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Title: Were We Wrong? Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 1985 Language: en Topics: capitalism, class struggle, critique Source: Retrieved on 26th October 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/were-we-wrong-murray-bookchin Notes: Published in Telos, Vol. 65, Fall, 1985, pp. 59–74.
Is it possible that the Left has been wrong about capitalist development
and revolutionary change? Is it possible that 20^(th)-century capitalism
is not “moribund;” that the Russian Revolution did not usher in an “era
of wars and revolutions,” as predicted by Lenin; that capitalism does
not unfold according to an “immanent” dialectic in which lie the “seeds”
of its own destruction? Could it be that we are in a ceaseless
“ascending phase” of capitalism?
We grasp at straws — Hungary in 1956, Paris in 1968, Czechoslovakia in
1969, Poland in the early 1980s — for evidence of a revolutionary
proletariat without seeing the tragic marginality of these events. We
turn to China, Cuba, Southeast Asia, Portugal, and Nicaragua for
evidence of a “revolutionary era” or to the Korean and Vietnamese
conflicts for evidence of a “war-ridden era” without seeing their
nationalist limitations. We try to acknowledge how ambiguous they are in
relation to the larger fact of a greatly expanded capitalism, the extent
to which the marketplace has deepened its reach into the most intimate
aspects of social life, the striking stability of the system as a whole,
its chilling technological sophistication that has made meaningless all
images of insurrectionary revolutions in the major centers of
capitalism.
Nor can we continue to use “betrayals” to explain the failures of the
past lour generations. Such a consistent pattern of treachery suggests
an internal weakness in the traditional socialist “perspective” of
capitalism and revolution that raises more questions than it answers.
The socialist project is fragile indeed if betrayal can occur so easily
and if “success” yields bureaucratic traits so constrictive and
reactionary that history is the better for its failures. The Russian
Revolution was a catastrophe whose shadow has cast the entire century
into darkness, and lives in our dreams more as a nightmare than a vision
of hope.
The answers are not to be found in quietism and defeat. It is not
defeatist to acknowledge that our expectations were unwarranted and the
analyses that nourished them were equally faulty. Nor is accommodation
possible if capitalism remains irrational to the core; that it has
always been so (Marx’s arguments about its “progressive role” to the
contrary notwithstanding); and that it has always stood at odds with an
abiding potential for freedom and ecological balance. But before that
potential can be seen and a relevant practice developed from efforts to
realize it, we must clear away the ideological fog that obscures our
thinking. This fog arises from a conjuncture of forces that has been
seriously misjudged by radicals for more than a century and from a
misreading of phenomena that span the last four centuries.
Whether one chooses to call capitalism “progressive” and “permanently
revolutionary,” to use Marx’s words, or a “historically necessary evil,”
to use Bakunin’s in regard to the state, the fact remains that WWI
opened an entirely new era in radical social theory. The terrible
blood-letting of the war posed serious challenges to the exuberant
belief in progress that the previous century associated with the new
social order. At the same time the revolutionary upheavals of the
1917–23 period awakened new hopes about the imminent likelihood of a
rational society — of socialism and human emancipation. The universalism
and humanism of the socialist project as it was formulated at that time
has no equal in our own. Clearly, it was agreed, capitalism had ceased
to be “progressive” or “historically necessary” irrespective of whether
it was “evil” or not. If it had an “ascending phase” characterized by
dramatic advances in technology and the demystification of all
traditional human bonds, and between humanity and nature, it had
definitely not entered in a “descending phase” that guaranteed its
self-extinction.
The socialist project was very specific about the shift in the cycle of
capitalist development. In its “ascending phase,” capitalism had
presumably established the technical preconditions for socialism. It
seemed to foster internationalism by secularizing all hum an bonds and
experiences, making giant strides in cultural and political development,
expanding hum an productivity and needs, rationalizing experience as
well as production — and, above all, creating a special class, the
proletariat, whose interests and afflictions inexorably drove it toward
the abolition of the wage system, capitalism, and class society as such.
Even if it was reasonable to suppose that without class consciousness
the proletariat could no more become a “hegemonic class” than the most
quietistic peasantry, socialist theorists emphasized that “objective
events” — and in Lenin’s view, a party of conscious revolutionaries —
would provide the self-reflexivity that could have made a successful
proletarian revolution possible.
The outbreak of WWII provided conclusive evidence of the failure of this
entrenched analysis. For nearly ten years prior to the war, world
capitalism had reached an unprecedented period of stagnation and
decline. The economy was frozen in crises that appeared to be chronic
and intractable. Living standards, employment, hopes for recovery, and a
belief in the legitimacy the social order had ebbed to an all-time low
by comparison with the pre-WWI era. Following the 1929 financial
collapse, the proletariat emerged almost explosively as a social force.
Although largely defensive, workers’ insurrections led by socialists
flared up in Austria and Spain (1934); general strikes swept France,
marked by the raising of red flags over factories (1935); plant
occupations and combative struggles with police in the U.S. created an
illusion of a near-insurrectionary crisis, buttressed by agrarian unrest
in which armed farmers closed down auctions and obstructed the movement
of produce during farmers’ strikes with road barricades. Despite
revealing failures, this movement could claim definite if illusory
successes: the election of the Popular Front in France and Spain; the
recognition of industrial unions in the U.S.; and, finally, the
short-lived achievements of the Spanish Revolution in 1936–37 which set
an unprecedented example of workers’ and peasants’ self-management.
