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Title: Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism Author: Janet Biehl Date: 2007 Language: en Topics: Murray Bookchin Source: Retrieved on 20 January 2011 from http://www.communalism.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=189:bookchin-breaks-with-anarchism&catid=84:movement&Itemid=2][www.communalism.net]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4142, retrieved on November 20, 2020. Notes: From Communalism
For much of his adult life Murray Bookchin was known as a major
anarchist theorist, perhaps the most wide-ranging and innovative of the
twentieth century. When he died in July 2006, the Times (London) Online
called him “the most important anarchist thinker in North America for
more than a quarter of a century.”[1] But the fact is that by the time
of his death Murray no longer identified himself as an anarchist.
As early as 1995 he was telling the people closest to him that he no
longer considered himself part of that movement. At a conference in 1999
in Plainfield Vermont he made the rupture public; and he put it in
writing in 2002, in an article published online.
The break, however, was fairly easy to miss. After he died, I noticed
that many of his admirers did not realize that he had parted ways with
anarchism, or if they did, they did not understand the reasons for it.
The story therefore needs telling. As his companion and collaborator for
almost two decades (our relationship began in March 1987 and continued
to his death), I had a front-row seat to watch the events unfold. I am
writing this article to tell what I know and saw about Murray Bookchin’s
break with anarchism.
Murray always said that to understand a thing, you have to know its
history. So to understand what happened with him and anarchism, we must
first go back to the 1950s, when he was undergoing his transition from
Marxism to anarchism.
In 1948, as a member of the United Auto Workers and a shop steward,
Murray participated in a large United Auto Workers strike against
General Motors that resulted in the workers winning quarterly
cost-of-living increases, company-paid health insurance and pension
funds, and extended paid vacations — in exchange for abjuring walkouts
for two years. That outcome convinced him that the working class, as
such, was not going to be the primary revolutionary agent. Contrary to
Marxist predictions, capitalism was not going to so “immiserate” the
working class that it rose up in rebellion against it. Rather, workers
were going to try to make improvements in their working conditions
within capitalism.
This realization must have been highly distressing to Murray. He was,
after all, a committed anticapitalist revolutionary. If workers were not
going to overthrow capitalism, then who would, and under what
circumstances? What, if any, were the limits to capitalism? In those
years he was developing an interest in environmental issues such as
chemicals — pesticides and herbicides — commonly used in and agriculture
and in food preservation; he thought they might have deleterious health
effects, even causing cancer. He wrote about the subject in 1952 in a
long essay called “The Problem of Chemicals in Food.”[2] Perhaps the
limits of capitalism, he thought, were environmental or ecological in
nature. But those problems affected everyone, regardless of class. The
revolutionary agent, in an ecological rebellion against capitalism,
would then be not the working class but the community as a whole.
Opposition to capitalism could become a general, transclass interest.
This assumption — that citizens, not workers, were the revolutionary
agent of greatest significance — remained foundational for the rest of
his life.
Where had Murray’s ideas about ecology come from? Surprisingly,
considering some of his later writings, they came from Marxism itself.
“I wrote my earliest, almost book-length work on the ecological
dislocations produced by capitalism, ‘The Problems of Chemicals in
Food,’ in 1952,” he recalled forty years later, “while I was a
neo-Marxist and had in no way been influenced by anarchist thinkers.”[3]
He would in later years bitterly criticize Marxism for its
anti-ecological premises (in, for example, the 1979 “Marxism as
Bourgeois Sociology”). But in the early 1950s, while he was still a
Marxist, he had come upon passages in Engels that got him thinking about
nonhuman nature and about ecology as a social phenomenon. “My basic
ideas on an ecological society really came from my decades-long studies
of the Athenian polis, Hegel, and even Marx. Specifically, my thinking
on ecology was instigated not by the works of any anarchist thinker but
by Marx and Engels’s remarks on the need to reconcile town and
country.”[4] A passage in Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring was
particularly fascinating:
Abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely
possible. It has become a direct necessity. ... the present poisoning of
the air, water and land can be put to an end only by the fusion of town
and country.”[5]
Another passage from Engels was also thought provoking, this one from
the 1872 The Housing Question:
The housing question can be solved only when society has been
sufficiently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the
contrast between town and country, which has been brought to its extreme
point by present-day society. Far from being able to abolish this
antithesis, capitalist society on the contrary is compelled to intensify
it day by day.[6]
Such passages led Murray to the insight that our present social order is
on a collision course with the natural world (“town and country”) and
that we must have an anticapitalist revolution in favor of an ecological
society. That being the case, he realized, he had to define the nature
of the postrevolutionary society. What would an ecological society look
like? An observation from Engels was striking: because it required a
“uniform distribution of the population over the whole country” it would
necessitate “the physical decentralization of the cities.”[7]
Accordingly, Murray wrote in 1962 that decentralization was essential
for an ecological society:
Some kind of decentralization will be necessary to achieve a lasting
equilibrium between society and nature. Urban decentralization underlies
any hope of achieving ecological control of pest infestations in
agriculture. Only a community well integrated with the resources of the
surrounding region can promote agricultural and biological diversity.
... a decentralized community holds the greatest promise for conserving
natural resources, particularly as it would promote the use of local
sources of energy [and use] wind power, solar energy, and hydroelectric
power.[8]
Given he importance of decentralization, Marxism (despite Engels’s
remark) was not the most congenial ideological home for Murray’s new
ecological ideas. In the late 1950s he had been attending meetings of
the Libertarian League in New York and learning about anarchism. As he
later recalled, what led him to turn from Marxism to that alternative
revolutionary tradition was “not any extensive readings into the works
of early anarchists” like Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. Rather it
was “my reaction against Marx and Engels’s critiques of anarchism, my
readings into the Athenian polis, George Woodcock’s informative history
of anarchism, my own avocation as a biologist, and my studies in
technology that gave rise to the views in my early essays.”[9] The first
anarchist work that Murray read was Herbert Read’s brief essay “The
Philosophy of Anarchism,” Read being “one of the few anarchists whose
writings I could find” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. [10]
An anarchist society, existing without the state, would by definition be
a decentralized society. “An anarchist society,” Murray wrote, ”should
be a decentralized society, not only to establish a lasting basis for
the harmonization of man and nature, but also to add new dimensions to
the harmonization of man and man.”[11] Other anarchist principles as
well seemed to converge with his ecological ideas, so much so that in
his eyes anarchism and ecology seemed tailor made for each other. One
example is the principle of differentiation (which Read mentions in his
essay). To Murray (whose lifelong philosophical grounding was in the
Hegelian dialectic), differentiation — a Hegelian concept — seemed to
have an affinity to the organic, the organismic, and the ecological:
“Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
... Both the ecologist and the anarchist view differentiation as a
measure of progress. ... to both the ecologist and the anarchist, an
ever-increasing unity is achieved by growing differentiations.”[12]
Another key concept in the convergence was diversity, considering “the
ecological principle of wholeness and balance as a product of
diversity.” “An expanding whole is created by the diversification and
enrichment of its parts,” he wrote; and “I submit that an anarchist
community would approximate a clearly definable ecosystem: it would be
diversified, balanced and harmonious.” And: “To sum up the
reconstructive message of ecology: if we wish to advance the unity and
stability of the natural world, if we wish to harmonize it, we must
conserve and promote variety.”[13]
Murray articulated these points of convergence between anarchism and
ecology in his path-breaking 1964 article “Ecology and Revolutionary
Thought.” As he put them all together, they led him to affirm that “an
anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a
precondition for the practice of ecological principles.”[14] Anarchism
had further appeal for him, in what he saw as its rich revolutionary
antecedents: in the German Peasant Wars of the 1500s; in the Diggers of
1640s England; in the Enragés of French Revolution; in the Paris
Communards of 1871; and above all in the Spanish Revolution.
Perhaps in retrospect it seems opportunistic to try to marry one’s
preexisting ideas to an existing ideology. But in the early 1960s
anarchism seemed like a historical relic, more or less up for grabs. Few
people in Europe and North America were interested in it as an ideology.
In 1962 (the year Murray published Our Synthetic Environment, with the
passages about decentralization) the historian George Woodcock
pronounced anarchism all but dead, after its last flowering in Spain in
1936–39.
Today there are still thousands of anarchists scattered thinly over many
countries of the world. There are still anarchist groups and anarchist
periodicals, anarchist schools and anarchist communities. But they form
only the ghost of the historical anarchist movement, a ghost that
inspired neither fear among governments nor hope among peoples nor even
interest among newspapermen. Cleary, as a movement, anarchism has
failed. ... During the past forty years the influence it once
established has dwindled, by defeat after defeat and by the slow
draining of hope, almost to nothing.[15]
Just as Murray was engaging with anarchism, then, anarchism was on life
support. By infusing it with parallel concepts from what he would call
“social ecology,” he did more than anyone else in the 1960s to
resuscitate anarchism. And indeed by promoting this refurbished
anarchism, by indefatigably writing and lecturing about it to the
counterculture and the New Left in the United States and Europe, he gave
rise to a revival of interest in anarchism itself.
As Murray would later point out, anarchism seems to have always been
most functional when merged with another ideology or set of ideas. For
example, synthesized with syndicalism, or trade unionism, it became
anarcho-syndicalism, one of its more significant tendencies and the
banner under which the greatest anarchist experiment of all was
conducted, the Spanish Revolution. Synthesized with communism, the idea
of the abolition of private property and distribution according to need,
it became anarcho-communism, a libertarian form of communism. In some
sense anarchism functions best as part of a duality.
The marriage of ecology and anarchism appeared to be no exception, and
Murray dedicated himself passionately to advancing the ideas. He felt
confident and even militant about his choice: his 1969 essay “Listen,
Marxist!” represented, not simply a warning to the SDS to avoid a
takeover by Maoists of the Progressive Labor Party, but also his
definitive personal break with Marxism as the ideology by which he
defined himself. He took pride when, a few years later, Victor Ferkiss
identified him with a tendency that he called “eco-anarchist.”[16]
In the following decade Murray went on to elaborate his anarchist ideas,
developing them into a social theory of great richness and depth.
Anarchist history and ideas seemed to stir his extraordinarily fecund
theoretical imagination. One idea after another struck him as relevant
to the ecology-anarchist project, and he enthusiastically incorporated
into it a number of innovative ideas.
