Murray Bookchin Tickles Me

Been reading some Bookchin to get into the groove for Foster's class. Some thoughts and quotes:

What renders social ecology so important in comparing ecosystems to societies is that it decisively challenges the very function of hierarchy as a way of ordering reality, of dealing with differentiation and variation- with "otherness" as such. Social ecology ruptures the association of order with hierarchy. It poses the question of whether we can experience the "other," not hierarchically on a "scale of one to ten" with a continual emphasis on "inferior" and "superior," but ecologically, as variety that enhances the unity of phenomena, enriches wholeness, and more closely resembles a food-web than a pyramid. (The Modern Crisis, 66-7)

I think this type of outlook is helpful. Not everyone is the same, but that doesn't mean we all cannot be valued equally. This doesn't mean Bookchin is simply focusing on values, though. If he were simply saying that everyone should be valued equally, we could use this logic and retort, "well, there needn't be hierarchy in capitalism because capitalism is a system in which everyone fulfills a valuable function, like in an ecosystem." But he does come dangerously close to this line of thinking, so thankfully he mentions "functional hierarchy," meaning he isn't just arguing against personal beliefs in certain superiorities, but hierarchy as a social fact. He also brings up a point I've thought alot about before:

In a world that is fairly innocent of greed and hierarchy- a world in which the very word "freedom" is absent from the vocabulary because it is a universal reality of life- only a far-reaching consciousness of the ills that emerge with the first breahces of its libertarian "social compact" can prevent the logic of domination from totally altering a community's fragile sensibility of mutual aid and respect for human beings and the natural world. Naivete bears not only the charm of purity, but also a dangerous vulnerability to manipulation. (118-9)

This is why history always matters, and why I am skeptical of the proposition that, in order to step closer toward (anarcho-)communism, we should expunge from the dictionary all words that harken back to old, abhorent social orders (along with happy words, like freedom, that imply the existence of any other possibilty.) To me, really, revolutionary activity will always be a necessity, because counter-revolution will always exist, even if only as a latent possibility. Which brings us back to Marx:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise. (The German Ideology, 57)