Anarchism and the arms race problem

I am not an anarchist, but I’m attracted to it because it is a political philosophy based on individual freedom and voluntary cooperation.  I believe in these things to the degree that they’re possible.

It also happens that many of the writers and thinkers I admire the most – Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills and James C. Scott – are anarchists or anarchist sympathizers.  

Murray Bookchin

Although I do not advocate revoIutionary violence, I respect the old-time anarchists of a century or so ago – Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, Emma Goldman and Sacco and Vanzetti.

I think that the coming shortages of fossil fuels will cripple the globalized economy and force a devolution of authority onto local communities.  Hopefully they will be democracies.  If so, anarchist thought should have something to teach us.

Six or so years ago, I became interested in anarchist ideology and wrote a chapter-by-chapter review of Murray Bookchin‘s The Ecology of Freedom.

I found it very interesting, but one of my concerns was what I call the arms race problem.  How do peaceful, democratic people protect themselves against violent, authoritarian people, without becoming violent and authoritarian themselves>

Earlier this week I received this thoughtful comment:

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Hi there, Phil!  My name’s Harmony and I recently stumbled across your blog. I just read your series reviewing each chapter of Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom and I want to thank you for writing it. I love how concisely and clearly you summarize each chapter, and I found this series interesting and very helpful.

I also want to address something you say at the end of your review of chapter 12:

That is my concern about anarchism in general—that it relies too much on the assumption of universal good will, and that anarchists are therefore unable to defend themselves without ceasing to be anarchists.

Regarding the first issue, that anarchism relies on assumptions of universal goodwill, I highly recommend reading the essay “Are We Good Enough?” by the 19th century anarchist Peter Kropotkin. His thesis is that, even if human nature is mostly selfish, greedy, corrupt, and just downright bad, that this is all the more reason why anarchism is a superior political/economic system. 

The essay is quite short, btw: 1,931 words. 

Regarding the second issue, that anarchists are unable to defend themselves without ceasing to be anarchists, recently someone raised exactly this exact concern in a comment on one of my videos (I have a small youtube channel; LuckyBlackCat, if you’re interested). I hope you don’t mind if I just copy/paste the answer I gave them.

In my opinion, one way to address the military dilemma you bring up, can be roughly as follows. Have voluntary, democratic militias — voluntary in that nobody is forced to join, democratic in that soldiers/members elect their own officers. However, these militias can be coordinated by a small committee of people who have good comprehension of military strategy. The members of this committee wouldn’t behave as delegates normally do; they wouldn’t take their guidance and direction from below, but would come up with their own ideas for how things should proceed, and would send the instructions (or you could even say “orders”) down to the militias. Decisions in the committee could be made swiftly by calling a majority vote after deliberation. (Even military generals will usually consult advisors and deliberate on what to do; allowing decisions by vote of a small committee doesn’t add extra time to decision making.) The anarchist group Amigos de Durruti / Friends of Durruti recommended something like this in their pamphlet “Towards a Fresh Revolution.”

Syrian Kurds attempt utopia in a war zone

Click to enlarge.  Source: edmaps.com.

The Kurds are among the few factions in the struggles in Iraq and Syria that I root for.  They fight not only for their own freedom, but they office refuge to other persecuted sects and ethnic groups as well.  They respect women’s rights.  They are stalwart fighters against the Islamic State (ISIS).  They do not practice terrorism themselves.

While all these things are true of the Kurdish leaders in both Iraq and Syria, the Kurds in northern Syria—Rojava—go further.  They are followers of the late Murray Bookchin, an American anarchist thinker, and have created a functioning society based on feminism, ecological awareness, minority rights and radical local democracy.

I first heard of Murray Bookchin when reading about the Kurds, and afterwards read and made many posts about Bookchin’s great work, The Ecology of Freedom.

Click to enlarge.  Source: infoshop.

The Kurds are a nation of about 30 million people who, after the 1919 Peace Conference, found themselves partitioned among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.  About 15 million of them live in Turkey, where they are denied the right to use the Kurdish language or follow their national customs.  The breakdown of order in Iraq and Syria has enabled them to set up their own autonomous regional governments.

Debbie Bookchin, Murray Bookchin’s daughter, wrote in the New York Review of Books how Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers Party, read The Ecology of Freedom while in prison in Turkey.  Partly inspired by Bookchin, he adopted a philosophy he called “democratic confederalism.”

