Deep Ecology?

deep ecology-considering nature as having a virtue and inherent value in itself as opposed simply in relation to humans, eg a bee has value and goodness not because it produces honey but because it is a living being.

Brizzul, I know next to nothing about the Institute for Social Ecology, I was linking to it because it's got a decent selection of Bookchin's articles on it, and for that reason only. I don't know the writing of any of the other people on the site, and some of it may well be patronising, but I don't think Bookchin himself can be blamed for unthinking criticism of anarcho-syndicalism. His main view seems to be that anarcho-syndicalism applies very well to a society in which a sizeable section of the population is factory workers, but that "industrial proletariat is everywhere destined, by virtue of technological innovation, to become a small minority of the population. It will not do to try to theoretically fabricate a "proletariat" out of clerical, service, and professional "workers" who, in many if not most cases, will not acquire the class consciousness that identified and gave a historical standing to the authentic proletarian." http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031118095526728

Here's a couple of definitions of factories:

wordiq.com - A factory (previously manufactory) is a large industrial building where goods or products are manufactured

hyperdictionary.com - [n] a plant consisting of buildings with facilities for manufacturing

The whole point of the word is that it deals with manufacture, with the making of things. It's therefore qualitatively different from a workplace that isn't involved in making things. So why confuse the issue and describe both as factories? It blurs the meaning of the term to the point where it's useless. The nature of work has fundamentally changed in the past 150 years due to a constant technological revolution. For a start, not all those places can "go on strike and bitch slap their bosses into next week" some of them are staffed almost exclusively by temps, who'd be replaced potentially within hours with no legal recourse. If you're talking about a general strike, you need a serious way to encourage its occurrence: simply because everyone could one day collectively decide to strike doesn't mean that they will.

Most people who work (and plenty don't, some students, the unemployed, some parents of both sexes, the old - Bookchin's around 80, do you expect him to be sitting on the production line?), have similar relationships to capital as did factory workers decades ago, but they don't have the same relationship to production. An admin temp often generates more surplus value for their employer, has far less rights, often worse pay, than a factory worker, but their view of work is fundamentally different, and reducing everyone who works to a uniform "workerness" does nothing to address the very different nature of the work they're engaged in.

What everyone does have in common is their locality, the area in which they live, and if they're lucky, work as well. Bookchin's point is that it's easier to point out the effects of capital on our total and immediate environment (including work) than it is to explain it in purely economic terms. Plenty of people are very happy to have a large percentage of their productive (or entirely unproductive, useless, or even negative) activity taken by their boss, since they depend on it for food, shelter etc. What they're not happy about is the fact that the food they have access to is full of chemicals, their journey to work is noxious, their housing is overpriced and dangerous, the stuff they can afford to buy falls apart in five minutes etc. etc. Acknowledging that capital affects every aspect of our daily lives, not just while we work, has got fuck all to do with telling forests to rise up. That argument may well have been made by some primitivist (while hugging a tree perhaps?), but it's something that Bookchin's spent much of the past thirty years trying to argue against, emphasising the distinction between his ideas and that hippy mysticism; trying to conflate the two viewpoints is absurd.

"Sure I can see the oppression in the chopping down of forests but I'm not going to walk up to a rubber plant and tell it to throw off it's chains. or resistance to take place it's up to the peasants (workers) in forest villages (neighbours) to do it not the forest itself."

Where's the trees from that forest going to? What goods are going to be manufactured from them? Who's going to make those goods, transport and consume them? Who's going to feed the local peasants employed by the timber trade if they give up their only means of income?

Transferring the responsibility of ending deforestation onto poor third world communities is pretty similar to saying that the only agent of revolutionary change is the industrial proletariat, and that about half of them live in China, so it's up to China to start the international revolution. The responsiblity for change can't be transferred to tiny minorities or remote locations, it has to reside in the immediate. If we can't gain control of our own localities, how can we expect other people in even more fragile circumstances to do the same?

Brizzul,

The first quote wasn't my words, it was Bookchin's. Looking at my post, it was in quotation marks but wasn't separated from the rest of the text. I note that you didn't use proletariat, and don't think I used it myself, but I thought that passage explained Bookchin's attitude towards syndicalism, your criticism of which I was responding to. Quite a lot of people on this board use proletariat as an interchangeable term with working class or workers, and I think these terms need to be used carefully if they're to retain any meaning whatsoever, not to say that you're guilty of this yourself.

I don't think factory workers necessarily have a different consciousness to anyone else (although I think they probably did have a very different consciousness to everyone else when Marx was writing). I agree that transport, at the end of the day, controls whether goods get out of the factory/into the city or not, and to a lesser extent, whether workers get to work or not. They do play a different role in the production process though, even though it's an important one.

