Considering the Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era

Abstract

MURRAY BOOKCHIN is perhaps the best known North American anarchist thinker and activist, a person whose name is linked with the movement and school of thought called ecology. International conferences have been organized to discuss and elaborate the concepts of social ecology — such as the one held in Portugal in August 1998. For more than four decades, his warnings even pre-dating Rachef Carson's Silent Spring, Bookchin has made us conscious of the crisis facing the planet. Without wishing to oversimplify, at the heart of the argument is the assertion that ecological problems have their root in class structure and socio-political organizations. Therefore, to save the earth and all the things upon it, we must transform the way in which human beings relate to each other. The direction in which we must move is that of anarchist communism. Anarchism, of course, encompasses a spectrum of arguments, the common theme of which is the rejection of hierarchy, the rejection of human domination in all of its forms (political, social, sexual, intellectual, economic). The social ecologist argues that these very hierarchies, in both capitalist and socialist states, establish the organizational and psychological conditions for the destruction of Nature and ourselves. Alternative organizations, especially alternative urban organizations, have become central to the discussion. The need for equality — impossible with private ownership of the means of production — and direct fact-to-face democracy is central to the social project. We are so familiar with the elitist and undemocratic character of our so-called representative democracies that we tend to take them for granted. Direct democracy