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Title: What is Communalism? Author: Murray Bookchin Language: en Topics: communalism, democracy Source: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/CMMNL2.MCW.html
Seldom have socially important words become more confused and divested
of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two centuries ago,
it is often forgotten, "democracy" was deprecated by monarchists and
republicans alike as "mob rule." Today, democracy is hailed as
"representative democracy," an oxymoron that refers to little more than
a republican oligarchy of the chosen few who ostensibly speak for the
powerless many.
"Communism," for its part, once referred to a cooperative society that
would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in which each
contributed to the social labor fund according to his or her ability and
received the means of life according to his or her needs. Today,
"communism" is associated with the Stalinist gulag and wholly rejected
as totalitarian. Its cousin, "socialism" -- which once denoted a
politically free society based on various forms of collectivism and
equitable material returns for labor -- is currently interchangeable
with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.
During the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political spectrum
has shifted ideologically to the right, "anarchism" itself has not been
immune to redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism is being
divested of its social ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy, an
emphasis that is draining it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite
individualism -- marked by an advocacy of lifestyle changes, the
cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and even an embrace of outright
mysticism -- has become increasingly prominent. This personalistic
"lifestyle anarchism" is steadily eroding the socialistic core of
anarchist concepts of freedom.
Let me stress that in the British and American social tradition,
autonomy and freedom are not equivalent terms. By insisting the need to
eliminate personal domination, autonomy focuses on the individual as the
formative component and locus of society. By contrast, freedom, despite
its looser usages, denotes the absence of domination in society, of
which the individual is part. This contrast becomes very important when
individualist anarchists equate collectivism as such with the tyranny of
the community over its members.
Today, if an anarchist theorist like L. Susan Brown can assert that "a
group is a collection of individuals, no more and no less," rooting
anarchism in the abstract individual, we have reason to be concerned.
Not that this view is entirely new to anarchism; various anarchist
historians have described it as implicit in the libertarian outlook.
Thus the individual appears ab novo, endowed with natural rights and
bereft of roots in society or historical development.[1]
But whence does this "autonomous" individual derive? What is the basis
for its "natural rights," beyond a priori premises and hazy intuitions?
What role does historical development play in its formation? What social
premises give birth to it, sustain it, indeed nourish it? How can a
"collection of individuals" institutionalizeitself such as to give rise
to something more than an autonomy that consists merely in refusing to
impair the "liberties" of others -- or "negative liberty," as Isaiah
Berlin called it in contradistinction to "positive liberty," which is
substantivefreedom, in our case constructed along socialistic lines?
In the history of ideas, "autonomy," referring to strictly personal
"self-rule," found its ancient apogee in the imperial Roman cult of
libertas. During the rule of the Julian-Claudian Caesars, the Roman
citizen enjoyed a great deal of autonomy to indulge his own desires --
and lusts -- without reproval from any authority, provided that he did
not interfere with the business and the needs of the state. In the more
theoretically developed liberal tradition of John Locke and John Stuart
Mill, autonomy acquired a more expansive sense that was opposed
ideologically to excessive state authority. During the nineteenth
century, if there was any single subject that gained the interest of
classical liberals, it was political economy, which they often conceived
not only as the study of goods and services, but also as a system of
morality. Indeed, liberal thought generally reduced the social to the
economic. Excessive state authority was opposed in favor of a presumed
economic autonomy. Ironically, liberals often invoked the word freedom,
in the sense of "autonomy," as they do to the present day.[2]
Despite their assertions of autonomy and distrust of state authority,
however, these classical liberal thinkers did not in the last instance
hold to the notion that the individual is completely free from lawful
guidance. Indeed, their interpretation of autonomy actually presupposed
quite definite arrangements beyond the individual -- notably, the laws
of the marketplace. Individual autonomy to the contrary, these laws
constitute a social organizing system in which all "collections of
individuals" are held under the sway of the famous "invisible hand" of
competition. Paradoxically, the laws of the marketplace override the
exercise of "free will" by the same sovereign individuals who otherwise
constitute the "collection of individuals."
No rationally formed society can exist without institutions and if a
society as a "collection of individuals, no more and no less" were ever
to emerge, it would simply dissolve. Such a dissolution, to be sure,
would never happen in reality. The liberals, nonetheless, can cling to
the notion of a "free market" and "free competition" guided by the
"inexorable laws" of political economy.
