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Title: The Forms of Freedom Author: Murray Bookchin Date: January 1968 Language: en Topics: Freedom, libertarian municipalism, post-scarcity, green anarchism, anti-authoritarianism Source: https://www.panarchy.org/bookchin/freedom.html
Freedom has its forms. However personalized, individuated or dadaesque
may be the attack upon prevailing institutions, a liberatory revolution
always poses the question of what social forms will replace existing
ones. At one point or another, a revolutionary people must deal with how
it will manage the land and the factories from which it acquires the
means of life. It must deal with the manner in which it will arrive at
decisions that affect the community as a whole. Thus if revolutionary
thought is to be taken at all seriously, it must speak directly to the
problems and forms of social management. It must open to public
discussion the problems that are involved in a creative development of
liberatory social forms. Although there is no theory of liberation that
can replace experience, there is sufficient historical experience, and a
sufficient theoretical formulation of the issues involved, to indicate
what social forms are consistent with the fullest realization of
personal and social freedom.
What social forms will replace existing ones depends on what relations
free people decide to establish between themselves. Every personal
relationship has a social dimension; every social relationship has a
deeply personal side to it. Ordinarily, these two aspects and their
relationship to each other are mystified and difficult to see clearly.
The institutions created by hierarchical society, especially the state
institutions, produce the illusion that social relations exist in a
universe of their own, in specialized political or bureaucratic
compartments. In reality, there exists no strictly “impersonal”
political or social dimension; all the social institutions of the past
and present depend on the relations between people in daily life,
especially in those aspects of daily life which are necessary for
survival—the production and distribution of the means of life, the
rearing of the young, the maintenance and reproduction of life. The
liberation of man—not in some vague “historical, “moral, or
philosophical sense, but in the intimate details of day-to-day life—is a
profoundly social act and raises the problem of social forms as modes of
relations between individuals.
The relationship between the social and the individual requires special
emphasis in our own time, for never before have personal relations
become so impersonal and never before have social relations become so
asocial. Bourgeois society has brought all relations between people to
the highest point of abstraction by divesting them of their human
content and dealing with them as objects. The object—the commodity—takes
on roles that formerly belonged to the community; exchange relationships
(actualized in most cases as money relationships) supplant nearly all
other modes of human relationships. In this respect, the bourgeois
commodity system becomes the historical culmination of all societies,
precapitalist as well as capitalist, in which human relationships are
mediated rather than direct or face-to-face.
To place this development in clearer perspective, let us briefly look
back in time and establish what the mediation of social relations has
come to mean.
The earliest social “specialists” who interposed themselves between
people—the priests and tribal chiefs who permanently mediated their
relations—established the formal conditions for hierarchy and
exploitation. These formal conditions were consolidated and deepened by
technological advances—advances which provided only enough material
surplus for the few to live at the expense of the many. The tribal
assembly, in which all members of the community had decided and directly
managed their common affairs, dissolved into chieftainship, and the
community dissolved into social classes.
Despite the increasing investiture of social control in a handful of men
and even one man, the fact remains that men in precapitalist societies
mediated the relations of other people—council supplanting assembly, and
chieftainship supplanted council. In bourgeois society, on the other
hand, the mediation of social relations by men is replaced by the
mediation of social relations by things, by commodities. Having brought
social mediation to the highest point of impersonality, commodity
society turns attention to mediation as such; it brings into question
all forms of social organization based on indirect representation, on
the management of public affairs by the few, on the distinctive
existence of concepts and practices such as ”election,” “legislation,”
“administration.”
The most striking evidence of this social refocusing are the demands
voiced almost intuitively by increasing numbers of American youth for
tribalism and community. These demands are “regressive” only in the
sense that they go back temporally to pre-hierarchical forms of
freedom.They are profoundly progressive in the sense that they go back
structurally to non-hierarchical forms of freedom.
By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand for council forms of
organization (what Hannah Arendt describes as “the revolutionary
heritage”) does not break completely with the terrain of hierarchical
society. Workers’ councils originate as class councils. Unless one
assumes that workers are driven by their interests as workers to
revolutionary measures against hierarchical society (an assumption I
flatly deny), then these councils can be used just as much to perpetuate
class society as to destroy it. We shall see, in fact, that the council
form contains many structural limitations which favor the development of
hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to say that most advocates of
workers’ councils tend to conceive of people primarily as economic
entities, either as workers or non-workers. This conception leaves the
onesidedness of the self completely intact. Man is viewed as a
bifurcated being, the product of a social development that divides man
from man and each man from himself.
Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected by demands for workers’
management of production and the shortening of the work week, for these
demands leave the nature of the work process and the quality of the
worker’s free time completely untouched. If workers’ councils and
workers’ management of production do not transform the work into a
joyful activity, free time into a marvelous experience, and the
workplace into a community, then they remain merely formal structures,
in fact, class structures. They perpetuate the limitations of the
proletariat as a product of bourgeois social conditions. Indeed, no
movement that raises the demand for workers’ councils can be regarded as
revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweeping transformations in the
environment of the work place.
