Text taken from Purchase’s book Anarchism & environmental survival (p. 57 -70) published at See Sharp Press in 1993

Murray Bookchin has deservedly emerged as a major thinker and writer in the late 20th century; and he is widely respected as one of the most important anarchist theoreticians of our time. His ideas about the relationship between social ecology, anarchism, and trade unions thus merit our close attention.

Although Bookchin has become openly hostile toward unionism and anarcho-syndicalism—and in fact to any class-based analysis—this has not always been the case. Some of his earlier writings on these subjects, though deeply critical of syndicalism, contained insightful comments upon the value of traditional anarcho-revolutionary theory and practice. The best example of his earlier thinking is found in his essay, « Self-Management and the New Technology, » published in 1980. Here Bookchin argues that the syndicalist conception of the central role of factory or workplace in a future anarchist society reflects an overestimation of the liberatory potential of large-scale industrial activity. He rightly claims that the factory system has destroyed the craftsman and the artisan, and has degraded the dignity of work, through its reliance on mass production:

Of the technical changes that separate our own era from the past ones, no single device was more important than that of the least mechanical of all-the factory. Neither Watt’s steam engine nor Bessemer’s furnace was more significant than the simple process of rationalizing labor into an industrial engine for the production of commodities. Machinery, in the conventional sense of the term, heightened this process vastly—but the systemic rationalization of labor to serve in ever-more-specialized tasks demolished the technical structure of self-managed societies and ultimately of workmanship-the « selfhood » of the economic realm.

True craftsmanship is loving work, not onerous toil. It arouses the senses, not dulls them. It adds dignity to humanity, not demeans it. It gives free range to the spirit, not aborts it. Within the technical sphere it is the expression of selfhood par excellence—of individuation, consciousness, and freedom. These words dance throughout every account of well-crafted objects and artistic works.

The factory worker lives merely on the memory of such traits. The din of the factory drowns out every thought, not to speak of any song; the division of labor denies the worker any relationship to the community; the rationalization of labor dulls his or her senses and exhausts his or her body. There is no room whatever for any of the artisan’s modes of expression—from artistry to spirituality—other than an interaction with objects that reduce the worker to a mere object. . . . Marxism and syndicalism alike, by virtue of their commitment to the factory as a revolutionary social arena, must recast self-management to mean the industrial management of the self. . . . Both ideologies share the notion that the factory is the « school » of revolution, and in the case of syndicalism, of social reconstruction, rather than its undoing. [Both] share a common commitment to the factory’s structural role as a source of social mobilization. . . . The factory not only serves to mobilize and train the proletariat but to dehumanize it. Freedom is to be found not within the factory but outside it.

Bookchin concludes that the factory system, the foundation of industrial syndicalism, is intrinsically authoritarian and dehumanizing. The syndicalists, he feels, have confused the factory, « the realm of economic necessity, » with the « realm of social freedom, » or community, and the liberated city. Contrary to the syndicalist vision, the factory should never be regarded as the locus of political action and freedom. In Bookchin’s view, only the re-emergence of a nonhierarchical and economically just social existence will guarantee liberty and prosperity. He further argues that the coal-steel-oil technology upon which the factory system is based is no longer viable due to resource depletion.

Bookchin contends that solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources are most efficiently utilized on a local basis. An economic infrastructure consisting of a large number of small work shops, producing individually crafted tools from local, non-polluting power sources, would replace the industrial manufacturing system of the past. The factory is obsolete; it no longer belongs even to the realm of necessity—environmental determinants having rendered the factory system of industrial production ecologically, and thus economically, redundant.

