           E.2 What do eco-anarchists propose instead of capitalism?

   Given what eco-anarchists consider to be the root cause of our
   ecological problems (as discussed in the [1]last section), it should
   come as no surprise that they think that the current ecological crisis
   can only be really solved by eliminating those root causes, namely by
   ending domination within humanity and creating an anarchist society. So
   here we will summarise the vision of the free society eco-anarchists
   advocate before discussing the limitations of various non-anarchist
   proposals to solve environmental problems in subsequent sections.

   However, before so doing it is important to stress that eco-anarchists
   consider it important to fight against ecological and social problems
   today. Like all anarchists, they argue for direct action and solidarity
   to struggle for improvements and reforms under the current system. This
   means that eco-anarchism "supports every effort to conserve the
   environment" in the here and now. The key difference between them and
   environmentalists is that eco-anarchists place such partial struggles
   within a larger context of changing society as a whole. The former is
   part of "waging a delaying action against the rampant destruction of
   the environment" the other is "a create movement to totally
   revolutionise the social relations of humans to each other and of
   humanity to nature." [Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society, p.
   43] This is one of the key differences between an ecological
   perspective and an environmental one (a difference discussed in
   [2]section E.1.2). Finding ways to resist capitalism's reduction of the
   living world to resources and commodities and its plunder of the
   planet, our resistance to specific aspects of an eco-cidal system, are
   merely a starting point in the critique of the whole system and of a
   wider struggle for a better society. As such, our outline of an
   ecological society (or ecotopia) is not meant to suggest an
   indifference to partial struggles and reforms within capitalism. It is
   simply to indicate why anarchists are confident that ending capitalism
   and the state will create the necessary preconditions for a free and
   ecologically viable society.

   This perspective flows from the basic insight of eco-anarchism, namely
   that ecological problems are not separate from social ones. As we are
   part of nature, it means that how we interact and shape with it will be
   influenced by how we interact and shape ourselves. As Reclus put it
   "every people gives, so to speak, new clothing to the surrounding
   nature. By means of its fields and roads, by its dwelling and every
   manner of construction, by the way it arranges the trees and the
   landscape in general, the populace expresses the character of its own
   ideals. If it really has a feeling for beauty, it will make nature more
   beautiful. If, on the other hand, the great mass of humanity should
   remain as it is today, crude, egoistic and inauthentic, it will
   continue to mark the face of the earth with its wretched traces. Thus
   will the poet's cry of desperation become a reality: 'Where can I flee?
   Nature itself has become hideous.'" In order to transform how we
   interact with nature, we need to transform how we interact with each
   other. "Fortunately," Reclus notes, "a complete alliance of the
   beautiful and the useful is possible." [quoted by Clark and Martin
   (eds.) , Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, p. 125 and p. 28]

   Over a century later, Murray Bookchin echoed this insight:

     "The views advanced by anarchists were deliberately called social
     ecology to emphasise that major ecological problems have their roots
     in social problems -- problems that go back to the very beginnings
     of patricentric culture itself. The rise of capitalism, with a law
     of life based on competition, capital accumulation, and limitless
     growth, brought these problems -- ecological and social -- to an
     acute point; indeed, one that was unprecedented in any prior epoch
     of human development. Capitalist society, by recycling the organise
     world into an increasingly inanimate, inorganic assemblage of
     commodities, was destined to simplify the biosphere, thereby cutting
     across the grain of natural evolution with its ages-long thrust
     towards differentiation and diversity.

     "To reverse this trend, capitalism had to be replaced by an
     ecological society based on non-hierarchical relationships,
     decentralised communities, eco-technologies like solar power,
     organic agriculture, and humanly scaled industries -- in short, by
     face-to-face democratic forms of settlement economically and
     structurally tailored to the ecosystems in which they were located."
     [Remaking Society, pp. 154-5]

   The vision of an ecological society rests on the obvious fact that
   people can have both positive and negative impacts on the environment.
   In current society, there are vast differences and antagonisms between
   privileged whites and people of colour, men and women, rich and poor,
   oppressor and oppressed. Remove those differences and antagonisms and
   our interactions with ourselves and nature change radically. In other
   words, there is a vast difference between free, non-hierarchical,
   class, and stateless societies on the one hand, and hierarchical,
   class-ridden, statist, and authoritarian ones and how they interact
   with the environment.

