WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere #19: Let's get to know Murray Bookchin, the extraordinary creator of "Social Ecology". - Nathan J. Robinson's interview with Janet Biehl (1) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Biographer Janet Biehl explains why Bookchin's decentralized,

anti-capitalist, ecological vision is so relevant today. ---- Janet
Biehl is one of the leading libertarian socialist writers in the United
States. For several decades she was a partner and collaborator of Murray
Bookchin (1921-2006), who was, in the words of the Village Voice, "at
the pinnacle of the genre of utopian social criticism." In supporting
works such as "Listen, Marxist!" and The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin
laid the foundations for an anti-capitalist, ecologically oriented,
anti-authoritarian left. Bookchin's analysis was often provocative, and
in works such as "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism" and
"Re-Enchanting Humanity" (which includes a satisfying takedown of
Richard Dawkins) he challenged what he believed were dangerous currents
of anti-Christian thought. rationalist and primitivist emerging on the
left. Bookchin sought to forge a philosophy that was pro-technology but
sensitive to ecological destruction, and that recaptured the insights of
Marx while avoiding the rigidities of 21st-century Marxism. He was one
of the first thinkers to warn that capitalism itself was causing
catastrophic global warming. Biehl is the author of Ecology or
Catastrophe The Life of Murray Bookchin, the editor of The Murray
Bookchin Reader, and the author of The Politics of Social Ecology, a
primer on Bookchin's ideas. He's here today to tell us a little about
Bookchin's life and work.

Nathan J. Robinson: When you meet people who have never heard of Murray
Bookchin or are unfamiliar with his thinking and work, what if they ask
you to tell them why you think his work is important or has lasting
value , where would you start?

Janet Biehl: First, he should be framed as a left-wing revolutionary and
socialist. He broke away from the communist movement, but innovated a
set of post-Marxist ideas for the left that he began to develop and
champion in the 1950s and continued for the rest of his life. And
instead of structuring a radical movement around a supposedly
revolutionary proletariat, which turned out to be non-revolutionary, he
thought it was necessary for a socialist movement to organize itself
around ideas of democracy and ecology.

He understood very early that the limits of capitalism were ecological.
He began to realize that in the fifties, when there were investigations
into the effects of chemical substances and food on human health, the
proletariat did not protest because they were impoverished, and, he
thought, that surely, in the future, they would not tolerate damage to
their own health due to the consumption of chemicals in food and would
be relieved. It didn't quite work out that way, but it was a valid
insight and has only become more valid as the decades have passed.

He thought that to prevent the powers that be from running the show -
the political and economic elites - power should be returned directly to
the people. Democracy was supposed to be a non-representational matter
of people going into voting booths and sending representatives to
Washington to make decisions on their behalf where they could easily be
corrupted. He thought that power should remain with the people in their
localities. He supported citizens' assemblies, or what I like to call
"assembly democracy"-he didn't use that term, but it seems useful to
describe it.

It is a democracy organized around people in assemblies making decisions
about their communities and then broader areas. The assemblies would
send delegates to confederations, where decisions could be made in
aggregate for larger areas. The aim was to ensure that power flowed from
the bottom up and not from the top down. He advocated this throughout
the rest of his life until his death in 2006. He started a school called
the Institute for Social Ecology, and traveled tirelessly throughout the
United States, Europe, and other parts of the world, to try to build a
movement around these ideas. But, I must say, in 2006 he was unable to
build the strong movement he dreamed of in the United States and he died
practically disappointed.

Robinson.I first encountered his writing when I was in college when I
was about 19 years old. I took a course called "Marxism vs. Anarchism"
and came across his essay "Listen, Marxist!" This lesson was about the
controversies and historical differences between Marxist and anarchist
thought. When I first came across his work, the first word I probably
would have used to describe it was "invigorating." He is a unique figure
as a leftist because he has developed a set of leftist ideas that are
really totally unique to him, in that he synthesizes the best of each
different strand and takes the best from various traditions. I ask: can
you take the best of the environmental movement and blend it with some
of the important insights of Marx and the best of direct democracy in
Athens? It's this fantastic fusion of ideas that, when you encounter it,
is like nothing else you've encountered before.