Rarely had an insurgent mass movement achieved such ongoing persistence
and militancy. Indeed, fascism seemed not only like an expression of a
general crisis in the capitalist social order that called for a vigorous
imposition of totalitarian controls but also like a defensive reaction
by a traditional bourgeoisie to a growing and increasingly menacing
labor movement whose militancy appeared to verge on outright social
revolution.
Capitalism in the 1930s also appeared to be a “historical materialist”
textbook example of a social order that had outlived its legitimacy. Not
only was the decade stagnant economically and ravaged by class conflict;
it was technologically stagnant as well. Judging from the literature of
the times, a convincing case could be made for Marx’s notion that “the
material forces of production” had “come into conflict with the existing
relations of production.” Technology was bound by sharp corporate and
monopolistic constraints that foreclosed innovation. Capitalism, it
seemed, could no longer perform its “historically assigned” function of
advancing the “material preconditions” for freedom; indeed, ii seemed to
block their development. A socialist revolution was needed, presumably,
to bring society back into history, that is, to restore the momentum of
technological advances which the bourgeois social order could no longer
sustain.
Finally the outbreak of WWII was seen as the culmination of the “chronic
crisis of capitalism ” — its climax and literally the battleground for a
resolution of the so-called “social question.” The mass defection of
leftist liberals to the Allied military cause did not induce despair
among the already contracting radical movements of the 1940s. WWII, it
was argued by traditional Marxists, was merely a continuation of WWI —
an imperialist adventure that would reopen all the wounds that caused
its predecessor to end in social revolution. Indeed, this second war was
now visualized as a more short-lived conflict. The proletarian masses of
the 1940s, presumably more educated by their experiences during the
interwar period of capitalist decay, social conflict, revolutions, the
usual diet of “betrayals” and “treachery” served up by social democracy
and Stalinism, and an expanded sense of class solidarity and
internationalism, would act to change society with greater determination
than the previous generation. Given a reasonable amount of time, the
contending imperialist blocs in the world conflict would reveal their
“bankruptcy” and a subterranean labor movement, even in fascist Germany
(to some, especially in fascist Germany) would pick up the dangling
threads of 1917–18 and soon terminate the war in social revolution.
It is difficult to convey how tenaciously this scenario was held by the
interwar generation of radicals. Nearly all of the radical theorizing of
a century fed into these visions of social change and the detailed
sequence of forecasts that the revolutionary socialist movement
projected for the future in 1940 and well into the war itself. By the
same token, any doubts about this analysis and its outcome yielded
reactions that were equally far-reaching. Trotsky, more than any of the
Bolsheviks, retained the classical perspective of the era, indeed, of
the traditional labor movement itself. Shortly before his death he
claimed that the war advanced very compelling challenges to the radical
tradition. After expressing the usual ritualistic confidence in the
above scenario and the certainties of its outcome, he turned to the
implications of an alternative outcome. If capitalism emerged from the
war intact, he warned, the revolutionary movement would have to
re-examine its most fundamental premises. His murder in 1940 foreclosed
the possibility of such a re-evaluation by his followers. But his words
doggedly haunt the entire revolutionary project as it developed from the
days of the earliest workers’ insurrections. Trotsky’s chilling
confrontation with the project’s failure enabled him to see WWII as a
test of a traditional Marxist and Leninist view of the entire history of
capitalist development.
WWII did not end early. It lasted for nearly six years. It did not
terminate in revolutions. The German workers fought to the very doors of
Hitler’s bunker in Berlin without even a significant mutiny. Far from
exhibiting any significant evidence of class solidarity and
internationalism, the war was fought out on largely nationalist term s
and for ideals redolent of 18^(th)-century “patriotism,” often
descending to a savage irredentism and even racism, without the
rationalist and utopian canons of the Enlightenment.
What is even more remarkable: capitalism emerged from WWII in a stronger
position than in past generations. Although the war devoured between 40
and 60 million lives, the social order that claimed this unprecedented
toll was never seriously questioned. With the exception of Russia and
Spain, countries whose “proletariat” largely consisted of peasants in
overalls, socialism and anarchism had failed to orient the European
proletariat toward social revolution. In the 50 years that followed the
last of the workers’ upsurges, there is no evidence that the long
experience of proletarian socialism has fostered any advance in human
freedom . Indeed, in the name of socialism, totalitarian states today
rule an immense portion of the world with a ruthlessness that is as
dismal as that of their antecedents.
