Blair Taylor

What, if anything, does social ecology have to contribute to ongoing discussions of race and racism? As a lifelong leftist and a Jew, Murray Bookchin, the core theorist of social ecology, was on a personal level implacably opposed to racism, colonialism, and all forms of bigotry and domination.  His theorization of social ecology’s core concept of hierarchy was a conscious attempt to carve out space for non-economic forms of domination like race and gender, one that could expand on Marxism’s narrower focus on class and economic exploitation. Likewise, the very term social ecology was articulated as a critique of the racist Malthusian assumptions common within both the mainstream and radical environmental movements.

Yet at the same time, while racism and colonialism are frequently mentioned in Bookchin’s writings, they are not central concerns that receive sustained or systematic analysis. Although his early work in particular drew inspiration from indigenous lifeways, in the main it remained focused primarily on the European revolutionary and intellectual traditions. Bookchin’s strongly antistatist and universalist political commitments translated into sharp critiques of New Left support for national liberation movements outside the west, as well as the rise of “identity politics” domestically. These often converged with broader polemics against intellectual tendencies like postmodernism and some versions of postcolonialism. As a result, his defenses of the western tradition and “the left that was,” despite their shortcomings, clashed with the emerging theoretical culture of the left. This constellation of gaps, critiques, and positions have led some to conclude that social ecology at best has a blind spot regarding race and colonialism, or is Eurocentric at worst.

This article explores the work of social ecology's core theorist to uncover what Bookchin says – and does not say – on matters of race, racism, colonialism, and identity.

The following interview is an email exchange with the author, which was conducted as a follow up to the School for Politics and Critique 2019: Municipal Organizing and Left-wing Environmental Solutions. The questions were prepared by Katerina Kolozova and Zdravko Saveski.

Taylor, Blair. “Refusing the False Choice Between Individual and Collective Liberation: Interview with Blair Taylor.” Interviewed by Katerina Kolozova and Zdravko Saveski. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019): 32-37.

Le meurtre, par des islamistes armés, des journalistes satiriques de Charlie Hebdo, à Paris, est devenu une pomme de discorde au sein de la gauche contemporaine. D’un côté, des libéraux, des athées et un certain nombre de représentants de la gauche « classique » dénoncèrent sévèrement l’attentat et l’Islam politique, défendant la liberté d’expression et manifestant leur solidarité en affirmant : « Je suis Charlie ». De l’autre, la gauche postcoloniale et anti-impérialiste profita de l’occasion pour dénoncer non pas l’attentat mais le magazine lui-même, présenté comme une publication raciste et « islamophobe », sans tenir compte des origines gauchistes et antiracistes de la revue. Refusant d’apporter à la liberté d’expression et aux journalistes assassinés un soutien suspecté de complicité avec l’« islamophobie » et la défense de l’ordre immuable des choses, ils déplacèrent l’attention sur le « racisme d’État » et sur l’impérialisme occidental, pointés comme les vrais coupables. Les attentats ultérieurs, à Paris et ailleurs, ont suscité les mêmes réactions, selon un modèle désormais assez prévisible.
Ces exemples sont symptomatiques d’une scission plus profonde au sein de la gauche contemporaine, sévèrement divisée sur des questions touchant l’universalité ou la particularité des mouvements de libération, le bien-fondé des critiques de la religion, et le rôle de la solidarité internationale. Des préoccupations relatives à la « fausse universalité » et à l’exploitation cynique de la solidarité se sont graduellement converties en une méfiance généralisée devant ce qui faisait partie naguère des concepts fondamentaux de la gauche.