Kurds in northern Syria in 2014 adopted a Charter based on that philosophy.  It calls for “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs.”

Communes of 30 to 200 families elect delegates to neighborhood or village councils, which elect delegates to municipal or district councils, which elect delegates to regional councils.

It is required that women comprise at least 40 percent of elected bodies.  Woman and non-Kurdish minorities are co-chairs of administrative bodies.

The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, formerly known as Rojava, guarantees the right of citizens to teach and be taught in their own languages.  It ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and abolished the death penalty.

Debbie Bookchin acknowledged charges of child soldiers, uprooted Arab villagers and other human rights violations.  But she went on to say to point out that the Kurds are creating their new society while fighting a war, dealing with shortages caused by a blockage and taking in thousands of refugees.

The current threat, she wrote, comes not from the government of Turkey, which has long repressed its own Kurds and is determined to stamp out the autonomous Kurdish community along its southern border.

How socialist is Bernie Sanders?

Young Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders has de-demonized the word “socialism” in American politics.  But what does his socialism consist of?

For him, it means being on the side of working people and poor people and opposed to big business and rich people, and not being worried if somebody calls what he does “socialism.”

He is no Jeremy Corbyn.  He does not plan the overthrow of capitalism.  There is nothing Sanders proposes to which an old-time New Deal Democrat of the 1930s and 1940s would object.  The New Deal’s purpose was to reform and tame capitalism, not replace it.

This is meant as an observation, not a criticism.  Sanders deserves credit for pushing the limit of acceptable radicalism.

Below is a link to an old article by Murray Bookchin, the anarchist thinker, questioning Sanders’ socialist credentials.

Bookchin lived in Vermont when Sanders was mayor of Burlington.  A friend of mine who knew both of them said they didn’t get along.  This isn’t surprising.  Anarchists have disliked socialists since the days of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bukharin and the First International.

LINK

The Bernie Sanders Paradox: When Socialism Grows Old by Murray Bookchin for Monthly Review (1886)

Learning about (and from) the Spanish anarchists

Anarchists advocate a society based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid.   They reject government and corporate bureaucracy and the profit motive.  They champion personal and political freedom.  I find this highly appealing.

Writers and thinkers I respect—Paul Goodman, Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, James C. Scott and David Graeber—self-identify as anarchists.

I’d like to believe such a philosophy is feasible.  The problem is the scarcity of examples of anarchists in power.

That’s why I recently read three books about the Spanish revolution of 1936.   The three books were Murray Bookchin’s The Spanish Anarchists: the Heroic Years, 1868-1936 and To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936, and Frank Mintz’s Anarchists and Workers Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain.

In the Spanish revolution, ordinary workers and farmers took over factories, businesses and landed estates and operated them on anarchist principles.  By one estimate, some 1.8 million Spaniards (workers and their families) participated in rural and industrial collectives.

I learned from reading these three books that anarchism can work well—provided there is a hard core of capable and strong-willed people dedicated to making it work.

Murray Bookchin and the Rojava revolution

I first heard of Murray Bookchin when I read that his philosophy had been adopted by the Kurdish fighters in Syria.

The Kurds are the only faction in the current struggles in the Middle East that I root for.

The Kurds of Rojava in northern Syria fight ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, while defending themselves against the Syria government.

They practice religious freedom and shelter persecuted ethnic minorities, including Assyrians and Turkmen, and religious minorities, including Christians.  They recognize equal rights for women.

Abdullah Ocalan, the leader and co-founder of the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, was a Communist and a nationalist leader who fought to create an independent Kurdish state.

After his arrest in 1999, he read Bookchin and adopted a philosophy he called “democratic confederalism,” which he thought would enable the Kurdish people to achieve freedom and true democracy on a local basis while remaining within the borders of Turkey.

Ocalan’s followers in Syria have adopted his ideas.  The Turkish government sees them as a threat and has them under an economic blockade.

The Ecology of Freedom: epilogue

THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).  Epilogue.  This concludes my chapter-by-chapter review of Murray Bookchin’s great work, which I began last April.  I could and should have completed this project in a few weeks.   But the exercise was worth doing from my standpoint, and I will be pleased if I have stimulated interest in Bookchin’s ideas.

Western philosophers, from the ancient Greeks to the European Renaissance, maintained that human values should be rooted in nature.  Their problem, according to Murray Bookchin, was that they called upon an external factor—God, Spirit, what Henri Bergson later called the “vital force” to bring them together.

