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Title: Social Ecology and Communalism Author: Murray Bookchin Date: 2006 Language: en Topics: social ecology, communalism, libertarian municipalism, municipalism, post-anarchism, post-marxism Source: http://new-compass.net/publications/social-ecology-and-communalism provided by New Compass.
m-b-murray-bookchin-social-ecology-and-communalism-1.png Social Ecology
and Communalism Murray Bookchin social ecology, communalism, libertarian
municipalism, municipalism, post-anarchism, post-marxism 2006
provided by New Compass. en
We are standing at a crucial crossroads. Not only does the age-old
“social question” concerning the exploitation of human labor remain
unresolved, but the plundering of natural resources has reached a point
where humanity is also forced to politically deal with an “ecological
question.” Today, we have to make conscious choices about what direction
society should take, to properly meet these challenges.
At the same time, we see that our very ability to make the necessary
choices are being undermined by an incessant centralization of economic
and political power. Not only is there a process of centralization in
most modern nation states that divests humanity of any control over
social affairs, but power is also gradually being transferred to
transnational institutions.
Simultaneously, the elites governing the multinational corporations are
virtually given free rein to continue exploiting people as well as the
natural world, in a series of new “free trade” agreements that in turn
have provoked a range of popular protests. The last few years have also
witnessed, in the ongoing “War on Terror,” serious encroachments on a
range of civil rights that we, in the Western world, have come to take
for granted. So, at a time when the social and ecological crises are
intensified in breadth and scope, we find ourselves utterly
disempowered, and virtually stripped of possibilities to arrest and
reverse this destructive “development.”
None of the established political tendencies, no matter how “radical”
they claim to be, seem to be able to counter these processes.
One after another, the European Social Democratic parties, not to speak
of the once so promising Green tendencies, have all lowered their
banners and come to accept the most pernicious market forces. Their
participation in national parliaments continuously hollows out their
expressed ideals. Not only has the traditional Left crumbled
ideologically with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc — which indeed is a
tragic irony — but today, there exists no real extraparliamentary
movement, with the will and ability to foster and advance an alternative
politics. No left libertarian movement has yet emerged that could make
use of the vast opportunities that opened up as “Real Existing
Socialism” ceased to exist. The great hopes that were nurtured by the
many new social movements which emerged in the twentieth century have
all but faded away, and where the radical Left has not simply “melted
into air,” it has become highly confused. This is a trend that echoes
throughout the world, and, despite the recent resurgence of protest
movements, there are still no visible tendencies which advance practical
and credible alternative directions to the destructive tracks we are on.
If we are not able to intelligently respond to these challenges, it is
clear that popular discontents will be channeled through the Right
instead, as we indeed witness in many industrialized countries today —
notably the disconcerting growth of religious fundamentalisms. Inasmuch
as there exists no clear and principled Left radicalism, the
conservatives and the reactionaries can set the political agenda, and as
a result, the whole political spectrum has tilted markedly toward the
Right. The current political climate is itself a reason to be concerned,
as there is an urgent need to find political alternatives that can
seriously deal with the social and ecological crisis in which we find
ourselves. We have to open up a debate and clarify the basic theoretical
issues at stake, before we can carve out a possible Left agenda suited
for our time. It is in this quest for political alternatives that we
turn to the radical theorist Murray Bookchin.
This book is a collection of essays written by Bookchin, a man who
dedicated his whole life to seeking rational alternatives to capitalist
society. Bookchin was born in January 1921, in New York City to
Jewish-Russian immigrants. His grandparents had been members of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and fled the country in the
wake of the failed revolution of 1905. In the working class
neighborhoods of the Bronx, Bookchin’s childhood and youth were strongly
marked by the hopeful enthusiasm that followed in the aftermath of the
October revolution of 1917. As America entered headlong into the Great
Depression, Bookchin got in touch with the radical organizations
agitating in his New York neighborhood, and quickly he became very
politically active.
This marked the beginning of a long life dedicated to the cause of
social freedom.
Because of his family’s economic situation, Bookchin had to start
working at an early age, and got involved in the activities of the trade
union movement. In the thirties, he was a member of the various
organizations spawned by the Communist Party, acting as an agitator,
organizer and study leader, although he gradually became strongly
critical of many of its policies. Already by the outbreak of the Spanish
Revolution, he broke with the Communists, mainly because of their
Popular Front strategy (notoriously the Stalinist betrayal of the
Spanish working class). He then became involved in the Trotskyist
movement — while Trotsky was still alive — and wrote his first articles
for dissident Left groups. After the Second World War, he gravitated
more and more toward a libertarian socialism, and started reevaluating
the basic premises and the logical conclusions of conventional radical
theory.
Bookchin was an untiring activist and theorist in most of the
significant radical movements that emerged after the Second World War.
He was in the worker’s movement while it was still truly radical, and
was active as a shop steward and a strike leader. He was one of the
definitive pioneers of ecological thought, and participated in the
environmental movement from its tentative inception in the 1950s.
Bookchin was also a part of the Civil Rights Movement, the anti- nuclear
movement, involved with Students for a Democratic Society, and a series
of urban development projects. He was very engaged in efforts to develop
neo-anarchist ideas, groups and projects. Later on he became heavily
involved in the emergence of the Greens, and was active in local issues
and electoral campaigns in his home town, Burlington, Vermont. It was
only in the last few years that physical infirmities impeded him from
taking part in active politics, and relegated him to the writer’s desk.
Indeed, it is probably for his theoretical contributions Bookchin is
most well-known and valued.
Bookchin published more than twenty books, and a wide range of articles,
lectures and essays, and his work has been translated into many
different languages. His writings have encompassed a great variety of
subject matters, including history, anthropology, philosophy, science,
and technology, as well as culture and social organization. Still, it is
his treatment of ecological and political issues that has made Bookchin
known to most readers, and some of his older books, notably
Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an Ecological Society, and The Ecology
of Freedom, have been sources of inspiration for several generations of
radicals.
Murray Bookchin experienced many radical movements in his lifetime, and
had a relationship to all the major radical ideological trends of the
last century. Still, he managed to hammer out a unique political
philosophy that attempts to build on the best in these traditions. The
purpose of his work was to renew radical theory so that it maintains its
best principles and draws lessons from a broad spectrum of historical
experiences, while being adapted to new issues and challenges.
Although by no means his first relevant work, it was with his 1964
essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” that Bookchin started to
define the outlines of the body of ideas he called social ecology — a
theory that was to be more fully developed in books like The Ecology of
Freedom, Remaking Society, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, and
Re-enchanting Humanity. In 1971, his “Spring Offensives and Summer
Vacations” was hinting at a libertarian municipalist approach, that
later was carved out in the pages of The Limits of the City, and
particularly in From Urbanization to Cities, as well as in a series of
shorter essays. His historical writings have recently culminated in his
massive history of revolutionary popular movements — the four-volume The
Third Revolution (1996–2005).
For more than four decades, the theory of social ecology has been
continually nuanced and developed. For a rounded introduction to his
body of ideas, readers should turn to Janet Biehl’s excellent
presentation in The Murray Bookchin Reader.
The basic promise of social ecology is to re-harmonize the relationship
between society and nature, and to create a rational, ecological
society. Here Bookchin suggests a dialectical interpretation of human
history, culture, and natural evolution. By looking at humanity’s
potentialities for freedom and cooperation he argues that history itself
suggests to us, if only in a fragmented and incomplete form, how such a
rational future can and ought to be formed.
While Bookchin relied partly on the the theories of Karl Marx
(particularly his critique of capitalism), he saw the need to distance
himself from the Marxist tradition, of which he had been a part, in
order to clarify the liberatory content of his ideas. As an
anti-authoritarian and a libertarian socialist, he tried to build upon
the viable fragments of anarchism to create a rounded libertarian
complement to Marx’s ideas on the radical Left. In order to create a new
ecological body of thought, as well as a new politics, he used the words
“post-scarcity anarchism” to express the new transcendence his
perspective reflected of both libertarian and Marxian views. Still, he
gradually felt that the traditional radical orthodoxies inhibited the
logic of his ideas. After making great efforts at defending (and trying
to fill with meaning) variably an “anarchist-communism,” an
“eco-anarchism,” and “social anarchism” that maintained a coherency and
political radicalism, he came to a point where this project no longer
seemed feasible. The inherent flaws of anarchism became all the more
apparent as Bookchin studied the historical emergence of its basic ideas
and its various organized expressions: Not only had anarchism been
infected by current trends of nihilism and lifestyle approaches, it was
indeed a product of individualist and anti-social attitudes from its
very inception. He openly broke with anarchism at the second
International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism, in Vermont, 1999 —
and made it clear that his theory of social ecology had to be embodied
in the ideology he called Communalism.
This is not to say that the anarchist tradition did not provide a set of
sound sentiments, namely anti-statism, federalism, and self- management
(however naïvely they were formulated), but that they never made up a
coherent theoretical framework for radical social action. Accordingly,
Bookchin urged serious libertarians to transcend anarchism, along with
Marxism and other radical ideologies. It is necessary, he contended, to
create a new body of thought based on a coherent and revolutionary
social approach that integrates and goes beyond all traditional forms of
socialist radicalism. Indeed, vague libertarian ideals of popular self-
management, mutual aid, and a stateless community, are through
Bookchin’s social ecology, developed into aspects of a coherent
political theory, marked by direct democracy, municipalization, and
confederalism. This constitutes the political alternative that Bookchin
argued could confront the market economy and powerful centralized
institutions.
These political ideas have been developed over many decades, and are
based on both concrete lessons as well as the creative formulations of a
man who passionately dedicated his life to the radical movement, a
glowing passion that is clearly expressed in the essays here presented.
The purpose of this small collection of essays is to give a general
overview of Murray Bookchin’s fundamental ideas on social ecology and
Communalism. Of course four essays cannot replace the many books and
polemical essays written by Bookchin on these subjects, and this
collection is not meant as a substitute for a more thorough study of his
ideas. Still, these essays can indeed serve as a decent introduction for
serious readers, and give a good sense of the theoretical outlines of
Bookchin’s theoretical corpus.
The first essay, “What is Social Ecology?,” gives an important overview
of the basic theoretical tenets of social ecology. Here Bookchin offers
a developmental perspective on society and nature, explaining how
“second nature” (human culture) has developed out of “first nature”
(biological evolution), and showing that the very “idea of dominating
nature” is connected to the historical emergence of hierarchies, and
later to the breakthrough of capitalism. In order to create an
ecological society, Bookchin claimed, we have to confront and challenge
all hierarchical relationships, and ultimately abolish hierarchy as such
from the human condition.
The essay was originally published in an anthology edited by Michael
Zimmerman, Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical
Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), although it was
revised both in 1996 and 2001.
The second essay, “Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism,”
appeared in Green Perspectives (#18, November 1989). The essay begins
with a critique of Marxism and its economistic class orientation, urging
radicals to understand the changing nature of capitalism. Bookchin urges
us to clarify the relationship between “society,” “politics,” and “the
state,” in order to develop an new radical ecological politics, by
expanding on the historical advances made by the public domain and the
city. It is, in my view, one of the clearest expressions of his proposal
for a new libertarian politics, insisting on the centrality of the
municipality and of confederalism. This essay was revised by Murray
Bookchin in 2001.
The third essay, “The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction,”
was written in 1995, when Bookchin had just finished writing
Re-enchanting Humanity. It makes very clear distinctions between social
ecology, and contemporary trends like “deep ecology,” mysticism,
anti-humanism, as well as postmodernist eclecticism and relativism. It
was first sent to an International Gathering of social ecologists in
Dunoon, Scotland, in August of that year, and it was subsequently
published as “Theses on Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction” in Green
Perspectives (# 33, October 1995).
In addition to many interesting comments on current cultural and
philosophical trends, Bookchin here places social ecology unequivocally
in the trajectory of the Enlightenment and its revolutionary offshoots,
and for those reasons I consider this essay particularly appropriate to
include in this anthology.
The final essay, “The Communalist Project,” is in my view the most
significant essay in this anthology, binding the other essays together
by defining a new outlook. Although an earlier version (that was to be
significantly revised and expanded) was circulated as “The Communalist
Moment,” this essay was first published in the journal Communalism (#2,
November, 2002). Bookchin details the need to go beyond all the
ideologies of the traditional Left, such as Marxism, anarchism, and
syndicalism, and create a new, coherent libertarian radicalism. He
explains the relationship between Communalism and libertarian
municipalism. This essay constitutes the best exposition to the extent
that Bookchin had shaken off all the “anarchist” trappings that were
formerly identified with his theories of social ecology. In fact, this
essay was initially published with an appendix on “Anarchism and Power
in the Spanish Revolution,” that criticizes anarchism for not having any
theory of power, and for not being able to deal with this important
question in real life politics. This appendix has been left out of this
collection for one reason: in these pages, I wanted to present only
general essays — essays which were neither considered too polemical nor
too specific — which would constitute a short book properly expressing
the main ideological aspects of Bookchin’s theoretical writings. (The
appendix is available at
, and will be published, along with other critiques of anarchism and
Marxism, in a forthcoming anthology presenting Bookchin’s recent
writings on Libertarian Municipalism.)
The red thread running through all these essays is the drive to
understand and explain the struggle for a rational society, and to
understand the necessary ideological underpinnings of a contemporary
radical politics. Although the essays included are very different in
focus and emphasis, I think that taken together, they convey the
ideological foundations of this political project, and its roots in the
rich and fecund theory of social ecology.
This book gives a highly accessible introduction to social ecology and
Communalism, as it has been developed by one of the most exciting and
pioneering thinkers of the twentieth century. Its purpose is to give a
general overview of Murray Bookchin’s ideas, and convey a sense of his
originality, by presenting some of his most central contributions to
radical theory. Despite Bookchin’s insistence that the ideas he proposed
are a product of revolutionary movements of the past, and of the ideals
of the Enlightenment, he nevertheless created a new and unique
synthesis. This political philosophy suggests that the solution to the
enormous social and ecological problems we face today, fundamentally lie
in the formation of a new citizenry, its empowerment through new
political institutions, and a new political culture. It is my profound
belief that Communalism, as a coherent body of ideas — with a
dialectical philosophy of nature, a confederalist politics, a
non-hierarchical social analysis, and an ethics based on complementarity
— can be an inspiration for a new radical popular movement in the years
to come, indeed, for the resuscitation of the Left in a meaningful
sense.
At this crossroads, we now have to decide where we want to go, and how
we can get there. The current ecological crisis is also a social one,
and we must redefine humanity’s relationship to the natural world by
remaking the basic social institutions and advancing a new ecological
humanism, in order to make science, technology, and the human intellect
serve both social development and a natural evolution guided by reason.
To carve the outlines of a rational ecological future, and to initiate
the necessary steps in that direction, has now become not only a
desideratum, but a necessity. As Murray Bookchin so challengingly asks,
“humanity is too intelligent not to live in a rational society. It
remains to see whether it is intelligent enough to achieve one.”
Eirik Eiglad,
January 14^(th), 2006
Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present
ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It
follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be
understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our
existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this
point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts,
among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological
dislocations we face today — apart, to be sure, from those that are
produced by natural catastrophes.
If this approach seems a bit too sociological for those
environmentalists who identify the primary ecological problem as being
the preservation of wildlife or wilderness, or more broadly as attending
to “Gaia” to achieve planetary “oneness,” they might wish to consider
certain recent developments. The massive oil spills that have occurred
over the past two decades, the extensive deforestation of tropical
forest and magnificent ancient trees in temperate areas, and vast
hydroelectric projects that flood places where people live, to cite only
a few problems, are sobering reminders that the real battleground on
which the ecological future of the planet will be decided is clearly a
social one, particularly between corporate power and the long-range
interests of humanity as a whole.
Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems — or even
to play down or give only token recognition to their crucial
relationship — would be to grossly misconstrue the sources of the
growing environmental crisis. In effect, the way human beings deal with
each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the ecological
crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will fail to see that the
hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly
permeate society are what has given rise to the very idea of dominating
the natural world.
Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the
brutally competitive imperative of “grow or die,” is a thoroughly
impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame
other phenomena — such as technology or population growth — for growing
environmental dislocations. We will ignore their root causes, such as
trade for profit, industrial expansion for its own sake, and the
identification of progress with corporate self- interest. In short, we
will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather
than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward
limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative.
Some critics have recently questioned whether social ecology has treated
the issue of spirituality in ecological politics adequately. In fact,
social ecology was among the earliest of contemporary ecologies to call
for a sweeping change in existing spiritual values. Indeed, such a
change would involve a far-reaching transformation of our prevailing
mentality of domination into one of complementarity, one that sees our
role in the natural world as creative, supportive, and deeply
appreciative of the well-being of nonhuman life. In social ecology a
truly natural spirituality, free of mystical regressions, would center
on the ability of an emancipated humanity to function as ethical agents
for diminishing needless suffering, engaging in ecological restoration,
and fostering an aesthetic appreciation of natural evolution in all its
fecundity and diversity.
Thus, in its call for a collective effort to change society, social
ecology has never eschewed the need for a radically new spirituality or
mentality. As early as 1965, the first public statement to advance the
ideas of social ecology concluded with the injunction: “The cast of mind
that today organizes differences among human and other life-forms along
hierarchical lines of ‘supremacy or ‘inferiority’ will give way to an
outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner — that is,
according to an ethics of complementarity.”[1] In such an ethics, human
beings would complement nonhuman beings with their own capacities to
produce a richer, creative, and developmental whole — not as a“dominant”
species but as supportive one. Although this ethics, expressed at times
as an appeal for the “respiritization of the natural world,” recurs
throughout the literature of social ecology, it should not be mistaken
for a theology that raises a deity above the natural world or even that
seeks to discover one within it. The spirituality advanced by social
ecology is definitively naturalist (as one would expect, given its
relation to ecology itself, which stems from the biological sciences)
rather than supernaturalistic or pantheistic areas of speculation.
The effort in some quarters of the ecology movement to prioritize the
need to develop a pantheistic “eco-spirituality” over the need to
address social factors raises serious questions about their ability to
come to grips with reality. At a time when a blind social mechanism —
the market — is turning soil into sand, covering fertile land with
concrete, poisoning air and water, and producing sweeping climatic and
atmospheric changes, we cannot ignore the impact that an aggressive
hierarchical and exploitative class society has on the natural world. We
must face the fact that economic growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic
domination — not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic
incursions on human well- being — are much more capable of shaping the
future of the natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual
self-redemption. These forms of domination must be confronted by
collective action and by major social movements that challenge the
social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply by personalistic
forms of consumption and investment that often go under the oxymoronic
rubric of “green capitalism.” The present highly cooptative society is
only too eager to find new means of commercial aggrandizement and to add
ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations efforts.
