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Title: The American Crisis Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 1980 Language: en Topics: USA, anti-capitalism Source: http://www.revoltlib.com/anarchism/the-american-crisis/view.php
To conceal real crises by creating specious ones is an old political
trick, but the past year has seen it triumph with an almost classic
example of text-book success.
The so-called “Iranian Crisis” and Russia’s heavy-handed invasion of its
Afghan satellite have completely deflected public attention from the
deeper waters of American domestic and foreign policy. One would have to
be blind not to see that the seizure of the American embassy in Teheran
by a ragtail group of Maoist students spared both Khomeini and Carter a
sharp decline in domestic popularity. The students, whoever they may be,
functioned like a deus ex machina in promoting the political interests
of the Iranian Ayatollah and the American President — the former, from a
civil war that was brewing among Iran’s middle classes, women, and
ethnic and religious minorities; the latter, from the lures of Camelot
and the Kennedy dynasty. By the same token, Russia’s ugly invasion of
Afghanistan, a country that remains distinctly within the Soviet orbit,
assumed a crisis-like character that by far exceeded her savage invasion
of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1969, invasions that evoked
virtually no serious response from Washington. That Russia’s attempt to
catch up her tyranny over the Afghans should have aroused fears of
military confrontation between the “superpowers,” not to speak of
nuclear war, is evidence more of the media’s capacity to manipulate
American public opinion than to inform it of the simplest rudiments of
foreign policy.
There is no danger of a war with Iran — and, in all probability, there
never was one. Warlike rhetoric, an economic blockade, a military show
of strength — yes; but outright war remains unlikely, to say the least.
Neither Khomeini nor Carter could have maintained their commanding
positions without each other’s support in creating “crises” that
demanded “national unity” and the muting of criticism. In both cases,
more deep-seated crises were concealed by surface storms that degraded
the entire level of social and economic conflict. Nor was there any
danger of nuclear war between Russia and the United States over the
Afghan invasion. Here, too, crude satire-rattling by Carter made it
possible for a cynical president to shrewdly alter the entire level of
political discourse in an election year. Even the “new nationalism” or
jingoism generated by the White House with the media’s complete
complicity served as a substitute for a real ideology — for a political
ethics, if you will — around which to focus American political
consciousness. To wave the flag, to join in spectacularized “prayers”
for the hostages, to replace moral decency by a martial bellowing of
“patriotism” while damning Iranians on billboards and pissoirs, or even
more disgustingly, by selectively arresting, taunting, and browbeating
them — all of this may have even served as a welcome outlet for the
Neanderthal sectors of the public that live in helpless desperation over
their ability to reconcile the American ideology of public virtue with
the reality of brothel-like practice at home and abroad.
This is not to say that there are no real crises that confront Americans
at home and abroad. Indeed, we are faced with a historic turning point
in our morality, institutions, economy, and freedoms comparable in scale
to the crises opened by the Civil War. But our crises do not center on
Iranian oil, the hostages, or the Russian “drive” to warm-water ports.
Nor are we faced with a crisis of scarcity in energy resources and raw
materials, of un balanced budgets, or an unaffordably “affluent”
lifestyle. All myths of this kind notwithstanding to the contrary, we
are neither short of oil nor of raw materials, nor have high
governmental expenditures, high levels of consumption or imbalances in
international payments produced the present galloping inflation.
Considerable evidence can be adduced to show that there is a glut of
petroleum and many strategic raw materials; that government and public
spending provide no serious explanation for inflation; that the
international balance of payments is not a significant factor in the
present inflationary runaway.
On this score, many environmentalists and the political careerists who
exploit environmental issues for their own ends have done us no service
in beating the drums of “scarcity” That fossil fuels and certain
“natural resources” will eventually dwindle to unconscionably low levels
goes without saying, but these problems — and they can be rapidly
resolved — are not upon us today. Resource depletion provides
environmentalists with no excuse for joining the corporate and
bureaucratic wolf pack that is beleaguering the American people and
their remaining democratic institutions.
The real American crisis lies elsewhere today and for the remainder of
the century. It lies in a fundamental tension between democratic rights
and institutions that were formulated in a pre-industrial, fairly
libertarian agrarian society and a multi-national corporate economy that
is paving the way for a highly authoritarian industrial society. It lies
in a fundamental tension between an idiosyncratic, highly individuated
philosophy of a self-reliant way of life and the need to create a
well-controlled, easily manipulated massified population. It lies in a
fundamental tension between an ideal of self-sufficiency, based on a
virtually autarchical commitment to national and regional
decentralization and an interdependent, highly specialized, global
economy and labor force. It lies in a fundamental tension between a
sizable middle-class that tends to be socially and politically
independent and the need I or a well-disciplined working class that can
be technically and logistically placed in the service of a corporate
factory structure. It lies in the fundamental tension between a
traditional, fairly labor-intensive industrial machine and a highly
automated, scientifically orchestrated technology.
In short, the real American crisis lies in the fundamental tensions
between two American dreams: the first, rooted in a more or less
preindustrial, premarket body of social relations, technics, and values;
the second, rooted in a highly industrial, monopolistic, corporate body
of social relations, technics, and values. Carter, the bouquet of
various Rockefeller commissions, the heavily veiled business councils,
and the political bureaucracies of the United States are grappling not
with the Ayatollah, the Russians, or the remaining bones of the American
“Left”; they are grappling with the American past as it exists in those
vast numbers of people who live by its quasi-libertarian values,
ideologies, and institutions. The tension between these two versions of
the “American Dream” cannot be permitted by the ruling elite of the
United States to pass into the next century without either tearing down
the existing corporate structure or producing one of the most
authoritarian societies in human history.