Bookchin makes some valid points in this penetrating essay. For example, the pictures of thousands of workers—heads held high and anarchist banners in hand, marching out of row upon row of factories—that have until recently adorned our anarcho-syndicalist journals, exhibit a singular inability to appreciate the scope of both the ecological crisis and the emerging, global ecological consciousness. The reasons for this important oversight are historical and practical, not theoretical. At the end of the 19th century, a century that witnessed rapid industrial development, marxists and socialists regarded the eco-anarchist ideal of ecoregional self-sufficiency and town/country balance as too utopian or, alternately, as indicative of a backward-looking, pre-industrial ideology. In turn, anarchists saw fit to downplay the environmental aspects of their vision, and anarcho-syndicalists continued to focus upon establishing industrial democracy inside the factory, to some extent ignoring the wider ecological components of the anarchist tradition. Unlike marxists, however, anarchists have always shown interest in the proper relationship between industry and ecology—an early and famous example being Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops. Given our current ecological crisis, Bookchin is quite correct in stressing the importance of restoring anarchist theory’s focus upon appropriate technologies and ecologically integrated communities.

Bookchin’s essay was, however, written over a decade ago and, with the other essays in Towards an Ecological Society, it bridges the two phases o f his writing and thinking: Bookchin the Anarchist-Ecologist of the 1960s and ’70s, and Bookchin the Social Ecologist o f the 1980s and ’90s. (Notably, Bookchin the Social Ecologist is far less kind to anarchism and unionism than he could be.) His two pamphlets, Ecology and Revolutionary Thought and Towards a Liberatory Technology (both written in 1965 and reprinted in an anthology of his writings entitled Post-Scarcity Anarchism), are succinct and easily understandable statements of the ecological-anarchist viewpoint. In these early pamphlets as well as in his two later books (The Limits of the City, 1974, and Toward an Ecological Society, 1980), Bookchin updated and enlarged upon many social-ecological ideas found in the works of past utopian and anarchist thinkers-notably Charles Fourier, Peter Kropotkin, and Elisee Reclus. He clearly and convincingly showed that, with its non-centrist and non-hierarchical prescription for a stateless order, anarchism is the only social philosophy capable of ensuring the long-term survival of our species and our planet.

Since the end of the 1970s Bookchin has been expounding his ecological philosophy, « social ecology ». Although none of the basic tenets of Bookchin’s social ecology are incompatible with anarchism, in his more recent works he mentions anarchy only in passing. Nevertheless, many things that Bookchin has to say are relevant to anarchists. This is especially true of his extended discussions of the role of patriarchy in creating a hierarchical, exploitative and anti-ecological social system—an issue that was underplayed by Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman in their analyses of the evolution of human authoritarian structures.

Bookchin’s explicit rejection of the need for working class organization and trade unionism, however, signifies a widening philosophical gap between social ecology and the dominant trends in modem anarchism. Indeed, Bookchin seems to reject any form of class analysis. In the most accessible of his recent works, The Modem Crisis, he mercilessly attacks anarcho-syndicalism, the IWW, and unionism. Because its proponents insist upon class analysis and believe in the revolutionary importance of the industrial proletariat (even though modern anarcho-syndicalists consider almost all productive persons— from housewives, to service workers, to factory workers— as part of the proletariat ) anarchism, like marxism, seems to Bookchin just another tired, old, irrelevant socialist philosophy:

The politics we must pursue is grassroots, fertilized by the ecological, feminist, communitarian and anti-war movements that have patently displaced the traditional workers’ movement of half a century ago. Here the so called revolutionary ideologies of our era -socialism and anarchism- fall upon hard times. Besides, their  « constituency » is literally being « phased out. » The factory in its traditional form is gradually becoming an archaism. Robots will soon replace the assembly line as the agents of mass industrial production. Hence future generations of industrial proletarians may be a marginal stratum marking the end of American industrial society.