Alternatively, freedom, a word that shares etymological roots with the
German Freiheit (for which there is no equivalent in Romance languages),
takes its point of departure not from the individual but from the
community or, more broadly, from society. In the last century and early
in the present one, as the great socialist theorists further
sophisticated ideas of freedom, the individual and his or her
development were consciously intertwined with social evolution --
specifically, the institutions that distinguish society from mere animal
aggregations.
What made their focus uniquely ethical was the fact that as social
revolutionaries they asked the key question -- What constitutes a
rational society? -- a question that abolishes the centrality of
economics in a free society. Where liberal thought generally reduced the
social to the economic, various socialisms (apart from Marxism), among
which Kropotkin denoted anarchism the "left wing," dissolved the
economic into the social.[3]
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Enlightenment thought and
its derivatives brought the idea of the mutability of institutions to
the foreground of social thought, the individual, too, came to be seen
as mutable. To the socialistic thinkers of the period, a "collection"
was a totally alien way of denoting society; they properly considered
individual freedom to be congruent with social freedom and, very
significantly, they defined freedom as such as an evolving, as well as a
unifying, concept.
In short, both society and the individual were historicized in the best
sense of this term: as an ever-developing, self-generative and creative
process in which each existed within and through the other. Hopefully,
this historicization would be accompanied by ever-expanding new rights
and duties. The slogan of the First International, in fact, was the
demand, "No rights without duties, no duties without rights" -- a demand
that later appeared on the mastheads of anarchosyndicalist periodicals
in Spain and elsewhere well into the present century.
Thus, for classical socialist thinkers, to conceive of the individual
without society was as meaningless as to conceive of society without
individuals. They sought to realize both in rational institutional
frameworks that fostered the greatest degree of free expression in every
aspect of social life.
Individualism, as conceived by classical liberalism, rested on a fiction
to begin with. Its very presupposition of a social "lawfulness"
maintained by marketplace competition was far removed from its myth of
the totally sovereign, "autonomous" individual. With even fewer
presuppositions to support itself, the woefully undertheorized work of
Max Stirner shared a similar disjunction: the ideological disjunction
between the ego and society.
The pivotal issue that reveals this disjunction -- indeed, this
contradiction -- is the question of democracy. By democracy, of course,
I do not mean "representative government" in any form, but rather
face-to-face democracy. With regard to its origins in classical Athens,
democracy as I use it is the idea of the direct management of the polis
by its citizenry in popular assemblies -- which is not to downplay the
fact that Athenian democracy was scarred by patriarchy, slavery, class
rule and the restriction of citizenship to males of putative Athenian
birth. What I am referring to is an evolving tradition of institutional
structures, not a social "model."[4] Democracy generically defined,
then, is the direct management of society in face-to-face assemblies --
in which policyis formulated by the resident citizenry and
administration is executed by mandated and delegated councils.
Libertarians commonly consider democracy, even in this sense, as a form
of "rule" -- since in making decisions, a majority view prevails and
thus "rules" over a minority. As such, democracy is said to be
inconsistent with a truly libertarian ideal. Even so knowledgeable a
historian of anarchism as Peter Marshall observes that, for anarchists,
"the majority has no more right to dictate to the minority, even a
minority of one, than the minority to the majority."[5] Scores of
libertarians have echoed this idea time and again.
What is striking about assertions like Marshall's is their highly
pejorative language. Majorities, it would seem, neither "decide" nor
"debate": rather, they "rule," "dictate," "command," "coerce" and the
like. In a free society that not only permitted, but fosteredthe fullest
degree of dissent, whose podiums at assemblies and whose media were open
to the fullest expression of all views, whose institutions were truly
forums for discussion -- one may reasonably ask whether such a society
would actually "dictate" to anyone when it had to arrive at a decision
that concerned the public welfare.
How, then, would society make dynamic collective decisions about public
affairs, aside from mere individual contracts? The only collective
alternative to majority voting as a means of decision-making that is
commonly presented is the practice of consensus. Indeed, consensus has
even been mystified by avowed "anarcho-primitivists," who consider Ice
Age and contemporary "primitive" or "primal" peoples to constitute the
apogee of human social and psychic attainment. I do not deny that
consensus may be an appropriate form of decision-making in small groups
of people who are thoroughly familiar with one another. But to examine
consensus in practical terms, my own experience has shown me that when
larger groups try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges
them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their
decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre
decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted --
precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from
voting on that issue. More disturbingly, I have found that it permits an
insidious authoritarianism and gross manipulations -- even when used in
the name of autonomy or freedom.
