ABSTRACT
After the Marxist doldrums of the 1970s, anarchist Murray Bookchin’s essays in Toward an Ecological Society offered an exhilarating release for some women activists stymied by unrelenting economism and male Left hierarchies.1 For Bookchin, Marxism had become ‘an ideology of naked power, pragmatic efficiency and social centralisation almost indistinguishable from the ideologies of modern state capitalism’ (1971: 92). But more importantly, Bookchin’s social ecology, born but yet unnamed as politics, focused on ecological crisis and its social origins just as ecofeminists were beginning to do. Among would-be fathers of ecopolitical thought, Bookchin alone intuited the ecofeminist connection: an understanding that men’s oppression of nature and of woman are fundamentally interlinked. As he wrote in The Ecology of Freedom: ‘The subjugation of her nature and its absorption into the nexus of patriarchal morality forms the archetypal act of domination that ultimately gives rise to man’s imagery of a subjugated nature’ (1991: 121 (italics added)). Bookchin’s impressive history of hierarchy coincides with this key ecofeminist idea in a number of places, despite an assertion that gerontocracy was the earliest social stratification.
