Yes — Murray Bookchin’s Social Ecology.

The core idea

Social ecology says: the ecological crisis is not really about humans vs nature.

It is about the way humans dominate each other.

Hierarchy → domination → instrumentalization → externalization.

The logic that destroys rivers and forests is the same logic that created:

• patriarchy

• class hierarchy

• state coercion

• capitalism

• racialized domination

So ecology is not a “green” issue — it is a social issue.

Environmental destruction is a symptom of hierarchical social relations.

You cannot solve the biosphere collapse without dismantling hierarchy as such.

Bookchin’s move

He flips the conventional environmentalism thesis:

“Man dominating nature” is not where domination originated.

Domination of nature is an extension of earlier domination of human by human.

This is a historical claim — hierarchy first arises within social structures, not between the species and the world.

Thus: anthropocene is a political formation.

Positive project: libertarian municipalism

Bookchin doesn’t believe in:

• nationalized socialism

• central planning

• technocracy

He believes in:

• bottom-up directly democratic municipal assemblies

• confederated cities

• ecological production (appropriate tech, renewables, small scale but high quality)

• non-hierarchical forms of coordination

His slogan often is:

“democracy is the ecological imperative.”

Because only people actually living in place, in relation with each other, with face-to-face accountability, can choose long-term ecological stewardship.

Why he hated “deep ecology”

He attacks deep ecology (Naess) and eco-misanthropy because they blame “humanity” as a monolith.

Bookchin’s critique: it’s not “humanity.”
It’s specific institutions of domination, historically contingent, that generate ecological crisis.

So the structure of his philosophy

• ecology is political

• politics must be de-hierarchized

• the future must be constructed from the scale of the municipality

• technology is not rejected: it is repurposed for ecological stewardship (anti-primitivist)

Where he fails / the open question

He has a transition problem.

He can describe the end form:

• municipal confederations, ecological production, participatory democracy

But he doesn’t fully solve:

• how you get there from nation-state-capitalism

• how you de-scale capital without being crushed by capital’s retaliation

Still:

His key insight — that social domination is prior to and generative of ecological domination — is one of the most powerful conceptual moves in the entire 20th century left ecology discourse.

If you take that move seriously, “environmentalism” becomes a subset of emancipatory political philosophy — not a separate niche cause or lifestyle choice.

Social ecology says: the ecological crisis is **not** really about humans vs nature. It is about the **way humans dominate each other**.

Does empirical evidence support this point?

ChatGPT said:

There is no single data set that proves Bookchin’s entire meta-claim, because it’s a structural genealogy claim, not a single falsifiable hypothesis.

BUT

when you break it into component questions, many of those are empirically measurable.

1) Does ecological destruction correlate with hierarchical social structures?

Yes.

Archaeology, anthropology, and environmental history all show this pattern:

• early immediate-return foragers had very low ecological footprint

• large centralized agrarian states (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China) show massive deforestation, soil salinization, etc.

• modern industrial capitalism amplifies extractive throughput by orders of magnitude

There’s pretty strong evidence that once you have:

• surplus extraction

• elite rentier strata

• violent enforcement

you also get intensified landscape exploitation.

2) Does domination of humans predict domination of environments historically?

Yes, in the sense that the mechanisms are shared.

Political ecology work (e.g. James C. Scott; Jason Moore’s “Capitalocene”; Alf Hornborg) shows the machinery of extraction works the same way whether the “resource” is a human population or a forest or a river.

Same logic:

• externalize costs

• intensify yield

• concentrate surplus

So this part of Bookchin is supported by serious scholarship — but this scholarship is not really from Bookchin, it’s convergent.

3) Could ecological destruction be explained without social domination?

There are competing explanations.

Some deep ecologists think it’s about human nature.
Some economic historians (e.g. Clark) say: any species with our toolset would have done this.

These are not trivial views.

But the empirical evidence that different social structures produce different ecological footprints is extremely robust:

• egalitarian small-scale societies tend toward reciprocity with ecosystems

• hierarchical, class stratified societies tend toward extraction

That pattern is empirical.

4) Does “domination of nature is an extension of domination within society” hold up?

It’s not perfect — because the causal arrows are interwoven (it’s co-produced, not unidirectional). Agriculture itself changed the human psyche and social form.

But Bookchin’s directionality (intra-human domination first → nature domination second) is not crazy. It is broadly consistent with:

• the timing of patriarchy formation

• the timing of class stratification

• the timing of massive ecological transformation

You get violence and hierarchy before you get industrial-scale ecocide.

So:

The honest assessment

Bookchin’s thesis is not proven in the strict Popperian sense.
But the empirical record strongly supports the correlations he claims, and the structural link between hierarchy and ecocide is well-evidenced.

The part that remains “theoretical” is the necessity claim (that hierarchy necessarily produces ecocide).
We don’t have a counterexample society that was hierarchical but ecologically benign.
We also don’t have a counterexample abundant egalitarian society that did ecocide.

So the pattern is remarkably consistent — but we cannot separate it from the confounding variable that scale and technology also co-vary with hierarchy.

If you strip the metaphysics away:

Bookchin’s core empirical claim can be rephrased this way:

The social technologies that evolved to dominate humans become the same technologies used to dominate ecosystems.

THAT is empirically well supported.

