Andy Price (3)

Recovering Bookchin 2e by Andy Price not only returns any discussion around Murray Bookchin to his ideas, but also serves as an excellent introduction to his thought.

Admittedly the only work I have read of Bookchin's is The Ecology of Freedom, and that was quite some time ago, so this volume served as a wonderful refresher on what I (used to) know and an introduction to what I didn't. With the many ecological and environmental crises we are facing, this offers excellent ideas to shape the show more future and, hopefully, avoid contributing too much more to our destruction.

While this is wonderful as a book of ideas, I think many readers will also enjoy reading about the infighting that resulted when Bookchin made quite well-founded critiques of both the Deep Ecology movement and what he called "lifestyle anarchism." Rather than defend themselves against the critiques and/or attach weaknesses in Bookchin's own philosophy, they attacked him in an effort to discredit him. These attacks were amazingly vitriolic and largely without substance.

Price presents, then dissects, those ad hominem attacks. He then shows that the critiques were consistent with the body of Bookchin's previous work. Finally, he addresses the more robust actual criticism of the philosophy, which demonstrates that, while not perfect, it was solid, well-argued, and most of all valuable. Price follows this pattern for both strands of attacks on Bookchin.

What makes this an essential read now is the way Price shows how we need to bring Bookchin's ideas into our current debates about what to do and how to do it. There is a lot of value here and we would be best served if we build upon, and modify where necessary, the work that has already been done.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss. show less

Overall I found this book enjoyable, though sometimes dry and boring. Price does a good job of bringing up arguments people made about Bookchin and his theories, and dispelling them. He complains that people (specifically deep ecologists (especially Earth First!) and anarchists) painted Bookchin as a grumpy old man who liked to start fights. I don't know why he had to do that though. Personally I like a grumpy old anarchist. How can one stay radical into old age and not be grumpy?

My problem show more with Bookchin has always been that his version of history seems partially made up and utopian, and his solutions seem unrealistic. Reading this book helped me look at Bookchin's work as part philosophy, part fantasy and it makes me want to go back and re-read it all show less

In this book, Andy Price gives a good introduction to the essence of what Bookchin meant by social ecology, and to his programme for political change along anarchist and ecological lines.

The book is not a simple primer, though. Quite a large chunk of the book is given over to a vicious academic battle of which I was completely unaware. Bookchin, it seems, has been maligned quite badly by his former colleagues in the anarchist and Deep Ecology worlds, and this is Price’s attempt to show more “recover” the essence of Bookchin’s thought, much of which got lost in the attacks on him towards the end of his life (he died in 2006).

What I liked about the book was its clarity of purpose. Price is not trying to wade into the ideological battle that engulfed Bookchin’s last twenty years. His aim is to detach Bookchin’s thought from the more personal slurs on Bookchin himself, and to examine it and see if it holds any useful points for us as we try to negotiate our way through a perilous-looking 21st century.

He does the job very thoroughly and effectively, and those new to Bookchin’s thought will get a good sense of what he stood for. The lengthy sections on the battles he fought with other thinkers are surprisingly enlightening, too. Bookchin’s break with the Deep Ecology movement came as a result of an incident in 1987 which says a lot about him. Deep Ecology claims that living beings are all of equal value and should be treated as such – humans are just a part of the ecology of the world, with no claim to superiority. Sounds good to me. But the problem Bookchin saw in the work of many deep ecologists of the 1980s was a callousness towards people, and an inability to see the social causes of ecological crises. For example, one deep ecologist claimed that the solution to the Ethiopian famine was to “just let nature there seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve”.

Bookchin, on the other hand, emphasised the social causes, and believed in social solutions. He said the Ethiopians were starving “not because of nature. It is because of civil war, agribusiness, social problems.” The deep ecologists’ emphasis on population as a problem ignored the fact that it’s rich societies that consume most of the resources and reap most of the ecological havoc; it blamed poor Ethiopian farmers for the problems created by CEOs and politicians. The very idea of an ecological balance, he said, made no sense in a world already heavily affected by human development. The solution is not to turn back the clock to find a mythical balance, but to participate in creating solutions using the consciously-formed communities that are humanity’s unique achievement. By seeking to redress the anthropocentric view of the world, the deep ecologists went too far and made humans into a kind of scourge that existed outside nature. Bookchin’s idea was to create a truly ecological society that respected nature and saw humans as part of nature, not separate from it.

The book also uses Bookchin’s clashes with colleagues to illustrate more of his ideology. He broke with other anarchists, for example, in arguing for achieving social change through running for local elections. He saw the municipality as the vehicle for social change, and argued that social ecologists should take control of local councils and gradually federate with other like-minded local councils to effect change from the bottom up. To me it doesn’t sound very plausible, but then neither do the alternatives. Changing a system you fundamentally disagree with is a hard thing to do. Price does a good job of laying out exactly what Bookchin meant, and answering some of the main criticisms from anarchists who prefer to work outside the system.

The format works well, I think, because it naturally introduces not only Bookchin’s thought, but possible objections to it, and then answers those objections. Often the objections were things that I had come up with myself as well, so it was good to read Price’s rebuttals, which often made me think of the issue in a new way.

For those who are more familiar with the worlds of social ecology and anarchism, I’d say this is a must read. For more general readers like me, the detailed analysis of twenty-year-old academic infighting can be off-putting at first, but is surprisingly rewarding in giving a sense of Murray Bookchin’s thought and analysing it in the light of possible counter-arguments. show less