Finally, council organizations are forms of mediated relationships
rather than face-to-face relationships. Unless these mediated
relationships are limited by direct relation-ships, leaving policy
decisions to the latter and mere administration to the former, the
councils tend to become focuses of power. Indeed, unless the councils
are finally assimilated by a popular assembly, and factories are
integrated into new types of community, both the councils and the
factories perpetuate the alienation between man and man and between man
and work. Fundamentally, the degree of freedom in a society can be
gauged by the kind of relationships that unite the people in it. If
these relationships are open, unalienated and creative, the society will
be free. If structures exist that inhibit open relationships, either by
coercion or mediation, then freedom will not exist, whether there is
workers’ management of production or not. For all the workers will
manage will be production—the preconditions of life, not the conditions
of life. No mode of social organization can be isolated from the social
conditions it is organizing. Both councils and assemblies have furthered
the interests of hierarchical society as well as those of revolution. To
assume that the forms of freedom can be treated merely as forms would be
as absurd as to assume that legal concepts can be treated merely as
questions of jurisprudence. The form and content of freedom, like law
and society, are mutually determined. By the same token, there are forms
of organization that promote and forms that vitiate the goal of
freedom,and social conditions favor sometimes the one and some-times the
other. To one degree or another, these forms either alter the individual
who uses them or inhibit his further development.
This article does not dispute the need for workers’ councils—more
properly, factory committees—as a revolutionary means of appropriating
the bourgeois economy.On the contrary, experience has shown repeatedly
that the factory committee is vitally important as an initial form of
economic administration. But no revolution can settle for councils and
committees as its final, or even its exemplary,mode of social
organization, any more than “workers’ management of production” can be
regarded as a final mode of economic administration. Neither of these
two relationships is broad enough to revolutionize work, free time,
needs, and the structure of society as a whole. In this article I take
the revolutionary aspect of the council and committee forms for granted;
my purpose is to examine the conservative traits in them which vitiate
the revolutionary project.
It has always been fashionable to look for models of social institutions
in the so-called “proletarian” revolutions of the past hundred years.
The Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Soviets of 1905 and 1917, the
Spanish revolutionary syndicates of the 1930s, and the Hungarian
councils of 1956 have all been raked over for examples of future social
organization. What, it is worth asking, do these models of organization
have in common? The answer is, very little, other than their limitations
as mediated forms. Spain, as we shall see, provides a welcome exception:
the others were either too short-lived or simply too distorted to supply
us with more than the material for myths.
The Paris Commune may be revered for many different reasons—for its
intoxicating sense of libidinal release, for its radical populism, for
its deeply revolutionary impact on the oppressed, or for its defiant
heroism in defeat. But the Commune itself, viewed as a structural
entity, was little more than a popular municipal council. More
democratic and plebeian than other such bodies, the council was
nevertheless structured along parliamentary lines. It was elected by
“citizens,” grouped according to geographic constituencies. In combining
legislation with administration, the Commune was hardly more advanced
than the municipal bodies in the U.S. today.
Fortunately, revolutionary Paris largely ignored the Commune after it
was installed. The insurrection, the actual management of the city’s
affairs, and finally the fighting against the Versaillese, were
undertaken mainly by the popular clubs, the neighborhood vigilance
committees,and the battalions of the National Guard. Had the Paris
Commune (the Municipal Council) survived, it is extremely doubtful that
it could have avoided conflict with these loosely formed street and
militia formations. Indeed, by the end of April, some six weeks after
the insurrection, the Commune constituted an “all-powerful” Committee of
Public Safety, a body redolent with memories of the Jacobin dictatorship
and the Terror, which suppressed not only the right in the Great
Revolution of a century earlier, but also the left. In any case, history
left the Commune a mere three weeks of life, two of which were consumed
in the death throes of barricade fighting against Thiers and the
Versaillese.
It does not malign the Paris Commune to divest it of ”historical”
burdens it never actually carried. The Commune was a festival of the
streets, its partisans primarily handicraftsmen, itinerant
intellectuals, the social debris of a precapitalist era, and lumpens. To
regard these strata as ”proletarian” is to caricature the word to the
point of absurdity. The industrial proletariat constituted a minority of
the Communards.
The Commune was the last great rebellion of the French sans-culottes, a
class that lingered on in Paris for a century after the Great
Revolution. Ultimately, this highly mixed stratum was destroyed not by
the guns of the Versaillese but by the advance of industrialism.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was largely a city council, established to
coordinate municipal administration under conditions of revolutionary
unrest. The Russian Soviets of 1905 were largely fighting organizations,
established to coordinate near-insurrectionary strikes in St.