Technological innovation, in turn, acquired a momentum that has
shattered every constraint — moral as well as economic — that society
could raise against its elevation to pre-eminence in the human mind. To
point to a ripening of the material conditions for socialism, communism,
or anarchism as a justification for this breakthrough verges on black
humor. A strong case can be made today for Adorno’s Luddism in Minima
Moralia — indeed, perhaps a stronger one that what he proposed. Never
before has technological innovation emerged so much as a force in its
own right to arrest any trend toward the realization of the “true
society.” The sophistication of today’s weaponry reduces insurrectionary
modes of social change to romanticism while hopes for the hegemony of
the proletariat are little more than mere nostalgia. But what today
haunts proletarian socialism even more than the end of the barricade as
anything other than a symbol is the numerical decline of the industrial
proletariat itself — the change in the very personality of what was once
called wage labor. This proletariat now faces near-extinction by
cybernation, a reality that is perhaps more persuasive testimony to the
archaic character of classical socialism and anarchosyndicalism than the
myth that this class will play a central role in social change. Long
gone are the days when technology could be seen as a force promoting
socialism. Technological innovation has taken on a life of its own and
can be adduced not only as a means of economic and political regulation
but as a causal factor in ecological breakdown. It is forming a history
that can be written in large part autonomously: as the story of an
avalanche of devices that make the citizen powerless, smother individual
expression, and submerge personal creativity. Capitalism has clearly
stabilized itself, assuming that it was ever unstable. And it has done
so by establishing itself as a social given that is now as unquestioned
as feudalism was in the 12^(th) century. That is to say, capitalism now
enjoys a psychological validity that renders its functions as free from
challenges, indeed, consciousness, as the operations of the autonomic
nervous system. The failure of the classical analysis is just as
complete and just as disturbing, for it too has had a significant role
in legitimating capitalism by its own interpretation of capitalism’s
origins and evolution.
The contribution of the classical analysis to the legitimation of
capitalism is most evident in the way socialism has assumed the
institutional forms of recent capitalism. A disquieting similarity
exists between the centralization of the state under capitalism and
classical socialist goals. This goes back to Marx’s Capital itself,
which notwithstanding its brilliant analysis of the commodity, projects
capitalist development into a phase that is so akin to its author’s
conception of socialism that the work ceases to be authentically
critical in the sense of providing a point of departure for social
liberation. To the contrary: the work enters into unknowing complicity
with the development of capitalism toward its still unknown
“maturation.” It is not Marx’s analysis that lakes the commodity in hand
but rather the commodity that takes possession of Marx’s analysis and
subtlety carries it into implied realms that he could never have
anticipated or regarded as desirable.
But the real failure of “historical materialism” is a much deeper one.
Marx’s “class analysis,” a still active dimension of his theoretical
corpus, raises problems that have not been adequately dealt with by most
of his acolytes. His “class analysis” is structured around the
fundamental notion that the “ domination of nature” cannot be achieved
without the “domination of man by man,” an implied view of nature whose
practical implications have profoundly shaped the classical tradition.
Classes in Marx’s larger social views were indispensable for separating
humanity from “savagery,” for bringing it into history and forming the
material preconditions for liberation — liberation not only from the
domination of man by man but from the domination of nature that made
human domination “historically necessary.” Within this convoluted
dialectic, classical socialism remained blind to ecological and gender
problems, both of which are linked not only to the emergence of classes
and exploitation, but are rooted even more fundamentally in the
emergence of hierarchy and domination. Accordingly, attempts to
formulate a socialist ecology and feminism to keep pace with the social
movements of our day tend to be mere contrivances. Although sectarian
socialists criticize these movements for lacking a class analysis, we
are still flooded with gleanings from Marx on ecology and women that
verge on caricature. Marx’s class analysis reflects a very Victorian,
indeed, bourgeois, marketplace notion of nature as a realm of
domination, blindness, rivalry, and scarce resources that once defined
every major discipline of the time from economics to psychology. The
more contemporary ecological image of nature, particularly of
ecosystems, as nonhierarchical, self-formative, mutualistic, and fecund
has eluded the Marxian outlook with the result that American socialists
today are more comfortable with the journalism of Andre Gorz, for whom
“ecological” problems arise from the “decline in the rate of profit”
than they are with more incisive works of ecophilosophy that preceded
his Ecology as Politics.
This problem goes far beyond that of the weight that 19^(th)-century
notions impose on the classical socialist analysis. Nor can it be seen
only as the result of a patchwork refurbishing of Marxism with concepts
that are alien to its core ideas. Rather, what is most relevant here is
the mischief Marx’s “class analysis” has wrought in formulating a fresh
interpretation of the capitalist development and the politics needed to
deal with it. We are obliged to ask whether radical theory is well
served by an image of social development based primarily on conflicting
economic interests premised on the ownership or control of property. As
an alternative to this, we might consider the possibility that
capitalism itself represents an exception to a more widespread social
development based on status and the ways in which the socialization
process and society as a whole define the individual’s position in the
human community and maintain the individual’s place in it.
Has capitalism, in fact, really revealed the material self-interest that
has presumably guided society under the mask of ideology for thousands
of years, as Marx claims, or has it rather created that interest in a
basically different social dispensation that replaced status
arrangements with classes? As Karl Polanyi observes, man “does not act
so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material
goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social
claims, his social assets.” Thus, the core for social analysis is the
paramount social tie for which economic relations are merely a highly
variable means rather than the “basis” for social interaction. To go
beyond Polanyi’s observation, we can see that his social tie may follow
a libertarian pathway or an authoritarian one. Indeed, once early
egalitarian societies began to break down, the libertarian pathway,
interlaced with the authoritarian one, rises from subterranean depths in
periods of social upheaval and then submerges in eras of social
stability.
The notion that precapitalist society was primarily a society of orders,
not simply of classes, is hardly new, but its implications as well as
its premises have yet to be fully explored. One’s community and the
place one occupies in it is one of the most human attributes we possess.
