Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to Dimitri Rousso- poulos and Lucia Kowaluk for the contribution they have made to the preparation and publication of this book. My deep personal friendship and high regard for both of these splendid people should not color their many years of effort they have given to our shared libertarian ideals. Their own gifts aside, their’s is a virtue and dedication of nearly two decades of day-to-day work, of moral probity, and reliability that quietly and unobtrusively turn dreams into reality amid the clamor and oratorical flourishes of compatriots long gone. For this steadfastness, loyalty to our common ideas, and depth of perception, I thank them earnestly and warmly.

Apart from the “Introduction” and “Conclusion,” all the essays in this book have appeared in the periodical literature — although several very important ones are published for the first time in their complete and unedited form. “Toward an Ecological Society” first appeared in WIN, “The Open Letter to the Ecology Movement” in Rain , the “Myth of City Planning” and “Spontaneity and Organization” in Liberation, “Toward a Vision of an Urban Future” in The Urban Affairs Annual Review, Vol. 34 (Sage Publications), “The Concept of Ecotechnologies and Ecocommunities in Habitat International (Pergamon Press) “Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology” in Comment, and “Self- Management and the New Technology” and an abridged version of “On Neo-Marxism...” called “Beyond Neo-Marxism” in Telos (including my review of Andre Groz’s book on ecology). To all of these periodicals I would like to express my appreciation for permission to republish the aforementioned works. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Paul Piccone and Paul Breines for their independence of mind in publishing some of my most controversial articles on Marxism in the journal, Telos, that has been associated with a neo-Marxian orientation.

[1] It remains supremely ironical that, in the history of elitism and vanguardism that runs through millenia of social theory, hierarchy did not confer material privileges on the rulers of ideal societies but austerity and renunciation of the material world. Plato’s “guardians” are notably denied the sensuous pleasures of life. Their training is demanding, their responsibilities awesome, their needs severely restricted, their possessions communal and limited. The Church was to make the same austere demands on the clerical elite in society, however much these were honored in the breach. Even in modern times the early Bolsheviks were expected to live harsh, self-abnegating lives — more confining and materially impoverished than their proletarian followers. The ideal of hiearchy was based on a concept of service, not on privilege. That such a notion remained an ideal does not alter the extra-material goals it raised and the surprising extent to which these goals were retained throughout its history.

[2] Even so intractable a bourgeois as Bentham based his ethics on a definition of good, however philistine and quantitative its norms. The transmutation of the utilitatian credo of good as the greatest happines for the greatest number into the modern credo of “benefits versus risks” marks a degradation even in the sphere of bourgeois morality that has no precedent in the cultural history of western sociey.

[3] This organization no longer exists and this revised essay is dated 1979.

[4] At the risk of spicing these remarks with some politically debatable issues, I would like to remind some of my libertarian Marxist friends — the sects we can give up as hopeless — that even “workers’ control of production,” a very fashionable slogan these days, would not be any sort of “control” at all if technology were so centralized and suprahuman that workers could no longer comprehend the nature of the technological apparatus other than their own narrow sphere. For this reason alone, libertarian Marxists would be wise to examine social ecology in a new light and emphasize the need to alter the technology so that it is controllable, indeed, to alter work so that it is no longer mind-stunting as well as physically exhausting toil. Victor Ferkiss, in his latest book (The Future of Technological Civilization) has dubbed my views “eco-anarchism.” If “ecoanarchism” means the technical — not only the spiritual and political — power of people to create an ecotechnology that is comprehensible to them, one that they can really “control,” I accept the new label with eagerness.

[5] E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (Harper & Row, New York, 1974).

[6] To rephrase the title of Tony Mullaney’s two-part article, “If Big is Not Good, Small is Not Beautiful,” Peacework (a New England publication of the American Friends Service Committee), December 1975 (No. 37) and January 1976 (No. 38). Mullaney’s criticism is very trenchant but, unfortunately, it overstates the case for centralism and planning in the Third World with the result that it tends to veer over to the position of Marxian criticisms of Schumacher.

