Author/journalist Debbie Bookchin and ISE Board member Bea Bookchin offer this in-depth review of Andy Price’s new book, Recovering Bookchin (New Compass Press, November 2012):
In his important new book Recovering Bookchin,
Andy Price has set himself a formidable task: he takes up the corpus of
criticism of Murray Bookchin that developed during the last 20 years of
his life and disentangles the valid, content-based criticism, from the
many ad hominem and polemical attacks against Bookchin, showing
how the latter were used to almost completely obscure the former and
cast aside Bookchin’s substantive critique. Equally important, Price
addresses the content-based criticism, in the process illuminating the
richness of Bookchin’s theoretical and political philosophy and
restoring him to his rightful role as one of the most important radical
thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century.
While such a task might have resulted in a book reserved for those
already familiar with Bookchin’s work, that is not the case here: Price,
a senior lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, U.K.,
provides such a clear rendering not only of Bookchin’s thought, but also
of the concerns of Bookchin’s critics, that his book serves also as one
of the most cohesive and readable introductions to the philosophy and
social theory of Murray Bookchin.
After describing the enormous impact that Bookchin’s ideas and
writing had on radical political thought prior to 1987, Price focuses on
two specific periods of Bookchin’s work. The first begins with the
Gathering of American Greens conference in Amherst in 1987 that
initiated the social ecology vs. deep ecology debate. The second begins
eight years later in 1995 with the social anarchism vs. lifestyle
anarchism, and subsequently, anarchism vs. communalism debates. Price
provides a detailed summary of the long literature in which these
debates and argumentation took place and shows that Bookchin’s
criticisms of these two movements stemmed not from an egotistical desire
to protect his turf, or some kind of querulous argumentative streak, as
his critics contended, but were compelled by the need to defend and
explicate the philosophical and political implications of his life’s
work. These interventions by Bookchin, Price explains, were “a direct
philosophical and political expression of his own theoretical
foundations.”
Price first examines the criticism from the social ecology vs. deep
ecology debate, centering on arguments by Naess, Devall, Sessions,
Forman, and Manes. He provides a synthesis of the main precepts of deep
ecology, its non-interventionist stance with respect to nature resulting
in a racist and misanthropic view of human beings, and describes how
Bookchin’s critique of this tendency in the ecology movement stemmed
from his long-standing view that human beings as “second nature” or
nature rendered self-conscious, were not apart from the natural world
but an expression of the natural world, one whose destiny was to
intervene—but in a rational fashion. In one of his many incisive
renderings of Bookchin’s philosophy, Price explains that for Bookchin,
“humanity, the human intellect and human reason, and the rest of the
characteristics that make humanity unique, are not alien to natural
evolution, but are solely one end of the continuum of evolution that
inheres in all of nature: that is, that humanity in all its forms,
creative and destructive is a direct product of natural
evolution. In the reduction of this important process in deep ecology,
where humanity as such is seen as blight on the natural world,
humanity is removed from its place in natural evolution, and this
abstracted humanity is subordinated to a static nature. Here, all the
attendant lessons of the processes of natural evolution are lost as
humanity is divested of its potentiality to play a continuing part in
this evolutionary continuum.” The key political question, for Bookchin,
was not whether humanity should intervene but how humanity should
intervene in the natural world, and in what form this intervention
should take.
Instead of addressing Bookchin’s theoretical critique of their
position, deep ecologists Sessions, Devall, Foreman and others deployed a
barrage of ad hominem characterizations about Bookchin to
discredit him, using loaded language that repeatedly portrayed him as
“attacking” them to protect his “turf.” Price peels away these layers
of obfuscation, examining how the unsubstantiated and
emotionally-charged rhetoric avoids engagement with the substance of
Bookchin’s critique, a critique, which Price notes, is premised on “a
spirited defense of humanity—of human reason, human society, and of the
role it has to play in averting the ecological crisis—against the
inconsistencies and misanthropy of deep ecology.” For Bookchin, deep
ecology not only provided no agency for human beings, but was
fundamentally reactionary in its reading of history and ecology. Given
the substance of Bookchin’s critique and the detailed philosophy of
nature on which it was based, Price calls the “misreading (or
non-reading) of Bookchin” by these deep ecologists “astounding.”