The nineteenth century did not come to an end in 1900. Nor did it come
to an end in 1914, with the outbreak of the first World War, as cultural
historians would have it. History does not conveniently begin or end its
epochs according to wall calendars and cultural cross-currents If one
looks for the real but elusive chasm that separates our time from its
historic past (say, retrospectively, with the keen eye of a Karl
Polanyi), the truth is that the nineteenth century with its liberal
credo of “free enterprise” and “minimal government” came to an end in
the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. It is not merely liberal ideologies
that came to their end but an entire way of life: neighborhood forms of
urban society, a well-layered retail middle class, the extended family,
a high degree of regional self-sufficiency, the labor-intensive factory
system, and, finally, the radical (presumably, “revolutionary”) workers’
movement, mobilized in combative socialist and syndicalist federations,
in militant trade unions, and supported by a uniquely class culture that
was continually fertilized by its contact with a still-viable rural,
indeed, agrarian life. Say what one will about the increasing
centralization and rationalization of industry, of growing “trusts” and
“joint-stock” companies, of Roosevelt’s efforts at state intervention in
the economy, of the waning tradition of the small farm, of
“five-and-dime” or department stores, of increasingly nuclear families,
of radio, telephones, and movies, of the League of Nations and economic
imperialism, of assembly lines and the CIO, of strikes, labor parties,
Sacco and Vanzetti, of Hitler and Stalin, the fact remains that vast
areas of social life were still largely premarket, preindustrial, and
precapitalist in character. However much these areas were invaded by
capitalist relations, whether individually or severally over the
generations prior to the fifties, they were not fully absorbed by them.
All the liberal and social credoes aside, the neighborhood or farm, the
retail shop or small industrial enterprise, the family or region, or,
for that matter, the workers’ movement itself still retained a core that
gave them a vital continuity with a centuries-old way of life. The great
demonstrations of American workers in the 1930’s with their placards
inscribed with slogans like “Work — Not War!” or “Bread — Not Guns!”
would have been thoroughly comprehensible to the Parisian workers who
raised red flags on the barricades of June, 1843. Spain of 1936 was cut
from the same historical fabric as the Paris Commune of 1871. With the
end of the Spanish Revolution, the era of workers’ revolutions also came
to an end. World War II ushered in not only a nuclear age, cybernetics,
spacecraft, and television; it ushered in a Euro-American world
fundamentally different from any which had existed in the past — a world
that has been changing our very perception of ourselves as well as
society.
The significant factor in this change has been the total colonization of
every aspect of life by the market. A great deal of confusion has been
produced by arguments over whether the “true” market is “free” or
“controlled,” a confusion generated by the “libertarian” tendency in
capitalism and the socialist, both of which form ideological expressions
of different phases of the market’s historical development (see my
“Marxism as Bourgeois Sociology,” Telos, No. 43 for a critique of the
ideology of controlled or state capitalism). However we may conceive of
its origin and development, the market has expanded to a point today
where every individual is reduced to a buyer and seller, be it of goods,
sex, culture, love, “concern,” personality, or ideologies. The appalling
degeneration of certain “founders” of the anti-nuclear alliances, not to
speak of the environmental movement, attests to the extent to which
“protest” has itself become a mere ware in the marketplace of “ideas.”
The marketplace permeates areas of life that have never been strictly
economic, except, perhaps, in a technical sense like the sexual division
of labor in the family. Not merely has every aspect of life become
“commodified,” to use the dubious terminology of Marxism; perhaps, more
significantly, it has become de-socialized, more strictly bureaucratic,
and in this sense more “politicalized” in the modern sense of the term
as distinguished from the Hellenic.
What I am saying is, as Buber so perceptively emphasized a generation
ago, that the “cell-tissue Society,” with its richly articulated
non-statist forms such as family, neighborhood, associative forms of
culture and profession, and local assemblies have been absorbed by
political institutions, as described in the best of the Anarchist
literature. People have not only become “commodified” or “reified”;
individuality itself has dissolved into atomized forms, personality into
egotism. The very fact that society disappears into “politics” yields an
appalling passivity and powerlessness rather than activity and control.
Not merely has the extended family dissolved into the nuclear family,
but in ever greater degree the nuclear family has dissolved into the
soloist who inhabits a highly commercialized, soulless “domestic”
singles’ world. Not only have the “brothers” and “sisters” of the
medieval town degenerated into citizens of the modern city, but in
ever-greater degree they have dissolved into the “tax payers” of the
Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. These are now individuals who
view the city not as an ethical community but as the arena for municipal
services. One can follow this downward trajectory in education and
educational norms, in culture, in industry, in religion, even in radical
or protest movements. What is crucial to every aspect of this
dissolution is the erosion of the internal powers of individual
self-assertion, ultimately, of the individual’s control over her or his
everyday life and social activity.
The role of the market in explaining this degenerative development
became visible most clearly in the 1950’s, when bureaucratic relations
began to replace personalized ones in the most intimate details of daily
life, even in those areas of home, neighborhood, church, cultural
activity, and club-life in which the individual took refuge from the
demands of the social order and economy. The absorption of the small
farm by agribusiness has its urban counter part in the absorption of the
small shopkeeper by the supermarket, finally, by the huge shopping mall.
In her or his loss of the small family-owned enterprise, the individual
lost the personal dimension of trade itself — a traditional face-to-face
process still rooted in ancient relations of reciprocity. Just as the
shop was replaced by impersonal, corporate retail chains, so the verbal
negotiation of trade, its logos so to speak, was replaced by the
“punch-out” line, a deadening computerized process that fixes use-values
as pure exchange values. The tendency of trade to swell to the level of
ruthless plunder and organized social piracy divested even exchange
value of the element of need. Need, now intermingled with mere egoistic
interest, has lost its integrity to a point where we often no longer
know what we need nor can we clearly identify our interests beyond those
of mere animal survival and security. We no longer “buy” things, in
effect; we are “sold” them without the dialogue of the bargaining
process or the interchange of information. Hence the “demos,” from which
democratic concepts and institutions emerged, is faced with extinction.
As Camus warned us, we are all becoming functionaries with the result
that bureaucracy has replaced family, neighborhood, and popularly based
collective institutions as the sinews of what we euphemistically call
“society.”