The truth is, according to Bookchin, that no external factor is necessary.   Mutualism, self-organization, freedom and awareness are present in nature, and evidently were latent in the universe from the very beginning.  Matter has self-organizing properties that cause it to become more complex.  Life has self-organizing properties that generate fertility, complexity and interdependence.

The evolution of life is as much a matter of developing new forms that fit in with the whole as it is competition between individuals and species.

Some biologists think that the biosphere itself is like a huge organism, which is able to regulate its internal processes and keep itself in balance.

The cruelty of nature is exaggerated, Bookchin wrote.  Wolves bringing down a sick or aged caribou is part of the cycle of life.  There is nothing in the natural world that is comparable to organized human warfare.

Murray Bookchin: an ecological society

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).  Doing this has been harder and taken longer than I expected.  The effort is worthwhile for me, but I fear I am not doing justice to the breadth and depth of Bookchin’s thought.  I hope videos and links will partly make up for this lack.

chapter twelve – an ecological society

In previous chapters, Murray Bookchin explained his ideas about humanity’s original organic societies, which were family-based clans in which everyone was valued, everyone contributed what they could and there supposedly was neither coercion nor selfish individualism.

He went on to explain his ideas of how hierarchy arose through priesthoods and warrior bands, and the permutations of hierarchy through human history, and how universal religious and philosophical ideals arose as both a product of hierarchy and a reaction against it.

In this, his final chapter, he outlined his hopes for a future society which embodies the best ideals and practices of the original organic society and the newer universal ideals.

He didn’t provide a detailed outline of an ideal anarchist society not a strategy for bringing such a society into being.

Rather he provided a way of thinking that leads me to question my assumptions about what the world has to be like and to realize that things do not have to be the way they are now.

A good society rejects the idea that humanity and nature are antagonistic, Bookchin wrote.  Although the idea that humanity is nature made conscious is only a figure of speech, it is the case that individual human nature is rooted in biological nature and human society is rooted in ecological nature.

Down through history, underneath the layers of domination, there have been “layered membranes” of freedom and community, he wrote.  We need a modern vision of freedom that is intentional and not based on tradition and custom, although it will be hard to improve on the virtues of pre-literate societies.

Civilization historically has rested on scarcity, so that the freedom of the elite rested on the labor of the many.   From scarcity arose the notion of contract, so that people could protect themselves from being cheater of their fair share.

Pre-literate societies rejected the idea of contract as the basis of society, Bookchin wrote.  When you live in fear of being short-changed, you short-change others.

He said we should cease to identify freedom with domination.   We should admire Michelangelo, not Gilgamesh, Achilles, Joshua and Julius Caesar.

Murray Bookchin: the ambiguities of freedom

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).  

chapter eleven – the ambiguities of freedom.

In this chapter, Murray Bookchin wrote about the philosophers of the Enlightenment, aka the Age of Reason, who hoped that reason, science and technology would lead to human liberation, and why this hasn’t happened.

This is a difficult chapter, and I’m not sure I fully understand it.   I’ll try.

Early philosophers of science, such as Francis Bacon, emphasized an important truth, which is that reality is whatever it is, regardless of anybody’s desires.

They thought that if you want to know how things really are, you stick to logic and facts, particularly facts that can be measured, because these are the only things that are objectively true.

Fantasy, art, imagination, intuition, illumination and inspiration are merely subjective feelings, and can be ignored.

What’s left is what’s called “instrumental reason,” which tells you how to achieve goals, but does not tell you what goals to set.  “You can’t get from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’,” as the saying goes.

By default, instrumental reason becomes a tool of government, business, the military and other structures of power.  Reason defeats itself.

Murray Bookchin: the social matrix of technology

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).   I’m interested in Bookchin’s work because he provides a way a deeper, broader and longer-range perspective than the false alternatives in current politics.

chapter ten – the social matrix of technology

In this chapter, Murray Bookchin debunked the idea that the level of technology determines the level of social organization.  Rather social organization itself is the most important technology.

Human beings do not have to adapt to the requirements of technology.  The machine was made for man, not man for the machine.

The Pyramids of Egypt and the great temples of Assyria and Babylonia did not depend on a high level of technology, he wrote; they were built with primitive tools.

What the great empires of ancient Egypt and the Fertile Crescent discovered was how to organize and mobilize huge numbers of people against their will, and to squeeze the maximum amount of labor out of them.   So long as they had slaves, they had no need to invent labor-saving machinery.

