieu”) tell us considerably more about Morse’s character than about Bookchin’s. The fact that Morse qualifies his persuasion by admitting that he “never saw Bookchin demand obsequiousness” – for this or any other reason – makes his comment seem even more ignoble.

Many of the recollections follow the same pattern. The pamphlet does require attentive reading if we are to correctly evaluate it, particularly since Morse usually substantiates his persuasions simply by referring to his own personal experiences. Furthermore, his charges are more based on hints and insinuations than any reasoned argumentation. His speculations therefore remain in the realm of quasi-theory, and entirely depend on the readers accepting his persuasions at face value. In fact, Morse’s pamphlet can easily be read as one long attack on Bookchin’s character, from which his ideas and actions ostensibly stem; yet it is presented as a “serious appraisal” from one who maintained “friendly contact.”[9]

Despite the striking shallowness Morse displays in these recollections, the real problems that this pamphlet expresses are not simply a result of sloppy work; it is one of real political disagreements. It would therefore be unfortunate if we got sidetracked from the ideological issues at stake, and I intend to spend no more time commenting on minor errors, inconsistencies, conceptual inaccuracies, and trivia in Morse’s pamphlet. Instead I intend to focus on the real political issues we must discuss in order to understand and evaluate the legacy that Murray Bookchin left us.

Above all, I will concentrate my efforts on challenging the main thrust of Chuck Morse’s pamphlet; namely the extent to which Murray Bookchin’s life and works are to be considered failures. This, after all, is Morse’s most fundamental criticism of Bookchin: He starts out by asking whether Bookchin was “successful,” and immediately replies with a resolute answer, “No, he was not.” He explains that Bookchin “did not create a new revolutionary doctrine that was adequate to his aims or one, for instance, that possessed the transformative force of Marxism.” This is a sweeping indictment indeed, and one that has to be backed up on both points, and it will be interesting to see how Morse attempts to do so.

First, we should take a look at why Morse thinks Bookchin’s social ecology does not possess “the transformative role of Marxism,” because he immediately continues by self-confidently asserting that Bookchin’s “work simply lacks the coherence and subtlety necessary to register on that scale.” Yet if we look for any kind of substantiation of this claim in his pamphlet, our search will be in vain. Nowhere does Morse tell us where and to what extent Bookchin’s “doctrine” is incoherent, and how it is so, and neither do we learn in what ways it lacks subtlety. This leaves us only with Morse’s personal, but hopelessly unreasoned, opinion. Okay, so Morse seems to think that Bookchin’s corpus lacks coherence and subtlety, but what more reasons does he give for this “doctrine” to be a failure? Why and in what way does social ecology fail to register on the scale of Marxism? Surprisingly enough, those are the only reasons Morse ever gives. In fact, that sentence is all that is said on that subject in the rest of the pamphlet; although he repeats the same claim in one of the concluding passages, where he writes that Bookchin “did not elaborate a doctrine comparable to Marxism,” any kind of validation of this claim is still woefully lacking.[10]

Second, we should take a look at how Morse judges whether or not Bookchin did “create a new revolutionary doctrine that was adequate to his aims,” as Bookchin admittedly hoped contribute to through his writings on social ecology and communalism. Morse professes to “judge Bookchin according to the standards that he set for himself.” However, to properly evaluate Bookchin’s achievements – as well as what the standards he set for himself actually were – we first need to take a closer look at the content of Morse’s pamphlet, and explore some key points in the presentation of social ecology that Morse offers: In order to understand Bookchin’s project or evaluate his theories, and see whether Morse can help us in this endeavor, perhaps we should even take a closer look at Bookchin’s ideas than Morse seems to warrant.

Indeed, in order to assess whether Morse is right in concluding that Bookchin was a failure, and whether the body of ideas he developed can be useful for future radicalism, I would like us also to enter a discussion on how social ecologists measure failure and how we measure success. This is not possible unless I first take issue with some of the major ideological questions involved, all of which are expressed in this pamphlet.[11] By bringing up these major points of contention – which in many respects distinguishes social ecology from other radical approaches, including Morse’s own – I hope to enter a more constructive discussion of Bookchin’s ideological legacy. Above all, I will look at whether this pamphlet really addresses “the strengths and weaknesses in [Bookchin’s] particular approach to revolutionary organizing,”[12]