I have emphasized the decline of the traditional retail world because
the retail outlet, be it family or corporately owned, directly faces the
individual, the family, and the neighborhood or town. The factory was
“zoned” out of this private world all the more to protect its privacy,
more precisely, its sociality, from the ravages of rationalized
production and industrial domination. It remains one the great idiocies
of Marxism that the decline of such protective barriers was greeted as
“progress” and a token of “proletarianization.” The emergence of chain
stores, supermarkets, and shopping malls “zoned” the factory into
private life — obviously, not as the domestic craft activity of the
medieval town or as a producer of goods in any sense of the term, but as
a distributor, scaled to immense, warehouse-like dimensions. The highway
network that was constructed after World tier II did much more than
divide neighborhoods and destroy urban greenbelts; it literally
dissolved them by opening suburbs and perhaps more significantly, by
changing the nature of trade. Like a vast lymph system, it absorbed
communities into shopping malls and consequently into what we may
reasonably call the retail factory, thus qualitatively altering our very
image of “goods and services” The crowded routes that led to shopping
malls in urban, suburban, and even rural areas form a new spiritual
landscape; its historic metaphor is the dissolution of the gift into the
bargain, of giving into competition, of quality into quantity. “Muzak”
replaces music and the stupor of “buying” replaces the discriminating,
rational choice of useful and lasting goods. The public intelligence
that rarely soared to the level of “high culture” is even eroded on the
level of “low culture.” Cunning is thereby divested of its own
rationality in dealing with the ordinary details of everyday living so
that television advertising with its infantile and gullible detergent
users, its hen-pecked, idiotic husbands, its naive fathers, and its
slinky, well-machined mannikans begin to reflect the human condition.
Packaging serves to conceal the poverty of goods just as fashion serves
to conceal the poverty of personality. Both the consumer and commodity
are wrapped up together on the “check-out” counter line.
Hence the public’s intuitive opposition to shopping malls, highways,
MacDonald-like food emporia, and department stores has become more than
an issue of esthetics, congestion, or repellent food; it has become an
issue of social identity that involves the sanctity of personality and
society, of human scale. and the right to spontaneous lifeways. Like the
growing opposition to high-rise buildings which architecturally can pass
for office buildings, hospitals, or prisons as well as homes, opposition
is directly or indirectly concerned with the texture of social life —
indeed, whether or not social life is to have any texture. Perhaps less
visible, but no less important, are the grave injuries technical changes
in industry have inflicted on society. Historically, we are now well
past the traditional labor intensive factory, the old assembly line,
even the national division of labor. The traditional industrial base of
America is undergoing major disintegration and is sharply confronted by
an almost futuristic restructuring of its technics, work force, and
output of commodities. The impact of these changes may well represent
the fulfillment of capitalism in its purest form and its technical
“contribution” to history in its most negative terms. In this respect,
it is not the supremacy of a “technical” or “instrumental” rationality
that threatens reason, but the supremacy of a rationalized technics.
What is in the balance is not merely technique and mind, but the
substitution of a cybernetic technics for both.
According to a fascinating survey by the Pacifica News Service, “U.S.
industry in the 1980s is headed for integration into a modular world
economy based on small, flexible units. This new economy compares to
older methods of organization the way the microprocessor compares to a
crystal radio set.” Technically, a modular economy is an ensemble of
mobile, standardized machine components, highly computerized and
robotized, that involves a very limited and interchangeable labor force,
generally clustered around machine units which perform much of the
routine industrial operations previously assigned to workers. By
standardizing the components of complex products like motor vehicles to
a point where the units, often partially assembled, can be sold to
different corporations all over the world, the industrial module itself
be comes a substitute for the traditional factory. The producing units,
in this respect, become very similar to their products: not only is the
product a module but so too are the cybernated units and work force that
produced it. Technical interlinkage and product interlinkage yield
corporate interlinkage and new industrial alliances, if not actual
conglomerations. Accordingly, “Motorola and Toshiba build computerized
engine modules for Ford; GM’S Delco division has turned to Texas
Instruments for design aid as well as microcomputer devices, and
Chrysler relies on RCA and Motorola for digital dashboards, engine
computers, and control modules for exhaust emissions.”
Interrelatedly domestically, these industries — auto may be taken merely
as an illustration of similar examples elsewhere — have reached out to
many areas of the world, most notably the cheap labor markets of the
Third World. Indeed, the very structure of employment has changed. While
the Japanese tend to hire a stable, adaptable, company-controlled
workforce that renders traditional images of the conflict between wage
labor and capital absurd, American corporations seem to rely on high
mobility and rapid job turnovers. Part-time or limited employment has
increasingly invaded work schedules based on seniority, long job tenure,
and community-rooted stability. A workforce, sizable sectors of which
tend to more closely resemble migrant farmers than a stable proletariat,
is not easily mobilized around class issues, especially when the
industry’s commitment to a locale is highly tenuous. By the same token,
a workforce that it itself highly mobile has nothing to defend but its
own access to jobs. This workforce is now fairly considerable: fully
twenty percent of the labor force is made up of “permanent” part-time
employes, a figure that is likely to grow in the years that lie ahead.
From the “retail revolution” to the latest “industrial revolution,” what
we are witnessing in effect is a complete restructuring of American
society itself. Instability is the emerging form of stability — and,
with it, a high degree of manipulability, domestic and global
interdependence, homogenization of industrial technics and vocations, of
commodities, human personality and human needs. Much as we may have
bemoaned the emergence of a “mass society,” a “mass culture,” and a
“mass media,” we are now approaching a point where society, culture, and
media threaten to give way to bureaucracy, advertising, and
manipulation. Commerce and industry, futuristically oriented toward the
divesting of the last vestiges of uniqueness in personality, threaten to
create a spiritual, political, and economic landscape denuded of the
most elemental human qualities of mind. Indeed, the “American Crisis”
can be regarded not only as the invasion of social life by the factory,
but by a modular industrial system that reduces women and men to
components of the module. The design literature that deals with the
technical problems of this phenomenon has adopted (without cynicism,
irony, or humor) its own term for the ideal modular “labor force”: the
robot. The term may well describe not only the technical restructuring
of human personality but its grim historic destiny within the prevailing
social system.