Petersburg. These councils were based almost entirely on factories and
trade unions: there was a delegate for every five hundred workers (where
individual factories and shops contained a smaller number, they were
grouped together for voting purposes), and additionally, delegates from
trade unions and political parties. The soviet mode of organization took
on its clearest and most stable form in St. Petersburg,where the soviet
contained about four hundred delegates at its high point, including
representatives of the newly organized professional unions. The St.
Petersburg soviet rapidly developed from a large strike committee into a
parliament of all oppressed classes, broadening its representation,
demands and responsibilities. Delegates were admitted from cities
outside St. Petersburg, political demands began to dominate economic
ones, and links were established with peasant organizations and their
delegates admitted into the deliberations of the body. Inspired by St.
Petersburg, Soviets sprang up in all the major cities and towns of
Russia and developed into an incipient revolutionary power counterposed
to all the governmental institutions of the autocracy.
The St. Petersburg soviet lasted less than two months. Most of its
members were arrested in December 1905. To a large extent, the soviet
was deserted by the St. Petersburg proletariat, which never rose in
armed insurrection and whose strikes diminished in size and militancy as
trade revived in the late autumn. Ironically, the last stratum to
advance beyond the early militancy of the soviet were the Moscow
students, who rose in insurrection on December22 and during five days of
brilliantly conceived urban guerrilla warfare reduced local police and
military forces to near impotence. The students received very little aid
from the workers in the city. Their street battles might have continued
indefinitely, even in the face of massive proletarian apathy, had the
czar’s guard not been transported to Moscow by the railway workers on
one of the few operating lines to the city.
The Soviets of 1917 were the true heirs of the Soviets of 1905, and to
distinguish the two from each other, as some writers occasionally do, is
spurious. Like their predecessors of twelve years earlier, the 1917
Soviets were based largely on factories, trade unions and party
organizations, but they were expanded to include delegates from army
groups and a sizeable number of stray radical intellectuals. The Soviets
of 1917 reveal all the limitations of “sovietism.“ Though the Soviets
were invaluable as local fighting organizations, their national
congresses proved to be increasingly unrepresentative bodies. The
congresses were organized along very hierarchical lines. Local Soviets
in cities, towns and villages elected delegates to district and regional
bodies; these elected delegates to the actual nationwide congresses. In
larger cities, representation to the congresses was less indirect, but
it was indirect nonetheless—from the voter in a large city to the
municipal soviet and from the municipal soviet to the congress. In
either case the congress was separated from the mass of voters by one or
more representative levels.
The soviet congresses were scheduled to meet every three months. This
permitted far too long a time span to exist between sessions. The first
congress, held in June 1917, had some eight hundred delegates; later
congresses were even larger, numbering a thousand or more delegates. To
“expedite” the work of the congresses and to provide continuity of
function between the tri-monthly sessions,the congresses elected an
executive committee, fixed at not more than two hundred in 1918 and
expanded to a maximum of three hundred in 1920. This body was to remain
more or less in permanent session, but it too was regarded as unwieldy
and most of its responsibilities after the October revolution were
turned over to a small Council of People’s Commissars. Having once
acquired control of the Second Congress of Soviets (in October 1917),
the Bolsheviks found it easy to centralize power in the Council of
Commissars and later in the Political Bureau of the Communist Party.
Opposition groups in the Soviets either left the Second Congress or were
later expelled from all soviet organs. The tri-monthly meetings of the
congresses were permitted to lapse: the completely Bolshevik Executive
Committee and Council of People’s Commissars simply did not summon them.
Finally, the congresses were held only once a year. Similarly, the
intervals between the meetings of district and regional Soviets grew
increasingly longer and even the meetings of the Executive
Committee,created by the congresses as a body in permanent
session,became increasingly infrequent until finally they were held only
three times a year. The power of the local Soviets passed into the hands
of the Executive Committee, the power of the Executive Committee passed
into the hands of the Council of People’s Commissars, and finally, the
power of the Council of People’s Commissars passed into the hands of the
Political Bureau of the Communist Party.
That the Russian Soviets were incapable of providing the anatomy for a
truly popular democracy is to be ascribed not only to their hierarchical
structure, but also to their limited social roots. The insurgent
military battalions,from which the Soviets drew their original striking
power,were highly unstable, especially after the final collapse of the
czarist armies. The newly formed Red Army was recruited, disciplined,
centralized and tightly controlled by the Bolsheviks. Except for
partisan bands and naval forces,soviet military bodies remained
politically inert through-out the civil war. The peasant villages turned
inward toward their local concerns, and were apathetic about national
problems. This left the factories as the most important political base
of the Soviets. Here we encounter a basic contradiction in class
concepts of revolutionary power: proletarian socialism, precisely
because it emphasizes that power must be based exclusively on the
factory, creates the conditions for a centralized, hierarchical
political structure.
