A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #46 - Twenty Years After Bookchin - For a Living Legacy of Bookchin: From Social Ecology to Cultures of Resistance - Federico Venturini (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Twenty years after the death of American thinker Murray Bookchin 
(1921-2006), the question is not how accurately he predicted the future. 
More useful is to ask why, after decades of environmental policies, 
technological innovations, and growing ecological awareness, the crisis 
continues to worsen. And above all, whether the tools of social ecology 
can still help us not only understand it, but transform the social 
conditions that produce it.
Personally, I encountered social ecology in my late teens, shortly after 
the 2001 Genoa G8 summit , in an anarchist social center in Udine , 
amidst social ecology , punk concerts , and daily collective practices . 
Since then, it has become a guiding principle for my activism and 
research, leading to my participation in the founding of the 
Transnational Institute of Social Ecology - TRISE (trise.net).

Revisiting Bookchin today does not mean turning him into an authority to 
be followed, but rather putting to the test one of his central insights: 
the ecological crisis cannot be separated from the society that produced it.

A social and ecological crisis

Climate change is only one component of a broader transformation of 
Earth systems. The planetary boundaries framework (1)    identifies nine 
processes critical to the stability of the Earth system: climate , 
biosphere integrity, land use, freshwater, nitrogen and phosphorus 
cycles, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone, atmospheric aerosols, 
and emerging entities. The concept does not imply automatic collapse 
beyond a threshold, but an increase in risk when certain boundaries are 
crossed.

The point is not simply how many boundaries have been crossed. These 
processes interact and reinforce each other. We are therefore not faced 
with separate problems, each solvable with a specific technology, but 
with a comprehensive destabilization of the ecological conditions of 
social life.

However, biophysical diagnosis alone does not answer the political 
questions: who is producing these pressures, through what economic 
relationships, to whose benefit, and who suffers the consequences? Not 
all people, social classes, businesses , or regions contribute equally 
to the crisis. Speaking generically of "humanity" risks masking profound 
inequalities of responsibility and vulnerability.

This is where social ecology makes a decisive shift. Capitalism, through 
extraction, commodification, accumulation, and continuous growth, 
intensifies the pressure on natural systems. But for Bookchin, the 
problem is deeper: the idea of dominating nature develops alongside the 
ways in which humans have learned to dominate other humans . Capitalism 
is today the main amplifier of ecological devastation, but hierarchy and 
domination have a longer history. ( 2)

Cities, urbanization and ecology

This relationship becomes particularly visible in cities. For social 
ecology, the city is not only a set of buildings and infrastructures, 
but also a space of proximity, conflict and construction of political 
life (3) . Bookchin distinguishes the city from urbanization: the former 
can generate civitas and the possibility of self-government; the latter 
tends instead to expand as an amorphous built environment, subordinating 
space to the needs of economic circulation.

Capitalist urbanization transforms territory into a commodity. Land, 
housing, and public spaces are valued by their ability to generate 
income . The city consumes land and resources, separates functions and 
populations, and concentrates enormous flows of materials and energy.

This highlights the limits of environmentalism when it's reduced to 
impact management. Urban greenery, energy efficiency, recycling, and 
renewables are necessary, but they don't in themselves constitute an 
ecological transformation. A city can become more efficient by 
continuing to expel the working classes or by maintaining a landscape 
built around private mobility.

Social ecology therefore proposes a more radical shift: from 
environmentalism as impact management to ecology as the transformation 
of social relations. It's not enough to green the capitalist city; we 
need to question ownership, production, resource distribution, and, 
above all, decision-making power. Urban planning, too, is not neutral: 
every urban form incorporates decisions about who can live where, how 
people move around, and who participates in decision-making.

Four dimensions of social ecology

I believe that the relevance of Bookchin 's contribution can be read 
through four interconnected dimensions: analysis, ethics, practice, and 
political vision.

- Analyses.

Ecological destruction cannot be separated from hierarchy, domination, 
exploitation , and capitalism. Environmental and social crises are 
interconnected manifestations of power relations . Capitalism is 
central, but hierarchy and domination cannot be reduced to class 
relations alone. At the same time, Bookchin identifies a persistent 
legacy of freedom in history, made up of cooperation, mutual aid, 
community forms , and moments of self-government.

- Ethics.

Through dialectical naturalism, social ecology offers a reconstructive 
ethical foundation. Nature and society are not two separate worlds: 
society emerges from nature and represents its specific development . 
Bookchin distinguishes a "first nature," constituted by biological 
evolution, and a "second nature," represented by human social evolution. 
Dialectical naturalism also explores the potential contained in natural 
and social processes. Cooperation, mutual aid, differentiation, and 
unity in diversity demonstrate that competition and domination do not 
exhaust the possible forms of relationship. A possible future "third 
nature" suggests the reconciliation of first and second nature through 
non-hierarchical and ecologically sustainable social relations.

- Practice.

Social ecology translates analysis and ethics into direct action, direct 
democracy, popular assemblies, confederation , and community management 
of the economy. Direct action is not simply a protest tactic: it is a 
process through which individuals and communities regain the capacity to 
decide and act, experimenting in the present with relationships that 
prefigure a different society. For Bookchin, power cannot simply be 
abolished: the question is where it resides and through which 
institutions it is exercised. Power concentrated in the state or 
economic structures becomes "power over"; power built through popular 
institutions can become the collective capacity for creation and 
self-determination.

