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Title: Anarchism: Past and Present Author: Murray Bookchin Language: en Topics: class struggle, history, marxism Source: Retrieved on April 28, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/pastandpresent.html Notes: This piece appeared as Vol. 1, No. 6 of Comment: New Perspectives in Libertarian Thought, edited by Murray Bookchin.
Note: The following issue of COMMENT was presented as a lecture to the
Critical Theory Seminar of the University of California at Los Angeles
on May 29, 1980. My remarks are intended to emphasize the extreme
importance today of viewing Anarchism in terms of the changing social
contexts of our era — not as an ossified doctrine that belongs to one or
another set of European thinkers, valuable as their views may have been
in their various times and places. Today, more than ever, the viability
of Anarchism in America will depend upon its ability to speak directly —
in the language of the American people and to living problems of the
American people — rather than to resurrect ideas, expressions, slogans
and a weary vernacular that belong to eras past. This is not to deny the
internationalist spirit of Anarchism or its historical continuity, but
rather to stress the need to solidarize with libertarian traditions and
concepts that are clearly relevant to dominated peoples in the areas —
conceived in terms of place, time, and forms — in which libertarian
movements function.
There is a grave danger that Anarchism may be dealt with simplistically,
the way we deal with most radical “isms” today — as a fixed body of
theory and practice that so often reduces Socialism to the textual works
of Marx and Engels and their acolytes. I do not mean to deny the generic
meaning of terms like “Socialism.” There are many types of Socialisms
ranging from the utopian to the Leninist, from the ethical to the
scientific. I simply wish to stake out the same claim for Anarchism. We
must always remember that there are also many forms of Anarchism,
notably anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-individualism,
anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism, and, amusingly enough,
anarcho-Bolshevism if I read the history of the Spanish Anarchist
movement correctly. These Anarchist theories and movements have been
burdened by all the intramural conflicts we encounter between
Socialists, albeit in a less bloody and lethal form.
What really concerns me with the wide range of Anarchisms, however, goes
well beyond the generic character of the term. I cannot stress strongly
enough that Anarchism not only encompasses a wide variety of theories
and movements but more importantly it has a very rich historical genesis
and development. This is crucial to an understanding of what I have to
say. More so than any radical movement with which we are familiar,
Anarchism is a profoundly social movement as distinguished from the
usual political movements we associate with The Left. Its vitality, its
theoretical form, indeed its very raison d’etre stem from its capacity
to express the millenia-long aspirations of peoples to create their own
egalitarian or, at least, self-administered social structures, their own
forms of human consociation by which they can exercise control over
their lives. In this sense, Anarchism really constitutes a folk or
people’s social philosophy and practice in the richest sense of the
term, just as the folk song constitutes the emotional expression of a
people in their esthetic or spiritual depths. The Hellenic origins of
the terms anarche or “no rule” should not deceive us into thinking that
it can be readily placed in the academic spectrum of social ideas.
Historically, Anarchism has found expression in non-authoritarian clans,
tribes and tribal federations, in the democratic institutions of the
Athenian polis, in the early medieval communes, in the radical Puritan
congregations of the English Revolution, in the democratic town meetings
that spread from Boston to Charleston after 1760, in the Paris Commune
of 1871, the soviets of 1905 and 1917, the Anarchist pueblos, barrios,
and worker-controlled shops of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 — in
short, in the self-directed, early and contemporary, social forms of
humanity that have institutionally involved people in face-to-face
relations based on direct democracy, self-management, active
citizenship, and personal participation.[1] It is within this electric
public sphere that the Anarchist credo of direct action finds its real
actualization. Indeed, direct action not only means the occupation of a
nuclear power plant site but less dramatic, often prosaic, and tedious
forms of self-management that involve patience, commitment to democratic
procedures, lengthy discourse, and a decent respect for the opinions of
others within the same community.
This institutional framework and sensibility is the authentic mileau of
Anarchism, its very protoplasm. The theories that emerge from the
activity of this protoplasm are the forms of self-reflexive rationality
that give it coherence and consciousness. To my thinking, the “Digger”
Winstanley, the Enrage Varlat, the artisan Proudhon, the worker
Pelloutier, and the Russian intellectuals Bakunin and Kropotkin voice at
various levels of consciousness different, often clearly delineable,
phases of humanity’s organic evolution toward freedom. One can often
associate these individuals or the ideas they developed with the actual
development of the popular social forms from which they emerged or to
which they gave ideological coherence. Thus one can justifiably
associate Winstanley’s ideas with the agrarian Anarchism of the yeoman
communities in seventeenth-century England, Varlat with the urban
neighborhood Anarchism of the revolutionary sections and Enrage movement
of Paris in 1793, Proudhon with the artisan Anarchism of craftspeople in
pre-industrial France, Bakunin’s anarcho-collectivism with the peasant
villages of Russia and Spain, Pelloutier’s anarcho-syndicalism, with the
industrial proletariat and emerging factory system and, perhaps most
prophetically, Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism with our own era, a body of
theory that readily lends itself to the ecological, decentralist,
technological, and urban issues that have come to the foreground of
social life today.
