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Title: Free Cities Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: communalism, social ecology, theory, municipalism, libertarian municipalism, municipal government, post-anarchism, post-marxism, nationalism, anti-nationalism, cities Source: https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5c9ac9ff9ff37c58f2622beb
What would a free municipality look like? What would its basic
institutions be? What material, political, and cultural preconditions
must be met before we can arrive at them, and who will be the agents for
social change? What kinds of movements and political efforts are
required to create them? These questions strike to the core of Murray
Bookchin’s political project, particularly as he refined it during the
1980s and 1990s. The immediate and ultimate aim of the political
approach he advanced is to create free cities or municipalities, and as
such it is meant to provide both a clear social ideal as well as a
concrete political praxis.
By advancing libertarian municipalism, Bookchin hoped to see new civic
movements emerge and claim control over their communities. Political
involvement at the local level is necessary, he insisted, to guide and
inspire a process of municipal empowerment. This process and the
institutions it entails, he hoped, may provide a focal point for
rallying progressive social movements to the common cause of political
freedom in its most expansive sense. To a very large extent, creating
free cities is about developing free citizens, in whose hands power over
society should be squarely placed: it must reside in popular assemblies
and not in bureaucracies, parliaments, or corporate boards. Libertarian
municipalism is an attempt to create the political structures necessary
for this shift in power. Democratized and radicalized, municipal
confederations would emerge, it is hoped, as a dual power to challenge
and ultimately replace the nation state and the market.
A lifelong radical and a fertile thinker, Murray Bookchin had been
politically active since the 1930s; first in Communist parties, trade
unions, and Trotskyist groups, then during the 1960s in the civil rights
movement, urban ecology projects, anarchist groups, the radical student
movement, and community groups; and later in the 1970s and 1980s in
anti-nuclear movements and the early Green movement. Only in the early
1990s did his health preclude further involvement in practical political
affairs, but he continued to write until the last years of his life.
Bookchin’s works spanned a broad range of issues, including ecology,
anthropology, technology, history, politics, and philosophy. He started
to write about ecology and urban issues in the 1950s, and in 1964 wrote
his seminal “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” the first definitive
essay on radical social ecology. Later he was to refine his theories –
through a corpus of more than 20 books – into a coherent body of ideas.
Murray Bookchin died at the age of 85, on July 30, 2006. With his
passing we lost one of the most challenging and innovative radical
thinkers of the twentieth century.
Bookchin expressed his ideas on libertarian municipalism in a number of
essays and articles, and advocated it in his lectures and talks. But no
book has yet appeared that collects his essays on the subject. This
collection of his late political essays, I am proud to say, helps fill
that gap.[1] It should be seen, however, in relation to Bookchin’s
full-length book on civic development, citizenship, and politics; From
Urbanization to Cities.[2] When he republished this monumental work in
1992 he added the essay “The Meaning of Confederalism,” and in a later
edition, in 1995, further added “Confederal Municipalism: An Overview”
as well as a new prologue. Bookchin was no academic, and he did not
write for purely scholarly purposes; his aim with this work “was to
formulate a new politics” and by appending these essays he showed how he
meant to inspire a movement to give his ideas concrete reality.
In light of this, I initially intended this book to be an expanded
appendix to From Urbanization to Cities, so that both together would
constitute an overview of his political thinking. In my view his late
essays, collected here, make his earlier works on urbanization, ecology,
and revolutionary history even more relevant and tangible. Bookchin’s
essays from the 1980s and 1990s had tried to advance libertarian
municipalism as an anarchist alternative, an effort that turned out to
be problematical. Although for many years Bookchin called himself an
anarchist, pioneering its concerns with ecology and with hierarchy, he
had long had a troubled relationship with the anarchist tradition. After
a bitter polemical struggle to defend what he considered to be its
highest social ideals against individualists, workerists, mystics,
primitivists, and autonomists, he got tired of “defending anarchism
against anarchists,” as he put it, and publicly disassociated himself
from anarchism as such. He had spent much time and effort formulating
and presenting libertarian municipalism as an anarchist politics, but
anarchists, it turned out, were not interested in these ideas, and in
fact the political idea of democracy is actually alien to anarchism.
Several notions in anarchism inspired Bookchin, but his ideas about
municipal government, direct democracy, and confederation could not be
contained within an anarchist framework. Breaking with anarchism, he
urged left libertarian radicals to embrace a new set of ideas, indeed a
new ideology – he called it communalism – that could transcend all
classical radical theories, both Marxist and anarchist. As an attempt to
revive Enlightenment radicalism, Bookchin intended communalism to be a
coherent ideological platform upon which we might develop libertarian
ideas today and provide the Left with a politics.
For these reasons, I realized very soon that these essays expanded the
purpose of the anthology; they gave a remarkably consistent overview of
Bookchin’s perspectives on communalism and its relationship to the Left
in general. Taken together these essays not only provide an overview of
Bookchin’s political ideas but explain how his political ideas stem from
his broader historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives.
Although the subject matter may be libertarian municipalism and
practical politics, their foundational analyses are profoundly social
ecological, and their ideological perspective is basically communalist.
I chose the title Free Cities for this anthology because I think it
stimulates our understanding of the historical impetus behind Bookchin’s
political project. In order to achieve its ideal of a rational and
ecological society, libertarian municipalism is an effort to create free
cities, with an emphasis on both these words. Bookchin would have
insisted that we interpret free not simply as “independent,” or
“autonomous.” Rather, we should understand freedom in its expansive
political sense, as the collective expression of human self-recognition
and consciousness. Similarly, cities should not be interpreted merely as
spatial centers of population or trade. For Bookchin, the historic rise
of cities brought humanity the kind of social framework needed to break
out of the rigid tribal world and develop into truly social beings; such
citification is a historical precondition for our notion of citizenship.
The ideal of the free cities was a subject not only of great historical
interest but one that gave meaning to the project for social and
political emancipation. The question that occupied Bookchin was to what
extent municipalities could become genuine arenas for political
creativity, universalism, and freedom and thus give human society its
most rational expression.
I also hope that the title Free Cities stimulates the reader to
conceptualize the political ideas of social ecology in a tangible
manner. How can we empower our communities and recreate them along
libertarian lines? How can we democratically transform the political,
cultural, and material conditions of our own towns, villages, and
cities? Social ecology proposes a politics of remaking daily life not
only by creating nonhierarchical social relationships but also by
institutionally restructuring neighborhoods and cities. The solemn
theoretical adherence of these essays to “civilizatory advances” and a
“rational society” should not frighten the reader; libertarian
municipalism is a concrete political practice. It is my genuine hope
that this book encourages readers to consider how to revitalize their
own communities, how we may remake our municipalities as great places to
live – for all their citizens – and render them politically and socially
free.
My choice of subtitle, Communalism and the Left, expresses Bookchin’s
wish to frame his theories in a communalist framework and to define
their relationship to the Left. Bookchin explains in these essays the
major achievements as well as the serious deficiencies of various
traditional radical Left ideologies, such as Marxism, anarchism, and
syndicalism. For one thing, both socialism and anarchism have ignored
the need to develop a political approach in the classical sense of the
term, a politics distinct from the State on the one hand and from the
social sphere on the other. Communalism was for Bookchin an attempt to
provide the ideological framework to resuscitate the greatest Left
traditions and to formulate a libertarian politics.
---
The idea for this book germinated when I last saw Murray, a few months
before his death. At the end of November 2005 Sveinung Legard and I
visited Murray and Janet Biehl, his long-time partner and collaborator,
in Burlington. During our stay we had lengthy political discussions and
undertook a substantial interview with Murray, which turned out to be
the last one he ever gave. At one point in our discussions, Bookchin
mentioned that he hoped to see his writings on libertarian municipalism
collected and published. I had already given this possibility some
serious thought and had specific ideas about how to put together
anthologies of his writings. For some time I had been translating his
works into Norwegian, and had edited, anthologized, and published his
political writings here in Scandinavia. But I had hesitated to suggest
an English-language anthology, since English is my second language – an
obvious shortcoming. Moreover, Murray had long benefited from the
support of Janet’s superior editing skills; for many years, she had
carefully helped prepare his manuscripts for publication. Hence I was
reluctant to offer my assistance. But at that time Janet was exhausted
from the intense work of editing The Third Revolution and was in no
position to undertake any new obligation of the sort proposed. I
fervently wanted to see the anthologies materialize, and, emboldened by
Murray’s expressed wish, I offered to assist.
My specific suggestions were twofold. First, I would put together a
small book consisting of some four essays that gave a rounded yet
accessible presentation of social ecology, to be called Social Ecology
and Communalism.[3] Then I would collect the more directly political
essays in a second book that would comprise a comprehensive overview.
Murray and I discussed these book projects in detail, and he gave me
some manuscripts and notes for my work.[4] I assured him that I would do
my very best to see that these books were edited according to his
wishes, and he expressed his confidence by putting me in charge of their
publication. As soon as I returned to Norway, I began to work on the
books.
My own qualifications for preparing these books may not be obvious to
the reader, as I not only live on the other side of the Atlantic from
Murray but am not a native English speaker. But I have been involved
with the ideas of social ecology and libertarian municipalism since the
early 1990s. I first met Murray in 1996 and visited him many times
thereafter, staying in Burlington for weeks and months, experiencing
both his generosity and that of his family. Murray and I regularly had
long telephone conversations throughout our ten years of friendship and
cooperation. Whenever I made a decision to translate his works into
Norwegian for publication, I always informed him of my choices, and I
consulted him when I encountered problems. He thus became familiar with
my editorial approach and abilities. When I started writing my own
essays, he always read them carefully and gave me his comments. He was
sometimes a stern critic, sometimes encouraging, but always his
perspectives were challenging. Over the years we grew ever closer. After
the Second International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism (held in
Plainfield, Vermont, in 1999), I suggested the creation of an
international journal to express a consistent communalist perspective.
Murray eagerly joined the journal’s editorial board, the last political
group to which he belonged.[5] For its launch I wrote “Communalism as
Alternative,” a manifesto-like essay presenting the basic ideological
views Murray had developed.
Editing the two anthologies was a way for me to continue our
cooperation, as well as a way to show my gratitude for his intellectual
generosity. Unfortunately Murray died only seven months after our
meeting on the books, and he never had the chance to see either of them
published. I nonetheless feel confident that Free Cities: Communalism
and the Left has become what he wanted it to be. The essays gathered
here are among Bookchin’s last, and they give a good overview of his
ideas at the end of his life. I genuinely hope that the reader will get
as much intellectual stimulation and political inspiration from reading
these essays as I have done from preparing them for publication.
---
Some of the essays in this anthology may already be familiar to readers
who have followed Bookchin’s work closely, but most of them are
previously unpublished; they have been collected from letters, lectures,
unfinished drafts, and manuscripts. I have tried to order them in a
flowing presentation to give an overview of Bookchin’s late political
outlook. Since he died before witnessing the completion of this project,
I think it is only decent to explain as fully as possible my editorial
choices in creating Free Cities.
Generally speaking, in addition to doing regular editorial work, such as
adding titles and subheadings, or doublechecking references, dates and
names, I have tried to create a common style of presentation by making
the notes, letters and unfinished manuscripts into proper essays. The
book consists both of independent essays on specific political issues
and of more general essays in which Bookchin often gives brief synopses
of his basic political ideas. As a consequence, there is inevitably some
overlap between the chapters, though I have tried to keep this to a
minimum. In these essays Murray made recurring references to his basic
works, From Urbanization to Cities, The Ecology of Freedom, and Remaking
Society, and though I have trimmed down the number of references here, I
would strongly advise the reader unfamiliar with these works to consult
them. Sometimes Bookchin would discuss the same idea in several places,
such as the distinction between politics and statecraft, or his
tripartite distinction between the political sphere, the social sphere,
and the State. Suffice to say, again, readers will deepen their
understanding of these ideas by exploring them further in Bookchin’s
larger works.
I have also cut out some of the conceptual discussions Bookchin repeated
over several of these essays: in particular his often-mentioned
explanation that he is using the term politics in its classical Greek
meaning, as the self-management of the polis, and his frequently
repeated caveat that he is well aware of the historical shortcomings of
ancient Athenian democracy in regard to slavery, xenophobia, and
patriarchy. When Bookchin raises similar themes in different essays –
say, on the issues of consensus, confederation, or government – I have
tried to limit the repetition, either by removing sections or
consolidating the discussion in one place, particularly in the
previously unpublished writings. Generally I have omitted repetitions of
similar arguments in different essays, but have left them intact when
they approach an issue from a distinctive angle and thus serve to nuance
his views. Here Bookchin was well aware of my general intention.
Whenever possible I have accommodated Bookchin’s wish to update his
essays according to the communalist perspective. This issue is of course
most significantly related to his break with anarchism, a matter he
explains in some detail in several of the essays.[6] To the extent that
was appropriate, I have also updated some of the older essays.
Similarly, when he appeals to a specific group (say, the Greens, with
whom he worked with for a while) in a way that seemed outdated, I have
tried to make the appeal more general (changing it to, say, “radical
ecologists”). I thoroughly discussed all these changes with Bookchin and
am making them here at his explicit request.
Whenever linking one paragraph to another required the addition of a
transitional sentence, I have tried to make use of concrete expressions
that Bookchin used elsewhere. To the best of my abilities, whenever I
have had to revise paragraphs or move phrases, I have tried to preserve
Bookchin’s tone. If readers sometimes miss the characteristic musicality
of his writings, it is not for lack of trying on my part.
The hardest part of putting together such an anthology, however, lies in
deciding which essays to include and how to organize them. I can only
hope that more of Bookchin’s essays, lectures and interviews will be
made available in the years to come, to shed further light on his
intellectual development, particularly during the last decades. Still,
based as it is on my understanding of what Bookchin wanted to see
published from the last years of his life, this book presents that work
as honestly as possible.
---
The “Introduction” is cobbled together from notes that Bookchin gave me
November 2005. When we were discussing this project, I told him that I
would love to have him write an introduction to this book, as his
earlier essays on libertarian municipalism needed contextualization in
light of his recent break with anarchism. He then revealed that he had
already started drafting such an introduction, and passed along to me
his draft, along with a draft for a separate essay he had recently
started writing. Both these drafts were in a woefully unfinished state,
almost notes, and we agreed that they had to be focused to fit this
specific anthology. To ease my work, I suggested we use the drafts in
combination with a short piece Bookchin had written to introduce a
recent Swedish anthology of his writings – a suggestion he approved.[7]
I have thus extracted the core message of his drafts and spun them
around the existing Swedish introduction. By further distinguishing his
communalist approach from Marxism and anarchism, and by emphasizing the
profound historicism of these ideas, I think this piece constitutes an
appropriate introduction to the present anthology.
The next essay, “The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society,”
brings us directly to some social ecological conclusions on political
radicalism, and situates the remaining essays in the context of social
ecology. I chose this essay because I find it to be an accessible leadin
to libertarian municipalism as a social ecological politics, in relation
to the impending ecological crisis that besets us. I also like the fact
that it briefly touches on Bookchin’s criticisms of other radical
tendencies in the ecology movement, criticisms that have made for
defining debates. This essay was originally published as “The Ecological
Crisis, Socialism, and the Need to Remake Society,” in Society and
Nature 2, no. 3 (1994), and has been edited only slightly to fit this
anthology.
“Nationalism and the ‘National Question,’” written in March 1993, was
first published in Society and Nature 2, no. 2 (1994). It has long been
one of my personal favorites among Bookchin’s essays, and I am happy to
include it here as it gives a solid historical argument not only against
statism but also against nationalism. In this essay Bookchin explores
the Left’s historically ambivalent relationship to the “national
question,” and contrasts his ideas of municipalism and confederation to
those of nations and states, precisely by the universal principles of
democracy and human solidarity. The succinct “Nationalism and the Great
Revolutions” was originally published as an addendum to the preceding
essay, highlighting the universalistic spirit of the Enlightenme
Bookchin’s arguments against nationalism and statism are taken further
in the next piece, which I have called “The Historical Importance of the
City,” and which consists of excerpts from a longer polemical essay
“Comments on the International Social Ecology Network Gathering and the
‘Deep Social Ecology’ of John Clark,” written in September 1995 and
published in Democracy and Nature 3, no. 3 (1997). Here we are given
forceful arguments for the civilizatory and humanizing aspects of the
emergence of the cities – the tendencies that libertarian municipalism
ultimately wants to recover and expand. I told Bookchin that I had long
wanted to highlight some of the main issues in his polemics with John
Clark, and I specifically suggested these excerpts. Frustratingly, many
of his political adversaries have tended to deflect attention from the
real ideological questions at stake; by including these excerpts, I hope
to offer the basic yet crucial arguments. I suggested to Bookchin that I
include this abridged version, but would not want to suggest that this
version is better than the original, only that it better serves our
purpose here. Neither would I want readers to ignore the fact that every
sentence in this essay is meant as a direct or indirect criticism of
Clark’s position. Readers are strongly encouraged to read the polemic in
full, which relates more directly to the actual points of contention and
contains other important discussions as well.[8] Other essays from
Bookchin’s 1990s debates with anarchists are certainly also of interest,
as they often give different emphases and nuances to his political
ideas.
The 1990s debates over the nature of anarchism alienated Bookchin from
the contemporary anarchist movement. Unfortunately he wrote no
fundamental essays that explained his conclusions in great detail,
although in retrospect we can see how Social Anarchism or Lifestyle
Anarchism initiated his break with this ideology.[9] Many of the
features of “lifestyle anarchism” that he criticized were ones that he
later concluded were symptomatic of anarchism as such. Murray explained
his reasoning in a letter to Peter Zegers and the editorial board of
Communalism (in November 2001), in which he considers even the more
social forms of anarchism to be basically egoist. He also developed some
of these ideas in a letter to Hamish Alcorn, written on July 30, 1999,
just before his public break with anarchism. With Bookchin’s permission
I have structured the essay “Anarchism as Individualism” around these
two letters, incorporating as well some unpublished material from
“Toward a Communalist Approach” and an early version of “The Communalist
Project.” Despite its brevity, I think this essay may shed light on
Bookchin’s reasons for breaking with anarchism – the political ideology
with which he had been associated, and of which he had been a major
representative, for four decades.
The next essay, “Anarchism, Power, and Government,” is based on the
appendix Murray wrote to “The Communalist Project,” which he called
“Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution,” published in
Communalism, no. 2 (November 2002). I have expanded it with excerpts on
the same subject originally from “The Future of the Left” and “Toward a
Communalist Approach.” As these essays were written around the same time
and brought up very similar issues, I have knitted similar passages
together. As such, I think this short essay contains one of his
weightiest arguments against anarchism, focusing particularly on its
inability to deal with real-life problems in periods of social change
and revolution.
The two preceding essays make an interesting contrast with “The
Revolutionary Politics of Libertarian Municipalism.” Written as a
video-transmitted speech that Bookchin presented to the First
International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism, held in Lisbon in
1998, it was one of his last attempts to present his political ideas as
a direct extension of the anarchist-communist tradition. Here he tries
to uphold the classical anarchist preference for communes,
revolutionism, and federations, in order to rework and refine these
ideals for changed social conditions: The speech was titled “A Politics
for the 21^(st) Century.” I have removed dated references and some parts
that overlap with the other essays included herein. I have also tried to
update the essay according to Bookchin’s expressed wishes, making minor
changes concerning his ideological drift from anarchism to communalism,
without changing any of its basic content. After this speech Bookchin
gave up on his attempts to influence the anarchist movement from within,
and, at the Second International Conference in Vermont the following
year, he broke openly with anarchism as a theory and a movement. This
essay contains his last important evaluation of the anarchist tradition
from within, trying to emphasize its revolutionary, democratic, and
socialist character. He later considered his efforts to have been an
utter failure. Where he had earlier attempted to expand the federalist,
cooperative, and municipalist trends within the anarchist tradition, he
now tried to bring those valuable contributions into a new theoretical
framework unburdened by the anti-social, anti-intellectual, and
antiorganizational tendencies with which anarchism has always struggled.
The next essay, “The Future of the Left,” is in my view the jewel of
this collection, tying all the other pieces together and giving this
anthology its necessary coherence and breadth. Here Bookchin assesses of
the state of radicalism at the turn of the twenty-first century – not
only the radicalism of the contemporary resistance against
“globalization,” but radicalism going back to the interwar period and
twentieth-century revolutionary experiences. He takes a remarkably
detached, yet engaged, look at traditional radicalism and its basic
premises, specifically analyzing trends in Marxism and anarchism.
Bookchin often spoke of this essay and finally showed it to me at our
November 2005 meeting. The manuscript he handed over to me to edit had
been written in December 2002. It was still unfinished (it actually
ended mid-sentence) but was remarkably consistent in its reasoning.
Although I have edited the essay, nothing of substance has been omitted,
and though it broadens the focus of this anthology far beyond the
collection of “strictly political” writings I had intended, it is this
piece that contains Bookchin’s most mature ideas. It is fully
communalist, posing a set of challenging questions for our generation of
radicals to consider, and even as a stand-alone essay it gives this book
a scope that stretches far into the future.
We close with an essay that Bookchin wrote for Communalism. Originally
written in July 2000 as “Communalism: An Overview,” it was supposed to
be revised for publication, but instead Bookchin wrote a completely new
essay that ended up as the masterfully composed and theoretically
challenging “The Communalist Project.”[10] Even though the “Overview”
essay was thus superseded, it contained so many interesting aspects that
I always felt it deserved to be published in its own right. As a matter
of fact, Bookchin himself returned to it in June 2003 and made some
significant updates, and I have since taken out all the parts that
overlap with “The Communalist Project.” I think it is of great interest,
not because it is a definitive exposition of communalism – it is not –
but rather because it is so suggestive of such an exposition. In this
essay we see Bookchin still struggling with his ideological break with
anarchism, framing his presentation almost entirely as a polemic against
prevalent anarchist notions – unlike “The Communalist Project” and “The
Future of the Left,” which stand out independently as a challenging
ideological testament.
Taken together, the essays in Free Cities represent Bookchin’s most
recent ideas, particularly on political and ideological issues. In my
view this anthology offers both a good introduction to his political
ideas as well as solid overview of his communalist approach. Not only
does it contain much previously unpublished material, it helps explain
ideological issues that remained unresolved at his death, particularly
concerning his ideological break with anarchism. It will be easy for
readers familiar with Bookchin’s writings to see how his distinct
political ideas are educed from his broader theory of social ecology.
For Bookchin, to advance libertarian municipalism meant to defend and
build upon the ideals of the Enlightenment, which he considered the
greatest tradition of social development. Based on communalism and
social ecology, libertarian municipalism is a fundamental attempt to
define a political humanism and to formulate and create a rational
society.
---
I confess that preparing this manuscript for publication has not been
easy, particularly since Bookchin passed away before seeing its
completion. Despite the arduous task, I have nevertheless found it a
pleasure to work with these wonderful ideas.
I would particularly like to thank Janet Biehl, who meticulously edited
all of Murray’s work in his last two decades before it saw publication.
I would also like to express my gratitude to my close comrades Yngvild
Hasvik and Sveinung Legard, since their support, patience, and advice
have been indispensable in finishing this project.
At the end of this preface I would also like to properly thank Murray
Bookchin for allowing me to work on these ideas, and for our ten years
of cooperation and friendship. It has been a privilege to be associated
with him; his intellectual vigor was always a source of great
inspiration, and I have gained much from his genuinely sharing
personality. However much I have enjoyed his warmth and generosity on a
personal level, my gratitude above all is for his achievement in
providing a future movement with such challenging ideas.
If this collection of essays contributes to contemporary discussions on
what kind of political institutions and radical organizations we need
today, it will have served its purpose. It is my genuine hope that
readers will seek to familiarize themselves with Bookchin’s ideas, here
and in his other works, not as an academic exercise but as a way of
preparing to change the world.
Eirik Eiglad
March 30, 2008
These essays are my final assessment of some 80 years of social
reflections on the twentieth century. In a very real sense, they are the
product of a lifetime of study and political work, distilled from a
remarkable era of revolutionary history that spanned decades of social
upheaval, from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the closing years of the
twentieth century.
I make no pretense to claiming that these essays resolve any of the
crises that beset the people who lived out the century. It would be
remarkable indeed to know even how to properly define these crises,
still less to be capable of solving them. I do not claim to be able to
answer all of the questions we face, but they must be considered –
hopefully as a basis for future and creative discourse. The questions we
ask and the answers we give are socially and politically defining. Taken
together, they actually form the battleground for the future of social
life, and our responses are the basis for how we constitute ourselves as
social beings.
I would like to suggest that these essays be seen as the political
conclusions I have drawn from my historical and philosophical work in
The Ecology of Freedom, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Re-Enchanting
Humanity, From Urbanization to Cities and last but not in the least The
Third Revolution. Throughout these works I have tried to meld together
the most challenging historical ideals into a body of theory that
generally went by the name “social ecology”. These ideas combine as
strands in a common thread: a search to understand the place of humanity
in the natural world and the social factors that must be present if we
are to actualize our ability (as yet incomplete) to bring to bear, in
all the affairs of “raw” or first nature, a “sophisticated” or second
nature informed by reason. By combining the words “ecology” and
“freedom” I tried to show that neither nature nor reason could be
properly conceptualized independently of the other; that the natural
world could not be given any meaning without the social world or the
human mind, that is, without the ability to abstract experience and
generalize facts into far-reaching insights.
---
For most of human history, society, in effect, was familial, not civic;
it was organized around blood ties (real or fictive), not legal tenets.
Allocation of the means of life fulfilled necessities – especially
rights and duties – among literal and figurative relatives in a nexus of
shared, unquestioned responsibilities. Things were brought together in
an indisputably “natural” manner, such that the “people” were unified –
even more compellingly than by custom – by an inborn scheme of reality.
They could not act otherwise, and their life-ways allowed for no
discretion to follow any path other than what was given by the “eternal”
nature of things.
The rise of organized communities – ultimately cities, civilization, and
citizenship, as distinguished from habitats, customs, and folk –
radically changed this state of affairs. Indeed, it marked the great
rupture of Homo sapiens from merely a creative kind of animal into
humans as such. The most powerful medium for achieving this radical new
dispensation was a process of alienation called trade, a process that
drastically remade the apprehension of reality from imagery into
objectivity. The traditional world of imagination and analogical
thinking gave way to a new world of systematic analysis and disciplined
thought, engendered by commerce, efficient production, and careful
calculation. Trade rewarded predictability based on objectivity, and
knowledge based on reality, with power and wealth. To know meant to live
in palpable touch with reality.
Knowledge ceased to be an end in itself; it became a tool, an instrument
of control and manipulation. Yet ultimately it created a new world of
thoughts and things, a new universe that redefined what it meant to be
alive – generating an appetite for wealth, for competition, for growth
for its own sake, for private ownership, and for power over men. What
humans could imagine, they brought into existence. Even the
transformation of human beings from earth-bound to flying creatures
constituted a remarkable advance in the conversion of image into object
– and no less significantly, it reduced a frightening mystery to a
prosaic problem of engineering. Nuclear physics transformed vast,
ineffable legends into problems of ordinary mathematics, no less
unsolvable than the questions posed by Euclidean geometry.
But how was this even possible? The people who now grappled with the
fantastic problems that had occupied human beings even several millennia
earlier were, in fact, no longer the same people. Their outlook was no
longer animistic, and they no longer lived in organic societies. Owing
to their habitation in villages and cities, to their written literature
and systematic modes of thought, to their careful retrospection and
introspection, to their substitution of mythopoeic fantasy with rational
thought, they were becoming humanized, rationalized, and civilized –
veritably a new species.
Social theory could not ignore the extent to which mythopoesis, fantasy,
and unbridled subjectivity yielded to humanization, rationalization and
civilization, and it did not do so. This new world, particularly its
emergence, was most brilliantly elucidated in the economic works of Karl
Marx and his disciples. Despite their historical limitations, they still
stand as a monument to the power of thought to rise above fantasy.
---
Bolstered by three massive volumes of closely reasoned economic
analysis, considerable mathematical formulations, and highly persuasive
historical data, Marxism emerged after World War One as the dominant
ideology of the Western European radical intelligentsia and affected the
thinking of great masses of literate working people. Despite many
variations in Marxist tenets, Marx was seen as the man who provided the
labor movement of the West with the basic ideas of socialism.
Treated like a new gospel, this “scientific” socialism was regarded as
evidence, not of dogmatism, but of learning and of modern intellectual
certainty. Marxist doctrine, in effect, was regarded as objective truth,
which qualified its expositors to speak authoritatively on any subject
as the peers of informed scientists, not only in economics but also in
the life sciences and mathematics, not to speak of literature and
ethics. In history, social development, and, needless to emphasize, with
regard to current events, its acolytes persuasively claimed to enjoy a
special knowledge of the course of events and their meaning. Owing to
their adoption of Hegel’s notion of the “cunning of reason,” Marxists
professed to understand the “hidden hand” of social development, as it
were, looking beyond cultural, political, religious, mystical, and even
artistic claims to the “underlying” class interests.
In the hands of Marxian acolytes like Georg Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky,
who essentially substituted dialectics for mechanics, social theory
became the deadening scientism of a new “social physics.” The interwar
generation, the product of the mechanics of the class struggle, the
dogma of social reductionism, and the hard-nosed idea of social dynamics
rather than social dialectics, emerged as true class beings – Homo
economicus. Marxism’s greatest claim to superiority over the so-called
“utopian” socialists was its contention that it had prospectively
established the hegemonic role of the proletariat over all other classes
in achieving a socialist society. Of all classes, the proletariat, Marx
expressly maintained, had nothing to sell but its abstract “labor power”
(that is, its biological capacity to produce commodities in quantities
beyond what was necessary for the satisfaction of its needs), and for
that reason its historical destiny was to be driven to overthrow the
capitalist system and replace it with a planned, nationalized economy.
This seminal, forcibly driven act made Marx’s work distinctive among
theories of socialism.
But the greatest shortcoming of Marxism was its celebrated claim to
finality. Capital asserted that capitalism appears as the dissection of
the bourgeois economy in all its “wholeness,” encapsulated as a
“science,” a notion that presupposes (like Quesnay’s Tableau Economique)
a social stability that would have credibility only in the finitude or
static perfection of Aristotle’s stars. Of course, nowhere in Being is
such immobility possible, and no concept could be more nonsensical.
Indeed, as the ancient Greeks emphasized, all that exists is
development, elaboration, and increasing (but always incomplete)
“fullness.” Thought and life are unending innovation. In a Being that is
necessarily paradoxical, we strive not only for a “whole,” not only for
a “totality” that is complete, but for one whose “final” contours always
elude us.
---
These essays, then, do not work from the notion that there can be an
“end to history.” Defining history as having an ultimate end would
dissolve it into a meaningless conundrum, bereft of experience and
development. Yet the word history is one of the few that alternately
denotes both completeness and dynamism. Within a given “stage” history
has a completeness to itself, but in history as a “process” a given
period “flows” into the next with no terminus, so to speak. We thus find
ourselves faced with a conundrum, more like a Kantian syllogism that has
to be accepted as a given, or what Hegel would call a contradiction.
Not only do the grand works of philosophy have intrinsic dual meanings,
they also reflect significant institutional changes that societies have
undergone with the passage of time, from eras of obeisance to kings and
nobles to our own. Sweeping social changes in a surprisingly brief
period of time have created a need for profoundly new social terms,
indeed for a dictionary more inclusionary than we have today. Such a
compilation of terms, or expansions in meaning of words in common use
today, amounts to the formulation of a new system of ideas. As we educe
one idea from the others, we can derive from every one the
potentialities of less inclusive but profoundly meaningful offspring,
with a variety of divergent developments.
From this perspective, history becomes an open prospect that suggests
the potentiality for a multitude of radically new forms. I presented one
of a number of courses that this approach to a social dialectic might
take in my book The Ecology of Freedom; alternative courses were put
forward by non-European societies, particularly in the pre-Columbian
Americas. It is not an idle endeavor to try to imagine what a handicraft
society, whose economy was deliberately mixed and small-scale in
character, might have looked like – as a “rational” society – in
contrast to the medieval world that actually preceded urban society in
Western Europe. It is not accidental that William Morris’s News from
Nowhere, which describes such a society, has attracted so many admirers
in our own time as a “model” utopia, especially among libertarian
socialists and syndicalists.
---
What concerns us here, however, is the ossification of these libertarian
and organic traditions during the period that spanned the two world
wars. The “Great War” was fought largely by means of brutal trench
warfare; backing out of that slaughter, the world entered the “Roaring
Twenties,” then the “Great Depression” and the tumultuous 1930s, with
socialist insurrections, the fascist coups of Mussolini and Hitler, the
Spanish Civil War, and Stalin’s massive purges. The period that thus
closed with the genocidal World War Two cannot be mechanically locked
into a historical box. The years from 1914 to 1950 constitute one of the
most eventful periods of true history, wherein people’s actions surmount
the quantitative stuff from which mere calendars are made.
The Euro-American generation of young radicals that emerged after World
War One and that tried to resolve the revolutionary era of the interwar
era was perhaps the most perplexing in modern history. It was certainly
the most embattled and, ideologically, the most insurrectionary toward
the deeply entrenched exploitative social order, notably capitalism.
After World War Two astonishing technological changes, soaring
production figures, major advances in the living standards of Western
workers, and broadly rightward shifts in popular political sentiments
all made it evident that capitalism had more life remaining to it than
the Bolsheviks and the anarcho-syndicalists had foreseen decades
earlier. After the short-lived New Left of the 1960s, revolutionary
movements waned steadily in numbers and purpose, while erstwhile radical
social theorists immersed themselves in academic esoterica such as the
peregrinations of the various Frankfurt School theorists, of Georg
Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, and finally in postmodernism, the expression
par excellence of the “virtues” of ideological disorder and social
nihilism.
---
As someone who lived out this era, I was variously regarded – or
regarded myself – as a communist (including one who adhered to
successive views held by Trotsky), a libertarian socialist, and in a
rather spotty fashion, an anarchist. In the 1970s and 1980s I expressed
my ideas forcefully in a rather romantic anarchist framework. Later,
however, I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile anarchism with
my basic views. In the 1990s it was gradually becoming clear to me that
an ideology that does little more than hail the “autonomy of the ego,”
and that conceives of “liberty” in extremely individualistic terms, can
never produce basic social change. A lifestyle rather than an ideology,
anarchism, I came to realize, is concerned more with individual behavior
than with political change and allows little room for a creative
political practice.
My own experiences in the labor movement (as a foundryman and later as
an autoworker) in the 1930s and 1940s had long ago convinced me that
making basic and lasting change requires organization (as the IWW martyr
Joe Hill voiced just before his execution). But most of the anarchists I
encountered resisted organization, sometimes vehemently. And when I
tried to properly define politics (as the directly democratic
organization of the free municipality by popular assemblies) as the very
opposite of statecraft (rule by professional bureaucrats, ultimately
through a monopoly of the means of violence), my once-close anarchist
associates assailed me as “statist.” Democracy, they asserted, is itself
a form of “rule,” by the majority over the minority. A preposterous
rejection of majority voting in favor of consensus decision-making
played a major role in ruining the huge American anti-nuclear movement
in the 1980s and potentially makes any movement organization and
institution (beyond a small group) dysfunctional. In the end I found
that I had either to close my eyes to the compelling need for
organization in praxis, and for democratic institutions in public
affairs in a future libertarian society, or else completely recast my
views. I chose to do the latter.
Reflecting as they do my most recent and, having passed the age of 80,
my most mature ideas, these essays try to explain why social ecology can
no longer be seen as a mere extension of traditional radical ideologies,
either Marxist or anarchist. It is now my conviction that the ensemble
of views that I call social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and
dialectical naturalism should properly form the basis for a new
libertarian ideology and politics – communalism – that takes full
account of the sweeping changes that have occurred in capitalism since
the failure of proletarian socialism in the second half of the twentieth
century and that suggests the new methods that are needed to transform a
market-based society into a truly libertarian socialist one.
The reader alone will decide whether these essays are correct or
erroneous and whether my expectations for communalism are sound or
fanciful, but their most essential purpose is to create a new departure
from ideologies that were inspired by the problems of the Industrial
Revolution of two centuries ago, a departure that takes full account of
changing class relations and hierarchical forms, of demographical
transformations and ecological dislocations, and of urbanization, to
cite the most important factors. Few of these issues had an important
place in the writings of Marx, Bakunin, and their successors. Without
ignoring the vital contributions that the ablest Marxists and left
libertarians have made to social theory, I would ask the reader to
recognize the centrality of these more recent issues in the essays that
follow.
---
Only time will tell how capitalism will undermine itself, as Marx long
ago expected it would, and to what degree the public – middle class and
working class alike – will acquire those mutualistic impulses that the
followers of Kropotkin impute to human nature. It will not be my
privilege to see in my lifetime the achievement of a rational,
ecological, and humanistic society in which people will finally be
natural and social evolution rendered self-conscious – the great hope of
Western philosophy and social progress for two thousand years. What I
hold to, and what I try to impart through these essays, is my belief
that the noblest role conscious human beings can play today is not only
to seek the emancipation of people from the irrationalities of
capitalist and hierarchical society but also to defend the Enlightenment
and its message of reason in public affairs against the dark forces of
irrationality, nihilism, and ultimately barbarism that stand at the
gates of civilization. My own generation fought off Nazism and
superstition with some success. The present and coming generations must
have as their task to oppose the “dumbing down” of the human mind, its
growing trivialization and juvenilization, and its appalling ignorance
even of the recent past. They must oppose the new gospel of
self-absorption at the expense of public affairs. They may have once
again to deal with ghosts of the past – fascism and Stalinism – as well.
In the meantime, we still have time to build a coherent theoretical
framework for our practice and to prepare for the “final conflict” that
may yet come at some point in the present century.
Murray Bookchin
Burlington, Vermont
November, 2005
In addressing the sources of our present ecological and social problems,
perhaps the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is
that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of
human by human. The primary implication of this most basic message is a
call for a politics and even an economics that offer a democratic
alternative to the nation-state and the market society. I would like to
offer a broad sketch of these issues to lay the groundwork for the
changes necessary in moving toward a free and ecological society.
First, the most fundamental route to a resolution of our ecological
problems is social in character. That is to say, if we are faced with
the prospect of outright ecological catastrophe, toward which so many
knowledgeable people and institutions claim we are headed today, it is
because the historical domination of human by human has been extended
outward from society into the natural world. Until domination as such is
removed from social life and replaced by a truly egalitarian and sharing
society, powerful ideological, technological, and systemic forces will
be used by the existing society to degrade the environment, indeed the
entire biosphere. Hence, more than ever today, it is imperative that we
develop the consciousness and the movement to remove domination from
society, indeed from our everyday lives – in relationships between the
young and the elderly, between women and men, in educational
institutions and workplaces, and in our attitude toward the natural
world. To permit the poison of domination – and a domineering
sensibility – to persist is, at this time, to ignore the most basic
roots of our ecological as well as social problems – problems whose
sources can be traced back to the very roots of our civilization.
Second, and more specifically, the modern market society that we call
capitalism, and its alter ego, “state socialism,” have brought all the
historic problems of domination to a head. The consequences of this
“grow or die” market economy must inexorably lead to the destruction of
the natural basis for complex life-forms, including humanity. It is,
however, all too common these days to single out either population
growth or technology – or both – to blame for the ecological
dislocations that beset us. But we cannot single out either of these as
“causes” of problems whose most deep-seated roots actually lie in the
market economy. Attempts to focus on these alleged “causes” are
scandalously deceptive and shift our focus from the social issues we
must resolve.
In the American experience, people only a generation or two removed from
my own generation slashed their way through the vast forests of the
West, nearly exterminated millions of bison, plowed fertile grasslands,
and laid waste to a large part of the continent – all using only hand
axes, simple plows, horse-drawn vehicles, and simple hand tools. It
required no technological revolution to create the present devastation
of what had once been a vast and fecund region capable, with rational
management, of sustaining both human and non-human life. What brought so
much ruin to the land was not the technological implements that those
earlier generations of Americans used but the insane drive of
entrepreneurs to succeed in the bitter struggle of the marketplace, to
expand and devour the riches of their competitors lest they be devoured
in turn by their rivals. In my own lifetime, millions of small American
farmers were driven from their homes not only by natural disasters but
by giant agricultural corporations that turned so much of the landscape
into a huge industrial system for cultivating food.
Not only has a society based on endless wasteful growth devastated
entire regions, indeed a continent, with only simple technology; the
ecological crisis it has produced is systemic – and not a matter of
misinformation, spiritual insensitivity, or lack of moral integrity. The
present social illness lies not only in the outlook that pervades the
present society; it lies above all in the very structure and law of life
in the system itself, in its imperative, which no entrepreneur or
corporation can ignore without facing destruction: growth, more growth,
and still more growth. Blaming technology for the ecological crisis
serves, however unintentionally, to blind us to the ways technology
could in fact play a creative role in a rational, ecological society. In
such a society, the intelligent use of sophisticated technology would be
direly needed to restore the vast ecological damage that has already
been inflicted on the biosphere, much of which will not repair itself
without creative human intervention.
Along with technology, population is commonly singled out for blame as
an alleged “cause” of the ecological crisis. But population is by no
means the overwhelming threat that some disciples of Malthus in today’s
ecology movements would have us believe. People do not reproduce like
the fruit flies that are so often cited as examples of mindless
reproductive growth. They are products of culture as well as of
biological nature. Given decent living standards, reasonably educated
families often have fewer children in order to improve the quality of
their lives. Given education, moreover, and a consciousness of gender
oppression, women no longer allow themselves to be reduced to mere
reproductive factories. Instead, they stake out claims as humans with
all the rights to meaningful and creative lives. Ironically, technology
has played a major role in eliminating the domestic drudgery that for
centuries culturally stupefied women and reduced them to mere servants
of men and men’s desire to have children – preferably sons, to be sure.
In any case, even if population were to decline for some unspecified
reason, the large corporations would try to make people buy more and
still more in order to render economic expansion possible. Failing to
attain a large enough domestic consumers’ market in which to expand,
corporate minds would turn to international markets – or to that the
most lucrative of markets, the military.