Perhaps the most immediate victims of the “American Crisis” are the
middle classes created by the post-World War II era — not only the poor
who, together with women and ethnic minorities, always suffer during
social “transitions.” The erosion of various middle strata of American
society is not a new phenomenon. In the 1930’s the Great Depression
basically victimized the small farmer. This development was of primary
significance; it was the farming class, rooted in small agrarian
holdings, that formed the most important support for American republican
institutions. Between 1860 and 1930, farmers dropped from nearly 60
percent of the population to about 22 percent, although in numbers they
still remained fairly considerable, some ten million in a work force of
about fifty and, with their sizable families, at least forty million in
a population of 127 million. Thereafter, in the forty years that
followed, the decline was disastrously precipitous: less than 12 percent
in 1950 and 2.9 percent in 1970. The passing of this yeomanry might well
have prepared the demographic texture for a highly authoritarian and
militaristic state in which republican institutions would have been
reduced to decorative political trappings.
But in the decades that followed the war, American republican
institutions found a new source of support, notably in a new suburban
and urban middle class. Highly stratified, regionalized, and culturally
variegated, this new stratum of small industrial and commercial
entrepreneurs, retailers, professionals. small contractors, students,
and even well-to-do farmers who had survived the “dust bowl” era — all,
in their unique ways, replicated in their myths and realities of in
dependence and self-reliance the decentralized, often libertarian
yeomanry in which American republicanism had anchored its historic
hopes. By “Left-wing” standards, neither the old yeomanry nor the new
middle classes were radical; indeed, generally, they were sol idly
conservative. But an authoritarian and certainly totalitarian political
structure conflicted sharply with their basic values and interests. This
middle class has not only been conservative in its response to basic
social change; it has been equally conservative in its response to
bureaucracy, centralization, social regimentation, and corporate
control. In this respect, it has actually opposed the most authentic
authoritarian tendencies in the government and the economy which can
plausibly tear down the republican institutions of the past. That is
most significant about this middle class is that the remaining decades
of the present century threaten its existence as surely as the 1930’s
completed the destruction of the American yeomanry.
The primary threat to the existence of this class is the al most
confiscatory inflation of the past decade. I use the word “confiscatory”
advisedly because it points to elements of the inflation that are rarely
emphasized in the economic literature. Firstly, the inflation is totally
inexplicable on the basis of strictly fiscal, budgetary, or consumption
premises. One must go back to the era of classical “free market”
economics to believe that trade imbalances, governmental expenditures,
high demand for goods in short supply can cause inflation rates to
nearly double in a decade, indeed, reach a staggering, almost usurious
rate of 18 percent per year. By the same token, the interest rate for
preferential bank loans soared in less than a year from an unprecedented
high of 10 percent to nearly twice that figure, or 18 percent. That the
price rises reflected by the inflation figures spell terrible
impoverishment for the poor, particularly individuals on fixed incomes
like the elderly, hardly requires emphasis. For the middle classes it
spells social extinction, a historic annihilation of its long existence
a s a social buffer. The doubling of prime interest rates in a few
months forecloses the attempt of small enterprises to effectively deal
with the seasonal rhythms of cash flow, not to speak of capital
maintenance and investment. Price inflation means a drastic reduction of
the market; more precisely, it means the usurpation of the remaining
market by retail chains and shopping malls. Thus the retail factory
closes in not only on private life but on the economic basis of that
private life, notably the small enterprise.
By contrast, the large corporations are internally financed. Their
staggering profits have turned them into self-sufficient credit
institutions that have radically diminished their reliance on
traditional financial institutions. Many of them, in fact, are lenders
rather than borrowers. They are free to capitalize at will or to export
capital to areas that yield favorable returns — accordingly, to benefit
from low wages in some regions or countries and from reduced
transportation costs in other areas. The global nature of the
multinational corporation provides it with a financial, economic, and
political power that tends increasingly to transcend the nation-state;
to literally plan the economy of the world with an effectiveness that
would have been the envy of orthodox socialist ideologists.
The point is that “free-market” economics explains nothing about the
present inflation because the market, from factory to shopping mall, is
almost completely controlled. Its freedom, like its competition, is
completely fictitious. In the energy industry, chemical industry,
transportation industry, steel industry, electronics industry, aerospace
industry, nuclear industry, and to a surprising extent, even in the
seemingly competitive auto industry, prices can be fixed at will with
only a marginal expectation of rivalry from domestic and foreign
enterprises. Where the “free market” rears its ugly head (for example,
when the American steel industry faced the challenge of dumping by
foreign rivals or when Chrysler faced bankruptcy), the state can be
expected to intervene and rescue the corporate giants, often in the name
of perpetuating “free enterprise.” Thus the production levels of highly
corporatized industrial sectors tend to be meaningless. If demand
declines or, as in the case of energy, attempts are made to curtail
usage, the corporate sector merely increases its prices. As the energy
industry has revealed with spectacular vividness, reduced demand in the
name of specious “shortages” actually becomes a device for acquiring
shamelessly high profits. It was not primarily as a result of increased
petroleum consumption of the cutoff of Iranian oil that Exxon netted
four billion dollars in profit. Such a massive plundering of the
public’s income occurred as a result of price increases, even when sales
threatened to fall precipitously. The debris of abandoned gasoline
filling stations on the very roads that lead to shopping malls is visual
testimony to the usurpation of small middle-class enterprises by
corporate giants and their retail excresences.