The anti-statist and anti-political views of these Anarchist thinkers
should not obscure the positive content of their views and their roots.
The Marxian notion that human “socialization” reaches its most advanced
historical form with bourgeois society — a society that strips humanity
of its remaining biosocial trappings — would have been emphatically
rejected by these Anarchists if only on the intuitive grounds that
society can never be totally denatured. As I have argued elsewhere (see
my “Beyond Neo-Marxism” in Telos, No. 36), society never frees itself of
its natural matrix, even in the internal relations between individuals.
The actual issue, if one is to learn from the ecological problems of our
time, is the nature of that nature in which society is rooted — organic
(as was the case in many precapitalist communities) or inorganic (as is
the case in market society). The clan, tribe, polis, medieval commune,
even the Parisian sections, the Commune, certainly the village and
decentralized towns of the past, were rooted in bio-social relations.
Market society with its atomization, competition, total objectification
of the individual and her or his labor-power — not to speak of the
bureaucratic sinews that hold this lifeless structure together, the
concrete, steel, and glass cities and suburbs that provide its
environments, and quantification that permeates every aspect of its
activity — all of these not only deny life in the biological and organic
sense but reduce it to its molecular components in the physical and
inorganic sense. Bourgeois society does not achieve society’s domination
of nature; rather, it literally desocializes society by making it an
object to be appropriated by inorganic nature, by the bourgeois in his
inner being and his social being. The bureaucracy colonizes the social
institutions of humanity; the concrete city, the organic relations of
nature; cybernetics and the mass media, the individual’s personality; in
short, market “society” colonizes every aspect of personal and social
life.
I cannot emphasize too strongly the umbilical cord that unites organic
societies, in the sense and with the qualifications I have described
them, with Anarchist theories and movements. Nor can I desist from
noting the extent to which Marxism, by contrast, is linked to the most
inorganic of all human structures, the state — and at other layers of
hierarchy, with that most inorganic of all oppressed classes, the
proletariat and such institutionalized forms of centralized power as the
factory, the party, and the bureaucracy. That the very “universality” of
the proletariat that Marx celebrates in the form of its dehumanization
by capital, its association with a technological framework based on
centralization, domination, and rationalization which presumably render
it into a revolutionary force reveals the extent to which Marx’s own
theoretical corpus is rooted in bourgeois ideology in its least
self-reflexive form. For this “universality” as we can now see
celebrates the “hollowing out” of society itself, its increasing
vulnerability to bureaucratic manipulation in industry and politics by
capital and trade unions. “Schooled” by the nuclear family, by
vocational supervisors, by the hierarchical factory structure, and by
the division of labor, the “universality” of the proletariat turns out
to be the faceleseness of the proletariat — its expression not of the
general interests of humanity in its progress toward socialism but its
particular interests, indeed, of interests as such, as the expression of
bourgeois egoism. The factory does not unite the proletariat; it defines
it — and no tendency more clearly expresses the proletariat’s human
desires than its attempt to escape from the factory, to seek what the
Berlin Dadaists of 1918 were to demand: “universal unemployment.”
These far-reaching distinctions between Anarchism as a social movement
and Marxism as a political one require further emendations. I have no
quarrel with the great wealth of Marx’s writings, particularly his work
on alienation, his analysis of the commodity relationship and the
accumulation of capital. His historical theories require the correction
of the best work of Max Weber and Karl Polanyi. But it is not Marx’s
writings that must be updated. Their limits are defined by their
fundamentally bourgeois origins and their incredible susceptibility to
political, that is, state-oriented ideologies. Historically, it is not
accidental that Anarchism in Spain, in the Ukraine, and, in its
Zapatista form in Mexico, could be crushed only by a genocidal
destruction of its social roots, notably the village. Marxian movements,
where they suffer defeat, are crushed merely by demolishing the party.
