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Title: On Spontaneity and Organisation
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1975?
Language: en
Topics: spontaneity, organization, ecology, social ecology, communism
Source: Original ‘Solidarity’ pamphlet, 49. Bookchin, Murray. On Spontaneity and Organisation. London: Solidarity, 1975.

Murray Bookchin

On Spontaneity and Organisation

Introduction

There can be few words more misused in politics than the word

‘spontaneity.’ It is often used to denote something which seems to

happen without obvious cause, without apparently being the result of

previous preparation. In the sense of ‘an effect without a cause’ there

is probably no such thing as ‘spontaneity’ — either in politics or life.

Human behaviour is always influenced by previous experience. If a person

is not consciously aware of why he is acting in a particular way, this

does not at all mean that there are no causes for what he is doing. It

only means that the causes elude him.

Murray Bookchin does not use the word ‘spontaneity’ in this crude and

unreflecting way. It is important to stress this semantic point in this

short introduction to his essay (first published in ‘Liberation’

magazine early in 1972). In Bookchin’s own words ‘Spontaneity is not

mere impulse’ ... It does not imply ‘undeliberated behaviour and

feeling’. ‘Spontaneity is behaviour, feeling and thought that is free of

external constraint, of imposed restriction’. It is ‘not an uncontrolled

effluvium of passion and action’. ‘Insofar as the individual removes the

fetters of domination that have stifled her or his self-activity, she or

he is acting, feeling and thinking spontaneously’.

Bookchin here uses the word ‘spontaneity’ as we would use the word

‘autonomy’. Literally speaking autonomous means ‘which makes its own

laws’ and therefore, by implication ‘which acts in its own interests’.

With the advocacy of spontaneity, understood in this sense, we have no

significant disagreement with Bookchin. Our own views on this matter are

outlined in greater detail in our Discussion Bulletin ‘Solidarity and

the Neo-Narodniks’ (10p + postage).

Full autonomy has both organisational and ideological implications.

Bookchin deals with both in some depth. He points out that ‘spontaneity

does not preclude organisation and structure’, thereby nailing a very

widespread leninist distortion of the libertarian case.[1] Bookchin

stresses that spontaneity, in the sense in which he uses the term

‘ordinarily yields non-hierarchical forms of organisation’.

We would go perhaps further, and stress that no collective autonomy is

meaningful which does not have organisational repercussions. Autonomous

activity and life — whether in the realm of practice or in the realm of

ideas — is impossible in hierarchically-structured organisation. As

Bookchin points out ‘the tragedy of the socialist movement is that it

opposes organisation to spontaneity and tries to assimilate the social

process to political and organisational instrumentalism’.

The main impact of Bookchin’s essay is however on the need for

ideological autonomy, for breaking all the intellectual fetters of the

past, for sweeping the cobwebs away that still clutter so much of the

thinking of the left. His greatest insight is his statement of the need

to eliminate domination in all its forms, not merely material

exploitation.

He stresses ‘the widespread erosion of authority as such — in the

family, in the schools, in vocational and professional areas, in the

Church, in the Army, indeed in virtually every institution that supports

hierarchical power and every relationship that is marked by domination’.

He takes the whole discussion into areas largely avoided by the left,

and is not scared of challenging many of their most fundamental

assumptions. In this his own writing is a vindication of his belief in a

creative, conscious and coherent spontaneity. ‘Consciousness’, he tells

us, ‘has its own history within the material world, and increasingly

gains sway over the course of material reality. Humanity is capable of

transcending the realm of blind necessity, it is capable of giving

nature and society rational direction and purpose’.

If the mass of the population is to become the creative subject of

history — and not just an inert object compelled to do certain things

because of the conditions of its existence — this kind of message must

be taken seriously and its implications thought out. For all those who,

whatever their age, are not suffering from a hardening of the

categories, Bookchin’s views are an important contribution to an

on-going debate.

‘Solidarity’ (London), December 1975.[2]

On Spontaneity and Organisation

This article elaborated a work I read at the Telos Conference on

Organisation at Buffalo, New York, on 21 November 1971. Space

limitations do not make it possible for me to deal concretely with my

view that we have already developed the technological bases for a

post-scarcity society or describe in greater detail the type of

organisation that I think is appropriate to our time. For a more

comprehensive discussion of these issues, I would refer the reader to my

book Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Books, 1971),

especially the essay ‘Toward a Liberatory Technology’ and the

‘Discussion on “Listen, Marxist”’.

1

It is supremely ironical that the socialist movement, far from being in

the ‘vanguard’ of current social and cultural developments, lingers

behind them in almost every detail. This movement’s shallow

comprehension of the counterculture, its anaemic interpretation of

women’s liberation, its indifference to ecology, and its ignorance even

of new currents that are drifting through the factories (particularly

among young workers) seem all the more grotesque when juxtaposed with

its simplistic ‘class analysis’, its proclivity for hierarchical

organisation, and its ritualistic invocation of ‘strategies’ and

‘tactics’ that were inadequate a generation ago.

Contemporary socialism has shown only the most limited awareness that

people by the millions are slowly redefining the very meaning of

freedom. They are constitutively enlarging their image of human

liberation to dimensions that would have seemed hopelessly visionary in

past eras. In ever-growing numbers they sense that society has developed

a technology that could completely abolish material scarcity and reduce

toil to a near vanishing point. Faced with the possibilities of a

classless post-scarcity society and with the meaninglessness of

hierarchical relations, they are intuitively trying to deal with the

problems of communism, not socialism.[3] They are intuitively trying to

eliminate domination in all its forms, not merely material exploitation.

Hence the widespread erosion of authority as such — in the family, in

the schools, in vocational and professional areas, in the church, in the

army, indeed, in virtually every institution that supports hierarchical

power and every nuclear relationship that is marked by domination.

Hence, too, the intensely personal nature of the rebellion that is

percolating through society, its highly subjective, existential and

cultural qualities. The rebellion affects everyday life even before it

visibly affects the broader aspects of social life and it undermines the

concrete loyalties of the individual to the system before it vitiates

the system’s abstract political and moral verities.

To these deep-seated liberatory currents, so rich in existential

content, the socialist movement continues to oppose the constrictive

formulas of a particularistic ‘working class’ interest, the archaic

notion of a ‘proletarian dictatorship’, and the sinister concept of a

centralised hierarchical party. If the socialist movement is lifeless

today, this is because it has lost all contact with life.