[7] Murray Bookchin, “Energy, ‘Ecotechnocracy’ and Ecology,” Liberation, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1975), pp. 29–33, and published elsewhere in this book.

[8] See Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala Berkeley, Ca., 1973).

[9] See C.K. Yang, “The Functional Relationship between Confucian Thought and Chinese Religion,” in Chinese Thought and Institutions (edited by John K. Fairbanks (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1957), pp. 270–71, for the larger context of rationalism and Asian philosophy.

[10] R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford University Press, New York 1945), pp. 29–92.

[11] Plato, The Laws, V, 737e, 738a (Trevor J. Saunders translation).

[12] Aristotle, The Politics, VIII, 5, 1326b25 (B. Jowett translation).

[13] Aristotle, The Politics, VIII, 5, 1326bl5 (H. Racham translation in Loeb Classical library). The latter translation has been selected, here, for its greater accuracy.

[14] In Aristotle, this intimacy of association advances beyond mere institutional relationships to. the level of friendship. “Political friendship is not an agreement of opinion as it might occur between strangers, or an agreement on scientific propositions,” observes Eric Vogelin; “it is an agreement between citizens as to their interests, an agreement on policies and their execution.” Eric Vogelin, Plato and Aristotle (Lousiane State University Press, Baton Rouge, La., 1957), p. 321.

[15] See Summer Chilton Powell, The Puritan Village (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn., 1963); Michael Zucherman, Peaceable Kingdoms (Vintage Books, New York, 1970); Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town (W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1970).

[16] J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract (Modern Library, New York, 1950), pp. 94–96. “In Greece, all that the people had to do, it did for itself; it was constantly assembled in the public square,” Rousseau observes. “... the moment a people allows itself to be represented,” he adds, “it is no longer free: it no longer exists.”

[17] Kropotkin did not actually model his image of a decentralized society on the Hellenic polis, but rather on the medieval communes. The author owes a debt to the German radical theorist, the late Josef Weber, who used the expression “the new or modern polis” in personal discussions that date back to the 1950s.

[18] Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (Benjamin Blom Publishers, New York, 1968 reissue of 1913 edition). An abridged version, updated by commentaries, has been prepared by Colin Ward and published by Harper & Row, New York, 1974.

[19] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Seabury Press, New York, 1972), pp. 151–52, 155, 166–67. The discussion is masterful in its profundity and, considering the year in which it was written (1944), its predictive insights.

[20] Aden and Marjorie Meinel, “A Briefing on Solar Power Farms,” presented before the Task Force on Energy of the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics, Washington, D.C., 6 March 1972; Steve Baer, Sunspots (Zomeworks Corp., Albuquerque, N. M., 1975), p. 97; William E. Heronemus, “The United States Energy Crisis: Some Proposed Gentle Solutions,” presented before a joint conference of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers and The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, West Springfield, Mass., 12 January 1972; R. Buckminister Fuller: Tetrahedral City, 1966 in Justus Dahinden, Urban Structures for the Future (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1972), pp. 162–63; Moshe Safdie, Beyond Habitat (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

[21] Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival (Anchor Books, New York, 1974), pp. 412–16, 426–27.

[22] E. Al Gutkind, Community and Environment (Philosophical Library, New York, 1954), p. 9. For a lengthy discussion of the distinction between ecology and environementalism, see Murray Bookchin, “Toward an Ecological Society,” Philosophica, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1974), pp. 73–85. This paper, originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Michigan in 1973, explores the concept of “ecotechnology” and “ecocommunity,” terms which the author coined in the 1960s and which have entered into the vernacular of the new technologists in forms that have no relation to their original meaning. The essay appears in this book.

[23] Ted Morgan, “Looking for: Epoch B,” The New York Times Magazine, 29 February 1976, p. 32.

[24] Ibid.

[25] John Todd (interview) in What Do We Use For Lifeboats? published as part of a collection of interviews by Harper & Row, New York, 1976, p. 76.

[26] Conversations between the author and John Todd of The New Alchemy Institute and Gil Friend of The Institute of Local Self-Reliance, 5 March 1976.