   Given the nature of ecology, it should come as no surprise that social
   anarchists have been at the forefront of eco-anarchist theory and
   activism. It would be fair to say that most eco-anarchists, like most
   anarchists in general, envision an ecotopia based on
   communist-anarchist principles. This does not mean that individualist
   anarchists are indifferent to environmental issues, simply that most
   anarchists are unconvinced that such solutions will actually end the
   ecological crisis we face. Certain of the proposals in this section are
   applicable to individualist anarchism (for example, the arguments that
   co-operatives will produce less growth and be less likely to pollute).
   However, others are not. Most obviously, arguments in favour of common
   ownership and against the price mechanism are not applicable to the
   market based solutions of individualist anarchism. It should also be
   pointed out, that much of the eco-anarchist critique of capitalist
   approaches to ecological problems are also applicable to individualist
   and mutualist anarchism as well (particularly the former, as the latter
   does recognise the need to regulate the market). While certain aspects
   of capitalism would be removed in an individualist anarchism (such as
   massive inequalities of wealth, capitalist property rights as well as
   direct and indirect subsidies to big business), it is still has the
   informational problems associated with markets as well as a growth
   orientation.

   Here we discuss the typical eco-anarchist view of a free ecological
   society, namely one rooted in social anarchist principles.
   Eco-anarchists, like all consistent anarchists advocate workers'
   self-management of the economy as a necessary component of an
   ecologically sustainable society. This usually means society-wide
   ownership of the means of production and all productive enterprises
   self-managed by their workers (as described further in [3]section I.3).
   This is a key aspect of making a truly ecological society. Most greens,
   even if they are not anarchists, recognise the pernicious ecological
   effects of the capitalist "grow or die" principle; but unless they are
   also anarchists, they usually fail to make the connection between that
   principle and the hierarchical form of the typical capitalist
   corporation. The capitalist firm, like the state, is centralised,
   top-down and autocratic. These are the opposite of what an ecological
   ethos would suggest. In contrast, eco-anarchists emphasise the need for
   socially owned and worker self-managed firms.

   This vision of co-operative rather than hierarchical production is a
   common position for almost all anarchists. Communist and non-communist
   social anarchists, like mutualists and collectivists, propose
   co-operative workplaces but differ in how best to distribute the
   products produced. The former urge the abolition of money and sharing
   according to need while the latter see income related to work and
   surpluses are shared equally among all members. Both of these systems
   would produce workplaces which would be under far less pressure toward
   rapid expansion than the traditional capitalist firm (as individualist
   anarchism aims for the abolition of rent, profit and interest it, too,
   will have less expansive workplaces).

   The slower growth rate of co-operatives has been documented in a number
   of studies, which show that in the traditional capitalist firm, owners'
   and executives' percentage share of profits greatly increases as more
   employees are added to the payroll. This is because the corporate
   hierarchy is designed to facilitate exploitation by funnelling a
   disproportionate share of the surplus value produced by workers to
   those at the top of the pyramid (see [4]section C.2) Such a design
   gives ownership and management a very strong incentive to expand,
   since, other things being equal, their income rises with every new
   employee hired. [David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, pp. 153-4]
   Hence the hierarchical form of the capitalist corporation is one of the
   main causes of runaway growth as well as social inequality and the rise
   of big business and oligopoly in the so-called "free" market.

   By contrast, in an equal-share worker co-operative, the addition of
   more members simply means more people with whom the available pie will
   have to be equally divided -- a situation that immensely reduces the
   incentive to expand. Thus a libertarian-socialist economy will not be
   under the same pressure to grow. Moreover, when introducing
   technological innovations or facing declining decline for goods, a
   self-managed workplace would be more likely to increase leisure time
   among producers rather than increase workloads or reduce numbers of
   staff.