The same was true of the New World, Bookchin wrote.   The democratic Iroquois and the totalitarian Inca used the same types of tools.  It was their social organization that was different.

Neither did geography determine social organization.  The Inca empire and Greek democracy both arose in mountainous regions.

Rather hierarchy arose, as Bookchin noted in previous chapters, when non-productive old people reinvented themselves as priests and the young men gave their loyalty to warrior bands rather than the village clans.   This happened in many different times and settings.  It set in motion an evolution ending with supposedly sacred despots supported by priests, warriors and tax collectors.

When despotic societies arose, Bookchin wrote, organic matricentric societies had to militarize themselves or else either be conquered or driven from their lands.  What’s remarkable, he wrote, is not the spread of despotism, but how much of the world’s people remained free.

Murray Bookchin: two images of technology

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).

chapter nine – two images of technology.

In this chapter, Murray Bookchin examined the current disillusionment with the idea of technological progress.  This is something fairly new, he noted.  In the early 20th century, even radicals such as Woody Guthrie celebrated giant engineering feats such as Boulder Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

There is a big difference, he wrote, between the ancient ideal of the good life and the modern ideal of the abundant life.

Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle believed that the good life was an ethical and balanced life lived within limits and within community.  A skilled craftsman, according to Aristotle, had understood well not only how to do his work, but the reason and purpose for his work.

Modern industrial production is the opposite.  It defines efficiency in terms of quantity and cost.  Workers are not required to understand their work, only to follow instructions.  “Living well” is defined as consumption and material comfort apart from work.  Industrial workers, unlike laborers in preceding ages, do not sing work songs.

Bookchin said the modern industrial system is not a result of technology.  It is a result of peasants being uprooted from the land and their communities, and having no choice but to work for merchants and capitalists.  Originally this was done by piecework in the home, but “factors” insisted in assembling workers in common workplaces so that they could be better controlled.

Industrial technology developed to fit the already-existing factory system, Bookchin said.  Mindless labor is not a product of mechanization, he wrote; it is part of a process of subordination and control.

Murray Bookchin: from saints to sellers

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin

chapter eight – from saints to sellers

In this chapter, Murray Bookchin traced the history of peasant revolts, starting with one recorded in Egypt in 2500 BC and continuing through peasant revolts in ancient Egypt and Sumeria, helot revolts in ancient Sparta, slave revolts in ancient Rome and peasant revolts in the European Middle Ages.

Based on my reading, I can say that what he wrote was also true of peasant revolts in Russia, China and probably other civilizations as well.

He wrote that all these rebels destroyed, first of all, records of taxation, mortgages, other debt and legal records, and secondly, treasure.

The rebels deeply resented the transubstantiation of tangible wealth, such as grain, livestock, wine and cloth, into symbolic wealth, such as golden utensils, jewelry, intricate works of art and rich furnishings and palaces, which were manifestations of domination.

In the politics of ancient Rome, Bookchin wrote, commoners demanded redistribution of land, cancellation of debts and greater equality before the law.  This is not too different from what the Occupy Wall Street movement demanded.

He devoted most of the chapter to the rebels of the European Middle Ages who, unlike the rebels of ancient times, had ideals of a better society which they derived from Christianity.

These ideals included (1) the tradition of the first Christians, who were poor and owned all things in common, (2) the ideal that all human beings are equal in the sight of God, (3) the idea that God’s law is superior to human law and (4) the hope of a better and more just world in the End Times.

Murray Bookchin: the legacy of freedom

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).  

chapter seven – the legacy of freedom

Bookchin was an anarchist who believed it was possible to create a society without government or corporations, in which free people could live in peace with each other and with nature.  I’m interested in Bookchin because of the failures of state socialism and corporate neoliberalism and the unsatisfactory nature of current politics.

In the first six chapters of The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin described how hierarchy emerged from what he called the original organic society, of how tribal shamans and warrior bands became priesthoods and armies and of how the idea of abstract justice to balance the power of ancient despots.

In this chapter, Murray Bookchin wrote about how Christianity shaped the idea of freedom, and how, for many centuries, the struggle between freedom and hierarchy was fought within the framework of Christian thought.

Early Christian communities, in many ways, fit Bookchin’s anarchist ideal.   Early Christians came together voluntarily and as equals.  They not only came together for worship, but to provide for each others’ needs, since the Roman government’s functions were mainly limited to collecting taxes, suppressing disorder and waging war.