First, I would like to question Morse’s presentation of social ecology; particularly since it has implications for our understanding of historical development and social change. For me, it was utterly astonishing to witness how Morse – after first having condemned Bookchin’s work for lacking coherence and subtlety – carelessly presents a most simplistic caricature of social ecology.[13] In Morse’s hands, the whole project Bookchin developed through a lifetime, and literally thousands of pages, is efficiently reduced to 3 embarrassing pages – a mere 611 words! – “explaining” what “those faithful to life’s evolutionary mission” must do “according to Bookchin.” The problem here is not brevity, but superficiality. We should not be surprised to learn that Morse thinks Bookchin’s work lacks coherence and subtlety: in this desultory presentation it certainly does.[14]

If we are to properly evaluate Bookchin’s legacy we need to first understand its content. Simplistic explications do not always make ideas simpler to grasp or more explicable. It would be unfortunate if we let our subsequent discussions be based on a misreading of Bookchin’s perspective on social evolution and political change, as this is necessary to understand the fuller content of this body of ideas. To begin this process of unraveling the ideas of Bookchin beneath the caricatured presentation in Morse’s pamphlet, we should perhaps start out by dealing with Bookchin’s alleged “catch phrases.”

According to Morse, Bookchin encouraged that “an ‘intelligentsia’ should study ‘organic societies’ if it wants to ‘render nature self-conscious.’”[15] The informed reader will surely question the extent to which the example in case accurately portrays “catch phrases” by Murray Bookchin. I also find it appropriate to ask readers to question whether Bookchin himself would prefer social ecologists to address other activists or citizens by his “catch phrases alone,” as Morse insinuates here. Clearly, Morse creates a straw man that can easily be ridiculed and dismissed. Morse even draws far-reaching conclusions from these alleged catch phrases, claiming that they partially explain why Bookchin’s ideas did not gain a larger following.[16] However superficial and obvious Morse’s ridicule may be, these “catch phrases” must be addressed, as they reveal much of Morse’s caricatured approach. To get to the core of this point of contention, I will first look at Bookchin’s view on the need to study organic societies, and comment on Morse’s presentation in light of this.

Morse writes that in order to “honor our evolutionary heritage, we must create a society whose metabolism with the natural world is ecologically sound and whose internal relationships are democratic and decentralized. It is solely these social forms that possess the wholeness and freedom that life requires.” Morse proceeds by proclaiming that “[a]ccording to Bookchin, we approximated this in our early history while living in what he called ‘organic societies.’ Then, humans had relatively egalitarian cultural practices and a sympathetic, if uninformed, relationship to nature. ‘Let us frankly acknowledge,’ Bookchin wrote, ‘that organic societies spontaneously evolved values that we rarely can improve.’”[17]

Despite the somewhat peculiar wordings, this passage at first glance may not seem too problematic. After all, Bookchin did base much of his monumental work The Ecology of Freedom on studies of “organic societies,” in an attempt to anthropologically understand the emergence of hierarchies, and, in turn, to suggest how hierarchies as such could be abolished by fundamentally remaking our societies. Morse chose to present this as a “catch phrase.” Still, as I will try to explain, this one-sided presentation Morse gives does pose some serious challenges for us, if we are to understand and evaluate a social ecological perspective on historical development.

First of all, it could be of interest to our subsequent discussions to note that by “organic society,” Bookchin meant “forms of organization in which the community is united by kinship ties and by common interest in dealing with the means of life. They are distinct in the fact that they are “not yet divided into the classes and bureaucracies based on exploitation we find in hierarchical society.”[18] This was not a “catch phrase” for Bookchin. For reasons of decency, it should be noted that Bookchin himself provided a very thorough critique of simplistic interpretations of organic societies, and the longing for a return to a Golden Age that has only existed in mythic imageries.[19] As he said himself: “At no point in my discussion did I suggest we can return to aboriginal lifeways. In fact I was at pains to warn against any belief that we can – or should – do so.” And further, “[i]f we are to achieve an ecological society in the future, it will have to enriched by the insights, knowledge, and data we have acquired as a result of the long history of philosophy, science, technology, and rationality.”[20] If Bookchin neither suggests that we can actually return to “aboriginal lifeways” nor look upon it as desirable, what then are these values that he evokes? Bookchin summarized it this way:

This careful evaluation of organic societies is already far removed from the attributed simplistic notions of primordial virtues. Actually, the quote Morse chose is taken from a longer passage, which interestingly reads: “Can we”, Bookchin asks,

The values that Bookchin sought to incorporate by selective integration were precisely the ethical principles of the irreducible minimum, usufruct, and complementarity, as necessary moral pillars for creating a social “equality of unequals,” the basic promise of freedom. These underlying principles for human consociation could be regenerated as basic social values and made existentially relevant; much like the values of care and nurture still are relevant to human interaction. Although their concrete social expressions certainly will be differentiated, and could be made much more socially complex through our social-ecological reconstruction, they would constitute social values whose basic principles and premises would essentially be the same.