To take a very striking case in point: the largest consensus-based
movement (involving thousands of participants) in recent memory in the
United States was the Clamshell Alliance, which was formed to oppose the
Seabrook nuclear reactor in the mid-1970s in New Hampshire. In her
recent study of the movement, Barbara Epstein has called the Clamshell
the "first effort in American history to base a mass movement on
nonviolent direct action" other than the 1960s civil rights movement. As
a result of its apparent organizational success, many other regional
alliances against nuclear reactors were formed throughout the United
States.
I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell Alliance,
consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by members of a
dubiously "anarchic" commune that was located in Montague,
Massachusetts. This small, tightly knit faction, unified by its own
hidden agendas, was able to manipulate many Clamshell members into
subordinating their goodwill and idealistic commitments to those
opportunistic agendas. The de facto leaders of the Clamshell overrode
the rights and ideals of the innumerable individuals who entered it and
undermined their morale and will.
In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision,
minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced
to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would
essentially amount to a one-person veto. This practice, called "standing
aside" in American consensus processes, all too often involved
intimidation of the dissenters, to the point that they completely
withdrew from the decision-making process, rather than make an honorable
and continuing expression of their dissent by voting, even as a
minority, in accordance with their views. Having withdrawn, they ceased
to be political beings -- so that a "decision" could be made. More than
one "decision" in the Clamshell Alliance was made by pressuring
dissenters into silence and, through a chain of such intimidations,
"consensus" was ultimately achieved only after dissenting members
nullified themselves as participants in the process.
On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect
of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the passionate dialogue
that still persists even after a minority accedes temporarily to a
majority decision, was replaced in the Clamshell by dull monologues --
and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of consensus. In majority
decision-making, the defeated minority can resolve to overturn a
decision on which they have been defeated -- they are free to openly and
persistently articulate reasoned and potentially persuasive
disagreements. Consensus, for its part, honors no minorities, but mutes
them in favor of the metaphysical "one" of the "consensus" group.
The creative role of dissent, valuable as an ongoing democratic
phenomenon, tends to fade away in the gray uniformity required by
consensus. Any libertarian body of ideas that seeks to dissolve
hierarchy, classes, domination and exploitation by allowing even
Marshall's "minority of one" to block decision-making by the majority of
a community, indeed, of regional and nationwide confederations, would
essentially mutate into a Rousseauean "general will" with a nightmare
world of intellectual and psychic conformity. In more gripping times, it
could easily "force people to be free," as Rousseau put it -- and as the
Jacobins practiced it in 1793-94.
The de facto leaders of the Clamshell were able to get away with their
behavior precisely because the Clamshell was not sufficiently organized
and democratically structured, such that it could countervail the
manipulation of a well-organized few. The de facto leaders were subject
to few structures of accountability for their actions. The ease with
which they cannily used consensus decision-making for their own ends has
been only partly told,[6] but consensus practices finally shipwrecked
this large and exciting organization with its Rousseauean "republic of
virtue." It was also ruined, I may add, by an organizational laxity that
permitted mere passersby to participate in decision-making, thereby
destructuring the organization to the point of invertebracy. It was for
good reason that I and many young anarchists from Vermont who had
actively participated in the Alliance for some few years came to view
consensus as anathema.
If consensus could be achieved without compulsion of dissenters, a
process that is feasible in small groups, who could possibly oppose it
as a decision-making process? But to reduce a libertarian ideal to the
unconditional right of a minority -- let alone a "minority of one" -- to
abort a decision by a "collection of individuals" is to stifle the
dialectic of ideas that thrives on opposition, confrontation and, yes,
decisions with which everyone need not agree and should not agree, lest
society become an ideological cemetery. Which is not to deny dissenters
every opportunity to reverse majority decisions by unimpaired discussion
and advocacy.
I have dwelled on consensus at some length because it constitutes the
usual individualistic alternative to democracy, so commonly counterposed
as "no rule" -- or a free-floating form of personal autonomy -- against
majority "rule." Inasmuch as libertarian ideas in the United States and
Britain are increasingly drifting toward affirmations of personal
autonomy, the chasm between individualism and antistatist collectivism
is becoming unbridgeable, in my view. A personalistic anarchism has
taken deep root among young people today. Moreover, they increasingly
use the word "anarchy" to express not only a personalistic stance, but
also an antirational, mystical, antitechnological and anticivilizational
body of views that makes it impossible for anarchists who anchor their
ideas in socialism to apply the word "anarchist" to themselves without a
qualifying adjective. Howard Ehrlich, one of our ablest and most
concerned American comrades, uses the phrase "social anarchism" as the
title of his magazine, apparently to distinguish his views from an
anarchism that is ideologically anchored in liberalism and possibly
worse.