Finally, well-meaning people who regard New Age moralism,
psychotherapeutic approaches, or personal lifestyle changes as the key
to resolving the present ecological crisis are destined to be tragically
disappointed. No matter how much this society paints itself green or
orates the need for an ecological outlook, the way society literally
breathes cannot be undone unless it undergoes profound structural
changes: namely by replacing competition with cooperation, and profit
seeking with relationships based on sharing and mutual concern. Given
the present market economy, a corporation or entrepreneur who tried to
produce goods in accordance with even a minimally decent ecological
outlook would rapidly be devoured by a rival in a marketplace whose
selective process of competition rewards the most villainous at the
expense of the most virtuous. After all, “business is business,” as the
maxim has it. And business allows no room for people who are restrained
by conscience or moral qualms, as the many scandals in the “business
community” attest. Attempting to win over the “business community” to an
ecological sensibility, let alone to ecologically beneficial practices,
would be like asking predatory sharks to live on grass or “persuading”
lions to lovingly lie down beside lambs.
The fact is that we are confronted by a thoroughly irrational social
system, not simply by predatory individuals who can be won over to
ecological ideas by moral arguments, psychotherapy, or even the
challenges of a troubled public to their products and behavior. It is
less that these entrepreneurs control the present system of savage
competition and endless growth than that the system of savage
competition and growth controls them. The stagnation of New Age ideology
today in the United States attests to its tragic failure to “improve” a
social system that must be completely replaced if we are to resolve the
ecological crisis. One can only commend the individuals who by virtue of
their consumption habits, recycling activities, and appeals for a new
sensibility undertake public activities to stop ecological degradation.
Each surely does his or her part. But it will require a much greater
effort – an organized, clearly conscious, and forward-looking political
movement – to meet the basic challenges posed by our aggressively
anti-ecological society.
Yes, we as individuals should change our lifestyles as much as possible,
but it is the utmost shortsightedness to believe that that is all or
even primarily what we have to do. We need to restructure the entire
society, even as we engage in lifestyle changes and single-issue
struggles against pollution, nuclear power plants, the excessive use of
fossil fuels, the destruction of soil, and so forth. We must have a
coherent analysis of the deep-seated hierarchical relationships and
systems of domination, as well as of class relationships and economic
exploitation, that degrade people as well as the environment. Here, we
must move beyond the insights provided by the Marxists, syndicalists,
and even many liberal economists, who for years reduced most social
antagonisms and problems to class analysis. Class struggle and economic
exploitation still exist, and the classical – and still perceptive –
class analysis reveals iniquities about the present social order that
are intolerable.
But the Marxian and liberal belief that capitalism has played a
“revolutionary” role in destroying traditional communities, and that
technological advances seeking to “conquer” nature are a precondition
for freedom, rings terribly hollow today, when many of these very
advances are being used to make the most formidable weapons and means of
surveillance the world has ever seen. Nor could the Marxian socialists
of my day, 60 years ago, have anticipated how successfully capitalism
would use its technological prowess to co-opt the working class and even
diminish its numbers in relation to the rest of the population.
Yes, class struggles still exist – but they occur further and further
below the threshold of class war. Workers, as I can attest from my own
experience as a foundryman and autoworker for General Motors, do not
regard themselves as mindless adjuncts to machines, or as factory
dwellers, or as “instruments of history,” as Marxists might put it. They
regard themselves as living human beings: as fathers and mothers, as
sons and daughters, as people with dreams and visions, as members of
communities – not only of trade unions. Living in towns and cities,
their eminently human aspirations go well beyond their “historic role”
as class agents of “history.” They suffer from the pollution of their
communities as well as from their factories, and they are as concerned
about the welfare of their children, companions, neighbors, and
communities, as they are about their jobs and wage scales.
The overly economistic focus of traditional socialism and syndicalism
has in recent years caused these movements to lag behind emerging
ecological issues and visions – as they lagged, I may add, behind
feminist concerns, cultural issues, and urban issues, all of which often
cut across class lines to include middle-class people, intellectuals,
small proprietors, and even some bourgeois. Their failure to confront
hierarchy – not only class and domination, not only economic
exploitation – has often alienated women from socialism and syndicalism
to the extent that they awakened to the age-old reality that they have
been oppressed irrespective of their class status. Similarly, broad
community concerns like pollution afflict people as such, whatever the
class to which they belong. Disasters like the meltdown of the Chernobyl
reactor in the Ukraine justly panicked everyone who was exposed to
radiation from the plant, not simply workers and peasants.
Indeed, even if we were to achieve a classless society free of economic
exploitation, would we readily achieve a rational society? Would women,
young people, the infirm, the elderly, people of color, various
oppressed ethnic groups – the list is, in fact, enormous – be free of
domination? The answer is a categorical no – a fact to which women can
certainly attest, even within the socialist and syndicalist movements
themselves. Without eliminating the ancient hierarchical and domineering
structures from which classes and the state actually emerged, we would
have made only a part of the changes needed to achieve a rational
society. There would still be a historical intoxicant in a socialist or
syndicalist society – hierarchy – that would continually erode its
highest ideals, namely the achievement of a truly free and ecological
society.
Perhaps the most disquieting feature of many radical groups today,
particularly socialists who may accept the foregoing observation, is
their commitment to at least a minimal state that would coordinate and
administer a classless and egalitarian society – a non-hierarchical one,
no less! One hears this argument from André Gorz and many others, who,
presumably because of the many “complexities” of modern society, cannot
conceive of the administration of economic affairs without some kind of
coercive mechanism, albeit one with a “human face.”
This logistical and in some cases frankly authoritarian view of the
human condition (as expressed in the writings of Arne Næss, the father
of “deep ecology”) reminds one of a dog chasing its tail. Simply because
the “tail” is there – a metaphor for economic “complexity” or market
systems of distribution – does not mean that the metaphorical dog must
chase it in circles that lead nowhere. The “tail” we have to worry about
can be rationally simplified by reducing or eliminating commercial
bureaucracies and the needless reliance on goods from abroad that can be
produced by recycling at home, and by increasing the use of local
resources that are now ignored because they are not “competitively”
priced: in short, reducing the vast paraphernalia of goods and services
that may be indispensable to profit making and competition, but not to
the rational distribution of goods in a cooperative society. The painful
reality is that most excuses in radical theory for preserving a “minimal
state” stem from the myopic visions of eco-socialists like Gorz, who can
accept the present system of production and distribution as it is to one
degree or another – not as it should be in a moral economy. So
conceived, production and distribution seem more formidable – together
with their bureaucratic machinery, irrational division of labor, and
“global” nature – than they actually need to be. It would take no great
wisdom or array of computers to show with even a grain of imagination
how the present “global” system of production can be simplified and
still provide a decent standard of living for everyone. Indeed, it took
only some five years or so to rebuild a ruined Germany after World War
Two, far longer than it will require thinking people today to remove the
statist and bureaucratic apparatus for administering the global
distribution of goods and resources.
What is even more disquieting is the naive belief that a “minimal state”
could indeed remain “minimal.” If history – in fact, the events of the
past few years – has shown anything, it is that the state, far from
being only an instrument of a ruling elite, becomes an organism in its
own right that grows as unrelentingly as a cancer. Anarchism, in this
respect, has exhibited a prescience that discloses the terrible weakness
of the traditional socialist commitment to a state – proletarian, social
democratic, or “minimal.” To create a state is to institutionalize power
in the form of a machine that exists apart from the people. It is to
professionalize rule and policymaking, to create a distinct interest (be
it of bureaucrats, deputies, commissars, legislators, the military, the
police, ad nauseam) that, however weak, or however well-intentioned it
may be at first, eventually takes on a corruptive power of its own. When
over the course of history have states – however “minimal” – ever
dissolved themselves or constrained their growth into massive
malignancies? When have they ever remained “minimal”?
The recent deterioration of the German Greens – the so-called “non-party
party” that, after its acquisition of a place in the Bundestag, has now
become a crude political machine – is dramatic evidence that
parliamentary power corrupts with a vengeance. The idealists who helped
found the organization and sought to use the Bundestag merely as a
“platform” for their radical message have by now either left in disgust
or have themselves become rather unsavory examples of wanton political
careerism. One would have to be either utterly naive or simply blind to
the lessons of history to ignore the fact that the state, “minimal” or
not, absorbs and ultimately digests even the most well-meaning critics
once they enter it. It is not that statists use the state to abolish it
or “minimalize” its effects; it is, rather, the state that corrupts even
the most idealistic anti-statists who flirt with it.
Finally, the most disturbing feature of statism – even “minimal statism”
– is that it completely undermines a politics based on confederalism.
One of the most unfortunate features of traditional socialist history,
Marxian and otherwise, is that it emerged in an era of nation-state
building. The Jacobin model of a centralized revolutionary state was
accepted almost uncritically by nineteenth-century socialists and became
an integral part of the revolutionary tradition – a tradition, I may
add, that mistakenly associated itself with the nationalistic emphasis
of the French Revolution, as seen in the “Marseillaise” and its
adulation of la patrie. Marx’s view that the French Revolution was
basically to be a model for formulating a revolutionary strategy – he
mistakenly claimed that in its Jacobin form it was the most “classical”
of the “bourgeois” revolutions – had disastrous effects upon the
revolutionary tradition. Lenin adopted this vision so completely that
the Bolsheviks were rightly considered the “Jacobins” of the Russian
socialist movement, and, of course, Stalin used techniques such as
purges, show trials, and brute force with lethal effects for the
socialist project as a whole.
The notion that human freedom can be achieved, much less perpetuated,
through a state of any kind is monstrously oxymoronic – a contradiction
in terms. Attempts to justify the existence of a cancerous phenomenon
like the state, and the use of statist measures or “statecraft,” exclude
a radically different form of social management, namely confederalism.
For centuries, in fact, democratic forms of confederalism – in which
municipalities were coordinated by mandated and recallable deputies who
were always under public scrutiny – have competed with statist forms and
constituted a challenging alternative to centralization,
bureaucratization, and the professionalization of power in the hands of
elite bodies. Let me emphasize that confederalism should not be confused
with federalism, which is simply the coordination of nation-states in a
network of agreements that preserve the prerogatives of policy-making
with little if any citizen involvement. Federalism is simply the state
writ large, indeed the further centralization of already centralized
states, as in the United States’ federal republic, the European
Community, or the recently formed Commonwealth of Independent States –
all collections of huge continental superstates that remove even further
whatever control the people have over nation-states.
A confederalist alternative would be based on a network of policy-making
popular assemblies with recallable deputies to local and regional
confederal councils – councils whose sole function, I must emphasize,
would be to adjudicate differences and undertake strictly administrative
tasks. One could scarcely advance such a prospect by making use of a
state formation of any kind, however “minimal.” Indeed, to juggle
statist and confederal perspectives in a verbal game by distinguishing
“minimal” from “maximal” is to utterly confuse the basis for a new
politics structured around a participatory democracy. Among Greens in
the United States there have already been tendencies that absurdly call
for “decentralization” and “grassroots democracy” while seeking to run
candidates for state and national offices – that is, for statist
institutions, one of whose essential functions is to confine, restrict,
and essentially suppress local democratic institutions and initiatives.
Indeed, as I have repeatedly emphasized, when radical ecologists and
libertarian socialists of all kinds engage in libertarian municipalist
politics and run for municipal public office, they are not merely
seeking to remake cities, towns, and villages on the basis of fully
democratic confederal networks; they are running against the state and
parliamentary offices. Hence, to call for a “minimal state,” even as a
coordinative institution, as André Gorz and others have done, is to
obscure and countervail any effort to replace the nation-state with a
confederation of municipalities.
It is to the credit of anarchism that it firmly rejects the traditional
socialist orientation toward state power and recognizes the corruptive
role of participating in parliamentary elections. What is regrettable is
that this rejection, so clearly corroborated by the corruption of
statist socialists, Greens, and members of other professed radical
movements, was not sufficiently nuanced to distinguish activity on the
municipal level as the basis of politics in the Hellenic sense: that is
to say, to distinguish electoral activity on the local level from
electoral activity on the provincial and national levels, which I have
argued really constitutes statecraft. The libertarian politics of social
ecology, by contrast, consistently seeks to revive or recreate the
political sphere, in flat opposition to the state; it attempts to create
a dual power to challenge the nationstate and replace it with a
confederation of democratized municipalities. Libertarian municipalism
may indeed begin in a limited way in civic wards, here and there, as
well as in small cities and towns, but its aim is nothing less than the
total remaking of society along rational, nonhierarchical and ecological
lines.
It would not be presumptuous to claim that social ecology, whatever its
other values or failings, represents a coherent interpretation of the
enormous ecological and social problems we face today. Its philosophy,
social theory, and political practice form a vital alternative to the
ideological stagnation and tragic failure of the present socialist,
syndicalist, and radical projects that were so much in vogue even as
recently as the 1960s. As to “alternatives” that offer us New Age or
mystical ecological solutions, what could be more naive than to believe
that a society whose very metabolism is based on growth, production for
its own sake, hierarchy, classes, domination, and exploitation could be
changed simply by moral suasion, individual action, and a childish
primitivism that essentially views technology as a curse and focuses
variously on demographic growth and personal modes of consumption as
primary issues? We must get to the heart of the crisis we face and
develop a popular politics that will eschew statism at one extreme and
New Age privatism at the other. If this goal is dismissed as “merely”
utopian, I am obliged to question what many radicals today would call
“realism.”
One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may
define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development
and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty.
For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily
as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the
heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the
anti-imperialist and presumably anti-capitalist struggle that it was to
become in the twentieth century.
This did not mean that the nineteenth-century Left favored imperialist
depredations in the colonial world. At the turn of this century, hardly
any serious radical thinker, to my knowledge, regarded the imperialist
powers’ attempts to quell movements for self-determination in colonial
areas as a blessing. The Left scoffed at and usually denounced the
arrogant claims of European powers to bring “progress” to the
“barbarous” areas of the world. Marx’s views of imperialism may have
been equivocal, but he never lacked a genuine aversion for the
afflictions that native peoples suffered at the hands of imperialists.
Anarchists, in turn, were almost invariably hostile to the European
claim to be the beacon of civilization for the world.
Yet if the Left universally scorned the civilizatory claims of
imperialists at the end of the nineteenth century, it generally regarded
nationalism as an arguable issue. The “national question,” to use the
traditional phrase in which such discussions were cast, was subject to
serious disputes, certainly as far as tactics were involved. But by
general agreement, leftists did not regard nationalism, culminating in
the creation of nation-states, as the ultimate dispensation of
humanity’s future in a collectivist or communist society. Indeed, the
single principle on which the Left of the pre- World War One and the
interwar periods agreed was a belief in the shared humanity of people
regardless of their membership in different cultural, ethnic, and gender
groups, and their complementary affinities in a free society as rational
human beings with the capacity for cooperation, a willingness to share
material resources, and a fervent sense of empathy. The
“Internationale,” the shared anthem of social democrats, socialists, and
anarchists alike up to and even after the Bolshevik revolution, ended
with the stirring cry, “The ‘Internationale’ shall be the human race.”
The Left singled out the international proletariat as the historic agent
for modern social change not by virtue of its specificity as a class, or
its particularity as one component in a developing capitalist society,
but by virtue of its need to achieve universality in order to abolish
class society – that is, as the class driven by necessity to remove wage
slavery by abolishing enslavement as such. Capitalism had brought the
historic “social question” of human exploitation to its final and most
advanced form. “Tis the final conflict!” rang out the “Internationale,”
with a sense of universalistic commitment – one that no revolutionary
movement could ignore any longer without subverting the possibilities
for passing from a “prehistory” of barbarous class interest to a “true
history” of a totally emancipated humanity.
Minimally, this was the shared outlook of the prewar and interwar Left,
particularly of its various socialistic tendencies. The primacy the
anarchists and libertarian socialists have historically given to the
abolition of the state, the agency par excellence of hierarchical
coercion, led directly to their denigration of the nation-state and of
nationalism generally, not only because nationalism divides human beings
territorially, culturally, and economically, but because it follows in
the wake of the modern state and ideologically justifies it.
Of concern here is the internationalist tradition that played so
pronounced a role in the Left of the nineteenth century and the first
third of the twentieth, and its mutation into a highly problematical
“question,” particularly in Rosa Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s writings. This
is a “question” of no small importance. We have only to consider the
utter confusion that surrounds it today – when a savagely bigoted
nationalism is subverting the internationalist tradition of the Left –
to recognize its importance. The rise of nationalisms that exploit
racial, religious, and traditional cultural differences between human
beings, including even the most trivial linguistic and quasi-tribalistic
differences, not to speak of differences in gender identity and sexual
preference, marks a decivilization of humanity, a retreat to an age when
the number of fingers with which people made the sign of the cross
determined whether they and their neighbors would disembowel each other
in bloody conflicts, as Nikos Kazantzakis pointed out in Zorba the
Greek.
What is particularly disturbing is that the Left has not always seen
nationalism as a regressive demand. The modern Left, such as it is
today, all too often uncritically embraces the slogan “national
liberation” – a slogan that has echoed through its ranks without regard
for the basic ideal voiced in the “Internationale.” Calls for tribal
“identity” shrilly accentuate a group’s particular characteristics to
garner constituencies, an effort that negates the spirit of the
“Internationale” and the traditional internationalism of the Left. The
very meaning of nationalism and the nature of its relationship to
statism are raising issues, especially today, for which the Left is
bereft of ideas apart from appeals for “national liberation.”
If present-day leftists lose all viable memory of an earlier
internationalist Left – not to speak of humanity’s historical emergence
out of its animalistic background, its millennia-long development away
from such biological facts as ethnicity, gender, and age differences
toward truly social affinities based on citizenship, equality, and a
universalistic sense of a common humanity – the great role assigned to
reason by the Enlightenment may well be in grave doubt. Without a form
of human association that can resist and hopefully go beyond nationalism
in all its popular variants – whether it takes the form of a
reconstituted Left, a new politics, a social libertarianism, a
reawakened humanism, an ethics of complementarity – anything that we can
legitimately call civilization, indeed, the human spirit itself, may
well be extinguished long before nuclear war, the growing ecological
crises, or, more generally, a cultural barbarism comparable only to the
most destructive periods in history overwhelms us. In view of today’s
growing nationalism, then, few endeavors could be more important than to
examine the nature of nationalism and understand the so-called “national
question” as the Left in its various forms has interpreted it over the
years.
The level of human development can be gauged in great part by the extent
to which people recognize their shared unity. Indeed, personal freedom
consists in great part of our ability to choose friends, partners,
associates, and affines without regard to their biological differences.
What makes us human, apart from our ability to reason on a high plane of
generalization, consociate into mutable social institutions, work
cooperatively, and develop a highly symbolic system of communication, is
a shared knowledge of our humanitas. Goethe’s memorable words, so
characteristic of the Enlightenment mind, still haunt as a criterion of
our humanity: “There is a degree of culture where national hatred
vanishes, and where one stands to a certain extent above nations and
feels the weal and woe of a neighboring people as if it happened to
one’s own.”[11]
If Goethe established a standard of authentic humanity here – and surely
one can demand more of human beings than empathy for their “own people”
– early humanity was less than human by that standard. Although a
lunatic element in today’s ecology movement calls for a “return to a
Pleistocene spirituality,” they would in all probability have found that
“spirituality” very dispiriting in reality. In prehistoric eras,
probably marked by band and tribal social organization, human beings
were, “spiritually” or otherwise, first and foremost members of an
immediate family, second, members of a band, and ultimately, members of
a tribe. What determined membership in anything beyond one’s given
family group was an extension of the kinship tie: the people of a given
tribe were socially linked to one another by real or fictive blood
relationships. This “blood oath,” as well as other “biological facts”
like gender and age, defined one’s rights, obligations, and indeed one’s
identity in the tribal society.
Moreover, many – perhaps most – band or tribal groups regarded only
those who shared the “blood oath” with themselves as human. Indeed, a
tribe often referred to itself as “the People,” a name that expressed
its exclusive claim to humanity. Other people, who were outside the
magic circle of the real or mythic blood linkages of a tribe, were
“strangers” and hence in some sense were not human beings. The “blood
oath” and the use of the name “the People” to designate themselves often
pitted a tribe against others who made the same exclusive claim to be
human and to be “the People,” even among peoples who shared common
linguistic and cultural traits.
Tribal society, in fact, was extremely wary of anyone who was not one of
its own members. In many areas, before a stranger could cross a
territorial boundary, he had to submissively and patiently await an
invitation from an elder or shaman of the tribe that claimed the
territory before proceeding. Without hospitality, which was generally
conceived as a quasi-religious virtue, any stranger risked life and limb
in a tribe’s territory, so that lodgings and food were usually preceded
by ritual acts of trust or goodwill. The modern handshake may itself
have originated as a symbolic expression that one’s right hand was free
of weapons.
Warfare was endemic among our prehistoric ancestors and in later native
communities, notwithstanding the high, almost cultic status enjoyed by
ostensibly peaceful “ecological aborigines” among white middle-class
Euro- Americans today. When foraging groups overhunted the game in their
accustomed territory, as often happened, they were usually more than
willing to invade the area of a neighboring group and claim its
resources for their own. Commonly, after the rise of warrior sodalities,
warfare acquired cultural as well as economic attributes, so victors no
longer merely defeated their real or chosen “enemies” but virtually
exterminated them, as witness the near-genocidal destruction of the
Huron Indians by their linguistically and culturally related Iroquois
cousins.
If the major empires of the ancient Middle East and Orient conquered,
pacified, and subjugated many different ethnic and cultural groups,
thereby making alien peoples into the abject subjects of despotic
monarchies, the most important single factor to erode aboriginal
parochialism was the emergence of the city. The rise of the ancient
city, whether democratic as at Athens or republican as in Rome, marked a
radically new social dispensation. In contrast to the family-oriented
and parochial folk who had constituted the tribal and village world,
Western cities were now structured increasingly around residential
propinquity and shared economic interests. A “second nature,” as Cicero
called it, of humanistic social and cultural ties began to replace the
older form of social organization based on the “first nature” of
biological and blood ties, in which individuals’ social roles and
obligations had been anchored in their family, clan, gender, and the
like, rather than in associations of their own choice.
Etymologically, “politics” derives from the Greek politika, which
connotes an actively involved citizenry that formulates the policies of
a community or polis and, more often than not, routinely executes them
in the course of public service. Although formal citizenship was
required for participation in such politics, poleis like democratic
Athens celebrated their openness to visitors, particularly to skilled
craftsmen and knowledgeable merchants of other ethnic communities. In
his famous funeral oration, Pericles declared:
We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude
foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the
eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality, trusting
less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens;
where in education, [our rivals in Sparta] from their very cradles by a
painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we
please and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate
danger.[12]
In Periclean times, Athenian liberality, to be sure, was still limited
by a largely fictitious notion of the shared ancestry of its citizens –
although less than it had been previously. But it is hard to ignore the
fact that Plato’s dialectical masterpiece, The Republic, occurs as a
dialogue in the home of Cephalos, whose family were resident aliens in
the Piraeus, the port area of Athens where most foreigners lived. Yet in
the dialogue itself the interchange between citizen and alien is
uninhibited by any status considerations.
The Roman emperor Caracalla, in time, made all freemen in the Empire
“citizens” of Rome with equal juridical rights, thereby universalizing
human relationships despite differences in language, ethnicity,
tradition, and place of residence. Christianity, for all its failings,
nonetheless celebrated the equality of all people’s souls in the eyes of
the deity, a heavenly “egalitarianism” that, in combination with open
medieval cities, theoretically eliminated the last attributes of
ancestry, ethnicity, and tradition that divided human beings from each
other.
In practice, it goes without saying, these attributes still persisted,
and various peoples retained parochial allegiances to their villages,
localities, and even cities, countervailing the tenuous Roman and
particularly Christian ideals of a universal humanitas. The unified
medieval world was fragmented juridically into countless baronial and
aristocratic sovereignties that parochialized local popular commitments
to a given lord or place, often pitting culturally and ethnically
related peoples against each other in other areas. The Catholic Church
opposed these parochial sovereignties, not only for doctrinal reasons
but in order to be able to expand papal authority over Christendom as a
whole. As for secular power, wayward but strong monarchs like Henry II
of England tried to impose the “king’s peace” over large territorial
areas, subduing warring nobles with varying degrees of success. Thus did
pope and king work in tandem to diminish parochialism, even as they
dueled with each other for control over ever-larger areas of the feudal
world.
Yet authentic citizens were deeply involved in classical political
activity in many places in Europe during the Middle Ages. The burghers
of medieval town democracies were essentially master craftsmen. The
tasks of their guilds, or richly articulated vocational fraternities,
were no less moral than economic – indeed, they formed the structural
basis for a genuine moral economy. Guilds not only “policed” local
markets, fixing “fair prices” and assuring that the quality of their
members’ goods would be high; they participated in civic and religious
festivals as distinct entities with their own banners, helped finance
and construct public buildings, saw to the welfare of the families of
deceased members, collected money for charity, and participated as
militiamen in the defense of the community of which they were a part.
Their cities, in the best of cases, conferred freedom on runaway serfs,
saw to the safety of travelers, and adamantly defended their civic
liberties. The eventual differentiation of the town populations into
wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless, and “nationalists” who
supported the monarchy against a predatory nobility, makes up a complex
drama that cannot be discussed here.
At various times and places some cities created forms of association
that were neither nations nor parochial baronies. These were intercity
confederations that lasted for centuries, such as the Hanseatic League,
cantonal confederations like that of Switzerland, and more briefly,
attempts to achieve free city confederations like the Spanish comuñero
movement in the early sixteenth century. It was not until the
seventeenth century – particularly under Cromwell in England and Louis
XIV in France – that centralizers of one form or another finally began
to carve out lasting nations in Europe.
Nation-states, let me emphasize, are states – not only nations.
Establishing them means vesting power in a centralized, professional,
bureaucratic apparatus that exercises a social monopoly of organized
violence, notably in the form of its armies and police. The state
preempts the autonomy of localities and provinces by means of its
all-powerful executive and, in republican states, its legislature, whose
members are elected or appointed to represent a fixed number of
“constituents.” The citizen in a self-managed locality vanishes into an
anonymous aggregation of individuals who pay a suitable amount of taxes
and receive the state’s “services.” “Politics” in the nation-state
devolves into a body of exchange relationships in which constituents
generally try to get what they pay for in a “political” marketplace of
goods and services. Nationalism as a form of tribalism writ large
reinforces the state by providing it with the loyalty of a people of
shared linguistic, ethnic, and cultural affinities, indeed legitimizing
the state by giving it a basis of seemingly all-embracing biological and
traditional commonalities among the people. It was not the English
people who created an England but the English monarchs and centralizing
rulers, just as it was the French kings and their bureaucracies who
forged the French nation.
Indeed, until state-building began to acquire new vigor in the fifteenth
century, nation-states in Europe remained a novelty. Even when
centralized authority based minimally on a linguistic commonality began
to foster nationalism throughout Western Europe and the United States,
nationalism faced a very dubious destiny. Confederalism remained a
viable alternative to the nation-state well into the latter half of the
nineteenth century. As late as 1871, the Paris Commune called upon all
the communes of France to form a confederal dual power in opposition to
the newly created Third Republic. Eventually the nation-state won out in
this complex conflict, and statism, in fact, was firmly linked to
nationalism. The two were virtually indistinguishable from each other by
the beginning of the twentieth century.
Radical theorists and activists on the Left dealt in very different ways
with the host of historical and ethical problems that nationalism raised
with respect to efforts to build a communistic, cooperative society.
Historically, the earliest leftist attempts to explore nationalism as a
problem obstructing the advent of a free and just society came from
various anarchist theorists. Pierre‑Joseph Proudhon seems never to have
questioned the ideal of human solidarity, although he never denied the
right of a people to cultural uniqueness and even to secede from any
kind of “social contract,” provided, to be sure, that no one else’s
rights were infringed upon. Although Proudhon detested slavery – he
sarcastically observed that the American South “with Bible in hand,
cultivates slavery,” while the American North “is already creating a
proletariat”[13] – he formally conceded the right of the Confederacy to
withdraw from the Union during the Civil War of 1861–65.
More generally, Proudhon’s federalist and mutualistic views led him to
oppose nationalist movements in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. His
anti-nationalist notions were somewhat diluted by his own Francophilism,
as the French socialist Jean Jaurès later noted. Proudhon feared the
formation of strong nation-states on or near France’s borders. But he
was also a product in his own way of the Enlightenment. Writing in 1862,
he declared: “I will never put devotion to my country before the rights
of Man. If the French Government behaves unjustly to any people, I am
deeply grieved and protest in every way that I can. If France is
punished for the misdeeds of her leaders, I bow my head and say from the
depths of my soul, ‘Merito haec patimur’ – ‘We have deserved these
ills.’”[14]
Despite his Gallic chauvinism, the “rights of Man” remained foremost in
Proudhon’s mind; nor was he oblivious to the fact that India and China
were, in his words, “at the mercy of barbarians.”[15] “Do you think that
it is French egoism, hatred of liberty, scorn for the Poles and Italians
that cause me to mock at and mistrust this commonplace word
nationality,” he wrote to Herzen, “which is being so widely used and
makes so many scoundrels and so many honest citizens talk so much
nonsense? For pity’s sake ... do not take offense so easily. If you do,
I shall have to say to you what I have been saying for six months about
your friend Garibaldi: ‘Of great heart but no brain.’”[16]
Michael Bakunin’s internationalism was as emphatic as Proudhon’s,
although his views were also marked by a certain ambiguity. “Only that
can be called a human principle which is universal and common to all
men,” he wrote in his internationalist vein; “and nationality separates
men, therefore it is not a principle.” Indeed, “There is nothing more
absurd and at the same time more harmful, more deadly, for the people
than to uphold the fictitious principle of nationality as the ideal of
all the people’s aspirations.” What counted finally for Bakunin was that
“Nationality is not a universal human principle.” Still further: “We
should place human, universal justice above all national interests. And
we should once and for all time abandon the false principle of
nationality, invented of late by the despots of France, Russia, and
Prussia for the purpose of crushing the sovereign principle of liberty.”
Yet Bakunin also declared that nationality “is a historic, local fact,
which like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general
acceptance.” Not only that, but this is a “natural fact” that deserves
“respect.” It may have been his rhetorical proclivities that led him to
declare himself “always sincerely the patriot of all oppressed
fatherlands.” But he argued that the right of every nationality “to live
according to its own nature” must be respected, since this “right” is
“simply the corollary of the general principle of freedom.”[17]
The subtlety of Bakunin’s observations should not be overlooked in the
midst of this seeming self-contradiction. He defined a general principle
that is human, one that is abridged or partially violated by asocial or
“biological” facts that for better or worse must be taken for granted.
To be a nationalist is to be less than human, but it is also inevitable
insofar as individuals are products of distinctive cultural traditions,
environments, and states of mind. Overshadowing the mere fact of
“nationality” is the higher universal principle in which people
recognize themselves as members of the same species and seek to foster
their commonalities rather than their “national” distinctiveness.
Such humanistic principles were to be taken very seriously by left
libertarians generally and strikingly so by the largest anarchist
movement of modern times, the Spanish anarchists. From the early 1880s
up to the bloody civil war of 1936–39, the anarchist movement of Spain
opposed not only statism and nationalism but even regionalism in all its
forms. Despite their enormous Catalan following, the Spanish anarchists
consistently raised the higher human principle of social liberation over
national liberation and opposed the nationalist tendencies within Spain
that so often divided Basques, Catalans, Andalusians, and Galicians from
one another and particularly from the Castilians, who enjoyed cultural
supremacy over the country’s minorities. Indeed, the word “Iberian”
rather than “Spanish” that appears in the name Iberian Anarchist
Federation (FAI) served to express not only a commitment to peninsular
solidarity but an indifference to regional and national distinctions
between Spain and Portugal. The Spanish anarchists cultivated Esperanto
as a “universal” human language more enthusiastically than any major
radical tendency, and “universal brotherhood” remained a lasting ideal
of their movement – as it historically did in most libertarian socialist
movements up to the present day.
Prior to 1914, Marxists and the Second International generally held
similar convictions, despite the burgeoning of nineteenth-century
nationalism. In Marx and Engels’s view, the proletariat of the world had
no country; authentically unified as a class, it was destined to abolish
all forms of class society. The Communist Manifesto ends with the
ringing appeal: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” In the body of
the work (which Bakunin translated into Russian), the authors declared:
“In the national struggles of the proletarians of different countries,
[Communists] point out and bring to the front the common interests of
the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.”[18] And
further: “The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them
what they have not got.”[19]
The support that Marx and Engels did lend to “national liberation”
struggles was essentially strategic, stemming primarily from their
geopolitical and economic concerns rather than from broad social
principle. They vigorously championed Polish independence from Russia,
for example, because they wanted to weaken the Russian empire, which in
their day was the supreme counter-revolutionary power on the European
continent. And they wanted to see a united Germany because a
centralized, powerful nation-state would provide it with what Engels, in
a letter to Karl Kautsky in 1882, called “the normal political
constitution of the European bourgeoisie.”
Yet the manifest similarities between the internationalist rhetoric of
Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto and the internationalism of
the anarchist theorists and movements should not be permitted to conceal
the important differences between these two forms of socialism –
differences that were to play a major role in the debates that separated
them. The anarchists were in every sense ethical socialists who upheld
universal principles of the “brotherhood of man” and “fraternity,”[20]
principles that Marx’s “scientific socialism” disdained as mere
“abstractions.” In later years, even when speaking broadly of freedom
and the oppressed, Marx and Engels considered the use of seemingly
“inexact” words like “workers” and “toilers” to be an implicit rejection
of socialism as a “science”; instead, they preferred what they
considered the more scientifically rigorous word proletariat, which
specifically referred to those who generate surplus value.
Indeed, in contrast to anarchist theorists like Proudhon, who considered
the spread of capitalism and the proletarianization of preindustrial
peasantry and craftspeople to be a disaster, Marx and Engels
enthusiastically welcomed these developments, as well as the formation
of large, centralized nation-states in which market economies could
flourish. They saw them not only as desiderata in fostering economic
development but, by promoting capitalism, as indispensable in creating
the preconditions for socialism. Despite their support for proletarian
internationalism, they derogated what they saw as “abstract”
denunciations of nationalism as such or scorned them as merely
“moralistic.” Although internationalism in the interests of class
solidarity remained a desideratum for Marx and Engels, their view
implicitly stood at odds with their commitment to capitalist economic
expansion with its need in the nineteenth century for centralized
nation-states. They held the nation‑state to be good or bad insofar as
it advanced or inhibited the expansion of capital, the advance of the
“productive forces,” and the proletarianization of preindustrial
peoples. In principle, they looked askance at the nationalist sentiments
of Indians, Chinese, Africans, and the rest of the noncapitalist world,
whose precapitalist social forms might impede capitalist expansion.
Ireland, ironically, seems to have been an exception to this approach.
Marx, Engels, and the Marxist movement as a whole acknowledged the right
of the Irish to national liberation largely for sentimental reasons and
because it would produce problems for English imperialism, which
commanded a world market. In the main, until such time as a socialist
society could be achieved, Marxists considered the formation of large,
ever more centralized nation‑states in Europe to be “historically
progressive.”
Given their instrumental geopolitics, it should not be surprising that
as the years went by, Marx and Engels essentially supported Bismarck’s
attempts to unify Germany. Their express distaste for Bismarck’s methods
and for the landed gentry in whose interests he spoke should not be
taken too seriously, in my view. They would have welcomed Germany’s
annexation of Denmark, and they called for the incorporation of smaller
European nationalities like the Czechs and Slavs generally into a
centralized Austria-Hungary, as well as the unification of Italy into a
nation‑state, in order to broaden the terrain of the market and the
sovereignty of capitalism on the European continent.
Nor is it surprising that Marx and Engels supported Bismarck’s armies in
the Franco‑Prussian war of 1870 – despite the opposition of their
closest adherents in the German Social Democratic party, Wilhelm
Liebknecht and August Bebel – at least up to the point when those armies
crossed the French frontier and surrounded Paris in 1871. Ironically,
Marx and Engels’s own arguments were to be invoked by the European
Marxists who diverged from their anti-war comrades to support their
respective national military efforts at the outbreak of World War One.
Pro-war German Social Democrats supported the Kaiser as a bulwark
against Russian “Asiatic” barbarism – seemingly in accordance with Marx
and Engels’s own views – while the French Socialists (as well as
Kropotkin in Britain and later in Russia) invoked the tradition of their
country’s Great Revolution in opposition to “Prussian militarism.”
Despite many widespread claims that Rosa Luxemburg was more anarchistic
than a committed Marxist, she actually vigorously opposed the
motivations of anarchic forms of socialism and was more of a doctrinaire
Marxist than is generally realized. Her opposition to Polish nationalism
and Pilsudski’s Polish Socialist Party (which demanded Polish national
independence) as well as her hostility toward nationalism generally,
admirable and courageous as it was, rested principally not on an
anarchistic belief in the “brotherhood of man” but on traditional
Marxist arguments – namely, an extension of Marx and Engels’s desire for
unified markets and centralized states at the expense of Eastern
European nationalities, albeit with a new twist.
By the turn of the century, new considerations had come to the
foreground that induced Luxemburg to modify her views. Like many social
democratic theorists at the time, Luxemburg shared the conviction that
capitalism had passed from a progressive into a largely reactionary
phase. No longer a historically progressive economic order, capitalism
was now reactionary because it had fulfilled its “historical” function
in advancing technology and presumably in producing a class-conscious or
even revolutionary proletariat. Lenin systematized this conclusion in
his famous work, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Thus both Lenin and Luxemburg logically denounced World War One as
imperialist and broke with all socialists who supported the Entente and
the Central Powers, deriding them as “social patriots.” Where Lenin
markedly differed from Luxemburg (aside from the famous issue of his
support for a centralized party organization) was on how, from a
strictly “realistic” standpoint, the “national question” could be used
against capitalism in an era of imperialism. To Lenin, the national
struggles of economically undeveloped colonized countries for liberation
from the colonial powers, including Tsarist Russia, were now inherently
progressive insofar as they served to undermine the power of capital.
That is to say, Lenin’s support for national liberation struggles was
essentially no less pragmatic than that of other Marxists, including
Luxemburg herself. For imperialist Russia, appropriately characterized
as a “prison of nations,” Lenin advocated the unconditional right of
non-Russian peoples to secede under any conditions and to form
nation-states of their own. On the other hand, he maintained,
non-Russian Social Democrats in Russia’s colonized countries would be
obliged to advocate some kind of federal union with the “mother country”
if Russian Social Democrats succeeded in achieving a proletarian
revolution.
Hence, although Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s premises were very similar, the
two Marxists came to radically different conclusions about the “national
question” and the correct manner of resolving it. Lenin demanded the
right of Poland to establish a nation‑state of its own, while Luxemburg
opposed it as economically unviable and regressive. Lenin shared Marx’s
and Engels’s support for Polish independence, albeit for very different
yet equally pragmatic reasons. He did not honor his own position on the
right to secession during the Russian Civil War, most flagrantly in his
manner of dealing with Georgia, a very distinct nation that had
supported the Mensheviks until the Soviet regime forced it to accept a
domestic variant of Bolshevism. Only in the last years of his life,
after a Georgian Communist Party took command of the state, did Lenin
oppose Stalin’s attempt to subordinate the Georgian party to the Russian
– a preponderantly intra-party conflict that was of little concern to
the pro‑Menshevik Georgian population. Lenin did not live long enough to
engage Stalin on this – and other – policies and organizational
practices.
The Marxist and Marxist-Leninist discussions on the “national question”
after World War One thus produced a highly convoluted legacy that
affected the policies not only of the Old Left of the 1920s and 1930s
but those of the New Left of the 1960s as well. What is important to
clarify here are the radically different premises from which left
libertarians and Marxists viewed nationalism generally. Libertarian
socialism and anarchism in the main, aside from some of its variants,
advanced humanistic, basically ethical reasons for opposing the
nation-states that fostered nationalism. Left libertarians did so, to be
more specific, because national distinctions tended to lead to state
formation and to subvert the unity of humanity, to parochialize society,
and to foster cultural particularities rather than the universality of
the human condition. Marxism, as a “socialist science,” eschewed such
ethical “abstractions.”
In contrast to the anarchist opposition to the state and to
centralization, not only did Marxists support a centralized state, they
insisted on the “historically progressive” nature of capitalism and a
market economy, which required centralized nation-states as domestic
markets and as means for removing all internal barriers to commerce that
local and regional sovereignties had created. Marxists generally
regarded the national aspirations of oppressed peoples as matters of
political strategy that should be supported or opposed for strictly
pragmatic considerations, irrespective of any broader ethical ones.
Thus two distinct approaches to nationalism emerged within the Left. The
ethical anti-nationalism of anarchists and libertarian socialists
championed the unity of humanity, with due allowance for cultural
distinctions but in flat opposition to the formation of nation-states;
while the Marxists supported or opposed the nationalistic demands of
largely precapitalist cultures for a variety of pragmatic and
geopolitical reasons. This distinction is not intended to be hard and
fast; socialists in pre-World War One Austria-Hungary were strongly
multinational as a result of the many different peoples who made up the
prewar empire. They called for a confederal relationship between the
German‑speaking rulers of the empire and its largely Slavonic members,
which approximated an anarchist view. Whether they would have honored
their own ideals in practice any better than Lenin adhered to his own
prescriptions once a “proletarian revolution” actually succeeded we will
never know. The original empire had disappeared by 1918, and the
ostensible libertarianism of “Austro-Hungarian Marxism,” as it was
called, became moot during the interwar period. To its honor, I may add,
in February 1934 in Vienna, Austrian socialists, unlike any other
movement apart from the Spaniards, resisted protofascist developments in
bloody street fighting; the movement never regained its revolutionary
élan after it was restored in 1945.
