Introduction
You live in a world facing deep ecological collapse, yet standard environmental reforms offer only superficial fixes. You see green consumerism and technocratic policies fail because they treat symptoms instead of the underlying social disease. Murray Bookchin argues in Remaking Society that the ecological crisis stems directly from social hierarchy and domination.
The book traces how human domination over nature grew out of the domination of humans by humans. You will explore the historical rise of classes, states, and capitalism that turned life into a hierarchy. The text then presents social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and face-to-face democracy as the path to a free, ecological society.
- How did social hierarchy emerge from ancient kinship groups?
- Why do capitalist imperatives demand perpetual growth at nature's expense?
- What distinguishes social ecology from mainstream environmentalism?
- How can grassroots municipal assemblies replace centralized state power?
1. Society and Ecology
Piecemeal environmental reforms create a dangerous illusion that the existing social order can fix its own abuses while ignoring the root cause of ecological destruction.
Pragmatic environmentalists focus on single-issue reforms like toxic waste control and nuclear power opposition. These limited struggles ignore the antiecological core of capitalism, which functions as a system of limitless expansion and capital accumulation. Pragmatic efforts serve to slow down disasters like Chernobyl, Love Canal, or the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Ecological problems stem directly from social conflicts and the domination of human by human rather than from humanity as a biological species.
The domination of nature arises from earlier forms of human domination, such as gerontocracies, patriarchies, and status hierarchies. Concepts like deep ecology create a mythic humanity that blames all people equally, obscuring the role of corporate elites and social oppression.
Unchecked industrial activity alters the ratio of atmospheric gases, increases carbon dioxide, destroys ancient rain forests, and thins the ozone layer with chemical pollutants like chlorofluorocarbons. These fragile rain forests have existed on earth for sixty million years or more.
First Nature and Second Nature
Society emerges from within primeval first nature as a second nature through the reworking of the natural world by human hands, thought, language, and biological changes. Cicero observed that humans bring a second nature into being within the realm of nature. Social life has a naturalistic dimension and does not face nature as a combatant in an unrelenting war.
Humanity is an evolutionary product of first nature, capable through social second nature of creating an emancipated free nature. Humanity's capacity for conceptual thought and intervention is an actualization of evolutionary potential, not a cosmic error. By abolishing hierarchy and aligning society with ecological precepts, humanity can render evolution self-conscious, caring, and rational.
The Social Roots of Environmental Crises
Nearly all ecological problems are fundamentally social problems rather than the result of religious, spiritual, or political ideologies. While ideologies can foster antiecological outlooks, economic needs and destructive work are forced upon ordinary people by social arrangements over which they have no control.
Lumberjacks clear-cutting magnificent forests and stockyard workers slaughtering animals do so out of economic need and social arrangements, not personal malice.
Exhibits and theories that blame humanity as a unified biological species for environmental destruction obscure the real culprits: corporate boards, governments, and hierarchical class societies. Misanthropic environmental views treat the poor and the oppressed the same as the wealthy beneficiaries of a predatory society, replacing social classes with a mythical human species and replacing institutions with individual tastes.
A New York Museum of Natural History presentation featured an exhibit titled The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth consisting of a mirror reflecting the human viewer back at themselves, ignoring corporate boards and government collusion.
The biological basis of society originates in maternal ties and the extended period of infantile dependence, which fosters early human virtues of mutual aid, solidarity, and interdependence. Unlike nonhuman mammals whose period of infantile dependence is much shorter, human children develop slowly with prolonged mental plasticity and dependency, making cooperation essential for survival.
A chimpanzee remains an infant for 3 years and a juvenile for 7, becoming a full-grown adult by age 10, whereas human children are considered infants for approximately 6 years and juveniles for 14.
A rational, ecologically oriented society can unite human uniqueness with natural evolution, allowing humanity to become a voice for free nature. Human intellectuality has a far-reaching natural basis tracing back through invertebrates, mollusks, fish, amphibians, and primates. Humanity represents the potential for nature to become fully self-conscious and free.