You said:

About point 4, it is often said that agriculture was the catalyst. Bookchin's directionality is at odds with this commonly held understanding, that's why I'm sceptical of this point.

ChatGPT said:

Right — and your scepticism is fair.

The “standard story” is:

agriculture → surpluses → hierarchy → domination → ecocide.

Bookchin inverts that causal arrow.

BUT here is the precision point:

Bookchin is not saying hierarchy predates agriculture in time.
He is saying hierarchy is the causal origin of the logic that later appears as “domination of nature.”

So you have to split:

• chronology

• causality

He is not denying that agriculture is where things took off.
He is denying that agriculture is where the form of domination was invented.

This is subtle.

What he means is:

once humans begin creating ranked status differentials (even proto-ranked), the social imaginary of instrumentality is born:

treating an Other (human) as an object to be disciplined, allocated, used.

Only after that imaginary is stabilized does the same imaginary get projected outward onto “nature.”

So his claim is not temporal inversion.
It is conceptual genealogy.

what is the empirical basis for his distinction?

Anthropologists like Brian Hayden, Kent Flannery, and others have argued that even pre-agricultural “complex foragers” developed:

• feasting hierarchies

• aggrandizers

• prestige competition

• proto-elite control of surpluses

before reliable large-scale cultivation.

So:

proto-hierarchy arises inside human social relations
before large-scale agro intensification.

Agriculture then becomes the amplifier, not the inventor.

This is actually consistent with:

• Gobekli Tepe case (ritual complex emerging prior to agriculture)

• NW Coast Pacific complex hunter-gatherers (with slavery, rank, wealth)

• Jomon Japan semi-sedentary foragers with craft specialization

Meaning: agriculture is not necessary for domination to begin.
Agriculture is where domination becomes structurally stable.

So your scepticism is valid if you read Bookchin as saying:

temporally, hierarchy comes before agriculture.

That’s not quite his precise claim.

His precise claim is:

logically, the ability to dominate nature is downstream from the ability to dominate other humans — because the cognitive category “use/allocate/control” is acquired socially first.

whether this is convincing

I think it’s partially supported.

Evidence that hierarchy predated agriculture in some contexts is strong.
Evidence that agriculture supercharged hierarchy is overwhelming.

Thus:

• the necessary condition for planetary-scale ecocide is agriculture-capitalism complex

• the conceptual seed of domination appears in inter-human relations earlier

So Bookchin’s directionality is not empirically absurd. It’s just that he’s doing conceptual genealogy, not a simple A → B history.

You’re totally correct that most popular accounts conflate these two layers.
Bookchin tries (awkwardly) to pry them apart.

You said:

Most anthropological studies show that the majority of Foragers had a strong tendency towards egalitarianism. It might be the case that the handful who did not developed agriculture? Is there proof?

ChatGPT said:

Short answer:
we do NOT have a clean causal chain “non-egalitarian foragers → agriculture.”

No one can honestly say we have that proof.

The evidence is far more fragmented.

What we do have:

1. The modal case of immediate-return mobile foragers is egalitarian.
   This is as close to consensus as anthropology ever gets.

• Woodburn (1982)

• Boehm (1999)

• Lee & Daly (1999)

• Kelly (2013)

…all converge on this.

2. We also have a minority cluster of “complex foragers” with hierarchy:

• Northwest Coast Pacific groups (Tlingit, Kwakwaka’wakw etc.) – slavery, nobles/commons, chiefly lineages, feasting/potlatch prestige economies.

• Jomon Japan (late phases) – sedentism, craft specialization, prestige goods.

These are well attested.

But: these do not straightforwardly become farmers.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

3) Agriculture emerges in multiple independent zones

And these zones are NOT uniformly hierarchical before agriculture.

• Levant Natufians: some signs of differential burial goods → proto-ranked, but not clear chieftainship.

• Yangtze/Yellow River basins: farming emerges out of multiple smaller coexisting groups; hierarchy deepens later.

• Andes: very long slow transition; state hierarchy comes much later.

So the “handful of non-egalitarian foragers invented agriculture” hypothesis is too clean.

Better to say:

There is a co-evolutionary loop.

Sedentism + intensification + storage → enables higher surplus → which enables hierarchical roles → which feedbacks into intensification.

It is not:

A → B

It is:

multiple small feedback loops that eventually lock in.

Does this undermine Bookchin’s directionality?

A bit, yes — if you try to give it a monotonic historical sequence.

Bookchin uses a grand historical arc.
Actual prehistory is patchwork, mosaic, non-linear.

BUT

Here is where Bookchin is not wrong conceptually:

You can’t find large scale hierarchical societies without some institutionalized domination of persons.

And once you have that, you get domination of non-persons (land, animals) as an extension of the same logic.

He is making a conceptual genealogical claim:

The form of domination is learned socially.

That part is plausible.

The precise historical mechanism?

Unknown, and probably not unitary.

There was no singular ancestral “turn.”
There are multiple local crystallizations.

So your corrective instinct is good:

• We know the modal forager is egalitarian.

• We know complex foragers exist.

• We know agriculture arises in multiple regions.

• We cannot draw a clean cause → effect line generalizing globally.

This is why the best scholarship today (e.g. Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything) pushes towards plural developmental trajectories, not a singular stage theory.

So: Bookchin’s philosophical move (domination of humans precedes domination of nature as a form) can survive.

But his historical simplification (implied linearity) cannot.