What clearly illustrates the high measure of economic control is the
ability of the economy to generate increased unemployment, decreased
effective demand, declining capital investment — indeed, virtually all
the typical characteristics of an economic depression — without any
decline of profits or prices in its major corporate sectors. The 1930’s,
like later albeit more shortlived “recessions,” were marked not only by
high unemployment but sweeping declines in prices, profits, and
investment. The most recent “recessions,” by sharp contrast, present a
picture of reduced demand, reduced employment — and soaring prices.
Although unemployment officially stands (at this writing) at six
percent, wholesale prices compounded at an annual rate have increased
approximately 20 percent. The classical notion that a “recession” will
produce deflation has now become a national myth. If a “recession” is to
have any function, it should be deflationary, but viewed from a more
historical stand point, its effects are likely to be more sinister than
even radical theorists are prepared to admit.
Economically, American corporate capitalism must recapitalize. It must
accumulate the funds to structure its technology along highly cybernated
and modular lines. A widely-cited model is the Japanese economy, where
the labor force has been melded to a highly sophisticated and automated
technology, yielding high productivity rates that overshadow the
American ones. This rationalization of Japanese basic industry,
reinforced by a patronal system of portal to-grave job security, has
produced immense profits, high output, minimal labor discord — and
minimal inflation. The patronal system should not be exaggerated. It is
actually underpinned by a large flotsam displaced urban population that
is hired sporadically when labor is needed, only to be ruthless fired
when production needs are met. Thus the labor force is stratified and
easily manipulated, partly by the lure of job security for one stratum,
partly by competition for jobs by another. What is unique about Japanese
industry is its versatility, its highly sophisticated, electronically
controlled technology, and its eerily faceless proletariat for whom
class war is as meaningless as nuclear war.
Until now, the traditional source of capital accumulation has been the
agrarian world, be it domestic farmers, colonized farmers, or both.
Primitive accumulation in England and Stalinist Russia left the
peasantry devastated. To some degree, the recapitalization of America
during and after the Second World War occurred on the bare remains of
its traditional yeomanry. No such social sector from which to plunder
the domestic economy for capital exists in America and Europe.
Agribusiness, which replaced the family farms of the United States and
Europe, is itself a corporate peer of the steel and petrochemical
industries. The resources to recapitalize technically “archaic”
industries must be acquired elsewhere — and today, they constitute the
once-“affluent” middle classes. Unorthodox as my view may seem, what the
current inflation may well represent is the recapitalization of American
industry and the industry of many European countries at the expense of
its middle-class strata.
This is not to say that the inflated spread between retail prices and
production costs is necessarily motivated by so far-reaching a social
vision. The bourgeoisie has never been more piratical today — more prone
to sheer pilfering, not to speak of plundering — since the days of the
first Industrial Revolution. The Watergate scandal, while an affront to
republican virtue in the political sphere, would be viewed as astute
cupidity in the economic sphere. The executive brothel is merely a tax
write-off hardly more morally degrading than the expenses of maintaining
an executive pissoir. It is no longer shocking to learn that industrial
espionage, surveillance, and possibly assassinations are part of the
“free enterprise” system, certainly not since the public learned of the
connections between the Mafia and key economic enterprises.
But the capacity of the American bourgeoisie to develop a futurology of
crises in anticipation of its overall class interests should not be
underrated. Perhaps at no time in its limited history has capital become
more organized, more integrated, and more coherent than it is today —
not only in its control of the market, but in its endeavors to control
its own historic policies. Laurence H. Shoupts fascinating, indeed,
schematic work, The Carter Presidency and Beyond (Ramparts, 1930),
reveals an apparatus of corporate policy-formulating institutions and
lobbies than can be regarded only as a state within the state. Between
the Business Council and the Trilateral Commission, corporate capitalism
is served by councils, institutions, academies, committees, and media
that reach into every sizable community in the United States and in many
European countries as well. That the Trilateral Commission alone has
provided the Carter administration with its Vise President (Mondale),
its Secretary of State (Vance), its most prominent national security
adviser (Brzezinski), its Secretary of the Treasury (Blumenthal and
Miller), its Secretary of Defense (Brown) and a bouquet of highly placed
advisers at the very summits of government can no longer be regarded as
testimony of a mere “conspiracy.” It is compelling evidence of a melding
of the political and economic spheres of what was once a comparatively
decentralized federal state into state capitalism.
Inflation, in effect, may well be evidence not of an economy “out of
control,” but rather one that is remarkably well-controlled. This
economy may be controlled not only to meet the insatiable appetite of
highly interlocked corporate enterprises, multinationals, and
conglomerates for profit, but also to meet their needs for
recapitalization on a historic scale. Summed up in brief: the “American
Crisis” may well be a crisis in a sophisticated accumulation of capital
that overshadows the social consequences of Marx’s account of “primitive
accumulation” of capital. These social consequences could reach into
every aspect of American life, with results that even the Trilateral
Commission, the Business Council, and the various sub-councils and
committees of this state infrastructure can barely foresee.
The sophisticated accumulation of capital, together with the sweeping
re-industrialization of America, necessarily has far reaching social and
political consequences. Multinational conglomerates, a corporatized
economy, an all-pervasive market society and a largely uprooted
underclass — all are completely inconsistent with republican
institutions that were developed in a mercantile and largely agrarian
period of history. The “Founding Fathers” are slowly becoming the
moribund grandfathers of what is now a qualitatively new social order.
To entrust issues like the election of legislative, judicial, and
executive representatives to the people, however meager their political
liberties and preselected the candidates, is regarded as erratic and
potentially laden with danger.