2. Hierarchies, Classes, and States
The domination of nature stems directly from the historical establishment of human domination over human through emerging hierarchies.
Liberalism, Marxism, and conservatism share the belief that the domination of nature requires the domination of human by human, using slaves, serfs, and workers to harness the natural world. Murray Bookchin reverses this assumption, showing that men did not think of dominating nature until they had already begun to dominate the young, women, and eventually each other.
Ruling elites throughout history have trickily identified their socially created hierarchical systems of domination with community life and human nature itself. By reifying social institutions into permanent, unchangeable entities, human-made structures of command and obedience acquire divine or biological sanctions, appearing as fixed genetic programming.
Projecting social categories of command and obedience onto animal communities as natural hierarchies is a preposterous misuse of zoology. Animals do not dominate or rule through systematic violence the way human elites do. Ascribing alpha statuses or patriarchy to animals ignores that animal behavior involves asymmetrical, idiosyncratic interactions rather than institutionalized coercion. Gibbons, orangutans, and gorillas exhibit peaceable behavior without fixed coercive status positions or systematic rule.
The Emergence of Hierarchy
Preliterate, organic communities maintained a nonhierarchical, cooperative social order based on substantive equality rather than formal, abstract equality. Unlike modern formal equality where individuals are equally free to starve, organic societies guaranteed the means of life to everyone irrespective of their productive contribution, compensating for personal infirmities through community support. Anthropologist Paul Radin observed that aboriginal communities like the Winnebago achieved profound respect for the individual and personal security transcending governmental forms.
The preliterate mindset and social relations of nonhierarchical indigenous groups were reflected directly in their language, lacking transitive verbs of possession and control. Analyses of native languages show an absence of words denoting power over individuals and objects. People lived with objects rather than possessing them, and relationships were framed through complementarity rather than hierarchy. Linguist Dorothy Lee noted that Indian communities like the Wintu lacked transitive verbs like to have, to take, and to own, reflecting a culture of mutual aid.
The earliest institutionalized systems of command and obedience emerged as gerontocracies, based on the ambiguous social status of society's elders. While elders were physically vulnerable during periods of want, they held high status as the living repositories of tradition, lore, and tribal identity in the absence of a written language, leading them to gradually claim decision-making powers.
Hereditary chiefs and autocratic rulers evolved from early big men whose initial social prestige was based on generosity and gift-giving rather than coercion. Over time, the gift-distributing big man transformed into a hereditary chief commanding respect and eventually into an autocrat surrounded by armed companions, eroding traditional kinship bonds in favor of territorial, militaristic rule. In the Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh adopted Enkidu as a companion, which challenged the integrity of the kinship system and undermined traditional communal ties.
The State and Statecraft
The State is not merely a system of social administration or general coercion, but a professional, institutionalized apparatus holding a monopoly of violence. Bookchin separates the social domain from statecraft, emphasizing that historical states often functioned as self-serving households and independent ruling apparatuses rather than simple instruments of economic classes. Under Emperor Domitian, the Roman State became the principal interest in the empire, superseding the interests of the landed aristocracy.
Entering into parliamentary and electoral statecraft legitimizes the State and inevitably disempowers the people. Participation in state power requires movements to function within predetermined rules, leading to a steady devolution of ideals and practices. Whatever power the State gains is acquired at the expense of popular power. The Hesse coalition of the German Greens with a Social Democratic government in the mid-1980s ended in compromise and bureaucratization, much like the rivals they once denounced.
3. Turning Points in History
European civilization shifted through the rise of warriors, centralized nation-states, and capitalist expansion in England.
You can trace the earliest harmful turn in social development to the hierarchical growth of the male civil domain. The male civil domain developed slowly as men were needed to protect communities from neighbors. This gradually shifted from rule by the elderly and shamans to warrior groups and supreme monarchs. You should avoid reducing complex historical changes simply to patriarchy or external invasions by pastoralists.
