{"id":8902,"date":"2016-07-12T22:32:24","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T03:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8902"},"modified":"2016-07-12T22:32:24","modified_gmt":"2016-07-13T03:32:24","slug":"assessing-murray-bookchins-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/07\/12\/assessing-murray-bookchins-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessing Murray Bookchin’s legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Damian White has posted an excellent review<\/a>\u00a0of Janet Biehl’s book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin <\/em>at the Jacobin<\/em> blog. Bookchin’s legacy has undergone something of a revival of late\u00a0thanks to the\u00a0efforts of Kurdish eco-socialist<\/a> communitarians in Rojava<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As he did in his 2008 book Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal<\/em><\/a>\u00a0— which remains<\/a> perhaps the most useful critical\u00a0assessment\u00a0of\u00a0Bookchin’s writings\u00a0— White frames\u00a0that legacy within the\u00a0broader context of environmental and social justice movements and theories. But here he updates it with reference to today’s\u00a0pressing issues\u00a0of climate emergency and economic injustice.<\/p>\n

White writes:<\/p>\n

“Bookchin deserves enormous credit for being one of the first radical voices to insist that the Left must mobilize around climate change. Today we must cut greenhouse emissions by up to 90 percent in perhaps fifty years while ensuring that upwards of 9 billion people have access to a good life.<\/p>\n

“The task is gargantuan<\/a>. The standard liberal technocratic response to this challenge has focused all attention on the importance of decarbonizing our energy supplies. But this isn\u2019t enough.”<\/p>\n

He\u00a0goes on to articulate what’s needed: building “a new, continental-scale, post-carbon energy infrastructure,” “more resilient and robust” communities, “just and sustainable industrial ecologies,” “demilitarization, the democratization of value creation and economic power,” and so on.<\/p>\n

“The counterculture vision of a decentralized ecological society \u201cneatly nested\u201d into place [of Bookchin’s influential middle-period writings] will have to give way to a more dynamic vision of postcapitalist democratic urbanscapes and ruralscapes that are constantly adjusting to, and making and remaking, their surrounding social ecologies.<\/p>\n

“[…] [T]his will have to involve enrolling many partners at many spatial scales of politics to facilitate social, technological, and ecological transformations. Most critically, the state \u2014 where it exists and where it is still relatively open to influence by progressive forces \u2014 is going to play a central role<\/a> in this transition.<\/p>\n

“The sensibility will have to be experimental and iterative rather than institutionally dogmatic and inflexible. The human scales of a democratic and ecological urban future are going to be multiple and varied.<\/p>\n

“Anything less fails to understand the amount of trouble we are in.”<\/p>\n

Bookchin’s legacy is writ through much of this, though the optimistic emphasis of many of his\u00a0writings has been somewhat lost. White writes:<\/div>\n

“Public art; collective experiments in eco-design and technology; attempts to cultivate participatory systems of social, urban, cultural and community innovation; an ecological politics of pleasure can all be scoffed at by purists.<\/p>\n

“But it is striking how removed the apocalyptic politics of the contemporary ecological left is from this project. The idea that we might not aspire to simply shrink<\/em> our ecological footprint but create a better<\/em> ecological footprint seems to have gone entirely missing.” [emphasis added]<\/p>\n

The very idea of creating\u00a0a “better ecological footprint” implies a critique of the focus on numbers that has become so prominent among environmentalists — from 350 carbon parts per million to 2 degrees temperature rise to all the cap-and-trade and carbon\u00a0credit schemes\u00a0being developed around the world.<\/p>\n

Not that we can do without numbers. But we need more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damian White has posted an excellent review\u00a0of Janet Biehl’s book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin at the Jacobin blog. Bookchin’s legacy has undergone something of a revival of late\u00a0thanks to the\u00a0efforts of Kurdish eco-socialist communitarians in Rojava.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[196,691215],"tags":[17866,350284,123577,350283,350204,350202,123580,350203],"class_list":["post-8902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecoculture","category-politics_postpolitics","tag-bookchin","tag-damian-white","tag-eco-anarchism","tag-janet-biehl","tag-kurdish-revolutionary-movement","tag-libertarian-municipalism","tag-murray-bookchin","tag-rojava"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2jA","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/02\/16\/the-ecology-of-syriankurdish-freedom\/","url_meta":{"origin":8902,"position":0},"title":"The ecology of Syrian\/Kurdish freedom","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Eco-theorists may recognize the title of this post as a variation on the title of Murray Bookchin's audacious and\u00a0deeply\u00a0influential (for many, including myself) 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (pdf here). What's little known to anyone following recent news about the war in Syria\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/_38eVyMfag0\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8482,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/11\/29\/the-rojava-experiment\/","url_meta":{"origin":8902,"position":1},"title":"The Rojava Experiment","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 29, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Wes Enzinna's New York Times Magazine article on \"The Rojava Experiment\" finally gives mainstream recognition to what has been happening among the Kurds of northern Syria. As he writes, \"In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan, Rojavan women had been championed as leaders,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9316,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/06\/23\/bioregionalism-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":8902,"position":2},"title":"Bioregionalism primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 23, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"When I began my involvement with environmental politics in the 1980s, the main currents of radical or critical thought were represented by deep ecologists\u00a0(or biocentrists), social ecologists (gathered around Murray Bookchin and his Institute for Social Ecology), and ecofeminists, and they seemed more at odds with each other than united.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10034,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2018\/12\/19\/rojava-at-risk\/","url_meta":{"origin":8902,"position":3},"title":"Rojava at risk","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 19, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I've posted here before about the Kurdish experiment in social-ecological-feminist radical democracy that's been unfolding in the unlikeliest circumstances in the northern Syrian region of Rojava. Donald Trump's sudden announcement of a complete U.S. military withdrawal from Syria now leaves that experiment extremely vulnerable... which puts anti-war* activists into an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1079,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/05\/30\/between-continental-environmental-philosophy\/","url_meta":{"origin":8902,"position":4},"title":"between continental & environmental philosophy","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Responding to a post on this blog, Kvond, a little while ago, raised the question of the relationship between Arne Naess, originator of \u201cdeep ecology,\u201d and Spinoza \u2013 which made me think of the interesting if sporadic\/uneven\/episodic relationships between the main traditions of continental philosophy and environmental thought. A glance\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1113,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/01\/teddy-goldsmith-left-right-ecopolitics\/","url_meta":{"origin":8902,"position":5},"title":"Teddy Goldsmith & left-right ecopolitics","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 1, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The obits have been coming in, albeit a little slowly, for Edward \"Teddy\" Goldsmith, founder of the fearless and influential British journal The Ecologist, co-founding member of Britain's Green and Ecology parties, and publisher of the instrumental 1972 manifesto A Blueprint for Survival. Goldsmith, who died in his sleep on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8902"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8907,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8902\/revisions\/8907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}