One was post-scarcity, the idea that the leisure time potentially
afforded to all in present-day Western societies need not necessarily
lead to complacency or embourgeoisement but could provide the freedom to
create a cooperative society. A high level of technological achievement
promised to eliminate the toil and drudgery and thereby to open the
doors to political participation to people of all classes. The working
class itself could even be its way out demographically: thanks to
automation technologies, jobs performed by people were increasingly
performed by machines. Murray saw this development as potentially
positive, as it could give people the free time to function as political
beings in their communities. Having worked as a foundryman and
autoworker as a young man, he personally experienced the drudgery of
factory work and understood well the difficulty of political activity
while forced to work under such circumstances. Post-scarcity, he
concluded, was potentially liberatory.
Another major innovation that he brought to anarchism was the critique
of hierarchy and domination, which he came to consider the authentic
“social question.”[17] Social hierarchies, he came to believe, were more
fundamental than economic classes, existing as they did long before
capitalism. It was through hierarchies that social strata dominated one
another. Indeed, social hierarchies gave rise to the idea of dominating
nature. The concept of hierarchy was thus of great relevance to Murray’s
still-developing “social ecology.”[18]
Murray may not have been the first libertarian social theorist to write
about hierarchy, but he towered above all others in elaborating it as a
significant social-political concept. In his elaborate dialectical
exposition of hierarchy, The Ecology of Freedom, he tried to do what
Marx had done with capital: show its emergence, its inner tensions, its
limits, its downfall. He turned to anthropology to trace its origins; to
history to trace its development; and to ethics and philosophy to
foresee possibilities for its downfall.[19] Published in 1982, The
Ecology of Freedom became an anarchist classic and a cornerstone of
social ecology, while the critique of hierarchy has become conventional
in anarchist thinking. [20]
Still another point of convergence between anarchism and ecology was the
emphasis on spontaneity: “Every development must be free to find its own
equilibrium. Spontaneity, far from inviting chaos, involves releasing
the inner forces of a development to find their authentic order and
stability. ... Spontaneity in social life converges with spontaneity in
nature to provide the basis for an ecological society.”[21] The concept
had its social parallel not only in previous anarchist writing but in
revolutionary history and theory itself. Historically, Murray observed,
the initial stage of revolutions tended to be spontaneous; revolutionary
peoples created revolutionary institutions spontaneously, as the
Parisians of 1793 did with their sectional assemblies, and the Russians
of St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1905 with their soviets, and as the
Spanish anarchists did in 1936 with their collectives. Its convergence
with the ecological concept of spontaneity made it newly relevant.
Murray went on in the 1970s to make further contributions to both
eco-anarchism and to anarchism as such. He pioneered exploration of
alternative energy sources and eco-technics in his 1965 essay “Towards a
Liberatory Technology.” In the 1970s he developed a distinction between
ecology (inherently radical) and environmentalism (reformist). He
explored the history of Spanish anarchism in The Spanish Anarchists
(1977). He nuanced his ideas by finding intellectual affinities with the
libertarian socialism of Western Marxism (the Frankfurt School). He
often wrote under the rubric of social ecology but sometimes seemed to
consider social ecology and anarchism to be more or less the same thing.
He once summarized his own contribution to anarchism this way:
Social ecology is a fairly integrated and coherent view point that
encompasses a philosophy of natural evolution and of humanity’ s place
in that evolutionary process; a reformulation of dialectics along
ecological lines; an account of the emergence of hierarchy; a historical
examination of the dialectic between legacies and epistemologies of
domination and freedom; an evaluation of technology from an historical ,
ethical, and philosophical standpoint; a wide-ranging critique of
Marxism, the Frankfurt School, justice, rationalism, scientism, and
instrumentalism; and finally an education of a vision of a utopian,
decentralized, confederal, and aesthetically grounded future society
based on an objective ethics of complementarity. ... Whether adequately
or not, this holistic body of ideas endeavors to place “eco-anarchism”
on a theoretical and intellectual par with the best systematic works in
radical social theory. [22]
Dating back to the days of his 1930s disillusionment with Stalinism,
Murray had a lifelong fascination with revolutionary institutions — the
various committees, councils, assemblies, soviets, and so on that were
historically created during the revolutionary process. There must be no
more Robespierres, he resolved, no more Stalins, no more Maos. There
must be no more guillotines or gulags. Revolutionaries must learn the
lessons if history. If a new revolution were to succeed in creating a
liberatory, ecological society, and not devolve into just another brutal
power grab, revolutionary institutions would have to be in place that
would control and the selfish desires of some individuals for
domination. The only kind of institutions that could both liberate
people and at the same time keep the power-hungry in check, he believed,
were democratic ones that could hold revolutionary leaders accountable.
Indeed the sine qua non of any revolutionary institution must be its
ability to facilitate democracy. And by “democracy” Murray did not mean
the system practiced by nation-states today, with representatives and
legislatures and parliaments, which he considered to be republicanism, a
form of statism. He meant, rather, face-to-face democracy.
In his musings about the origins of his interest in anarchism, as we
have seen, Murray mentioned, among other things, “my readings into the
Athenian polis” — that is, Athenian democracy. In “Ecology and
Revolutionary Thought” Murray had referred to “the anarchist concept of
... a face-to-face democracy,” calling it a “rich libertarian concept,”
as if democracy had a long lineage in anarchist history and theory.[23]
Face-to-face democracy seemed to him to be not only the ideal
revolutionary institution but the perfect political institution for a
decentralized, differentiated, diverse, eco-anarchist society.
To my knowledge Murray’s first discussion of democracy appeared in the
remarkable essay “Forms of Freedom,” an inquiry into revolutionary
institutions written in the annus mirabilis 1968. “Let us turn to the
popular assembly for an insight into unmediated forms of social
relations,” he urges — that is, unmediated by legislators and
parliamentarians. In ancient Athens, he says, “the trend toward popular
democracy ... achieved a form that has never quite been equaled
elsewhere. By Periclean times the Athenians had perfected their polis to
a point where it represented a triumph of rationality within the
material limitations of the ancient world.” Not that Athenian society
itself was ideal, far from it, marred as it was by slavery, social
classes, and the exclusion of women. But “Athens, despite the slave,
patriarchal and class features it shared with classical society, as a
whole developed into a working democracy in the literal sense of the
term.” As a political institution, he noted, the popular assembly later
“reappeared in the medieval and Renaissance towns of Europe.”[24]
Among the most extraordinary of popular assemblies were the sectional
assemblies of 1793, Murray wrote, which “emerged as the insurgent bodies
in Paris during the Great Revolution.” The sectional assemblies “by
degrees ... turned into neighborhood assemblies of all ‘active’
citizens, varying in form, scope and power form one district to
another.” Here was an ultra-democratic institution right in the heart of
revolutionary Europe: the sections “represented genuine forms of
self-management.” Some might argue that a city like Paris was too large
to handle face-to-face democracy, but “the sections provide us with a
rough model of assembly organization in a large city and during a period
of revolutionary transition from a centralized political state to a
potentially decentralized society.” Just so, the Athenian “ecclesia
provides us with a rough model of assembly organization in a
decentralized society.”[25]
Murray’s intention, then, was to place face-to-face democracy on the
eco-anarchist program.
In 1969 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the primary political
organization of the American New Left, collapsed, its leadership having
been taken over by ultraleft guerrilla groups like Weatherman. The
Maoist guerrilla campaigns that had seemed to be the path ahead ended up
destroying the organization. The student movement had always suffered
from the endemic problem of fast turnover — no sooner do students
organize a demonstration than summer vacation begins; no sooner do
students develop political experience than they graduate. In April 1970
National Guards killed four student demonstrators at Kent State in Ohio.
Among the New Left’s rank and file the National Mobilization Committee
to End the War in Vietnam continued to pull together intermittent
demonstrations in Washington. The 1972 presidential campaign of George
McGovern channeled the energy of many antiwar activists. Amid the
once-vibrant American radical movement confusion reigned.
In these years Murray was involved with the East Side Anarchists in New
York as well as a libertarian collective that published the periodical
Anarchos. What the American radical movement needed, he realized, in
order to function as a real social and political alternative, was a set
of institutions that would have at least some permanence. But no such
institutions remained from the detritus of SDS or emerged from the
antiwar demonstrations. Marches were “ephemeral spectacles,” he wrote in
“Spring Offensives and Summer Vacations,” published in Anarchos in June
1972. “After each demonstration, street action, or confrontation, this
hollow cone [of organizational leadership] all but collapsed, only to be
recreated again with varying degrees of success for another
demonstration, street action, or confrontation.”[26]
Something more lasting had to be built: “The hollow cone that we call a
movement must acquire a more solid geometry. It must be filled in by an
authentic popular movement based on the self-activity of the American
people, not the theatrical eruptions of a dedicated minority.” Antiwar
activists, he urged, should build stable institutions — somewhat like
the ones he had written about four years earlier, in “Forms of Freedom”:
Our effort must now be directed throughout the entire year to catalyzing
popular antiwar groups: popular assemblies and local action committees,
if you like, each rooted in a community, campus, school, professional
arena, ... factory, office, and research establishment. A real movement
must be built out of these formations for the immediate purpose of
antiwar activity and perhaps in the long run as popular modes of
self-activity to achieve a society based on self-management. ... each
popular institution is free to make its own local decisions, free to act
or not act as it feels necessary.
Those popular assemblies and local action committees, he wrote, should
themselves form confederations over larger regions:
We propose a qualitatively different level of political activity: the
confederal or, if you like, the “communard” concept of institutional
organization that also found expression in the Paris communes of 1793–94
and 1871. This “communard” approach ... essentially called for a
confederation of the municipalities as opposed to the development of a
centralized state ... For American radicals to raise this approach today
and restore its revolutionary content based on a post-scarcity
technology would mark a decisive, indeed a historical advance in the
development of an authentic left in the United States.
The article was signed by the Anarchos Group but was clearly written by
Murray, containing many of his idiosyncratic phrasings. It has not been
republished (to my knowledge) and so its key parts are worth
transcribing here at some length, especially its list of proposals:
1. The formation of local coalitions of non-party groups — the best of
the urban and rural communes, independent student groups, radical
professional, working class, and women’s groups ... independent antiwar
groups — to act concertedly in choosing and presenting candidates for
city councils in the municipalities of this country. These coalitions,
we believe, must be free and non-hierarchical; they must try to be
rooted in their local communities and act openly with each other in a
consistently democratic manner, eschewing any form of bureaucratic or
manipulatory behavior ...