2

We are travelling the full circle of history. We are taking up again the

problems of a new organic society on a new level of history and

technological development — an organic society in which the splits

within society, between society and nature, and within the human psyche

that were created by thousands of years of hierarchical development can

be healed and transcended. Hierarchical society performed the baneful

‘miracle’ of turning human beings into mere instruments of production,

into objects on a par with tools and machines, thereby defining their

very humanity by their usufruct in a universal system of scarcity, of

domination and, under capitalism, of commodity exchange. Even earlier,

before the domination of man by man, hierarchical society brought woman

into universal subjugation to man, opening a realm of domination for its

own sake, of domination in its most reified form. Domination, carried

into the depths of personality, has turned us into the bearers of an

archaic, millennia-long legacy that fashions the language, the gestures,

indeed, the very posture we employ in everyday life. All the past

revolutions have been too ‘olympian’ to affects these intimate and

ostensibly mundane aspects of life, hence the ideological nature of

their professed goals of freedom and the narrowness of their liberatory

vision.

By contrast, the goal of the new development towards communism is the

achievement of a society based on self-management in which each

individual participates fully, directly, and in complete equality in the

unmediated management of the collectivity. Viewed from the aspects of

its concrete human side, such a collectivity can be nothing less than

the fulfillment of the liberated self, of the free subject divested of

all its ‘thingifications’, of the self that can concretise the

management of the collectivity as an authentic mode of self-management.

The enormous advance scored by the countercultural movement over the

socialist movement is attested precisely by a personalism that sees in

impersonal goals, even in the proprieties of language, gesture,

behaviour and dress, the perpetuation of domination in its most

insidious unconscious forms. However marred it may be by the general

unfreedom that surrounds it, the countercultural movement has thus

concretely redefined the now innocuous word ‘revolution’ in a truly

revolutionary manner, as a practice that subverts apocryphal

abstractions and theories.

To identify the claims of the emerging self with ‘bourgeois

individualism’ is a grotesque distortion of the most fundamental

existential goals of liberation. Capitalism does not produce

individuals; it produces atomised egoists. To distort the claims of the

emerging self for a society based on self-management and to reduce the

claims of the revolutionary subject to an economistic notion of

‘freedom’ is to seek the ‘crude communism’ that the young Marx so

correctly scorned in the 1844 manuscripts. The claim of the libertarian

communists to a society based on self-management asserts the right of

each individual to acquire control over her or his everyday life, to

make each day as joyous and marvellous as possible. The abrogation of

this claim by the socialist movement in the abstract interests of

‘Society’, of ‘History’, of the ‘Proletariat’, and more typically of the

‘Party’, assimilates and fosters the bourgeois antithesis between the

individual and the collectivity in the interests of bureaucratic

manipulation, the renunciation of desire, and the subservience of the

individual and the collectivity to the interests of the State.

3

There can be no society based on self-management without self-activity.

Indeed, revolution is self-activity in its most advanced form: direct

action carried to the point where the streets, the land, and the

factories are appropriated by the autonomous people. Until this order of

consciousness is attained, consciousness at least on the social level

remains mass consciousness, the object of manipulation by elites. If for

this reason alone, authentic revolutionaries must affirm that the most

advanced form of class consciousness is self-consciousness: the

individuation of the ‘masses’ into conscious beings who can take direct,

unmediated control of society and of their own lives. If only for this

reason, too, authentic revolutionaries must affirm that the only real

‘seizure of power’ by the ‘masses’ is the dissolution of power: the

power of human over human, of town over country, of state over

community, and of mind over sensuousness.

4

It is in the light of these demands for a society based on

self-management, achieved through self-activity and nourished by

self-consciousness, that we must examine the relationship of spontaneity

to organisation. Implicit in every claim that the ‘masses’ require the

‘leadership’ of ‘vanguards’ is the conviction that revolution is more a

problem of ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ than a social process;[4] that the

‘masses’ cannot create their own liberatory institutions but must rely

on a state power — a ‘proletarian dictatorship’ — to organise society

and uproot counterrevolution. Every one of these notions is belied by

history, even by the particularistic revolutions that replaced the rule

of one class by another. Whether one turns to the Great French

Revolution of two centuries ago, to the uprisings of 1848, to the Paris

Commune, to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and March 1917, to the

German Revolution of 1918, to the Spanish Revolution of 1934 and 1936,

or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, one finds a social process,

sometimes highly protracted, that culminated in the overthrow of

established institutions without the guidance of ‘vanguard’ parties

(indeed, where these parties existed they usually lagged behind the

events). One finds that the ‘masses’ formed their own liberatory

institutions, be these the Parisian sections of 1793–1794, the clubs and

militias of 1848 and 1871, or the factory committees, workers’ councils,

popular assemblies, and action committees of later upheavals.

It would be a crude simplification of these events to claim that

counterrevolution reared its head and triumphed where it did merely

because the ‘masses’ were incapable of self-co-ordination and lacked the

‘leadership’ of a well-disciplined centralised party. We come here to

one of the most vexing problems in the revolutionary process, a problem

that has never been adequately understood by the socialist movement.

That co-ordination was either absent or failed — indeed, that effective

counterrevolution was even possible — raises a more fundamental issue

than the mere problem of ‘technical administration’. Where advanced,

essentially premature revolutions failed, this was primarily because the

revolutions had no material basis for consolidating the general interest

of society to which the most radical elements staked out an historic

claim. Be the cry of this general interest ‘Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity’ or ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’, the harsh

fact remains that the technological premises did not exist for the

consolidation of this general interest in the form of a harmonised

society. That the general interest divided again during the

revolutionary process into antagonistic particular interests — that it

led from the euphoria of ‘reconciliation’ (as witness the great national

fetes that followed the fall of the Bastille) to the nightmare of class

war, terror, and counterrevolution — must be explained primarily by the

material limits of social development, not by technical problems of

political co-ordination.

The great bourgeois revolutions succeeded socially even where they

seemed to fail ‘technically’ (i.e. to lose power to the radical

‘day-dreaming terrorists’) because they were fully adequate to their

time. Neither the army nor the institutions of absolutist society could

withstand their blows. In their beginnings, at least, these revolutions

appeared as the expression of the ‘general will’, uniting virtually all

social classes against the aristocracies and monarchies of their day,

and even dividing the aristocracy against itself. By contrast, all

‘proletarian revolutions’ have failed because the technological premises

were inadequate for the material consolidation of a ‘general will’, the

only basis on which the dominated can finally eliminate domination. Thus

the October Revolution failed socially even though it seemed to succeed

‘technically’ — all Leninist, Trotskyist and Stalinist myths to the

contrary notwithstanding — and the same is true for the ‘socialist

revolutions’ of Asia and Latin America. When the ‘proletarian

revolution’ and its time are adequate to each other — and precisely

because they are adequate to each other — the revolution will no longer

be ‘proletarian’, the work of the particularised creatures of bourgeois

society, of its work ethic, its factory discipline, its industrial

hierarchy, and its values. The revolution will be a people’s revolution

in the authentic sense of the word.[5]

