by Jessica Vara
As climate breakdown accelerates, the reactionary right poses as the defender of freedom against meddling greens, championing the right to consume with impunity whilst the poor and planet are left to pick up the tab. For the right, human freedom and ecological flourishing are incompatible aims: the latter must be sacrificed for the former.
But the right’s dog-eat-dog competitive individualism is not the only vision of freedom available. Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the pioneering green thinker Murray Bookchin developed an ecological conception of freedom rooted in cooperation, liberation from unjust social hierarchies and popular participation in democratic self-government.
For Bookchin, human freedom is not only compatible with ecological flourishing but is an essential prerequisite for it, and his work remains a rich resource for an ecosocialist left seeking to reconcile the goals of ecological harmony and working-class emancipation.
Bookchin was among the first green thinkers to articulate the view that the ecological crisis is a social crisis at heart.
A theorist who began his political life as a Trotskyist newspaper seller in 1930s New York, Murray Bookchin’s political journey took him through several decades in the anarchist movement to eventually developing his own radical green perspective, culminating in his major work The Ecology of Freedom. Bookchin was among the earliest thinkers on the radical left to take the ecological crisis seriously, first writing about The Problem of Chemicals in Food in a 1952 article.
Bookchin argues the capacity to experience freedom is an emergent product of complex ecosystems. As an organism’s environment grows richer in differentiated plant and animal species, it offers a broader range of potential survival strategies. In turn, organisms evolve more complex brains to process these increasingly complex environments, brains that can weigh up competing options and choose between them. This gradual increase in the capacity for conscious choice reaches a tipping-point with the arrival of homo sapiens, who birth an unprecedented social tapestry of art, culture, politics and technology that creates a more expansive environment of choices than ever before.
Drawing on anthropological studies, Bookchin contends that early human societies were relatively egalitarian and viewed themselves as an integrated part of the natural world and its ecological processes. They were ‘organic societies’ in the sense that their social development parallelled the trend towards ever-greater complexity and freedom found in non-human nature. The rise of societies structured by hierarchy and domination, however, would bring humans into an increasingly destructive relationship with nature.
The ecological crisis is a social crisis
Bookchin was among the first green thinkers to articulate the view that the ecological crisis is a social crisis at heart. As hierarchical societies developed, structured by relationships of “command and obedience” rather than free cooperation, these societies began to project their hierarchical worldview outwards onto the natural world, viewing it as a realm of lower beasts to be exploited rather than a living process with which humans are inextricably entwined. Bookchin traces a deep-structure analysis of the development of hierarchy from the classical era through to feudalism and capitalism.
Participatory budgeting has proved extremely effective at redistributing wealth from rich to poor since its introduction.
Capitalism, in Bookchin’s view, is the most sophisticated form of hierarchical society yet to emerge, one that subordinates even its own elites to the algorithmic logics of market competition and capital accumulation. Bookchin writes that ‘to speak of “limits to growth” under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits to warfare under a warrior society.’
He compares capitalist growth to the growth of the cancer cell, which does not reach equilibrium with its surroundings but replicates itself ceaselessly until it destroys its host. But, differentiating himself from some of the orthodox Marxists of his time, Bookchin argues it is not enough to overthrow capitalism. Old hierarchies of gender and race would still persist after its abolition, or a new bureaucratic elite could establish itself after capitalism’s demise: social hierarchy itself must be overcome, not just one particular form of economic hierarchy.
Power to the local
To re-harmonise human society with nature, hierarchy must be “dissolved”. Bookchin views the local government of the municipality as the best political arena in which to achieve this. In place of national parliamentary government by distant and barely-accountable state representatives, he argues for the establishment of directly democratic local assemblies reminiscent of the ancient Athenian polis, where the citizens of towns and cities would gather to discuss, debate and legislate on local matters within their direct experience.