The new « classless class » we now deduce is united more by cultural ties than by economic ones: ethnics, women, countercultural people, environmentalists, the aged, unemployables or unemployed, the « ghetto » people, etc. It is this « counter-culture » in the broadest sense of the term, with its battery of alternative organizations, technologies, periodicals, food co-operatives, health and women’s centers, that seems to offer common resistance to Caesarism and corporatism. The re-emergence of « the people » in contrast to the steady decline of « the proletariat » verifies the ascendancy of community over factory, of town and neighborhood over assembly line. The hand fits the glove perfectly—and clenched it makes the real fist of our time.2

Exactly what sense are we to make of such sweeping dismissals of several centuries of sustained resistance to the encroachments of capital and state by ordinary working people? Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists have, to my knowledge, always emphasised the need to foster community, and have never made the absurd claim that society could be « organized from the factory floor. » It is simply wrong for Bookchin to claim that anarcho-syndicalism (let alone anarchism as a whole) has emphasized the historical destiny of the industrial proletariat at the expense of community and free city life. Anarchists have always emphasized that the primary unit of anarchist society should be the free, ecologically integrated city or town—how else could one hope to organize social life in the absence of the nation state? And just why wouldn’t unions and workers’ cooperatives—be they comprised of bakers, grocers, bus drivers, postal workers or daycare workers—be the natural, logical bodies within which ordinary working people would coordinate the economic and industrial life of their city? Members and potential members of trade unions and industrial unions are not just « the proletariat »; they are, rather, real people— feminists, peace activists and ecologists included. They join together to organize their trade or service in a spirit of equality, peace and cooperation.

Observing today’s decline in manufacturing and heavy industry in his own country, Bookchin fails to appreciate the well-known fact that capitalist manufacturers have moved offshore. Rather than give in to workers’ demands for higher pay and better conditions, capitalists in America and Australia have chosen to move their industrial plants into “newly industrializing” countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. In some of these countries, the state/capitalist push to industrialize has led to the mass exploitation of labor at near starvation wages, and the appalling abuse of female and child labor. The American union movement, long ago usurped by conservative elements (with the active aid of the government), has done very little— both in the U.S. and abroad— to combat these trends, and most Americans rightly perceive it as ineffective and outdated. Meanwhile, workplace organizers in Indonesia and Latin America regularly “disappear” or receive long prison sentences. Millions of people, including children, slave in sweat shops in these “newly industrializing countries,” and, in doing so, undermine the wages and conditions in the “industrialized world.” Capitalists insist that labor costs are too high at home, and call for working people to accept lowered wages and degraded working conditions in order to retain jobs and to compete with offshore enterprises. Virtual slave labor overseas is thus being used to manipulate workers and undermine the effectiveness of unions at home, while fledgling union movements in developing countries are ruthlessly suppressed.

Near instantaneous satellite communication and accounting technologies have allowed the industrialists to move their operations into the more stable areas of the Third World; increased transport costs are handsomely compensated for by negligible labor costs. Because anti-syndicalist anarchists fail to look beyond their own shores, they lack an appreciation of this global capitalist strategy designed to destroy working class organization. The industrial working class is indeed declining at home, but the mass proletarianization of, for example, the rural villagers of Northern Thailand, who are moving south to work in the new factories, is increasing. Meanwhile, world population continues to increase, and nearly everyone wants a TV and a car, while everyone needs can openers, clothes, cooking utensils, and other necessities. Because it is the working class who produce such items, it follows that, even given the trend toward automation, worldwide the industrial working class is increasing, not decreasing. The virtual outlawing of unionism in Indonesia should provide anti-syndicalist anarchists with ample evidence of the fact that the capitalist state will go to almost any lengths to prevent worker organization.

Developments within the service sector are also foolishly overlooked by Bookchin and other critics of industrial unionism. Hamburger slingers and supermarket personnel may not be industrial workers in the traditional sense, but they are certainly exploited workers. As jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry move offshore, large numbers of adult women (and increasing numbers of displaced adult male workers) are joining 14-to-17- year-old youths in jobs in the light industrial, clerical, and service sectors. Unfortunately, the adults are too desperate, and the teenagers too naive, to be easily organized. As new or existing unions begin to seriously undertake the task of listening to and organizing these workers, encouraging trends are emerging in the service sector that certainly should not be overlooked by anarchists.

