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Title: Post-Scarcity Anarchism Author: Murray Bookchin Date: December 1968 Language: en Topics: post-scarcity, anarchism, ecology, dialectics Source: First chapter of the book by the same name. https://libcom.org/files/Post-Scarcity%20Anarchism%20-%20Murray%20Bookchin.pdf Notes: This is the essay/pamphlet entitled *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-1.
All the successful revolutions of the past have been particularistic
revolutions of minority classes seeking to assert their specific
interests over those of society as a whole. The great bourgeois
revolutions of modern times offered an ideology of sweeping political
reconstitution, but in reality they merely certified the social
dominance of the bourgeoisie, giving formal political expression to the
economic ascendancy of capital. The lofty notions of the "nation," the
"free citizen," of equality before the law," concealed the mundane
reality of the centralized state, the atomized isolated man, the
dominance of bourgeois interest. Despite their sweeping ideological
claims, the particularistic revolutions replaced the rule of one class
by another, one system of exploitation by another, one system of toil by
another, and one system of psychological repression by another.
What is unique about our era is that the particularistic revolution has
now been subsumed by the possibility of the generalized
revolution—complete and totalistic. Bourgeois society, if it achieved
nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale
unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in
cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world
without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now
exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of
guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given
over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now
possible to conceive of man's future experience in terms of a coherent
process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and
sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community,
man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are
all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new
realm of freedom. Just as the particularized revolution produced a
particularized, bifurcated society, so the generalized revolution can
produce an organically unified, many-sided community. The great wound
opened by propertied society in the form of the "social question" can
now be healed.
That freedom must be conceived of in human terms, not in animal terms—in
terms of life, not of survival—is clear enough. Men do not remove their
ties of bondage and become fully human merely by divesting themselves of
social domination and obtaining freedom in its abstract form. They must
also be free concretely: free from material want, from toil, from the
burden of devoting the greater part of their time—indeed, the greater
part of their lives—to the struggle with necessity. To have seen these
material preconditions for human freedom, to have emphasized that
freedom presupposes free time and the material abundance for abolishing
free time as a social privilege, is the great contribution of Karl Marx
to modern revolutionary theory.
By the same token, the preconditions for freedom must not be mistaken
for the conditions of freedom. The possibility of liberation does not
constitute its reality. Along with its positive aspects, technological
advance has a distinctly negative, socially regressive side. If it is
true that technological progress enlarges the historical potentiality
for freedom, it is also true that the bourgeois control of technology
reinforces the established organization of society and everyday life.
Technology and the resources of abundance furnish capitalism with the
means for assimilating large sections of society to the established
system of hierarchy and authority. They provide the system with the
weaponry, the detecting devices and the propaganda media for the threat
as well as the reality of massive repression. By their centralistic
nature, the resources of abundance reinforce the monopolistic,
centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies in the political apparatus. In
short, they furnish the state with historically unprecedented means for
manipulating and mobilizing the entire environment of life—and for
perpetuating hierarchy, exploitation and unfreedom.
It must be emphasized, however, that this manipulation and mobilization
of the environment is extremely problematical and laden with crises. Far
from leading to pacification (one can hardly speak, here, of
harmonization), the attempt of bourgeois society to control and exploit
its environment, natural as well as social, has devastating
consequences. Volumes have been written on the pollution of the
atmosphere and waterways, on the destruction of tree cover and soil, and
on toxic materials in foods and liquids. Even more threatening in their
final results are the pollution and destruction of the very ecology
required for a complex organism like man. The concentration of
radioactive wastes in living things is a menace to the health and
genetic endowment of nearly all species. Worldwide contamination by
pesticides that inhibit oxygen production in plankton or by the
near-toxic level of lead from gasoline exhaust are examples of an
enduring pollution that threatens the biological integrity of all
advanced lifeforms—including man.