To escape from this profit-oriented image of ecology, let us begin with
some basics — namely, by asking what society and the natural world
actually are. Among the many definitions of nature that have been
formulated over time, the one that has the most affinity with social
ecology is rather elusive and often difficult to grasp because
understanding and articulating it requires a certain way of thinking —
one that stands at odds with what is popularly called “linear thinking.”
This “nonlinear” or organic way of thinking is developmental rather than
analytical, or in more technical terms, it is dialectical rather than
instrumental. It conceives the natural world as a developmental process
, rather than the beautiful vistas we see from a mountaintop or images
fixed on the backs of picture postcards. Such vistas and images of
nonhuman nature are basically static and immobile. As we gaze over a
landscape, to be sure, our attention may momentarily be arrested by the
soaring flight of a hawk, or the bolting leap of a deer, or the
low-slung shadowy lope of a coyote. But what we are really witnessing in
such cases is the mere kinetics of physical motion, caught in the frame
of an essentially static image of the scene before our eyes. Such static
images deceive us into believing in the “eternality” of single moments
in nature.
But nonhuman nature is more than a scenic view, and as we examine it
with some care, we begin to sense that it is basically an evolving and
unfolding phenomenon, a richly fecund, even dramatic development that is
forever changing. I mean to define nonhuman nature precisely as an
evolving process, as the totality, in fact, of its evolution. Nature, so
concerned, encompasses the development from the inorganic into the
organic, and from the less differentiated and relatively limited world
of unicellular organisms into that of multicellular ones equipped with
simple, then, complex, and in time fairly intelligent neural apparatuses
that allow them to make innovative choices. Finally, the acquisition of
warm-bloodedness gives to organisms the astonishing flexibility to exist
in the most demanding climatic environments.
This vast drama of nonhuman nature is in every respect stunning and
wondrous. Its evolution is marked by increasing subjectivity and
flexibility and by increasing differentiation that makes an organism
more adaptable to new environmental challenges and opportunities and
that better equips living beings (specifically human beings) to alter
their environment to meet their own needs rather than merely adapt to
environmental changes. One may speculate that the potentiality of matter
itself — the ceaseless interactivity of atoms in forming new chemical
combinations to produce ever more complex molecules, amino acids,
proteins, and under suitable conditions, elementary life-forms — is
inherent in inorganic nature. [2] Or one may decide quite
matter-of-factly that the “struggle for existence” or the “survival of
the fittest” explains why increasingly subjective and more flexible
beings are capable of addressing environmental change more effectively
that are less subjective and flexible beings. But the simple fact
remains that these evolutionary dramas did occur, indeed the evidence is
carved in stone in the fossil record. That nonhuman nature is this
record, this history, this developmental or evolutionary process, is a
very sobering fact that cannot be ignored without ignoring reality
itself.
Conceiving nonhuman nature as its own interactive evolution rather than
as a mere scenic vista has profound implications — ethical as well as
biological — for ecologically minded people. Human beings embody, at
least potentially, attributes of nonhuman development that place them
squarely within organic evolution. They are not “natural aliens,” to use
Neil Evernden’s phrase, strong exotics, phylogenetic deformities that,
owing to their tool-making capacities, “cannot evolve with an ecosystem
anywhere.” [3] Nor are they “intelligent fleas,” to use the language of
Gaian theorists who believe that the earth (“Gaia”) is one living
organism. [4] These untenable disjunctions between humanity and the
evolutionary process are as superficial as they are potentially
misanthropic. Humans are highly intelligent, indeed, very self-conscious
primates, which is to say that they have emerged — not diverged — from a
long evolution of vertebrate life-forms into mammalian and finally
primate life-forms. They are a product of a significant evolutionary
trend toward intellectuality, self-awareness, will, intentionality, and
expressiveness, be it in verbal or in body language.
Human beings belong to a natural continuum, no less than their primate
ancestors and mammals in general. To depict them as “aliens” that have
no place or pedigree in natural evolution, or to see them essentially as
an infestation that parasitizes the planet the way fleas parasitize dogs
and cats, is not only bad ecology but bad thinking. Lacking any sense of
process, this kind of thinking — regrettably so commonplace among
ethicists — radically divides the nonhuman from the human. Indeed, to
the degree environmental thinkers romanticize nonhuman nature as
wilderness and see it as more authentically “natural” than the works of
humans, they freeze nonhuman nature as a circumscribed domain in which
human innovation, foresight, and creativity have no place and offer no
possibilities.
The truth is that human beings not only belong in nature, they are
products of a long, natural evolutionary process. Their seemingly
“unnatural” activities — like the development of technology and science,
the formation of mutable social institutions, highly symbolic forms of
communication, and aesthetic sensibilities, and the creation of towns
and cities — all would have been impossible without the large array of
physical human attributes that have been aeons in the making, be they
the large human brain or the bipedal motion that frees human hands for
making tools and carrying food. In many respects, human traits are
enlargements of nonhuman traits that have been evolving over the ages.
Increasing care for the young, cooperation, the substitution of mentally
guided behavior for largely instinctive behavior — all are present more
keenly in human behavior. Among humans, as opposed to nonhuman beings,
these traits are developed sufficiently to reach a degree of elaboration
and integration that yields cultures, comprising institutions of
families, bands, tribes, hierarchies, economic classes, and the state —
in short, highly mutable societies for which there is no precedent in
the nonhuman world, unless the genetically programmed behavior of
insects is to be regarded as social. In fact, the emergence and
development of human society has been a continual process of shedding
instinctive behavioral traits and of clearing a new terrain for
potentially rational behavior.
Human beings always remain rooted in their biological evolutionary
history, which we may call “first nature,” but they produce a
characteristically human social nature of their own, which we may call
“second nature.” Far from being unnatural, human second nature is
eminently a creation of organic evolution’s first nature. To write
second nature out of nature as a whole, or indeed to minimize it, is to
ignore the creativity of natural evolution itself and to view it
one-sidedly. If “true” evolution embodies itself simply in creatures
like grizzly bears, wolves, and whales — generally, animals that people
find aesthetically pleasing or relatively intelligent — then human
beings are de-natured. Such views, whether they see human beings as
“aliens” or as “fleas,” essentially place them outside the
self-organizing thrust of natural evolution toward increasing
subjectivity and flexibility. The more enthusiastic proponents of this
de-naturing of humanity may see human beings as existing apart from
nonhuman evolution, as a “freaking,” as Paul Shepard put it, of the
evolutionary process. Others simply avoid the problem of clarifying
humanity’s unique place in natural evolution by promiscuously putting
human beings on a par with beetles in terms of their “intrinsic worth.”
The “either/ or” propositional thinking that produces such obfuscations
either separates the social from the organic altogether or flippantly
makes it disappear into the organic, resulting in an inexplicable
dualism at one extreme or a naive reductionism at the other. The
dualistic approach, with its quasi-theological premise that the world
was “made” for human use, is saddled with the name anthropocentrism,
while the reductionist approach, with its almost meaningless notion of a
“biocentric democracy,” is saddled with the name biocentrism.
The bifurcation of the human from the nonhuman reflects a failure to
think organically or to approach evolutionary phenomena with an
evolutionary way of thought. Needless to say, if nature were no more
than a scenic vista, then mere metaphoric and poetic descriptions of it
might suffice to replace systematic thinking about it. But nature is the
history of nature, an evolutionary process that is going on to one
degree or another under our very eyes, and as such, we dishonor it by
thinking of it in anything but a processual way. That is to say, we
require a way of thinking that recognizes that “what is,” as it seems to
lie before our eyes, is always developing into “what is not,” that it is
engaged in a continual self-organizing process in which past and
present, along a richly differentiated but shared continuum, give rise
to a new potentiality for an ever-richer degree of wholeness. Life,
clearly in its human form, becomes open- endedly innovative and
transcends its relatively narrow capacity to adapt only to a pregiven
set of environmental conditions. As V. Gordon Childe once put it, “Man
makes himself; he is not preset to survive by his genetic makeup.”
By the same token, a processual, organic, and dialectical way of
thinking has little difficulty in locating and explaining the emergence
of the social out of the biological, of second nature out of first
nature. It seems more fashionable these days to deal with ecologically
significant social issues like an accountant. Thus, one simply
juxtaposes two lists of cultural facts — one labeled “old paradigm” and
the other, “new paradigm” — as though they were columns of debits and
credits. Obviously distasteful items like centralization are listed
under “old paradigm,” while more appealing ones like decentralization
are regarded as “new paradigm.” The result is an inventory of
bumper-sticker slogans whose “bottom line” is patently absolute good
versus absolute evil. All of this may be deliciously synoptic and easy
on the eyes, but it is singularly lacking as food for the brain. To
truly know and be able to give interpretive meaning to the social issues
and ideas so arranged, we should want to know how each one derived from
the other and what its part is in an overall development. What, in fact,
is meant by “decentralization,” and how, in the history of human
society, does it derive from or give rise to centralization? Again, we
need processual thinking to comprehend processual realities, if we are
to gain some sense of direction — practical as well as theoretical — in
addressing our ecological problems.
Social ecology seems to stand alone, at present, in calling for an
organic, developmental way of thinking out problems that are basically
organic and developmental in character. The very definition of the
natural world as a development (albeit not any one) indicates the need
for organic thinking, as does the derivation of human from nonhuman
nature — a derivation from which we can draw far-reaching conclusions
for the development of an ecological ethics that in turn can provide
serious guidelines for the solution of our ecological problems.
Social ecology calls upon us to see that the natural world and the
social are interlinked by evolution into one nature that consists of two
differentiations: first or biotic nature, and second or social nature.
Social nature and biotic nature share an evolutionary potential for
greater subjectivity and flexibility. Second nature is the way in which
human beings, as flexible, highly intelligent primates, inhabit and
alter the natural world. That is to say, people create an environment
that is most suitable for their mode of existence. In this respect,
second nature is no different from the environment that every animal,
depending upon its abilities, partially creates as well as primarily
adapts to — the biophysical circumstances or ecocommunity in which it
must live. In principle, on this very simple level, human beings are
doing nothing that differs from the survival activities of nonhuman
beings, be it building beaver dams or digging gopher holes.
But the environmental changes that human beings produce are profoundly
different from those produced by nonhuman beings. Humans act upon their
environments with considerable technical foresight, however lacking that
foresight may be in ecological ideals. Animals adapt to the world around
them; human beings innovate through thought and social labor. For better
or worse, they alter the natural world to meet their needs and desires —
not because they are perverse, but because they have evolved quite
naturally over the ages to do so. Their cultures are rich in knowledge,
experience, cooperation, and conceptual intellectuality; however, they
have been sharply divided against themselves at many points of their
development, through conflicts between groups, classes, nation- states,
and even city-states. Nonhuman beings generally live in ecological
niches, their behavior guided primarily by instinctive drives and
conditioned reflexes. Human societies are “bonded” together by
institutions that change radically over centuries. Nonhuman communities
are notable for their general fixity, by their clearly preset, often
genetically imprinted rhythms. Human communities are guided in part by
ideological factors and are subject to changes conditioned by those
factors. Nonhuman communities are generally tied together by genetically
rooted instinctive factors — to the extent that these communities exist
at all.
Hence human beings, emerging from an organic evolutionary process,
initiate, by the sheer force of their biological and survival needs, a
social evolutionary development that clearly involves their organic
evolutionary process. Owing to their naturally endowed intelligence,
powers of communication, capacity for institutional organization, and
relative freedom from instinctive behavior, they refashion their
environment — as do nonhuman beings — to the full extent that their
biological equipment allows. This equipment makes it possible for them
to engage not only in social life but in social development. It is not
so much that human beings, in principle, behave differently from animals
or are inherently more problematical in a strictly ecological sense, as
it is that the social development by which they grade out of their
biological development often becomes more problematical for themselves
and nonhuman life. How these problems emerge, the ideologies they
produce, the extent to which they contribute to biotic evolution or
abort it, and the damage they inflict on the planet as a whole lie at
the very heart of the modern ecological crisis. Second nature as it
exists today, far from marking the fulfillment of human potentialities,
is riddled by contradictions, antagonisms, and conflicting interests
that have distorted humanity’s unique capacities for development. Its
future prospects encompass both the danger of tearing down the biosphere
and alas, given the struggle to achieve an ecological society, the
capacity to provide an entirely new ecological dispensation.
How, then, did the social emerge from the biological? We have good
reason to believe that as biological facts such as kin lineage, gender
distinctions, and age differences were slowly institutionalized, their
uniquely social dimension was initially quite egalitarian. Later this
development acquired an oppressive hierarchical and then an exploitative
class form. The lineage or blood tie in early prehistory obviously
formed the organic basis of the family. Indeed, it joined together
groups of families into bands, clans, and tribes, through either
intermarriage or fictive forms of descent, thereby forming the earliest
social horizon of our ancestors. More than in other mammals, the simple
biological facts of human reproduction and the protracted maternal care
of the human infant tended to knit siblings together and produced a
strong sense of solidarity and group inwardness. Men, women, and their
children were socialize by means of a fairly stable family life, based
on mutual obligation and an expressed affinity that was often sanctified
by initiation ceremonies and marital vows of one kind or another.
Human beings who were outside the family and all its elaborations into
bands, clans, tribes, and the like, were regarded as “strangers” who
could alternatively be welcomed hospitably or enslaved or put to death.
What mores existed were based on unreflective customs that seemed to
have been inherited from time immemorial. What we call morality began as
the rules or commandments of a deity or various deities, in that moral
beliefs required some kind of supernatural or mystical reinforcement or
sanctification to be accepted by a community. Only later, beginning with
the ancient Greeks, did ethics emerge, based on rational discourse and
reflection. The shift from blind custom to a commanding morality and
finally to a rational ethics occurred with the rise of cities and urban
cosmopolitanism, although by no means did custom and morality diminish
in importance. Humanity, gradually disengaging its social organization
from the biological facts of blood ties, began to admit the “stranger”
and increasingly recognize itself as a shared community of human beings
(and ultimately a community of citizens) rather than an ethnic folk or
group of kinsmen.
In this primordial and socially formative world, other human biological
traits were also reworked from the strictly natural to the social. One
of these was the fact of age and its distinctions. In social groups
among early humans, the absence of a written language helped to confer
on the elderly a high degree of status, for it was they who possessed
the traditional wisdom of the community, including knowledge of the
traditional kinship lines that prescribed marital ties in obedience to
extensive incest taboos as well as survival techniques that had to be
acquired by both the young and the mature members of the group. In
addition, the biological fact of gender distinctions was slowly reworked
along social lines into what were initially complementary sororal and
fraternal groups. Women formed their own food-gathering and care-taking
groups with their own customs, belief systems, and values, while men
formed their own hunting and warrior groups with their own behavioral
characteristics, mores, and ideologies.
From everything we know about the socialization of the biological facts
of kinship, age, and gender groups — their elaboration into early
institutions — there is no reason to doubt that these groups existed
initially in complementary relationships with one another. Each, in
effect, needed the others to form a relatively stable whole. No one
group “dominated” the others or tried to privilege itself in the normal
course of things. Yet even as the biological underpinnings of
consociation were, over time, further reworked into social institutions,
so the social institutions were slowly reworked, at various periods and
in various degrees, into hierarchical structures based on command and
obedience. I speak here of a historical trend, in no way predetermined
by any mystical force or deity, and one that was often a very limited
development among many preliterate or aboriginal cultures and even in
certain fairly elaborate civilizations.
Hierarchy in its earliest forms was probably not marked by the harsh
qualities it has acquired over history. Elders, at the very beginnings
of gerontocracy, were not only respected for their wisdom but were often
beloved of the young, with affection that was often reciprocated in
kind. We can probably account for the increasing harshness of later
gerontocracies by supposing that the elderly, burdened by their failing
physical powers and dependent upon their community’s goodwill, were more
vulnerable to abandonment in periods of material want than any other
part of the population. “Even in simple food-gathering cultures,”
observed anthropologist Paul Radin, “individuals above fifty, let us
say, apparently arrogate to themselves certain powers and privileges
which benefited themselves specifically, and were not necessarily, if at
all, dictated by considerations either of the rights of others or the
welfare of the community.” [5] In any case, that gerontocracy was
probably the earliest form of hierarchy is corroborated by its existence
in communities as disparate as the Australian Aborigines, tribal
societies in East Africa, and Native communities in the Americas. Many
tribal councils throughout the world were really councils of elders, an
institution that never completely disappeared (as the word alderman
suggests), even after they were overlaid by warrior societies,
chiefdoms, and kingships.
Patricentricity, in which masculine values, institutions, and forms of
behavior prevail over feminine ones, seems to have developed in the wake
of gerontocracy. Initially, the emergence of patricentricity may have
been a useful adjunct to a life deeply rooted in the primordial natural
world; preliterate and early aboriginal societies were essentially small
domestic communities in which the authentic center of material life was
the home, not the “men’s house” so widely present in later, more
elaborate tribal societies. Male rule, if such it can strictly be
called, takes on its harshest and most coercive form in patriarchy, an
institution in which the eldest male of an extended family or clan has a
life-and-death command over all other members of the group. Women may be
ordered whom to marry, but they are by no means the exclusive or even
the principal object of a patriarch’s domination. Sons, like daughters,
may be ordered how to behave at the patriarch’s command or be killed at
his whim.
So far as patricentricity is concerned, however, the authority and
prerogative of the male are the product of a long, often subtly
negotiated development in which the male fraternity edges out the female
sorority by virtue of the former’s growing “civil” responsibilities.
Increasing population, marauding bands of outsiders whose migrations may
be induced by drought or other unfavorable conditions, and vendettas of
one kind or another, to cite common causes of hostility or war, create a
new “civil” sphere side by side with woman’s domestic sphere, and the
former gradually encroaches upon the latter. With the appearance of
cattle-drawn plow agriculture, the male, who is the “master of the
beasts,” begins to invade the horticultural sphere of woman, whose
primacy as the food cultivator and food gatherer gives her cultural
preeminence in the community’s internal life, slowly diluting her
preeminence. Warrior societies and chiefdoms carry the momentum of male
dominance to the level of a new material and cultural dispensation. Male
dominance becomes extremely active and ultimately yields a world in
which male elites dominate not only women but also, in the form of
classes, other men.
