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Title: The Greening of Politics
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: January 1986
Language: en
Topics: green anarchism, ecology, politics, politics
Source: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives1.html

Murray Bookchin

The Greening of Politics

There are two ways to look at the word “politics.” The first—and most

conventional—is to describe politics as a fairly exclusive, generally

professionalized system of power interactions in which specialists whom

we call “politicians” formulate decisions that affect our lives and

administer these decisions through governmental agencies and

bureaucrats.

These “politicians” and their “politics” are generally regarded with a

certain measure of contempt by many Americans. They come to power partly

through “parties,” which are highly structured bureaucracies, and

profess to “represent” people—at times, one person for vast numbers of

people such as Congressmen and Senators. They are “elected” and belong

to “the Elect” (to translate an old religious term into a “political”

one), and, in this sense, form a distinct hierarchical elite however

much they profess to “speak” in “the People’s” name. They are not “the

People.” They are its “representatives” at best, which sets them apart

from the people, and its manipulators at worst, which often sets them

against the people. Quite often, they are very offensive creatures

because they engage in manipulative, immoral, and elitist practices,

using mass media and normally betraying some of their most basic

programmatic commitments to “serve” the people. Rather, they tend to

serve special interest groups, usually well-heeled moneyed ones, who are

likely to advance their careers and material well-being.

This professionalized, elitist, often immoral, and manipulative system

of “politics,” which usually makes a mockery of the democratic processes

we associate with our traditions, is a relatively new political

conception. It arose with the Nation-State several hundred years ago,

when the Absolute monarchs of Europe like Henry VIII in England or Louis

XIV in France began to centralize enormous power in their hands, forming

the hierarchical states we associate with “Government” and carving out

those distinct large-scale jurisdictions we call “nations” from more

decentralized jurisdictions such as free cities, confederations of

localities, and a variety of feudal domains.

Before the formation of the Nation-State “politics” had a meaning that

was very different from the one it has today—and the “powers that be”

are doing everything they can to erase the memory of this meaning from

our minds. At its best, it meant that people at the community level—in

villages, towns, neighborhoods, and cities—managed the public affairs

that have since been pre-empted by politicians and bureaucrats. They

managed these affairs in direct, face-to-face citizens’ assemblies such

as we still encounter in New England town-meetings. At most they elected

councils to administer policy decisions which the citizens formulated in

their own assemblies. And the assemblies were careful to closely

supervise the administrative activities of the councils, recalling

“deputies” whose behavior became the object of public disapproval.

Moreover, political life extended beyond citizens’ assemblies to include

a rich political culture: daily public discussions in squares, parks,

street-corners, educational institutions, open lectures, clubs, and the

like. People discussed politics wherever they came together, as though

they were preparing themselves for the citizens’ assemblies. Politics

was a form of education, not mobilization; its goal was not only

formulating decisions but building character and developing mind. It was

a self-formative process in which the citizen body developed not only a

rich sense of cohesion but a rich sense of personal selfhood—that

indispensable self-development so necessary to foster

self-administration and self- management. Finally, the concept of a

political culture gave rise to civic rituals, festivals, celebrations,

and shared expressions of joy and mourning that provided every locality,

be it a village, town, neighborhood, or city, with a sense of

personality and identity, one which supported individual uniqueness

rather than subordinated it to the collective.

Such politics, in effect, was organic and ecological rather than

“structural” in the top-down sense of the word. It was a continual

process, not a fixed and limited “event” such as we encounter on

“election days.” The citizen developed personally as a result of his or

her political involvement because of the wealth of discussion and

interaction it entailed and the sense of empowerment it engendered.

Citizens correctly believed that they had control over their destinies

and could determine their fate—not that it was predetermined for them by

people and forces over which they had no control. This feeling was

mutualistic: the political domain reinforced the personal by giving it a

sense of power, and the personal domain reinforced the political by

supporting it with a sense of loyalty. In this reciprocal process, the

individual “I” and the collective “we” were not subordinated to each

other, but each nourished the other. The public sphere provided the

collective base and soil for the development of strong personal

characters and the latter united together to form the contours and

domain of a strong public sphere.

It remains to emphasize that such free communities did not always or

necessarily dissolve into self-contained, mutually exclusive, and

parochial units. They often networked with each other to coordinate

their decisions in a cooperative way. They confederated—initially on the

equivalent of what we, today, would designate as a “county” level;

later, in many cases, on a regional (perhaps equivalently, in the U.S.,

on a statewide) level. We have a rich history of such municipal

confederations, in some cases structured around grassroots, even

neighborhood, control that have yet to be given the study they

deserve—and in the U.S. no less than in Europe. In some cases, too,

confederal councils coordinated decisions made by local assemblies which

at all times formulated policies, while recallable, carefully supervised

councils administered them in a purely technical way. Wherever experts

were needed to provide strictly technical alternatives, they were

organized into advisory boards and, lacking any decision-making powers,

advanced various alternatives for consideration, modification, and

determination by the citizens’ assemblies in villages, towns,

neighborhoods, and cities. And where differences existed, they were

simply adjudicated by conference committees or arbitration boards, such

as they still are today when different, often conflicting variations of

the same law are passed by the U.S. Senate and the House of

Representatives.