No less alarming is the fact that we must drastically revise our
traditional notions of what constitutes an environmental pollutant. A
few decades ago it would have been absurd to describe carbon dioxide and
heat as pollutants in the customary sense of the term. Yet both may well
rank among the most serious sources of future ecological imbalance and
may pose major threats to the viability of the planet. As a result of
industrial and domestic combustion activities, the quantity of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by roughly twenty-five percent
in the past one hundred years, and may well double by the end of the
century. The famous "greenhouse effect" which the increasing quantity of
the gas is expected to produce has been widely discussed in the media;
eventually, it is supposed, the gas will inhibit the dissipation of the
world's heat into space, causing a rise in overall temperatures which
will melt the polar ice caps and result in the inundation of vast
coastal areas. Thermal pollution, the result mainly of warm water
discharged by nuclear and conventional power plants, has had disastrous
effects on the ecology of lakes, rivers and estuaries. Increases in
water temperature not only damage the physiological and reproductive
activities of the fish, they also promote the great blooms of algae that
have become such formidable problems in waterways.
Ecologically, bourgeois exploitation and manipulation are undermining
the very capacity of the earth to sustain advanced forms of life. The
crisis is being heightened by massive increases in air and water
pollution; by a mounting accumulation of nondegradable wastes, lead
residues, pesticide residues and toxic additives in food; by the
expansion of cities into vast urban belts; by increasing stresses due to
congestion, noise and mass living; and by the wanton scarring of the
earth as a result of mining operations, lumbering, and real estate
speculation. As a result, the earth has been despoiled in a few decades
on a scale that is unprecedented in the entire history of human
habitation of the planet. Socially, bourgeois exploitation and
manipulation have brought everyday life to the most excruciating point
of vacuity and boredom. As society has been converted into a factory and
a marketplace, the very rationale of life has been reduced to production
for its own sake—and consumption for its own sake.[1]
Is there a redemptive dialectic that can guide the social development in
the direction of an anarchic society where people will attain full
control over their daily lives? Or does the social dialectic come to an
end with capitalism, its possibilities sealed off by the use of a highly
advanced technology for repressive and co-optative purposes? We must
learn here from the limits of Marxism, a project which, understandably
in a period of material scarcity, anchored the social dialectic and the
contradictions of capitalism in the economic realm. Marx, it has been
emphasized, examined the preconditions for liberation, not the
conditions of liberation. The Marxian critique is rooted in the past, in
the era of material want and relatively limited technological
development. Even its humanistic theory of alienation turns primarily on
the issue of work and man's alienation from the product of his labor.
Today, however, capitalism is a parasite on the future, a vampire that
survives on the technology and resources of freedom.
The industrial capitalism of Marx's time organized its commodity
relations around a prevailing system of material scarcity; the state
capitalism of our time organizes its commodity relations around a
prevailing system of material abundance. A century ago, scarcity had to
be endured; today, it has to be enforced—hence the importance of the
state in the present era. It is not that modern capitalism has resolved
its contradictions[2] and annulled the social dialectic, but rather that
the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism have expanded
from the economic to the hierarchical realms of society, from the
abstract "historic" domain to the concrete minutiae of everday
experience, from the arena of survival to the arena of life.
The dialectic of bureaucratic state capitalism originates in the
contradiction between the repressive character of commodity society and
the enormous potential freedom opened by technological advance. This
contradiction also opposes the exploitative organization of society to
the natural world—a world that includes not only the natural
environment, but also man's "nature"—his Eros-derived impulses. The
contradiction between the exploitative organization of society and the
natural environment is beyond co-optation: the atmosphere, the
waterways, the soil and the ecology required for human survival are not
redeemable by reforms, concessions, or modifications of strategic
policy. There is no technology that can reproduce atmospheric oxygen in
sufficient quantities to sustain life on this planet. There is no
substitute for the hydrological systems of the earth. There is no
technique for removing massive environmental pollution by radioactive
isotopes, pesticides, lead and petroleum wastes. Nor is there the
faintest evidence that bourgeois society will relent at any time in the
foreseeable future in its disruption of vital ecological processes, in
its exploitation of natural resources, in its use of the atmosphere and
waterways as dumping areas for wastes, or in its cancerous mode of
urbanization and land abuse.
