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Title: Radicalizing Democracy Author: Murray Bookchin Language: en Topics: democracy, interview Source: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/raddemocracy.html Notes: by the editors of Kick It Over magazine
includes:
For more copies or further information, please contact:
Green Program Project
P. O. Box 111, Burlington, Vermont O5401
K.I.O. Interviews Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin is the author of numerous books and pamphlets . His most
famous include Post-Scarcity Anarchism and The Ecology of Freedom. His
ideas have deeply influenced some members of the Kick It Over collective
This interview was conducted at a conference on community economic
development in Waterloo Ontario in early 1985. Thanks to Steve H. for
his generous assistance. and to Murray B. for giving so unstintingly of
his time. The interview was conducted by Ron Hayley and edited by
Alexandra Devon.
K.I.O.: You've said in your writings that we are undergoing a change as
far-reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture
or from agriculture to industry. Could you elaborate on this and talk a
bit about why this is occurring now?
Murray Bookchin: The transformation I have in mind is cybernation,
genetic engineering, nucleonics, and the sophistication of electronic
technology in vast numbers of fields and the development of means of
surveillance of a highly sophisticated form. The extent of the
transformation is absolutely astonishing. What we find today is a
totally immoral economy and society which has managed to unearth the
secrets of matter and the secrets of life at the most fundamental level.
This is a society that, in no sense, is capable of utilizing this
knowledge in any way that will produce a social good. Obviously there
are leavings from a banquet that fall from the table but my knowledge
and my whole experience with capitalism and with hierarchical society
generally is that almost every advance is as best a promise and at worst
utterly devastating for the world.
So when one speaks of this combination which has occurred. only within
my own lifetime, of plumbing the deepest secrets of matter, notably
nuclear energy, and transforming matter into energy and bioengineering,
I feel that we are confronted with a revolution of monumental importance
and while this revolution is in the hands of capital and the state, its
impacts upon society could very well be devastating. I cannot foresee
that it will benefit human society or the ecology of our planet as much
as is will be utilized for domination and hierarchy, which is what all
technological innovation, to one extent or another, has always been
utilized for.
The scope of the revolution can be delineated in many ways; first of
all, cybernetics threatens to undermine the status of almost every kind
of nonproressional working-class, white or blue collar. I have every
expectation that if cybernation is introduced, and it is only a matter
of time until it is, it will displace tens of millions ot people. The
industrial working class will be reduced at least in the major
Euro-American centers, in all probability, to a stratum that is no
larger numerically than that of the farmers today who number some four
million in the U.S.
Already we are witnessing a decline of the American labor movement, the
organized trade union movement from 1 out of 3 workers (and this is a
diminishing labour force as well) to 1 out of 5. This also reflects the
diminution of class consciousness even on the elementary level of trade
unionism. I'm not speaking of syndicalism. I'm speaking of ordinary
bread and butter trade unionism. I can also forsee perhaps a labour
force that does not number more than say 17 million, after numbering
very close to nearly 27 million, which will eventually go down to 10
million. will eventually go down to 7 million, will eventually go down
to 5 million. Not to be able to foresee this is extremely myopic.
I still lived in a time when there were close to 30 million farmers and
now we have only 4 million. This is a tremendous revolution, first of
all in the way production occurs. It's a tremendous revolution in the
class structure of this society.
Please remember very well that whether one was a Marxist or an
anarchist, particularly a syndicalist, it was generally supposed that
the population would become more proletarianized and that its power lay
in the capacity to control the means of production. One of the primary
concepts of anarcho-syndicalism, not to speak of Marxism, was the idea
that the working class was the all-powerful force whose going on general
strike would paralyze the system. But if so much of the working class is
diminished numerically and so much of industry has become robotized,
then concepts like the general strike become utterly meaningless.
That would be the first consequence-namely the diminution of labour as a
powerful force. Another consequence would be the political problem this
is going to raise. With so many "irrelevant" people, so to speak, what
kind of political structure is going to deal with them? What are we
going to do with tens of millions of people that have no place in this
society? How are they going to be used? How are they going to be
employed?
In the U.S. we still have a largely agrarian constitution built around
republican principles that even the bourgeoisie did not want to accept.
It benefitted from them but it didn't want to accept them. These were
the principles formulated by Virginian aristocrats, based on land, who
still had an agrarian perspective however much they were locked into
capitalism. These are principles emerging from small farmers,
compromises with the commercial bourgeoisie, not even the industrial
bourgeoisie. This is the revered picture of American republicanism and
American democracy. I could just as well include aspects of Canadian
federalism. Such structures which we designate as "bourgeois
revolutionary structures" are utterly incompatible with the future
development of capitalism.
The checks and balances that exist in the American constitution and
which we, as radicals. once regarded as very reactionary because they
didn't give power to the people, are actually serving to check the
executive power, and inhibiting the totalitarianization of American
political life. Reagan was obliged to pull the Marines from Beirut. He
cannot easily invade Nicaragua because of checks and balances that were
once regarded as undemocratic but which now actually inhibit a highly
authoritarian president from doing whatever he wants in the world.
By the same token, we still have a republican system with democratic
features to it that make protest possible, that make a public opinion
possible and which stand in the way of manipulating the population and
controlling it, particularly a population that has faced a form of
economic extinction. So I can see a tremendous tension building up, a
crisis between the so-called "bourgeois" past and the capitalist future.