Biehl. He took Rosa Luxemburg's maxim that our choice is either
socialism or barbarism very seriously. After World War II, when many of
the people who had been on the left rushed into the institutions of
capitalism, Murray refused to do so and said that the revolution must
not be given up. We need to rethink it because the proletariat may not
be revolutionary, but capitalism is still barbarism, and we cannot
accept that. And the question is: what are the mechanisms by which it
will ultimately self-destruct and must self-destruct? It is based on the
exploitation of people and is dehumanizing, so it cannot thrive. So how
do we get people to realize this? There are so many ways people can
fully understand this.

His goal, his guiding star, has always been to build an anti-capitalist
movement. And yes, you're right, he drew on all the traditions he got
the idea of assembly democracy from ancient Greece and the Vermont town
meeting. Historically, the ancient Athenian polis was made up of all men
and was built on slavery and the exclusion of anyone who was not
Athenian, and his idea was to extract the idea and nature of that
institution - of citizens taking decisions horizontally - from that
historical context and say that while everything serves to deny it, we
can look at the institution itself that is worth saving. According to
the Vermont town meeting, these people were always waging war on the
Indians and were religious fanatics (they were Calvinists),

Robinson. In your bio, you included a quote from his book Ecology or
Catastrophe, and it seems very relevant at a time when we see immense
heat waves in the US and Britain. This incredible quote from him is from
1964:

"This blanket of carbon dioxide tends to increase the temperature of the
atmosphere by intercepting heat waves, which go from Earth to space.
Theoretically, after several centuries of burning fossil fuels, the
increase in atmospheric heat could even melt the Earth's polar ice caps,
leading to the flooding of the continents with sea water. This is
symbolic of the long-term catastrophic effects of our irrational
civilization on the balance of nature."

He was really one of the first to warn, not only about the threat of
climate catastrophe, but also about the connection of that catastrophe
to capitalism.

Biehl. Yes. I want to underline, first of all, that the title Ecology or
Catastrophe is the successor to socialism or barbarism. But the idea of
climate change was still quite new. There were scientists studying it at
MIT in the 1950s, and people were starting to write about it in
peer-reviewed journals. But his intuition was that to solve this
problem, we will have to rebuild the entire society. It's not something
you can simply adapt to, and his word for making small adjustments to
deal with ecological problems was "environmentalism." For him, the word
"ecology" represented that reconstructed society that was
post-capitalist in which people would regain power and make decisions at
the local level where the city and the countryside would be reintegrated.

Robinson Yes. His work seems to answer numerous questions, such as: How
can you take Marx's insights without adopting the kind of rigid,
dogmatic authoritarian Marxism of the 20th century? How can you adopt an
ecological worldview without being a primitivist who romanticizes
primitive societies and forgoes the advantages of modern technology? How
can you take the good in the anarchist tradition without individualism?

In any case, trying to synthesize these insights and move away from the
extremes towards this completely new and dialectical approach, if you
will, that weaves all these threads together, as I said before.

Biehl. There has been a constant reshuffling of ideology. It was not a
question of accepting or rejecting the ideology as it was. Ideology can
be right about some things and wrong about others, and the important
thing is to identify what remains valid and useful for the future and
discard the rest. This can lead to confusion for people who confuse the
part with the whole.

I also liked Robinson because his ideas were constantly evolving and
changing over time. Could he describe the way in which he developed his
ideas about himself?

Biehl. He has always tried to keep up with the times, answering the
questions posed by the present time. I discovered that as I was working
on his biography, his life tended to break down into decades. He
realized that anti-statism was a big problem. Marxists continued to
attack him for this. Eventually he realised, after a certain point, that
the people he was most likely to persuade of the validity of his ideas
were people who were already anti-statist, i.e. anarchist. So when I met
him, his passion was to try to show the international anarchist movement
that social ecology, this idea of participatory, face-to-face democracy,
was his natural politics and he should adopt it.

For him, he thought it was quite obvious that they should accept this
set of ideas about democracy and ecology. And so when I met him, he was
basically having meetings everywhere, mostly talking to anarchists at
that point because, like I said, he thought they would be the most
receptive. But it turns out that they didn't like the idea of majority
voting because it was majority rule. Majority rule: It's still a rule,
right? So, that's when he concluded that anarchists are just
individualists; they won't accept majority voting and just want things
to go their way. It was then that he decided that it really needed to be
about a community movement rather than an anarchist one.