It is to his credit that Price extensively explores the deep ecology
literature seeking out kernels of genuine theoretical disagreement in
some of the less polemical attacks of Bookchin’s position as put forth
by Eckersley, Albrecht, Alexander, Leff, and occasionally John Clark. He
describes, for example, how Eckersley believes there is nothing to
validate Bookchin’s claim of a liberatory potentiality in natural
evolution over the more destructive tendencies that can be seen in the
natural world. Price answers that for Bookchin, “the existence of the
potentiality does not automatically mean it will necessarily be
fulfilled.” As Bookchin observes: the potentiality contains only “a
message of freedom not of necessity; it speaks to an immanent striving
for realization not a predetermined certainty of completion.”
In similar fashion, the criticism of each of these writers is
presented, explicated, and then refuted. Contrary to the depiction
studiously crafted by the deep ecologists, Price shows that Bookchin’s
critique stemmed from “a richly elaborated set of theoretical
principles” that can be traced to some of Bookchin’s earliest writing
and that had been developed over the previous 30 years, ideas which
deserve to be examined and critiqued on their merits. Thus, he not only
defends the validity of Bookchin’s critique of deep ecology, but in the
process elaborates Bookchin’s singular contribution to ecological
thought by laying out the philosophical basis of his philosophy of
nature and illustrating how Bookchin’s critique is based on this opus.
In the middle section of his book, Price mines the critical
literature for intelligent criticism, or what he terms the “robust”
criticism, of Bookchin’s positions, and here offers us a glimpse of the
kind of new scholarship and debate that Bookchin’s work deserves and
that we might hope to see in the future. He suggests that Bookchin’s
writing on the emergence of hierarchy and other forms of domination,
based as it was on scant anthropological evidence available at the time
he wrote The Ecology of Freedom, is subject to criticism from
those who might question whether he produces sufficient evidence for his
conception of society before the emergence of hierarchy and during the
transition to hierarchical society. Scholars, he says, are correct in
asking whether Bookchin is historically accurate in his portrayal of the
emergence of hierarchy from organic society and whether, for example,
Bookchin’s legacy of domination and legacy of freedom provide adequate
grounds upon which to understand the movement of history.
Price examines these claims and others and offers a defense of
Bookchin’s views. Among recent developments in ethnography, for example,
he cites the work of prominent anthropologist David Graeber who
presents a convincing argument that while much ethnographic study
reveals the existence of non-statist, non-hierarchical forms of
organization, anthropologists “have been terrified of being accused of
romanticizing the societies they study.” Though Graeber does not share
Bookchin’s conclusions, he believes that “one obvious role for a radical
intellectual is to do precisely that: look at those who are creating
viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger
implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those
ideas back, not as prescriptions but as contributions, possibilities,”
an approach, Price says, that “is an almost word for word account of
the way in which Bookchin used his anthropological and ethnographic
materials.”
Price takes up other controversies as well in what he calls the
“central motor” of Bookchin’s social theory and in each case provides a
lucid description of the criticisms of (and in some cases apparent
contradictions within) Bookchin’s work, and then offers an informed
defense of Bookchin’s positions based on both objective evidence and on
the philosophical precepts contained within Bookchin’s philosophy and
social theory. Equally important as his efforts to “recover Bookchin”
from the ad hominem attacks of the deep ecologists and
anarchists, these sections of Price’s book excite because they engage
Bookchin’s philosophy and political theory systematically and advance
the critical scholarship that Bookchin’s theoretic deserves.
Finally, in the last quarter of his book, Price turns to an
examination of Bookchin’s criticism of anarchist politics. He describes
the furor following Bookchin’s publication in 1995 of the lengthy
article “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm”
in which Bookchin accused modern day anarchists of having lost sight of
the social dimensions of their cause and therefore of the social
solutions. In this piece Bookchin offers an caustic repudiation of those
tendencies within anarchism that emphasize direct action, and what
Bookchin called, “ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to
theory oddly akin to the anti-rational biases of postmodernism,
celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically
apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire,
and ecstasy, and an immensely self-oriented enchantment of every day
life” which “reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on
Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades.”
Price suggests that Bookchin’s rancorous tone in this piece was due
in part to the fact that Bookchin was exhausted by eight years of
arguing with the deep ecologists. He criticizes Bookchin—and rightly
so—for addressing the young “lifestyle” anarchists so acerbically,
noting that since Bookchin contends that the interplay between the
underlying contradictory tendencies of individualistic anarchism and
collectivist anarchism are dependent largely on the scale of social
repression, “then it follows that the emergence of lifestyle anarchism
requires a sympathetic rather than harshly critical approach.” If this
tendency found expression because of “the reactionary social context” of
the 1990s, Price contends, its adherents, “are in need of guidance, not
of upbraiding.”