   This means that rather than produce a few big firms, a
   worker-controlled economy would tend to create an economy with more
   small and medium sized workplaces. This would make integrating them
   into local communities and eco-systems far easier as well as making
   them more easily dependent on green sources of energy. Then there are
   the other ecological advantages to workers' self-management beyond the
   relative lack of expansion of specific workplaces and the
   decentralisation this implies. These are explained well by market
   socialist David Schweickart:

     "To the extent that emissions affect the workers directly on the job
     (as they often do), we can expect a self-managed firm to pollute
     less. Workers will control the technology; it will not be imposed on
     them from without.

     "To the extent that emissions affect the local community, they are
     likely to be less severe, for two reasons. Firstly, workers (unlike
     capitalist owners) will necessarily live nearby, and so the
     decision-makers will bear more of the environmental costs directly.
     Second . . . a self-managed firm will not be able to avoid local
     regulation by running away (or threatening to do so). The great
     stick that a capitalist firm holds over the head of a local
     community will be absent. Hence absent will be the macrophenomenon
     of various regions of the country trying to compete for firms by
     offering a 'better business climate' (i.e. fewer environmental
     restrictions)."
     [Op. Cit., p. 145]

   For an ecological society to work, it requires the active participation
   of those doing productive activity. They are often the first to be
   affected by industrial pollution and have the best knowledge of how to
   stop it happening. As such, workplace self-management is an essential
   requirement for a society which aims to life in harmony with its
   surrounds (and with itself, as a key aspect of social unfreedom would
   be eliminated in the form of wage slavery).

   For these reasons, libertarian socialism based on producer
   co-operatives is essential for the type of economy necessary to solve
   the ecological crisis. These all feed directly into the green vision as
   "ecology points to the necessity of decentralisation, diversity in
   natural and social systems, human-scale technology, and an end to the
   exploitation of nature." [John Clark, The Anarchist Moment, p. 115]
   This can only be achieved on a society which bases itself on workers'
   self-management as this would facilitate the decentralisation of
   industries in ways which are harmonious with nature.

   So far, all forms of social anarchism are in agreement. However,
   eco-anarchists tend to be communist-anarchists and oppose both
   mutualism and collectivism. This is because workers' ownership and
   self-management places the workers of an enterprise in a position where
   they can become a particularistic interest within their community. This
   may lead to these firms acting purely in their own narrow interests and
   against the local community. They would be, in other words, outside of
   community input and be solely accountable to themselves. This could
   lead to a situation where they become "collective capitalists" with a
   common interest in expanding their enterprises, increasing their
   "profits" and even subjecting themselves to irrational practices to
   survive in the market (i.e., harming their own wider and long-term
   interests as market pressures have a distinct tendency to produce a
   race to the bottom -- see [5]section I.1.3 for more discussion). This
   leads most eco-anarchists to call for a confederal economy and society
   in which communities will be decentralised and freely give of their
   resources without the use of money.

   As a natural compliment to workplace self-management, eco-anarchists
   propose communal self-management. So, although it may have appeared
   that we focus our attention on the economic aspects of the ecological
   crisis and its solution, this is not the case. It should always be kept
   in mind that all anarchists see that a complete solution to our many
   ecological and social problems must be multi-dimensional, addressing
   all aspects of the total system of hierarchy and domination. This means
   that only anarchism, with its emphasis on the elimination of authority
   in all areas of life, goes to the fundamental root of the ecological
   crisis.