Even more immediate is the contradiction between the exploitative
organization of society and man's Eros-derived impulses—a contradiction
that manifests itself as the banalization and impoverishment of
experience in a bureaucratically manipulated, impersonal mass society.
The Eros-derived impulses in man can be repressed and sublimated, but
they can never be eliminated. They are renewed with every birth of a
human being and with every generation of youth. It is not surprising
today that the young, more than any economic class or stratum,
articulate the life-impulses in humanity's nature—the urgings of desire,
sensuousness, and the lure of the marvelous. Thus, the biological
matrix, from which hierarchical society emerged ages ago, reappears at a
new level with the era that marks the end of hierarchy, only now this
matrix is saturated with social phenomena. Short of manipulating
humanity's germplasm, the life-impulses can be annulled only with the
annihilation of man himself.
The contradictions within bureaucratic state capitalism permeate all the
hierarchical forms developed and overdeveloped by bourgeois society. The
hierarchical forms which nurtured propertied society for ages and
promoted its development—the state, city, centralized economy,
bureaucracy, patriarchal family, and marketplace—have reached their
historic limits. They have exhausted their social functions as modes of
stabilization. It is not a question of whether these hierarchical forms
were ever "progressive" in the Marxian sense of the term. As Raoul
Vaneigem has observed: "Perhaps it isn't enough to say that hierarchical
power has preserved humanity for thousands of years as alcohol preserves
a fetus, by arresting either growth or decay." Today these forms
constitute the target of all the revolutionary forces that are generated
by modern capitalism, and whether one sees their outcome as nuclear
catastrophe or ecological disaster they now threaten the very survival
of humanity.
With the development of hierarchical forms into a threat to the very
existence of humanity, the social dialectic, far from being annulled,
acquires a new dimension. It poses the "social question" in an entirely
new way. If man had to acquire the conditions of survival in order to
live (as Marx emphasized), now he must acquire the conditions of life in
order to survive. By this inversion of the relationship between survival
and life, revolution acquires a new sense of urgency. No longer are we
faced with Marx's famous choice of socialism or barbarism; we are
confronted with the more drastic alternatives of anarchism or
annihilation. The problems of necessity and survival have become
congruent with the problems of freedom and life. They cease to require
any theoretical mediation, "transitional" stages, or centralized
organizations to bridge the gap between the existing and the possible.
The possible, in fact, is all that can exist. Hence, the problems of
"transition," which occupied the Marxists for nearly a century, are
eliminated not only by the advance of technology, but by the social
dialectic itself. The problems of social reconstruction have been
reduced to practical tasks that can be solved spontaneously by
self-liberatory acts of society.
Revolution, in fact, acquires not only a new sense of urgency, but a new
sense of promise. In the hippies' tribalism, in the drop-out lifestyles
and free sexuality of millions of youth, in the spontaneous affinity
groups of the anarchists, we find forms of affirmation that follow from
acts of negation. With the inversion of the "social question" there is
also an inversion of the social dialectic; a "yea" emerges automatically
and simultaneously with a "nay."
The solutions take their point of departure from the problems. When the
time has arrived in history that the state, the city, bureaucracy, the
centralized economy, the patriarchal family and the marketplace have
reached their historic limits, what is posed is no longer a change in
form but the absolute negation of all hierarchical forms as such. The
absolute negation of the state is anarchism—a situation in which men
liberate not only "history," but all the immediate circumstances of
their everyday lives. The absolute negation of the city is community— a
community in which the social environment is decentralized into rounded,
ecologically balanced communes. The absolute negation of bureaucracy is
immediate as distinguished from mediated relations—a situation in which
representation is replaced by face-to-face relations in a general
assembly of free individuals. The absolute negation of the centralized
economy is regional ecotechnology— a situation in which the instruments
of production are molded to the resources of an ecosystem. The absolute
negation of the patriarchal family is liberated sexuality—in which all
forms of sexual regulation are transcended by the spontaneous,
untrammeled expression of eroticism among equals. The absolute negation
of the marketplace is communism—in which collective abundance and
cooperation transform labor into play and need into desire.
