Bookchin concluded that the Marxism on which he had been brought up had not gone deeply enough. The Marxists had taught that hierarchical relationships were necessary even as they attacked class society. Marx had attacked Bakunin . Seeing things in industrial terms, the Marxists asked how a steel mill could be run without hierarchical relationships. Bookchin came to see that such relationships were not simply economic but were based on status, that they involved for instance the domination of women by men, of people of colour by whites.
Anarchism is concerned to oppose the one basic concept of authority as such.
The idea of the domination of nature, said Bookchin, is a projection of human domination onto the natural world, and the ecological crisis has its origins in a social crisis. To resolve the ecological problems we have to look within our own society. His point was that before we can eliminate antagonisms between human societies and the natural world we must first eliminate antagonisms between human beings. Human inequality is at the root of the biospheric degradation of today. The rivalry was between the big business firms in the United States and between the EEC, America and Japan.