The Left of the interwar period, the so-called Old Left, viewed the
fast-approaching war against Nazi Germany as a continuation of the
“Great War” of 1914–18. Anti- Stalinist Marxists predicted a short-lived
conflict that would terminate in proletarian revolutions even more
sweeping than those of the 1917–21 period. Significantly, Trotsky staked
his adherence to orthodox Marxism itself on this calculation: if the war
did not end in this outcome, he proposed, nearly all the premises of
orthodox Marxism would have to be examined and perhaps drastically
revised. His death in 1940 precluded such a reevaluation on his own
part. When the war did not conclude in international proletarian
revolutions, Trotsky’s supporters were hardly willing to make the
sweeping reexamination that he had suggested.
Yet this reexamination was very much needed. Not only did World War Two
fail to end in proletarian revolutions in Europe; it brought an end to
the whole era of revolutionary proletarian socialism and the
class-oriented internationalism that had emerged in June 1848, when the
Parisian working class raised barricades and red flags in support of a
“social republic.” Far from achieving any successful proletarian
revolutions after World War Two, the European working class failed to
exhibit a semblance of internationalism during the conflict. Unlike
their fathers a generation earlier, no warring troops engaged in
fraternization; nor did the civilian populations exhibit any overt
hostility to their political and military leaders for their conduct of
the war, despite the massive destruction of cities by aerial bombers and
artillery. The German army fought desperately against the Allies in the
West and its soldiers were prepared to defend Hitler’s bunker to the
end.
Above all, an elevated awareness of class distinctions and conflicts in
Europe gave way to nationalism – partly in reaction to Germany’s
occupations of home territories, but partly also, and significantly, as
a result of the resurgence of a crude xenophobia that verged on outright
racism. What limited class‑oriented movements did emerge for a while
after the war, notably in France, Italy, and Greece, were easily
manipulated by the Stalinists to serve Soviet interests in the Cold War.
Hence although World War Two lasted much longer than the first, its
outcome never rose to the political and social level of the 1917–21
period. In fact, world capitalism emerged from World War Two stronger
than it had been at any time in its history, owing principally to the
state’s massive intervention in economic and social affairs.
The failure of serious radical theorists to reexamine Marxist theory in
the light of these developments, as Trotsky had proposed, was followed
by the precipitate decline of the Old Left, the general recognition that
the proletariat was no longer a “hegemonic” class in overthrowing
capitalism, the absence of a “general crisis” of capitalism, and the
failure of the Soviet Union to play an internationalist role in postwar
events.
What came to foreground instead were national liberation struggles in
“Third World” countries and sporadic anti- Soviet eruptions in Eastern
European countries, which were largely smothered by Stalinist
totalitarianism. The Left, in these instances, has often taken
nationalist struggles as general “anti-imperialist” attempts to achieve
“autonomy” from imperialism, and state formation as a legitimation of
this “autonomy,” even at the expense of a popular democracy in the
colonized world.
If Marx and Engels often supported national struggles for strategic
reasons, the Left in the twentieth century, both New and Old, often
elevated such support for such struggles into a mindless article of
faith. The strategic “nationalisms” of Marxist‑type movements largely
foreclosed inquiry into what kind of society a given “national
liberation” movement would likely produce, in a way that ethical
socialisms like anarchism in the nineteenth century did not. It was – or
if not, it should have been – a matter of the gravest concern for the
Old Left in the 1920s and 1930s to inquire into what type of society Mao
Tse-tung, to take a striking case in point, would establish in China if
he defeated the Kuomintang, while the New Left of the 1960s should have
inquired into what type of society Castro, to cite another important
case, would establish in Cuba after the expulsion of Batista.
But throughout the twentieth century, when “Third World” national
liberation movements in colonial countries made conventional avowals of
socialism and then proceeded to establish highly centralized, often
brutally authoritarian states, the Left often greeted them as effective
struggles against imperialist enemies. Advanced as “national
liberation,” nationalism has often stopped short of advancing major
social changes and has even ignored the need to do so. Avowals of
authoritarian forms of socialism have been used by “national liberation”
movements very much the way Stalin used socialist ideologies to brutally
consolidate his own dictatorship. Indeed, Marxism- Leninism has proved a
remarkably effective doctrine for mobilizing “national liberation”
struggles against imperialist powers and gaining the support of leftist
radicals abroad, who saw “national liberation” movements as largely
anti-imperialist struggles rather than observing their true social
content.
Thus, despite the populist and often even anarchistic tendencies that
gave rise to the European and American New Left, its essentially
international focus was directed increasingly toward an uncritical
support for “national liberation” struggles outside the Euro-American
sphere, without regard for where these struggles were leading and the
authoritarian nature of their leadership. As the 1960s progressed, this
incredibly confused movement in fact steadily shed the libertarian and
universalistic ambience with which it had begun. After Mao’s practices
were elevated to an “ism” in the New Left, many young radicals adopted
“Maoism” unreservedly, with grim results for the New Left as a whole. By
1969, the New Left had largely been taken over by Maoists and admirers
of Fidel Castro. An utterly misleading book like William Hinton’s
Fanshen, which uncritically applauded Maoist activities in the Chinese
countryside, was revered in the late 1960s, and many radical groups
adopted what they took to be Maoist organizational practices. So heavily
focused was the New Left’s attention on “national liberation” struggles
in the Third World that the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1969
hardly produced serious protest from young leftists, at least in the
United States, as I can personally attest.
The 1960s also saw the emergence of yet another form of nationalism on
the Left: increasingly ethnically chauvinistic groups began to appear
that ultimately inverted Euro‑American claims of the alleged superiority
of the white race into an equally reactionary claim to the superiority
of non-whites. Embracing the particularism into which racial politics
had degenerated instead of the potential universalism of a humanitas,
the New Left placed blacks, colonial peoples, and even totalitarian
colonial nations on the top of its theoretical pyramid, endowing them
with a commanding or “hegemonic” position in relation to whites,
Euro‑Americans, and bourgeois‑democratic nations. In the 1970s, this
particularistic strategy was adopted by certain feminists, who began to
extol the “superiority” of women over men, indeed to affirm an allegedly
female mystical “power” and an allegedly female irrationalism over the
secular rationality and scientific inquiry that were presumably the
domain of all males. The term “white male” became a patently derogatory
expression that was applied ecumenically to all Euro‑American men,
irrespective of whether they themselves were exploited and dominated by
ruling classes and hierarchies.
A highly parochial “identity politics” began to emerge, even to dominate
many New Leftists as new “micronationalisms,” if I may coin a word. Not
only do certain tendencies in such “identity” movements closely resemble
those of very traditional forms of oppression like patriarchy, but
“identity politics” also constitutes a regression from the libertarian
and even general Marxian message of the “Internationale” and a
transcendence of all “micronationalist” differentia in a truly
humanistic communist society. What passes for “radical consciousness”
today is shifting increasingly toward a biologically oriented emphasis
on human differentiation like gender and ethnicity – not an emphasis on
the need to foster human universality that was so pronounced among the
anarchist and libertarian socialist writers of the nineteenth century
and even in The Communist Manifesto.
How to assess this devolution in leftist thought and the problems it
raises today? I have tried to place nationalism in the larger historical
context of humanity’s social evolution from the internal solidarity of
the tribe to the increasing expansiveness of urban life and the
universalism advanced by the great monotheistic religions in the Middle
Ages and finally to ideals of human affinity based on reason,
secularism, cooperation, and democracy in the nineteenth century. We can
say with certainty that any movement that aspires to something less than
these anarchist and libertarian socialist notions of the “brotherhood of
man,” certainly as expressed in the “Internationale,” is less than
human. Indeed, from the perspective of the beginning of the twenty-first
century, we are obliged to ask for even more than what
nineteenth-century internationalism demanded. We are obliged to
formulate an ethics of complementarity in which cultural differentia
mutualistically serve to enhance human unity itself, in short, that
constitute a new mosaic of vigorous cultures that enrich the human
condition and that foster its advance rather than fragment and decompose
it into new “nationalities” and an increasing number of nation‑states.
No less significant is the need for a radical social outlook that
conjoins cultural variety and the ideal of a unified humanity with an
ethical concept of what a new society should be like – one that is
universalistic in its view of humanity, cooperative in its view of human
relationships on all levels of life, and egalitarian in its idea of
social relations. While internationalist in their class outlook, nearly
all Marxist attitudes toward the “national question” were instrumental:
they were guided by expediency and opportunism, and worse, they often
denigrated ideas of democracy, citizenship, and freedom as “abstract”
and, presumably, “unscientific” notions. Outstanding Marxists accepted
the nation‑state with all its coercive power and centralistic traits, be
they Marx or Engels, Luxemburg or Lenin. Nor did these Marxists view
confederalism as a desideratum. Luxemburg’s writings, for example,
simply take confederalism as it existed in her own time (particularly
the vicissitudes of Swiss cantonalism) as exhausting all the
possibilities of this political idea, without due regard for the left
libertarian emphasis on the need for profound social, political, and
economic changes in the municipalities that are to confederate with each
other. With few exceptions, Marxists advanced no serious critique of the
nation‑state and state centralization as such, an omission that, all
“collectivistic” achievements aside, would have foredoomed their
attempts to achieve a rational society if nothing else had.
Cultural freedom and variety, let me emphasize, should not be confused
with nationalism. That specific peoples should be free to fully develop
their own cultural capacities is not merely a right but a desideratum.
The world will be a drab place indeed if a magnificent mosaic of
different cultures do not replace the largely deculturated and
homogenized world created by modern capitalism. But by the same token,
the world will be completely divided and peoples will be chronically at
odds with one another if their cultural differences are parochialized
and if seeming “cultural differences” are rooted in biologistic notions
of gender, racial, and physical superiority. Historically, there is a
sense in which the national consolidation of peoples along territorial
lines did produce a social sphere that was broader than the narrow
kinship basis for kinship societies because it such consolidation
obviously is more open to strangers, just as cities tend to foster
broader human affinities than tribes. But neither tribal affinities nor
territorial boundaries constitute a realization of humanity’s
potentiality to achieve a full sense of commonality with rich but
harmonious cultural variations. Frontiers have no place on the map of
the planet, any more than they have a place on the landscape of the
mind.
A socialism that is informed by this kind of ethical outlook, with a due
respect for cultural variety, cannot ignore the potential outcome of a
national liberation struggle as the Old and New Lefts alike so often
did. Nor can it support national liberation struggles for instrumental
purposes, merely as a means of “weakening” imperialism. Certainly, such
a socialism cannot, in my view, promote the proliferation of
nation-states, much less increase the number of divisive national
entities. Ironically, the success of many “national liberation”
struggles has had the effect of creating politically independent statist
regimes that are nonetheless as manipulable by the forces of
international capitalism as were the old, generally obtuse imperialist
ones. More often than not, “Third World” nations have not cast off their
colonial shackles since the end of World War Two: they have merely
become domesticated and rendered highly vulnerable to the forces of
international capitalism, with little more than a facade of
self-determination. Moreover, they have often used their myths of
“national sovereignty” to nourish xenophobic ambitions to grab adjacent
territories and oppress their neighbors as brutally as imperialists in
their own right, such as Ghana’s oppression under Nkrumah of the Togo
peoples in West Africa or Milošević’s attempt to “cleanse” Muslims from
Bosnia. What is no less regressive, such nationalisms evoke what is most
sinister in a people’s past – religious fundamentalism in all its forms,
traditional hatreds of “foreigners,” a “national unity” that overrides
terrible internal social and economic inequities, and most commonly, a
total disregard for human rights. The “nation” as a cultural entity is
superseded by an overpowering and oppressive state apparatus. Racism
commonly goes hand in hand with “national liberation” struggles, such as
“ethnic cleansing” and wars for territorial gain, as we see most
poignantly today in the Middle East, India, the Caucasus, and Eastern
Europe. Nationalisms that only a generation ago might have been regarded
as “national liberation” struggles are more clearly seen today, in the
wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire, as little more than social
nightmares and decivilizing blights.
Put bluntly, nationalisms are the kind of regressive atavisms that the
Enlightenment tried to overcome long ago. They introject the worst
features of the very empires from which oppressed peoples have tried to
shake loose. Not only do they typically reproduce state‑machines that
are as oppressive as those the colonial powers imposed on them, but they
reinforce those machines with cultural, religious, ethnic, and
xenophobic traits that are often used to foster regional and even
domestic hatreds and sub-imperialisms. No less important, in the absence
of genuine popular democracies the sequelae of understandably
anti‑imperialist struggles too often include the strengthening of
imperialism itself, such that the powers that have been seemingly
dispossessed of their colonies can now play off the state of one former
colony against that of another, as witness the conflicts that ravage
Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. These are the
areas, I may add, where nuclear wars will be more likely to occur as the
years go by than elsewhere in the world. The development of an Islamic
nuclear bomb to countervail an Israeli one, or of a Pakistani bomb to
countervail an Indian one, portend no good for the South and its
conflict with the North. Indeed, the tendency for former colonies to
actively seek alliances with their erstwhile imperialist rulers is now a
more typical feature of North–South diplomacy than is any unity within
the South against the North.
Nationalism has always been a disease that divided human from human –
“abstract” as traditional Marxists may consider this notion to be – and
it can never be viewed as anything more than a regression toward tribal
parochialism and the fuel for intercommunal warfare. Nor have the
“national liberation” struggles that have produced new states throughout
the “Third World” and in Eastern Europe impaired the expansion of
imperialism or eventuated in fully democratic states. That the
“liberated” peoples of the Stalinist empire are less oppressed today
than they were under communist rule should not mislead us into believing
that they are also free from the xenophobia that nearly all
nation‑states cultivate or from the cultural homogenization that
capitalism and its media produce.
No left libertarian, to be sure, can oppose the right of a subjugated
people to establish itself as an autonomous entity – be it in a
confederation based on libertarian municipalism or as a nation‑state
based on hierarchical and class inequities. But to oppose an oppressor
is not equivalent to calling for support for everything formerly
colonized nation-states do. Ethically speaking, one cannot oppose a
wrong when one party commits it, then support another party who commits
the same wrong. The trite but pithy maxim – “My enemy’s enemy is not my
friend” – is particularly applicable to oppressed people who may be
manipulated by totalitarians, religious zealots, and “ethnic cleansers.”
Just as an authentic ethics must be reasoned out and premised on genuine
humanistic potentialities, so a libertarian socialism or anarchism must
retain its ethical integrity if the voice of reason is to be heard in
social affairs. In the 1960s, those who opposed American imperialism in
Southeast Asia and at the same time rejected giving any support to the
communist regime in Hanoi, and those who opposed American intervention
in Cuba without supporting Castroist totalitarianism, stood on a higher
moral ground than the New Leftists who exercised their rebelliousness
against the United States predominantly by supporting “national
liberation” struggles without regard to the authoritarian and statist
goals of those struggles. Indeed, identified with the authoritarians
whom they actively supported, these New Leftists eventually grew
demoralized by the absence of an ethical basis in their liberatory
ideas. Today, in fact, liberatory struggles based on nationalism and
statism have borne the terrifying harvest of internecine bloodletting
throughout the world. Even in recently “liberated” states like East
Germany, nationalism has found brutal expression in the rise of fascist
movements, German nationalism, plans to restrict the immigration of
asylum-seekers, violence against “foreigners” including victims of
Nazism like gypsies, and the like. Thus the instrumental view of
nationalism that Marxists originally cultivated has left many “leftist”
tendencies like Social Democracy in a condition of moral bankruptcy.
Ethically, let me add, there are some social issues on which one must
take a stand – such as white and black racism, patriarchy and
matriarchy, and imperialism and “Third World” totalitarianism. An
unswerving opposition to racism, gender oppression, and domination as
such must always be paramount if an ethical socialism is to emerge from
the ruins of socialism itself. But we also live in a world in which
issues sometimes arise on which leftists cannot take any position at all
– issues in which to take a position is to operate within the
alternatives advanced by a basically irrational society and to choose
the lesser of several irrationalities or evils over other
irrationalities or evils. It is not a sign of political ineffectuality
to reject such a choice altogether and declare that to oppose one evil
with a lesser one must eventually lead to the support of the worst evil
that emerges. German Social Democracy, by abetting one “lesser evil”
after another during the 1920s, went from supporting liberals to
conservatives to reactionaries – who finally brought Hitler to power. In
an irrational society, conventional wisdom and instrumentalism can
produce only ever‑greater irrationality, using virtue as a patina to
conceal basic contradictions both in its own position and in society.
“[L]ike the processes of life, digestion and breathing,” observed
Bakunin, nationality “has no right to be concerned with itself until
that right is denied.” This was a perceptive enough statement in its
day. With the explosions of barbarous nationalism in our own day and the
snarling appetites of nationalists to create more and more
nation‑states, I am obliged to add that “nationality” is a form of
indigestion and that its causes must be vomited up if society is not to
further deteriorate because of this malady.
If nationalism is regressive, what rational and humanistic alternative
to it can an ethical socialism offer? There is no place in a free
society for nation-states – either as nations or as states. However
strong may be the impulse of specific peoples for a collective identity,
reason and a concern for ethical behavior oblige us to recover the
universality of the city or town and a directly democratic political
culture, albeit on a higher plane than even the polis of Periclean
Athens. Identity should properly be replaced by community – by a shared
affinity that is humanly scaled, non-hierarchical, libertarian, and open
to all, irrespective of an individual’s gender, ethnic traits, sexual
identity, talents, or personal proclivities. Such community life can
only be recovered by the new politics that I have called libertarian
municipalism: the democratization of municipalities so that they are
self-managed by the people who inhabit them, and the formation of a
confederation of these municipalities to constitute a counter-power to
the nation-state.
The danger that democratized municipalities in a decentralized society
would result in economic and cultural parochialism is very real, and it
can only be precluded by a vigorous confederation of municipalities
based on their material interdependence. The “self-sufficiency” of
community life – even if it were possible today – would by no means
guarantee a genuine grassroots democracy. The confederation of
municipalities, as a medium for interaction, collaboration, and mutual
aid among its municipal components, provides the sole alternative to the
powerful nation-state on the one hand and the parochial town or city on
the other. Fully democratic, in which the municipal deputies to
confederal institutions would be subject to recall, rotation, and
unrelenting public purview, the confederation would constitute an
extension of local liberties to the regional level, allowing for a
sensitive equilibrium between locality and region in which the cultural
variety of towns could flourish without turning inward toward local
exclusivity. Indeed, beneficial cultural traits would also be
“trafficked,” so to speak, within and between various confederations,
along with the interchange of goods and services that make up the
material means of life.
By the same token, “property” would be municipalized, rather than
nationalized (which merely reinforces state power with economic power),
collectivized (which simply recasts private entrepreneurial rights in a
“collective” form), or privatized (which facilitates the reemergence of
a competitive market economy). A municipalized economy would approximate
a system of usufruct based entirely on one’s needs and citizenship in a
community rather than one’s proprietary, vocational, or professional
interests. Where a municipal citizens’ assembly controls economic
policy, no one individual controls, much less “owns,” the means of
production and of life. Where confederal means of administering a
region’s resources coordinate the economic behavior of the whole,
parochial interests would tend to give way to larger human interests and
economic considerations to more democratic ones. The issues that
municipalities and their confederations address would cease to range
around economic self-interest; they would focus on democratic procedures
and simple equity in meeting human needs.
Let there be no doubt that the technological resources that make it
possible for people to choose their own lifestyles and have the free
time to participate fully in a democratic politics are absolutely
necessary for the libertarian, confederally organized society that I
have sketched here. Even the best of ethical intentions are likely to
yield to some form of oligarchy, in which differential access to the
means of life will lead to elites who have more of the good things in
life than do other citizens. On this score, the asceticism that
ecomystics and deep ecologists promote is insidiously reactionary: not
only does it ignore the freedom of people to choose their own lifestyle
– the only alternative in the existing society to becoming a mindless
consumer – but it subordinates human freedom as such to an almost
mystical notion of the dictates of “Nature” – prescribing a “return to
the Pleistocene,” to the Neolithic, or to food gathering, to cite the
most extreme examples. A free ecological society – as distinguished from
one regulated by an authoritarian ecological elite or by the “free
market” – can only be cast in terms of an ecologically confederal form
of libertarian municipalism. When at length free communes replace the
nation and confederal forms of organization replace the state, humanity
will have rid itself of nationalism.
During and after the great revolutions in the eighteenth century –
particularly the American and the French – expressions redolent with
nationalism did not have the meaning they often have today. The word
“patriot” was not used to express a special loyalty to a “Fatherland”
two centuries ago; the word normally was used in both the American and
French revolutions to delegitimate the claim of the monarchy to
literally own the countries and colonies it ruled as the personal
patrimony of the King and establish the ordinary citizen’s status as a
“shareholder” in what had previously been regarded as a royal estate.
Accordingly, the American revolutionaries who declared their
independence from the British monarchy in 1776 fundamentally altered
their ties to the “mother country” by replacing royal rule with a
republican system structured politically around citizenship rather than
subjecthood. The French, a decade and a half later, deliberately changed
the title of Louis XVI from “King of France” to “King of the French,” a
shift that was not a mere semantic one. Just as King George III could no
longer claim to possess the American colonies, a claim the colonists
never really regarded as existentially valid, so Louis XVI no longer
“owned” France once the National Assembly was formed.
The word “patriot,” so widely used in both revolutions, and la “Nation”
in the French revolution legally restored a national patrimony to the
people. Indeed, terms like “Nation” essentially referred to the citizen
body as a whole in contrast to the “Court,” which referred to the
proprietary authority of the royal family. Indeed, the distinction
between “Court” and “Country” had already been made in the English
revolution of the 1640s, and was to find expression later in
distinctions between “royalist” and “patriot” during the late 1700s.
Characteristically, the historic documents that proclaimed a fundamental
alteration of of the ties between a “Nation” and its former rulers were
addressed to humanity as a whole, not merely to a given people. Thomas
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence opens with the challenging
remarks that ”a decent respect for the opinions of mankind require that
[the Americans] should declare what impels them” to sever their bonds
with the British monarchy. Like the French revolutionary documents that
were to follow, it based this claim on the belief ”that all men are
created equal” and that ”Government is instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed [emphasis added].”
The American Declaration of July 4, 1776, was to become the theoretical
template for similar declarations by the French revolutionaries. Far
from being nationalistic statements, they were fervently cosmopolitan
and addressed to the world at large. Thomas Paine’s famous personal
maxim, “My country is the world,” was not idiosyncratic to the American
revolutionary leaders. George Washington did not hesitate to declare
that he was “a citizen of the great republic of humanity,” and Benjamin
Rush allowed that the revolution opened “no breach in the republic of
letters.” In a statement that fervently expressed the spirit of the
Enlightenment, John Adams was to state that, the war in the colonies
notwithstanding, “Science and literature are of no party nor nation.”
The phrase “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is reported to have been
given to the French by Benjamin Franklin, whose freedom from nationalism
and parochialism earned widespread admiration. “Where liberty is at
stake,” he declared in 1783, “there is my country.”
The thinkers and propagators in the French Enlightenment were no
different in spirit and conveyed it fully to the revolutions of 1789.
Montesquieu, whose Persian Letters (1721) has been called the “first
major work of the French Enlightenment,” by Norman Hampson, was to jot
in his notebooks: “When I act, I am a citizen; but when I write, I am a
man and regard all the peoples of Europe with as much impartiality as
those of Madagaskar.” This universalism was characteristic of
essentially all the Encyclopedists with the possible exception of
Rousseau, whose mystification of his Swiss origins involved a democratic
but often sentimental passion for a fictitious ruralism of which he was
never part of in his real life. That French became the language of
educated Europe was not accidental: the worldly outlook of the
Enlightenment intellectuals, in fact, created a secular republic of
letters that was to be eroded over time by romanticism, mysticism, and
ultimately an identification of nationhood with race or ethnic
superiority.
Nationalism existed outside the orbit of the Enlightenment and the great
revolutions of the eighteenth century, which were explicitly
universalistic in their social and cultural spirit. Never ceasing to be
captivated by cultural variety and its more humanistic features, the
revolutionaries of the time, like the Enlighteners who prepared the
intellectual bases of their social activities, saw themselves above all
as “citizens” of a secular human community that knew no intellectual,
political, or territorial frontiers.
I have long argued that libertarian municipalism constitutes the
politics of social ecology, notably a revolutionary effort in which
freedom is given institutional form in public assemblies that become
decision-making bodies. It depends upon libertarian leftists running
candidates at the local municipal level, calling for the division of
municipalities into wards, where popular assemblies can be created that
bring people into full and direct participation in political life.
Having democratized themselves, municipalities would confederate into a
dual power to oppose the nation-state and ultimately dispense with it
and with the economic forces that underpin statism as such.
Libertarian municipalism is above all a politics that seeks to create a
vital democratic public sphere. In my From Urbanization to Cities as
well as other works, I have made careful but crucial distinctions
between three societal realms: the social, the political, and the state.
What people do in their homes, what friendships they form, the communal
lifestyles they practice, the way they make their living, their sexual
behavior, and the cultural artifacts they consume – all these personal
as well as materially necessary activities belong to what I call the
social sphere of life. Families, friends, and communal living
arrangements are part of the social realm.
However much all aspects of life interact with one another, none of
these social aspects of human life properly belongs to the public
sphere, which I explicitly identify with politics in the Hellenic sense
of the term. In creating a new politics based on social ecology, we are
concerned with what people do in this public or political sphere, not
with what people do in their bedrooms, living rooms, or basements.
Let me state from the outset that I have never declared that libertarian
municipalism is a substitute for the manifold dimensions of cultural or
even private life. Yet even a modicum of a historical perspective shows
that it is precisely the municipality that most individuals must deal
with directly, once they leave the social realm and enter the public
sphere. Doubtless the municipality is usually the place where even a
great deal of social life is existentially lived, which does not efface
its distinctiveness as a unique sphere of life.
As a project for entering into the public sphere, libertarian
municipalism calls for a radical presence in a community that addresses
the question of who shall exercise power in a lived sense; indeed, it is
truly a political culture that seeks to re-empower the individual and
sharpen his or her sensibility as a living citizen.
Today, the concept of citizenship has already undergone serious erosion
through the reduction of citizens to “constituents” of statist
jurisdictions or to “taxpayers” who sustain statist institutions. To
further reduce citizenship to “personhood” – or to etherealize the
concept by speaking of an airy “earth citizenship” – is nothing short of
reactionary. It took long millennia for History to create the concept of
the citizen as a self-managing and competent agent in democratically
shaping a polity. During the French Revolution the term citoyen was used
precisely to efface the status-generated relegation of individuals to
mere “subjects” of the Bourbon kings. Moreover, revolutionaries of the
last century – from Marx to Bakunin – referred to themselves as
“citizens” long before the appellation “comrade” replaced it.
We must not lose sight of the fact that the citizen, as he or she should
be, culminates the transformation of ethnic tribal folk, whose societies
were structured around biological facts like kinship, gender
differences, and age groups, and should be part of a secular, rational,
and humane community. Indeed, much of the National Socialist war against
“Jewish cosmopolitanism” was in fact an ethnically (völkisch)
nationalistic war against the Enlightenment ideal of the citoyen. For it
was precisely the depoliticized, indeed, animalized “loyal subject”
rather than the citizen that the Nazis incorporated into their racial
image of the German Volk, the abject, status-defined creature of
Hitler’s hierarchical Führerprinzip. Once citizenship becomes
contentless as a result of the deflation of its existential political
reality or, equally treacherously, by the expansion of its historic
development into a “planetary” metaphor, we have come a long way toward
accepting the barbarism that the capitalist system is now fostering with
Heideggerian versions of ecology.
Today, we cannot allow flippant diminutions of the uniqueness of
citizenship, so pregnant with political meaning, nor can we ignore the
factors that can help us develop a general civic interest today. The
tendency of physiography among ecomystics and spiritualists to overtake
and devour vast socio-cultural differences is nothing less than
dazzling. Put the prefix bio before a word, and you come up with the
most inane, often asocial body of “ideas” possible, such as
bioregionalism, which overrides the very fundamental cultural
differences that demarcate one community or group of communities from
another by virtue of a common watershed, lake, or mountain range.
Bioregionalism, as expressed by John Clark and others, is not only a
mystification of first (biological) nature at the expense of second
(social and cultural) nature; its irrelevance to improving the human
condition is truly incredible. One has only to view the terrible
conflict in the former Yugoslavia, which raged in areas that are almost
identical bioregionally but are grossly dissimilar culturally, to
recognize how meaningless and mystifying are Clark’s expectations of his
bioregional “politics.”
The extent to which contemporary mystical ecologists absorb second
nature into first nature, the social into the biological, ignores the
extent to which the sociosphere today encompasses the biosphere, to
which first nature has been absorbed into second nature, and reveals a
stunning neglect of the decisive importance of society in determining
the future of the natural world. We can no longer afford a naive nature
romanticism, which may be very alluring to juveniles but has been
contributing a great deal to the strident nationalism and growing
ecofascism that is emerging in the Western world.
libertarian municipalism is that the “Greek polis,” which “advocates of
direct democracy have always appealed to,” was marred by “the exclusion
of women, slaves, and foreigners.” This is certainly true, and we must
always remember that libertarian municipalists are also libertarian
communists, who obviously oppose hierarchy, including patriarchy and
chattel slavery.
As it turns out, in fact, the “Greek polis” is neither an ideal nor a
model for anything – except perhaps for Rousseau, who greatly admired
Sparta. It is the Athenian polis whose democratic institutions I often
describe and that has the greatest significance for the democratic
tradition. In the context of libertarian municipalism, its significance
is to provide us with evidence that a people, for a time, could quite
self-consciously establish and maintain a direct democracy, despite the
existence of slavery, patriarchy, economic and class inequalities,
agonistic behavior, and even imperialism, which existed throughout the
ancient Mediterranean world.
The fact is that we must look for what is new and innovative in a
historical period, even as we acknowledge continuities with social
structures that prevailed in the past. Ancient Athens and other parts of
Greece, it is worth noting in this postmodern era, was the arena for the
emergence not only of direct democracy but of Western philosophy, drama,
political theory, mathematics, science, and analytical and dialectical
logic. On the other hand, I could hardly derive democratic ideas from
the Chinese Taoist tradition, rooted as it is in quietism and a credo of
resignation and submission to noble and royal power (not to speak of the
exclusion of women from socially important roles).[21]
In fact, short of the hazy Neolithic village traditions that Marija
Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, and William Irwin Thompson hypostatize, we will
have a hard time finding any tradition that was not patriarchal to one
degree or another. Rejecting all patriarchal societies as sources of
institutional study would mean that we must abandon not only the
Athenian polis but the free medieval communes and their confederations,
the comuñero movement of sixteenth-century Spain, the revolutionary
Parisian sections of 1793, the Paris Commune of 1871 – and even the
Spanish anarchist collectives of 1936–37. All of these institutional
developments, be it noted, were marred to one degree or another by
patriarchal values.
No, libertarian municipalists are not ignorant of these very real
historical limitations; nor is libertarian municipalism based on any
historical “models.” Neither does anyone who seriously accepts a
libertarian municipalist approach believe that society as it exists and
cities as they are structured today can suddenly be transformed into a
directly democratic and rational society. The revolutionary
transformation we seek is one that requires education, the formation of
a movement, and the patience to cope with defeats. As I have emphasized
again and again, a libertarian municipalist practice begins, minimally,
with an attempt to enlarge local freedom at the expense of state power.
And it does this by example, by education, and by entering the public
sphere (that is, into local elections or extralegal assemblies), where
ideas can be raised among ordinary people that open the possibility of a
lived practice. In short, libertarian municipalism involves a vibrant
politics in the real world to change society and public consciousness
alike, not a program directed at navel-gazing, psychotherapy, and
“surregionalist manifestoes.” It tries to forge a movement that will
enter into open confrontation with the state and the bourgeoisie, not
cravenly sneak around them murmuring Taoist paradoxes.
I should perhaps point out that my appeal to a new politics of
citizenship is not in any way meant to put a rug over very real social
conflicts, nor is it an appeal to class neutrality. The fact is that
“the People” I invoke does not include Chase Manhattan Bank, General
Motors, or any class exploiters and economic bandits; let me emphasize
that I am addressing an oppressed humanity, all of whom must – if they
are to eliminate their oppressions – try to remove the shared roots of
oppression as such.
I have never argued that we can or should ignore class interests by
completely absorbing them into trans-class ones. But in our time
particularization is being overemphasized, to the point where any shared
struggle must now overcome not only differences in class, gender,
ethnicity, “and other issues,” but nationalism, religious zealotry, and
identity based on even minor distinctions in status. The role of the
revolutionary movement for over two centuries has been to emphasize our
shared humanity precisely against ruling status groups and ruling
classes – which Marx, even in singling out the proletariat as hegemonic,
viewed as a “universal class.” Nor are all “images” that people have of
themselves as classes, genders, races, nationalities, and cultural
groups rational or humane, or evidence of consciousness, or desirable
from a radical viewpoint. In principle, there is no reason why
différance as such should not entangle us and paralyze us completely in
our multifarious and self-enclosed “particularity,” in postmodernist,
indeed Derridean fashion. Indeed, today, when parochial differences
among the oppressed have been reduced to microscopic divisions, it is
all the more important for a revolutionary movement to resolutely point
out the common sources of oppression as such and the extent to which
commodification has universalized them – particularly global capitalism.
The deformations of the past were created largely by the famous “social
question,” notably by class exploitation, which in great measure could
have been remedied by technological advances. In short, they were
scarcity societies – albeit not that alone. Of course a new
social-ecological sensibility has to be created, as do new values and
relationships, and it will be done partly by overcoming economic need,
however economic need is construed. Little doubt should exist that a
call for an end to economic exploitation must be a central feature in
any social ecology program and movement, which are part of the
Enlightenment tradition and its revolutionary outcome.
The essence of dialectic is to always search out what is new in any
development: specifically, for the purposes of this discussion, the
emergence of a trans-class People, such as oppressed women, people of
color, even the middle classes, as well as subcultures defined by sexual
preferences and lifestyles. To particularize distinctions (largely
created by the existing social order) to the point of reducing oppressed
people to seemingly “diverse persons” – indeed, to mere “personhood” –
is to feed into the current privatistic fads of our time and to remove
all possibility for collective social action and revolutionary change.
To examine what is really at issue in the questions of municipalism,
confederalism, and citizenship, as well as the distinction between the
social and the political, we must ground these notions in a historical
background where we can locate the meaning of the city (properly
conceived in distinction to the megalopolis), the citizen, and the
political sphere in the human condition.
Historical experience began to advance beyond a conception of mere
cyclical time, trapped in the stasis of eternal recurrence, into a
creative history insofar as intelligence and wisdom – more properly,
reason – began to inform human affairs. Over the course of a hundred
thousand years or so, as we now know, Homo sapiens sapiens slowly
overcame the sluggishness of their more animalistic cousins, the
Neanderthals, and, amidst ups and downs, entered as an increasingly
active agent into the surrounding world – both to meet their more
complex needs (material as well as ideological), and to alter that
environment by means of tools and, yes, instrumental rationality. Life
became longer, more acculturated aesthetically, and more secure, and,
potentially at least, human communities tried to define and resolve the
problems of freedom and consciousness at various levels of their
development.
The necessary conditions for freedom and consciousness – or
preconditions, as socialists of all kinds recognized in the last century
and a half – involved technological advances that, in a rational
society, could emancipate people from the immediate, animalistic
concerns of self-maintenance, increase the realm of freedom from
constrictions imposed upon it by preoccupations with material necessity,
and place knowledge on a rational, systematic, and coherent basis to the
extent that this was possible. These conditions at least involved
humanity’s self-emancipation from the overpowering theistic creations of
its own imagination (creations largely formulated by shamans and priests
for their own self-serving ends, as well as by apologists for hierarchy)
– notably, mythopoesis, mysticism, anti-rationalism, and fears of demons
and deities, calculated to produce subservience and quietism in the face
of the social powers that be.
That the necessary and sufficient conditions for this emancipation have
never existed in a “one-to-one” relationship with each other – and it
would have been miraculous if they had – has provided the fuel for
Cornelius Castoriadis’s rather disordered essays on the omnipotence of
“social imaginaries,” for Theodor Adorno’s basic nihilism, and for
frivolous anarcho-chaotics who, in one way or another, have debased the
Enlightenment’s ideals and the classical forms of socialism and
anarchism. True – the discovery of the spear did not produce an
automatic shift from “matriarchy” to “patriarchy,” nor did the discovery
of the plow produce an automatic shift from “primitive communism” to
private property, as evolutionary anthropologists of the nineteenth
century supposed. Indeed, it cheapens any discussion of history and
social change to create “one-to-one” relations between technological and
cultural developments, a tragic feature of Friedrich Engels’s
simplification of his mentor’s ideas.
In fact, social evolution is very uneven and combined, which one would
hope Castoriadis learned from his Trotskyist past. No less
significantly, social evolution, like natural evolution, is profligate
in producing a vast diversity of social forms and cultures, which are
often incommensurable in their details. If our goal is to emphasize the
vast differences that separate one society from another – rather than
identify the important thread of similarities that bring humanity to the
point of a highly creative development – “the Aztecs, Incas, Chinese,
Japanese, Mongols, Hindus, Persians, Arabs, Byzantines, and Western
Europeans, plus everything that could be enumerated from other cultures”
do not resemble each other, to cite the naive obligations that
Castoriadis places on what he calls “a ‘rational dialectic’ of history”
and, implicitly, on reason itself.[22] Indeed, it is unpardonable
nonsense to carelessly fling these civilizations together without regard
for their place in time, their social pedigrees, the extent to which
they can be educed dialectically from one another, or without an
explanation of why as well as descriptions of how they differ from each
other. By focusing entirely on the peculiarity of individual cultures,
one reduces the development of civilizations in an eductive sequence to
the narrow nominalism that Stephen Jay Gould applied to organic
evolution – even to the point where the “autonomy” so prized by
Castoriadis can be dismissed as a purely subjective “norm,” of no
greater value in this postmodernist world of interchangeable
equivalences than authoritarian “norms” of hierarchy.
But if we explore very existential developments toward freedom from toil
and freedom from oppression in all its forms, we find that there is a
History to be told of rational advances – without presupposing
teleologies that predetermine that History and its tendencies. If we can
give material factors their due emphasis without reducing cultural
changes to strictly automatic responses to technological changes and
without locating all highly variegated societies in a nearly mystical
sequence of “stages of development,” then we can speak intelligibly of
definite advances made by humanity out of animality, out of the timeless
“eternal recurrence” of relatively stagnant cultures, out of blood,
gender, and age relationships as the basis for social organization, and
out of the image of the “stranger,” who was not kin to other members of
a community, indeed, who was “inorganic,” to use Marx’s term, and hence
subject to arbitrary treatment beyond the reach of customary rights and
duties, defined as they were by tradition rather than reason.
Important as the development of agriculture, technology, and village
life were in moving toward this moment in human emancipation, the
emergence of the city was of the greatest importance in freeing people
from mere ethnic ties of solidarity, in bringing reason and secularity,
however rudimentarily, into human affairs. For it was only by this
evolution that segments of humanity could replace the tyranny of
mindless custom with a definable and rationally conditioned nomos, in
which the idea of justice could begin to replace tribalistic “blood
vengeance” – until later, when it was replaced by the idea of freedom. I
speak of the emergence of the city, because although the development of
the city has yet to be completed, its moments in History constitute a
discernable dialectic that opened an emancipatory realm within which
“strangers” and the “folk” could be reconstituted as citizens, notably,
secular and fully rational beings who approximate, in varying degrees,
humanity’s potentiality to become free, rational, fully individuated,
and rounded.
Moreover, the city has been the originating and authentic sphere of
politics in the Hellenic democratic sense of the term, and of
civilization – not, as I have emphasized again and again, of the state.
Which is not to say that city-states have not existed. But democracy,
conceived as a face-to-face realm of policy-making, entails a commitment
to the Enlightenment belief that all “ordinary” human beings are
potentially competent to collectively manage their political affairs – a
crucial concept in the thinking, all its limitations aside, of the
Athenian democratic tradition, and, more radically, of those Parisian
sections of 1793 that gave an equal voice to women as well as all men.
At such high points of political development, in which subsequent
advances often self-consciously built on and expanded more limited
earlier ones, the city became more than a unique arena for human life
and politics, and municipalism – civicism, which the French
revolutionaries later identified with “patriotism” – became more than an
expression of love of country. Even when Jacobin demagogues gave it
chauvinistic connotations, “patriotism” in 1793 meant that the “national
patrimony” was not the “property of the King of France” but that France,
in effect, now belonged to all the people.
Over the long run, the city was conceived as the socio-cultural destiny
of humanity, a place where, by late Roman times, there were no
“strangers” or ethnic “folk,” and by the French Revolution, no custom or
demonic irrationalities, but rather citoyens who lived in a free
terrain, organized themselves into discursive assemblies, and advanced
canons of secularity and fraternité, or more broadly, solidarity and
philia, hopefully guided by reason. Moreover, the French revolutionary
tradition was strongly confederalist until the dictatorial Jacobin
Republic came into being – wiping out the Parisian sections as well as
the ideal of a fête de la fédération. One must read Jules Michelet’s
account of the Great Revolution to learn the extent to which civicism
was identified with municipal liberty and fraternité with local
confederations, indeed a “republic” of confederations, between 1790 and
1793. One must explore the endeavors of Jean Varlet and the Evêché
militants of May 30–31, 1793, to understand how close the Revolution
came in the insurrection of June 2 to constructing the cherished
confederal “Commune of communes” that lingered in the historical memory
of the Parisian fédérés, as they designated themselves, in 1871.
Hence, let me stress that a libertarian municipalist politics is not a
mere “strategy” for human emancipation; it is a rigorous and ethical
concordance, of means and ends (of instrumentalities, so to speak) with
historic goals – which implies a concept of History as more than mere
chronicles or a scattered archipelago of self-enclosed “social
imaginaries.” The civitas, humanly scaled and democratically structured,
is the potential home of a universal humanitas that far transcends the
parochial blood tie of the tribe, the geo-zoological notion of the
“earthling,” and the anthropomorphic and juvenile “circle of all Beings”
(from ants to pussycats) promoted by Father Berry and his acolytes. It
is the immediate sphere of public life – not the most “intimate,” to use
Clark’s crassly subjectivized word – which, to be sure, does not
preclude but indeed should foster intimacy in the form of solidarity and
complementarity.