It is also the way in which we situate ourselves throughout our lives,
the way in which familial care is projected beyond the family into the
larger context of hum an relations. Thus, nearly all precapitalist
societies projected family and kinship relations onto social life.
Despite the growth of a purely juridical concept of citizenship and a
rationalist concept of politics, lineage retained enormous importance in
secular communities. Monarchies dealt with the territories under their
control more as patrimonies than as nations or cultures, and it was by
these biosocial norms that people “ordered” their economic lives into
social orders, not according to economic elements which would have
structured them as classes.
We must keep this distinction between a society of orders and a society
of classes clearly in mind, inasmuch as it has important political and
practical implications. A class analysis based exclusively on economic
interests misleads history and misdirects practice. Social distortions
and regressions can no longer be explained primarily by property
relations, nor can they be rectified by socio-economic measures alone,
such as nationalization, collectivization, or “workplace democracy.” For
what explodes all these proffered solutions to the tainted nature of
modern society is the swollen legacy of command and obedience relations
— in a word, hierarchy as the more basic substrate of all class
relations.
To develop more fully the contrast between status societies and class
societies, it is necessary to reject altogether the idea that capitalism
as a society of classes could have emerged organically within the “womb”
of feudalism, a society of orders. Capitalism’s uniqueness must be seen
in the light that traditional society as a whole — oriented around
family and status — sheds upon it. No precapitalist world was equipped
to deal with the formidable social and cultural irresponsibility that an
uncontrolled market economy would foster. One does not have to accept
the canons of laissez-faire to recognize that a market lacking any
ethical, cultural, and institutional constraints would have horrified
people even in the commercial world of the Renaissance, with its nuanced
standards for commerce. The identification of the market with
capitalism, in fact, results only from a highly specious reworking of
historical fact. Markets existed for ages in many different forms, but
they were carefully integrated into larger, more demanding, and socially
more legitimate communities that structured life around orders, largely
united by kinship and craft ties. These elements of early tribalism and
village societies never disappeared completely from the precapitalist
world. It was precisely capitalism, the uncontrolled market, that became
society, or, more precisely, began to eat away at society as a cancer, a
malignancy that threatened the very existence of the social bond itself.
It is only in the 20^(th) century, especially in post-WWII America that
capitalism emerged from its position as a predominant force in society
to become a substitute for society, corroding all familial and kinship
ties — and reducing the population as a whole to buyers and sellers in a
universal, ever-expanding marketplace.
Capitalism, always a dormant system in the larger context of
precapitalist social orders, essentially burst upon the world in a
period of sweeping social decline. The feudal system of orders which the
absolutist monarchies of Europe seemingly held together had fallen into
complete decay. By the 18^(th) century, Europe existed in what was
little more than a social vacuum within which capitalism could grow and
ultimately flourish, a period in which there was a general erosion of
all mores, not least of which were traditions that inhibited the growth
and authority of the burgher strata itself. Capitalism began to emerge
as a predominant economy feeding on the decomposing corpses of all
traditional status-oriented societies. It pandered to the vices of; a
decadent nobility, to the profligacy of a malignant court, to the
indulgent pretentions of the nouveau riches and it battened on the
misery of abandoned masses — peasants, laborers, guildsmen, and
lumpenproletarians — that feudalism had cast aside to fend for
themselves with the decline of the patronal system and its traditional
nexus of rights and duties. The good “burghers” of the declining feudal
world and the era of absolutism — the so-called “ nascent bourgeoisie” —
were no less status-oriented and later no less royalist than the
“classes” they were supposed to oppose and displace. T here is nothing
to show that these nascent bourgeois were capitalist in any unique sense
other than their desire to accumulate capital with a view toward buying
titles that would make them part of the nobility or acquire land that
would validate their noble status.
Nor is there much evidence that the nascent bourgeois had political
aspirations that “historically” pitted them against the traditional
status structures of the ancien regime. Quite to the contrary: their
hostility was mainly directed against the arrogance of the nobility,
against its exclusively, not against the principle of ennoblement and
oligarchy as such. Nor did the bourgeoisie exhibit any republican, much
less democratic, proclivities. Their detestation of the masses was no
less savage, indeed often more so, than that of the nobility, which
often included enlightened, urban individuals riddled by a sense of
guilt over their wealth and prerogatives. England, not America, was the
political ideal of the French bourgeoisie — a constitutional monarchy
structured around a collaborative aristocracy joined with a socially
mobile commercial and industrial middle class. Republicanism was almost
universally regarded by the Enlightenment as the door to political
license and democracy was simply equated with “anarchy,” a word that
speckled the vocabulary of the revolutionary politicians throughout the
1790s.
Radical historians’ emphasis on Paris during the French Revolution makes
it difficult to bring the revolution into a clear perspective. Paris was
the administrative center of the monarchy and the urban playground of
the French aristocracy, a city that harbored thriving financial
establishments that pandered to the court and family-owned workships
given over to the production of luxury goods. The real centers of French
bourgeois life, particularly the textile industry around which the
industrial revolution was to develop, were cities like Lyons and Amiens,
which, taken together with commercial centers like Bordeaux and major
seaports like Marseilles and Toulon, more accurately reflected the
bourgeois spirit of the revolutionary period than Paris, a magnet for
the more radical elements of the intelligentsia and the shabby quarters
and decaying slums occupied by a huge petit bourgeoisie composed of
professionals, shopkeepers, printers, artisans, and a socially amorphous
mass of day laborers and lumpenproletarians, the well-known sans
culottes.