I don't think we can overlook this enormous tension. That bourgeois past
has libertarian features about it: the town meetings of New England.
municipal and local control, the American mythology that the less
government the better, the American belief in independence and
individualism. All these things are antithetical to a cybernetic
economy, a highly centralized corporative economy and a highly
centralized political system that is necessary to manage that economy on
a domestic and world scale, not to speak of a bureaucracy of enormous
proportions which has an interest of its own in the consolidation of
power. These contradictions have to be faced; they have an extremely
radical potential and somehow or other we have to deal with them.
K.I.O.: In some of your writings, you, and some of your colleagues
talked about how each mode of production, to borrow the Marxist
terminology, tends to create a certain epistemology or way of looking at
the world. Are there any other ideological trends commensurate with this
economic change that are worth commenting on briefly?
Murray Bookchin: Well, the most important one is the invasion of the
commodity as an epistemological outlook into ways of thinking. This
expresses itself in expressions such as "I'll buy that idea," "What is
the bottom line?" or "I'd like some feedback." These expressions are not
to be viewed light-mindedly. They're not just idiomatic attempts to
conform with systems theory and cybernetics. They really reflect a
business mentality and a cybernetic mentality that is very significant
from an epistemological point of view.
The modern corporation is a system and the way it's diagrammed on
flowcharts is in terms of feedback and it's not accidental that systems
theory has now become almost imperialistically pervasive in our
thinking. We use its language: feedback, input, output. We don't have
dialogue any more from the Greek word dialogos, logos meaning mind as
well as speech. We use information in terms of data, not in terms of
giving form to something. We think now in terms of typologies (according
to the dictionary definition, the doctrine or study of types or
symbols - ed.) instead of processes. So we develop flow diagrams and we
lay out patterns which are philosophically at odds with the idea of a
changing society. We think more in terms of a dynamic equilibrium of a
given society than the dialectical concept of a changing,
self-transforming and self destructive economy in which the seeds of
self destruction are built into the society.
This type of logical and cybernetic mentality reveals an accommodation
with the status quo. It's considered a given that we're going to have
corporations -- how are we going to make them more efficient or
effective? And where they are destructive, how to make them more
destructive; where they are pernicious, how to make them more
pernicious. And that has profoundly affected not only our language but
inasmuch as so many thoughts are formed by language, our very ability to
think. We need a real cleansing of the language or else our
revolutionary thinking is bound to be perverted by this mentality.
Already, we have writers like Jürgen Habermas who uses typologies and
flow diagrams. This man professes to be a Marxist, but he's totally
broken in my opinion with even the dialectical mentality of Marxism
which is built around the idea of an immanent development in which decay
is latent in any social order. The typological approach sees no decay,
sees merely layout and here information is really the form, not only the
data that is supplied in laying out a social structure. You assume the
social structure to be static and, from that, the main thing is to
examine the internal workings as though society were an engine. And all
you have to do is talk about whether the parts are working efficiently
or whether you can improve the parts, technologically, so that you live
within the status quo as a matter of habit without ever knowing that you
are doing so.
K.I.O.: What you're talking about seems connected with the whole trend
towards an information-centred economy. It's something that puzzles me.
It was always assumed, in the past, that the bottom line in economics is
the production of real goods and services, real wealth. Now it seems
that so much of what goes on economically is the purchasing, sale, and
processing of information. I wonder if you could comment briefly on what
this means economically, why it's happening now and how it relates to
more traditional economic processes.
Murray Bookchin: It's interesting to me that you said the "bottom line."
I'm not being critical. I'm just showing how much we say these things
without being conscious of the extent to which we operate within the
"paradigms" and the typologies of capitalism.
We are going to produce commodities. What we're merely saying is that
what we call "information" is also a commodity, and it's assumed
exaggerated importance. But information is not merely merchandisable,
it's used to produce. So, I do not see that we've entered an information
age as much as I think we are learning how to accumulate information for
all kinds of manipulatory purposes, be they economic, political, or
psychological.
I resist the use of the word "information" as I resist the use of the
word "deindustrialization". I think what they re doing is cybernating
the economy and the economy will produce goods, a very substantial
proportion of which will be military. In the United States, you're not
deindustrializing as much as reindustrializing in a new way. The
Americans are turning the economy into a war economy. Its greatest
product consists of missiles, rockets, satellites, space technologies,
weaponry, and everything else is being geared around that. They're ready
to let the Japanese, the Asians, generally, produce the textiles and let
the Mexicans and Third World peoples produce the blue collar type
industrial goods of traditional capitalism. They'll always maintain
enough of that in America, by the way, in order to support the arms
industry or at least to meet their minimal needs.
K.I.O.: There's a lot of economic polarization going on with the trend
towards cybernation but, to tell you the truth, I would have thought it
would have gone further, in the sense that a lot of people still have a
lot of money in North America. Does that come from exploitation of the
third world, as in the trend away from the pauperization of the working
class towards affluent consumerism? What's going to happen now that a
lot of people are becoming economically redundant? Will they be
maintained artificially as consumers or will they be pauperized?
Murray Bookchin: I can't foresee what they will do. It's beyond my life
span, beyond my time, beyond my era. I can only offer various
possibilities. They can militarize the whole society in which every
stratum of society will be, essentially, whether in uniform or not,
working for the military. They may have to initiate some systems of
birth control. I'm not suggesting genocide, but some way of diminishing
the population.
They may create a two-tiered society and economy in which there will be
the very affluent and the others will fend for themselves.