The civitas, humanly scaled and democratically structured, is the
initiating arena of rational reflection, discursive decision-making, and
secularity in human affairs. It speaks to us from across the centuries
in Pericles’ magnificent funeral oration and in the earthy, amazingly
familiar, and eminently secular satires of Aristophanes, whose works
demolish Castoriadis’ emphasis on the “mysterium” and “closure” of the
Athenian polis to the modern mind. No one who reads the chronicles of
Western humanity can ignore the rational dialectic that underlies the
accumulation of mere events and that reveals an unfolding of the human
potentiality for universality, rationality, secularity, and freedom in
an eductive relationship that alone should be called History. This
History, to the extent that it has culminations at given moments of
development, on which later civilizations built, is anchored in the
evolution of a secular public sphere, in politics, in the emergence of
the rational city – the city that is rational institutionally,
creatively, and communally. Nor can imagination be excluded from
History, but it is an imagination that must be elucidated by reason. For
nothing can be more dangerous to a society, indeed to the world today,
than the kind of unbridled imagination, unguided by reason, that so
easily lent itself to Nuremberg rallies, fascist demonstrations,
Stalinist idolatry, and death camps.
Social ecology refuses to allow this vast movement toward citification
and the emergence of the citizen to be effaced by decontextualizing the
city of its historical development. Nor can we allow the political
domain – the most immediate public sphere that renders a face-to-face
democracy possible – to be collapsed into the social sphere; we cannot
afford to dismiss the qualitatively unique sphere called the civitas,
and its history or dialectic.
The cultural and social barbarism that is closing around this period is
above all marked by ideologies of regression: a retreat into an often
mythic prelapsarian past; a narcissistic egocentricity in which the
political disappears into the personal; and an “imaginary” that
dissolves the various phases of a historical development into a black
hole of “Oneness” or “interconnectedness,” so that all the moments of a
development are flattened out. Underpinning this ideological flattening
is a Heideggerian Gelassenheit, a passive-receptive, indeed quietistic,
“letting things be,” that is dressed up in countervailing Taoist
“contraries” – each of which cancels out its opposite to leave practical
reason with a blank sheet upon which anything can be scrawled, however
hierarchical or oppressive. The Taoist ruler, who John Clark adduces in
his writings, who does not rule, who does nothing yet accomplishes more
than anyone else, is a contradiction in terms, a mutual cancellation of
the very concepts of “ruler” and “sage” – or, more likely, a tyrant who
shrewdly manipulates his or her subject while pretending to be
self-effacing and removed from the object of his or her tyranny.
The Chinese ruling classes played at this game for ages – just as the
pope, to this day, kisses the feet of his newly ordained cardinals with
Christian “humility.” What Marx’s fetishism of commodities is for
capitalism, this Heideggerian Gelassenheit is for present-day ideology,
particularly for deep ecology in all its various mutations. Thus, we do
not change the world; we “dwell” in it. We do not reason out a course of
action; we “intuit” it, or better, “imagine” it. We do not pursue a
rational eduction of the moments that make up an evolution; instead, we
relapse into a magical reverie, often in the name of an aesthetic
vanguardism that surrenders reality to fancy or imagination. Hence the
explosion these days of mystical ecologies, primitivism, technophobia,
anti-civilizationalism, irrationalism, and cheap fads from devil worship
to angelology.
In fact, we are facing a real crisis in this truly counter-revolutionary
time – not only in society’s relationship with the natural world but in
human consciousness itself. When John Clark started designating himself
as a “social deep ecologist or a deep social ecologist,”[23] he
obfuscated earnest attempts to demarcate the differences between a
deadening mystical, often religious, politically inert, and potentially
reactionary tendency in the ecology movement, and one that is trying to
emphasize the need for fundamental social change and fight
uncompromisingly the “present state of political culture.”
Instead of retreating to quietism, mysticism, and purely personalized
appeals for change, social ecology seeks to think out the kinds of
institutions that would be required in a rational, ecological society;
the kind of politics we should appropriately practice; and the political
movement needed to achieve such a society. Should we fail to initiate
new movements, based on new ideas, and advance new programs to mobilize
the great mass of humanity, this planet may well be degraded beyond
redemption socially even before it is degraded beyond redemption
ecologically. It is this terrible prospect social ecology seeks to
avert.
I have long suspected that anarchism, if thought out to its logical
conclusions and reasoned out from its most fundamental roots, is
inherently a negative conception of liberty in its most abstract form.
Indeed, if the wild mix of anarchists today and yesterday all share one
thing in common, it is their rejection of state coercion of the
individual.
If we take a closer look at anarchism as an ideology, it has followed a
careening trajectory. It originated (apart from some precursors) in the
1830s and 1840s as a form of unfettered egoism, a radical demand for
personal autonomy. Initially it meant little more than unrelenting
resistance to attempts by society and particularly the state to restrict
individual liberty. Later it flirted with various social movements of
the oppressed, embracing the collectivism of the archaic peasant
village, then the syndicalism of craft and industrial workers, and later
still it was heavily influenced by Marxism and associated itself with a
libertarian form of communism. The commitment to various forms of
collective social organization, I believe, was a response primarily to
the spread of socialism among the working classes of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
But by the turn of the twenty-first century, in the wake of social and
cultural homogenization that has been produced by modern corporate
capitalism and the mass media, anarchism has come full circle and has
returned to its old individualistic, autonomist origins. Let me
emphasize that recent developments are not anomalous to anarchism. The
“left liberalism” found all over the place in anarchism, as well as the
unsavory, even outright reactionary ideas in Anarchy, Fifth Estate, and
the like (these are the largest circulation anarchist periodicals in the
US), are built into some of the most fundamental premises of anarchism –
notably, the individualism that forms the conceptual building block of
the whole skewed edifice.
History can provide ample examples of how some self-professed anarchists
explicitly denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their
private concerns.[24] Yet, I am not primarily taking issue with
full-frontal individualists or even the often explicitly anti-social
elements that somehow have always been accepted within the folds of
anarchism. What I would like to get at is the essence of this
contradictory “ideology” and the social consequences it yields; even the
most “social” forms of anarchism have been defined by a foundational
individualism. In fact, the ideas of social and economic reconstruction
that have in the past been offered in the name of “anarchy” have
invariably been drawn to a great extent from Marxism and other forms of
socialism. The fact that anarchism came wrapped in socialist concepts
has often prevented anarchists from appearing as what they are: egoists.
As far as I can judge, anarchists basically seek a future of “voluntary
agreements” between individuals. Insofar as anarchists have called for a
communal society, they have meant a form of association that was
necessary for the individual’s achievement of autonomy in a
non-oppressive or “anti-authoritarian” manner. They share the belief
that enforceable, structured or institutionalized relations within and
between communes are evil, threatening their highly treasured individual
autonomy.
Absolutely canonical for all anarchists – yes, including those who call
themselves “anarcho-collectivist,” “anarcho-communist,” and
“anarcho-syndicalist” – is the belief that the individual ego must be
autonomous, and a free society must be one in which individual autonomy
has free rein, unrestricted by laws and constitutions.
Throughout the writings of the canonical theorists militant assertions
of individual liberty abound. Proudhon hardly requires much elucidation
on this score – some of his most basic “social” ideas are built around
entirely bourgeois concepts of individualism. Bakunin and Kropotkin, to
be sure, criticized “Individualists” at great length, but my view is
that their own ideas were themselves essentially individualistic, often
overlaid with socialist ideas – and that the “collectivist” or
“communist” overlay stood in utter contradiction to their
individualistic foundations. I myself once used anarchism as a political
label for my views, but further thought has forced me to conclude that
anarchism is not a social theory at all but rather a personal
psychology; it is not a political movement but a subculture.
Some of the ideas of classical anarchism will certainly be useful for a
future libertarian radicalism. I have consistently invoked confederalism
as one of anarchism’s contributions to social theory. But I have also
pointed out that the confederalist element in historical anarchism,
heavily influenced by Proudhon, is so loosely constructed, and so
charged with a belief in autonomy, that any component of the
confederation could withdraw at any time. The form of confederalism that
anarchists have advanced – “a federation of autonomous communes”
– recapitulates the same self-contradiction between individual and
society: if a commune is completely autonomous, it cannot be part of a
federation. Proudhon, for example, declared that he would divide and
subdivide “power” until he reached its most elementary components. But
in such a situation, nothing remains in the end but the individual, the
purely self-sufficient ego, secure in his own way of life and
sufficiency. Followed to its logical conclusion, Proudhon’s “federalism”
would render organized society untenable because of assertions of
communal and individual “liberties.”
If individuals must be free of constraint, anarchists have argued, so
must the communes in a future society. (How communes could even exist
when their members were all individually autonomous is an unresolved
question.) Although Kropotkin called himself an anarcho-communist, he
essentially agreed with Proudhon on his point: “the social revolution
must be achieved by the liberation of the communes,” he wrote, “and ...
it is the communes, absolutely independent, liberated from the tutelage
of the state, that alone can give us the necessary setting for a
revolution and the means of accomplishing it.”[25] To bolster this
notion, Kropotkin also rejects majority rule: he’s against people
“submitting themselves to the majority-rule, which always is a
mediocrity-rule.”[26]
By the same logic, anarchists claim that the future society must be one
bereft of laws and constitutions, because they necessarily restrict the
sovereign autonomy of the individual. When Proudhon was a member of the
French Chamber of Deputies, he once declared that he refused to vote for
a particular constitution, not because he opposed the content of it, but
simply because it was a constitution. I fail to see how any free society
can be constituted rationally without a constitution – and for that
matter, laws, ordinances, rules, and the like. This condemnation of all
constitutions, laws, and institutions – claiming they are all equivalent
to a state – as all “great” anarchist thinkers did and others today
continually do, is to appeal to wanton chaos, indeed to a sociality that
essentially depends on good instincts and, hopefully, education (to
which Bakunin added custom and others, habit). Such thinking reveals not
only the basic socio-biologism that underpins most anarchist theory (if
one can use the word theory at all), but also the tendency of anarchists
to refer back to primordial levels for their moral philosophy – genes,
custom, habit, tradition, and the like.
The tension between individualism and collectivism or communism would
not exist if the interests of individuals could somehow be conceived to
be the same as or at least compatible with the interests of the larger
society. Bakunin and Kropotkin tried to do just that. Bakunin asserted
that individual and social interests were indeed compatible, blaming the
idea that individual and social interests did not always harmoniously
converge on, variously, the state or the religious doctrine of original
sin. Kropotkin went further, maintaining that individual morality was in
the end identical to social morality: he gave a socio-biological basis
to the instinct for mutual aid, saying that most creatures, from the
simplest to the most complex, are driven by an urge to cooperate. This
being the case, he believed, the individual – freed from the trammels of
the state – would make choices in behavior and thinking that were in
harmony with the needs of his or her society. Thus Kropotkin could
write:
Humanity is trying now to free itself from the bonds of any government
whatever, and to respond to its needs of organization by the free
understanding between individuals pursuing the same common aims.... Free
agreement is becoming a substitute for law. And free cooperation a
substitute for governmental guardianship.... We already foresee a state
of society where the liberty of the individual will be limited by no
laws, no bonds – by nothing else but his own social habits and the
necessity, which everyone feels, of finding cooperation, support, and
sympathy among his neighbors.[27]
But this socio-biologically based cooperation rests, of course, on a
fallacy. In fact, individuals have often placed their own personal
interest above those of their community. Since Kropotkin, moreover, was
always prone to highlight the steady advance of mutual aid in the world
in which he lived, he would have had a hard time to explain the
brutalities that occurred from 1914 onward, which opened one of the
bloodiest periods in history. Alas, cooperation is not embedded in our
genes. But it is on such genetically based cooperation that Kropotkin’s
“anarcho-communism” rests; and when it collapses, so does the whole
edifice. What remains, again, is the individual ego.
Martin A. Miller, a Kropotkin biographer, wrote that “Kropotkin argued
for the full and complete liberty of the individual‚ as the ethical
basis of anarchism. He stopped short of falling into the trap of having
to accept egoism and extreme individualism only because he believed in
the innate sociability and passivity of man, when allowed to be free
without constraint from above.”[28] This belief too was mistaken.
Lacking the linchpin that unites individualism and socialism,
“anarcho-communism” and “anarcho-collectivism” become oxymoronic words,
bereft of meaning.
Furthermore, anarchism, grounded in the egoistic individual, tends to
reject anything about Western society with a flat “No!” and to demand
its opposite instead, as if a libertarian society was simply the mere
negation of bourgeois society. Radical as this posturing may seem at
first, it implies the disbanding of society as such. Hence the
fascination of so many anarchist writers with primitivism, their
technophobic outlook, their aversion to regulation of any kind, and
indeed their indifference to the realm of necessity, as though its
compulsions – possibly including death itself – could be abolished.
In its world outlook, anarchism has consistently opposed dialectics and
favored either positivism or mysticism instead. In the absence of any
dialectical theory of history – unless one wants to believe that
humanity is currently progressing toward mutual aid in the form of one
sort of collective or other – anarchism hardly rises beyond a “vision.”
Its most appropriate “philosophy,” in my view, is actually
postmodernism, with its radical fragmentation of reality, its chaos, its
vacuous spontaneity, and as Feyerabend put it, the notion that “anything
goes.”
Anarchists have always shown little regard for the place of reason in
history, and they have not cared for a serious appreciation of
historical development with an endeavor to distinguish the
preconditional in key social developments (where Marx often excelled)
from the conditional. Here, I completely agree with Marx’s statement in
the Eighteenth Brumaire that “men” make history but not under conditions
of their own choosing.
Among anarchists, I find, such views are heinous. As Colin Ward puts it,
“anarchy” is the wonderful society that, like soil, lies beneath the
snow (of capitalism, the state, religion, and oppressive institutions
generally); the snow only has to melt away, and then we will have our
Wonderland. Kropotkin seems to have had no greater appreciation than
other anarchist theorists for the mutual interaction between the legacy
of domination and the legacy of freedom in history. Ward’s “snow”
metaphor is moreover very much in tune with Bakunin’s continual reliance
on an alleged instinct for revolution that lies latent in workers and
peasants, and Kropotkin’s tendency to fall back on an instinct for
mutual aid.
While I would argue that the rejection of any limitation on behavior is
symptomatic of anarchism’s individualistic basis, the way anarchists are
invoking “instinct” as an alternative social foundation not only makes a
mockery of reason but also reduces us to a quasi-animalistic existence.
The absence of any real historical sense – which makes anarchy possible
anytime, even in the “affluent” societies of the Paleolithic and
Neolithic – easily leads anarchists into primitivism and technophobia.
Of course, the disregard for dialectical reason, indeed the antagonism
toward it, fits in with the anti-rationalism that pervades much of
anarchism; it is precisely the hypostatization of instinct, habit, and
tradition, that leads anarchists into mysticism and anti-rationalism,
and reinforces their proclivity for primitivism.[29]
Hence anarchism does not pay any attention to the “forms of freedom,”
nor to the imperative material, technological, and cultural
preconditions for a free and rational society. Few if any of the major
anarchist theorists clearly faced the problem of such institutions, and
certainly none of them today propose to deal with it. Dozens of
questions and issues, ranging from philosophy to the interpretation of
history, to the evaluation of politics, capitalism, organization,
programs, and so on, simply remain beyond the purview of anarchism.
In my mind, these notions taken together form a complete fit, on a level
more basic than the differences between one form of anarchism and
another. That anarchism’s commitment to the ego outweighs its variously
colored socialistic veneers is evident in its history. It is highly
symptomatic that anarchists have been notoriously unable to develop
beyond a small group level or to form organizations. Why not? we ask
ourselves. What stands in the way, I assure you, is not the
“communistic” dimension of anarchism – it is its foundational
individualism.
Between 1917 and 1921, in Europe’s climactic revolutionary years,
anarchism played no major role (although various syndicalists often
temporarily thought of themselves as anarchists). In 1917, for example,
Russian anarchism, much to its discredit, did not embrace syndicalism
but yielded to the Moscow “house expropriators.”
What gave anarchism a semblance of a mass following was syndicalism, a
form of libertarian socialism. It was syndicalists, not anarchists, who
built the CNT, and hence the CNT is an example not of anarchism but of
syndicalism. The anarchists formed a volatile but very small fraction
within the CNT, consisting of small loosely structured affinity groups
inside very highly structured trade unions that quarreled endlessly with
the syndicalists.[30] The continuing demand of the anarchist grupistas,
in the 1920s, was to reject the need for democratic decision-making and
demand ever more decentralization within what was already a loose and
unstable confederation – to the point where the individual group should
be able to function on its own, autonomously, as it saw fit. Here the
anarchists held true to the ideas of Proudhon and Kropotkin, quoted
above. Throughout the 1930s the faístas were in endless conflicts with
the cenetistas. Tragically, in 1933 the grupistas dragged the movement
into the disastrous “cycle of insurrections” that contributed
significantly to the outbreak of the civil war, for which the CNT–FAI
was totally unprepared.
Apart from the syndicalists, many of whom were decidedly not anarchists,
anarchism has shown little regard for institutions of direct democracy.
In fact, the total identification of politics with the state leads
anarchists to pit purely social actions and phenomena against the state,
leading to incidents, “direct actions” such as “reclaiming the streets,”
cooperatives, squats, and mere forms of merriment or theater that I can
no longer take seriously as political work. Some of these actions are
useful gymnastics or training on cooperation, but they exhibit no
concern for or interest in power.
Libertarian municipalism, by contrast, is concerned with power – and who
will have it. How can power be acquired and communally managed by the
oppressed? In what libertarian institutions should it be collected? How
does one move toward creating those institutions?
Popular assemblies, in my view, are the means by which direct democracy
can be institutionalized. While anarchism has no politics, libertarian
municipalism is intensely political. It is my hope that a libertarian
municipalist program will resonate among responsible and thinking people
who are concerned with where power will repose in a free and rational
society.
Libertarian municipalism is not only the end – the political
infrastructure for the future society – but the means; a rare confluence
of means and ends that has not been worked out in either Marxism or
anarchism. Hence it is a matter of vital importance that when we run
candidates to municipal elections, in order to achieve popular
assemblies and confederal structures, they are as a matter of civic and
political responsibility obliged to take office, or else there is no
point in advocating a libertarian municipalist program. Thus to run
candidates who will not occupy seats on city councils or similar
institutions is to turn libertarian municipalism into a theater or
propaganda for other ends. It does not show any true concern for how
power will be institutionalized; indeed it makes a mockery of the
potentialities of the municipality for creating an empowered people’s
assembly.
We are faced with a real dilemma. It is very difficult to govern or
manage society from the “ground up” in an immensely populous and global
world. I envision confederations within confederations, essentially
structured around local, citywide, countywide, provincial, regional, and
national confederal councils based on directly democratic procedures.
The logic of anarchist thought and its endless demands for autonomy
precludes that this vision can be realized within its framework. When
Kropotkin and other anarchists extol “free agreements” they express a
voluntarism by which individuals and communities not only confederate
together but may withdraw from these confederations at will, making
collective social and political life impossible. Popular assemblies,
which would ultimately validate laws and constitutions, must operate
with a deep sense of responsibility for one another by majority votes
and within a framework that limits their right to walk out of a
confederation without the consent of the majority of the entire
confederation’s members.
We must work to make left libertarian thought relevant today, and focus
on how we can remake society by serious libertarian organization. To
this end, I suggest that we must work to create a democratic form of
government, one that is libertarian and municipalist. I prefer the word
government here to self-management or even self-government for several
reasons, most importantly because concepts of self-management and
self-government seem to me to contain the implication – reinforced by
this business-oriented and narcissistic society – that social life is
basically an agglomeration of autonomous egos, or “selves,” and that
communal life can be reduced to them. Indeed, many anarchists often
refer to “self-government” when describing their dismissal of any kind
of obligations of any sort as authoritarian or coercive or worse, since
they are demanding unrestricted rights for every “sovereign” individual
without requiring of them any duties.
I have come to the conclusion that these concerns merely float on the
surface of a deeply flawed view of social reality. We must therefore
clearly distinguish between anarchy and my ideas of libertarian
municipalism. After 40 exhausting years in the anarchist scene, I’ve
been forced to conclude that “anarchism” is more symptomatic of the
decadence that marks the present era than a force in opposition to it.
It is my desire, in the time that I have left, to get out of the
anarchist “loop” (as this generation likes to put it) before it turns
into a noose and strangles me. I’ve tried to rescue a social anarchism,
with social ecology and libertarian municipalism, from the rest of
anarchism; but the response to these efforts have led me to conclude
that this has been a failure among anarchists. With a few notable
exceptions, they simply don’t want these ideas – and that is that. I
would like to put all the distance I can between this scene and myself.
Yet I would also like to believe that we can develop a synthesis of the
best in Marx’s writings and in the anarchist tradition – a communalism
that will be meaningful and relevant to serious, responsible people in
the years ahead. This is the project that is now dearest to my heart,
not an attempt to rescue movements and traditions that have been
outlived by history.
Today, when anarchism has become le mot du jour in radical circles, the
differences between a society based on anarchy and one based on the
principles of social ecology should be clearly distinguished. Therefore,
just as elsewhere I have distinguished between politics and statecraft,
I must now also point out the distinction between governments and
states. All anarchists, and indeed most left libertarians, dismiss every
government as a state. The fact is that no society can exist without an
orderly way of administering itself, which necessarily implies
administration or regulation of some kind.
All states are governments, but not all governments are states. A
government is a set of organized and responsible institutions that are
minimally an active system of social and economic administration. They
handle the problems of living in an orderly fashion. A government may be
a dictatorship; it may be a monarchy or a republican state; but it may
also be a libertarian formation of some kind. But without a rudimentary
body of institutions to sort out the rights and duties of its members,
hopefully in a democratic way, society would simply dissolve into a
disorderly aggregation of individuals.
Indeed, the very notion of community is meaningless unless those who
claim allegiance to it take on obligations that allow it to function,
flourish, and meet everyone’s needs. Even self-government is therefore a
form of government, for under systems of self-government community
members contribute to its functioning. It is possible, and indeed
necessary, for human beings to govern themselves in civilized and
rational institutions. In fact, institutions as such are necessary for
social organization.
Social revolutionaries have traditionally sought a social order that is
concerned with “the administration of things, instead of the
administration of men,” but people must first be organized
institutionally in such a way that they can administer things. One, in
effect, cannot be done without the other. Thus if a society is to
socially own or control property, if it is to produce goods to meet the
needs of all instead of allow profit for a few, if it is to organize a
system of distribution so that all rather than an elite share equitably
in the material means of life – then clearly definable administrative
institutions have to be established that not only make them workable but
also constrain irrational behavior. In short, forms of authority have to
be created that are meant not to exploit or oppress human beings, but
rather to ensure that some human beings are not exploited or oppressed
by others and to ensure the means for acquiring the good life.
Such institutions must exist in a society, even a libertarian one. Their
absence would lead to a prevalence of chaos, disorder, instability, and
disequilibrium – none of which necessarily has revolutionary or
liberatory implications. That revolutions produce instability does not
mean that instability is somehow a desirable condition or that it must
produce a libertarian revolution. If “anarchy is the highest form of
order,” as some anarchists have said, then it is also the highest form
of administration and stability.
What kinds of governments, then, are not states? Tribal councils, town
meetings, workers’ committees, soviets (in the original sense of the
word), popular assemblies and the like are governments, and no amount of
juggling with words can conceal that fact. They are organized
institutions that serve generalized human needs, such as those of a
revolutionary proletariat or peasantry, in a libertarian fashion. The
end that a government serves, no less than its structure, is an integral
part of its nature and definition.
A state, by contrast, is a government that is organized to serve the
interests of a privileged and often propertied class at the expense of
the majority. This historic rise of the state transformed governance
into a malignant force for social development. When a government becomes
a state – that is, a coercive mechanism for perpetuating class rule for
exploitative purposes – it invariably acquires different institutional
characteristics. First, its members are professionalized to one degree
or another, in order to separate them from the mass of the population
and thereby impart to them an extraordinary status, which in turn
renders them the full-time protectors of a ruling class. Second, the
state, aided by military and police functionaries, enjoys a monopoly
over the means of violence. The members of a state’s armies and police
may be drawn from the very classes they are organized to coerce – that
is irrelevant; once they are separated from the population at large,
uniformed, rigorously trained, disciplined, and placed in an explicit
chain of command, they cease to belong to any class and become
professional men and women of violence who are at the service of those
who command them. The chain of command binds them together and places
them at the disposal of their commanders.
The tendency of anarchists to classify all governments as states is a
mischievous distortion (just as the tendency of anarchists to identify
constitutions and laws as such with statism verges on the absurd). Both
tendencies are the product of a radical ego-orientation that denies the
need for any constraints – indeed, that unthinkingly sees all
constraints as evil.
This issue is by no means an idle discussion. It played a pivotal role
during the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37, a history that even has
profound implications for the future of left libertarian theory and
practice.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Spain was the most
important locus of worldwide anarcho-syndicalism. Here, uniquely,
anarchists and syndicalists conjointly developed a mass movement that
persisted for at least two generations. The National Confederation of
Labor (CNT), formed in 1910 in Barcelona, was by the mid-1930s the
largest anarcho-syndicalist union in the world. It was a strong and
vital force, particularly on the eastern coast of Spain.
Despite or perhaps because of its breadth, the CNT was based on at least
two distinct ideologies that were frequently in tension with each other.
The first, syndicalism, was perhaps the most highly organized of all
libertarian ideologies. Syndicalism emphasized discipline and unity, and
its high regard for the importance of organizing the exploited classes
could surpass even that of socialism. Syndicalists would have agreed
strongly with the words of Joe Hill as he faced a firing squad in Utah:
“Don’t mourn – organize!”
For their part, anarchists historically distrusted organization. Leading
figures of Spanish anarchism such as Anselmo Lorenzo and Federico Urales
viewed the formation of the CNT with deep suspicion, if not outright
hostility. Achieving a creative union between the more madcap members of
the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), who in fact were true to their
anarchist precepts, and the syndicalists was difficult; fractious
disputes often shredded the CNT and, in the early 1930s, led to an
outright split.[31]
The outbreak of the Spanish Revolution in 1936 created a decisive crisis
that tested the very integrity of the CNT. In the process, it challenged
anarchism to deal with the serious question of acquiring and holding
power.
On July 21, 1936, the workers of Catalonia and especially its capital,
Barcelona, defeated the rebel forces of General Francisco Franco and
thereby gained control over one of Spain’s largest and most
industrialized provinces, including many important cities along the
Mediterranean coast and a considerable agrarian area. In the face of the
conflict, the Catalan state institutions either floundered helplessly or
dissolved. Something unprecedented in modern history then took place: an
anarcho-syndicalist movement found itself in a position of power. Partly
as the result of an indigenous libertarian tradition and partly as a
result of the influence exercised by the CNT, Spain’s mass
revolutionary-syndicalist trade union was possessed of the authority to
create a libertarian communist society and the institutions to structure
it.
The CNT membership proceeded to create a dazzling series of libertarian
institutions. In the cities it organized a huge network of defense,
neighborhood, factory, supply, and transportation committees and
assemblies, while in the countryside the more radical peasantry (a
sizable part of the agrarian population) took over and collectivized the
land. Catalonia and its population were protected against a possible
counterattack by a revolutionary militia, which, notwithstanding its
often archaic weapons, was sufficiently well armed to have defeated the
rebel army and police force. This committee system assumed control over
the economic and political life of eastern coastal Spain and parts of
the peninsula’s interior. It controlled nearly every aspect of social
life in Barcelona, from the feeding of the city’s population to its
safety.
The committee structure had not been created by an elite group, such as
the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, it decidedly emerged, under the
guidance of CNT militants, from the workers and peasants of Catalonia
themselves – to the surprise and even the patent unease of most of the
CNT’s regional and national leaders, who seemed to be unnerved and
thrown off balance by the rapid tempo of revolutionary events.
Notwithstanding their reputation for indiscipline, the majority of CNT
members, or cenetistas, were libertarian syndicalists rather than
anarchists; they were strongly committed to a well-structured,
democratic, disciplined, and coordinated organization. In July 1936 they
acted, often on their own initiative, to create these councils,
committees, and assemblies, breaking through all predetermined
ideologies within the revolutionary movement.
The result was that they shattered the bourgeois state-machine and
created a radically new government or polity in which they themselves
exercised direct control over public and economic affairs through
institutions of their own making. For several months the CNT’s
grassroots proletarian and peasant militants provided rare examples of
the use of federative principles of economic control, in contrast to
private or statist methods, to effectively manage production in the
cities and the countryside. Put bluntly, they took power by destroying
the old institutions and creating radically new ones whose form and
substance gave the masses the right to determine the operations of
economy and polity.[32]
What they created was a libertarian government, one that constituted the
authentic power in the expansive areas in which they existed.[33] The
anarcho-syndicalist workers clearly desired to prevent the liberals and
conservatives who had run the official Spanish state (and under whose
cover the army rebels had plotted and executed their rebellion) from
returning to power. The committee structure institutionally embodied the
desire of most workers in the large area where it was established to
take over society and manage it in the interests of the oppressed; in
fact, in the interests of humanity as a whole. Never was
anarcho-syndicalism in a more favorable position in its history to
declare libertarian communism, their stated social goal. Many of the
committees were eager to believe that the CNT would ideologically
legitimate their existence and provide them with the guidance needed to
achieve a libertarian communist society. They therefore turned to CNT –
or rather to the union’s “influential militants” (as CNT leaders were
euphemistically called) – to coordinate the new institutions into an
effective government.
The structure the Catalan workers and peasants had created in fact stood
at odds with the individualism emphasized by anarchism. In this
situation, the anarchist ideology embraced by the CNT leadership gave
them no tools to function appropriately. After all, pure anarchism has
nothing to do with government – indeed it rejects government, even
libertarian, popular government, on the basis that all governments are
inherently states.
Nonetheless, almost as a matter of course, the CNT membership gave its
union leadership the authority to organize a revolutionary government
and provide it with political direction. After all, for years the CNT
had continuously propagated revolutions and uprisings; in the early
1930s it had taken up arms again and again, without the least prospect
of actually being able to change Spanish society. Now in 1936, as its
membership looked to it for coordination, the CNT leadership could
finally have a significant impact on society.
What did it do? Apparently it stood around with a puzzled look, as if
orphaned by the very success of its working-class members in achieving
the goals embedded in its rhetoric. This confusion was not the result of
a failure of nerve; it stemmed from a failure of the CNT’s theoretical
insight. For in the eyes of the “influential militants,” the committee
structure that the revolutionary works had created, and that now ran a
very large part of Spain, bore some resemblance to that perennial
nightmare that haunted the anarchist tradition from its inception: a
state.
On July 23, a mere two days after the workers’ victory over the
Francoist uprising, a Catalan regional plenum of the CNT convened in
Barcelona. Here the CNT leadership would decide what to do with the
power that the workers and peasants had fought for in the streets and
villages and then offered up to it. The leadership could have accepted
that power and decided to use it to transform the social order in the
considerable and strategic area of Spain that was now under the union’s
de facto control. It could have declared libertarian communism and the
end of the old political and social order. It could have created a
“Barcelona Commune,” one that might have been no more permanent than the
“Paris Commune” but would have been far more memorable and inspiring to
later generations. A few delegates from the militant Bajo de Llobregat
region (on the outskirts of the city), and the CNT militant Juan García
Oliver, fervently demanded that the plenum do just this: claim the power
it already possessed and proclaim libertarian communism.
But to the astonishment of these militants, the plenum’s members found
themselves reluctant to take this decisive measure. Federica Montseny
and the arguments of Diego Abad de Santillán (two CNT leaders) urged the
plenum not to take this move, denouncing it as a “Bolshevik seizure of
power.” Their oratory prevailed. Betraying the historic trust of its
class, the CNT plenary instead voted to establish a coalition government
along with all the other parties in Barcelona that had opposed the
military rebellion. This new body, called the Anti-Fascist Militia
Committee, included the bourgeois liberals and the Stalinists. In
effect, the CNT leadership surrendered its own power by entering into
this “People’s Front” style government. Incredibly, all these parties
and unions were granted representation on the basis of parity, not in
proportion to their memberships, which would have certainly provided the
CNT with a commanding majority on the committee.
The monumental nature of this error should be fully appreciated because
it reveals all that is internally contradictory about anarchist
ideology. By mistaking a workers’ government for a state, the CNT
leadership rejected political power in Catalonia at a time when it was
actually in their hands. In effect, the CNT turned the power that the
workers’ committees had vested in their hands over to a new state – and
eventually, a few months later, to the bourgeois Generalidad itself. The
CNT remained “pure” ideologically, but only by acting as a conduit to
transform workers’ power into capitalists’ power. That is, the plenum
did not eliminate power as such; it merely transferred it to its
treacherous “allies.”
In taking its action, the CNT revealed that while it could militantly
protest the abuses of capitalism, it lacked any theoretical and
organizational capacity to replace it. It was incapable of
distinguishing between a worker– peasant government that the masses had
created from below and a capitalist state (or, even more pathetically, a
Stalinist-type dictatorship) carefully contrived by the bourgeoisie from
above. By expressly rejecting the taking of the power as “statist,” even
���Bolshevistic” and “dictatorial,” it permitted the bourgeoisie to occupy
the power arena. This ensured the actual transfer of power away from the
workers and peasants and into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the
Stalinists, who then proceeded to consolidate their power and eventually
used it to destroy the workers’ and peasants’ government. Adding insult
to injury, the CNT soon joined the Generalidad, and the power of the
revolutionary workers and peasants thus passed to the bourgeois state.
Why did the CNT leadership decide to transfer its power to the
Anti-Fascist Militia Committee? Diego Abad de Santillán, who was one of
the principal architects of this curious policy, later articulated the
twisted logic:
We could have remained alone, imposed our absolute will, declared the
Generalidad null and void, and imposed the true power of the people in
its place, but we did not believe in dictatorship when it was being
exercised against us, and we did not want it when we could have
exercised it ourselves only at the expense of others. The Generalidad
would remain in force with President Companys at its head, and the
popular forces would organize themselves into militias to carry on the
struggle for the liberation of Spain.[34]
This statement, reiterated in different ways by nearly all the leading
figures of the CNT, combines outright falsehood with numbing stupidity.
Had the CNT taken the power, it would not have “remained alone.” All the
revolutionary workers and, perhaps, a substantial number of the
enlightened petty bourgeoisie in Catalonia would have supported it.
Certainly the POUM, a large anti- Stalinist Marxist party in the
province, would have actively supported a workers’ government. Even the
Stalinist leadership of the PSUC and UGT (both of which were quite small
in 1936) would most likely have been unable to prevent a majority of
their members from supporting workers’ power in Catalonia.
Nor would a workers’ government have had to be a “dictatorship” in any
usual sense of the term. It could have been quite democratic, indeed
libertarian, and still functioned in the interests of the working class
and other oppressed strata. Structured from the bottom up, it would have
been a popular power or government that could have allowed a free press,
free expression, and public criticism. Even the middle-class press,
provided that it did not incite people to armed rebellion against the
new workers’ regime, might have been allowed to publish its criticisms.
True, the factories would have been taken over by workers’ committees,
but former technicians and even owners could have been employed for
their expertise. In one or another permutation, Catalonia could have
been recreated as a tolerant, even open libertarian communist region
from a civil liberties’ standpoint.
But this was not to be. The CNT’s “influential militants” were wedded to
a pseudo-theory that perceived no distinction between a government and a
state. They were blind to the fact that no bourgeois government such as
the Generalidad would permit the anarcho-syndicalist movement to
exercise effective power once early revolutionary enthusiasm among the
masses waned. Thus the CNT’s shrewd opponents could lead the
“influential militants” by the nose, step by step, into the clutches of
the state apparatus.
Actually, in the intervening year, the CNT leaders discovered that their
rejection of power for the Catalan proletariat and peasantry did not
include a rejection of power for themselves as individuals. Four CNT-FAI
leaders actually agreed to participate in the bourgeois state in Madrid,
as cabinet ministers. But first, with a rather adolescent concern for
form rather than content, they tried to get the prime minister, Largo
Caballero, to change the state’s name from that of a cabinet to a
“Defense Council.” Caballero, a humorless old social democrat, simply
told the CNT to go to hell – whereupon the four anarcho-syndicalists,
who were never notorious for their theoretical insights, meekly joined
the Madrid state as outright ministers in the service of the
bourgeoisie. There, they dutifully served the bourgeois state as long as
they were useful, up to the closing days of the civil war.
Thus did anarcho-syndicalism follow the unrelenting logic of events to
the edge of the political cliff – and ignominiously jump off, by its
presence legitimating a state that it was committed to oppose.
Needless to emphasize, the old ruling classes in Catalonia, the CNT’s
capitalist and petty-bourgeois opponents, celebrated it all. Aided by
the Stalinists, they exhibited no qualms in accepting the power that the
anarchists had donated to them. Inevitably, they used the power the
workers had won to constitute their own state and systematically
demolish all the strategic gains the workers had made.
In the autumn of 1936, the newly reempowered parties set out to
dismantle the workers’ government in the region. Under the
circumstances, that process opened the door to an authoritarian
Stalinist regime. Indeed, the reborn Catalan state, in order to
eviscerate the power of the CNT workers, soon became a violently
counter-revolutionary instrument of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinists.
Systematically and with armed force, it swept away the committee system,
it restored the old police forces (under new names), and it so abridged
workers’ control and management of the factories that their role for the
rest of the civil war was ineffective. Eventually, it hunted down,
arrested, and often executed militant CNT and POUM members. It finally
booted the CNT out of the Catalan government, and the Stalinists had a
free hand to further efface the revolution and hound its supporters.
Rather than refuse the political and economic power that its own members
had offered to it, the CNT plenum should have accepted it and
legitimated and approved the new institutions they had already created.
Instead, the tension between metaphorical claims and painful realities
finally became intolerable, and in May 1937 resolute CNT workers in
Barcelona were drawn into open battle with the revived Catalan state in
a brief but bloody war within the civil war. Finally the bourgeois state
suppressed the last major uprising of the syndicalist movement,
butchering hundreds if not thousands of CNT militants. How many were
killed will never be known, but we do know that before it was over, the
internally contradictory ideology called anarcho-syndicalism lost the
greater part of the following it had possessed in the summer of 1936.
Pure anarchism seeks above all the emancipation of individual
personality from all ethical, political, and social constraints. In so
doing, it fails to address the concrete issue of power that confronts
all revolutionaries in a period of social upheaval. Rather than address
how the people, organized into confederated popular assemblies, might
capture power and create a fully developed libertarian society,
anarchists have traditionally conceived of power as a malignant evil
that must be destroyed. Proudhon, for example, once stated that he would
divide and subdivide power until, in effect, it ceased to exist.
Proudhon may well have intended that government should be reduced to a
minimal entity, but his statement perpetuates the illusion that power
can actually cease to exist.
Spain revealed the inability of this anti-intellectual,
anti-theoretical, and ego-oriented ideology (however sincere and radical
its adherents) to cope with the compelling issues of power and social
reconstitution. Having staged no less than three insurrections in 1933,
the Spanish anarchists and their syndicalist allies seem never to have
asked themselves what they would do if they actually succeeded in
overthrowing the republic. As a matter of self-defining dogma, anarchism
eschews the creation of institutional power. But in Spain anarchists
could not tolerate even an entity that had sprung from its own loins:
the revolutionary workers’ committees. To stand at the head of these
committees and simply take control over Catalonia and other areas would
have violated a self-defining principle, but one that assured
anarchism’s ineffectuality in a revolutionary period.
Power always exists, and it must always be institutionalized – whether
in democratic forms like popular assemblies, committees, and councils,
or perniciously, in chiefdoms, aristocracies, monarchies, republics,
dictatorships, and totalitarian regimes. To suggest that power can be
abolished, and that “everyone” may come to feel “personally empowered,”
is to play with psychological fallacies that have in the past led more
than one libertarian movement to come to grief. Confusion over the
nature of popular power contributed to popular disempowerment, and to
the disempowerment of popular institutions such as the sectional
assemblies of 1794, the revolutionary clubs of 1848, the neighborhood
committees of 1871, the soviets of 1917, and the committees and
assemblies of 1936.
The fact is that power is as ubiquitous as gravity. Just as gravity is
one of the forces that hold the universe together, so power is one of
the forces that hold any society together. A defining feature of any
society – whether it is tribal, slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist,
communist, or even anarchist – is not whether power is being exercised
but how. To argue that social power as such is somehow wrong or “evil”
is fallacious. What counts is whether it belongs to the people, and by
what kind of institutions is it being exercised. Communalism, to take
one example, seeks as I have argued to transfer power from the state to
organized confederations of popular assemblies.
The Spanish anarchist experience cannot be judged as an anomalous event,
possible only on an isolated peninsula south of the Pyrenees. If we are
to learn anything from this crucial error by the CNT leadership, it is
that power is always a feature of social and political life. The real
question that every revolutionary movement faces is not whether power
has been eliminated, but where it is located: in institutions that serve
the interests of oppressive classes and strata, or in those that serve
the oppressed; will it rest in the hands of an elite or in the hands of
the people?
That which is “pure” exists only within the confines of the laboratory
and the workings of the human brain. In the real world, where real
people, animals, and plants live, impurity is unavoidable; any
development, change, or dialectic yields new elements and phenomena that
instantly adulterate a seemingly pure process. Many of the stark dictums
historically posed by the Left have been shown to belie the authenticity
of the real world, yielding false results for social expectations.
During the classical period of socialism many Marxists believed it
inevitable that socialism would be achieved; similarly, many anarchists
believe it inevitable that freedom can emerge without being conditioned
by necessity. Unless those of us on the libertarian left are to accept
the absurd notion of a decivilized “autonomous individual,” we must
concede that society cannot exist without organized institutions that
abridge pure autonomy by situating the individual within contextual
limitations.
Power that is not placed securely in the hands of the masses must
inevitably fall into the hands of their oppressors. There is no closet
in which it can be tucked away, no bewitching ritual that can make it
evaporate, no superhuman realm where it can be placed in reserve – and
no simplistic ideology can make it disappear. Self-styled radicals may
try to ignore the problem of power, as the CNT leaders did in July 1936,
but it will remain hidden at every meeting, lie concealed in public
activities, and appear and reappear at every rally.