5

It is not for want of organisation that the past revolutions of radical

elements ultimately failed but rather because all prior societies were

organised systems of want. In our own time, in the era of the final,

generalised revolution, the general interest of society can be tangibly

and immediately consolidated by a post-scarcity technology into material

abundance for all, even by the disappearance of toil as an underlying

feature of the human condition. With the lever of an unprecedented

material abundance, the revolution can remove the most fundamental

premises of counterrevolution — the scarcity that nourishes privilege

and the rationale for domination. No longer need any sector of society

‘tremble’ at the prospect of a communist revolution, and this should be

made evident to all who are in the least prepared to listen.[6]

In time, the framework opened by these qualitatively new possibilities

will lead to a remarkable simplification of the historic ‘social

question’. As Joseph Weber observed in The Great Utopia, this revolution

— the most universal and totalistic to occur — will appear as the ‘next

practical step’, as the immediate praxis involved in social

reconstruction. And, in fact, step by step the counterculture has been

taking up, not only subjectively but also in their most concrete and

practical forms, an immense host of issues that bear directly on the

utopian future of humanity, issues that just a generation ago could be

posed (if they were posed at all) only as the most esoteric problems of

theory. To review these issues and to reflect upon the dizzying rapidity

with which they emerged in less than a decade is simply staggering,

indeed unprecedented in history. Only the principal ones need be cited:

the autonomy of the self and the right to self-realisation; the

evolution of love, sensuality, and the unfettered expression of the

body; the spontaneous expression of feeling; the de-alienation of

relations between people; the formation of communities and communes; the

free access of all to the means of life; the rejection of the plastic

commodity world and its careers; the practice of mutual aid; the

acquisition of skills and countertechnologies; a new reverence for life

and for the balance of nature; the replacement of the work ethic by

meaningful work and the claims of pleasure; indeed, a practical

redefinition of freedom that a Fourier, a Marx, or a Bakunin rarely

approximated in the realm of thought.

The point to be stressed is that we are witnessing a new Enlightenment

(more sweeping even than the half-century of enlightenment that preceded

the Great French Revolution) that is slowly challenging not only the

authority of established institutions and values but authority as such.

Percolating downward from the intelligentsia, the middle classes, and

youth generally to all strata of society, this enlightenment is slowly

undermining the patriarchal family, the school as an organised system of

repressive socialisation, the institutions of state, and the factory

hierarchy. It is eroding the work ethic, the sanctity of property, and

the fabric of guilt and renunciation that internally denies to each

individual the right to the full realisation of her or his

potentialities and pleasures. Indeed, no longer is it merely capitalism

that stands in the dock of history, but the cumulative legacy of

domination that has policed the individual from within for thousands of

years, the ‘archetypes’ of domination, as it were, that compromise the

State with our unconscious lives.

The enormous difficulty that arises in understanding this Enlightenment

is its invisibility to conventional analyses. The new Enlightenment is

not simply changing consciousness, a change that is often quite

superficial in the absence of other changes. The usual changes of

consciousness that marked earlier periods of radicalisation could be

carried quite lightly, as mere theories, opinions, or a cerebral

punditry that was often comfortably discharged outside the flow of

everyday life. The significance of the new Enlightenment, however, is

that it is altering the unconscious apparatus of the individual even

before it can be articulated consciously as a social theory or a

commitment to political convictions.

Viewed from the standpoint of a typically socialist analysis — an

analysis that focuses almost exclusively on ‘consciousness’ and is

almost completely lacking in psychological insights — the new

Enlightenment seems to yield only the most meagre ‘political’ results.

Evidently, the counterculture has produced no ‘mass’ radical party and

no visible ‘political’ change. Viewed from the standpoint of a communist

analysis, however — an analysis that deals with the unconscious legacy

of domination — the new Enlightenment is slowly dissolving the

individual’s obedience to institutions, authorities and values that have

vitiated every struggle for freedom. These profound changes tend to

occur almost unknowingly, as for example among workers who, in the

concrete domain of everyday life, engage in sabotage, work

indifferently, practice almost systematic absenteeism, resist authority

in almost every form, use drugs, acquire various freak traits — and yet,

in the abstract domain of politics and social philosophy, acclaim the

most conventional homilies of the system. The explosive character of

revolution, its suddenness and utter unpredictability, can be explained

only as the eruption of these unconscious changes into consciousness, as

a release of the tension between unconscious desires and consciously

held views in the form of an outright confrontation with the existing

order. The erosion of the unconscious restrictions on these desires and

the full expression of the desires that lie in the individual

unconscious is a precondition for the establishment of a liberatory

society. There is a sense in which we can say that the attempt to change

consciousness is a struggle for the unconscious, both in terms of the

fetter that restrain desire and the desires that are fettered.

6

Today it is not a question of whether spontaneity is ‘good’ or ‘bad’,

‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’. Spontaneity is integrally part of the very

dialectic of self-consciousness and self-de-alienation that removes the

subjective fetters established by the present order. To deny the

validity of spontaneity is to deny the most liberatory dialectic that is

occurring today; as such, for us it must be a given that exists in its

own right.

The term should be defined lest its content disappear in semantic

quibbling. Spontaneity is not mere impulse, certainly not in its most

advanced and truly human form, and this is the only form that is worth

discussing. Nor does spontaneity imply undeliberated behaviour and

feeling. Spontaneity is behaviour, feeling and thought that is free of

external constraint, of imposed restriction. It is self-controlled,

internally controlled, behaviour, feeling, and thought, not an

uncontrolled effluvium of passion and action. From the libertarian

communist viewpoint, spontaneity implies a capacity in the individual to

impose self-discipline and to formulate sound guidelines for social

action. Insofar as the individual removes the fetters of domination that

have stifled her or his self-activity, she or he is acting, feeling, and

thinking spontaneously. We might just as well eliminate the word ‘self’

from ‘self-consciousness’, ‘self-activity’ and ‘self-management’ as

remove the concept of spontaneity from our comprehension of the new

Enlightenment, revolution and communism. If there is an imperative need

for a communist consciousness in the revolutionary movement today, we

can never hope to attain it without spontaneity.

Spontaneity does not preclude organisation and structure. To the

contrary, spontaneity ordinarily yields non-hierarchical forms of

organisation, forms that are truly organic, self-created, and based on

voluntarism. The only serious question that is raised in connection with

spontaneity is where it is informed or not. As I have argued elsewhere,

the spontaneity of a child in a liberatory society will not be of the

same order as the spontaneity of a youth, or that of a youth of the same

order as that of an adult; each will simply be more informed, more

knowledgeable, and more experienced than its junior.[7] Revolutionaries

may see today to promote this informative process, but if they try to

contain or destroy it by forming hierarchical movements, they will

vitiate the very process of self-realisation that will yield

self-activity and a society based on self-management.