Anarchos, that is, was calling upon anarchists to elect candidates to
city councils. On what platform? The answer: they could write programs
on many topics but
could also demand a radical restructuring of municipal institutions
along directly democratic lines, involving above all the right by
popular constituencies and assemblies to recall representatives who do
not reflect their will, the replacement of the police by a popular guard
organized on a roster basis from neighborhoods and factories, and open
defiance against the central government’s parasitization of the
municipality’s fiscal and economic resources.
That is, the anarchist programs would call for a democratization of city
government, abolishing city councils and replacing them with popular
assemblies. They would thus use the power of the municipality — the
level of the state closest to the people — to create popular and
potentially antistatist institutions, “unmediated” by representatives.
Thus the next proposal was:
2. The dissolution of the gigantic megalopolitan “city” governments into
local town halls and city councils with direct neighborhood control over
civic life.
And the next:
3. Lastly, a demand for a confederation of the city councils to resist
the encroachment by State governments and by the Federal government on
local and municipal autonomy.
The group issued a caveat against the use of these proposals for statist
purposes:
If the proposals we advance are to be more than mere liberal or Social
Democratic pap, if they are to acquire a truly radical thrust, the
coalitions which advance them must themselves be alliances of authentic
popular groups such as the grass-roots antiwar movement we have
proposed, not cadre organizations ... Should the local coalitions and
municipal confederal movement we propose go beyond a municipal and
confederal level, should it grasp for institutional control or influence
on the State and Federal level, it would become nothing more than
another treacherous Social Democracy — another betrayal of the popular
movement and the principles of freedom and revolution.
The group emphasized the confrontational nature of the approach:
The issue of local control versus the centralized state is being joined
today whether we like it or not. A long-range historical dialectic
toward state capitalism pits the neighborhood against the megalopolis,
the village, town, and small city against the State governments and
Federal government, the municipality against the national state.
The essay “Spring Offensives and Summer Vacations” did not go
unchallenged — not even at its very moment of publication. Some members
of the Anarchos collective strongly disagreed with its calls for
participation in municipal electoral campaigns. As these members were in
charge of printing the periodical, they were able enclose an insert in
that June 1972 issue, expressing their objections. Judith Malina (yes,
she of the Living Theater) wrote the dissenting article:
What is voting? Voting is an agreement by all that the will of the most
shall be carried out. When there is unanimous agreement the decision of
the people is self-evident. But when there is no unanimity the vote
becomes the tyranny of the many over the reluctant few. This tyranny is
the expression of a principle inherent in the democratic ethic: a tacit
understanding that the few will not fight the many because the many
would win by virtue of their superior numbers. ... The myth is that
justice consists of a few “bowing down to the ill of the majority”;
whereas, the tyranny of the majority is injustice like any other form of
tyranny.[27]
That is, democracy, even face-to-face democracy, based as it is on the
will of the majority, is inherently tyrannical. Malina offered an
anarchist alternative:
Yes, the people should take over local control at the community level —
but not through the municipal governments which, through party lines,
are always closely bound to state and federal governmental structures.
Instead, the people should take over control by creating community
structures from below. Such structures will not exist parallel to the
governmental municipal structures — but will in fact — wrest the power
from them. ... The criticism here is not of the forms of local
organization that the Anarchos group proposes, but only of the
submission to the jurisdiction of the local constitutional
government.[28]
Murray surely responded in some way to Malina, but to my knowledge no
written record of it survives. He did recall the incident in 1985:
Someone wrote a reply to me stating that anarchists should never
participate in any elections of any kind ... I’m saying that city
government, as you call it, has to be restructured at the grassroots
level. ... what anarchists should be doing is not hesitating to get
involved in local politics to create forms of organization in which they
may run once they’ve established these forms or, alternatively, running
on a platform to establish these forms.[29]
Malina’s objection would recur frequently in the following decades, but
few expressed it as clearly and thoroughly as she did, at the outset.
Murray, in turn, would frequently respond to Malina’s type of argument
about parallel institutions. Alternative community groups that exist
parallel to the municipality have no real power, he argued. Citizens
might be motivated to attend one or two meetings, out of concern over a
specific issue, but they would have no real reason to continue to
participate in them over time, or to maintain their existence for its
own sake. For a group of people to actively work to keep an institution
alive, it must have some form of structural power.
Murray would later conclude that anarchists misunderstand the nature of
power and were therefore unprepared to address it.
Anarchists conceive of power as an essentially malignant evil that must
be destroyed. Proudhon, for example, once stated that he would divide
and subdivide power until it, in effect, ceased to exist ... a notion as
absurd as the idea that gravity can be abolished ... The truly pertinent
issue ... is not whether power will exist but whether it will rest in
the hands of an elite or in the hands of the people ... Social
revolutionaries ... must address the problem of how to give power a
concrete institutional emancipatory form.[30]
Still, Malina’s objection exemplified an important point: anarchism had
not historically been particularly friendly to democracy. George
Woodcock had pointed this out back in 1962:
The extreme concern for the sovereignty of the individual ... explains
the anarchist rejection of democracy as well as autocracy. No conception
of anarchism is farther from the truth than that which regards it as an
extreme form of democracy. Democracy advocates the sovereignty of the
people. Anarchism advocates the sovereignty of the person. This means
that automatically the anarchists deny many of the forms and viewpoints
of democracy.[31]
Murray had read Woodcock’s book, but if he noticed this caveat, he must
have responded with skepticism. After all, anarchism in the past had not
been ecological, either, or concerned with post-scarcity or hierarchy.
Yet he had injected those concepts into anarchism. Why not democracy
too? It must have seemed obvious to him: if he called anarchists’
attention to face-to-face democracy, surely they would agree that it was
the best model of self-management for a decentralized and ecological
society.
Anarchism is after all potentially dynamic:
Anarchism could be the most creative and innovative movement in
radicalism today ... [With] our ideals of self-management,
decentralization, confederalism, and mutual aid ... we have long been
the progenitors of an organic, naturalist, and mutualistic sensibility
that the ecology movement has appropriated with few references to their
source — the naturalism of Kropotkin.[32]
In the early 1980s Murray developed his ideas about face-to-face
democracy into a specific approach that, for purposes of easy
identification, he gave a name. Libertarian municipalism was his
strategy for achieving democratic revolutionary institutions, as well as
the political infrastructure of a rational ecological society. He had
sketched the rudiments of this approach in “Spring Offensives,” but did
not write much about it after 1972. Then in 1983 he returned to the
subject, developing it in a mature and detailed form. I will summarize
it very briefly here. [33]
We need a “new politics,” Murray argued, one based, not in a national
capital, but at the community level. “Here, in the most immediate
environment of the individual — the community, the neighborhood, the
town, or the village — where private life slowly begins to phase into
public life, the authentic locus for functioning on a base level exists
insofar as urbanization has not totally destroyed it.”[34] Here a “new
politics” of citizenship may be instituted, one in which people take
charge of their own political life, through participation in popular
assemblies. Murray distinguished between politics (which is practiced by
citizens in assemblies) and statecraft (which is practiced by
officeholders in the institutions of the nation-state). He believed that
politics must be “a school for genuine citizenship.
Ultimately there is no civic “curriculum,” as it were, that can be a
substitute for a living and creative political realm. But what we must
clearly do in an era of commodification, rivalry, anomie, and egoism is
formulate and consciously inculcate the values of humanism, cooperation,
community, and public service in the everyday practice of civic life.
... Grass-roots citizenship must go hand in hand with grass-roots
politics.[35]
Libertarian municipalist activists would therefore create groups to run
candidates in municipal elections, on platforms calling for the creation
of face-to-face democracy in popular assemblies. When the citizenry
elected enough such candidates to office, the new city councilors would
fulfill the one purpose for which they had been elected: they would
alter city and town charters to create popular assemblies. Thus the
assemblies would come about as a result of a conscious devolution of
power from existing statist municipal institutions: The assemblies, so
empowered, would take over the functions of municipal governments. They
would municipalize the economy, taking over the ownership and management
of local economic life, allowing the people of community to make
decisions about economic activity in their area.
The township should have control over the land; it should have control
over the industries. Collectivization itself can lead many different
directions .... Municipalization means the municipality controls it
through neighborhood organizations or through town meetings.[36]
Over larger regions the democratized municipalities would interlink by
confederating with one another:
What, then, is confederalism? It is above all a network of
administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from
popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, ... The members of these
confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible
to the assemblies that chose them for the purpose of coordinating and
administering the policies formed by the assemblies themselves. Their
function is thus a purely administrative and practical one, not a
policy-making one like the function of representatives in republican
systems of government.[37]
The confederated municipalities, in which power flowed from the bottom
up, would form a dual power, a counterpower, against the nation-state.
I’m concerned with developing local institutions — neighborhood
assemblies, neighborhood councils that will be thrown into dynamic
opposition to the centralized state. My most important concern is to
stop the centralization of economic and political power ... to see that
the municipal level acts as a brake upon the centralization of the state
and ultimately leads to the abolition of the centralized state in a free
municipal confederation of town and cities and villages structured in a
libertarian form.[38]
Libertarian municipalism is that it is grounded in historical reality
and local traditions “to legitimate its claims,
traditions which, however fragmentary and tattered, still offer the
potentiality for a participatory politics of challenging dimensions to
the State. The Commune still lies buried in the city council; the
sections still lie buried in the neighborhood; the town meeting still
lies buried in the township; confederal forms of municipal association
still lie buried in regional networks of towns and cities.[39]
This approach also had roots in revolutionary history. Many radical
workers’ movements, Murray wrote,
were largely civic phenomena, grounded in specific neighborhoods in
Paris, Petrograd, and Barcelona, and in small towns and villages that
formed the arenas not only of class unrest but of civic or communal
unrest. In such milieus oppressed and discontented people acted in
response to the problems they faced not only as economic beings but as
communal beings.[40]
Through these democratic institutions a revolutionary people would be
enabled to replace the nation-state and exercise its power through
popular self-government.
Starting in the early 1980s Murray mounted a veritable campaign to try
to persuade anarchists to adopt libertarian municipalism. He delved into
anarchist history to find support for it there, for organic,
community-level politics, and for confederated municipalities. In fact
the nineteenth-century originators of anarchist thought, he found, had
had a lot to say about such ideas.