   The eco-anarchist argument for direct (participatory) democracy is that
   effective protection of the planet's ecosystems requires that all
   people are able to take part at the grassroots level in decision-making
   that affects their environment, since they are more aware of their
   immediate eco-systems and more likely to favour stringent environmental
   safeguards than politicians, state bureaucrats and the large, polluting
   special interests that now dominate the "representative" system of
   government. Moreover, real change must come from below, not from above
   as this is the very source of the social and ecological problems that
   we face as it divests individuals, communities and society as a whole
   of their power, indeed right, to shape their own destinies as well as
   draining them of their material and "spiritual" resources (i.e., the
   thoughts, hopes and dreams of people).

   Simply put, it should be hardly necessary to explore in any great depth
   the sound ecological and social reasons for decentralising decision
   making power to the grassroots of society, i.e. to the people who have
   to live with the decisions being reached. The decentralised nature of
   anarchism would mean that any new investments and proposed solutions to
   existing problems would be tailored to local conditions. Due to the
   mobility of capital, laws passed under capitalism to protect the
   environment have to be created and implemented by the central
   government to be effective. Yet the state, as discussed in [6]section
   E.1, is a centralised structure unsuited to the task of collecting and
   processing the information and knowledge required to customise
   decisions to local ecological and social circumstances. This means that
   legislation, precisely due to its scope, cannot be finely tuned to
   local conditions (and so can generate local opposition, particularly if
   whipped up by corporate front organisations). In an eco-anarchist
   society, decentralisation would not have the threat of economic power
   hanging over it and so decisions would be reached which reflected the
   actual local needs of the population. As they would be unlikely to want
   to pollute themselves or their neighbours, eco-anarchists are confident
   that such local empowerment will produce a society which lives with,
   rather than upon, the environment.

   Thus eco-communities (or eco-communes) are a key aspect of an ecotopia.
   Eco-communes, Bookchin argued, will be "networked confederally through
   ecosystems, bioregions, and biomes" and be "artistically tailored to
   their naturally surrounding. We can envision that their squares will be
   interlaced by streams, their places of assembly surrounded by groves,
   their physical contours respected and tastefully landscaped, their
   soils nurtured caringly to foster plant variety for ourselves, our
   domestic animals, and wherever possible the wildlife they may support
   on their fringes." They would be decentralised and "scaled to human
   dimensions," using recycling as well as integrating "solar, wind,
   hydraulic, and methane-producing installations into a highly variegated
   pattern for producing power. Agriculture, aquaculture, stockraising,
   and hunting would be regarded as crafts -- an orientation that we hope
   would be extended as much as possible to the fabrication of use-values
   of nearly all kinds. The need to mass-produce goods in highly
   mechanised installations would be vastly diminished by the communities'
   overwhelming emphasis on quality and permanence." [The Ecology of
   Freedom, p. 444]

   This means that local communities will generate social and economic
   policies tailored to their own unique ecological circumstances, in
   co-operation with others (it is important stress that eco-communes do
   not imply supporting local self-sufficiency and economic autarchy as
   values in themselves). Decisions that have regional impact are worked
   out by confederations of local assemblies, so that everybody affected
   by a decision can participate in making it. Such a system would be
   self-sufficient as workplace and community participation would foster
   creativity, spontaneity, responsibility, independence, and respect for
   individuality -- the qualities needed for a self-management to function
   effectively. Just as hierarchy shapes those subject to it in negative
   ways, participation would shape us in positive ways which would
   strengthen our individuality and enrich our freedom and interaction
   with others and nature.

   That is not all. The communal framework would also impact on how
   industry would develop. It would allow eco-technologies to be
   prioritised in terms of R&D and subsidised in terms of consumption. No
   more would green alternatives and eco-technologies be left unused
   simply because most people cannot afford to buy them nor would their
   development be under-funded simply because a capitalist sees little
   profit form it or a politician cannot see any benefit from it. It also
   means that the broad outlines of production are established at the
   community assembly level while they are implemented in practice by
   smaller collective bodies which also operate on an egalitarian,
   participatory, and democratic basis. Co-operative workplaces form an
   integral part of this process, having control over the production
   process and the best way to implement any general outlines.