All of these cities were bitterly anti-Jacobin and often militantly
royalist. The suppression of the Lyons sans-culottes in May, 1793, was
the work, in Lefebvre’s words, of “the bourgeoisie who had remained
monarchist” as well as partisans of the old order from other strata of
the population. “Amiens never become solidly republican, ” notes Lynn
Hart in her book on the political culture of the revolution. In fact, as
late as 1799, five years after the counterrevolutionary Thermidorians
had dispatched Robespierre and the Jacobins, the city was torn by
anti-conscription riots that resounded with such denunciations as “Down
with the Jacobins! Long live the King! Long live Louis XVIII!” Even the
stolid bourgeois Thermidoreans found Amiens an embarrassment. The
Girondist seaports and commercial towns of Marseilles and Toulon
repressed the Jacobins (by no means the most radical faction in the
revolution) with the same vigor that Paris repressed the Girondists.
Indeed, Toulon had become so royalist by 1793 that that city delivered
itself over to the English rather than submit to the authority of
revolutionary Paris.
The image of the French or, for that matter, of the English or American
revolutions as “bourgeois” is a simplistic projection of present-day
ideological biases onto the past.[1] It is not helpful simply to note
that the bourgeoisie benefited in the long run from these revolutions.
This tells us very little about the forces, motives, and ideals of the
revolutionary era — an era opened by English Puritans in the 1640s and
brought to a close by Spanish anarchosyndicalists in the 1930s. English
yeomen, American farmers, and, most notably, French peasants were the
immediate beneficiaries of these revolutions no less than the early
bourgeoisie. Doubtless, the bourgeoisie ultimately became the greatest
beneficiary of the revolutions, but complete supremacy came to it very
unevenly over the course of time and in a very mixed form. The
Jeffersonian “Revolution of 1800” was largely a political victory of
U.S. agrarian strata: the American bourgeoisie’s interests were more
directly tied to Hamilton’s self-styled “Federalist Party” than
Jefferson’s Republican Party, and political power in America as in
England — was held by the gentry, occasionally in direct conflict with
the financiers, merchants, and industrialists who were not to gain
complete control of the republic until the Reconstruction Era. To say,
as Hunt does, that the French Revolution placed the bourgeoisie in the
political saddle because the revolutionary officials... were either
merchants with capital, professionals with skills, artisans with their
own shops, or, more rarely, peasants with land” is to make a grab-bag of
the word “ bourgeois” — indeed, to use the word more in a feudal sense
as burghers than a modern sense, as capitalists. This kind of
“bourgeoisie” was in no sense a stable class but a pot pourri of highly
disparate strata that was unified more by what it was not — namely,
nobles and priests than what it seemed to be. It was simply the Third
Estate. To add, as Hunt does, that it was “anti-feudal, anti-aristocrat,
and anti-absolutists” is to raise the question of what constitutes an
authentic bourgeoisie. Presumably, not the industrialists of Amiens and
the merchants of Toulon — if Hunt is correct. Least of all the Parisian
Thermidorians who so willingly turned the French state over to Napoleon
who, in Lefebvre’s own words, became reconciled with the church,
pardoned the emigres, and took into his service all of those —
aristocrats and bourgeoisie, royalists and republicans — who were
willing to support him.”
The fact is that radical theoreticians decided to designate the
revolutions of the Enlightenment as bourgeois and to deal with
monarchial absolutism as preparatory for the emergence of a
predetermined capitalism. Perry Anderson was to treat absolutism as a
basically feudal phenomenon to support a very ill-founded theory of the
stages of history. This is teleology with a vengeance a teleology that
denies any spontaneity to history by nailing it to the hard and
splintered cross of necessity. That history can have meaning and
direction is vulgarized into a concept of historical natural law,
operating in hum an affairs with the grim causality that is imputed to
its operation in socially conditioned images of nature. Capitalism, in
effect, ceases to be a result of a social process and turns into its
very substance. The fact that capitalism is the most asocial and
malignant system to emerge in human experience is in great part the
result of decay in history rather than a product of the elaboration of
world history. It is a “social order” that flourishes cancerously on the
corpses of traditional societies. Today, the interaction between the
traditional centers of capitalism and the noncapitalist world differs
significantly from earlier periods, when the contact between the two was
more equitable. Like a metastatic cell, the commodity has done its work
and the doors of traditional societies have been flung wide open to
unrestricted exploitation.