The Left, both in the United States and globally, is sharply divided on questions regarding the universality or particularity of liberatory politics, the validity of critiques of religion, and the role of international solidarity. Concerns about false universality and the cynical manipulation of solidarity have translated into a generalized suspicion of these once basic left concepts. Increasingly, one set of ostensibly left commitments—anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and anti-militarism—are deployed against the values of universalism, free speech, and solidarity. Is this simply a matter of strategic differences, or does it reflect more fundamental theoretical and political disagreements that are reshaping the basic contours of left politics? This article explores this question through a Marxian analysis of left reactions to the Charlie Hebdo attack, the subsequent PEN award boycott, and the decolonial politics of Le Parti des indigènes de la République in the United States. It argues that this transformation in political culture mirrors a transformation within academia that was pioneered in the United States but is now transatlantic: the ascendance of a new constellation of critical intellectual traditions—postcolonialism, poststructuralism, Critical Whiteness Studies, and queer theory—that are highly critical of the Enlightenment, universalism, and secularism. It offers a political and theoretical critique of the assumptions undergirding contemporary postcolonial left argumentation, illustrating how they resonate with philosophical positions pioneered by the right.

Neoanarchist politics have become increasingly hegemonic on the North American left. Tracing its emergence during the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999 to its recent incarnation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, this article argues that neoanarchism’s attempts to “change the world without taking power” pose serious theoretical and practical problems for emancipatory politics today. The text also examines recuperation as a factor in social movement decline, arguing that the incorporation of social movement themes is constructing a “new spirit of capitalism” that both addresses widespread demand for a more ethical world while simultaneously insulating itself from critique – a process facilitated by significant ideological resonance between neoanarchism and neoliberalism.

This encyclopedia entry on the U.S. Alt-Right, short for alternative right, describes a constellation of right-wing forces loosely united by a critique of traditional conservatism animated by political commitments to white nationalism or ultranationalism, authoritarianism and rejection of democracy, gender traditionalism, hatred of the left and liberalism, and antisemitism. It explores this amorphous term, one that encompasses a spectrum of far-right actors that includes white nationalists, “race realists,” neo-Nazis, far-right academics, esoteric antimodernists, and the misogynist “manosphere.” It addresses the political division between alt-right – who openly embrace white nationalism, fascism, or Nazism – and the “alt-lite,” who advocate civic rather than white nationalism and welcome participation by Jews, gays, and people of color. Yet defending both wings are united by a commitment to human inequality, understood as an inherent and inescapable fact of life that manifests between races, nations, culture, sexes, and sexualities. In almost all cases, straight white men are situated at the apex of this civilizational hierarchy. 

The entry describes the movement's origins, political and intellectual composition, key actors, specific racial discourse, relationship to president Trump, and impact on U.S. political culture more generally.

The rise of the so-called 'alt-right', or alternative right, has transformed the political landscape in the United States and challenged established political categories. For at least a generation, the political right has been understood primarily as a defence of the status quo: pro-capitalist, pro-state, pro-science and technology, and anti-environmental. By contrast, the alt-right draws its energy from a critique of the established order, liberal and conservative alike, not from its defence. Thus, it has resurrected older right-wing traditions of the antimodernist, revolutionary, and fascist right which have remained marginal in the North American conservative movement, often articulated in a white nationalist framework. While this milieu is highly diverse and internally divided, much of it is animated by strains of reactionary thought which attack liberal democracy, the state, and the 'mongrelizing', amoral forces of global capitalism. It has adopted positions associated with the political left, for example against war and free trade and for (exclusionary) social protection-ism. Many contemporary researchers of the far right have begun to examine these new political alignments and how they disrupt past understandings (Reid Ross 2017; Lyons 2018). However, these accounts often overlook the extent to which alt-right discourse draws from ecological discourse. Ecology is an increasingly important political vector for the rejection of traditional pro-business conservative positions by the constellation of esoteric, revolutionary, and traditionalist currents that comprise the alt-right. This chapter thus analyses how the alt-right deploys ecological discourse, rediscovering older Nazi themes like organic agriculture and animal rights while articulating novel right-wing interpretations of concepts like biodiversity, decentralism, deep ecology, bioregionalism, anti-capitalism, Indigenism, and anarchism. It will explore the core themes and political actors within the milieu, as well as how ideological cross-pollination has resulted in left-right resonance and, at times, political collaboration. The chapter concludes by discussing the potential political role of alt-right ecology in the present historical conjuncture, drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by Fraser (2017) and Brown (2006).

