Reflections on elections (2002)

Book Review from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism by Janet Biehl (Black Rose books 1997)

Murray Bookchin is one contemporary thinker and writer who comes close to us on a number of key points. He stands for a democratic society of common ownership where there’d be no production for profit, no working for wages and no money and where the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” would apply, even if he doesn’t call this socialism (though he might if you got him into a corner).

There are differences of course. For instance, whereas we still see the working class (in the broad sense of everyone obliged by economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary) as the agent of the revolutionary change from capitalism to such a society, Bookchin has come to the conclusion that the agent is the municipality or rather a federation of municipalities that have come to practise direct democracy (town meetings, citizens’ assemblies, etc).

Bookchin himself is a wordy writer, but fortunately his views have been well summarised by Janet Biehl in The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism. Although he now prefers to call himself a “social ecologist” or a “libertarian municipalist” he still regards himself as an anarchist. Despite this – and this of course brings him closer to us than to classical anarchists – he envisages both participating in local elections and a future society having a written constitution that would provide for, among other things, majority decision-making:

“It is highly unlikely, when libertarian municipalists demand that existing municipal governments surrender their powers to citizens’ assemblies, that those governments will accede. Libertarian municipalists should therefore run for local elective office themselves, so that ultimately they can change the city charter to create fully empowered citizens’ assemblies at the expense of the State.”

An anarchist who believes in contesting elections is indeed a rarity. In fact, many anarchists would regard this as a contradiction in terms and would, on this ground, deny that Bookchin really is an anarchist.

The standard anarchist argument against the revolutionary movement contesting elections, local as well as national, is that this inevitably leads to it becoming reformist; revolutionary MPs and local councillors, whatever may have been their original intention, end up merely administering capitalism at local or national level. This, they claim, can be seen from the history of, first, the European Social Democratic parties which once claimed to be Marxist and, more recently, of Green parties which said, as in Germany, that they were only going into parliament to use it as a tribune from which to proclaim the need for an ecological society. When, however, it comes to explaining why this happens they fall back on the lame explanation of “power corrupts”.

We can agree that this is what happened to these parties but offer an alternative explanation: that such parties went off the rails because they advocated reforms of capitalism and not just its abolition. The originally Marxist Social Democratic parties had in addition to the “maximum” programme of socialism what they called a “minimum programme” of immediate reforms to capitalism. What happened, we contend, is that they attracted votes on the basis of their miniumum, not their maximum, programme, i.e. reformist votes, and so became the prisoners of these voters. In parliament, and later in office, they found themselves with no freedom of action other than to compromise with capitalism. Had they been the mandated delegates of those who voted for them (rather than leaders) this could be expressed by saying that they had no mandate for socialism, only to try to reform capitalism. It was not a case of being corrupted by the mere fact of going into national parliaments but was due to the basis on which they went there and how this restricted what they could do. In short, it is not power as such that corrupts. It is power obtained on the basis of followers voting for leaders to implement reforms that, if you want to put it that way, “corrupts”.

Bookchin accepts the classic anarchist argument as far as participating in national elections is concerned. As Biehl argues for him:

“If history, from ancient times to the present, has demonstrated anything, it is the implacable fact that State power is corruptive: that an individual who takes State office is inexorably refashioned by that office into a creature of the State, regardless of his or her idealistic intentions.”

His answer, as to how to prevent a revolutionary movement that contests elections going reformist, is that it should not contest national elections but should restrict itself to contesting local ones. Apparently power only corrupts beyond the local level. The trouble is that his mistaken explanation as to why the old European Social Democratic parties went off the rails – corruption through mere participation in state institutions – leads him to propose the same tactics, even if at local level only, that in our view led to these parties becoming openly reformist.

In his view, at this stage contesting elections can essentially only be an exercise in political education, of getting ideas across. We can go along with that. In fact it is why we contest elections today knowing perfectly well that we have no chance of getting elected. But then Bookchin and Biehl say:

“The electoral platform should consist of a series of demands that represent the aims for which the group is fighting – above all the radical democratization of the municipal government through the creation of citizens’ assemblies. But it is not enough merely to call for direct democracy; the platform should offer the steps by which that goal can be met. Indeed, it should make a series of clearly specified immediate demands, then place them in a radical context by tying them to the longer-term goal of fundamentally transforming society. For libertarian municipalism is a revolutionary movement, not a reformist movement, and it aims not to reform the existing system but to replace it with a liberatory one. In programmatic terms these immediate and long-term goals can be called respectively minimum and maximum demands. Minimum demands are those that are immediately realizable within the existing system; they are specific and concrete. Maximum demands, by contrast, are more general; they comprise the rational society that the group hopes ultimately to achieve.”

Exactly the same division of their programme into a maximum and miniumum one as the old Social Democratic parties, and which led to their downfall.

On at least one occasion Bookchin has put his money where his mouth is and put up candidates at local level – in Burlington, Vermont, in the US in 1989. The electoral programme of the “Burlington Greens” is reproduced as an appendix to Biehl’s book. The programme begins by denouncing the grow-or-die nature of capitalism (referred to as the market economy) but, without even stating the full alternative (the so-called “maximum programme”), rapidly moves on listing some “stepping stones” to where they want to go:

“A community-controlled municipal financial resources and low-interest loans for the purchase and repair of homes and for the initiation of innovative ecological housing projects for low-income groups. 

Bond issues and changes in local tax structures to provide for as much housing for the need and elderly as is necessary. A direct network between farmers and consumers to foster local agriculture. Municipal acquisition of open land to be held in public trust for recreation, gardening, and parks. Municipally controlled cooperatives to develop and implement alternative technologies and to produce quality goods in accord with Vermont’s reputation for craftmanship.”

We can only describe this as a common-or-garden reformist programme.

So, although we share with Bookchin the view that revolutionaries should contest elections, we part company very rapidly when it comes to the programme on which to do so. While we advocate only socialism and nothing but (the so-called “maximum programme”, if you like) Bookchin wants to seek a mandate on the basis of a programme of reforms of capitalism. In our view, this would lead to pure and simple reformism. People would vote for the immediate reforms of capitalism not the maximum programme of replacing it, and any “libertarian municipalist” elected to office would find themselves the prisoners of their reform-minded voters and would end up participating in the government of capitalism at local level, just like the other Greens Bookchin and Biehl criticise.

In any event, Bookchin is being inconsistent in advocating contesting local elections but not national ones and has provided no explanation as to why power at national level corrupts while power at local level doesn’t, especially as local councils are part of the state’s administrative structure and local councillors and mayors are little more than elected state functionnaries.

Actually, we agree with Bookchin that power at local level doesn’t have to corrupt. It is possible to envisage a movement at local level (as he does) that would be based on delegate democracy, where those elected to the local council would be the mandated delegates of those who voted for them, being accountable to them and subject to recall if they failed to carry out their mandate. But we go further. We can’t see anything to prevent this applying to elected representatives of the revolutionary movement above local level too: why couldn’t (in the US context) State congress members also be subject to such democratic control? And why not federal congress members too?

Because Bookchin does not believe this to be possible he proposes an unnecessarily dangerous strategy for getting rid of capitalism: confrontation with the state. He envisages that when sufficient municipalities have been won over to the cause of “libertarian municipalism” they should take on the capitalist state, defying it, refusing to implement its decrees and even forming local citizens’ militias to defend themselves if necessary (decidely, Bookchin’s Trotskyist past is coming back to haunt him in his old age). Given that for such a scenario to succeed a majority of the population would have to support “liberatarian municipalism”, all this would be unnecessary. Being a majority they could use their votes not just to win control of municipalities but of States, regions and provinces and the national state itself.

At the very minimum this would prevent the forces at the disposal of the central state from being used against the local councils. But, more positively – since there is no reason to suppose that power necessarily corrupts – it would provide a framework for a less disruptive, more orderly transition from capitalism to a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society of common ownership and democratic control.