So, although, thankfully, millions of people are no longer forced to claw at rocks with crude picks in the bowels of the Earth in order to make a living, I fail to see why Bookchin is confident that the worker is obsolete. If work itself is obsolete, how are the majority of our population—people who are not managers or well-educated professionals—going to support their families? How is anyone going to travel or phone another city in Bookchin’s ideal world of liberated, self-sufficient city-communes unless we can construct, install, and repair the roads, railways and telephone cables? People will always want to send letters and packages to each other, and thus a postal service will always be necessary (and, if we ever colonize other planets, even more necessary!). Economic and industrial life are unmistakably global in nature; the idea that one could organize an intercontinental railway network from one commune or city alone is as absurd as the proposition that one could organize social life from the factory floor.

Industrial and service sector work is hardly likely to disappear, indeed, 60% of the United States adult population does such work. Anarchists simply state, realistically, that, in the absence of capitalism and the nation suite, most workers will organize (or continue to organize) to control the work that they choose to perform-for the good of themselves, their city, their ecological region, and humanity. Most anarcho-syndicalists do not have tunnel vision; anarcho-syndicalism is a humanistic cluster of ideas that embraces decentralized self-government in all aspects of human social life-the free city, the agricultural cooperative, the household, the hobby group, and the workplace.

Bookchin is more constructive when he points to « the Green network » as providing a new and significant springboard to revolutionary transformation. Over the past 30 years, individuals and groups of people connected by nothing other than a love of the Earth have begun putting their philosophies into action. Local groups of horticulturalists growing native trees for free distribution, organic food cooperatives, forest action groups, and a plethora of specialized ecological journals, have been bringing together people of all races, classes, and ages. The local, popular, and decentralized nature of this Green networking represents a powerful and non-centralized force for social and ecological change. At the more radical end of the Green network one finds people who care deeply about the environment, but who have become disillusioned about the ability of the state/capitalist order to solve the urgent ecological problems of the day. This group has set out to save the planet by any reasonable means—legal or otherwise. They have flung themselves in front of bulldozers, whaling ships, and logging trucks. Their antics and exploits have captured the popular imagination, and they have had some success in saving portions of the wilderness from destruction.

But due to the lack of a significant working class power base, the efforts of radical environmentalists have resulted in few lasting victories. They are not getting their message across to their potentially most powerful allies-unionists and unorganized working people. Indeed, many of these people feel alienated from environmentalists’ direct-action tactics, which appear to them to mock productivity and the American Dream, which they are often still striving to attain for themselves.

Inspired by a vision of a more just and equitable society, working class organisations have opposed capitalism and the state for centuries. The fact that these two forces are not only unjust and authoritarian, but also extremely environmentally destructive, only confirms the inherent wisdom of centuries of radical working class organization. The heroic resistance of working class organizations to state-sponsored capitalist exploitation represents a long and bloody history involving the useless murder and ruthless torture of millions of ordinary people, whose only crime was to attempt to protect their families, communities, and natural resources from being sacrificed for the short-term benefit of the rich and powerful. Radical environmentalists, in contrast, are relative newcomers to the art of organized resistance, and have yet to digest the hard historical fact that the institutions of state-sponsored exploitation cannot be defeated without the commitment of large sections of the majority of our population— that is, the poor and working classes—to the Green cause.

The tragic lack of communication between eco-activist groups and unions has deprived the ecology movement of an effective power base. It has led, for example, to the absurd situation in Australia of Green activists fighting with rank-and-file members of woodworkers’ unions, whose members are unaware that gross corporate mismanagement, not latter-day conservation efforts, is the true cause of forest depletion and job loss. There is a lesson for both Greens and workers alike in these absurd showdowns— that the real enemies are the greedy and short-sighted institutions of capital and state, not our near-individually powerless fellow citizens. Both parties would be better served by joining together and working towards a grassroots, revitalized and ecologically informed union movement which, if not capable (for the time being) of overthrowing the forces of the rich and powerful, would at least be able to resist the worst excesses of the present order. That the welfare of working people is intimately dependent upon a healthy environment is an undeniable fact, and both ecoactivists and unionists should try to improve their communication and to find common ground.

