Murray Bookchin

By Chris Burnett - Counterpunch, May 13, 2016

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has yet to recognize, for scientific reasons, our current geological epoch as the Anthropocene, or “Age of Humans”. The term was coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 due to the fact that humans are changing the face of the planet, and are clearly responsible for the current 6th mass extinction event and climate disruption. Eco-radicals – black-red-green – might prefer the term Capitalocene, or the “Age of Capital”.

The former implies that humanity is an undifferentiated whole while the latter suggests that capital, and its system of class and power relations, are the real problem, the real driving force that has altered the planet so extensively. I prefer the latter, of course, for political reasons.

There is no substitute for understanding the historical forces of capitalism that has brought us to the edge. The logic of capitalism is grow or die, and we are all being dragged towards the die part. We need targets of accountability, and we need remedies for the dispossessed. There is a biological debt that must be paid by the most rapacious among us.

But yet, I am still sympathetic to the Anthropocene label because it makes me feel personally responsible. The collective “we”. There is something unsettling about it, and we all need to be immediately unsettled. It puts the burden of action on all of us, and counterintuitively, might pull us out of our comfortable anthropocentric worldview. Eco-radicals rightly put the blame at the doorstep of capitalism and the state, but we should all feel personally responsible, in our collective guts.

There are approximately 150-200 species going extinct everyday. The background rate of the normal extinction process is roughly one to five species a year. We are at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate today due to human activities. As far as the last members of a doomed species might be concerned, humans are responsible, not just the capitalist class. To them, it is the Anthropocene. Might your perspective on this issue be determined by which side of the axe you are on?

If I were to anthropomorphize those lost species, they might provide us an analogy to chew on. They might say, “imagine the surviving members of countless families murdered from bombs dropped by Bush, or assassinated with drones sent by Obama. Do you think they would care about the internal political dynamics of the US after such a tragedy?”

From the survivors perspective, it is the US government, the US Empire system, that killed their relatives. Our friends pondering this analogy for us might just make the same argument in regards to the human race: “yes, okay, we understand there are class distinctions. But, from our perspective, you are the problem. You are that system.”

I am reminded of Noam Chomsky’s use of the word “we” when discussing the crimes of empire. I recall feeling defensive when he implied we all had responsibility, because, well, I opposed imperialism! But I think he was right. In his 1967 essay, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, he writes, reflecting on Dwight Macdonald’s question as to what extent the people are responsible for their own government’s crimes,

“We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam… As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years – on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions.”

Continuing at the end of the essay,

“Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam – as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.”

That is the question we are all faced with today, “What have I done?”, as we observe fresh atrocities committed against the biosphere and all life on this planet. Only those that resist authority and capitalism have the right to condemn our modern death-camp paymasters.

Joris Leverink - RoarMag.Org, August 9, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The introduction to the new book The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015), explains how Murray Bookchin – born to Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City in 1921 – was introduced to radical politics at the age of nine when he joined the Young Pioneers, a Communist youth organization. This would be the start of his ‘life on the left’ in which he would turn from Stalinism to Trotskyism in the years running up to World War II before defining himself as an anarchist in the late 1950s and eventually identifying as a ‘communalist’ or ‘libertarian municipalist’ after the introduction of the idea of social ecology.

Even though Bookchin never even attended college – except for a few classes in radio technology right after World War II – he wrote dozens of books and published hundreds of academic articles, besides founding several journals and setting up the Institute for Social Ecology in 1974. Possibly his most important contribution to radical politics was to (re)introduce the concept of ecology to the arena of political thought.

Bookchin opposed the ideas and practices of the emerging environmentalist movements, accusing them of advocating mere “technical fixes” of capitalism, counter-posing it to an ecological approach that seeks to address the root causes of the systemic problem. In his view, capitalism’s fatal flaw lay not in its exploitation of the working class, as Marxists believe, but rather in its conflict with the natural environment which, if allowed to develop unopposed, would inevitably lead to the dehumanization of people and the destruction of nature.

The Next Revolution includes the 1992 essay The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society. In it, Bookchin argues that “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.” For an ecological society to develop, first the inter-human domination must be eradicated. According to Bookchin, “capitalism and its alter-ego, ‘state socialism,’ have brought all the historic problems of domination to a head,” and the market economy, if it is not stopped, will succeed in destroying our natural environment as a result of its “grow or die” ideology.

For years, Bookchin sought to convince anarchist groups in the US that his idea of libertarian municipalism — which, in his own words “seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of parliamentarism and its mystification of the ‘party’ mechanism as a means for public representation” — was the key to making anarchism politically and socially relevant again.

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, January 17, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Stories:

• The Robots Are Coming! Let's Make Them Work for the Workers - By Thomas Matt, Truthout, January 15, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• BP, ConocoPhillips to cut 530 jobs in the North Sea - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, January 15, 2015
• Schlumberger to cut 9,000 employees, including in Houston - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, January 15, 2015; [related]: Schlumberger axes 9,000 workers - By Michael Allan McCrae, Mining.Com, January 16, 2015
• Wage growth for oil workers slowed in 2014, data firm says - By Joshua Cain, FuelFix, January 15, 2015

Green Jobs and Just Transition:

• By focusing on collaboration, not competition, teachers can save civilization - By Lizanne Foster, Rabble.ca, January 18, 2015
• Offshore Wind in the Atlantic Would Provide Twice the Number of Jobs, Energy as Offshore Drilling - By Jaime McClain, Oceana, January 15, 2015
• Solar Jobs Boom: US Industry Adds 31,000 Workers as Installations Surge - By Pete Danko, Breaking Energy, January 15, 2015
• There are now twice as many solar jobs as coal jobs - By Tim McDonnell, Grist, January 15, 2015

Other News of Interest:

• Bhopal Cloud Hovers Over Industrial Safety in India - By Neeta Lal, Truthout, January 20, 2015
• Five Die After Crash In South Texas Oil Field - by Katie Valentin, Think Progress, January 16, 2015
• Forced labor on Thai fishing vessels - By Farah Obaidullah, Greenpeace Blogs, January 16, 2015
• Global union alerts Bougainville about Rio Tinto - Adam Lee interviewed by Radio New Zealand, Papua New Guinea Mine Watch, January 20, 2015
• Oil-by-Rail Reality: Watch What Industry Does, Not What They Say - By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog, January 15, 2015
• Peruvian Youth To Protest Against New Labor Law - Telesur, December 22, 2014
• RCMP union: Solidarity forever? - By John Baglow, Rabble.ca, January 17, 2015
• Report urges injury, death coverage for farm workers - By Karen Kleiss, Edmonton Journal, January 15, 2015
• Soma, Ermenek, Yirca: Can Anti-Coal Activists Defend Coal Miners and Olive Farmers? - By Ethemcan Turhan, Jadaliyya, January 17, 2015
• Textile Workers’ Strike Stirs Discontent In Sisi’s Egypt - By Hossam el-Hamalawy, al-Araby, January 16, 2015
• Women Garment Workers Organize Against Inhumane Conditions in India - By Pushpa Achanta, Waging Nonviolence, January 12, 2015
• Worker dies at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant - By Justin McCurry, The Guardian, January 20, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC