one can never further the course of freedom by creating new forms of coercion
This is denying the ambiguous character of such institutions as the State with regard to freedom and domination. It has historically been able to "liberate" in one sense but in doing so forge new chains.
That institutions like the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance are not inevitable; that it would be possible to have a world in which these things would not exist, and that we’d all be better off as a result. To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith, since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters?
Anarchism as a kind of faith.
even Mikhail Bakunin, for all his endless battles with Marx over practical questions, also personally translated Marx’s Capital into Russian.
Bakunin only translated a portion of the first chapter, from what I recall. He was not pleased with what he was reading as he was working on the translation and chose not to continue.
Now consider the different schools of anarchism. There are Anarcho-Syndicalists, Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists, Cooperativists, Individualists, Platformists... None are named after some Great Thinker; instead, they are invariably named either after some kind of practice, or most often, organizational principle.
Not entirely true. There was a time when certain anarchists were known as "Bakuninists."
It is, presumably, to preserve the possibility of winning the game that intellectuals insist, in discussing each other, on continuing to employ just the sort of Great Man theories of history they would scoff at in just about any other context: Foucault’s ideas, like Trotsky’s, are never treated as primarily the products of a certain intellectual milieu, as something that emerged from endless conversations and arguments involving hundreds of people, but always, as if they emerged from the genius of a single man (or, very occasionally, woman).
Marxism and the academy seem to operate by Carlyle's "great man" theory of history.
Put simply, a war of attrition in which the U.S. suffers no casualties while plenty of Russians die suits some key players in Washington. In such circles, whether it comports with the well-being of the Ukrainian people receives no more than lip service.
The US government does not care so much about Ukraine being stuck in a war of attrition, because it isn't Americans whose lives are on the line. All that matters to the US is that the war is weakening Russia.
“The Statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”
Which is to say, in conditions of war, there is no law that will prevent against spontaneous acts of destruction—massacres, torture, scorched earth, use of chemical weapons, or even the use of nuclear warheads. To my understanding, the field of international relations takes inter-state relations to be characterized by conditions of anarchy.
“From my vantage point in a hotel room in the center of Kyiv,” he writes, “the whole attack was no big deal — just a matter of losing a little sleep and hearing some loud thumps,”
Boot would appear to be downplaying the power of the Russian military, convincing readers that Ukrainian victory is just around the corner.
I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow.
Max Boot is a pro-American-hegemony warhawk—he riles up liberal readers in the US and convinces them of the need for American military domination around the world.
Ernst Mayr, the most influential evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, maintained that speciation could only occur when a given population was geographically separated, after which the two populations on either side of the divide would face different selective pressures over time and eventually become so different that interbreeding would no longer be possible even if they were reunited.152 This became, for a time, the received wisdom of evolutionary biology. That may be surprising, given its utter implausibility as a theoretical framework for understanding the speciation of large, highly mobile marine animals, between whom geographic barriers are quite literally impossible.153 Something else must act as the root cause of their reproductive isolation.
The point being that killer whales have no clear physical barriers separating them, yet they have remained apart.
Despite sex being among the most presumably instinctive of animal behaviors, young elephants also require sex education: specifically how to act to invite sexual encounters and who to seek out as a mate. Female elephants reach sexual maturity around ten to twelve years of age.
This implies that elephants have developed in such a way that they come to rely on these customs and forms of order to adequately function in the world. Such conventions offer certain adaptive advantages, but they also then restrict the life of these creatures to these forms of order. Reminds me of Rousseau's discussion on science and technological advancement.
This debate about chimpanzees often circles back to the question of homology versus analogy: in essence, do the cultural aspects of humans and the cultural aspects of other animals actually emerge from the same evolved cognitive apparatus? Or are they only evolutionarily converging and appearing to be similar without direct relationship by descent?73 I consider this debate to be a thoroughly unilluminating distraction, and a narcissistic one at that: reducing scientific import to whether it can tell us something about “where we came from.”
Chimpanzees are, of course, divergent from our common ancestors, meaning they have developed in ways distinct from us—they are not a point of our origin.
In particular, cumulative culture seems to rely upon imitation and teaching as key transmission mechanisms. It is not, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd write, simply “a by-product of intelligence and social life.”
Implying culture can develop without a society.
Whiten would classify these each as “a culture,” given that there is a whole suite of socially transmitted behaviors that continue to be passed on. Others assert that the meanings of “culture” and “tradition” are largely interchangeable.48 Many scientists define culture in a manner that includes all mechanisms of social learning, while others assert that applying the word “culture” meaningfully only entails behaviors learned through imitation, emulation, and teaching.49 Summarizing their basic commonalities across disagreements, however, primatologist William McGrew writes that, “Consensually, all seem to agree that culture is learned (rather than instinctive), social (rather than solitary), normative (rather than plastic), and collective (rather than idiosyncratic).”50
The interchangeability of "culture" and "tradition" is not a semantic argument but concerns a key distinction one can find in Bookchin's thinking—culture and tradition can be distinguished from law and institutions, along the lines that community is distinguished from society. For Bookchin, custom, related to tradition and community, is based on habit, whereas law is based on reason.
Social learning is huge, because it means that a dolphin or an elephant, a parrot or a chimpanzee or a lion, can tap into collective skills and wisdom that accrued slowly over centuries.
This frames "society" as a kind of knowledge repository or library.
Cecilia Heyes influentially defined social learning as “learning that is influenced by observation or interaction with another individual or its products.”
Is this not along the lines of mimicry?
When early pastoralists domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats, they began consuming milk and milk products. This was a cultural practice, not a biologically evolved one. Humans, like all mammals, stop producing lactase, the enzyme capable of digesting lactose, after infancy—or at least did until the cultural innovation of animal domestication. Under these new selective pressures generated by a novel cultural practice, groups of people who were raising animals underwent evolutionary genetic changes as well.
This would be to Francis Galton's point that we have shaped the world (and ourselves), only largely unconsciously. That is to say, cultural practices have shaped our biology, but our understanding of that influence has only been rudimentary.
Cultural innovations, however, are often not accidents. Even when they are entirely experimental, they are still the products of thinking minds capable of considering multiple courses of action to solve problems in a complex and dynamic environment.
In other words, cultural innovations are resultant from intention, associated with degrees of subjectivity.
Kinship relationships are important for cultural transmission patterns, but unlike genes, cultural traits are vastly more flexible and dynamic in their possible spread. They are therefore not directly tied to reproductive outcomes.
For example, we can learn from neighbors, teachers, or others who are not part of our immediate kinship groups. But this does not strike me as antithetical to the idea of inheritance—rather, it expands what the notion of inheritance encompasses, so an entire eco-community could be understood broadly as a "parent."
For Bookchin, animals can hardly be called “social” at all, their clustering together in groups being ephemeral, unstructured, and purely instinctive, geared towards particular passing needs of collective predator defense or mating.
But Bookchin does insist upon the order inherent in nature, and he has argued evolution is a continuum. It is not that nonhuman animals are "purely instinctive"—their formation of communities is demonstrative of a developing consciousness, and Bookchin even holds that humans are not yet "nature rendered self-conscious."
For an attempt at developing a comprehensive philosophy of humanity’s relationship to nature, social ecology has surprisingly little to say about the animal question. There have been few engagements by social ecologists with animal liberationist or post-humanist ideas seeking to broaden conceptions of subjectivity, moral worth, and philosophical import to non-humans.
Suggesting possible need for considering vegetarian/vegan approach to social ecology.
Mexicans — and Indians, I may add — do not need the evocative account of their stolen lands and place names in the Southwest that Foreman penned in the Nov. 1 issue of Earth First!, nor his rhetorical offer of a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition. to recognize when they are being asked to disappear in the name of “radical environmentalism.” Their oppressors do not only live in Mexico; they occupy far too many boards of directors in U.S. concerns. To hear the Arizona Junta bemoan their plight at home and then try to ship them out of the country that their ancestors once lived in is a hypocrisy that defies anything Chim Blea could impute to me.
Xenophobes like Foreman and Abbey ignore how the US has fostered the undesirable conditions Mexicans and Indians live in.
I will not enter into the implications of deep zoology and its use by xenophobic elements in the Arizona Junta, notably Edward Abbey, who fears, as expressed in The Bloomsbury Review (April — May 1986), that the immigration of Mexicans into the United States threatens to “Latinize” our “northern European” (Aryan?) culture and force us to “accept a more rigid class system, a patron style of politics, less democracy and more oligarchy, a fear and hatred of the natural world. a densely populated land base, a less efficient and far more corrupt economy, and a greater reliance on crime and violence as normal instruments of social change.”
The argument that Mexicans will bring "less democracy and more oligarchy" to the US really did not age well. White Americans have done that to themselves (not to mention to other countries).
There is no way to go back to animal innocence.
It actually may be possible to evolve certain levels of reason or consciousness out of ourselves, not unlike the hypothesis that viruses evolved life out of themselves. Simplification, in this way, could further the existence of a species. But that's the bigger question at hand—should we "return to innocence?" Social ecology answers with a resounding "No."
The “beauty” of the Noah Principle, in fact, is precisely its mindless simplicity. Mere existence, you see, is the only fact that confers “value” on an organism. Equipped with this guiding maxim, we no longer have to think about the consequences an organism — or who knows? maybe an institution or a social system like Nazism — produces in the biosphere. Like Noah responding to God’s command. we simply collect two of everything, even of deadly pathogens. After all, it exists, so we rescue it.
Bookchin here implies a distinction between mere existence and a just existence. I've written about this argument as it appears in both Bookchin and Ernst Haeckel:
Refusing to accept a worldly life of dejection and desolation, Haeckel challenges the “traditional” morality that sees nonbeing as more terrible than being as such, instead striving for the not-yet-being of a just life. In Bookchin’s terms, this appears as the distinction between the real and actual, the existential “brute facts” versus the speculative what-could-be and what-should-be. Haeckel’s eugenics thinking leads him to find no sanctity in mere life, in any and all conditions of being, which would include the ugliest and most oppressive—he seeks to create a life in which all human beings are emancipated, freed from social restrictions.
"Agency in Eugenics Thinking" (2024)
The distinction of mere and just life is the key element of eugenics thinking that I find worthy of rescuing. I actually first found it articulated by Walter Benjamin in his "Critique of Violence."
But it is by no means a “silly quibble to ask whether AIDS and smallpox organisms have rights.” to use Professor Flowers’s condescending remarks on this issue. Indeed, the “rights” of viruses are one of the sizzling “issues” raised by “anti — humanists” and their papa, David Ehrenfeld, who earns high praise in the literature of deep zoology. I didn’t raise this issue: Ehrenfeld did, and so did the professorial establishment of “anti-humanism” that writes for the academic press. I feel obliged to ask if Ehrenfeld’s “Noah Principle” is part of deep zoology? Is every living thing, including the AIDS virus, plague bacillus, and smallpox virus to be preserved because “Existence is the only criterion of the value of parts of Nature,” as Ehrenfeld puts it in The Arrogance of Humanism (p. 208). Do Sessions and Devall. accept Ehrenfeld’s notion that “for those who reject the humanist basis of modern life, there is simply no way to tell whether one arbitrarily [?] chosen part of Nature has more ‘value’ than another, so like Noah we do not bother to make the effort”? (p. 208)
This is part of why I am skeptical of the notion of "rights of Nature," despite certain intriguing aspects.
Rather, the Nazi version of deep zoology was vastly expansive. It reached into the German family itself. reducing women to breeders of men for the army and men into “warrior” cannon fodder. The Hitler Youth were thoroughly indoctrinated in a crude biologism that stressed, ironically, the virtues of wilderness, wildlife, and the rugged joys of a comradeship formed around the campfire. Teutonic paganism and “folk tribalism” were given so much emphasis that they led to protests by priests and religious parents — usually to no avail.
The Nazis developed a kind of technological primitivism in this way, highly syncretic of course.
Although this disruption spanned the most crucial years of World War II, from 1942 to early 1945, it went on and on, even to the frustration of German army commanders who were grimly in need of troops, supplies, and ammunition.
The Nazis exterminated Jews even to the detriment of their military efforts.
As a people, the Jews were not so numerically significant that they interfered with Hitler’s “development” plans for Lebensraum, or “living space.”
This is to say, the extermination of the Jews was not due to the Nazis' belief that the population on the whole needed to be reduced. Their goal was to kill the Jews in particular, even simultaneously pressing for an increase in the population of ethnic Germans.
Even American Indians had the opportunity to fight back, and an aroused public opinion often came to their rescue when cowboys and the cavalry invaded their lands.
For example, during the Rogue Indian Wars in what is now Southern Oregon, there were white settlers who formed militias, effectively backed by the US government, explicitly to exterminate the local Indians, but there were other white settlers who sympathized with the Indians and were inclined to help them. Of course, as contemporary American liberals would do, they offered no counter to the extermination mobs but simply told the Indians to talk to the US military officials about the issue—"Just report it to the police!"
It was not merely a propaganda stunt for focusing on Jewish scapegoats, as so many of us believed fifty years ago. Adolf Hitler had murder in his eyes when it came to the Jews. and this murder derived from a form of deep zoology that fostered the most extreme and deadly racism in history.
I believe Bookchin had read Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism by this time, which would lead him to understand antisemitism as a historical development rather than a matter of arbitrary "scapegoating," and he would understand what is called "antisemitism" to be more precisely anti-Jewish racism, not merely religious prejudice. Bookchin's student Chaia Heller has opted to used the phrase "anti-Jewish racism" in place of "antisemitism" for this reason.
Note well that this reproach is directed not so much against Hitler as against the Jews who doubtless got what they deserve inasmuch as they have an “anthropocentric” and “humanistic” religion. More than one person I’ve met in the “ecology movement” has said this in barely veiled attacks upon Judaism as the very source of “anthropocentrism” and “humanism” in history.
In other words, when one holds that Jews created and spread anthropocentrism at the same time as one condemns anthropocentrism, there is a possible implication that one would hold the Jews to be responsible for their own annihilation and got what was coming to them.
what is accepted as a matter of course when humans are doing it to animals becomes ‘unparalleled evil’ when humans do the same to other humans.
This raises a question of ethics with regard to nonhuman animals—when we say someone is being treated "like an animal" or that they have been "dehumanized," what does this say about our relation to and treatment of nonhuman animals? To Bookchin's point, the emphasis on the horrors of "dehumanization," especially by self-professed opponents of anthropocentrism, reveals a mentality that takes the brutalization of nonhuman animals—indeed, even the whole nonhuman world—as given. It is seriously hypocritical, for sure.
Professor R. Wills Flowers is palpable evidence that one doesn’t have to be very bright or knowledgeable to make it as a professor these days.
PhDs are indeed a dime a dozen, and universities are filled with quite awful and dogmatic people, although certainly not everyone is. This seems a case similar to that of Richard Dawkins, who has done significant research in evolutionary biology but published arguments based more on projections of social order he takes as given. And Dawkins of course is completely inept when it comes to philosophy and theology, yet he has made himself into a public figure of a certain chauvinistic atheism and speaks more on matters of philosophy and theology than his own area of special knowledge. One can do some fine scientific work yet be a careless bastard in other areas, and sadly that ineptitude in such areas as ethics often bleeds into the work in biology and similar fields.
Anarchism, I may add, knows no “Popes.”
Peter Kropotkin was also called the "pope of anarchism" by those who hated him.
I even corrected an erroneous citation in the Utne Reader that had me saying that “most” Earth Firsters! are “ecofascists,” pointing out again in my response that a distinction must be drawn between the movement and the Junta.