However much its social position is strengthened by a system of
“self-management,” the factory is not an autonomous social organism. The
amount of social control the factory can exercise is fairly limited, for
every factory is highly dependent for its operation and its very
existence upon other factories and sources of raw materials. Ironically,
the Soviets, by basing themselves primarily in the factory and isolating
the factory from its local environment, shifted power from the community
and the region to the nation, and eventually from the base of society to
its summit. The soviet system consisted of an elaborate skein of
mediated social relationships, knitted along nationwide class lines.
Perhaps the only instance where a system of working-class
self-management succeeded as a mode of class organization was in Spain,
where anarcho-syndicalism attracted a large number of workers and
peasants to its banner. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists consciously
sought to limit the tendency toward centralization. The CNT
(Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo), the large anarcho-syndicalist
union in Spain, created a dual organization with an elected committee
system to act as a control on local bodies and national congresses. The
assemblies had the power to revoke their delegates to the council and
countermand council decisions. For all practical purposes the “higher”
bodies of the CNT functioned as coordinating bodies. Let there be no
mistake about the effectiveness of this scheme of organization: it
imparted to each member of the CNT a weighty sense of responsibility, a
sense of direct,immediate and personal influence in the activities and
policies of the union. This responsibility was exercised with a
highmindedness that made the CNT the most militant as well as the
largest revolutionary movement in Europe during the interwar decades.
The Spanish Revolution of 1936 put the CNT system to a practical test,
and it worked fairly well. In Barcelona,CNT workers seized the
factories, transportation facilities and utilities, and managed them
along anarcho-syndicalist lines. It remains a matter of record, attested
to by visitors of almost every political persuasion, that the city’s
economy operated with remarkable success and efficiency—despite the
systematic sabotage practiced by the bourgeois Republican government and
the Spanish Communist Party. The experiment finally collapsed in
shambles when the central government’s assault troops occupied Barcelona
in May 1937, following an uprising of the proletariat.
Despite their considerable influence, the Spanish anarchists had
virtually no roots outside certain sections of the working class and
peasantry. The movement was limited primarily to industrial Catalonia,
the coastal Mediterranean areas, rural Aragon, and Andalusia. What
destroyed the experiment was its isolation within Spain itself and the
overwhelming forces—Republican as well as fascist, and Stalinist as well
as bourgeois—that were mobilized against it.
It would be fruitless to examine in detail the council modes of
organization that emerged in Germany in 1918, in the Asturias in 1934,
and in Hungary in 1956. The German councils were hopelessly perverted:
the so-called ”majority” (reformist) social democrats succeeded in
gaining control of the newly formed councils and using them for
counter-revolutionary ends. In Hungary and Asturias the councils were
quickly destroyed by counter-revolution, but there is no reason to
believe that, had they developed further, they would have avoided the
fate of the Russian Soviets. History shows that the Bolsheviks were not
the only ones to distort the council mode of operation. Even in
anarcho-syndicalist Spain there is evidence that by 1937 the committee
system of the CNT was beginning to clash with the assembly system;
whatever the outcome might have been, the whole experiment was ended by
the assault of the Communists and the Republican government against
Barcelona.
The fact remains that council modes of organization are not immune to
centralization, manipulation and perversion. These councils are still
particularistic, one-sided and mediated forms of social management. At
best, they can be the stepping stones to a decentralized society—at
worst,they can easily be integrated into hierarchical forms of social
organization.
Let us turn to the popular assembly for an insight into unmediated forms
of social relations. The assembly probably formed the structural basis
of early clan and tribal society until its functions were pre-empted by
chiefs and councils. It appeared as the ecclesia in classical
Athens;later, in a mixed and often perverted form, it reappeared in the
medieval and Renaissance towns of Europe. Finally, as the “sections,”
assemblies emerged as the insurgent bodies in Paris during the Great
Revolution. The ecclesia and the Parisian sections warrant the closest
study. Both developed in the most complex cities of their time and both
assumeda highly sophisticated form, often welding individuals of
different social origins into a remarkable, albeit temporary, community
of interests. It does not minimize their limitations to say that they
developed methods of functioning so successfully libertarian in
character that even the most imaginative Utopias have failed to match in
speculation what they achieved in practice.
The Athenian ecclesia was probably rooted in the early assemblies of the
Greek tribes. With the development of property and social classes, it
was replaced by a feudal social structure, lingering only in the social
memory of the people. For a time, Athenian society seemed to be charting
the disastrous course toward internal decay that Rome was to follow
several centuries later. A large class of heavily mortgaged peasants, a
growing number of serf-like sharecroppers, and a large body of urban
laborers and slaves were polarized against a small number of powerful
and magnates and a parvenu commercial middle class. By the sixth century
B.C., all the conditions in Athens and Attica (the surrounding
agricultural region) had ripened for a devastating social war.