Exactly how Chuck Morse manages to make the study of organic societies a “catch phrase” by Bookchin, or essential for the social ecological approach escapes me. Bookchin advocated a serious study of society and social development as such (including organic societies), from prehistory to our own day, in order to understand historical development and prospects. In caricatured versions like Morse’s presentation, we are simply bereft of the ability to understand how Bookchin viewed the basic issues at stake: How has society developed? To what extent is society rooted in nature? What are its defining socializing features? How can we discern liberatory societal traits from oppressive ones, and how and to what extent do they interplay? Indeed, what is progressive and rational in social development, and, ultimately, what would define a rational society? Those were some of the basic questions Bookchin tried to answer in his many books. If we seek to understand and evaluate the theories Bookchin developed, we must try and understand how these kinds of questions were related to his attempt to create distinct, radical social theory. To make a mockery out of social ecological analysis by reducing it to “catch phrases” and some random quotes brings us nowhere. After all, with little effort, wilful de-contextualization can render virtually concept and idea meaningless.[23] However, when dealing with history and social theory, to paraphrase American scholar Mary G. Dietz; context is all.

In order to clarify some of the most blatant distortions by Chuck Morse, I will therefore have to briefly re-contextualize Bookchin’s ideas. By re-contextualization I urge us to try to understand both the social context in which these ideas of social ecology were developed as well as the theoretical context in which concepts were presented.[24] Social ecology is not just a set of catch phrases or a pile of quotes from Murray Bookchin, it is not even his collected writings: Social ecology, as it has been developed by Bookchin, is simultaneously an ethical social theory, an ecological world-view and a radical political approach.

Bookchin was the first social thinker to insist that a free society would also have to be an ecological one; at the same time he insisted that an ecological society would have to be one of a liberated humanity. “In addressing the sources of our present social and ecological problems,” Bookchin argues, “perhaps the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.”[25] His ecological philosophy had revolutionary implications: We can never solve today’s ecological problems, Bookchin maintained, without challenging their social roots: The “most fundamental route to a resolution of our ecological problems is social in character.” [26] To confront the ecological crisis, social ecology therefore calls for a new politics and a new movement, indeed for a total remaking of society. “Until domination as such is removed from social life and replaced by a truly egalitarian and sharing society, powerful ideological, technological, and systemic forces will be used by the existing society to degrade the environment, indeed the entire biosphere.”[27]

Bookchin’s perseverance with the necessity to properly address the totality of the crisis we face, did put him squarely at odds with the mainstream of most radical and environmental movements, and were often the basis for his polemics and intellectual feuds within those movements. “If,” as Bookchin challengingly asked in the quote above, “the freedom of humanity implies the liberation of nature through humanity, by what means and criteria and means can we reenter natural evolution?” Although Morse may ridicule social ecology’s concern with macro-historical perspectives, such questions still beg for solutions: Anyone concerned with creating an ecological society will have to relate to them.

Murray Bookchin sought to answer these questions with an integrated and coherent theory addressing the totality of humanity’s relationship to nature, and its meaning for social liberation. Social ecologists follow his reasoning that, in our struggle for an ecological society, we must seek social liberation through the conscious reintegration of society (or second nature) in the natural world (or first nature), a reintegration that gives due value to our distinctly rational and social faculties. Yes, this implies “no less a humanization of nature than a naturalization of humanity.”[28] This philosophical naturalism suggests that we can, given full humanization and socialization, actually achieve full naturalization of humanity. By actualizing our potentiality for rationality and ethical deliberation, social ecologists insist that humanity can play the role of a “nature rendered self-conscious.”[29] In fact, our societies have the potentiality of actualizing what Bookchin called a free nature. To understand our potentialities for sociality, rationality, and freedom, we must not only look at evolution; but more specifically, we must look to history.

