Originally published by Resilience.org
Proponents of the theory and praxis of social ecology – the holistic approach to reharmonizing society and nature originated by social theorist Murray Bookchin during the 1960s – ’90s – have long sought new ways to introduce those ideas to a wider audience. While Bookchin’s writings offer an exceptional depth of analysis that has thoroughly captivated several generations of ecological thinkers and activists, even his most accessible work, Remaking Society from 1990, is sometimes viewed as too theoretical to be a sufficient starting point for some contemporary readers.
A new book by activist anthropologist Eleanor Finley offers just what many of us have been searching for. Finley discovered social ecology during the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street and then became deeply immersed in the Occupy movement. She went on to graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts and became a dedicated scholar and chronicler of a wide array of kindred movements, from municipal organizers in Barcelona to pemaculturists in Massachusetts and, most notably, Kurdish militants in Turkey and in the European diaspora. Her new book, Practicing Social Ecology: From Bookchin to Rojava and Beyond, from Pluto Press, offers a compelling synthesis of ethnographic research, journalism and political analysis, combining her field research and her own activist experiences in a highly engaging and superbly accessible manner. The book offers a kind of radical travelogue deeply rooted in radical history and theory, and along the way it addresses a host of key problems that remain as primary concerns for today’s environmental and social activists. It offers a welcome, up-to-date examination of social ecology as a living tradition.
Finley appropriately frames social ecology as a holistic response to the emerging global “polycrisis.” She invokes some of the foundational figures in left libertarian thought – writers like Kropotkin and his French comrade Elisée Reclus – and then summarizes Bookchin’s unique political biography, as well as the evolution of the Kurdish liberation movement from Maoist-inspired armed struggle toward a goal of stateless direct democracy that is most fully realized in the region of northeastern Syria widely known as Rojava. Finley’s analysis draws upon a host of kindred contemporary outlooks, including feminist theory, degrowth economics, aspects of Indigenous thought, environmental justice and elements of Pan Africanism – a “pluriversal” movement of movements in its fullest sense.
The book goes on to describe Bookchin’s dialectical nature philosophy in eminently accessible terms , focusing upon the emergence of a potential for self-organization and self-realization in primordial biological evolution, enabling the emergence of human consciousness and its myriad social expressions. Echoing Bookchin, she describes how, “The quest for freedom, ethics, and justice that direct democracy embodies is itself rooted in biology because we are rooted in biology.” She elaborates upon social ecology’s core understanding that today’s ecological upheavals are firmly rooted in the growth imperative of capitalism, and even more fundamentally in the long emergence of social hierarchy in all its forms, linking Bookchin’s insights to contemporary anthropological scholarship including Graeber and Wengrow’s epic Dawn of Everything. Bookchin’s 1960s era understanding of the potential for a “post-scarcity” society is updated with reference to Indigenous knowledge and contemporary degrowth outlooks, and social ecology’s advocacy for direct democracy is framed in the context of current movements such as Pan-African social ecologist Modibo Kadalie’s proposal for an “intimate direct democracy.”
One of the most compelling chapters in Practicing Social Ecology addresses the need to challenge traditional power dynamics and more effectively ground our social movements in practices of social and emotional healing. Finley draws upon experiences from Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and from contemporary Indigenous activists, as well as the central historical role of consciousness raising and political education, from early African American cooperatives in the South to the example of anarchist affinity groups. As with several chapters here, the most fully developed examples are from the contemporary Kurdish movement, with its commitment to internal group study and mentorship, self-formation and deep relationship building – including a commitment to gender parity – and practices of self-criticism. While one may question the origins of the latter practice in the movement’s guerrilla history, potentially reproducing the harsh judgments of individuals that have plagued many Leninist formations, other observers have largely affirmed Finley’s conclusion that this practice currently embodies a genuinely “open and horizontal logic.” She cites Gabor Maté’s exemplary work on capitalism and trauma as a guide toward healthier internal relationships within our movements and describes the Kurdish movement’s civil justice system, rooted in the institution of People’s Houses, as an example of a consensus-driven system that advances social harmony.
Another chapter begins by reflecting on processes of symbiosis in the natural world – also an area of personal fascination for Bookchin – along with recent findings on animal intelligence, and goes on to explore a variety of practices aimed at restoring cooperative relationships with non-human nature. Finley features an extended interview with a Massachusetts-based permaculture practitioner and teacher, who was first inspired by social ecology during the global justice/alterglobalization movement of the late 1990s to early 2000s, and also reviews Institute for Social Ecology co-founder Dan Chodorkoff’s history of involvement with urban homesteaders on the Lower East Side of Manhattan starting in the 1970s. There is a Kurdish connection here as well, specifically the women-centered philosophy of jineologî and its actualization in a women-centered ecovillage in the Kurdish-majority region of northeastern Syria. The Kurdish movement in Syria and Turkey has inspired a wide array of ecological restoration efforts in response to the dual threats of desertification and military conflict. Finley has also studied the evolution of new municipal movements in Spain in great detail, and here recounts her visit to an ecovillage and social center near Barcelona that offers a unique model of ecological living and popular education. The center emerged from Barcelona’s legacy of radical squatters’ movements, and is also linked to the long-term activist encampments that have emerged in several European countries in recent years, organized to resist unwanted mega-scale development projects such as airport expansions and new fossil fuel infrastructure.