[27] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Lie Besiimmung des Menschen (1800), translated by R. M. Chisholm as The Vocation of Man (The Bobbs-Merrill Co., New York, 1956), p. 20.

[28] Consider the degree to which cybernetics has entered into commonplace linguistic usage, for example, as evidence of this development. We no longer ask for an interlocutor’s “advice” but for his or her “feedback” and we no longer engage in a “dialogue” but solicit an individual’s “input.” This sinister invasion of the world of “logos,” in its wide-ranging meaning as speech and reason, by the electronic terminology of modern technocracy represents not only the subversion of human interaction at every level of social experience but of personality itself as an organic and developmental phenomenon. LaMettrie’s Man a Machine enters his modern estate as a cybernetic system — not merely in his physical attributes but in his very subjectivity.

[29] It should be evident to the reader that I use the word “politics” in the Hellenic meaning of the terms, as the administration of the polis, not in any electoral sense. The administration of the polis was seen by the Athenians as a continual educative process as well as a vital social activity in which each citizen was expected to participate.

[30] See “Toward a Liberatory Technology” in my Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Black Rose Books, 1977)

[31] Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 131.

[32] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 105.

[33] Aristotle, “Politica” in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1284, Book VII, 4:25.

[34] E.A. Gutkind, The Twilight of Cities (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), p. 17.

[35] Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in Community, Life and Social Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 120.

[36] Leonard Reissman, The Urban Process (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 10.

[37] Ibid., p. 7.

[38] Frank Fisher, “Where City Planning Stands Today,” Commentary, January 1954, p. 75.

[39] Charles Fourier, Selections (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), p. 138.

[40] Mel Scott, American City Planning (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971), p. 1.

[41] Lewis Mumford, “The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning,” in Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1965), p. 29.

[42] F.J. Osborn (preface), Ibid., p. 21.

[43] Aristotle, op. cit., p. 1284, Book VII, 5:32.

[44] Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), p, 1.

[45] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The City as Machine,” in Metropolis: Values in Conflict, ed. C.E. Elias, Jr., et al (Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 94.

[46] Alexander Tzonis, Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment (Boston: i Press, Inc., 1972), p. 66.

[47] Ebenezer Howard, op. cit., p. 51.

[48] Ibid., see especially pp. 90, 113–15.

[49] Ibid., p. 150.

[50] R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 360.

[51] “Blueprint for a Communal Environment,” in Sources, ed. Theodore Roszak (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1972), p. 393.

[52] Ibid., p. 394.

[53] Ibid., p. 395.

[54] Ibid., pp. 399, 400.

[55] Ibid., pp. 411–12.

[56] Ibid., p. 405.

[57] The ambiguity of the tendency is evident in the writings of Marx and Engels. Despite Engels’s critical thrust in his well-known pamphlet “The Housing Question,” he clearly shared Marx’s view that the bourgeois city marked a distinct advance over rural “parochialism.”

[58] Notably organizations such as the Alliance for Neighborhood Government in the United States and the Montreal Citizens Movement (MCM) in Canada, The MCM, which already holds a considerable number of seats in Montreal’s city council, has advanced the most radical program of all. “Nous devons instaurer noter propre democratic afin de realizer noter plan de reorganization de la societe,” it declares in its latest program. And further: “Le conseil de quartier (which the MCM seeks to substitute for the existing “districts electoraux”) ne devra done jamais devenir un autre palier de gouvernement a I’interieur de la societe capitaliste” (Montreal Citizens Movement, 1976).

[59] There is, in fact, no offical “sweat equity program” in New York City. The “program” is the legal and funding nexus which youthful activists on the East 11 Street project and “U-Hab,” a New York homesteading group, created when early attempts were made to rebuild abandoned structures in the city. For the most recent survey of “sweat equity” projects in New York, see the Third Annual Progress Report of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board.

[60] Milton Kotler (1975), for example, has emphasized the efficiency of decentralization and F.S. Schumacher (1973), its capacity to promote ecological awareness. In the latter case, I must share some responsability for this emphasis in as much as Dr. Schumacher, quoting me by earlier pseudonym, Lewis Herber, accepts my assertion that “reconciliation of man with the natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become necessary” (p. 107).