The seeming “atavism” of Anarchism — its attempts to retain artisanship,
the mutual aid of the community, a closeness to nature and enlightened
ethical norms — are its virtues insofar as they seek to retain those
richly articulated, cooperative, and self-expressive forms of human
consociation scaled to human dimensions. The seeming “effectiveness” of
Marxism — its attempt to replicate the state in the form of the party,
its emphasis on a political apparatus, its scientific thrust and its
denial of a prophetic ethical vision — are its vices insofar as they do
not demolish the bourgeois state but incorporate it into the very
substance of protest and revolution.
Not accidentally, Marxism has been most sharply alienated from itself.
The attempt to “update” Marxian theory, to give it relevance beyond the
academy and reformist movements, has added an obfuscating eclectic
dimension to its ideological corpus. In response to the Russian general
strike of 1905, Rosa Luxemburg was obliged to make the “mass strike” — a
typical Anarchist “strategy” — palatable to the Second International —
this, not without grossly distorting Engel’s view on the subject and the
Anarchist view as well.[2] Lenin was to perform much the same acrobatics
in State and Revolution in 1917 when events favored the Paris Commune as
a paradigm, again assailing the Anarchists while concealing Marx’s own
denigrating judgment of the uprising in the later years of his life.
Similar acrobatics were performed by Mandel, Gorz, et al in May-June
1968, when all of France was swept into a near-revolutionary situation.
What is significant, here, is the extent to which the theory follows
events which are essentially alien to its analysis. The emergence of the
ecology movement in the late 1960s, of feminism in the early 1970s, and
more belatedly, of neighborhood movements in recent years has rarely
been viewed as a welcome phenomenon by Marxist theorists until, by the
sheer force of events, it has been acknowledged, later distorted to meet
economistic, Marxist criteria, and attempts are ultimately made to
absorb it. At which point, it is not Anarchism, to which these issues
are literally indigenous, that has been permitted to claim its relevancy
and legitimacy to the problems of our era but rather Marxism, much of
which has become the ideology of state capitalism in half of the world.
This obfuscating development has impeded the evolution of revolutionary
consciousness at its very roots and gravely obstructs the evolution of a
truly self-reflexive revolutionary movement.
By the same token, Anarchism has acquired some bad Marxist habits of its
own, notably an ahistorical and largely defensive commitment to its own
past. The transformation of the sixties counterculture into more
institutionalized forms and the decline of the New Left has created
among many committed Anarchists a longing for the ideological security
and pedigree that currently afflicts many Marxist sects. This yearning
to return to a less inglorious past, together with the resurgence of the
Spanish CNT after Franco’s death, has fostered an Anarchism that is
chillingly similar in its lack of creativity to sectarian forms of
proletarian socialism, notably anarcho-syndicalism. What is lacking in
both cases is the proletariat and the historical constellation of
circumstances that marked the hundred-year-old era of 1848 to 1938.
Anarchist commitments to the factory, to the struggle of wage labor
versus capital, share all the vulgarities of sectarian Marxism. What
redeems the anarcho-syndicalists from outright congruence with
authoritarian Marxism is the form their libertarian variant of
proletarian socialism acquires. Their emphasis on an ethical socialism,
on direct action, on control from below, and their apolitical stance may
serve to keep them afloat, but what tends to vitiate their efforts —
this quite aside from the historical decline of the workers movement as
a revolutionary force — is the authoritarian nature of the factory, the
pyramidal structure fostered by syndicalist theory, and the reliance
anarcho-syndicalists place on the unique role of the proletariat and the
social nature of its conflict with capital.
Viewed broadly, anarcho-syndicalism, Proudhonianism, and Bakuninism
belong to an irretrievable past. I say this not because they lack
ideological coherence and meaning — indeed, Proudhon’s emphasis on
federalism still enjoys its original validity — but simply because they
speak to epochs which have faded into history. There is much they can
teach us, but they have long been transcended by historically new issues
— in my view, more fundamental in their libertarian implications — to
which the entire Left must now address itself. This does not mean the
“death” or even the “transcendence” of Anarchism as such once we view
the term in its generic and historical meaning, for the issues that
confront us are more distinctly social than they have ever been at any
time in the past. They literally involve the recreation of a new public
sphere as distinguished from the state with the forms, institutions,
relations, sensibilities, and culture appropriate to a world that is
faced with desocialization at every level of life. For Marxism, these
issues are fatal and, in fact, render Marxism itself into ideology in a
socially destructive sense.