The course of Athenian history was reversed by the reforms of Solon. In
a series of drastic measures, the peasantry was restored to an
economically viable condition, the landowners were shorn of most of
their power, the ecclesia was revived, and a reasonably equitable system
of justice was established. The trend toward a popular democracy
continued to unfold for nearly a century and a half, until it achieved a
form that has never quite been equaled elsewhere. By Periclean times the
Athenians had perfected their polis to a point where it represented a
triumph of rationality within the material limitations of the ancient
world.
Structurally, the basis of the Athenian polis was the ecclesia. Shortly
after sunrise at each prytany (the tenth day of the year), thousands of
male citizens from all over Attica began to gather on the Pnyx, a hill
directly outside Athens, for a meeting of the assembly. Here, in the
open air, they leisurely disported themselves among groups of friends
until the solemn intonation of prayers announced the opening of the
meeting. The agenda, arranged under the three headings of “sacred,”
“profane” and “foreign affairs,” had been distributed days earlier with
the announcement of the assembly. Although the ecclesia could not add or
bring forward anything that the agenda did not contain, its subject
matter could be rearranged at the will of the assembly. No quorum was
necessary, except for proposed decrees affecting individual citizens.
The ecclesia enjoyed complete sovereignty over all institutions and
offices in Athenian society. It decided questions of war and peace,
elected and removed generals, reviewed military campaigns, debated and
voted upon domestic and foreign policy, redressed grievances, examined
and passed upon the operations of administrative boards, and banished
undesirable citizens. Roughly one man out of six in the citizen body was
occupied at any given time with the administration of the community’s
affairs. Some fifteen hundred men, chosen mainly by lot, staffed the
boards responsible for the collection of taxes,the management of
shipping, food supply and public facilities, and the preparation of
plans for public construction. The army, composed entirely of conscripts
from each of the ten tribes of Attica, was led by elected officers;
Athens was policed by citizen-bowmen and Scythian state slaves.
The agenda of the ecclesia was prepared by a body called the Council of
500. Lest the council gain any authority over the ecclesia, the
Athenians carefully circumscribed its composition and functions. Chosen
by lot from rosters of citizens who, in turn, were elected annually by
the tribes, the Council was divided into ten subcommittees, each of
which was on duty for a tenth of the year. Every day a president was
selected by lot from among the fifty members of the subcommittee that
was on duty to the polis. During his twenty-four hours of office, the
Council’s president held the state seal and the keys to the citadel and
public archives and functioned as acting head of the country. Once he
had been chosen, he could not occupy the position again.
Each of the ten tribes annually elected six hundred citizens to serve as
“judges”—what we would call jurymen—in the Athenian courts. Every
morning, they trudged up to the temple of Theseus, where lots were drawn
for the trials of the day. Each court consisted of at least 201 jurymen
and the trials were fair by any historical standard of juridical
practice.
Taken as a whole, this was a remarkable system of social management; run
almost entirely by amateurs, the Athenian polis reduced the formulation
and administration of public policy to a completely public affair. “Here
is no privileged class, no class of skilled politicians, no bureaucracy;
no body of men, like the Roman Senate, who alone understood the secrets
of State, and were looked up to and trusted as the gathered wisdom of
the whole community,” observes W. Warde Fowler. “At Athens there was no
disposition, and in fact no need, to trust the experience of any one;
each man entered intelligently into the details of his own temporary
duties, and discharged them, as far as we can tell, with industry and
integrity.” Overdrawn as this view may be for a class society that
required slaves and denied women any role in the polis, the fact remains
that Fowler’s account is essentially accurate.
Indeed, the greatness of the achievement lies in the fact that Athens,
despite the slave, patriarchal and class features it shared with
classical society, as a whole developed into a working democracy in the
literal sense of the term. No less significant, and perhaps consoling
for our own time, is the fact that this achievement occurred when it
seemed that the polis had charted a headlong course toward social decay.
At its best, Athenian democracy greatly modified the more abusive and
inhuman features of ancient society. The burdens of slavery were small
by comparison with other historical periods, except when slaves were
employed in capitalist enterprises. Generally, slaves were allowed to
accumulate their own funds; on the yeoman farmsteads of Attica they
generally worked under the same conditions and shared the same food as
their masters; in Athens, they were indistinguishable in dress, manner
and bearing from citizens—a source of ironical comment by foreign
visitors. In many crafts, slaves not only worked side by side with
freemen, but occupied supervisory positions over free workers as well as
other slaves.
On balance, the image of Athens as a slave economy which built its
civilization and generous humanistic outlook on the backs of human
chattels is false—“false in its interpretation of the past and in its
confident pessimism as to the future, willfully false, above all, in its
cynical estimate of human nature,” observes Edward Zimmerman.
