6
ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
I believe social ecology, feminism, and social anarchism can help
illuminate a definition of desire that is profoundly social, rather than purely
romantic or individualistic. This is crucial because, while our society offers us a
variety of ways to describe the many dimensions of individualistic desire, we
are offered a paltry vocabulary with which to describe a social understanding
of desire. We are saturated by consumerist rhetoric of ‘personal satisfaction’, yet
rarely do we hear eloquent discussion regarding the cooperative impulse, or
regarding the craving for a free and non-hierarchical society. Instead, our
society worships at the fountain of capitalism whose insatiable waters of
material greed and sexual domination crowd out the opportunity to cultivate a
desire to regenerate rather than deplete cooperative social and ecological
relationships.
Yet while there is little talk of social desire within the domain of liberal
capitalism, it continues to speak its own name within many social movements.
Within social anarchist movements of the Old Left and the more recent
movements of file New Left, there exists an implicit understanding of both the
complex needs and desires which people bring to the revolutionary project.
Activists in the civil rights, women’s liberation, gay and lesbian liberation,
ecology, and anti-war movements fight to recreate social life from a qualitative'
perspective in addition to opposing material inequality in society.
Indeed,
the
feminist
and
ecological
movements
are
compelling
illustrations of ‘desirous movements.’ Radical feminists of the sixties and
seventies demanded more than to merely survive male violence and sexual
inequality: they also addressed a wide spectrum of aesthetic, sexual, and
relational concerns. Similarly, the ecology movement of the seventies and early
eighties wanted more than to stem ecological destruction. The back-to-the-land
movement crystallized a desire for a more healthful and sensual expression of
everyday life.
In turn, the civil rights movement embodied a sensual impulse in its plea
for brotherhood’ between the races expressed in Martin Luther King’s speech,
‘1 Have a Dream”. King’s speech represents one of the most passionate and
poetic in history, giving voice to the collective desire of the African American
community not just for political and economic equality, but for a particular
quality of life infused with dignity, beauty, and cultural integrity. Civil rights
activists sought to awaken a sensibility based on mutual respect and a
reclamation of collective cultural self-love.
Even within
movements
driven
primarily by material
scarcity,
a
dimension of desire plays a vital role. Among the anarchists in the Spanish Civil
War were peasants who fought not merely for an allotment of bread, but for a
spectrum of social and moral freedoms as well. What made their struggle
different from communist sectors within the Old Left was their demand for