Later on the Christian church developed a hierarchy that accommodated itself to the Roman Empire, and then to feudal lords and medieval kings, and to the modern state.

The medieval Papacy was the ultimate hierarchy.  Its ideal was the Great Chain of Being—God and his angels at the peak, delegating authority to popes and kings, who empowered priests and nobles, with the common people at the bottom.  Papal power reached its peak under Pope Gregory VII, who excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, for resisting the church’s claims to power.

But, as Bookchin noted, the memory and ideal of primitive Christianity never entirely disappeared.  In time, Puritans, in the name of Christianity, beheaded their king and labeled the Pope as the Antichrist.

St. Augustine, he wrote, regarded government not merely as irrelevant, but as evil—a necessary evil, however, because people were corrupted by original sin.  The ideal, however, was a community in which people were united by the bonds of love, and that ideal never disappeared.

The ancient Greeks, Romans and most of the rest of the pagan world regarded history as cyclical, so that everything that happened would happen again.   But Christians believed that history had a direction and a goal, starting with the Garden of Eden and ending with the Second Coming of Christ, in which a better world would come into being.   That hope of a better world never disappeared.

Murray Bookchin: justice—equal and exact

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin.   His ideas about the evolution of human society are conjectural, but I think much of what he wrote is unquestionably true, most of it could be true and all of it makes me see the world in a new light.

chapter six: justice—equal and exact

In this chapter, Murray Bookchin wrote about how concepts such as “freedom” and “justice” came into being as counterpoints to domination. 

The first human communities, which he called “organic societies,” practiced what Bookchin called equal treatment of unequals—what Marx later called the principle of from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

Over time this changed into what Bookchin called the unequal treatment of equals—impersonal laws that treated everybody as if they were the same—what Anatole France called the law that in its majesty forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal loaves of bread.

In organic societies, Bookchin wrote, there were no laws, judges or punishments.  Instead there was solidarity within the group.  In such societies, it didn’t matter whether you were a mighty hunter or somebody who could barely keep up.  Everybody was entitled to what they needed in order to survive.

Limitations on choice were imposed by circumstances—the weather, the availability of game, sickness and health—not human domination.

If you endangered the survival of the group, you might be put to death (as among Eskimos) or severely beaten (as among Crow Indians).  Other than that, there was free rein for eccentric behavior, sexual freedom, personal ambition (to be a “big man”), religious visions and the exercise of skill and courage.

Bookchin wrote in previous chapters how the elders of organic societies reinvented themselves as shamans and then as priests, while young warriors made blood oaths that took precedence over loyalty to the tribe.   As sacred kings emerged in Egypt and Mesopotamia, priests and warriors provided teachings and coercive force to support their rule.

Within the original small organic societies, everybody knew each other personally.  The larger kingdoms had need for impersonal laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi.   Legal obligations and punishments were different for nobles, common people and slaves, and for subjects of the kingdom and for strangers.

As empires expanded, the idea of impartial and universal justice grew.

The Mosaic law in the Hebrew Bible, for example, deals mostly with obligations of the Jewish people toward one another, and distinguishes between Jews and strangers.  But the law contains other passages—inserted later?— prescribing the duty to be as just and kind to strangers as to one’s own.

There seems to be an evolution here.  Likewise, Yahweh is described at first as a jealous God and then as a just God.  What seems to be emerging is a need to morally justify the religion.

Ancient Greeks strongly believed that only they were free men by nature (Greek women weren’t free) and non-Greeks were naturally slaves.  Athenian democracy did not apply slaves, freed slaves, women or foreigners.

The conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors broke down this distinction.  They created empires that came and went, without resting on any fixed traditions or making any.

Murray Bookchin: the legacy of domination

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin, which I’m doing in order to help myself understand it better.  I’m interested in Bookchin’s philosophy of social ecology, which seems like a kind of socialism without government or libertarianism without corporations.

chapter five: the legacy of domination

Murray Bookchin believed that human beings first lived in what he called “organic societies”.  They lived more or less in harmony with nature and with each other.  They were “matricentric”—not ruled by women, but reflecting the motherly values of home and hearth.

By the time of ancient Israel and ancient Greece, patriarchy came into its own.  Israelite and Greek fathers had complete authority over their grown sons, including the right to banish and disinherit them for disobedience.