I wonder how this has developed since the 1980s, because it is quite usual today to hear certain so-called environmentalists as well as casual "conscious" liberals use the same talking points put forward by the likes of Foreman and Abbey—if not on the matter of immigration, at least on population.
And what do those good gentlemen think about Foreman’s demand that we close our borders to Latin Americans (of which more later) because they put “more pressure on the resources we have in the USA”? Shall we kick “them” out to spare “our” forests and water including Indians, whose ancestors came to this continent thousands of years ago? If so, how many little Hitlers will “we” need to round “them” up? What detention camps, police, military forces, and coercive institutions established by the State will “we” need to expedite “their” removal — that is, until “we” need “their” labor to harvest “our” crops and feed “our” faces? They will keep coming, you know, because “our” corporations, banks, and oil magnates destroyed their revolution in Mexico three generations ago and inflicted a terrifying hell upon them. Although they did this with the aid of their own bourgeois thugs, it was “ours” who guided them. Much of the land “we” occupy was stolen from “them” by “our” own thugs in the last century, particularly land in the Southwest and in California. where the Arizona Junta and its “warriors” have their stamping grounds.
Note that Foreman is not alone in his xenophobic Mathusianism—this view is held by many others, including Edward Abbey, who I still find quoted by so-called environmentalists today. When I bring up the barbarism proposed by these beloved figures, I'm typically met with apologetic arguments about how they ultimately did good things for "preserving nature." But here's the kind of crap Abbey has said of migrants from Latin America:
it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically impoverished people
"Immigration and Liberal Taboos" (1988)
Having seen this become a mainstream opinion and basis for policy in the United States now in the 21st century as well as the major rhetoric fueling the rise of neo-fascist parties in Europe, Bookchin was undoubtedly on the mark with his repudiation of these people.
As with most questions surrounding power and its redistribution, there remains much uncertainty as to what could fill this void. A danger inherent in self-organized approaches is the unintentional reinforcing of the very same power mechanisms they attempt to counter. With the flattening of hierarchies and circumvention of regulating bodies, economies of free time, social and cultural capital, and unpaid labor all become alternative currencies which can take unaccountable and unsustainable forms. Self-organized forms of education can reaffirm the very same neoliberal tendencies in education they intend to critique by relieving the institution of its responsibility to provide for its students and faculty. For this reason it’s important for these initiatives to be speculative and world-building in nature, but also to be rooted in and cognizant of the conditions that structure their range of possibilities.
This reads to me as a jaded argument
By thinking of the “living forest” not only as an ecosystem but also as a laboratory, full of sensors collecting data for future testimonials and stories, the implications of ecological personhood expand into social relations.
But ecological "personhood" is already the basis of how nature is understood by humans, including human systems of domination. The anthropomorphic view of the natural world has been a common practice throughout human history and even through the present day. Ascribing personhood to nature is not the factor that will change our relationship to it—it is the concept of exploitation and domination themselves that must be dealt with.
Because of these priorities engrained in the software, terra0 sidelines critical ecological factors and risks simply reproducing capitalist-colonial dynamics.
My criticism of it as well
The smart contract offers digital and economic forms of ecological sovereignty, expanding the agency of the NHA and serving as a critical infrastructure for environmental personhood. As articulated by the artists, “Blockchain technology and smart contracts enable nonhuman actors to administer capital and therefore to claim the right to property for the first time.”
Again, expanding property, not challenging it. "Environmental personhood" is also questionable. Personhood is not the prerequisite for violation—the abuse and domination of people/persons has been perfectly acceptable, seen as a social "necessity" by many. It also heavily projects humanity onto the nonhuman, which is unhelpful for both understanding nature itself and our position within it, as both part of nature and distinct from nonhuman nature.
Through a reworking of traditional contractual relations, proponents of blockchain technologies argue that they constitute a reorienting of the historical trajectories of ownership and property.
But reoriented in a desirable way? The blockchain does not dismantle property but advances the power of property as a concept.