Yet, uncharitable as Bookchin might have been in this work, Price
says, the vehemence and personal nature of the counter-attacks were
absurdly out of proportion and served once again to almost completely
obscure the valid theoretical underpinnings of Bookchin’s critique. As
Price observes, once again Bookchin’s motives were questioned, the
charges against him were mostly personal in nature, and the valuable
contribution of his thinking was lost to polemic.
During the battle that unfolded between Bookchin and the anarchist
theorists, Bookchin criticized the writings of Clark, Zerzan, Bey, Brown
and Watson, (some of whom wrote under pseudonyms; Clark as Cafard, and
Watson as Bradford), for, among other things, “rooting the ills of
society in ‘civilization’ rather than capital and hierarchy, in the
‘mega-machine’ rather than the commodification of everyday life, and in
shadowy ‘simulations’ rather than the very tangible tyranny of material
want and exploitation.” Price describes the fierce, extremely personal
nature of the responses that ensued, particularly those of Bob Black,
John Clark and Joel Kovel, the latter two having being one time Bookchin
collaborators, and quotes at length from Clark. He suggests that “the
personal name-calling and slurs are too plentiful to even list” and
wisely leaves it to “the reader to draw their own conclusions on their
quality.”
Price concludes that, “The more problematic aspects of his 1995
critique of lifestyle anarchists should not be overstated. That is, the
brevity and perhaps even the uncharitable tone of Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism
do not amount to the attempt to push out all other creeds except his
own that so many accused him of. Nor do they suggest, as Cafard [Clark]
argued, that had lifestyle anarchism or deep ecology never appeared,
Bookchin ‘would be attacking some other competing philosophy.’ On the
contrary, exactly like his exchange with the deep ecologists, the
genesis of Bookchin’s disagreement with lifestyle anarchism can be seen
to be the result of his career long commitment [to]…an anarchism that is
pro-organization, pro-empowerment, and pro-its own constant
self-evaluation.”
Here again, Price is not content to criticize the critics: he
separates the name-calling from the substantive and interrogates
Bookchin’s concept of communalism to tease out whether his political
program—his libertarian municipalist commitment to citizens assemblies,
local elections and confederalism—provides a basis for his criticism of
anarchist politics and is sustainable in its own right. Price examines
Bookchin’s distinction between “statecraft” and “politics,” his notion
of power, and particularly his concept of building a dual power in
opposition to the state, simultaneously addressing Bookchin’s critics
and illustrating how these practical manifestations of Bookchin’s
widening social theory form the foundation of his critique of anarchism.
“It is argued here,” Price asserts, “that the political program
outlined above is Bookchin at his most utopian—and yet most practical.
His is a program that calls for the complete remaking of society, yet
does so through concrete organization and realist interpretations of
power…This dual focus on both utopianism and practicality, on the
creation of the forms of freedom yet with a constant watch on the forms
of social domination, imparts a uniqueness to the Bookchin program that
perhaps explains some of the difficulties he would have with the
movements to which he belonged.”
Price maintains that it was Bookchin’s lifelong goal of uniting
revolutionary ideals—that is, his philosophical commitments—with the
political practice they necessitate, and his striving for not only a
rational and coherent society, but rational and coherent movements in
opposition to the existing society, that motivated his criticisms of
deep ecology and anarchism. And it is Price’s honest evaluation of this
immense project—assessing its philosophy, social theory and political
practice—that points to a direction for future discussion. Having
resuscitated this work from under the detritus of personal attack,
having eloquently presented the foundations of Bookchin’s thought and
the substantive objections as well, Price shows that while there is much
to debate in Bookchin’s theoretic, despite the claims some critics have
tried to levy, “there is nothing that undermines his project as a
whole, there is no terminal contradiction that renders the project
obsolete.”
On the contrary, the time for an appreciation of the grand scale and
originality of Bookchin’s project, its reevaluation, and further
elaboration, is at hand. “The objections we have raised to the Bookchin
theoretic are in fact useful to Bookchin and social ecology: once
exposed to a full analysis these objections can help to qualify his
project, help to point to the areas of his work that are perhaps
under-examined or inadequately explained. The task now is to develop
this theoretic further.”
By clearing a path for this task, Andy Price has rendered us an
incalculable service. It is a task, he observes, that the ecological
crisis on our doorstep necessitates more than ever before.
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