It is not accidental that at a point in history when hierarchical power
and manipulation have reached their most threatening proportions, the
very concepts of hierarchy, power and manipulation are being brought
into question. The challenge to these concepts comes from a rediscovery
of the importance of spontaneity—a rediscovery nourished by ecology, by
a heightened conception of self-development, and by a new understanding
of the revolutionary process in society.
What ecology has shown is that balance in nature is achieved by organic
variation and complexity, not by homogeneity and simplification. For
example, the more varied the flora and fauna of an ecosystem, the more
stable the population of a potential pest. The more environmental
diversity is diminished, the greater will the population of a potential
pest fluctuate, with the probability that it will get out of control.
Left to itself, an ecosystem tends spontaneously toward organic
differentiation, greater variety of flora and fauna, and diversity in
the number of prey and predators. This does not mean that interference
by man must be avoided. The need for a productive agriculture—itself a
form of interference with nature—must always remain in the foreground of
an ecological approach to food cultivation and forest management. No
less important is the fact that man can often produce changes in an
ecosystem that would vastly improve its ecological quality.
But these efforts require insight and understanding, not the exercise of
brute power and manipulation.
This concept of management, this new regard for the importance of
spontaneity, has far-reaching applications for technology and
community—indeed, for the social image of man in a liberated society. It
challenges the capitalist ideal of agriculture as a factory operation,
organized around immense, centrally controlled land-holdings, highly
specialized forms of monoculture, the reduction of the terrain to a
factory floor, the substitution of chemical for organic processes, the
use of gang-labor, etc. If food cultivation is to be a mode of
cooperation with nature rather than a contest between opponents, the
agriculturist must become thoroughly familiar with the ecology of the
land; he must acquire a new sensitivity to its needs and possibilities.
This presupposes the reduction of agriculture to a human scale, the
restoration of moderate-sized agricultural units, and the
diversification of the agricultural situation; in short, it presupposes
a decentralized, ecological system of food cultivation.
The same reasoning applies to pollution control. The development of
giant factory complexes and the use of single or dual-energy sources are
responsible for atmospheric pollution. Only by developing smaller
industrial units and diversifying energy sources by the extensive use of
clean power (solar, wind and water power) will it be possible to reduce
industrial pollution. The means for this radical technological change
are now at hand. Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes
for large-scale industrial operation—small versatile machines and
sophisticated methods for converting solar, wind and water energy into
power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are often more
productive and less wasteful than the large-scale facilities that exist
today.[3]
The implications of small-scale agriculture and industry for a community
are obvious: if humanity is to use the principles needed to manage an
ecosystem, the basic communal unit of social life must itself become an
ecosystem—an ecocommunity. It too must become diversified, balanced and
well-rounded. By no means is this concept of community motivated
exclusively by the need for a lasting balance between man and the
natural world; it also accords with the Utopian ideal of the rounded
man, the individual whose sensibilities, range of experience and
lifestyle are nourished by a wide range of stimuli, by a diversity of
activities, and by a social scale that always remains within the
comprehension of a single human being. Thus the means and conditions of
survival become the means and conditions of life; need becomes desire
and desire becomes need. The point is reached where the greatest social
decomposition provides the source of the highest form of social
integration, bringing the most pressing ecological necessities into a
common focus with the highest Utopian ideals.
If it is true, as Guy Debord observes, that "daily life is the measure
of everything: of the fulfillment or rather the non-fulfillment of human
relationships, of the use we make of our time," a question arises: Who
are "we whose daily lives are to be fulfilled? And how does the
liberated self emerge that is capable of turning time into life, space
into community, and human relationships into the marvelous? The
liberation of the self involves, above all, a social process. In a
society that has shriveled the self into a commodity—into an object
manufactured for exchange—there can be no fulfilled self. There can only
be the beginnings of selfhood, the emergence of a self that seeks
fulfillment—a self that is largely defined by the obstacles it must
overcome to achieve realization. In a society whose belly is distended
to the bursting point with revolution, whose chronic state is an
unending series of labor pains, whose real condition is a mounting
emergency, only one thought and act is relevant—giving birth. Any
environment, private or social, that does not make this fact the center
of human experience is a sham and diminishes whatever self remains to us
after we have absorbed our daily poison of everyday life in bourgeois
society.