There's a futurama called Blade Runner, which is the most realistic
futurama I've ever seen, at least in terms of what the future may look
like. You have a split-level economy in society, the privileged living
in staggering high-rise buildings while down in the streets you have
squalor and catch as catch can, a lumpen proletariat. Bioengineering
plays a very important role. One way or another they'll have to have a
highly controlled society; that much I'm convinced of. How totalitarian
or authoritarian it will be is hard to foresee.
K.I.O.: One of the most disturbing things for me is that, both in terms
of liberatory forces as well as some of the things you've described, it
has never felt it harder to predict what's happening or what the
different tendencies are. The situation is so contradictory.
Murray Bookchin: Yes. I know. because capitalism is restructuring its
entire class base. Capitalism was never a pure system. We still don't
know what mature capitalism is, assuming it will be capitalism if it
becomes mature. The capitalist societies of the 19th century had a vast
number of preindustrial features. Admittedly, in industry you had
capitalism but once you left the immediate industrial sector you went
back into the neighborhoods which were really pre-capitalist and
pre-industrial. You went into family farms and extended families. You
didn't have shopping malls or supermarkets but small family retail
establishments.
Now, and especially since the 1950's-and remember that I regard the
second World War as a tremendous turning point in the history of
humanity, not just the history of capitalism-when you go back to your
home you go back to immediate media control in the form of television.
You're wired up to Betamaxes and VCR's. You have telephones. You have
nuclear families or singles living in high rises. You have shopping
malls. You have automobiles. And capitalism invades your life in the
language that you use. in the relationships you establish. Capitalism
has, more or less, come into its own and we're beginning to see
something of what mature capitalism is like, or, at least we are seeing
the beginnings of a mature form of capitalism in contradistinction to
the earlier capitalist system which was still very mixed with
pre-industrial, semi-feudal-type patriarchal forms.
I'm not saying that the earlier society was better, but I'm saying that
at least the spirit of rebellion could be nourished by community
networks, by discourse in which you were relatively free of the mass
media and the educational system to an extent that many young people
today cannot even imagine. The revolts against capitalism that occurred
memorably, whether you look to Russia in 1917 or Spain in the 1930's -
and there were other revolts all along the way - were really the work of
peasants in overalls. The revolutionary workers' movement was really a
peasant movement in overalls. These people were people who existed in
the tension between two cultures. Even in the 1930's it was conceivable
because people lived in the tension of two cultures, one pre-capitalist
and pre-industrial and the other one industrial and capitalist.
So the pure working class is a fiction. The hereditary working class is
a fiction. In fact wherever the working class became hereditary it fed
into the system. This was most noticeable in Germany where there was
never a chance for a workers' revolution anyways. Rosa Luxemburg
notwithstanding. And Rosa Luxemburg understood that there wasn't a
chance of a successful workers' revolution in central Europe.
And to this day when one talks of revolutions, one talks of national
revolutions of peasant populations. So the revolt against capitalism
usually occurred among classes that were alien to capitalism to begin
with. We named them workers because they happened to be in the
factories, but we forgot that they were only one step away from the
village. This was the case in Russia. This was the case in Spain. This
was the case, to a great extent, in France during the Paris Commune of
craftsmen and artisans. It was not the industrial workers who guided the
Commune but the old sans culottes (literally breechless, republicans of
Parisian lower classes in French revolution. according to the Concise
Oxford Dictionary) of 1789-1794.
Even the miners today in Britain still live in villages: they're not the
London proletariat, which has been remarkably unsympathetic to their
strike. That working class is disappearing completely. It's becoming
extinct, and it's a real question of whether or not the workers -
industrial proletarians, organized in the mass production industries
that Marx so admired - were ever revolutionary, if they ever were
capable of being revolutionary as a class, not as working people.
Working people may become radicalized. What I'm talking about is the
view that the proletariat, compactly unified as a class, within the womb
of capitalism, will destroy the capitalist social order through the very
extension of capitalism. In fact the very extension of capitalism is
destroying exactly that class which exhibits the only good promise of
any kind of revolutionary, or at least insurrectionary, opposition to
capital.
K.I.O.: There are some interesting developments going on in science and
philosophy (specifically in biology), new ways of analysing cooperation
in nature. There's talk of a paradigmatic shift and new ways of
analysing things in philosophy. For example, David Bohm has written a
book on the theory of "implicate order". It almost seems as if all these
little pieces are trying to pull together and create something new, but
what are the prospects of that happening?
Murray Bookchin: Well, I believe that it is essential, first of all, to
develop a grounding in something more than public opinion, notably the
idea that capital punishment is good on Tuesday because 51% of the
people are for it or it's bad on Wednesday because 51% of the people are
against it. This relativistic ethics is totally lacking in any substance
or meaning. So I think ethics has to be grounded in something that's
objective. The Greeks tried to do it by basing it in nature and what
they thought was some concept of natural law or nature philosophy.
Ecology is beginning that project again - looking for something in which
to objectively base a concept or the good, of the virtuous - some
criteria of what constitutes right and wrong that is not merely subject
to the vicissitudes of "What's good for me is good for me and what's
good for you is good for you (a purely functional and privatistic
morality)."
I have developed in my own writings an approach to ethics which is the
very opposite of the Victorian conception of nature. The Victorian
conception of nature was that nature is a realm of cruelty - as though
nature had any morality - that nature is stingy, that nature is
blind-mute and necessitarian-and that society is the realm of reason,
and of freedom. The necessitarian concept of nature is that technology
is the realm of emancipation, in contrast to the scarce resources or
stinginess of nature. The ecological approach, on the other hand, says
that nature is neither moral, nor cruel, nor any of these things. On the
contrary, nature is fecund (prolific, fertile, fertilizing - ed.), ever
innovative, a realm of chance and complexity, of ecosystems that succeed
one upon the other. And you can grade, so to speak, society out of
nature and you can develop an ethics that is continuous with nature.