While it is true that humanity’s pre-historical social forms merit serious attention, the study of organic societies was never one of Bookchin’s “catch phrases.” Neither did Bookchin, unlike so many others in the ecology movement, flatly romanticize organic society. In fact, as the above quote shows, he was always mindful of the necessary subjectivity and abstraction of rationality that makes it problematical to even speak of “individuality” and “humanity” in pre-historical human communities. He was also always mindful of the necessary development of the material preconditions for a libertarian and ecological society, in which people would be free to dedicate their leisure time to political and cultural development. Important technological, scientific and industrial advances have created the potential for a social organization free of poverty, toil and scarcity, advances that have made it possible for humanity to attain freedom and welfare for all human beings, if only we are able to fundamentally reorganize our societies.[30] Of particular importance is the development of the city, when social organization gradually came to itself, and created a sphere that was undermining the biological limitations on social development present in first nature. The emergence of the city is of great importance for historical development and its civilizing efforts – and therefore to social ecology – something Bookchin did not ignore. In fact, he bluntly stated that cities “embody the most important traditions of civilization.”[31]

Morse completely omits the centrality of cities and even politics in his marred presentation of social ecology. Actually, it is hard to grasp the essential characters of the municipality and the confederations envisioned by social ecologists, or even to understand the real content of social ecologists’ calls for a new politics and an empowered citizenry, if we dismiss or ignore the “Urban revolution.” Bookchin not only values these “most important traditions of civilization,” but he goes much further when he says that “some kind of urban community” is indeed “not only the environment of humanity: it is its destiny. Only in a complete urban environment can there be complete people; only in a rational urban situation can the human spirit advance its most vital cultural and social traditions.”[32]

Despite this lyrical adherence to the classical ideal, Bookchin was not romanticizing urban life as such. To qualify this passage, Bookchin concludes that there is a point where “cities negate themselves.” The current processes of urbanization are steadily eroding citizenship as responsible human agency in a civil setting, and consequently undermining city life as politics, thus pitting the city against itself. In our time, this antagonism between modern urban entities and the civic freedoms embodied in the historical city has not only set the city against itself, but is to a large extent the cause of the complete disruptions in the balance between the city and the land. Today, this historical antagonism has become not only an important social question, but one of decisive ecological urgency. To glimpse how Bookchin perceived this tension in civic development, consider the following passage:

Bookchin, after all, was quite convinced that social potentialities are rooted in “material factors.” This reference to The Limits of the City I find important, precisely because it is such an early social ecological work (began in the 1950s and was finished in the 1970s), which contained many of the unique elements he would return to and sophisticate in his later works.[34] With The Limits of the City, however, Bookchin was, in his own words, bent on “using Marx against Marxism”: This book, he claimed, carries “what is most useful in Marx’s work over to the libertarian arena,” where he wanted us to discuss the “city as a world in its own right.”[35] The city was a social phenomenon of immense cultural as well as economical importance. For Bookchin, the city could not be understood in mere commercial or spatial terms; he perceived the city as the “realm of the citizen.” Although Bookchin clearly admires the instances where citizenship was understood as “an ethical compact,” the main focus of The Limits of the City is to explain the economical aspects of the development of cities, as well as their possibilities and limitations.[36] If the city is pitted against itself, this paradox is created precisely because cities are “developing with the material conditions that shape society as a whole.”[37]

In order to understand how Bookchin perceived a phenomenon like the city, and its relationship to early tribal villages as well as modern urban metropolises, we have to see it in light of his perspective on historical development in general, which spun around in a “double helix”: the legacy of freedom and the legacy of domination. Analyzing the expressed unfolding of each of these legacies gave Bookchin the opportunity to discern historical progress from a libertarian perspective, and Bookchin’s analysis was always rooted in this historical understanding. Not only was it necessary to explain these legacies’ distinct features and separate logical unfolding, but also how they interplayed and informed each other.