This lengthy discussion of the so-called bourgeois revolutions,
capitalist development, and the distinction between status and class
societies has been guided not by any abstract concern for the historical
record but by explicitly political reasons. Regarding the English,
American, and French revolutions as “bourgeois” has been very harmful
politically, resulting in a highly economistic exploration of the
revolutionary era. George Rude, to take a case in point, has so closely
correlated fluctuations of the price of bread with crowd behavior in the
French Revolution that the sans culottes emerge more as stomachs than as
vital, politically concerned hum an beings. Charles Beard’s
well-intentioned treatment of the American Revolution is so biased by a
preoccupation with class interest that his insightful correction of
purely ideological historical accounts suffers heavily from a crude
economic determinism . Such swings of the pendulum may be necessary to
correct exaggerations of both accounts — a starry-eyed idealism at one
extreme and crude self-interest at the other — but they have gone too
far. That men like the English Leveller, John Lilburne, or the American
yeoman radical, Dan Shays, were concerned with larger social issues than
the cost of bread or farm foreclosures tends to be lost in a welter of
statistical data aimed at proving the predominance of material interests
over ideological and cultural ones. David P. Szatmar’s Shays’ Rebellion
points out that Shays and the yeomen who followed him into insurrection
in 1787 rose against the newly founded U.S. to preserve a complex way of
life, not merely to cow the Boston merchants who threatened to
dispossess them of their lands.
The sinister side of radical historiography has been explored
repeatedly. If history uses humanity to fulfill ends of its own, then
suffering, cruelty, and despotism can be justified in the name of
progress and ultimately freedom. Ideology, ethics, culture, politics —
and, of course, leaders — are moved to act beyond their own
understanding of events by Hegel’s “cunning of reason. Lenin, by
superadding the party and its political consciousness to the objective
movement of history — a history that has a foresight, lawfulness, and
goal of its own — did not deny this Hegelian concept of Spirit in
history. He merely bureaucratized Spirit with an apparatus of
self-anointed professional revolutionaries who consciously executed the
designs of history in the ultimate interests of the unknowing masses.
The result of this authoritarian logic was the usurpation of the Russian
Revolution by a party that professed to represent the objective
interests of the proletariat often in the very course of suppressing the
proletariat itself.
We have paid for this “materialism ” by suffocating every ethical and
humanist dimension in history. We have tallied up the statistics for
economic growth and productivity in “ socialist societies” in
juxtaposition with the statistics for mass murder and the formation of
entire populations of slave laborers to render our ultimate verdict on
the “success” or “failure” of these seemingly “socialist” institutions.
Freedom plays no role whatever in this tally. More than any modern
ideology other than fascism, socialism has traded off liberty for
“distributive justice” — an exchange that has poisoned its very image of
everything hum an, turning society itself into a mere machine for the
conquest of nature. What is most disconcerting today is the
interpretation and the politics stemming from this disastrous vision of
history. If the English, American, and French revolutions are not
bourgeois revolutions, what are they? If the classical revolutionary era
has come to an end, what kind of politics follows from this? Finally, if
the proletariat is not a revolutionary class, w hat is the “historical
subject” that will transform a hierarchical, and exploitative society
into one that is egalitarian, classless, and free?
Capitalism is a system that is permanently counter-revolutionary —
Marx’s views to the contrary notwithstanding. Now here did it rescue or
advance the hum an spirit of cooperation that existed in the most
despotic societies and the most parochial communities of the past; at no
time did its sense of charity extend beyond a utilitarian manipulation
of the masses. Few of its material benefits, technical advances, or
wealth were used to better the hum an condition. Capitalism was a blight
on society from the moment it began to rise. Almost every attempt to
arrest the development of capitalism early on was more progressive than
the progressive role imputed to the bourgeois mode of production. The
Luddites were essentially right. They were not reactionary when they
tried to halt the rapacious advance of the Industrial Revolution. So too
were the Critical-Utopian socialists and communists, the Proudhonians
and Fourierists on whom Marx and Engels heaped their scorn in the
Communist Manifesto. Even the English gentry who wrote the Speenham land
Law of 1795 were right, however self-serving their motives, when they
tried to prevent the peasantry from being delivered wholesale over to
the wage system. And the Russian populists were right when they tried to
rescue the village, particularly its mutualistic features, from the
travail of capitalist industrialism.
The list is almost endless. In large part, it consists of the hidden
libertarian tendency in history that tried to provide an alternative to
Speenham land as well as the wage system, to backbreaking manual labor
as well as soul-corroding factory work, to parochialism as well as the
world market system. To think that present-day urban misery is the only
alternative to rural poverty is to fall into a trap that so paralyzes
creative thought and practice that radical theory can no longer
distinguish what is from what could be. Movements did exist that opposed
status societies as well as class societies, feudalism as well as
capitalism, technological stagnation as well as mindless technological
innovation. In the 20^(th) century, one thinks of Russia and Spain, the
populists and the anarchists, as striking examples of highly moral
social movements that tried to bypass capitalist development without
acceding to the oppressive features of autocratic and quasi-feudal
societies. The “third way” these movements offered was simply suppressed
— not only by the state (Stalinist and fascist) but by radical
historians themselves, whose history of the Left was often highly
selective and biased toward the conventional socialism of our time.
In any case, this much is clear: We must acknowledge the permanent,
retrogressive nature of capitalism from its very inception. We must see
it as a saprophytic system that is by definition asocial, and recognize
it as a mechanism that will die on its own only like a cancer that
destroys its host. We have to understand that the economic
interpretation of history and society is the extension of the bourgeois
spirit into the totality of the hum an condition. Capitalism will not
decay. It will either destroy society as we have known it, and possibly
much of the biosphere along with it, or it will be corroded, weakened,
and hollowed out by libertarian traditions. It would be difficult to
explain why the “ Fourth World” has offered such massive resistance to
the “ blessings” of industrialism unless we invoke the power of strong
traditions, entrenched lifeways, deeply held values, beliefs and custom
s. It would be difficult to explain why the Barcelona
proletarian-peasants burned money and disdained every lure of opulence
after the city fell into their hands without invoking the moral power of
their libertarian beliefs — a sensibility that was to often stand in
sharp contrast to the pragmatic mentality of their leaders.
