In previous columns I’ve mentioned Murray Bookchin’s popular assembly model, implemented in Rojava in north-eastern Syria, in which decisions are handed up from local communities, rather than down from a distant centre; and the highly successful participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, wh

t outcome convinced him that the working class, as such, was not going to be the primary revolutionary agent. Contrary to Marxist predictions, capitalism was not going to so “immiserate” the working class that it rose up in rebellion against it. Rather, workers were going to try to make improvements in their working conditions within capitalism

one of the earliest thinkers to warn us of its dangers was Murray Bookchin, who in 1962 summarized cogently what an ecological understanding of the world means and what it does to our understanding of our place within it:The critical edge of ecology, a unique feature of the science in a period of general scientific docility, derives from its subject matter—from its very domain. The issues with which ecology deals are imperishable in the sense that they cannot be ignored without bringing into question the survival of man and the survival of the planet itself. The critical edge of ecology is due not so much to the power of human reason—a power which science hallowed during its most revolutionary periods—but to a still higher power, the sovereignty of nature . . . ecology clearly shows the totality of the natural world—nature viewed in all its aspects, cycles and interrelationships—cancels out human pretensions to mastery over the planet.[7]

social ecology formally emerged with the work of Murray Bookchin