In advocating craftsmanship on the one hand, and large industrial plants run by robots on the other (in Towards a Liberatory Technology), Bookchin seems to contradict himself. He has never to my knowledge endorsed any kind of anti-technological viewpoint, which makes his anti-union stance all the more puzzling. How is one to design, manufacture, and recycle the environmentally friendly eco-technologies to which he so frequently refers without utilizing the skills and resources of industrial workers? Although working people now form the backbone of our profoundly destructive oil-steel-coal industrial culture, their proven skills could also turn munitions factories into wind generator manufacturing plants, and our agri-business wastelands into productive farms. The wise ecologist recognizes the need to move away from large-scale industrial activity, but knows that our present factories are the places, in cooperation with research institutions, that should begin to design and manufacture the eco-friendly technologies of tomorrow. A successful end to this period of transition and technological readjustment clearly cannot be achieved without the cooperation of the industrial workforce.

Bookchin goes on to insult American anarchists and trade unionists of the past. « These immigrant socialists and anarchists (presumably referring to such people as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Haymarket martyrs) « were largely unionists rather than revolutionary utopians, » and had little understanding of America’s democratic traditions. If the American people had ignored the « narrow » and « class-based » ideologies of these anarchist and socialist foreigners, and instead upheld the individualistic values of the American Constitution, concretely enshrined in the small town meetings of New England, an authentic American radicalism could, in Bookchin’s view, have taken firmer root, and a decentralized vision of a free American republic could have become a reality:

Irish direct action, German Marxism, Italian anarchism and Jewish socialism have always been confined to the ghettoes of American social life. Combatants of a pre-capitalist world, these militant European immigrants stood at odds with an ever-changing Anglo-Saxon society . . . whose constitution had been wrought from the struggle for Englishmen’s rights, not against feudal satraps. Admittedly these « rights » were meant for white men rather than people of color. But rights they were in any case-universal, inalienable rights » that could have expressed higher ethical and political aspirations than the myths of a « workers party » or the day dream of ‘’One Big Union,’’ to cite the illusions of socialists and syndicalists alike. Had the Congregationalist town-meeting conception of democracy been fostered . . . and the middle classes been joined to the working classes in a genuine people’s movement instead of being fractured into sharply delineated class movements, it would be difficult to predict the innovative direction American social life might have followed. Yet never did American radicals, foreign born or native, ask why socialist ideas never took root outside the confines of the ghettoes, in this, the most industrialized country in the world.3

 Again, what sense is one to make of such comments? Bookchin accuses American radicals of the past of having a “ghetto” outlook, yet it is precisely this group of people— »ethnics,” “unemployables,” and “the ‘ghetto’ people »—whom Bookchin identifies in a passage quoted above as representing the new revolutionary « classless class » of people who will somehow organize the cooperative suburban communities of the future social ecological order. Ironically, it was the « ethnic,” “unemployable” and “ghetto people » of the 19th and early 20th centuries, of whom Bookchin speaks so disparagingly, who led the movement to form unions, leading ordinary working people to fight for One Big Union.

Moreover, the specific organization to which Bookchin refers, the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW, was not, as he suggests, unappealing to « native » Americans. Rather, it was brutally and systematically smashed by the combined forces of federal and state military and judicial might. Many IWW organizers— and the members they signed up— risked life and limb and had little stake in the comfortable, middle-class vision of small town life of which Bookchin speaks.

Finally, in embracing unionism, anarcho-syndicalists do not, as Bookchin claims, have some naive or mystical faith in the ability of working class culture to save the world. They do not share the marxist vision of a workers’ paradise; they merely say that if we want to create a more balanced and equitable world, a good place to start is in the workplace.

Groups of peace protesters and environmentalists singing songs outside nuclear bases cannot by themselves be an organizational basis for sustained national resistance to the state/capitalist system. Unless the telephones, railways, and other vital industrial systems continue to function from the moment the state/capitalist order begins to crumble, Bookchin’s ideas will remain nothing but a pipe dream. Nor is the bringing together of millions of workers— in unions— in a general strike an end in itself, rather, it is the best vehicle for producing a movement that is capable of resisting military and economic monopoly, and, ultimately, of replacing the present order.