I can go into that in very great detail, and it would require a whole
separate discussion to indicate how one can overcome the dualisms that
exist between mind and body between society and nature, in which the two
are placed in opposition to each other. What markedly distinguishes a
human society from an animal and plant community is that you don't have
institutions that make it possible for Nicholas the II to become Czar of
Russia, even though intellectually and psychologically he wasn't
equipped to run a post office, or for Louis the XVII to become anything
more than an ordinary locksmith and have control over the destinies of
millions of people.
So the distinction between society and animal and plant communities must
be made, but I can see how, through the mediation of a mother-child
relationship (why only mother-child?-ed.), society begins to take root
in the protracted infancy of the young. Here you develop sociation. This
is a distinctively human attribute which leads ultimately to the
consolidation of family relationships, initially around the mother, and
after extending to society at large. So the origins of society are not
each against all as Hobbes would have contended or as many "rugged
individualists" do. The origins of society are above all in cooperation,
in participation and in sharing and caring.
So I think these dualisms can be overcome through historical
perspective. Mind cannot be separated from body because mind emerges
from body. In fact, there's a natural history of development of mind
from simple, reactive cells to nerve networks and the development of
complex nerve systems, and finally to different forms of brains and
their integration.
So I don't find it necessary to deal with a chasm between mind and
nature because I see mind emerging from nature. There's no need to work
with a dualistic conception. My image of nature is not one of stingy,
cruel, blind nature that has to be conquered but, on the contrary, a
fecund nature that forever gives rise to greater complexity and, in
giving rise to ever greater complexity, opens up new evolutionary
pathways in which animals and plants, however germinally (and I don't
want to impute anthropomorphically will and choice-but something like
will and choice) participate in evolutionary development. So that you
don't have merely natural selection. What you have is the participation
of species in their own evolution. Evolution is an active process that
comes as much from the species themselves as from genetic chance or
mutations.
All of which leads us to the idea that germinal freedom emerges from
nature. Not freedom as we know it, where we exercise choice, will, and
conscious decision, but a germinal freedom in that opportunities are
created in which animals participate in their own selection and in some
sense select themselves for survival. It's not only a question of
survival in nature, it's a question of development and growth and
complexity. Well, from that standpoint, I can already begin to see that
freedom is a theme in evolution no less significant than complexity;
that the development of a nervous system is a theme in evolution; that
consciousness or the movement toward consciousness is a theme in
evolution, and that animal and plant evolution grades into social
evolution. So it is out of that that I very strongly feel a ground is
created for ethics. I'm not saying nature is ethical. We are ethical.
But the grounding for an ethics can be explored: freedom is a theme in
the evolution of life. It's not just an idealistic goal.
What disturbs me about many of the eco-philosophies that are emerging
now is that they are structured around systems theory. I regard systems
theory as very valuable, but it's largely reductionist and I've already
stated some of my criticisms of systems theory - it's really a corporate
theory in some respects. Which is not to say that systems theory is
erroneous, provided it simply colonizes a terrain which lends itself to
systems analysis. But to imperialize it and say that it is the totality
of everything is as unsettling to me and disturbing as to claim that
passive-receptive epistemology or Taoism is the alpha and omega of
eco-philosophy.
What I'm beginning to see is many well-meaning ecologists making use of
systems theory as their methadology and their paradigm, using the
passive receptive mentality of: "Don't interfere - lay back. Let nature
go on its own. Any type of technology is interfering with nature." I
believe that human beings can self-consciously intervene in nature
without trying to dominate it. They can act as products of nature, as
self-conscious nature, able to facilitate the evolutionary process of
complexity and spontaneous development going alone with the grain, so to
speak, of natural evolution.
So my eco-philosophy, if I may use that word, is somewhat different from
many of the other eco-philosophies that are around. What's important is
that people feel the need for an eco-philosophy, and it's not coming
from the philosophers, it's coming from the scientists - oddly enough.
They need it, and it's ironic that philosophy, which denigrates nature
and regards it as archaic, is now confronting a scientific community
that is increasingly turning to philosophy or making up its own
philosophy. And if we can't make up a radical philosophy, then you might
get very reactionary ones, including fantastic ones - like "blood and
soil" and the "selfish gene", and like the views expressed in E O.
Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
K.I.O: One of the interesting things that a friend was telling me is
that many of the "new age" and feminist spiritual communities of the
20's in Germany went along with the Nazi's mysticism.
MURRAY BOOKCHlN: That troubles me immensely since I have a great deal to
do with Germany and I've done a lot of reading into their past. The
attempt has been also to impute that tendency to the Greens in Germany
and I regard that as grotesque simplification of what happened in
Germany. For one thing the Vandervogel divided completely. Some elements
went to the fascists and others went to the socialists. Some became
reactionaries and some became revolutionaries.
KIO: What was the Vandervogel?