Bookchin’s attempted distinction between local and central state level does not hold water. If power doesn’t corrupt at local level – as it doesn’t have to, if organised on the basis of mandated and recallable delegates – then it won’t automatically at state level either. On the other hand, if, as we contend, “a reform programme corrupts” it will do so just as much at local as at central state level.

Bookchin’s formula of only contesting local, but not national, elections on a reform programme is not the right one for avoiding reformism. The correct formula is contesting elections at national and local level but only on the basis of delegates being given an imperative mandate for the sole purpose of carrying through the formalities involved in winding up capitalism.

Adam Buick

Graphic Novel (2023)

Book Review from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Blood Got Mixed. Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. By Janet Biehl. PM Press. 2022. 246pp.

‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish for ‘West’) is the name given by Kurdish nationalists to an area of Northeast Syria largely inhabited by Kurds but also home to Arabs and Assyrian Christians. It is the western part of their aimed-at state of Kurdistan, incorporating areas from Iran in the east, through Iraq and Turkey to Syria in the west, where the majority population is Kurdish-speaking. It is a de facto independent region of Syria, always threatened but not controlled by Turkey and the Syrian government. Currently it is controlled by the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), a vanguard party led by Abdullah Ocalan.

In prison in Turkey (where he still is) Ocalan read and was impressed by the ‘communitarian’ ideas of American social theorist, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, who was also the long-term partner of Janet Biehl, the author of this book, developed the idea that the basic unit of society should be a decentralised, face-to-face participatory democracy, which he called ‘municipalism’, practising ‘community support and solidarity’ as opposed to the way ‘capitalism has organised society for competition and manipulation’. The PKK adopted this policy for local decision-making while keeping a firm hand on major political decisions and its militia.

Biehl explains, in a chapter entitled ‘Why I’m Here’, how she first visited the region in 2014 and was attracted to it by its claim to be putting into practice Bookchin’s ‘communitarian’ vision. She carried on visiting the region, most recently in 2019, and it is on her personal experiences and knowledge of the region that she gained over her visits that much of this book is based.

The system of district and local councils there is often held up as a model of democratic co-operative organisation by those seeking an alternative both to authoritarian centralised rule and capitalist democracies of one kind or another. The region has since been subject to aggression, sometimes savage, as by Islamic State forces, and by the Turkish military, who have effectively taken over part of the region spreading death and destruction. Despite this, it survives as a kind of communitarian experiment, but constantly teetering on the edge and, as someone has put it, ‘trapped within a spider web of competing Great Powers and local powers’.

Biehl has made a brave effort to make sense of this by producing what is termed a graphic novel (though it is not a novel in the normal sense of fiction or imagined reality) which seeks to represent, in art work, commentary and ‘word bubbles’, the history, social organisation and way of living of the multi-ethnic groups that co-exist and intermingle (hence the sub-title ‘Their Blood Got Mixed’) in this small border area. She does this in a way that displays her admiration for these people while at the same time not being afraid to show the downsides, often bloody, of the path they have taken. A selection of the titles of the 15 chapters into which the book is divided gives an idea of the areas she covers: Islamic State, A Place of Refugees, Women and Men, Economics, Security, Social Ecology, Democracy, Self-Administration.

Her book illustrates both some of the most disturbing things that have happened to the people of the region, part of which she refers to as ‘the long tortured history of Kurds in the Middle East’. But she also describes, with obvious enthusiasm, some of the most positive and optimistic sides of what she considers they have established. So while, for example, on the one hand a piece of her graphic art pictures an ISIS soldier saying ‘The Koran says it’s permitted to take non-Muslim women and girls captive and rape them’, on the other she vividly brings out the joy experienced by the city of Raqqa at being liberated from the terror of the IS caliphate. She also details the suffering of the region’s people when the Turkish army invaded parts of it in 2018 but at the same time waxes rather lyrical about its system of citizens’ assemblies, committees and regional councils and extols Ocalan’s call for ‘gender equality, a cooperative economy, and ethnic and religious inclusiveness’. Yet even the positive side is complex and she is at pains not to portray it without flaws. She expresses a certain degree of doubt about the claim she hears that ‘our revolution is ecological, stateless and of women’, and it is not hard for the reader to join with her in questioning this given that without exception the women we see in her pictures are wearing hijabs, refer to those who’ve died in the fighting there as ‘martyrs’ and seem steeped in religious belief. She also wonders about the reality of the claims that ‘leadership here gets no special treatment … everyone is a link in the chain’, and recognises that the Bookchin model of a decentralised ‘face-to-face democracy’ and ‘an ecological society based on non-hierarchical relations’ may not be being followed as closely as she would like it to be.

A socialist would add that society in the region continues to use a money economy, markets (even though called ‘cooperative markets’) and buying and selling, which are the very essence of the wider capitalist system, and so does not merit the title ‘revolutionary’. So even if the author sees it as a kind of haven attempting to practice ‘communitarian’ principles, it is nevertheless trapped within the capitalist system and forced to rely on ‘protection’ from outside by coercive state regimes at war with one another. Like all other attempts to ‘go it alone’ in the capitalist world, its survival is perilous to say the least.

Small-scale attempts at establishing anything even slightly different (eg, the abolition of money and trade and ‘free consumption’ in some Republican communities during the Spanish Civil War and the ‘horizontal’ social and economic organisation of the Zapatistas in 20th century Mexico) are ultimately likely to fail. For socialists, in fact, as long as the capitalist world system exists, there can be no ‘islands of socialism’. No matter what the wishes or intentions or, no matter how sincere the participants are, eventually the logic and demands of the capitalist state system will prevail.

Howard Moss

Socialism and nature (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below a criticism from a Marxist viewpoint of the so-called “Deep Greens” or “Deep Ecologists” who see nature as a force to which humans must submit.

Our ecological crisis, say the “deep” Greens, stems from a fundamentally unhealthy relationship between society and nature. In this relationship, inherited from attitudes and philosophies developed during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, we regard ourselves as separate from and superior to nature. We think we can constantly change, develop and destroy it for material benefit. Such alienation and exploitation result, Deep Greens say, from human arrogance and greed, which are displayed equally in capitalism and socialism.

They argue that a healthy, holistic, organic relationship with nature would, by contrast, regard humans as part of it, not separate from it—subject, like any other species, to the same ecological laws. We therefore must observe the natural limits on human activity imposed by finite resources. We should respect, celebrate and revere nature in its own right (the “bioethic”)—regardless of its use value to us. This means abandoning materialism and “living lightly on the earth”, while conserving virtually all species from highest to lowest.

Socialists, too, condemn Western attitudes to nature. However we relate them not to human “sin” but to the specific workings of capitalist economics (state or private). We reject the Deep Ecology approach in favour of a dialectical Marxist one.

Dialectical approach

A dialectical view of the society-nature relationship says, first, that there is no separation between them. They are part of a unity. There is not a self-contained “humanity” counterposed to a self-contained “non-human” world. The two are so un-self-contained that you cannot define one without the other (try it!). They are really aspects of one another: what humans do is natural, while nature is socially produced.

Second, as they develop they constantly interact to change each other, in a circular, mutually affecting way. “Non-human” nature, and human perceptions of it, affect and change human society. The latter then changes nature, which, changed, affects society to further change it, and so on.

Underlying human interactions with nature is the process of production, which is a defining characteristic of being human. In production we change nature with forethought, into forms more useful to us than in their “natural” state. Labour incorporates our essential human forces into nature, which therefore gains social quality in the form of use values. Under capitalism, of course, the value of nature is not judged simply by its use, material or aesthetic. It is expressed as exchange value: the value which its products realise when bought and sold in a market place.