It is plain that the goal of revolution today must be the liberation of
daily life. Any revolution that fails to achieve this goal is
counterrevolution. Above all, it is we who have to be liberated, our
daily lives, with all their moments, hours and days, and not universals
like "History" and "Society."[4]
The self must always be identifiable in the revolution, not overwhelmed
by it. The self must always be perceivable in the revolutionary process,
not submerged by it. There is no word that is more sinister in the
"revolutionary" vocabulary than "masses." Revolutionary liberation must
be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not "mass
liberation" or "class liberation" behind which lurks the rule of an
elite, a hierarchy and a state. If a revolution fails to produce a new
society by the self-activity and self-mobilization of revolutionaries,
if it does not involve the forging of a self in the revolutionary
process, the revolution will once again circumvent those whose lives are
to be lived every day and leave daily life unaffected. Out of the
revolution must emerge a self that takes full possession of daily life,
not a daily life that once again takes full possession of the self. The
most advanced form of class consciousness thus becomes
self-consciousness—the concretization in daily life of the great
liberating universals.
If for this reason alone, the revolutionary movement is profoundly
concerned with lifestyle. It must try to live the revolution in all its
totality, not only participate in it. It must be deeply concerned with
the way the revolutionist lives, his relations with the surrounding
environment, and his degree of self-emancipation. In seeking to change
society, the revolutionist cannot avoid changes in himself that demand
the reconquest of his own being. Like the movement in which he
participates, the revolutionist must try to reflect the conditions of
the society he is trying to achieve—at least to the degree that this is
possible today.
The treacheries and failures of the past half century have made it
axiomatic that there can be no separation of the revolutionary process
from the revolutionary goal. A society whose fundamental aim is
self-administration in all facets of life can be achieved only by
self-activity. This implies a mode of administration that is always
possessed by the self. The power of man over man can be destroyed only
by the very process in which man acquires power over his own life and in
which he not only "discovers" himself but, more meaningfully, in which
he formulates his selfhood in all its social dimensions.
A libertarian society can be achieved only by a libertarian revolution.
Freedom cannot be "delivered" to the individual as the "end-product" of
a "revolution"; the assembly and community cannot be legislated or
decreed into existence. A revolutionary group can seek, purposively and
consciously, to promote the creation of these forms, but if assembly and
community are not allowed to emerge organically, if their growth is not
matured by the process of demassification, by self-activity and by
self-realization, they will remain nothing but forms, like the Soviets
in postrevolutionary Russia. Assembly and community must arise within
the revolutionary process; indeed, the revolutionary process must be the
formation of assembly and community, and also the destruction of power,
property, hierarchy and exploitation.
Revolution as self-activity is not unique to our time. It is the
paramount feature of all the great revolutions in modern history. It
marked the journees of the sansculottes in 1792 and 1793, the famous
"Five Days" of February 1917 in Petrograd, the uprising of the Barcelona
proletariat in 1936, the early days of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956,
and the May-June events in Paris in 1968. Nearly every revolutionary
uprising in the history of our time has been initiated spontaneously by
the self-activity of "masses"—often in flat defiance of the hesitant
policies advanced by the revolutionary organizations. Every one of these
revolutions has been marked by extraordinary individuation, by a
joyousness and solidarity that turned everyday life into a festival.
This surreal dimension of the revolutionary process, with its explosion
of deep-seated libidinal forces, grins irascibly through the pages of
history like the face of a satyr on shimmering water. It is not without
reason that the Bolshevik commissars smashed the wine bottles in the
Winter Palace on the night of November 7, 1917.