For Bookchin it was essential not only to trace social progress empirically in material conditions, developed as existential possibilities, but also to explore the processes of ideational abstraction that could serve to explain and ultimately judge this progression. Unless we have an idea of freedom we cannot actually know whether we are free or not, and hence we are not free.[39] Simple forms of conscious social interaction in early human communities have gradually paved the way for a historical process of ever-greater degrees of human self-consciousness and rationality, at least unfolded as potentialities. Although we do not live in a free society, we can now know what freedom is; we can debate its features and further expand our conceptions of it. This knowledge of social concepts, if only on the level of ideas, is crucial, and we can use this understanding to pass judgements on any given social order. In light of the ethical “what should be” we are fit to evaluate the existential “what is,” and make conscious choices about the future of our society. Such social choices were made possible only through a process of increasing subjectivity and rational interaction, and thus the gradual emergence of morality and ethics has laid the real foundation for social freedom. When humans are able to fully make sense of and conceptually explain the increasingly broader range of social potentialities, our ideas and value systems could encompass broader and richer ideals of freedom, and by acting on this knowledge we can contribute to a society rendered self-conscious: It is by choosing a social order that embodies these conceptions of self-consciousness and rationality (and, by implication, choice), we can actualize potentialities for social freedom. In this sense, social ecologists fight to ensure that we politically choose our shared destiny – as a society – to a degree that is unprecedented in history, not only as a result of improved technological, scientific, and material preconditions, but also because of an expansion of our shared concepts of rationality, humanity, and freedom.

Freedom is not a static social concept, and there are no particular historical models to explain it fully. Bookchin had no one-dimensional perspective on either “organic societies,” ancient “city states,” or any other historical institution: He cherished these examples for their contribution to the general human legacy of freedom. In his distinctive vein, Bookchin further qualifies his views in the following passage:

Social ecologists seek to sophisticate this legacy of human freedom by “selective integration.”[41] As Bookchin reminded us, it “is not atavistic to cull from history the ways in which people developed humanistic lifeways and realistic institutions that could provide workable examples for developing a free society.” He then explains how:

Bookchin did see social development as a totality – yet one of many dimensions and nuances – and this totality explains itself only through concrete historical examples. Of course, this totality must be mediated by human interpretation through cumulative knowledge, in order to make sense out of these developments. Despite countless attempts to insist that his social analysis or political theory was not based on any social models, Bookchin’s critics repeatedly return to their favorite straw men. Bookchin never allowed for a fetishization of the virtues of organic societies, nor of the ones associated with the ancient Greek poleis like Athens, the traditions of New England, or even the achievements of revolutionary Spain. He sought to bring out and highlight what was rational and progressive in any given social development. If only for these reasons, it is highly problematical to simply say, as Morse does, that we approximated a society of “wholeness and freedom” in early history, when humans lived in “organic societies.” It becomes even more problematical when Morse moves on to mock Bookchin on this score, like when he wants us to consider what appeal such “catch phrases” would have to the general public.[43]

At the risk of repeating myself, I must point to one last example before I leave this discussion on the social ecology of development. Immediately after quoting Bookchin as saying we could not improve the values of organic society, Morse writes: “However, instead of building upon this early achievement, we made a tragic departure from our evolutionary itinerary,” and choose to quote Bookchin: “[I]n the intermediate zone between first [non-human] nature and second [human] … social evolution began to assume a highly aberrant form. The effort of organic societies like bands and tribes to elaborate nonhierarchical, egalitarian social forms was arrested. … social evolution was divested from the realization and fulfilment of a cooperative society into a direction that yielded hierarchical, class-oriented, and Statist institutions.”[44]

Again, the reader is advised to read the original passages from Murray Bookchin, in order to appropriately understand the actual sentences as well as their context. The full passage in the original reads: “To speak concretely: in the intermediate zone between first nature and second that saw the graded passage of biological evolution into social, social evolution began to assume a highly aberrant form. The effort of organic societies like bands and tribes to elaborate their nonhierarchical, egalitarian social forms was arrested. For reasons that involve complex evaluation, social evolution was divested from the realization and fulfillment of a cooperative society into a direction that yielded hierarchical, class-oriented, and Statist institutions.”[45] Bookchin himself tried to give such a “complex evaluation” of these processes of social evolution in his works, but Morse seemingly wants to depict Bookchin as someone who simply sought to revitalize the virtues of organic society.[46] But for Bookchin it was crucial to address precisely this “graded passage of biological evolution into social,” in order to understand both cultural development as well as the limitations of our biological heritage. An elaboration of the relationship between biological and cultural factors in conditioning the development of society is imperative for understanding Bookchin’s social ecology.