The “Federal Constitution” — itself a centralistic and nationalistic
reaction to the regionally and locally oriented Articles of
Confederation of the 1780s — advanced the doctrine of a “separation of
powers” that placed the national legislature, executive, and judiciary
in an offsetting relationship to each other. Montesquieu, following from
a long tradition on this issue, created the basis in French and American
political theory for legal checks and balances that served to diminish
governmental power and bureaucratic usurpation. The balancing of power
came to mean a balancing of interests, a legal framework for checking
the tendency of the market to preempt all other economic forms and
interests. It is ironical that bourgeois interest was not always
well-served by the political theorists who have since been so smugly
classified as “bourgeois democrats.” The principal republican theorists
of the 17^(th) and 18^(th) centuries were not merchants or
industrialists but rather enlightened aristocrats like Harrington,
Montesquieu, and Jefferson. Granting the privileges they consciously or
unconsciously accepted as their social heritage, they nevertheless
feared the dominance of bourgeois interest (indeed, of interest itself)
as a matter of principle. The separation of powers was meant to contain
the impact of private interest, bureaucratic manipulation, and
“monocratic” power, to use the language of the day, from subverting
republican institutions, however deeply these institutions were
infiltrated by aristocrats with enlightenment views of government.
The historic shift from a distributive to a market economy — a shift
that is only now achieving completion — and the concentration of
economic power in corporate elites and bureaucracies has opened a
brutal, indeed, explosive tension between the claims of society and the
needs of the state. The separation of powers has fuzed with the
conflicting “pluralistic” demands of a vast population of increasingly
displaced Americans who are confronted by a totally ambiguous future.
The family structure, the community, the neighborhood, the attempt to
perpetuate a simple material competence (be it a small enterprise, a
farm, a professional career, or merely a secure job) are now in
question. The very fear of up rootedness and isolation in a precarious
world exudes not only an ambiance of fear but of “sedition.” Quixotic as
it may seem, a ghetto uprising is not dissimilar in principle from the
massive support that Proposition 13 in California received from white
middle class suburbanites.
The recasting of the concept of “pluralism” into a derogatory notion of
“special interests” yields sinister ideological and political results.
Valid conflicting interests that reflect valid differences and
contradictions in status at every level of social life are
totalitarianized rather than resolved within a framework of equity and
reciprocity. A “new constitutionalism” has emerged that finds its most
overt expression in the views of Bayard Manning of the Council on
Foreign Relations Gregg Guma in a recent article has summarized
Manning’s views and their implications admirably. According to Guma,
Manning, early in 1977, agreeing with the Trilateral Commission’s
“diagnosis that America’s problems stem from an ‘an excess of democracy’
... proposed that new permanent councils be established to handle both
domestic and international affairs. They would become the entry point to
Congress for executive proposals and would review each bill before it
went to a floor vote. The new U.S. Council and its offspring in congress
and executive branch would bring together key cabinet officials and the
chairmen and ranking minority members of at least seven House and Senate
committees. They would have a staff and would be able to short-circuit
opposition to new proposals.” Vermont Vanguard, July 22, 1980.
The proposal marks a major transition from a republican to a
technocratic ideology — corporative, bureaucratic, and ultimately
totalitarian in nature. The “special interests” — working class, ethnic
minorities, feminists, gays, environmentalists, the elderly and
anti-nuclear people, not to speak of the massive middle classes — are
dissolved into the new framework. Their own needs and interests are
neutralized by a fictive “general interest” (the “new patriotism”
generated by the so-called Iranian crisis is only the most recent case
in point) that is literally institutionalized as corporate-controlled
“councils,” the “soviets” of the bourgeoisie. A historic cementing of
theoretically independent structures results in one effective structure
— the bureaucratic technocracy. This development has been in the making
since Roosevelt’s day, when the “Imperial Presidency” became fact under
wartime conditions and has been reinforced by its caste of “special
advisers” or “viziers” from Harry Hopkins in the thirties and forties to
the Kissingers and Brezinskis of today. But the presidency itself has
been too person-oriented and eccentric to allow for the predictability
and assurance that go with a highly rationalized economy. With Manning’s
“permanent councils,” the administration of the state becomes
counciliar, ideologically and “objectively,” the product of
“information,” “scientific management,” an expression of political or
administrative Taylorism, and the clear voice of corporate authority.
For a cybernetic economy, one must have a cybernetic politics. The
administered economy spawns the administered state — a state which is
neither republican nor immediately totalitarian but exquisitely
“effective.”
Nevertheless, there are factors at work in American society that must
eventually make “effectiveness” congruent with totalitarianism. The
“reindustrialization” of the United States must yield vast unemployment
in the long run. This high level of chronic unemployment may not even be
clearly visible; its forms are largely “illegal” by present-day
juridical standards. The forty-percent unemployment rate among black
youth, a condition that threatens to become permanent, has produced a
massive crime wave, widespread prostitution, drug-dealing, and theft.
This crime wave is also rapidly growing among unemployed white youth,
ironically at a higher rate in suburbs than in the inner city. The
elderly are simply being warehoused for death in nursing homes and
“retirement” communities. Within the cities, an enormous number of the
aging and aged live in self-imposed domestic prisons, regulated by
self-imposed curfews, and “protected” by a veritable armamentorium of
window bars, door locks, and alert systems. Viewed from this
perspective, “unemployment” has in fact become a form of employment —
marginal, illegal, fearsome, and socially destabilizing. Apart from the
skills obviously required for the existence of any society such as the
health professions. maintenance professions, and the basic techniques
that service the material and logistical needs of any community, an air
of uncertainty surrounds most careers that people can hope to choose. In
an era that celebrates futurism, no definable future can be charted by
the individual and there is little enough individuality left to take the
future in hand.
With the prospect of massive unemployment or criminalized employment and
a growing declasse stratum, massive unrest and soaring criminality,
brutality, and social unrest become unavoidable. Despite the rhetoric of
New Deal reformism, the basis for a sweeping regimentation of the
American people is being prepared by the state power. Draft registration
and ultimately military conscription are merely the surface features of
a far-reaching militarization and mobilization of all socially dominated
sectors of the population. Various approximations of an internal
passport system, legislation to restrict civil liberties, gun control,
the perfection of electronic surveillance devices, “bills of rights” for
the FBI and CIA, the expansion of professional and auxilliary police
forces, the use of computers to essentially “register” and “correlate”
data on the population — all taken together are a coherent constellation
of social controls to implement the “new constitutionalism.” The most
important single trend for effecting these measures is the growing
centralization of the national state. At a time when so much is being
written about the “decline,” “withering away,” and “breakdown” of the
state, the searing fact is that the fuzing of separate powers into a
single power threatens to produce a state apparatus so commanding in its
power and so greatly reinforced by economic corporatism that it
surpasses the most despotic state forms of history.