This would bring politics down to the “human scale”, at which the individual can exert genuine agency within a community of their peers, developing competence in the skills of democratic self-government through hands-on participation. To manage decisions too large for the municipal level, assemblies would elect representatives to attend regional assemblies with those of other municipalities, empowered only to coordinate with their counterparts and never to overrule their electors. These representatives would be subject to strict mechanisms of democratic accountability, such as limited legal mandates and the right of recall.
Bookchin argues that mass participation in these local assemblies would create a sphere of social equality, in which the hierarchies that stratify capitalist society are suspended and slowly eroded over time. Their creation would form the centrepiece of a ‘minimum programme’ of immediate reforms that would in turn create the conditions for a much more comprehensive political transformation.
Coordinating with each other, these networked democratic municipalities would incubate an expanding sphere of radically egalitarian consciousness, growing into an alternative centre of political legitimacy capable of rivalling and eventually replacing the nation-state. Bookchin rejects all participation in national parliaments, where decisions are made too far from those they affect and politics too easily becomes the plaything of self-interested careerists.
The Porto Alegre experiment…
A democratic experiment in Porto Alegre, Brazil, offers a glimpse of what Bookchin’s proposed democratic assemblies could look like in practice.
In the late 1980s, the city of Porto Alegre began an experiment in participatory budgeting that continues to this day, under which the city budget was set by a network of neighbourhood committees open to public participation from all residents. Convened by the Worker’s Party city government, local ward committees met alongside more general committees focused on city-wide priorities, such as transport and policing.
All citizens were invited to take part in the deliberations, taking place over a period of months each year, in which they could also submit their own proposals for consideration. At the conclusion of this process, delegates from each neighbourhood attended a citywide meeting to coordinate proposals from the various committees into a single proposed annual budget.
Recognising that not all citizens arrive with the specialised knowledge to make informed decisions about some areas of public policy, the city government provided classes and seminars on key subjects to help bring citizen participants up to speed. Technical experts were brought in to advise delegates at the coordinative stage, but were not empowered to make decisions themselves.
…and its consequences
Erik Olin Wright argues participatory budgeting has proved extremely effective at redistributing wealth from rich to poor since its introduction, attracting high participation across a broad range of class backgrounds – though less from the very poorest and least educated strata, indicating there is still work to be done in breaking down barriers to participation among the most marginalised.
The budgeting committees have also invested in a wealth of infrastructural improvements to the benefit of ordinary Porto Alegrans. Between 1988 and 2002, access to treated water expanded to become near-universal, the sewer system’s area of coverage doubled in size, and accessible green spaces expanded to encompass 30% of the city area.
Martin Calisto Friant claims the budgeting committees’ investments have created ‘healthier environmental conditions for all residents’ along with a ‘significant reduction in child mortality’ and an increase in overall life expectancy.
Since 2017, however, the powers and funds of the committees have come under increasing pressure from the Brazilian central government, blunting their effectiveness.
The path to a green transition?
Decentralised decisionmaking processes are not a silver bullet for overcoming resistance to green measures. There is no guarantee that participants will make ecological choices, and some will try to block or reverse them. It’s also worth noting that in the context of the UK, local government has been substantially defunded and subject to draconian legal restrictions. It’s hard to see how democratic assemblies could be established here without substantial intervention from the national government, necessitating some kind of engagement with the parliamentary politics that Bookchin rejects.
Bookchin argues that equal participation in collective self-government offers a far more substantial form of cooperative freedom than the mere freedom to consume. The practical example of Porto Alegre demonstrates that participatory assemblies can inspire broad engagement with democratic processes, providing an active political education for participants.
In contemporary Britain, where decades of sustained assault on the institutions of popular democracy has de-skilled the public in the arts of self-government, embedding participatory democracy into an ecosocialist programme could be an important step toward a popular green transition, one built by the working class and not inflicted upon it by a distant elite.
Jessica Vara is a democratic socialist and member of the Green Party of England and Wales, and is based in the UK. She has a Masters in Political Theory from the University of Sheffield, has stood for local government for the Greens and Labour, and has volunteered with Greens Organise and Labour for a Green New Deal.
