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Title: Reply to ACF
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1996
Language: en
Topics: a reply, Anarchist Federation, Organise!, social anarchism, lifestylism
Source: Retrieved on May 13, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130514010749/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue44/bookchin.html
Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 44 — Autumn/Winter 1996.

Murray Bookchin

Reply to ACF

Dear Comrades,

Thank you for sending me a copy of your review of my pamphlet, Social

Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. This was a courtesy I seldom encounter

on the so-called ‘Left’ in the U.S. and U.K. You have my sincere respect

for your probity and for the comradely way in which you examine my work.

You may be right that I am “ignorant of the Anarchist movement in

Ireland and Britain”. I do not receive any periodicals from either

country, and alas, my limited income at the age of seventy-five does not

allow me to subscribe to overseas periodicals. Hence my failure to deal

with the situations in your countries. If comrades in Britain, Ireland,

Scotland and Wales would care to send me their periodicals, I would read

them eagerly and send in exchange the periodical I occasionally produce,

Green Perspectives.

But to keep the record straight, I did not mean to argue that the

movement abroad is entirely given over to lifestyle anarchism. I do

know, however, that it is a problem in Germany and the Netherlands, and

comrades from Britain have complained to me that it exists there as

well.

My pamphlet, as well as my book, Re-Enchanting Humanity (a harsh

critique of postmodernism, primitivism, deep ecology, socio-biology, and

technophopia that has just been published by Cassell), are concerned

with a massive trend in contemporary society: an ideological

counterrevolution against the entire revolutionary tradition and the

best elements of the Enlightenment. Antirationalism, mysticism, and

hatred of civilisation as such are so widespread that, not unlike

Heideggar’s desire for ‘authenticity’, they reflect and even articulate

the bourgeoisie’s success in fragmenting social life and directing

millions inward toward privatism and egoism.

It is all too facile, I think, to blame this trend entirely on a

consumerist culture and what is called productivism. Now that capitalism

has disintegrated most community ties — and every workers’ movement was

also, often unknowingly, a civic movement — the oppressed and exploited

are now “on their own,” as it were. Capitalist society is the most

masked society to have appeared in history. Its sources of exploitation

have traditionally been concealed by the “three factors of production”

and similar notions. But not since economists abandoned the labour

theory of value for the myth that profit consists of the ‘wages’ of the

capitalist have the masks that conceal the true nature of capitalist

social relationships been so numerous and varied. In the U.S.,

astrology, religion, Asian mysticism, and a multitude of

supernaturalisms, including rituals in the name of ecology or earth

goddesses, make it impossible to see the sources of economic

exploitation and hierarchical domination. If 93 per cent of the American

people believe in a supreme being; if more than 80 per cent believe in

immortality; and if more than 60 per cent believe in the existence of

angels, then people of rational and humanistic thought have their work

cut out for themselves. I would ask whether comparable figures exist in

England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Not only have these ideologies impeded class consciousness in the U.S.;

they have become substitutes for social action of almost any kind. Thus

a short time ago, when Clinton literally rolled back social welfare to

the pre-New Deal era by dumping single mothers and their children from

the welfare rolls, there was not a single protest demonstration of note

in American cities. Any cheap religious fundamentalist can rally tens

and hundreds of thousands of people, but not one political organisation

can bring a few thousand people into the streets to protest the

withdrawal of guaranteed assistance (which has existed here since 1935)

to improvident women and their children.

So we are much in need of a movement that operates against the system as

a whole; that shows the connections between single-issues and roots them

in capitalist social relations. Yet some of our leading ‘Left’

intellectuals are hindering rather than helping the development of

radical movement. Chomsky has recently called for strengthening the

centralisated state and has joined some of our local social democratic

organisations — Democratic Socialists of America and The New Party. At

the beginning of this summer he reportedly declared that he would vote

for Clinton while “holding his nose.” Yet he still avows a belief in

Anarchism — “as a vision”. Probably many Labourites in Britain also

believe in socialism — as a “vision”- but will hold their noses and

support Tony Blair.