The causes of the emergence of hierarchy are transparent enough: the
infirmities of age, increasing population numbers, natural disasters,
technological changes that privileged activities of hunting and animal
husbandry over horticultural responsibilities, the growth of civil
society, and the spread of warfare. All served to enhance the male’s
standing at the expense of the female’s. It must be emphasized that
hierarchical domination, however coercive it may be, is not the same
thing as class exploitation. As I wrote in The Ecology of Freedom,
hierarchy
must be viewed as institutionalized relationships, relationships that
living beings literally institute or create but which are neither
ruthlessly fixed by instinct on the one hand nor idiosyncratic on the
other. By this, I mean that they must comprise a clearly social
structure of coercive and privileged ranks that exist apart from the
idiosyncratic individuals who seem to be dominant within a given
community, a hierarchy that is guided by a social logic that goes beyond
individual interactions or inborn patterns of behavior. [6]
They are not reducible to strictly economic relationships based on the
exploitation of labor. In fact, many chiefs earn their prestige, so
essential to their authority, by disposing of gifts, and even by a
considerable disaccumulation of their personal goods. The respect
accorded to many chiefs is earned, not by hoarding surpluses as a source
of power but by disposing of them as evidence of generosity.
By contrast, classes tend to operate along different lines. In class
societies power is usually gained by the acquisition of wealth, not by
its disposal; rulership is guaranteed by outright physical coercion, not
simply by persuasion; and the state is the ultimate guarantor of
authority. That hierarchy is historically more entrenched than class can
perhaps be verified by the fact that despite sweeping changes in class
societies, even of an economically egalitarian kind, women have still
been dominated beings for millennia. By the same token, the abolition of
class rule and economic exploitation offers no guarantee whatever that
elaborate hierarchies and systems of domination will also disappear.
In nonhierarchical societies, certain customs guide human behavior along
basically decent lines. Of primary importance among early customs was
the principle of the irreducible minimum (to use Paul Radin’s
expression), the shared notion that all members of the same community
are entitled to the means of life, irrespective of the amount of work
they perform. To deny anyone food, shelter, and the basic means of life
because of their infirmities or even their frivolous behavior would have
been seen as a heinous denial of the very right to live. Nor were the
basic resources needed to sustain the community ever permitted to be
privately owned; overriding individualistic control was the broader
principle of usufruct — the notion that the means of life that were not
being used by one group could be used, as needed, by another. Thus
unused land, orchards, and even tools and weapons, if left idle, were
often at the disposition of anyone in the community who needed them.
Lastly, custom fostered the practice of mutual aid, the rather sensible
cooperative sharing of things and labor, so that an individual or family
in straitened circumstances could expect to be helped by others. Taken
as whole, these customs became so sedimented into organic society that
they persisted long after hierarchy became oppressive and class society
became predominant.
Nature, in the sense of the biotic environment from which humans take
the simple things they need for survival, often has no meaning to
preliterate peoples as a general concept. Immersed in it as they are,
even celebrating animistic rituals in an environment they view as a
nexus of life, often imputing their own social institutions to the
behavior of nonhuman species, as in the case of beaver “lodges” and
humanlike spirits, the concept of “nature” a such eludes them. Words
that express our conventional notions of nature are not easy to find, if
they exist at all, in the languages of aboriginal peoples.
With the rise of hierarchy and domination, however, the seeds were
planted for the belief that first nature not only exists as a world that
is increasingly distinguishable from the community but one that is
hierarchically organized and can be dominated by human beings. The
worldview of magic reveal this shift clearly. Here nature was not
conceived as a world apart; rather, a practitioner of magic essentially
pleaded with the “chief spirit” of a game animal (itself a puzzling
figure in the dream world) to coax it in the direction of an arrow or a
spear. Later, magic became almost entirely instrumental; the hunter used
magical techniques to “coerce” the game to become prey. While the
earliest forms of magic may be regarded as the practices of a generally
nonhierarchical and egalitarian community, the later kinds of animistic
beliefs betray a more or less hierarchical view of the natural world and
of latent human powers of domination over reality.
We must emphasize here that the idea of dominating nature has its
primary source in the domination of human by human and in the
structuring of the natural world into a hierarchical chain of being (a
static conception, incidentally, that has no relationship to the dynamic
evolution of life into increasingly advanced forms of subjectivity and
flexibility). The biblical injunction that gave command of the living
world to Adam and Noah was above all an expression of a social
dispensation. Its idea of dominating nature — so essential to the view
of the nonhuman world as an object of domination — can be overcome only
through the creation of a society without those class and hierarchical
structures that make for rule and obedience in private as well as public
life, and the objectifications of reality as mere materials for
exploitation. That this revolutionary dispensation would involve changes
in attitudes and values should go without saying. But new ecological
attitudes and values will remain vaporous if they are not given
substance and solidity through real and objective institutions (the
structures by which humans concretely interact with each other) and
through the tangible realities of everyday life from childrearing to
work and play. Until human beings cease to live in societies that are
structured around hierarchies as well as economic classes, we shall
never be free of domination, however much we try to dispel it with
rituals, incantations, ecotheologies, and the adoption of seemingly
“natural” lifeways.
The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost as old as
that of hierarchy itself. Already in the Gilgamesh epic of Mesopotamia,
a drama whose written form dates back some four thousand years, the hero
defies the deities and cuts down their sacred trees in his quest for
immortality. The Odyssey is a vast travelogue of the Greek warrior, more
canny than heroic, who in his wanderings essentially subdues the nature
deities that the Hellenic world had inherited form its less well-known
precursors (ironically, the dark pre-Olympian world that has been
revived by purveyors of eco-mysticism and spiritualism). Long before the
emergence of modern science, “linear” rationality, and “industrial
society” (to cite causal factors that are invoked so flippantly in the
modern ecology movement), hierarchical and class societies laid waste to
much of the Mediterranean basin as well as the hillsides of China,
beginning a vast remaking and often despoliation of the planet.
To be sure, human second nature, in inflicting harm on first nature,
created no Garden of Eden. More often than not, it despoiled much that
was beautiful, creative, and dynamic in the biotic world, just as it
ravaged human life itself in murderous warfare, genocide, and acts of
heartless oppression. Social ecology maintains that the future of human
life goes hand in hand with the future of the nonhuman world, yet it
does not overlook the fact that the harm that hierarchical and class
society inflicted on the natural world was more than matched by the harm
it inflicted on much of humanity.
However troubling the ills produced by second nature, the customs of the
irreducible minimum, usufruct, and mutual aid cannot be ignored in any
account of anthropology and history. These customs persisted well into
historical times and surfaced sometimes explosively in massive popular
uprisings, from revolts in ancient Sumer to the present time. Many of
those revolts demanded the recovery of caring and communistic values, at
times when these were coming under the onslaught of elitist and class
oppression. Indeed, despite the armies that roamed the landscape of
warring areas, the tax-gatherers who plundered ordinary village peoples,
and the daily abuses that overseers inflicted on peasants and workers,
community life still persisted and retained many of the cherished values
of a more egalitarian past. Neither ancient despots nor feudal lords
could fully obliterate them in peasant villages and in the towns with
independent craft associations. In ancient Greece, a rational philosophy
that rejected the encumbering of thought and political life by
extravagant wants, as well as a religion based on austerity, tended to
scale down needs and delimit human appetites for material goods.
Together they served to slow the pace of technological innovation
sufficiently that when new means of production were developed, they
could be sensitively integrated into a balanced society. In medieval
times, markets were still modest, usually local affairs, in which guilds
exercised strict control over prices, competition, and the quality of
the goods produced by their members.
But just as hierarchies and class structures had acquired momentum and
permeated much of society, so too the market began to acquire a life of
its own and extended its reach beyond a few limited regions into the
depths of vast continents. Where exchange had once been primarily a
means to provide for essential needs, limited by guilds or by moral and
religious restrictions, long-distance trade subverted those limits. Not
only did trade place a high premium on techniques for increasing
production; it also became the progenitor of new needs, many of them
wholly artificial, and gave a tremendous impetus to consumption and the
growth of capital. First in northern Italy and the European lowlands,
and later — and most decisively — in England during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the production of goods exclusively for sale and
profit (the production of the capitalistic commodity) rapidly swept
aside all cultural and social barriers to market growth.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the new
industrial capitalist class, with its factory system and commitment to
limitless expansion, had embarked on its colonization of the entire
world, including most aspects of personal life. Unlike the feudal
nobility, with its cherished lands and castles, the bourgeoisie had no
home but the marketplace and its bank vaults. As a class, it turned more
and more of the world into a domain of factories. In the ancient and
medieval worlds, entrepreneurs had normally invested profits in land and
lived like country gentry, given the prejudices of the times against
“ill-gotten” gains from trade. But the industrial capitalists of the
modern world spawned a bitterly competitive marketplace that placed a
high premium on industrial expansion and the commercial power it
conferred, functioning as though growth were an end in itself.
In social ecology it is crucially important to recognize that industrial
growth did not and does not result from changes in cultural outlook
alone — least of all from the impact of scientific and technological
rationality on society. Growth occurs above all from harshly objective
factors churned up by the expansion of the market itself, factors that
are largely impervious to moral considerations and efforts at ethical
persuasion. Indeed, despite the close association between capitalist
development and technological innovation, the most driving imperative of
any enterprise in the harshly capitalist marketplace, given the savagely
dehumanizing competition that prevails there, is the need of an
enterprise to grow in order to avoid perishing at the hands of its
savage rivals. Important as even greed may be as a motivating force,
sheer survival requires that the entrepreneur must expand his or her
productive apparatus in order to remain ahead of others. Each
capitalist, in short, must try to devour his or her rivals — or else be
devoured by them. The key to this law of life — to survival — is
expansion, and the quest for ever- greater profits, to be invested, in
turn, in still further expansion. Indeed, the notion of progress, once
regarded as faith in the evolution of greater human cooperation and
care, is now identified with ever greater competition and reckless
economic growth.
The effort by many well-intentioned ecology theorists and their admirers
to reduce the ecological crisis to a cultural crisis rather than a
social one becomes very obfuscatory and misleading. However ecologically
well-meaning an entrepreneur may be, the harsh fact is that his or her
very survival in the marketplace precludes the development of a
meaningful ecological orientation. The adoption of ecologically sound
practices places a morally concerned entrepreneur at a striking and
indeed fatal disadvantage in a competitive relationship with a rival —
who, operating without ecological guidelines and moral constraints,
produces cheap commodities at lower costs and reaps higher profits for
further capital expansion. The marketplace has its own law of survival:
only the most unscrupulous can rise to the top of that competitive
struggle.
Indeed, to the extent that environmental movements and ideologies merely
moralize about the wickedness of our anti- ecological society and call
for changes in personal lifestyles and attitudes, they obscure the need
for concerted social action and tend to deflect the struggle for
far-reaching social change. Meanwhile, corporations are skillfully
manipulating this popular desire for personal ecologically sound
practices by cultivating ecological mirages. Mercedes-Benz, for example,
declaims in a two-page magazine advertisement, decorated with a bison
painting from a Paleolithic cave wall, that “we must work to make
progress more environmentally sustainable by including environmental
themes in the planning of new products.” [7] Such messages are
commonplace in Germany, one of western Europe’s worst polluters. Such
advertising is equally manipulative in the United States, where leading
polluters piously declare that for them, “every day is Earth Day.”
The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual
persuasion and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are
necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is structurally
amoral and hence impervious to moral appeals. The modern marketplace is
driven by imperatives of its own, irrespective of what kind of CEO sits
in a corporation’s driver’s seat or holds on to its handlebars. The
direction it follows depends not upon ethical prescriptions and personal
inclinations but upon objective laws of profit or loss, growth or death,
eat or be eaten, and the like. The maxim “Business is business”
explicitly tells us that ethical, religious, psychological, and
emotional factors have virtually no place in the predatory world of
production, profit, and growth. It is grossly misleading to think that
we can divest this harsh, indeed mechanistic world of its objective
characteristics by means of ethical appeals.
A society based on the law of “grow or die” as its all-pervasive
imperative must of necessity have a devastating impact on first nature.
Nor does “growth” here refer to population growth; the current wisdom of
population-boomers to the contrary, the most serious disruptors of
ecological cycles are found in the large industrial centers of the
world, which are not only poisoning water and air but producing the
greenhouse gases that threaten to melt the ice caps and flood vast areas
of the planet. Suppose we could somehow cut the world’s population in
half: would growth and the despoliation of the earth be reduced at all?
Capital would insist that it was “indispensable” to own two or three of
every appliance, motor vehicle, or electronic gadget, where one would
more than suffice if not be too many. In addition, the military would
continue to demand ever more lethal instruments of death and
devastation, of which new models would be provided annually.
Nor would “softer” technologies, if produced by a grow-or-die market,
fail to be used for destructive capitalistic ends. Two centuries ago,
large forested areas in England were hacked into fuel for iron forges
with axes that had not changed appreciably since the Bronze Age, and
ordinary sails guided ships laden with commodities to all parts of the
world well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, much of the United
States was cleared of its forests, wildlife, and aboriginal inhabitants
with tools and weapons that could have easily been recognized, however
much they were modified, by Renaissance people centuries earlier. What
modern technics did was accelerate a process that had been well under
way at the close of the Middle Ages. It cannot be held solely
responsible for endeavors that were under way for centuries; it
essentially abetted damage caused by the ever-expanding market system,
whose roots, in turn, lay in one of history’s most fundamental social
transformations: the elaboration of a system of production and
distribution based on exchange rather than complementarity and mutual
aid.
Social ecology is an appeal not only for moral regeneration but, and
above all, for social reconstruction along ecological lines. It
emphasizes that, taken by itself, an ethical appeal to the powers that
be, based on blind market forces and ruthless competition, is certain to
be futile. Indeed, taken by itself, such an appeal obscures the real
power relationships that prevail today by making the attainment of an
ecological society seem merely a matter of changing individual
attitudes, spiritual renewal, or quasi-religious redemption.
Although always mindful of the importance of a new ethical outlook,
social ecology seeks to redress the ecological abuses that the
prevailing society has inflicted on the natural world by going to the
structural as well as the subjective sources of notions like the
domination of first nature. That is, it challenges the entire system of
domination itself — its economy, its misuse of technics, its
administrative apparatus, its degradations of political life, its
destruction of the city as a center of cultural development, indeed the
entire panoply of its moral hypocrisies and defiling of the human spirit
— and seeks to eliminate the hierarchical and class edifices that have
imposed themselves on humanity and defined the relationship between
nonhuman and human nature. It advances an ethics of complementary in
which human beings play a supportive role in perpetuating the integrity
of the biosphere — the potentiality of human beings to be the most
conscious products of natural evolution. Indeed, humans have an ethical
responsibility to function creatively in the unfolding of that
evolution. Social ecology thus stresses the need to embody its ethics of
complementarity in palpable social institutions that will make human
beings conscious ethical agents in promoting the well-being of
themselves and the nonhuman world. It seeks the enrichment of the
evolutionary process by the diversification of life-forms and the
application of reason to a wondrous remaking of the planet along
ecological lines. Notwithstanding most romantic views, “Mother Nature”
does not necessarily “know best.” To oppose activities of the corporate
world does not require one to become naively biocentric. Indeed by the
same token, to applaud humanity’s potential for foresight, rationality,
and technological achievement does not make one anthropocentric. The
loose usage of such buzzwords, so commonplace in the ecology movement
today, must be brought to a definitive end by reflective discussion, not
by deprecating denunciations.
Social ecology, in effect, recognizes that — like it or not — the future
of life on this planet pivots on the future of society. It contends that
evolution, both in first nature and in second, is not yet complete. Nor
are the two realms so separated from each other that we must choose one
or the other — either national evolution, with its “biocentric” halo, or
social evolution, as we have known it up to now, with its
“anthropocentric” halo — as the basis for a creative biosphere. We must
go beyond both the natural and the social toward a new synthesis that
contains the best of both. Such a synthesis must transcend both first
and second nature in the form of a creative, self-conscious, and
therefore “free nature,” in which human beings intervene in natural
evolution with their best capacities — their ethical sense, their
unequaled capacity for conceptual thought, and their remarkable powers
and range of communication.
But such a goal remains mere rhetoric unless a movement gives it
logistical and social tangibility. How are we to organize such a
movement? Logistically, “free nature” is unattainable without the
decentralization of cities into confederally united communities
sensitively tailored to the natural areas in which they are located.
Ecotechnologies, and of solar, wind, methane, and other renewable
sources of energy; organic forms of agriculture; and the design of
humanly scaled, versatile industrial installations to meet the regional
needs of confederated municipalities — all must be brought into the
service of an ecologically sound world based on an ethics of
complementarity. It means too an emphasis not only on recycling but on
the production of high-quality goods that can, in many cases, last for
generations. It means the replacement of needlessly insensate labor with
creative work and an emphasis on artful craftspersonship in preference
to mechanized production. It means the free time to be artful and to
fully engage in public affairs. One would hope that the sheer
availability of goods, the mechanization of production, and the freedom
to choose one’s material lifestyle would sooner or later influence
people to practice moderation in all aspects of life as a response to
the consumerism promoted by the capitalist market. [8]
But no ethics or vision of an ecological society, however inspired, can
be meaningful unless it is embodied in a living politics. By politics, I
do not mean the statecraft practiced by what we call politicians —
namely, representatives elected or selected to manage public affairs and
formulate policies as guidelines for social life. To social ecology,
politics means what it meant in the democratic polis of classical Athens
some two thousand years ago: direct democracy, the formulation of
policies by directly democratic popular assemblies, and the
administration of those policies by mandated coordinators who can easily
be recalled if they fail to abide by the decision of the assembly’s
citizens. I am very mindful that Athenian politics, even in its most
democratic periods, was marred by the existence of slavery and
patriarchy, and by the exclusion of the stranger from public life. In
this respect, to be sure, it differed very little from most of the other
ancient Mediterranean civilizations — and certainly ancient Asian ones —
of the time. What made Athenian politics unique, however, was that it
produced institutions that were extraordinarily democratic — even
directly so — by comparison with the republican institutions of the
so-called “democracies” of today’s world. Either directly or indirectly,
the Athenian democracy inspired later, more all-encompassing direct
democracies, such as many medieval European towns, the little- known
Parisian “sections” (or neighborhood assemblies) of 1793 that propelled
the French Revolution in a highly radical direction, and more
indirectly, New England town meetings, and other, more recent attempts
at civic self-governance.[9]
Any self-managed community, however, that tries to live in isolation and
develop self-sufficiency risks the danger of becoming parochial, even
racist. Hence the need to extend the ecological politics of a direct
democracy into confederations of ecocommunities, and to foster a healthy
interdependence, rather than an introverted, stultifying independence.
Social ecology would be obliged to embody its ethics in a politics of
libertarian municipalism, in which municipalities conjointly gain rights
to self-governance through networks of confederal councils, to which
towns and cities would be expected to send their mandated, recallable
delegates to adjust differences. All decisions would have to be ratified
by a majority of the popular assemblies of the confederated towns and
cities. This institutional process could be initiated in the
neighborhoods of giant cities as well as in networks of small towns. In
fact, the formation of numerous “town halls” has already repeatedly been
proposed in cities as large as New York and Paris, only to be defeated
by well-organized elitist groups that sought to centralize power rather
than allow its decentralization.