I would like to suggest that far more than a qualifying adjective is
needed if we are to elaborate our notion of freedom more expansively. It
would be unfortunate indeed if libertarians today had to literally
explain that they believe in a society, not a mere collection of
individuals! A century ago, this belief was presupposed; today, so much
has been stripped away from the collectivistic flesh of classical
anarchism that it is on the verge of becoming a personal life-stage for
adolescents and a fad for their middle-aged mentors, a route to
"self-realization" and the seemingly "radical" equivalent of encounter
groups.
Today, there must be a place on the political spectrum where a body of
anti-authoritarian thought that advances humanity's bitter struggle to
arrive at the realization of its authentic social life -- the famous
"Commune of communes" -- can be clearly articulated institutionally as
well as ideologically. There must be a means by which socially concerned
anti-authoritarians can develop a program and a practice for attempting
to change the world, not merely their psyches. There must be an arena of
struggle that can mobilize people, help them to educate themselves and
develop an anti-authoritarian politics, to use this word in its
classical meaning, indeed that pits a new public sphere against the
State and capitalism.
In short, we must recover not only the socialist dimension of anarchism
but its political dimension: democracy. Bereft of its democratic
dimension and its communal or municipal public sphere, anarchism may
indeed denote little more than a "collection of individuals, no more and
no less." Even anarcho-communism, although it is by far the most
preferable of adjectival modifications of the libertarian ideal,
nonetheless retains a structural vagueness that tells us nothing about
the institutions necessary to expedite a communistic distribution of
goods. It spells out a broad goal, a desideratum -- one, alas, terribly
tarnished by the association of "communism" with Bolshevism and the
state -- but its public sphere and forms of institutional association
remain unclear at best and susceptible to a totalitarian onus at worst.
I wish to propose that the democratic and potentially practicable
dimension of the libertarian goal be expressed as Communalism, a term
that, unlike political terms that once stood unequivocally for radical
social change, has not been historically sullied by abuse. Even ordinary
dictionary definitions of Communalism, I submit, capture to a great
degree the vision of a "Commune of communes" that is being lost by
current Anglo-American trends that celebrate anarchy variously as
"chaos," as a mystical "oneness" with "nature," as self-fulfillment or
as "ecstasy," but above all as personalistic.[7]
Communalism is defined as "a theory or system of government [sic!] in
which virtually autonomous [sic!] local communities are loosely in a
federation."[8] No English dictionary is very sophisticated politically.
This use of the terms "government" and "autonomous" does not commit us
to an acceptance of the State and parochialism, let alone individualism.
Further, federation is often synonymous with confederation, the term I
regard as more consistent with the libertarian tradition. What is
remarkable about this (as yet) unsullied term is its extraordinary
proximity to libertarian municipalism, the political dimension of social
ecology that I have advanced at length elsewhere.
In Communalism, libertarians have an available word that they can enrich
as much by experience as by theory. Most significantly, the word can
express not only what we are against, but also what we are for, namely
the democratic dimension of libertarian thought and a libertarian form
of society. It is a word that is meant for a practice that can tear down
the ghetto walls that are increasingly imprisoning anarchism in cultural
exotica and psychological introversion. It stands in explicit opposition
to the suffocating individualism that sits so comfortably side-by-side
with bourgeois self-centeredness and a moral relativism that renders any
social action irrelevant, indeed, institutionally meaningless.
It is important to emphasize that libertarian municipalism--or
Communalism, as I have called it here--is a developing outlook, a
politics that seeks ultimately to achieve the "Commune of communes." As
such, it tries to provide a directly democratic confederal alternative
to the state and to a centralized bureaucratic society. To challenge the
validity of libertarian municipalism, as many liberals and ecosocialists
have, on the premise that the size of existing urban entities raises an
insurmountable logistical obstacles to its successful practice is to
turn it into a chess "strategy" and freeze it within the given
conditions of society, then tally up debits and credits to determine its
potential for "success," "effectiveness," "high levels of
participation," and the like. Libertarian municipalism is not a form of
social bookkeeping for conditions as they are but rather a
transformative process that starts with what can be changed within
present conditions as a valid point of departure for achieving what
should be in a rational society.