Over time, our work on a nature which existed before humans were present—a “first nature”—has produced the material creations of society together with its institutions, ideas and values—a “second nature”. Here, we should recognise something which most Deep Ecologists do not (or if they do, they do not welcome it—see Bill McKibben’s Death of Nature). This is that wherever there are humans it is no longer meaningful to distinguish between first or second nature: everything is the latter. Marx certainly recognised this:

Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to consider as products of nature, are, in their present form, not only products of, say, last year’s labour, but the results of a gradual transformation, continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence and by means of his labour. (Capital Vol. I).

The nature that preceded human history . . . today no longer exists anywhere . . .

(German Ideology).

In these days of concern about ubiquitous global atmospheric modification the truth of these observations becomes clear upon a moment’s reflection. Even “wilderness” areas and wildlife preserves are not “natural”. They have been artificially segregated from normal development processes by human decisions.

Because socialists accept all this with equanimity, Deep Ecologists often accuse them of sharing with capitalism an arrogance towards the rest of nature. And, indeed, Marxism was, like liberalism, born of the Enlightenment view that saw nature as something to be understood in order to use its laws, principles and resources for the material benefit of humans.

But the society-nature dialectic does also acknowledge human dependence on non-human nature as well as vice versa. This is fundamental in the recognition of nature as one of the forces of production: a recognition which should beget, in socialists, sensitivity to the objective existence of ecological laws. It should also beget kindness and humane (i.e. like humanity) treatment of animals. For, if in changing nature we change ourselves, then acts of cruelty to animals create cruel humans.

This all means that as the productive forces of technology develop, what it is to be human and to be “natural” both change. In production

Man sets in motion arms and legs, head and hands—the natural forces of his body—in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. (Marx. Capital).

So through learning how to farm nature’s products we changed ourselves from nomadic hunter/gatherers to sedentary humans. Through learning how to manufacture things we changed ourselves to an industrial society. As our ability to use resources has grown we have developed new needs: housing, energy, telecommunication. As we have changed our power to do things (e.g. via transport and computers) we have changed the things we want and need to do (e.g. travel).

This interaction is not just material. Through changing nature and making things, we have changed ourselves into creatures who appreciate the beauty of what we create: buildings, machines, art, landscapes. Included in all this are our intellectual senses. As we transform nature, we get to know nature’s laws in order to do it more effectively and usefully. As this happens we develop our own intelligence.

Lewis Mumford described aspects of this dialectic, in Technics and Civilisation. He argued that creating machines produced new moral values in Western societies. These elevated practicality, thus favouring a meritocracy which swept aside a feudal caste system. And new cultural values were created. Nature was transformed into a human work of art: its beauty and wonder being augmented by the quantitative and analytic appreciation which a machine culture induces. The human imagination has also been enlarged by scientific, technological fantasising, and by a new machine aesthetic: a second nature of cranes, skyscrapers and microscopes. Cubism was the first style to reflect the beauty of the machine. Photography enhanced our appreciation of pure form in nature, while films brought distant environments near, recreating symbolically a world beyond our immediate reach.

This unfolding society-nature dialectic is an evolutionary process. In it, industrial, technological society is not some unnatural aberration, but a natural stage in social development and a social stage in the development of nature. It follows that changing our nature changes our needs. If most needs are thus socially produced, so too are the resources to fill them. Coal, oil, quartz, then, are not fundamental, basic resources: they did not become resources until we developed the technologies to use them. So we should be less concerned about whether they are going to run out. Rather, we should ask whether we wish to fulfil needs for energy, transport and telecommunication through these particular resources or others. Alternatively, we may wish to change our view of what we need; consequently our view of what constitutes “resources”. The point is that the choice is ours: we are not the helpless playthings of natural or economic forces that Greens sometimes would have us believe.

We should appreciate that this dialectical perspective is profoundly holistic. It contains no dualism of society and nature, but a monism in which both are defined by each other and are constantly co-cvolving:

Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. “Man lives on nature” means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature . . . (Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).

As Fritjof Capra, the Deep Ecology physicist who is not a friend of Marxism, has conceded, this is a deeply ecological view of the society-nature relationship.

Alienation from nature

The socialist conception of nature, then, is not as a mere stock of economic goods (capitalism), nor as a source of intrinsic worth or good (deep ecology), nor as an endangered ecosystem (tragedy of the commons survivalism). It conceives of nature as a social category: though there was an “objective” nature it has been reshaped and reinterpreted by one aspect of itself, human society.

Since alienation means separation from aspects of the self, then alienation from nature means a failure to realise that it is an aspect of the self, i.e. a social creation. This implies that the environmental crisis results from failing to see nature as our own creation and to understand that we can exercise conscious social control over this creation in order to make it a more desirable environment. Instead, we tend to view change towards unpleasant environments as substantially inevitable—a result of economic and technological forces (like the market and mechanisation) that are (we imagine) largely beyond our control. Reformist environmentalists and politicians try to wrestle with such forces, introducing taxes and legislation to soften their environmental impact. But they consider that a truly socialist society—an egalitarian, productive community of society and nature in which both are mutually benign—is quite beyond their reach.

For Deep Greens, “alienation” from nature means something quite different. It means asserting the naturalness of humans by “living in harmony with nature”, i.e. effectively conceding that natural laws (c.g. carrying capacity) have immediate determining power over us. Nature is seen as the source of worth (it “knows best”) and we endanger it unless we follow its rules. This view, says Steven Vogel, by seeing human activity as encroachment on or violation of nature

seems to be curiously guilty of just the sort of dualism it ascribes to the project of dominating nature. Somehow the activity of humans in transforming their environmcnt, alone of all other species, is ‘‘unnatural". ("Marx and Alienation from Nature", Social Theory and Practice, Vol 14, No3).

Vogel might well be thinking of Greenpeace's 1990 recruiting leaflet, which accuses “man” of multiplying “his numbers to plague proportions . . . and now stands like a brutish infant, gloating over this metcroric rise to ascendency".

Deep Ecologists would have us revere nature, preserving it to acknowledge our “one-ness” with it. But, as Murray Bookchin suggests, such worship mystifies nature, actually placing humanity far apart from it. It is a "Supernature with its shamans, priests, priestesses and fanciful deities". Reverent mystification really separates us from nature: we the “impotent and terrified mortal before a jealous and angry god", Gaia as an inhuman force we cannot change but to which we must adjust for our survival.

So Deep Ecology’s view of alienation from nature really rests on a dualistic conception of the human-nature relationship: a conception it is supposed to reject. The socialist dialectic, however, is not dualistic, and therefore, as Vogel says, “the question is not whether what we do ‘accords with nature’, it is whether we like what we have wrought”. And, as Reiner Grundmann says, in communism (socialism) humans will “dominate” nature but only in the sense of being in total control of their relationship with it. This in fact is the precondition for avoiding ecological crises.

David Pepper

Carrying Capacity Carry-ons (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

When members of the World Socialist Movement explain that we aspire to a society of abundance where there is plenty for all, it is not a recommendation for some sort of orgy of consumerism, but simply referring to the fact that it is technically possible to produce more than enough to satisfy everyone’s material needs and that meeting everybody’s needs will indeed likely involve an increase in what people consume. This will certainly be the case for the billions of people who endure horrendous hunger, disease, and squalor. So, yes, socialism will involve raising the personal and individual consumption for much of the world’s population.

Surprisingly, some of our most vociferous critics are not conservatives but liberal progressives who decry such a goal as ecologically unfriendly and unachievable. More often than not, they will cite statistics of our planet’s carrying capacity and tell us we would require two or three Earths to provide for humanity’s needs.

Carrying capacity is a well-known and widely accepted concept. It basically says that sustainability requires balance and goes something like this: Humans need certain resources to survive, food, water and shelter. A sustainable habitat is one in which supply of and demand for these resources are balanced.