We are no longer living in a world where revolutionary consciousness can
be developed primarily or even significantly around the issue of wage
labor versus capital. I do not wish to denigrate the significance of
this century-old conflict. That a class struggle exists between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie (however broadly we choose to define the
term “proletariat”) hardly requires discussion, anymore than the fact
that we live in a capitalist society that is ruled by a capitalist class
(again, however broadly we choose to define the term “capitalist”). What
is really at issue is that a class struggle does not mean a class war in
the revolutionary sense of the term. If the past century has taught us
anything, I submit it has demonstrated that the conflict between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie has been neither more nor less
revolutionary than the conflict between the plebians and patricians in
the ancient world or the serfs and the nobility in the feudal world.
Both conflicts did not simply end in an impasse; they never contained
the authentic possibilities of transcending the social, economic, and
cultural forms within which they occurred. Indeed, the view of history
as a history of class struggle is a highly convoluted one that is not
exhausted by conflicting economic interests, by class consciousness and
identity, or by the economically motivated methods that have so easily
rooted socialist and syndicalist ideologist in economic reductionism or
what is blithely called a “class analysis.”
What lies on the horizon of the remaining portion of this century is not
the class struggle as we have known it in the metaphors of proletarian
socialism — Socialist or Anarchist. The monumental crisis bourgeois
society has created in the form of a disequilibrium between humanity and
nature, a crisis that has telescoped an entire geological epoch into a
mere century; the expansive notion of human freedom that has given rise
of feminism in all its various forms; the hollowing out of the human
community and citizenship that threatens the very claims of
individuality, subjectivity, and democratic consciousness, perhaps the
greatest claim the bourgeois epoch has made for itself as a force for
progress; the terrifying sense of powerlessness in the face of
ever-greater urban, corporate, and political gigantism; the steady
demobilization of the political electorate in a waning era of
institutional republicanism — all of these sweeping regressions have
rendered an economistic interpretation of social phenomena, a
traditional “class analysis,” and largely conventional political
strategies in the forms of electoral politics and party structures
grossly inadequate. One must truly torture these issues and grossly warp
them into utterly distorted forms to fit them into Marxian categories.
Perhaps no less significantly, the far-reaching politicization of the
economy itself in the form of state capitalism or its various
approximations and the emergence of a highly elaborated bureaucracy have
given to the state sweeping historical functions that go far beyond its
earlier role as a so-called “executive committee of the ruling class.”
Indeed, to an appalling extent, they have turned the state into a
substitution for society itself.
One must realize the entirely new conditions this constellation of
circumstances has produced for radicalism, the extent to which they
redefine the revolutionary project theoretically and practically. The
technical progress that Socialism once regarded as decisive to
humanity’s domination of nature and as preconditions for human freedom
have now become essential in sophisticating the domination of human by
human. Technology now savagely reinforces class and hierarchical rule by
adding unprecendented instrumentalities of control and destruction to
the forces of domination. The wedding of the economy to the state, far
from simplifying the revolutionary project as Engels so naively believed
in Anti-Duhring, has reinforced the powers of the state with resources
that the most despotic regimes of the past never had at their command.
The growing recognition that the proletariat has become — and probably
has always been — an organ of capitalist society, not a revolutionary
agent gestating within its womb, has raised anew the problem of the
“revolutionary agent” in an entirely new and non-Marxian form. Finally,
the need for the revolutionary project to view itself as a cultural
project (or counterculture, if you will) that encompasses the needs of
human subjectivity, the empowerment of the individual, the
astheticization of the revolutionary ideal has led, in turn, to a need
to consider the structural nature, internal relations, and institutional
forms of a revolutionary movement that will compensate, if only in part,
for the cultural, subjective, and social negation of the public and the
private sphere. Indeed, we must redefine the very meaning of the word
“Left” today. We must ask if radicalism can be reduced to a crude form
of social democracy that operates within the established order to
acquire mass, mindless constituencies or if it must advance a
far-reaching revolutionary challenge to desocialization and to every
aspect of domination, be it in everyday life or in the broader social
arena of the coming historic epoch.
Whatever else Anarchism meant in the past — be it the millenarian
movements of Christianity, the peasant movements of the Anabaptists,
-the Makhnovite and Zapatista militias, the Parisian Enrages and
Communards, the Proudhonian artisans, or the early industrial workers
who entered the CGT in France and the CNT in Spain — it is clear to me
that contemporary Anarchism must address itself in the most
sophisticated and radical terms to capitalist, indeed to hierarchical
society, in its advanced and, I genuinely believe, its terminal forms.