By using the term “evolutionary itinerary,” moreover, Morse seems to suggest that Bookchin harbored a teleological approach to natural evolution, something Bookchin repeatedly and forcefully denied. His open-endedness was characteristic. Still, he recognized that historical progress has occurred, and that human beings are potentially capable of rationally interpreting these processes that advance society. Bookchin claimed that it was only through careful retrospection of our past that we can elicit and explain what is truly progressive in civilization, by reasonable judgments of the various “what have been,” “what is,” and “what could be,” and from there be able to educe “what should be” according to ethical criteria. Bookchin did not have a schematic view when he used his social ecological analysis to evaluate historical developments: He simply sought to inspire us to look for and draw out the rational in any given social development.

Unfortunately, nothing in Morse’s short tract sheds light on the fundamental bases of Bookchin’s historical and philosophical approach, and, again, I advise readers to consult Bookchin’s own works to get a more correct picture. The far-reaching conclusions Morse draws from his simplistic presentation are nothing short of stunning: With a few sentences, he unabashedly writes Bookchin off as an idealist (in the traditional philosophical sense of the term), and makes the pretense that Bookchin’s ethical perspectives were not concerned with material factors. This would imply that Bookchin, wholly emphasizing cultural values and ethics in explaining historical development – according to Morse, that is – was basically aiming for a return to the social principles of organic society, albeit on a more self-conscious level than those societies were historically able to.

The fact that I have dwelled so long with Bookchin’s supposed preferences for organic societies is precisely because it leads us directly to this more fundamental misreading by Chuck Morse: Bookchin’s alleged disregard for material factors. Indeed, in his pamphlet Morse writes how “[t]his voluntarism was consistent with [Bookchin’s] broader view of historical development. For Bookchin, it is our ideas and values – not society’s economic base – that determine the course of events (in the “final instance”). He wove this principle into all of his historical writings, whether he was examining revolutionary movements or broader topics in the history of civilization.”[47]

I have never seen any instances where Bookchin stressed the need to emphasize the element of will in disregard of material elements. When Bookchin described historical events (as in his works on radical popular movements), he often addressed a range of subjective factors, particularly at important historical junctures, but this does not explain Bookchin’s “broader view of historical development.” Acknowledging this element of will – and of “ideas and values” – certainly does not make Bookchin an idealist or even a strict voluntarist, in any meaningful philosophical sense. Bookchin never contended that will was the fundamental or dominant factor either politically or historically. It is true, however, that Bookchin did seek to recreate a popular politics where “will” expressed through rational deliberation and ethically based choices would become the dominant factor in social development. He wanted to see a world where the realm of necessity gradually was surpassed by the realm of freedom. Still, a free society would have to relate to material factors: “In the realm of true freedom – that is, freedom that has been actualized as the result of consciousness, knowledge, and necessity – to know what we can and cannot do is more cleanly honest and true to reality than to avert the responsibility of knowing the limits of the lived world.”[48]

Furthermore, at no time did Bookchin disregard the importance of material factors in shaping social reality; these insights were incorporated into a framework that sought to understand historical development in material, as well as cultural, ecological, and political terms. Bookchin sought to understand history as a totality of tendencies. To grasp the fact that social development consists of both material and ideational dimensions is perhaps too much to ask of Morse, who mistakes Bookchin for an idealist because he challenged the rather conventional Marxist image of historical development. Still, in evaluating Marxism at the end of his life, Bookchin maintained that it was “[b]rilliant as a theory of the material preconditions for socialism,” although he was quick to point out that it had failed to “address the ecological, civic, and subjective forces or the efficient causes that could impel humanity into a movement for revolutionary social change.”[49] Nowhere did Bookchin discard the need to address the material preconditions for socialism; he only thought it insufficient if taken alone, and sought also to explain the cultural and political preconditions for attaining a new libertarian society.

By accusing Bookchin of “voluntarism” Morse meant that Bookchin dismissed “the material conditions for social change.”[50] These accusations of “voluntarism” here are partly based on a lack of understanding of Bookchin, and partly on a false dichotomy. Even Lenin, who has often been depicted as the voluntarist par excellence, cannot be accused of simply dismissing “material factors,” not even after the publication of his “April Theses”: Despite his high premium on the subjective preparation and organization of the working class into a party, Lenin based his broader view of historical development on a quite rigid Marxism, a fact that played no little role in his civil war against the peasantry and its revolutionary parties. In fact, Morse’s flippant categorizations easily renders any self-conscious political agent seeking to change the world an “idealist” and a “voluntarist” in “the final instance,” regardless of their actual philosophical or political inclinations. As it is, any political actor must believe that there is sense in changing ideas and struggling to personally contribute to changing the course of events.