Some environmentalists today assert that current consumption limits have already breached or are about to breach the carrying capacity of our planet. This view assumes carrying capacity to be static. Seldom do they question why many carrying capacity calculations often differ. It is because determining a sustainable carrying capacity involves many variables which depend upon various criteria. Estimates vary widely depending on availability of resources and differing lifestyles of people in different parts of the world consuming different amounts of those resources.

The carrying capacity concept is fraught with problems from an ecological point of view. Carrying capacity is an idealised concept not to be taken literally. When applied to ecosystems, and even more, to human society, it falls apart. The fundamental flaw is failure to consider the role of social structure and relationships.

The talk of carrying capacity isn’t particularly helpful and supports the status quo. We are accustomed to the claim of too many people with images of the teeming slums of mega-cities, the bloated bellies of starving babies in the crammed refugee camps, as evidence that the planet cannot support our numbers. To bring the argument closer to home, we hear scare stories that Europe or the United States needs to shut its borders to (non-white) immigration, for having finally got our own birth-rate down to manageable levels, the last thing we now need to do is to open our doors to an invasion of poor (non-whites), who will use up our scarce social services and crowd us out of our neighbourhoods – the racist ‘white replacement’ theory.

The very concept of carrying capacity is a fabrication designed for social control. The possibility of marginalised populations being subject to eugenics and sterilisation to ‘curb’ their procreation isn’t too far-fetched. It is irrational that the culpability for poverty and hunger is attributed to them having big families and not to today’s wealth and resource inequality.

Too many sincere eco-activists buy into the idea that overpopulation is a problem leading to the destruction of the environment. The enemy is people. The poor are being blamed for being poor. The WSM response is that it is capital accumulation which is responsible for most resource use and subsequent waste. It demands increasing levels of consumption and strives toward unending growth and expanding markets. We should ask why advertisers need to spend billions of dollars on marketing if people seek never-satisfied levels of consumption. Under capitalism, there is a very large industry devoted to creating these wants. Capitalism requires consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and drives us to consume up to, and past, our ability to pay for that consumption. In a system of capitalist competition, there is a built-in tendency to stimulate demand to a maximum extent. Corporations need to persuade customers to buy their products or they go out of business. De-growth as a few radical green proponents propose would destroy the capitalist economy.

‘Would the grow-or-die economy called capitalism really cease to plunder the planet even if the world’s population were reduced to a tenth of its present numbers? Would lumber companies, mining concerns, oil cartels, and agribusiness render redwood and Douglas fir forests safer for grizzly bears if — given capitalism’s need to accumulate and produce for their own sake — California’s population were reduced to one million people? The answer to these questions is a categorical no…’ argued Murray Bookchin, who introduced the school of thought called social ecology.

The ideal use of technology is to find ways to make fewer resources stretch far further. Renewable energy is clearly capable of providing large quantities of power for large numbers of people without emitting so much carbon. Adaptive agricultural methods are similarly capable of meeting the dietary needs of many more people than at present. Technology can cope with the growing demands placed on carrying capacity or planetary boundaries, by which we are not referring to greenwashing capitalist techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage.

Technological innovation under capitalism is overwhelmingly introduced with the fundamental goal of enhancing profits and capital accumulation. So it is not suprising that some technological innovations under capitalism come at the cost of the environment. Capitalism lacks any intrinsic mechanism for regulating negative social and ecological side effects, which are deemed ‘externalities.’ The most that can be achieved, and then only under the pressure of social movements, is limited regulation.

Socialists are seeking to create a ‘steady-state economy’ which corresponds to what Marx called ‘simple reproduction’ – a situation where human needs are in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating this continuously from production period to production period. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilised at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods.

The existence of the carrying capacity concept is to maintain the ruling class’s current stranglehold over the lives of the poor – and to extend this stranglehold into the most intimate aspects of their lives such as decisions over family size and childbearing. Figures for carrying capacity are tied to current technology and practices. Any talk of carrying capacity should start by saying ‘If we never, ever do a single thing different than we do today…’

The future of society, and of the environment, relies on whether the global working class can wrest control of society from the parasitic few and commence production for need and use instead of for profit and capital accumulation.

When those in the environmentalist movement offer their ideal future it usually tends towards a pastoral idyll. Marxists have always advocated the greening of the cities ever since the Communist Manifesto declared for the ‘gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.’

ALJO

How I became a socialist (2021)

From the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Up until Brexit politics didn’t really feature much in my life except for a brief time at university. Brexit changed all that, it made me look deeper into current affairs, which made me realise that the system was broken and socialism could be just the thing to fix it.

I was originally from a small mining village in the North East of England. My mum was of Irish extraction, a pious catholic and salt-of-the-earth working-class woman. She married my dad, an émigré from Portuguese India. The house was a 2-up-2-down terrace with an outside toilet that always froze up in winter. I remember the backyard had cobbled stones with an open drain for the sink waste. Dad had knocked it up with old tin cans and it would block up, he never was any good at DIY. Working for the National Coal Board (NCB) Dad received the free allocation of coal. I guess that would be described as a company perk these days but in fact just helped keep wages down for the NCB. The coal truck would dump a ton of coal out the front and mum would wheel-barrow it around into the backyard, where it was stacked. In the 60s when the pit closed and Dad lost his job, he managed to find a storekeeper’s job with Wimpey, the house builder, in Birmingham. So we upped sticks, dad, mum and six kids to join the exodus of many other families from the Durham coalfields. I was 8 years old.

As a child and adolescent I didn’t have any great political awareness, I was more interested in playing football and cricket with my mates. However, I do remember the Aberfan disaster in 1966; principally because of my mum’s reaction to the horrendous deaths of all those innocent children. The political significance of that disaster was lost on me at the time but would come to influence my views of government in later life. Any political awareness I had was probably socialist coming from my mother who described Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as: ‘the best book she had ever read’. My dad had come to the UK in the 1950s and, after a short time as a clerk in the civil service, joined the British army, the first six years in the regulars during the Suez crisis and a further 27 with the part-time territorials. He would often take me along to the territorial pay corps offices on the back of his Vespa 90 scooter, hoping I would join up when I grew up, but I only went along for the ride. I couldn’t stand all the uniforms and tipping your forelock to the officers. I remember dad always complaining that I was always asking ‘why’ when he would assert some Catholic religious dogma; mystified as to why I didn’t share ‘the faith’.

I never shared my parents’ religious views as I found them impossible to reconcile with science and reason. I was always keen on physics at school and left home to study electronics at Salford University in Manchester. Whilst at university I became involved with student politics and joined the Anti-Nazi League, an offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party. I participated in many demos protesting against the National Front. After graduation I dropped out of active politics and concentrated on my engineering career. In the 80s and 90s my involvement in politics was restricted to just casting a vote.

In the early 80s the company I worked for at the time sent me to Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales to install some electronics in the main telephone exchange. When I arrived I was shocked to find the whole town shrouded in the dark shadow of huge coal slag heaps. It was then I realised that this was just four miles from where the tragedy took place at Aberfan some 20 years previously. I can remember being moved to tears visiting the cemetery seeing so many gravestones for the children that died. I was incredulous that governments could have allowed that to happen and not even bothered to restore the landscape after the horrendous mess the industry had made to the environment. The scruffy terraced housing, run-down shops and impoverished locals left an impression that this place had been forgotten by the powers that be.

Thatcher’s assault on the miners, the unions and her profuse use of police violence to break up strikes was shocking to witness. The charade of the Falklands War to bolster her re-election in 1983 just reinforced my opinions of the Conservative Party. The imposition of the Poll Tax in 1989 seemed the last straw, and even I considered joining one of many demonstrations against that unfair tax against the working class. Her fall from grace and replacement by centrist John Major did seem like a change for the better. I didn’t have any great understanding of politics, believing Labour to be a socialist party that cared more about the working class; therefore, deserving of my vote.