As to the American counter-culture — and you can include here much of

the ecology ‘movement’ as well as the new left of the sixties — the

potentiality of which I was concerned has not been realised. I do not

fault myself for trying to expand the horizon of anarchism in the

sixties along cultural and ecological lines. I regret only that I

failed, not that I saw the wrong possibilities for profoundly changing

our society. Tragically, many self-professed anarchists didn’t even try

to do much back then and have since abandoned their convictions for

private life and academic careers. Surely failure doesn’t mean that one

shouldn’t try. Every meaningful opportunity, including working class

organising, must be explored, enlarged, and deepened if anarchist

communists (among who I have always counted myself) want to build a

viable movement.

As to the state of civilisation today: granted, it’s a mess. I never

claimed it was otherwise. But argue that together with the horrors that

have existed from time immemorial, it has also been marked by real

progress. Unlike me, the primitivists really attack civilisation as

such. Should anarchist communists go along with this mentality, which

once again masks capitalist social relations with the virtues of

primitive ‘innocence’ and ‘authenticity’? True, I have always insisted

that “production for the sake of production” is undermining our planet.

But this phrase, taken from Marx, is not only an ideology, like the

notion of endless growth, it stems very real grow-or-die imperative of

capitalist accumulation — unrelenting market competition. Concepts like

civilisation and growth must not only be defined in ideological terms —

and they certainly have become ideologies. They must be related to the

market system, which grimly reflects their meaning in society. Given the

masked nature of capitalism, the naive could accept the

characteristically bourgeois thesis that declines in employment are due

exclusively to technological advances, rather than to market imperatives

to utilise new technologies to make profit. I certainly agree that we

need a new civilisation, indeed that we must become civilised enough to

build a rational society; but I would vigorously oppose any ideology

that enjoins us to drop to all fours and bay at the moon.

My views on libertarian municipalism are entirely orientated toward

creating a dual power composed of directly democratic assemblies of the

people in revolutionary opposition to the state. The idea that

“libertarian municipalists” should try to “capture the local State” and

operate within a statist framework is totally alien here. Quite to the

contrary, my hope is that a movement can be created that builds on

whatever local democracy still remains in a community — and tries to

enlarge it into a direct face-to-face democracy, with the intention of

throwing it against the state on all levels, up to the central

government.

In short, I treasure the historical appeal for a “Commune of communes”

that surfaced in French revolutions and to some degree in Spain in 1936.

If this perspective is not understood — and I have developed it at book

length in my From Urbanisation to Cities (also available from Cassell) —

none of my views on democracy or politics will be understood. In any

event, a truly libertarian municipalist movement will always be a

minority movement even within neighbourhood, town, and, village

assemblies, until the masses are prepared to finally dissolve state

power and replace it with communalist federations. When erstwhile

“libertarian municipalists” deny this project and try to qualify its

demands with social democratic compromises and pacifist approaches, I

always vehemently object. Similarly you can be assured that any

“disciple” who favours nationalism in any form is not, in my eyes, a

libertarian municipalist.

These remarks cannot convey the full scope of my views. At least three

of my books have recently been published by Cassell and are generally

available in your area. Others are published by Black Rose Books and AK

Press. I would ask any reader of Organise! to consult these writings to

learn what my views are and not take the words of my critics — be they

lifestyle and liberal anarchists, orthodox, neo- and post- Marxists, new

agers, or deep ecologists. You might care to know the critical

literature on me — often quite ad hominem in character — has become

fairly sizeable. Much of it is directed against my revolutionism,

denouncing it, in typical social democratic fashion, as “sectarianism,”

“dogmatism,” and (in conjunction with Bakunin!) “anarcho-Leninism.” But

I suspect such charges have been levelled against you yourselves —

precisely because you are committed to revolutionary change. Nothing

rankles the walking dead of the sixties who have been co-opted by the

existing society more than pricks of their post revolutionary

conscience.

With comradely best wishes,

Murray Bookchin