MB: The Vandervogel was "wandering birds". It was a youth movement that
developed earlier on in the 20th century which was suffused with the
romantic love of nature, collective living, living close to the natural
world, trying to discover within oneself intuitive sentiments and an
aversion to capitalism. It's very one-sided to see in these movements
nothing more than a drift towards an organicism - a people's community
mentality that must lead to fascism with its blood and soil mythos. By
no means did such a movement have to go in that direction and by no
means did the movement consistently go in that direction. Many people in
the Vandervogel movement were later to feed into the nature philosophies
of Marxists like Ernst Bloch or into essentially anarchists like Gustave
Landauer. They didn't all become Nazis.
In fact, Nazism grew out more of the 1st World War French comradeship of
soldiers in battle. That's what Hitler really regarded as community, a
community of warriors in the trenches. Most tried to avail themselves of
the organic drift in German thought and in German poetry and in the
German romantic tradition, even going back as far as Holderlin and Hegel
and Schelling, but Hitler himself was a brute and he used anything he
could find including, and may I say this very markedly, socialist ideas.
The Nazi flag was a red flag with a swastika on it, just as Mussolini
adopted the black shirt because of the popularity of anarchism in Italy.
They were called "blackshirts" The choice of the black shirt was an
attempt to identify with the syndicalist tendencies of Italian workers
and anarchist sentiments, so what does that mean, that anarchism leads
to fascism? I can give a better case of the fact that socialism and
social democracy leads to fascism than the fact that the German romantic
tradition led into fascism.
Hitler called his party the National Socialist German Workers Party.
They used the expression of the social democracy, 'un camerade'. They
used the mass mobilization techniques of social democracy. In fact
Hitler was boggled when he first came to Vienna by the great serried
ranks of workers marching with red flags in Vienna and was inspired by
that to finally create the whole theatre for the Nuremburg rallies. His
program was anti-capitalist. He adopted the language of the socialist
movement. Shall I now say that Marxism and fascism are equivalent?
KIO: One could.
MB: I don't believe that Marx was a fascist. I don't think he was trying
to lay the groundwork for fascism. By the same token I don't believe
that Schelling was a fascist or that the Vandervogel movement was laying
the groundwork for fascism. This is utter nonsense. Besides Hitler was
cynical about all of this. He used every idea he could find and patched
it together into an eclectic hodge-podge and within the Nazi Party, this
produced a split led by Gregor Strasser. He split the Nazi Party and
attacked it for accommodating itself to Prussian Junkers and the
capitalists, and demanded that the party follow through on a social
program. Of course Hitler purged the stormtroopers because the
bourgeoisie and the Junkers were afraid of this strong trip or movement
which was committed more to the socialism than the racism and blood and
soil mythology of fascism.
So this is pure rubbish. Why don't they remember the extent to which you
can suck Hitler out of socialism and even Mussolini out or anarchism?
Mussolini regarded Proudhon as a teacher. I'm not saying that anarchism
or socialism led into Nazism. But I also insist where do people get off
claiming that the German romantic movement or the German Vandervogel
movement and the love of nature movements in Germany fed into Nazism?
Why are they so selective? Why don't they look at their own ideologies
and find the extent to which these feed into fascism, and how much more
compelling a case can be made for that? It infuriates me because the
German Greens are being guilted all over the place because of their
ecological perspective. And I think that this is the crudest kind of,
not only reductionism, but vulgarization of the extremely complex
history of Germany and of the extremely complex role that communitarian
and ecological outlooks have played in the politics of the 2Oth century.
KIO: In North America the Green movement seems to be a mixed bag. I know
that in Canada, and this is true elsewhere, there are a hell of a lot of
careerists who get attracted to Green politics like flies to a corpse.
And there are a lot of technocratic drifts within it too. What do you
see emerging in North American - or more broadly in the world - around
the Green movement? What accounts for its complexity and its
divergencies?
MB: Let me first of all explain what I mean by Green politics because I
don't mean parliamentary politics and I don't believe in capitulating to
the state or trying to operate within it. That is a great mistake. I
believe in a libertarian politics. What I'm saying basically is that
anarcho-syndicalism can no longer suffice to explain and to mobilize the
forces today that will change capitalism and in my opinion hopefully rid
us of this system entirely.
What do I mean by politics? I go back first of all to the Greek meaning
of politics. I'm not talking of statecraft; statecraft is operating as a
party within the state with the view toward having control of the state.
When I use the word politics, I go back to the original Hellenic meaning
of the word polis, the Athenian polis.
I beg people not to remind me of what I already know; it was
patriarchal; it was militaristic; it included a slave society and it was
also often very parochial. When I talk of politics in the Athenian
sense, I talk of the best features, the fact that citizens participated
in a face to face democracy in Athens, made decisions, had a militia
system, insofar as they were involved in anything military, brought
their own arms and had a system of rotation. These are all libertarian
notions. So when I talk of politics, I talk of politics in the sense of
polis and community, decentralized, confederal, built around rotation,
built around sortition and hopefully approximating consensus as much as
possible -- in which you have an active citizen body managing its own
affairs. That is what politics means to me. When I talk of a libertarian
politics, I mean literally that, a politics that is not only democratic
but libertarian and structured around a decentralized society without
private ownership, in which you have the collectivization and, above
all, the municipalization of the economy.
I also believe that there has been a very marked failure to separate
politics from statecraft and that, unfortunately, many very well meaning
comrades have gotten the two contused; I think it is very important for
us to separate the two. I would never have entered into the Peoples
Front government as the CNT did in 1936. But, by the same token, I
believe that on a local level, one should try and create again, restore
and recover community structures, neighborhood structures - citizens'
councils and citizens' assemblies-and try to form a real underpinnings
for managing the community. So, I would vote on the local but not on the
national level.
