ILLUSTRATIVE OPPOSITION
151
rather than natural law or necessity. And while this inorganic analogy is in itself
insufficient for providing us with a plan to create a revolution, we may use this
analogy to begin to think through the necessary and sufficient conditions for
an ecological and social revolution. We may ask ourselves: What are the
necessary and sufficient conditions to
‘heat up” society to produce a
revolutionary situation?
As we think through the necessary and sufficient conditions for social
and political change, the sufficient condition must be understood to be just
that—sufficiejit—neither perfect, nor a determined end in itself, but an
incomplete beginning. Hence, the sufficient condition is not a deterministic
factor. Just because we may have the pot, the water, file heating coil, the right
time, and the right place, a great rainbow could majestically appear outside the
window and we could find ourselves wholly disenchanted with the idea of
boiling water after all. Or the pot could turn out to have an undetectable leak.
The sufficient condition means merely that we have fleshed out the idea of
necessity enough to begin the work that is set out before us. It does not mean
that we will be successful in our work, or that the work will turn out to be
what we had in mind. It only means that we have a good enough chance, that
we have done almost all that we can to increase the likelihood that we will
actualize our goals. The sufficient condition, then, represents a glorious point
of departure, open-ended as the utopian horizon whose band of brilliant color
recedes incrementally as we make our approach so that we never arrive but
forever enjoy the desirous and sensuous apprehension of arrival.
In embarking upon this question, we see, as already stated above, that
most movements for social change conflate that which is necessary with that
which is sufficient. People often select a single issue, source of oppression, or
form of hierarchy as the sole focus for necessary social action, never thinking
through the sufficient condition for a free and ecological society. However,
when we begin to. think holistically, we begin to see that the sufficient
condition for an ecological society represents the accumulative integration of
non-hierarchical institutions and an ecological technics, ethics, and sensibility.
As social anarchism implies, unless we abolish hierarchy in geneml as
the sufficient condition for a free society, specific forms of hierarchy may
endure. The idea of abolishing only specific forms of hierarchy (such as the
State, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy), while necessary,; proves over and over
again throughout history to be woefully insufficient. For instance, while
Marxian socialism seeks to abolish hierarchies derived from material inequities,
hierarchies such as the State and patriarchal institutions remain largely
unchallenged. Similarly, while liberal feminists seek to abolish hierarchies that
exclude women
from male dominated social and political
institutions,
hierarchical structures such as capitalism remain unchallenged, leaving women