Climate justice demonstration in Madrid during the COP25 UN Climate Conference in December, 2019. Photo by ph_m / Shutterstock.com

It is not up for debate: climate change is the most pressing issue of our time. Aside from the rather obvious fact that we cannot wage any struggle or build any new society in the shell of the old if we are all dead, the struggle for climate justice is a deeply intersectional one that touches on all the other issues we hold dear.

Concerned about inequality and the class war? Look at the way the wealthy have already started building walls to protect themselves while the lower classes drown or burn. Concerned about housing as a human right? Millions of houses are in areas that will soon be underwater or in flames will bring the affordable housing crisis to levels we have never seen before. Concerned about migrant justice, racial justice and the violent impacts of the nation-state more broadly? Look no further than Fortress Europe and the US-Mexico border to see that white, wealthy nations are already justifying locking out the Global South to face the effects of the climate apocalypse the North caused. No movement or strategy can afford to ignore the struggle for climate justice.

To tackle this hydra, organizers and authors on the left are increasingly embracing a dual power strategy by creating directly democratic, grassroots assemblies and institutions that are capable of challenging and ultimately supplanting capitalism and the nation-state.

Less well known are the origins of this strategy. The philosophy that is actually responsible for introducing dual power as a strategy for the contemporary left while connecting to the struggle for climate justice is social ecology. Examining social ecology provides the missing link in understanding the radicalization of the environmental movement historically and in constructing a dual power climate strategy for the future.

From domination of man to domination of nature

Social ecology is a philosophy that understands environmental problems as stemming from human social problems, especially hierarchy. As Murray Bookchin, the founding theorist of social ecology, explained in Toward an Ecological Society,

The notion that man is destined to dominate nature stems from the domination of man by man — and perhaps even earlier, by the domination of woman by man and the domination of the young by the old. The hierarchical mentality that arranges experience itself — in all its forms — along hierarchically pyramidal lines is a mode of perception and conceptualization in to which we have been socialized by hierarchical society.

In response to these social and environmental ills, social ecology puts forward a politics of radical democracy and dual power. In the same essay, Bookchin writes, “I would like to ask if the environmental crisis does not have its roots in the very constitution of society as we know it today, if the changes that are needed to create a new equilibrium between the natural world and the social do not require a fundamental, indeed revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines.” In later works, Bookchin elaborates this “revolutionary reconstitution of society” as communalism achieved through dual power, as many of the other essays in this issue have elaborated on aspects of that vision and strategy.

Social ecology’s understanding that environmental problems are rooted in social problems was a key contribution to the early climate justice movement. Now it’s common sense, but at first the case had to be made that capitalism and ecological sustainability are fundamentally incompatible.

The popularization of the idea that environmental problems are rooted in the deeper social issues of hierarchy, particularly the hierarchies of capitalism and the state, was largely thanks to Bookchin and social ecology. “Bookchin was among the first thinkers in the West to identify the growth imperative of capitalism as a fundamental threat to the integrity of living ecosystems,” Brian Tokar, board member of the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) and author of multiple works on the intersection of social ecology and climate justice, writes. “[Bookchin] consistently argued that social and ecological concerns are fundamentally inseparable, questioning the narrowly instrumental approaches advanced by many environmentalists to address particular issues.”

Bookchin pointed to capitalism and hierarchy as the deeper roots of environmental issues in the early 1960s, when much of the burgeoning environmental movement was focused on band-aid, surface level solutions. Dan Chodorkoff, who co-founded the ISE along with Bookchin, illustrated the point using the example of acid rain in a 2017 lecture introducing social ecology:

It [acid rain] was a huge problem, and an environmentalist looked at that problem and said, “Well, the problem is the particulates, the sulfur dioxide, and the solution of course is just put scrubbers on the tall stacks, and that’ll clean it up.” And it did, to a certain extent. Those scrubbers were an effective technology. But a social ecologist looked at that same situation and said, “Well yes, the sulfur dioxide is a problem and the tall stacks are a problem, but so is the centralized form of industrial production that requires those tall stacks and burning coal, and underlying that centralized form of industrial production is the system of capitalism. And underlying the system of capitalism is this notion that we have that society must be organized along hierarchical lines…

Scrubbers might mitigate the effects of acid rain, but they do so while the rest of the ecological crisis created by burning coal, centralized industrial production and capitalism rages on.

Tokar explains that these arguments in the “largely underground distribution” of essays by Bookchin such as “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” heavily influenced popular environmental movements in the 1960s: “Ideas he first advanced, such as the need for a fundamentally radical ecology in contrast to technocratic environmentalism, were embraced by growing numbers of ecologically-informed radicals.”

Social ecologists were also some of the first to enact the deeper environmental solutions they called for. The ISE assisted residents of New York’s marginalized Lower East Side in early experiments with wind and solar initiatives in the 1970s. In Vermont, windmills, solar collection and organic gardening were a core part of the institute from the earliest days of its founding in 1974. In the late 1970s, social ecology played a key role in the movement against nuclear power and the development of anti-nuclear alliances across the US, and social ecologists also played an important role in the development of concepts such as ecofeminism and affinity groups as they are used today.

Laying the groundwork to challenge capital and the state

Social ecology’s most important contribution to the climate justice struggle, however, is not historical. It is the concept of using dual power as a strategic blueprint, and it is vital for the present and the future of the struggle for a livable planet. Dual power is a transitional strategy that lays the groundwork in the here and now for the ecologically sustainable and just future we want.

The historical and theoretical context above leads us to the conclusion that — as social ecology has argued for decades — our struggle for climate justice cannot focus only on the narrow realm of climate or environmental issues. It is the whole hierarchical system that is threatening our planet and our lives. Smokestack scrubbers will not suffice; they never have. Nothing short of a radical overhaul will do.

Which brings us back to dual power. The term was originally a descriptive one, used by Russian socialists to describe the period during the Russian Revolution when workers’ councils had so much grassroots power that they contended with the state for authority and legitimacy. Lenin argued that this situation of divided power could not last and might give way to revolutionary overthrow.

Austro-German Marxists began to use the term theoretically after WWI, but they thought of it as a desirable permanent state: permanent councils for workers and a parliamentary state for the bourgeoisie, each balancing the other. Bookchin argued that by using this term, social democrats “divested ‘dual power’ of its revolutionary tension, and the term became a synonym for a two-part government that could conceivably have existed indefinitely.”

By contrast, Bookchin was the first to identify the potentiality of the “revolutionary tension” inherent in the idea of dual power and apply it prescriptively as a blueprint for the revolutionary transformation of society. He argued that we must build directly democratic assemblies in order to challenge and ultimately supplant their existing exploitative counterpart, the state. Just as dual power was originally used in Russia to describe a situation that could not persist long-term, dual power in social ecology is a transitional framework, intended to ultimately create a situation where confederations of assemblies and the nation-state cannot coexist, and the former must eventually displace the latter.

The beauty of dual power as a framework is that we can make concrete improvements to our daily lives while simultaneously laying the groundwork to challenge capital and the state. By constructing grassroots, horizontal, local institutions that take the place of exploitative or absent statist and/or capitalist institutions in our and our neighbors’ lives, we are both planning for the future and meeting our needs right now.