“Societies, like men, cannot live in compartments. They cannot hope to
achieve greatness by making amends in their use of leisure for the lives
they have brutalized in acquiring it. Art, literature, philosophy, and
all other great products of a nation’s genius, are no mere delicate
growths of a sequestered hothouse culture; they must be sturdily rooted,
and find continual nourishment, in the broad common soil of national
life. That, if we are looking for lessons, is one we might learn from
ancient Greece.”
In Athens, the popular assembly emerged as the final product of a
sweeping social transition. In Paris, more than two millennia later, it
emerged as the lever of social transition itself, as a revolutionary
form and an insurrectionary force. The Parisian sections of the early
1790s played the same role as organs of struggle as the Soviets of 1905
and 1917, with the decisive difference that relations within the
sections were not mediated by a hierarchical structure. Sovereignty
rested with the revolutionary assemblies themselves, not above them.
The Parisian sections emerged directly from the voting system
established for elections to the Estates General. In 1789 the monarchy
had divided the capital into sixty electoral districts, each of which
formed an assembly of so-called “active” or taxpaying citizens, the
eligible voters of the city. These primary assemblies were expected to
elect a body of electors which, in turn, was to choose the sixty
representatives of the capital. After performing their electoral
functions, the assemblies were required to disappear,but they remained
on in defiance of the monarchy and constituted themselves into permanent
municipal bodies.By degrees they turned into neighborhood assemblies of
all ”active” citizens, varying in form, scope and power from one
district to another.
The municipal law of May 1790 reorganized the sixty districts into
forty-eight sections. The law was intended to circumscribe the popular
assemblies, but the sections simply ignored it. They continued to
broaden their base and extend their control over Paris. On July 30,
1792, the Theatre-Francais section swept aside the distinction between
“active” and “passive” citizens, inviting the poorest and most destitute
of the sans-culottes to participate in the assembly. Other sections
followed the Theatre-Francais,and from this period the sections became
authentic popular organs—indeed the very soul of the Great Revolution.
It was the sections which constituted the new revolutionary Commune of
August 10, which organized the attack on the Tuileries and finally
eliminated the Bourbon monarchy; it was the sections which decisively
blocked the efforts of the Girondins to rouse the provinces against
revolutionary Paris; it was the sections which, by ceaseless prodding,
by their unending delegations and by armed demonstrations, provided the
revolution with its remarkable leftward momentum after 1791.
The sections, however, were not merely fighting organizations; they
represented genuine forms of self-management. At the high point of their
development, they took over the complete administration of the city.
Individual sections policed their own neighborhoods, elected their own
judges, were responsible for the distribution of food, provided public
aid to the poor, and contributed to the maintenance of the National
Guard. With the declaration of war in April 1792 the sections took on
the added tasks of enrolling volunteers for the revolutionary army and
caring for their families, collecting donations for the war effort, and
equipping and provisioning entire battalions. During the period of the
“maximum,” when controls were established over prices and wages to
prevent a runaway inflation, the sections took responsibility for the
maintenance of government-fixed prices. To provision Paris, the sections
sent their representatives to the countryside to buy and transport food
and see to its distribution at fair prices.
It must be borne in mind that this complex of extremely important
activities was undertaken not by professional bureaucrats but, for the
most part, by ordinary shopkeepers and craftsmen. The bulk of the
sectional responsibilities were discharged after working hours, during
the free time of the section members. The popular assemblies of the
sections usually met during the evenings in neighborhood churches.
Assemblies were ordinarily open to all the adults of the neighborhood.
In periods of emergency, assembly meetings were held daily; special
meetings could be called at the request of fifty members.Most
administrative responsibilities were discharged by committees, but the
popular assemblies established all the policies of the sections,
reviewed and passed upon the work of all the committees, and replaced
officers at will.
The forty-eight sections were coordinated through the Paris Commune, the
municipal council of the capital.When emergencies arose, sections often
cooperated with each other directly, through ad hoc delegates. This form
of cooperation from below never crystalized into a permanent
relationship. The Paris Commune of the Great Revolution never became an
overbearing, ossified institution; it changed with almost every
important political emergency,and its stability, form and functions
depended largely upon the wishes of the sections. In the days preceding
the uprising of August 10, 1792, for example, the sections simply
suspended the old municipal council, confined Petion, the mayor of
Paris, and, in the persons of their insurrectionary commissioners, took
over all the authority of the Commune and the command of the National
Guard.Almost the same procedure was followed nine months later when the
Girondin deputies were expelled from the Convention, with the difference
that the Commune, and Pache, the mayor of Paris, gave their consent
(after some persuasive “gestures”) to the uprising of the radical
sections.