Proudhon, for one, had written favorably about federalism (also known as
confederalism or confederation) as a libertarian alternative to the
nation-state. In The Federal Principle (1863), written toward the end of
his life, he advocated a decentralized theory of federal (confederal)
government. Public administration, he argued, should be organized most
basically at the local level, with communes and associations. These
communes would group together regionally, and a confederation of regions
would replace the nation-state. Power would rise from below. Delegates
would be recallable, ensuring the implementation of the popular will.
Proudhon’s was the first exposition of the idea that a confederation
could be an alternative to the nation-state.[41]
“Due honor should certainly be given to Proudhon,” Murray argued, ”for
developing federalistic notions of social organization against the
nation-state and defending the rights of crafts people and peasants who
were under the assault of industrial capitalism.”[42] Indeed,
What I find most worth emphasizing in Proudhon is his highly communal
notion of confederalism. He was at his best, allowing for certain
reservations, when he declared that “the federal system is the contrary
of hierarchy or administrative and governmental centralization”; that
the “essence” of federal contracts is ”always to reserve more powers of
the citizen than for the state, and for municipal and provincial
authorities than for the central power”; that “the central power” must
be ‘imperceptibly subordinated it... to the representatives of
departments or provinces, provincial authority to the delegates of
townships, and municipal authority to its inhabitants.”[43]
Very popular among nineteenth-century libertarians was the idea of what
in French and other European languages was called the commune — the unit
of local government closest to the people; that is, the municipality.
The word “commune” also had overtones of the revolutionary Paris Commune
of 1793–94. “The importance of the commune in traditional anarchist
thought,” wrote Murray, “has not received the full attention it
deserves.”[44] Libertarian thinkers, in the wake of Proudhon, commonly
thought of the confederation to replace the nation-state as constituting
a network of communes. Wrote Murray: “The anarchic ideal of
decentralized, stateless, collectively managed, and directly democratic
communities — of confederated municipalities or ‘communes’ — speaks
almost intuitively ... to the transforming role of libertarian
municipalism into the framework of a liberatory society.”[45]
The commune was also an important idea to Bakunin. In his “Revolutionary
Catechism” of 1865–66 the Russian saw the commune as a revolutionary
institution, close to the people and responsive to their needs, and
functioning in a confederation:
Immediately after government has been overthrown, communes will have to
reorganize themselves along revolutionary lines ... No commune can
defend itself in isolation. So it will be necessary for each of them to
radiate revolution outward, to raise all of its neighboring communes in
revolt to the extent that they will rise up, and to federate with them
for common defense. Between themselves they will of necessity enter into
a federal pact founded simultaneously upon solidarity of all and
autonomy of each. ... The same revolutionary requirements induce the
autonomous provinces to federate into regions, regions into national
federations, nations into international federations.[46]
Later in the same document he wrote:
First: all organizations must proceed by way of federation from the base
to the summit, from the commune to the coordinating association of the
country or nation. Second: there must be at least one autonomous
intermediate body between the commune and the country, the department,
the region, or the province ... The basic unit of all political
organization in each country must be the completely autonomous commune,
constituted by the majority vote of all adults of both sexes ... the
province must be nothing but a free federation of autonomous
communes.[47]
In 1871 the Paris Commune, despite its brief existence, excited many
libertarians. Murray once noted that it “provided Marxism and anarchism
with its earliest models of a liberated society” and “was precisely a
revolutionary municipal movement whose goal of a ‘social republic’ had
been developed within a confederalist framework of free municipalities
or ‘communes.’”[48] It gave the already-interesting concept of the
“commune” even more electricity.
The commune loomed large on the horizon of Peter Kropotkin, the
anarchist theorist closely identified with anarcho-communism.[49] In
1879 Kropotkin wrote:
Once expropriation has been carried through, and the capitalists’ power
to resist been smashed, the ... there will necessarily arise a new
system of organizing production and exchange ... the foundations of the
new organization will be the free federation of producers’ groups and
the free federation of Communes and groups of independent Communes.[50]
And a year later: “The communes of the next revolution will proclaim and
establish their independence by direct socialist revolutionary action,
abolishing private property. When the revolutionary movement happens ...
the people themselves will abolish property by a violent
expropriation.”[51]
The communes of the next revolution will not only break down the state
and substitute free federation for parliamentary rule; they will part
with parliamentary rule within the commune itself. They will trust the
free organization of food supply and production to free groups of
workers — which will federate with like groups in other cities and
villages not through the medium of a communal parliament but directly,
to accomplish their aim.[52]
And Kropotkin wrote in 1913 that “the form that the social revolution
must take [is] the independent commune.”[53]
We notice in these countries the evident tendency to form into groups of
entirely independent communes, towns, and villages, which would combine
by means of free federation, in order to satisfy innumerable needs and
attain certain immediate ends ... The future revolutions in France and
Spain will be communalist — not centralist.[54]
In sum, the commune in confederation (“the Commune of communes”) was
crucial to these major nineteenth-century anarchists as well as others.
Together their writings, said Murray in the 1980s, constituted a
“communalist” tendency within anarchism, a tendency that had been
largely overlooked amid the more conspicuous tendencies of
anarcho-individualism and anarcho syndicalism. He now campaigned to call
attention to it: “It would be well to remember that there has always
been a communalist tendency in anarchism, not only a syndicalist and an
individualist one. Moreover, this communalist tendency has always had a
strong municipalist orientation.”[55] He told Kick It Over in 1985:
Long before syndicalism emerged in the anarchist tradition, there was a
communalist tradition which dates back to Proudhon and which appears in
Kropotkin and I don’t know why that’s been so completely neglected. So
if I’m to take that seriously and update it up into our own time and
explore its logic completely, then I have to ask myself: what can I do
to recover the neighborhood and the community? How can I empower the
citizens to take control of their community at the base grassroots
level, ... and not to develop the bad habits of parliamentarism, but to
try to create neighborhood assemblies such as we have in Burlington —
town meeting type forms — councils in neighborhoods — confederate them,
and confederate the communities into a dual power against the
centralized state on the basis of a libertarian tradition.[56]
To be sure, in Murray’s hands the communalist tendency underwent
transformation. The nineteenth-century theorists had seen the communes
as mainly administrative in function, providing “public services,” and
had given actual decision-making power over to workers’ associations
that comprised the communal federations. The communes themselves would
be kind of mini-confederations at the municipal level, made up of
smaller components like producers’ groups, collectives, cooperatives,
and the like. Murray instead envisioned the commune as a direct
democracy, made up of popular assemblies, that controls the economy.
But then, how would the forebears’ workers’ associations and communes
make decisions? As bodies for policymaking as well as administration,
they would have to make decisions. Perhaps they would comprise councils,
or committees. These councils or committees might consist of councilors
who were delegates — recallable delegates, empowered to carry out the
will of the people. As Bakunin wrote in 1868: ”As regards organization
of the Commune, there will be a federation of standing barricades and a
Revolutionary Communal Council will operate on the basis of one or two
delegates from each barricade, one per street or per district, these
deputies being invested with binding mandates and accountable and
revocable at all times.”[57]
But how would the deputies be chosen? Bakunin does not say; nor does
Kropotkin or any of the other forebears. Perhaps the deputies would be
hand-picked by revolutionary leaders, but that does not seem
particularly enlightened. Or perhaps the delegates would be elected
democratically. By the people. Perhaps by the people in assemblies. The
forebears do not say.
The fact is that, if I may generalize wildly, the European Left of the
nineteenth century tended not to think of democracy as a desideratum in
its own right. Even democratic grassroots self-government held little
appeal. Democracy, as a concept, seemed the politics of compromise,
requiring tolerance and moderation, unsuited for violent revolutionary
goals of expropriation. Statist democracy (what Murray would call
republicanism) was a means for the acquisition power by the working
class rather than a goal in its own right. For European leftists the
revolutionary institutions par excellence were factory committees and
workers’ councils, institutions whose origins lay in economic thought.
Perhaps it required an American radical to insist that democracy was
exciting in its own right, to give it priority, to make it a goal worth
fighting for.
And it became his job to try to persuade anarchists that democracy was
worth fighting for, to be valued in its own right. Libertarian
municipalism, he believed, as a translation and update of
anarchist-communalism, could become the basis for a new anarchism
dedicated to face-to-face democracy.
Before I go on, I would like to look at another notable fact about the
“commune” formations described by the nineteenth-century forebears:
these communes were intended to come into existence after the workers’
revolution. That is, once the workers had expropriated private property
and forced the collapse of the state, they would spontaneously form
communes. Note that one of the Bakunin quotes above begins “Immediately
after government has been overthrown ... ” And that one of the Kropotkin
quotes begins “Once expropriation has been carried through ...” For both
thinkers, the workers’ revolution would come first.
As we have seen, Murray had argued that revolutionary institutions are
formed spontaneously by the people during the course of a revolution.
(Spontaneity was one of his principles of convergence between anarchism
and ecology.) But in the early 1980s something happened that permanently
changed his thinking: he came to the realization that he was not going
to see a revolution would happen in his lifetime. The way he put it to
me was: he realized that the revolutionary era is over.
He had been working with the Clamshell Alliance, the group that
prevented the Seabrook nuclear reactor from going on line. Was it
something about that experience that led to this realization? He was
frustrated by the decision-making processes used in that group:
consensus, he found, was a process very prone to manipulation. Or was it
the changes happening in North America and Europe in the 1970s?
Certainly the United States was entering a period of right-wing backlash
against the 1960s (a backlash that continues to this day). Onetime
radicals were now pursuing careers, getting “a piece of the pie” for
themselves. The new social movements were emerging, which offered hope
but also fragmentation of any broad movement; they moved radical
thinking increasingly toward identity politics. Ecology was emerging as
an issue of general concern, but as Washington adopted a few
environment-friendly laws, radical ecologists were becoming reformist
environmentalists. Finally the alternative (non-Western and noncredal)
spiritualities that made up the New Age were ever more popular, luring
former political activists into private life and promising to replace
extroverted demands to change society with inner quests for serenity and
enlightenment.