Libertarian municipalism is above all a politics, to use this word in
its original Hellenic sense, that is engaged in the process of remaking
what are now called "electoral constituents" or "taxpayers" into active
citizens, and of remaking what are now urban conglomerations into
genuine communities related to each other through confederations that
would countervail and ultimately challenge the existence of the state.
To see it otherwise is to reduce this multifaceted, processual
development to a caricature. Nor is libertarian municipalism intended as
a substitute for association as such--for the familial and economic
aspects of life--without which human existence is impossible in any
society.[9] It is rather an outlook and a developing practice for
recovering and enlarging on an unprecedented scale what is now a
declining public sphere, one that the state has invaded and in many
cases virtually eliminated.[10] If the large size of municipal entities
and the decline of the public sphere are accepted as unalterable givens,
then we are left with no hope but to work with the given in everysphere
of human activity--in which case, anarchists might as well join with
social-democrats (as quite a few have, for all practical purposes) to
work with and merely modify the state apparatus, the market, and a
commodity system of relationships. Indeed, on the basis of such
commonsensical reasoning, a far stronger argument could be made for
preserving the state, the market, the use of money, and global
corporations than could be made merely for decentralizing urban
agglomerations. In fact, many urban agglomerations are already groaning
physically and logistically under the burden of their size and are
reconstituting themselves into satellite cities before our very eyes,
even though their populations and physical jurisdictions are still
grouped under the name of a single metropolis.
Strangely, many life-style anarchists, who, like New Age visionaries,
have a remarkable ability to imagine changing everything tend to raise
strong objections when they are asked to actually change anything in the
existing society--except to cultivate greater "self-expression," have
more mystical reveries, and turn their anarchism into an art form,
retreating into social quietism. When critics of libertarian
municipalism bemoan the prohibitively large number of people who are
likely to attend municipal assemblies or function as active participants
in them--and question how "practical" such assemblies could be--in large
cities like New York, Mexico City, and Tokyo, may I suggest that a
Communalist approach raises the issue of whether we can indeed change
the existing society at all and achieve the "Commune of communes."
If such a Communalist approach seems terribly formidable, I can only
suspect that for life-style anarchists the battle is already lost. For
my part, if anarchy came to mean little more than an aesthetics of
"self-cultivation," an titillating riot, spraycan graffiti, or the
heroics of personalistic acts nourished by a self-indulgent "imaginary,"
I would have little in common with it. Theatrical personalism became too
much in style when the sixties counterculture turned into the seventies
New Age culture--and became a model for bourgeois fashion designers and
boutiques.
Anarchism is on the retreat today. If we fail to elaborate the
democratic dimension of anarchism, we will miss the opportunity not only
to form a vital movement, but to prepare people for a revolutionary
social praxis in the future. Alas, we are witnessing the appalling
desiccation of a great tradition, such that neo-Situationists,
nihilists, primitivists, antirationalists, anticivilizationists and
avowed "chaotics" are closeting themselves in their egos, reducing
anything resembling public political activity to juvenile antics.
None of which is to deny the importance of a libertarian culture, one
that is aesthetic, playful, and broadly imaginative. The anarchists of
the last century and part of the present one justifiably took pride in
the fact that many innovative artists, particularly painters and
novelists, aligned themselves with anarchic views of reality and
morality. But behavior that verges on a mystification of criminality,
asociality, intellectual incoherence, anti-intellectualism and disorder
for its own sake is simply lumpen. It feeds on the dregs of capitalism
itself. However much such behavior invokes the "rights" of the ego as it
dissolves the political into the personal or inflates the personal into
a transcendental category, it is a priori in the sense that has no
origins outside the mind to even potentially support it. As Bakunin and
Kropotkin argued repeatedly, individuality has never existed apart from
society and the individual's own evolution has been coextensive with
social evolution. To speak of "The Individual" apart from its social
roots and social involvements is as meaningless as to speak of a society
that contains no people or institutions.