No less serious for any revolutionary movement is the fact that only if

a revolution is spontaneous can we be reasonably certain that the

‘necessary condition’ for revolution has matured, as it were, into the

‘sufficient condition’. An uprising planned by an elite is almost

certain today to lead to disaster. The state power we face is too

formidable, its armamentorium is too destructive, and, if its structure

is still intact, its efficiency is too compelling to be removed by a

contest in which weaponry is the determining factor. The system must

fall, not fight; and it will fall only when its institutions have been

so hollowed out by the new Enlightenment, and its power so undermined

physically and morally, that an insurrectionary confrontation will be

more symbolic than real. Exactly when or how this ‘magic moment’, so

characteristic of revolution, will occur is unpredictable. but, for

example, when a local strike, ordinarily ignored under ‘normal’

circumstances, can ignite a revolutionary general strike, then we will

know that the conditions have ripened — and this can occur only when the

revolutionary process has been permitted to find its own level of

revolutionary confrontation.[8]

7

If it is true that revolution today is an act of consciousness in the

broadest sense and entails a demystification of reality that removes all

its ideological trappings, it is not enough to say that ‘consciousness

follows being’. To deal with the development of consciousness merely as

the reflection of subjectivity of the development of material

production, to say as the older Marx does that morality, religion and

philosophy are the ‘ideological reflexes and echoes’ of actuality and

‘have no history and no development’ of their own, is to place the

formation of ideology and thereby to deny this consciousness any

authentic basis for transcending the world as it is given.[9] Here,

communist consciousness itself becomes an ‘echo’ of actuality. The ‘why’

in the explanation of this consciousness is reduced to the ‘how’, in

typical instrumentalist fashion; the subjective elements involved in the

transformation of consciousness become completely objectified.

Subjectivity ceases to be a domain for itself, hence the failure of

Marxism to formulate a revolutionary psychology of its own and the

inability of the Marxists to comprehend the new Enlightenment that is

transforming subjectivity in all its dimensions.

Classical western philosophy in its broad, albeit often mystified,

notion of ‘spirit’, recognised that reason increasingly ‘subsumes’ the

material world — or, stated in a more ‘materialistic’ sense, that matter

becomes rational and reason forms its own ‘cortex’, as it were, over

natural and social history. Reason is ultimately nature and society

rendered conscious. In this sense, it is insufficient to say that

‘consciousness follows being’, but rather that being develops towards

consciousness; that consciousness has its own history within the

material world and increasingly gains sway over the course of material

reality. Humanity is capable of transcending the realm of blind

necessity; it is capable of giving nature and society rational direction

and purpose.

This larger interpretation of the relationship between consciousness and

being is not a remote philosophical abstraction. On the contrary, it is

eminently practical. Followed to its logical conclusion, this

interpretation requires a fundamental revision of the traditional notion

of revolutionary consciousness as class consciousness. If the

proletariat, for example, is conceived of merely as the product of its

concrete being — as the object of exploitation by the bourgeoisie and a

creature of the factory system — it is reduced in its very essence to a

category of political economy. Marx leaves us in no doubt about this

conception. As the class that is most completely dehumanised, the

proletariat transcends its dehumanised condition and comes to embody the

human totality ‘through urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely

imperative need...’. Accordingly: ‘The question is not what this or that

proletarian, or even the whole proletariat at the moment considers as

its aims. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent

on that being, it will be compelled to do.’ (The emphasis throughout is

Marx’s and provides a telling commentary on the de-subjectification of

the proletariat.) I will leave aside the rationale that this formula

provides for an elitist organisation. For the present, it is important

to note that Marx, following in the tradition of classical bourgeois

political economy, totally objectifies the proletariat and removes it as

a true subject. The revolt of the proletariat, even its humanisation,

ceases to be a human phenomenon; rather, it becomes a function of

inexorable economic laws and ‘imperative need’. The essence of the

proletariat as proletariat is its non-humanity, its creature nature as

the product of ‘absolutely imperative need’. Its subjectivity falls

within the category of harsh necessity, explicable in terms of economic

law. The psychology of the proletariat, in effect, is political economy.

The real proletariat resists this reduction of its subjectivity to the

product of need and lives increasingly within the realm of desire, of

possibility. As such, it becomes increasingly rational in the classical,

not the instrumentalist, sense of the term. Concretely, the worker

resists the work ethic because it has become irrational in view of the

possibilities for a non-hierarchical society. The worker, in this sense,

transcends her or his creature nature and increasingly becomes a

subject, not an object; a non-proletarian, not a proletarian. Desire,

not merely need, possibility, not merely necessity, enter into her or

his self-formation and self-activity. The worker begins to shed her or

his status of workerness, her or his existence as a mere class being, as

an object of economic forces, as mere ‘being’, and becomes increasingly

available to the new Enlightenment.

As the human essence of the proletariat begins to replace its factory

essence, the worker can now be reached as easily outside the factory as

in it. Concretely, the worker’s aspect as a woman or man, as a parent,

as an urban dweller, as a youth, as a victim of environmental decay, as

a dreamer (the list is nearly endless), comes increasingly to the

foreground. The factory walls become permeable to the counter-culture to

a degree where it begins to compete with the worker’s ‘proletarian’

concerns and values.

No ‘workers’ group’ can become truly revolutionary unless it deals with

the individual worker’s human aspirations, unless it helps to

de-alienate the worker’s personal milieu and begins to transcend the

worker’s factory milieu. The working class becomes revolutionary not in

spite of itself but because of itself, literally as a result of its

awakening selfhood.[10]

8

Revolutionaries have the responsibility of helping others become

revolutionaries, not of ‘making’ revolutions. And this activity only

begins when the individual revolutionary undertakes to remake herself or

himself. Obviously, such a task cannot be undertaken in a personal

vacuum; it presupposes existential relations with others of a like kind

who are loving and mutually supportive. This conception of revolutionary

organisation forms the basis of the anarchist affinity group. Members of

an affinity group conceive of themselves as sisters and brothers whose

activities and structures are, in Josef Weber’s words, ‘transparent to

all’. Such groups function as catalysts in social situations, not as

elites; they seek to advance the consciousness and struggles of the

larger communities in which they function, not assume positions of

command.

Traditionally, revolutionary activity has been permeated by the motifs

of ‘suffering’, ‘denial’ and ‘sacrifice’, motifs that largely reflected

the guilt of the revolutionary movement’s intellectual cadres.

Ironically, to the extent that these motifs still exist, they reflect

the very anti-human aspects of the established order that the ‘masses’

seek to abolish. The revolutionary movement (if such it can be called

today) thus tends, even more than ideology, to ‘echo’ the prevailing

actuality — worse, to condition the ‘masses’ to suffering, sacrifice and

denial at its own hands and the aftermath of the revolution. As against

this latter-day version of ‘republican virtue’, the anarchist affinity

groups affirm not only the rational but the joyous, the sensuous and the

aesthetic side of revolution. They affirm that revolution is not only an

assault on the established order but also a festival in the streets. The

revolution is desire carried into the social terrain and universalised.