The revolutionary era, Murray realized in the early 1980s, was over. The
era of proletarian revolutions had begun on the barricades of June 1848
and had continued through the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and
beyond. But it had come to an end in May 1937, on the barricades of
Barcelona. That was the last time workers had risen up in pursuit of a
new, utopian society.[58] He said in a 1985 speech: “I believe that the
revolutionary era in the classical sense is over. ... I lived through
the era of the barricades. The glamour of them has always enchanted me,
but I’ve learned when an epic has come to an end.”[59] He later told me
that he came to that realization after Clamshell. “Hardly any authentic
revolutionary opposition exists in North American and Europe,” he wrote
in 1979.[60]
This realization must have been wrenching, as much so as his 1948
realization that the workers would not be revolutionary agents. After
all, capitalism and the nation-state still had to be overthrown, even
more urgently now with the ecological crisis, and Murray himself, as
well as other revolutionaries, had no intention of giving up their
fight. He could have settled back and adjusted his views to the tenor of
the times, but it was not in his personality to do so — he had always
been a revolutionary, and would remain one. But now that revolution was
no longer on the horizon, how was he to continue? How should any
revolutionaries function, given that history was no longer on their
side?
His thinking shifted, and one hallmark of the shift, in my view, was his
virtual abandonment of the concept of spontaneity. Revolutionaries had
to stop supposing that revolutionary institutions would be formed after
the revolution, or even during the course of an uprising. Instead,
revolutionaries had to start creating revolutionary institutions now.
That way the institutions would not simply be a product of revolution;
they could help foment a revolution. Revolutionaries had to create these
institutions consciously and deliberately. Certainly events might erupt
that would fuel social change; a growing awareness of the ecological
crisis could lead to a broad social movement; global warming, wreaking
havoc, could threaten survival and lead to a major social and political
upheaval. But for now, in the absence of such broad popular unrest,
revolution had to be worked for consciously. And to perform that
conscious work, an organized, coherent, and purposive libertarian
movement was needed.
The strategy of that movement, of course, was libertarian municipalism.
The institutions of face-to-face democracy were the ones that could be
created before the revolution and that would be in place if and when the
revolution finally came. After all, in the wake of the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991, the rest of the world seemed to be embracing
democracy, in the form of the republican nation-state. Municipalist
revolutionaries could do no less, but in their case the democracy they
embraced would be direct and face-to-face.
As we have seen, Murray mounted a campaign to convince his fellow
anarchists that this was the path they should take. He passionately
advocated libertarian municipalism at a major international anarchist
conference held in Venice in 1984. He wrote The Rise of Urbanization and
the Decline of Citizenship (a cumbersome and academic-sounding title for
a brilliant book shot through with political engagement), published in
1985, tracing the democratic tradition and exploring the age-old
conflict between the municipality and the state. From 1983 to the early
1990s he produced a series of articles on various aspects of libertarian
municipalism, many of them published in Green Perspectives (later
renamed Left Green Perspectives). He formed a libertarian municipalist
political group in Burlington, Vermont. (By this time I was in his life
and became a member of that group, the Burlington Greens; I coedited
Green Perspectives with him.)
How did anarchists respond to this campaign? For the most part, the
response I heard, both in my presence and in writings that crossed our
desks, it was univocal: anarchists will never participate in elections.
Municipalism is statism, it is parliamentarism, they said, just as
Judith Malina had in 1972.
But at the local level, Murray replied, politics is not statism; it is
something qualitatively different. The state, in his definition, was the
institution that involves a surrender of sovereignty to legislators;
politics, by contrast, takes place at the community level, where
communal self-management is possible; it involves people actively
managing their own communities, not surrendering power to legislators
but exercising it themselves. That fact made all the difference. “Civic
politics is not intrinsically parliamentary politics,” he wrote in
1984.[61] And: “If this kind of assembly brings anarchists into city
councils, there is no reason why such a politics should be construed as
parliamentary, particularly if it is confined to the civic level and is
consciously posed against the state.”[62]
He frequently quoted Bakunin on the qualitative difference between local
politics and the national state. In 1870 Bakunin had drawn an implicit
distinction between them:
Due to their economic hardships the people are ignorant and indifferent
and are aware only of things closely affecting them. They understand and
know how to conduct their daily affairs. Away from their familiar
concerns they become confused, uncertain, and politically baffled. They
[the people] have a healthy practical common sense when it comes to
communal affairs. They are fairly well informed and know how to select
from their midst the most capable officials. Under such circumstances,
effective control is quite possible, because the public business is
conducted under the watchful eyes of the citizens and vitally and
directly concerns their daily lives. This is why municipal elections
always best reflect the real attitude and will of the people. Provincial
and county governments, even when the latter are directly elected, are
already less representative of the people.[63]
“I would want to restate his formulation to mean that municipal
elections can more accurately reflect the popular will than
parliamentary ones,” Murray wrote.[64]
Moreover, the municipality and the state have long been in tension if
not conflict.
The state, until comparatively recent times, has never been able to
fully claim the municipality as its own ... Almost every major
revolution has involved — indeed, has often been — a conflict between
the local community and the centralized state ... The municipality may
well be the one arena in which traditional institutional forms can be
reworked to replace the nation-state itself ... The municipality’s
capacity to play a historic role in changing society depends on the
extent to which it can shake off the state institutions that have
infiltrated it: its mayoralty structure, civic bureaucracy, and its own
professionalized monopoly on violence. Rescued from these institutions,
however, it retains the historical materials and political culture that
can pit it against the nation-state and the cancerous corporate
world.[65]
But still the objections continued. In 1996 the periodical Organise!
suggested that Murray was advocating a process wherein “’libertarians’
capture the local state and end up captured by it.”[66] His response:
My views on libertarian municipalism are entirely oriented toward
creating a dual power composed of directly democratic assemblies of the
people in revolutionary opposition to the state. The idea that
libertarian municipalism should try to capture the local state and
operate within a statist framework is alien to my views. My hope is that
a movement can be created that seeks to enlarge whatever local democracy
still remains in a community — particularly a direct face-to-face
democracy — in the hope that it can be thrown against the state on all
levels, from the municipality to the central government.[67]
But already in 1992 he was becoming discouraged. “The extreme resistance
I have encountered from anarchist traditionalists and ‘purists’ on this
issue has virtually foreclosed any possibility of developing a
libertarian, participatory, municipalist, and confederal politics today
as part of the anarchist tradition.”[68]
Most discouragingly, many anarchists objected to the basic principle of
democratic decision-making, majority rule. “Majority rule is still
rule,” he was told. As he described the difficulty:
Libertarians commonly consider democracy, even in this [face-to-face]
sense, as a form of “rule” — since in making decisions, a majority view
prevails and thus “rules” over a minority. As such, democracy is said to
be inconsistent with a truly libertarian ideal. Even so knowledgeable a
historian of anarchism as Peter Marshall observes that, for anarchists,
“the majority has no more right to dictate to the minority, even a
minority of one, than the minority to the majority.”[69]
Such thinking dates back to Kropotkin, who asserted that “majority rule
is as defective as any other kind of rule.”[70]
As an alternative to majority rule, some anarchists argued that
consensus was preferable; by seeking unanimous or near-unanimous
consent, it seemed to eliminate the problem of overruled minorities.
But Murray did not agree. Consensus decision-making, he thought, was
suitable for small groups of people who know each other but was entirely
impracticable for large assemblies of strangers. Moreover, it tended to
turn citizens into manipulators, working behind the scenes to get full
support for their proposal, rather than openly articulating valid
disagreements. And by insisting on unanimous or near-unanimous support
for a decision, consensus tended to suppress dissent, subtly coercing
those who disagreed with the majority to “step aside” — that is, to
negate themselves as citizens and participants. As a fourteen-year-old
member of the Young Communist League, Murray had defied the Stalinists’
ban on talking — even talking! — to Trotskyists. He had never been one
to agree to the suppression of dissent — on the contrary, he would
always champion dissent, not simply for allowing it but for encouraging
it, because “dissensus” brought creativity. A democracy did indeed
insist that the outvoted minority had to abide by the decisions of the
majority, but it always left open the possibility that a dissenting
minority could express its views freely and thereby hope one day to
reverse the noxious decision.[71]
Yes, anarchists are rightly concerned about statism, Murray said, and
their “concern over parliamentarism and statism” has been “amply
justified by history.” But “it can also lead to a siege mentality that
is no less dogmatic in theory than an electoral radicalism is corrupt in
practice.”[72] Murray felt passionately that anarchists should not let
their justified opposition to parliamentarism lead them to oppose
elections and face-to-face democracy.
Today, so great is the fear of a localist politics of any sort — of
crossing the mystical line between nonvoting and voting — that the
rejection of electoral activity, even if base don the locality in which
one lives, has become a paralyzing dogma.[73]
Anarchism, Murray insisted over and over again, has to be able to move
forward; it shouldn’t allow itself to be ossified.
We can certainly build on views advanced by the great anarchist thinkers
of the past. But must we ignore the need for more sophisticated notions
of confederalism, anti-statism, decentralism, definitions of freedom, a
sensitivity to the natural world than those that they advance? ... If
anarchist theory and practice cannot keep pace with — let alone go
beyond — historic changes that have altered the entire social, cultural,
and moral landscape ... the entire movement will indeed become what
Adorno called it — a “ghost.”[74]
“You know,” he said to me and to others several times in these years,
“the Spanish anarchists back in the 1890s wanted to drop the name
‘anarchist’ in favor of ‘libertarian communism.’ Maybe I’ll do the same
thing.”
As it turned out, anarchism was indeed changing with the times — but not
in the way that Murray had been urging. On the contrary, during all
those years when he had been trying to revive anarcho-communalism, much
of anarchist thinking had actually been going in the opposite direction,
toward individualism. Murray became alarmed by this tendency in the
early 1990s. Anarchism, he warned, was moving away from a “collectivist
commitment to socialist freedom” and toward “a personalistic commitment
to individual autonomy.” These tendencies had once “simply coexisted
within anarchism as a minimalist credo of opposition to the State.” But
during the 1980s and 1990s,
as the entire social and political spectrum has shifted ideologically to
the right, “anarchism” itself has not been immune to redefinition. In
the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism is being divested of its social
ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy, an emphasis that is draining
it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite individualism ... has become
increasingly prominent. This personalistic “lifestyle anarchism” is
steadily eroding the socialistic core of anarchist concepts of
freedom.[75]
Such individualism lay at the root of a complex that Bookchin called
“lifestyle anarchism,” which he criticized in the essay “Social
Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm.”[76] As Murray
described lifestyle anarchism:
Invertebrate protests, directionless escapades, self-assertions, and a
very personal “recolonization” of everyday life parallel the
psychotherapeutic, New Age, self-oriented lifestyles of bored baby
boomers and members of Generation X. Today what passes for anarchism in
America and increasingly in Europe is little more than an introspective
personalism that denigrates responsible social commitment; an encounter
group variously renamed a collective or an affinity group; a state of
mind that arrogantly derides structure, organization, and public
involvement; and a playground for juvenile antics.[77]
Personalistic or lifestyle anarchism was preoccupied with the ego,
Murray thought, typified by a narcissistic inwardness and seeking
self-enchantment. Its very forms of rebellion were petulant and
egoistic, episodes of “ad hoc adventurism” marked by personal bravura.