Merely to exist, institutions must have form, as I argued some thirty
years ago in my essay "The Forms of Freedom," lest freedom itself --
individual as well as social -- lose its definability. Institutions must
be rendered functional, not abstracted into Kantian categories that
float in a rarefied academic air. They must have the tangibility of
structure, however offensive a term like structure may be to
individualist libertarians: concretely, they must have the means,
policies and experimental praxis to arrive at decisions. Unless everyone
is to be so psychologically homogeneous and society's interests so
uniform in character that dissent is simply meaningless, there must be
room for conflicting proposals, discussion, rational explication and
majority decisions -- in short, democracy.
Like it or not, such a democracy, if it is libertarian, will be
Communalist and institutionalized in such a way that it is face-to-face,
direct, and grassroots, a democracy that advances our ideas beyond
negative liberty to positive liberty. A Communalist democracy obliges us
to develop a public sphere -- and in the Athenian meaning of the term, a
politics -- that grows in tension and ultimately in a decisive conflict
with the State.
Confederal, antihierarchical, and collectivist, based on the municipal
management of the means of life rather than their control by vested
interests (such as workers' control, private control, and more
dangerously, State control), it may justly be regarded as the processual
actualization of the libertarian ideal as a daily praxis.[11]
The fact that a Communalist politics entails participation in municipal
elections -- based, to be sure, on an unyielding program that demands
the formation of popular assemblies and their confederation -- does not
mean that entry into existing village, town and city councils involves
participation in state organs, any more than establishing an
anarchosyndicalist union in a privately owned factory involves
participation in capitalist forms of production. One need only turn to
the French Revolution of 1789-94 to see how seemingly state
institutions, like the municipal "districts" established under the
monarchy in 1789 to expedite elections to the Estates General, were
transformed four years later into largely revolutionary bodies, or
"sections," that nearly gave rise to the "Commune of communes." Their
movement for a sectional democracy was defeated during the insurrection
of June 2, 1793 -- not at the hands of the monarchy, but by the
treachery of the Jacobins.
Capitalism will not generously provide us the popular democratic
institutions we need. Its control over society today is ubiquitous, not
only in what little remains of the public sphere, but in the minds of
many self-styled radicals. A revolutionary people must either assert
their control over institutions that are basic to their public lives --
which Bakunin correctly perceived to be their municipal councils -- or
else they will have no choice but to withdraw into their private lives,
as is already happening on an epidemic scale today.[12] It would be
ironic, indeed, if an individualist anarchism and its various mutations,
from the academic and transcendentally moral to the chaotic and the
lumpen, in the course of rejecting democracy even for "a minority of
one," were to further raise the walls of dogma that are steadily growing
around the libertarian ideal, and if, wittingly or not, anarchism were
to turn into another narcissistic cult that snugly fits into an
alienated, commodified, introverted and egocentric society.
-- September 18, 1994
[1]
L. Susan Brown: The Politics of Individualism (Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1993), p. 12. I do not question the sincerity of Brown's
libertarian views; she regards herself as an anarcho-communist, as
do I. But she makes no direct attempt to reconcile her
individualistic views with communism in any form. Both Bakunin and
Kropotkin would have strongly disagreed with her formulation of what
constitutes "a group," while Margaret Thatcher, clearly for reasons
of her own, might be rather pleased with it, since it is so akin to
the former British prime minister's notorious statement that there
is no such thing as society -- there are only individuals. Certainly
Brown is not a Thatcherite, nor Thatcher an anarchist, but however
different they may be in other respects, both have ideological
filiations with classical liberalism that make their shared
affirmations of the "autonomy" of the individual possible. I cannot
ignore the fact, however, that neither Bakunin's, Kropotkin's nor my
own views are treated with any depth in Brown's book (pp. 156-62),
and her account of them is filled with serious inaccuracies.
[2] Liberals were not always in accord with each other nor did they hold
notably coherent doctrines. Mill, a free-thinking humanitarian and
utilitarian, in fact exhibited a measure of sympathy for socialism. I am
not singling out here any particular liberal theorist, be he Mill, Adam
Smith or Friedrich Hayek. Each had or has his or her individual
eccentricity or personal line of thought. I am speaking of traditional
liberalism as a whole, whose general features involve a belief in the
"laws" of the marketplace and "free" competition. Marx was by no means
free of this influence: he, too, unrelentingly tried to discover "laws"
of society, as did many socialists during the last century, including
utopians like Charles Fourier.
[3] See Kropotkin's "Anarchism," the famous Encyclopaedia
Britannicaarticle that became one of his most widely read works.