When New Labour finally regained power with the Blair/Brown regime in the 90s there was great expectation in the country, which was reflected in the sweeping victory in 1997. However, with the tragedy of the Iraq war, the selling of public utilities, the Private Finance Initiatives, etc it became almost impossible to differentiate between New Labour and the old Tories, so there didn’t seem any point in voting.

Brexit

In 2016 I retired, providing lots of free time and which happened to coincide with Brexit. The propaganda from the Tory Vote Leave side and UKIP had such a ring of xenophobia it was reminiscent of the National Front back in the 1970s. Alarmingly, fuelled by the media this polemic seemed to resonate and rekindled latent nationalistic fervour in a large section of the public. This level of public support seemed perplexing as the arguments didn’t seem to stand up to any scrutiny, particularly from an economic perspective. In the media, many commentators were citing neoliberal economics as one of the main causes of this rise in right-wing populism. Not having any idea of what that actually meant I started reading some of the popular political commentators: Robert Peston’s WTF; Finton OToole on Heroic Failure; and Ian Dunt’s What the Hell Happens Now? I discovered Yanis Varoufakis’s, Adults in the Room, which was a great eye-opener for the workings of the European Union.

Austerity

The first time I saw the 2015 movie The Big Short I found it somewhat confusing with all the references to financial derivatives such as Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). It was only after reading Robert Peston’s How Do We Fix This Mess? that the shocking reality of what happened in 2008 became clear. The financial system was built on debt and required the subsequent bail out of the banks. Labour chancellor Gordon Brown then embarked on his ‘balancing the budget’ austerity programme, which continued under subsequent Tory administrations. This has been the main factor in the effective decline in living standards (real earnings) in recent times, particularly for those on low incomes. Brown had constantly claimed that, with his policy of sticking to tight inflation targets, the age of boom-to-bust economics was over – so much for that prediction.

New Hope

I joined the Labour Party in 2018, attracted by their new manifesto which promised to reverse some of the Tory and previous Labour sell-offs of public utilities. Jeremy Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell promised a more cooperative and democratic economy starting with a limited programme of renationalisation, a National Bank, increased spending on the welfare state, increasing corporation tax, reducing student tuition fees and scrapping Trident. These seemed at the time to be a great reason to sign up to Labour.

However, as a leader Corbyn came over as indecisive and easily undermined by many on the rightwing of the parliamentary party. This indecision, exemplified with his position on Brexit and accusations of antisemitism, established him as weak in the eyes of the public and an easy target for the media.

The election result in December 2019 and the collapse of the Labour vote in Labour’s key heartlands of the North gave the green light for a centrist takeover and the marginalisation of the Left.

I started reading economic theorists such as Stiglitz, Krugman, Piketty and Ha Joon Chang, authors of several texts on the crisis facing neoliberal, free-market capitalism. They all suggest state interventionist methods to reform the system to prevent this recurrent boom-to-bust cycle and rise in inequality. What they don’t seem to want to admit is that these Keynesian reformist methods have been tried many times in the past and as yet haven’t managed to prevent the boom-to-bust cycles which repeat every few years.

A social-democratic Labour Party can’t achieve its expressed aim of liberty, equality and fraternity by reforming capitalism. The capitalist ethic of dog-eat-dog, grow-or-die is diametrically opposed to a truly democratic, mutual, caring, equal and ecological society.

Discovering socialism

My awareness of socialism started when an old friend suggested I read some Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, an American theorist from New York, has written copiously on everything Left and has certainly shaped my ideas since reading his books and essays. The material on YouTube from Richard Wolff, Double Down News and alternative media like Counter Punch and Byline Times have also helped shape my views.

Having previously been a member of the Anti-Nazi League as a student I had some knowledge of the SWP and so thought they might be worth having a look at. I attended a few online discussions to get an idea of where the party stood against my view of socialism. It soon came apparent that they have a strict ideological commitment to a Leninist/Trotskyist interpretation of Marx. I didn’t feel comfortable with this, being aware that this revolutionary approach of overthrowing the state has always led to state capitalism, not socialism.

On Google using the search string ‘list of socialist parties in the UK’, then following the most popular result, Wikipedia; a huge list of parties is revealed. Browsing through the list you come across around 20 allegedly socialist (non-capitalist) organisations. I checked out those and found most were in the same mould as the Trotskyist SWP or supporters of the Labour Party.

But the SPGB welcome page is clearly laid out with a straightforward statement of Party goals. The Party’s declaration of key socialist principles is clear: common ownership, democratic control and free access to goods and services. This contrasts markedly with other so-called socialist parties where a lot of policy is hidden. The website also had a wealth of well-researched articles and literature; all this encouraged me to join one of the online meetings to find out more.

After attending a few meetings and reading the literature I decided to join. What particularly struck me was the requirement to complete a questionnaire. A little bit intimidating at first compared to entering your address and credit card details to join the Labour Party. However, as an option you can just answer the questions over a call should you so wish.

Having been in the Party for just a few months, I was quite surprised when some of the experienced hands asked me to write about myself and what motivated me to join the Party. However, support and helpful advice was at hand. Just a word too on the informal online group meetings through Discord which are run twice a week. They give you a chance to learn new stuff and discuss current issues with like-minded people in a friendly environment.

The party is democratically organised in small groups and branches rather than being focused on direct action, public demonstrations and confrontation with the state, and I would heartily recommend anyone with like-minded views to join.

Nick Sampays

Hitler was a vegetarian (1996)

Book Review from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Janet Biehl & Peter Staudenmaier
 (AK Press, Edinburgh & San Francisco 1995, 
£5.00)

Since the 1970s the Green movement world-wide has been dominated by anarchist and left-wing tendencies; but this has obscured the movement's more diverse ancestry. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s there were right-wing expressions of concern for the environment, combining a mystical conception of nature with the myths of race and nation. The epitome of this outlook came with the Nazis, whose whole political ideology can be described as "ecofascist". (It is to be regretted, however, since this term blurs some important distinctions between Italian fascism and German “National Socialism".) Hitler was a vegetarian, opposed to vivisection and loved his dogs. He was an enthusiast for renewable energy sources. Himmler saw to it that the SS had it own supply of organic farm produce. The Nazis introduced the first nature reserve in Europe and began a programme of extensive reforestation.

That was then and this is now. But the resurgence of Nazism shows the futility of supposing that it (and environmental problems) could be reformed out of existence within capitalism. The darling of the left-wing of the German Greens in the 1970s and 1980s used to be Rudolf Bahro; but not any more, for he has revealed himself to be an ecofascist, calling for a new “Green Adolf'. What is important here is that Bahro claims that he is only making explicit what was always in his Green political thought. For instance, he is quoted in the early 1980s, as a leading member of the German Greens, stating that "if we want to build an ecological decentralised Germany, we have to first free German territory” (From Red to Green). Bahro is currently Professor of Social Ecology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Social Ecology is a concept usually associated with the American anarchist Murray Bookchin, and in November 1990 he was invited by Bahro to a seminar on the question: "Is the alternative to ecological destruction freedom from domination or an 'ecological' dictatorship?" Bahro argued that, because there is a "dark side” to human nature, we need a Nazi-style dictatorship to save the environment and ourselves. Bookchin replied that the “dark side" is to be found in the sort of society we live in; whereupon Bahro told him that he would not be invited again.

Any right thinking person (pun intended) should of course be concerned with what's happening to our environment. It really is a scandal. What the existence of ecofascism, shows, however, is that uninformed concern and “doing something” can have disastrous consequences. For this reason, anyone who has read of the Malthusians with the Green movement blaming overpopulation will have been uneasy about where their line of argument is taking them. We need to understand the social and economic causes of environmental degradation before we can take effective political action. This does not have to be difficult, but it can confound a professor.

Lew Higgins

The Fall of Rojava (2019)

From the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Amid the horror of the Syrian civil war it had seemed that there was one shining beacon of hope. In the north of Syria Kurdish militants, inspired by the political thought of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, filled the vacuum when the Assadist forces abandoned most of the Kurdish regions, and were combatting and defeating the seemingly unstoppable Islamic State.