Lifestyle anarchists were stridently antipolitical and
anti-organizational.
Perhaps most grievously, lifestyle anarchism rejected the core values of
the Enlightenment, to which Murray had always been committed and that he
had always presupposed, never imagining that they would one day be
challenged. Attracted to mysticism, desire, ecstasy, imagination,
paganism, and the New Age, lifestyle anarchism was hostile to reason as
such and harbored an aversion to theory, even celebrating theoretical
incoherence; and when it was not engaged in bravura, it receded into
Taoist quietism and Buddhist self-effacement. It condemned modern
technology as well as science, even though Kropotkin, for one,
significantly emphasized “the progress of modern technics, which
wonderfully simplifies the production of all the necessaries of
life.”[78]
Lifestyle anarchism furthermore was anti-civilizational, offering “a
glorification of prehistory and the desire to somehow return to its
putative innocence,” Lifestyle anarchists “draw their inspiration from
aboriginal peoples and myths of an edenic prehistory.” They believe that
“life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of a
leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and
health.” Primitive peoples “refused technology” because “with their
animistic beliefs [they] were saturated by a ‘love’ of animal life and
wilderness.’” People in prehistory consciously decided to refuse not
only tools but even language. Theirs was “a dancing society, a singing
society, a celebrating society, a dreaming society.” Lifestyle
anarchists seemed to imagine that complex societies could one day return
to the simple forms of social organization of tribal or even band
societies.
Lifestyle anarchists categorically rejected libertarian municipalism and
anything resembling democracy
By denying institutions and democracy, lifestyle anarchism insulates
itself from social reality, so that it can fume all the more with futile
rage, thereby remaining a subcultural caper for gullible youth and bored
consumers of black garments and ecstasy posters. To argue that democracy
and anarchism are incompatible because any impediment to the swishes of
even a minority of one constitutes a violation of personal autonomy is
to advocate not a free society but a herd. No longer would “imagination”
come to power. Power, which always exists, will belong either to the
collective in a face-to-face and clearly institutionalized democracy, or
to the egos of a few oligarchs who will produce a “tyranny of
structurelessness.[79]
And above all they rejected socialism. Kropotkin had once said that
anarchism was the left wing of socialism. “The rise of modern
secularism, scientific knowledge, universalism, reason and
technologies,” wrote Murray, “potentially offer the hope of a rational
and emancipatory dispensation of social affairs.” But “in a very real
sense [lifestyle anarchists] are no longer socialists — the advocates of
a communally oriented libertarian society-and they eschew any serious
commitment to an organized, programmatically coherent social
confrontation with the existing order.”[80]
Nor did they seem to grasp, Murray wrote, that true individuality (as
opposed to individualism) depends on a social context. “Left to his or
her own self, the individual loses the indispensable social moorings
that make for what an anarchist might be expected to prize in
individuality: reflective powers, which derive in great part from
discourse; the emotional equipment that nourishes rage against
unfreedom; the sociality that motivates the desire for radical change;
and the sense of responsibility that engenders social action.”[81]
Against this cultural tide, Murray warned, anarchism must retain its
social and political core.
There must be a place on the political spectrum where a body of
anti-authoritarian thought that advances humanity’s bitter struggle to
arrive at the realization of its authentic social life — the famous
“Commune of communes” — can be clearly articulated institutionally as
well as ideologically. There must be a means by which socially concerned
anti-authoritarians can develop a program and a practice for attempting
to change the world, not merely their psyches. There must be an arena of
struggle that can mobilize people, help them to educate themselves and
develop an anti-authoritarian politics ... that pits a new public sphere
against the state and capitalism. In short, we must recover not only the
socialist dimension of anarchism but its political dimension, democracy.
’”[82]
For the name of this “place on the political spectrum,” Murray used his
old word “communalism,” now explicitly defining it as “the democratic
dimension of anarchism”: “ I wish to propose that the democratic and
potentially practicable dimension of the libertarian goal be expressed
as Communalism, a term that has not been historically sullied by
abuse.”[83]
Lifestyle anarchists responded to “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle
Anarchism,” often in ad hominem ways. Kingsley Widmer, for one, accused
Murray of engaging in an “inquisitional burning which allows only one
tradition and style of anarchism” — an absurd accusation, given even the
title of Murray’s essay. Another tactic was to diagnose Murray as
suffering from a mental disturbance: Jason McQuinn asserted that the
article revealed his “paranoid side”: “Murray “aims to pin the blame for
his lifetime of frustration [in contesting the powers-that-be] , . . on
an evil anti-socialist conspiracy which has subverted his drams at every
turn.” Far from seeing a conspiracy, Murray clearly identified lifestyle
anarchism as a symptom of a larger social malaise, of social reaction
and capitalist commodification. Others diagnosed Bookchin as power
hungry, or as intent on making a power play. Laure Akai, a reviewer for
Anarchy, asserted that Murray was “fighting for his seat as leading
theoretician.” She nonsensically dismissed him (along with Hakim Bey) as
“old men hungry for affection who want to leave their mark on radical
theory before they croak.” Bob Black also portrayed Murray as wealthy
and privileged, motivated by a lust for power.[84]
The most popular tactic was to caricature Murray as an authoritarian —
especially of the Marxist or Stalinist variety. Murray’s defense of the
libertarian social-revolutionary left was distorted into a devious,
indirect defense of the authoritarian, Stalinist left. David Watson,
untroubled by the fact that Murray had broken with Marxism in the 1950s,
designated him as both “General Secretary” and “Chairman,” suffering
from megalomania to boot. Steve Ash wrote that Murray “retains a kind of
Marxoid determinism that undermines his claim to be a libertarian.” John
Clark accused Bookchin of a pernicious “Bakuninist (or
anarcho-Leninism).” Taking issue with none of Murray’s arguments, he
went on to write a “Confession to Comrade Murray Bookchin,” casting
Bookchin metaphorically as Stalin, staging a Moscow show trial — and
self-servingly casting himself (Clark) as a Bukharin — type victim.
On the issues of substance, David Watson wrote an entire book, Beyond
Bookchin, in which he militantly defended primitivism and mysticism.
[85] People, he wrote, should “humble themselves ... before the smallest
ant, realizing their own nothingness.” Murray wrote a long article
entitled “Whither Anarchism?” in which he defended himself against
Watson’s, Clark’s, and other criticisms.[86] Astonishingly, scarcely a
year after the publication of Beyond Bookchin, in the pages of Fifth
Estate, Watson proceeded to reverse himself and rejected “pretenses to
an anarcho-primitive perspective or movement,” calling primitivism “a
fool’s paradise” and “self-proclaimed primitivists” as “deluded.”[87]
Murray couldn’t have said it better.
In the wake of the lifestyle anarchism fight, Murray was exhausted. In
1996 he was seventy-five years old. The intractable and unwavering
anarchist rejection of libertarian municipalism demoralized him, and the
attacks by the lifestyle anarchists were personally discouraging. No one
seemed to stand up for him, to take his part. He felt alone and
misunderstood, a man out of his time, even a relic from another era.
The whole experience, he believed, said a great deal about the world he
was living in. The primitivists “are telling us to look inside ourselves
and discover our own ‘real’ selves,” he noted. Apparently we are “to
shed the psychic layers that civilization has imposed on us for
thousands of years — civilization being responsible for our problems —
and peel away our various civilized attributes, much like an onion,
until we get to the innermost core.” But “if we do so, we are likely to
find very little in the core, if anything, but our barest physical
attributes, instincts, and emotions.”
The fact is that “human beings are social beings.” As such we ”have no
natural inner self that exists apart from ... the civilization in which
we live, whether we accept its values and lifeways or are in revolt
against them. This is true for even the most militant individualist.
What we do have is the ability to develop intellectually, to absorb
knowledge, to become emotionally, mature, and above all to innovate and
create. For that we require the presence of other people.”
Oriented as he was toward the future, he looked fondly back to some
aspects of precapitalist society, especially insofar as people were
“tied to one another by their feelings, communities, and a generous
capacity for empathy.” Under capitalism, by contrast, “commodification
severs all the ties created by feeling and community, decomposing them
... capitalism turns the organic into the inorganic, so to speak ... It
fetishizes commodities as substitutes for genuine social ties.
Thus people come to relate to one another through things. If we’re
unhappy, we are advised to buy a new outfit or household device, and
then we’ll feel better. The family mutates into a unit of consumption.
Acquiring an education is reduced to training for earning an income;
gaining one’s livelihood often involves the exploitation of other people
and plundering the natural world. Friendships are reduced to
relationships designed to advance one’s career. Commodification, in
short, replaces genuine social ties to such an extent that things seem
to preside over human relationships, as Marx observed, instead of human
beings administering the disposition of things.
People today have become interested in mysticism and religion out of
emptiness and despair. “In the Western industrialized countries, the
mystical revival is primarily a substitute for the creation of a
politics that would otherwise genuinely empower people. Thus, rather
than entering into a political sphere, trying to change the society
around them, to destroy the disease — capitalism — and replace it with a
new social order, people today are more likely to turn inward, in their
despair, and to belief in a god.” But even the god becomes commodified.
“Capitalism commercializes emotions by placing a dollar sign on
everything people believe or feel.” It not only creates desperation but
then “tries to profit from the aspirations that surge within and yearn
for meaning and significance.”
Murray believed that “today capitalism and commodification are
trivializing people to a remarkable extent,” and that “the egoism, the
narcissism, and the psychotherapeutic mentality that are all so typical
of our society today” are symptoms of that trivialization. “One of our
most important first tasks, as revolutionaries, is to de-trivialize
ourselves and others, ... to recover the great revolutionary traditions
that once existed when people devoted their lives to creating a better
society.”[88]
As the debate wore on, the “unbridgeable chasm” between social and
lifestyle anarchism became ever more evidently unbridgeable. Murray had
treated lifestyle anarchism and social anarchism as two strains of the
same movement, in the hopes of bolstering the social strain, but many of
his critics seemed intent on consigning social anarchism to the
unrecoverable past. The great divide, according to anarchist Kingsley
Widmer, was not simply the one between social and lifestyle anarchism
but the one between anarchism past and anarchism present. Murray, in
this view, was an anachronism, standing “in lonely splendor ... on the
ghostly shoulders of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and their descendants in such
as the Spanish anarchists of more than two generations ago.” Social
anarchism, Widmer wrote, is historically over: “What Bookchin propounds
overall seems a sometimes admirable but now narrow and thin
libertarianism of a different time and place and conditions. To put it
kindly, much of Bookchinism steams with quaintness.”[89]
Such critics seemed intent on defining social anarchism as
anarchism-of-the-past, and lifestyle anarchism as anarchism-of-today.
