Communalism is a system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are brought together in a confederation under the principles and practice of communal ownership. Social Ecology is its recognition of the often-overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems.
Dialectical naturalism is the philosophical underpinning of social ecology. Through dialectical naturalism we reason the evolutionary becoming of the biological world or “first nature”, the emergence of the realm of culture or “second nature”, and the potentiality for “free nature”—a rational and ecological society.
From dialectical analysis we can deduce a history of hierarchy, which traces the emergence of hierarchy from the rise of government by elders, the emergence of patriarchy, shamanistic guilds, warrior groups, chiefdoms, and eventually the state.
With history for evidence, an ecological critique finds that the idea of dominating nature emerges from the domination of human by human. Economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological problems we face today. Minimally, an ecological society must eliminate the domination of human by human.
We develop a political strategy, from ecological critique, for a libertarian municipalist society - organised as a confederation of directly democratic municipal assemblies, production would be municipalised and brought under the control of the assemblies, and the market economy would be replaced with a moral economy.
Seeking to reconstruct society both physically and institutionally, this utopianism includes practical experiments and alternative technology.