The nature of the new regime being created under the protection of the YPG/PYG was greatly attractive to leftists and anarchists. Ocalan in prison had been influenced by the writing of Murray Bookchin and other anarchist-inspired writers and this had shifted the PKK and its allied Kurdish parties away from a rigid and military Stalinism towards a polity which stressed mutualism and participatory democracy.

The vision of this communitarian experiment becoming flesh in the villages and towns of Syrian Kurdistan in the teeth of Islamist obscurantism and Turkish militarist assault galvanised solidarity. Recruits came from all over the world to embattled ‘Rojava’ (the Kurdish word for ‘west’ as the western part of the wider region, spanning several countries, inhabited by Kurds). One volunteer unit renamed themselves the Bob Crow Brigade after the British rail union leader.

At the time voices urging a certain caution tended to be drowned out or were silenced by the sheer enormity and barbarity of the opposition that the Kurdish forces faced. For socialists, as long as the capitalist world system exists, there can be no ‘islands of socialism’. No matter what the wishes or intentions or, no matter how sincere the participants are, eventually the logic and demands of the capitalist state system will prevail.

Rojava, trapped within a spider web of competing Great Powers and local powers, either faced extinction or acceded to this logic and took its own place as a junior partner to one or other of the great military powers. Becoming the armed fist of the US effort against ISIS must have seemed a sure bet; arms, advisors and money poured in, at a time when the democratic Syrian opposition was being starved of support and the rebel cities were being pounded into rubble by Assad and his Russian allies. 

The abandonment of Rojava to Turkey by Trump’s Twitter diplomacy led to an almost ritualised ‘changing of the guard’, as Russian troops took over on patrol where US special forces had been just days before. But this masked a more brutal exchange as Kurdish forces abandoned Syrian villages to Assadist forces and the brutal Mukhabarat secret police.

With America’s betrayal and Turkey threatening its very existence, it is unsurprising that the nascent state of Rojava would be drawn to the siren call of Putin’s Russia. The alliance with Assad may shock a few of their Western cheerleaders, but nationalism, however it justifies itself ideologically, will always be first and foremost a movement for the establishment and defence of a nation within a capitalist world system; Rojava’s principles would always take a second place to this.

D.W.

Anti-Bolshevik (2018)

Book Review from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Kronstadt Uprising’. By Ida Mett. (Theory and Practice, www.theoryandpractice.org.uk)

In March 1921, after the civil war in Russia had ended with the victory of the Bolshevik government, strikes broke out in Petrograd and other cities demanding an improvement in living conditions, basically the ‘Bread’ part of the ‘Peace, Land and Bread’ slogan that the Bolsheviks had used to win enough popular support to seize power. In Kronstadt, an island fortress and naval base commanding access to Petrograd, the armed sailors went further. They deposed the Bolshevik officials, locked some of them up, and demanded free and secret elections to the soviets (councils), in effect a genuine ‘soviet government’ rather than the one-party rule of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks responded by sending in the Red Army to suppress this challenge to their rule. At least 4000 insurgents were killed or executed.

This is a reprint of Ida Mett’s classic pamphlet on what happened. Written in French in 1938, it set out to refute the Bolshevik view that it had been a counter-revolutionary plot hatched by the French secret service, led by Tsarist generals, etc. She succeeded well enough in making her case. As a native Russian-speaker (she was an anarchist exile from Russia living in France), she had access to the proclamations and declarations of the Kronstadt ‘provisional revolutionary committee’ and was able to show that they were demanding the ‘soviet’ rule that was supposed to have been established in November 1917 following the overthrow of Kerensky, but which had in fact resulted in the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. One of the declarations she quoted denounced the ‘state capitalism’ of the Bolshevik party. All of their declarations are now available in English translation on the Marxist Internet Archive website.

Her article was published in 1948 (not in 1938 as stated in this and previous English editions) under the title ‘The Kronstadt Commune: the bloody twilight of the soviets’. Mett explained in a preface to a reprint of the French edition in 1970 that the syndicalist publication, Révolution prolétarienne, to which she had submitted it turned it down on the grounds that it was too hostile to Trotsky who was then being hounded by the Stalin regime that ended in his assassination in 1940. (It wasn’t as hostile as the Kronstadters’ declarations, though, which denounced him as ‘Field Marshal Lord Trotsky’).

Lenin and Trotsky do come out badly as what happened at Kronstadt showed that Bolshevik Russia was already in their day a brutal one-party dictatorship whose leaders would stop at nothing to hold on to power, i.e. well before Stalin was in control. To this day the very mention of ‘Kronstadt’ makes Trotskyists squirm.

This reprint includes the preface to the original edition published by the old Solidarity Group in 1967 and one by Murray Bookchin to a reprint in 1971. It is not the complete pamphlet as the opening chapter on the revolutionary role of Russian sailors in 1905-6 and in 1917 was not translated and has not yet been.

Adam Buick

Authoritarian (1997)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where There’s Brass There’s Muck: Ecology and Anarchism. Anarchist Communist Federation pamphlet.

An interesting short survey of anarchist thinking on ecology. It reveals that Murray Bookchin, founder of the Social Ecology movement, has become even more reformist in adopting "Confederal Municipalism":". . .  a belief in taking state power at a local level and using that power to transform society from the bottom up."

The ACF itself advocates using Direct Action to bring about a classless society in harmony with the environment. The anti-roads movement, they say, "has a fine record of sabotage". They admit that their road to social transformation will lead to violence, as indeed it must. It is also a dead end. Apart from the people involved, they have no way of establishing that they represent the majority view, nor is there any way of democratically assessing their argument. This is the paradox of anarchism: the method for bringing about the society they want is inherently authoritarian.

Lew Higgins

Editorial: Socialism and Ecology (1986)

Editorial from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Only when the Earth has become the common heritage of all will humanity be able to face up to the ecological problems posed by its existence as the only animal species that changes nature to satisfy its needs.

All other animal species merely take (the rest of) nature as they find it, feeding off the plants and/or other animals that nature spontaneously supplies and are in fact, both during and after their lives, part of what nature supplies for other animal species. All forms of plant and animal life are linked together in a network of relationships known as an "ecosystem". This system is normally self-sustaining and self-correcting in the sense that if an imbalance develops it is spontaneously eliminated, either by the old balance being restored or by the establishment of a new balance. This latter course is how change, including evolution, occurs.

The animal species known as homo sapiens is also part of nature and must have evolved out of a related species that at one time also merely lived off the spontaneous fruits of nature, gathering plants and insects. Pre-humans came to be distinguished from the other animals — became "human" — when they began to change nature to satisfy their needs, as for instance by systematically using sticks and stones as weapons to capture and kill other animals which they would otherwise have been unable to do. This introduced a new. potentially disturbing element into the ecosystem that had not existed before. Previous disturbing elements which upset the balance had resulted from changes in the non-living part of nature, from climatic and geological changes. Now the activities of a living species also introduced changes. This human activity — changing nature to supply their needs — is what we call today production and is an activity engaged in by no other animal species.

Production inevitably upsets the previously existing balance of nature. This is not necessarily a problem in itself since, as we saw, a new, different balance will sooner or later come into being and there is no reason to suppose that one particular balance is any better than any other. This new balance, like the old one, will tend to be self-sustaining as long as new changes — such as a change in productive methods — do not happen. Humans are in fact quite capable, despite the production (changing nature to satisfy their needs) they engage in, of being a fully integrated part of a self-sustaining ecology system. This was the case of many early human societies which lived in full harmony with the rest of nature and there is no inherent reason arising from the nature of production why this should not be possible today on the basis of modern technology and productive methods.