Steve Ash, writing in Freedom, went even further, asserting that
individualistic anarchism was anarchism-of-always: “Anarchism as a whole
... has always emphasized self determinism” — that is, autonomy. If
Murray thought anarchism ever had some collectivist or communal
dimension, he was apparently mistaken; indeed, Ash asserted, Bookchin
had joined the “anarchist movement mistaking it for a radical form of
anti-hierarchical communism.” To which Murray replied: “Can it be that
Mr. Ash has never heard of comunismo libertario or the tens of thousands
of Spanish anarchists who raised the cry for it in the streets of
Zaragoza, Barcelona, and Alcoy, among other Spanish cities and towns, as
well as on the battlefronts of Aragon? If it is a mistake to believe
that ‘anti-hierarchical communism’ belongs to ‘genuine [!] anarchist
idea,’ then we have chosen to ignore a major chapter of anarchist
history.” Ash’s critique not only consigned social anarchism to the past
but lost all historical memory of it.
Those of us who knew Murray personally understood that he had privately
rejected anarchism as such in 1995, around the time he wrote “Social
Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.” In that booklet he essentially was
saying, If anarchism continues in this vein, I’ll have to leave the
movement. But in reality he had already left, emotionally and
intellectually. Still, for four years he hesitated to make a public
break. He had forty years of history with the movement and many
anarchist friends. He had anarchist publishers and a major reputation.
Was he going to jettison that? But Murray, to his credit, never made the
intellectual mistake of caring about reputation. He cared only about
doing what he thought was right.
Why, then, did he procrastinate with the break? In my view, an important
reason was his age. He had just been through a vicious fight with the
lifestyle anarchists. He might now write an article called “Communalism
vs. Anarchism,” but if he did so he would open up another fight. At
seventy-five, he felt himself to be too fragile, and his health too
poor, to withstand the counterattack. He knew that he would need my help
to write the replies, but I was already hard at work editing and
research-assisting the final two volumes of The Third Revolution.
Another reason was the libertarian municipalism conference series of
1997–99. In 1997 I wrote a small book summarizing his political ideas,
called The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism, which
was almost immediately translated into several languages. Some of his
friends wanted to use the book to try to interest whatever social
anarchists remained in face-to-face democracy. The publisher proposed
that we organize a series of two international conferences, to pitch
democracy to anarchists one last time. Since Murray was too crippled by
arthritis to travel, I agreed to participate in his stead. He was
impatient with the whole project but, perhaps out of deference to me,
kept his misgivings to himself. The first conference took place in 1998
in Lisbon, Portugal; the second, in 1999, in Plainfield, Vermont. As
Murray had predicted, the conference series failed to produce a movement
or even a set of initiatives. On the contrary, the anarchists that the
conferences reached continued to make the same objections: Democracy is
rule. Libertarian municipalism is statism.
By then his friends understood as well as Murray did that no progress
could be made. He had given it his best shot. “I’m tired of defending
anarchism against the anarchists,” he used to say. Writing to the
English periodical Organise! he admitted that his attempt to transform
anarchism had been a failure:
I do not fault myself for trying to expand the horizon of anarchism in
the sixties along cultural lines. I regret only that I failed, not that
I saw the wrong possibilities for profoundly changing our society.
Tragically, many self-professed American anarchists didn’t even try to
do much back then and have since abandoned their convictions for private
life and academic careers. Surely failure doesn’t mean that one
shouldn’t try?[90]
Over the decades Murray had indeed transformed anarchism — much to its
benefit, he had infused it with ecology and the critique of hierarchy
and other ideas.[91] But George Woodcock turned out to be right —
anarchists had no taste for democracy. At least Murray had the
satisfaction of knowing he had tried. In the end, his loyalty to
democracy as a concept and a praxis was stronger than his loyalty to
anarchism. So when he had to choose between them, he chose democracy.
In the meantime a group of talented Scandinavian communalists had come
into his life. They met with us in 1996–97 and, upon returning home,
proceeded to create a solid organization, Democratic Alternative. They
formed study groups. They held meetings and public forums. They wrote
platforms and programs. They held internal congresses and external
conferences. They translated Murray’s and my works into Norwegian and
published them. They wrote their own articles. They edited and published
periodicals. They de-trivialized themselves. They were astonishing.
In Norwegian, as in other European languages, the word municipalism is
translated as an equivalent of “communalism.” Our Norwegian comrades
therefore easily called themselves “communalists.” In 1994 Murray had
referred to communalism as “the democratic dimension of anarchism”; his
next, inevitable step was to separate communalism from anarchism. The
Norwegians gave him the political and psychological support he needed in
order to make the break with the ideology that had been his home for
forty years.
At the second conference of the libertarian municipalism series, in
Vermont in 1999, Murray broke with anarchism. Then three years later, he
wrote it down in his final theoretical article, the brilliant summation
of his late-life views that he called “The Communalist Project.”[92]
In the late 1950s, when anarchism in the United States was a barely
discernible presence, it seemed like a sufficiently clear field in which
I could develop social ecology, as well as the ... political ideas that
would eventually become ... libertarian municipalism. I well knew that
these views were not consistent with traditional anarchist ideas ...
Today I find that anarchism remains the very simplistic individualistic
and antirationalist society it has always been. My attempt to retain
anarchism under the name of “social anarchism” has largely been a
failure, and I now find that the term I have used to denote my views
must be replaced with Communalism, which coherently integrate and goes
beyond the most viable features of the anarchist and Marxist traditions.
The article is notable for its sobriety — although critical of
anarchism, it does not polemicize against it but rather calmly
explicates a transformation:
I myself once used this political label [anarchism], but further thought
has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and
insights notwithstanding, it simply is not a social theory ...
Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists
from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are:
individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong
commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or
socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible
form of social organization ... The history of his ideology is peppered
with idiosyncratic acts of defiance that verge on the eccentric, which
not surprisingly have attracted many young people and aesthetes. In
fact, anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s
ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic
acts of defiance of the state.
He did not lash out at anarchism, his former ideological home.
Several years ago, while I still identified myself as an anarchist, I
attempted to formulate a distinction between “social” and “lifestyle”
anarchism, and I wrote an article that identified Communalism as “the
democratic dimension of anarchism.” ... I no longer believe that
Communalism is a mere ”dimension” of anarchism, democratic or otherwise;
rather, it is a distinct ideology with a revolutionary tradition that
has yet to be explored.
As for the communalism that he now affirmed, Murray saw it as a
transcendence of both anarchism and Marxism, and he attributed to it all
the political and philosophical and social ideas that he had been
advocating for decades.
It is my contention that Communalism is the overarching political
category most suitable to encompass the fully thought out and systematic
views of social ecology, including libertarian municipalism and
dialectical naturalism. As an ideology, Communalism draws on the best of
the older Left ideologies — Marxism and anarchism, more properly the
libertarian socialist tradition — while offering a wider and more
relevant scope for our time.
My own view is that Murray had no alternative but to do what he did.
Anarchists had repeatedly and consistently rejected his approach. “The
Communalist Project” is a fitting capstone to a life of immense
intellectual integrity. Here he hoped that, having blazed a new trail,
he would give libertarian social revolutionaries a new path forward. The
task of further developing communalism and working to build a
communalist movement therefore now falls to the next generation of
social ecologists.
September 28, 2007
This article will appear in Anarchism for the 21^(st) Century, ed. Larry
Gambone and Pat Murtagh (Edinburgh and Oakland: A.K. Press,
forthcoming).
[1] Times Online, August 10, 2006.
[2] Bookchin, The Problem of Chemicals in Food. This article, like many
others cited in these notes, may be found online at the Anarchy Archive,
.
[3] Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarchosyndicalism, and the Future of
Anarchist Thought,” in Bookchin, Graham Purchase, Brian Morris, and
Rodney Aitchtey, contributors, Deep Ecology and Anarchism (London:
Freedom Press, 1993), p. 54.
[4] Emphasis added. Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the
Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993–1998 (Edinburgh and San Francisco:
A.K. Press, 1999), p. 57.
[5] Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science
(Anti-Dühring) (New York: International Publishers, 1939), p. 323,
quoted in Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism
(Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 209.
[6] Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progressive
Publishers, 1970), p. 49. Murray quotes this passage in The Limits of
the City (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), p. 138n.
[7] Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!” p. 209. In this essay Murray thought of
decentralism as a common goal of both anarchism and Marxism: “Both
Marxism and anarchism have always agreed that a liberated, communist
society entails sweeping decentralization, the dissolution of
bureaucracy, the abolition of the state, and the breakup of the large
cities”(p. 209).
[8] Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment (1962; reprinted by New York:
Harper, & Row, 1974), pp. 242–43.
[9] Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarchosyndicalism,” pp. 53–54.
[10] Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism, p. 57.
[11] Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post Scarcity
Anarchism, p. 79.
[12] Ibid., pp. 77, 78.
[13] Ibid., pp. 78, 80, 76.
[14] Ibid., p. 76.
[15] George Woodcock, Anarchism: A history of Libertarian Ideas and
Movements. (Cleveland: World, 1962), p. 468.
[16] Victor Ferkiss, The Future of Technological Civilization (New York:
George Braziller, 1974), p. 75. Murray wrote in 1999, “I regard
Kropotkin as the real pioneer in the eco-anarchist tradition, as well as
anarchist communism.” Anarchism, Marxism, p. 58. In 2002 he rejected
eco-anarchism as primitivistic. See Bookchin, “The Communalist Project,”
in Communalism: Journal for a Rational Society (2002), originally
published online at www.communalism.net; republished in Bookchin, Social
Ecology and Communalism (Oakland and Edinburgh: A.K. Press, 2007).
[17] Bookchin, introduction to Towards an Ecological Society (Montreal:
Black Rose Books, 1980), p. 29.