It is not without grave risks, tragedies, and pain, but these are the

risks, tragedies and pain of birth and new life, not of contrition and

death. The affinity groups affirm that only a revolutionary movement

that holds this outlook can create the so-called ‘revolutionary

propaganda’ to which the new popular sensibility can respond — a

‘propaganda’ that is art in the sense of a Daumier, a John Milton, and a

John Lennon. Indeed, truth today can exist only as art and art only as

truth.[11]

The development of a revolutionary movement involves the seeding of

America with such affinity groups, with communes and collectives — in

cities, in the countryside, in schools and in factories. These groups

would be intimate, decentralised bodies that would deal with all facets

of life and experiences. Each group would be highly experimental,

innovative and oriented toward changes in life-style as well as

consciousness; each would be so constituted that it could readily

dissolve into the revolutionary institutions created by the people and

disappear as a separate social interest. Finally, each would try to

reflect as best it could the liberated forms of the future, not the

given world that is reflected by the traditional ‘left’. Each, in

effect, would constitute itself as an energy centre for transforming

society and for colonising the present by the future.

Such groups could interlink, federate and establish communication on a

regional and national level as the need arises without surrendering

their autonomy and uniqueness. They would be organic groups that emerged

out of living problems and desires, not artificial groups that are

foisted on social situations by elites. Nor would they tolerate an

organisation of cadres whose sole nexus is ‘programmatic agreement’ and

obedience to functionaries and higher bodies.

We may well ask if a ‘mass organisation’ can be a revolutionary

organisation in a period that is not yet ripe for a communist

revolution? The contradiction becomes self-evident once we couple the

word ‘mass’ with ‘communist revolution’.[12] To be sure, mass movements

have been built in the name of socialism and communism during

non-revolutionary periods, but they have achieved mass proportions only

by denaturing the concepts of socialism, communism and revolution.

Worse, they not only betray their professed ideals by denaturing them,

but they also become obstacles in the way of the revolution. Far from

shaping the destiny of society, they become the creatures of the very

society they profess to oppose.

The temptation to bridge the gap between the given society and the

future is inherently treacherous. Revolution is a rupture not only with

the established social order but with the psyche and mentality it

breeds. Workers, students, farmers, intellectuals, indeed all

potentially revolutionary strata literally break with themselves when

they enter into revolutionary motion, not only with the abstract

ideology of the society. And until they make this break, they are not

revolutionaries. A self-styled ‘revolutionary’ movement that attempts to

assimilate these strata with ‘transitional programmes’ and the like will

acquire their support and participation for the wrong reasons. The

movement, in turn, will be shaped by the people it has vainly tried to

assimilate, not the people by the movement. Granted that the number of

people who are revolutionary today is miniscule, granted, furthermore,

that the great majority of the people today is occupied with the

problems of survival, not of life. But it is precisely this

preoccupation with the problems of survival, and the values as well as

needs that promote it, that prevents them from turning to the problems

of life — and then to revolutionary action. The rupture with the

existing order will be made only when the problems of life infiltrate

and assimilate the problems of survival — when life is understood as a

precondition for survival today — not by rejecting the problem of life

in order to take up the problems of survival, i.e. to achieve a ‘mass’

organisation made up only of ‘masses’.

Revolution is a magic moment not only because it is unpredictable; it is

a magic moment because it can also precipitate into consciousness within

weeks, even days, a disloyalty that lies deeply hidden in the

unconscious. But revolution must be seen as more than just a ‘moment’;

it is a complex dialectic even within its own framework. A majoritarian

revolution does not mean that the great majority of the population must

necessarily go into revolutionary motion all at the same time.

Initially, the people in motion may be a minority of the population — a

substantial, popular, spontaneous minority, to be sure, not a small,

‘well-disciplined’, centralised and mobilised elite. The consent of the

majority may reveal itself simply in the fact that it will no longer

defend the established order. It may ‘act’ by refusing to act in support

of the ruling institutions — a ‘wait and see’ attitude to determine if,

by denying the ruling class its loyalty, the ruling class is rendered

powerless. Only after the testing the situation by its passivity may it

pass into overt activity — and then with a rapidity and on a scale that

removes in an incredibly brief period institutions, relations,

attitudes, and values that have been centuries in the making.

9

In America any organised ‘revolutionary’ movement that functions with

distorted goals would be infinitely worse than no movement at all.

Already the ‘left’ has inflicted an appalling amount of damage on the

counter-culture, the women’s liberation movement and the student

movement. With its overblown pretentions, its dehumanising behaviour,

and its manipulatory practices, the ‘left’ has contributed enormously to

the demoralisation that exists today. Indeed, it may well be that in any

future revolutionary situation the ‘left’ (particularly its

authoritarian forms) will raise problems that are more formidable that

those of the bourgeoisie, that is if the revolutionary process fails to

transform the ‘revolutionaries’.

And there is much that requires transforming — not only in social views

and personal attitudes, but in the very way ‘revolutionaries’

(especially male ‘revolutionaries’) interpret experience. The

‘revolutionary’, no less than the ‘masses’, embodies attitudes that

reflect an inherently domineering outlook towards the external world.

The western mode of perception traditionally defines selfhood in

antagonistic terms, in a matrix of opposition between the objects and

subjects that lie outside the ‘I’. The self is not merely an ego that is

distinguishable from the external ‘others’, it is an ego that seeks to

master these others and to bring them into subjugation. The

subject/object relation defines subjectively as a function of

domination, the domination of objects and the reduction of other

subjects to objects. Western selfhood, certainly in its male forms, is a

selfhood of appropriation and manipulation in its very self-definition

and definition of relationships. This self- and relational definition

may be active in some individuals, passive in others, or reveal itself

precisely in the mutual assignment of roles based on a domineering and

dominated self, but domination permeates almost universally the

prevailing mode of experiencing reality.

Virtually every strain in Western culture reinforces this mode of

experiencing — not only its bourgeois and Judeo-Christian strains but

also its Marxian one. Marx’s definition of the labour process as mode of

self-definition, a notion he borrows from Hegel, is explicitly

appropriative and latently exploitative. Man forms himself by changing

the world; he appropriates it, refashions it according to his ‘needs’,

and thereby projects, materialises and verifies himself in the objects

of his own labour. This conception of man’s self-definition forms the

point of departure for Marx’s entire theory of historical materialism.

‘Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or

anything else you like’, observes Marx in a famous passage from The

German Ideology. ‘They begin to distinguish themselves from animals as

soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ... As

individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore,

coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with

how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material

conditions determining their production.’

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit the theme of labour is taken up

within the context of the master/slave relationship. Here, the subject

becomes an object in the dual sense that another self (the slave) is

objectified and concomitantly reduced to an instrument of production.

The slave’s labour, however, becomes the basis for an autonomous

consciousness and selfhood. Through work and labour the ‘consciousness

of the slave comes to itself ...’, Hegel observes. ‘Labour is desire

restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other

words, labour shapes and fashions the thing.’ The activity of ‘giving

shape and form’ is the ‘pure self-existence of [the slave’s]

consciousness, which now in the work it does is externalised and passes

into the condition of permanence. The consciousness that toils and

serves accordingly attains by this means the direct apprehension of that

independent being as its self.’