The Iroquois Confederacy demonstrated intertribal cooperation based on strong democratic traditions. It was entirely focused on its own interests and earned the bitter hatred of invaded Indigenous peoples like the Hurons and the Illinois.
Drawing on Michael Bakunin, certain historical developments functioned as historically necessary evils through which humanity raised itself into freedom. Human beings developed as much through historical evil as through virtue. Civilization advanced with half-open eyes while burdened by ancient prejudices.
The Rise of Warriors and Cities
The emergence of the city created a new territorial arena where residence and economic interests replaced ancestral blood ties. This gave rise to a universal sense of humanitas. Urbanity allowed humans to interact with little regard for lineage, providing strangers and outsiders with de facto or de jure justice and protection through written law codes and monarchs.
This progressive social dispensation was accompanied by the privatization of land, the crystallization of economic classes, and the retention of older hierarchies. You can see this dual nature across three thousand years of the ongoing drama of civic politics and conflicts between towns and territorial nobles.
Periclean Athens granted supreme authority to its democratic village assembly form of decision making. Yet it regrettably abandoned earlier liberality by making citizenship a strict privilege for men of proven local ancestry.
The Nation-State and Capitalism
The nation-state emerged as centralizing monarchs slowly ate away at local powers, baronies, and towns. Kings acted initially as a buffer against arrogant nobles. Nation-building began as early as the twelfth century when Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of France began centralizing monarchical power. Commoners initially welcomed royal justice as protection, but royal power soon became an oppressive interest in its own right.
The Fronde involved conflicts initiated by French nobility and Parisian burghers against growing royal power during the youth of Louis XIV. This conflict temporarily drove the young king out of Paris.
Europe genuinely vacillated between the rise of the centralized nation-state and an alternative confederal pathway based on towns and cities. Towns enjoyed significant autonomy and formed confederations to struggle against local lords and absolute monarchs.
The Comuneros of Castile rose up in the early-sixteenth century to try and establish a municipal confederation against Charles II of Spain. Their eventual defeat marked the economic and cultural decline of Spain for nearly three centuries.
Capitalism was neither an unavoidable necessity nor a preordained precondition for socialism. It achieved global supremacy through a specific breakthrough in England. Precapitalist societies heavily emphasized cooperation, local self-sufficiency, and traditional guild restrictions, treating the market as marginal and growth as a taboo. In England's loosely constructed society, nouveau nobles enclosed common lands for sheep runs. Industrial capitalists then established a harsh factory system that circumvented guild limits.
Venice had a huge arsenal that employed three thousand workers, yet it involved traditional artisans working in small alcoves and shops rather than modern mass production.
Capitalism represents the absolute negativity of civilization and cannot be reformed or made ecological because endless growth is its inherent law of life.
Capitalism universalizes ruthless competition, commodification, and accumulation, dividing human against human and society against nature. While past theorists looked for internal economic limits, the crisis of capitalism has now manifested as insurmountable external ecological limits that threaten the entire planet.
4. Defining the Revolutionary Project
Traditional proletarian socialism has failed as a historical agent for revolutionary change. The working class has become an integrated organ within capitalism rather than its unyielding antagonist.
Proletarian socialism failed because workers adopted bourgeois expectations and lost their millenarian zeal.
Traditional industrial workers once possessed precapitalist agrarian cultures, naturalistic rhythms, and craft values. These traits gave them revolutionary militancy and deep utopian impulses.
Anarchist workers in Barcelona during the July 1936 uprising burned money found in looted gun shops, acting from utopian and ethical impulses rather than narrow economic interests.
As the agrarian world vanished and workers became fully industrialized, the proletariat adopted bourgeois expectations. It lost its sense of contrast, making it a counterpart to the bourgeoisie rather than an embryo of a future society.