This text examines the political legacy of the New Left on the alterglobalization movement and Occupy Wall Street in the United States. It argues that the U.S. New Left’s transformation from participatory democracy to Maoist sectarianism constituted a trauma deeply inscribed on the formation of subsequent social movements in the United States, especially its direct chronological successors in the New Social Movements of the 1980s and 1990s. This synthetic movement milieu was characterized by commitments to feminism, antiracism, and ecology coupled to a critique of economic reductionism, an aversion to ideological sectarianism instantiated in a turn to culture and single issue campaigns, and a preference for prefigurative political forms which embodied a consistency of means and ends. This political constellation would become definitional for the alterglobalization movement that emerged on the streets of Seattle in 1999, and, after a period of movement abeyance, would re-emerge later in Occupy Wall Street alongside new populist themes.

By charting the development of groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Abalone/Clamshell Alliances, Direct Action Network, this paper explores how the New Left’s discourse of “the personal is the political” evolved into the neo-anarchism that became hegemonic within the alterglobalization movement and later OWS. It also contends that the same challenges and limitations that demobilized the early New Left, New Social Movements, and the alterglobalization movement persist in Occupy Wall Street. Exploring the continuities and ruptures between these movements, I argue that the “prefigurative politics” now hegemonic within the North American left, by overcorrecting for the failures of 20th Century Marxism, poses formidable theoretical and practical problems for social movements today.

Accounts of the antiglobalization movement often identify repression of dissent post-9/11 and the shift to an antiwar frame as the main causes of demobilization. But what if the alterglobalization movement faded not because it failed, but rather because it succeeded? Movements of the 1990s popularized a moral critique of corporations; thus they changed corporations, not the world. Today business speaks the language of movements: various forms of ethical consumption are now mainstream political discourse and consumer habitus, from organic food to alternative energy. At the level of production, movement critiques have translated into decentralized workplaces, flexibility, informality, and shifts towards a post-material/affective economy.

Yet these transformations occurred while the social movements that once proposed such solutions – until recently – have been in decline. Building on the works of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2000) and Nancy Fraser (2009), my paper examines how the recuperation of social movement themes is constructing a “New Spirit of Capitalism.” This paper interrogates the latent affinities between neoanarchism and neoliberalism, arguing that the mircopolitical and “prefigurative” orientation of neoanarchism dominant within the alterglobalization movement and living on in Occupy Wall Street has facilitated the explosive growth in the discourse of “ethical capitalism,” a process which also insulates it from critique. The authoritarian legacy of 20th century Marxism has given rise to a politics that seeks to “change the world without taking power,” a process which has redefined the historical left and poses serious theoretical and practical problems for social movements today.

Leftists love a good crisis; there’s even an old joke, “Marxists have successfully predicted the last 13 of the last 4 crises.” It is unsurprising then, that the twinned ecological and economic crises of the present have birthed a resurgence of various forms of “crisis critique.” This line of critique rests on the idea that the logic of a given system generates internal contradictions which manifest as “crisis,” “breakdown,” or “pathology,” depending on the preferred social metaphor. Quite often this is also linked to a second moment, either implicit or explicit, wherein crisis triggers a response by the body politic, often creating social movement “antibodies” which fight whatever the destructive crisis tendency may be.

Ecology is typically framed as a politics of limits premised on objective, scientific, natural boundaries to human activity which, when overstepped, undermines the biological systems necessary for human life. The growing space taken on the left up by ecology in general, and climate change in particular, has merged with pre-existing traditions of crisis critique, including Marxism. In many cases, the result has been an unhappy marriage which heightens problematically objectivist tendencies in both where politics is tightly linked, if not derived from, objective laws of nature or society. This paper will explore the assumptions of both sides of this formulation – the nature of crisis and reactions to it – to assess the implications and limitations it poses for emancipatory politics today. Along the way it will also explore how ecology has come to occupy such a central role in left politics, charting its lukewarm reception by the New Left, its popularization by thinkers like Murray Bookchin, to its eventual political dominance within the alterglobalization movement.