Hegel transforms the imprisonment of labour in the master/slave

relationship — i.e. in the framework of domination — with the dialectic

that follows this ‘moment’. Eventually, the split between the subject

and object as an antagonism is healed, although as reason fulfilled in

the wholeness of truth, in the Absolute Idea. Marx does not advance

beyond the moment of the master/slave relationship. The moment is

transfixed and deepened into the Marxian theory of class struggle — in

my view a grave shortcoming that denies consciousness the history of an

emergent dialectic [13] — and the split between subject and object is

never wholly reconciled. All interpretations of the young Marx’s

‘Feuerbachian naturalism’ notwithstanding, humanity, in Marx’s view,

transcends domination ambivalently, by dominating nature. Nature is

reduced to the ‘slave’, as it were, of a harmonised society, and the

self does not annul its Promethean content.[14] Thus, the theme of

domination is still latent in Marx’s interpretation of communism; nature

is still the object of domination. So conceived, the Marxian concept of

nature — quite aside from the young Marx’s more ambivalent notions —

vitiates the reconciliation of subject and object that is to be achieved

by a harmonised society.

That ‘objects’ exist and must be ‘manipulated’ is an obvious

precondition for human survival that no society, however harmonised, can

transcend. But whether ‘objects’ exist merely as objects or whether

their ‘manipulation’ remains merely manipulation — or, indeed, whether

labour, as distinguished from art and play, constitutes the primary mode

of self-definition — in quite another matter. The key issue around which

these distinctions turn is domination — an appropriative relation that

is defined by an egotistical conception of need.[15] Insofar as the

self’s need exists exclusively for itself, without regard to the

integrity (or what Hegel might well call the ‘subjectivity’) of the

other, the other remains mere object for the self and the handling of

this object becomes mere appropriation. But insofar as the other is seen

as an end in itself and need is defined in terms of mutual support, the

self and the other enter into a complementary relationship. This

complimentary relationship reaches its most harmonised form in authentic

play.[16] Complementarity as distinguished from domination — even from

the more benign forms of contractual relationships and mutual aid

designated as ‘reciprocity’ — presupposed a new animism that respects

the other for its own sake and responds actively in the form of a

creative, loving and supportive symbiosis.

Dependence always exists. How it exists and why it exists, however,

remain critical towards an understanding of any distinction between

domination and complementarity. Infants will always be dependent upon

adults for satisfying their most elemental physiological needs, and

younger people will always require the assistance of older ones for

knowledge and the assurance of experience. Similarly, older generations

will be dependent upon the younger for the reproduction of society and

for the stimulation that comes from inquiry and fresh views toward

experience. In hierarchical society, dependence ordinarily yields

subjugation and the denial of the other’s selfhood. Differences in age,

in sex, in modes of work, in levels of knowledge, in intellectual,

artistic and emotional proclivities, in physical appearance — a vast

array of diversity that could result in a nourishing constellation of

inter-relationships and interdependencies — are all reassembled

objectively in terms of command and obedience, superiority and

inferiority, rights and duties, privileges and denials. This

hierarchical organisation of appearances occurs not only in the social

world; it finds its counterpart in the way phenomena, whether social,

natural or personal, are internally experienced. The self in

hierarchical society not only lives, acts and communicates

hierarchically, it thinks and feels hierarchically by organising the

vast diversity of sense data, memory, values, passions and thoughts

along hierarchical lines. Differences between things, people and

relations do not exist as ends in themselves; they are organised

hierarchically in the mind itself and pitted against each other

antagonistically in varying degrees of dominance and obedience even when

they could be complementary to each other in the prevailing reality.

The outlook of the early organic human community, at least in its most

harmonised form, remained essentially free of hierarchical modes of

perception; indeed, it is questionable if humanity could have emerged

from animality without a system of social reciprocities that compensated

for the physical limitations of a puny, savannah-dwelling primate. To a

large extent, this early non-hierarchical outlook was mystified; not

only plants and animals, but wind and stones were seen as animate. Each

was seen, however, as the spiritualised element of a whole in which

humans participated as one among many, neither above nor below the

others. Ideally, this outlook was fundamentally egalitarian and

reflected the egalitarian nature of the community. If we are to accept

Dorothy Lee’s analysis of Wintu Indian syntax, domination in any form

was absent even from the language; thus, a Wintu mother did not ‘take’

her infant into the shade, she ‘went’ with her child into the shade. No

hierarchies were imputed to the natural world, at least not until the

human community began to become hierarchical. Thereafter, experience

itself became increasingly hierarchical, reflecting the splits that

undermined the unity of the early organic human community. The emergence

of patriarchalism, of social classes, of the towns and the ensuing

antagonism between town and countryside, of the state, and finally of

the distinctions between mental and physical labour that divided the

individual internally undermined this outlook completely.

Bourgeois society, by degrading all social ties to a commodity nexus and

by reducing all productive activity to ‘production for its own sake’,

carried the hierarchical outlook into an absolute antagonism with the

natural world. Although it is surely correct to say that this outlook

and the various modes of labour that produced it also produced

incredible advances in technology, the fact remains that these advances

were achieved by bringing the conflict between humanity and nature to a

point where the natural fundament for life hangs precariously in the

balance. The institutions that emerged with hierarchical society,

moreover, have now reached their historical limits. Although once the

social agencies that promoted technological advance, they have now

become the most compelling forces for ecological disequilibrium. The

patriarchal family, the class system, the city and the state are

breaking down on their own terms; worse, they are becoming the sources

of massive social disintegration and conflict. As I’ve indicated

elsewhere, the means of production have become too formidable to be used

as means of domination. It is domination itself that has to go, and with

domination the historical legacy that perpetuates the hierarchical

outlook toward experience.

10

The emergence of ecology as a social issue reminds us of the extent to

which we are returning again to the problems of an organic society, a

society in which the splits within society and between society and

nature are healed. It is by no means accidental that the counter-culture

turns for inspiration to Indian and Asian outlooks toward experience.

The archaic myths, philosophies, and religions of a more unified,

organic world become alive again only because the issues they faced are

alive again. The two ends of the historic development are united by the

word ‘communism’: the first, a technologically sophisticated utopia that

could live in reference for nature and bring its consciousness to the

service of life. Moreover, the first lived in a social network of

rigidly defined reciprocities based on custom and compelling need; the

second could live in a free constellation of complementary relations

based on reason and desire. Both are separated by the enormous

development of technology, a development that opens the possibility of a

transcendence of the domain and necessity.