Women were taught the virtues of renunication, modesty and obedience, lest they become like Eve, Pandora or Circe.   They were regarded as sources of temptation, and were taught the virtues of renunciation, modesty and obedience.

In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh exercised the absolute authority of a patriarch, not only over a clan but over a whole nation.   The book of Genesis told how Joseph, Pharaoh’s agent, collected and distributed food, and had food surpluses stored up so they would be available in hard times.

This became the typical pattern for the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.  People became convinced they could not get along without a government to provide for them, Bookchin wrote.

The same attitude persists today, he added.  People think freedom is choosing the right form of government.  They do not question the need for government.

Ancient Athens was the shining exception to this, he wrote.

It is true the Athenians were patriarchal.  They did not accept slaves, former slaves, women or foreigners as equals, so were every other people they knew about.  But among themselves, they regarded each other as competent, self-reliant individuals, capable of self-management and management of public affairs.

Everything was decided in public assemblies, and the people who decided were the ones who carried out the decisions, including decisions regarding peace and war.

This represented an advance over the primitive organic societies, Bookchin wrote, because Athenian society was created and maintained intentionally and with full awareness, as the Funeral Oration of Pericles showed.

The oration was the equivalent of the Gettysburg address, paying tribute to Athenian soldiers who died in the war with Sparta.   Pericles said Athenians honored the right of the individual to strive for excellence in his own way, and they fought just as bravely as those who submitted to regimentation and hierarchy.

But many Athenian thinkers, including Thucydides, who recorded Pericles’ oration, regarded freedom and democracy as a form of chaos, and chose order instead.

Murray Bookchin: epistemologies of rule

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).

chapter four – epistemologies of rule

Murray Bookchin said the great enemy of human well-being is hierarchy.  The reason hierarchy persists, according to him, is that that hierarchical values rule our minds—discipline, renunciation, the work ethic, sexual guilt and obedience to rules.

In this chapter, he speculated as to how these values came to rule us.  In the previous chapter, he spoke of how old people in “organic” societies may have protected themselves from being regarded as expendable by reinventing themselves as shamans and priests, and how young men then may have replaced the ties of family and clan with oaths to the warrior’s blood brotherhood.

The first cities of the ancient Near East did not grow up around marketplaces, according to Bookchin; they grew up around temples.  People were ruled mentally by priesthoods, backed up by the power of warriors.

Community property, once controlled by families, clans and village elders, came to be placed at the disposal of the ruling gods.

This rule, however, was not complete.  Bookchin noted that there were popular assemblies in ancient Sumeria, the prophets of Israel denounced the sins of their kings and, even in Egypt, village life continued independently of the all-powerful Pharoah.   Ancient rulers were oppressive, but they did not interfere with the daily lives of their subjects.

Murray Bookchin: the emergence of hierarchy

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005)

chapter three: the emergence of hierarchy

At the dawn of recorded history, the human race was in the midst of a social, political and technological revolution.  Agriculture had started to replace hunting and gathering.  New technologies such as the wheel, the pottery kiln, the metal smelter and the loom generated increased wealth, making possible societies with much larger populations than villages and hunting clans.

Hardly any of this, however, went to improve the overall human material standard of living.  Instead the increased means of power and wealth went to support emperors, priesthoods, aristocracies and the armies and merchants who served them.

Human beings gained both increased power over nature and increased power over other human beings.

Studies of grave sites indicate that the average human in ancient civilizations was in poorer health and was more poorly nourished that the so-called savages living in hunting and gathering societies on their borders.

Most historians, including Marxist historians, recognize this, but they think it was a good thing, not a bad thing.

If the increased wealth had been spread among the populace, they say, it would have resulted only in a moderately prosperous mediocrity.  The concentration of wealth made it possible to create science, philosophy, literature, the fine arts and more new technologies, which is turn allowed humanity to advance through stages to the good life we enjoy today—or, according to the Marxists, create the material basis for a utopian society yet to come.

Murray Bookchin disagreed.  For one thing, he did not believe that history proceeds in pre-ordained stages.  He believed that the different periods of history offered choices of roads to take, some good, some bad, most of them mixtures of the two.

The rejection of hierarchy would have been a good choice, he wrote.  There are many non-Western societies in which people, in Gandhi’s words, have enough for their need, but not their greed.  Such societies are rich in tradition and culture, and their people are at least as happy as modern Americans and Europeans.

I am not as sure as Bookchin that such a choice was feasible.  Once one civilization devotes itself to militarism and acquisition, the rest must submit or find a method of defense, and the most obvious method of defense is to become militaristic and acquisitive themselves.