From the alterglobalization movement to Occupy Wall Street, neoanarchist politics have become increasingly hegemonic on the North American left. Yet at the same time, capitalism has increasingly come to speak the language of social movements: sustainability, fairness, authenticity, freedom. How did the language of the left become the language of business?

This paper proposes an important part of the answer lies in the historical trajectory of left social movements over the past 40 years. Building on the works of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2000) and Nancy Fraser (2009) my paper examines how the recuperation of social movement themes is constructing a “New Spirit of Capitalism” that both addresses widespread demand for an ethical lifeworld while simultaneously insulating itself from critique. I explore how the experience of New Left Marxism deeply shaped the politics of the new social movements that emerged in its wake in the 70s and 80s – resulting in the prefigurative politics of the direct action movement that evolved into the neo-anarchism of alterglobalization movement and later within Occupy. Reacting to state-led Fordism and the hegemony of Marxism on the left,  neoanarchism expresses significant ideological resonances with neoliberal discourse, examined here by comparing overlapping elements of critique and the shared communitarian antistatist vision of Occupy Wall Street and the U.S. Tea Party and “Big Society” UK Conservative Party program. The paper argues that neoanarchism’s attempt to construct a left politics that avoids the authoritarianism of 20th Century Marxism poses serious theoretical and practical problems for emancipatory politics today.

The current sense of crisis/in economy, ecology, politics, and society/is prompting many critical theorists to revisit the question of capitalism. We salute this return to core questions of social theory after a period of neglect. But received models of capitalism, crisis and critique may no longer be adequate to 21st century conditions. We propose, accordingly, to re-examine some basic theoretical questions, with a view to determining how best to revive the critique of capitalism in the present era. Our questions include: How is capitalism best conceptualised/as an economic system, a grammar of life, or an institutional order? What genres of critique are best able to clarify its fundamental mechanisms and practical effects/moral critique, ethical critique, genealogical critique, and/or crisis critique? How can we best understand current struggles surrounding capitalism, and what, after all, is to be done?

The recent chants of " Jews Will Not Replace Us " at the deadly Charlottesville " Unite the Right " rally caught many observers off guard. Although antisemitism is on the rise in the U.S. and globally, it remains mostly absent from progressive, left, and liberal political activism and discourse. This article seeks shines a light on this " invisible " form of racism. It chronicles the left's long and complicated relationship with antisemitism, spotlighting historical changes in how progressive movements have and have not discussed it. The article clarifies how antisemitism is different from other forms of racism, outlining its core tropes and general worldview. By focusing on how antisemitism can manifest in left critiques of capitalism, modernity, or global politics, I illustrate how it both overlaps with and diverges from the antisemitism of the right. It highlights common rhetorical strategies which deny or downplay the existence of antisemitism, or derail conversations about it from taking place. It focuses on particularities of the U.S. context that exclude antisemitism from left politics, including how Americans tend to see it as a primarily European phenomenon largely confined to the distant past, its colonization and perception as an issue of the right, to the hegemony of antiracist conceptual frameworks like critical whiteness/white privilege theory that lack conceptual tools for addressing it. I conclude by arguing that antisemitism constitutes a serious lacuna within the contemporary U.S. left, one which blinds it to important changes in the current political landscape.

Neoanarchism: Utopia Reawakened or the New Spirit of Capitalism?

Since the collapse of actually-existing socialism, anarchism has experienced a renaissance within the global left as the historical rival tradition to Marxism. A variety of recent left movements from the Zapatistas, the Spanish indignados, Argentine Piqueteros, to Occupy Wall Street have embraced what some have called neoanarchism, a politics that seeks to “change the world without taking power.” This lecture will offer a critical analysis of contemporary anarchist politics in theory and practice, focusing on three main themes. First, it will examine the content of neoanarchism and how it differs from classical anarchism: its particular political analysis, social critique, and utopian vision. Second, it will trace the major historical moments, movements, and intellectual debates which shaped its emergence and political logic – focusing especially on the experience of the New Left and New Social Movements, the anarchist turn in the 1990s by the radical ecology and alterglobalization movement, its hegemony within Occupy Wall Street. Along the way I will discuss the interplay of movements and ideas as various thinkers such as Murray Bookchin, John Zerzan, and David Graeber sought to reformulate anarchist theory in light of changing social and historical conditions.