Given the growing centralization of the state and the hollowing out of
all social forms, the problem of developing popular forms of social
organization has become the historic responsibility of a relevant
Anarchist movement. The myth of a “minimal state” advanced by
neo-Marxists, by “New Age” decentralists, and by right-wing libertarians
— however well-meaning their notions may be — is ultimately a
justification of the state as such. Within the context of the present
crisis, any minimal state becomes a naive ideology for the only kind of
state that is possible in a corporate, cybernetic society — a de facto
maximum state. It is part of the very dialectic of the present situation
that any state can no more be “minimal” than a hydrogen bomb can be
turned into a instrument for peace. To discuss the “size” of a state —
its dimensions, degree of control, and functions — reflects the same
wisdom that is inherent in a discussions of the size of a weapon that
can only lead to the extermination of society and the biosphere. To the
degree that discussions around the state focus on its scope and
authority, we remain at a level of discourse that is as rational as
discussions on whether our nuclear arsenal will contain weapons that
will destroy the world five, ten, or fifty times over. Once is enough —
both for nuclear arsenals and the state.
If a decentralist opposition to the state, indeed, to the regimentation
and militarization of American society, is to be meaningful, the term
“decentralization” itself must acquire form, structure, substance, and
coherence. Words like “human scale” and “holism” become a deadening
cliche when they are not grasped in terms of their full revolutionary
logic, that is, as the revolutionary reconstruction of all social
relations and institutions; the creation of an entirely new economy
based not merely on “workplace democracy” but on the esthetisization of
human productive powers, the abolition of hierarchy and domination in
every sphere of personal and social life; the reintegration of social
and natural communities in a common ecosystem. This project entails a
total break with market society, domineering technologies, statism, and
the patricentric, Promethean sensibilities toward humans and nature that
have been absorbed into and heightened by bourgeois society. Every
half-step in this direction is grossly untrue to the project and its
essence. Inevitably, it yields a total betrayer, an ideological prop for
centralization in the guise of “decentralization.” Either the project
must be carried through to its most radical ends or it will be thrown
into sharp conflict with itself and its original goals.
What is the authentic locus of this project? Certainly, it is not the
present day workplace — the factory and office — which itself has to be
reconstituted fundamentally from a hierarchical, technologically
obsolete arena for mobilizing labor into a creative world that blends
richly with the public sphere and transcends the mere conflict of
economic interests. In so far as syndicalism and council communism still
perpetuate the myth of the workplace as a revolutionary sphere, they
become a crude form of Marxism without its overt authoritarian
characteristics. Nor can the locus for this project be the isolated
commune and cooperative, despite their invaluable features as the
gymnasia for learning the arts and resolving the problems of direct
action, self-management, and social interaction. No food cooperative
will ever replace great food chains such as Shoprite and no organic farm
will replace agribusiness without fundamental changes in society at
large. As nuclei in an all-pervasive market society, they can scarcely
be expected to significantly counter a massive politicized economy based
on stupendous material resources and ultimately physical coercion. They
may be foci of resistance, indispensable in dealing with the new
challenges that confront a revolutionary opposition today. But the
Proudhonian notion that they are the material wellsprings of a new
society, one that will gradually replace the old, is utterly mythic —
worse, obscurantist. Hence, the subtle viciousness of the Stanford
Research Institute’s image of a dual society — one, small and
self-indulgent, that will live by the canons of “voluntary simplicity,”
the other, massive and probably overwhelming in numbers, that will live
by the needs engendered by mass production and a mass society.
Ultimately, this image serves to deflect any conflict but a personal one
with the problem of confronting a massifying media that crushes the very
spirit of resistance by the great majority of society.
Resistance and the recolonization of society must flow from the logic of
a broad-based conflict between society and the centralized state, not
from soloist endeavors that are boxed into isolated communal and
personal efforts. Every revolution has been precisely that: a conflict
between society and the state. And just as the centralized state today
means the national state, so society today increasingly comes to mean
the local community — the township, the neighborhood, and the
municipality. The demand for “local control” has ceased to mean
parochialism and insularity, with the narrowness of vision that aroused
Marx’s fears. In the force field generated by an increasingly
centralized and corporatized economy, the cry for a recovery of
community, autonomy, relative self-sufficiency, self reliance, and
direct democracy has become the last residue of social resistance to
increasing state authority. The overwhelming emphasis the media has
given to local autonomy, to a militant municipalism, as refuges for
middle-class parochialism — often with racist and economically
exclusionary restrictions — conceals the latent radical thrust that can
give a new vitality to the towns, neighborhoods, and cities against the
national state. Whether we choose terms like “socialism” or “anarchism”
to set in contrast with seemingly parochial terms like “municipalism,”
it would be well to remember that even “socialism” and “anarchism” have
their negative side if we emphasize the authoritarian aspects of the
former and the chronic failure of the latter to consolidate itself
organizationally in most countries of the world. Truth ultimately
remains a very thin line that can easily meander from its course. In
this respect, no rules, dogmas, and traditions are substitutes for
consciousness .
By the same token, the municipality may easily become the point of
departure for a broad-based, directly democratic, truly popular, and
humanly scaled constellation of social institutions that by their very
logic, stand in sharp opposition to increasingly all pervasive political
institutions. This much is clear: the potential for a libertarian
radicalism is inherent in the municipality. It forms the bedrock for
direct social relations, face-to-face democracy, and the personal
intervention of the individual, the neighborhood or commune and
cooperative in the formation of a new public sphere. Rescued from its
own political institutions such as the mayoralty structure, the civic
bureaucracy, and its own organized monopoly of violence, it still
preserves the historic materials for a reconstruction (and ultimately, a
transcendence) of the polls, the free medieval commune, the New England
town meeting system, the Parisian sections, the decentralized cantonal
structure, and the Paris Commune.