Power will always belong to elite and commanding strata if it is not
institutionalized in face-to-face democracies, among people who are
fully empowered as social beings to make decisions in new communal
assemblies. Attempts to empower people in this manner and form
constitute an abiding challenge to the nation- state — that is, a dual
power in which the free municipality exists in open tension with the
nation-state. Power that does not belong to the people invariably
belongs to the state and the exploitative interests it represents. Which
is not to say that diversity is not a desideratum; to the contrary, it
is the source of cultural creativity. Still it never should be
celebrated in a nationalistic sense of “apartness” from the general
interests of humanity as a whole, or else it will regress into the
parochialism of folkdom and tribalism.
Should the full reality of citizenship in all its discursiveness and
political vitality begin to wane, its disappearance would mark an
unprecedented loss in human development. Citizenship, in the classical
sense of the term, which involved a lifelong, ethically oriented
education in the art of participation in public affairs (not the empty
form of national legitimation that it so often consists of today), would
disappear. Its loss would mean the atrophying of a communal life beyond
the limits of the family, the waning of a civic sensibility to the point
of the shriveled ego, the complete replacement of the public arena with
the private world and with private pursuits.
The failure of a rational, socially committed ecology movement would
yield a mechanized, aesthetically arid, and administered society,
composed of vacuous egos at best and totalitarian automata at worst.
Before the planet was rendered physically uninhabitable, there would be
few humans who would be able to inhabit it.
Alternatively, a truly ecological society would open the vista of a
“free nature” with a sophisticated eco-technology based on solar, wind,
and water; carefully treated fossil fuels would be sited to produce
power to meet rationally conceived needs. Production would occur
entirely for use, not for profit, and the distribution of goods would
occur entirely to meet human needs based on norms established by
citizens’ assemblies and confederations of assemblies. Decisions by the
community would be made according to direct, face-to-face procedures
with all the coordinative judgments mandated delegates. These judgments,
in turn, would be referred back for discussion, approval, modification,
or rejection by the assembly of assemblies (or Commune of communes) as a
whole, reflecting the wishes of the fully assembled majority.
We cannot tell how much technology will be expanded a few decades from
now, let alone a few generations. Its growth and the prospects it is
likely to open over the course of this century alone are too dazzling
even for the most imaginative utopian to envision. If nothing else, we
have been swept into a permanent technological and communications
revolution whose culmination it is impossible to foresee. This amassing
of power and knowledge opens two radically opposing prospects: either
humanity will truly destroy itself and its habitat, or it will create a
garden, a fruitful and benign world that not even the most fanciful
utopian, Charles Fourier, could have imagined.
It is fitting that such dire alternatives should appear now and in such
extreme forms. Unless social ecology — with its naturalistic outlook,
its developmental interpretations of natural and social phenomena, its
emphasis on discipline with freedom and responsibility with imagination
— can be brought to the service of such historic ends, humanity may well
prove to be incapable of changing the world. We cannot defer the need to
deal with these prospects indefinitely: either a movement will arise
that will bestir humanity into action, or the last great chance in
history for the complete emancipation of humanity will perish in
unrestrained self-destruction.
Defying all the theoretical predictions of the 1930s, capitalism has
restabilized itself with a vengeance and acquired extraordinary
flexibility in the decades since World War II. In fact, we have yet to
clearly determine what constitutes capitalism in its most “mature” form,
not to speak of its social trajectory in the years to come. But what is
clear, I would argue, is that capitalism has transformed itself from an
economy surrounded by many precapitalist social and political formations
into a society that itself has become “economized.” Terms like
consumerism and industrialism are merely obscurantist euphemisms for an
all-pervasive embourgeoisement that involves not simply an appetite for
commodities and sophisticated technologies but the expansion of
commodity relationships — of market relationships — into areas of life
and social movements that once offered some degree of resistance to, if
not a refuge from, utterly amoral, accumulative, and competitive forms
of human interaction. Marketplace values have increasingly percolated
into familial, educational, personal, and even spiritual relationships
and have largely edged out the precapitalist traditions that made for
mutual aid, idealism, and moral responsibility in contrast to
businesslike norms of behavior.
There is a sense in which any new forms of resistance — be they by left
libertarians, or radicals generally — must open alternative areas of
life that can countervail and undo the embourgeoisement of society at
all its levels. The issue of the relationship of “society,” “politics,”
and “the state” becomes one of programmatic urgency. Can there be any
room for a radical public realm beyond the communes, cooperatives, and
neighborhood service organizations fostered by the 1960s counterculture
— structures that easily degenerated into boutique-type businesses when
they did not disappear completely? Is there, perhaps, a public realm
that can become an arena for the interplay of conflicting forces for
change, education, empowerment, and ultimately, confrontation with the
established way of life?
The very concept of a public realm stands at odds with traditional
radical notions of a class realm. Marxism, in particular, denied the
existence of a definable “public,” or what in the Age of Democratic
Revolutions of two centuries ago was called “the People,” because the
notion ostensibly obscured specific class interests — interests that
were ultimately supposed to bring the bourgeoisie into unrelenting
conflict with the proletariat. If “the People” meant anything, according
to Marxist theorists, it seemed to mean a waning, unformed, nondescript
petty bourgeoisie — a legacy of the past and of past revolutions — that
could be expected to side mainly with the capitalist class it aspired to
enter and ultimately with the working class it was forced to enter. The
proletariat, to the degree that it became class conscious, would
ultimately express the general interests of humanity once it absorbed
this vague middle class, particularly during a general economic or
“chronic” crisis within capitalism itself.
The 1930s, with its waves of strikes, its workers’ insurrections, its
street confrontations between revolutionary and fascist groups, and its
prospect of war and bloody social upheaval, seemed to confirm this
vision. But we cannot any longer ignore the fact that this traditional
radical vision has since been replaced by the present-day reality of a
managed capitalist system — managed culturally and ideologically as well
as economically. However much living standards have been eroded for
millions of people, the unprecedented fact remains that capitalism has
been free of a “chronic crisis” for a half-century. Nor are there any
signs that we are faced in the foreseeable future with a crisis
comparable to that of the Great Depression. Far from having an internal
source of long-term economic breakdown that will presumably create a
general interest for a new society, capitalism has been more successful
in crisis management in the last fifty years than it was in the previous
century and a half, the period of its so-called “historical ascendancy.”
The classical industrial proletariat, too, has waned in numbers in the
First World (the historical locus classicus of socialist confrontation
with capitalism), in class consciousness, and even in political
consciousness of itself as a historically unique class. Attempts to
rewrite Marxian theory to include salaried people in the proletariat are
not only nonsensical, they stand flatly at odds with how this vastly
differentiated middle-class population conceives itself and its
relationship to a market society. To live with the hope that capitalism
will “immanently” collapse from within as a result of its own
contradictory self-development is illusory as things stand today.
But there are dramatic signs that capitalism, as I have emphasized
elsewhere, is producing external conditions for a crisis an ecological
crisis — that may well generate a general human interest for radical
social change. Capitalism, organized around a “grow-or-die” market
system based on rivalry and expansion, must tear down the natural world
— turning soil into sand, polluting the atmosphere, changing the entire
climatic pattern of the planet, and possibly making the earth unsuitable
for complex forms of life. In effect, it is proving to be an ecological
cancer and may well simplify complex ecosystems that have been in the
making for countless aeons.
If mindless and unceasing growth as an end in itself — forced by
competition to accumulate and devour the organic world — creates
problems that cut across material, ethnic, and cultural differences, the
concept of “the People” and of a “public sphere” may become a living
reality in history. Some kind of radical ecology movement has yet to be
established that could acquire a unique, cohering, and political
significance to replace the influence of the traditional workers’
movement. If the locus of proletarian radicalism was the factory, the
locus of the ecology movement would be the community: the neighborhood,
the town, and the municipality. A new alternative, a political one,
would have to be developed that is neither parliamentary on the one hand
nor locked into direct action and countercultural activities on the
other. Indeed, direct action could mesh with this new politics in the
form of community assemblies oriented toward a fully participatory
democracy — in the highest form of direct action, the full empowerment
of the people in determining the destiny of society.
If the 1960s gave rise to a counterculture to resist the prevailing
culture, the following decades have created the need for popular
counter-institutions to countervail the centralized state. Although the
specific form that such institutions could take may vary according to
the traditions, values, concerns, and culture of a given area, certain
basic theoretical premises must be clarified if one is to advance the
need for new institutions and, more broadly, for a new radical politics.
The need once again to define politics — indeed, to give it a broader
meaning than it has had in the past — becomes a practical imperative.
The ability and wilingness of radicals to meet this need may well
determine the future of movements like the Greens and the very
possibility of radicalism to exist as a coherent force for basic social
change.
The major institutional arenas — the social, the political, and the
statist — were once clearly distinguishable from each other. The social
arena could be clearly demarcated from the political, and the political,
in turn, from the state. But in our present, historically clouded world,
these have been blurred and mystified. Politics has been absorbed by the
state, just as society has increasingly been absorbed by the economy
today. If new, truly radical movements to deal with ecological breakdown
are to emerge and if an ecologically oriented society is to end attempts
to dominate nature as well as people, this process must be arrested and
reversed.
It easy to think of society, politics, and the state ahistorically, as
if they had always existed as we find them today. But the fact is that
each one of these has had a complex development, one that should be
understood if we are to gain a clear sense of their importance in social
theory and practice. Much of what we today call politics, for one, is
really statecraft, structured around staffing the state apparatus with
parliamentarians, judges, bureaucrats, police, the military, and the
like, a phenomenon often replicated from the summits of the state to the
smallest of communities. But the term politics, Greek etymologically,
once referred to a public arena peopled by conscious citizens who felt
competent to directly manage their own communities, or poleis.
Society, in turn, was the relatively private arena, the realm of
familial obligation, friendship, personal self-maintenance, production,
and reproduction. From its first emergence as merely human group
existence to its highly institutionalized forms, which we properly call
society, social life was structured around the family or oikos.
(Economy, in fact, once meant little more than the management of the
family.) Its core was the domestic world of woman, complemented by the
civil world of man.
In early human communities, the most important functions for survival,
care, and maintenance occurred in the domestic arena, to which the civil
arena, such as it was, largely existed in service. A tribe (to use this
term in a very broad sense to include bands and clans) was a truly
social entity, knitted together by blood, marital, and functional ties
based on age and work. These strong centripetal forces, rooted in the
biological facts of life, held these eminently social communities
together. They gave them a sense of internal solidarity so strong that
the tribes largely excluded the “stranger” or “outsider,” whose
acceptability usually depended upon canons of hospitality and the need
for new members to replenish warriors when warfare became increasingly
important.
A great part of recorded history is an account of the growth of the male
civil arena at the expense of this domestic or social one. Males gained
growing authority over the early community as a result of intertribal
warfare and clashes over territory in which to hunt. Perhaps more
important, agricultural peoples appropriated large areas of the land
that hunting peoples required to sustain themselves and their lifeways.
It was from this undifferentiated civil arena (again, to use the word
civil in a very broad sense) that politics and the state emerged. Which
is not to say that politics and statecraft were the same from the
beginning. Despite their common origins in the early civil arena, these
two were sharply opposed to each other. History’s garments are never
neat and unwrinkled. The evolution of society from small domestic social
groups into highly differentiated, hierarchical, and class systems whose
authority encompassed vast territorial empires is nothing if not complex
and irregular.
The domestic and familial arena itself — that is to say, the social
arena — helped to shape the formation of these states. Early despotic
kingdoms, such as those of Egypt and Persia, were seen not as clearly
civil entities but as the personal “households” or domestic domains of
monarchs. These vast palatial estates of “divine” kings and their
families were later carved up by lesser families into manorial or feudal
estates. The social values of present-day aristocracies are redolent of
a time when kinship and lineage, not citizenship or wealth, determined
one’s status and power.
It was the Bronze Age “urban revolution,” to use V. Gordon Childe’s
expression, that slowly eliminated the trappings of the social or
domestic arena from the state and created a new terrain for the
political arena. The rise of cities — largely around temples, military
fortresses, administrative centers, and interregional markets — created
the basis for a new, more secular and more universalistic form of
political space. Given time and development, this space slowly evolved
an unprecedented public domain.
Cities that are perfect models of such a public space do not exist in
either history or social theory. But some cities were neither
predominantly social (in the domestic sense) nor statist, but gave rise
to an entirely new societal dispensation. The most remarkable of these
were the seaports of ancient Hellas and the craft and commercial cities
of medieval Italy, Russia, and central Europe. Even modern cities of
newly forming nation- states like Spain, England, and France developed
identities of their own and relatively popular forms of citizen
participation. Their parochial, even patriarchal attributes should not
be permitted to overshadow their universal humanistic attributes. From
the Olympian standpoint of modernity, it would be as petty as it would
be ahistorical to highlight failings that cities shared with nearly all
“civilizations” over thousands of years.
What should stand out as a matter of vital importance is that these
cities created the public domain. There, in the agora of the Greek
democracies, the forum of the Roman republic, the town center of the
medieval commune, and the plaza of the Renaissance city, citizens could
congregate. To one degree or another in this public domain a radically
new arena — a political one — emerged, based on limited but often
participatory forms of democracy and a new concept of civic personhood,
the citizen.
Defined in terms of its etymological roots, politics means the mangement
of the community or polis by its members, the citizens. Politics also
meant the recognition of civic rights for strangers or “outsiders” who
were not linked to the population by blood ties. That is, it meant the
idea of a universal humanitas, as distinguished from the genealogically
related “folk.” Together with these fundamental developments, politics
was marked by the increasing secularization of societal affairs, a new
respect for the individual, and a growing regard for rational canons of
behavior over the unthinking imperatives of custom.
I do not wish to suggest that privilege, inequality of rights,
supernatural vagaries, custom, or even mistrust of the “stranger”
totally disappeared with the rise of cities and politics. During the
most radical and democratic periods of the French Revolution, for
example, Paris was rife with fears of “foreign conspiracies” and a
xenophobic mistrust of “outsiders. “ Nor did women ever fully share the
freedoms enjoyed by men. My point, however, is that something very new
was created by the city that cannot be buried in the folds of the social
or of the state: namely, a public domain. This domain narrowed and
expanded with time, but it never completely disappeared from history. It
stood very much at odds with the state, which tried in varying degrees
to professionalize and centralize power, often becoming an end in
itself, such as the state power that emerged in Ptolemaic Egypt, the
absolute monarchies of seventeenth-century Europe, and the totalitarian
systems of rule established in Russia and in China in the past century.
The abiding physical arena of politics has almost always been the city
or town — more generically, the municipality. The size of a politically
viable city is not unimportant, to be sure. To the Greeks, notably
Aristotle, a city or polis should not be so large that it cannot deal
with its affairs on a face-to-face basis or eliminate a certain degree
of familiarity among its citizens. These standards, by no means fixed or
inviolable, were meant to foster urban development along lines that
directly countervailed the emerging state. Given a modest but by no
means small size, the polis could be arranged institutionally so that it
could conduct its affairs by rounded, publicly engaged men with a
minimal, carefully guarded degree of representation.
To be a political person, it was supposed, required certain material
preconditions. A modicum of free time was needed to participate in
political affairs, leisure that was probably supplied by slave labor,
although it is by no means true that all active Greek citizens were
slaveowners. Even more important than leisure time was the need for
personal training or character formation — the Greek notion of paidaeia
— which inculcated the reasoned restraint by which citizens maintained
the decorum needed to keep an assembly of the people viable. An ideal of
public service was necessary to outweigh narrow, egoistic impulses and
to develop the ideal of a general interest. This was achieved by
establishing a complex network of relationships, ranging from loyal
friendships — the Greek notion of philia — to shared experiences in
civic festivals and military service.
But politics in this sense was not a strictly Hellenic phenomenon.
Similar problems and needs arose and were solved in a variety of ways in
the free cities not only in the Mediterranean basin but in continental
Europe, England, and North America. Nearly all these free cities created
a public domain and a politics that were democratic to varying degrees
over long periods of time. Deeply hostile to centralized states, free
cities and their federations formed some of history’s crucial turning
points in which humanity was faced with the possibility of establishing
societies based on municipal confederations or on nation-states.
The state, too, had a historical development and cannot be reduced to a
simplistic ahistorical image. Ancient states were historically followed
by quasi- states, monarchical states, feudal states, and republican
states. The totalitarian states of this century beggar the harshest
tyrannies of the past. But essential to the rise of the nation-state was
the ability of centralized states to weaken the vitality of urban, town,
and village structures and replace their functions by bureaucracies,
police, and military forces. A subtle interplay between the municipality
and the state, often exploding in open conflict, has occurred throughout
history and has shaped the societal landscape of the present day.
Unfortunately, not enough attention has been given to the fact that the
capacity of states to exercise the full measure of their power has often
been limited by the municipal obstacles they encountered.
Nationalism, like statism, has so deeply imprinted itself on modern
thinking that the very idea of a municipalist politics as an option for
societal organization has virtually been written off. For one thing, as
I have already emphasized, politics these days has been identified
completely with statecraft, the professionalization of power. That the
political realm and the state have often been in sharp conflict with
each other — indeed, in conflicts that exploded in bloody civil wars —
has been almost completely overlooked.
The great revolutionary movements of the past, from the English
Revolution of the 1640s to those in our own century, have always been
marked by strong community upsurges and depended for their success on
strong community ties. That fears of municipal autonomy still haunt the
nation-state can be seen in the endless arguments that are brought
against it. Phenomena as “dead” as the free community and participatory
democracy should presumably arouse far fewer opponents than we continue
to encounter.
The rise of the great megalopolis has not ended the historic quest for
community and civic politics, any more than the rise of multinational
corporations has removed the issue of nationalism from the modern
agenda. Cities like New York, London, Frankfurt, Milan, and Madrid can
be politically decentralized institutionally, be they by neighborhood or
district networks, despite their large structural size and their
internal interdependence. Indeed, how well they can function if they do
not decentralize structurally is an ecological issue of paramount
importance, as problems of air pollution, adequate water supply, crime,
the quality of life, and transportation suggest.
History has shown very dramatically that major cities of Europe with
populations approaching a million and with primitive means of
communication functioned by means of well-coordinated decentralized
institutions of extraordinary political vitality. From the Castilian
cities that exploded in the Comuñero revolt in the early l500s through
the Parisian sections or assemblies of the early 1790s to the Madrid
Citizens’ Movement of the 1960s (to cite only a few), municipal
movements in large cities have posed crucial issues of where power
should be centered and how societal life should be managed
institutionally.
That a municipality can be as parochial as a tribe is fairly obvious —
and is no less true today than it has been in the past. Hence, any
municipal movement that is not confederal — that is to say, that does
not enter into a network of mutual obligations to towns and cities in
its own region — can no more be regarded as a truly political entity in
any traditional sense than a neighborhood that does not work with other
neighborhoods in the city in which it is located. Confederation, based
on shared responsibilities, full accountability of confederal delegates
to their communities, the right to recall, and firmly mandated
representative forms an indispensable part of a new politics. To demand
that existing towns and cities replicate the nation-state on a local
level is to surrender any commitment to social change as such.