One of the central strategic contributions of social ecology over many decades has been its advocacy for direct democracy, and especially for popular assemblies in towns and neighborhoods that can then form bottom-up federations to address issues that reach beyond the local level. Finley highlights the central role of people’s assemblies in social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, as well as their role in historical events like the Paris Commune (whose legacy led Bookchin to rename his political philosophy as Communalism in his later years) and the 2011 Arab Spring – and, most notably, in a wide array of non-Western, village-centered cultural traditions. She explores how Kurdish institutions of popular governance – once resolutely patriarchal – have evolved under the current movement into structures that mandate full participation of women. The complex and often controversial unfolding of directly democratic practices during Occupy Wall Street is also examined here, with a focus on its broader social and political implications. The Occupy movement, Finley observes, “awakened in countless people a permanent desire for a better world.” She continues:
The lesson of Occupy is not that direct democracy is too impractical to work. On the contrary, the lesson is that subsequent movements have learned greatly from that experiment. If Occupy’s one-size-fits-all approach to democracy reproduced racial, ethnic, and linguistic inequality, we see today’s radical municipalist movements prioritize multiracial coalitions and the centrality of non-Western perspectives. Similarly, if Occupy lacked social cohesion and a grounding in real communities, municipalist movements have prioritized place-based struggles and identities. Radical municipalists [today have] delivered a more nuanced understanding of what real democracy means and how it can be achieved.
Another important case study described in some detail is the municipalist movement that first emerged from a May 2011 encampment in central Madrid, and later made international headlines with the electoral victories of the political formation known as Barcelona en Comú. By Finley’s account, Barcelona en Comú has remained true to its grassroots, feminist roots and achieved important successes in increasing social spending, addressing the city’s housing crisis, and closing many local streets to traffic to create more congenial and child-friendly neighborhoods. While some recent reports have been more critical of Barcelona en Comú, suggesting that its social movement base and its electoral aspirations eventually became increasingly difficult to reconcile, this account speaks to the most promising underlying potential of municipally-based movements to improve people’s lives in realms where statist institutions routinely fall short.
One of the most common critiques of self-consciously decentralist and community-centered movements is around whether they can feasibly unite to address concerns that reach beyond the local level. Finley’s exploration of this question draws mainly on examples from the Kurdish movement, but also touches upon the federated Local Autonomous Governments of the Zapatistas and the experiences of Black liberationists who came to question the nationalist politics of liberation movements in the global South. A key source here, once again, is the Pan-African social ecologist Modibo Kadalie, who was active in Detroit at the height of the Black Power movement, was expelled from teaching at Atlanta Junior College in the 1970s for supporting student activists, and collaborated on several occasions with the prominent Trinidadian libertarian Marxist C.L.R. James. Kadalie’s 2019 book, Pan-African Social Ecology, reflects upon his lifetime of experiences as an activist and community organizer, and how he came to embrace the political and ethical outlook of social ecology through those experiences. (For a wide-ranging discussion of whether locally rooted movements should aspire to ‘scaling up’ or confederating and radiating outward, see B. Tokar, et al., “Think Globally, Act Locally?,” published online by the Great Transition Initiative in 2019.)
The Kurdish model of Democratic Confederalism, elements of which have been implemented in parts of both Syria and Turkey, is the core example that Finley draws upon here. She delves further into the historical development of the Kurdish liberation movement, and especially the imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan’s evolution from a Soviet-allied Marxism-Leninism toward a resolutely non-statist approach rooted in popular assemblies and regional federations. This is the political outlook that facilitated the liberation of much of northeastern Syria from both the Assad regime and ISIS-led military assaults, and also inspired the most potent political challenge to the increasing concentration of power by the Erdogan regime in Turkey. Finley examines the underlying structures of Kurdish-led direct democracy and its widely studied Social Contract, as well as the union of villages that once thrived around the city of Amed (a.k.a. Diyarbakir), the effective capital of Turkish North Kurdistan, until Turkish state repression crushed that political experiment in the mid-2010s.
Any effort to describe such an interwoven set of theoretical concepts and practical experiments is bound to overlook some important nuances and miss some interesting details. For example, Finley credits the Greens in Burlington, Vermont, founded by Murray and Bea Bookchin and their associates, with introducing the idea of Neighborhood Planning Assemblies in the city. Burlington’s local assemblies were in fact launched by Bernie Sanders’ mayoral administration in the early 1980s as part of a process for allocating federal community block grants, but it was the group around Murray and Bea – just prior to the formation of the Greens – that pushed to expand their scope, become more lasting institutions, and eventually challenge a series of large scale development projects that the Sanders administration once supported. Burlington’s neighborhood assemblies continue to thrive in many areas of the city to this day. Similarly, there are debates within the Kurdish movement that Finley has addressed elsewhere around the persistence of some older, militarized leadership elements amidst the movement’s institutionally democratic structures. There is clearly more to be said about the structural debates in Occupy Wall Street, the historical evolution of the Zapatista movement, and many other topics introduced here. But Practicing Social Ecology remains a uniquely comprehensive and forward-looking treatment of a wide scope of ideas and movements, one that will surely help inspire its readers to examine these and many other questions in more specialized sources.
The book appropriately ends on a hopeful note. To quote Finley’s conclusion,
There is no single blueprint for a democratic and ecological way of life. Indeed, if the last decades of emancipatory social movements and democratic experimentation have revealed anything, it is that each community must reinvent real democracy for itself.
The impressive scope of living examples explored in these pages offers today’s radicals a host of inspiring models for thinking about democracy and its continuing reinvention in today’s exceptionally troubled times. “The comrades whose stories appear in this book demonstrate profound courage,” Finley concludes. “Their perseverance speaks to a resilience and love of freedom embedded in nature itself. Reconciliation with nature is, at the end of the day, a reconciliation with ourselves.”
Alara Permaculture Forest Garden, London Borough of Camdemn (2019) by David Hawgood via Wikimedia Commons.
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