To be sure, in itself the municipality is as helpless as a social force
as a commune and a cooperative. Furthermore, insofar as it preserves the
political institutions of the state, it remains not merely a social
ineffectual entity but a state in miniature. But insofar as
municipalities confederate to form a new social network, insofar as they
interpret local control to mean free popular as semblies, insofar as
self-reliance means the collectivization of resources, and finally
insofar as their administrative coordination of common concerns occurs
through deputies — not “representatives” — who are openly chosen and
mandated by their assemblies, subject to rotation, recall, and their
activities severely restricted to the administration of policies that
are always decided by popular assemblies they cease to be political or
state institutions in any sense of the term. A confederation of such
municipalities — a Commune of communes — is the only broadly based
Anarchist social movement that is envisionable today, one from which to
launch a truly popular movement that will yield the abolition of the
state. It is the one movement that can speak to the increasing demands
by all dominated sectors of society for empowerment and alone
pragmatically restates the reconstruction of a libertarian communist
society in the visceral terms of our present-day social problematic —
the recovery of an empowered selfhood, an authentic public sphere, and
an active, participatory concept of citizenship. Anarchism has raised
the vision of the confederation of municipalities for generations,
partly in the writings of Proudhon and most notably in the writings of
Kropotkin. Tragically, Anarchist theorists of the past have been too
acutely sensitive to the political trappings of contemporary
municipalities to give full attention to the social anatomy of the
municipality that lies beneath its state-like veneer.
Historically, the municipality itself has been a battleground between
society and the state; indeed, it historically antedates the state and
has been in perpetual conflict with it. It has been a battleground
because the state, until comparatively recently, has never fully claimed
the municipality owing to its rich social life — the family, guilds, the
Ecclesia, neighborhoods, local societies, the sections, and town
meetings. These richly nucleated structures, despite their own internal
divisions, have been strikingly impervious to political
institutionalization. Ironically, the tension between society and state
on the municipal level never became the serious issue it is today
because the internal forces of the town and neighborhood still possessed
the material, cultural, and spiritual means to resist the invasive
tendencies of political forces. Municipal life — richly textured by
family networks, local loyalties, professional organizations’ popular
societies, and even cafes — provided a human refuge from the
homogenizing, bureaucratic forces of the state apparatus. Today, the
state, particularly in the form of the market economy, threatens to
destroy this refuge, and municipalism has become the most significant
terrain for the struggle against the state on nonpolitical grounds. The
very concept of citizenship, not merely of civic autonomy, is at stake
in this conflict.
It is crucial at this time for any Anarchist movement that seeks to be
socially relevant to the unique nature of the American Crisis to
recognize the meaning and significance of the civic terrain — to
explore, develop, and help reconstitute its social bedrock. Urban
politics is not foredoomed to become state politics. For an Anarchist to
become a Minister of Health or a Minister of Justice in a republican
government is unpardonable. But for an Anarchist to help organize a
neighborhood assembly, to advance its conscious ness along libertarian
lines, to raise demands for the recall and rotation of deputies chosen
by the assembly, to draw clear distinctions between policy formulation
and administrative coordination, challenge civic bureaucratism in every
form, to educate the community in collectivism and mutual aid, finally,
to foster confederal relations between assemblies within a municipality
and between municipalities in open defiance of the national state — this
program constitutes an Anarchist “politics” that, by its very logic,
yields the negation of politics. For Anarchists to stand for election —
yes, let us use the word openly — with a view toward rewriting the civic
charters of American cities and towns along the lines of this program —
is no different in principle than -for Anarchists to stand for election
in workshops and labor organizations with a view toward creating
anarcho-syndicalist unions. The difference in views is not over whether
Anarchists are standing for “election” or whether they are engaged in
politics. The real difference is whether the terrain of their
“electioneering”, and their “politics” is in a state sphere or a social
sphere. The traditional syndicalist argument that it is perfectly valid
for libertarians to stand for elections in workshops and unions is built
on the very dubious presupposition that these sphere stand outside the
state apparatus and remain within a revolutionary arena. They assume in
the face of increasingly questionable realities that workshop and union,
as class organizations, are neither state nor bourgeois institutions. To
close discourse on these issues by viewing civic activities as a
capitulation to bourgeois politics is to ignore very compelling
realities about the civic sphere itself — or to use more traditional
anarchistic terms, the communitarian sphere itself. As a result,
externalities such as “elections,” “deputies,” and “coordination” are
removed from the context in which they acquire meaning and content. They
become free-floating autonomous terms that determine policy without the
flesh of reality and insight.
This much is clear: the factories in the United States are virtually
quiescent while the cities, particularly the ghettoes and neighborhoods
are not. Today, American workers can be reached more readily and
receptively as neighbors and citizens than as wage earners in factories
— a situation that brings many issues regard ing the American working
class into serious question. Were Anarchist groups in the United States
— resting on their 19^(th) century traditions, their lightly held
anti-statism, and their economism — to ignore the historic conflict
between social localities called towns, neighborhoods, and cities on the
one side and the state on the other, they will have earned their black
flags — not as banners of protest, but as shrouds. The demarcation
between anarchism and statism must always be clear but so, too, must the
demarcation between society and the state or else we will never know the
terrain on which the battle is to be fought. In the historic crisis that
confronts us, which public life itself threatens to fade away, the
recreation of the public sphere — humanly scaled, directly democratic,
and composed of active citizens — is perhaps the most pressing
responsibility of our time. For without that public sphere, a sphere
that must have civic tangibility and substance if it is to exist as more
than a metaphor — the very conditions and substance for protest will
have disappeared.