- Eutopian vision.

Social ecology finally offers a eutopian horizon: not a perfect society, 
but the concrete construction of "good places" in which freedom, social 
justice and ecological balance can develop together. Post-scarcity does 
not mean unlimited abundance, but using resources, knowledge and 
technologies to guarantee dignified material conditions and free up time 
for political participation, creativity and social relations (4) . 
Technology too must be evaluated by asking who controls it , what needs 
it satisfies and what relationship it establishes with ecosystems. The 
objective is not a greener version of the existing society, but a 
transformation of its social, economic and political conditions .

Criticizing Bookchin to keep his legacy alive

Keeping social ecology alive also means criticizing its limits. A first 
issue concerns libertarian municipalism and the role attributed to 
municipal elections. Bookchin distinguishes the municipal level from 
state institutions and considers the municipality a space where more 
direct citizen control can be regained. But this distinction is not a 
given. A municipal administration remains embedded in the legal, fiscal, 
and bureaucratic system of the state, and geographic proximity between 
representatives and those represented does not automatically make the 
mandate more binding or democratic. Without autonomous assemblies, 
social movements, and effective tools for oversight and recall, the risk 
is that municipalism will be reduced to a local form of parliamentarism.

A second limitation concerns democracy itself. The distinction between 
political decision-making and technical administration is useful, but 
the boundary is often blurred: energy, transportation, or health imply 
specialized skills, political priorities, and the distribution of 
resources. Even the preference for the majority leaves open the problem 
of dissent and minorities. A more general limitation concerns the 
political and intellectual geography within which Bookchin developed his 
project. His main references remain the Greek polis, medieval European 
cities, the French Revolution, Spanish anarchism, and the town meetings 
of New England. He was aware of and sometimes cited experiences 
developed elsewhere , but contemporary movements in the global South 
rarely became interlocutors capable of profoundly altering his theory. 
Colonialism and racism, while incompatible with the framework of social 
ecology, do not receive the same systematic attention as hierarchy, the 
state, and class.

The Zapatistas make this limit evident.

While Bookchin was making libertarian municipalism increasingly 
prescriptive, in Chiapas forms of autonomy were developing based on 
mandar obedeciendo, on the rotation of responsibilities and on the 
articulation between communities and territories. His position on 
Palestine can be read within the same limit (5): a theory based on the 
critique of domination could have applied its categories more radically 
to territorial colonisation, expulsions and the asymmetries produced by 
the construction of the Israeli state. These limits do not cancel the 
value of social ecology; they show the need to remove it from being 
transformed into a doctrine.

Building cultures of resistance

What, then, should we do with the knowledge accumulated through decades 
of social ecology?

Don't keep it unchanged. If Bookchin's legacy is to live on, it must 
continue to be questioned and transformed in light of the contradictions 
of the present and the experiences that have come after him.

In this sense, Bookchin's contribution can be placed within a broader 
process I define as the construction of cultures of resistance: a 
learning process that draws nourishment from the memory of the past and 
the imagination of possible futures in harmony with nature. It develops 
through alternative social projects and movements that arise in 
opposition to capitalism and various forms of domination, producing 
shared ideas, practices, values, and norms capable of shaping 
reconstructive and liberatory alternatives.

Talking about cultures, in the plural, is fundamental.

There is no revolutionary culture that can be transferred from one place 
to another, nor a universal path.

Struggles emerge from specific conditions: what can be shared is not a 
model, but a wealth of experiences, mistakes, and possibilities .

Building cultures of resistance means remembering, because the memory of 
struggles removes us from the present as the only possible world; 
imagining, because capitalism narrows the space for alternatives; and 
transforming, because memory and imagination gain strength when tested 
in collective practices.

It is in this sense that we can learn from the Zapatistas, the Kurdish 
liberation movement , and the many experiences building autonomy, mutual 
aid, and grassroots democracy . Not as models to be copied, but as 
situated experiments capable of demonstrating how radical ideas can be 
reinterpreted and transformed into institutions rooted in everyday life.

Building cultures of resistance therefore means moving between 
discovery, engagement , and transformation: discovering practices and 
stories that challenge what we considered inevitable; testing them in 
our own realities; transforming them and allowing ourselves to be 
transformed by their contradictions.

This is where Bookchin 's legacy can continue to be useful: not as a set 
of definitive answers, but as part of a broader heritage of 
revolutionary knowledge and practices. Our responsibility is to keep it 
alive, useful, and accessible to movements committed to social 
transformation.

This is how we can pay homage to Bookchin: not by preserving his work 
unchanged , but by contributing to the construction of cultures of 
resistance capable of remembering the past, imagining what does not yet 
exist , and concretely transforming the present, keeping revolutionary 
possibilities alive.

Note:

(https://economiacircolare.com/planetary-boundaries-cosa-sono/)

(https://www.eleuthera.it/scheda_libro.php?idlib=428).

(https://www.eleuthera.it/scheda_libro.php? Idlib=556)

(https://www.orthotes.com/anarchism/? 
srsltid=AfmBOoq9AncZyDKm_v0_JFyd2HODXJNlxI4ZoXVusjXI9NrAJFz1tI6Q)

(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-attacks-on-israel-ignore-the-long-history-of-arab-conflict)

https://alternativalibertaria.org/
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