   It is for these reasons that anarchists argue that common ownership
   combined with a use-rights based system of possession is better for the
   environment as it allows everyone the right to take action to stop
   pollution, not simply those who are directly affected by it. As a
   framework for ecological ethics, the communal system envisioned by
   social anarchists would be far better than private property and markets
   in protecting the environment. This is because the pressures that
   markets exert on their members would not exist, as would the perverse
   incentives which reward anti-social and anti-ecological practices.
   Equally, the anti-ecological centralisation and hierarchy of the state
   would be ended and replaced with a participatory system which can take
   into account the needs of the local environment and utilise the local
   knowledge and information that both the state and capitalism
   suppresses.

   Thus a genuine solution to the ecological crisis presupposes communes,
   i.e. participatory democracy in the social sphere. This is a
   transformation that would amount to a political revolution. However, as
   Bakunin continually emphasised, a political revolution of this nature
   cannot be envisioned without a socio-economic revolution based on
   workers' self-management. This is because the daily experience of
   participatory decision-making, non-authoritarian modes of organisation,
   and personalistic human relationships would not survive if those values
   were denied during working hours. Moreover, as mentioned above,
   participatory communities would be hard pressed to survive the pressure
   that big business would subject them to.

   Needless to say, the economic and social aspects of life cannot be
   considered in isolation. For example, the negative results of workplace
   hierarchy and its master-servant dynamic will hardly remain there.
   Given the amount of time that most people spend working, the political
   importance of turning it into a training ground for the development of
   libertarian values can scarcely be overstated. As history has
   demonstrated, political revolutions that are not based upon social
   changes and mass psychological transformation -- that is, by a
   deconditioning from the master/slave attitudes absorbed from the
   current system -- result only in the substitution of new ruling elites
   for the old ones (e.g. Lenin becoming the new "Tsar" and Communist
   Party aparatchiks becoming the new "aristocracy"). Therefore, besides
   having a slower growth rate, worker co-operatives with democratic
   self-management would lay the psychological foundations for the kind of
   directly democratic political system necessary to protect the
   biosphere. Thus "green" libertarian socialism is the only proposal
   radical enough to solve the ecological crisis.

   Ecological crises become possible only within the context of social
   relations which weaken people's capacities to fight an organised
   defence of the planet's ecology and their own environment. This means
   that the restriction of participation in decision-making processes
   within hierarchical organisations such as the state and capitalism
   firms help create environmental along with social problems by denying
   those most affected by a problem the means of fixing it. Needless to
   say, hierarchy within the workplace is a prerequisite to accumulation
   and so growth while hierarchy within a community is a prerequisite to
   defend economic and social inequality as well as minority rule as the
   disempowered become indifferent to community and social issues they
   have little or no say in. Both combine to create the basis of our
   current ecological crisis and both need to be ended.

   Ultimately, a free nature can only begin to emerge when we live in a
   fully participatory society which itself is free of oppression,
   domination and exploitation. Only then will we be able to rid ourselves
   of the idea of dominating nature and fulfil our potential as
   individuals and be a creative force in natural as well social
   evolution. That means replacing the current system with one based on
   freedom, equality and solidarity. Once this is achieved, "social life
   will yield a sensitive development of human and natural diversity,
   falling together into a well balanced harmonious whole. Ranging from
   community through region to entire continents, we will see a colourful
   differentiation of human groups and ecosystems, each developing its
   unique potentialities and exposing members of the community to a wide
   spectrum of economic, cultural and behavioural stimuli. Falling within
   our purview will be an exciting, often dramatic, variety of communal
   forms -- here marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to
   semi-arid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to
   forested areas. We will witness a creative interplay between individual
   and group, community and environment, humanity and nature." [Bookchin,
   Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 39]

