this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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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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[–] keepthepace 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

One of the most enlightening moments for me recently has been when a sociology researcher attempted an experiment on youtube to prove that we can organize without hierarchy. His main point was not what was interesting to me.

His experiment was actually flawed in a major way: he proposed a task to a group of 100 that was doable even by a single person. In such a case, organization is easy. But what I found interesting is that even in such a setting hierarchies emerged: people took some organizational power and others followed. Even if that was clearly unnecessary. And the crowd following his channel are probably less authoritarian than average.

It was a revelation to me: to have flat structures, you not only need to make it possible to organize without hierarchy, but you also need a process to constantly weed out emerging hierarchies. Another theory is that you should rather explicit some lesser-evil hierarchies to prevent the emergence of others, in the same way you may let one weed grow to prevent the emergence of other less desirable ones.

I still don't have a theory or a praxis that goes with it, but that has been good food for thought.