To relegate Anarchism to an ahistorical moral movement based on the
virtues of “natural man” and his proclivities for mutual aid, to define
it merely in terms of its opposition to the state as the source of all
evil, worse, to describe Anarchism merely in terms of one of its
variants — the Anarchism of Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, or Kropotkin, —
is to grossly misread Anarchism as a historical movement, to ignore its
existence as a social movement in a specific social context. Anarchism
does not have the proprietary character of Marxism with its body of
definable texts, commentators, and their offshoots. Conceived as a
social movement rather than a political one, it is not only deeply woven
into the development of humanity but demands historical treatment.
Do I mean to say, then, that Anarchism dissolves into history and has no
theoretical identity? My reply would be an emphatic “No.” What unites
all Anarchist theories and movements are not only their defense of
society against the state, of direct action against political action;
more fundamentally, I believe, Anarchism by definition goes beyond class
exploitation (whose significance it never denies) into hierarchical
domination, whose historical significance it increasingly analyzes as
the source of authority as such. The domination of the young by the old
in tribal gerontacracies, of women by men in patriarchal families, the
crude objectification of nature — all precede class society and economic
exploitation. In fact, they remain the crucial residual sphere of
authority that Marxism and Socialism retain all too comfortably in their
notions of a classless society. Anarchism, in effect, provides the
materials for an analysis of the nature of freedom and the nature of
oppression that go beyond the conventional economistic, nexus of
capitalist society into the very sensibility, structure, and nature of
human consociation as such. The genesis of hierarchy, which for Marx was
an inevitable extension of biology into society, is seen as a social
phenomenon within the Anarchist framework, one which has its most
consolidating source in patriarchy and the supremacy of the male’s civil
domain over the woman’s domestic domain. I know of no more brilliant
statement of this far-reaching shift than Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s
passage on “animals” at the end of the Dialectic of Enlightenment: “For
millena men dreamed of acquiring absolute mastery over nature, of
converting the cosmos into one immense hunting-ground. “ (p. 248)
Inevitably, the genesis of hierarchy and domination yields the
objectification of nature as mere natural resources, of human beings as
mere human resources, of community as mere urban resources in short, the
reduction of the world itself to inorganic technics and a technocratic
sensibility that sees humankind as a mere instrument of production.
I have tried to show elsewhere that Marx sophisticates and extends this
trend into socialism and, unwittingly, reduces socialism to ideology.
(See my “Marxism as Bouregois Sociology,” Our Generation, Vol. 13, No.
3) What concerns me for the present is that Anarchism, often
intuitively, assembles the materials for a deeper, richer, and more
significantly, a broads insight and grasp into the dialectic of
domination and freedom, this by reaching beyond the factory and even the
marketplace into hierarchical relations that prevail in the family, the
educational system, the community, and in fact, the division of labor,
the factory, the relationship of humanity to nature, not to speak of the
state, bureaucracy, and the party. Accordingly, the issues of ecology,
feminism, and community are indigenous concerns of Anarchism, problems
which it often advances even before they acquire social immediacy — not
problems which must be tacked on to its theoretical corpus and distorted
to meet the criteria of an economistic, class-oriented viewpoint. Hence,
Anarchism, by making these issues central to its social analyses and
practice has acquired a relevance that, by far, overshadows most trends
in present-day socialism. Indeed, Anarchism has become the trough in
which Socialism eclectically nourishes itself on an alien diet of
“socialist feminism,” the “economics of pollution,” and the “political
economy of urbanism.”
Secondly, Anarchism has faced the urgent problem of structuring itself
as a revolutionary movement in the form of the very society it seeks to
create. It should hardly be necessary to demolish the preposterous
notion that hierarchical forms of organization are synonymous with
organization as such, anymore than it should be necessary to demolish
the notion that the state has always been synonymous with society. What
uniquely distinguishes Anarchism from other socialisms is it commitment
to a libertarian confederal movement and culture, based on the
coordination of human-scaled groups, united by personal affinity as well
as ideological agreement, controlled from below rather than from
“above,” and committed to spontaneous direct action. Here, it fosters
embryonic growth, cell by cell as it were, as distinguished from
bureaucratic growth by fiat and inorganic accretion. At a time when
consociation is faced with the deadly prospect of dissociation,
Anarchism opposes social form to political form, individual empowerment
through direct action to political powerlessness through bureaucratic
representation. Thus Anarchism is not only the practice of citizenship
within a new public sphere, but the self-administration of the
revolutionary movement itself. The very process of building an Anarchist
movement from below is viewed as the process of consociation,
self-activity and self-management that must ultimately yield that
revolutionary self that can act upon, change and manage an authentic
society.