As a case study that explicitly mobilizes the “Rights of Nature” clause, the speculative art project terra0 proposes a protocol that enables a forest to own itself. Formulated in 2016 by Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling, and Max Hampshire as both a white paper and a series of ongoing exhibitions, terra0 lays a possible groundwork for digital forestry practices through nonhuman forms of ownership.
An issue here is the expansion of ownership/property rather than an erosion of the concept. If a tree here is more-or-less given "selfhood" but still needs to be cut down to be used for lumber, this logic would reaffirm the violation of human "selves" as somehow necessary for life, which has historically been the justification for slavery.
“A profound change occurred in the late Middle Ages: it was not forest clearance, but the forest itself that became the foundation of political power... Territorial lords manifested their claim to dominion in the forest no longer by clearing the forest, but by protecting it.”
Protection of the forest supported one's claim of dominion
the ‘netherworld of fantasy’, in which progress came to seem a lie and many people rejected Enlightenment ideals, favouring the false sanctuaries of occultism, astrology and divination
Ernst Bloch wrote in the 1940s of this mood:
Man today is thoroughly acquainted with the frontier-existence outside the previous expectation-context of Becomeness. He no longer sees himself surrounded by ostensibly completed facts, and no longer considers these as the only Real; devastatingly, possible fascist Nothing has opened up in this Real, and above all, finally feasible and overdue, socialism. A different concept of reality to the narrow and ossified one of the second half of the nineteenth century is thus overdue, a different one to that of the positivism to which the idea of process is alien, and of its counterpart: the non-committal ideal world of pure appearance (The Principle of Hope vol. 1, 1954, p. 197).
Impossible times lead to such fantasies, and everything became seemingly possible. While the focus here is on the fascist branch of this spiritual phenomenon, Bloch reminds that the shifted concept of apparent reality was also the source of socialist possibility. Elements of the latter can be found in Bloch's own thought as well as those of other Leftist Germans like Gustav Landauer or Walter Benjamin.
It is the knowledge that society, by virtually excluding the possibility of spontaneous change, is gravitating toward total catastrophe
According to Ernst Bloch, Christian-religious pre-appearance sees the perfection of the world in it "being exploded and apocalyptically vanishing" (The Principle of Hope vol. 1, p. 215). The catastrophe is a requirement of the totality of salvation, hence the destructive character of "I make all things new" (Rev. 21:5).
conferred upon Jewry a metaphysical evil
There are strains of gnostic thought that not only reject the creator of the reality we know—often called the Demiurge—but also consider it to be analogous to the God of Judaism. Jews would be understood as worshipers of the wicked God of this world. Gershom Scholem once referred to this as "metaphysical anti-Semitism."
time
https://multidimensional.link/static/audio/eternal%20return.mp3
The world we want is one where many worlds fit.
hypertext.
A thought comes as it wills, not when I will it.
So far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned, I will never tire of emphasizing over and over again a small brief fact which these superstitious types are unhappy to concede - namely, that a thought comes when "it" wants to and not when "I" wish, so that it's a falsification of the facts to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." It thinks: but that this "it" is precisely that old, celebrated "I" is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an assertion, in no way an "immediate certainty." After all, we've already done too much with this "it thinks": this "it" already contains an interpretation of the event and is not part of the process itself.
What translator Ann Goldstein describes so evocatively as “dissolving margins” or “dissolving boundaries” is smarginare (verb) or la smarginatura (noun), a peculiarly untranslatable and double-edged typographical term.
https://podcast.radionz.co.nz/sat/sat-20160319-0905-ann_goldstein_translating_elena_ferrante-048.mp3
My work is anti-nature
Her work is most closely associated with Taos, with some of her early work visibly inspired by the desert environment of New Mexico. However, there is also a strong influence from her young upbringing in rural Canada, particularly the vast and quiet Saskatchewan prairies. While she described herself as an American painter, she never forgot her Canadian roots, returning there after she left New York in 1967, as well as during her extensive travels in the 1970s. Some of Martin's early works have been described as simplified farmer's fields, and Martin herself left her work open to interpretation encouraging comparisons of her unembellished, monochromatic canvases to landscapes.
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)