Bookchin's social ecology and its contributions to the red-green movement

Abstract

Murray Bookchin, the founding theorist of social ecology, was a pioneer of left ecological thought and action beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, and his voluminous and many-faceted work continues to influence theorists and activists to this day. His historical and anthropological investigations in The Ecology of Freedom affirm the belief that any truly liberatory popular movement must directly challenge hierarchy in general, not just its particular manifestations as oppression by race, gender or class, and his 'libertarian municipalism' offers both an outline of a political strategy and the structure underlying social ecology's long-range reconstructive vision. This vision of directly democratic communities, challenging state power while evolving in harmony with all of nature, drew on decades of research into political structures, sustainable technologies, revolutionary popular movements, and the best of the utopian tradition in Western thought. At a time when the corrosive simplification of living ecosystems and the retreat into an increasingly unstable and synthetic world that Murray Bookchin predicted in the 1960s has evolved from a disturbing future projection into a global reality, our long-term survival depends to a large extent on our ability to challenge the dominant capitalist system at its core and evolve a broad, counter-hegemonic social movement that refuses to compromise its values and settle for partial measures. The revolutionary and reconstructive social and political vision of social ecology can still play an enlightening and encouraging role in such a movement. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.