I have merely scratched the wails of a considerable theoretical corpus
and critique that would require volumes to develop in detail. Let me
emphasize that the most advanced Anarchist theories, today, do not
involve a mystical return to a “natural man,” a crude anti-statism, a
denial of the need for organization, a vision of direct action as
violence and terrorism, a mindless rejection of sophisticated theory, an
opaqueness to what is living in the work of all Socialist theories.
Anarchist critique and reconstruction reach far and deep into the
Socialist and bourgeois traditions. If Anarchism is the “return of a
ghost,” as Adorno once insisted, we may justly ask why this “ghost”
continues to haunt us today. This reality can only be answered
rationally if one remembers that the “ghost” is nothing less than the
attempt to restore society, human consociation at the present level of
historical development, in the face of an all-ubiquitious state and
bureaucracy with its attendant depersonalization of the individual and
its demobilization of the public and the public sphere. By the same
token, the bourgeois essence of Socialism, particularly in its Marxian
form, lies in its inglorious celebration of the massification of the
citizen into the proletarian, of the factory as the public sphere, of
cultural impoverishment as “class consciousness,” of the retreat from
the social to the economic, of the triumph of technics over nature and
of science over ethics. If Anarchism is a “ghost,” it is because human
consociation itself threatens to become spectral; if Marxism is a
“living presence,” it is because the market threatens to devour social
life. Adorno’s metaphors become confused in the name of a false
“historicism” where even the past actually enjoys more vitality than the
present, a vitality that can never be recovered without giving life to
the “ghost” itself. If the state, bureaucracy, and “masses” are to be
exorcised, it is not Anarchism that will be removed from the stage of
history but Marxism, with its centralized parties, hierarchies,
economistic sensibilities, political strategies, and class mythologies.
There is much I have been obliged to omit. My limited time makes it
impossible for me to deal with such delectable questions as the nature
of the “revolutionary agent” today, the relationship of Anarchist
practice to the political sphere (a more complex issue than is generally
supposed when one recalls that Anarchists played a significant role in
the electoral activities of the Montreal Citizens Movement), the details
of Anarchist organizational structures, the relationship of Anarchism to
the counterculture, to feminism, to the ecology movement, to neo-Marxist
tendencies, and the like.
But allow me to conclude with this very important consideration. At a
time when the proletariat is quiescent — historically, I believe — as a
revolutionary class and the traditional factory faces technological
extinction, Anarchism has raised almost alone those ecological issues,
feminist issues, community issues, problems of self-empowerment, forms
of decentralization, and concepts of self-administration that are now at
the foreground of the famous “social question.” And it has raised these
issues from within its very substance as a theory and practice directed
against hierarchy and domination, not as exogenous problems that must be
“coped” with or warped into an economistic interpretation subject of
class analysis and problems of material exploitation.
[1] It would be well, at this point, to stress that I am discussing the
institutional structure of the social forms cited above. That they all
variously may have excluded women, strangers, often non-conformists of
various religious and ethnic backgrounds, not to speak of slaves and
people lacking property, does not diminish humanity’s capacity to
recreate them on more advanced levels. Rather, it indicates that despite
their historical limitations, such structures were both possible and
functional, often with remarkable success. A free society will have to
draw its content from the higher canons of reason and morality, not from
— “models” that existed in the past. What the past recovers and
validates is the human ability to approximate freedom, not the
actualization of freedom in the fullness of its possibilities.
[2] A distortion all the more odious because the Social Democratic
rank-and-file had been deeply moved, ideologically as well as
emotionally, by the 1905 events. “The anarchists and syndicalists who
had previously been driven underground by orthodox Social Democracy now
rose to the surface like mushrooms on the periphery of the SPD,”
observes Peter Nettl rather disdainfully in his biography of Luxemburg;
“when it came to something resembling ‘their’ general strike they felt
they were close to legitimacy once more.” And, indeed, with good reason:
“For the first time for years anarchist speakers appeared on provincial
Socialist platforms by invitation. The orthodox party press led by
Vorwarts was much more cautious; but it, too, gave pride of place
[albeit if not of doctrine — M. B.] to Russian events and for the first
few months abstained from wagging blunt and cautious fingers over the
differences between Russian chaos and German order.” (Peter Nettl, Rosa
Luxemburg, Oxford University Press, 1969, abridged version, pp. 203–4).