this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Anarchism and Social Ecology

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Anarchism

Anarchism is a social and political theory and practice that works for a free society without domination and hierarchy.

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

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Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

~ Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

~Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~Murray Bookchin, "A Politics for the Twenty-First Century"

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

~Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism

In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

~Abdullah Öcalan

The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution...

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin

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Bookchin prefigured many ideas in solarpunk and degrowth before these things were even coined. But what are your critiques of him?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Tl;dr: He got a bit crazy in his later years, started a cult like commune and always had a bit of a blind spot for problems faced by BIPOCs etc.

Typical story of well known anarchist writers... ambiguous personalities 😅

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

One of the things I love about anarchist thinkers is that you don't have to pretend they were infallible idols. There's a little bit of mythologizing that goes on among anarchists, but most of us acknowledge that as a rule they were insufferable people naturally replicating the trauma they experienced from the political systems they lived under onto others. If someone is like "Bakunin was an antisemite" you can be like, "yeah, and fuck him for that. Fuck all antisemitism. But he hated the state most of all, so lets talk about why."

I don't think that's a good thing -- it has definitely been an obstacle in anarchist organizing, and we wouldn't say "Be careful with each other..." if we didn't need to be reminded. Maybe if there was an anarchist Mr. Rogers, we'd have automated transgender space luxury communism already.

No Gods, no masters also means no anarchist gods or masters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Reminds me of something I heard someone say a few years ago (I can't remember who said it): Build statues of ideas, not people.

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