Social revolutionaries, far from removing the problem of power from
their field of vision, must address the problem of how to give power a
concrete institutional emancipatory form. To be silent with respect to
this question, and to hide behind superannuated ideologies that are
irrelevant to the present overheated capitalist development, is merely
to play at revolution, even to mock the memory of the countless
militants who have given their all to achieve it.
Libertarian municipalism is a revolutionary politics, and not a new
version of Paul Brousse’s reformist “possibilism” of the 1890s.
Libertarian municipalism in no way compromises with parliamentarism,
reformist attempts to “improve” capitalism, or the perpetuation of
private property. Limited exclusively to the municipality as the locus
for political activity, as distinguished from provincial and state
governments, not to speak of national and supranational governments,
libertarian municipalism is revolutionary to the core, in the very
important sense that it seeks to exacerbate the latent and often very
real tension between the municipality and the state, and to enlarge the
democratic institutions of the commune that still remain, at the expense
of statist institutions. It counterposes the confederation to the
nation-state, and libertarian communism to existing systems of private
and nationalized property. Libertarian municipalism is an explicit
attempt to update the traditional anarchist-communist ideal of the
federation of communes or “Commune of communes.” More specifically, it
aims for the confederal linking of libertarian communist municipalities,
in the form of directly democratic popular assemblies as well as the
collective control or “ownership” of socially important property.
Where anarchist-communists in the past have regarded the federation of
communes as an ideal to be achieved after an insurrection, libertarian
municipalists, I contend, regard the federation – or confederation – of
communes as a political practice that can be developed, at least partly,
prior to an outright revolutionary confrontation with the state – a
confrontation which, in my view, cannot be avoided and, if anything,
should be encouraged by increasing the tension between the state and
confederations of municipalities. In fact, libertarian municipalism is a
communalist practice for creating a revolutionary culture, and for
bringing revolutionary change into complete conformity with our social
goals.
In the last case, it unifies practice and ideal into a single and
coherent means-and-ends approach for initiating a libertarian communist
society, without any disjunction between the strategy for achieving such
a society and the society itself. At no point should libertarian
municipalists cultivate the illusion that the state and bourgeoisie will
allow such a continuum to find fulfillment without open struggle.
It would be helpful to place libertarian municipalism in a broad
historical perspective, all the more to understand its revolutionary
character in human affairs generally as well as its place in the
repertoire of anti-statist practices. The town or city, or, more
broadly, the municipality, is not merely a “space” created by a given
density of human habitations. In terms of its history as a civilizing
tendency in humanity’s development, the municipality is integrally part
of the sweeping process whereby human beings began to dissolve
biologically conditioned social relations based on real or fictitious
blood ties, with their primordial hostility to “strangers,” and slowly
replace them by largely social and rational institutions, rights, and
duties that increasingly encompassed all residents of an urban space,
irrespective of consanguinity and biological facts. The town, city,
municipality, or commune (the equivalent word, in Latin countries, for
“municipality”) was the emerging civic substitute, based on residence
and social interests, for the tribal blood group, which had been based
on myths of a common ancestry. The municipality, however slowly and
incompletely, formed the necessary condition for human association based
on rational discourse, material interest, and a secular culture,
irrespective of and often in conflict with ancestral roots and blood
ties. Indeed, the fact that people can come together peacefully and
share creatively in the exchange of ideas without hostility or suspicion
today, despite our disparate ethnic, linguistic, and national
backgrounds, is a grand historic achievement of civilization, one that
is the work of centuries involving a painful discarding of primordial
definitions of ancestry, and the replacement of these archaic
definitions by reason, knowledge, and a growing sense of our status as
members of a common humanity.
In great part, this humanizing development was the work of the
municipality – the increasingly free space in which people, as people,
began to see each other realistically, steadily unfettered by archaic
notions of biological consanguinity, tribal affiliations, and a
mystical, tradition-laden, and parochial identity. I do not contend that
this process of civilization has been completely achieved. Far from it.
Without the existence of a rational society, the municipality can easily
become a megalopolis, in which community, however secular, is replaced
by atomization and an inhuman social scale beyond the comprehension of
its citizens – indeed, becomes the space for class, racial, religious,
and other irrational conflicts.
But both historically and contemporaneously, citification forms the
necessary condition – albeit by no means fully actualized – for the
realization of humanity’s potentiality to become fully human, rational,
and collectivistic, thereby shedding divisive, essentially animalistic
divisions based on presumed blood affiliations and differences, mindless
custom, fearful imaginaries, and a non-rational, often intuitional,
notion of rights and duties.
Hence the municipality is the potential arena for realizing the great
goal of transforming parochialized human beings into truly universal
human beings, a genuine humanitas, divested of the darker animalistic
attributes of the primordial world. The rational municipality in which
all human beings can be citizens – irrespective of their ethnic
background and ideological convictions – constitutes the true arena of a
communalist society. Metaphorically speaking, it is not only a
desideratum for rational human beings, without which a free society is
impossible; it is also the future of a rational humanity, the
indispensable space for actualizing humanity’s potentialities for
freedom and self-consciousness.
I do not presume to claim that a confederation of libertarian
municipalities – a Commune of communes – has ever existed in the past.
Yet no matter how frequently I disclaim the existence of any historical
“models” and “paradigms” for libertarian municipalities, my critics
still try to saddle me with the many social defects of Athens,
revolutionary New England towns, and the like, as if they were somehow
an integral part of my “ideals.” This criticism is cynical demagogy and
beneath contempt. I privilege no single city or group of cities – be
they classical Athens, the free cities of the medieval world, the town
meetings of the American Revolution, the sections of the Great French
Revolution, or the anarcho-syndicalist collectives that emerged in the
Spanish Revolution – as the full actualization, still less the
comprehensive “models” or “paradigms,” of the libertarian municipalist
vision.
Yet significant features – despite various, often unavoidable,
distortions – existed among all of these municipalities and the
federations that they formed. Their value for us lies in the fact that
we can learn from all of them about the ways in which they practiced the
democratic precepts by which they were guided; and we can incorporate
the best of their institutions for our own and future times, study their
defects, and gain inspiration from the fact that they did exist and
functioned with varying degrees of success for generations, if not
centuries.
At present, I think it is important to recognize that when we advance a
politics of libertarian municipalism, we are not engaged in discussing a
mere tactic or strategy for creating a public sphere; rather, we are
trying to create a new political culture that is not only consistent
with our communalist goals but that includes real efforts to actualize
these goals, fully cognizant of all the difficulties that face us and
the revolutionary implications that they hold for us in the years ahead.
Let me note here that the “neighborhood” is not merely the place where
people make their homes, rear their children, and purchase many of their
goods. Under a more political coloration, so to speak, a neighborhood
may well include those vital spaces where people congregate to discuss
political as well as social issues. Indeed, it is the extent to which
public issues are openly discussed in a city or town that truly defines
the neighborhood as an important political and power space.
By this I do not mean only an assembly, where citizens discuss and gird
themselves to fight for specific policies; I also mean the neighborhood
as the center of a town, where citizens may gather as a large group to
share their views and give public expression to their policies. This was
the function of the Athenian agora, for example, and the town squares in
the Middle Ages. The spaces for political life may be multiple, but they
are generally highly specific and definable, not random or ad hoc.
Such essentially political neighborhoods have often appeared in times of
unrest, when sizable numbers of individuals spontaneously occupy spaces
for discussion, as in the Hellenic agora. I recall them during my own
youth in New York City, in Union Square and Crotona Park, where hundreds
and possibly thousands of men and women appeared weekly to informally
discuss the issues of the day. Hyde Park in London constituted such a
civic space, as did the Palais-Royal in Paris, which was the breeding
ground of the Great French Revolution and the revolution of 1830.
And during the early days of the 1848 revolution in Paris, scores
(possibly hundreds) of neighborhood assembly halls existed as clubs and
forums and potentially formed the basis for a restoration of the older
neighborhood sections of 1793. The best estimates indicate that club
membership did not exceed 70,000 out of a total population of about a
million residents. Yet had this club movement been coordinated by an
active and politically coherent revolutionary organization, it could
have become a formidable, possibly a successful, force during the weeks
of crisis that led to the June insurrection of the Parisian workers.
There is no reason, in principle, why such spaces and the people who
regularly occupy them cannot become citizens’ assemblies as well.
Indeed, like certain sections in the Great French Revolution, they may
well take a leading role in sparking a revolution and pushing it forward
to its logical conclusion.
Libertarian municipalism seeks to go beyond the problems and limitations
in classical anarchist-communist theory. Above all by insisting that a
political sphere, distinguishable from the state and potentially
libertarian in its possibilities, must be acknowledged, and its
potentialities for a truly libertarian politics must be explored. We
cannot simply content ourselves with simplistically dividing
civilization into a workaday world of everyday life that is properly
social, as I call it, in which we reproduce the conditions of our
individual existence at work, in the home, and among our friends, and,
the world of the state, which reduces us at best to docile observers of
the activities of professionals who administer our civic and national
affairs. Between these two worlds is still another world, the realm of
the political, where our ancestors in the past, at various times and
places historically, exercised varying degrees of control over the
commune and the confederation to which it belonged.
It has always been a lacuna in anarchist-communist theory that the
political was conflated with the state, thereby effacing a major
distinction between a political sphere in which people in varying
degrees exercised power, often through direct assemblies, over their
civic environment, and the state, in which people had no direct control,
often no control at all, over that environment.
If politics is denatured to mean little more than statecraft and the
manipulation of people by their so-called “representatives,” then a
condition that has acquired varying forms of expression in the classical
Athenian assembly, popular medieval civic assemblies, town meetings, and
the revolutionary sectional assemblies of Paris, is conveniently erased,
and the multitudinous institutions for managing a municipality become
reducible to the behavior of cynical parliamentarians, or worse. Yet, it
is a gross simplification of historical development and the world in
which we live to see the political simply as the practice of statecraft.
Just as the tribe emerged long before the city, so the city emerged long
before the state – indeed, often in opposition to it. Mesopotamian
cities, appearing in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
some 6,000 years ago, are believed to have been managed by popular
assemblies long before they were forced by intercity conflicts to
establish state-like institutions and ultimately despotic imperial
institutions. It was in these early cities that politics – that is,
popular ways of managing the city – were born and may very well have
thrived. The state followed later and elaborated itself institutionally,
often in bitter opposition to tendencies that tried to restore popular
control over civic affairs.
Nor can we afford to ignore the fact that the same conflict also emerged
in early Athens and probably other Greek poleis long before the
development of the state reached a relatively high degree of completion.
One can see the recurrence of similar conflicts in the struggle of the
Gracchi brothers and popular assemblies in Rome against the elitist
Senate and, repeatedly, in the medieval cities, long before the rise of
late medieval aristocracies and the Baroque monarchies of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. Kropotkin did not write nonsense when he
pointed to the free cities of Europe, marked not by the existence of
states but by their absence.
Indeed, let us also acknowledge that the state itself underwent a
process of development and differentiation, at times developing no
further than into a loose, almost minimal system of coercion; extending
further at other times into an ever-growing apparatus; finally, in this
century in particular, acquiring totalitarian control over every aspect
of human existence – an apparatus that was only too familiar thousands
of years ago in Asia and even in Indian America in pre-Columbian times.
The classical Athenian city-state was only partially statist; it
constituted a fraternity, often riven by class conflicts, of select
citizens who collectively oppressed slaves, women, and even foreign
residents. The medieval state was often a much looser state formation
than, say, the Roman imperial state, and at various times in history
(one thinks of the comuñeros in Spain during the sixteenth century and
the sections in France during the eighteenth) the state almost
completely collapsed and direct democracies based on what approximated
communalist political principles played a hegemonic role in social
affairs.
Libertarian municipalism is concerned with this political sphere,
including aspects of basic civic importance, such as economic issues, as
well as the many cultural factors that must play a role in the formation
of true citizens, indeed, of rounded human beings. (In this respect, it
does not draw strict impenetrable barriers between politics and
economics to the point where they are implacably set against each other:
libertarian municipalism calls for the municipalization of the economy
and, where material interests between communities overlap, the
confederalization of the economy.) In a very fundamental sense, the
libertarian municipalist arena may be a school for educating its youth
and its mature citizens; but what makes it particularly significant,
especially at this time, is that it is a sphere of power relations that
must be crystallized against capitalism, the marketplace, the forces for
ecological destruction, and the state. Indeed, without a movement that
keeps this need completely in mind, libertarian municipalism may easily
degenerate in this age of academic cretinism into another subject in a
classroom curriculum.
Libertarian municipalism rests its politics today on the historically
preemptive role of the city in relation to the state, and above all on
the fact that civic institutions still exist, however distorted they may
appear or however captive to the state they may be, institutions that
can be enlarged, radicalized, and eventually aimed at the elimination of
the state. The city council, however feeble its powers may be, still
exists as the remnant of the communes with which it was identified in
the past, especially in the Great French Revolution and the Paris
Commune of 1871. The possibility of recreating a sectional democracy
still remains, assuming either a legal or extralegal form. We must bear
in mind that the French revolutionary sections did not have any prior
tradition on which to rest their claims to legitimacy – indeed, they
even emerged from the elitist assemblies or districts of 1789, which the
monarchy had created to elect the Parisian deputies to the Estates
General – except that they refused to disband after they completed their
electoral role and remained as watchdogs over the behavior of the
Estates in Versailles.
We, too, are faced with the task of restructuring and expanding the
civic democratic institutions that still exist, however vestigial their
forms and powers may be; of attempting to base them on old or new
popular assemblies – and, to be quite categorical, of creating new legal
or, most emphatically, extralegal popular democratic institutions where
vestiges of civic democracy do not exist. In doing so, we are direly in
need of a movement – indeed, a responsible, well-structured, and
programmatically coherent organization – that can provide the
educational resources, means of mobilization, and vital ideas for
achieving our libertarian communist and municipalist goals.
Our program should be flexible in the special sense that it pose minimum
demands that we seek to achieve at once, given the political
sophistication of the community in which we function. But such demands
would easily degenerate into reformism and even possibilism if they did
not escalate into a body of transitional demands that would ultimately
lead to our maximum demands for a libertarian and ecological society.
Nor can we give up our seemingly utopian vision that the great
metropolitan areas can be structurally decentralized. Cities on the
scale of New York, London, and Paris, not to speak of Mexico City,
Buenos Aires, Bombay, and the like, must ultimately be parceled into
smaller cities and decentralized to a point where they are once again
humanly scaled communities, not huge and incomprehensible urban belts.
Libertarian municipalism takes its immediate point of departure from the
existing facts of urban life, many of which are beyond the comprehension
of its residents. But it always strives to physically as well as
politically fragment the great cities, until it achieves the great
anarchist-communist and even Marxian goal of scaling all cities to human
dimensions.
Perhaps the most common criticism that both Marxists and anarchists have
presented against libertarian municipalism is the claim that modern
cities are too huge to be organized around workable popular assemblies.
Some critics assume that if we are to have true democracy, everyone from
age zero to one hundred, irrespective of health, mental condition, or
disposition, must be included in a popular assembly – and that an
assembly must be as small as a touchy-feely American encounter group
(say 30 or 40 people), or “affinity group,” as one critic calls it. But
in large world cities, these critics suggest, which have several million
residents, we would require many thousands of assemblies in order to
achieve true democracy. In such cities such a multiplicity of small
assemblies, they argue, would be just too cumbersome and unworkable.
But a large urban population is itself no obstacle to libertarian
municipalism. Indeed, based on this kind of calculation – which would
count all residents as participating citizens – the 48 Parisian sections
of 1793 would have been completely dysfunctional, in view of the fact
that revolutionary Paris had a total of 500,000 to 600,000 people. If
every man, woman, and child, indeed every pathological lunatic and
totally dysfunctional person, had attended sectional assemblies, and
each assembly had had no more than 40 people, my arithmetic tells me
that about 15,000 assemblies would have been needed to accommodate all
the people of revolutionary Paris. Under such circumstances one wonders
how the French Revolution could ever have occurred.
Such critics are usually not revolutionaries at all, and would probably
believe that history would have been all the better if the sections had
never existed to push the French Revolution forward. Their objection
represents the instrumental mind qua calculating machine at its worst. A
popular democracy, to begin with, is not premised on the idea that
everyone can, will, or even wants to attend popular assemblies. Nor
should anyone make participation compulsory, coercing everyone into
doing so. Even more significantly, it has rarely happened – indeed, to
my knowledge, it has never happened in revolutionary history – that the
great majority of people in a particular place, still less everyone,
engage in revolution. In the face of insurrection in a revolutionary
situation, while unknown militants aided by a fairly small number of
supporters rise up and overthrow the established order, most people tend
to be either active or inactive observers.
Having reviewed carefully the course of almost every major revolution in
the Euro-American world, I can say with some knowledge that, even in a
completely successful revolution, it was always a minority of the people
who attended meetings of assemblies that made significant decisions
about the fate of their society. The very differentiated political and
social consciousness, interests, education, and backgrounds among masses
in a capitalist society guarantee that people will be drawn into
revolutions in waves, if at all. The foremost, most militant wave is, at
first, numerically surprisingly small; it is followed by seeming
bystanders who, if an uprising seems to be capable of success, merge
with the foremost wave, and only after the uprising is likely to be
successful do the politically less developed waves, in varying degrees,
follow it. Even after an uprising is successful, it takes time for a
substantial majority of the people to fully participate in the
revolutionary process, commonly as crowds in demonstrations, more rarely
as participants in revolutionary institutions.
In the English Revolution of the 1640s, for example, it was primarily
the Puritan army that raised the most democratic issues, with the
support of the Levellers, who formed a very small fraction of the
civilian population. The American Revolution was notoriously supported,
albeit by no means actively, by only one-third of the colonial
population; the Great French Revolution found its principal support in
Paris and was carried forward by 48 sections, most of which were rooted
in assemblies that were poorly attended, except at times when momentous
decisions aroused the most revolutionary neighborhoods.
Indeed, what decided the fate of most revolutions was less the amount of
support their militants received than the degree of resistance they
encountered. What brought Louis XVI and his family back to Paris from
Versailles in October 1789 was certainly not all the women of Paris –
indeed, only a few thousand made the famous march to Versailles – but
the king’s own inability to mobilize a sufficiently large and reliable
force to resist them. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 in
Petrograd – for many historians the “model” of a mass spontaneous
revolution (and an uprising far more nuanced than most accounts suggest)
– succeeded because not even the tsar’s personal guard, let alone such
formerly reliable supports of the autocracy as the Cossacks, was
prepared to defend the monarchy. Indeed, in revolutionary Barcelona in
1936, the resistance to Franco’s forces was initiated by only a few
thousand anarcho-syndicalists with the aid of the Assault Guards, whose
discipline, weaponry, and training were indispensable factors in pinning
down and ultimately defeating the regular army’s uprising.
It is such constellations of forces, in fact, that explain how
revolutions actually succeed. They do not triumph because “everyone,” or
even a majority of the population, actively participates in overthrowing
an oppressive regime, but because the armed forces of the old order and
the population at large are no longer willing to defend it against a
militant and resolute minority.
Nor it is likely, however desirable it may be, that after a successful
insurrection the great majority of the people or even of the oppressed
will personally participate in revolutionizing society. Following the
success of a revolution, the majority of people tend to withdraw into
the localities in which they live, however large or small, where the
problems of everyday life have their most visible impact on the masses.
These localities may be residential and/or occupational neighborhoods in
large cities, the environs of villages and hamlets, or even at some
distance from the center of a city or region, fairly dispersed
localities in which people live and work.
In short, I fail to see why the large size of modern cities should
constitute an insuperable obstacle to the formation of a neighborhood
assembly movement. The doors of the neighborhood assemblies should
always be open to whoever lives in the neighborhood. Politically less
aware individuals may choose not to attend their neighborhood assembly,
and they should not be obliged to attend. The assemblies, regardless of
their size, will have problems enough, without having to deal with
indifferent bystanders and passersby. What counts is that the doors of
the assemblies remain open for all who wish to attend and participate,
for therein lies the true democratic nature of neighborhood assemblies.
Another criticism I have heard against libertarian municipalism is that
a forceful speaker or faction may manipulate a large crowd, such as
numerous citizens at an assembly meeting. This philistine criticism
could be directed against any democratic institution, be it a large
assembly, a small committee, an ad hoc conference or meeting, or even an
“affinity” group. In my view, such a transparent effort to inflict
bruises on any attempt to create a popular organization hardly deserves
discussion. The size of the group is not a factor here – some very
abusive tyrannies appear in very small groups, where one or two
intimidating figures can completely dominate everyone else.
What the critics might well ask – but seldom do – is how we are to
prevent persuasive individuals from making demagogic attempts to control
any popular assembly, regardless of size. In my view the only obstacle
to such attempts is the existence of an organized body of
revolutionaries – yes, even a faction – that is committed to seeking
truth, exercising rationality, and advancing an ethics of public
responsibility. Such a faction or organization will be needed, in my
view, not only before and during a revolution but also after one, when
the constructive problem of creating stable, enduring, and educational
democratic institutions becomes the order of the day.
Such an organization will be particularly needed during the period of
social reconstruction, when attempts are made to put libertarian
municipalism into practice. We cannot expect that, just because we
propose the establishment of neighborhood assemblies, we will always –
or perhaps even often – be the majority in the very institutions that we
have significantly helped to establish. We must always be prepared, in
fact, to be in the minority, until such time as circumstances and social
instability make our overall messages plausible to assembly majorities.
Indeed, wherever we establish a popular assembly, with or without legal
legitimacy, it will eventually be invaded by competing class interests.
Libertarian municipalism, I should emphasize here, is not an attempt to
overlook or evade the reality of class conflict; on the contrary, it
attempts, among other things, to give due recognition to the class
struggle’s civic dimension. Modern conflicts between classes have never
been confined simply to the factory or workplace; they have also taken a
distinctly urban form, as in “Revolutionary Paris,” “Red Petrograd,” and
“Anarcho-syndicalist Barcelona.” As any study of the great revolutions
vividly reveals, the battle between classes has always been a battle not
only between different economic strata in society but also within and
between neighborhoods.
Moreover, the neighborhood, town, and village also generates searing
issues that cut across class lines: between working people (the
traditional industrial proletariat, which is now dwindling in numbers in
Europe and the United States and is fighting a rearguard battle with
capital), middle-class strata (which lack any consciousness of
themselves as working people), the vast army of government employees, a
huge professional and technical stratum that is not likely to regard
itself as a proletariat, and an underclass that is essentially
demoralized and helpless.
We cannot ignore the compelling fact that capitalism has changed since
the end of the World War Two; that it has transformed the very social
fiber of the great majority of people, both attitudinally and
occupationally, in Western Europe and the United States; that it will
wreak even further changes in the decades that lie ahead, with dazzling
rapidity, especially as automation is further developed and as new
resources, techniques, and products replace those that seem so dominant
today.
No revolutionary movement can ignore the problems that capitalism is
likely to generate in the years that lie ahead, especially in terms of
capital’s profound effects on both society and the environment. The
futility of syndicalism today lies in the fact that it is still trying
to address the problems generated by the old Industrial Revolution, and
in the context of the social setting that gave these problems meaning in
the first half of the twentieth century. If we have historically
exhausted the syndicalist alternative, it is because the industrial
proletariat is everywhere destined, by virtue of technological
innovation, to become a small minority of the population. It will not do
to try to theoretically fabricate a “proletariat” out of clerical,
service, and professional “workers” who, in many if not most cases, will
not acquire the class consciousness that identified and gave a
historical standing to the authentic proletarian.
But these strata, often among the most exploited and oppressed, can be
enlisted to support our communalist ideals on the basis of the larger
environment in which they live and the larger issues of their
sovereignty in a world that is racing out of control: namely their
neighborhoods, cities, and towns, and the expansion of their democratic
rights as free citizens in a world that has reduced them to mere
electoral constituents. They can be mobilized to support our communalist
ideals because they feel their power to control their own lives is
diminishing in the face of centralized state and corporate power.
Needless to say, I am not denying that working people have grim economic
problems that may pit them against capital, but their quasi-middle-class
outlook if not status diminishes their ability to see the ills of
capitalism exclusively as an economic system.
Today we live in an era of permanent industrial revolution in which
people tend to respond to the extreme rapidity and vast scope of change
with a mysticism that expresses their disempowerment and a privatism
that expresses their inability to contend with change. Indeed,
capitalism, far from being “advanced,” still less “moribund,” continues
to mature and extend its scope. What it will look like half a century or
a century from now is open to the boldest of speculations.
Hence, more than ever, any revolutionary left libertarian movement must,
in my view, recognize the importance of the municipality as the locus of
new, indeed often trans-class problems that cannot simply be reduced to
the struggle between wage labor and capital. Real problems of
environmental deterioration affect everyone in a community; real
problems of social and economic inequities affect everyone in a
community; real problems of health, education, sanitary conditions, and
the nightmare, as Paul Goodman put it, of “growing up absurd” plague
everyone in a community – problems that are even more serious today than
they were in the alienated 1960s decade. These trans-class issues can
bring people together with workers of all kinds in a common effort to
seek their self-empowerment, an issue that cannot be resolved into the
conflict of wage labor against capital alone.
Nor are workers mere “agents” of history, as vulgar Marxists (and
implicitly, syndicalists) would have us believe. Workers live in cities,
towns, and villages – not only as class beings but also as civic beings.
They are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and
comrades, and no less than their ecological counterparts among the petty
bourgeoisie, they are concerned with environmental issues. As parents
and young people, they are concerned with the problems of acquiring an
education, entering a profession, and the like. They are deeply
disturbed by the decay of urban infrastructures, the diminution of
inexpensive housing, and issues of urban safety and aesthetics. Their
horizon extends far beyond the realm of the factory or even the office
to the residential urban world in which they and their families live.
After I had spent years working in factories, I was not surprised to
find that I could reach workers, middle-class people, and even
relatively affluent individuals more easily by discussing issues
relating to their lived environments – their neighborhoods and cities –
rather than to their workplaces.
Today, in particular, the globalization of capital raises the question
of how localities can keep productive resources within their own
confines without impairing the opportunities of peoples in the so-called
“Third World” or South to freely develop technologically according to
their own needs. This conundrum cannot be resolved by legislation and
economic reforms. Capitalism is a compulsively expansive system. A
modern market economy dictates that an enterprise must grow or die, and
nothing will prevent capitalism from industrializing – more accurately,
expanding – endlessly over the entire face of the planet whenever it is
prepared to do so. Only the complete reconstruction of society and the
economy can end the dilemmas that globalization raises, including the
one-sided economic development of the South, often at the expense of
workers in the North, and the enhancement of corporate power to the
point of threatening the stability, indeed the very safety, of the
planet.
Here again, I would contend that only a grassroots economic policy,
based on a libertarian municipalist agenda and movement, can offer a
major alternative – and it is precisely an alternative that many people
seek today – capable of arresting the impact of globalization. For the
problem of globalization, there is no global solution. Global capital,
precisely because of its very hugeness, can only be eaten away at its
roots, specifically by means of a libertarian municipalist resistance at
the base of society. It must be eroded by the myriad millions who,
mobilized by a grassroots movement, challenge global capital’s
sovereignty over their lives and try to develop local and regional
economic alternatives to its industrial operations. Developing this
resistance would involve subsidizing municipally controlled industries
and retail outlets, and taking recourse to regional resources that
capital does not find it profitable to use. A municipalized economy,
slow as it may be in the making, will be a moral economy, one that –
concerned primarily with the quality of its products and their
production at the lowest possible cost – can hope to ultimately subvert
a corporate economy, whose success is measured entirely by its profits
rather than by the quality of its commodities.
Let me stress that when I speak of a moral economy, I am not advocating
a communitarian or cooperative economy in which small profiteers,
however well-meaning their intentions may be, simply become little
“self-managed” capitalists in their own right. In my own community I
have seen a self-styled “moral” enterprise, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream,
grow in typical capitalist fashion from a small, presumably “caring,”
and intimate enterprise into a global corporation, intent on making
profit and fostering the myth that “capitalism can be good.”
Cooperatives that profess to be moral in their intentions have yet to
make any headway in replacing big capitalist concerns or even in
surviving without themselves becoming capitalistic in their methods and
profit-oriented in their goals.
The Proudhonist myth that small associations of producers – as opposed
to a genuinely socialistic or libertarian communistic endeavor – can
slowly eat away at capitalism, should finally be dispelled. Sadly, these
generally failed illusions are still promoted by liberals such as Harry
Boyte and by naive lifestyle anarchists such as the journalistic
ruffians at Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, and pure academics such
as John Clark and his associates. Either municipalized enterprises
controlled by citizens’ assemblies will try to take over the economy, or
capitalism will prevail in this sphere of life with a forcefulness that
no mere rhetoric can diminish.
Capitalist society has effects not only on economic and social relations
but on ideas and intellectual traditions as well, indeed, on all of
history, fragmenting them until knowledge, discourse, and even reality
become blurred, divested of any distinctions, specificity, and
articulation. The culture that promotes this celebration of diffuseness
and fragmentation – a culture that is epidemic in American colleges and
universities – goes under the name of poststructuralism or, more
commonly, postmodernism. Given its corrosive precepts, the postmodernist
worldview is able to level or homogenize everything that is unique or
distinctive, dissolving it into a low common denominator of ideas.
Consider, for example, the obscurantist term “earth citizenship,” which
dissolves the very complex notion of “citizenship,” with its
presuppositions of paideia – that is, the lifelong education of the
citizen for the practice of civic self-management – into a diffuse
category, by extending (and cheapening) the notion of citizenship to
include animals, plants, rocks, mountains, the planet, indeed the very
cosmos itself. With a purely metaphorical label for all relationships as
an “earth community,” the historical and contemporary uniqueness of the
city disappears. It presumably preempts every other community because of
its wider scope and breadth. Such metaphors ultimately flatten
everything, in effect, into a universal “Oneness” that, in the name of
“ecological wisdom,” denies definition to vital concepts and realities
by the very ubiquity of the “One.”
If the word “citizen” applies to every existing thing, and if the word
“community” embraces all relationships in this seemingly “green” world,
then nothing, in fact, is a citizen or a community. Just as the logical
category “Being” is rendered as mere existence, Being can only be
regarded as interchangeable with “Nothing.” So, too, “citizen” and
“community” become a universal passport to vacuity, not to uniquely
civic conditions that have been forming and differentiating
dialectically for thousands of years, through the ancient, medieval, and
modern worlds. To reduce them to an abstract “community” is to
ultimately negate their wealth of evolutionary forms and particularly
their differentiation as sophisticated aspects of human freedom.
As a revolutionary politics, libertarian municipalism must nonetheless
be conceived as a process, a patient practice that will probably have
only limited success at the present time, and even then only in select
areas that can at best provide examples of the possibilities it could
hold if and when it is adopted on a large scale. We will not create a
libertarian municipalist society overnight, and in this era of
counter-revolution we must be prepared to endure more failures than
successes. Patience and commitment are traits that revolutionaries of
the past cultivated assiduously; alas today, in our fast consumerist
society, the demand for immediate gratification, for fast food and fast
living, inculcates a demand for fast politics. Individuals who are prone
to adopt a fast lifestyle over one that acknowledges the need for slow
growth, with all its disappointments, would do well to learn the art of
throwing bricks and painting graffiti rather than commit themselves to
the educational responsibilities required by a libertarian municipalist
movement. What should count for us is whether libertarian municipalism
is a rational means for achieving the rational culmination of human
development, not whether it is suitable as a quick fix for present
social problems.
We must learn to be flexible without allowing our basic principles to be
replaced by a postmodernist quagmire of ad hoc, ever-changeable
opinions. For example, if we have no choice but to use electronic means,
such as to establish popular participation in relatively large citizens’
assemblies, then so be it. But we should, I would argue, do so only when
it is unavoidable and for only as long as is necessary. By the same
token, if certain desirable measures require a degree of centralization,
then we should accept that – without sacrificing, let me insist, the
right to immediate recall. But here, too, we should endure such
organizational measures for only as long as they are necessary and no
longer. Our basic principles in such cases must always be our guide: we
remain committed to a direct face-to-face democracy and a
well-coordinated, confederal, but decentralized society.
Nor should we fetishize consensus over democracy in our decision-making
processes. Consensus, as I have argued, is practicable with very small
groups in which people know each other intimately. But in larger groups
it becomes tyrannical because it allows a small minority to decide what
will be the practice of a large or even sizable majority; and it fosters
homogeneity and stagnation in ideas and policies. Minorities and their
factions are the indispensable yeast for maturing new ideas – and nearly
all new ideas start out as the views of minorities. In a libertarian
group, the “rule” of the majority over a minority is a myth; no one
expects a minority to give up its unpopular beliefs or to yield its
right to argue its views – but the minority must have patience and allow
a majority decision to be put into practice. This experience and the
discussion it generates should be the most decisive element in impelling
a group or assembly to reconsider its decision and adopt the minority’s
viewpoint, spurring on the further innovation of practices and ideas as
other minorities emerge. Consensus decision-making can easily produce
intellectual and practical stagnation if it essentially compels a
majority to forgo a specific policy in order to please a minority.
I will not enter here into my distinction between policy decisions and
their enactment in practice by those qualified to administer them. I
will only note something that my friend Gary Sisco has pointed out: that
if the US Congress – a gathering, for the most part, of lawyers – can
make basic policy decisions on the reconstruction of the American
infrastructure, on war and peace, on education and foreign policy, etc.,
without having full knowledge of all aspects of these fields, leaving
the administration of their decisions to others, then it is difficult to
understand why a citizens’ assembly cannot make policy decisions on
usually more modest issues and leave their administration, under close
supervision, to experts in the fields involved.
Among the other issues we must at some point consider are the place of
law or nomos in a libertarian municipalist society, as well as
constitutions that lay down important principles of right or justice and
freedom. Are we to vest the perpetuation of our guiding principles
simply in blind custom, or in the good nature of our fellow humans –
which allows for a great deal of arbitrariness? For centuries oppressed
peoples demanded written founding constitutional provisions to protect
them from arbitrary oppression by the nobility. With the emergence of a
libertarian communist society, this problem does not disappear. For us,
I believe, the question can never be whether law and constitutions are
inherently “authoritarian,” but whether they are rational, mutable,
secular, and restrictive only in the sense that they prohibit the abuse
of power.
Admittedly, the present time is not one that is favorable for the spread
of revolutionary and libertarian anti-capitalist ideas and movements.
Unless we are to let the capitalist cancer spread over the entire
planet, however, absorbing even the natural world into the world
economy, we must develop a theory and practice that provides us with an
entry into the public sphere – a theory and practice, I should
emphasize, that is consistent with the goal of a rational libertarian
communist society.
Finally, we must assert the historic right of speculative reason –
resting on the real potentialities of human beings as we know them from
the past as well as the present – to project itself beyond the immediate
environment in which we live, indeed, to claim that the present
irrational society is not the actual – or “real” – that is worthy of the
human condition. Despite its prevalence – and, to many people, its
permanence – the present society is untrue to the project of fulfilling
humanity’s potentiality for freedom and self-consciousness, and hence it
is unreal in the sense that it is a betrayal of the claims of humanity’s
greatest qualities, the capacity for reason and innovation.
If our attempts to think, fight for, educate people about, and rise in
battle for, a libertarian communist society based on the Commune of
communes, are evidence of “Bakuninist will,” for which present-day
mystics such as John Clark (aka “Max Cafard” or “C”) have criticized me,
then I can only reply that I find all the more flattering this
association with Bakunin, who would have denounced Clark’s Taoist
notions of passivity and “going with the flow” as a fundamental
accommodation to the status quo. Libertarian municipalists must
distinguish themselves from those who, in the name of organic thought,
reduce themselves to bystanders, their behavior guided by the Taoist
doctrine of “wu-wei,” that is, the “virtues” of non-action.
By the same token, that broad school of ideas we call “anarchism” is
faced with a parting of the ways between those who genuinely wish to
focus their efforts on the revolutionary elimination of hierarchical and
class society, and self-indulgent lifestyle anarchists who, if they
believe in anything beyond mere adventures (say, throwing bricks at
police), see social change only in terms of their personal
self-expression and the replacement of serious ideas with mystical
fantasies.
Left libertarian revolutionaries cannot have any hopes of creating a
public movement unless they formulate a politics that opens it to social
intervention, indeed that is brought into the public sphere as an
organized movement that can grow, think rationally, mobilize people, and
actively seek to change the world. The social democrats have offered us
parliamentary reforms as a practice, and the results they have produced
have been debilitating – most notably, a radical decline in public life
and a disastrous growth in consumerist self-indulgence and privatism.
Although the Stalinists as architects of the totalitarian state have
mostly passed from the public scene, a few persist as parasites on
whatever radical movement may emerge among oppressed peoples. And
fascism, in its various mutations, has attempted to fill the void
created by disempowerment and a lack of human scale in politics as well
as community, with tragic results.
As left libertarians we must ask ourselves what mode of entry into the
public sphere is consistent with our vision of empowerment. If our ideal
is the Commune of communes, then I submit that the only means of entry
and social fulfillment is a politics – that is, a movement and program
that finally emerges on the local electoral scene as the uncompromising
advocate of popular neighborhood and town assemblies and the development
of a municipalized economy. I know of no other alternative to
capitulation to the existing society – unless some among us wish to
throw rocks at police, deface walls with graffiti, or engage in ad hoc
“actions” that disappear without any trace like a pebble thrown into a
lake.
I have no doubt that libertarian municipalism, if it meets with a
measure of success, will face many obstacles and the possibility of
being co-opted or degenerated; that it will face not only a civic realm
of ideological discord but internal discord within its own
organizational framework; and that it opens a broad field of political
conflict, with all its risks and uncertainties. At a time when social
life has been trivialized beyond description, when accommodation to
capitalist values and life-ways has reached unprecedented levels, when
anarchism and socialism are seen as the “lost causes” of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries – one can only hope that such discord
becomes a genuine public reality. At no time has mediocrity been more
triumphant than it is today, and at no time has indifference to social
and political issues been as widespread.
I do not believe that social change can be achieved without taking
risks, allowing for uncertainties, and recognizing the possibility of
failure. If we are to have any effect on the fossilization of public
life – to the extent that the present period is marked in any sense by a
genuine public life – history too must move with us. On this score, I am
much too old to make worthwhile predictions about how the course of
events will unfold, except to say that the present, whether for good or
ill, will hardly be recognizable to the generation that will come of age
50 years from now, so rapidly are things likely to change in the present
century.
But where change exists, so too do possibilities. The times cannot
remain as they are – any more than the world can be frozen into
immobility. What we can hope to do is to preserve the thread of
rationality that distinguishes true civilization from barbarism – and
barbarism would indeed be the outcome of a world that is permitted to
tumble into a future without rational activity or guidance. For those
who will a world of freedom and self-consciousness, there can be no
accommodation with the status quo.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Left had reached an
extraordinary degree of conceptual sophistication and organizational
maturity. Generally what was called leftism at that time was socialist,
influenced in varying degrees by the works of Karl Marx. This was
especially the case in Central Europe, but socialism was also intermixed
with populist ideas in Eastern Europe and with syndicalism in France,
Spain, and Latin America. In the United States all of these ideas were
melded together, such as in Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party and in the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
On the eve of World War One leftist ideas and movements had become so
advanced that they seemed positioned to seriously challenge the
existence of capitalism, indeed, of class society as such. The words
from the Internationale, “Tis the final conflict,” acquired a new
concreteness and immediacy. Capitalism seemed faced with an insurgency
by the world’s exploited classes, particularly the industrial
proletariat. Indeed, given the scope of the Second International and the
growth of revolutionary movements in the West, capitalism appeared to be
facing an unprecedented, international social upheaval. Many
revolutionaries were convinced that a politically mature and
well-organized proletariat could finally take conscious control over
social life and evolution and satisfy, not the particularized elitist
interests of a propertied minority class, but the general interests of
the majority.
The “Great War,” as it was called, actually did end amid socialistic
revolutions. Russia established a “proletarian dictatorship,” premised
ostensibly on revolutionary Marxist principles. Germany, with the
largest and most ideologically advanced industrial proletariat in
Europe, went through three years of Marxist-influenced revolutionary
upheaval, while Bavaria, Hungary, and other places experienced
short-lived insurgencies. In Italy and Spain, the end of the war saw the
emergence of great strike movements and near-insurrections, although
they never reached a decisive revolutionary level. Even France seemed to
be teetering on revolution in 1917, when entire regiments at the Western
Front raised red flags and tried to make their way to Paris. Such
upheavals, which recurred into the 1930s, appeared to support Lenin’s
view that a “moribund” capitalism had finally entered into a period of
war and revolution, one that in the foreseeable future could end only
with the establishment of a socialist or communist society.
By this time, moreover, major intellectual innovators – from Diderot and
Rousseau through Hegel and Marx to an assortment of libertarian rebels –
had brought secular and radical ideologies to a point where, sorted into
a logical whole, they provided the framework for a truly coherent body
of ideas that gave a rational meaning to historical development,
combining a due recognition of humanity’s material needs with its hopes
for intellectual and social emancipation. For the first time, it seemed,
without recourse to divine or other archaic non-human forms of
intervention, humanity would finally be able to draw upon its own
advancing intellectuality, knowledge, and virtues, and upon its unique
capacity for innovation, to create a new world in which all the
conditions would exist to actualize its potentiality for freedom and
creativity. These eminently human goals, embodied in Marx’s great
theoretical synthesis of the ideas he had drawn from the Enlightenment
as well as new ideas he had developed on his own, could be initiated in
practice by the downtrodden themselves, who would be driven inexorably
by the contradictions of capitalist society into revolution and the
establishment of a rational society for humanity as a whole.
I should note that many of my own words – “inexorably,” “moribund,”
“decaying,” and “general interests” – are drawn from the literature of
early twentieth-century leftist theorists and movements. Yet whatever
may be the limits of this literature and its writers – as we, at the
turn of the millennium, are now privileged to see in retrospect – this
sweeping language was not the product of mere sloganeering: it was
derived from an integrated and coherent leftist outlook and culture that
appeared on the eve of the Great War. This outlook and culture formed
what we can properly call a classical body of universalist ideas,
continually enlarged by the generations that followed the French
Revolution of 1789 to 1794. In the years that passed, this body of ideas
was steadily enlarged by experience and succeeded in mobilizing millions
of people into international movements for human emancipation and social
reconstruction.
