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Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future

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Murray Bookchin wrote "Remaking Society" as a synopsis of his life of radical thought. Bookchin details his theories of history, ecology, and political organization, with other subjects along the way, within his "Remaking Society." The language and the point are quite straightforward and the book serves as a handy reference to his prolific writing career.

The author looks back first to ancient tribal structures and finds a very egalitarian ethos in all aspects of life. The growth of hierarchies related to age, gender, wealth, etc, to a large extent eliminated that egalitarianism. These hierarchies seem to have began with age: old people could claim special powers for their accumulated wisdom and knowledge of tribal customs. Then war was made necessary to defend the attacks of aggressive neighboring communities: hence men with their specialties in military affairs gained dominance over women and their sphere. This need justified the centralization of power. Male chiefs who had functioned as generous community leaders and in whom any concentration of wealth or arrogance was an ultimate taboo, became despots. But many communities retained an egalitarian ethos and some communities even reverted to non-hierarchal forms of society after undergoing a despotic phase, such as the American Mound Builders and the Mayans. He notes that a good example of egalitarian indigenous values was on display when Hopi Indian children were attempted to be instructed in competitive sports by the whites sent to "civilize" them but they couldn't understand the concept of keeping score.

The bourgeoisie was significantly thought of as a marginal and anti-social element in every area of the world before capitalism emerged in Europe In the middle ages, markets were largely local, carefully regulated by guilds of craftsman. The nobles mainly sat on their on butts and took huge rents from their miserable serfs. It never occurred to them to horde poor people in factories and not uncommonly drive them to death to make goods and then make sick money from those goods whose wealth was created by their slaves. The marginal bourgeoisie class seems to have aspired to accumulate enough wealth to buy estates so they could live like the nobles.

The bourgeoisie became most powerful in England in the early Renaissance years. The nobility had largely destroyed itself trying to loot and ravage France during the War of the Roses. The new nobles were appointed from a lower class, the bourgeoisie and other middling sorts who had the instinct to relentlessly accumulate wealth and find new ways to exploit the inferior classes. With the growth of the bourgeoisie, the power of the state grew. There was serious resistance to the growth of state power by the nobles and rural communities, the latter who might have initially seen state power as buffer against abuses by the nobles but quickly discovered the bourgeois state was in many ways worse. He points to the interesting obviously flawed but still relatively egalitarian utopian visions of people like Thomas More.

The author has some interesting things to say about Marxism. That history goes through automatic stages is bunk. Marxism denies any root of spontaneity for organizing in communal egalitarian fashion. It can lead to the acceptance of plundering the earth's resources and exploitation of labor on the ground that such is "progressive" development. He gives the example of Marxist social democrat Reichstag members in Weimar Germany in the 20's,vetoing anti-monopoly legislation on the ground that blocking increasing concentration of wealth hindered the "progressive" development of capitalism. Marx for some reason did not take into account the ways capitalism would have of reforming itself to stave off its destruction such as the welfare state and regulatory agencies.

I would be amiss if I did not mention that the relationship between ecology and hierarchy is one of the prime themes of this book. It is not human nature which leads to environmental degradation but the domination of people by people (hierarchy). The hierarchy created by capitalist competion leads to the unhindered power to exploit earth's resources.

Well, what is the author's vision of a just society? He is all for technology. He can't stress enough how much he regards as dangerous those tendencies in the environmental movement who move into the forests and worship Goddesses and witches or other such crazy and silly things. His vision of society is rooted in the Greek ideal of citizenship. Yes, he writes, the Greeks had slaves and didn't treat ladies well, but compared to other socities in that era it was pretty progressive for that and much later periods of development of humanity. In Periclean Greece, governance was carried on by direct democracy. Property owning males were able to come to city-wide meetings and determine and vote on policies affecting them. He writes that this had some equivalent in the early town meeting forums in the early Puritan settlements in New England. It was seriously expected that the primary responsibility of a citizen was to take a day-to-day hand in governance, to be very knowledgeable about current affairs, and not to accumulate excessive wealth and to be generous in using their wealth.

Interestingly the author is against worker's control of workplaces. Such workplaces should be managed by city-wide assemblies made up all of all people. Workplaces managed directly by their workers or consumers such as in co-opsk, no much more benign than regular capitalist enterprises, still have to enter the destructive realm of competition. Directly democratic assemblies would have the interests of a sustainable environment, just allocation of resources at heart and other human needs, rather than the narrow interests of economic competition. Officials to run economic enterprises (as well as other necessary enterprises) would be appointed and closely monitored and easily recalled if need be.

This society is probably not going to happen within our lifetimes, the author stresses. People need to be educated about visions of society where people could freely develop their creative and intellectual potentials and not be hindered by wasting their energy creating products that only capitalists will gain the wealth from.

This is an excellent book though written in a prose style that to read is somewhat hard on the cerebrum...

Not a work replete with big phrases or designed for only the most erudite of readers, this book is a good starting point for just about anyone who wants to "change the world". Using rational humanism as his basis, Bookchin attacks what he views as the mystical and anti-human approach to social ecology and to politics. While the author definitely points out many flaws in several prevailing belief systems, his excessive dependence on rationality can be a turn-off at times.