So on to dialectical naturalism, AKA putting as primary motor of history not a struggle of classes, a struggle of the ecological milieu.
Not only is this pure idealism: to raise in front of man's devastating influence of nature the prevalence of an ecological discourse, but it is also completely circular and self-defeating. In essentializing natural discourse, we see an abandonment of any sort of structuralist view of human society in favor of a theory based on ecological determinism (inevitable consequence of putting primacy on nature, in and of itself a thing man dominates, and if anything nature is entirely subject to man's architectural prowess as a species).
The major issue I have with Bookchin anarchists – speaking as someone who was first influenced by Bookchin and his social ecology ideas – is their willingness to involve themselves, almost deeply, in parliamentary democracy. This is sort of the double-edged sword of Bookchin's dual power idea, wherein you're trying to build an alternative, but you also put a heavy emphasis on near-term goals, almost to the sacrifice of your long-term outlook. The consequence is that if you're continuously involving yourself in bourgeois politics, there is no time or effort actually expounded in building the other power that is supposed to be challenging those institutions in the first place.
Nothing wrong with supporting immediate measures which lessen the misery of the working class, but this is often misconstrued as "doing something now" which a lot of anarchists (and Marxists, for that matter) concern themselves with. You're not actually doing anything now, where it regards working class liberation. The other problem is that there are a lot of social ecologists involved in the Green Party, or in other small, insignificant electoral parties, and ignore the fact that the way the system is set up almost always precludes "being involved" or making any sort of significant gains. It's all just wheel spinning.
The other problem I have is that these particular followers are really prone to utopianism. It's not as bad as the people who take parecon dogmatically, but it approaches that point.
I have known some Bookchin-inspired anarchists from the libcom forums. What will immediately strike you when you converse with these anarchists is the total lack of clarity, especially with regards to bourgeois "democracy", imperialism and the difference between the left wing of capital (Trotskyists, "post-Maoists", etc.) and the communist perspective. They dislike Chomsky (I never expected this, but looking at his followers this is surprisingly the case), but in spite of this they will in the end support the same politics in light of "voting for the lesser evil" and "supporting local initiatives", thus ending up in the same cultish "extreme left" camp that they supposedly want to avoid. Few of them are truly internationalist and some will openly "critically" support Rojava or any other regime or national liberation movement that pays lip service to local autonomy while doing next to nothing for any emancipatory anti-capitalist politics.
I talked shit about Trotskyites just a paragraph ago, but Trotsky himself surprisingly provided an amazing critique of parliamentarism and the democratic principle, see: youtube.com/watch?v=uwgJidatmH8. It comes from a different angle than Bordiga did before him, but is good food for thought regardless for the libertarian left ranks who want a real challenge.
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