What is of immense practical importance is that prestatist institutions,
traditions, and sentiments remain alive in varying degrees throughout
most of the world. Resistance to the encroachment of oppressive states
has been nourished by village, neighborhood, and town community
networks, as witness such struggles in South Africa, the Middle East,
and Latin America. To ignore the communal basis of this resistance would
be as myopic as to ignore the latent instability of every nation-state;
worse would be to take the nation-state as it is for granted and deal
with it merely on its own terms. Indeed, whether a state remains “more”
of a state or ”less” — no trifling matter to radical theorists as
disparate as Bakunin and Marx — depends heavily upon the power of local,
confederal, and community movements to countervail it and hopefully
establish a dual power that will replace it. The major role that the
Madrid Citizens’ Movement played nearly three decades ago in weakening
the Franco regime would require a major study to do it justice.
Notwithstanding Marxist visions of a largely economistic conflict
between “wage labor and capital,” the revolutionary working class
movements of the past were not simply industrial movements. The volatile
Parisian labor movement, largely artisanal in character, for example,
was also a community movement that was centered on quartiers and
nourished by a rich neighborhood life. From the Levellers of
seventeenth-century London to the anarcho-syndicalists of Barcelona in
the twentieth century, radical activity has been sustained by strong
community bonds, a public sphere provided by streets, squares, and
cafes.
This municipal life cannot be ignored in radical practice and must even
be recreated where it has been undermined by the modern state. A new
politics, rooted in towns, neighborhoods, cities, and regions, forms the
only viable alternative to the anemic parliamentarism that is
percolating through various Green parties today and similar social
movements — in short, their recourse to sheer and corruptive statecraft
in which the larger bourgeois parties can always be expected to
outmaneuver them and absorb them into coalitions. The duration of
strictly single-issue movements, too, is limited to the problems they
are opposing. Militant action around such issues should not be confused
with the long-range radicalism that is needed to change consciousness
and ultimately society itself. Such movements flare up and pass away,
even when they are successful. They lack the institutional underpinnings
that are so necessary to create lasting movements for social change and
the arena in which they can be a permanent presence in political
conflict.
Hence the enormous need for genuinely political grassroots movements,
united confederally, that are anchored in abiding and democratic
institutions that can be evolved into truly libertarian ones.
Life would indeed be marvelous, if not miraculous, if we were born with
all the training, literacy, skills, and mental equipment we need to
practice a profession or vocation. Alas, we must go though the toil of
acquiring these abilities, a toil that requires struggle, confrontation,
education, and development. It is very unlikely that a radical
municipalist approach, too, is meaningful at all merely as an easy means
for institutional change. It must be fought for if it is to be
cherished, just as the fight for a free society must itself be as
liberating and self-transforming as the existence of a free society.
The municipality is a potential time-bomb. To create local networks and
try to transform municipal institutions that replicate the state is to
pick up a historic challenge — a truly political one — that has existed
for centuries. New social movements are foundering today for want of a
political perspective that will bring them into the public arena, hence
the ease with which they slip into parliarnentarism. Historically,
libertarian theory has always focused on the free municipality that was
to provide the cellular tissue for a new society. To ignore the
potential of this free municipality because it is not yet free is to
bypass a slumbering domain of politics that could give lived meaning to
the great libertarian demand: a commune of communes. For in these
municipal institutions and the changes that we can make in their
structure — turning them more and more into a new public sphere — lies
the abiding institutional basis for a grassroots dual power, a
grassroots concept of citizenship, and municipalized economic systems
that can be counterposed to the growing power of the centralized
nation-state and centralized economic corporations.
Social ecology developed out of important social and theoretical
problems that faced the Left in the post-World War II period. The
historical realities of the 1940s and the 1950s completely invalidated
the perspectives of a proletarian revolution, of a “chronic economic
crisis” that would bring capitalism to its knees, and of commitment to a
centralistic workers’ party that would seize state power and, by
dictatorial means, initiate a transition to socialism and communism. It
became painfully evident in time that no such generalized crisis was in
the offing; indeed, that the proletariat and any party — or labor
confederation — that spoke in the name of the working class could not be
regarded as a hegemonic force in social transformation.
Quite to the contrary: capitalism emerged from the war stronger and more
stable than it had been at any time in its history. A generalized crisis
could be managed to one degree or another within a strictly bourgeois
framework, let alone the many limited and cyclical crises normal to
capitalism. The proletariat, in turn, ceased to play the hegemonic role
that the Left had assigned to it for more than a century, and Leninist
forms of organization were evidently vulnerable to bureaucratic
degeneration.
Moreover, capitalism, following the logic of its own nature as a
competitive market economy, was creating social and cultural issues that
had not been adequately encompassed by the traditional Left of the
interwar era (1917–39). To be sure, the traditional Left’s theoretical
cornerstone, notably, the class struggle between wage labor and capital,
had not disappeared; nor had economic exploitation ceased to exist. But
the issues that had defined the traditional Left — more precisely,
“proletarian socialism” in all its forms — had broadened immensely,
expanding both the nature of oppression and the meaning of freedom.
Hierarchy, while not supplanting the issue of class struggle, began to
move to the foreground of at least Euro-American radical concerns, in
the widespread challenges raised by the sixties “New Left” and youth
culture to authority as such, not only to the State. Domination, while
not supplanting exploitation, became the target of radical critique and
practice, in the early civil rights movement in the United States, in
attempts to remove conventional constraints on sexual behavior, dress,
lifestyle, and values, and later, in the rise of feminist movements,
ecological movements that challenged the myth of “dominating” the
natural world, and movements for gay and lesbian liberation.
It is unlikely that any of these movements would have emerged had
capitalism at midcentury not created all the indispensable technological
preconditions for a libertarian communist society — prospects that are
consistent with Enlightenment ideals and the progressive dimensions of
modernity. One must return to the great debates that began in the late
1950s over the prospects for free time and material abundance to
understand the ideological atmosphere that new technologies such as
automation created and the extent to which they were absorbed by the
“New Left” of the 1960s.
The prospect of a post-scarcity society, free of material want and
demanding toil, opened a new horizon of potentiality and hope —
ironically, reiterating the prescient demands of the Berlin Dadaists of
1919 for “universal unemployment,” which stood in marked contrast to the
traditional Left’s demand for “full employment.”
Social ecology, as developed in the United States in the early sixties
(long after the expression had fallen into disuse as a variant of “human
ecology”), tried to advance a coherent, developmental, and socially
practical outlook to deal with the changes in radicalism and capitalism
that were in the offing. Indeed, in great part, it actually anticipated
them. Long before an ecology movement emerged, social ecology delineated
the scope of the ecological crisis that capitalism must necessarily
produce, tracing its roots back to hierarchical domination, and
emphasizing that a competitive capitalist economy must unavoidably give
rise to unprecendented contradictions with the nonhuman natural world.
None of these perspectives, it should be noted, were in the air in the
early sixties — Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with its emphasis on
pesticides notwithstanding. Indeed, as early as 1962, social ecology
projected the alternative of solar energy, wind power, and water power,
among other new ecotechnologies, and alternatives to existing productive
facilities that were to become axiomatic to a later generation of
ecologists. It also advanced the vision of new ecocommunities based on
direct democracy and nonhierarchical forms of human relations. These
facts should be emphasized in view of deep ecology’s attempt to rewrite
the history of the ecology movement in terms of its own quasi-religious
and scarcity-oriented outlook. Nor should we overlook the fact that
social ecology’s antihierarchical analyses laid the theoretical basis
for early feminism, various community movements, the antinuclear
movement, and in varying degrees, Green movements, before they turned
from “nonparty parties” into conventional electoral machines.
Nonetheless, social ecology makes no claim that it emerged ab novo. It
was — and it remains — deeply rooted in Enlightenment ideals and the
revolutionary tradition of the past two centuries. Its analyses and
goals have never been detached from the understandably less developed
theoretical analyses of Karl Marx and classical radical thinkers (like
Peter Kropotkin), or from the great revolutions that culminated in the
Spanish Revolution of 1936–37. It eschews any attempt to defame the
historic traditions of the Left in favor a neo-liberal patchwork of
ideas or a queasy political centrism that parades as “postmodernism” and
“post- industrialism,” not to speak of the “post-materialist”
spiritualism fostered by eco-feminists, life-style anarchists, deep
ecologists, and so-called “social deep ecologists” or “deep social
ecologists.”
Quite to the contrary: social ecology functions to countervail attempts
to denature the Enlightenment and revolutionary project by emphasizing
the need for theoretical coherence, no less today than it did in the
1960s, when the “New Left” drifted from a healthy libertarian populism
into a quagmire of Leninist, Maoist, and Trotskyist tendencies. Social
ecology retains its filiations with the Enlightenment and the
revolutionary tradition all the more emphatically in opposition to the
quasi-mystical and expressly mystical trends that are thoroughly
sweeping up the privileged petty bourgeoisie of North America and
Europe, with their goulash of antirational, spiritualistic, and
atavastic ideologies. Social ecology is only too mindful that capitalism
today has a nearly infinite capacity to coopt, indeed commodify,
self-styled “oppositional trends” that remain as the detritus of the
“New Left” and the old counterculture. Today, anarchism comes packaged
by Hakim Bey, Bob Black, David Watson, and Jason McQuinn, and is little
more than a merchandisable boutique ideology that panders to petty-
bourgeois tastes for naughtiness and eccentricity.
Ecology, too, has been packaged and repackaged into a variety of “deep
ecologies” that generally emphasize an animalistic reductionism,
neo-Malthusian “hunger politics,” antihumanism, and bio- or
“eco-”centrism — in short, a pastiche that renders it equally palatable
to members of the British royal family at the summit of the social
hierarchy and to lumpenized anarchoids at its base. Feminism, initially
a universalized challenge to hierarchy as such, has devolved into
parochial, often self-serving, and even materially rewarding species of
eco-feminism and express theisms that pander to a myth of gender
superiority (no less ugly when it concerns women than when it concerns
men) in one form or another — not to speak of the outright
wealth-oriented “feminism” promoted by Naomi Wolf et al.
Capitalism, in effect, has not only rendered the human condition more
and more irrational, but it has absorbed into its orbit, to one degree
or another, the very consciousness that once professed to oppose it. If
Fourier insightfully declared that the way a society treats its women
can be regarded as a measure of its status as a civilization, so today
we can add that the extent to which a society devolves into mysticism
and eclecticism can be regarded as measure of its cultural decline. By
these standards, no society has more thoroughly denatured its
once-radical opponents than capitalism in the closing years of the
twentieth century.
This devolution of consciousness is by no means solely the product of
our century’s new global media, as even radical theorists of popular
culture tend to believe. Absolutism and medievalism, no less than
capitalism, had its own “media,” the Church, that reached as
ubiquitously into every village as television reaches into the modern
living room. The roots of modern cultural devolution are as deep-seated
as the ecological crisis itself. Capitalism, today, is openly flaunted
not only as a system of social relationships but as the “end of
history,” indeed, as a natural society that expresses the most intrinsic
qualities of “human nature” — its ostensible “drive” to compete, win,
and grow. This transmutation of means into ends, vicious as the means
may be, is not merely “the American way”; it is the bourgeois way.
The commodity has now colonized every aspect of life, rendering what was
once a capitalist economy into a capitalist culture. It has produced
literally a “marketplace of ideas,” in which the coin for exchanging
inchoate notions and intuitions is validated by the academy, the
corrupter par excellence of the “best and brightest” in modern society
and the eviscerator of all that is coherent and clearly delineable.
Indeed, never has “high culture,” once guarded by academic mandarins,
been so scandalously debased by academic presses that have become the
pornographers of ideology.
Bourgeois society qua culture, particularly its academic purveyors,
abhors a principled stand, particularly a combative one that is prepared
to clearly articulate a body of coherent principles and thrust it into
opposition against the capitalist system as a whole. Theoretically and
practically, serious opposition takes its point of departure from the
need to understand the logic of an ideology, not its euphemistic
metaphors and drifting inconsistencies. Capitalism has nothing to fear
from an ecological, feminist, anarchist, or socialist hash of hazy ideas
(often fatuously justified as “pluralistic” or “relativistic”) that
leaves its social premises untouched. It is all the better for the
prevailing order that reason be denounced as “logocentrism,” that
bourgeois social relations be concealed under the rubric of “industrial
society,” that the social need for an oppositional movement be brushed
aside in favor of a personal need for spiritual redemption, that the
political be reduced to the personal, that the project of social
revolution be erased by hopeless communitarian endeavors to create
“alternative” enterprises.
Except where its profits and “growth opportunities” are concerned,
capitalism now delights in avowals of the need to “compromise,” to seek
a “common ground” — the language of its professoriat no less than its
political establishment — which invariably turns out to be its own
terrain in a mystified form.
Hence the popularity of “market socialism” in self-styled “leftist”
periodicals; or possibly “social deep ecology” in deep ecology
periodicals like The Trumpeter; or more brazenly, accolades to Gramsci
by the Nouvelle Droite in France, or to a “Green Adolf ” in Germany. A
Robin Eckersley has no difficulty juggling the ideas of the Frankfurt
School with deep ecology while comparing in truly biocentric fashion the
“navigational skills” of birds with the workings of the human mind. The
wisdom of making friends with everyone that underpins this academic
“discourse” can only lead to a blurring of latent and serious
differences — and ultimately to the compromise of all principles and the
loss of political direction.
The social and cultural decomposition produced by capitalism can be
resisted only by taking the most principled stand against the corrosion
of nearly all self-professed oppositional ideas. More than at any time
in the past, social ecologists should abandon the illusion that a shared
use of the word “social” renders all of us into socialists, or
“ecology,” into radical ecologists. The measure of social ecology’s
relevance and theoretical integrity consists of its ability to be
rational, ethical, coherent, and true to the ideal of the Enlightenment
and the revolutionary tradition — not of any ability to earn plaudits
from the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, or Gary Snyder, still less from
academics, spiritualists, and mystics. In this darkening age when
capitalism — the mystified social order par excellence — threatens to
globalize the world with capital, commodities, and a facile spirit of
“negotiation” and “compromise,” it is necessary to keep alive the very
idea of uncompromising critique. It is not dogmatic to insist on
consistency, to infer and contest the logic of a given body of premises,
to demand clarity in a time of cultural twilight. Indeed, quite to the
contrary, eclecticism and theoretical chaos, not to speak of practices
that are more theatrical than threatening and that consist more of
posturing than convincing, will only dim the light of truth and
critique. Until social forces emerge that can provide a voice for basic
social change rather than spiritual redemption, social ecology must take
upon itself the task of preserving and extending the great traditions
from which it has emerged.
Should the darkness of capitalist barbarism thicken to the point where
this enterprise is no longer possible, history as the rational
development of humanity’s potentialities for freedom and consciousness
will indeed reach its definitive end.
Whether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or
the most reactionary — or will simply lapse into a gray era of dismal
mediocrity — will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement
and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical,
organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the
past two centuries of the revolutionary era. The direction we select,
from among several intersecting roads of human development, may well
determine the future of our species for centuries to come. As long as
this irrational society endangers us with nuclear and biological
weapons, we cannot ignore the possibility that the entire human
enterprise may come to a devastating end. Given the exquisitely
elaborate technical plans that the military-industrial complex has
devised, the self- extermination of the human species must be included
in the futuristic scenarios that, at the turn of the millennium, the
mass media are projecting — the end of a human future as such.
Lest these remarks seem too apocalyptic, I should emphasize that we also
live in an era when human creativity, technology, and imagination have
the capability to produce extraordinary material achievements and to
endow us with societies that allow for a degree of freedom that far and
away exceeds the most dramatic and emancipatory visions projected by
social theorists such as Saint- Simon, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and
Peter Kropotkin.[10] Many thinkers of the postmodern age have obtusely
singled out science and technology as the principal threats to human
well-being, yet few disciplines have imparted to humanity such a
stupendous knowledge of the innermost secrets of matter and life, or
provided our species better with the ability to alter every important
feature of reality and to improve the well-being of human and nonhuman
life-forms.
We are thus in a position either to follow a path toward a grim “end of
history,” in which a banal succession of vacuous events replaces genuine
progress, or to move on to a path toward the true making of history, in
which humanity genuinely progresses toward a rational world. We are in a
position to choose between an ignominious finale, possibly including the
catastrophic nuclear oblivion of history itself, and history’s rational
fulfillment in a free, materially abundant society in an aesthetically
crafted environment.
Notwithstanding the technological marvels that competing enterprises of
the ruling class (that is, the bourgeoisie) are developing in order to
achieve hegemony over one another, little of a subjective nature that
exists in the existing society can redeem it. Precisely at a time when
we, as a species, are capable of producing the means for amazing
objective advances and improvements in the human condition and in the
nonhuman natural world — advances that could make for a free and
rational society — we stand almost naked morally before the onslaught of
social forces that may very well lead to our physical immolation.
Prognoses about the future are understandably very fragile and are
easily distrusted. Pessimism has become very widespread, as capitalist
social relations become more deeply entrenched in the human mind than
ever before, and as culture regresses appallingly, almost to a vanishing
point. To most people today, the hopeful and very radical certainties of
the twenty-year period between the Russian Revolution of 1917–18 and the
end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 seem almost naïve.
Yet our decision to create a better society, and our choice of the way
to do it, must come from within ourselves, without the aid of a deity,
still less a mystical “force of nature” or a charismatic leader. If we
choose the road toward a better future, our choice must be the
consequence of our ability — and ours alone — to learn from the material
lessons of the past and to appreciate the real prospects of the future.
We will need to have recourse, not to ghostly vagaries conjured up from
the murky hell of superstition or, absurdly, from the couloirs of the
academy, but to the innovative attributes that make up our very humanity
and the essential features that account for natural and social
development, as opposed to the social pathologies and accidental events
that have sidetracked humanity from its self-fulfillment in
consciousness and reason. Having brought history to a point where nearly
everything is possible, at least of a material nature — and having left
behind a past that was permeated ideologically by mystical and religious
elements produced by the human imagination — we are faced with a new
challenge, one that has never before confronted humanity. We must
consciously create our own world, not according to demonic fantasies,
mindless customs, and destructive prejudices, but according to the
canons of reason, reflection, and discourse that uniquely belong to our
own species.
What factors should be decisive in making our choice? First, of great
significance is the immense accumulation of social and political
experience that is available to revolutionaries today, a storehouse of
knowledge that, properly conceived, could be used to avoid the terrible
errors that our predecessors made and to spare humanity the terrible
plagues of failed revolutions in the past. Of indispensable importance
is the potential for a new theoretical springboard that has been created
by the history of ideas, one that provides the means to catapult an
emerging radical movement beyond existing social conditions into a
future that fosters humanity’s emancipation.