The point I'm making is not how well these groups are organised, or whether their workplaces are run in a similar way to a call centre/office/McDonald's. It's that a factory makes stuff, transport workers move it, and call centres sell insurance, or try to get you to change your long-distance phone service.

There are other essential services and jobs, I'm not trying to say that factory workers are the only people who do anything useful, or that a call-centre can never be useful, but a big majority of workers don't do anything useful at all, or very little. Plenty of factory workers are producing useless shit - how about the Franklin Mint factory? And plenty of useful jobs involve plenty of unnecessary paperwork, so only a portion of the work being done is actually providing that useful service or product.

How much transportation is moving people, food and goods around to areas where they can be produced for minimal labour expenditure? Pretty much anyone who works in a hospital has to do a lot of unnecessary paperwork, including nurses, doctors, OTs etc. etc. not to mention the amount of time they now spend treating illnesses caught in hospital - something like 10% of people who go into hospital contract diseases while there, not to mention the number of people in psychiatric hospitals who's condition is made significantly worse by staying in what are often dirty, overcrowded conditions - I've worked in three and if someone had locked me up in one of the wards for a month, I might well have required the services of the hospital afterwards.

My friend Gary Sisco used this example on another forum -

"If people would stop to think about how much labor and energy is burned up by paper work (which concept has to include also the labor and energy used by all from the logger who dropped the tree on through the entire process of transport and manufacture and transport again and etc, never mind the entire disposal process and subsequent issues), normally for next to no reason (junk mail, for example, like the continuous barrage of "privacy statements" everyone receives, which explain in reality why nothing is private, to make matters even more absurd)."

The jobs may all be as shitty, but the point is that some activities are necessary to provide goods and services and some aren't, and most jobs fall into the second category, as do parts of most jobs in the first category.

Revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism must have as its eventual goal the occupation and seizure of the means of production and the self-management, co-ordination, and eventual transformation of them by the workers. Otherwise it'd merely be reformism - better wages, better hours etc.

In 1890, or 1930, nearly every job had some kind of tangible use value - it was producing a good or a service that was needed. The vast improvements in technology since then mean that the majority of jobs are not producing goods or services, and that many of those goods or services are useless or possibly harmful in some sense. Seizing those workplaces, unless their use could be immediately transformed, has no real use that I can ascertain. I can't think of many uses for offices for example - many people have computers and phones at home, and there's vast numbers of internet cafés (at least in East London) for those who don't, so what would you use them for? Certainly there'd be no need for a massive percentage of offices, so why not leave them empty or use them as crash accommodation - different to seizing a factory no? Those places represent capital, but to occupy them and then run them under worker councils would be completely irrational to me.

If you can locate the process of consciousness raising within localities and communities (including workplaces), rather than just within workplaces, then there's much less chance of it becoming reformism. Bookchin's main reason for concentrating on this is his view that the effect of Capitalism on our environment or ecology affects everyone, and they're more likely to become motivated by this than by entirely economic arguments. It doesn't exclude the importance of work, but it doesn't rely on it completely for raising consciousness.

"Everyone has class consciousness". Do you really think so?

The best short description of Deep Ecology is an Eco-centric philoshophy, which doesnt place mankind at the centre of the universe. It was termed by Norwegian Arne Naess, who believed most ecological movements were shallow in their immediate goals, hence deep.

EF! are the best example of practicioners of Deep Ecology.

Try some green-anarchist and primitivist literature. Primitivism is a very interesting ideology.

here is a link to some info: http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/primprimer.htm

interesting? yeah like a car crash.

what a crock of shit primivitism is, can we not ban direct links to primivitists like fascists!

You get him, I can't be arsed.

Sorry my psychic powers were not working today, i didnt know it had been discussed in other threads!

Im new to this forum and havnt a clue what you folks have already discussed.

Ill go read them now!

With the hate towards primitivists, do folks here mean that people who do the fantastic Do or Die journal and earth first!ers are "crusty scums" and "croc of shite"

or

do you mean the american version of it, like Zerzan and Green Anarchy mag?

alright, because i heard the guy who does the DoD to say that he is a primitivist.

That's because DOD has no coherent politics and publishes a lot of shite. They have carried some decent stuff but how seriously can you take a periodical that has repeatedly listed the unabomber as a prisoner to support?

er, while I don't agree with all the content, DoD does fucking rock and I think is a superior quality of publication than any of the feds manage...

(Hmmm well I spose DA does have features of comparable quality, and Organise has historical stuff as good)

GT, get the last one though, the first third of the jourbal/book is one of the best shit written in ages.