[61] I say this provocatively because the myth still persists among council communists, many neo-Marxists, and particularly anarchosyndicalists (who, owing to the resurgence of the CNT in Spain, represent a very vocal constituency in the European libertarian Left) that “workers control” of the economy is equivalent to worker’s control of society. All theoretical considerations aside, the ease with which the CNT was out-maneuvered by the bourgeois state, despite its massive control of the Catalan economy in 1936–37, should have dispelled such simple economistic notions of power a generation ago.

[62] For my own part, I could cite many personal experiences where young people who read this passage in Marcuse’s essay and viewed such repellent “documentaries” as To Die in Madrid had to be educated into the real facts about Spain, not to speak of such myths as the “libertarian” proclivities of Maoism and theory of an “external proletariat,” a position that was later to become the keystone of Weatherman propaganda.

[63] I cannot help but note that Freudo-Marxism itself is an unstable hybridization of subjective categories with the value-free “social science” Marx sought to bestow on socialism. Women’s liberation, like ecology, urbanism, even “workers’ control” and neighborhood sovereignty, must be grafted on to the Marxian corpus like alien theoretical transplants. Alas, the sutures barely hold the grafts to the main body. A veritable industry, maintained by a number of well-known “neo-Marxist” hacks, has been established to provide the necessary cosmetics for the disfiguring effects of this bizarre surgery. But behind it all, one invariably encounters the same Marxian outlook with its fixation on the proletariat (“external” or “internal,” “old” or “new”), on economic data and power constellations. Important as these areas surely are, they are not the last word in social analyzes and as mere subjects of analyzes do not provide the fundamental bases for theoretical reconstruction and a new radical practice.

[64] The patronizing attitude of many Marxist theorists toward Kropotkin’s work in this area and the cultivated oblivion they exhibit toward historical disputes that were waged between Marxists and anarchists over such widely ranging issues as the general strike and the importance of popular control of revolutionary institutions is evidence of an odious “partyness” that must be directly confronted wherever it exists. Are we to forget that Rose Luxemburg in the Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions grossly misrepresented the anarchist emphasis on the general strike after the 1905 revolution in Russia in order to make it acceptable to Social Democracy? That Lenin was to engage in the same misrepresentation on the issue of popular control in State and Revolution? That in recent years Marxist writers, who have adduced the factory as a “school” for conditioning the proletariat into submission to union and party hierarchies have yet to acknowledge the anarchist literature that originally pointed to this problem ? Much the same can be said around such issues as ecology, utopianism, and even gay and women’s liberation. As long as neo-Marxists stake out a claim to concepts that are historically alien to their traditions in Marxism, they not only perpetuate the mystification of radical history, but exhibit a moral probity that is hardly better than that of the society they profess to oppose.

[65] Historically, one of the most striking examples of this support must be placed directly at the doorstep of Marx himself. For Marx to have described capital as a “great civilizing influence” that not only reduces nature purely to an “object for man (Menschen — “mankind” in the McLellan translation, “humankind” in the Nicolaus!), purely as an object of utility,” but also as a force that drives beyond “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life” must now be viewed as more closely akin to this ideological process than a form of naive nineteenth-century evolutionism. (Grundrise, Random House, pg. 410; the Nicolaus translation has been corrected to remove the fiction that Marx was a committed feminist in his terminology) These remarks by Marx must not be dismissed as a mere theoretical matter. Bitter conflicts within the Russian and Spanish revolutionary movements over opponents and supporters of the more desirable features of village society were to reflect conflicting attitudes toward Marx’s encomiums to the “historically progressive” role of capitalism, particularly in its destruction of precapitalist formations. Isaiah Berlin, in his excellent introduction to Franco Venturi’s Roots of Revolution (Grosset & Dunlap, 1960), has discussed this cleavage in the Russian revolutionary movements with great sympathy for the anarchistic Populists. I have dealt with the same issue in the Spanish revolutionary movements in my Spanish Anarchists (Free Life Editions, 1977), a work that is also available as a Harper & Row paperback.