This is a dilemma that still exists today, which thinkers such as Gene Sharp have tried to find answers for.

Murray Bookchin: the outlook of organic society

This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005)

chapter two: the outlook of organic society

Drawing on archeological evidence, mainly from the Near East, and anthropological research, mainly among American Indians in the Southwest, Murray Bookchin constructed a picture of human society before the emergence of hierarchy.

He saw primal human societies as “organic”—one in which everybody shared, nobody gave orders and all regarded themselves as members of an extended family.

He gave the example of the Kintu Indians, who lacked words for “have,” “take” or “rule.”  A Kintu mother does not “take” a baby with her, she “goes with” it.  A Kintu husband does not “have” a wife, he “lives with” her.  A Kintu leader does not rule, he “stands with” his people.

People in organic societies typically saw plants and animals as living things like themselves, Bookchin wrote; they saw themselves as part of the natural world and not separated from it or dominating it.

They had private property in that each person had personal tools and other possessions.  But they typically had usufruct—the right to take anything you need for survival.

Nobody in an organic society would deny anyone food, clothing or shelter, no matter what their work contribution.  In a community living close to the margin of survival, this would be the equivalent of a death sentence.

Bookchin wrote that organic societies did have a sexual division of labor.  Women bore children and raised them.  Because of this, they had less mobility than the male hunters and warriors.  Instead they were gardeners, potters and keepers of the hearth.

Kinship was based on descent from common mothers.  Bookchin did not believe that organic societies were  matriarchal, in the sense that women gave orders to the men, but he did believe they were matricentric, in their unity was based on kinship, and because they honored the values associated with hearth and home.

Organic societies extended their sympathies by extending family ties—by intermarrying with other kin groups, or by adopting strangers into their own kin group

Murray Bookchin: the concept of social ecology

This is part of a chapter by chapter review of THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005)

chapter one: the concept of social ecology.

The Ecology of Freedom begins with an account of Norse mythology and how the Vikings saw the world’s precarious balance.  There was Asgaard, the celestial domain of the gods above; Midgard, where human beings lived on the earth; and Niffleheim, the dark, icy domain of giants, dwarves and the dead.

These domains were linked by the great World Tree, which was sustained by a magic fountain that infused it continually with life.  Odin, the god of wisdom, and his mighty son Thor kept the great wolf Fenris, and the great serpent of Midgard and the hostile giants at bay.   They enforced the keeping of oaths and treaties and invited the bravest of warriors to dine with them in Valhalla.

Odin attained wisdom from drinking of the waters of the World Tree, but the price he had to pay was the sacrifice of an eye.  So his wisdom was a one-eyed wisdom, like that of modern science, which reveals the scientific laws that govern the world, but blinds us to the uniqueness of each individual thing, especially living things.

Order began to break down when the gods tortured the witch Gullveig, the maker of gold, to make her reveal her secrets.  Corruption, treachery and greed began to rule the world.  Warriors sought gold and forgot their blood oaths.

The end will be Ragnarok, a war in which the giants, Fenris the wold and the great serpent will destroy humanity and the gods and make the universe a void of cold and darkness.

In one version, that is the end.  In another, gods and humans will regenerate, learn from their mistakes and live in joy.

Modern scientific knowledge, according to Bookchin, gives us the possibilities both of Ragnarok or a world of joy.  It depends on whether we have a one-eyed or a two-eyed wisdom.

The Ecology of Freedom: introduction

THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM: the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy by Murray Bookchin (1982, 1991, 2005).  Introduction

I am coming to realize that  Murray Bookchin, whose name I first heard a year or so ago, was one of the great thinkers of our time.

His book, The Ecology of Freedom, is a profound work that is worth studying closely.  I intend to do this by reviewing the book chapter by chapter, partly to stimulate interest in his ideas but more to clarify my own thinking.

His basic idea is that human domination of nature and human domination of other human beings are part of the same thing.  This sounds simple.  What he does in this book is to describe the history of how this has played out in all its cultural, political, economic and religious aspects, and map paths to a better future.

My basic political principles are the ideas of American freedom and democracy that I was taught as a small boy.  My ideals have changed little in more than 70 years, but my ideas of how the world works have changed a lot, especially in the past 10 or 20 years.