The puritanism and work ethic of the traditional left stem from one of
the most powerful forces opposing revolution today—the capacity of the
bourgeois environment to infiltrate the revolutionary framework. The
origins of this power lie in the commodity nature of man under
capitalism, a quality that is almost automatically transferred to the
organized group—and which the group, in turn, reinforces in its members.
As the late Josef Weber emphasized, all organized groups "have the
tendency to render themselves autonomous, i.e., to alienate themselves
from their original aim and to become an end in themselves in the hands
of those administering them." This phenomenon is as true of
revolutionary organizations as it is of state and semi-state
institutions, official parties and trade unions.
The problem of alienation can never be completely resolved apart from
the revolutionary process itself, but it can be guarded against by an
acute awareness that the problem exists, and partly solved by a
voluntary but drastic remaking of the revolutionary and his group. This
remaking can only begin when the revolutionary group recognizes that it
is a catalyst in the revolutionary process, not a "vanguard." The
revolutionary group must clearly see that its goal is not the seizure of
power but the dissolution of power—indeed, it must see that the entire
problem of power, of control from below and control from above, can be
solved only if there is no above or below.
Above all, the revolutionary group must divest itself of the forms of
power—statutes, hierarchies, property, prescribed opinions, fetishes,
paraphernalia, official etiquette—and of the subtlest as well as the
most obvious of bureaucratic and bourgeois traits that consciously and
unconsciously reinforce authority and hierarchy. The group must remain
open to public scrutiny not only in its formulated decisions but also in
their very formulation. It must be coherent in the profound sense that
its theory is its practice and its practice its theory. It must do away
with all commodity relations in its day-to-day existence and constitute
itself along the decentralizing organizational principles of the very
society it seeks to achieve—community, assembly, spontaneity. It must,
in Josef Weber's superb words, be "marked always by simplicity and
clarity, always thousands of unprepared people can enter and direct it,
always it remains transparent to and controlled by all." Only then, when
the revolutionary movement is congruent with the decentralized community
it seeks to achieve, can it avoid becoming another elitist obstacle to
the social development and dissolve into the revolution like surgical
thread into a healing wound.
The most important process going on in America today is the sweeping
de-institutionalization of the bourgeois social structure. A basic,
far-reaching disrespect and a profound disloyalty are developing toward
the values, the forms, the aspirations and, above all, the institutions
of the established order. On a scale unprecedented in American history,
millions of people are shedding their commitment to the society in which
they live. They no longer believe in its claims. They no longer respect
its symbols. They no longer accept its goals, and, most significantly,
they refuse almost intuitively to live by its institutional and social
codes. This growing refusal runs very deep. It extends from an
opposition to war into a hatred of political manipulation in all its
forms. Starting from a rejection of racism, it brings into question the
very existence of hierarchical power as such. In its detestation of
middle-class values and lifestyles it rapidly evolves into a rejection
of the commodity system; from an irritation with environmental
pollution, it passes into a rejection of the American city and modern
urbanism. In short, it tends to transcend every particularistic critique
of the society and to evolve into a generalized opposition to the
bourgeois order on an ever broadening scale.
In this respect, the period in which we live closely resembles the
revolutionary Enlightenment that swept through France in the eighteenth
century—a period that completely reworked French consciousness and
prepared the conditions for the Great Revolution of 1789. Then as now,
the old institutions were slowly pulverized by molecular action from
below long before they were toppled by mass revolutionary action. This
molecular movement creates an atmosphere of general lawlessness: a
growing personal day-to-day disobedience, a tendency not to "go along"
with the existing system, a seemingly "petty" but nevertheless critical
attempt to circumvent restriction in every facet of daily life. The
society, in effect, becomes disorderly, undisciplined, Dionysian—a
condition that reveals itself most dramatically in an increasing rate of
official crimes. A vast critique of the system develops—the actual
Enlightenment itself, two centuries ago, and the sweeping critique that
exists today—which seeps downward and accelerates the molecular movement
at the base. Be it an angry gesture, a "riot" or a conscious change in
lifestyle, an ever-increasing number of people—who have no more of a
commitment to an organized revolutionary movement than they have to
society itself—begin spontaneously to engage in their own defiant
propaganda of the deed.