Morse continues this shadow-boxing, when he curiously tries to “invert one of Marx’s more incisive phrases” into “it is not being that determines consciousness, but consciousness that determines being,” and claim that this apply to Bookchin’s ideas.[51] I assume Morse refers to Marx’ discussion in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he stated that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” This sentence is far more precise than Morse’s paraphrase, as Marx (and this was important for him) referred specifically to our relationship to the prevailing mode of production – in other words, to our class status. In the preceding sentences Marx explains his views:

Furthermore Marx explicitly said that it was impossible to judge “a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” This is precisely the kind of historical perspective that Bookchin refused to accept. We clearly see how deterministic historical materialism is – at least compared to Bookchin’s more nuanced dialectical naturalism – when Marx thereafter exclaimed: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”[53] Such schematic expositions fostered even more rigid historical interpretations, views that heavily informed almost all socialists of the Marxist bent, and it goes a long way in explaining the Russian Mensheviks unfaltering commitment to “the bourgeois stage of revolution.”

But let us look at how Morse substantiates this. Interestingly, Morse wants us to “consider the following discussion of the rise of capitalism” in order to prove that Bookchin adhered to strict idealist interpretation of history, where “consciousness determines being”:

I find it irredeemably odd that Morse has chosen this excerpt from the preface of The Third Revolution, to “prove” that Bookchin was an idealist, presumably in the classical Hegelian tradition. I will strongly doubt that even the most scrupulous reader will find anything that suggests an idealist interpretation of history in the quote above. We should perhaps highlight Bookchin’s use of the word merely in the first sentence here, so that Morse can understand what is obvious for the rest of us; that Bookchin was once more qualifying his dialectical perspective of historical development, one that was decidedly neither “idealist” nor “materialist.” The interrelationships between cultural and material factors are extremely important when we are trying to explain historical development. Indeed, it was a problem that apparently troubled Karl Marx as well, one that he was unable to answer despite – or rather because of – his materialist conception of history, insisting that social change was wholly contingent on the development of the mode of production. For Bookchin, it was imperative to strive to understand the economical, political, cultural, and ecological conditions – as well as the ideas and actions of real-life human beings – in order to explain historical phenomena.

Indeed, if Morse had only read the preceding paragraphs, he would perhaps have understood more fully Bookchin’s reasons for writing this passage, as he tried to explain why we should care to seriously explore the ideals, the programs, the organizations, and the actions of past revolutionaries, in order to grasp the depth and breadth of the social possibilities that emerged at various historical turning points throughout the revolutionary era he describes. In no way did Bookchin accept that capitalism was predestined to gain supremacy, as Marxian historical materialism suggests, and, for very obvious reasons, it has been necessary for Bookchin to distinguish his approach from the traditional Marxist one, which has all but dominated the radical left, whether explicitly or unthinkingly.[55]

Indeed, Bookchin sought to avoid such a crude economistic interpretation in this work by examining “past revolutions internally, from within their own inner dynamics, rather than externally, from the standpoint of where we are today.” Bookchin uses the preface to explain how he is not “working with the teleological conviction that what now exists had to come into existence,” and that he refused to “consider the high ideals that emerged in past revolutions as merely an ideological patina for uncontrollable economic forces that determined human behavior irrespective of human wishes and desires.”[56] For this reason, Bookchin’s work refutes the economistic categorizations of the English, French, and the American revolutions as bourgeois revolutions, and their radical movements as advocates of bourgeois social ideals. As Bookchin further stated: “I have avoided viewing the intentions of these movements as reflecting the emergence and consolidation of industrial capitalism; rather, I have taken the demands of the various revolutionary tendencies at their word. I believe that the great mass of people who made the revolutions described in this work genuinely believed in the notions of liberty, equality, fraternity, and the pursuit of happiness that they articulated – not necessarily in free trade, a ruthless egotism, or class collaboration, contrary to the retrospective interpretations that have been given to their liberatory slogans.” Moreover, Bookchin specified that each revolution “advanced moral, political, and social alternatives to capitalism – although they lacked any clear idea of what capitalism would become and often even cleared the way for modern capitalism,”[57] a comment that in itself should be sufficient to undermine Morse’s unfounded charges of idealism. In his discussions in The Third Revolution, Bookchin has, in his own words, “tried to provide the social, economic, cultural, and political background that gave rise to and sustained its radical movement.”[58]