I have a disagreement with the German Greens in that they take their
activities in the German Bundestag seriously. I find that when they
perform theatre out there it's amusing; I can be delighted by it but, if
they are out to take over the German Bundestag I think that it is naive
and I think at the same time it leads to the politics of collaboration
with the social democrats and the liberals. That's not my politics at
all. There are tendencies in the Greens that are very aware of that
danger and really oppose it. Many of them are the more radical and
libertarian tendencies among the fundamentalists in the Greens: I have
great respect for them.
Today we cannot form a syndicalist movement in the factories for the
fact the factories are disappearing, if not entirely, at least
diminishing to a great extent and the workforce is being replaced
enormously by machines; this is the locus classicus of socialist and
anarchist revolutions. I have to ask myself what is the other sphere in
which libertarians participate, and it has always been the communal
sphere. Long before syndicalism emerged in the anarchist tradition,
there was a communalist tradition which dates back to Proudhon and which
appears in Kropotkin and I don't know why that's been so completely
neglected. So if I'm to take that seriously and update it up into our
own time and explore its logic completely, then I have to ask myself:
what can I do to recover the neighborhood and the community'? How can I
empower the citizens to take control of their community at the base
grassroots level, not enter into the houses of Parliament, the Bundestag
or the American Congress (as though you have a fat chance of doing it
anyway and thank God we don't) [and] not to develop the bad habits of
parliamentarism, but to try to create neighborhood assemblies such as we
have in Burlington - town meeting type forms - councils in
neighborhoods-confederate them, and confederate the communities into a
dual power against the centralized state on the basis of libertarian
tradition?
The democratic revolutions have been misnamed bourgeois revolutions. The
French Revolution was not fought to establish capitalism, capitalism fed
on the French Revolution; it used it; it opposed the French Revolution
like sin. It was for a constitutional monarchy. Their model was England,
not America. In the U. S., there was a tremendous conflict between the
farmers on the one side and the commercial interests and aristocrats on
the Atlantic seaboard, on the other side. Dan Shay's rebellion in 1787
clinched the new constitution and enabled the Articles or Confederation
but the new constitution still retained its libertarian features.
I'm for democratizing the republic and radicalizing the democracy, and
doing that on the grass roots level: that will involve establishing
libertarian institutions which are totally consistent with the American
tradition. We can't go back to the Russian Revolution or the Spanish
revolution any more. Those revolutions are alien to people in North
America. You can't translate Committees of Correspondence into Bolshevik
Parties. You can't translate town meetings into Soviets. You can't
translate a republican or democratic system or a republican system
permeated by democracy into a centralized state or a constitutional
monarchy or a proletarian dictatorship. You can't translate this
republican system into a proletarian dictatorship, if you're a Marxist,
on the one side, or into a syndicalist society, if you're on the other,
especially at a time when the trade unions in America are dying out on
just the bread and butter issues. I believe we have to start speaking in
the vocabulary of the democratic revolutions. We have to unearth and
enlarge their libertarian content. I see no other answer- strategically,
tactically, politically, economically to the problems that we face
today. We can't live in the past and simply repeat the traditional
slogans of the great workers' movements that are gone, and will not
reappear again, in spite of Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia. They're
not products of the enlightenment in the way the socialist and anarchist
movements were in the 19th century. The latter came out of the French
Revolution and out of the American Revolution.
Now we live under the shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution. The 20th
century is simply living in the darkness of that Bolshevik success which
was our greatest failure. It's given us the cold wars, paralyzed all
radical movements. You take sides: one side of the cold war or the
other. We have to spring that trap and we have to break out of it.
Looking largely at where we were wrong, I might venture the opinion that
capitalism is not a system that follows the old dialectical cyclical
forms of emergence, then growth and then decay. Capitalism is a cancer.
It has always been a cancer. It's the greatest disease society ever
suffered.
The Luddites were really right, that doesn't mean that I want to go back
to the stone age, but they were right all the time when they tried to
stop modern machinery because modern machinery, in the hands of
capitalism, meant the enslavement of society in the long run. In their
day the [Luddites] showed more insight than we have ever given them
credit for. The attempts on the part of the English squirearchy to keep
the British farmers on the land and to keep them out of the hands of the
capitalists -- however self-serving they were -- was at least something
to put a brake on capitalism.
Capitalism has been permitted to run rampant; it was originally
designated as progressive and, in its progressive phase, it was going to
build up technology. It was going to create the proletariat which would
make the revolution. In contrast to that, a rebellious peasantry is
really staging all the revolutions we have today in the third world.
Irony of ironies! Bakunin should be alive today to mock the Marxist
paradigm.
Capitalism is a social cancer. It has always been a social cancer. It is
the disease of society. It is the malignancy of society. And I do not
hesitate to say that anything that could have stopped its development --
short of something even worse than capitalism -- would have been a
desideratum. I have reflected upon many positions I have held in the
past as a Marxist, and to some extent even as an anarchist, and I have
recognized that two centuries of radicals have been misreading the
history of the modern world. Just as the women's movement has had to go
back thousands of years to recover where we went wrong with the
emergence of patriarchy, so I realize where we went wrong with the
emergence of capitalism. We went wrong hundreds of years ago. But we
have been working with Victorian ideologies about the progressive role
of capitalism, about the progressive role of technology, and the
progressive role of the proletariat. All of these notions have been
wrong, which is not to say, again, that I want to go back to the stone
age. It is not to say that I am opposed to technology. What I am opposed
to is the capitalist market society which I believe is vicious - a
cancer in society from the very word go - that has always broken through
where other societies, traditional societies which always cried to stop
it, have decayed. It's a saprophytic organism - like a fungus which has
only been able to grow and break through where traditional forms have
been decaying, which has lived off the root of traditional societies It
has never been a wholesome illuminating light in the world today. This
has caused me to reflect upon a hundred and fifty years of revolutionary
thinking and to ask myself some very far-reaching questions.