Quite obviously, the Enlightenment goals and Lenin’s prognoses, with
their promise of successful socialist revolutions, were not to be
realized in the twentieth century. Indeed, what has occurred since the
midpoint of the twentieth century is a very different development: a
period of cultural and theoretical decadence so far as revolutionary
ideas and movements are concerned – a period of decomposition, in fact,
that has swept up nearly all the philosophical, cultural, ethical, and
social standards that the Enlightenment had produced. For many young
people who professed to hold a radical outlook in the 1960s and 1970s,
leftist theory has shriveled in scope and content to the level of
spectatorial esthetics, often focused on the scattered works of people
like the indecisive critic Walter Benjamin, the postmodernist Jacques
Derrida, or the constipated structuralist Louis Althusser, as social
theory has retreated from the lusty debating forums of 1930s socialism
to the cloistered seminar rooms of contemporary universities.
Now that the twentieth century has come to a close, we are justified in
asking: Why has humanity’s emancipation failed to achieve fruition? Why,
in particular, has the proletariat failed to make its predicted
revolution? Indeed, why did the once-radical Social Democrats fail from
their very inception to achieve even a majority vote in such centers as
Germany? Why did they, in 1933, surrender so tamely to Hitler? (The
German Communists, of course, were simply shunted aside after 1923,
assuming they could even be taken seriously in that year, except as
contrived targets for demagogic propagandistic purposes to frighten the
middle classes with the menace of social disorder.)
How, moreover, did capitalism manage to free itself from the “chronic
economic crisis” in which it seemed hopelessly mired during the 1930s?
Why, especially after World War Two, did it produce advances in technics
so dazzling that bourgeois society is now undergoing a permanent
“Industrial Revolution” whose results are difficult to foresee? Finally,
why did it come to pass that, following the profound economic and social
crises of the 1930s, capitalism emerged from a second world war as a
more stable and more socially entrenched order than it had ever been in
the past?
None of these events, so important in the predictive calculations of
revolutionary Marxists, have been adequately explained in a fundamental
and historical sense, notably the progressive role that Marx assigned to
capitalism in his “stages theory” of history.[35] Instead, for years
Marxists largely expended their polemical energy in throwing epithets at
each other and at other labor movements for their “betrayals” – without
asking why Marxism was so vulnerable to betrayal in the first place. In
more recent years Marxists have tried to appropriate fragments of ideas
that belong to once-despised utopian ideologies, such as Fourierism
(Marcuse, to cite only one example) or to other alien ideologies, such
as syndicalism, anarchism, ecology, feminism, and communitarianism,
appropriating ill-fitting ideological tenets from one or the other to
refurbish their limited view of a changing bourgeois reality, until what
passes for Marxism today is often a pastiche of fragments patched
together with planks from basically alien ideologies.
How, in short, did it come to pass that the classical era, marked by its
coherence and unity in revolutionary thought and practice, gave way to a
completely decadent era in which incoherence is celebrated, particularly
in the name of a postmodernism that equates chaotic nihilism with
freedom, self-expression, and creativity – not unlike the chaos of the
marketplace itself?
We can answer these questions because we now enjoy over a half-century
of hindsight. What the past fifty years have shown us is that the
uniquely insurgent period between 1917 and 1939 was not evidence of
capitalist morbidity and decline, as Lenin surmised. Rather, it was a
period of social transition. During those decades the world was so torn
by circumstantially created tensions that Lenin’s view of capitalism as
a dying social order seemed indeed confirmed by reality.
What this classical prognosis and its supporting theoretical corpus did
not take into account were various alternative developments that faced
capitalism before the outbreak of the Great War and even during the
interwar period – alternatives that lay beneath the tumultuous surface
of the early twentieth century. The classical Left did not consider
other possible social trajectories that capitalism could have followed –
and eventually did follow – that would make for its stabilization. It
not only failed to understand these new social trajectories but also
failed to foresee, even faintly, the emergence of new issues that
extended beyond the largely worker-oriented analysis of the classical
Left.
For one thing, what makes so much of the classical revolutionary
prognoses formulated by prewar and wartime socialism seem paradoxical is
that the “moribund” period in which many classical leftists anchored
their hopes for revolution was still not even a period of “mature”
capitalism, let alone one of “dying” capitalism. The era before the
Great War was one in which mass production, republican systems of
government, and so-called “bourgeois-democratic” liberties were still
emerging from a chrysalis of precapitalist forms of craft production and
commerce, state structures ruled by royal families and courts, and
economies in which ennobled landlords such as the German Junkers,
British aristocrats, and Latin Grandees coexisted with a huge,
technically backward peasant population. Even where most great estates
were owned by bourgeois elements, as in Spain, their management of
agriculture was conducted lethargically, emulating the diffident
economic habits that characterized parasitic agrarian elites of a
precapitalist era. Capitalism, while it was the dominant economy of the
United States, Great Britain, Germany, more ambiguously France, and only
marginally in other European countries, was still subordinated
culturally and even structurally to elite strata, often based on
kinship, that were more feudal than bourgeois, and marked by the rentier
and militaristic values that distinguished a waning era.
In effect, even modern industry, while becoming central to the
development of major nation-states in the early twentieth century, was
still anchored in a craft-peasant social matrix. The ownership of land
and of small-scale workshops, often family managed, formed the
traditional features of social status in a very status-ridden world,
such as England and Germany. It is hard to recall today how low was the
real status of women during the early 1900s; how degraded was the status
of propertyless, often mendicant workers; how eagerly even substantial
capitalists tried to marry into titled families; how feeble were
elementary civil liberties in a world that acknowledged the validity of
inherited privilege and the authority of monarchs; and how embattled was
the industrially regimented proletariat (often removed by a generation
or two from village life with its more natural life-ways) in its efforts
to merely organize reformist trade unions.
The Great War – a monstrous event that was as much, if not more, the
product of dynastic ambitions, military obtuseness, and the awesome
authority allowed to preening monarchs, as it was of economic
imperialism – was not a “historical necessity.” An entangled Europe,
caught up in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s juvenile posturing and dizzying images
of German national grandeur, the blind spirit of French revanchisme
following the country’s loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871 to the
Wilhelmine Reich, and the naive nationalism of the masses, whose class
internationalism was often more rhetorical than real – all led to a
horrible form of trench warfare that should have been unendurable to any
civilized people within a few months after it fell into place, let alone
for four bloody years. The Deutsche Mark, the emblematic expression of
German capitalism, managed to perform economic prodigies that neither
Wilhelm’s nor Hitler’s bayonets could hope to perform during the last
century – so different are the alternatives that the postwar era finally
revealed!
Yet, ironically, it was not the battlefront in the Great War that
generated the revolutions of 1917–18; it was the rear, where hunger
managed to do what the terrifying explosives, machine guns, tanks, and
poison gas at the front never quite succeeded in achieving – a
revolution over issues such as bread and peace (in precisely that
order). It is breathtaking to consider that, after three years of
constant bloodletting, mutilation, and incredible daily fear, the German
strikes of January 1918 that had the pungent odor of revolution actually
subsided, and the German workers remained patiently quiescent when
General Ludendorff’s spring and summer offensives of that year gained
substantial ground from French and British troops in the West to the
“greater glory” of the Reich. So much for the “revolutionary instincts”
of the people, which Bakunin was wont to celebrate. It speaks volumes
that, despite the horrors of the Great War, the masses went along with
the conflict until it was completely unendurable materially. Such is the
power of adaptation, tradition, and habit in everyday life.
Notwithstanding the Russian Revolution, the Great War came to an end
without overthrowing European capitalism, let alone world capitalism.
The war actually revealed that the classical tradition of socialism was
very limited and, in many respects, was greatly in need of repair.
Understandably, Lenin and Trotsky tried to foreshorten historical
development and bring about the likelihood of socialism within their own
life spans, although this is less true of Luxemburg and particularly of
Marx, who was far more critical of Marxism than his acolytes. Indeed,
Marx was at pains to warn that it had taken centuries for feudalism to
die and for capitalism to emerge, hence Marxists should hardly expect
that the bourgeoisie would be overthrown in a year, a decade, or even a
generation. Trotsky was far more sanguine than Lenin in his conviction
that capitalism was “moribund,” “decaying,” “rotting,” and otherwise
falling apart, and that the proletariat was growing “stronger,” or “more
class conscious,” or “organized” – but it matters little today to dwell
on his expectations and prognoses.
Nevertheless the Great War – while not completely sweeping the
historical slate clean of the feudal detritus that contributed so
greatly to its outbreak – left the Western world in a cultural, moral,
and political stupor. An era was clearly ending, but it was not
capitalism that was faced with imminent oblivion. What was disappearing
was the traditional, time-worn status and class system of a feudal past,
yet without any fully developed form of capitalism to take its place.
With the Great Depression, British landlordism began to enter into hard,
even devastating times, but it had not completely disappeared during the
1930s. The Prussian Junkers were still in command of the German army at
the beginning of the 1930s and, thanks to von Hindenburg’s election as
president of the German state, still enjoyed many of the privileges of
an established elite early in the Hitler period. But this once haughty
stratum was eventually faced with the challenge of Hitler’s
Gleichschaltung, the process of social leveling that finally degraded
the Prussian officer caste. In the end, it was the Anglo-American and
Russian armies that swept the Junkers away by seizing their estates in
the East and dissolving them as a socio-economic entity. France was
fighting its last battles as a middle-class republic during the mid
1930s, with Catholic reactionaries and the blooded young fascists of the
Croix de Feu, who aspired to an aristocratic Gallicism led by rich and
titled leaders.
Thus, the interwar decades were a stormy period of transition between a
declining quasi-feudal world, already shattered but not buried, and an
emerging bourgeois world, which, despite its vast economic power, had
still not penetrated into every pore of society and defined the basic
values of the century. The Great Depression, in fact, showed that the
pedestrian maxim, “money isn’t everything,” is true when there is no
money to go around. Indeed, the Depression threw much of the world,
especially the United States, into a disorderly world that resembled its
own hectic populist era of the 1870s and 1880s, hence the flare-up of
trade unionism, violent strikes, great demonstrations, and “Red”
agitation that swept over the American and European continents in the
1930s.
In this socially hyperactive but indecisive period of social tensions
between the old and new, when the ruling classes as well as the
dominated masses lived in murderous antipathy toward each other, history
unlocked the door to revolutionary upheavals. Amid the uncertainty of a
tension-filled world, the fulfillment of Marx’s dream – a democratic
workers’ system of government – seemed achievable. As a result of the
tensions that existed within that interwar period, it appeared that
capitalism had collapsed economically and a worldwide movement toward a
democratic, possibly libertarian socialist society was achievable. But
to create such a society required a highly conscious movement with an
able leadership and a clear-eyed sense of purpose.
Tragically, no such movement appeared. Grossly pragmatic bureaucrats
such as Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann, and pedestrian theorists
such as Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding, assumed the deflated mantle
of the Socialist International and set its tone up until the rise of
German fascism. Shortly afterward Stalin intervened in every potentially
revolutionary situation in Europe and poisoned it to serve Russia’s –
and his own – interests. The prestige of the Bolshevik revolution, to
which this tyrant contributed absolutely nothing and which he defamed
when he came to power, was still not sufficiently sullied to allow the
classical Left to create its own authentic movements and expand its
vision to accord with emerging social issues that reflected changes in
capitalism itself.
What must now be acknowledged is that between 1914 and 1945 capitalism
was enlarging its foundations with mass manufacture and new industries,
not digging its grave, as Lenin and Trotsky had opined. Its status as a
dominant world economy and society still lay before it in 1917, not
behind it. And it would be sheer myopia not to see that it is still
industrializing the world – the agrarian as well as the urban – which is
basically what the word “globalization” means. Moreover, it is still
eroding the particularisms that divide human beings on the basis of
nationalism, religion, and ethnicity. Most of the “fundamentalisms” and
“identity politics” erupting in the world today are essentially
reactions against the encroaching secularism and universalism of a
business-oriented, increasingly homogenizing capitalist civilization
that is slowly eating away at a deeply religious, nationalistic, and
ethnic heritage. The commodity is still performing prodigies of social
erosion in precapitalist cultures, be they for good or bad, such as Marx
and Engels described in the first part of The Communist Manifesto. Where
sanity and reason do not guide human affairs, to be sure, the good is
nearly always polluted by the bad, and it is the function of any serious
revolutionary thinker to separate the two in the hope of unearthing the
rational tendency in a social development.
At the same time capitalism is not only homogenizing old societies and
remaking them in its urbanized, commodity-oriented image; it is doing
the same to the planet and the biosphere in the name of “mastering” the
forces of the natural world. This is precisely the “historically
progressive” role that Marx and Engels assigned, in a celebratory
manner, to the capitalist mode of production. How “progressive” this
process of homogenization is, in fact, remains to be seen. For the
present, it behooves us to examine the failure of Marxism and anarchism
(arguably the two principal wings of the revolutionary tradition) to
deal with the transitional nature of the twentieth century.
In the post-World War Two period the weakest elements in Marx’s schema
of history, class struggle, capitalist development, and political
activity have been subjected to penetrating critical examination.[36]
The Marxian canon to the contrary, history, viewed as a whole, cannot be
reduced to economic factors as Marx tried to do in his key works,
although capitalism may well be mutating homo sapiens into homo
consumerans and fostering the tendency among masses of people to
experience reality as a huge market. Marx’s basic views may have
provided his acolytes with the necessary or preconditional causes for
social development – admittedly material or economic causes – but they
failed to explain the enormous role of the efficient causes – the
immediate causes, such as culture, politics, morality, juridical
practices, and the like (which Marx denoted as a “superstructural”) –
for producing social change.
Indeed, what else besides “superstructural” (particularly moral,
religious, and political) factors can explain why the development of
capitalism, which always existed in varying degrees in agrarian and
craft economies, was arrested for thousands of years and became a major
economy in only one country (England) early in the nineteenth century?
Or why revolutions occur only under conditions of complete social
breakdown, that is, after a vast body of massively influential
“superstructural” belief systems (often accepted in their time as
eternal realities) are shattered? Marx was not oblivious to the extent
to which belief-systems override bourgeois forces in precapitalist
societies, especially in his discussions on the predominance of agrarian
values over urban ones in his Grundrisse. Very significantly, Marxists
were riddled by conflicts over the status of capitalism at various
points in its development, especially during the early twentieth
century, when the bourgeoisie faced one of the stormiest periods of its
history – precisely because capitalism had not fully shed the trappings
of feudalism and come “completely into its own,” so to speak.
How, for example, was it possible for many Marxists to insist that
capitalism was in decline at a time when major technical innovations
like mass manufacture, radically new forms of transportation such as the
automobile, advances in electrical and electronic machines and goods,
and new chemical innovations were occurring in the decade directly
following the Great War? Had Marx not written, after all, that “No
social order ever perishes before all the productive forces [technology]
for which there is room in it have developed”?[37] Could this be said of
capitalism in 1914–18 and 1939–45? Indeed, will it ever be said of the
capitalist mode of production in the future?
In asking these questions, I am not trying to suggest that capitalism
will never produce problems that necessitate its overthrow or
replacement. My purpose is, rather, to suggest that the problems that
may well turn most of humanity against capitalism may not necessarily be
strictly economic ones or rooted in class issues.
Arguable as Marx’s productivist interpretation of social development and
its future may be, it becomes a very forced and artificial, even
contorted explanation of history if it is not greatly modified by the
dialectic of ideas, that is, by political and social ideology, morality
and ethics, law, juridical standards, and the like. Marxism has yet to
forthrightly acknowledge that these different spheres of life have their
own dialectic, indeed, that they can unfold from inner forces of their
own and not simply result from a productivist dialectic called the
“materialist interpretation of history.” Moreover, it has yet to
emphasize that a dialectic of ethics or religion can profoundly affect
the dialectic of productive forces and production relations. Is it
possible, for example, to ignore the fact that Christian theology led
logically to a growing respect for individual worth and finally to
radical conceptions of social freedom – a dialectic, in turn, that
profoundly influenced social development by altering the way human
beings interacted with each other and with the material world?
By the time of the French Revolution, centuries of deeply entrenched
ideas on property, such as the enormous esteem that accompanied the
ownership of land, were intermingling and modifying seemingly objective
social forces, such as the growth of an increasingly capitalistic
market. As a result, the exalted image of the independent, often
self-sufficient peasant, who began to emerge in the wake of the
Revolution with his small bit of property and his craft-oriented
village, actually inhibited capitalist economic development in France
well into the nineteenth century by closing off large parts of the
domestic market to commodities mass-produced in the cities. The image of
the French Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution that fostered a
capitalist development at home is arguably more fictitious than real,
although in the long run it created many preconditions for the rise of
the industrial bourgeoisie.
In short, by educing the dialectic of history along overwhelmingly
productivist lines, Marx easily deceived himself as well as his most
important followers, notably Lenin and Trotsky, about capitalism’s
morbidity, by assuming that the bourgeoisie had finally prepared all the
economic preconditions for socialism and hence was prepared to be
replaced by socialism. What he ignored was that many of the problems,
contradictions, and antagonisms he imputed almost exclusively to
capitalism were, in fact, the product of lingering feudal traits that
society had not shed; moreover, that the seemingly “superstructural”
institutions and values that had characterized precapitalist societies
played a major role in defining a seemingly predominant capitalist
society that was still aborning. On this score, the anarchists were
right when they called not so much for the economic improvement of the
proletariat as for its moral development being vital to the formation of
a free society – improvements that the Marxists largely brushed aside as
issues that fell within the domain of “private life.”
Marx and Marxism also fail us when they focus overwhelmingly on the
working class – even enhancing its social weight by presumably elevating
transparently petty-bourgeois elements such as salaried white-collar
employees to a proletarian status when industrial workers are evidently
declining numerically. Nor does the authentic proletariat, which assumed
an almost mystical class status in the heyday of Marxism, act as though
it is a uniquely hegemonic historical agent in the conflict with
capitalism as a system. Nothing proved to be more misleading in the
advanced industrial countries of the world than the myth that the
working class, when appealed to as an economic class, could see beyond
the immediate conditions of its given life-ways – the factory and
bourgeois forms of distribution (exchange).[38] It consistently adopted
reformist programs designed to gain higher wages, shorter working days,
longer vacations, and improved working conditions until thunderous
events drove it to revolutionary action – together, it should be added,
with non-proletarian strata. Virtually none of the classical socialist
movements, it is worth noting, appealed to the workers as people, such
as parents, city dwellers, brothers and sisters, and individuals trying
to live decent lives in a decent environment for themselves and their
offspring.
Most conventional Marxist theorists to the contrary, the worker is first
of all a human being, not simply the embodiment of “social labor” that
is definable in strictly class terms. The failure of classical socialism
to make a human and civic appeal to the worker – even to seriously
consider him or her as more than a class being – created a warped
relationship between socialist organizations and their alleged
“constituency.” Although the classical Social Democracy, especially the
German Social Democrats, provided workers with a highly varied cultural
life of their own, from educational activities to sports clubs, the
proletariat was usually boxed into a world bounded by a concern for its
most immediate material interests. Even in the pre-World War Two
cultural centers of the socialists, such as the casas del pueblo
established by the Spanish Socialists, it was fed primarily on
discussions of its exploitation and degradation by the capitalist
system, which in any case it experienced daily in factories and
workshops. The attempt to redefine the proletariat and make it a
majority of a national population lost all credibility when capitalism
began to create a huge “salariat” of office employees, managers, sales
people, and an army of service, engineering, advertising, media, and
governmental personnel who see themselves as a new middle class deeply
invested in bourgeois property through stocks, bonds, real estate,
pensions, and the like, however minor these may seem by comparison with
the big bourgeoisie.
Finally, a very significant failing of Marxism when it came to building
a revolutionary movement was its commitment to the statist acquisition
and maintenance of parliamentary power. By the late 1870s Marx and
Engels had developed into “Red Republicans,” notwithstanding Marx’s
encomiums to the Parisian Communards and their quasi-anarchist vision of
a confederal form of government. What is often ignored is that Marx
disclaimed these encomiums shortly before his death a decade later.
Doubtless Marx’s vision of a republic was marked by more democratic
features than any that existed in Europe and America during his
lifetime. He would have favored the right to recall deputies at all
levels of the state, as well as minimal bureaucracy and a militia system
hopefully based on working-class recruits. But none of the institutions
he attributed to a socialist state were incompatible with those of a
“bourgeois-democratic” state. Not surprisingly, he believed that
socialism could be voted into power in England, the United States, and
the Netherlands, a list to which Engels years later added France.
In vowing that only insurrection and a complete restructuring of the
state were compatible with socialism, Lenin and Luxemburg among others
(especially Trotsky) decidedly departed from Marx and Engels’s political
ideas in their late years. At least in trying to work within republican
institutions, the early Social Democrats were more consistently Marxist
than were their revolutionary critics. They viewed the German Revolution
of 1918– 19 as an indispensable preliminary to the creation of a
republican system that would open a peaceful but, more significant,
institutionally sound road to socialism. That workers’ councils such as
the Russian soviets and German Räte were more radically democratic made
them, as institutional measures, frightening, more akin to anarchism and
certainly Bolshevism than to a parliament elected by universal suffrage.
Although a younger Marx would have found a state structured around
councils more to his taste, there is little to show in his later
writings (apart from his flirtation with the libertarian features of the
Paris Commune) that he would have “smashed the state,” to use Lenin’s
terminology, to the point of rejecting parliamentary government.
Does this mean that anarchist precepts, spawned nearly two centuries
ago, provide a substitute for Marxism?
After 40 years of trying to work with this ideology, my own very
considered opinion is that such a hope, which I entertained as early as
the 1950s, is unrealizable. Nor do I feel that this is due only to the
failings of the so-called “new anarchism” spawned in recent years by
young activists. The problems raised by anarchism belong to the days of
its birth, when writers like Proudhon celebrated its use as a new
alternative to the emerging capitalist social order. In reality,
anarchism has no coherent body of theory other than its commitment to an
ahistorical conception of “personal autonomy” – that is, to the
self-willing, asocial ego, divested of constraints, preconditions, or
limitations short of death itself. Indeed, today, many anarchists
celebrate this theoretical incoherence as evidence of the highly
libertarian nature of their outlook and its often dizzying, of not
contradictory, respect for diversity. It is primarily by giving priority
to an ideologically petrified notion of an “autonomous individual” that
anarchists justify their opposition not only to the state but to any
form of constraint, law, and often organization and democratic
decision-making based on majority voting. All such constraints are
dismissed in principle as forms of “coercion,” “domination,”
“government,” and even “tyranny” – often as though these terms are
coequal and interchangeable.
Nor do anarchist theorists take cognizance of the social and historical
conditions that limit or modify the ability to attain “Anarchy,” which
is often described as a highly personal affair or even an episodic or
“ecstatic” experience. Followed to its logical conclusion, indeed to its
most fundamental premises, Anarchy to anarchists is essentially a moral
desideratum, a “way of life,” as one anarchist put it to me, that is
independent of time or place. Anarchy, we are justified in concluding,
emerges from the exercise of pure will. Presumably, when enough wills
converge to “adopt” Anarchy, it will simply be – like the soil that
remains beneath melting snow, as one British anarchist ideologist put
it.
This revelatory interpretation of how Anarchy makes its appearance in
the world lies at the core of the anarchist vision. Anarchy, it would
appear, has always been “there,” as Isaac Puente, the most important
theorist of Spanish anarchism in the 1930s, put it, save that it was
concealed over the ages by an historically imposed layer of
institutions, entrenched experiences, and values that are typified by
the state, civilization, history, and morality. Somehow, it must merely
be restored from its unsullied past like a hidden geological stratum.
This summary easily explains the emphasis on primitivism and the notion
of “recovery” that one so often encounters in anarchist writing.
Recovery should be distinguished from the notion of discovery and
innovation that modern thinking and rationalism was obliged to
counterpose to the premodern belief that truth and virtue in all their
aspects were already in existence but concealed by an oppressive or
obfuscating historical development and culture. More than one anarchist
could easily use this formulation to justify social passivity apart from
mere protest. One had only to let the “snow” (that is the state, and
civilization) melt away for Anarchy to be restored, a view that may well
explain the pacifism that is so widespread among anarchists throughout
the world today.
In any event, some anarchists have argued that the civilization,
technics, and rationality which in recent years have been singled out by
many anarchists as the greatest failings of the human condition must be
replaced by a more primitive, presumably “authentic” culture that
eschews all the attainments of history in order to restore humanity’s
primal “harmony” with itself and with an almost mystical “Nature.”
Insofar as anarchists currently espouse this view, they have actually
returned anarchism to its true home after its centuries-long meanderings
through the mazes of syndicalism and other basically alien social
causes. Proudhon’s wistful image of the self-sufficient peasant farm or
village, wisely presided over by an all-knowing paterfamilias, is
finally recovered – this, I would add, at a time when the world is more
interdependent and technologically sophisticated than at any other in
history!
Inasmuch as anarchism emphasizes primitivism as against acculturation,
recovery as against discovery, autarchy as against interdependence, and
naturism as against civilization – often rooting its conceptual
apparatus in a “natural,” conceivably “basic” ahistorical autonomous
ego, freed of the rationalism and theoretical burden of “civilization” –
it in fact stands in marked contrast to the real ego, which is always
located in a given temporal, technological, cultural, traditional,
intellectual, and political environment. Indeed, the anarchist version
of the stripped-down, indeed vacuous, ego disturbingly resembles Homer’s
description of the Lotus Eater in the Odyssey, who, while eating the
lotus fruit, slips into the indolence of forgetfulness, atemporality,
and blissfulness that actually represents the very annihilation of
personality and selfhood.
Historically, this “autonomous ego” became the building block that
anarchists used to create various movement-type structures that often
gave it a highly social and revolutionary patina. Syndicalism, to cite
the most important case in point, became the architectural form in which
these blocks were most commonly arranged – not as a defining foundation
for an anarchist movement but as a highly unstable superstructure. When
workers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century became actively
involved in socialism, unionism, organization, democracy, and everyday
struggles for better living and working conditions, anarchism took on
the form of a radical trade unionism. This association was precarious at
best. Although both shared the same libertarian ambience, syndicalism
existed in sharp tension with the basic individualism that pure
anarchists prized, often above – and against – all organizational
institutions.
Both ideologies – Marxism and anarchism – emerged at times when
industrial societies were still in their infancy and nation-states were
still in the process of being formed. While Marx tried to conceptualize
small-scale, often well-educated Parisian craftsmen as “proletarians,”
Bakunin’s imagination was caught up with images of social bandits and
peasant jacqueries. Both men, to be sure, contributed valuable insights
to revolutionary theory, but they were revolutionaries who formulated
their ideas in a socially limited time. They could hardly be expected to
anticipate the problems that emerged during the hectic century that
followed their deaths. A major problem facing radical social thought and
action today is to determine what can be incorporated from their time
into a new, highly dynamic capitalist era that has long transcended the
old semi-feudal world of independent peasants and craftsmen; a new era,
also, that has largely discarded the textile– metal–steam-engine world
of the Industrial Revolution, with its burgeoning population of totally
dispossessed proletarian masses. Their place has been taken in great
part by technologies that can replace labor in nearly all spheres of
work and provide a degree of abundance in the means of life that the
most imaginative utopians of the nineteenth century could not have
anticipated.
But just as advances in an irrational society always taint the most
valuable of human achievements with evil, so too the Industrial
Revolution has produced new problems and potential crises that call for
new means to deal with them. These new means must go beyond mere protest
if they are not to suffer the fate of all movements such as the
Luddites, that could offer little more than a return to the past by
trying to destroy the technical innovations of their era. Any assessment
of the revolutionary tradition immediately raises the question of the
future of the Left in a social environment that is not only beset by new
problems but demands new solutions. What can incorporate the best of the
revolutionary tradition – Marxism and anarchism – in ways and forms that
speak of the kind of problems that face the present time? Indeed, in
view of the remarkable dynamism of the twentieth century and the
likelihood that changes in the new one will be even more sweeping, it
now behooves us to speculate about the analyses that will explain its
forthcoming development, the kind of crises it is likely to face, and
the institutions, methods, and movements that can hope to render society
rational and nourishing as an arena for human creativity. Above all, we
must think beyond the immediate present and its proximate past by trying
to anticipate problems that may lie at least a generation, if not
further, beyond a highly transitory present.
What remains very contemporary in Marx’s writings, even after a century
and a half, is the insight they bring to the nature of the capitalist
development. Marx fully explored the competitive forces that inhere in
the buyer–seller exchange, a relationship that, under capitalism,
compels the bourgeoisie to continually expand its enterprises and
operations. Ever since the capitalist economy became prevalent over a
sizable area of the world it has been guided by the competitive market
imperative of “grow or die,” leading to continual industrial expansion
and to the consolidation of competing concerns into ever-larger,
quasi-monopolistic complexes. Would the process of capital concentration
culminate in a worldwide economy under the tutelage of a few or of a
single corporate entity, thereby terminating the process of accumulation
and bringing capitalism to an end? Or would capital expansion (that is,
“globalization”) so level market differentials that the exchange of
commodities as a source of accumulation becomes impossible? These were
serious topics of discussion during the heyday of classical Marxism.
They remain conundrums today.
Today we can say for certain that existing quasi-monopolistic complexes
furiously accelerate the rate at which society undergoes economic and
social change. Not only do firms expand at an ever-increasing pace,
either annihilating or absorbing their competitors, but the commodities
they produce and the resources they devour affect every corner of the
planet. Globalization is not unique to modern capitalist industry and
finance – the bourgeoisie has been eating its way into isolated and
seemingly self-contained cultures for centuries and, either directly or
indirectly, transforming them. What is unusual about present-day
globalization is the scale on which it is occurring and the far-reaching
impact it is having on cultures that once seemed to be insulated from
modern commodity production and trade and from nation-state sovereignty.
Now the presumably “quaint” traits of precapitalist peoples have been
turned into marketable items to titillate Western tourists who pay
exorbitant prices to enjoy a presumably “primitive” item or experience.
Marx and his followers considered this process of expanding
industrialization and market relations to be a progressive feature of
the capitalist “stage” of history, and they expected that it would
eventually eliminate all preexisting territorial, cultural, national,
and ethnic ties and replace them with class solidarity, thereby removing
obstacles to the development of revolutionary internationalism.
Commodification, Marx famously emphasized, turns everything solid into
air. It once eliminated the economic exclusivity of guilds and other
economic barriers to innovation; and it continues to corrode art,
crafts, familial ties, and all the bonds of human solidarity – indeed,
all the honored traditions that nourished the human spirit.
Marx saw the homogenizing effects of globalization as destructive
insofar as they dissolved the meaningful relationships and sentiments
that knitted society together; but his formulation was not only a
critique. He also saw these effects as progressive insofar as they
cleared away precapitalist and particularistic detritus. Today, radicals
emphasize that the worldwide invasion of the commodity into society is
overwhelmingly destructive. Capitalism (not simply globalization and
corporatization) not only turns everything solid into air but replaces
earlier traditions with distinctly bourgeois attributes. Implicit in
Marx’s remarks was the belief that globalized capitalism would provide
the future with a clean slate on which to inscribe the outlines of a
rational society. But as capitalism writes its message of uniquely
bourgeois values, it creates potentially monstrous developments that may
well undermine social life itself. It supplants traditional ties of
solidarity and community with an all-pervasive greed, an appetite for
wealth, a system of moral accounting focused on “the bottom line,” and a
heartless disregard for the desperation of the poor, aged, and
physically disabled.
Not that greed and heartlessness were absent from capitalism in the
past. But in an earlier time, the bourgeoisie was relatively marginal
and vulnerable to the patronizing outlook of the landed nobility;
preindustrial values more or less held capitalists in check. Then the
market economy rendered increasingly prevalent an unbridled capitalist
spirit of self-aggrandizement and unfeeling exploitation. Naked
bourgeois greed and heartlessness, illuminated by the vigilance of great
writers such as Balzac and Dickens, produced a wave of revulsion that
swept over people who were exposed. In past epochs the rich were neither
admired nor turned into embodiments of virtue. The honored virtue of
most of the precapitalist world, rather, was not self-aggrandizement but
self-sacrifice, not accumulating but giving, however much these virtues
were honored in the breach.
But today capitalism has penetrated into all aspects of life; greed, an
inordinate appetite for wealth, an accounting mentality, and a
disdainful view of poverty and infirmity have become a moral pathology.
Under these circumstances bourgeois traits are the celebrated symbols of
the “beautiful people” and, more subtly, of yuppified baby boomers.
These values percolate into less fortunate strata of the population who,
depending upon their own resources, view the fortunate with envy, even
awe, and guiltily target themselves for their own lack of privilege and
status as “ne’er-do-wells.”
In this new embourgeoisement the dispossessed harbor no class
antagonisms toward the “rich and beautiful” (a unique juxtaposition) but
rather esteem them. At present, poor and middle-class people are less
likely to view the bourgeoisie with hatred than with servile admiration;
they increasingly see the ability to make money and accrue wealth not as
indicative of a predatory disposition and the absence of moral scruples,
as was the case a few generations ago, but as evidence of innate
abilities and intelligence. Newsstands and bookstores are filled with a
massive literature celebrating the lifestyles, careers, personal
affairs, and riches of the new wealthy, who are held up as models of
achievement and success. That these “celebrities” of postmodernity
bubble up from obscurity is an added asset: it suggests that the
admiring but debt-burdened reader can also “make it” in a new bourgeois
world. Any obscure candidate can “become a millionaire” – or a
multimillionaire – merely by winning in a television game show or a
lottery. The myriad millions who envy and admire the bourgeoisie no
longer see its members as part of a “class”; they are rather a
“meritocracy” who have become, as a result of luck and effort, winners
in the lottery of life. If Americans once widely believed that anyone
could become the president of the United States, the new belief holds
that anyone can become a millionaire or – who knows? – one of the ten
richest people in the world.
Capitalism, in turn, is increasingly assumed to be the natural state of
affairs toward which history has been converging for thousands of years.
Even as capitalism is achieving this splendor, we are witnessing a
degree of public ignorance, fatuity, and smugness unseen since the
inception of the modern world. Like fast food and quick sex, ideas and
experiences simply race through the human mind, and far from being
absorbed and used as building blocks for generalizations, they quickly
disappear to make room for still newer and faster-moving ideas and
experiences, of an ever more superficial or degraded character. Every
few years, it would seem, a new generation initiates ostensibly “new
causes” that were exhausted only a decade or two earlier, thereby
casting into ideological oblivion invaluable lessons and knowledge that
are indispensable for a radical social practice. Each new generation has
a concomitantly arrogant notion that history began only when it was
born; hence all experiences from the past, even the recent past, are to
be ignored. Thus the struggle against globalization, which was fought
for decades under the rubric of anti-imperialism, has been reinvented
and renamed.
The problem of lost definition and specificity, of everything being
turned into “air,” and the disastrous loss of the memory of experiences
and lessons vital to establishing a Left tradition, confronts any
endeavor to create a revolutionary movement in the future. Theories and
concepts lose their dimensions, their mass, their traditions, and their
relevance, as a result of which they are adopted and dropped with
juvenile flippancy. The chauvinistic notion of “identity,” which is the
byproduct of class and hierarchical society, ideologically corrodes the
concept of “class,” prioritizing a largely psychological distinction at
the expense of a socio-political one. “Identity” becomes a highly
personal problem with which individuals must wrestle psychologically and
culturally rather than a root social problem that must be understood by
and resolved through a radical social approach.
Indeed, the bourgeoisie can easily remedy such a problem by promoting
ethnically discriminated employees to upper-level managers and by
promoting female lieutenants in the military into majors or generals.
Hence the amazing willingness that new enterprises and the media exhibit
in selecting blacks and women for high spots in their operations or
media presentations. Baby-boomer capitalists such as Tom Peters, who
season their ideas of non-hierarchical practices in business
administration with dashingly anarchic traits, often regard race and
gender as archaisms. Colin Powell has shown that even with an
African-American as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the American
military can be as deadly as it needs to be, and Oprah Winfrey has
demonstrated that what Americans read or buy needs have no bearing on
the race or gender of a television purveyor of those commodities.
The middle and working classes no longer think of the present society as
structured around classes. Current opinion holds that the rich are
deserving and the poor are not, while an incalculable number of people
linger between the categories. A huge section of public opinion in the
Western world tends to regard oppression and exploitation as residual
abuses, not inherent features of a specific social order. The prevailing
society is neither rationally analyzed nor forcefully challenged; it is
prudently psychoanalyzed and politely coaxed, as though social problems
emerge from erratic individual behavior. Although strident protests
explode from time to time, a growing gentility is watering down the
severity of social disputes and antagonisms, even among people who
profess leftist views.
What is absent in this type of sporadic and eruptive opposition is an
understanding of the causal continuities that only serious and above all
rational explorations can reveal. In the so-called “Seattle rebellion”
in late November and early December 1999 against the World Trade
Organization, what was at issue was not the substitution of “fair trade”
for “free trade.” It was the question of the ways in modern society
produces the wealth of the world and distributes it. Although some
militant demonstrators attempted to invoke the “injustices” of
capitalism – actually, capitalism was not being peculiarly “unjust” any
more than lethal bacilli are being “unfair” when they produce illness
and death – few, if any, of the demonstrators appeared to understand the
logic of a market economy. It has been reported that during anti-WTO
demonstrations little literature was distributed that explained the
basic reason for denouncing the WTO and “preventing” its delegates from
doing their business.
Indeed, the demonstration in Seattle, like the one in Washington, DC,
that followed it several months later, however well-meant, created the
illusion that acts of mere disruption, which became increasingly staged,
can do more than moderate the “excesses” of globalization. The
Washington demonstration, in fact, was so negotiated in character that
the police allowed the demonstrators to walk across a chalked line as a
mere symbol of illegality and then to allow themselves to be escorted
into buses as arrestees. Police spokesmen pleasantly agreed that the
young demonstrators were “decent” and “socially concerned kids” who
meant well, and WTO delegates tolerantly acknowledged that the
demonstrators drew their attention to troubling economic and
environmental problems that needed correction. Undoubtedly, the
authorities expect these “socially concerned kids” to eventually grow up
and become good citizens.
The demonstrations appeared more like acts of catharsis than aroused
protest; demonstrators hugged each other lovingly and wore idiosyncratic
clothing, unwittingly turning themselves into cultural oddities. If
anything, they separated themselves from the general public rather than
related to it. Rather than meaningful protests, the demonstrations were
noteworthy mainly because protest of any kind is such a rarity today.
The limited number of participants seemed to lack an in-depth
understanding of what the WTO represented. Even to protest “capitalism”
is simply to voice an opposition to an abstract noun, which in itself
tells us nothing about capitalist social relations, their dynamic, their
transformation into destructive social forces, the prerequisites for
undoing them, and finally the alternatives that exist to replace them.
Few of the demonstrators appeared to know the answers to these
questions; thus they castigated corporations and multinationals, as
though these are not the unavoidable outcome of historic forces of
capitalist production. Would the dangers of globalization be removed
from the world if the corporations were scaled down in size? More
fundamentally, could smaller enterprises ever have been prevented from
developing into industrial, commercial, and financial giants that would
not differ from modern multinationals?
My point is less to advance criticisms than to question the extent to
which the Seattle and Washington demonstrators adequately understood the
problems they were dealing with. Indeed, what is a demonstration meant
to demonstrate? It must not only protest but also confront official
power with popular power, even in incipient form. Demonstrations are
mobilizations of sizable numbers of serious people who, in taking to the
streets, intend to let the authorities know that they earnestly oppose
certain actions by the powers-that-be. Reduced to juvenile antics, they
become self-deflating forms of entertainment. As such, they constitute
no challenge to the authorities; indeed, where idiosyncratic behavior
replaces the forcefulness of stern opposition, they merely show the
public that advocates of their view are mere eccentrics who need not be
taken seriously and whose cause is trivial. Without the gravitas that
commands respect – and, yes, the discipline that reveals serious
intentionality – demonstrations and other such manifestations are worse
than useless; they harm their cause by trivializing it.
A politics of mere protest, lacking programmatic content, a proposed
alternative, and a movement to give people direction and continuity,
consists of little more than events, each of which has a beginning and
an end and little more. The social order can live with an event or
series of events and even find this praiseworthy. Worse still, such a
politics lives or dies according to an agenda established by the social
order it opposes. Corporations proposed the WTO; they needed worldwide
participation in the Organization and, in their own way, generated the
very opposition that now denounces its lack of democracy and lack of
humaneness. They expected opposition, and only police amateurism in
Seattle let it get slightly out of hand. It ill-becomes such an
opposition to then plan to demonstrate before nominating conventions of
major political parties whose very existence many of the demonstrators
profess to oppose. Indeed, the demonstrators, however well-meaning,
legitimate the existence of the parties by calling upon them to alter
their policies on international trade, as though they even have a
justifiable place in a rational society.
A politics of protest is not a politics at all. It occurs within
parameters set by the prevailing social system and merely responds to
remediable ills, often mere symptoms, instead of challenging the social
order as such. The masked anarchists who join in these events by
smashing windows use the clamor of shattered glass to glamorize limited
street protests with the semblance of violence and little more.
I have not made these critical remarks about the state of the Left today
in order to carp against people, activities, and events, or from any
generational or sectarian disdain. On the contrary, my criticisms stem
from a deep sympathy for people who are sensitive to injustices and
particularly for those who are striving to remedy them. Better to do
something to end the silence of popular acquiescence than simply to
perpetuate the complacency generated by a consumer-oriented society.