Without disregarding the material “basis” of any given society, we must also acknowledge the cultural and institutional features of a society, as well as its ideological components. Today, we cannot stick to stale perceptions that “being determines consciousness,” as traditional Marxists would claim, and its disdainful references to ethics, culture, and politics as mere superstructural expressions of the mode of production. Such a one-dimensional perspective cannot explain our contemporary society any more than it can explain our past. I think this could be an appropriate moment to pause and ask ourselves why Morse thinks this phrase is one of Marx most incisive ones; Does Morse actually think being fully determines consciousness?

Bookchin did not. Again, it is the character and the dynamic of the interrelationship that Bookchin was concerned with, not antiquated adherences to either a materialist or idealist conception of historical development. This interrelationship is crucial as well as the differentiated qualifications that can give meanings to questions about why and not merely how a certain historical development occurred. After all, how can we else make sense of the fact that, more often than not, various social systems have existed side by side for longer periods of time, as witnessed by the European Middle Ages, which was clearly a mixed economy, and not a strict feudal one. In fact, feudalism never gained a completely hegemonic position in Europe, and even at its height, its systems of production and distribution were based on mixed economies. Some European regions and countries, like Norway, were actually notoriously lacking in feudal institutions or culture. At the same time, we have to account for the fact that wealthy merchants, bankers, and proto-industrialists did exist long before capitalism gained predominance. This meant that some of the technological and material preconditions already existed and, according to Marxist interpretations, should have brought the emergence of capitalism as a system at an earlier stage in history. However, it was only centuries later that some of the very same technologies and forms of production – in a different social, cultural, and political setting – ensured the breakthrough of capitalism in the Western world. This fact suggests that we cannot turn to schematic materialist interpretations of the transitions from one class society to another, but seek more nuanced explanations that encompass material as well as cultural developments.

Bookchin used many “cultural arguments” to counter the prevailing Marxist notions of social development, but this was not “in disregard of material factors.” After all, Marx and Engels were certainly right when they boldly claimed that the “history of all hitherto existing society has been a history of class struggles,” but it is at the same time important to acknowledge that this is not all history has been.[59] Class struggles have been an important and often decisive component of historical progress, but it is still woefully insufficient in explaining the whole process of social development. The process of capitalist development out of feudalism is more complex than the historical materialist interpretation suggests, in its one-dimensional scheme, where forms of societal succession are entirely reflecting the various modes of productive relations. While recognizing the importance of material factors in shaping social development, Bookchin’s social ecology, I would argue, is more careful, and far more nuanced.

To conclude, I must say that I frankly had a hard time understanding how Morse can accuse Bookchin of idealism. After all, as Bookchin said repeatedly, “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.”[60] How could Bookchin possibly state more clearly that our ideas are shaped by social conditions? Social ecology seeks to end the idea of dominating nature precisely by remaking society. By aiming at eliminating oppression, exploitation and hierarchies in the social world, we aim at making it possible to end the attempts to “dominate,” exploit and plunder nature. How Morse, a self-proclaimed “core disciple,” is able to misinterpret this is simply astonishing.

It has to be emphasized, again, that these discussions of organic societies or of idealism are by no means the only problematical simplifications to occur in Morse’s text, neither are they the worst misrepresentations of Bookchin’s ideas appearing here. I have chosen to highlight them for very particular reasons. First, because it is such an obvious de-contextualization of certain phrases by Bookchin, and it clearly shows Morse’s irresponsible “methods” in dealing with social theory. Second, the negligence of the political impact of citification completely obscures the message of libertarian municipalism, the politics of social ecology (a subject that I will discuss in greater detail later). Third, Morse’s patently absurd claims that Bookchin displayed a disregard for material factors, and even “dismissal of the material conditions of social change,” derails our attempts to understand the social ecology of development. Last, but not least, through Morse’s superficial presentation we could come to believe that Bookchin’s theories on non-hierarchical social forms were historically cemented and thus irrelevant in several important respects, and it would make it particularly hard to understand the non-hierarchical and fundamentally anti-racist message of Bookchin’s social ecology. It is to these issues we will now turn.