That the socialist movement has failed utterly to see the implications

of the communist issues that are now emerging is attested by its

attitude towards ecology: an attitude that, when it is not marked by

patronising irony, rarely rises above petty muckraking. I speak, here,

of ecology, not environmentalism. Environmentalism deals with the

serviceability of the human habitat, a passive habitat that people use,

in short, an assemblage of things called ‘natural resources’ and ‘urban

resources’. Taken by themselves, environmental issues require the use of

no greater wisdom than the instrumentalists modes of thought and methods

that are used by city planners, engineers, physicians, lawyers — and

socialists. Ecology, by contrast, is an artful science or scientific

art, and at its best a form of poetry that combines science and art in a

unique synthesis. [17] Above all, it is an outlook that interprets all

interdependencies (social and psychological as well as natural)

non-hierarchically. Ecology denies that nature can be interpreted from a

hierarchical viewpoint. Moreover, it affirms that diversity and

spontaneous development are ends in themselves, to be respected in their

own right. Formulated in terms of ecology’s ‘ecosystem approach’, this

means that each form of life has a unique place in the balance of nature

and its removal from the ecosystem could imperil the stability of the

whole. The natural world, left largely to itself, evolves by colonising

the planet with ever more diversified life forms and increasingly

complex interrelationships between species in the form of food chains

and food webs. Ecology knows no ‘king of beasts’; all life forms have

their place in a biosphere that becomes more and more diversified in the

course of biological evolution. Each ecosystem must be seen as a unique

totality of diversified life forms in its own right. Humans, too, belong

to the whole, but only as one part of the whole. They can intervene in

this totality, even try to manage it consciously, provided they do so in

its own behalf as well as society’s; but if they try to ‘dominate’ it,

i.e., plunder it, they risk the possibility of undermining it and the

natural fundament for social life.

The dialectical nature of the ecological outlook, an outlook that

stresses differentiation, inner development and unity in diversity,

should be obvious to anyone who is familiar with Hegel’s writings. Even

the language of ecology and dialectical philosophy overlap to a

remarkable degree. Ironically, ecology more closely realises Marx’s

vision of science as dialectics than any other science today, including

his own cherished realm of political economy. Ecology could be said to

enjoy this unique eminence because it provides the basis, both socially

and biologically, for a devastating critique of hierarchical society as

a whole, while also providing the guidelines for a viable, harmonised

future utopia. For it is precisely ecology that validates on scientific

grounds the need for social decentralisation based on new forms of

technology and news modes of community, both tailored artistically to

the ecosystem in which they are located. In fact, it is perfectly valid

to say that the affinity-group form and even the traditional ideal of

the rounded individual could be regarded as ecological concepts.

Whatever the area to which it is applied, the ecological outlook sees

unity in diversity as a holistic dynamic totality that tends to

harmoniously integrate its diverse parts, not as an aggregate of

neutrally co-existing elements.

It is not fatuity alone that blocks the socialist movement’s

comprehension of the ecological outlook. To speak bluntly, Marxism is no

longer adequate to comprehend the communist vision that is not emerging.

The socialist movement, in turn, has acquired and exaggerated the most

limiting features of Marx’s works without understanding the rich

insights they contain. What constitutes the modus operandi of this

movement is not Marx’s vision of a humanity integrated internally and

with nature, but the particularistic notions and the ambivalences that

marred his vision and the latent instrumentalism that vitiated it.

11

History has played its own cunning game with us. It has turned

yesterday’s verities into today’s falsehood, not by generating new

refutations but by creating a new level of social possibility. We are

beginning to see that there is a realm of domination that is broader

than the realm of material exploitation. The tragedy of the socialist

movement is that, steeped in the past, it uses the methods of domination

to try to ‘liberate’ us from material exploitation.

We are beginning to see that the most advanced form of class

consciousness is self-consciousness. The tragedy of the socialist

movement is that it opposes class consciousness to self-consciousness

and denies the emergence of the self as ‘individualism’ — a self that

could yield the most advanced form of collectivity, a collectivity based

on self-management.

We are beginning to see that spontaneity yields its own liberated forms

of social organisation. The tragedy of the socialist movement is that it

opposes organisation to spontaneity and tries to assimilate the social

process to political and organisational instrumentalism.

We are beginning to see that the general interest can now be sustained

after a revolution by a post-scarcity technology. The tragedy of the

socialist movement is that it sustains the particular interest of the

proletariat against the emerging general interest of the dominated as a

whole — of all dominated strata, sexes, ages, and ethnic groups.

We must begin to break away from the given, from the social

constellation that stands immediately before our eyes, and try to see

that we are somewhere in a process that has a long history behind it and

a long future before it. In little more than half a decade, we have seen

established verities and values disintegrate on a scale and with a

rapidity that would have seemed utterly inconceivable to the people of a

decade ago. And yet, perhaps, we are only at the beginning of a

disintegrating process whose most telling effects still lie ahead. This

is a revolutionary epoch, an immense historical tide that builds up,

often unseen, in the deepest recesses of the unconscious and whose goals

continually expand with the development itself. More than ever, we now

know a fact from lived experience that no theoretical tomes could

establish: consciousness can change rapidly, indeed, with a rapidity

that is dazzling to the beholder. In a revolutionary epoch, a year or

even a few months can yield changes in popular consciousness and mood

that would normally take decades to achieve.

And we must know what we want lest we turn to means that totally vitiate

our goals. Communism stands on the agenda of society today, not a

socialist patchwork of ‘stages’ and ‘transitions’ that will simply mire

us in a world we are trying to overcome. A non-hierarchical society,

self-managed and free of domination in all its forms, stands on the

agenda of society today, not a hierarchical system draped in a red flag.

The dialectic we seek is neither a Promethean will that posits the

‘other’ antagonistically nor a passivity that reaches phenomena in

repose. Nor is it the happiness and pacification of an eternal status

quo. Life when we are prepared to accept all the forbidden experiences

that do not impede survival. Desire is the sense of human possibility

that emerges with life, and pleasure the fulfillment of this

possibility. Thus, the dialectic we seek is an unceasing but gentle

transcendence that finds its most human expression in art and play. Our

self-definition will come from the humanised ‘other’ of art and play,

not the bestialised ‘other’ of toil and domination.

We must always be on a quest for the new, for the potentialities that

ripen with the development of the world and the new visions that unfold

with them. An outlook that ceases to look for what is new and potential

in the name of ‘realism’ has already lost contact with the present, for

the present is always conditioned by the future. True development is

cumulative, not sequential; it is growth, not succession. The new always

embodies the present and past, but it does so in new ways and more

adequately as the parts of a greater whole.

Murray Bookchin

[1] A prime example of this kind of nonsense is to be found on p.143 of

Tariq Ali’s ‘The Coming British Revolution’ (Jonathan Cape, 1972).

Apparently ‘Solidarity’s ‘belief in spontaneously-generated political

consciousness’ leads us to ‘deny the need for any organisation’. Both

the premise and the conclusion are false. The ‘argument’, moreover, is a

non-sequitur.

[2] Published by ‘Solidarity’ (London), c/o 123 Lathom Road, London E.