Nor have I presented my criticisms of Marxism and anarchism – the main
players in the classical Left – in order to try to astound a new
generation of activists with the grandeur of revolutionary history that
they somehow must match. Again to the contrary, I have invoked the
classical Left of yesteryear not only to suggest what it has to teach us
but also to note its own limitations, as the product of a different era,
and one that, for better of worse, will never return. What the classical
Left has to teach us is that ideas must be systematic – coherent – if
they are to be productive and understandable to people who are seriously
committed to basic social change; indeed, a future Left must show that
the seemingly disparate problems of the present society are connected
with each other and that they stem from a common social pathology that
must be removed as a totality. Moreover, no attempts to change the
existing society will ever be basic unless we understand how its
problems are interconnected and how the solutions that can resolve them
can be educed from humanity’s potentialities for freedom, rationality,
and self-consciousness.
By coherence, I do not mean only a methodology or a system of thinking
that explores basics; rather that the very process of attempting to link
together the various social pathologies to common causes and to resolve
them in their totality is an ethical endeavor. To declare that humanity
has a potentiality for freedom, rationality, and self-consciousness –
and, significantly, that this potentiality is not being realized or
actualized today – leads inexorably to the demand that every society
justify its existence according to the extent to which it actualizes
these norms. Any endeavor to assess a society’s success in achieving
freedom, rationality, and self-consciousness makes an implicit judgment.
It raises the searing question of what a society “should be” within its
material and cultural limits. It constitutes the realizable ideal that
social development raises for all thinking people and that, up to now,
has kept alive movements for the fulfillment of freedom.
Without that ideal as a continual and activating presence, no lasting
movement for human liberation is possible – only sporadic protests that
themselves may mask the basic irrationality of an unfree society by
seeking to cosmetically remove its blemishes. By contrast, a constant
awareness that a given society’s irrationality is deep-seated, that its
serious pathologies are not isolated problems that can be cured
piecemeal but must be solved by sweeping changes in the often hidden
sources of crisis and suffering – that awareness alone is what can hold
a movement together, give it continuity, preserve its message and
organization beyond a given generation, and expand its ability to deal
with new issues and developments.
Too often ideas that are meant to yield a certain practice are instead
transported into the academy, as fare for “enriching” a curriculum and,
of course, generating jobs for the growing professoriat. Such has been
the unhappy fate of Marxism, which, once an embattled and creative body
of ideas, has now acquired academic respectability – to the extent that
it is even regarded as worthy of study.
At the same time the routine use of the word “activist” raises problems
that unintentionally can be regressive. Can there be action without
theory and insight into the nature of social ills and an understanding
of the measures needed to resolve them? Can the activist even act
meaningfully and effectively without drawing upon the rich body of
experiences and ideas that have grown up over the years and that can
show us the dangerous pitfalls that lie below the surface, or the many
strategies that have been tested by earlier generations?
In what likely directions is capitalist society developing in the coming
century, and what are the most basic problems it is raising for
humanity? Is there any special sector, class, or group in society to
which we must appeal if we are to hope to create a revolutionary
movement? What kind of movement and institutions must we create that
will play a leading role in social change? Do we need any well-organized
movement at all, or will our hoped-for changes occur spontaneously,
emerging out of demonstrations around specific issues or street
festivals or communitarian enterprises such as co-ops, alternative
enterprises, and the like? Or do we have to build political entities,
and if so, what kind? What is the relationship of a revolutionary
movement to these new political entities? And how should power be
situated and institutionalized in a rational society? Finally, what
ethical considerations should guide us in our efforts?
Marxism failed to form an adequate picture of the worker as a many-sided
human being and indeed fetishized him or her to the point of absurdity.
It did not normally see workers as more than economic entities, but
rather endowed them with semi-mystical properties as revolutionary
agents, possessed of secret powers to understand their interests and a
unique sensitivity to radical possibilities in the existing society. To
read Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leon Trotsky, the syndicalist
propagandists, and even run-of-the-mill old-time Social Democrats is to
sense that they held the socialist judgment of workers in awe and imbued
them with remarkable revolutionary powers. That workers could also
become fascists or reactionaries was inconceivable.
This mystification has not entirely been dispelled, but even so we must
ask: which part of society can play a leading role in radical change
today? The fact is that the leveling role of Western capitalism and the
increasing development of social struggles along ever vaguer lines has
opened up a vista much different from that which once hypnotized the
classical Left. The technological level of the Industrial Revolution was
highly labor intensive; the brutish exploitation of labor and the
simplification of the work process with its consequent destruction of
skills by a deadening division of labor made it possible for Marx and
other theorists to single out the proletariat as the principal victim of
capitalism and the principal engine of its demise.
Although many traditional factories are still with us, especially in the
Third World, in Europe and North America they are giving way to highly
skilled and differentiated systems of production. Many new strata can no
longer be regarded, except in the most elastic way, as “workers” in any
industrial sense. Such people are even becoming the majority of the
“working class,” while the industrial proletariat (contrary to Marx’s
expectations) is visibly becoming an ever-smaller minority of the
population. For the present, at least, these workers are well paid
(often receiving salaries rather than wages), consumer-oriented in
tastes, and far removed from a working-class outlook and a disposition
to hold leftist social views.
Capitalism, in effect, is creating the bases for a populist politics –
hopefully a radical and ultimately revolutionary one – that is focused
on the broadening and expanding of professional opportunities, the
quality of life, and a more pleasant environment. Economically, maturing
capitalism can properly be descriptively divided into strata of the
wealthy, the well-off, the comfortable, and the poor. Industrial wage
workers in the West have more in common with salaried technicians and
professionals than with underpaid unskilled workers in the service
sector of fast-food restaurants and retail sales and the like, let alone
with the nearly lumpenized poor. In the absence of economic crises,
social disquiet may focus on fears of crime, shortcomings in public
services and education, the decline of traditional values, and the like.
More momentously, this populist outlook fears environmental degradation,
the disappearance of open spaces, and the growing congestion of
once-human-scaled communities – indeed, of community life in all its
aspects.
For more than a half century, capitalism has managed not only to avoid a
chronic economic crisis of the kind Marx expected but also to control
crises that potentially had a highly explosive character. As a system,
capitalism is one of the most unstable economies in history and hence is
always unpredictable. But equally uncertain is the traditional radical
notion that it must slip with unfailing regularity into periodic crises
as well as chronic ones. The general population in Europe and the United
States has displayed a remarkable confidence in the operations of the
economy; more than 40 percent of US families have now invested in the
stock market and accept its huge swings without being swept up by
panics, such as afflicted financial markets in the past. A strictly
class-oriented politics based on industrial workers has receded, and the
Left now faces the imperative to create a populist politics that reaches
out to “the people” as they are today, in anticipation that they can now
more easily be radicalized by issues that concern their communities,
their civil liberties, their overall environment, and the integrity of
their supplies of food, air, and water, not simply by a focus on
economic exploitation and wage issues. The importance of economic issues
cannot be overstated, but especially in periods of relative well-being a
future Left will be successful only to the extent that it addresses the
public as a “people” rather than as a class, a population whose disquiet
has at least as much to do with freedoms, quality of life, and future
well-being as it does with economic crises and material insecurity.[39]
By the same token, a future Left can hope to exercise influence only if
it can mobilize people on issues that cut across the class lines. From
Marx’s day until the Depression and fascist decade of the 1930s, the
principal victims of capitalist exploitation appeared to be workers at
the point of production. The French Revolution, it was argued, allowed
the peasantry to gain greater control of the land, and the democratic
revolutions of the eighteenth century granted the lower middle classes a
major place in all spheres of French society. But they left one class
unsatisfied: the emerging industrial proletariat, which was subjected to
harsh working conditions, prevented from organizing, and suffered a
declining standard of living. Engels portrayed a working-class life
based on the English proletariat of 1844 at the height of the first
Industrial Revolution; Marx argued that the concentration of capital and
the displacement of workers by machines would create insufferable misery
in the factories of England and the continent. This anti-capitalist
vision was predicated on the belief that the proletariat’s material
conditions of life would worsen steadily while its numbers would
increase to a point where it became the majority of the population.
By the late nineteenth century, however, these predictions were falling
short, and by 1950 they were wholly discredited. What with the
sophistication of machinery, the appearance of electronics, the
spectacular increase in motor vehicle production, the rise of the
chemical industry, and the like, the proportion of industrial workers to
the population at large was diminishing, not rising. Moreover, due in
large part to the struggles of legal trade unions to improve the living
conditions of the proletariat in particular, the conflict between
capital and labor was being significantly muted. Marxism, then, was
clearly boxed into the class relations of a historically limited period,
the era of the first Industrial Revolution.
Far from becoming proletarianized or declining to a minority of the
population, as Marx had predicted, the middle class retained the
psychology and consciousness of people who could hope for an ever-higher
status. Propertyless as it may have been in reality and often cowed by
the real bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie was (and remains to a great
extent) convinced that it has a privileged place in the market economy
and entertains expectations that it can climb upward on the social
ladder of the capitalist system. If anything, the working class has made
sufficient gains that it expects its children, equipped with a better
education than their parents, to step upward in life. Small property
owners are invested by the millions in financial markets. Workers now
describe themselves as “middle class” or, with a nuance that heightens
the dignity of labor, as “working families.” Combative and exclusive
expressions like “workers,” “toilers,” and “laborers” that once
implicitly hinted at the existence of class struggle are now used with
increasing rarity or not at all.
The sharp lines that once distinguished a plant’s accounting office from
the proletariat are being blurred ideologically and eating away at
working-class consciousness. Notwithstanding Marx’s theory of history as
an account of class struggles, with its many truths, a class is no more
authentic than the consciousness with which it views reality. No worker
is truly a class being, however much he is exploited, when he views
social life in bourgeois terms. The bourgeoisie learned this fact quite
early when it exploited ethnic, religious, gender, and craft divisions
within the proletariat as a whole. Hence the blue-collar or white-collar
worker is a class being according to how she thinks of herself, relates
to her boss, and holds expectations in life. A worker without a
combative class consciousness is no more an exploited proletarian, for
all practical purposes, than a policeman is an ordinary worker. Radical
intellectuals’ mystification of the worker has its origins in their
imputation that “consciousness follows being,” that is, when the worker
recognizes that he is exploited and that capitalism is his social enemy.
What does this mean for a future Left? Unless capitalism unexpectedly
collapses into a major chronic crisis (in which case workers may well
turn to the fascism of a Le Pen in France or the reactionism of a
Buchanan in the US), then the Left must focus on issues that are
interclass in nature, addressing the middle as well as the working
class. By the very logic of its “grow or die” imperative, capitalism may
well be producing ecological crises that gravely imperil the integrity
of life on this planet. The outputs of factories and the raw material
industries, the destructive agricultural practices, and the consumption
patterns in privileged parts of the world are simplifying the highly
complex ecological ties that emerged over millions of years of natural
evolution, reducing highly fertile areas to concrete landscapes, turning
usable water into an increasingly degraded resource, surrounding the
planet with a carbon dioxide layer that threatens to radically change
the climate, and opening dangerous holes in the ozone layer. Rivers,
lakes, and oceans are becoming garbage dumps for poisonous and
life-inhibiting wastes. Almost every tangible component of daily life,
from the food on the dinner table to substances used in the workplace,
is becoming polluted with known or potentially dangerous toxicants.
Cities are growing into vast, polluted, sprawling environments whose
populations are larger than those of many nation-states only a few
decades ago. The equatorial belt of tropical forests that surround the
planet’s land areas and large parts of the temperate zones are being
deforested and denuded of their complex life-forms.
Yet for capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be for it
to commit social suicide. By definition capitalism is a competitive
economy that cannot cease to expand. The problems it may be creating for
humanity as a whole – problems that transcend class differences – can
easily become the bases for a vast critique if current environmentalists
are willing to raise their concerns to the level of a radical social
analysis and organize not simply around saving a select species or
around the vices of automobile manufacturers but around replacing the
existing irrational economy by a rational one. The fact that the nuclear
industry still exists must be seen not simply as an abuse or a matter of
stupidity, for example, but as an integral part of a greater whole: the
need for an industry in a competitive economy to grow and out-compete
its rivals. Similarly, the successes of the chemical industry in
promoting the use of toxicants in agriculture, and the growing output of
the automobile and petroleum industries – all must be seen as the
results of the inner workings of a deeply entrenched system. Not only
workers but the public must be educated in the reality that our emerging
ecological problems stem from our irrational society.
Issues such as gender discrimination, racism, and national chauvinism
must be recast not only as cultural and social regressions but as
evidence of the ills produced by hierarchy. A growing public awareness
must be fostered that oppression includes not only exploitation but also
domination, and that it is based not only on economic causes but on
cultural particularisms that divide people according to sexual, ethnic,
and similar traits. Where these issues come to the foreground in the
form of patent abuses, then a conscious revolutionary movement must
expand their implications to show that society as it exists is basically
irrational and dangerous.
Such a revolutionary movement needs a distinctive body of tactics
designed to expand the scope of any issue, however reformist it may seem
at first glance, steadily radicalizing it and giving it a potentially
revolutionary thrust. It should make no agreement with liberals and the
bourgeoisie on retaining the existing order. If the solution to a
specific environmental problem seems fairly pragmatic, then the movement
must regard it as a step for widening a partly open door until it can
show that the entire ecological problem is systemic and expose it as
such to public view. Thus a revolutionary movement should insist not
only on blocking the construction of a nuclear plant but on shutting
down all nuclear plants and replacing them with alternative energy
sources that enhance the environment. It should regard no limited gains
as conclusive but rather must clearly link a given demand to the need
for basic social change. The same strategy applies to the use of
chemicals in agriculture, current agricultural methods of growing food,
the manufacture of harmful means of transportation, the manufacture of
dangerous household products – indeed, every item whose production and
use debases the environment and degrades human values.[40]
I have examined elsewhere the reasons why power cannot be ignored – a
problem that beleaguered the Spanish anarchists. But can be we conceive
of a popular movement gaining power without an agency that can provide
it with guidance?
A revolutionary Left that seeks to advance from protest demonstrations
to revolutionary demonstrations must resolutely confront the problem of
organization. I speak here not of ad hoc planning groups but rather of
the creation and maintenance of an organization that is enduring,
structured, and broadly programmatic. Such an organization constitutes a
definable entity and must be structured around lasting and formal
institutions to make it operational; it must contain a responsible
membership that firmly and knowledgeably adheres to its ideals; and it
must advance a sweeping program for social change that can be translated
into everyday practice. Although such an organization may join a
coalition (or united front, as the traditional Left called it), it must
not disappear into such a coalition or surrender its independence, let
alone its identity. It must retain its own name at all times and be
guided by its own statutes. The organization’s program must be the
product of a reasoned analysis of the fundamental problems that face
society, their historical sources and theoretical fundaments, and the
clearly visible goals that follow from the potentialities and realities
for social change.
One of the greatest problems that revolutionaries in the past faced
(from the English revolutionaries in the seventeenth century to the
Spanish in the twentieth) was their failure to create a resolute,
well-structured, and fully informed organization with which to counter
their reactionary opponents. Few uprisings expand beyond the limits of a
riot without the guidance of a knowledgeable leadership. The myth of the
purely spontaneous revolution can be dispatched by a careful study of
past uprisings (as I have attempted in my own work on The Third
Revolution). Even in self-consciously libertarian organizations,
leadership always existed, even in the form of “influential militants,”
spirited men and women who constituted the nuclei around which crowds
transformed street protests into outright insurrections. In his famous
etching “The Revolt,” Daumier intuitively focuses on a single
individual, amid other rebels, who raises the cry that brings the masses
into motion. Even in seemingly “spontaneous insurrections,” advanced
militants, scattered throughout rebellious crowds, spurred the uncertain
masses on to further action. Contrary to anarchistic myths, none of the
soviets, councils, and committees that arose in Russia in 1917, Germany
in 1918, and Spain in 1936 were formed simply of their own accord.
Invariably specific militants (a euphemism for leaders) took the
initiative in forming them and in guiding inexperienced masses toward
the adoption of a radical course of action.
Absorbed as they were with making concrete and immediate demands, few of
these councils and committees had a broad overview of the social
possibilities opened by the insurrections they initiated or a clear
understanding of the enemies they had temporarily defeated. By contrast,
the bourgeoisie and its statesmen knew only too well how to organize
themselves, thanks to their considerable experience as entrepreneurs,
political leaders, and military commanders. But the workers too often
lacked the knowledge and experience so vital to developing an overview.
It remains a tragic irony that insurrections that were not defeated
outright by superior military forces often froze into immobility once
they took power from their class enemies and rarely took the
organizational steps necessary to retain their power. Without a
theoretically trained and militant organization that had developed a
broad social vision of its tasks and could offer workers practical
programs for completing the revolution that they had initiated,
revolutions quickly fell apart for lack of further action. Their
supporters, zealous at the outset and for a brief period afterward, soon
floundered, became demoralized for want of a thoroughgoing program, lost
their élan, and then were crushed physically. Nowhere was this
destructive process more apparent than in the German Revolution of
1918–19 and, to a great degree, in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37,
mainly because the mass anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT, surrendered
the power it had received from the Catalan workers in July 1936 to the
bourgeoisie.
A future Left must carefully study these tragic experiences and
determine how to resolve the problems of organization and power. Such an
organization cannot be a conventional party, and find a comfortable
place in a parliamentary state, without losing its revolutionary élan.
The Bolshevik party, structured as a top-down organization that
fetishized centralization and internal party hierarchy, exemplifies the
way a party can merely replicate a state and become a bureaucratic and
authoritarian entity.
If Marxists, when they found themselves in revolutionary situations,
could not conceive of any politics that abolished the state, then the
anarchists, and tragically the syndicalists who were deeply influenced
by them intellectually, were so fixated on avoiding the state that they
destroyed vital, self-governing revolutionary institutions. This not the
place to discuss Spanish anarchism and its rather confused
anarcho-syndicalist “farrago,” as Chris Ealham has so aptly called
it,[41] but the CNT-FAI leadership seems to have lacked the slightest
idea how to achieve a libertarian communist revolution: when power was
actually thrust into their trembling hands, it simply did not know what
to with it.
Every revolution, indeed, even every attempt to achieve basic social
change, will always meet with resistance from the elites in power. Every
effort to defend a revolution will require the amassing of power –
physical as well as institutional and administrative – which is to say,
the creation of a government. Anarchists may call for the abolition of
the state, but coercion of some kind will be necessary to prevent the
bourgeois state from returning in full force with unbridled terror. For
a libertarian organization to eschew, out of misplaced fear of creating
a “state,” the taking of power when it can do so with the support of the
revolutionary masses is confusion at best and a total failure of nerve
at worst. Perhaps the CNT-FAI actually lived in awe of the very state
apparatus whose existence it was committed to abolish. Better that such
a movement gets out of the way than remain cloaked in a seemingly
“radical” camouflage that makes promises to the masses that it cannot
honor.
The history of the libertarian Left does suggest, however, a form of
organization that is consistent with attempts to create a left
libertarian society. In a confederation, seeming higher bodies play the
role of administering policy decisions that are made at the base of the
organization. In the end, nearly all policy decisions, especially basic
ones, must be made at the base of the organization by its branches or
sections. Decisions made at the base move to the top and then back again
in modified form to the base until, by majority votes at the base, they
become policies whose implementation is often undertaken by special or
standing committees.
No organizational model, however, should be fetishized to the point
where it flatly contradicts the imperatives of real life. Where events
require a measure of centralization, coordination at a confederal level
may have to be tightened to implement a policy or tactic – to the extent
that it is necessary and only for as long as it is necessary. A
confederation can allow necessary centralization on a temporary basis,
without yielding to a permanent centralized organization, only if its
membership is conscious and thoroughly informed, theoretically, to guard
against the abuses of centralization and only if the organization has
structures in place to recall leaders who seem to be abusing their
powers. Otherwise we have no certainty that any libertarian practices
will be honored. I have seen people who for decades were committed to
libertarian practices and principles throw their ideals to the wind, and
even drift into a coarse nationalism, when events appealed more to their
emotions than to their minds. A libertarian organization must have in
place precautions such as the right to recall by the organization’s
membership and the right to demand a full accounting of a confederal
body’s practices, but the fact remains that there is no substitute for
knowledge and consciousness. Certainly no dogmatic formula can provide
an adequate method for defying the imperatives of real life,
particularly in times of armed conflict.
A libertarian communist society would have to make decisions on how
resources are to be acquired, produced, allocated, and distributed. Such
a society must seek to prevent the restoration of capitalism and of old
or new systems of privilege, which may involve civil war and military
regimentation. It must try to achieve a degree of administrative
coordination and regulation on a huge scale among communities, and
decision-making must be forceful if social life of any kind is not to
collapse completely.
These constraints are necessary to provide the greatest degree of
freedom possible, but they will not be imposed simply by “good will,”
“mutual aid,” “solidarity,” or even “custom,” and any notion that they
will rests more on a prayer than on human experience. Material want will
quickly erode any “good will” and “solidarity” that a successful, indeed
forceful revolution with its fighting and expropriations creates among
the libertarian victors; hence the need for post-scarcity as a
precondition for a communalist society. In the Spanish Revolution of
1936– 37 many of the new society’s collectives – all flying the
black-and-red flag of anarcho-syndicalism – entered into blatant
competition with one another for raw materials, technicians, and even
markets and profits. The result was that they had to be “socialized” by
the CNT – that is, the trade union had to exert control to equalize the
distribution of goods and the availability of costly machinery, and
oblige “rich” collectives to share their wealth with poor ones. (Later
this authority was taken over by the Madrid nation-state for reasons of
its own.) Nor were all peasants eager to join collectives when they were
also afforded the opportunity to function as small property owners.
Still others left the collectives in sizable numbers when they found
themselves free to do so without fear. In other words, to establish a
viable communalist society, more than personal and moral commitments
will be needed – least of all, those extremely precarious variables that
are based on “human nature” and “instincts for mutual aid.”
The problem of achieving libertarian communism is one of the most
untheorized aspects of the libertarian repertoire. The communist maxim
“From each according to ability, to each according to need” presupposes
a sufficiency of goods and hence complex technological development. That
achievement involves a close agreement with Marx’s emphasis that
advances in the instruments of production are a precondition for
communism. The success of libertarian communism, then, depends
profoundly on the growth of the productive forces over many centuries
and on the increasing availability of the means of life.
History is filled with countless examples where natural scarcity or
limited resources obliged peoples to turn popular governments into
kingly states, captives into slaves, women into subjugated drudges, free
peasants into serfs, and the like. No such development lacks excesses,
and if kindly rulers did not turn into brutal despots, it would have
been miraculous. That we can sit in judgment on these societies, their
states, and their oppressive methods is evidence that progress has
occurred and, equally importantly, that our circumstances differ
profoundly from theirs. Where famine was once a normal feature of life,
we today are shocked when no effort is made to feed the starving. But we
are shocked only because we have already developed the means to produce
a sufficiency, disallowing indifference to scarcity. In short, the
circumstances have changed profoundly, however unjust the distribution
of the means of life may continue to be. Indeed, that we can even say
that the distribution is unjust is a verdict that only a society that
can eliminate material scarcity – and create, potentially, a
post-scarcity society – can make.
Thus our expansive visions of freedom, today, have their preconditions:
minimally, technological advancement. Only generations that have not
experienced the Great Depression can ignore the preconditional bases for
our more generous ideologies. The classical Left – particularly thinkers
such as Marx – gave us much systematic thinking on history and
contemporary social affairs. But will we elect to follow a truly
libertarian use of the resources at our command and create a society
that is democratic, communistic, and communalistic, based on popular
assemblies, confederations, and sweeping civil liberties? Or will we
follow a course that is increasingly statist, centralized, and
authoritarian? Here another “history” or dialectic comes into play – the
great traditions of freedom that were elaborated over time by unknown
revolutionaries and by libertarian thinkers such as a Bakunin,
Kropotkin, and Malatesta. We are thus faced with two legacies that have
unfolded in tandem with each other: a material one and an ideological
one.
Let us be frank and acknowledge that these legacies are not well-known
or easily understood. But from them we can weave an ethical approach to
social change that can give our endeavors definition and a possibility
of success. For one thing, we can declare that “what should be,”
humanity’s potentialities for freedom, rationality, and
self-consciousness, is to be actualized and guide our social lives. We
can affirm “what should be” on the basis of decidedly real material
possibilities and realizable ideological ones. Knowledge of “what should
be” if reason is to guide our behavior becomes the force driving us to
make social change and to produce a rational society. With our material
preconditions in place and with reason to guide us to the actualization
of our potentialities, notably a rational society, we can begin to
formulate the concrete steps that a future Left will be obliged to take
to achieve its ends. The material preconditions are demonstrably at
hand, and reason, fortified by a knowledge of past endeavors to produce
a relatively rational society, provides the means to formulate the
measures and the means, step by step, to produce a new Left that is
relevant for the foreseeable future.
Far from eschewing reason and theory, a future Left that is meaningful
must be solidly grounded in theory if it is to have any power to
understand the present in relationship to the past, and the future in
relationship to the present. A lack of philosophical equipment to
interpret events, past and present, will render its theoretical insights
fragmentary and bereft of contextuality and continuity. Nor will it be
able two show how specific events relate to a larger whole and link them
together in a broad perspective. It was this admirable intention, I
should note, that induced Marx to give his ideas a systematic and
unified form, not any personal disposition on his part for
“totalitarianism.” The world in which he lived had to be shown that
capital accumulation and the bourgeoisie’s unrelenting concentration of
industrial resources were not products of greed but vital necessities
for enterprises in a sharply competitive economy.
One can project an alternative to the present society only by advancing
rational alternatives to the existing order of things – alternatives
that are objectively and logically based on humanity’s potentialities
for freedom and innovation. In this respect, the ability of human beings
to project themselves beyond their given circumstances, to rationally
recreate their world and their social relations, and to infuse
innovation with ethical judgments, becomes the basis for actualizing a
rational society.
This “what should be,” as educed by reason, stands on a higher plane of
truthfulness and wholeness than does the existential and pragmatic “what
is.” Figuratively speaking, the contrast between the “what should be”
and the “what is,” as elaborated and challenged by mind as well as by
experience, lies at the heart of dialectic. Indeed, the “what should
be,” by sitting in judgment on the validity of the given, joins
dialectical development in the biosphere with dialectical development in
the social sphere. It provides the basis for determining whether a
society is rational and to what degree it has rational content. Absent
such a criterion, we have no basis for social ethics apart from the
egocentric, adventitious, anarchic, and highly subjective statement “I
choose!” A social ethics cannot remain suspended in the air without an
objective foundation, a comprehensive evolution from the primitive to
the increasingly sophisticated, and a coherent content that supports its
development.
Moreover, without an objective potentiality (that is, the implicit
reality that lends itself to rational eduction, in contrast to mere
daydreaming) that sits in “judgment” of existential reality as
distinguished from a rationally conceived reality, we have no way to
derive an ethics that goes beyond mere personal taste. What is to guide
us in understanding the nature of freedom? Why is freedom superior to
mere custom or habit? Why is a free society desirable and an enslaved
one not, apart from taste and opinion? No social ethics is even
possible, let alone desirable, without a processual conception of
behavior, from its primal roots in the realm of potentiality at the
inception of a human evolution, through that evolution itself, to the
level of the rational and discursive. Without criteria supplied by the
dialectically derived “ought,” the foundations for a revolutionary
movement dissolve into an anarchic vacuum of personal choice, the
muddled notion that “what is good for me constitutes the good and the
true” – and that is that!
As much as we are obliged to deal with the “what is” – with the
existential facts of life, including capitalism – it is the
dialectically derived “true,” as Hegel might put it, that must always
remain our guide, precisely because it defines a rational society.
Abandon the rational, and we are reduced to the level of mere animality
from which the course of history and the great struggles of humanity for
emancipation have tended to free us. It is to break faith with History,
conceived as a rational development toward freedom and innovation, and
to diminish the defining standards of our humanity. If we often seem
adrift, it is not for lack of a compass and a map by which to guide
ourselves toward the actualization of our uniquely human and social
potentialities.
Which leads us to another premise for acquiring social truth: the
importance of dialectical thinking as our compass. This logic
constitutes both the method and the substance of an eductive process of
reasoning and unfolding. Eduction is the procedure that immanently
elicits the implicit traits that lend themselves to rational
actualization, namely freedom and innovation. A deep ecologist once
challenged me by asking why freedom should be more desirable than
unfreedom. I reply that freedom, as it develops objectively through
various phases of the ascent of life, from mere choice as a form of
self-maintenance to the recreation of the environment by intellection
and innovation, can make for a world that is more habitable, humane, and
creative than anything achieved by the interplay of natural forces.
Indeed, to rephrase a famous axiom of Hegel’s, a point can be reached in
a free society where what is not free is not real (or actual).
Indeed, a task of dialectical thinking is to separate the rational from
the arbitrary, external, and adventitious in which it unfolds, an
endeavor that demands considerable intellectual courage as well as
insight. Thus the conquests of Alexander the Great dovetail with the
rational movement of History, insofar as Alexander unified a decomposing
world made up of rotting city-states and parasitic monarchies and
transmitted Hellenic thought to it. But the explosion of Mongol horsemen
from the steppes of central Asia contributed no more to the rational
course of events than did, say, a decline in rainfall over North Africa
that turned a vast forested area into a grim formidable desert.
Moreover, to speak of a Mongol invasion as evidence of a “potentiality
for evil” is to divest the rich philosophical term potentiality of its
creative content. Much better to use here the ideologically neutral term
capacity, which can be applied anywhere for any phenomenon – and to no
intelligible purpose whatever.
Remote as it may seem to some, dialectical thinking is in my view
indispensable for creating the map and formulating the agenda for a new
Left. The actualization of humanity’s potentiality for a rational
society – the “what should be” that is achieved by human development –
occurs in the fully democratic municipality, the municipality based on a
face-to-face democratic assembly composed of free citizens, for whom the
word politics means direct popular control over the community’s public
affairs by means of democratic institutions. Such a system of control
should occur within the framework of a duly constituted system of laws,
rationally derived by discourse, experience, historical knowledge, and
judgment. The free municipality, in effect, is not only a sphere for
deploying political tactics but a product of reason. Here means and ends
are in perfect congruence, without the troubling “transitions” that once
gave us a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that soon turned into a
dictatorship of the party.
Furthermore, the libertarian municipality, like any social artifact, is
constituted. It is to be consciously created by the exercise of reason,
not by arbitrary “choices” that lack objective ethical criteria and
therefore may easily yield oppressive institutions and chaotic
communities. The municipality’s constitution and laws should define the
duties as well as the rights of the citizen – that is, they should
explicitly clarify the realm of necessity as well as the realm of
freedom. The life of the municipality is determined by laws, not
arbitrarily “by men.” Law as such is not necessarily oppressive: indeed,
for thousands of years the oppressed demanded laws, as nomos, to prevent
arbitrary rule and the “tyranny of structurelessness.” In the free
municipality, law must always be rationally, discursively, and openly
derived and subject to careful consideration. At the same time we must
continually be aware of regulations and definitions that have harnessed
oppressed humanity to their oppressors.
As Rousseau saw, the municipality is not merely an agglomeration of
buildings but of free citizens. Combined with reason, order can yield
coherent institutions. Lacking order and reason, we are left with a
system of arbitrary rule, with controls that are not accountable or
answerable to the people – in short, with tyranny. What constitutes a
state is not the existence of institutions but rather the existence of
professional institutions, set apart from the people, that are designed
to dominate them for the express purpose of securing their oppression in
one form or another.
A revolutionary politics does not challenge the existence of
institutions as such but rather assesses whether a given institution is
emancipatory and rational or oppressive and irrational. The growing
proclivity, in oppositional movements, to transgress institutions and
laws merely because they are institutions and laws is in fact
reactionary and, in any case, serves to divert public attention away
from the need to create or transform institutions into democratic,
popular, and rational entities. A “politics” of disorder or “creative
chaos,” or a naive practice of “taking over the streets” (usually little
more than a street festival), regresses participants to the behavior of
a juvenile herd; by replacing the rational with the “primal” or
“playful,” it abandons the Enlightenment’s commitment to the civilized,
the cultivated, and the knowledgeable. Joyful as revolutions may
sometimes also be, they are primarily earnestly serious and even bloody
– and if they are not systematic and not astutely led, they will
invariably end in counter-revolution and terror. The Communards of 1871
may have been deliriously drunk when they “stormed the heavens” (as Marx
put it), but when they sobered up, they found that the walls surrounding
Paris had been breached by the counter-revolutionary Versaillais. After
a week of fighting, their resistance collapsed, and the Versaillais shot
them arbitrarily and in batches by the thousands. A politics that lacks
sufficient seriousness in its core behavior may make for wonderful
Anarchy but is disastrous revolutionism.
What specific political conclusions do these observations yield? What
political agenda do they support?
First, the “what should be” should preside over every tenet that makes
up a future political agenda and movement. As important as a politics of
protest may be, it is no substitute for a politics of social innovation.
Today Marxists and anarchists alike tend to behave defensively, merely
reacting to the existing social order and to the problems it creates.
Capitalism thus orchestrates the behavior of its intuitive opponents.
Moreover it has learned to mute opposition by shrewdly making partial
concessions to protesters. Thus when an anti-nuclear movement reaches
major proportions, one country may decide to limit the construction of
new reactors – but they multiply in other countries where no
anti-nuclear movement is threatening. Similarly, bioengineered foods may
be curbed in some places because of public fears about their effects,
but bioengineering expands exponentially in other places and
disciplines; or the industry may agree to take prudent self-limiting
measures rather than yield to complete public control.
The municipality, as we have seen, is the authentic terrain for the
actualization of humanity’s social potentialities to be free and
innovative. Still, left to itself, even the most emancipated
municipality may become parochial, insular, and narrow. Confederalism
remains at once the operational means of rounding out the deficits that
any municipality is likely to face when it introduces a libertarian
communist economy. Few, if any, municipalities are capable of meeting
their needs on their own. An attempt to achieve economic autarchy – and
the concomitant cultural parochialism that it so often yields in less
economically developed societies – would be socially undesirable. Nor
does the mere exchange of surplus products remove the commodity
relationship; the sharing of goods according to a truly libertarian view
is far different from an exchange of goods, which closely resembles
market exchanges. By what standard would the “value” of surplus
commodities be determined – by their congealed labor? The incipient
bases for a capitalist economy remained unrecognized even in anarchist
Catalonia, among those who boasted of their communist convictions.
Still another distinction that must be drawn is that between
policy-making decisions and strictly administrative ones. Just as the
problems of distribution must not be permitted to drag a community into
capitalist mores and market practices, administrators must not be
allowed to make policy decisions, which properly belong to the popular
assemblies. Such practices must be made, quite simply, illegal – that
is, the community must establish regulations, with punitive features,
forbidding committees and agencies to exercise rights that properly
belong to the assembled community. As insensitive as such measures may
seem to delicate libertarian sensibilities, they are justified by a
history in which hard-won rights were slowly eroded by elites who sought
privileges for themselves at the expense of the many. Post-scarcity in
the availability of the means of life may serve to render any pursuit of
economic privilege a laughable anachronism. But, as hierarchical society
has shown, something more than economic privileges, such as the
enhancement of status and power, may be involved.
Human beings actualize their potentialities not only in the free
municipality but in one that is rationally and discursively constituted
and institutionalized in free popular assemblies. Whatever politics
abets this development is historically progressive; any self-professed
politics that diminishes this development is reactionary and reinforces
the existing social order. Mere expressions of formless “community” that
devolve into “street festivals,” particularly when they become
substitutes for a libertarian municipalist politics (or, more
disturbingly, a distortion of them), feed the overall juvenilization
that capitalism promotes through its impetus to dumb down society on a
massive scale.
During the interwar years, when proactive forces for revolutionary
change seemed to threaten the very existences of the social order, the
classical Left was focused on a distinct set of issues: the need for a
planned economy, the problems of a chronic economic crisis, the
imminence of a worldwide war, the advance of fascism, and the
challenging examples provided by the Russian Revolution. Today,
contemporary leftists are more focused on major ecological dislocations,
corporate gigantism, the influence of technology on daily life, and the
impact of the mass media. The classical Left looked at deep-seated
crises and the feasibility of revolutionary approaches to create social
change; the contemporary Left is more attentive to a different set of
abuses.
The issues dominant today are characteristic of a seemingly settled and
basically secure society that feels it can contain demands for change
within its orbit. The ills that currently exist, however troubling, seem
correctable without challenging the premises of the existing society.
Continental Europe especially, where cynicism has taken deep root in an
“end of history” mentality and where an unending repetition of the
status quo is assumed as the only future of humanity, sees the United
States as emblematic of the unshakable overall stability of the existing
order. America, in turn, has become almost gluttonously consumerist;
capitalist accumulation has brought with it a form of public
accumulation in which a corps of buyers with an unending number of
insatiable needs purchases an infinity of new products. Indeed, one of
the greatest problems facing American industry and commerce is how to
create new products to titillate public taste, even it means dredging up
old, long-discarded forms of entertainment and products and adding on
the vulgar glitz of the present age.
The capitalism under which we live today is far removed from the
capitalism that Marx knew and that revolutionaries of all kinds tried to
overthrow in the first half of the twentieth century. It has, indeed,
developed in great part along the lines Marx suggested in his closing
chapters of the first volume of Capital: as an economy whose very law of
life is accumulation, concentration, and expansion. When it can no
longer develop along these lines, it will cease to be capitalism. This
follows from the very logic of commodity exchange, with its expression
in competition and technological innovation.
Marxist productivism and anarchist individualism have both led to blind
alleys, albeit widely divergent ones. Where Marxism tends to
over-organize people into parties, unions, and proletarian “armies”
guided by elitist leaders, anarchism eschews organization and leaders as
“vanguards” and celebrates revolutionism as an instinctive impulse
unguided by reason or theory. Where Marxism celebrates technological
advances, without placing them in a rational, ethical, and ecological
context, anarchism deprecates sophisticated technics as the demonic
parent of the “technocratic man” who is lured to perdition by reason and
civilization. Technophilia has been pitted against technophobia;
analytical reason against raw instinct; and a synthetic civilization
against a presumably primeval nature.
The future of the Left, in the last analysis, depends upon its ability
to accept what is valid in both Marxism and anarchism for the present
time – and for the future that is coming into view. In an era of
permanent technological revolution, the validity of a theory and a
movement will depend profoundly on how clearly it can see what lies just
ahead. Radically new technologies, still difficult to imagine, will
undoubtedly be introduced that will have a transformative effect upon
the entire world. New power alignments may arise, that may well produce
a degree of social disequilibrium that has not been seen for decades.
New weapons of unspeakable homicidal and ecocidal effects may emerge.
The ecological crisis may continue.
But no greater damage could afflict human consciousness than the loss of
the Enlightenment program: the advance of reason, knowledge, science,
ethics, and even technics, which must be modulated to find a progressive
place in a free and humane society. Without the attainments of the
Enlightenment, no libertarian revolutionary consciousness is possible.
In assessing the revolutionary tradition, a reasoned Left has to shake
off dead traditions that, as Marx warned, weigh on the heads of the
living, and to commit itself to create to a rational society and a
rounded civilization. A Marxism that retains a meaningless focus on
proletarian hegemony, and an anarchism that has never stirred the “soil”
beneath the “snow” of reason, civilization, and technics, may well serve
to make irrelevant the components of past revolutionary ideologies that
are still vital, components whose lasting achievements our time greatly
needs.
There is an urgent need for a new radical approach to adequately address
the new economic, ecological, technological, and cultural challenges of
contemporary society; it must be one of theory and action, one that will
draw on features from classical Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, yet
go beyond their historical and theoretical limitations.
Conceived as they all were in the socially tumultuous era of industrial
revolution, the ideologies of communism, socialism, and the more social
versions of anarchism responded with a reasonable degree of adequacy to
the challenges of the oppressive and exploitative circumstances and
contexts in which they took form. In Marx’s hands, communism provided a
philosophy, a theory of history, and a political strategy centered on a
revolutionary class agent – the industrial proletariat – the coherence
of which was unequaled by any other body of social theory and practice
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Marxism’s
historical adequacy as a revolutionary ideology depended overwhelmingly
on the social and economic conditions of the Industrial Revolution as
they existed between 1848 and 1871. The degradation of the factory
proletariat and the oppressions inflicted by the industrial bourgeoisie
led to a furious class war. A remarkable confluence of circumstances –
particularly the outbreak in 1914 of the worst war that humanity had
ever known and the instability of quasi-feudal governments in most of
continental Europe – allowed Lenin to use (and misuse) Marxism to take
power in a vast, economically backward empire. The first “proletarian
state” to hold power in history went on to produce a tyrannical state
system that lasted for decades and tragically smothered socialism under
a dark totalitarian regime.
Once World War One opened the revolutionary interwar period, however,
socialism qua social democracy, despite its professed radical goals,
responded by retreating to the liberal credo it had always held close to
its heart, finally abandoning all its rhetorical pretensions as a
radical movement for social change. In all fairness, however, the
conventional social democratic parties constituted more of an authentic
working-class movement than most of their competitors on the Left. Apart
from rare – and remarkable – occasions brought about by unusual
constellations of events, the proletariat proved not to be the fervent
revolutionary agent that Marx, Engels, and the syndicalist theorists had
believed it was. While its left-wing devotees celebrated the working
class fervently for its alleged susceptibility to revolutionary ideas,
workers in reality proved to be as closely wedded to bourgeois society
as were the middle classes with which Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists
contrasted them. With few exceptions the proletariat responded in vastly
greater numbers to the reformist directives of pragmatic trade union
leaders than to the revolutionary pleas of communist propagandists. Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht of the revolutionary Spartacus League, for
example, never exercised the enormous influence over the German workers
that Karl Legien, of the reformist (social democratic) Free Trade
Unions, enjoyed.
Capitalism thus survived the horrors of two long world wars, the
international impact of the Russian Revolution, and a highly unstable
Depression decade in the 1930s. Although it was badly shaken at times,
in the end capitalism did not lose its overall legitimacy (except
perhaps in Spain in 1936) in the eyes of the very class that Marxism and
syndicalism had selected as its historically revolutionary agent.