The only revolutionary era on which we can premise any future for
radical change is the one that lies behind us. No cycle of socialist or
anarchist revolution will follow the so-called “bourgeois” cycle
initiated some three centuries ago. The arsenal of our time has
developed so far beyond the classical insurrectionary models on which
traditional radical theory has been fixated as to make unthinkable the
recurrence of another Spain or Russia. Indeed, no creative discussion of
a radical politics can even begin without acknowledging the change this
simple technical fact has introduced into the “art of insurrection” — to
use Trotsky’s words.
By the same token, the only agent on which we can premise future radical
change emerges from the melding of traditional groups into a public
sphere, a body politic, a community imbued with a sense of cultural and
spiritual continuity and renewal. This community, however, is
constituted only in the ever-present act of an ever-dynamic effort of
public and self-assertion that yields a sharp sense of selfhood.
Collectivity thus melds with individuality to produce rounded hum an
beings in a rounded society. Direct action assumes the form of direct
democracy: the participatory form s of freedom that rest on face-to-face
assemblies, rotation of public functions, and, where possible,
consensus.
Such a community must presume that solidarity outweights status or class
interests, that its way of life can absorb the centrifugal interests
that separate hum an from hum an, that a shared ethics imparts the
consciousness, conscience, and sympathy needed to override a sense of
selfhood that risks degenerating into selfishness and that preoccupation
with private concerns so characteristic o f the contemporary therapeutic
age. No proletariat has ever fit these standards of social and political
propriety as a class phenomenon. Indeed, class is so integrally tied up
with interest that it precludes the ability to voice broadly human
concerns. Hence, no possibility ever existed that the proletariat,
particularly the hereditary one that had a long tradition of class being
behind it, could ever speak for the general interest of society. It is
noteworthy that the individual, who is so readily conglomerated into a
class existence by radical historiography, tends to behave with greater
decency than the mass. The denial of the individual’s role in history
has had the sinister effect of denying the moral integrity of the person
in contrast to the role assigned to masses as forces in history and to
demolish the only arm or people have against the degrading effects of
“civilization” — the personal ethics, simple etiquette, psychological
uniqueness, and human intimacy of care and understanding that can
challenge monstrous excesses with personal, day-to-day resistance and
delegitimation.
This brings us back to what was not bourgeois in the so-called bourgeois
revolutions — the utopian dimension of hum an liberty, equality, and
fraternity that panicked the real bourgeois into Hamilton’s royalist
conspiracies in America and, finally, the dissolution of the republic
into Napoleonic autocracy in France. The American yeomanry and the
Parisian sans culottes did not rise against their rulers because they
were interested in freeing trade or fostering capital accumulation. They
rose to defend their own conception of a distinctly ethical ideal:
freedom from arbitrary authority, an intensely communal world that
fostered intercourse among their people, humaneness in dealing with
individuals irrespective of status and wealth, in fact, a return to the
regulation of commerce (as evidenced by the sans-culottes demands for
price controls and Shays’ belief in the yeomanry’s right to land
irrespective of legal entailments). By all standards of historical
materialism, they were reactionaries who believed in a moral economy and
tried to hang onto traditional rights and duties as they construed them
. To revolt meant literally to restore ancient liberties, communal
lifeways, and responsibilities. Insofar as these revolutions invariably
went beyond the privileged institutions of English constitutionalism,
they were no more bourgeois than the Bolshevik take-over was
proletarian. They were first and foremost republican or democratic
revolutions that were foisted on the bourgeoisie — a class that
vigorously resisted their libertarian features, The bourgeoisie did not
make these revolutions; it was saddled with them two centuries ago.
The tension between the revolutionary tradition to which even the
bourgeoisie must make its obeisances and the corporate reality that
stands at odds with it constitutes the greatest single obstacle to the
unrestrained supremacy of capital. Like the estates generale that
blocked the French monarchy in 1789, the bourgeoisie carries the
heritage of its beginnings on its shoulders like a lead weight. More
importantly, this alien heritage is also the mystique that lends moral
legitimacy to the bourgeoise’s otherwise colorless and prosaic reality.
The aversion of Americans for the state, their mythology of self-
sufficiency, local control, and individualism are at once the disguise
for bourgeois rapacity and the Damocles sword that hangs over the
bourgeoisie. The identification of family with the family-farm, of
individuality with property, of self-reliance with self-employment, of
liberty with local control, and tyranny with the state, conscription,
surveillance, and police intervention into politics — all limit the
capitalist enterprise in America and are as obstructive as they are
self-serving.