But we must also be fully aware of the scope of the problems that we
face. We must understand with complete clarity where we stand in the
development of the prevailing capitalist order, and we have to grasp
emergent social problems and address them in the program of a new
movement. Capitalism is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to
appear in history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains a system
of commodity exchange in which objects that are made for sale and profit
pervade and mediate most human relations. Yet capitalism is also a
highly mutable system, continually advancing the brutal maxim that
whatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of its rivals must die.
Hence “growth” and perpetual change become the very laws of life of
capitalist existence. This means that capitalism never remains
permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions
that arise from its basic social relations.
Although capitalism became a dominant society only in the past few
centuries, it long existed on the periphery of earlier societies: in a
largely commercial form, structured around trade between cities and
empires; in a craft form throughout the European Middle Ages; in a
hugely industrial form in our own time; and if we are to believe recent
seers, in an informational form in the coming period. It has created not
only new technologies but also a great variety of economic and social
structures, such as the small shop, the factory, the huge mill, and the
industrial and commercial complex. Certainly the capitalism of the
Industrial Revolution has not completely disappeared, any more than the
isolated peasant family and small craftsman of a still earlier period
have been consigned to complete oblivion. Much of the past is always
incorporated into the present; indeed, as Marx insistently warned, there
is no “pure capitalism,” and none of the earlier forms of capitalism
fade away until radically new social relations are established and
become overwhelmingly dominant. But today capitalism, even as it
coexists with and utilizes precapitalist institutions for its own ends
(see Marx’s Grundrisse for this dialectic), now reaches into the suburbs
and the countryside with its shopping malls and newly styled factories.
Indeed, it is by no means inconceivable that one day it will reach
beyond our planet. In any case, it has produced not only new commodities
to create and feed new wants but new social and cultural issues, which
in turn have given rise to new supporters and antagonists of the
existing system. The famous first part of Marx and Engels’s Communist
Manifesto, in which they celebrate capitalism’s wonders, would have to
be periodically rewritten to keep pace with the achievements — as well
as the horrors — produced by the bourgeoisie’s development.
One of the most striking features of capitalism today is that in the
Western world the highly simplified two-class structure- the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat-that Marx and Engels, in T he Communist Manifesto,
predicted would become dominant under “mature” capitalism (and we have
yet to determine what “mature,” still less “late” or “moribund”
capitalism actually is) has undergone a process of reconfiguration. The
conflict between wage labor and capital, while it has by no means
disappeared, nonetheless lacks the all-embracing importance that it
possessed in the past. Contrary to Marx’s expectations, the industrial
working class is now dwindling in numbers and is steadily losing its
traditional identity as a class — which by no means excludes it from a
potentially broader and perhaps more extensive conflict of society as a
whole against capitalist social relations. Present-day culture, social
relations, cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, and
transportation have remade the traditional proletariat, upon which
syndicalists and Marxists were overwhelmingly, indeed almost mystically
focused, into a largely petty-bourgeois stratum whose mentality is
marked by its own bourgeois utopianism of “consumption for the sake of
consumption.” We can foresee a time when the proletarian, whatever the
color of his or her collar or place on the assembly line, will be
completely replaced by automated and even miniaturized means of
production that are operated by a few white-coated manipulators of
machines and by computers.
By the same token, the living standards of the traditional proletariat
and its material expectations (no small factor in the shaping of social
consciousness!) have changed enormously, soaring within only a
generation or two from near poverty to a comparatively high degree of
material affluence. Among the children and grandchildren of former steel
and automobile workers and coal miners, who have no proletarian class
identity, a college education has replaced the high school diploma as
emblematic of a new class status. In the United States once-opposing
class interests have converged to a point that almost 50 percent of
American households own stocks and bonds, while a huge number are
proprietors of one kind or another, possessing their own homes, gardens,
and rural summer retreats.
Given these changes, the stern working man or woman, portrayed in
radical posters of the past with a flexed, highly muscular arm holding a
bone-crushing hammer, has been replaced by the genteel and well-mannered
(so-called) “working middle class.” The traditional cry “Workers of the
world, unite!” in its old historical sense becomes ever more
meaningless. The class-consciousness of the proletariat, which Marx
tried to awaken in The Communist Manifesto, has been hemorrhaging
steadily and in many places has virtually disappeared. The more
existential class struggle has not been eliminated, to be sure, any more
than the bourgeoisie could eliminate gravity from the existing human
condition, but unless radicals today become aware of the fact that it
has been narrowed down largely to the individual factory or office, they
will fail to see that a new, perhaps more expansive form of social
consciousness can emerge in the generalized struggles that face us.
Indeed, this form of social consciousness can be given a refreshingly
new meaning as the concept of the rebirth of the citoyen — a concept so
important to the Great Revolution of 1789 and its more broadly
humanistic sentiment of sociality that it became the form of address
among later revolutionaries summoned to the barricades by the heraldic
crowing of the red French rooster.
Seen as a whole, the social condition that capitalism has produced today
stands very much at odds with the simplistic class prognoses advanced by
Marx and by the revolutionary French syndicalists. After the Second
World War, capitalism underwent an enormous transformation, creating
broad new social issues with extraordinary rapidity, issues that went
beyond traditional proletarian demands for improved wages, hours, and
working conditions: notably environmental, gender, hierarchical, civic,
and democratic issues. Capitalism, in effect, has generalized its
threats to humanity, particularly with climatic changes that may alter
the very face of the planet, oligarchical institutions of a global
scope, and rampant urbanization that radically corrodes the civic life
basic to grassroots politics.
Hierarchy, today, is becoming as pronounced an issue as class — as
witness the extent to which many social analyses have singled out
managers, bureaucrats, scientists, and the like as emerging, ostensibly
dominant groups. New and elaborate gradations of status and interests
count today to an extent that they did not in the recent past; they blur
the conflict between wage labor and capital that was once so central,
clearly defined, and militantly waged by traditional socialists. Class
categories are now intermingled with hierarchical categories based on
race, gender, sexual preference, and certainly national or regional
differences. Status differentiations, characteristic of hierarchy, tend
to converge with class differentiations, and a more all-inclusive
capitalistic world is emerging in which ethnic, national, and gender
differences often surpass the importance of class differences in the
public eye. This phenomenon is not entirely new: in the First World War
countless German socialist workers cast aside their earlier commitment
to the red flags of proletarian unity in favor of the national flags of
their well-fed and parasitic rulers and went on to plunge bayonets into
the bodies of French and Russian socialist workers — as they did, in
turn, under the national flags of their own oppressors.
At the same time capitalism has produced a new, perhaps paramount
contradiction: the clash between an economy based on unending growth and
the desiccation of the natural environment. [11] This issue and its vast
ramifications can no more be minimized, let alone dismissed, than the
need of human beings for food or air. At present the most promising
struggles in the West, where socialism was born, seem to be waged less
around income and working conditions than around nuclear power,
pollution, deforestation, urban blight, education, health care,
community life, and the oppression of people in underdeveloped
countries-as witness the (albeit sporadic) antiglobalization upsurges,
in which blue- and white-collar “workers” march in the same ranks with
middle-class humanitarians and are motivated by common social concerns.
Proletarian combatants become indistinguishable from middle- class ones.
Burly workers, whose hallmark is a combative militancy, now march behind
“bread and puppet” theater performers, often with a considerable measure
of shared playfulness. Members of the working and middle classes now
wear many different social hats, so to speak, challenging capitalism
obliquely as well as directly on cultural as well as economic grounds.
Nor can we ignore, in deciding what direction we are to follow, the fact
that capitalism, if it is not checked, will in the future-and not
necessarily the very distant future — differ appreciably from the system
we know today. Capitalist development can be expected to vastly alter
the social horizon in the years ahead. Can we suppose that factories,
offices, cities, residential areas, industry, commerce, and agriculture,
let alone moral values, aesthetics, media, popular desires, and the like
will not change immensely before the twenty-first century is out? In the
past century, capitalism, above all else, has broadened social issues —
indeed, the historical social question of how a humanity, divided by
classes and exploitation, will create a society based on equality, the
development of authentic harmony, and freedom — to include those whose
resolution was barely foreseen by the liberatory social theorists in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our age, with its endless
array of “bottom lines” and “investment choices,” now threatens to turn
society itself into a vast and exploitative marketplace. [12]
The public with which the progressive socialist had to deal is also
changing radically and will continue to do so in the coming decades. To
lag in understanding behind the changes that capitalism is introducing
and the new or broader contradictions it is producing would be to commit
the recurringly disastrous error that led to the defeat of nearly all
revolutionary upsurges in the past two centuries. Foremost among the
lessons that a new revolutionary movement must learn from the past is
that it must win over broad sectors of the middle class to its new
populist program. No attempt to replace capitalism with socialism ever
had or will have the remotest chance of success without the aid of the
discontented petty bourgeoisie, whether it was the intelligentsia and
peasantry-in-uniform of the Russian Revolution or the intellectuals,
farmers, shopkeepers, clerks, and managers in industry and even in
government in the German upheavals of 1918–21. Even during the most
promising periods of past revolutionary cycles, the Bolsheviks,
Mensheviks, the German Social Democrats, and Russian Communists never
acquired absolute majorities in their respective legislatives bodies.
So-called “proletarian revolutions” were invariably minority
revolutions, usually even within the proletariat itself, and those that
succeeded (often briefly, before they were subdued or drifted
historically out of the revolutionary movement) depended overwhelmingly
on the fact that the bourgeoisie lacked active support among its own
military forces or was simply socially demoralized.
Given the changes that we are witnessing and those that are still taking
form, social radicals can no longer oppose the predatory (as well as
immensely creative) capitalist system by using the ideologies and
methods that were born in the first Industrial Revolution, when a
factory proletarian seemed to be the principal antagonist of a textile
plant owner. (Nor can we use ideologies that were spawned by conflicts
that an impoverished peasantry used to oppose feudal and semifeudal
landowners.) None of the professedly anticapitalist ideologies of the
past — Marxism, anarchism, syndicalism, and more generic forms of
socialism — retain the same relevance that they had at an earlier stage
of capitalist development and in an earlier period of technological
advance. Nor can any of them hope to encompass the multitude of new
issues, opportunities, problems, and interests that capitalism has
repeatedly created over time.
Marxism was the most comprehensive and coherent effort to produce a
systematic form of socialism, emphasizing the material as well as the
subjective historical preconditions of a new society. This project, in
the present era of precapitalist economic decomposition and of
intellectual confusion, relativism, and subjectivism, must never
surrender to the new barbarians, many of whom find their home in what
was once a barrier to ideological regression-the academy. We owe much to
Marx’s attempt to provide us with a coherent and stimulating analysis of
the commodity and commodity relations, to an activist philosophy, a
systematic social theory, an objectively grounded or “scientific”
concept of historical development, and a flexible political strategy.
Marxist political ideas were eminently relevant to the needs of a
terribly disoriented proletariat and to the particular oppressions that
the industrial bourgeoisie inflicted upon it in England in the 1840s,
somewhat later in France, Italy, and Germany, and very presciently in
Russia in the last decade of Marx’s life. Until the rise of the populist
movement in Russia (most famously, the Narodnaya Volya), Marx expected
the emerging proletariat to become the great majority of the population
in Europe and North America, and to inevitably engage in revolutionary
class war as a result of capitalist exploitation and immiseration. And
especially between 1917 and 1939, long after Marx’s death, Europe was
indeed beleaguered by a mounting class war that reached the point of
outright workers’ insurrections. In 1917, owing to an extraordinary
confluence of circumstances — particularly with the outbreak of the
First World War, which rendered several quasi-feudal European social
systems terribly unstable — Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to use (but
greatly altered) Marx’s writings in order to take power in an
economically backward empire, whose size spanned eleven time zones
across Europe and Asia. [13]
But for the most part, as we have seen, Marxism’s economic insights
belonged to an era of emerging factory capitalism in the nineteenth
century. Brilliant as a theory of the material preconditions for
socialism, it did not address the ecological, civic, and subjective
forces or the efficient causes that could impel humanity into a movement
for revolutionary social change. On the contrary, for nearly a century
Marxism stagnated theoretically. Its theorists were often puzzled by
developments that have passed it by and, since the 1960s, have
mechanically appended environmentalist and feminist ideas to its
formulaic ouvrierist outlook.
By the same token, anarchism — which, I believe, represents in its
authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically
unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action-is far
better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and
craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself
once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to
conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights
notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory. Its foremost
theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism and the
liberatory effects of “paradox” or even “contradiction,” to use
Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the
earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of
the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have
been advanced in the name of “anarchy” were often drawn from Marxism
(including my own concept of “post-scarcity,” which understandably
infuriated many anarchists who read my essays on the subject).
Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists
from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are:
individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong
commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or
socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible
form of social organization. Indeed the history of this “ideology” is
peppered with idiosyncratic acts of defiance that verge on the
eccentric, which not surprisingly have attracted many young people and
aesthetes.
In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of
liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a
celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos
of self-regulation (auto nomos) — the radical assertion of the
individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of
responsibility for the collective welfare — leads to a radical
affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s
ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even
denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private
concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called
grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather
than social.
Anarchism has often been confused with revolutionary syndicalism, a
highly structured and well-developed mass form of libertarian trade
unionism that, unlike anarchism, was long committed to democratic
procedures,[14] to discipline in action, and to organized, long-range
revolutionary practice to eliminate capitalism. Its affinity with
anarchism stems from its strong libertarian bias, but bitter antagonisms
between anarchists and syndicalists have a long history in nearly every
country in Western Europe and North America, as witness the tensions
between the Spanish CNT and the anarchist groups associated with Tierra
y Libertad early in the twentieth century; between the revolutionary
syndicalist and anarchist groups in Russia during the 1917 revolution;
and between the IWW in the United States and the SAC in Sweden, to cite
the more illustrative cases in the history of the libertarian labor
movement. More than one American anarchist was affronted by Joe Hill’s
defiant maxim on the eve of his execution in Utah: “Don’t mourn —
Organize!” Alas, small groups were not quite the “organizations” that
Joe Hill, or the grossly misunderstood idol of the Spanish libertarian
movement, Salvador Seguí, had in mind. It was largely the shared word
libertarian that made it possible for somewhat confused anarchists to
coexist in the same organization with revolutionary syndicalists. It was
often verbal confusion rather than ideological clarity that made
possible the coexistence in Spain of the FAI, as represented by the
anarchist Federica Montseny, with the syndicalists, as represented by
Juan Prieto, in the CNT- FAI, a truly confused organization if ever
there was one.
Revolutionary syndicalism’s destiny has been tied in varying degrees to
a pathology called ouvrierisme, or “workerism,” and whatever philosophy,
theory of history, or political economy it possesses has been borrowed,
often piecemeal and indirectly, from Marx — indeed, Georges Sorel and
many other professed revolutionary syndicalists in the early twentieth
century expressly regarded themselves as Marxists and even more
expressly eschewed anarchism. Moreover, revolutionary syndicalism lacks
a strategy for social change beyond the general strike, which
revolutionary uprisings such as the famous October and November general
strikes in Russia during 1905 proved to be stirring but ultimately
ineffectual. Indeed, as invaluable as the general strike may be as a
prelude to direct confrontation with the state, they decidedly do not
have the mystical capacity that revolutionary syndicalists assigned to
them as means for social change. Their limitations are striking evidence
that, as episodic forms of direct action, general strikes are not
equatable with revolution nor even with profound social changes, which
presuppose a mass movement and require years of gestation and a clear
sense of direction. Indeed, revolutionary syndicalism exudes a typical
ouvrierist anti-intellectualism that disdains attempts to formulate a
purposive revolutionary direction and a reverence for proletarian
“spontaneity” that, at times, has led it into highly self-destructive
situations. Lacking the means for an analysis of their situation, the
Spanish syndicalists (and anarchists) revealed only a minimal capacity
to understand the situation in which they found themselves after their
victory over Franco’s forces in the summer of 1936 and no capacity to
take “the next step” to institutionalize a workers’ and peasants’ form
of government.
What these observations add up to is that Marxists, revolutionary
syndicalists, and authentic anarchists all have a fallacious
understanding of politics, which should be conceived as the civic arena
and the institutions by which people democratically and directly manage
their community affairs. Indeed the Left has repeatedly mistaken
statecraft for politics by its persistent failure to understand that the
two are not only radically different but exist in radical tension — in
fact, opposition — to each other.[15] As I have written elsewhere,
historically politics did not emerge from the state — an apparatus whose
professional machinery is designed to dominate and facilitate the
exploitation of the citizenry in the interests of a privileged class.
Rather, politics, almost by definition, is the active engagement of free
citizens in the handling their municipal affairs and in their defense of
its freedom. One can almost say that politics is the “embodiment” of
what the French revolutionaries of the 1790s called civicisme. Quite
properly, in fact, the word politics itself contains the Greek word for
“city” or polis, and its use in classical Athens, together with
democracy, connoted the direct governing of the city by its citizens.
Centuries of civic degradation, marked particularly by the formation of
classes, were necessary to produce the state and its corrosive
absorption of the political realm.
A defining feature of the Left is precisely the Marxist, anarchist, and
revolutionary syndicalist belief that no distinction exists, in
principle, between the political realm and the statist realm.
By emphasizing the nation-state — including a “workers’ state”- as the
locus of economic as well as political power, Marx (as well as
libertarians) notoriously failed to demonstrate how workers could fully
and directly control such a state without the mediation of an empowered
bureaucracy and essentially statist (or equivalently, in the case of
libertarians, governmental) institutions. As a result, the Marxists
unavoidably saw the political realm, which it designated a “workers’
state,” as a repressive entity, ostensibly based on the interests of a
single class, the proletariat.
Revolutionary syndicalism, for its part, emphasized factory control by
workers’ committees and confederal economic councils as the locus of
social authority, thereby simply bypassing any popular institutions that
existed outside the economy. Oddly, this was economic determinism with a
vengeance, which, tested by the experiences of the Spanish revolution of
1936, proved completely ineffectual. A vast domain of real governmental
power, from military affairs to the administration of justice, fell to
the Stalinists and the liberals of Spain, who used their authority to
subvert the libertarian movement — and with it, the revolutionary
achievements of the syndicalist workers in July 1936, or what was dourly
called by one novelist “The Brief Summer of Spanish Anarchism.”