Republished in Roger N. Baldwin, ed., Kropotkin's Revolutionary
Pamphlets: A Collection of Writings by Peter Kropotkin (Vanguard Press,
1927; reprinted by Dover, 1970).
[4] I have never regarded the classical Athenian democracy as a "model"
or an "ideal" to be restored in a rational society. I have long cited
Athens with admiration for one reason: the polis around Periclean times
provides us with striking evidence that certain structures can exist --
policy-making by an assembly, rotation and limitation of public offices
and defense by a nonprofessional armed citizenry. The Mediterranean
world of the fifth century B.C.E. was largely based on monarchical
authority and repressive custom. That all Mediterranean societies of
that time required or employed patriarchy, slavery and the State
(usually in an absolutist form) makes the Athenian experience all the
more remarkable for what it uniquely introduced into social life,
including an unprecedented degree of free expression. It would be naive
to suppose that Athens could have risen above the most basic attributes
of ancient society in its day, which, from a distance of 2,400 years we
now have the privilege of judging as ugly and inhuman. Regrettably, no
small number of people today are willing to judge the past by the
present.
[5] Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of
Anarchism(London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 22.
[6] Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution:
Non-Violent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991), especially pp. 59, 78, 89, 94-95, 167-68,
177. Although I disagree with some of the facts and conclusions in
Epstein's book -- based on my personal as well as general knowledge of
the Clamshell Alliance -- she vividly portrays the failure of consensus
in this movement.
[7] The association of "chaos," "nomadism," and "cultural terrorism"
with "ontological anarchy" (as though the bourgeoisie had not turned
such antics into an "ecstasy industry" in the United States) is fully
explicated in Hakim Bey's (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) T.A.Z.: The
Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York: Autonomedia, 1985). The Yuppie
Whole Earth Review celebrates this pamphlet as the most influential and
widely read "manifesto" of America's countercultural youth, noting with
approval that it is happily free of conventional anarchist attacks upon
capitalism. This kind of detritus from the 1960s is echoed in one form
or another by most American anarchist newssheets that pander to youth
who have not yet "had their fun before it is time to grow up" (a comment
I heard years later from Parisian student activists of '68) and become
real estate agents and accountants.
For an "ecstatic experience," visitors to New York's Lower East Side
(near St. Mark's Place) can dine, I am told, at Anarchy Café. This
establishment offers fine dining from an expensive menu, a reproduction
of the famous mural The Fourth Estate on the wall, perhaps to aid in
digestion, and a maitre d' to greet Yuppie customers. I cannot attest to
whether the writings of Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Fredy Perlman and
Hakim Bey are on sale there or whether copies of Anarchy: A Journal of
Desire Armed, The Fifth Estate or Demolition Derby are available for
perusal, but happily there are enough exotic bookstores nearby to buy
them.
[8] Quoted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978).
[9] History provides no "model" for libertarian municipalism, be it
Periclean Athens, or a tribe, village, town, or city--or a hippie
commune or Buddhist ashram. Nor is the "affinity group" a model--the
Spanish anarchists used this word interchangeably with "action group" to
refer to an organizational unit for the FAI, not to the institutional
basis for a libertarian society.
[10] A detailed discussion of the differences between the social domain,
which includes the ways in which we associate for personal and economic
ends; the public sphere or political domain; and the state in all its
phases and forms of development can be found in my book Urbanization
Without Cities (1987; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992).
[11] I should emphasize that I am not counterposing a Communalist
democracy to such enterprises as cooperatives, people's clinics,
communes, and the like. But there should be no illusions that such
enterprises are more than exercises in popular control and ways of
bringing people together in a highly atomized society. No food
cooperative can replace giant retail food markets under capitalism and
no clinic can replace hospital complexes, any more than a craft shop can
replace factories or plants. I should observe that the Spanish
anarchists, almost from their inception, took full note of the limits of
the cooperativist movement in the 1880s, when such movements were in
fact more feasible than they are today, and they significantly separated
themselves from cooperativism programmatically.
[12] For Bakunin, the people "have a healthy, practical common sense
when it comes to communal affairs. They are fairly well informed and
know how to select from their midst the most capable officials. This is
why municipal elections always best reflect the real attitude and will
of the people." Bakunin on Anarchy, Sam Dolgoff, ed. (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1972; republished by Black Rose Books: Montreal), p. 223. I
have omitted the queasy interpolations that Dolgoff inserted to "modify"
Bakunin's meaning. It may be well to note that anarchism in the last
century was more plastic and flexible than it is today.