Thus, a strong argument can be made for the need to recognize the hidden
libertarian content of the American Dream: the possibility of
democratizing the republic and radicalizing the democracy. Herein lies a
radical agenda, rooted in the tension between corporatism and
republicanism , centralism and democracy, bourgeois society and a
libertarian society, that may create from the failed “perspectives” of
the past a new reading of the future. A new libertarian politics must
emerge from the debris of the classical Left. Politics in its original
sense presupposed a very distinct public sphere — the community, be it a
town, a neighborhood, or a city articulated into neighborhoods — in
which passive residents could be transformed into active citizens by
virtue of their direct access to the levers of power. Hence, politics
cannot be divorced from an operational scale that fosters it: the
community. Lacking this operational scale, it withers away, or worse, it
becomes transformed into parliamentarism and the delegation of all power
to professional politicians. Politics, so conceived, is municipalist or
it does not exist at all.
Municipalism is a politics structured around the assembly of the citizen
body, not its representatives. Collectively and individually, it must
acquire a sense of itself, its social personality, its form. It is a
politics that must not only involve citizens in communal administration;
it must also educate them in public life.
Politics, so conceived, is the communizing core of community, the
process of citizen-formation, the school in which character is developed
as well as the art of citizenship. It is the medium for expanding one’s
competence in the fully human sense of the term and not just in the
sense of skills in the performance of responsibilities.
The recreation of the polis has many aspects. Suffice it to say that an
ecological sensibility is fostered by the interdependence of a parent
and child, of children with each other and with adults, by production
conceived as a symbiotic relation, not a domineering one, with tools
that move with the grain of substance and its varied possibilities, not
by forcing them selves on “raw matter” and ruthlessly torturing it into
mere objects of utility. Finally, an ecological sensibility includes a
politics of creative citizenship that opens a new sphere for education
as well as administration, a politics of self-fulfillment and
solidarity.
Ultimately the democratization of the republic and the radicalization of
democracy is achievable only as a municipalist movement linked together
confederally in opposition to the centralized nation-state. Hence, it
will either move toward a radical form of libertarian municipalism or it
will degenerate into another form of liberal parliamentarism that will
end in the prevailing corporative politics. The contrast between
politics and parliamentarism, between the management of the polis and
statecraft, cannot be drawn too sharply. In this distinction, the role
of consciousness is decisive. Politics consists as much in the
attainment of self-reflexivity of goals and processes as it does in the
social functions it performs and the forms of freedom it
institutionalizes.
To this end, the polis must itself be created out of smaller units —
groups of people for whom the cultivation of consciousness is a calling
in its own right. Education within this grouping is both an effort to
realize the self-reflexivity that enters into an authentically creative
citizenship and the means of mobilizing people for a new praxis.
Self-reflexivity cannot be separated from selfadministration without
reducing the group to a cellular academy at one extreme or an affinity
group at the other. The formation of a collective subject that is not
burdened by authoritarian Bolshevism is thus attained in the crafting of
subjectivity as a participatory enterprise. Ultimately, this new radical
agenda is as meaningful as the force-field and confrontation it creates
between two powers: the centralized corporate state and the
decentralized municipalities.
If the dissolution of the state is not an imminent possibility, the
creation of a counterpower to it in the form of the libertarian
municipalist confederation is a reasonable possibility at some time in
the future. In any case, the problem of discriminating between politics
and statecraft, the nature of one’s participation in liberation
movements, and finally the distinction between the municipality and the
state itself, all pose problems that must be resolved with due regard
for the nature of capitalist development.
Capitalism is not a decaying social order; it is an ever-expanding order
that grows beyond the capacity of any society to contain its ravages and
cope with its predatory activities. If capitalism is not abolished in
one way or another, it will annihilate social life as such or, at least,
do an excellent job of undermining it and the biosphere on which all
life depends. The revolutions that we so facilely designate as
bourgeois, i.e., the revolutions that created enough social instability
to remove traditional constraints to capitalism’s growth, were not
cherished by the bourgeoisie. Rather, they saddled it with a heritage
that now constitutes a major obstacle to its complete and unchecked
dominance.
What appeals to Americans today is not the decorative side of their
dream but its authentically libertarian side. Ideology still counts
enough in the U.S. to bind a highly industrialized and increasingly
centralized society in the straitjacket of a largely agrarian,
individualistic, and still somewhat federal constitution with all the
traditions that support this imagery. Nationalized or even collectivized
property may be as onerous to most Americans as corporatized and
monopolistic property. The municipal control of economic resources, by
contrast, is much easier to accept. The current withdrawal of the
nation-state from involvement with localities, economically as well as
politically, poses the issue of municipal control more poignantly than
at any time in American history, and the public uneasiness that
accompanies the growth of state power is a desideratum in an
increasingly totalitarian world.
[1] Perez Zagorin scornfully deflates Eric Hobsbawm’s depiction of the
English Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution” resulting from a chronic
crisis within feudalism that forms the historical materialist correlate
of the “chronic crisis” within capitalism. What is wrong with Hobsbawn’s
thesis, Zagorin says, “is the absence of evidence that could demonstrate
the actuality of a general crisis in terms described.” The details of
Zagorin’s criticism are too numerous to repeat here. Nor is it possible
here to deal with the liberties Hobsbawn takes in dealing with
precapitalist movements, notably his atrocious treatment of Spanish
anarchosyndicalism in Primitive Rebels. Cf. Perez Zagorin, Rebels and
Rulers, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and my
The Spanish Anarchists (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).