[66] I have emphasized the word “all” because a market society is no longer a market economy. The colonization of every aspect of life by capitalism — personal as well as social, domestic as well as industrial, retail as well as productive — is a relatively recent phenomenon that really came into its own after World War II. Until the 1950s, the individual could still find a refuge from the workaday world of the capitalist economy in the private world of home and neighborhoods. Not until the postwar years did capitalism fully colonize the realm of consumption; its prewar triumphs were largely limited to the realm of production. Neighborhoods, structured around a viable domestic world, small retail shops, and a dazzling variety of cultural societies, existed up to the early 1950s. The dissolution of neighborhoods by suburbs, of retail shops by shopping malls, and cultural societies by television, not to speak of domestic life by the nuclear family, finally ended the neighborhood as a form of village life within the city. Capitalist consumption, now triumphant, has ended even the most externalized notions of a public space. ’ The nearest thing to such a “space” is literally the shopping mall, where consumers engage in a ballet with commodities and adolescents wander amid deserted lobbies to meet for sexual assignations and, of course, smoke marijuana.

[67] To my knowledge, this implicit anarchism in the young Hegel has been ignored by neo-Marxists and its Joachimite roots examined only casually, if at all. The considerable attention which has been given to labor and language in Hegel’s early writings has often slighted their utopian dimension and has turned Hegel not merely into a “precursor” of Marxism but also one of its victims.

[68] Most of my observations about the proletariat were made at the Telos Conference on Organization at Buffalo, New York, in November, 1971, and were developed in my article “On Spontaneity and Organization.” These observations can be traced back to my “Listen, Marxist!” of April, 1969. They have since been appropriated by many Neo-Marxists to add a legitimation precisely to a “proletarian consciousness” an interest that my remarks were meant to challenge. I adduce this type of distortion primarily to guard the reader against “neo-Marxist” tendencies that attach basically alien ideas to the withering conceptual framework of Marxism — not to say something new but to preserve something old with ideological formal dehyde — to the detriment of any intellectual growth that the distinctions are designed to foster. This is mystification at its worst, for it not only corrupts ideas but the very capacity of the mind to deal with them. If Marx’s work can be rescued for our time, it will be by dealing with it as an invaluable part of the development of ideas, not as pastiche that is legitimated as a “method” or continually “updated” by concepts that come from an alien zone of ideas.

[69] “Communism” has come to mean a stateless society, based on the maxim, “From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.” Society’s affairs are managed directly from “below” and the means of production are communally “owned.” Both Marxists and anarchists (or, at least, anarcho- communists) view this form of society as a common goal. Where they disagree is primarily on the character and role of the organized revolutionary movement in the revolutionary process and the intermediate “stages” (most Marxists see the need for a centralized “proletarian dictatorship,” followed by a “socialist” state — a view anarchists emphatically deny) required to achieve a communist society. In the matter of these differences, it will be obvious that I hold to an anarchist viewpoint.

[70] The use of military or quasi-military language — “vanguard,” “strategy,” “tactics” — betrays this conception fully. While denouncing students as “petty bourgeois” and “shit,” the “professional revolutionary” has always had a grudging admiration and respect for that most inhuman of all hierarchical institutions, the military. Compare this with the counterculture’s inherent antipathy for “soldierly virtues” and demeanor.

[71] The word “people” (le peuple of the Great French Revolution) will no longer be the Jacobin (or, more recently, the Stalinist and Maoist) fiction that conceals antagonistic class interests within the popular movement. The word will reflect the general interests of a truly human movement, a general interest that expresses the material possibilities for achieving a classless society.