Having relied on the sections to fasten their hold on the Convention,
the Jacobins began to rely on the Convention to destroy the sections. In
September 1793 the Convention limited section assemblies to two a week;
three months later the sections were deprived of the right to elect
justices of the peace and divested of their role in organizing relief
work. The sweeping centralization of France, which the Jacobins
undertook between 1793 and 1794, completed the destruction of the
sections. The sections were denied control over the police and their
administrative responsibilities were placed in the hands of salaried
bureaucrats. By January 1794 the vitality of the sections had been
thoroughly sapped. As Michelet observes: “The general assemblies of the
sections were dead,and all their power had passed to their revolutionary
committees, which, themselves being no longer elected bodies,but simply
groups of officials nominated by the authorities, had not much life in
them either.” The sections had been subverted by the very revolutionary
leaders they had raised to power in the Convention. When the time came
for Robespierre, Saint-Just and Lebas to appeal to the sections against
the Convention, the majority did virtually nothing in their behalf.
Indeed, the revolutionary Gravilliers section—the men who had so
earnestly supported Jacques Roux and the enrages in 1793—vindictively
placed their arms at the service of the Thermidorians and marched
against the Robespierrists—the Jacobin leaders,who, a few months
earlier, had driven Roux to suicide and guillotined the spokesmen of the
left.
The factors which undermined the assemblies of classical Athens and
revolutionary Paris require very little discussion. In both cases the
assembly mode of organization was broken up not only from without, but
also from within—by the development of class antagonisms. There are no
forms, however cleverly contrived, that can overcome the content of a
given society. Lacking the material resources, the technology and the
level of economic development to overcome class antagonisms as such,
Athens and Paris could achieve an approximation of the forms of freedom
only temporarily—and only to deal with the more serious threat of
complete social decay. Athens held on to the ecclesia for several
centuries, mainly because the polis still retained a living contact with
tribal forms of organization; Paris developed its sectional mode of
organization for a period of several years, largely because the
sans-culottes had been precipitously swept to the head of the revolution
by a rare combination of fortunate circumstances. Both the ecclesia and
the sections were undermined by the very conditions they were intended
to check—property, class antagonisms and exploitation—but which they
were incapable of eliminating. What is remarkable about them is that
they worked at all, considering the enormous problems they faced and the
formidable obstacles they had to overcome.
It must be borne in mind that Athens and Paris were large cities, not
peasant villages; indeed, they were complex, highly sophisticated urban
centers by the standards of their time. Athens supported a population of
more than a quarter of a million, Paris over seven hundred thousand.
Both cities were engaged in worldwide trade; both were burdened by
complex logistical problems; both had a multitude of needs that could be
satisfied only by a fairly elaborate system of public administration.
Although each had only a fraction of the population of present-day New
York or London, their advantages on this score were more than canceled
out by their extremely crude systems of communication and
transportation, and by the need, in Paris at least, for members of the
assembly to devote the greater part of the day to brute toil. Yet Paris,
no less than Athens, was administered by amateurs: by men who, for
several years and in their spare time, saw to the administration of a
city in revolutionary ferment. The principal means by which they made
their revolution, organized its conquests, and finally sustained it
against counterrevolution at home and invasion abroad, was the
neighborhood public assembly. There is no evidence that these assemblies
and the committees they produced were inefficient or technically
incompetent. On the contrary, they awakened a popular initiative, a
resoluteness in action, and a sense of revolutionary purpose that no
professional bureaucracy, however radical its pretensions, could ever
hope to achieve. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that Athens founded
Western philosophy, mathematics, drama, historiography and art, and that
revolutionary Paris contributed more than its share to the culture of
the time and the political thought of the Western world. The arena for
these achievements was not the traditional state, structured around a
bureaucratic apparatus, but a system of unmediated relations, a
face-to-face democracy organized into public assemblies.
The sections provide us with a rough model of assembly organization in a
large city and during a period of revolutionary transition from a
centralized political state to a potentially decentralized society. The
ecclesia provides us with a rough model of assembly organization in a
decentralized society. The word “model” is used deliberately. The
ecclesia and the sections were lived experiences, not theoretical
visions. But precisely because of this they validate in practice many
anarchic theoretical speculations that have often been dismissed as
“visionary” and “unrealistic.”
The goal of dissolving propertied society, class rule, centralization
and the state is as old as the historical emergence of property, classes
and states. In the beginning, the rebels could look backward to clans,
tribes and federations; it was still a time when the past was closer at
hand than the future. Then the past receded completely from man’s vision
and memory, except perhaps as a lingering dream of the “golden age” or
the “Garden of Eden.”* At this point the very notion of liberation
becomes speculative and theoretical, and like all strictly theoretical
visions its content was permeated with the social material of the
present. Hence the fact that Utopia, from More to Bellamy, is an image
not of a hypothetical future, but of a present drawn to the logical
conclusion of rationality—or absurdity. Utopia has slaves, kings,
princes, oligarchs, technocrats, elites, suburbanites and a substantial
petty bourgeoisie. Even on the left, it became customary to define the
goal of a propertyless, stateless society as a series of approximations,
of stages in which the end in view was attained by the use of the state.