In its concrete details, the disintegrating social process is nourished
by many sources. The process develops with all the unevenness, indeed
with all the contradictions, that mark every revolutionary trend. In
eighteenth century France, radical ideology oscillated between a rigid
scientism and a sloppy romanticism. Notions of freedom were anchored in
a precise, logical ideal of self-control, and also a vague, instinctive
norm of spontaneity. Rousseau stood at odds with d'Holbach, Diderot at
odds with Voltaire, yet in retrospect we can see that one not only
transcended but also presupposed the other in a cumulative development
toward revolution.
The same uneven, contradictory and cumulative development exists today,
and in many cases it follows a remarkably direct course. The "beat"
movement created the most important breach in the solid, middle-class
values of the 1950s, a breach that was widened enormously by the
illegalities of pacifists, civil-rights workers, draft resisters and
longhairs. Moreover, the merely reactive response of rebellious American
youth has produced invaluable forms of libertarian and Utopian
affirmation—the right to make love without restriction, the goal of
community, the disavowal of money and commodities, the belief in mutual
aid, and a new respect for spontaneity. Easy as it is for
revolutionaries to criticize certain pitfalls within this orientation of
personal and social values, the fact remains that it has played a
preparatory role of decisive importance in forming the present
atmosphere of indiscipline, spontaneity, radicalism and freedom.
A second parallel between the revolutionary Enlightenment and our own
period is the emergence of the crowd, the so-called "mob," as a major
vehicle of social protest. The typical institutionalized forms of public
dissatisfaction—in our own day, they are orderly elections,
demonstration and mass meetings—tend to give way to direct action by
crowds. This shift from predictable, highly organized protests within
the institutionalized framework of the existing society to sporadic,
spontaneous, near-insurrectionary assaults from outside (and even
against) socially acceptable forms reflects a profound change in popular
psychology. The "rioter" has begun to break, however partially and
intuitively, with those deep-seated norms of behavior which
traditionally weld the "masses" to the established order. He actively
sheds the internalized structure of authority, the long-cultivated body
of conditioned reflexes, and the pattern of submission sustained by
guilt that tie one to the system even more effectively than any fear of
police violence and juridical reprisal. Contrary to the views of social
psychologists, who see in these modes of direct action the submission of
the individual to a terrifying collective entity called the "mob," the
truth is that "riots" and crowd actions represent the first gropings of
the mass toward individuation. The mass tends to become demassified in
the sense that it begins to assert itself against the really massifying
automatic responses produced by the bourgeois family, the school and the
mass media. By the same token, crowd actions involve the rediscovery of
the streets and the effort to liberate them. Ultimately, it is in the
streets that power must be dissolved: for the streets, where daily life
is endured, suffered and eroded, and where power is confronted and
fought, must be turned into the domain where daily life is enjoyed,
created and nourished. The rebellious crowd marked the beginning not
only of a spontaneous transmutation of private into social revolt, but
also of a return from the abstractions of social revolt to the issues of
everyday life.
Finally, as in the Enlightenment, we are seeing the emergence of an
immense and ever-growing stratum of declasses, a body of lumpenized
individuals drawn from every stratum of society. The chronically
indebted and socially insecure middle classes of our period compare
loosely with the chronically insolvent and flighty nobility of
prerevolutionary France. A vast flotsam of educated people emerged then
as now, living at loose ends, without fixed careers or established
social roots. At the bottom of both structures we find a large number of
chronic poor- vagabonds, drifters, people with part-time jobs or no jobs
at all, threatening, unruly sans-culottes— surviving on public aid and
on the garbage thrown off by society, the poor of the Parisian slums,
the blacks of the American ghettoes. But here all the parallels end. The
French Enlightenment belongs to a period of revolutionary transition
from feudalism to capitalism—both societies based on economic scarcity,
class rule, exploitation, social hierarchy and state power. The
day-to-day popular resistance which marked the eighteenth century and
culminated in open revolution was soon disciplined by the newly emerging
industrial order—as well as by naked force. The vast mass of declasses
and sans-culottes was largely absorbed into the factory system and tamed
by industrial discipline. Formerly rootless intellectuals and footloose
nobles found secure places in the economic, political, social and
cultural hierarchy of the new bourgeois order. From a socially and
culturally fluid condition, highly generalized in its structure and
relations, society hardened again into rigid, particularized class and
institutional forms—the classical Victorian era appeared not only in
England but, to one degree or another, in all of Western Europe and
America. Critique was consolidated into apologia, revolt into reform,
declasses into clearly defined classes and "mobs" into political
constituencies. "Riots" became the well-behaved processionals we call
"demonstrations," and spontaneous direct action turned into electoral
rituals.