[Now] I regard capitalism as destructive only in the sense that it will
tear everything down (which is not what we [Marxists] mean by
self-destructing; we thought that it would create forces in opposition
to it and would hold back technological growth). On the contrary,
capitalism has gone mad technologically and it is promoting a
technological growth that the world has never seen before; it s going
out into outer space. But in addition, I see that the so-called
bourgeois revolutions were not bourgeois revolutions. The French
Revolution was sin to the bourgeoisie; it was a constitutional
monarchist bourgeoisie which opposed the sans coulottes. In America the
American Revolution horrified Hamilton, who cried to establish (and he
was the dissenting voice of the American bourgeoisie) a monarchy and
warned Washington to become the first King George. Washington refused,
being the Virginian aristocrat he was, and insisted upon a republican
system of virtue, and thus attested this development towards royalism in
America. The constitution that was framed was framed, not by a rapacious
bourgeoisie, but in great part by agrarian classes. Even if many of them
were involved with capitalism, they were still agrarian classes, a
yeomanry, as well as Virginia aristocrats who had non-capitalist values,
however much they cried to contain the lower classes.
So now I realize that we have to elicit the libertarian dimension out of
these revolutions, because I do not believe that the bourgeoisie
existing now could ever make a Spanish revolution possible again. It
wouldn't last six hours. Forget about four days. They'll come out with
bazookas and missiles; they'll come out with their Green Berets, their
radar and their bombers and wipe out everything in just a matter of
days, just as they did in Chile, with not even that sophisticated an
army. They could have settled the Vietnam war with hydrogen bombs if
they had wanted to, if they were not concerned with public opinion or
domestic opinion. But what are we saying when we say that? We say that
their own republican institutions paralyze their operations, and their
own democracy and republican institutions inhibit them from acting
freely. Then they'll have to get rid of these republican institutions
and democratic institutions; our job is to stop that, and to enlarge
them and bring out their libertarian dimension on a municipal level and
finally create a counter-force of an empowered citizenry on a local
level and a confederal system of relationships. I'm not talking of
parochial isolated cities, but of a confederal dual power that will
oppose the centralized power in the name of the highest ideals of the
revolutionary era, which spans from the English Revolution up to the
Spanish Revolution. Are people prepared to think that far ahead and to
re-evaluate this whole experience? Or am I going to be ten years behind
or ten years ahead so that nobody can accept that? That is a dilemma I'm
personally faced with when I voice these opinions.
The Greens in Germany represent a promising development not in terms of
their intent to take power or function as a party. What is amazing about
the German Greens is the factionalization going on over the various
issues I'm discussing implicitly. They're not as conscious, I suspect,
of these issues as I am. Rather they're not as conscious of these issues
as I think they should be. But they intuitively feel that these are the
issues they are debating, and the various factions inside the Greens
have turned the Greens into the most radical movement imaginable; I
mean, that I have seen in Europe or any place. When one talks of Greens
in Canada or the U.S., remember that the Greens in Germany came out of
an extraparliamentary movement and had probably reached its limits. How
far can an extraparliamentary movement go? It either has to go into some
kind of syndicalist movement and stabilize itself as the CNT did in
Spain; or it has to go into insurrection and imagine a Germany in
insurrection! So, they have to move somewhere, or else their
extraparliamentary movement would dissolve back into social democracy or
become demoralized, as so many extraparliamentary movements have in
North America. So, if it has to move towards a political sphere, the
question is what kind of political sphere will it move toward? Was it
going to be authoritarian, liberal or libertarian? They chose a
libertarian direction, by and large, and now they're finding out whether
or not that libertarian direction is going to be preserved with its
rotation of representatives, and with its very close ties to the
extraparliamentary movement. Or are they going to move into a strict
statecraft parliamentarian form? Those are the fights that are being
fought out there.
In the U.S. and Canada, all this is coming from the top down. Six people
get together and say, "Look, the German Greens are so successful." They
don't know why. They don't understand that hundreds and thousands of
people were brought into motion fighting nuclear reactors, fighting
missiles, fighting citizens' initiative movements, involving many people
who are closer to the Chnstian Democrats than the Social Democrats, and
that the Greens came out of that movement. Here, without any social
movement, they organize a party and they make it as authoritarian as
possible, and they start dictating to the people what kind of
parliamentarian movement they're going to create. I think it's terribly
important that libertarians initiate such developments on the local
level or else this whole thrust will be taken over by authoritarians, or
by Marxists who shrewdly take over quite frequently what we often
initially start. So, I think it's very important for us to think these
things out, and to talk them out, and to weigh them carefully, or else
we'll be dreaming the old daydreams of Spain, and the Paris commune of
1848, or Bakunin on the barricades, or Kropotkin in Petrograd and, in
the meantime, history will just pass us by.
KI0: I was just wondering briefly what kinds of libertarian trends you
have seen in Germany?