Robinson. When she was alive you were her collaborator and partner for
many years. Can you tell us what your first impressions were when you
first met him?

Biehl. I lived in New York and saw and heard him speak at the Socialist
Scholars Conference and other conferences in New York. I was thrilled
with what he was saying. I was in graduate school at the Graduate Center
at CUNY at the time, and I was trying to decide whether I was really
going to be a professor, and here he was talking about building a
movement. He said this is a movement that needs theorists, writers and
talented people to convince. And I thought, "Here's my chance to do
something relevant to build a better future," rather than write articles
- sorry, I had a very dim view of academics at the time - that six
people will read in newspapers, including my mother. .

Robinson. That's why I'm not an academic.

Biehl. Also, at the time, academia was full of post-structuralism, and
he irritated me into turning away. I decided I would rather come to
Burlington and listen to Murray talk in his living room. At the time, he
was writing two books: one was a history of revolutions and popular
movements within the European and American revolutions which was later
published in four volumes as The Third Revolution, and then he was also
writing a book on dialectical philosophy called The Politics of Cosmology.

He was really in tears; he wrote a chapter every week or two alternating
between these two books and lectured on them in his living room. He was
just stunning to me. And at the same time, on Friday evenings, we held
meetings of our political group. There aren't many great thinkers who
open their front door and say, "Join my group. My vote carries no more
weight than yours." But that's what he did.

We were a group of about 15 or 20 people. We ran political campaigns in
Burlington, developed programs, and tried to be a model for this kind of
politics that he was describing and trying to get the world to accept.
And yes, it was remarkable. There were study groups all over Burlington
with people studying subjects like the French Revolution and economics -
we had a little informal university here. And at the same time, he was
engaging in debates with ecologists who disagreed with him who had a
very dark view of humanity - Murray called them misanthropes - and he
was getting into debates with anarchists who wanted to do nothing but
throw stones at the police.

It was very exciting. Vermont is a very small-scale place. I
occasionally see Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy on the street.
Government doesn't feel like a remote, distant place, and instead it
feels like a place where you really have the chance to interact and
become part of a small-scale political culture. So, the utopia he talked
about almost seemed possible here, as if I could reach out and touch it.

Robinson. He wasn't a Bernie Sanders supporter, was he?

Biehl. We had many discussions with Sanders, who we considered a
socialist still linked to the myth of the working class, but who should
instead have based his political action on citizens rather than on workers.

Robinson. Murray Bookchin's vision of what political life should be like
for people is deeply democratic, very communal and focused on
participation. How would he summarize the kind of transformation he was
talking about and promoting?

Biehl. He talked about putting many things back into the hands of the
people, such as economic power. He thought that the economy should be
placed in the hands of bottom-up, assembly-based self-governing bodies.
He wanted technology to be decentralized, he would have loved Apple
computers, maybe not the company, but the decentralization that the
laptop brought was simply remarkable to him. He wanted the automation to
be on a small scale. It was about decentralizing and fragmenting cities
into small-scale cities that were integrated with agriculture.

So, the theme that I discovered when I was working on the biography was
that a lot of his ideas were about decentralizing different parts of
society and reintegrating them into a new whole. In the book I call it
eco-decentralism, but it's not a term he used. It was about
decentralization in order to give control back to the people. When I
analyzed his relationship with anarchism I asked myself: "Why was he
attracted to this ideology from which he later dissociated himself?"
When I read his real reasons for embracing anarchism in his previous
writings, I noticed that he did so because the state makes people
passive. He admired that active political engagement in the Athenian
polis, where people could be actively involved in their society,

Regardless of what you think about anarchism, that's something that we
need to preserve from him]. He agreed with Aristotle that we are
political animals and that we need to engage. I think that was one of
his main goals: to create engaged citizens locally and in the
surrounding regions, who didn't just surrender their minds to the state.

(1) The interview we are publishing is the transcription of part of a
larger, oral interview given by Janet Biehl to Nathan J. Robinson on the
Current Affairs podcast at https://www.patreon.com/
posts/life-of-murray-69581310, The transcript, which we publish, edited
by Patrick Farnsworth, was published on
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/05/introducing-murray-bookchin-the-extraordinary-
originator-of-social-ecology

Alternativa Libertaria/FdCA Il Cantiere #19 settembre 2023
ilcantiere@autistici.org http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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