This is not to say that the industrial system which has led our planet to the brink of catastrophe need not undergo radical change, but rather that while it must undergo profound change, this does not mean that industrial unionism should disappear. On the contrary, an ecologically informed and regenerated union movement could do much to initiate the needed transformation. The boycotting of environmentally damaging substances and industrial practices, an insistence upon safe and healthy working conditions, the production of socially necessary goods and services based on need rather than profit, and a de-emphasis on demands for high wage increases in favor of more workplace democracy, are all issues capable of realization by traditional means. Strikes, walkouts, sit-ins, and sabotage would undoubtedly bring about changes in our industrial infrastructure more quickly than environmental legislation and any number of health food stores. The Green Ban in Australia, for example, is the name given to the successful refusal of dockworkers and transportation workers to handle environmentally harmful cargo. In fact, the failure of the Green movement to get its message across to ordinary workers and union members has resulted in significant damage to Greens, working people, and the environment.

Further evidence of Bookchin ’s attempt to distance himself and his theory of social ecology from the mainstream of anarchist thought can be found in his recent book, The Philosophy o f Social Ecology (1990), in which he attempts to provide a philosophical basis for his social ecological theories. Unfortunately, the rich ecological content of anarchist philosophy is largely unacknowledged, Bookchin deals only briefly with anarchism’s traditional focus on natural models of nonhierarchy anti noncentrism. Instead, Bookchin presents us with an intellectual history of the development of social ecological thought, devoting many pages to Diderot’s « sensibilities » and Hegel’s « concept of spirit at the expense of Kropotkin’s ethical naturalism and Reclus’ bioregionalism—concepts which, at least in the case of Kropotkin, contain important ethical insights that seem to have contributed significantly to the development of Bookchin’s own thinking. The Philosophy of Social Ecology, subtitled Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, directs readers who wish to find out more about the philosophical basis of social ecology and ecological ethics to study the notoriously cloudy pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology o f Spirit.

The reasons for Bookchin’s disillusionment with the organized anarchist movement must remain a matter for speculation. A generous explanation of his objectives is that he wishes to produce an ecological alternative that does not scare people off by using the emotionally loaded and popularly misunderstood term, « anarchy, » meanwhile integrating into a broadly anti-statist framework the anarchistic ideas floating around in the peace, environmental, and feminist movements. If this is indeed his intention he has, in my opinion, been quite successful. His theory of social ecology is presented in a rational and secular format that permits meaningful dialogue with subscribers to other bodies of thought.

To be fair, Bookchin does acknowledge the influence of anarchist theoretician and geographer Peter Kropotkin in all of the above-mentioned works. However, he does so only in passing, and certainly exhibits no real desire to deal with Kropotkin’s thought in the detail that it deserves. The themes with which both Bookchin and Kropotkin deal are, of course, not new; the battles between nature and the profit motive, freedom and tyranny, and liberty and authority, have been with us since the beginning of human society, and neither Bookchin nor Kropotkin originated the anarchist position. Nonetheless, with the important exception of his analysis of the development of patriarchy, all of the basic components of Bookchin’s social ecological vision—diversity, decentralization, complementarity, alternative technology, municipal socialism, self-sufficiency, and direct democracy—are found in the works of the great anarchist thinkers of the past. Elisee Reclus and Peter Kropotkin both advocated a global federation of autonomous and ecologically integrated cities and towns, Bookchin has done us the service of updating these ideas and presenting them in modern form.

However, to take all the major ecological insights of anarchist theory and practice and dress them up in a socialist-feminist cum neo-hegelian garb, and then go on to more or less claim them as his own is reprehensible. And to actively misrepresent the movement from which these ideas originally came is an intellectual outrage.

1. Towards an Ecological Socuty, by Murray Bookchin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980, pp. 123-126.

2. The Modem Crisis, by Murray Bookchin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, ch. 4.

3. The Modem Crisis, chapter 4.