---

The modern version of what we call “politics,” today, is really

statecraft. It emphasizes “professionalism,” not popular control; the

monopoly of power by the few, not the empowerment of the many; the

“election” of an “Elect” group, not face-to-face democratic processes

that involve the people as a whole; “representation,” not participation.

We use “politics” to mobilize “constituencies” to achieve preselected

goals, not educate them into the self management of society and the

formation of the strong selves that make for genuine individuality and

personality. We deal with the people as a passive “electorate” whose

“political” task is to ritualistically vote for “candidates” who come

from so-called “parties,” not for deputies who are strictly mandated to

administer the policies formulated and decided by active citizens. We

stress obedience, not involvement—and even distort words like

“involvement” to mean little more than a spectatorial stance in which

the individual is lost in the “mass” and the “masses” are themselves

fragmented into isolated, frustrated, and powerless atoms.

This image of “politics,” as I have indicated, is a fairly recent

phenomenon that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century and made its

way into popular consciousness in fairly recent times. It was still not

the accepted notion of “politics” in the last century. Quite to the

contrary: the Nation-State in France, Spain, Germany, and Italy—and

perhaps most significantly, in the United States—still had to make every

effort to assert its authority over localities and regions against

massive popular resistance. In America, this process is perhaps less

Complete than most European countries. Our Revolution, two centuries

ago, gave enormous powers—initially complete power—to regional and local

areas (I refer to our first constitution, The Articles of Confederation,

which gave the original thirteen states preemptive authority over the

national government—a constitution, I may add, that favored the farmers

and urban poor over the wealthy, hence its “ignoble” place in our

history texts) and structured our defense around a citizen’s militia,

not a professional army.

The reality of early politics persisted for generations even after the

Nation-State began to assert itself juridicially. ‘That is to say,

regions and municipalities retained enormous de facto power and provided

vital political arenas despite the enactment of laws to diminish their

activities and place them under the Nation-State’s sovereignty. The

American tradition, often in marked contrast to the European, stresses

this ideal of local autonomy and the dangers of excessive State power.

That tradition emphasizes the rights of the individual to assert himself

or herself against authority, the desirability of a relative degree of

self-sufficiency, the claims of the community against corporate

power—the “inalienable” rights of human beings to “life, liberty, and

the pursuit of happiness,” an expression that is notable for the absence

of any emphasis on property. Washington’s remoteness as a “national

capitol” has been an abiding feature of American political rhetoric and

an emphasis on regionalism and localism an abiding ideal.

We have permitted cynical political reactionaries and the spokesmen of

large corporations to preempt these basic libertarian American ideals.

We have permitted them not only to become the specious “voice” of these

ideals such that individualism has been used to justify egotism; the

“pursuit of happiness” to justify greed, and even our emphasis on local

and regional autonomy has been used to justify parochialism, insularism,

and exclusivity—often against ethnic minorities and so-called “deviant”

individuals. We have even permitted these reactionaries to stake out a

claim to the word “libertarian,” a word, in fact, that was literally

devised in the 1890s in France by Elisée Reclus as a substitute for the

word “anarchist,” which the government had rendered an illegal

expression for identifying one’s views. The propertarians, in

effect—acolytes of Ayn Rand, the “earth mother” of greed, egotism, and

the virtues of property—have approporiated expressions and traditions

that should have been expressed by radicals but were willfully neglected

because of the lure of European and Asian traditions of “socialism,”

“socialisms” that are now entering into decline in the very countries in

which they originated.

It is time, at long last, that we developed a politics that is not

statecraft—a statecraft that the American people already view with deep

and justifiable suspicion. It is time, too, that we begin to speak to

the American people in the vocabulary of homegrown American radicalism,

not German Marxism or Chinese Maoism, a vocabulary that is waning even

in Germany and China. Finally, it is time that we develop an organic

politics—an ecological politics—not a statist politics structured around

parties, bureaucracies, political specialists, and elites. Organic or

ecological—in a word, Green—means literally the evolution of a politics

of the organism in the very real sense that we begin with the cellular

level of social life: the community, be it the neighborhood, city, town,

or village, not the abstract “nation” with its imperatives of national

parties, bureaucracies, “executives,” and the like. Green politics means

that we apply ecological principles and processes to our ways of

functioning politically—at grassroots levels in face-to-face,

democratic, and popular assemblies. It means an intimate politics that

is based on education, not simply mobilization, such that we help to

create active, politically concerned, participatory citizens, not

passive, privatized, and spectatorial “constituents” who have no control

over their destinies. The terrain for this politics is the municipality:

neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, community meetings that will

turn our own localities into a confederated, inter-linked, and

well-organized network of localist institutions—institutions that will

act as a countervailing force to the ever-growing centralization and

bureaucratization of the Nation-State. Its basic program will be: let

the people decide! And it is a program that stems from a distinctly

American radical tradition, not a borrowed and refurbished one from

abroad.

Weak as they may be, these parallel local institutions in the U.S. are

still very much in place. They exist as a democracy within our republic

and as a form of indigenous radicalism within our democracy. Our demand

should be:

Americans! In an era of ever-growing State centralization and

bureaucratization, we demand that we democratize our republic and

radicalize our democracy!