The talk concludes with an exploration of neoanarchism’s latent affinities with neoliberalism; as neoanarchism developed primarily in opposition to state-led Fordist capitalism and its Marxist opposition, aspects of its social critique overlap with that of neoliberalism. This makes neoanarchism especially prone to recuperation – the process of incorporating radical ideas and movements into power – an important but overlooked factor contributing to both movement decline and the legitimization of power. Whereas the anti-corporate politics of the alterglobalization movement was recuperated as ethical consumption, the anti-statist communitarian politics of movements like Occupy Wall Street have also been absorbed into the neoliberal discourse of the post-crisis era. Echoed in the Tory Big Society program and the U.S. Tea Party manifesto, their shared emphasis on direct action self-provisioning by non-state actors, critique of “politics,” and emphasis on economic alternatives is increasingly attractive to both left and right. Thus just as New Left critiques of the hierarchical Fordist order lent ethical legitimacy to neoliberalism, neoanarchism offers a potential glimpse of a new spirit of capitalism perfectly adapted to the austerity conditions of “post” or “zombie” neoliberalism. In this light, neoanarchism’s allegedly impractical and utopian politics can also be understood as the vanguard of capitalist development, prefiguring not the new society but the means to modernize and stabilize the old.

Taylor examines how political transformations within left social movements have helped to construct a “new spirit of capitalism” that addresses widespread demand for an ethical lifeworld, simultaneously innovating and modernizing while neutralizing critique.

Today ideas and practices pioneered by oppositional movements have become mainstream political discourse and consumer habitus; modern capitalism increasingly speaks the same language of its critics: sustainability, fairness, authenticity, freedom.

Looking at the cases of the alterglobalization and Occupy Wall Street movements in the United States, Taylor analyzes latent affinities with neoliberalism to argue that recuperation – the process of incorporating contentious movements and discourse into power – constitutes an important but overlooked factor in movement decline, but also in establishing political legitimacy.

Taylor examines how political transformations within left social movements have helped to construct a “new spirit of capitalism” that addresses widespread demand for an ethical lifeworld, simultaneously innovating and modernizing while neutralizing critique.

Taylor suggests that ideas and practices pioneered by oppositional movements have become mainstream political discourse and consumer habitus; modern capitalism increasingly speaks the same language of its critics: sustainability, fairness, authenticity, freedom.

Looking at the cases of the alterglobalization and Occupy Wall Street movements in the United States, Taylor analyzes latent affinities with neoliberalism to argue that recuperation – the process of incorporating contentious movements and discourse into power – constitutes an important but overlooked factor in movement decline, but also in establishing political legitimacy.

Murray Bookchin was a pioneering thinker and lifelong revolutionary whose politics of ecological direct democracy strongly influenced the New Left, ecology movement, alterglobalization movement, and most recently the Kurdish liberation struggle. The Next Revolution brings together Bookchin’s essays on freedom and popular assemblies for the first time; coeditors Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor will discuss his ideas and political vision to argue Bookchin was a key theoretical architect of the modern left.