As for anarchism, Bakunin expressed the typical view of its adherents in
1871 when he wrote that the new social order could be created “only
through the development and organization of the nonpolitical or
antipolitical social power of the working class in city and country,”
thereby rejecting with characteristic inconsistency the very municipal
politics which he sanctioned in Italy around the same year. Accordingly,
anarchists have long regarded every government as a state and condemned
it accordingly — a view that is a recipe for the elimination of any
organized social life whatever. While the state is the instrument by
which an oppressive and exploitative class regulates and coercively
controls the behavior of an exploited class by a ruling class, a
government — or better still, a polity — is an ensemble of institutions
designed to deal with the problems of consociational life in an orderly
and hopefully fair manner. Every institutionalized association that
constitutes a system for handling public affairs — with or without the
presence of a state — is necessarily a government. By contrast, every
state, although necessarily a form of government, is a force for class
repression and control. Annoying as it must seem to Marxists and
anarchist alike, the cry for a constitution, for a responsible and a
responsive government, and even for law or nomos has been clearly
articulated — and committed to print! — by the oppressed for centuries
against the capricious rule exercised by monarchs, nobles, and
bureaucrats. The libertarian opposition to law, not to speak of
government as such, has been as silly as the image of a snake swallowing
its tail. What remains in the end is nothing but a retinal afterimage
that has no existential reality.
The issues raised in the preceding pages are of more than academic
interest. As we enter the twenty-first century, social radicals need a
socialism — libertarian and revolutionary — that is neither an extension
of the peasant-craft “associationism” that lies at the core of anarchism
nor the proletarianism that lies at the core of revolutionary
syndicalism and Marxism. However fashionable the traditional ideologies
(particularly anarchism) may be among young people today, a truly
progressive socialism that is informed by libertarian as well as Marxian
ideas but transcends these older ideologies must provide intellectual
leadership. For political radicals today to simply resuscitate Marxism,
anarchism, or revolutionary syndicalism and endow them with ideological
immortality would be obstructive to the development of a relevant
radical movement. A new and comprehensive revolutionary outlook is
needed, one that is capable of systematically addressing the generalized
issues that may potentially bring most of society into opposition to an
ever-evolving and changing capitalist system.
The clash between a predatory society based on indefinite expansion and
nonhuman nature has given rise to an ensemble of ideas that has emerged
as the explication of the present social crisis and meaningful radical
change. Social ecology, a coherent vision of social development that
intertwines the mutual impact of hierarchy and class on the civilizing
of humanity, has for decades argued that we must reorder social
relations so that humanity can live in a protective balance with the
natural world.
Contrary to the simplistic ideology of “eco-anarchism,” social ecology
maintains that an ecologically oriented society can be progressive
rather than regressive, placing a strong emphasis not on primitivism,
austerity, and denial but on material pleasure and ease. If a society is
to be capable of making life not only vastly enjoyable for its members
but also leisurely enough that they can engage in the intellectual and
cultural self-cultivation that is necessary for creating civilization
and a vibrant political life, it must not denigrate technics and science
but bring them into accord with visions of human happiness and leisure.
Social ecology is an ecology not of hunger and material deprivation but
of plenty; it seeks the creation of a rational society in which waste,
indeed excess, will be controlled by a new system of values; and when or
if shortages arise as a result of irrational behavior, popular
assemblies will establish rational standards of consumption by
democratic processes. In short, social ecology favors management, plans,
and regulations formulated democratically by popular assemblies, not
freewheeling forms of behavior that have their origin in individual
eccentricities.
It is my contention that Communalism is the overarching political
category most suitable to encompass the fully thought out and systematic
views of social ecology, including libertarian municipalism and
dialectical naturalism.[16] As an ideology, Communalism draws on the
best of the older Left ideologies-Marxism and anarchism, more properly
the libertarian socialist tradition-while offering a wider and more
relevant scope for our time. From Marxism, it draws the basic project of
formulating a rationally systematic and coherent socialism that
integrates philosophy, history, economics, and politics. Avowedly
dialectical, it attempts to infuse theory with practice. From anarchism,
it draws its commitment to antistatism and confederalism, as well as its
recognition that hierarchy is a basic problem that can be overcome only
by a libertarian socialist society.[17]
The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophical,
historical, political, and organizational components of a socialism for
the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The word
originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the
French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of
Paris and its administrative substructures but also to create a
nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican
nation-state. Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the
individualism and the often explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor
does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as
embodied in Bolshevism.
It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or on the
industrial proletariat as its main historical agent; and it does not
reduce the free community of the future to a fanciful medieval village.
Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional
dictionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language, is ”a theory or system of government
in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a
federation.”[18]
Communalism seeks to recapture the meaning of politics in its broadest,
most emancipatory sense, indeed, to fulfill the historic potential of
the municipality as the developmental arena of mind and discourse. It
conceptualizes the municipality, potentially at least, as a
transformative development beyond organic evolution into the domain of
social evolution. The city is the domain where the archaic blood-tie
that was once limited to the unification of families and tribes, to the
exclusion of outsiders, was-juridically, at least-dissolved. It became
the domain where hierarchies based on parochial and sociobiological
attributes of kinship, gender, and age could be eliminated and replaced
by a free society based on a shared common humanity. Potentially, it
remains the domain where the once-feared stranger can be fully absorbed
into the community-initially as a protected resident of a common
territory and eventually as a citizen, engaged in making policy
decisions in the public arena. It is above all the domain where
institutions and values have their roots not in zoology but in civil
human activity.
Looking beyond these historical functions, the municipality constitutes
the only domain for an association based on the free exchange of ideas
and a creative endeavor to bring the capacities of consciousness to the
service of freedom. It is the domain where a mere animalistic adaptation
to an existing and pregiven environment can be radically supplanted by
proactive, rational intervention into the world — indeed, a world yet to
be made and molded by reason- with a view toward ending the
environmental, social, and political insults to which humanity and the
biosphere have been subjected by classes and hierarchies. Freed of
domination as well as material exploitation-indeed, recreated as a
rational arena for human creativity in all spheres of life — the
municipality becomes the ethical space for the good life. Communalism is
thus no contrived product of mere fancy: it expresses an abiding concept
and practice of political life, formed by a dialectic of social
development and reason.
As a explicitly political body of ideas, Communalism seeks to recover
and advance the development of the city (or commune) in a form that
accords with its greatest potentialities and historical traditions. This
is not to say that Communalism accepts the municipality as it is today.
Quite to the contrary, the modern municipality is infused with many
statist features and often functions as an agent of the bourgeois
nation-state. Today, when the nation-state still seems supreme, the
rights that modern municipalities possess cannot be dismissed as the
epiphenomena of more basic economic relations. Indeed, to a great
degree, they are the hard-won gains of commoners, who long defended them
against assaults by ruling classes over the course of history — even
against the bourgeoisie itself.
The concrete political dimension of Communalism is known as libertarian
municipalism, about which I have previously written extensively. [19] In
its libertarian municipalist program, Communalism resolutely seeks to
eliminate statist municipal structures and replace them with the
institutions of a libertarian polity. It seeks to radically restructure
cities’ governing institutions into popular democratic assemblies based
on neighborhoods, towns, and villages. In these popular assemblies,
citizens — including the middle classes as well as the working
classes-deal with community affairs on a face- to-face basis, making
policy decisions in a direct democracy, and giving reality to the ideal
of a humanistic, rational society.
Minimally, if we are to have the kind of free social life to which we
aspire, democracy should be our form of a shared political life. To
address problems and issues that transcend the boundaries of a single
municipality, in turn, the democratized municipalities should join
together to form a broader confederation. These assemblies and
confederations, by their very existence, could then challenge the
legitimacy of the state and statist forms of power. They could expressly
be aimed at replacing state power and statecraft with popular power and
a socially rational transformative politics. And they would become
arenas where class conflicts could be played out and where classes could
be eliminated.
Libertarian municipalists do not delude themselves that the state will
view with equanimity their attempts to replace professionalized power
with popular power. They harbor no illusions that the ruling classes
will indifferently allow a Communalist movement to demand rights that
infringe on the state’s sovereignty over towns and cities. Historically,
regions, localities, and above all towns and cities have desperately
struggled to reclaim their local sovereignty from the state (albeit not
always for high-minded purposes). Communalists’ attempt to restore the
powers of towns and cities and to knit them together into confederations
can be expected to evoke increasing resistance from national
institutions. That the new popular-assemblyist municipal confederations
will embody a dual power against the state that becomes a source of
growing political tension is obvious. Either a Communalist movement will
be radicalized by this tension and will resolutely face all its
consequences, or it will surely sink into a morass of compromises that
absorb it back into the social order that it once sought to change. How
the movement meets this challenge is a clear measure of its seriousness
in seeking to change the existing political system and the social
consciousness it develops as a source of public education and
leadership.
Communalism constitutes a critique of hierarchical and capitalist
society as a whole. It seeks to alter not only the political life of
society but also its economic life. On this score, its aim is not to
nationalize the economy or retain private ownership of the means of
production but to municipalize the economy. It seeks to integrate the
means of production into the existential life of the municipality, such
that every productive enterprise falls under the purview of the local
assembly, which decides how it will function to meet the interests of
the community as a whole. The separation between life and work, so
prevalent in the modern capitalist economy, must be overcome so that
citizens’ desires and needs, the artful challenges of creation in the
course of production, and role of production in fashioning thought and
self-definition are not lost. “Humanity makes itself,” to cite the title
of V. Gordon Childe’s book on the urban revolution at the end of the
Neolithic age and the rise of cities, and it does so not only
intellectually and esthetically, but by expanding human needs as well as
the productive methods for satisfying them. We discover ourselves — our
potentialities and their actualization — through creative and useful
work that not only transforms the natural world but leads to our
self-formation and self-definition.
We must also avoid the parochialism and ultimately the desires for
proprietorship that have afflicted so many self-managed enterprises,
such as the “collectives” in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. Not
enough has been written about the drift among many “socialistic”
self-managed enterprises, even under the red and red-and-black flags,
respectively, of revolutionary Russia and revolutionary Spain, toward
forms of collective capitalism that ultimately led many of these
concerns to compete with one another for raw materials and markets. [20]
Most importantly, in Communalist political life, workers of different
occupations would take their seats in popular assemblies not as workers
— printers, plumbers, foundry workers and the like, with special
occupational interests to advance — but as citizens, whose overriding
concern should be the general interest of the society in which they
live. Citizens should be freed of their particularistic identity as
workers, specialists, and individuals concerned primarily with their own
particularistic interests. Municipal life should become a school for the
formation of citizens, both by absorbing new citizens and by educating
the young, while the assemblies themselves should function not only as
permanent decision-making institutions but as arenas for educating the
people in handling complex civic and regional affairs. [21]
In a Communalist way of life, conventional economics, with its focus on
prices and scarce resources, would be replaced by ethics, with its
concern for human needs and the good life. Human solidarity — or philia,
as the Greeks called it — would replace material gain and egotism.
Municipal assemblies would become not only vital arenas for civic life
and decision-making but centers where the shadowy world of economic
logistics, properly coordinated production, and civic operations would
be demystified and opened to the scrutiny and participation of the
citizenry as a whole. The emergence of the new citizen would mark a
transcendence of the particularistic class being of traditional
socialism and the formation of the “new man” which the Russian
revolutionaries hoped they could eventually achieve. Humanity would now
be able to rise to the universal state of consciousness and rationality
that the great utopians of the nineteenth century and the Marxists hoped
their efforts would create, opening the way to humanity’s fulfillment as
a species that embodies reason rather than material interest and that
affords material post-scarcity rather than an austere harmony enforced
by a morality of scarcity and material deprivation.[22]
Classical Athenian democracy of the fifth century B.C.E., the source of
the Western democratic tradition, was based on face-to-face
decision-making in communal assemblies of the people and confederations
of those municipal assemblies. For more than two millennia, the
political writings of Aristotle recurrently served to heighten our
awareness of the city as the arena for the fulfillment of human
potentialities for reason, self-consciousness, and the good life.
Appropriately, Aristotle traced the emergence of the polis from the
family or oikos — i.e., the realm of necessity, where human beings
satisfied their basically animalistic needs, and where authority rested
with the eldest male. But the association of several families, he
observed, “aim[ed] at something more than the supply of daily
needs”[23]; this aim initiated the earliest political formation, the
village. Aristotle famously described man (by which he meant the adult
Greek male [24]) as a “political animal” (politikon zoon) who presided
over family members not only to meet their material needs but as the
material precondition for his participation in political life, in which
discourse and reason replaced mindless deeds, custom, and violence.
Thus, “[w]hen several villages are united in a single complete community
(koinonan), large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing,” he
continued, “the polis comes into existence, originating in the bare
needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good
life.”[25]
For Aristotle, and we may assume also for the ancient Athenians, the
municipality’s proper functions were thus not strictly instrumental or
even economic. As the locale of human consociation, the municipality,
and the social and political arrangements that people living there
constructed, was humanity’s telos, the arena par excellence where human
beings, over the course of history, could actualize their potentiality
for reason, self-consciousness, and creativity. Thus for the ancient
Athenians, politics denoted not only the handling of the practical
affairs of a polity but civic activities that were charged with moral
obligation to one’s community. All citizens of a city were expected to
participate in civic activities as ethical beings.
Examples of municipal democracy were not limited to ancient Athens.
Quite to the contrary, long before class differentiations gave rise to
the state, many relatively secular towns produced the earliest
institutional structures of local democracy. Assemblies of the people
may have existed in ancient Sumer, at the very beginning of the
so-called “urban revolution” some seven or eight thousand years ago.
They clearly appeared among the Greeks, and until the defeat of the
Gracchus brothers, they were popular centers of power in republican
Rome. They were nearly ubiquitous in the medieval towns of Europe and
even in Russia, notably in Novgorod and Pskov, which, for a time, were
among the most democratic cities in the Slavic world. The assembly, it
should be emphasized, began to approximate its truly modern form in the
neighborhood Parisian sections of 1793, when they became the authentic
motive forces of the Great Revolution and conscious agents for the
making of a new body politic. That they were never given the
consideration they deserve in the literature on democracy, particularly
democratic Marxist tendencies and revolutionary syndicalists, is
dramatic evidence of the flaws that existed in the revolutionary
tradition.
These democratic municipal institutions normally existed in combative
tension with grasping monarchs, feudal lords, wealthy families, and
freebooting invaders until they were crushed, frequently in bloody
struggles. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that every great
revolution in modern history had a civic dimension that has been
smothered in radical histories by an emphasis on class antagonisms,
however important these antagonisms have been. Thus it is unthinkable
that the English Revolution of the 1640s can be understood without
singling out London as its terrain; or, by the same token, any
discussions of the various French Revolutions without focusing on Paris,
or the Russian Revolutions without dwelling on Petrograd, or the Spanish
Revolution of 1936 without citing Barcelona as its most advanced social
center. This centrality of the city is not a mere geographic fact; it
is, above all, a profoundly political one, which involved the ways in
which revolutionary masses aggregated and debated, the civic traditions
that nourished them, and the environment that fostered their
revolutionary views.
Libertarian municipalism is an integral part of the Communalist
framework, indeed its praxis, just as Communalism as a systematic body
of revolutionary thought is meaningless without libertarian
municipalism. The differences between Communalism and authentic or
“pure” anarchism, let alone Marxism, are much too great to be spanned by
a prefix such as anarcho-, social-, neo-, or even libertarian. Any
attempt to reduce Communalism to a mere variant of anarchism would be to
deny the integrity of both ideas — indeed, to ignore their conflicting
concepts of democracy, organization, elections, government, and the
like. Gustave Lefrancais, the Paris Communard who may have coined this
political term, adamantly declared that he was “a Communalist, not an
anarchist.”[26]
Above all, Communalism is engaged with the problem of power.[27] In
marked contrast to the various kinds of communitarian enterprises
favored by many self-designated anarchists, such as “people’s” garages,
print shops, food coops, and backyard gardens, adherents of Communalism
mobilize themselves to electorally engage in a potentially important
center of power — the municipal council — and try to compel it to create
legislatively potent neighborhood assemblies. These assemblies, it
should be emphasized, would make every effort to delegitimate and depose
the statist organs that currently control their villages, towns, or
cities and thereafter act as the real engines in the exercise of power.
Once a number of municipalities are democratized along communalist
lines, they would methodically confederate into municipal leagues and
challenge the role of the nation-state and, through popular assemblies
and confederal councils, try to acquire control over economic and
political life.
Finally, Communalism, in contrast to anarchism, decidedly calls for
decision-making by majority voting as the only equitable way for a large
number of people to make decisions. Authentic anarchists claim that this
principle — the “rule” of the minority by the majority — is
authoritarian and propose instead to make decisions by consensus.
Consensus, in which single individuals can veto majority decisions,
threatens to abolish society as such. A free society is not one in which
its members, like Homer’s lotus-eaters, live in a state of bliss without
memory, temptation, or knowledge. Like it or not, humanity has eaten of
the fruit of knowledge, and its memories are laden with history and
experience. In a lived mode of freedom — contrary to mere café chatter —
the rights of minorities to express their dissenting views will always
be protected as fully as the rights of majorities. Any abridgements of
those rights would be instantly corrected by the community — hopefully
gently, but if unavoidable, forcefully — lest social life collapse into
sheer chaos. Indeed, the views of a minority would be treasured as
potential source of new insights and nascent truths that, if abridged,
would deny society the sources of creativity and developmental advances
— for new ideas generally emerge from inspired minorities that gradually
gain the centrality they deserve at a given time and place — until,
again, they too are challenged as the conventional wisdom of a period
that is beginning to pass away and requires new (minority) views to
replace frozen orthodoxies.
It remains to ask: how are we to achieve this rational society? One
anarchist writer would have it that the good society (or a true
“natural” disposition of affairs, including a “natural man”) exists
beneath the oppressive burdens of civilization like fertile soil beneath
the snow. It follows from this mentality that all we are obliged to do
to achieve the good society is to somehow eliminate the snow, which is
to say capitalism, nation-states, churches, conventional schools, and
other almost endless types of institutions that perversely embody
domination in one form or another. Presumably an anarchist society —
once state, governmental, and cultural institutions are merely
removed-would emerge intact, ready to function and thrive as a free
society. Such a “society,” if one can even call it such, would not
require that we proactively create it: we would simply let the snow
above it melt away. The process of rationally creating a free
Communalist society, alas, will require substantially more thought and
work than embracing a mystified concept of aboriginal innocence and
bliss.
A Communalist society should rest, above all, on the efforts of a new
radical organization to change the world, one that has a new political
vocabulary to explain its goals, and a new program and theoretical
framework to make those goals coherent. It would, above all, require
dedicated individuals who are willing to take on the responsibilities of
education and, yes, leadership. Unless words are not to become
completely mystified and obscure a reality that exists before our very
eyes, it should minimally be acknowledged that leadership always exists
and does not disappear because it is clouded by euphemisms such as
“militants” or, as in Spain, “influential militants.” It must also be
acknowledge that many individuals in earlier groups like the CNT were
not just “influential militants” but outright leaders, whose views were
given more consideration — and deservedly so! — than those of others
because they were based on more experience, knowledge, and wisdom, as
well as the psychological traits that were needed to provide effective
guidance. A serious libertarian approach to leadership would indeed
acknowledge the reality and crucial importance of leaders — all the more
to establish the greatly needed formal structures and regulations that
can effectively control and modify the activities of leaders and recall
them when the membership decides their respect is being misused or when
leadership becomes an exercise in the abusive exercise of power.