[72] The utter stupidity of the American “left” during the late Sixties in projecting a mindless “politics of polarization” and thereby wantonly humiliating so many middle-class — and, yes, let it be said: bourgeois — elements who were prepared to listen and to learn, can hardly be criticized too strongly. Insensible to the unique constellation of possibilities that stared it in the face, the “left” simply fed its guilt and insecurities about itself and followed a politics of systematic alienation from all the authentic radicalizing forces in American society. This insane politics, coupled with a mindless mimicry of the “third world,” a dehumanizing verbiage (the police as “pigs,” opponents as “fascists”), and a totally dehumanizing body of values, vitiated all its claims as a “liberation movement.” The student strike that followed the Kent murders revealed to the “left” and the students alike that they had succeeded only too well in polarizing American society, but that they, and not the country’s rulers, were in the minority. It is remarkable testimony to the inner resources of the counter-culture that the debacle of SDS led not to a sizable Marxist-Leninist party but to the well-earned disintegration of the “Movement” and a solemn retreat back to the more humanistic cultural premises that appeared in the early Sixties — humanistic premises that the “left” so cruelly ravaged in the closing years of that decade.

[73] Obviously I do not believe that adults today are “more informed, more knowledgeable, and more experienced” than young people in any sense that imparts to their greater experience any revolutionary significance. To the contrary, most adults in the existing society are mentally cluttered with preposterous falsehoods and if they are to achieve any real learning, they will have to undergo a considerable unlearning process.

[74] This is a vitally important point and should be followed through with an example. Had the famous Sud-Aviation strike in Nantes of May 13, 1968, a strike that ignited the massive general strike in France of May-June, occurred only a week earlier, it probably would have had only local significance and almost certainly would have been ignored by the country at large. Coming when it did, however, after the student uprising, the Sud-Aviation strike initiated a sweeping social movement. Obviously, the tinder for this movement had accumulated slowly and imperceptibly. The Sud-Aviation strike did not “create” this movement; it revealed it, which is precisely the point that cannot be emphasized too strongly. What I am saying is that a militant action, presumably by a minority — an action unknowingly radical even to itself — had revealed the fact that it was the action of a majority in the only way it could so reveal itself. The social material for the general strike lay at hand and any strike, however trivial in the normal course of events (and perhaps unavoidable), might have brought the general strike into being. Owing to the unconscious nature of the processes involved, there is no way of foretelling when a movement of this kind will emerge — and it will emerge only when it is left to do so on its own. Nor is this to say that will does not play an active role in social processes, but merely that the will of the individual revolutionary must become a social will, the will of the great majority in society, if it is to culminate in revolution.

[75] The young Marx in Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law held a quite different view: “It is not enough that thought should seek its actualization; actuality must itself strive toward thought.”

[76] As the decline of fictional literature attests. Life is far more interesting than fiction, not only as social life but as personal experience and autobiography.

[77] I would argue that we are not in a “revolutionary period” or even a “prerevolutionary period,” to use the terminology of the Leninists, but rather in a revolutionary epoch. By this term I mean a protracted period of social disintegration, a period marked precisely by the Enlightenment discussed in the previous sections.

[78] One sees this in Marx’s restless concept of practice and especially of material “need,” which expands almost indefinitely. It is also clearly seen in the exegetical views of Marxian theorists, whose concepts of an unending, willful, power- asserting practice, assumes almost Dionysian proportions.

[79] And “need,” here, in the sense of psychic as well as material manifestations of egotism. Indeed, domination need not be exploitative in the material sense alone, as merely the appropriation of surplus labor. Psychic exploitation, notably of children and women, may well have preceded material exploitation and even established its cultural and attitudinal framework. And unless exploitation of this kind is totally uprooted, humanity will have made no advance into humanness.

[80] Music is the most striking example where art can exist for itself and even combine with play for itself. The competitive sports, on the other hand, are forms of play that are virtually degraded to marketplace relations, notably in the frenzy for scoring over rivals and the egocentric antagonisms that the games so often engender. The reader should note that a dialectic exists within art and play, hence my use of the words “true art” and “authentic play,” i.e., art and play as ends in themselves.

[81] “Art” in the sense that ecology demands continual improvization. This demand stems from the variety of its subject matter, the ecosystem: the living community and its environment that form the basic unit of ecological research. No one ecosystem is entirely like another, and ecologists are continually obliged to take the uniqueness of each ecosystem into account in their research. Although there is a regressive attempt to reduce ecology to little more than systems analysis, the subject matter continually gets in the way, and it often happens that the most pedestrian writers are obliged to use the most poetic metaphors to deal with their material.