[3] ‘Communism’ has come to mean a stateless society, based on the

maxim, ‘From each according to his ability and to each according to his

needs’. Society’s affairs are managed directly from ‘below’ and the

means of production are communally ‘owned’. Both Marxists and anarchists

(or, at least, anarcho-communists) view this form of society as a common

goal. Where they disagree is primarily on the character and role of the

organised revolutionary movement in the revolutionary process and the

intermediate ‘stages’ (most Marxists see the need for a centralised

‘proletarian dictatorship’, followed by a ‘socialist’ state — a view

anarchists emphatically deny) required to achieve a communist society.

In the matter of these differences, it will be obvious that I hold to an

anarchist viewpoint.

[4] The use of military or quasi-military language — ‘vanguard’,

‘strategy’, ‘tactics’ — betrays this conception fully. While denouncing

students as ‘petty bourgeois’ and ‘shit’, the ‘professional

revolutionary’ has always had a grudging admiration and respect for that

most inhuman of all hierarchical institutions, the military. Compare

this with the counter-culture’s inherent antipathy for ‘soldierly

virtues’ and demeanour.

[5] The word ‘people’ (le peuple of the Great French Revolution) will no

longer be the Jacobin (or, more recently, the Stalinist and Maoist)

fiction that conceals antagonistic class interests within the popular

movement. The word will reflect the general interests of a truly human

movement, a general interest that expresses the material possibilities

for achieving a classless society.

[6] The utter stupidity of the American ‘left’ during the late sixties

in projecting a mindless ‘politics of polarisation’ and thereby wantonly

humiliating so many middle-class — and, yes, let it be said: bourgeois —

elements who were prepared to listen and to learn can hardly be

criticised too strongly. Insensible to the unique constellation of

possibilities that stared it in the face, the ‘left’ simply fed its

guilt and insecurities about itself and followed a politics of

systematic alienation from all the authentic, radicalising forces in

American society. This insane politics, couples with a mindless mimicry

of the ‘third world’, a dehumanising verbiage (the police as ‘pigs’,

opponents as ‘fascists’), and a totally dehumanising body of values,

vitiated all its claims as a ‘liberation movement’. The student strike

that followed the Kent murders revealed to the ‘left’ and the students

alike that they had succeeded only too well in polarising American

society, but that they, and not the country’s rulers, were in the

minority. It is remarkable testimony to the inner resources of the

counter-culture that the debacle of SDS led not to a sizeable

Marxist-Leninist party but to the well-earned disintegration of the

‘Movement’ and a solemn retreat back to the more humanistic cultural

premises that appeared in the early sixties — humanistic premises that

the ‘left’ so cruelly ravaged in the closing years of that decade.

[7] Obviously I do not believe that adults today are ‘more informed,

more knowledgeable and more experienced’ than young people in any sense

that imparts to their greater experience any revolutionary significance.

To the contrary, most adults in the existing society are mentally

cluttered with preposterous falsehoods and if they are to achieve any

real learning, they will have to undergo a considerable unlearning

process.

[8] This is a vitally important point and should be followed through

with an example. Had the famous Sud-Aviation strike in Nantes of May 13,

1968, a strike that ignited the massive general strike in France of

May-June, occurred only a week earlier, it probably would have had only

local significance and almost certainly would have been ignored by the

country at large. Coming when it did, however, after the student

uprising, the Sud-Aviation strike initiated a sweeping social movement.

Obviously the tinder for this movement had accumulated slowly and

imperceptibly. The Sud-Aviation strike did not ‘create’ this movement;

it revealed it, which is precisely the point that cannot be emphasized

too strongly. What I am saying is that a militant action, presumably by

a minority — an action unknowingly radical even to itself — had revealed

the fact that it was the action of a majority in the only way it could

reveal itself. The social material for the general strike lay at hand

and any strike, however trivial in the normal course of events (and

perhaps unavoidable), might have brought the general strike into being.

Owing to the unconscious nature of the processes involved, there is no

way of foretelling when a movement of this kind will emerge — and it

will emerge only when it is left to do so on its own. Nor is this to say

that will does not play an active role in social processes, but merely

that the will of the individual revolutionary must become a social will,

the will of the great majority in society, if it is to culminate in

revolution.

[9] The young Marx in Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law

held a quite different view: ‘It is not enough that thought should seeks

its actualisation; actuality must itself strive toward thought’.

[10] A fact which was already clearly in evidence during the May-June

events in France at the Champs de Mars gathering of students and workers

on 12 May. Here, worker after worker stood before the microphone and

spoke of his life, his values and his dreams as a human being, not

merely of his class interests. Indeed, the extent to which broader human

life issues emerged in the May-June events has yet to be adequately

explored. It was precisely the Stalinists, on the other hand, who

appealed to workers as ‘proletarians’ and maliciously stressed their

‘social differences’ with the ‘bourgeois students’.

[11] As the decline of fictional literature attests. Life is far more

interesting than diction, not only as social life but as personal

experience and autobiography.

[12] I would argue that we are not in a ‘revolutionary period’ or even a

‘pre-revolutionary period’, to use the terminology of the Leninists, but

rather in a revolutionary epoch. By this term I mean a protracted period

of social disintegration, a period marked precisely by the Enlightenment

discussed in the period sections.

[13] See my ‘Dialectical Philosophy’, to be published by Times Change

Press in the autumn of 1972.

[14] One sees this in Marx’s restless concept of practice and especially

of material ‘need’, which expands almost indefinitely. It is also

clearly seen in the exegetical views of Marxian theorists, whose

concepts of an unending, wilful, power-asserting practice assumes almost

Dionysian proportions.

[15] And ‘need’, here, in the sense of psychic as well as material

manifestations of egotism. Indeed, domination need not be exploitive in

the material sense alone, as merely the appropriation of surplus labour.

Psychic exploitation, notably of children and women, may well have

preceded material exploitation and even established its cultural and

attitudinal framework. And unless exploitation of this kind is totally

uprooted, humanity will have made no advance in humanness.

[16] Music is the most striking example where art can exist for itself

and even combine with play for itself. The competitive sports, on the

other hand, are forms of play that are virtually degraded to

market-place relations, notably in the frenzy for scoring over rivals

and the egocentric antagonisms that the games so often engender. The

reader should note that a dialectic exists within art and play, hence my

use of the words ‘true art’ and ‘authentic play’, i.e. art and play as

ends in themselves.

[17] ‘Art’ in the sense that ecology demands continual improvisation.

This demand stems from the variety of its subject matter, the ecosystem:

the living community and its environment that forms the basic unit of

ecological research. No one ecosystem is entirely like another, and

ecologists are continually obliged to take the uniqueness of each

ecosystem into account in their research. Although there is a regressive

attempt to reduce ecology to little more than systems analysis, the

subject matter continually gets in the way, and it often happens that

the most pedestrian writers are obliged to use the most poetic metaphors

to deal with their material.