Our own era is also a transitional one, but with a profound and new
difference. In the last of their great insurrections, the sans-culottes
of the French Revolution rose under the fiery cry: "Bread and the
Constitution of '93!" The black sans-culottes of the American ghettoes
rise under the slogan: "Black is beautiful!" Between these two slogans
lies a development of unprecedented importance. The declasses of the
eighteenth century were formed during a slow transition from an
agricultural to an industrial era; they were created out of a pause in
the historical transition from one regime of toil to another. The demand
for bread could have been heard at any time in the evolution of
propertied society. The new declasses of the twentieth century are being
created as a result of the bankruptcy of all social forms based on toil.
They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself
and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when
technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the
exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form
whatever, the cry "Black is beautiful" or "Make love, not war" marks the
transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a
historically new demand for life.[5]
What underpins every social conflict in the United States today is the
demand for the realization of all human potentialities in a fully
rounded, balanced, totalistic way of life. In short, the potentialities
for revolution in America are now anchored in the potentialities of man
himself.
What we are witnessing is the breakdown of a century and a half of
embourgeoisement and a pulverization of all bourgeois institutions at a
point in history when the boldest concepts of Utopia are realizable. And
there is nothing that the present bourgeois order can substitute for the
destruction of its traditional institutions but bureaucratic
manipulation and state capitalism. This process is unfolding most
dramatically in the United States. Within a period of little more than
two decades, we have seen the collapse of the "American Dream," or what
amounts to the same thing, the steady destruction in the United States
of the myth that material abundance, based on commodity relations
between men, can conceal the inherent poverty of bourgeois life. Whether
this process will culminate in revolution or in annihilation will depend
in great part on the ability of revolutionists to extend social
consciousness and defend the spontaneity of the revolutionary
development from authoritarian ideologies, both of the "left" and of the
right.
[1] It is worth noting here that the emergence of the "consumer society"
provides us with remarkable evidence of the difference between the
industrial capitalism of Marx's time and state capitalism today. In
Marx's view, capitalism as a system organized around "production for the
sake of production" results in the economic immiseration of the
proletariat. "Production for the sake of production" is paralleled today
by "consumption for the sake of consumption," in which immiseration
takes a spiritual rather than an economic form—it is starvation of life.
[2] The economic contradictions of capitalism have not disappeared, but
the system can plan to such a degree that they no longer have the
explosive characteristics they had in the past.
[3] For a detailed discussion of this "miniaturized" technology see
"Towards a Liberatory Technology."
[4] Despite its lip service to the dialectic, the traditional left has
yet to take Hegel's "concrete universal" seriously and see it not merely
as a philosophical concept but as a social program. This has been done
only in Marx's early writings, in the writings of the great Utopians
(Fourier and William Morris) and, in our time, by the drop-out youth.
[5] The above lines were written in 1966. Since then, we have seen the
graffiti on the walls of Paris, during the May-June revolution: "All
power to the imagination"; "I take my desires to be reality, because I
believe in the reality of my desires"; "Never work"; "The more I make
love, the more I want to make revolution"; "Life without dead times";
"The more you consume, the less you live"; "Culture is the inversion of
life"; "One does not buy happiness, one steals it"; "Society is a
carnivorous flower." These are not graffiti, they are a program for life
and desire.