Radical clarity to the concept of real "change".

• Author: Hardy, Karl

The presidential primary season had pundits and pollsters proclaiming "change" a primary factor in the minds of many voters. It's little wonder that this stark period--marked by the so-called "War on Terror," the extension of neoliberalism across the globe, and the urgency of global warming--has motivated such vague desires among the citizenry. Undefined, undifferentiated and ultimately relegated to mere platitudes, "change" here means little; it is cosmetic, commodified, and reinforces the status quo. Absent is a lens, a coherent perspective through which current and future movements might comprehend and ultimately transcend the prevailing order, inspiring the crucial transformative "change" so necessary to reverse today's regressive and reactionary tendencies.

While the US Green Party struggles on and plans yet again to rely on a presidential candidacy to foster a "trickle down" growth for state and local parties, there is little to suggest that Greens or any other marginalized American Left movements are positioned to fill this void of coherent analyses and strategies for reconstructive action. Yet the American Green movement's early history included the influence of social ecology, a body of thought primarily developed by Murrary Bookchin, that articulates just such a vision based on ecological principles, notions of radical democracy, and a celebration of our uniquely human potentialities. Bookchin was a keynote speaker at the first national gathering of US Greens in 1987 and his work, including more than 20 books, numerous essays, articles, speaking engagements, and the co-founding of the Institute for Social Ecology, affected the formation of the Left Greens and played a prominent role in debates over direction for the nascent American Green movement.

Social Ecology and Communalism, a recently released collection of four essays written in Book- chin's later years, offers an accessible introduction to social ecology's fundamental rejection of social hierarchy and domination, critique of instrumental reasoning in favor of a dialectical philosophical orientation, and its ecological "libertarian municipalist" political strategy. It should be noted that Bookchin's version of "communalism" bears no relation to the (largely religion-based) sectarianism it evokes in South Asia. Instead, here communalism refers to the theory and system of government in which local communities are associated in a confederation.

Norwegian communalist Eirik...