Anarchism (which should not be confused with syndicalism and communism)
in its pure form meant little more than unrelenting resistance to and
protest against attempts by society and particularly the state to
confine individual liberty. It appealed mainly to marginal, déclassé
elements, ranging from the dispossessed to idiosyncratic artists and
writers. Although rarely influential as an ideology, it resonated with
the agrarian bunty, the Russian peasant uprisings that were notorious
for their destructive, sometimes anti-urban insurrections. When
impulsive anarchist sentiments affected well-organized proletarian
struggles, they mutated into anarcho-syndicalism, which was seldom
internally stable or free of serious tensions. Many anarcho-syndicalist
notions, such as workers’ control over industry and confederally
structured revolutionary trade unions, enjoyed a considerable vogue
among industrial workers; still, in the absence of external pressure and
persecution by the bourgeoisie and the state, anarcho-syndicalist unions
seldom refrained from compromising their libertarian principles.
The great theories advanced by Marxists, socialists, anarchists, and
anarcho-syndicalists, then, were insightful on many issues and were
sometimes inspiring in making a socialistic revolution a realizable
possibility. But today these theories are understandably incapable of
encompassing and programmatically integrating into a coherent whole the
new social issues, potential class realignments, and economic advances
that have arisen (and that continue to arise) with extraordinary
rapidity since the end of World War Two. To simply resuscitate them,
even in the face of the failures they produced, and pretend that they
enjoy an unchallengeable ideological immortality, would be dogmatic
fatuity.
Significantly, capitalism has changed in many respects since World War
Two. It has created new, generalized social issues that are not limited
to wages, hours, and working conditions – notably environmental, gender,
hierarchical, civic, and democratic issues. The problems raised by these
issues cut across class lines, even as they exacerbate or modify the
problems that once gave rise to the classical revolutionary movements.
Older definitions of freedom, while preserving certain unassailable
components, become inadequate in the light of later historical advances;
so too older revolutionary theories and movements, while losing none of
their insights and lessons, become inadequate with the passage of time,
as the emergence of new issues necessitate broader programs and
movements.
Since Marxism was fashioned in the context of the Industrial Revolution,
it would indeed be uncanny if it did not require sweeping revisions and
redefinitions as a body of ideas. Or if socialism (qua social democracy)
– all its cross-currents and variations notwithstanding – remained a
fixed strategy for achieving basic social change in the face of new
developments over the past fifty years. Or if anarchism and its
variants, with their central demand for personal autonomy (as opposed to
social freedom), could adequately deal with the new ecological,
hierarchical, technological, democratic, and civic issues that have
arisen.
Nor can the proletariat, whose class identity is being subverted by an
immense middle class, hope to speak for the majority of the population.
Capitalism is inflicting generalized threats on humanity, sweeping
problems such as globalization, climate changes that may alter the very
face of the planet, challenges to civil rights and traditional freedoms,
and the radical transformation of civic life as a result of rampant
urbanization; other issues have yet to emerge as a result of the
immensely transformative technologies that will make the coming century
unrecognizable. A new revolutionary movement must be capable of dealing
not only with the more familiar issues that linger on, but with new,
more general ones that potentially may bring the vast majority of
society into opposition to an ever evolving and challenging capitalist
system.
That these major problems that confront us were not on the agenda of
previous socialistic movements, or else were treated marginally, should
not surprise us. A socially oriented ecology has yet to take hold,
despite newly arrived anarchists’ attempts to impute one to Peter
Kropotkin or Elisée Reclus. Older movements regarded hierarchy, if they
saw it as undesirable at all, more as an epiphenomenon of class
structures and the state than as the oppressive institutionalization of
cultural and economic differentiation among men, and between men and
women, that emerged very early in social life. Classical socialists and
anarchists cloaked the role of the city and democracy in human affairs
in such strictly class terms that they barely explored them as arenas
for human development and self-realization. Indeed, nearly all classical
radical and revolutionary discussions centered on the industrial
proletariat, which was supposed to become the majority of the population
in Western European countries and would inevitably be driven to
revolution by capitalist exploitation and immiseration.[42]
What classical revolutionary ideologies can teach us is that capitalism
remains a grossly irrational social order in which the pursuit of profit
and the accumulation of wealth for its own sake pollutes every material
and spiritual advance. It is an economic and social order that now
threatens to afflict humanity with the homogenization and atomization of
human relationships by the spread of commodity production and by the
disintegration of community life and solidarity. This crisis-ridden
society will not disappear on its own: it has to be opposed
unrelentingly by a dedicated Left that must be committed to the rescuing
of the high estate of reason in human affairs that is currently under
siege by anti-Enlightenment forces. To encompass the problems we face
today, the ideological orbit described by Marxism, anarchism, and (to a
lesser degree) socialism qua social democracy would have to be expanded
beyond recognition. To this end the idea of communalism is presented as
a project – one that will render the best in classical revolutionary
ideologies relevant to a new century and confront problems that were
formerly little more than ancillary anticipations.
Communalism is an attempt to enter into a more advanced terrain of
revolutionary ideas. From the outset, we must distinguish communalism,
as a tradition and a theory, from communitarianism, with which it is
often mistaken. Communitarianism was and is a movement to establish
communities that are organized around cooperative personal living and
working arrangements, such as were common among counter-cultural youth
during the 1960s and 1970s. Their propagators saw these islets of the
good life as products of healthy normal human impulses, in contrast to
evil conventional norms that warped or blotted out such impulses. The
most famous communitarians were nineteenth-century utopian visionaries
such as Robert Owen (whose followers established the New Harmony
community) and John Humphrey Noyes (a religious social reformer who
established the more successful Oneida community in New York State).
These experiments and radical ones like them rested on the conviction
that once enough people adopted cooperative lifestyles, they would
eventually abandon the evil world of private property and egoism in
favor of new cooperative living arrangements.
Most commonly, however, the social perspective of communitarians was
highly limited. They usually saw their communities as personal refuges
from the ills of the surrounding world. But communitarianism – which is
still alive in the writings of Robert Theobald, a variety of
cooperativists, and assorted anarchists – is basically a lifestyle
project, committed to the ethical and often quasi-religious principle
that humanity is innately good and must be restored to its pristine
condition of kindness and mutual aid, primarily by example and gradual
physical expansion. In a word, communitarianism – to the extent that it
even seeks to change the world – slowly inculcates the values of
goodness by a one-to-one conversion to particular living arrangements.
Communalism, by contrast, is a revolutionary political theory and
practice, deeply rooted in the general socialist tradition. Far from
setting up models or examples of cooperative lifestyles, it actively
seeks to confront capital and the basic structures of state power. Far
from functioning as a personal refuge, it seeks to construct a broad
civic sphere and markedly enhance political involvement. Indeed, it
seeks to reconstruct municipalities as a whole to form a counter-power
to the nation-state. The word has roots as a political term in the Paris
Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the French capital fought for
the idea of a quasi-socialistic confederation of the nation’s cities and
towns or communes (as they are called to this day in many parts of
Europe). Today, we can still get a sense of the far-reaching social
goals of communalism from consulting even conventional reference books
like The American Heritage Dictionary.
Socialist revolutionary theory seldom attributed an important place to
municipalities. Early nineteenth-century socialists were concerned
mainly with influencing the working class and ultimately gaining control
of the nation-state. Apart from anarchists, most left-wingers tended
retrospectively to admire the Jacobins of the Great French Revolution,
who were the advocates of a highly centralized state apparatus. The
Jacobins’ principal opponents on the Left, the Girondins, preached a
federalist message but were closely associated with the
counter-revolution of the 1790s and hated revolutionary Paris so deeply
that their federalist ideas fell into disrepute on the Left. Not for
decades would federalism gain a good name among French radicals.
After the Revolution the most active European movements for social
change were spawned less in the countryside than in towns and cities.
Insurgent Paris exploded in the insurrection of 1830 and in a workers’
uprising in June 1848 – and the French capital was highly conscious of
its ancient municipal identity and liberties. Well into the twentieth
century it clung to that identification with civic freedom with
extraordinary fervor. Indeed, in the years to come many socialistic
revolutions that swept over Europe, even those that were
internationalist in character, were notable for the hegemonic role that
municipalities played in their uprisings. “Red Petrograd,” “Red Berlin,”
and “Red and Black Barcelona” became synonymous with particularly
incendiary uprisings between 1917 and 1936. More often than not, a
municipality initiated a revolution, and its success in overthrowing the
old local authorities initiated a nationwide insurrection.
On closer inspection, the civic nature of most modern revolutions points
to the fundamental role that municipalities have played as incubators of
social development and the functions they have performed in fulfilling
humanity’s potentialities. When Aristotle wrote his political works he
set a standard for the Western conception of the city, defining it as
the arena for the development of citizenship and even humanness itself,
specifically reason, self-consciousness, and the good life. The Hellenic
word polis, from which we derive the word political, has too often been
wrongly translated as “city-state.” In fact the Athenian polis was not a
state but a humanly scaled municipality that became an outright
face-to-face democracy. The Athenians of the fifth century BCE would
have regarded even a modern republic as oppressive and would have found
its bureaucratic apparatus oligarchical at best and tyrannical at worst.
In Periclean times they drew a clear distinction between monarchy,
aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy. They generally viewed a
face-to-face democracy as the fulfillment of the polis’s evolution out
of assemblages of households, and they continued to treasure its
essentially democratic features over all other forms, even after their
Roman conquerors virtually eliminated it.
Communalism not only recaptures these functions but goes beyond them as
an effort to constitute the developmental arena of mind and discourse.
By contrast, modern urbanized cities reduce citizens to mere co-dwellers
who live in close physical proximity to one another, or to taxpayers who
expect the city to provide them with goods and services in return for
revenue. As such, communalism sees the municipality as potentially a
transformative development beyond organic evolution into the domain of
social evolution. Indeed, for communalists the municipality is the
domain wherein mere adaptation to changing environments is supplanted by
proactive association based on the free exchange of ideas, the creative
endeavor to bring consciousness to the service of change, and the
collective vehicle, where necessary, to intervene in the world with a
view toward ending environmental as well as economic insults. The
municipality, once it is freed of hierarchical domination and material
exploitation – indeed, once it is recreated as rational arena for human
creativity in all spheres of life – is potentially the ethical space for
the good life. It is also potentially the school for the formation of a
new human being, the citizen, who has shed the archaic blood ties of
tribalism and the hierarchical impulses created by differences in
ethnicity, gender, and parochial exclusivity.
Historically, the municipality was the domain that, at least
juridically, dissolved the blood tie, which had formerly united family
and tribe according to the facts of biology, to the exclusion of the
outsider. It was in the municipality, eventually, that the once-feared
stranger could be absorbed into a community of citizens, initially as
the coequal of all other residents who occupied a common territory and
eventually as a member of the citizens’ assembly, engaging with all
other free male residents in making policy decisions. In this respect,
the formation of the municipality antedated the rise of the state –
which, it is worth noting, appeared among agrarian peoples well before
it appeared among their urban cousins.
Indeed, the state, which may be defined as an organized system of
dominance by a privileged class, was continually in tension, if not in
open warfare, with the municipality. The so-called autonomous cities of
the medieval world were in conflict with medieval and Renaissance
monarchs as well as with territorial lords, both of whom threatened
their civic freedoms. To be sure, internal conflicts raged within their
own walls between various classes and estates. But if they were not
often at peace either with themselves or with their external opponents,
their libertarian origins were seldom forgotten: during periods of
crisis, these sentiments surfaced as revolutionary upsurges in Europe
and even Asia. Indeed today, when the nation-state seems supreme,
whatever rights municipalities retain are the hard-won gains of
commoners, who over the course of history preserved them against
assaults by ruling classes. Characteristically, the comuñero uprising of
the Castilian cities in 1520–22 and the journées of the Parisian
sectional assemblies during the French Revolution (to cite only two of
the more outstanding cases) were impelled by strong civic sentiments and
by demands for a Federation of Communes.
Thus communalism is no contrived body of political and social concepts,
spun out from the vagrant fancies of mere imagination. In many respects,
it expresses an abiding concept of political reconstruction, one that
long antedates nationalism. As a movement of downtrodden classes, its
pedigree is perhaps more ambiguous. The guildsmen who kept their muskets
and swords at the ready beside their workbenches, so as to be able to
immediately rise to the defense of their hard-won liberties, often had a
class status somewhere between the beggarly crowds that filled the
medieval cities and the patricians. In fact, upper-class nobles often
hired déclassés from the towns to undermine the status and political
influence of the craftsmen-burghers. Nevertheless, it was this burgher
stratum that fashioned the ideals of civic freedom and political
participation, upon which all the great revolutionaries of later years
drew, often with no knowledge of their medieval origins.
Here, too, however, contemporary language betrays the past, just as it
does when polis is translated as “city-state.” The word politics,
derived as it is from the Greek word for “city,” denotes an activity
that is charged with moral obligation to one’s own community – in
contrast to statecraft, which minimally presupposes a professionalized
and bureaucratic state apparatus that is expressly set apart from the
people. Politics once referred to the civic responsibilities that all
citizens were expected to discharge as ethical beings. In the Middle
Ages, citizens committed themselves to undertake these political
responsibilities by swearing an ethical oath or pledge of fraternity – a
conjuratio – which was seen not as a contract but minimally as a moral
vow to act in the interests of all who lived and worked in the city.
They participated in citizens’ assemblies that either formulated civic
policies themselves or else annually elected a publicly responsible
administrative committee. The city was defended from external threats by
a popular militia, while a citizens’ guard maintained domestic peace.
Any attempt at professionalization of the city’s administrative
apparatus, even if tentatively undertaken to deal with the dangers of
invasion and war, was viewed with deep suspicion.
Thus politics originally did not mean statecraft. In contrast to the
self-governing polis, the state consists of the institutions by which a
privileged and exploitative class imposes itself, by force where
necessary, on an oppressed and exploited class. Statecraft is the
activity of officials within that professional machinery to control the
citizenry in the interests of that privileged class. By contrast,
politics is the active participation of free citizens in managing the
affairs of the city and defending its freedom. Only after centuries of
civic debasement, marked by class formation, conflict, and mutual
hatred, was the state produced and politics degraded to the practice of
statecraft. With the rise of statecraft, people became disengaged from
moral responsibility for their cities; the city was transformed,
ultimately along with the nation, into a provider of goods and services.
Proactive citizens, filled with a deep moral commitment to their cities,
gradually gave way to the passive subjects of rulers and to the
constituents of parliamentarians, until today they are, in fact, little
more than consumers whose free time is spent in shopping malls and
retail stores.
Communalism is in every way a decidedly political body of ideas that
seeks to recover the city or commune in accordance with its greatest
historical traditions, and to advance its development. It seeks to
create popular assemblies as vital decision-making arenas for civic
life. It advances a civic ethics predicated on reason, and a
municipalized economy.
In advancing these goals, communalism seeks to actualize the traits that
potentially make us human. It departs decidedly from Marxist notions of
a centralized state, let alone a dictatorial regime ostensibly based on
the interests of a single class. At the same time it goes beyond loose
anarchist notions of autonomous confederations, collectives, and towns,
which ostensibly can “go it on their own” as they choose without due
consideration for the society as a whole. These ad hoc, often chaotic
and “spontaneous” anarchic escapades in autonomy, even in “temporary
autonomous zones,” usually express individualistic, indeed egocentric,
impulses that in practice lead to demands for the unrestricted rights of
sovereign individuals without requiring of them any obligatory duties.
Anarchists and their affines often dismiss obligations of any sort as
authoritarian or worse. But one of the great maxims of the First
International, to which all factions subscribed, was Marx’s slogan: “No
Rights Without Duties, No Duties Without Rights.” In a free society, as
revolutionaries of all kinds generally understood, we would enjoy
freedoms (“rights”), but we would also have responsibilities (“duties”)
we would have to exercise. The concept of individual autonomy becomes
meaningless when it denies the obligations that every individual owes to
society as social responsibilities.
We are all shaped to one degree or another by forces outside our control
and, frankly, beyond our control. No one can live forever, or do without
nutrition; and after a certain age simply keeping oneself in health
requires numerous – even onerous – efforts. In the fullness of daily
life, long life requires effort and calls for actions that may be
painful, annoying, demanding, and disagreeable. We are thus always under
some kind of constraint; the real issue is whether a constraint is
rational and advances the fulfillment of the good life or whether it is
exploitative and irrational. It is the height of hubris to believe that
total “autonomy” – including the right to “choose” whatever one wants
about anything – can coexist with society.
Communalists seek to create a democratic, collectivist social order.
Property, in a communalist society, will be municipalized and its
overall management placed in the hands of popular assemblies. In past
revolutions efforts at “workers’ control” over factories and farms were
frequently plagued by parochialism and evolved into forms of
collectivistic capitalism. By contrast, communalism calls for the full
administrative coordination of all public enterprises by confederal
committees, whose members are the responsible voices of the popular
assemblies; without the assent of the citizenry as a whole in a
confederation-wide vote, no policy-making confederal decision can be
valid.
Pragmatically, a communalist polity requires a written constitution and,
yes, regulatory laws, to avoid a structurelessness that would yield
mindless anarchy. The more defined the rights and duties of citizens
are, the more easily can they be upheld as part of the general interest
against the intrusion of petty tyrannies. It is not the clarity of
definitions that has oppressed humanity; rather, wrong definitions have
been used cannily to uphold privilege and domination. Indeed,
constitutions and laws served to free the ancient bondsman of arbitrary
despotism and even women of patriarchal control. From the earliest times
oppressed peoples have raised the demand for constitutions and laws; in
their absence “barons” (to use Hesiod’s term in the seventh century BCE)
arbitrarily inflicted rule and terror on the masses. Anarchist demands
to eliminate law as such, without providing for substantive ways to
avoid the oppressions of structurelessness and arbitrary behavior, have
produced mayhem and tyranny more reliably than liberty and autonomy.
Historically, constitutions and laws have indeed been oppressive, often
grossly so, but this raises the question of their content, not the fact
of their existence. Indeed, only a peculiarly egocentric mentality will
assume that a rationally constituted society and a rationally formulated
body of laws must necessarily violate personal autonomy and hence social
freedom. Nothing more clearly sheds light on the individualistic basis
of present-day anarchism and its Proudhonesque origins than this
personalistic fear of any limitation on individual behavior. Taking
recourse to biologistic “instinct” as a guide to a libertarian
lifestyle, rooting freedom in human nature and in prehistory, anarchists
inadvertently petrify freedom rather than ensure it.
Communalism’s concept of the free municipality (in contrast to the
primitivistic, technophobic anarchic image of “autonomy”) is, I would
argue, a product of reason in history, or what I have called the “legacy
of freedom,” and indeed the embodiment of reason institutionally and
legally. It is reason constituted in institutions, embodied in the
functioning of these institutions – that is, in their constitution and
their laws, as well as in citizens, and their personal life-ways,
productive activities, and intersubjective relations or
“socializations.” To reduce constitutions and laws ipso facto to
trammels that bind free will is to make a mockery not only of reason but
of humaneness – for what remains of the human being, after this
reduction, is little more than animality and biology. It thereby negates
the historic function of the free city except as a habitation of a
peculiar kind, and in the spirit of William Morris (whose utopia News
from Nowhere is by no means a credit to a rational vision of society),
the less we have of it, the better!
Communalism, in effect, declares that each individual should act with
full regard for the needs of all, and that democracy decidedly includes
the rights of a dissenting minority to freely and fully express itself.
Within a confederation over broader regional areas the decisions of
individual assemblies merge with those of all the assemblies; thus the
popular decisions of the entire confederation are taken as a single
assembly.
Assuredly, a failure to deal rationally and humanely with necessity,
which cannot be evaded in any aspect of life, is the most certain path
to oppression and worse. Pure anarchism, whose crude individualism
regards the ego as a natural entity rather than a socially formed
subject, tends to negate everything about capitalist society and seek
out its opposite without any qualifications, as though a libertarian
society is the mere negation of bourgeois society. In its most extreme
form, this express individualism demands the disbanding of society as
such; hence the fascination of so many anarchist writers with
primitivism, their technophobic outlook, their aversion to regulation of
any kind, and indeed their hatred of necessity. Must even the
self-regulatory features of social life really be abolished in favor of
reliance on an alleged instinct for mutual aid or, more startling, on
custom? Beyond such mechanism, anarchism in fact relies on old socialist
tenets, such as workers’ control and direct democracy, which it has
picked up and, in the best of cases, eagerly embraced as its own.
Communalism demands great advances in theory (not its denigration) as
well as permanent activity (in the form of firmly established
institutions, deeply rooted in a community and marked by their
continuity) – not ad hoc escapades that dissipate after a demonstration,
riot, or the establishment of a “temporary autonomous zone.” If activism
is reduced to demonstrations, riots, and TAZs, then revolution is
nothing but a few hours of frolicking, after which the real authority of
the state and ruling class takes over. Capitalism has nothing to fear
from frolicking; indeed, its fashion designers and lifestyle specialists
are only too eager to turn juvenile expressions of dissent into highly
merchandisable commodities.
No less disturbing is the passion that many devotees of pure anarchism
exhibit for consensus as a form of decision-making. The veneration of
individual autonomy can become so radical that it would permit no
majority, no matter how large, to override even “a majority of one,” as
some anarchist writers have put it. In this extreme fetishization of
individualism, the core anarchic concept of the all-sovereign ego
stands, in all its splendor, against the wishes of the majority. By
permitting the self-sufficient ego, by its merest inclinations, to
override the wishes of the community, anarchism becomes untenable.
Coordinated political organization become impossible, as it did in Spain
in 1933, when part of the Nosotros affinity group, led by Buenaventura
Durruti, chose to lead an insurrection in Saragossa (which was doomed),
while others like Juan García Oliver, his trusted compañero, simply
abstained and discouraged others from giving military aid to their
comrades in the Aragonese city.
The establishment of an organization places certain constraints on the
autonomy of its members, but that in itself does not necessarily make it
authoritarian. “Libertarian organization” is not a contradiction in
terms. In the early twentieth century leading Spanish anarchists had
opposed the very formation of the CNT because it was an organization and
as such demanded of its members the fulfillment of onerous duties. But
organization as such is not authoritarian.
The formation of communalist political institutions depends on the
formation of a communalist organization. How can one be established? It
would be useful to provide a summary of some measures that will be
necessary to create such an organization, as well as briefly describe
the role it can be expected to play in a larger libertarian municipalist
movement.
To begin with, politically concerned individuals who feel the need to
explore communalist ideas and practices may form a study group in a
given neighborhood or town. The study groups seek to inform and develop
those interested in social and political change into fully competent
individuals and leaders. At a time when the knowledge of philosophy,
history, and social theory has retreated appallingly, the objects of
study may range from immediate political issues to the great
intellectual traditions of the past. Minimally, however, the group
should give social theory and the history of ideas pronounced attention,
particularly insofar as these subjects enlarge members’ understanding of
a municipalist approach to democracy and social change.
The study groups, whose members are by now composed of individuals who
are committed to a serious exploration of ideas, should begin to
function within the neighborhood, town, or city in which they are
located. They seek to enter and remain in the public domain – to be a
continual revolutionary presence by virtue of their ideas, their
emphasis on organization, their methods, and their goals. Communalists
refuse to withdraw from the public domain in the name of individual
sovereignty, artistic expression, or self-absorption. They wear no ski
masks, either metaphorically or physically, and do not allow mindless
dogmatic assumptions and simplifications to stand in their way. They are
always accessible and transparent, involved and responsible. They can be
expected to establish a well-informed, carefully structured
organization, if possible with neighborhood branches.
The organization’s goals should be carefully formulated into a concrete
program, based on communalist principles, that consistently demands the
formation of policy-making municipal popular assemblies. As a component
of a minimum program, no issue is too trivial for communalists to
ignore, be it transportation, recreation, education, welfare, zoning,
environment, housing, public safety, democracy, civil rights, and the
like. The primacy that communalists give to the establishment and
development of popular assemblies does not mean that they ignore other
issues of concern to the citizenry. To the contrary they resolutely
fight – both within municipal institutions and outside them – for all
steps to improve civic life in their communities and elsewhere. On
specific issues, such as globalization, environmental problems, ethnic
and gender discrimination, communalist organizations freely enter into
coalitions with other organizations to engage in common struggles, but
they should never surrender their ideological or organizational
independence or their claim to their own independent action. Their
identity, ideas, and institutions are their most precious possessions
and must never be impugned in the interests of “unity.”
Indeed, while working on these issues, they always seek to enlarge them,
to reveal through a transitional program their deep-seated roots. They
escalate cries for reforms into radical demands, seeking to expand every
civil and political right of the people by creating the institutional
power to formulate decision-making policies and see to their execution.
The implications of solving these problems is a call for a revolution in
social relations – that is, the achievement of a maximum program based
on the confederation of municipalist assemblies in which property is
steadily municipalized and subjected to coordination by confederal
administrative bodies.[43]
The communalist organization, while always retaining its identity and
program, initiates regular public forums to engage in discursive,
face-to-face democratic exploration of ideas – partly to spread its
program and basic ideas and partly to create public spaces that provide
venues for radical civic debate, until actual popular assemblies can be
established. While it will clearly become involved in local issues, its
primary focus should be the public domain where real power is vested:
municipal elections, which allow for a close association between
communalist candidates (for city councils or their equivalents) and the
people.
The ablest members of the communalist organization should stand in
municipal elections and call for the changing of city charters so as to
legally empower the municipal assemblies. The new communalist
organization should expressly seek to be elected to municipal positions
with a view to using charter or extralegal changes to significantly
shift municipal power from existing state-like and seemingly
representative institutions to popular assemblies as embodiments of
direct democracy. Where no city charter exists that can be changed
electorally, communalists should attempt (both educationally and
organizationally) to convene direct democratic assemblies on an
extralegal basis, exercising moral pressure on statist institutions, in
the hope that people will, in time, regard them as authentic centers of
public power with the expectation that they can thereby gain structural
power. Communalism never compromises by advocating delegated or statist
institutional structures, and in contrast to organizations such as the
Greens, it refuses to exist within the institutional cage of the
nation-state or to try to gild it with reforms that ultimately simply
make the state more palatable.
A communalist group or movement that refuses to run candidates in
municipal elections where it can, and thereby removes its focus on the
centers of institutionalized municipal power, will shrivel into an ad
hoc, rootless, sporadic, polymorphous form of anarchic protest and
quickly fade away. It will be communalist in name only, not in content.
It is concerned not with the locus of power but with mere defiance at
best, which leads nowhere or terminates in frolicking with the system at
worst. In the communalist vision, public assemblies in confederation are
a means for destroying the state and capitalism, as well as the
embodiments of a rational society. To hop from demonstration to
demonstration without attempting to recreate power in the form of public
assemblies by taking control of city councils (which means practicing
politics in opposition to parliamentary statecraft) is to make a mockery
of communalism.
Communalists seek to create a fully democratic society, but they never
fetishize numbers, be it numbers of members, voters, participants in
public assemblies, and the like. In a communalist polity it suffices
that the doors of a public assembly are always open to the citizenry. If
a majority of a neighborhood, town, or city choose to attend an assembly
meeting and become participants in making important decisions, all the
better, but if only a few are sufficiently interested in the political
fate of their community to attend, so be it. The assembly’s decisions
carry the same weight, regardless of whether the number of people
present is a dozen, a hundred, or several thousand. Political decisions
should be made by politically involved citizens: Under no circumstances
should poor attendance at a public assembly be an excuse to abandon a
direct and discursive democracy in favor of anonymous voting at polls,
which renders politics impersonal and non-discursive.
Communalist groups call for the popular assemblies – be they legally
empowered or only morally empowered – to confederate, with a view toward
replacing the state. In effect, communalists aim at establishing a dual
power of citizen-constituted institutions that will challenge the
authority, legitimacy, and policies of existing institutions.
Throughout, municipal confederations should hold regular congresses and
conferences, plenaries and committee meetings. As need arises, they
establish extraordinary commissions to undertake specific tasks.
Wherever assemblies elect delegates to coordinate a confederal
association, they ensure that the delegates’ powers are always mandated
by their respective citizens’ assemblies and that the delegates
themselves are always subject to recall. Emerging libertarian
municipalities must be united through the formation of well-organized
and socially responsible confederations.
An organization that is more advanced theoretically and programmatically
than the broader public movement of which it is part has every right to
regard itself as a vanguard, just as the French term avant-garde denoted
that certain artistic, musical, and other schools were more advanced in
practice and thought. Obviously, such an acknowledgement does not confer
upon a vanguard any special privileges, but it simply recognizes that
their ideas and practical contributions can be expected to have a
marked, indeed guiding, importance. An advanced, highly conscious
political organization should provide leadership, yet always retaining
its independence institutionally and functionally. By the same token,
not everyone in an organization has the same level of experience,
knowledge, wisdom, and leadership ability. Leadership that is not
formalized will be informal, but it will not disappear. Many individuals
in revolutionary groups were outright leaders, whose views had more
significance than others; it is a disservice to perpetuate the deception
that they were simply “influential militants.” Leadership always exists,
however much libertarians try to deny the fact by concealing its
existence beneath euphemisms.
A serious libertarian organization would establish not only leaders but
also means by which the membership may recall leaders whose views and
behavior they oppose, and effectively modify their activities. On the
other hand, frivolous opposition to leaders for its own sake should
never be tolerated. One of the most scandalous features of anarchist
organizations (when they exist) has been the dizzying individualism that
permits neurotic personalities to disrupt meetings and activities as
expressions of selfhood. Similarly, the use of ad hominem attacks,
gossip, and personal rumors to undermine the influence of leaders and
subvert serious ideas has done much to prevent anarchists from
establishing effective organizations.
Finally, communalism is not simply a vehicle for establishing a
communalist polity and the appropriate institutions. It is also an
outlook that includes a philosophical approach to reality as well as
society and toward the natural world as well as human development. It
contends that the ongoing crisis in our culture and values stems not
from an overabundance of civilization but from an insufficiency of it.
It defends technological development, used rationally and morally, as
reducing labor and creating free time that potentially allows citizens
to participate in public affairs, time for creativity, a reasonable
abundance in the means of life, and even, in a rational and ecological
society, the ability to improve upon the impact of natural forces.
Post-scarcity abundance (not to be confused with the mindless
consumerism fostered by capitalism) must be wisely tempered and
controlled by municipal assemblies and the free confederal institutions
that an emancipated society can create.
Above all, communalism stakes out a claim as a continuation of all that
is emancipatory in the Enlightenment tradition of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It firmly shares the Enlightenment’s conception
that freedom constitutes the defining potentiality of humanness: the
potentiality for the self-elaboration of reason by rational praxis until
humanity finally achieves the actualization of a truly rational society.
This self-actualization of humanity’s potentiality for reason,
creativity, and self-consciousness is more than a distant ideal; it is
the one abiding goal that gives meaning to any effort to change the
world. Indeed, the magnificent goal of advancing reason, creativity, and
self-consciousness in human affairs is all that gives meaning to the
evolution of humanity itself as the potentially creative agent; in its
absence the world has no meaning. This goal should hover over every
transformative project that communalists undertake in their efforts to
make an inhuman world into a human one and an irrational society into a
rational one – favoring a commitment to truth and innovation,
irrespective of what is so misleadingly called realism and adaptation.
It is not by any pragmatic map but by this flame, which is fueled by
reason’s conception of “what should be” as against “what is,” that
humanity can fulfill its potentiality for reason and self-consciousness,
thereby justifying itself in the scheme of things.
[1] The most comprehensive and accessible overview of these ideas is
Janet Biehl’s book The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian
Municipalism (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1998), a work that Bookchin
himself often recommended as the best introduction to his political
ideas.
[2] The book was originally published by Sierra Club Books (San
Francisco) as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship in
1987; republished by Black Rose Books (Montréal) in 1992 as Urbanization
Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship; and finally
republished in a revised version as From Urbanization to Cities: Toward
a Politics of Citizenship, by Cassell (London) in 1995. Despite the
fairly dry titles, the book gives a vivid account of the emergence and
meaning of politics, citizenship, and civic development.
[3] This small book was published by AK Press in 2007.
[4] We also discussed his manuscript on philosophy, The Politics of
Cosmology, which he wanted me to work on; he gave me a copy with
instructions on how to edit it, and I gave him my promise that I would
see to its publication.
[5] Communalism was first launched in October 2002 on the Internet.
Apart from Murray Bookchin and myself, the other members of the
editorial board were Janet Biehl, Peter Zegers, Gary Sisco, and Sveinung
Legard. (At our first meeting, in August 1999, I was elected general
editor.) Bookchin suggested the subtitle on its masthead – International
Journal for a Rational Society – and took a great interest in the
workings of the journal, although his declining health impeded him from
playing a more active role. (The journal continues to appear, at
www.communalism.net; now available in print.)
[6] For Janet Biehl’s account of this ideological break, see “Bookchin
Breaks with Anarchism,” in L. Gambone and P. Murtagh, eds., Anarchism
for the 21^(st) Century (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, forthcoming).
This essay was also published in Communalism, no. 12 (October 2007).
[7] This introduction was written on December 14, 2002, and has been
known only to Scandinavian audiences. See Murray Bookchin, Perspektiv
för en ny vänster: Essäer om direct demokrati, moralisk ekonomi,
socialekologi och kommunalism, translated by Jonathan Korsár and Mats
Runvall (Malmö: Frihetlig Press, 2003).
[8] In fact, the original essay should be read together with Bookchin’s
“The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction,” in Social Ecology
and Communalism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2007), pp. 68–76;
“Whither Anarchism? A Reply to Recent Anarchist Critics,” in Anarchism,
Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays 1993–1998
(Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 1998), particularly pp. 216–46; and
“Turning Up the Stones: A Reply to John Clark’s October 13 Message,”
sent to the RA-list and available online at
dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_ Archives/bookchin/turning.html.
[9] Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An
Unbridgeable Chasm? (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 1994).
[10] This essay was originally published in Communalism, no. 2 (November
2002), and later included in Social Ecology and Communalism.
[11] Goethe quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A
Biographical History, 3^(rd) edn. (New York: The Dial Press, 1961), p.
578.
[12] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book 2, Chapter 4 (New York:
Modern Library, 1944), pp. 121–2.
[13] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, letter to Dulieu, December 30, 1860, in
Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans.
Elizabeth Frazer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 184.
[14] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Fédération et l’unité en Italie (1862),
in Selected Writings, pp. 188–9.
[15] Proudhon, letter to Dulieu, December 30, 1860, in Selected
Writings, p. 185.
[16] Proudhon, letter to Alexander Herzen, April 21, 1861, in Selected
Writings, p. 191.
[17] All Bakunin quotations are from P. Maximoff, ed., The Political
Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe; London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1953), pp. 324–35; emphasis
added.
[18] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,”
Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 120.
[19] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto,” p. 124.
[20] Despite the genderedness of these words – a product of the era in
which Bakunin lived – they obviously may be interpreted as signifying
humanity generally.
[21] Elites who studied the Tao Te Ching, for their part, could easily
find it a useful handbook for ruling and manipulating a servile
peasantry. Depending upon which translation the English reader uses,
several interpretations are valid, but what is clear to everyone but the
blind is that quietism underlies the entire work.
[22] Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in
Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 63.
[23] John Clark, “Not Deep Apart,” The Trumpeteer, vol. 12, no. 2
(Spring 1995), p. 104.
[24] A striking example is found in Victor Serge’s quarrel with his
French “pure” anarchist compatriots over the historical importance of
the outbreak of revolution in Russia. In response to Serge’s excitement,
these café anarchists or “Individualists,” as he chooses to call them,
“mocked [Serge] with their store of cynical stock phrases: ‘Revolutions
are useless. They will not change human nature. Afterwards reaction sets
in and everything starts all over again. I’ve only got my own skin; I’m
not marching for wars or revolutions, thank you.’” Victor Serge, Memoirs
of a Revolutionary, translated and abridged by Peter Sedgewick
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 53.
[25] Peter Kropotkin, “The Commune,” in Words of a Rebel (Montréal:
Black Rose Books, 1992), p. 81; emphasis added.
[26] See Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and
Principles,” in R. Baldwin, ed., Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets
(New York: Dover Press, 1970), pp. 51–2.
[27] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism,” p. 63; also Conquest of
Bread, ed. P. Avrich (New York: New York University Press, 1972), pp.
66–7.
[28] Martin A. Miller, “Introduction” to Peter Kropotkin’s Selected
Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. M.A. Miller (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1970), p. 31.
[29] These basic assumptions can also go a long way in explaining why
anarchism has been so fascinated by mystifications of the peasantry,
bioregionalism, not to speak of deep ecology, Buddhism, Tolstoyism,
Gandhi-ism, and the like.
[30] It should be mentioned, though, that despite their basic
differences, syndicalism has also been burdened by its expressly
anti-intellectual stance, and it shares with authentic anarchism a
disdain for rationalism and theory. Despite its commitment to mass
organization and social transformation, syndicalism has no strategy for
fundamental change beyond the general strike. Invaluable as general
strikes may be in revolutionary situations, they do not have the
essentially mystical capacity that syndicalists assigned to them, as the
vast general strike initiated in Germany in 1921 during the Kapp Putsch
demonstrated. Such failures are, in fact, evidence that militant direct
actions in themselves are not equatable with revolutions nor even with
profound social changes. For a critique of syndicalism, see my “The
Ghost of Anarcho- Syndicalism,” in Anarchist Studies, vol. 1, no. 1
(Spring 1993).
[31] As Ronald Fraser observes in Blood of Spain (in my view the best
book to date on the Spanish Revolution): “The two differentiated but
linked concepts which comprised anarcho-syndicalism, as its hyphenated
name suggested, could by the 1930s be schematically stated in a series
of polarities: rural/urban, local/ national, artisanal/industrial,
spontaneous/organized, autarkic/ interdependent,
anti-intellectual/intellectual.” Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral
History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books; 1972), p.
542. These polarities were never reconciled; indeed, the civil war of
1936–39 exacerbated them to a near breaking point.
[32] These revolutionary syndicalists conceived the means by which they
had carried out this transformation as a form of direct action. They
meant by that term well-organized and constructive activities directly
involved in managing public affairs. Direct action, in their view, meant
the creation of a polity, the formation of popular institutions, and the
formulation and enactment of laws, regulations, and the like – which
authentic anarchists regarded as an abridgment of individual will or
autonomy.
[33] The Spanish socialists of the UGT, who rivaled the CNT among the
workers, also created an appreciable number of these committees or
participated in them, but the committee structure was primarily – and in
Catalonia, entirely – in the hands of CNT workers.
[34] Quoted in Pierre Broué and Emile Témine, The Revolution and the
Civil War in Spain, trans. Tony White (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970),
p. 131.
[35] Whether in Russia or in Germany, the conviction that “bourgeois
democracy” (that is, capitalism) was a preconditional stage for leading
society to socialism helped justify the reluctance of Social Democracy
to lead the workers to make a proletarian revolution between 1917 and
1919. Marx’s “stages theory,” in effect, was not only an attempt to give
an interpretation to historical development; it played a vital role in
Marxist politics from the German and Russian Revolutions of 1917–21 to
the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37.
[36] I refer, here, not to the conventional criticisms that were mounted
against Marxism by political opponents – criticisms that emerged from
the very inception of Marx’s theoretical activities and the emergence of
the socialist movements based in varying degrees on his ideas. Nor am I
concerned with Marxist critics such as Eduard Bernstein, who mounted
their critiques within the Marxist movement itself in the 1890s. Rather
I refer to the critiques that emerged with the Frankfurt School and
assorted writers like Karl Korsch, who seriously challenged the many
premises of Marx’s philosophical and historical concepts.
[37] Karl Marx, “Preface to a Contribution of the Critique of Political
Economy,” in Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), Vol. 1,
p. 504.
[38] All of which induced Georg Lukács to impart this hegemonic role to
the “proletarian party,” which mystically embodies the proletariat as a
class even when its leadership is usually predominantly petty bourgeois.
[39] I am not trying to downplay the importance of economic issues.
Quite to the contrary: only in recent times, especially since the mid
twentieth century, has capitalism’s commodity economy become a commodity
society. Commodification has now penetrated into the most intimate
levels of personal and social life. In the business-ese that prevails
today, almost everything is seen as a trade-off. Love itself becomes a
“thing” with its own exchange value and use value, even its own price –
after all, do we not “earn” the love of others by our behavior? Still,
this kind of commodification is not complete; the value of love is not
entirely measurable in terms of labor or supply and demand.
[40] What the public thinks at any time should play no role in
determining the policies of a rational movement. If the public should
want nuclear power, then it is wrong – and nothing more – and the
movement should do whatever can be done to change its mind in a manner
consistent with democratic procedure. But at no time, in my view, should
the movement drop, modify, or bypass the issue of eliminating nuclear
power because it lacks public support or alienates people. In this
terribly dumbed-down and juvenilized society, truth must learn to stand
on its own feet, so to speak, and continually gnaw away at public
naivety, ignorance, and fatuity, if only to provide an example of
integrity.
[41] Chris Ealham, “From the Summits to the Abyss: The Contradictions of
Individualism and Collectivism in Spanish Anarchism,” in The Republic
Besieged: Civil War in Spain, eds. Paul Preston and Ann L. Mackenzie
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 140. This essay is one
of the most important contributions I have read to the literature on the
contradictions in anarchism.
[42] Today ecological issues are highly fashionable and acceptable to
leftists, but even during the tumultuous 1960s they were readily
dismissed. I recall publishing key, manifesto-type articles such as
“Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” in 1964, and raising environmental
issues for years in radical circles, only to be snidely derogated for
“ignoring” class issues (as though the two were in conflict with each
other!) and not adopting views that were more closely linked to Cold War
diplomacy than they were to socialism. The same was true of feminist
issues. It took the Left decades to show any appreciation of the crises
opened by global warming, to which I had alluded in “Ecology and
Revolutionary Thought,” and several decades to remove itself from the
mire of Cold War “socialism,” such as Maoism. Now, to be sure, one
learns that Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, and Reclus were ecologically
oriented all the time – as far back as the nineteenth century – and
clairvoyantly anticipated all the new issues that were raised in the
last half of the twentieth century! Nevertheless, the left-wing
movements lack a clear idea of how these issues can be given a
programmatic character on which people can act.
[43] The term “transitional program,” coined by Trotsky in the 1930s,
could be applied to any socialist program that seeks to escalate
“reformist” demands to a revolutionary level. That the phrase was
formulated by Trotsky does not trouble me; it is precise and
appropriate, and its use does not make one into a Bolshevik.