In one of the first pamphlets of modern ecological theory, Murray Bookchin’s ‘Ecology and Revolutionary Thought’ from 1964, the radical challenge of ecology to the entire social system governed by capitalist values was already clearly asserted.
Bookchin drew attention to modern society’s despoliation of nature on a global scale and warned that if the process of ‘urbanising man and industrialising agriculture’ continues, then much of the earth would become inhospitable and some areas utterly uninhabitable. The originality and critical power of his ‘social ecology’ includes the insight that ‘imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world’ and the realisation that the ‘integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology leads directly into anarchic areas of social thought.’
According to Bookchin, there is no immutable and institutionalised system of hierarchy in nature. He argues that the domination of non-human nature by humans, that we now take for granted, originally arose out of the domination of human by human. He traces the problem to the breakdown of organic communities based on kinship into hierarchical or class societies, culminating in the growth of the state, which gradually undermined the unity of human society with the non-human world.
Social ecology encompasses the classical anarchist view that while society and human beings are naturally social and cooperative, there has throughout history been a struggle with an opposing tendency towards domination and hierarchy. Periodically the tension between the libertarian and authoritarian approaches has resulted in uprisings and popular rebellions and even if they were short lived or ended in failure, as the brief moment of revolution seems inevitably to be followed by a period of reaction, the overall movement has been towards expanding the potential for human freedom.
The 1956 uprising in Hungary offers a significant case study here. Although it was crushed within two weeks, it left a legacy and created a precedent that set the course for future political uprisings against dictatorship in Eastern Europe. At the sunset of communism, the shift in Hungary towards recognising 1956 as a genuine revolution rather than a bourgeois counter-revolution - symbolised by the public reburial of the executed leader Imre Nagy in June 1989 - was a trigger for the ‘pan European picnic’ across the Austrian border that summer that breached the Iron Curtain and brought down the whole system.
Anarchist accounts celebrate 1956 as one of the most significant uprisings in modern times, complete with workers’ councils, direct democracy and direct action, and trace the roots of Hungarian anarchism further back to the brief 1919 Republic of Councils. Hungarian artists and art activists, on the other hand, have been more interested in exploring anarchist practices that are perceived to be missing from the local scene. The starting point of Tamás Kaszás and Aniko Loránt’s Do It Right - Children Squat Modell 1:1 was the question ‘why are there no squats in Hungary?’ They turned a gallery into a squat environment for the duration of the show, living there and engaging in squat type activities, including late night political discussions. Subsequently a Hungarian squatting movement has emerged, testing the democratic limits and social tolerance of the post-communist state, and drawing on both insurrectionary undercurrents in Hungarian society and models borrowed from other contexts where squatting is more ‘established’.
Challenging Marx’s supremacy over revolutionary theory and practice in the 20th century, Murray Bookchin emerged as one of his most vociferous critics on the anarchist left.
Rejecting the Marxist view of history as determined by economics and class, he saw the primary dynamic in the problem of hierarchies within society. Bookchin observed that the new social movements, such as feminism, ecology and minority rights, beyond their own particular concerns, share a drive to confront the problem of hierarchy and domination, which is not necessarily based on economic exploitation. He points out that at issue is not just class oppression, since hierarchies and oppression of other kinds would continue to exist in the classless society idealised by Marx.
Igor Grubić has explored both the artistic and ideological legacy of Marxism and the human consequences of the experience of ‘existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe. A recent project involved photographing the miners of the Kolubara region of Serbia against the backdrop of their harsh working environment wearing the white wings of angels. The work refers to their role in bringing down the Milošević regime by bravely downing tools and marching to Belgrade, as well as to the mythic figure of the industrial worker in communist culture. Despite their past ideological importance and celebrated political intervention, the miners of Serbia endure horrific conditions in one of the last remaining socialist rustbelts in Eastern Europe. His multifaceted work Revolution is Heritage also examines the conflicted legacy of communism, celebrating its call for artistic engagement versus the quietism of modernism, while pointing to the danger of revolutionary energies being redirected towards nationalistic or violent ends.