It is not production itself that is incompatible with a sustainable balance of nature - though all the great productive innovations, from hunting, fire and metal-working to agriculture and the domestication of animals, will have initially been upsetting factors — but the application of certain productive methods as if there was no balance of nature to be upset or which introduce changes too quickly to allow a new sustainable balance to develop. This, basically, is what capitalism's use. or rather abuse, of industrial methods of production has done over the past two hundred or so years and is still doing today. As a system of society rent by property and class divisions in which economic units compete to achieve relatively short-term economic gains (monetary profits), it is inherently incapable of taking into consideration the longer-term and overall factors which ecological science teaches are of vital importance.

This is why it is only when the original communist condition of humanity is restored, but at a global level with modern technological knowledge, that the ecological problems involved in industrial production and in supplying the needs of over 4.000 million people will be properly faced. Of course capitalism has ultimately to face up to the ecological problems its pursuit of profit creates, but only after the event, after the damage has been done. Capitalism in fact goes on from energy crisis to energy crisis adopting new sources when the old ones have become exhausted or too expensive; it exploits one source after another according to their relative cheapness without any concern for the future.

Humans occupy a unique place in nature. Not only are we the only species that engages in production and the only species whose activities are a potentially disrupting element, but we are also the only conscious part of nature, the only part which can, at least in principle, choose its patterns of behaviour. We are what the ecologist philosopher Murray Bookchin has described as the "self-conscious spokesmen of nature" and as such we have a special responsibility to the rest of nature in the sense of our being the only animal species capable of taking steps to ensure that a sustainable ecological balance is maintained.

Bookchin has attempted to derive from this an "ethic" in the sense of a code of behaviour governing what human societies should and should not do: we should abstain from using productive methods which are incompatible with a sustainable balance of nature or, expressed positively, we should only employ productive methods which are compatible with such a balance. Of course this is not a question of choosing particular productive methods in isolation from the structure of society but of the objectives and so of the structure of society itself.

Clearly, a class-divided society geared to production for profit is incompatible with humans fulfilling their responsibility to the rest of nature since, being governed by economic laws operating as external constraints on human productive activities, such a society allows no free choice as to what productive methods to adopt. In fact it is obliged to adopt those methods which serve profit rather than ecological considerations — with the consequences in terms of pollution, plunder of non-renewable resources and waste that are well-known.

We can only meet our responsibility as "the self-conscious spokesmen of nature" in, and by establishing, a society without property rights and the profit motive, a society in which humans would be free to choose which productive methods to adopt because it would be a society freed from the uncontrollable economic laws of profit-seeking and capital accumulation. Only a world socialist society, based on the common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources, is compatible with human responsibility to the rest of nature.

Anarchist history (1998)

Book Review from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Spanish Anarchists. The Heroic years 1868-1936 by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. £13.95.

This is a reprint, with a new introduction, of a history of anarchism Spain until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 that first appeared in 1976.

Spain was the one European country where the organised working-class movement embraced anarchism rather than Social Democracy as its ideology. Bookchin traces the historical reasons for this. One was that everywhere the workers' movement emerged out of the leftwing of the bourgeois radical movement and in Spain the bourgeois radicals were Federalists, i.e. wanted a constitution for Spain similar to that in Switzerland where power would rest with cantons rather than with a central state.

Anarchist ideas were introduced into Spain at the end of the 1860s by the followers of Bakunin within the First International. Contrary to the myth cultivated by anarchists, the dispute between Marx and Bakunin within this organisation was not between an authoritarian Marx and a libertarian Bakunin but between a Marx who saw the workers' movement as an open democratic movement and Bakunin who advocated that it should be directed behind the scenes by a secret society of dedicated revolutionaries. Bakunin was booted out of the First International not for being a libertarian but for being a proto-Leninist vanguardist. Even Bookchin, who writes as an anarchist, is compelled by the facts to concede:

"Bakunin's 'International Brotherhood' has been dealt with derision as a hierarchical, elitist organization which stands in blatant contradiction to his libertarian principles. This contradiction in my view is very real. Bakunin had intended the 'International Brotherhood' to be a secret organization of Anarchist militants, led in tightly disciplined fashion by a highly centralized group of initiates—indeed, by what amounted to a revolutionary general staff" (p. 41).

This idea that revolutionaries should organise as a masonic-type secret society was another bourgeois-revolutionary tradition inherited by Spanish anarchists which lasted right down to the 1930s when the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) infiltrated and came to control the syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labour) which had been set up by militant trade unionists in 1911.

The CNT was not an anarchist body but anarchists had an input in its organisation and ideology. As a result the CNT adopted as its long-term aim "libertarian communism" rather than state-capitalist nationalisation as elsewhere in Europe. This did allow it to avoid the mistakes made by trade unionists elsewhere of supporting and even sponsoring parties that stood for state capitalism, but it was only a long-term aim and in practice the CNT acted as a militant trade union seeking immediate improvements for workers within capitalism.

The FAI—which was essentially a secret anarchist terrorist organisation set up in 1927 under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship—regarded this as reformism and sought to use the CNT in its plans for insurrection. This met resistance from within the ranks of the CNT by trade unionists who, according to Bookchin's account, seem to have had a better grasp of reality:

"Not only did the CNT lack the support of a majority of the Spanish people, they argued, but it lacked the support of the majority of the Spanish working class. Anarchosyndicalists were a minority within a minority. Even within the CNT membership, a large number of workers and peasants shared only a nominal allegiance to libertarian ideals. They were members of the CNT because the union was strong in their localities and work places. If these people, and the Spaniards generally, were not educated in Anarchist principles, warned the moderates, the revolution would simply degenerate into an abhorrent dictatorship of ideologues" (p. 193).

The FAI brushed such objections aside and in 1931 succeeded in capturing the CNT and, applying classic Bakuninist tactics, in Bookchin's words, "dragged" the CNT into a number of "insurrectionary adventures". The results were disastrous. Not only were hundreds of workers' lives sacrificed but the CNT split. In fact, reading Bookchin's account the thought springs to mind that the disaster that was to befall the Spanish working class might have had a chance of being avoided if the anarchist vanguardists of the FAI had left the CNT alone.

Even Bookchin questions whether an "anarchist revolution" could have been sustained in Spain in 1936. Certainly, the workers showed that they could take over and run the factories and the peasants that they could take over and cultivate the land without capitalists and landlords but, Bookchin asks, could it have lasted:

"But what would happen when everyday life began to feel the pinch of economic want of the material problems imposed not only by the Civil War but by Spain's narrow technological base? 'Communism will be the result of abundance,' Santillan had warned in the spring of 1936, 'without which it will remain only an ideal'. Could the ardor of the CNT and FAI surmount the obstacles of scarcity and material want in the basic necessities of life, obstacles that had limited the forward thrust of earlier revolutions?" (p. 284).

Bookchin only hints at a negative answer, but in the event the matter was not tested. The "anarchist revolution" was first stopped by the Republican government with the Stalinist "Communists" in the lead and then savagely crushed by the Franco fascists.

Adam Buick

No wonder they hate him! (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Which Way for the Ecology Movement? by Murray Bookchin, AK Press, £4.50.

According to Bookchin, the ecology movement has a choice: either it can realise that capitalism is the cause of ecological damage and work to end capitalism or it can retreat into "ecomysticism" blaming science, technology and reason as such, calling on individuals to adjust their personal lifestyles so as to better attune with “nature”.

Bookchin takes up basically the same position as us that, for humanity to produce and consume in ecologically acceptable ways, it must first replace capitalism and its drive to make profits with a system of common ownership, democratic participation and production for use, which can make full use of modern science and technology but for ecological and human ends instead of profit.