MB: Well the most amazing things that I have seen in Germany are some of
the people in the Greens and the people that I've encountered or spoken
to, and the kinds of discussions that have taken place regarding the
attempt to develop a libertarian political movement. I've seen this most
notably among the Remer Greens and the city council of Frankfurt. They
are fundis (as the more radical Greens are called) with a very strong
libertarian proclivity who want to remain independent of the Social
Democrats, and who are eager to develop their own libertarian form of
organization with close connections with the extraparliamentary
movement. A wonderful development has been the transformation of a
Leninist/Maoist like Ebermann of the Communist League in Northern
Germany and his colleagues who have undergone great transformations. And
I've had discussions with them. One of them told me, Two years ago, what
you said would have been anathema, but now I agree with 90% of what you
say," and they've largely abandoned all their Leninist principles, and
have moved in a highly libertarian direction. These are, by the way,
hardline Maoists who were in the workers' movement in Hamburg where you
have shipyard workers, you know, real heavy proletarian Red Hamburg --
which Hitler only visited once and said, "Damn Hamburg, if I could only
get it out of Deutschland, I would be delighted." He would have wanted
to surgically excise it. These were strongholds of the socialist and
communist parties of the 1930's.
That has been terribly encouraging. There has been an elaborate network
established in Germany through this extraparliamentary movement which is
very encouraging, which I hope will act as a correction of the Greens.
Let me emphasize that if the Greens go with the Social Democrats, they
will follow a logic that is very tragic. They will lose their identity.
A very important thing that I also learned is that politics is an
education; it's not just power. The attempt to develop a libertarian
politics means to educate people not to take power but to educate people
to empower themselves. That's why I emphasize the local level not the
national level. My concern is with the communalist, community oriented
feel and I'm simply trying to follow out the logic of that as it applies
to the 1980's.
KIO: Hasn't city government become really stratified in the last ten
years.
MB: Yes, the state has appeared everywhere. The question now is to try
to disengage cities and towns from the state by mutually confederating
with each other and developing some sort of network where resources can
be moved back and forth. I'm not looking for a stable situation where
you have municipal government co-existing with the state government. I'm
concerned with developing local institutions - neighborhood assemblies,
neighborhood councils that will be thrown into dynamic opposition to the
centralized state. My most important concern is to stop the
centralization of economic and political power, just like the Luddites
tried to stop industrialization, not because they were against machines,
but because they were against wage labour and the factory system, and
realized that it was threatening their way of life. By the same token,
my concern is not to establish a municipal confederation which exists
side by side with the powerful state. My concern is to see that the
municipal level act as a brake upon the centralization of the state and
ultimately lead to the abolition of the centralized state in a free
municipal confederation of towns and cities and villages structured in a
libertarian form.
You know this is an ideal that is ages old. It belonged to the early
Swiss confederacy, not the present one. It was an ideal that existed in
New England. Farmers in New Hampshire and Vermont and the upper valley
tried to establish a republic of towns and cities during the American
Revolution, and in the aftermath of the American Revolution against the
federal centralized state. These are notions that Americans can
understand and that have meaning in contrast with the old socialist
notions of nationalizing the economy. Remember too that there is an
economic program of municipalization, not just collectivization. The
township should have control over the land; it should have control over
the industries. Collectivization itself can lead many different
directions. So, in Spain, the coordinating role of the trade unions was
not without its centralistic features. Please let's not kid ourselves
about the Spanish industrial collectives during the revolution in Spain.
You can also have competition between collectivized industries in a
market economy. Municipalization means the municipality controls it
through neighborhood organizations or through town meetings.
So remember that I'm not only talking about a certain kind of
libertarian politics. I'm also talking about municipalist economics.
Many people think these ideas are new to me, but they're not. In the
last issue of Anarchos, published in 1971, I wrote a piece called Spring
Offensives and Summer Vacations. Those were the days in the 60's when
you had spring offensives. And I mocked the idea that they went on
offensives in the spring, then vacated for the summer and everything
died. But what I advanced in that editorial - and I'm talking of ideas
advanced almost 15 years ago-was the commune of communes based upon the
American libertarian tradition that emerged out of the revolution. There
I wrote that it's necessary for anarchists to intervene in local
politics and create new kinds of local Structures - municipal structures
such as neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, neighborhood councils -
to take control of municipal governments and confederate them nationally
and counterpose them to the centralized state. That all appeared in 1971
and someone wrote a reply to me stating that anarchists should never
participate in any elections of any kind and criticized me for holding
that view.
KIO: So, Murray, are you saving that anarchists should run for city
government?
MB: No. I'm saying that city government as you call it, has to be
restructured at the grassroots level. These governments will not really
be governments in the traditional statist form. Therefore what
anarchists should be doing is not hesitating to get involved in local
politics to create forms of organization in which they may run once
they've established these forms or, alternatively, running on a platform
to establish these forms. There are two ways in which you can
participate in the electoral process on a grassroots municipalist level.
One way is to help create these forms, as we've tried to do in
Burlington. We were the ones in Burlington who established the
neighborhood planning assemblies and proposed the idea that led to the
erlabling legislation to establish them in the five wards in Burlington.
We now have five neighborhood assemblies. It was not the socialists who
proposed them. They took the credit for it, but they didn't propose
them. So I'm saying there are two ways in which you can function. One is
to work to create these assemblies; the other is to run, or have people
run, or support people who will run with a view towards establishing
these forms or organizations on a municipal level. But we have to
libertarianize our communities to create and institutionalize grassroots
democracy that can counteract the centralization of power, cooperatively
and politically.
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