Much contemporary art reacts against the authoritarianism and hierarchies of the Marxist approach to revolution, and is attracted to the less rigid and dogmatic realms of anarchist thought. Nils Norman seeks out and shares the alternative knowledges of small communities, permaculture villages, anarchist libraries, recycling centres and individual free spirits living outside or beyond mainstream society, notably through his Exploding School, which is dedicated to the ideals of anarchist educationalist Colin Ward. He draws attention to the creeping institutionalisation and state control of public space, identifying and criticising the countless technologies for surveillance and crowd control in the modern city. The Library to Civil Disobedience, along with the Anarchist Cookbook and Kropotkin’s Evolution and Revolution includes a copy of Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom, all classics of libertarian anarchist thought that invite us to change our thinking and the world.
While for Marxists, the immiserisation of the proletariat is a driving force for revolutionary change, for Bookchin it is not the immiseration of the proletariat, but the immiserisation of the planet that should stir us into revolutionary action. As a rational ecologist, he was a vehement opponent of deep ecology, which he accused of propagating biocentrism, fetishizing wilderness and showing an ‘unfeeling Malthusianism that views famine and disease as Gaia’s retribution for human intervention into ‘Nature’. Interestingly his opposition to deep ecology coincided with the appearance of the concept of ‘sustainable development’ in the 1980s that criticised earlier environmentalism for its Western-centred approach, recognising that global environmental solutions are impossible without global social justice.
The rational approach to ecology that Bookchin stands for has parallels in the no-nonsense attitude of many contemporary artists who are concerned about the problems of the planet, are aware of the unsustainability of contemporary lifestyles and the growth oriented economy, but are wary of the label of ‘eco-artist’ for its association with earth healing, river-cleansing rituals, and a vague spiritism.
Among the most pertinent of Bookchin’s insights is the observation of the degree to which capitalism has spread throughout society, interfering in an ever increasing number of spheres of human behaviour. He argues that the most compelling real fact that radicals in our era have not adequately faced is that ‘capitalism today has become a society not only an economy.’ This perspective is echoed in many works of contemporary art that tackle the ill effects of globalisation in producing a blander and dumbed-down society. Michael Blum’s film The Three Failures deals with the three social orders of the 20th century: communism, social democracy and capitalism. In the closing sequence, he calls for ‘fresh air’, for a way out, expressing the collective need for a radical alternative.
The tension between the extreme individualism manifested in the desire for absolute freedom from all state control on one side, and the need for responsible social behaviour at the level of genuine face-to-face communities on the other, is a recurrent issue in anarchism. There might be parallels with the divide within contemporary art between the cult of individual artistic genius and the opposing side that stresses the social aspect of artistic creativity. In the latter case, there is a willingness on the part of the artist to step back and not insist on putting their own ego and individual creative production at the centre. Vladimir Arkhipov’s Post-Folk Archive is a collection of DIY inventions and hand-made objects by ordinary people, collected by the artist from gardens, allotments, garages and kitchens. The work celebrates an individualistic anti-consumerist ethic, hundreds of personal acts of creative resistance to the dictates of consumerism and the capitalist injunction to constantly buy and throw away objects designed and produced elsewhere.
When green parties and pressure groups formed in Eastern Europe, they initially concentrated their attention on the very visible relics of environmental degradation in polluted rivers, a decaying industrial infrastructure and the side effects on health of pollution. Over the last decade, the economic and social system changed completely, and ecologists have also had to reorient themselves towards a new wave of degradation and exploitation of the environment by global capitalism, symbolised by massive motorway building projects and a hyper production of out of town shopping centres, with all the associated infrastructure and patterns of consumerist behaviour they imply. The progress of capitalism up to today has begun to make the ideological factories of late communism seem quaint and almost benign in retrospect.
Contemporary artists have been sensitive to these changes and are arguably helping to create a climate in which public discussion about the implications of globalisation for local life can take place. Csaba Nemes’s film The Sun of Africa highlights the precarious livelihoods of small-scale market gardeners in eastern Hungary, who invested everything into technologies for intensive agriculture that soon became outdated and now struggle to compete with better-placed and equipped farmers from warmer climes. They find themselves at the mercy of ruthless global supermarket chains that use their monopolistic power to drive down prices below the production cost. Nemes probes the farmers’ unwillingness to join forces in local cooperatives, which they associate with the bad old times of communism rather than an up-to-date strategy of resistance.
A new social ethic of rational ecological behaviour is paramount at a time in which the undeniable and unavoidable consequences of global warming are already upon us. The current situation requires a responsible anarchism that calls into question the basic capitalist imperative to profit and expansion – while free contemporary art creates liberated zones for autonomous thinking and revolutionary action.
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