this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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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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What Kind of Anarchism Survives the 20th Century? (anarchistnews.org)
submitted 3 days ago by Five@slrpnk.net to c/anarchism@slrpnk.net
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[–] banan67@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 days ago

A question in this article that I feel is important. "Has social ecology been eclipsed in ecological anarchism? Should it be revived?"

Partially, yes and absolutely yes. In my honest opinion, it's a great shame that some other anarchistic eco-currents (like anarcho-primitivism, rewilding, and now solarpunk-ish movements) have sometimes pushed Bookchin aside, finding social ecology too rationalist. Its insight, that we need communal, decentralized, directly democratic solutions to ecological collapse, is more relevant than ever. Maybe today it needs to be expanded. Maybe we make it more pluralistic, more attuned to Indigenous knowledges, more experimental. But its core spirit absolutely deserves revival.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 days ago

Bloody hell, their comment section is toxic.

I do agree with many of them that Enlightenment philosophy served to calcify hierarchy and elitism by dismissing all "non-rational" argument, with "non-rational" defined to enshrine patriarchy, elitism, whiteness, centralized executive power, alienation of labor, etc.

It is debilitating to ignore the biggest part of the brain when doing intellectual activity. Any successful intellectual has learned to hide their intuitions behind a charade of Rationality, but that mandatory hiding prevents people from communicating the most important parts and from learning to address their most toxic intuitions. This is why schools are so bad at their jobs; we aren't allowed to communicate what matters. This is why psychology academia is so ill-fitting; we aren't allowed to publish how we decide to make good decisions.

And in context of the central question, the 21st century rise of post-rationalism is the natural product of two centuries of rationalism steering us off a cliff and designing our societies to be hollow optimizations of certain rational paramaters. We can't survive by going back to the system that is currently in its death throes.

What kind of anarchism survives the 20th century? 21st century anarchism. Lifestyle anarchism; the active pursuit of what feels fulfilling when taking the entire world into consideration, rather than what you can rationally justify. Communities of people who enjoy each other's company doing things with enthousiastic consent or sitting out. Seeing what communities feel healthy and which help people and the world flourish.

We learn by trying, and we try by feeling.