State socialism based on command economies haven’t worked.  A tiny group of masterminds, even if they have good intentions, are not qualified to make decisions for the rest of us.  The kind of capitalism we have now doesn’t work either.  So I am interested in learning about alternatives.

Born in 1921 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Bookchin was a labor organizer in the 1930s and 1940s and a participant in the anti-nuclear and radical Green movements in the 1960s and 1970s.  As a young man, he was a Communist.  He later became a Trotskyite, then an anarchist, and, in this book, espoused a philosophy he called social ecology or libertarian socialism.

The Ecology of Freedom begins with introductions to the 2005, 1991 and original 1982 editions, in which he expresses his disappointment with the environmental movement’s failure to live up to its original promise because of the failure to develop an adequate political philosophy.

One current of the environmental movement became a mere lifestyle option, based on consumer choice.  The Deep Ecology movement and part of the population control movement decided that human beings as such, rather than oppressive governments or exploitative corporations, were the problem.

Many self-described environmentalists identified being anti-rational, anti-science and anti-technology with being in harmony with nature, which was one of the teachings of fascism.

All these things, Bookchin wrote, indirectly helped prop up the status quo.  Environmentalists did accomplish important practical victories in individual situations, for which they deserve praise.  But they did not change the overall direction of society because of the lack of a unifying vision, which he called “social ecology”.

That vision is a symbiotic relationship among human beings, and between human beings and the rest of nature.  This doesn’t mean passivity, or abandonment of the human-made environment to wilderness, he wrote; it means to work with natural processes and with human nature rather than trying to override them.

This seems to me very much like the Unitarian Universalist Seventh Principle, which is “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

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NEXT: chapter one: the concept of social ecology

chapter two: the outlook of organic society

chapter three: the emergence of hierarchy

chapter four: epistemologies of rule

chapter five: the legacy of domination

chapter six: justice—equal and exact

chapter seven: the legacy of freedom

chapter eight: from saints to sellers

chapter nine: two images of technology

chapter ten: the social matrix of technology

chapter eleven: the ambiguities of freedom

chapter twelve: an ecological society

epilogue

LINKS

MURRAY BOOKCHIN’S COLLECTED WORKS

The Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin – the complete book in PDF form.

Society and Ecology by Murray Bookchin.

Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement by Murray Bookchin (1987)

Libertarian Municipalism by Murray Bookchin (1991)

What Is Social Ecology? by Murray Bookchin (1993)

Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism by Janet Biehl.

Murray Bookchin: The Man Who Brought Radical Ecology and Assembly Democracy to the Left by Janet Biehl

Remembering Murray Bookchin by David Rosen for Counterpunch.

Another way of looking at things

Murray Bookchin is a leading anarchist thinker whose work I had never thought about until I learned that he is, of all things, respected by the Kurdish people in the Middle East.

The Kurds have struggled for decades for independence for decades against the governments of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria.  They are the most effective fighters in their region against the Islamic State and the successors to Al Qaeda in their region.

In all this, they have not engaged in acts of terrorism against civilians.  They respect the rights of women, and even have women in their fighting forces.  Although mostly Sunni Muslims, they gave refuge to people of all religions, including Christians, who suffer religious persecution.

Of course all this does not necessarily stem from their admiration for Murray Bookchin, but I am intrigued that this American thinker finds admirers in admirable people in a (to me) unlikely part of the world.

Bookchin is an anarchist, which means that he is opposed both to capitalism and to state socialism, a point of view I have come to share, late in life.  Some other anarchist writers I admire, and have posted about, are David Graeber and James C. Scott.

I just finished reading Bookchin’s Remaking Society, a quick and readable, but somewhat superficial, outline of his views.  I have started reading his earlier and longer book, The Ecology of Freedom: the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy, which is more detailed and profound, but more difficult to follow.

Bookchin is opposed to hierarchy as such.  He thinks all domination is connected – political domination, economic domination, racism, patriarchy and the domination of nature.

His ideal is the “organic” society, in which people cooperate voluntarily for their mutual benefit, and seek to understand natural processes rather than override them.

He thinks organic societies existed in pre-historic times.  Tribes based on kinship worked together for the benefit of all.  Persons of superior ability became leaders, but not rulers.  They had prestige, but not the power to coerce.  Men and women had different functions, but neither ruled the other.

Their principle, he said, the equal treatment of unequals, which sound to me very like the Marxian principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”.  Our present capitalist society, he said, is based on the opposite principle – the unequal treatment of equals.