Part One, titled Bookchin’s Theoretical Legacy, opens with Jean-François Filion’s discussion of how social ecology builds on Hegelian dialectics in pushing for a dialectical naturalism which acknowledges nature’s fluid, plastic potentiality and understands humans as both evolving from and depending on nature. Given today’s dramatic ecological degradations, social inequalities and political failures, the statecraft and economic systems that have grown out of these interrelations are in dire need of mending, and social ecology proposes distinct forms of direct democracy and societal organization that can result in symbiotic relations with nature. “Bookchin drew a direct link between social organization and human interaction with nature the way societies treated their natural environment was a reflection of the way their social interrelations were structured” (X).
As Bookchin criticised the depoliticcation of social movements and the fragmentation of reality through postmodernism, his work, Tariski insists, should be read as a call to action (IX). Based on the insight that it is not human nature as such but rather the organization of society that determines attitudes to and engagement with nature, the Russian-American philosopher and educator proposed alternative forms of social organization that could lead to an ecological society (X). Spearheading these, the Introduction by editor Yavor Tarinski presents Bookchin as a left-wing activist and writer whose lifetime of teaching, public speaking, organizing, and writing carried a distinctly direct, non-intellectual and at times polemical style (VI). The volume is divided into two parts, the first discussing social ecology’s theoretical influence, the second exploring its discourses in different socio-cultural contexts as well as its adaptation to the liberatory struggles of Rojava and its connections to the recent rise of municipalism in Europe. The outcome is a multifaceted anthology whose engaged voices paint a vivid, dialectical picture of the challenges and hopes of creating practice out of theory. The activists, thinkers and scholars writing place their contributions in political and economic theory, in decades of social engagement and in co-creation and observation of real-life movements.
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The anthology is a heart-felt endeavour to point out the urgency, potential and possibility for social change that grounds in the collaborative world-making of ecosystems to create free democratic societies that gain their resilience through a unity in diversity.
The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century" (Black Rose Books, 2021) celebrates Bookchin’s legacy and considers the lived experiences of social ecology. The edited volume "Enlightenment and Ecology. In the new millennium, it has formed the basis of the Kurdish feminist-ecological revolution in Rojava and thus been implemented for the first time in practice. Throughout the 20th century it stood alongside growing arguments for eco-social change and influenced leftist discourses on citizenship, domination and freedom. Murray Bookchin’s (1921-2006) anti-capitalist thinking combined community, direct democracy and ecology into a radical political theory he called social ecology.
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