Mediated power entered into the vision of the future; worse, as the
development of Russia indicates, it was strengthened to the point where
the state today is not merely the “executive committee”of a specific
class but a human condition. Life itself has become bureaucratized.
In envisioning the complete dissolution of the existing society, we
cannot get away from the question of power — be it power over our own
lives, the “seizure of power,” or the dissolution of power. In going
from the present to the future, from “here” to “there,” we must ask:
what is power? Under what conditions is it dissolved? And what does its
dissolution mean? How do the forms of freedom, the unmediated relations
of social life, emerge from a statified society, a society in which the
state of unfreedom is carried to the point of absurdity — to domination
for its own sake?
We begin with the historical fact that nearly all the major
revolutionary upheavals began spontaneously: witness the three days of
“disorder” that preceded the take-over of the Bastille in July 1789, the
defense of the artillery in Montmartre that led to the Paris Commune of
1871, the famous “five days” of February 1917 in Petrograd, the uprising
of Barcelona in July 1936, the takeover of Budapest and the expulsion of
the Russian army in 1956. Nearly all the great revolutions came from
below, from the molecular movement of the “masses,” their progressive
individuation and their explosion — an explosion which invariably took
the authoritarian “revolutionists” completely by surprise.
There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the
revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be
achieved by means of self-administration. This implies the forging of a
self (yes, literally a forging in the revolutionary process) and a mode
of administration which the self can possess. If we define “power” as
the power of man over man, power can only be destroyed by the very
process in which man acquires power over his own life and in which he
not only “discovers” himself but, more meaningfully, formulates his
selfhood in all its social dimensions.
Freedom, so conceived, cannot be “delivered” to the individual as the
“end product” of a “revolution” — much less as a “revolution” achieved
by social-philistines who are hypnotized by the trappings of authority
and power. The assembly and community cannot be legislated or decreed
into existence. To be sure, a revolutionary group can purposively and
consciously seek to promote the creation of these forms; but if assembly
and community are not allowed to emerge organically, if their growth is
not instigated, developed and matured by the social processes at work,
they will not be really popular forms. Assembly and community must arise
from within the revolutionary process itself; indeed, the revolutionary
process must be the formation of assembly and community, and with it,
the destruction of power. Assembly and community must become “fighting
words,” not distant panaceas. They must be created as modes of struggle
against the existing society, not as theoretical or programmatic
abstractions.
It is hardly possible to stress this point strongly enough. The future
assemblies of people in the block, the neighborhood or the district —
the revolutionary sections to come — will stand on a higher social level
than all the present-day committees, syndicates, parties and clubs
adorned by the most resounding “revolutionary” titles. They will be the
living nuclei of Utopia in the decomposing body of bourgeois society.
Meeting in auditoriums, theaters, courtyards, halls, parks and — like
their forerunners, the sections of 1793 — in churches, they will be the
arenas of demassification, for the very essence of the revolutionary
process is people acting as individuals.
At this point the assembly may be faced not only with the power of the
bourgeois state—the famous problem of”dual power”—but with the danger of
the incipient state.Like the Paris sections, it will have to fight not
only against the Convention, but also against the tendency to create
mediated social forms.* The factory committees,which will almost
certainly be the forms that will take over industry, must be managed
directly by workers’ assemblies in the factories. By the same token,
neighborhood commit-tees, councils and boards must be rooted completely
in the neighborhood assembly. They must be answerable at every point to
the assembly; they and their work must be under continual review by the
assembly; and finally, their members must be subject to immediate recall
by the assembly. The specific gravity of society, in short, must be
shifted to its base—the armed people in permanent assembly.
As long as the arena of the assembly is the modern bourgeois city, the
revolution is faced with a recalcitrant environment. The bourgeois city,
by its very nature and structure, fosters centralization, massification
and manipulation. Inorganic, gargantuan, and organized like a
factory,the city tends to inhibit the development of an organic,rounded
community. In its role as the universal solvent,the assembly must try to
dissolve the city itself.
We can envision young people renewing social life just as they renew the
human species. Leaving the city, they begin to found the nuclear
ecological communities to which older people repair in increasing
numbers. Large resource pools are mobilized for their use; careful
ecological surveys and suggestions are placed at their disposal by the
most competent and imaginative people available. The modern city begins
to shrivel, to contract and to disappear, as did its ancient progenitors
millennia earlier. In the new,rounded ecological community, the assembly
finds its authentic environment and true shelter. Form and content now
correspond completely. The journey from “here” to”there,” from sections
to ecclesia, from cities to communities, is completed. No longer is the
factory a particularized phenomenon; it now becomes an organic part of
the community. In this sense, it is no longer a factory. The dissolution
of the factory into the community completes the dis-solution of the last
vestiges of propertied, of class, and,above all, of mediated society
into the new polis. And now the real drama of human life can unfold, in
all its beauty,harmony, creativity and joy.