[18] Murray first mentioned the phrase “social ecology” in “Ecology and
Revolutionary Thought.” He co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology
in 1974. He did not write his first article defining social ecology,
“What Is Radical Social Ecology?”, until 1983.
[19] In the essay “Post Scarcity Anarchism” Murray quoted Raoul
Vaneigem’s “Totality for Kids.” See Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley,
Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 39. Vaneigem, in this two-part essay
(published in 1962 and 1963), referred several times to “hierarchical
power.” Originally titled “Banalités de base,” the essay has more
recently been retranslated as “Basic Banalities” and published (parts 1
and 2) in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, rev. and
updated ed. (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006). To my knowledge,
Murray first wrote about “hierarchical society” in the 1967 essay
“Desire and Need,” then at greater length in the 1969 “Listen, Marxist!”
and finally in his magisterial 1982 The Ecology of Freedom. “Ecology and
Revolutionary Thought,” as reprinted in Post-Scarcity Anarchism,
contains a discussion of hierarchy, but it was a revision added to the
1971 book and did not appear in the original article.
[20] The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, Calif.: Cheshire Books, 1982)
opens with an epigraph from Kropotkin’s Ethics. Murray’s
acknowledgements say: “Peter Kropotkin’s writings on mutual aid and
anarchism remain an abiding tradition to which I am committed.”
[21] Bookchin, introduction, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 21.
[22] Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarcho-syndicalism,” pp. 52–53.
[23] Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” p. 69.
[24] Quotes in this paragraph are from Bookchin, “Forms of Freedom,” in
Post-Scarcity Anarchism, pp. 155–58.
[25] “Forms of Freedom,” pp. 155–65. In his preface to the 1985 Black
Rose edition of Post-Scarcity Murray wrote: “’The Forms of Freedom,’
written seventeen years ago, still constitutes the basis for my views on
libertarian municipalism: the assembly as the authentic basis for
democracy and my criticism of syndicalism.”
[26] The article was signed “The Anarchos Group.” In many respects this
remarkable article foreshadows the 1994 polemic “Social Anarchism vs.
Lifestyle Anarchism.” Murray’s 1972 complaints about the transience and
theatricality of the antiwar movement anticipate his later criticisms of
lifestyle “ad hoc adventurists.” This article was also his first
exposition of ideas that, ten years later, he would call “libertarian
municipalism.”
[27] Judith Malina, “Anarchists and the Pro-Hierarchical Left,” Anarchos
(June 1972), insert.
[28] Ibid.
[29] “Democratizing the Republic and Radicalizing the Democracy: An
Interview with Murray Bookchin” (part 2), Kick It Over (Winter 1985–86),
p. 9.
[30] Bookchin, “Communalist Project.”
[31] Woodcock, Anarchism, pp. 28, 30.
[32] Bookchin, “Anarchism: 1984 and Beyond,” address to the
international anarchist gathering, Venice, Sept. 24–30, 1984
(unpublished).
[33] Murray’s major book on libertarian municipalism is The Rise of
Urbanization and Decline of Citizenship (Sierra Club, 1987), republished
as Urbanization Against Cities (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992) and as
From Urbanization to Cities (London: Cassell, 1995). From the early
1980s he wrote numerous articles on the subject as well. For a list of
those works, as well as a brief summary of the ideas, see my The
Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montreal: Black
Rose Books, 1998).
[34] Bookchin, “Theses on Libertarian Municipalism” (1984), in The
Limits of the City, rev. ed. (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), p. 172.
[35] Bookchin, Rise of Urbanization, p. 258.
[36] “Democratizing the Republic,” p. 9.
[37] Bookchin, “The Meaning of Confederalism,” in From Urbanization to
Cities, pp. 252–53.
[38] “Democratizing the Republic,” p. 9.
[39] Bookchin, “Theses,” p. 178.
[40] Bookchin, “The Ghost of Anarcho-syndicalism,” Anarchist Studies 1
(1993), p. 7.
[41] Murray had some major disagreements with Proudhon, such as his
“commitment to a contractual form of economic relationships, as
distinguished from the communistic maxim of ‘from each according to his
or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs,’ a commitment
that ... can scarcely be distinguished from bourgeois conceptions of
‘right.’“ See Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarcho-syndicalism.” He also
objected to “the proprietarian mentality that appears in so many of
Proudhon’s writings,” which he says is “dispensable.” See Bookchin,
“Ghost,” p. 7.
[42] Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarcho-syndicalism,” p. 54.
[43] Bookchin, “Ghost,” p. 6; he is citing Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The
Principle of Federation (1863), trans. Richard Vernon (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 41, 45, 48.
[44] Bookchin, “Ghost,” p. 6.
[45] Bookchin, “Theses on Libertarian Municipalism,” p. 166.
[46] Michael Bakunin, “Revolutionary Catechism of the International
Revolutionary Society or Brotherhood” (1865), in Daniel Guerin, ed., No
Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism, trans. Paul Sharkey
(Edinburgh and San Francisco: A. K. Press, 1998), book 1, p. 142.
[47] Michael Bakunin, “Revolutionary Catechism” (1866) in Bakunin on
Anarchy, ed. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), pp. 82–83;
quoted in Bookchin, “Ghost,” p. 7.
[48] Bookchin, “Toward a Vision of the Urban Future,” in Towards an
Ecological Society, p. 183.
[49] Murray was careful to define his differences with Kropotkin’s
thought, objecting to Kropotkin’s notion of a “social instinct” to
validate his mutualism. That idea was “troubling, not only because it is
based on a highly selective study of animals, but because it tends to
ignore a host of solitary animals, including highly advanced mammals.
Even more troubling is that he tends to confuse animal troops, herds,
packs, and transient communities with societies — that is, with highly
mutable institutions, alterable as they are by virtue of the distinctly
human ability to form, develop, subvert, and overthrow them according to
their interests and will.” See Bookchin, “Deep Ecology,
Anarcho-syndicalism.”
[50] Peter Kropotkin, “The Anarchist Idea,” November 1, 1879; reprinted
in Daniel Guerin, No Gods No Masters, book 1, p. 232.
[51] Kropotkin, “The Commune of Paris,” March 20, 1880; reprinted in P.
A. Kropotkin, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. Martin
A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1970), pp. 128–29.
[52] Ibid., p. 132.
[53] Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism” (1913), in Kropotkin’s
Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger Baldwin (1927; reprinted New York:
Dover, 1970), p. 163; quoted in Bookchin, “Ghost,” p. 8.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Bookchin, “Theses,” p. 177.
[56] “Democratizing the Republic,” p. 9, emphasis added.
[57] Michael Bakunin, “Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary
Organization of the International Brethren,” in Guerin, No Gods No
Masters, book 1, p. 155.
[58] Murray considered the revolutions in China and Cuba and Vietnam to
be nationalist in nature, not authentically socialist. See, for example,
Bookchin, Modern Crisis, p. 129.
[59] Bookchin, Keynote Address to Waterloo-PIRG, Waterloo, Ontario,
1985, videotape, Bookchin Papers, Tamiment Institute Library, New York.
[60] Bookchin, introduction to Towards an Ecological Society, p. 11.
[61] Bookchin, “Theses,” p. 178.
[62] Ibid., p. 179.
[63] Michael Bakunin, “Representative Government and Universal Suffrage”
(1870), in Dolgoff, ed., Bakunin on Anarchy, pp. 218–24; quoted, e.g.,
in “Ghost,” pp. 7–8.
[64] Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarcho-syndicalism,” p. 55.
[65] Quotations in this paragraph are from Modern Crisis, pp. 39–41.
[66] Organise, no. 43 (Summer 1996).
[67] Organise, no. 44 (Autumn 1996).
[68] Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarcho-syndicalism,” p. 55.
[69] Bookchin, “What Is Communalism? The Democratic Dimension of
Anarchism,” Green Perspectives no. 31 (October 1994), p. 3, quoting
Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
(London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 22.
[70] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles,”
in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger Baldwin (1927;
reprinted by New York: Dover, 1970), p. 68.
[71] For Murray’s objections to consensus decision-making, see “What Is
Communalism?”
[72] Bookchin, “Theses,” p. 178.
[73] Bookchin, letter to the editor, A: Rivista Anarchica [Milan] 185
(Sept.-Oct. 1991), pp. 40–41; written Aug. 14, 1991.
[74] Bookchin, “Deep Ecology, Anarcho-syndicalism,” pp. 57–58.
[75] Bookchin, “What Is Communalism?” p. 1.
[76] Bookchin, “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable
Chasm,” in Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable
Chasm (Edinburgh and San Francisco: A.K. Press, 1995).
[77] Ibid., p. 10.
[78] Ibid., p. 35.
[79] Ibid., p. 58. On “the tyranny of structurelessness,” see Jo
Freeman’s classic 1970 article by that name online at
).
[80] Kropotkin, “Anarchism” (1910), in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary
Pamphlets; Bookchin, “Social Anarchism,” pp. 35, 1–2.
[81] Bookchin, “Social Anarchism,” p. 16.
[82] Bookchin, “What Is Communalism?” p. 4.
[83] Ibid., p. 5.
[84] Kingsley Widmer, “How Broad and Deep Is Anarchism?” Social
Anarchism, no. 24 (1997); Jason McQuinn, review of Social Anarchism or
Lifestyle Anarchism, in Alternative Press Review (Spring — Summer 1987);
Laure Akai, “Social Anarchism Revisited,” in Anarchy: Journal of Desire
Armed, no. 44 (Fall-Winter 1997–98); Bob Black, Anarchy After Leftism
(Columbia, Mo.: C.A.L. Press, 1997).
[85] David Watson, Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1996).
[86] Bookchin, “Whither Anarchism?” in Anarchism, Marxism.
[87] David Watson, “Swamp Fever, Primitivism, and the ‘Ideological
Vortex’: Farewell to All That,” Fifth Estate (Fall 1997).
[88] Quotations in this section are from Murray Bookchin, Anarchism,
Marxism, pp. 122–24.
[89] Widmer, “How Broad and Deep?”
[90] Bookchin, letter to Organise!, p. 18. Sadly, Iain Mackay, a writer
associated with Organise!, is currently circulating a rumor that late in
life Murray suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. As his primary caregiver,
I can state categorically that this rumor is entirely false. Murray
remained lucid almost to the end of his life.
[91] Space has not permitted me to discuss Murray’s philosophical ideas,
which he called dialectical naturalism. See his The Philosophy of Social
Ecology, rev. ed. (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1984).
[92] Bookchin, “Communalist Project.”