A successful revolutionary project must rest on a general human interest. This interest cuts across particularistic divisions of class, nationality, ethnicity, and gender.
Past movements foundered on particularistic interests. Today, transclass issues like the ecological limits to growth provide the basis for a New Left that can unify humanity under a broad libertarian agenda.
Feminism complements social ecology by making hierarchical domination visible and concrete across all spheres of life. This expands the revolutionary project beyond class analysis.
By demonstrating that women are victims of male-oriented civilization regardless of class position, early radical feminists highlighted how hierarchy permeates nurseries, kitchens, schools, and workplaces. Together, feminism and social ecology redefine the revolutionary project as the abolition of all hierarchy and the reharmonization of humanity with nature.
Libertarian Municipalism
Social ecology establishes that ecological problems originate in social hierarchies and the domination of human by human. There is no primordial human drive to dominate nature.
Capitalism turns the organic world into inanimate commodities through endless competition, growth, and capital accumulation.
To reverse this destruction, you must reconstruct society along ecological lines. You rely on decentralized communities, ecotechnologies like solar power, and face-to-face democracy.
Libertarian municipalism replaces statecraft with face-to-face popular assemblies in decentralized communities. You confederate them regionally as a counterpower to the nation-state.
Citizens manage community affairs directly in open assemblies, separating policy-making minds from administrative hands. This approach reclaims politics from bureaucratic statecraft and builds a dual power structure against the centralized nation-state.
You use specific organizational steps to build this democratic foundation:
- Convene in open, face-to-face assemblies to propose, discuss, and decide upon policies directly.
- Delegate administrative execution to boards, commissions, or collectives that remain under close public purview and full accountability.
- Coordinate communities through confederal sinews to form a regional power.
Reconstructing Society
An ecological economy requires the municipalization of land and industry rather than nationalization or worker-controlled cooperatives. Nationalization relies on the State and breeds bureaucratic totalitarianism.
Worker-controlled enterprises often function like capitalist corporations competing in the market.
Instead, popular municipal assemblies should control land and workshops, operating as citizens expressing a general interest. You ensure that production serves community needs rather than profit.
Conclusion
Social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and confederalism fit together as a unified political project to dismantle hierarchy. You must recognize that ecological destruction and social oppression share a single origin in the structures of domination. Fixing the crisis requires more than recycling or green consumerism. You need to confront the underlying market imperative that demands endless growth and accumulation.
You can apply these ideas through several practical steps.
- Attend local town meetings and neighborhood assemblies to build face-to-face democratic institutions.
- Push your municipality to take ownership of local land, enterprises, and resources to form a cooperative municipal economy.
- Link your local assembly with neighboring towns into a regional confederation to coordinate policy without a centralized state.
- Resist all forms of hierarchy, domination, and state control in your daily life and political organizing.
- Cultivate an ecological sensibility that views humanity as an interactive, creative part of nature rather than its master.
10 Key Ideas
- Ecological problems stem directly from social conflicts and the domination of human by human rather than from humanity as a biological species.
- Humanity is an evolutionary product of first nature, capable through social second nature of creating an emancipated free nature.
- Preliterate, organic communities maintained a nonhierarchical, cooperative social order based on substantive equality rather than formal, abstract equality.
- The earliest institutionalized systems of command and obedience emerged as gerontocracies, based on the ambiguous social status of society's elders.
- The domination of nature stems directly from the historical establishment of human domination over human through emerging hierarchies.
- The nation-state emerged as centralizing monarchs slowly ate away at local powers, baronies, and towns.
- Capitalism represents the absolute negativity of civilization and cannot be reformed or made ecological because endless growth is its inherent law of life.
- Proletarian socialism failed because workers adopted bourgeois expectations and lost their millenarian zeal.
- Libertarian municipalism replaces statecraft with face-to-face popular assemblies in decentralized communities.
- Popular municipal assemblies should control land and workshops, operating as citizens expressing a general interest.