Bookchin is a good polemicist and it is a pleasure to read him berate the “deep" ecologists (who say a fly is of equal worth with a human), the ecofeminists (who extol “feminine intuition” as opposed to "male” rationality), the Earth Firsters (or People Seconders), the population bombers (like Paul Ehrlich), the Gaia worshippers and the rest of the New Age irrationalists. No wonder they hate him! But they deserve it, since what they advocate is not just a diversion from the real solution but, in attacking technology, science and reason, is also a rejection of the body of knowledge and mode of thought that, once capitalism has been ended, would have to be used to clear up die ecological destruction wrought by capitalism. 

Adam Buick

Spanish Anarchism & Libertarianism (1997)

Book Review from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936. Essays by Murray Bookchin (AK Press £4.50.)

This pamphlet consists of two essays: "An Overview of the Spanish Libertarian Movement" and "After Fifty Years: the Spanish Civil War".

Bookchin’s view of the Spanish Civil War is made clear from the outset. In the preface he describes it as "the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries". Compared with similar struggles in Italy, Germany and Austria, he writes that the Spanish working class and peasantry put up a massive, brave and organised resistance to the forces of fascism in the guise of Franco's military uprising. Bookchin views the Spanish Civil War not as a struggle to defend a discredited and treacherous republican regime but to create a social revolution in Spanish society. Much literature on Spain has tended to play down the more radical forms the conflict took, with the so-called Communist movement at the forefront of this camouflage.

As its title would suggest, much of the first essay deals with the development of the Spanish Anarchist movement, its structure, attempts at democratic control and how these varied from the countryside to the more urban areas.

The remainder discusses the problems of building a mass libertarian movement in the circumstances which have changed since the time of the Spanish Civil War. Bookchin highlights those changes and the limitation of unions, syndicalist as well as reformist. He outlines the capacity of the capitalist system to condition the working class through institutions like the family, school, religious organisations, the factory and trade unions. The system teaches workers obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic and authoritarian discipline and these also have their effects on organisations formed to try to emancipate workers from capitalism. Employment, (although Bookchin uses the term "factory"), and the class organisations that spring from it, are seen as most important in instilling docility in workers, manifesting itself in a commitment to hierarchical organisations and authoritarian leaders with the result that most militant groups and situations can be bought off to serve the interests of a reformist labour bureaucracy.

Bookchin does not provide clear-cut answers to these problems, nor would we expect him to do so, but while socialists may not always agree with the attempts to formulate a solution he does make, this sort of discussion should be of concern to all of us attempting to build libertarian forms of organisation that can begin to challenge capitalism.

In the second essay Bookchin argues against the view of the so-called Communists that Spain was too economically backward for a socialist/anarchist revolution. He sees this as just an excuse for the reactionary role they played in destroying the more radical elements in the civil war in the interest of the dictatorship of the state capitalist Soviet Union, adding that if Spain in 1936-9 was too economically backward then so was Russia in 1917. The more radical initiatives which the "Communists" helped to destroy is well documented as is the reactionary role of popular frontism. What is not considered is the implications of their isolation in one country. The causes of the Civil War are considered by Bookchin to be cultural as well as economic.

The second essay also gives an interesting account of the depth of what has been called the Spanish revolution. In the Catalonia region it is estimated that three-quarters of the economy was under "workers’ control" and in what are described as "the more thoroughly anarchist areas” especially among the agrarian collectives, money was eliminated and the material means of life were allocated according to need rather than work, but it is clear that the circumstances varied from region to region.

Whilst sometimes Bookchin uses the terms socialist and Marxist in, to say the least, irritating ways this pamphlet is still well worth reading. It is certainly an encouragement to find out more about the “Spanish revolution" if your knowledge of it is limited. Some may feel Bookchin overstates the significance of the Spanish Civil War or the depth of support for the more radical movements within it What cannot be denied, even sixty years on, is that it was an event of enough significance to analyse and learn from.

Ray Carr

Beyond anarchism (2015)

Book Review from the December 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Next Revolution', by Murray Bookchin. Verso. 2015.

Murray Bookchin was among the strongest of figures to come out of twentieth century American radicalism. As well as being known for the establishment of ‘social ecology’ (a criticism of social problems coupled with ecological concerns) he also developed a political programme known as ‘libertarian municipalism’ which he saw as a method for getting from our present society of minority control and environmental destruction to a new rational and ecological society of mass democratic control.

The basic building block of libertarian municipalism is the community or neighbourhood assembly, face to face meetings where citizens meet to discuss and vote on the issues of the day. These assemblies elect mandated and recallable delegates who then link with other assemblies forming a confederated council, a 'community of communities'. The difference between this form of delegate democracy and our current form of representative democracy is that in a representative democracy power is given wholesale to the representative who then is free to act on their own initiative; in a delegate democracy the initiative is set by the electing body and the delegate can be recalled at any time should the electing body feel that their mandate is not being met, thus power remains at the base.

Bookchin saw the setting up of such assemblies as a task that could be initiated now, even if the only functions they could have initially were moral ones. He also saw that, as a means for extending the democratic legitimacy and for the further confederalisation of these bodies, it would be necessary to elect town and city councillors sympathetic to the cause. This position eventually led to Bookchin making a break with his previously held anarchism. Bookchin criticised the anarchists for holding a false theory on the nature of power. Instead of seeking to abolish power, which Bookchin thought was impossible as it is always a feature of political and social life, the purpose of an emancipatory politics should be to ensure that power is in the hands of masses and is dispersed equally among them. Bookchin used the classic example of Barcelona in July 1936 to illustrate this point. The defeat of the military coup meant that the CNT (an anarcho-syndicalist union) and its armed militias were now the only real power in the city. Despite this, and because of their anarchist ideology, the CNT refused to enter the government and to exercise the political power that they already had, thus leaving the door open for the eventual Stalinist take over. By refusing to take power, Bookchin argues, the anarchists did not destroy power but merely transferred it into the hands of their enemies. While the CNT did hold power in the factories and workplaces a vast swathe of real governmental power, from the administration of military affairs and the overseeing of justice, was left in control of the liberals and Stalinists who would later use this power to reverse the gains of the July victory.

Through the gradual building up of the power and spread of assemblies Bookchin hoped that libertarian municipalism could lead to a situation of dual power where the authority of the assemblies would eventually challenge that of the state. This brings us to our criticisms. Bookchin held that there was a distinction between the statecraft of professional politicians as the administrators of the governmental machine and politics proper as practised by free citizens engaging in the direct democracy of their self-managed communities. Whilst this distinction may be fair to a certain extent the practical conclusions that Bookchin drew from this do not seem to be very cogent. Bookchin thought that, in order to avoid becoming agents of the state, councillors standing in favour of libertarian municipalism should only stand for posts in local elections. If the majority of the population were in favour of libertarian municipalism then they would be able to use their votes to elect delegates at all levels of the state and so realise their programme that way. Failure to exercise political power at all levels would have the result of handing power to their opponents. Despite his criticism Bookchin repeats the mistake of the Spanish anarchists.

Moreover, Bookchin thought that councillors favourable to libertarian municipalism should stand on a typical reformist programme with its 'minimal' and 'maximum' demands. We would hold that it is this, rather than the supposed principle of 'power corrupts', that led to the 'revolutionary' parties of the past degenerating into nothing more than mere administrators of the existing order. Once elected on a platform of short term reforms it is these that come to take precedence over any 'maximum' long term revolutionary goals which fade away permanently into the background. In order to stay in power the party has to appease those who voted it in on a reformist platform.

In recent years the ideas of Bookchin have found an unlikely testing ground in Rojova, a semi-autonomous Kurdish area in north eastern Syria. Abdullah Öcalan, a former Leninist and imprisoned leader of the PKK, came across the works of Bookchin whilst in prison and saw their potential for organising the Kurds, a people without a state.

As an introduction to Bookchin's thought this book is not a bad place to start but as this is a collection of articles republished from various sources there is a certain amount of repetition of ideas and themes. Despite some significant differences there is much that the Socialist Party would agree with and find of use.

DJP