   So, to conclude, in place of capitalism eco-anarchists favour
   ecologically responsible forms of libertarian socialism, with an
   economy based on the principles of complementarily with nature;
   decentralisation (where possible and desirable) of large-scale
   industries, reskilling of workers, and a return to more artisan-like
   modes of production; the use of eco-technologies and ecologically
   friendly energy sources to create green products; the use of recycled
   and recyclable raw materials and renewable resources; the integration
   of town and country, industry and agriculture; the creation of
   self-managed eco-communities which exist in harmony with their
   surroundings; and self-managed workplaces responsive to the wishes of
   local community assemblies and labour councils in which decisions are
   made by direct democracy and co-ordinated (where appropriate and
   applicable) from the bottom-up in a free federation. Such a society
   would aim to develop the individuality and freedom of all its members
   in order to ensure that we end the domination of nature by humanity by
   ending domination within humanity itself.

   This is the vision of a green society put forth by Murray Bookchin. To
   quote him:

     "We must create an ecological society -- not merely because such a
     society is desirable but because it is direly necessary. We must
     begin to live in order to survive. Such a society involves a
     fundamental reversal of all the trends that mark the historic
     development of capitalist technology and bourgeois society -- the
     minute specialisation or machines and labour, the concentration of
     resources and people in gigantic industrial enterprises and urban
     entities, the stratification and bureaucratisation of life, the
     divorce of town from country, the objectification of nature and
     human beings. In my view, this sweeping reversal means that we must
     begin to decentralise our cities and establish entirely new
     eco-communities that are artistically moulded to the ecosystems in
     which they are located . . .

     "Such an eco-community . . . would heal the split between town and
     country, indeed, between mind and body by fusing intellectual with
     physical work, industry with agriculture in a rotation or
     diversification of vocational tasks. An eco-community would be
     supported by a new kind of technology -- or eco-technology -- one
     composed of flexible, versatile machinery whose productive
     applications would emphasise durability and quality . . ."
     [Toward an Ecological Society, pp. 68-9]

   Lastly, we need to quickly sketch out how anarchists see the change to
   an ecological society happening as there is little point having an aim
   if you have no idea how to achieve it.

   As noted above, eco-anarchists (like all anarchists) do not
   counterpoise an ideal utopia to existing society but rather participate
   in current ecological struggles. Moreover, we see that struggle itself
   as the link between what is and what could be. This implies, at
   minimum, a two pronged strategy of neighbourhood movements and
   workplace organising as a means of both fighting and abolishing
   capitalism. These would work together, with the former targeting, say,
   the disposal of toxic wastes and the latter stopping the production of
   toxins in the first place. Only when workers are in a position to
   refuse to engage in destructive practices or produce destructive goods
   can lasting ecological change emerge. Unsurprisingly, modern anarchists
   and anarcho-syndicalists have been keen to stress the need for a green
   syndicalism which addresses ecological as well as economical
   exploitation. The ideas of community and industrial unionism are
   discussed in more detail in [7]section J.5 along with other anarchist
   tactics for social change. Needless to say, such organisations would
   use direct action as their means of achieving their goals (see
   [8]section J.2). It should be noted that some of Bookchin's social
   ecologist followers advocate, like him, greens standing in local
   elections as a means to create a counter-power to the state. As we
   discuss in [9]section J.5.14, this strategy (called Libertarian
   Municipalism) finds few supporters in the wider anarchist movement.

   This strategy flows, of course, into the structures of an ecological
   society. As we discuss in [10]section I.2.3, anarchists argue that the
   framework of a free society will be created in the process of fighting
   the existing one. Thus the structures of an eco-anarchist society (i.e.
   eco-communes and self-managed workplaces) will be created by fighting
   the ecocidal tendencies of the current system. In other words, like all
   anarchists eco-anarchists seek to create the new world while fighting
   the old one. This means what we do now is, however imperfect, an
   example of what we propose instead of capitalism. That means we act in
   an ecological fashion today in order to ensure that we can create an
   ecological society tomorrow.

   For more discussion of how an anarchist society would work, see
   [11]section I. We will discuss the limitations of various proposed
   solutions to the environmental crisis in the following sections.

References

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