The recent murder of satirical journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris by Islamist gunmen became a hotly contested event for the contemporary left. On one side, liberals, atheists, and a smattering of “classical” leftists harshly denounced both the attacks and Political Islam, defending free speech and declaring their solidarity with the victims: Je suis Charlie. On the other, the primarily postcolonial and anti-imperialist left denounced not the attack, but the magazine Charlie Hebdo as racist and Islamophobic for its satirical depictions of Islam, interpreting the attacks as misguided resistance to domestic racism and imperial military intervention. For them, support for free speech or the murdered journalists was seen as implicit racism and support for the status quo. Similar debates have taken place around the rise of the Islamic State and questions of military support for the Kurdish defenders of Kobane – was this a modern Homage to Catalonia necessitating international Left support, or simply another excuse for military intervention in the Middle East? Especially as political Islam grows as a powerful global force, the left is fragmented by questions about the universality or particularity of our political critique, the validity of critiques of religion, and the role of international solidarity.  Concerns about the cynical manipulation of solidarity and false universality have motivated recent Twitter wars, for example around #bringbackourgirls or #solidarityisforwhitepeople, which has translated into a deep suspicion of these basic left concepts. Increasingly, one set of left commitments – antiracism, anti-imperialism, and anti-militarism – are deployed against the values of universalism, liberalism, and solidarity. This talk will examine the emergence and stakes of this debate by analyzing left responses to recent political events like Charlie Hebdo, IS, and the struggle for Kobane. Are these strategic disagreements or more basic political ones?  What does Social Ecology have to say about this recent impasse?

From Alterglobalization to Occupy Wall Street:
Neoanarchism and the New Spirit of Capitalism

The Research Group on Post-Growth Societies, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Tuesday, September 29th

This talk will present an overview of my doctoral research, which examines how political transformations within left social movements have helped to construct a “new spirit of capitalism” that addresses widespread demand for an ethical lifeworld, simultaneously innovating and modernizing while neutralizing critique. Ideas and practices pioneered by oppositional movements have become mainstream political discourse and consumer habitus; modern capitalism increasingly speaks the same language of its critics: sustainability, fairness, authenticity, freedom. Looking at the cases of the alterglobalization and Occupy Wall Street movements in the United States, I analyze the emergence of their distinctive neoanarchist political orientation and explore its latent affinities with neoliberalism to argue that recuperation – the process of incorporating contentious movements and discourse into power – constitutes an important but overlooked factor in movement decline as well as establishing political legitimacy.
The talk will examine the political logic which animated the shift from New Left Marxism to neoanarchism, offer a critique of the neoanarchist theorists like David Graeber and Simon Critchley based on its resonance with neoliberal concepts, and theorize recuperation as a factor in social movement decline and in the modernization of capitalism’s normative order. Whereas the anti-corporate politics of the alterglobalization movement of the late 90s and early 2000s was reborn as ethical consumption, I suggest that in a post-crisis era, the anti-statist communitarian politics of movements like Occupy Wall Street have also been absorbed into neoliberal policy and discourse. I argue that the orientation of direct action self-provisioning by non-state actors, increasingly attractive to left and right actors alike, offers a glimpse of a potentially new spirit of capitalism well-tailored to a post-crisis era of “post” or “zombie” neoliberalism. Both theoretical and empirical, the project the project explores how ostensibly oppositional social movements also constitute important resources for political stabilization in contemporary societies.

While antisemitism has long been a thriving topic of academic inquiry in the United States, prior to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in August 2016, it received relatively little political attention, especially by the Left. Thus, the haunting chants of “Jews will not replace us” from tiki-torch wielding young white men seemed to catch many off guard, a threat punctuated by the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer. Indeed, the rise of the so-called Alt-Right has rekindled a public conversation about antisemitism and fascism usually reserved for academic specialists. Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, the UK Labour Party has been wracked by a series of scandals that has put a spotlight on Left antisemitism. This transformed political context seems tailor-made for Michele Battini’s well-timed book Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism. It offers not only an erudite inquiry into the history and logic of antisemitism vis-à-vis economy but also an important contemporary resource for understanding the dramatic return of a central historical problematic that is currently animating both the Right and the Left.

Neoanarchist politics have become increasingly hegemonic on the North American left. Tracing its emergence during the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999 to its recent incarnation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, this article argues that neoanarchism’s attempts to “change the world without taking power” pose serious theoretical and practical problems for emancipatory politics today. The text also examines recuperation as a factor in social movement decline, arguing that the incorporation of social movement themes is constructing a “new spirit of capitalism” that both addresses widespread demand for a more ethical world while simultaneously insulating itself from critique – a process facilitated by significant ideological resonance between neoanarchism and neoliberalism.