A libertarian municipalist movement should function, not with the
adherence of flippant and tentative members, but with people who have
been schooled in the movement’s ideas, procedures and activities. They
should, in effect, demonstrate a serious commitment to their
organization — an organization whose structure is laid out explicitly in
a formal constitution and appropriate bylaws. Without a democratically
formulated and approved institutional framework whose members and
leaders can be held accountable, clearly articulated standards of
responsibility cease to exist. Indeed, it is precisely when a membership
is no longer responsible to its constitutional and regulatory provisions
that authoritarianism develops and eventually leads to the movement’s
immolation. Freedom from authoritarianism can best be assured only by
the clear, concise, and detailed allocation of power, not by pretensions
that power and leadership are forms of “rule” or by libertarian
metaphors that conceal their reality. It has been precisely when an
organization fails to articulate these regulatory details that the
conditions emerge for its degeneration and decay.
Ironically, no stratum has been more insistent in demanding its freedom
to exercise its will against regulation than chiefs, monarchs, nobles,
and the bourgeoisie; similarly even well- meaning anarchists have seen
individual autonomy as the true expression of freedom from the
“artificialities” of civilization. In the realm of true freedom — that
is, freedom that has been actualized as the result of consciousness,
knowledge, and necessity — to know what we can and cannot do is more
cleanly honest and true to reality than to avert the responsibility of
knowing the limits of the lived world. Said a very wise man more than a
century and a half ago: “Men make their own history, but they do not
make it just as they please.”
The need for the international Left to advance courageously beyond a
Marxist, anarchist, syndicalist, or vague socialist framework toward a
Communalist framework is particularly compelling today. Rarely in the
history of leftist political ideas have ideologies been so wildly and
irresponsibly muddled; rarely has ideology itself been so disparaged;
rarely has the cry for “Unity!” on any terms been heard with such
desperation. To be sure, the various tendencies that oppose capitalism
should indeed unite around efforts to discredit and ultimately efface
the market system. To such ends, unity is an invaluable desideratum: a
united front of the entire Left is needed in order to counter the
entrenched system-indeed, culture-of commodity production and exchange,
and to defend the residual rights that the masses have won in earlier
struggles against oppressive governments and social systems.
The urgency of this need, however, does not require movement
participants to abandon mutual criticism, or to stifle their criticism
of the authoritarian traits present in anticapitalist organizations.
Least of all does it require them to compromise the integrity and
identity of their various programs. Th vast majority of participants in
today’s movement are inexperienced young radicals who have come of age
in an era of postmodernist relativism. As a consequence, the movement is
marked by a chilling eclecticism, in which tentative opinions are
chaotically mismarried to ideals that should rest on soundly objective
premises.[28] In a milieu where the clear expression of ideas is not
valued and terms are inappropriately used, and where argumentation is
disparaged as “aggressive” and, worse, “divisive,” it becomes difficult
to formulate ideas in the crucible of debate. Ideas grow and mature
best, in fact, not in the silence and controlled humidity of an
ideological nursery, but in the tumult of dispute and mutual criticism.
Following revolutionary socialist practices of the past, Communalists
would try to formulate a minimum program that calls for satisfaction of
the immediate concerns of the masses, such as improved wages and shelter
or adequate park space and transportation. This minimum program would
aim to satisfy the most elemental needs of the masses, to improve their
access to the resources that make daily life tolerable. The maximum
program, by contrast, would present an image of what human life could be
like under libertarian socialism, at least as far as such a society is
foreseeable in a world that is continually changing under the impact of
seemingly unending industrial revolutions.
Even more, however, Communalists would see their program and practice as
a process. Indeed, a transitional program in which each new demand
provides the springboard for escalating demands that lead toward more
radical and eventually revolutionary demands. One of the most striking
examples of a transitional demand was the programmatic call in the late
nineteenth century by the Second International for a popular militia to
replace a professional army. In still other cases, revolutionary
socialists demanded that railroads be publicly owned (or, as
revolutionary syndicalists might have demanded, be controlled by
railroad workers) rather than privately owned and operated. None of
these demands were in themselves revolutionary, but they opened
pathways, politically, to revolutionary forms of ownership and operation
— which, in turn, could be escalated to achieve the movement’s maximum
program. Others might criticize such step-by-step endeavors as
“reformist,” but Communalists do not contend that a Communalist society
can be legislated into existence. What these demands try to achieve, in
the short term, are new rules of engagement between the people and
capital — rules that are all the more needed at a time when “direct
action” is being confused with protests of mere events whose agenda is
set entirely by the ruling classes.
On the whole, Communalism is trying to rescue a realm of public action
and discourse that is either disappearing or that is being be reduced to
often-meaningless engagements with the police, or to street theater
that, however artfully, reduces serious issues to simplistic
performances that have no instructive influence. By contrast,
Communalists try to build lasting organizations and institutions that
can play a socially transformative role in the real world.
Significantly, Communalists do not hesitate to run candidates in
municipal elections who, if elected, would use what real power their
offices confer to legislate popular assemblies into existence. These
assemblies, in turn, would have the power ultimately to create effective
forms of town-meeting government. Inasmuch as the emergence of the city
— and city councils — long preceded the emergence of class society,
councils based on popular assemblies are not inherently statist organs,
and to participate seriously in municipal elections countervails
reformist socialist attempts to elect statist delegates by offering the
historic libertarian vision of municipal confederations as a practical,
combative, and politically credible popular alternative to state power.
Indeed, Communalist candidacies, which explicitly denounce parliamentary
candidacies as opportunist, keep alive the debate over how libertarian
socialism can be achieved — a debate that has been languishing for
years.
There should be no self-deception about the opportunities that exist as
a means of transforming our existing irrational society into a rational
one. Our choices on how to transform the existing society are still on
the table of history and are faced with immense problems. But unless
present and future generations are beaten into complete submission by a
culture based on queasy calculation as well as by police with tear gas
and water cannons, we cannot desist from fighting for what freedoms we
have and try to expand them into a free society wherever the opportunity
to do so emerges. At any rate we now know, in the light of all the
weaponry and means of ecological destruction that are at hand, that the
need for radical change cannot be indefinitely deferred. What is clear
is that human beings are much too intelligent not to have a rational
society; the most serious question we face is whether they are rational
enough to achieve one.
Murray Bookchin unfortunately did not live to see the publication of
Social Ecology and Communalism. July 30^(th), 2006, he died peacefully
in his home, surrounded by family and friends.
Until his very last breath, Bookchin never abandoned his commitment to
humanism and Enlightenment, and he was always a forceful representative
of the great radical traditions he strove to nurture and develop.
Although his impact on the ecology movement and on grassroots activism
is recognized and appreciated, Bookchin’s real importance and
originality has yet to be asserted. Fortunately Bookchin was not only a
lifelong activist but also a prolific writer, leaving behind numerous
books, essays, lectures, and interviews. Bookchin was a real thinker —
controversial and stimulating — and he maintained a consistent social
focus all his life. Without doubt, the loss of this great revolutionary
will be felt for many years to come.
The publication of these essays seems particularly appropriate now, as
they can help us understand how Bookchin has left us a comprehensive and
coherent corpus. This book is important for two reasons. First, it
provides a decent and accessible introduction to Bookchin’s basic ideas,
and it is my sincere hope that this book will encourage the reader to
take a closer look at his rich theoretical works. Second, it provides a
very definable and ideological focus by which we can evaluate his older
works and his many polemics. Indeed, “The Communalist Project” was the
last proper essay Bookchin ever wrote, and the oldest essays were
revised quite recently. (It could also be noted that I presented my
editorial choices to him while working on this project, and he even read
and commented on the introduction I have written for this book.)
Bookchin was enthusiastic about this specific collection of essays, and
thought that they represented the most recent and, in many ways,
clearest expression of his ideological stance. In that respect, they can
be considered a political testament.
I believe that social ecology and Communalism, and the whole body of
ideas that Bookchin created, has left us with a tremendous legacy that
will continue to challenge us and inspire us in the struggle for a new
libertarian and ecological society. Let us make sure these ideas get the
attention they deserve, and help create the free society that Bookchin
never had the privilege to see come into being. Creating a new radical
movement, and indeed a new society, is an immense project that can not
be taken lightly. As Bookchin himself wrote in Re-enchanting Humanity:
“The achievement of freedom must be a free act on the highest level of
intellectual and moral probity, for if we cannot act vigorously to free
ourselves, we will not deserve to be free.”
Murray Bookchin threw down the gauntlet.
The future is our responsibility.
Eirik Eiglad,
October 30^(th), 2006
[1] Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” originally
published in the libertarian socialist periodical Comment (September
1965) and collected, together with all my major essays of the 1960s, in
Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1972; reprinted
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977). The expression “ethics of
complementarity” is from my The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and
Dissolution of Hierarchy (San Francisco: Cheshire Books, 1982; revised
edition Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991; reprinted with a new
introduction by AK Press, 2005).
[2] I am not saying that complexity necessarily yields subjectivity,
merely that it is difficult to conceive of subjectivity without
complexity, specifically the nervous system. Human beings, as active
agents in changing their environments to suit their needs, could not
have achieved their present level of control over their environments
without their extraordinary complex brains and nervous systems – a
remarkable example of the specialization of an organ system that had
highly general functions.
[3] Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1986), p. 109.
[4] Quoted in Alan Wolfe, “Up from Humanism,” American Prospect (Winter
1991), p. 125.
[5] Paul Radin, The World of Primitive Man (New York: Grove Press,
1960), p. 211.
[6] Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire
Books, 1982), p. 29.
[7] Der Spiegel (Sept. 16, 1991), pp. 144–45.
[8] I spelled out all these views in my 1964–65 essay “Ecology and
Revolutionary Thought,” and they were assimilated over time by
subsequent ecology movements. Many of the technological views advanced
in my 1965 essay “Toward a Liberatory Technology” were also assimilated
and renamed “appropriate technology,” a rather socially neutral
expression in comparison with my original term ecotechnology. Both of
these essays can be found in Post-Scarcity Anarchism.
[9] See “The Forms of Freedom” in Post Scarcity-Anarchism; “The Legacy
of Freedom” in The Ecology of Freedom ; and “Patterns of Civic Freedom “
in From Urbanization to Cities: Towards a New Politics of Citizenship
(1982, 1992; rev. ed. London: Cassell, 1995).
[10] Many less-well-known names could be added to this list, but one
that in particular I would like very much to single out is the gallant
leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, Maria Spiridonova,
whose supporters were virtually alone in proposing a workable
revolutionary program for the Russian people in 1917–18. Their failure
to implement their political insights and replace the Bolsheviks (with
whom they initially joined in forming the first Soviet government) not
only led to their defeat but contributed to the disastrous failure of
revolutionary movements in the century that followed.
[11] I frankly regard this contradiction as more fundamental than the
often-indiscernible tendency of the rate of profit to decline and
thereby to render capitalist exchange inoperable – a contradiction to
which Marxists assigned a decisive role in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
[12] Contrary to Marx’s assertion that a society disappears only when it
has exhausted its capacity for new technological developments,
capitalism is in a state of permanent technological revolution – at
times, frighteningly so. Marx erred on this score: it will take more
than technological stagnation to terminate this system of social
relations. As new issues challenge the validity of the entire system,
the political and ecological domains will become all the more important.
Alternatively, we are faced with the prospect that capitalism may pull
down the entire world and leave behind little more than ashes and ruin –
achieving, in short, the “capitalist barbarism” of which Rosa Luxemburg
warned in her “Junius” essay.
[13] I use the word extraordinary because, by Marxist standards, Europe
was still objectively unprepared for a socialist revolution in 1914.
Much of the continent, in fact, had yet to be colonized by the
capitalist market or bourgeois social relations. The proletariat – still
a very conspicuous minority of the population in a sea of peasants and
small producers – had yet to mature as a class into a significant force.
Despite the opprobrium that has been heaped on Plekhanov, Kautsky,
Bernstein et al., they had a better understanding of the failure of
Marxist socialism to embed itself in proletarian consciousness than did
Lenin. Luxemburg, in any case, straddled the so-called
“social-patriotic” and “internationalist” camps in her image of a
Marxist party’s function, in contrast to Lenin, her principal opponent
in the so-called “organizational question” in the Left of the wartime
socialists, who was prepared to establish a “proletarian dictatorship”
under all and any circumstances. The First World War was by no means
inevitable, and it generated democratic and nationalist revolutions
rather than proletarian ones. (Russia, in this respect, was no more a
“workers’ state” under Bolshevik rule than were the Hungarian and
Bavarian “soviet” republics.) Not until 1939 was Europe placed in a
position where a world war was inevitable. The revolutionary Left (to
which I belonged at the time) frankly erred profoundly when it took a
so-called “internationalist” position and refused to support the Allies
(their imperialist pathologies notwithstanding) against the vanguard of
world fascism, the Third Reich.
[14] Kropotkin, for example, rejected democratic decision-making
procedures: “Majority rule is as defective as any other kind of rule,”
he asserted. See Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and
Principles,” in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, edited by Roger N.
Baldwin (1927; reprinted by New York: Dover, 1970), p. 68.
[15] I have made the distinction between politics and statecraft in, for
example, Murray Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New
Politics of Citizenship (1987; reprinted by London: Cassell, 1992), pp.
41–3, 59–61.
[16] Several years ago, while I still identified myself as an anarchist,
I attempted to formulate a distinction between “social” and “lifestyle”
anarchism, and I wrote an article that identified Communalism as “the
democratic dimension of anarchism” (see Left Green Perspectives, no. 31,
October 1994). I no longer believe that Communalism is a mere
“dimension” of anarchism, democratic or otherwise; rather, it is a
distinct ideology with a revolutionary tradition that has yet to be
explored.
[17] To be sure, these points undergo modification in Communalism: for
example, Marxism’s historical materialism, explaining the rise of class
societies, is expanded by social ecology’s explanation of the
anthropological and historical rise of hierarchy. Marxian dialectical
materialism, in turn, is transcended by dialectical naturalism; and the
anarcho-communist notion of a very loose “federation of autonomous
communes” is replaced with a confederation from which its components,
functioning in a democratic manner through citizens’ assemblies, may
withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.
[18] What is so surprising about this minimalist dictionary definition
is its overall accuracy: I would take issue only with its formulations
“virtually autonomous” and “loosely bound,” which suggest a parochial
and particularistic, even irresponsible relationship of the components
of a confederation.
[19] My writings on libertarian municipalism date back to the early
1970s, with “Spring Offensives and Summer Vacations,” Anarchos, no. 4
(1972). The more significant works include the books From Urbanization
to Cities (1987; reprinted by London: Cassell, 1992) and The Limits of
the City (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974), as well as the articles
“Theses on Libertarian Municipalism,” Our Generation [Montreal], vol.
16, nos. 3–4 (Spring/Summer 1985); “Radical Politics in an Era of
Advanced Capitalism,” (included herein); “The Meaning of Confederalism,”
Green Perspectives, no. 20 (November 1990); and “Libertarian
Municipalism: An Overview,” Green Perspectives, no. 24 (October 1991).
For a concise summary, see Janet Biehl, The Politics of Social Ecology:
Libertarian Municipalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).
[20] For one such discussion, see Murray Bookchin, “The Ghost of
Anarchosyndicalism,” Anarchist Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1993).
[21] One of the great tragedies of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and
the Spanish Revolution of 1936 was the failure of the masses to acquire
more than the scantiest knowledge of social logistics and the complex
interlinkages involved in providing for the necessities of life in a
modern society. Inasmuch as those who had the expertise involved in
managing productive enterprises and in making cities functional were
supporters of the old regime, workers were in fact unable to actually
take over the full control of factories. They were obliged instead to
depend on “bourgeois specialists” to operate them, individuals who
steadily made them the victims of a technocratic elite.
[22] I have previously discussed this transformation of workers from
mere class beings into citizens, among other places, in From
Urbanization to Cities (1987; reprinted by London: Cassell, 1995), and
in “Workers and the Peace Movement” (1983), published in The Modern
Crisis (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987).
[23] Aristotle, Politics (1252 [b] 16), trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The
Complete Works of Aristotle , Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan
Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, p.
1987.
[24] As a libertarian ideal for the future of humanity and a genuine
domain of freedom, the Athenian polis falls far short of the city’s
ultimate promise. Its population included slaves, subordinated women,
and franchiseless resident aliens. Only a minority of male citizens
possessed civic rights, and they ran the city without consulting a
larger population. Materially, the stability of the polis depended upon
the labor of its noncitizens. These are among the several monumental
failings that later municipalities would have to correct. The polis is
significant, however, not an example of an emancipated community but for
the successful functioning of its free institutions.
[25] Aristotle, Politics (1252 [b] 29–30), trans. Jowett; emphasis
added. The words from the original Greek text may be found in the Loeb
Classical Library edition: Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
[26] Lefrancais is quoted in Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist
(New York: Horizon Press, 1968), p. 393. I too would be obliged today to
make the same statement. In the late 1950s, when anarchism in the United
States was a barely discernible presence, it seemed like a sufficiently
clear field in which I could develop social ecology, as well as the
philosophical and political ideas that would eventually become
dialectical naturalism and libertarian municipalism. I well knew that
these views were not consistent with traditional anarchist ideas, least
of all post-scarcity, which implied that a modern libertarian society
rested on advanced material preconditions. Today I find that anarchism
remains the very simplistic individualistic and antirationalist
psychology it has always been. My attempt to retain anarchism under the
name of “social anarchism” has largely been a failure, and I now find
that the term I have used to denote my views must be replaced with
Communalism, which coherently integrates and goes beyond the most viable
features of the anarchist and Marxist traditions. Recent attempts to use
the word anarchism as a leveler to minimize the abundant and
contradictory differences that are grouped under that term and even
celebrate its openness to “differences” make it a diffuse catch-all for
tendencies that properly should be in sharp conflict with one another.
[27] For a discussion of the very real problems created by anarchists’
disdain for power during the Spanish Revolution, see the appendix
originally written to this article, “Anarchism and Power in the Spanish
Revolution.” (Available at
.)
[28] I should note that by objective I do not refer merely to
existential entities and events but also to potentialities that can be
rationally conceived, nurtured, and in time actualized into what we
would narrowly call realities. If mere substantiality were all that the
term objective meant, no ideal or promise of freedom would be an
objectively valid goal unless it existed under our very noses.